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Louis Drax is a nine-year-old boy living in France with his stay at home mother and Air France pilot father. Such an apparently normal family description is the merest tissue of appearances. The father is probably an alcoholic and unfaithful; the son is "accident-prone" (a nearly fatal episode of SIDS at two weeks of age, a near fatal electrocution at age 6 after falling on the tracks of the métro in Lyon; salmonella, tetanus, botulism, meningitis, etc. [or, as Louis is fond of saying, "blah, blah, blah."]) and the mother has issues that only emerge as one becomes more deeply involved in what is a mystery story.

Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or Janet Lewis’s superb The Trial of Søren Qvist, one knows the ending early on (page 16 in Louis Drax), but not the details. The why and the how are the stuff of the novelist’s art in all three books.

With premonition of more danger, Louis goes on a family picnic (see below for the author’s biographical basis for this tale) and winds up at the bottom of a ravine, dead. Drowned and dead. A few hours later, in the morgue, he is found to be alive. Comatose and in a persistent vegetative state but alive. He is therefore transferred to the care of a neurologist specializing in comatose patients at the Clinique de l’Horizon (formerly l’Hôpital des Incurables).

It is here that the mystery unfolds. The questions are: How did Louis end up at the bottom of the ravine? Did his father, now missing, push him as his distraught mother alleges? What role does the clearly neurotic mother play in this tragedy? And who exactly is Louis Drax? Lastly, how do the mysterious letters allegedly from him, written while still in a coma, come to be?

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Hollinghurst's Booker Prize winning novel begins in 1983, just as Nick Guest has graduated from university. A young middle class gay man, he has secured for himself a rather cozy spot in the posh Notting Hill mansion of the wealthy Fedden family, based on his friendship at Oxford with the family scion, Toby, and partly earning his keep by looking after the daughter, Catherine, whose manic depression is marked by mood swings, lability, suicidal thoughts, and self-mutilation.

Gerald Fedden, the imposing paterfamilias has recently been elected a Tory MP (Member of Parliament), rising to power on the coattails of Margaret Thatcher's dominance of British politics in the 1980s. The story follows Nick through the mid-1980s, between Thatcher's two re-elections, chronicling his relationships with the Fedden family, his parents and his lovers, as his own fortunes and opportunities swell and then burst.

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During  the Dutch Golden Age, religion and medical science were combined in people's minds to the extent that illness, especially plague, was seen as a punishment from God. In the minds of  many Dutch seventeenth-century Calvinists, God was vengeful and often angry with the sinner. As Matton shows in this fictional monologue of an illiterate peasant woman, Hendrickje Stoffels (1626-1663), when plague swept through the city of Amsterdam, the afflicted person had three ways of fighting the disease: prayer, folk remedies, and the ministrations of the plague doctors. But for Hendrickje, prayer held first place.Hendrickje Stoffels modeled for several Rembrandt works. She was one of the three most important women in the life of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606-1669).

He was first married to Saskia van Uylenburgh, who bore him 4 children. Only Titus,their son, survived. As Saskia lay dying of tuberculosis, Rembrandt hired Geertje Dircx  (c.1610-1656) as Titus's wetnurse. She became Rembrandt's lover. Hendrickje entered his household and began a relationship with the painter in the late 1640s. As Geertje was being forced out of the home, Rembrandt started paying her an annuity; later, she sued Rembrandt for breach of marriage contract. He had her removed to a prison/insane asylum. Hendrickje bore him a daughter, Cornelia (1654),the only one of his five children to survive their father.

The book begins when Hendrickje is 23 years old and Rembrandt 42. Matton's book cover shows Rembrandt's painting, Hendrickje Bathing (1655). This and several other paintings of his lover illustrates Rembrandt's passion for Henrickje who  devoted her life to the artist, to Titus, and Cornelia. We read the experiences articulated by the deeply religious Hendrickje as she moves around Rembrandt's home and studio, and the streets of Amsterdam. She thinks that  cats and dogs, not rats, carry the plague.  She notices wounded war veterans with open sores in the streets, lepers, and public whippings and executions. She is obsessed with the worms that live in the body and cause plague and death. Cherries also cause the plague.

In 1654, the City Fathers summon her, pregnant, accusing her of whoredom--hence the title of the book. She endures an admonition and is banished from the Lord's Supper. She becomes Rembrandt's common law wife. We witness the home birth of Cornelia and observe Hendrickje breastfeeding her. She watches Rembrandt and his pupils at work in the evil smelling studio where his assistants boil rabbit skins to make glue for the paints. Hendrickje composes medications she has learnt about  from a midwife in her home town of Bradevoort, but she cannot cure the plague. A comet streaks across the sky to announce an outbreak in Amsterdam. Rembrandt goes bankrupt, and Hendrickje feels Rembrandt's tears on her face as she suffers a horrific death from plague, clinically rendered by the author.

