When I saw The White Devil, by Justin Evans, on a list of books that Harper was willing to send me for review, I couldn't resist--even though it's a ghost story and I usually shy away from anything scary. But it's about Byron...
And it turned out to be one of those mysteries where what happens is driven by a character finding out more about Byron's life. Mmm, total catnip for an English major. If I could have, I'd have read the whole thing in one pleasant afternoon. But deadlines and kids' awards ceremonies intervened, and I ended up having to put it down twice, which was two more times than I would have otherwise.
As Jenny observes, this novel has a lot of plot elements, and I think that's what kept me reading. If I got a little tired of one story line, maybe the teenage boy's puerile meanderings about his relationship with his father, there would soon be another one along to keep me going down the track toward finding out more about Byron's relationship with the ghost.
He's a malevolent ghost, and it's not until a scene at the very end that you find out a little bit about why Byron could have loved him. In the meantime, though, you get some impressions of life in a British boarding school, the realism of which may be due to the author's own year at Harrow. I like the comparison of the attitude of students to their British teachers and their American ones--at Harrow,
"the banter was larded with respectful Sirs, seasoned with eager, show-offy anecdotes from the newly risen Sixth Formers. All this was friendly, even affectionate..."
while at the American school,
"the baby boomer faculty who had chosen such a low-paying career as teaching were treated with suppressed contempt by the students, children of Wall Streeters, who knew that grades didn't matter, didn't help you make millions; that these teachers, then, must be little better than servants."
When Andrew, the American, comes to Harrow, he is told that he looks like Lord Byron and should therefore act his part in the play that a poet and housemaster is writing, about which of Byron's many sexual partners could be shown to be the love of his life. The ghost wants that distinction, and he wants Andrew.
So Andrew has to find out what part this ghost might have played in Byron's life, and who he might have wanted to kill, in order to keep his friends alive.
I particularly enjoy the poet's reply to one of Andrew's questions:
"Ah, children, who want to know what poems mean. They don't mean. They express. They are songs. When you sympathize, you make them mean something...."
I have to admit that I read up until the last few chapters and then put the book aside to finish in the morning, as is my habit if I read anything that might be scary. But I could have gone ahead and read it; it wraps things up nicely without adding anything too horrific.
This was a nice little piece of fiction-candy, suitable for popping all in your mouth at once; one of those attractive, light-colored candies with a dark, chewy center.
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book review. Show all posts
Monday, May 16, 2011
Thursday, May 12, 2011
Lucky Jim
When someone in the Imaginary Friends Book Club proposed reading Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, I went downstairs to find my copy, and came back up having found only Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. The paperback I was remembering must have been from my college-professor-parents' house. So on a subsequent visit to a used book store whose shelves struck me as an oddly exact recreation of my parents', I picked up a copy of Lucky Jim, a spoof of British academic life in the 1950s.
I read the whole thing because it was mildly funny in a low-key, David Lodge kind of way. But I have to wonder about the point of digging this one up. Didn't we get over the 1950's already? Wasn't all of Jim's sort of fumbling about with women addressed by the "summer of love"? And if he didn't want to be a history professor, then surely the lesson of the hippies was that he didn't have to be. So why reread this book?
It's very British; I was continually irritated by the reiterations of Jim's feeling that "nice things are nicer than nasty things." Duh! Only the British eat seed cake when there's gateaux to be had.
Jim, whose last name is Dixon, is very irritating. He rarely does anything nice for anyone; in fact, he specializes in making other peoples' lives more difficult. That can be funny, but at--what is, for me at least--a very low level, as in this passage:
"when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."
When another character finally asks Jim why he wants to teach medieval history in a college, he reveals himself to be the 1950's version of a slacker, one who had some choices but didn't care enough to make them:
"the reason why I'm a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It's why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I'd be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff."
Amis' comic genius, if you think he has any, lies in his ability to capture the small details of conversation that can make it so awkward and wearing, like when someone says a word wrong because he's thinking of another word and you start thinking about that instead of what he's said:
"'And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'
The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical."
Every time Jim said something awkward in a conversation, I was torn between laughing at him and identifying with him, which disturbed me because I didn't like him! And yet I often say things like he does out of nervousness when I'm at an academic gathering:
"'Well, it's an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.'
'You're in luck, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing around cigarettes.
Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name."
At one point when they're sitting at a table and Jim Dixon is observing a conversation, his thoughts are petty and mean in almost the exact same way mine would be in a similar situation, which made me grin and cringe at the same time:
"Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it--Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values'--and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence."
The high point of the novel is when Jim finally says to his annoying and manipulative friend Margaret what readers have been longing for him to say for pages and pages:
"Don't be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do."
And then she has a page and a half of hysterics, ending with having her face slapped and being given a glass of whiskey, which she takes and "with eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more."
If there's any satisfaction in the ending, it's that Margaret is revealed as a fraud and Jim gets free of her.
Overall, though, I'd take rereading Lodge's Nice Work over plowing through this old-fashioned relic, if I felt the need for British academic humor. The uncomfortable pleasure of reading the quite awkward bits of conversation is the only reason this particular novel should still be read at all. Have you ever had a conversation at an academic gathering that made you feel you had just said something monumentally stupid? And did you cringe for days afterwords?
I read the whole thing because it was mildly funny in a low-key, David Lodge kind of way. But I have to wonder about the point of digging this one up. Didn't we get over the 1950's already? Wasn't all of Jim's sort of fumbling about with women addressed by the "summer of love"? And if he didn't want to be a history professor, then surely the lesson of the hippies was that he didn't have to be. So why reread this book?
It's very British; I was continually irritated by the reiterations of Jim's feeling that "nice things are nicer than nasty things." Duh! Only the British eat seed cake when there's gateaux to be had.
Jim, whose last name is Dixon, is very irritating. He rarely does anything nice for anyone; in fact, he specializes in making other peoples' lives more difficult. That can be funny, but at--what is, for me at least--a very low level, as in this passage:
"when publicly disagreeing with her husband for example, she was the only living being capable of making Dixon sympathize with him. It was rather annoying to hear how kind she'd been; it entailed putting tiresome qualifications on his dislike for her."
When another character finally asks Jim why he wants to teach medieval history in a college, he reveals himself to be the 1950's version of a slacker, one who had some choices but didn't care enough to make them:
"the reason why I'm a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It's why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. But I never guessed I'd be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff."
Amis' comic genius, if you think he has any, lies in his ability to capture the small details of conversation that can make it so awkward and wearing, like when someone says a word wrong because he's thinking of another word and you start thinking about that instead of what he's said:
"'And I happen to like the arts, you sam.'
The last word, a version of 'see', was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short 'a', as if he were going to say 'sat'. This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible 'm'. After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with 'You do', which he tried to make knowing and sceptical."
Every time Jim said something awkward in a conversation, I was torn between laughing at him and identifying with him, which disturbed me because I didn't like him! And yet I often say things like he does out of nervousness when I'm at an academic gathering:
"'Well, it's an unexpected pleasure to be drinking pints at a do like this.'
'You're in luck, Dixon,' Gore-Urquhart said sharply, handing around cigarettes.
Dixon felt himself blushing slightly, and resolved to say no more for a time. None the less he was pleased that Gore-Urquhart had caught his name."
At one point when they're sitting at a table and Jim Dixon is observing a conversation, his thoughts are petty and mean in almost the exact same way mine would be in a similar situation, which made me grin and cringe at the same time:
"Gore-Urquhart had tilted his large dark head over towards Bertrand; his face, half-averted, eyes on the ground, wore a small intent frown, as if he were hard of hearing and couldn't bear to miss a word. Dixon couldn't bear not missing any more of it--Bertrand was now using the phrase 'contrapuntal tone-values'--and switched to his right, where for some moments he'd been half-conscious of a silence."
The high point of the novel is when Jim finally says to his annoying and manipulative friend Margaret what readers have been longing for him to say for pages and pages:
"Don't be fantastic, Margaret. Come off the stage for a moment, do."
And then she has a page and a half of hysterics, ending with having her face slapped and being given a glass of whiskey, which she takes and "with eerie predictability she choked and coughed, swallowed some, coughed again, swallowed some more."
If there's any satisfaction in the ending, it's that Margaret is revealed as a fraud and Jim gets free of her.
Overall, though, I'd take rereading Lodge's Nice Work over plowing through this old-fashioned relic, if I felt the need for British academic humor. The uncomfortable pleasure of reading the quite awkward bits of conversation is the only reason this particular novel should still be read at all. Have you ever had a conversation at an academic gathering that made you feel you had just said something monumentally stupid? And did you cringe for days afterwords?
Monday, May 9, 2011
Fuzzy Nation
When I read that John Scalzi's Fuzzy Nation was coming out, I had to find our copy of H. Beam Piper's The Fuzzy Papers so I could reread the original of the story that Scalzi has enlarged and updated. Then the Piper book sat on my shelf until last week, when Cassandra Ammerman at Tor sent me a shiny, new hardback copy of Fuzzy Nation, and I had to hurry up and read one book right after the other, which turned out to be a fine thing to do, as Scalzi's story is an agreeable addition to Piper's, much more than just a re-hashing of some of the old issues.
The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story The Star Beast was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations). There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.
Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama. There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).
Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.
Fuzzy Nation comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension. I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.
The human meets alien story has so many conventions, at this point, that it's hard for an experienced reader of science fiction to go into any story about aliens without suspecting them of sentience. Heinlein's story The Star Beast was one of my formative experiences with this genre, so the phrase "raising John Thomases" always goes through my mind when a strange alien is introduced (the "star beast" was kept as a pet until its human owner, John Thomas, discovers it has been studying them for generations). There's not much suspense at all about the sapience of these smart little "fuzzies," and Scalzi copes with that by having his narrator, Holloway, say things to them like "your evil mystic cuteness has no effect on me" when it obviously does, and by the humor in such things as the way the fuzzies interact with Holloway's dog.
Besides humor, though, the other way Scalzi copes with the lack of suspense about sapience is by making Holloway a clever lawyer and much of the second half of the novel some pretty riveting courtroom drama. There will be surprises even for the person who has recently reread the Piper story--you may know the secret of how the fuzzies communicate, but the way it is revealed in Scalzi's fictional courtroom will still be delightful, partly due to Scalzi's inventiveness and partly due to the possibilities offered by updating the technology (Piper's humans had "vocowriters" and video phones, while Scalzi's are equipped with security cameras and ipads).
Even though Holloway claims, at the end of the novel, that "building a nation is not all parties and fireworks," he belies his own claim even as he says it, and the author belies it by making the building of this fictional nation so much fun.
Fuzzy Nation comes out tomorrow, and you don't have to have read any previous science fiction to enjoy it, although if you want to, that will add another dimension. I like being reminded that in the 1950's, writers thought that "cocktail hour" was an immutable human custom and would be carried out to all the planets. It makes me wonder if the environmental concerns of our generation, reflected on Scalzi's fictional planet, will seem similarly transitory sixty years from now.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Maul
On Saturday night I got a plaque that says "It's kind of fun to do the impossible." That's exactly how it felt to pull off a high school musical in only five and a half weeks of rehearsal.
It went well. Now it's over. I feel like I've been a little mauled by the experience, or maybe that's just because of the title of the YA novel I was reading in very small bits during the last week of rehearsals and performance--Maul, by Tricia Sullivan.
As a novel, I didn't like it. It begins with a scene designed to shock its readers, progresses to a story they don't realize is parallel to the first one for a few chapters, and then starts weaving some details of the story together so readers think there's going to be a satisfying ending for both, and then just...stops. We're told "the game's over now" and that's it. Humph. Not a game I would have let myself get interested in if I'd been able to see that the ending didn't succeed in making sense of the plethora of detail given earlier. Even if you're someone who likes to read the ending first, though, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. There's some video-game-world-echoing-the-real-world stuff going on here.
Despite the fact that I don't think it's well structured, there are some parts that are absolutely amazing, many of them in terms of how well they describe adolescent emotion:
'Did you ever feel so much of something that you just couldn't control it? And you've tried shit like going to the basketball game and screaming your head off for hours and you had the orgasm or six or seven and you drank the SuperSize Chocolate Shake from 7-Eleven but in the end you didn't feel as empty as you hoped to feel. Did you ever feel something so strong you thought it was a physical hunger but it couldn't be satisfied that way, it was thicker than physical, it stuffed your axons, it was a pregnant idea begging to be born and it was using you for that shit, but you just didn't know what it LOOKED LIKE or WHO inseminated you or how to get it OUT.
Did you ever feel that? It feels like being slapped upside the head about 20,000 times a day and you'll do anything to escape it but you CAN'T.
