Paddock’s Pick: ‘Where the God of Love Hangs Out’

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock

Let me preface this review with an apology of sorts: If you’re a fan of Jan Karon, Debbie Macomber, James Patterson, or Elmer Kelton, or any authors vaguely resembling them, this is not the book for you. “Where the God of Love Hangs Out” is intense, complex, and definitely not for the timid.

If you’re liberal minded, open to different life styles, and appreciate fine writing, then this book deserves your attention. It’s really a collection of chapters that tells interlocking stories of different sets of characters. The author, Amy Bloom, teaches creative writing at Yale. That should tell you all you need to know about her writing credentials. The title alone gives you a clue that this is not a run-of-the-mill love story.

The novel opens with a scene of William and Clare watching television while their respective spouses are upstairs sound asleep. The couples are best friends and frequently spend time with each other. They go on vacations together, see movies together, know all there is to know about all their grown children.

William is an overweight fellow, with a penchant for clothes from Brooks Brothers. Clare is on the shy side, not near as pretty as William’s doting wife, Isabelle who reads the Wall Street Journal every day. Clare’s husband, Charles, is a good man, a good husband, and good looking.

William and Clare are cuddled up on the couch eating popcorn and watching CNN before the movie, “Mrs. Dalloway,” comes on. They are night owls, unlike their spouses who turn in early. Clare is wearing her pajamas and robe. William still has on the clothes he’s worn all day.

“May I?” William says, unbuttoning Clare’s top button. And so begins an affair that lasts until William dies. Did they deserve what they got? Did Clare get what was coming to her?

Amy Bloom never tells the reader what to think. She just presents the characters and lets them do their thing. You decide if you like them or not.

The second collection revolves around a black jazz musician, Lionel, who is dead, but never really lost to his family. His wife, Julia, is white. Their young son, Buster, is a beautiful color of chocolate milk. His oldest son, Lionel Jr., lost his mother to a drug overdose when he was just a child, and Julia is the only mother he’s ever loved.

Lionel’s death leaves his family forlornly clinging to his memory, so much so that Julia and Lionel, Jr. comfort each other in a way that eventually becomes much more than love between a mother and step-son. This act of comfort only occurs once, but it horrifies each of the participants. Lionel Jr. leaves and never returns until he’s a grown man with a truckload of troubled relationships and a truckload of money. The family can never connect again, although they all try, and only two people know why. Buster never guesses the real reason; he only knows something isn’t right.

When Julia dies, the children and grandchildren are left, still adrift and much more puzzled when they find out that Julia’s real love was a woman named Peaches.

This novel made me want to know more about Amy Bloom, so I Googled her and found out that she is divorced and has two daughters and one son. She’s also bisexual. I just throw that out, and let you do with it what you will. Which is just the way Amy Bloom tells her stories.

•••

I tried and tried to think of someone I could interview whose life was somehow connected with the current book I’m reviewing. I was pretty sure no one would want me to interview them because they had had an affair or two. I don’t know a black jazz musician. But, Eureka! I know a woman who reads the Wall Street Journal.

Lorna Pryor is a retired professor of economics, and it was in that capacity that she used the Wall Street Journal for classroom discussions. She is married to Tom Pryor, a retired Fort Smith attorney, and they raised a son and daughter who are now grown and married.

Her first childhood book she remembers reading was “Treasure Island,” a book that had been her father’s favorite book when he was a 12 year old boy.

“I was not nearly as enthralled with the story as he had been, and I think it would have helped if I had been a boy, “ Lorna says. “More  to my liking were the books that my mother had grown up with like “Freckles” and “Girl of the Limberlost” and the Louisa Mae Alcott books.”

The books she is currently reading are “Good Night Moon” and “Five Little Monkeys.” She and Tom have a granddaughter, Kasey Laurel Sparks, and what she likes, they like.

“Reading is an underpinning of my life,” Lorna says. “I cannot imagine my life without that pleasure.”

She does not ever anticipate holding an electronic version of a book in her hands.

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