Book Reviews by Kara Sirmans

Praising Anne Tyler’s writing has become nearly as difficult over the years as finding new things to say about Meryl Streep’s acting. Tyler makes it look so easy one could easily miss the subtlety and intricacy she puts into accounts of everyday life. Even the missteps have life that lesser writers would be happy to own.

Tyler hews to her recurring themes of entangled family relationships and the struggle to balance self with a sense of obligation in Noah's Compass . Neither a misstep nor a landmark, it explores some of these familiar issues with outcomes that reflect different sensibilities and choices but leaves the reader wanting more.

The view from the top of life’s hill can be expansive yet daunting. While we can see where we came from, we also see the other side of the slope and it’s all downhill from here.

Dani Shapiro stands at the top of the hill with a lot on her mind. Has she been a good enough wife, daughter and mother? Is she Jewish enough? Has she practiced enough yoga? She is less interested in “Why are we here?” than in “What does it all mean for me?”

These aren’t the small questions, obviously, but they’re questions that we all face whether we confront them openly or hide from them. Shapiro decides to face them head-on as she adjusts to the view from the “afternoon” of her life in her memoir Devotion: A Memoir .

The transatlantic cousin to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of a City series returns with an airy update on the eclectic residents of the 44 Scotland Street series. The Unbearable Lightness of Scones: A 44 Scotland Street Novel (5)  is an ideal book for a long flight, a busy schedule or the avid fan. Like a letter from a distant cousin, it can be consumed in one sitting or easily put down and picked back up again without really losing one’s place.

Julie Powell is not Tiger Woods but one can’t be blamed if the golf star’s colossal implosion comes to mind while reading her new work. How juicy was that first bite about the golfer’s late night-early morning car crash and reports of another woman... then another woman … then another woman. But that tasty moment of gossip eventually gave way to a sense that we’ve seen too much -- the crying child and collapsed mother-in-law on the 911 call sealed it. If we must read on, it should be with real compassion for the wrecked lives involved.

• The Song Is You, by Arthur Phillips -- A novel for the iPod age. Phillips takes the almost-too-clever conceit of two would-be lovers who never quite connect and makes their lives unique, breathable and distinct. What could easily come across as contrivance truly sings with the suggestion that sometimes a great love can happen between two people who keep missing each other. Not the most perfect book ever written, but Phillips nails the advances and retreats of this first decade of the century and how we relate to each other.

• A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore -- I adore Lorrie Moore. Seriously. So this hurts me more than it hurts you.

Judith Matloff’s idea of a normal life probably isn’t what you’d call normal. As a foreign correspondent, Matloff spent the first 20 years of her career covering tragedies from Zaire to Chechnya, but decided to trade it in for a life somewhere more peaceful, more practical. …Somewhere like a dilapidated crack house in West Harlem during its drug trafficking heyday.

A gay single man of good fortune, must be in want of a long-lost stepdaughter. So goes the thinking in Elinor Lipman’s latest novel, “The Family Man.” Oh the misunderstandings, calamities and eventual embraces such a blended pairing could create!

Lipman and her body of work constantly beget comparisons to Jane Austen. They both take lighthearted society sketches and smudge streaks of gray between the black and white. “The Family Man” premise reliably delivers on those drawing room credentials but doesn’t quite reach her usual standard that makes the witty and stylized seem poignant and near enough to touch.