Subversive behaviour. What a fucking world. It's like everyone's flowing along and the only ones stopping are the ones who can't hack it, they are the worldly possessions it hurts YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING DELUDED & HELPLESS and I'm reduced to paying $18.99 for a CD to express this for me because you won't let me do anything REAL until after I've been indoctrinated broken down and seduced into submitting to the same CIVILIZING WILL that's sitting on your face."
Even the little throwaway lines, the random thoughts, are fabulously provocative:
'Then I saw a live picture of myself in one of the TVs. I stuck out my tongue just to be sure. It's a well-known fact that TV is more real than real life so when people say get a life what they really mean is, get on TV. Because either you're watching TV or you're on it, and if you're doing neither it's a little like Schrodinger's cat, neither alive nor dead till observed. So when I saw myself on the video screen I was pretty happy because it meant I was alive."
There's some interesting commentary on gender politics, ending with a logical absurdity about where we could end up if we go on as we have been. This passage is from along that road:
"There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they'd whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides, you're not supposed to let it get to you. You're supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren't allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don't like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don't) who if you're lucky will offer to go beat them up knowng you won't take him up on it because you know perfectly well he'd probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they've been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and grime of uneducated testosterone."
There are also wonderful moments in the Maul (Mall), like when the heroine finds a clothing store with items that help her feel what she needs to feel right then in order to survive, and a bookstore where the books become exactly what she needs to read.
Lots of flashes of brilliance, but no final explosion, no settling of the dust so readers can glimpse the new world that has been created. It's the end of the game just when you've figured out a few of the rules.
It went well. Now it's over. I feel like I've been a little mauled by the experience, or maybe that's just because of the title of the YA novel I was reading in very small bits during the last week of rehearsals and performance--Maul, by Tricia Sullivan.
As a novel, I didn't like it. It begins with a scene designed to shock its readers, progresses to a story they don't realize is parallel to the first one for a few chapters, and then starts weaving some details of the story together so readers think there's going to be a satisfying ending for both, and then just...stops. We're told "the game's over now" and that's it. Humph. Not a game I would have let myself get interested in if I'd been able to see that the ending didn't succeed in making sense of the plethora of detail given earlier. Even if you're someone who likes to read the ending first, though, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. There's some video-game-world-echoing-the-real-world stuff going on here.
Despite the fact that I don't think it's well structured, there are some parts that are absolutely amazing, many of them in terms of how well they describe adolescent emotion:
'Did you ever feel so much of something that you just couldn't control it? And you've tried shit like going to the basketball game and screaming your head off for hours and you had the orgasm or six or seven and you drank the SuperSize Chocolate Shake from 7-Eleven but in the end you didn't feel as empty as you hoped to feel. Did you ever feel something so strong you thought it was a physical hunger but it couldn't be satisfied that way, it was thicker than physical, it stuffed your axons, it was a pregnant idea begging to be born and it was using you for that shit, but you just didn't know what it LOOKED LIKE or WHO inseminated you or how to get it OUT.
Did you ever feel that? It feels like being slapped upside the head about 20,000 times a day and you'll do anything to escape it but you CAN'T.
Subversive behaviour. What a fucking world. It's like everyone's flowing along and the only ones stopping are the ones who can't hack it, they are the worldly possessions it hurts YOU ARE ALL SO FUCKING DELUDED & HELPLESS and I'm reduced to paying $18.99 for a CD to express this for me because you won't let me do anything REAL until after I've been indoctrinated broken down and seduced into submitting to the same CIVILIZING WILL that's sitting on your face."
Even the little throwaway lines, the random thoughts, are fabulously provocative:
'Then I saw a live picture of myself in one of the TVs. I stuck out my tongue just to be sure. It's a well-known fact that TV is more real than real life so when people say get a life what they really mean is, get on TV. Because either you're watching TV or you're on it, and if you're doing neither it's a little like Schrodinger's cat, neither alive nor dead till observed. So when I saw myself on the video screen I was pretty happy because it meant I was alive."
There's some interesting commentary on gender politics, ending with a logical absurdity about where we could end up if we go on as we have been. This passage is from along that road:
"There they are with their uniforms and their discipline, an abstract and codified representation of all the construction workers who ever whistled at you and there you were, too polite to pee in their toolboxes in retaliation, too polite to challenge them, walking away red-faced because the worst part of it is that you were wondering whether they were really whistling like they'd whistle at Caprice or if they were just being sarcastic and were even now laughing at you with your short skinny legs and flat ass. Besides, you're not supposed to let it get to you. You're supposed to have a sense of humour: they do. See them waving their cocks at each other and farting? You aren't allowed to break the rules of their society which say that you are a cold uptight lesbian bitch if you don't like their hohoho aggressive male ways so just hold your head high from your position of moral superiority and go home and tell your boyfriend (if you have one, which I don't) who if you're lucky will offer to go beat them up knowng you won't take him up on it because you know perfectly well he'd probably get his ass kicked, most of the boys you know are highly ass-kickable because they've been brought up nicely. They were brought up in the luxury of knowing the money power of the military-industrial complex would protect them from the dirt and grime of uneducated testosterone."
There are also wonderful moments in the Maul (Mall), like when the heroine finds a clothing store with items that help her feel what she needs to feel right then in order to survive, and a bookstore where the books become exactly what she needs to read.
Lots of flashes of brilliance, but no final explosion, no settling of the dust so readers can glimpse the new world that has been created. It's the end of the game just when you've figured out a few of the rules.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
My New American Life
I loved After and was less enthusiastic about Goldengrove, so when Harper offered to send me an advance copy of the new novel by Francine Prose, I said yes, send me My New American Life. And the verdict? While I'm never sorry to have read anything by Francine Prose, because she's a good writer and a smart person, this one doesn't address national issues as well as I hoped it would, and as well as I thought After did.
The novel tells the story of Lula, an Albanian girl who came to New York City on a tourist visa and has been spinning tales about her native land as part of her effort to find a way into the American Dream. For the suburban New Jersey dad she calls Mr. Stanley who hires her to watch over his son Zach, a high school senior, she tells folk tales and goes along with the assumption that she is a war refugee. For Zach she tells stories about rebellious teenagers. For the Albanians she sees in New Jersey, Lula tries to tell a tale of her American success, but since none of them believe that success comes without some kind of sinister price tag, they see no real opportunity to capture that elusive American Dream, no house in the suburbs that isn't haunted by the failures of its former occupants.
The darkness and emptiness that are so integral to this story make the story itself feel underpopulated and flat. Here's Prose reading a one-minute segment from her novel. You can see that she believes in its satiric potential, but I don't see that the satiric moments ever coalesce into a meaningful whole.
The moments are interesting and amusing enough to sustain a reader, however. Especially early on in the novel, Lula's "teaching moments" with Zach are wonderful, like this one:
Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening news, educational for them both. The president had come on the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird flu. The word avian was hard for him. His forehead stitched each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he'd been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.
'At home,' Lula marveled, 'that man is a god.'
'You say that every night,' Zeke said.
'I'm reminding myself,' she'd said. Her country's love affair with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescuing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's death squads. Even at home she'd had her doubts about the streets paved with gold, but when she finally got to New York and started working at La Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feelings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula's opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.
Yesterday night, as always, she'd felt sorry for the president, so like a dim little boy who'd told a lie that had set off a war, and then he'd let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice president, who scared Lula too, with his cold little eyes not blinking when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.
'There is no bird flu,' Lula had told Zeke. 'A war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a sore throat and a fever.'
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York subway system.
Lula said 'There is no threat.'
'How do you know everything?' Zeke asked. 'Not that I don't agree it's all bullshit.'
She'd been about to tell Zeke--again!--about having grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha, who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he'd had built in a country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a chance to repeat herself, she'd been distracted by an advertisement for the new season of ER.
'Look, Zeke,' she'd said, 'see that gurney rushing in and doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at you till you figure out who to pay off.'
It seems to me that the delights of the satire in that passage are offset by the childishness of the caricature of the president, and so like all partisan political rants, the novel is going to end up preaching--to the extent that it succeeds in preaching at all--to the choir. Lula becomes less of an interesting character, and more of a liberal mouthpiece.
She's a canny operator at all times:
"She wanted to give him a consoling pat on the shoulder, but she never touched Mister Stanley, and she didn't want to start now, both of them weakened in body and spirit, both perhaps seeking relief from the damage that alcohol had inflicted on their bodies. Mister Stanley wasn't the type of guy to hit on the nanny, but every guy was a hangover away from being that type of guy. Even a friendly shoulder squeeze was a door best left unopened."
After enough passages like that, it gets harder for me to work up much sympathy for what Lula wants, and cheer for her to get it--she's looking out for herself, and she doesn't need anybody else.
As she gets more sarcastic, she gets funnier, but seems more two-dimensional, so that passages like this one--which should hit me right where I live (and work)--bounce off without much effect except a wry smile:
"It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world."
By the time Lula and Mister Stanley take Zeke to visit a fictional college called Alice Ames, the satire has stopped working. Lula's musings, at this point, are the ravings of someone who is becoming unhinged by months of boredom and disappointment:
"It had tickled her to see Americans taken in by the sort of scam people thought happened only in Eastern Europe. If she had a dollar for every La Changita customer who told her about not being allowed to drive his rental car to Prague because it might get stolen, she wouldn't have had to work there. But now that she'd come to care about Zeke and Mister Stanley, she'd lost the ironic remove from which she watched Americans get conned, and she hoped that Alice Adams was not a dirty trick cynically named after some grifter's favorite hooker."
Satire requires a delicate hand, and Francine Prose is almost good enough to do it well. So even though this isn't the satire about what has happened to The American Dream that I might have been hoping for, it's as close as anyone else has come since Miss Saigon, another "see ourselves as others see us" kind of satire, and it makes an interesting companion volume to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. My New American Life will be available--in bookstores--on Tuesday, April 26.
The novel tells the story of Lula, an Albanian girl who came to New York City on a tourist visa and has been spinning tales about her native land as part of her effort to find a way into the American Dream. For the suburban New Jersey dad she calls Mr. Stanley who hires her to watch over his son Zach, a high school senior, she tells folk tales and goes along with the assumption that she is a war refugee. For Zach she tells stories about rebellious teenagers. For the Albanians she sees in New Jersey, Lula tries to tell a tale of her American success, but since none of them believe that success comes without some kind of sinister price tag, they see no real opportunity to capture that elusive American Dream, no house in the suburbs that isn't haunted by the failures of its former occupants.
The darkness and emptiness that are so integral to this story make the story itself feel underpopulated and flat. Here's Prose reading a one-minute segment from her novel. You can see that she believes in its satiric potential, but I don't see that the satiric moments ever coalesce into a meaningful whole.
The moments are interesting and amusing enough to sustain a reader, however. Especially early on in the novel, Lula's "teaching moments" with Zach are wonderful, like this one:
Last night, like every weeknight, Lula and Zeke had eaten dinner in front of the TV. Lula made them watch the evening news, educational for them both. The president had come on the air to warn the American people about the threat of bird flu. The word avian was hard for him. His forehead stitched each time he said it, and his eyelids fluttered, as if he'd been instructed to think of birds as a memory prompt.
'At home,' Lula marveled, 'that man is a god.'
'You say that every night,' Zeke said.
'I'm reminding myself,' she'd said. Her country's love affair with America had begun with Woodrow Wilson, and Clinton and Bush had sealed the deal by bombing the Serbs and rescuing the Kosovar Albanians from Milosevic's death squads. Even at home she'd had her doubts about the streets paved with gold, but when she finally got to New York and started working at La Changita, the waitstaff had quickly straightened her out about the so-called land of opportunity. And yet for all the mixed feelings shared by waiters and busboys alike, the strongest emotion everyone felt was the desire to stay here. Well, fine. In Lula's opinion, ambivalence was a sign of maturity.
Yesterday night, as always, she'd felt sorry for the president, so like a dim little boy who'd told a lie that had set off a war, and then he'd let all those innocent people die in New Orleans, and now he was anxiously waiting to see what worse trouble he was about to get into. He seemed especially scared of the vice president, who scared Lula too, with his cold little eyes not blinking when he lied, like an Eastern Bloc dictator minus the poufy hair.
'There is no bird flu,' Lula had told Zeke. 'A war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, sure. Maybe one chicken in China with a sore throat and a fever.'
But by then the city police chief had appeared on the screen to announce that the alert level had been raised to code orange because of a credible terrorist threat against the New York subway system.
Lula said 'There is no threat.'
'How do you know everything?' Zeke asked. 'Not that I don't agree it's all bullshit.'