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One of Steinbeck's earliest published works, The Pastures of Heaven is a collection of stories about the inhabitants of a fertile valley in California, beginning with the Spanish corporal who first stumbles across the "long valley floored with green pasturage on which a herd of deer browsed" and concluding with the families living there during the first stages of the great depression.  Most of the stories take place in 1928-1929, although many are rooted in flashbacks and narratives that span the generations before.  

The novel consists of short stories that describe particular times and places within the valley, and collectively form multiple different perspectives on life there; they are linked by the valley but also by the relationships between the families, and in particular, the Munroes, whose pleasant, mild appearance in almost every story heralds disaster.

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Set against the backdrop of the violent post-Duvalier years in Haiti, this novel traces the development of Sophie, the product of a violent rape. Having been raised lovingly by her aunt in a village near Port-au-Prince for 12 years, Sophie is suddenly sent for by her mother (who had immigrated to the United States as an asylum seeker). Living in New York, Sophie discovers that her mother is haunted by violent nightmares, a remnant of the trauma she had suffered before fleeing Haiti.

Part Two opens as Sophie, now 18, falls in love with her neighbor, a musician named Joseph. Her mother, upon finding out about Sophie's love interest, begins the humiliating tradition of her mother, "testing" Sophie's virginity by inserting a finger in her vagina to make sure the hymen was not broken. After several "tests," Sophie painfully breaks her own hymen with a pestle and immediately runs off with Joseph.

Part Three of the novel opens about a year later, when Sophie has left her husband and returns to Haiti with her baby daughter. Here, she begins learning about her mother's past as well as telling her aunt and grandmother about her own current sexual dysfunction and her bulimia. Sophie and her mother reunite and reconcile in Haiti and later return to the States where Sophie returns to Joseph and begins a kind of therapy that includes rituals from Haitian, African, and Chicana traditions.

Meanwhile, Sophie's mother becomes pregnant (by her long time lover and friend) and increasingly agitated, finally committing suicide. At the funeral, in Haiti, Sophie runs into the cane field where her mother had been raped some 20 years earlier. As she is screaming her grief and rage, she tears at the cane stalks. Rather than attempting to stop her, Sophie's aunt and grandmother watch her, finally asking, "are you free?" and then insisting, "You are free!" (p. 233)

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At fourteen, after marginally consensual sex with a boyfriend, Jane has a baby.  She managed to keep her pregnancy a well-camouflaged secret until late in the process; both family and friends are still reeling from her late-breaking news.  Her mother has died; her grandmother has moved from the tribal reservation to live with Jane, her father (a white Canadian), and Jane's two brothers.  Though the school she attends has daycare for students' babies, Jane finds little emotional support, even among former friends, until a new girl, Dawna, takes an active, unpretentious interest in both Jane and the baby.

With Dawna's and her grandmother's help Jane decides to make the rather complicated arrangements required to allow her to audition for the school play and pursue a longstanding dream of singing and dancing on stage.  She meets with fierce and aggressive competition from a much more privileged girl who does her best to discredit Jane's efforts on account of her unfitness as both a Native American who doesn't look the part, and as an unwed mother who, as one faculty member puts it, shouldn't "parade herself" in public.  Nevertheless, Jane's skill and determination and soul-searching pay off; despite the steep learning curve required to care for a baby and the psychological cost of teen motherhood, she succeeds in making the accommodations and compromises necessary to retrieve old dreams on new terms.

            

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Late in the twentieth century, the young doctor Goodheart fails in a city practice and accepts a salaried position in the country.  Even there his difficulties persist. A challenging patient—the Reverend Pastor--refuses a tiny muscle biopsy that would not only confirm the diagnosis of trichinosis, but establish the doctor’s reputation. “I would rather die than let myself be skewered alive!” the pastor shouts (p. 11).

Deeply discouraged Goodheart wanders into the country at twilight, sighing, “If only there were a means of making the human body as transparent as jelly fish” (p. 13). Suddenly a woman appears in a blaze of light. She is “Electra the spirit of the twentieth century” (p. 15). She gives the astonished doctor a box and bids him open the lid. The nearby tree immediately becomes “as transparent as a jelly fish” (p.17). Next the box, judiciously aimed, illuminates the inner workings of a frog.

Goodheart applies his box to the ailing pastor and sees parasites teaming throughout his body. Then he effects a dramatic cure with helminthotoxin made from the worms themselves—a treatment that had been invented sometime during the century.

The box proves to be a simple electrical device, easily replicated. Declining financial recognition, to the vexation of his wife, Goodheart communicates the workings of the box to the world with no mention of Electra. But fame and riches flow his way and he dies in old age an honored man.

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