Three Day Road (2005)

"They gave me medicine for the pain, and I learned how to fly in a new way. The cost this time is that I can no longer live without the medicine, and in a few days there will be none left. Their morphine eats men."

Set during World War I, Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road centers on two friends: Xavier and Eli. They meet as children in residential school, later escaping to live with Xavier's aunt, Niska, in the bush. Though Xavier would be happy to remain in the bush, continuing to learn from Niska, the lure of the war in Europe is too great for Eli and he talks Xavier into joining him. They go overseas where their skill as marksmen allows them to become snipers, but they quickly start to split, heading in two different directions. Eli is admired for his skill and his bravery, but eventually goes mad with bloodlust and drug addiction; Xavier is overshadowed by his friend, growing resentful of living in Eli's shadow and also become scared of him, of what he has shown himself to be capable of.

The novel is split into two narratives. One takes place in the past, charting Xavier and Eli's experiences in the war. The other takes place in the novel's present, following Niska and Xavier as they journey back into the bush, Xavier suffering greatly from the physical injuries he's returned with and the psychological injuries of his memories and his impending withdrawal from morphine. The two narratives function not only to tell two different, but intimately connected, stories, but also as a contrast between the traditional way of life embraced by Niska and the "modern" way of life dictated by the white governing culture.

Boydon's prose is crisp and vivid, with the passages detailing battle scenes that paint an intense picture. The action sequences are excellently rendered, but Boyden is equally adept at the story's many quieter moments, moments that dig deep into the psyches of the characters, giving nuance and shading to their personalities and their relationships. Three Day Road is an incredibly engaging and moving novel and the writing is so assured and skilled that it's hard to believe this is a first novel. For this effort he won the Rogers' Writers Trust Fiction Prize, and his second novel, Through Black Spruce picked up the Giller Prize in 2008. After reading and thoroughly enjoying Three Day Road, Through Black Spruce is now at the top of my "must read" list.

The Position (2005)

"Fuck the book, Holly used to say. Yes, that was about right: Fuck the book."

Depending on how you look at it, Meg Wolitzer's The Position is a novel about how a book destroyed the members of a family, or it's about how a book provided the framework for the destruction that would have happened regardless. It centers on the Mellows, Roz and Paul, the parents who write the how-to book "Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment," and their four children: Holly, Michael, Dashiell, and Claudia, all of whom are deeply affected by the book's existence.

The novel begins with the childrens' discovery of the book - Holly and Michael are adolescents, Dashiell and Claudia still very young - and with the family in tact and happy, but most of the novel takes places three decades later, when publishers want to reissue the book to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Roz and Paul are by now divorced and the children are grown with lives and problems of their own. Holly has become a spectre, a figure only nominally connected to the rest of the family and determined to keep it that way; Michael is a workaholic whose anti-depressants have made him unable to function sexually; Dashiell is a Log Cabin Republican; and Claudia is aimless, struggling to find her place in the world.

Wolitzer moves back and forth between the characters, relating the story from their various perspectives. The children are all shown to have been profoundly impacted by the fact of the book, though the issues really have more to do with the implosion of their parents' marriage soon after the book's publication and the knowledge that intense sexual intimacy is not, necessarily, a guarantee of relationship longevity (the only exception seems to be Dashiell, whose issue is with the book, specifically with the fact that there's nothing in it that he can connect to his own experiences and desires). The Position is a sexually frank, if not necessarily erotic, novel with a few brief flashes of brilliance. All things told it's a bit uneven, but it's ultimately worth a read.