She'd been about to tell Zeke--again!--about having grown up in the most extreme and crazy Communist society in Europe, ruled for decades by the psycho dictator Enver Hoxha, who died when Lula was a child, but not without leaving his mark. The nation was a monument to him, as were the seventy thousand mushroomlike concrete bunkers he'd had built in a country smaller than New Jersey. But before she even had a chance to repeat herself, she'd been distracted by an advertisement for the new season of ER.
'Look, Zeke,' she'd said, 'see that gurney rushing in and doors flying open and all the nurses throwing themselves on the patient? Other countries, no one rushes. No one even looks at you till you figure out who to pay off.'
It seems to me that the delights of the satire in that passage are offset by the childishness of the caricature of the president, and so like all partisan political rants, the novel is going to end up preaching--to the extent that it succeeds in preaching at all--to the choir. Lula becomes less of an interesting character, and more of a liberal mouthpiece.
She's a canny operator at all times:
"She wanted to give him a consoling pat on the shoulder, but she never touched Mister Stanley, and she didn't want to start now, both of them weakened in body and spirit, both perhaps seeking relief from the damage that alcohol had inflicted on their bodies. Mister Stanley wasn't the type of guy to hit on the nanny, but every guy was a hangover away from being that type of guy. Even a friendly shoulder squeeze was a door best left unopened."
After enough passages like that, it gets harder for me to work up much sympathy for what Lula wants, and cheer for her to get it--she's looking out for herself, and she doesn't need anybody else.
As she gets more sarcastic, she gets funnier, but seems more two-dimensional, so that passages like this one--which should hit me right where I live (and work)--bounce off without much effect except a wry smile:
"It was darling, the way Americans put so much faith in going to college, the way American parents bought their baby birds a dovecote in which to roost for four years before their maiden flight out into the world."
By the time Lula and Mister Stanley take Zeke to visit a fictional college called Alice Ames, the satire has stopped working. Lula's musings, at this point, are the ravings of someone who is becoming unhinged by months of boredom and disappointment:
"It had tickled her to see Americans taken in by the sort of scam people thought happened only in Eastern Europe. If she had a dollar for every La Changita customer who told her about not being allowed to drive his rental car to Prague because it might get stolen, she wouldn't have had to work there. But now that she'd come to care about Zeke and Mister Stanley, she'd lost the ironic remove from which she watched Americans get conned, and she hoped that Alice Adams was not a dirty trick cynically named after some grifter's favorite hooker."
Satire requires a delicate hand, and Francine Prose is almost good enough to do it well. So even though this isn't the satire about what has happened to The American Dream that I might have been hoping for, it's as close as anyone else has come since Miss Saigon, another "see ourselves as others see us" kind of satire, and it makes an interesting companion volume to Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. My New American Life will be available--in bookstores--on Tuesday, April 26.
Monday, April 18, 2011
One Thousand White Women
One day when I was looking for birthday gift ideas in the YA section of a bookstore owned by a local children's writer, Bonnie Pryor, she recommended a novel to me, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd, by Jim Fergus. I added it to my pile of books, brought it home, and let it get buried underneath books from the library and others with more urgent deadlines. Then a few weeks ago, looking for something different to read, I unearthed it and read it in a couple of sittings.
The premise of the novel is taken from an actual historical event; in the preface, we are told that
"in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world--a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes' request was not well received by the white authorities--the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do."
At the beginning, I thought the novel was going to consist of Chief Seattle-type propaganda about the noble Native American. The Cheyenne Chief who asks President Ulysses S. Grant for the women explains that "we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People" and proposes the idea of intermarriage so that the white women can "teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone." But the novel becomes more a portrait of a vanished way of life, with the character of May Dodd as interpreter, rather than apologist.
Although I grew up near a state park called Trail of Tears in memory of the Cherokee who died crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1838 (including the "Princess Otahki"), I've never had any experience of prejudice against Native Americans, and have always regarded it as something that existed only in the past. This novel explains some of the prejudice on both sides by showing how May, who grows to love the Cheyenne, experiences hatred from both "civilized folks" and "savages."
Although May does continually praise things like "how cunningly and perfectly these native people had folded themselves into the earth" and criticizes "the white man" for "his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up," she doesn't venerate the Cheyenne blindly, but frequently challenges their "male only" rules and laments their "pitifully low tolerance" for alcohol.
Both the love affair May has with a white man, Captain Bourke, and the love she feels for her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, help her see the deep gulf that lies between their different views of the world:
"According to Captain Bourke...the only true hope for the advancement of the savage is to teach him that he must give up this allegiance to the tribe and look towards his own individual welfare. This is necessary, Bourke claims, in order that he may function effectively in the 'individualized civilization' of the Caucasian world. To the Cheyenne such a concept remains completely foreign--the needs of the People, the tribe, and above all the family within the tribe are placed always before those of the individual. In this regard they live somewhat like the ancient clans of Scotland. The selflessness of my husband, Little Wolf, for instance, strikes me as most noble and something that hardly requires 'correction' by civilized society. In support of his own thesis, the Captain uses the unfortunate example of the Indians who have been pressed into service as scouts for the U.S. Army. These men are rewarded for their efforts as good law-abiding citizens--paid wages, fed, clothed, and generally cared for. The only requirement of their employment, their allegiance to the white father, is that they betray their own people and their own families...I fail to see the nobility or the advantage of such individualized private initiative..."
The way the story is told--with an introduction by a fictional male descendent of May Dodd's, a prologue based on the historical meeting of President Grant with a Cheyenne Chief, and an afterward about the journals kept by May-- gives the story a feeling of authenticity and preserves some of the flavor of the antiquated diction that Fergus uses so well for "Dodd's" writing. I was surprised to be reminded, at the end, that this novel was written by a male author, so deeply had I been immersed in the female point of view.
The greatest strength of this novel is characterization; these well-realized characters will live in your memory for a long time after you've been drawn into their stories.
The premise of the novel is taken from an actual historical event; in the preface, we are told that
"in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother's tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man's world--a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes' request was not well received by the white authorities--the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do."
At the beginning, I thought the novel was going to consist of Chief Seattle-type propaganda about the noble Native American. The Cheyenne Chief who asks President Ulysses S. Grant for the women explains that "we have never been numerous because we understand that the earth can only carry a certain number of the People" and proposes the idea of intermarriage so that the white women can "teach us and our children the new life that must be lived when the buffalo are gone." But the novel becomes more a portrait of a vanished way of life, with the character of May Dodd as interpreter, rather than apologist.
Although I grew up near a state park called Trail of Tears in memory of the Cherokee who died crossing the Mississippi River in the winter of 1838 (including the "Princess Otahki"), I've never had any experience of prejudice against Native Americans, and have always regarded it as something that existed only in the past. This novel explains some of the prejudice on both sides by showing how May, who grows to love the Cheyenne, experiences hatred from both "civilized folks" and "savages."
Although May does continually praise things like "how cunningly and perfectly these native people had folded themselves into the earth" and criticizes "the white man" for "his flimsy fortifications against the vastness and emptiness of earth which he does not know to worship but tries instead to simply fill up," she doesn't venerate the Cheyenne blindly, but frequently challenges their "male only" rules and laments their "pitifully low tolerance" for alcohol.
Both the love affair May has with a white man, Captain Bourke, and the love she feels for her Cheyenne husband, Little Wolf, help her see the deep gulf that lies between their different views of the world:
"According to Captain Bourke...the only true hope for the advancement of the savage is to teach him that he must give up this allegiance to the tribe and look towards his own individual welfare. This is necessary, Bourke claims, in order that he may function effectively in the 'individualized civilization' of the Caucasian world. To the Cheyenne such a concept remains completely foreign--the needs of the People, the tribe, and above all the family within the tribe are placed always before those of the individual. In this regard they live somewhat like the ancient clans of Scotland. The selflessness of my husband, Little Wolf, for instance, strikes me as most noble and something that hardly requires 'correction' by civilized society. In support of his own thesis, the Captain uses the unfortunate example of the Indians who have been pressed into service as scouts for the U.S. Army. These men are rewarded for their efforts as good law-abiding citizens--paid wages, fed, clothed, and generally cared for. The only requirement of their employment, their allegiance to the white father, is that they betray their own people and their own families...I fail to see the nobility or the advantage of such individualized private initiative..."
The way the story is told--with an introduction by a fictional male descendent of May Dodd's, a prologue based on the historical meeting of President Grant with a Cheyenne Chief, and an afterward about the journals kept by May-- gives the story a feeling of authenticity and preserves some of the flavor of the antiquated diction that Fergus uses so well for "Dodd's" writing. I was surprised to be reminded, at the end, that this novel was written by a male author, so deeply had I been immersed in the female point of view.
The greatest strength of this novel is characterization; these well-realized characters will live in your memory for a long time after you've been drawn into their stories.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Illyria
Eleanor won a prize from the public library, and with this prize, a gift certificate for Amazon, we ordered a book I'd read very good things about, Illyria, by Elizabeth Hand. I thought Eleanor would like it because it's about performing the play Twelfth Night.
But because Eleanor is rehearsing for the high school musical, submitting senior papers, preparing for band contest, and signing up for AP exams, she hasn't had time to read the book yet. So I picked up Illyria and read it first, and it wasn't what I expected.
The author says it's the fictionalized story of her first love/best friend, so perhaps there was more of a feeling of being bound by actual events than I might otherwise have expected from a novel, but what happens just seems wrong to me. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, are in love with performing and with each other. Rather than embracing the love and the boy's genius, the girl accepts the dictates of her family and leaves him to pursue her own career, one that turns out, not surprisingly, to be a pale version of what his could have been, had he received the same patronage and encouragement.
Aunt Kate, the relative who acts as a patron and gets the girl into her first acting school, says to her:
"talent--if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on a track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless."
But rather than rescue the boy, Rogan, who has shown his willingness to rebel against his non-artistic family, Aunt Kate (who he calls "Aunt Fate") decides to give only the girl, Maddy--whose family is more easily persuaded-- a start in the theater. This is a betrayal of a sort, but worse is Maddy's betrayal. She doesn't even protest that Rogan should be included, but accepts her good fortune and leaves him to be berated and beaten by his father for the discovery of the condoms and blankets the two have been sharing.
Rogan is extraordinary in the central performance of Twelfth Night, and this is the way Maddy describes how he makes everyone feel:
"I've seen spectacular performances since then--Anthony Hopkins's Broadway debut in Equus, Kevin Kline in On the Twentieth Century, John Wood in The Invention of Love. Rogan's turn as the Clown rivaled all of them.
Everyone in that auditorium felt it: everyone was bewitched. I felt drugged, light-headed with desire and raw adrenaline. Whatever envy I had burned away at the expectation of sharing the stage with him. It was like sex--it was sex, magnified somehow and transformed into a vision we could all see, all share in; and there was Rogan, grinning and looking as happy as I'd ever seen him outside of the hidden space in his room."
But then Maddy goes off and leaves him, despite the way he begs her not to go:
"They can't make you," he said. "Not unless you let them. They can't force you to go."
"I know."
"I wouldn't go. If it was me....If they tried to make me go without you. I wouldn't do it."
And then, despite Maddy's betrayal, the story is not a tragedy. It's a mundane little story about a girl who went away to become an actress and spent her life playing small parts and a boy who never got that kind of opportunity and spent his life getting older.
I hated it. Perhaps Eleanor will like it better, because it does capture some of the pathos of what it is to be young and passionate about almost everything. The ending, when Maddy and Rogan meet again, strikes me as pointless and disappointing. He spent his life taking care of the house and the toy theater that meant so much to them. She came back for Aunt Kate's funeral and saw him only incidentally.
She was just a girl; she couldn't help it... I don't buy her story, the heartless bitch.
But because Eleanor is rehearsing for the high school musical, submitting senior papers, preparing for band contest, and signing up for AP exams, she hasn't had time to read the book yet. So I picked up Illyria and read it first, and it wasn't what I expected.
The author says it's the fictionalized story of her first love/best friend, so perhaps there was more of a feeling of being bound by actual events than I might otherwise have expected from a novel, but what happens just seems wrong to me. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, are in love with performing and with each other. Rather than embracing the love and the boy's genius, the girl accepts the dictates of her family and leaves him to pursue her own career, one that turns out, not surprisingly, to be a pale version of what his could have been, had he received the same patronage and encouragement.
Aunt Kate, the relative who acts as a patron and gets the girl into her first acting school, says to her:
"talent--if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on a track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless."
But rather than rescue the boy, Rogan, who has shown his willingness to rebel against his non-artistic family, Aunt Kate (who he calls "Aunt Fate") decides to give only the girl, Maddy--whose family is more easily persuaded-- a start in the theater. This is a betrayal of a sort, but worse is Maddy's betrayal. She doesn't even protest that Rogan should be included, but accepts her good fortune and leaves him to be berated and beaten by his father for the discovery of the condoms and blankets the two have been sharing.
