Addendum

I forgot to say that I have been reading Jayneanne Phillips' new novel, Lark and Termite, for Bookies, the bookclub at school. I didn't take to the book right away. I had to make myself read it. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I wasn't in the mood for its melancholy tone. The slim novel is told, rather like The Sound and the Fury, from the perspective of several of its characters, though it always returns to Lark, the daughter of Lola, who is at the time of the novel, dead by suicide; Termite, Lola's son by a husband who died young in the Korean War, never having seen his child or knowing that he was hydrocephalic; the dead husband, who relates in his section the tale of the battle that took his life; and Nonie, Lola's sister, who cares for Lark and Termite. In places it is lyrical and lovely, hypnotic, but sometimes it dragged for me, and I became impatient with it. Still, I am glad I read it.