When 9-year-old Helen Johnson finds herself, once again, locked in a dark closet by her emotionally broken mother, the door tied shut, she calms herself by thinking of happy things: strawberry ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream. Helen narrates what happens next:

“I’m not scared to be in the closet anymore!” I shouted as hard as I could.

“Just wait until you meet Shizuka.” Mom pushed back the door again.

“Shizuka?”

“The ghost of Shizuka lives in the closet.” Mom was putting the second rope around the doorknobs. “She died hundreds of years ago in your grandma’s hometown. Grandma always said the ghost of Shizuka lives in the closet.”

That’ll scare a 9-year-old, even a brave one.

Ghosts dominate Helen’s life in California: The ghosts of her ancestors who lived in Japan, where her mother was born. The ghost of Shizuka, which holds a mystery and a clue. And the ghosts of war, which damaged nearly everyone she loves—her U.S.-born father, who fought in Vietnam; her mother, left orphaned after World War II; her great-uncle Hideo in Japan, who fought in the war; and Hideo’s wife, who witnessed atrocities in Manchuria. All of them are wrestling with ghosts, and the ghosts often feel more real than the living.

In The Ocean in the Closet, a debut novel by Yuko Taniguchi (M.F.A. ’01), war is a sweeping, destructive force that reverberates through generations. Separation—from one’s family, as well as one’s country—brings further misery. And the ocean is both divider and joiner, both threat and hope, both fear and comfort; it is life itself.

The story is told in alternating chapters through Helen’s and Hideo’s eyes. Both are survivors—wounded, but resilient.

After Helen’s mother, Anna, is hospitalized with a breakdown, Helen and her younger brother move in with their uncle Steve and his wife. Helen is a tough, resourceful girl, filled with fears but also with the courage to address them.  She is baffled and hurt by her mother’s mental illness. And when Steve tells her to think of Anna as a frail tree and herself as a stick that helps prop her up, Helen takes his words to heart.

She intuits that Anna’s breakdown has something to do with her childhood and her lost mother, Ume. So she writes a letter to Ume’s brother, Hideo, who, dealing with ghosts of his own, reluctantly invites her to visit him in Japan.

Books about the devastating human toll of war have been written before. But Taniguchi’s novel shows how the damage is not only permanent but how it can follow families for generations. “War memories are like a terminal illness growing inside our brains,” she writes.

The book is marred slightly by Helen’s voice, which is not completely believable. At times it sounds stilted and too deliberately childlike, which keeps the reader from being swept into her character the way he or she is with the character of the pained, remote Hideo. But this is a minor quibble. The story is powerful, a gripping read filled with pain balanced by flashes of great beauty.

The scenes in which Hideo’s wife buries her anguish in her music are beautifully told. One can practically hear the thrums of the double-bass reverberating. Even in all this pain, Taniguchi tells us, there is beauty. In all this devastation, there is hope.

—Laurie Hertzel

The Ocean in the Closet
Coffee House Press, 2007
By Yuko Taniguchi (M.F.A ’01)

Let’s say you’re having coffee with your oldest, closest female friend—a woman with a sense of humor, a flair for description, and an endless interest in analyzing emotions, particularly her own. She confesses to an extramarital affair, then launches into a moment-by-moment account of the entire experience. The novel Still Life with Husband by Lauren Fox (M.F.A. ’98) is the fictional equivalent of that long, intimate, one-way chat.

Emily Ross, the narrator, is a 30-year-old Milwaukee freelance writer. She is married to Kevin, a technical writer and seemingly almost-perfect man: intelligent, attractive, sensitive, reliable. Maybe a little too reliable, though. She’s feeling a bit bored, not to mention leery of Kevin’s increasing desire for a baby and a house in the suburbs, a life phase Emily isn’t ready to enter.

One morning in a coffee shop, she meets David Keller, a writer at the local alternative newspaper, who appears even closer to perfect than Kevin: He’s also intelligent, attractive, sensitive, etc., but not boring. Sexy, in fact! Oh, and he’s attracted to her.

Emily agrees to meet David for a date, neglecting to mention that she’s married. When she eventually admits her marital status, David is repelled, but only temporarily. So begins their intense affair.

Most of Still Life with Husband involves Emily brooding about her conflicted feelings: her attraction to David versus her affection for Kevin, her guilt and angst. As she goes about her life—working at a medical journal called Male Reproduction, attempting to comfort her best friend after a miscarriage—she constantly frets about the tangled relationships. The perspective is close and narrow, the story unfolding via the thoughts and observations that pass through Emily’s head.

David stands as I approach and holds up his hand in greeting. I have a brief, blinding vision of him grabbing me by the coat collar and pulling me toward him, kissing me wildly. I have to snap out of it, drag my wobbly self back to this planet. “Hey!” I say, walking toward him.

“I have the day off,” he says. “I brought chocolate.”

I can tell that he’s flustered. His non sequiturs are an advertisement for it. He pulls out a bar of fancy European chocolate from his coat pocket, holds it flat in his open palm.

“I took a risk,” he says, “that you’d be a dark chocolate woman.”

“I am,” I say, smiling, still facing him, ten inches from him. I take a tiny step closer.

Despite her mistakes, Emily is a classic “good girl”—unaccustomed to transgression, fully aware of what she should be doing. Both Kevin and David are nice guys. Yet inevitably someone must get hurt. The narrative drive stems from the reader’s curiosity about whether Emily can pull a happy ending from this mess.

But with everybody so basically decent, the stakes never rise high enough to create much tension. You know that, unlike literature’s most famous adulteresses, nobody’s going to take poison or throw herself under a train. Feelings may get hurt, but everything will turn out more or less all right. In real life, such knowledge is comforting; in fiction, it tends to sap some urgency from the plot. But Fox has an appealing, breezy style and an eye for color and details. She’s a pleasant person to spend time with, like that hypothetical close friend.

—Katy Read

Still Life with Husband
Alfred A. Knopf, 2007
By Lauren Fox (M.F.A. ’98)

Grace Above All
By Jane St. Anthony (B.A. ’73)
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007

Thirteen-year-old Grace is forced to spend two precious weeks of summer vacation with her four siblings and do-nothing mother at her mother’s childhood cabin. Grace is certain that the time there will be a waste. But she unexpectedly meets some new relatives, and discovers new parts of herself in the process. A companion novel to St. Anthony’s first book for young adult readers, The Summer Sherman Loved Me.

Bessler’s book is part inspirational guide and part how-to manual for anyone who has ever encountered a blank page. He demystifies the writing process by breaking it down into manageable steps and offers would-be writers valuable techniques for improving both their writing and their enjoyment of it. He draws liberally upon the wisdom of the world’s best writers to inspire the everyday writer.