Rogan is extraordinary in the central performance of Twelfth Night, and this is the way Maddy describes how he makes everyone feel:
"I've seen spectacular performances since then--Anthony Hopkins's Broadway debut in Equus, Kevin Kline in On the Twentieth Century, John Wood in The Invention of Love. Rogan's turn as the Clown rivaled all of them.
Everyone in that auditorium felt it: everyone was bewitched. I felt drugged, light-headed with desire and raw adrenaline. Whatever envy I had burned away at the expectation of sharing the stage with him. It was like sex--it was sex, magnified somehow and transformed into a vision we could all see, all share in; and there was Rogan, grinning and looking as happy as I'd ever seen him outside of the hidden space in his room."
But then Maddy goes off and leaves him, despite the way he begs her not to go:
"They can't make you," he said. "Not unless you let them. They can't force you to go."
"I know."
"I wouldn't go. If it was me....If they tried to make me go without you. I wouldn't do it."
And then, despite Maddy's betrayal, the story is not a tragedy. It's a mundane little story about a girl who went away to become an actress and spent her life playing small parts and a boy who never got that kind of opportunity and spent his life getting older.
I hated it. Perhaps Eleanor will like it better, because it does capture some of the pathos of what it is to be young and passionate about almost everything. The ending, when Maddy and Rogan meet again, strikes me as pointless and disappointing. He spent his life taking care of the house and the toy theater that meant so much to them. She came back for Aunt Kate's funeral and saw him only incidentally.
She was just a girl; she couldn't help it... I don't buy her story, the heartless bitch.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Seduction of Water
Today the Imaginary Friends Book Club are discussing The Seduction of Water, by Carol Goodman. Ever since I finished reading this book, several weeks ago, I've been trying to get past my first reaction to it, which is that adjunct teaching doesn't really work like it does for the narrator of this novel. College students in an English class won't all come to an art show on another campus, no matter how much you talk it up. Male students who show up in odd places to talk to their female teachers are rarely attracted to them. If you put a big red A on a narrative paper because of "the sheer beauty of the story," despite the fact that the "English is so faltering that it's painful to read," you won't be working as an adjunct for long. That this is the introduction to the world of the novel makes me have trouble suspending my disbelief, even though I'm usually about as credulous as they come.
On the other hand, the narrator, Iris, doesn't work as an adjunct for long. She goes back to the hotel where she spent her childhood and works as a manager while trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to her mother, a novelist whose legacy to Iris is a story she used to tell about a selkie, a story she used in her novels, and one that is gradually revealed to have parallels to her own life as a wife and mother:
"It was like nothing could really touch her because she could always slip away into a world where she made all the rules and everything had to turn out the way she said. And then when she went away I thought for a long time that that's where she'd gone. Like she never really belonged with us in this world and she'd gone back to where she really belonged."
The teacher background does seem true to life when Iris meets someone who says he'll have to watch how he talks around her and she thinks, as English teachers so often do, "no doubt I was paying for some martinet grammar-queen he'd had in the eighth grade."
There's a mystery about an older man who knew Iris' mother (he turns out to be something of a red herring), and about a necklace with magical powers. The necklace mystery entangles Iris in a circle of writers and hotel employees her mother knew, until she finds out that hardly anything she thought she knew about her own mother was true, including the woman's name. Iris does more than walk in her mother's shoes; she wears all of her clothes, one by one, over an entire summer, until she finds out something about what her mother was like as a person, before she became a mother.
That this novel is a story about storytelling is confirmed by the author's note at the end of my copy, in which she reveals that her own mother had a story, similar to the one Iris' mother tells her, and she told it over and over, "making sense of her life by telling it to me."
That's one of the benefits of motherhood; you can tell your children stories about yourself and teach them to believe that's what you're really like. They won't believe it as teenagers, and by the time they get old enough to see the good in you again, you might not be around to tell the whole truth about any foibles you might have left out of the abridged version for small children. It's not so black and white, is it, teaching children not to "tell stories"?
On the other hand, the narrator, Iris, doesn't work as an adjunct for long. She goes back to the hotel where she spent her childhood and works as a manager while trying to piece together the mystery of what happened to her mother, a novelist whose legacy to Iris is a story she used to tell about a selkie, a story she used in her novels, and one that is gradually revealed to have parallels to her own life as a wife and mother:
"It was like nothing could really touch her because she could always slip away into a world where she made all the rules and everything had to turn out the way she said. And then when she went away I thought for a long time that that's where she'd gone. Like she never really belonged with us in this world and she'd gone back to where she really belonged."
The teacher background does seem true to life when Iris meets someone who says he'll have to watch how he talks around her and she thinks, as English teachers so often do, "no doubt I was paying for some martinet grammar-queen he'd had in the eighth grade."
There's a mystery about an older man who knew Iris' mother (he turns out to be something of a red herring), and about a necklace with magical powers. The necklace mystery entangles Iris in a circle of writers and hotel employees her mother knew, until she finds out that hardly anything she thought she knew about her own mother was true, including the woman's name. Iris does more than walk in her mother's shoes; she wears all of her clothes, one by one, over an entire summer, until she finds out something about what her mother was like as a person, before she became a mother.
That this novel is a story about storytelling is confirmed by the author's note at the end of my copy, in which she reveals that her own mother had a story, similar to the one Iris' mother tells her, and she told it over and over, "making sense of her life by telling it to me."
That's one of the benefits of motherhood; you can tell your children stories about yourself and teach them to believe that's what you're really like. They won't believe it as teenagers, and by the time they get old enough to see the good in you again, you might not be around to tell the whole truth about any foibles you might have left out of the abridged version for small children. It's not so black and white, is it, teaching children not to "tell stories"?
Monday, March 14, 2011
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages
Tom Holt's novel entitled Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages is subtitled A Comedy of Transdimensional Tomfoolery (which makes it slightly less appealing than his Who's Afraid of Beowulf? and Paint Your Dragon). This newest novel seems designed to appeal to lovers of Douglas Adams--OF WHICH I AM ONE--but I wouldn't have heard of it except for the review at Life With Books. In the end, though, I didn't find it funny enough to carry off the absurdity in true Adamsian style. The details, while cunningly arranged, have about the staying power of ripe dandelion fluff.
There were parts that made me laugh out loud, though. What begins all the trouble with the space-time continuum is a man stretching it out to get a parking place, and one of the first symptoms that something is wrong is that a paralegal keeps getting cups of coffee that disappear before she can drink them. The portal between worlds turns out to be a small, mom-and-pop drycleaners. Even the way magic is used turns out to be largely a matter of being able to read the manual, and if there are guidelines, they're a bit like the hippocratic oath ("first, do no harm"):
"Magic could get you out of traffic, but only if you vanished all the other road users. Of course, there were people who'd do that, and presumably that was why magic wasn't used, and why it was kept a secret."
There is a very British sense of humor throughout this book about small actions and large consequences.
Reading Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages is fun the way putting together the answer to a mystery is fun--you can work out what's happening before it's explained, and the clues are fitted perfectly to each other, like in a good thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Also there's the pleasure of allusions--including an explicit allusion to a rationalization in The Lord of the Rings when someone finds a magical object and wants to keep it--and some to Alice in Wonderland, the first Narnia book, and Doctor Who.
One beginning of a chapter shows me that Holt at his best can be almost as good as Adams, even if it takes him a lot more words. Adams' The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul begins with the memorable line:
"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."
And Holt's seventh chapter of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages begins with the following two paragraphs:
"The daily commute is a joyful thing. In our secular society it's taken the place of morning prayers; a time to meditate, reflect, get one's head together, to consider the challenges and opportunities of the day ahead and decide how best to engage with them for the greater good of oneself and others.
Or something like that. In the bus scrum someone grazed his heel down the side of Polly's ankle, laddering her tights and delaminating her skin--but he muttered, "Sorry," so that was all right. The Tube escalator had broken down, so she got some healthy exercise. One handle of her shoulder bag gave way, spilling her possessions onto the pavement like a Medici flinging gold to the masses in the piazza. All good fun."
Also like Adams, Holt throws in an occasional gratuitously silly image:
"Depending on the water pressure and the angle from which the jets were directed, the flames either rose higher, doubled their heat output or played selections from Phantom of the Opera (the original cast recording). Fire-suppressant foam turned the fire purple, with a faint green pinstripe...." Later, when a hired thamaturg comes into an apartment and feels an object of power, he thinks maybe his career is about to reach a pinnacle and he'll get an award, although "these days the Merlins are little more than a popularity contest, a means of recognizing the fact that so-and-so's managed to complete thirty years in the trade without being killed, transfigured or imprisoned for ever in the heart of a glacier."
Reading this book will definitely give you more possible answers than you ever wanted to know to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Who would like this book? People who long for anything Douglas Adams-like now that he's gone. Monty Python fans. Certainly any reader of science fiction who likes it on the silly side (yes, Scalzi fans).
There were parts that made me laugh out loud, though. What begins all the trouble with the space-time continuum is a man stretching it out to get a parking place, and one of the first symptoms that something is wrong is that a paralegal keeps getting cups of coffee that disappear before she can drink them. The portal between worlds turns out to be a small, mom-and-pop drycleaners. Even the way magic is used turns out to be largely a matter of being able to read the manual, and if there are guidelines, they're a bit like the hippocratic oath ("first, do no harm"):
"Magic could get you out of traffic, but only if you vanished all the other road users. Of course, there were people who'd do that, and presumably that was why magic wasn't used, and why it was kept a secret."
There is a very British sense of humor throughout this book about small actions and large consequences.
Reading Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages is fun the way putting together the answer to a mystery is fun--you can work out what's happening before it's explained, and the clues are fitted perfectly to each other, like in a good thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Also there's the pleasure of allusions--including an explicit allusion to a rationalization in The Lord of the Rings when someone finds a magical object and wants to keep it--and some to Alice in Wonderland, the first Narnia book, and Doctor Who.
One beginning of a chapter shows me that Holt at his best can be almost as good as Adams, even if it takes him a lot more words. Adams' The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul begins with the memorable line:
"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear."
And Holt's seventh chapter of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages begins with the following two paragraphs:
"The daily commute is a joyful thing. In our secular society it's taken the place of morning prayers; a time to meditate, reflect, get one's head together, to consider the challenges and opportunities of the day ahead and decide how best to engage with them for the greater good of oneself and others.
Or something like that. In the bus scrum someone grazed his heel down the side of Polly's ankle, laddering her tights and delaminating her skin--but he muttered, "Sorry," so that was all right. The Tube escalator had broken down, so she got some healthy exercise. One handle of her shoulder bag gave way, spilling her possessions onto the pavement like a Medici flinging gold to the masses in the piazza. All good fun."
Also like Adams, Holt throws in an occasional gratuitously silly image:
"Depending on the water pressure and the angle from which the jets were directed, the flames either rose higher, doubled their heat output or played selections from Phantom of the Opera (the original cast recording). Fire-suppressant foam turned the fire purple, with a faint green pinstripe...." Later, when a hired thamaturg comes into an apartment and feels an object of power, he thinks maybe his career is about to reach a pinnacle and he'll get an award, although "these days the Merlins are little more than a popularity contest, a means of recognizing the fact that so-and-so's managed to complete thirty years in the trade without being killed, transfigured or imprisoned for ever in the heart of a glacier."
Reading this book will definitely give you more possible answers than you ever wanted to know to the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Who would like this book? People who long for anything Douglas Adams-like now that he's gone. Monty Python fans. Certainly any reader of science fiction who likes it on the silly side (yes, Scalzi fans).
Thursday, March 10, 2011
When You Reach Me
I'm afraid that Rebecca Stead took Ursula le Guin at face value when she was exposed to the quotation so beloved among writer's groups: "Sure, it's simple, writing for kids. Just as simple as bringing them up." I think she wanted to write the kind of children's book that Madeleine L'Engle described in her Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech:
"Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up."
How else can one explain the plot of When You Reach Me, permeated with references to L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and yet disingenuous about the conventions of any of the time travel literature that preceded it?
When You Reach Me is a time travel story for children who have never read a time travel story before--children who have never read A Wrinkle in Time. It is a story with characters that seem wooden because they're all hiding something until an opportune moment. And it's a 2010 Newbery winner. Go figure.
Here's the spoiler: IT'S A TIME TRAVEL STORY! But since you don't know that until the end, there are no rules. No rules, no fun, I say.
Who could possibly like this book? Maybe a young girl who thinks she only likes realistic fiction.
