I'm entertained by Ayelet Waldman.
When I first read Bad Mother a few years ago, I was charmed by her tone and her wide, confessional sweep--enough that I said so to her, and got a characteristically open response. Since then I've followed her ups and downs--which are higher and lower than most peoples'--until I read that she'd published a new book of fiction. Now, I'd already had a bad experience with reading fiction by a confessional essayist I loved (Anne Lamott) and wasn't anxious to repeat the experience. Curiosity won out, however, and I'm glad to report that the experience wasn't the same. I'm not going to say that I prefer Waldman's fiction; just that I'm pretty much going to enjoy anything she writes.
Why? Mostly it's tone. I loved the parts of Red Hook Road that explain the relationship between an academic who lives in Manhattan for nine months out of the year and a local who cleans her house year-round. It is pretty nearly pitch perfect, as far as I can tell, and I'm someone who is acquainted with lots of academic women and a few of the women who clean their houses.
The tone of the section in which a father has to pick out a casket for his daughter also struck me, as he thinks that his wife would ask
"what, exactly, the point was of 'lasting quality' in an item whose very purpose was to decompose?"
The way the characters think of and try to anticipate each other is another charm of the novel--the third-person point of view shifts the focus from one character to another so that you sympathize with each one, in turn, although the academic, Iris, seems to me to get a little more time than the other characters. As a mother, seeing the conflict that this woman has with her surviving daughter was agonizing--I could see both of their points of view, but despite, that, knew that my reaction would be the same as this mother's and that my daughter would (will someday?) react the same way:
"Ruthie had ached to talk about her anxiety with her mother, to ask her for advice, but while Iris had greeted Matt's plan with studied nonchalance, Ruthie knew how intensely she disapproved. Any apprehension Ruthie expressed would be greeted with relief. There would be no opportunity for the unbiased consideration of the options that she actually sought."
The sympathetic portrait of Iris culminates in her husband's analysis of her personality after he's left her:
"Iris had always been like that...loyal to a fault. She was that way with everyone she loved, tenacious in her defense of them, absolute in her allegiance. This was the other side of her bossiness, her pushiness. She always thought she knew what was best for you, always tried to force you to comply, but she did it because she wanted the best for you."
This describes not only me, but also several of my academic friends, women who aren't casual about much, but bring an intensity to everything they do.
The way the story ends is pretty sentimental and contrived, but I enjoyed it anyway. There's a boat-building/violin playing metaphor that runs all the way through the novel, and it leads to a sappy paragraph about marriage:
"That was true... about marriage: it was only a boat, too. A wooden boat, difficult to build, even more difficult to maintain, whose beauty derived at least in part from its unlikelihood. Long ago the pragmatic justifications for both marriage and wooden-boat building had been lost or superseded. Why invest countless hours, years, and dollars in planing and carving, gluing and fastening, caulking and fairing, when a fiberglass boat can be had at a fraction of the cost? Why struggle to maintain love and commitment over decades when there were far easier ways to live, ones that required no effort or attention to prevent corrosion and rot? Why continue to pour your heart into these obsolete arts? Because their beauty, the way they connect you to your history and to the living world, justifies your efforts."
Yes, this is a book written to appeal especially to a long-married woman of my age and avocation. I can't tell you that you'll like it, too, but I should think that any reader will at least enjoy the part when Iris' daughter, working at a library, recommends Pride and Prejudice to a patron who has been checking out Regency romances and converts her to an Austen fan.
Showing posts with label Ayelet Waldman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ayelet Waldman. Show all posts
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Monday, October 26, 2009
Manhood for Amateurs
Because I was going to my second weekend chess tournament requiring an overnight stay and at the first one I had read Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, I decided to read Michael Chabon's new collection of essays entitled Manhood for Amateurs this weekend. I find that parenthood memoirs are always good reading over a weekend you're dedicating to your child's enjoyment, and since I've already read Fred Waitzken's memoir of being a chess parent, it was on to more general topics.
The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).
And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.
His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.
The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.
I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."
Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.
The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).
And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.
His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.
The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.
I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."
Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Bad Mother
I was a third of the way through the ARC of Ayelet Waldman's memoir Bad Mother (courtesy of the Kenyon college bookstore) before I realized--because she says it--that she's married to Michael Chabon, author of Summerland and therefore one of my favorite writers. So I continued reading with heightened interest.
Not that I wasn't pretty much absorbed from the first page, when she reveals "I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco." How many times have we all done that? I think I busted my first Bad Mother in the fall of 1993, at 9 pm on an ordinary Wednesday night in Wal-Mart. I was buying disposable diapers, my own new baby safely at home in her crib with her father in the next room. The toddler in the cart ahead of mine was clearly tired, wailing and being ignored by her harrassed young mother. I will never do that, I thought. And then, like all mothers, I proceeded from the disposable diapers to even bigger maternal sins. Let she who is without sin cast the first vote for Bad Mother of the Year. Ayelet Waldman has twice the opportunity for Bad Mothering that I do, because she has two more children. No matter how bad your life as a Mother may have gotten, I can almost guarantee that reading about Waldman's experiences will give you the company that misery loves, as it did for me.