"Even the most straightforward tales say far more than they seem to mean on the surface. Little Women, The Secret Garden, Huckleberry Finn --- how much more there is in them than we realize at a first reading. They partake of the universal language, and this is why we turn to them again and again when we are children, and still again when we have grown up."
How else can one explain the plot of When You Reach Me, permeated with references to L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and yet disingenuous about the conventions of any of the time travel literature that preceded it?
When You Reach Me is a time travel story for children who have never read a time travel story before--children who have never read A Wrinkle in Time. It is a story with characters that seem wooden because they're all hiding something until an opportune moment. And it's a 2010 Newbery winner. Go figure.
Here's the spoiler: IT'S A TIME TRAVEL STORY! But since you don't know that until the end, there are no rules. No rules, no fun, I say.
Who could possibly like this book? Maybe a young girl who thinks she only likes realistic fiction.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Pilgrimage
After reading Jo Walton's Among Others, featuring the most-beloved science fiction titles of my childhood, I had to find out more about the only author she mentions with whom I wasn't at all familiar, Zenna Henderson. Walton's narrator loves Henderson's novel Pilgrimage, so I ordered a copy, hoping it would be as good as the other books she and I both loved as young readers in the 1970s.
I was moved by the sympathy in Jenny's review of Among Others, in which she says about those of us who were, like Walton and her fictional narrator, young teenagers in the 70s:
"It’s touching to read about these kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and who find these small windows into a world where people are like them and love the same things they love. Poor things, if only they had grown up a few decades later, in this generation of the geek fairly decisively inheriting the earth."
This is part of what Henderson's novel Pilgrimage is about--kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and the stories of how they found others who were like them and loved the same things they loved. Because it's science fiction, the people who are like them are from their home planet, and they love things like being able to float above the ground, make coins glow, and read other peoples' minds.
The first story builds slowly, with readers finding out what make these people different much as any outsider would, through little slips, like a child "lifting" above the ground on the way to school "along a public road" where anyone could see. Once we've seen this, though, we find out a little ahead of the new teacher that
"the members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips, and found Cougar Canyon they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there's something complicated about marketing the stuff....Anyway our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us."
Eventually, the new teacher exhibits talents that reveal her to be a lost member of the People.
In each story, a lost member finds his or her way to the Group and finds acceptance. The over-arcing story is about Lea, who is finding her way to the Group but has been merely filling up her days, thinking that her life is bearable, only to be told, like a gifted child who isn't living up to his potential: "if you won't fill the slot you were meant to you might as well just sit and count your fingers. Otherwise you will just interfere with everything."
When the earth People finally meet some of the People from the Home planet, more technologically advanced and effete, we get a description of the way one character's mother spends her time:
"what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting--she knows all the finer distinctions--then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she's very adept, just barely ahead of the other."
And then we get a look at ourselves as others see us when we think, along with the earth-born speaker, "I can't see spending two days watching a rose bud" only to hear the rejoinder:
"And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times."
So yes, this collection of stories, Pilgrimage, could well have been as dear to me as Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions or Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber if I'd discovered it back when I felt isolated, in the 1970s. It wasn't quite as exciting as finding Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles from reading the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters in Cornelia Funke's Inkheart--that was one of the most exciting literary discoveries I ever made--but certainly Pilgrimage is a book worth reading and owning.
Who would like this book? Anyone who reads science fiction or fantasy. Any imaginative teenager. Anyone who likes reading about the American west, where the stories are set. Certainly anyone who has done any kind of teaching, because the stories are all about teaching children to use their gifts well.
I was moved by the sympathy in Jenny's review of Among Others, in which she says about those of us who were, like Walton and her fictional narrator, young teenagers in the 70s:
"It’s touching to read about these kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and who find these small windows into a world where people are like them and love the same things they love. Poor things, if only they had grown up a few decades later, in this generation of the geek fairly decisively inheriting the earth."
This is part of what Henderson's novel Pilgrimage is about--kids who feel terribly isolated and different, and the stories of how they found others who were like them and loved the same things they loved. Because it's science fiction, the people who are like them are from their home planet, and they love things like being able to float above the ground, make coins glow, and read other peoples' minds.
The first story builds slowly, with readers finding out what make these people different much as any outsider would, through little slips, like a child "lifting" above the ground on the way to school "along a public road" where anyone could see. Once we've seen this, though, we find out a little ahead of the new teacher that
"the members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips, and found Cougar Canyon they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there's something complicated about marketing the stuff....Anyway our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us."
Eventually, the new teacher exhibits talents that reveal her to be a lost member of the People.
In each story, a lost member finds his or her way to the Group and finds acceptance. The over-arcing story is about Lea, who is finding her way to the Group but has been merely filling up her days, thinking that her life is bearable, only to be told, like a gifted child who isn't living up to his potential: "if you won't fill the slot you were meant to you might as well just sit and count your fingers. Otherwise you will just interfere with everything."
When the earth People finally meet some of the People from the Home planet, more technologically advanced and effete, we get a description of the way one character's mother spends her time:
"what Mother likes is Anticipating a rose. She chooses a bud that looks interesting--she knows all the finer distinctions--then she makes a rose, synthetic, as nearly like the real bud as she can. Then, for two or three days, she sees if she can anticipate every movement of the opening of the real rose by opening her synthetic simultaneously, or, if she's very adept, just barely ahead of the other."
And then we get a look at ourselves as others see us when we think, along with the earth-born speaker, "I can't see spending two days watching a rose bud" only to hear the rejoinder:
"And yet you spent a whole hour just looking at the sky last evening. And four of you spent hours last night receiving and displaying cards. You got quite emotional over it several times."
So yes, this collection of stories, Pilgrimage, could well have been as dear to me as Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions or Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber if I'd discovered it back when I felt isolated, in the 1970s. It wasn't quite as exciting as finding Michael de Larrabeiti's The Borribles from reading the excerpts at the beginnings of the chapters in Cornelia Funke's Inkheart--that was one of the most exciting literary discoveries I ever made--but certainly Pilgrimage is a book worth reading and owning.
Who would like this book? Anyone who reads science fiction or fantasy. Any imaginative teenager. Anyone who likes reading about the American west, where the stories are set. Certainly anyone who has done any kind of teaching, because the stories are all about teaching children to use their gifts well.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Between a Rock and a Hot Place
When I saw the title Between a Rock and a Hot Place: Why Fifty is Not the New Thirty on a list of books that Harper was willing to send me, I said yes, send this one. I thought it would be something different from the usual baby boomer books about how to stay in charge of the world forever, but, sadly, it's not. Tracey Jackson is somewhat more than fifty, as it turns out, putting her more squarely in the baby boomer generation than I would have suspected, and her attitudes are just not that different.
As you know, I am against baby boomers. So any book that starts out trying to lump me in with them is not going to get any sympathy--much less a sense of identification--from me. I am not the "us" she's speaking to when she says "the image most of us have of being over fifty...is our grandparents." No, honey, it's you. It's ex-hippies who never grow up.
That Tracey is overly focused on appearance is hardly surprising, given what she tells us about her mother, a woman who put her on a reducing diet when she was only eight years old, spent an hour each day washing her face with beauty products, and once traveled to Transylvania to be injected with something called Gerovital H3 that she believed would make her look younger. So Tracey's own obsessions with exercising and having substances injected into her face seem less crazy, by comparison.
I thought maybe I'd get some tips from this book about how to deal with menopause, but most of what I got was a rant about how essential hormone replacement therapy is (despite the horrible physical symptoms it gave Tracey--the most remarkable being lumps on her face).
To be fair, I read Between a Rock and a Hot Place the day after I saw Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, and the depth of the ideas about mortality in the play made the book seem even more shallow than I think it would have, ordinarily.
The part where this book really "jumped the shark" for me was when the author revealed that she had sexual fantasies about Jack Nicholson . . . um, wasn't she just speaking of grandparents? After that, it's impossible for me to take anything else she says quite seriously. Her claim that women over fifty "don't come like we used to" seems to me complete nonsense. Her advice about exercising every day is based on this quotation: "every day your body makes a choice. It's either going to get a little older...or it will get a little stronger," which is a nice example of the "only two choices" logical fallacy, don't you think? And I can think; I have other choices!
But there are two parts of the book I like. One is based on a quotation that the author claims is from Virginia Woolf (who killed herself at the age of 59, you know): "arrange whatever pieces come your way." Tracey's advice about having a career after fifty is that you should "start thinking about and actually setting up some pieces that will be ready to arrange before you have to start scrambling around for them or find yourself left with difficult or unsatisfactory pieces." This makes a lot of sense to me right now, especially in light of the story about how her career as a screenwriter turned into a new career as a documentary film maker when she got to her fifties. Plus, she's written this book!
The other part I like is her chapter about sending your first child to college, entitled "The Biggest Pink Slip You Will Ever Get." Tracey is typically over the top about the experience, so my answer is "yes" to her question:
"Are we needy, clingy women who are unable to acknowledge that time is marching on and our kids are at the front of the parade and we are at the back?"
But it's fun to measure yourself against a hysteric; you come off so much better. And she reassures me that I will be able to sleep next year when my daughter is off at college, something I've actually wondered about recently, and out loud.
So reading this book wasn't a complete loss, despite the fact that telling me that "all the female Supreme Court justices dye their hair" doesn't convince me that all women over fifty ought to have surgery on their faces.
Who would like this book? Some baby boomers. Maybe a few stay-at-home mothers who thought they'd go back to work when their kids were grown up and now find themselves aged out of the workforce. Anyone who wants tips about how to go to great lengths to look younger.
As you know, I am against baby boomers. So any book that starts out trying to lump me in with them is not going to get any sympathy--much less a sense of identification--from me. I am not the "us" she's speaking to when she says "the image most of us have of being over fifty...is our grandparents." No, honey, it's you. It's ex-hippies who never grow up.
That Tracey is overly focused on appearance is hardly surprising, given what she tells us about her mother, a woman who put her on a reducing diet when she was only eight years old, spent an hour each day washing her face with beauty products, and once traveled to Transylvania to be injected with something called Gerovital H3 that she believed would make her look younger. So Tracey's own obsessions with exercising and having substances injected into her face seem less crazy, by comparison.
I thought maybe I'd get some tips from this book about how to deal with menopause, but most of what I got was a rant about how essential hormone replacement therapy is (despite the horrible physical symptoms it gave Tracey--the most remarkable being lumps on her face).
To be fair, I read Between a Rock and a Hot Place the day after I saw Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, and the depth of the ideas about mortality in the play made the book seem even more shallow than I think it would have, ordinarily.
The part where this book really "jumped the shark" for me was when the author revealed that she had sexual fantasies about Jack Nicholson . . . um, wasn't she just speaking of grandparents? After that, it's impossible for me to take anything else she says quite seriously. Her claim that women over fifty "don't come like we used to" seems to me complete nonsense. Her advice about exercising every day is based on this quotation: "every day your body makes a choice. It's either going to get a little older...or it will get a little stronger," which is a nice example of the "only two choices" logical fallacy, don't you think? And I can think; I have other choices!
But there are two parts of the book I like. One is based on a quotation that the author claims is from Virginia Woolf (who killed herself at the age of 59, you know): "arrange whatever pieces come your way." Tracey's advice about having a career after fifty is that you should "start thinking about and actually setting up some pieces that will be ready to arrange before you have to start scrambling around for them or find yourself left with difficult or unsatisfactory pieces." This makes a lot of sense to me right now, especially in light of the story about how her career as a screenwriter turned into a new career as a documentary film maker when she got to her fifties. Plus, she's written this book!
The other part I like is her chapter about sending your first child to college, entitled "The Biggest Pink Slip You Will Ever Get." Tracey is typically over the top about the experience, so my answer is "yes" to her question:
"Are we needy, clingy women who are unable to acknowledge that time is marching on and our kids are at the front of the parade and we are at the back?"
But it's fun to measure yourself against a hysteric; you come off so much better. And she reassures me that I will be able to sleep next year when my daughter is off at college, something I've actually wondered about recently, and out loud.
So reading this book wasn't a complete loss, despite the fact that telling me that "all the female Supreme Court justices dye their hair" doesn't convince me that all women over fifty ought to have surgery on their faces.
Who would like this book? Some baby boomers. Maybe a few stay-at-home mothers who thought they'd go back to work when their kids were grown up and now find themselves aged out of the workforce. Anyone who wants tips about how to go to great lengths to look younger.
Monday, February 28, 2011
The Tapestry of Love
In one of the most gracious moves ever made by an author, Rosy Thornton responded to my lackluster review of one of her earlier novels, Crossed Wires, by sending me an email in which she offered to send me her newer one, The Tapestry of Love.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that such an offer, followed by the receipt of the book directly from Cambridge (with a nice note), did predispose me to give the book every benefit of the doubt. So when I say I liked it, that will come as no surprise. But there's also a reason I would be predisposed to dislike it. Let me tell you a bit of a story.
Once there was a young mother who had reached a stumbling block in her academic career and was staying home with two preschoolers. She had a friend who would pass on bags full of paperback romance novels brought to her by her mother. Every couple of weeks, this friend would bring over a new bag of books. The young mother didn't have to dress the preschoolers, (who were often nebulizer-sucking sick), get them in carseats, and take them to the library. She didn't have to worry about when the books were due. She could read for ten minutes, dog-ear the page rather than scrambling for a bookmark, and answer the next pressing preschooler need. A fast reader, the young mother read almost all the books she was brought, passing over only the occasional title with a half-naked Scots warrior on the front. At least a third of the paperback romances she read featured a divorced woman who moves to a new place, starts her own business--usually a restaurant, a bakery, or a catering service--makes good friends very quickly and easily from among her new neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who truly appreciates her talents. The young mother got very tired of this formula.
Okay, fast forward to this same mother, years later, getting a novel in which a divorced woman moves to a new place (the Cevennes mountains, in France), starts her own business (sewing and upholstery--a change from the cooking, at least), makes good friends very quickly from among her neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who appreciates her talents so much he buys and frames something she sewed. I think you're now aware of why I might be predisposed to dislike this novel.
But I didn't. Putting both my predispositions aside, I enjoyed the writing style and got immersed in the story, pretty much from the point where the main character, Catherine, who has moved to the Cevennes, is talking on the phone to her daughter Lexie, in England, and Lexie says to her:
"I know what the trouble is....Completely understandable, you poor thing. All very scenic over there and everything but naturally you're missing me."
Since this is almost exactly what I think my own daughter would say to me in similar circumstances, I started identifying with Catherine.
In fact, Catherine is almost completely happy with her own company and her sewing. Even though I'd personally rather do almost anything than be made to sew, the appeal of it for Catherine is clear to me:
"As she started to stitch....She saw it all clearly, translated into the colors of silk. It was funny how, even as a child, she had been able to visualise a picture or pattern as soon as she began to sew; she had only to begin and the image would emerge, a template for her to follow, like the outline that forms on closed lids after staring at something too long."
It's amusing to watch Catherine adapt to rural life, especially in terms of eating locally. The first time she is offered a dish of fresh wild boar, she "stared at him; she had a horror of killing in the raw. She was no vegetarian, but she preferred her meat without its claws." The dish is delicious, of course, and she asks for the recipe. Later, when she smells lamb cooking after a day spent helping herd a neighbor's sheep to summer pastures, she asks "Is it traditional....Sheep farmers who've walked all day with their flock, keeping them safely on the path, then when they stop for the night, dining enjoyably on a nice piece of mutton. It's a little close to home, don't you think? The matter-of-fact answering question, from the local man she fancies, is "What better than food that transports itself?"
I love the part where Catherine's neighbor Madame Bouschet tells her a story about how hard her husband Augustin has always worked, even on vacation, because it sounds like what my friends always say about our sand castle projects at the beach:
"You should have seen him...with his trousers rolled up to the knee, digging holes in the sand. Jean-Marc wanted him to dig a hole as deep as the well at home, and he was at it a whole morning. I said to him, when the children were in bed, I said, it's typical of you. Supposed to be on holiday, and here you are, digging like it's time to lift the potatoes."
There is sadness in this story but it too is well-described. I particularly like the simile Catherine uses to describe how she felt when her mother died after spending years in a nursing home:
"I don't mean it was a surprise, because it wasn't. I didn't feel surprised, in my mind. What caught me unawares wasn't the fact of her dying, but the force of it. The physical impact, if that makes any sense.
Like standing ankle deep in the surf and knowing full well a cold wave is going to hit you, but the knowledge doesn't lessen the brunt of its strike."
And finally, you can't beat this novel for a happy ending. The local man turns out to have been wildly in love with her all along, and he finally has the sense to say it to her:
"When you ate my wild boar with such delicious reluctance. I fell at once. I have been quite enslaved."
If you're going to use a romance novel plot, you might as well do the romance part right. But there are other good parts to this novel, and I enjoyed them all. It's like one of the wonderful French casseroles it describes, full of unexpected ingredients that end up better in combination than I could ever have hoped.
So who will like this book? Women, particularly women over 30. Anyone who wants a good story with lots of descriptions of French food in it--I got some of the same pleasure from reading The Tapestry of Love that I always get from rereading Peter Mayle's books about Provence. Anyone who loves France and is curious about what life is like in the donkey-trodden Parc National des Cevennes.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that such an offer, followed by the receipt of the book directly from Cambridge (with a nice note), did predispose me to give the book every benefit of the doubt. So when I say I liked it, that will come as no surprise. But there's also a reason I would be predisposed to dislike it. Let me tell you a bit of a story.
Once there was a young mother who had reached a stumbling block in her academic career and was staying home with two preschoolers. She had a friend who would pass on bags full of paperback romance novels brought to her by her mother. Every couple of weeks, this friend would bring over a new bag of books. The young mother didn't have to dress the preschoolers, (who were often nebulizer-sucking sick), get them in carseats, and take them to the library. She didn't have to worry about when the books were due. She could read for ten minutes, dog-ear the page rather than scrambling for a bookmark, and answer the next pressing preschooler need. A fast reader, the young mother read almost all the books she was brought, passing over only the occasional title with a half-naked Scots warrior on the front. At least a third of the paperback romances she read featured a divorced woman who moves to a new place, starts her own business--usually a restaurant, a bakery, or a catering service--makes good friends very quickly and easily from among her new neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who truly appreciates her talents. The young mother got very tired of this formula.
Okay, fast forward to this same mother, years later, getting a novel in which a divorced woman moves to a new place (the Cevennes mountains, in France), starts her own business (sewing and upholstery--a change from the cooking, at least), makes good friends very quickly from among her neighbors and clients, and falls in love with a man who appreciates her talents so much he buys and frames something she sewed. I think you're now aware of why I might be predisposed to dislike this novel.
But I didn't. Putting both my predispositions aside, I enjoyed the writing style and got immersed in the story, pretty much from the point where the main character, Catherine, who has moved to the Cevennes, is talking on the phone to her daughter Lexie, in England, and Lexie says to her:
"I know what the trouble is....Completely understandable, you poor thing. All very scenic over there and everything but naturally you're missing me."
Since this is almost exactly what I think my own daughter would say to me in similar circumstances, I started identifying with Catherine.
In fact, Catherine is almost completely happy with her own company and her sewing. Even though I'd personally rather do almost anything than be made to sew, the appeal of it for Catherine is clear to me:
"As she started to stitch....She saw it all clearly, translated into the colors of silk. It was funny how, even as a child, she had been able to visualise a picture or pattern as soon as she began to sew; she had only to begin and the image would emerge, a template for her to follow, like the outline that forms on closed lids after staring at something too long."
It's amusing to watch Catherine adapt to rural life, especially in terms of eating locally. The first time she is offered a dish of fresh wild boar, she "stared at him; she had a horror of killing in the raw. She was no vegetarian, but she preferred her meat without its claws." The dish is delicious, of course, and she asks for the recipe. Later, when she smells lamb cooking after a day spent helping herd a neighbor's sheep to summer pastures, she asks "Is it traditional....Sheep farmers who've walked all day with their flock, keeping them safely on the path, then when they stop for the night, dining enjoyably on a nice piece of mutton. It's a little close to home, don't you think? The matter-of-fact answering question, from the local man she fancies, is "What better than food that transports itself?"
I love the part where Catherine's neighbor Madame Bouschet tells her a story about how hard her husband Augustin has always worked, even on vacation, because it sounds like what my friends always say about our sand castle projects at the beach:
"You should have seen him...with his trousers rolled up to the knee, digging holes in the sand. Jean-Marc wanted him to dig a hole as deep as the well at home, and he was at it a whole morning. I said to him, when the children were in bed, I said, it's typical of you. Supposed to be on holiday, and here you are, digging like it's time to lift the potatoes."
There is sadness in this story but it too is well-described. I particularly like the simile Catherine uses to describe how she felt when her mother died after spending years in a nursing home:
"I don't mean it was a surprise, because it wasn't. I didn't feel surprised, in my mind. What caught me unawares wasn't the fact of her dying, but the force of it. The physical impact, if that makes any sense.
Like standing ankle deep in the surf and knowing full well a cold wave is going to hit you, but the knowledge doesn't lessen the brunt of its strike."
And finally, you can't beat this novel for a happy ending. The local man turns out to have been wildly in love with her all along, and he finally has the sense to say it to her:
"When you ate my wild boar with such delicious reluctance. I fell at once. I have been quite enslaved."
If you're going to use a romance novel plot, you might as well do the romance part right. But there are other good parts to this novel, and I enjoyed them all. It's like one of the wonderful French casseroles it describes, full of unexpected ingredients that end up better in combination than I could ever have hoped.
So who will like this book? Women, particularly women over 30. Anyone who wants a good story with lots of descriptions of French food in it--I got some of the same pleasure from reading The Tapestry of Love that I always get from rereading Peter Mayle's books about Provence. Anyone who loves France and is curious about what life is like in the donkey-trodden Parc National des Cevennes.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
The House at Riverton
Do you believe in the kind of altruism that would cause a person to give up her own happiness in order to serve another and never even tell that other person what she'd done? Can you possibly believe in a nineteenth-century female character who would make plans to run away with the love of her life and then shoot him because she thought he was threatening her sister? If so, have I got a shaggy dog story of a novel for you!
The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton, is intriguingly structured, with the story of what happened to the narrator's employers told at the end of their former housemaid's life. And some of the dialogue is fun:
"I'm tired of reciting The Lady of Shalott while she snivels into her handkerchief."
"She's crying for her own lost love," Emmeline said with a sigh.
Hannah rolled her eyes.
"It's true!" Emmeline said. "I heard Grandmama tell Lady Clem. Before she came to us, Miss Prince was engaged to be married."
"Came to his senses, I suppose," Hannah said.
"He married her sister instead," Emmeline said.
This silenced Hannah, but only briefly. "She should have sued him for breach of promise."
"That's what Lady Clem said--and worse--but Grandmama said Miss Prince didn't want to cause him trouble."
"Then she's a fool," Hannah said. "She's better off without him."
"What a romantic," David said archly. "The poor lady's hopelessly in love with a man she can't have and you begrudge reading her the occasional piece of sad poetry. Cruelty, thy name is Hannah."
But, as in this passage, the foreshadowing is unrelentingly heavy-handed. Yes, these sisters will end up quarreling over the same man! Surprise!
The writing only occasionally takes on the flavor of the early twentieth century, with bits of odd nineteenth-century tone completely pulling me out of the story:
"It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation."
In the end, what happens is simply unbelievable. People do not act like this, no matter how much the narrator protests that they were different back then. I felt cheated that I had actually read more than 400 pages, only to have such a wildly improbable ending thrust upon me. It was like listening to one of those shaggy dog stories that goes on and on and then has a stupid ending, and you discover that the only funny thing is that you actually listened to that nonsense for so long.
The House at Riverton, by Kate Morton, is intriguingly structured, with the story of what happened to the narrator's employers told at the end of their former housemaid's life. And some of the dialogue is fun:
"I'm tired of reciting The Lady of Shalott while she snivels into her handkerchief."
"She's crying for her own lost love," Emmeline said with a sigh.
Hannah rolled her eyes.
"It's true!" Emmeline said. "I heard Grandmama tell Lady Clem. Before she came to us, Miss Prince was engaged to be married."
"Came to his senses, I suppose," Hannah said.
"He married her sister instead," Emmeline said.
This silenced Hannah, but only briefly. "She should have sued him for breach of promise."
"That's what Lady Clem said--and worse--but Grandmama said Miss Prince didn't want to cause him trouble."
"Then she's a fool," Hannah said. "She's better off without him."
"What a romantic," David said archly. "The poor lady's hopelessly in love with a man she can't have and you begrudge reading her the occasional piece of sad poetry. Cruelty, thy name is Hannah."
But, as in this passage, the foreshadowing is unrelentingly heavy-handed. Yes, these sisters will end up quarreling over the same man! Surprise!
The writing only occasionally takes on the flavor of the early twentieth century, with bits of odd nineteenth-century tone completely pulling me out of the story:
"It is a universal truth that no matter how well one knows a scene, to observe it from above is something of a revelation."