My experience of reading Bad Mother was fascinatingly illuminated by my surroundings; I was accompanying my just-13-year-old son to his first big chess tournament. As I opened my book and began reading during the "Simul," in which chess masters and grand masters play up to twenty challengers at one time, a woman I'd nodded to earlier as our sons struck up an acquaintance came over to me and told me what lovely manners my son has. As I beamed, she asked "is he home schooled?" and when I said no, she looked surprised, saying something about how home schooled children tend to be more polite than others. Strike one for me at the Bad Mother competition, with consolation points for the compliment.
The tournament weekend provided the right context for me to read this book. My husband had to be in Chicago and my son was missing a soccer game. The three-hour car trip to the city where the tournament was held had to be coordinated with my daughter's play rehearsal and set building schedule, her overnight with a friend, and care of all our pets. All of our trips necessitated fast food meals--Bad Mother points. But Waldman reminds me that "jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air."
And Waldman reassures me that I'm not the only mother to ever do specific bad things to my children. How? By telling about all the bad things she's done! And they're not all minor, I assure you. The chapter about Rocketship is particularly brave, as I know of few other mothers who can compete with her in that particular mode of Bad Motherhood. One part I found especially reassuring is when she says "The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament." So was I, Ayelet, and I know exactly what you mean. Also I know a number of mothers who have said almost exactly what you say when they found out what was causing some problem for their child: "I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him...."
The chapter about homework was balm to my soul on a busy April weekend: "apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I'm not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.)" I also loved her separation of little girls' Halloween costumes into two main categories: "cereal box" or "ho." And I enjoyed her common sense: "Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid." Kind of like the Health Teacher in the movie Mean Girls ("Don't have sex. You'll die."), or the reaction to the anti-gay-marriage "Gathering Storm" video that was taken off YouTube because everyone laughed at it (see the parody, "Gaythering Storm" here).
Bad Mother is scheduled to go on sale May 5, 2009. If you've ever busted a Bad Mother, you want to read it... and you want to tell me about your Bad Mother busts! Because we're all in this together, even if some of us are more polite about it than others.
Not that I wasn't pretty much absorbed from the first page, when she reveals "I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco." How many times have we all done that? I think I busted my first Bad Mother in the fall of 1993, at 9 pm on an ordinary Wednesday night in Wal-Mart. I was buying disposable diapers, my own new baby safely at home in her crib with her father in the next room. The toddler in the cart ahead of mine was clearly tired, wailing and being ignored by her harrassed young mother. I will never do that, I thought. And then, like all mothers, I proceeded from the disposable diapers to even bigger maternal sins. Let she who is without sin cast the first vote for Bad Mother of the Year. Ayelet Waldman has twice the opportunity for Bad Mothering that I do, because she has two more children. No matter how bad your life as a Mother may have gotten, I can almost guarantee that reading about Waldman's experiences will give you the company that misery loves, as it did for me.
My experience of reading Bad Mother was fascinatingly illuminated by my surroundings; I was accompanying my just-13-year-old son to his first big chess tournament. As I opened my book and began reading during the "Simul," in which chess masters and grand masters play up to twenty challengers at one time, a woman I'd nodded to earlier as our sons struck up an acquaintance came over to me and told me what lovely manners my son has. As I beamed, she asked "is he home schooled?" and when I said no, she looked surprised, saying something about how home schooled children tend to be more polite than others. Strike one for me at the Bad Mother competition, with consolation points for the compliment.
The tournament weekend provided the right context for me to read this book. My husband had to be in Chicago and my son was missing a soccer game. The three-hour car trip to the city where the tournament was held had to be coordinated with my daughter's play rehearsal and set building schedule, her overnight with a friend, and care of all our pets. All of our trips necessitated fast food meals--Bad Mother points. But Waldman reminds me that "jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air."
And Waldman reassures me that I'm not the only mother to ever do specific bad things to my children. How? By telling about all the bad things she's done! And they're not all minor, I assure you. The chapter about Rocketship is particularly brave, as I know of few other mothers who can compete with her in that particular mode of Bad Motherhood. One part I found especially reassuring is when she says "The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament." So was I, Ayelet, and I know exactly what you mean. Also I know a number of mothers who have said almost exactly what you say when they found out what was causing some problem for their child: "I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him...."
The chapter about homework was balm to my soul on a busy April weekend: "apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I'm not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.)" I also loved her separation of little girls' Halloween costumes into two main categories: "cereal box" or "ho." And I enjoyed her common sense: "Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid." Kind of like the Health Teacher in the movie Mean Girls ("Don't have sex. You'll die."), or the reaction to the anti-gay-marriage "Gathering Storm" video that was taken off YouTube because everyone laughed at it (see the parody, "Gaythering Storm" here).
Bad Mother is scheduled to go on sale May 5, 2009. If you've ever busted a Bad Mother, you want to read it... and you want to tell me about your Bad Mother busts! Because we're all in this together, even if some of us are more polite about it than others.
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