In the end, what happens is simply unbelievable. People do not act like this, no matter how much the narrator protests that they were different back then. I felt cheated that I had actually read more than 400 pages, only to have such a wildly improbable ending thrust upon me. It was like listening to one of those shaggy dog stories that goes on and on and then has a stupid ending, and you discover that the only funny thing is that you actually listened to that nonsense for so long.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Among Others
Saturday we took our non-necromancy show on the road and entertained ourselves in the city an hour away while Walker played three chess games on the first day of a tournament. He now plays at the "expert" level, which means there's less drama; he knows many of his competitors and more of the games end in a draw. So we left him to it. Eleanor and I got haircuts while Ron sat in a next-door coffeeshop, and then we had a fancy lunch at the restaurant next door on the other side (Eleanor had her favorite, brie and pear pizza). We went to see Gnomeo and Juliet, which was mildly amusing. Walker went out to dinner with us, and then we took him back for the evening game and headed for the place we always go when we've done everything else and need somewhere to hang out: the bookstore. We all found some books and settled in for a while. When the while was over, I discovered that I was totally hooked on the book I'd picked up to see if it was as good as I'd read over at Things Mean A Lot-- Among Others, by Jo Walton. I had to buy it and carry it with me on the long, moonlit road home and wait until the next day after I'd taken Walker back for the second day of the tournament until I could finish reading it.
The first-person narrator of Among Others is a young girl who reads a lot of the kind of poetry and science fiction and fantasy I read when I was her age. Throughout her story, she says what she thinks of this book and that, and--especially because we don't always agree--it's kind of like having a conversation about the kind of most-beloved books that live deepest and longest in your imagination, the kind that have provided you with the metaphors through which you've always seen the world, like thinking that huorns should be coming to help when you've finally had the courage to do the thing that will vanquish evil.
Among Others is, first and foremost, a book about books-- not a genre I often like, because it usually strikes me as somewhat artificial and precious. This book isn't like that, though; it's more like a Victorian children's book in which the children have read a lot of the same books you have and loved them for most of the same reasons. She reads and talks about J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Plato, Poul Anderson, Mary Renault, C.S. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon, among others. And if you've read some of the same books she has, you know exactly what she means when she says that sometimes a person she knows "gives me the creeps. Who could help wanting to Impress a dragon in preference? Who wouldn't want to be Paul Atreides?"
At one point when the narrator has to make a choice between life and death, she chooses life simply because "I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out."
The book-loving theme is the main attraction of this book, and it has an ending more fulfilling and satisfying than any I could have imagined. There are huorns, finally, and a reference to Burnham Wood, and the narrator says she had tears in her eyes, and I definitely had them in mine. This is the line you want to get to in this book: "If you love books enough, books will love you back." I'm glad I hadn't read Jo Walton's "big idea" post over at Whatever before I read her book, but now that I have, I like what she says about this line.
The other thing this book is about is fairies. Yeah, but don't look at me like that. Again, it's more like a Victorian children's book where the fairies are treated matter-of-factly than the kind of thing you might be imagining. Part of what the book is about is magic. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not mentioning the narrator's name.
Let me try to give you some of the matter-of-fact flavor:
"One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has....They couldn't believe I didn't know....It turns out it's a Bentley--I wrote and asked--which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want me to be able to place everyone very precisely....
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."
The narrator occasionally wrestles with the necessity for using magic:
"I think I ought to do something about the way the universe is unfolding, because there are things that need obvious and immediate attention, like the fact that the Russians and the Americans could blow the world to bits at any moment, and Dutch elm disease, and famine in Africa..."
And she thinks about the way magic works:
"I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn't exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming around the corner, it isn't as if I'd be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they're going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I'd have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn't have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that's just for a bus."
What I like best about the magic, besides her descriptions of what particular fairies look like, is the way she always wonders about what she's trying to do in the world: "was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it?"
There are people you meet who fall in step with you, like the friends the narrator meets in town who turn with her towards the bookshop because they're "bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop." Reading this book is like meeting friends like that. And the book is about people who know how books can be friends--reading it gave me the pleasure of seeing how this new friend--Walton's narrator-- first met many of my old friends, and the pleasure of adding her story to theirs.
This book is for anyone who loves reading, anyone who claps during a performance of Peter Pan, and anyone who has been a teenager.
The first-person narrator of Among Others is a young girl who reads a lot of the kind of poetry and science fiction and fantasy I read when I was her age. Throughout her story, she says what she thinks of this book and that, and--especially because we don't always agree--it's kind of like having a conversation about the kind of most-beloved books that live deepest and longest in your imagination, the kind that have provided you with the metaphors through which you've always seen the world, like thinking that huorns should be coming to help when you've finally had the courage to do the thing that will vanquish evil.
Among Others is, first and foremost, a book about books-- not a genre I often like, because it usually strikes me as somewhat artificial and precious. This book isn't like that, though; it's more like a Victorian children's book in which the children have read a lot of the same books you have and loved them for most of the same reasons. She reads and talks about J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Plato, Poul Anderson, Mary Renault, C.S. Lewis, Philip K. Dick, Larry Niven, Zenna Henderson, and Theodore Sturgeon, among others. And if you've read some of the same books she has, you know exactly what she means when she says that sometimes a person she knows "gives me the creeps. Who could help wanting to Impress a dragon in preference? Who wouldn't want to be Paul Atreides?"
At one point when the narrator has to make a choice between life and death, she chooses life simply because "I was halfway through Babel 17, and if I went on I would never find out how it came out."
The book-loving theme is the main attraction of this book, and it has an ending more fulfilling and satisfying than any I could have imagined. There are huorns, finally, and a reference to Burnham Wood, and the narrator says she had tears in her eyes, and I definitely had them in mine. This is the line you want to get to in this book: "If you love books enough, books will love you back." I'm glad I hadn't read Jo Walton's "big idea" post over at Whatever before I read her book, but now that I have, I like what she says about this line.
The other thing this book is about is fairies. Yeah, but don't look at me like that. Again, it's more like a Victorian children's book where the fairies are treated matter-of-factly than the kind of thing you might be imagining. Part of what the book is about is magic. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not mentioning the narrator's name.
Let me try to give you some of the matter-of-fact flavor:
"One of the first questions they asked me was about what kind of car my father has....They couldn't believe I didn't know....It turns out it's a Bentley--I wrote and asked--which is an acceptable kind of car. But why do they care? They want me to be able to place everyone very precisely....
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic."
The narrator occasionally wrestles with the necessity for using magic:
"I think I ought to do something about the way the universe is unfolding, because there are things that need obvious and immediate attention, like the fact that the Russians and the Americans could blow the world to bits at any moment, and Dutch elm disease, and famine in Africa..."
And she thinks about the way magic works:
"I wanted the bus to come, and I wasn't exactly sure when it was due. If I reached magic into that, imagined the bus just coming around the corner, it isn't as if I'd be materialising a bus out of nowhere. The bus is somewhere on its round. There are two buses an hour, say, and for the bus to be coming right when I wanted it, it must have started off on its route at a precise time earlier, and people will have caught it and got on and off at particular times, and got to where they're going at different times. For the bus to be where I want it, I'd have to change all that, the times they got up, even, and maybe the whole timetable back to whenever it was written, so that people caught the bus at different times every day for months, so that I didn't have to wait today. Goodness knows what difference that would make in the world, and that's just for a bus."
What I like best about the magic, besides her descriptions of what particular fairies look like, is the way she always wonders about what she's trying to do in the world: "was it all going to happen anyway and I only think the magic did it?"
There are people you meet who fall in step with you, like the friends the narrator meets in town who turn with her towards the bookshop because they're "bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop." Reading this book is like meeting friends like that. And the book is about people who know how books can be friends--reading it gave me the pleasure of seeing how this new friend--Walton's narrator-- first met many of my old friends, and the pleasure of adding her story to theirs.
This book is for anyone who loves reading, anyone who claps during a performance of Peter Pan, and anyone who has been a teenager.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Company of Liars
In the mood for some light winter reading, I picked up Karen Maitland's medieval mystery entitled Company of Liars, and enjoyed it immensely all the way through. It's the story of a small band of wanderers trying to avoid the plague and also too much scrutiny. They are all "liars" in some way, and as their stories are told or revealed, the reader grows to care about them as their companions do.
There are lots of secrets and lots of stories, and the fun of reading is in discovery, so I won't tell much about what happens, but there are lots of incidental pleasures. Maitland has done her research, and so the details of medieval life on the road are interesting in themselves; I'd never thought about the fact that glass-blowing apprentices had to be more than usually intelligent and disciplined: "get careless with a rod of molten glass and a man could be burned so badly his wounds might never heal. They were quick, eager lads and they needed to be. This was not a profession for dullards."
Even to a twentieth-century person living in a house with central heating, some universal truths appeal, like when one character asserts that "it is only when you get truly warm that you realise how cold you have been."
It's not until p. 314 of this 453-page novel that readers get the first big clue about the "lie" that the first-person narrator, a Camelot, or (according to the glossary at the back) "medieval peddler who also sold or carried news" has been carrying around. The very medieval kind of black or white judgment which puts lies absolutely on the side of evil finally leads to a confrontation at the end of the novel. And the last chapter, in which we learn "the truth about scars"--and a few other things that we might otherwise have believed were supernatural--is unforgettable, and a deeply satisfying end to a sometimes scary story.
There are lots of secrets and lots of stories, and the fun of reading is in discovery, so I won't tell much about what happens, but there are lots of incidental pleasures. Maitland has done her research, and so the details of medieval life on the road are interesting in themselves; I'd never thought about the fact that glass-blowing apprentices had to be more than usually intelligent and disciplined: "get careless with a rod of molten glass and a man could be burned so badly his wounds might never heal. They were quick, eager lads and they needed to be. This was not a profession for dullards."
Even to a twentieth-century person living in a house with central heating, some universal truths appeal, like when one character asserts that "it is only when you get truly warm that you realise how cold you have been."
It's not until p. 314 of this 453-page novel that readers get the first big clue about the "lie" that the first-person narrator, a Camelot, or (according to the glossary at the back) "medieval peddler who also sold or carried news" has been carrying around. The very medieval kind of black or white judgment which puts lies absolutely on the side of evil finally leads to a confrontation at the end of the novel. And the last chapter, in which we learn "the truth about scars"--and a few other things that we might otherwise have believed were supernatural--is unforgettable, and a deeply satisfying end to a sometimes scary story.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Hamlet's BlackBerry
I read Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building A Good Life in the Digital Age, by William Powers, because of the review at Sophisticated Dorkiness. And really, I don't know what I was expecting--something I didn't already know? Some kind of magic solution?
The book begins with a delightful analogy and goes on to identify the problem of busyness, which is that it's inevitable in a culture where "it's good to be connected, and it's bad to be disconnected." (If you don't believe that of our culture, think back to the last time you visited a parents' house, a hotel or a restaurant that didn't have a wireless connection.)
Although I believe that there are some problems with what he calls "the Vanishing Family Trick," I don't believe that parental authoritarianism, his recommended remedy, is the solution. As he points out in a later chapter on Ben Franklin, people have to see the positive in their resolution to give up something they want, and the children in his family, while they may like the parentally-mandated internet free weekends, as he asserts they do, have had it chosen for them; I'm assuming that they're younger than my teenagers.
I've recently been dealing with my teenage son's struggle for independence, and I'm trying hard to see his side--so hard that this book may have just come at the wrong time for me. It does affect my reaction to sentences like "my most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared about put everything and everyone else aside to be with me alone...." which seems to me to be a version of the "only two choices" logical fallacy--either you spend this much time with someone without answering the call of electronic devices, or you give in to their lure entirely. Wouldn't teaching a kid good manners solve some a lot of these problems--you know, like talk to the people you're with rather than ignore them because of your phone? Powers does mention changes in the etiquette of telephone use: "for much of the twentieth century, when the phone rang it was customary to drop whatever you were doing and answer it....And we're still learning to live with phones."
The section in which Powers proposes we have something to learn about how to construct our own versions of the good life from Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan seemed contrived and spun-out to me, as if a small, clever idea Powers came up with had been plumped and cosseted so it could stretch out to book length. He's dug up several references to an erasable "table" mentioned in Hamlet and asserts that "it played a central role in people's lives for hundreds of years and helped some of history's most brilliant minds organize their time and thoughts" while comparing its usefulness to that of his own moleskine notebook, and he's usefully inserted an interpretation of Walden back into the context of Transcendentalism. But I found nothing relevatory here.
Powers ends with some personal suggestions about how to live a good life amid a myriad of screens demanding some of our time and attention. One of them that I particularly like--because it's one I already do and it works well for me--is "to start using other people as your search engines....it's more enjoyable listening to the latest developments through the interpretive lens of a person you know, and it saves a lot of trouble."
Other suggestions I like less: "Have a disconnected party where all devices are confiscated at the door." Again, wouldn't good manners dictate that when you go to a party, you voluntarily put them away when you come through the door? Maybe where Powers lives it isn't considered rude to use electronic devices while visiting someone else's house, but where I live, unless you're a medical doctor on call, you're expected to be able to live without your devices for a couple of hours when the pleasure of your company has been requested.
This book inspires me to begin concluding my reviews with an audience recommendation. You could see this series building in my previous posts--one of my most urgent criticisms of Stanley Fish's book How To Write A Sentence was that I didn't think he had a very good idea of who he was writing it for, and the audience for Eleanor's Brown's novel was also a subject for my speculation. It seems like a good direction, to recommend the book based on who I think would most like to read it.
Who would most like to read Hamlet's Blackberry? Someone who would not think to pick it up. Someone who has never thought about designing a "philosophy for building a good life" but who lives from moment to digital moment, rarely reading a printed book. Someone who would text in the theater (and surely there's a special circle of hell for those folks).
The book begins with a delightful analogy and goes on to identify the problem of busyness, which is that it's inevitable in a culture where "it's good to be connected, and it's bad to be disconnected." (If you don't believe that of our culture, think back to the last time you visited a parents' house, a hotel or a restaurant that didn't have a wireless connection.)
Although I believe that there are some problems with what he calls "the Vanishing Family Trick," I don't believe that parental authoritarianism, his recommended remedy, is the solution. As he points out in a later chapter on Ben Franklin, people have to see the positive in their resolution to give up something they want, and the children in his family, while they may like the parentally-mandated internet free weekends, as he asserts they do, have had it chosen for them; I'm assuming that they're younger than my teenagers.
I've recently been dealing with my teenage son's struggle for independence, and I'm trying hard to see his side--so hard that this book may have just come at the wrong time for me. It does affect my reaction to sentences like "my most cherished childhood memories, the ones that made me who I am and sustain me today, are about moments when a parent, grandparent, or somebody else I cared about put everything and everyone else aside to be with me alone...." which seems to me to be a version of the "only two choices" logical fallacy--either you spend this much time with someone without answering the call of electronic devices, or you give in to their lure entirely. Wouldn't teaching a kid good manners solve some a lot of these problems--you know, like talk to the people you're with rather than ignore them because of your phone? Powers does mention changes in the etiquette of telephone use: "for much of the twentieth century, when the phone rang it was customary to drop whatever you were doing and answer it....And we're still learning to live with phones."
The section in which Powers proposes we have something to learn about how to construct our own versions of the good life from Plato, Seneca, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Ben Franklin, Thoreau, and Marshall McLuhan seemed contrived and spun-out to me, as if a small, clever idea Powers came up with had been plumped and cosseted so it could stretch out to book length. He's dug up several references to an erasable "table" mentioned in Hamlet and asserts that "it played a central role in people's lives for hundreds of years and helped some of history's most brilliant minds organize their time and thoughts" while comparing its usefulness to that of his own moleskine notebook, and he's usefully inserted an interpretation of Walden back into the context of Transcendentalism. But I found nothing relevatory here.
Powers ends with some personal suggestions about how to live a good life amid a myriad of screens demanding some of our time and attention. One of them that I particularly like--because it's one I already do and it works well for me--is "to start using other people as your search engines....it's more enjoyable listening to the latest developments through the interpretive lens of a person you know, and it saves a lot of trouble."
Other suggestions I like less: "Have a disconnected party where all devices are confiscated at the door." Again, wouldn't good manners dictate that when you go to a party, you voluntarily put them away when you come through the door? Maybe where Powers lives it isn't considered rude to use electronic devices while visiting someone else's house, but where I live, unless you're a medical doctor on call, you're expected to be able to live without your devices for a couple of hours when the pleasure of your company has been requested.
This book inspires me to begin concluding my reviews with an audience recommendation. You could see this series building in my previous posts--one of my most urgent criticisms of Stanley Fish's book How To Write A Sentence was that I didn't think he had a very good idea of who he was writing it for, and the audience for Eleanor's Brown's novel was also a subject for my speculation. It seems like a good direction, to recommend the book based on who I think would most like to read it.
Who would most like to read Hamlet's Blackberry? Someone who would not think to pick it up. Someone who has never thought about designing a "philosophy for building a good life" but who lives from moment to digital moment, rarely reading a printed book. Someone who would text in the theater (and surely there's a special circle of hell for those folks).
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
The Weird Sisters
There are a lot of reasons I felt I had to read Eleanor's Brown's new novel The Weird Sisters sooner rather than later. There's the fact that she has said the college is a combination of Kenyon and Oberlin. There was Eleanor saying that she must have gone into the future to write it (as she said, the author's got my name, it's about where I grew up, and they talk in literary tropes like we do). And then there were Kim's "5 Reasons You Should Read The Weird Sisters."
But the book didn't live up to my expectations. The most interesting thing about it is the way it's told, as if the three sisters could share each others' thoughts. Still, the use of the archaic definition of the word "weird" as "fate" to define the sisters just doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't have a sister and am not infrequently irritated by the cutesy way some of my friends and relatives have taught their daughters to act with each other (a problem with relating to the characters in this book that my own daughter will share), but I don't understand or much like the whole premise about how a sister's life is defined by her place in the birth order and her role as a sister.
Brown is a good storyteller, and she gets a lot of the details about a small, college town just right. Things are just too tidy in the story, though. What she misses are the rivalries and small, petty annoyances that grow inevitably between proud, intelligent people who have to rub elbows with each other for too many years. All of the small-town folks in The Weird Sisters are pleasant and welcoming to the sisters when they come back home. They offer them jobs and food and love. Not one reveals any festering jealousy from way back when.
The plot is fairly standard chick-lit fare (when I described it to a friend of mine who is a tenured professor at Kenyon, she called it "highbrow chick lit"). One sister realizes, towards the end of the novel, that her mother, a homemaker (there's an accurate detail; there are more of those in small college towns than in the world in general) was probably more self-actualized by cooking, gardening and reading than she would have been by getting a job. I do love this passage:
"Barnwell is full of people like our mother, married to spouses who dragged them to the middle of a cornfield and set off for the academic races with no more than a kiss and a cheerful exhortation to go ahead and build a life for themselves in the middle of nothing."
Despite the fact that I really don't like any of the characters--the thieving, adulterous sister, the blindly ambitious one, or the apathetic hippie wanna-be--I do like some of the ways they relate to the world. They think it's natural to always have a book with you, as does almost everyone I know. And they have one of the most satisfying answers to the perennial "How do you have time to read" question that I've heard in a while:
"Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces?"
Readers will like this book, and women with sisters will like it even better. I like it for its description of the dynamics of a family which "has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years," although I do find this fictional family's adherence to quoting only one author oddly narrow.
Perhaps I expected too much from this book. If I had gone into it thinking it would be like a new novel from Jennifer Crusie or Weiner, I'd have been pleasantly surprised.
But the book didn't live up to my expectations. The most interesting thing about it is the way it's told, as if the three sisters could share each others' thoughts. Still, the use of the archaic definition of the word "weird" as "fate" to define the sisters just doesn't work for me. Maybe it's because I don't have a sister and am not infrequently irritated by the cutesy way some of my friends and relatives have taught their daughters to act with each other (a problem with relating to the characters in this book that my own daughter will share), but I don't understand or much like the whole premise about how a sister's life is defined by her place in the birth order and her role as a sister.
Brown is a good storyteller, and she gets a lot of the details about a small, college town just right. Things are just too tidy in the story, though. What she misses are the rivalries and small, petty annoyances that grow inevitably between proud, intelligent people who have to rub elbows with each other for too many years. All of the small-town folks in The Weird Sisters are pleasant and welcoming to the sisters when they come back home. They offer them jobs and food and love. Not one reveals any festering jealousy from way back when.
The plot is fairly standard chick-lit fare (when I described it to a friend of mine who is a tenured professor at Kenyon, she called it "highbrow chick lit"). One sister realizes, towards the end of the novel, that her mother, a homemaker (there's an accurate detail; there are more of those in small college towns than in the world in general) was probably more self-actualized by cooking, gardening and reading than she would have been by getting a job. I do love this passage:
"Barnwell is full of people like our mother, married to spouses who dragged them to the middle of a cornfield and set off for the academic races with no more than a kiss and a cheerful exhortation to go ahead and build a life for themselves in the middle of nothing."
Despite the fact that I really don't like any of the characters--the thieving, adulterous sister, the blindly ambitious one, or the apathetic hippie wanna-be--I do like some of the ways they relate to the world. They think it's natural to always have a book with you, as does almost everyone I know. And they have one of the most satisfying answers to the perennial "How do you have time to read" question that I've heard in a while:
"Because I don't spend hours flipping through cable complaining there's nothing on? Because my entire Sunday is not eaten up with pre-game, in-game, and post-game talking heads? Because I do not spend every night drinking overpriced beer and engaging in dick-swinging contests with the other financirati? Because when I am waiting in line, at the gym, on the train, eating lunch, I am not complaining about the wait/staring into space/admiring myself in available reflective surfaces?"
Readers will like this book, and women with sisters will like it even better. I like it for its description of the dynamics of a family which "has always communicated its deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years," although I do find this fictional family's adherence to quoting only one author oddly narrow.
Perhaps I expected too much from this book. If I had gone into it thinking it would be like a new novel from Jennifer Crusie or Weiner, I'd have been pleasantly surprised.
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Golden Spruce
If you could recommend one book that everyone in the world should read, what would it be? Hard question, isn't it? I'm not sure I could come up with just one. But I notice that readers of non-fiction often have one particular pet book, and it's almost always interesting and rewarding to read it. In addition to what I learn, I see the person who recommended it to me from an unexpected angle.
So when a friend of mine on FB recommended The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, by John Vaillant, I told her I wanted to read it and she brought her copy right over to my house. Feeling like I'd better seize the moment, I plunged into it immediately, and fairly soon got bogged down. I kept plugging away, though, and discovered by the end that reading this book is like going to the opera--you really should know the story ahead of time. I think it would have been a better book if the newspaper story that appears in the epilogue had appeared instead in the prologue:
Picea Sitchensis 'Bentham's Sunlight'--Fresh Graft $20.00
NEW! A piece of history from a legendary 300 yr. old Golden Sitka Spruce growing wild on fog shrouded Queen Charlotte Island in Canada, sacred to the Haida Indians, with a tragic end. In 1997 a protestor felled this tree in protest to general apathy towards clearcutting. He disappeared before he made it to his court appearance, presumed dead, with only the remains of his broken and battered kayak to be found, and some rudimentary camping gear. A story that has it all--history, sacred symbolism, tragedy, mystery. Grafting material was taken from the downed tree and efforts have been made to graft on to the original rootstock.
There, now, you're ready to read this book. And it really is a fascinating story; I was glad, by the end, that it had been so enthusiastically recommended.
The prologue tells the story of someone discovering a wrecked kayak on an island near the Canadian border, and then the first chapter plunges into an explanation of the climate and conditions in "North America's coastal temperate rainforests"--you know, a bit north of where the photos of giant redwoods come from and where one of my favorite childhood movies, The Gnomemobile, was filmed. The first chapter ends by zeroing in on the Queen Charlotte islands and one particular tree that grew there, a golden spruce that was "sixteen stories tall and more than twenty feet around" and is described (in a later chapter) as a tree that had "peculiar radiance, as if it were actually generating light from deep within its branches" and was called "the Ooh-Aah tree, because that's what it made us all say."
After many chapters about the dangers of the waters off the coast of British Columbia, the history of logging in the Pacific Northwest, and the childhood and logging career of Grant Hadwin, the person who destroyed the golden spruce, you finally have enough background to understand the story of greed. After that you get to hear the story of myth and finally Hadwin's madness. The background is essential, though. One of the points of the book is that most people--certainly me--are even less aware about where the paper for their books and houses comes from than they are about the origins of the beef they eat. Not only that, but "there is another reason we are so far removed from this process...and that is because, in most cases, the process is so far removed from us. Old-growth loggers are latter-day frontiersmen letting the light into the last dark corners of the country; we don't see them because they are pushing deep into places where the bulk of the population wouldn't last twenty-four hours."
Vaillant made me think of other books I've read, like the one by Conrad Richter about prehistoric Ohio entitled The Trees. In fact, Vaillant observes that "out here, the empty spaces still look like wounds, like violations of the natural order, but back east--that is, from Chicago to Babylon--we find this hard to visualize because the clear-cutting happened generations before any of us was born. Treeless expanses look normal to us--'natural,' even."
Also, as I said, Vaillant made me think of that 1967 movie The Gnomemobile, which centers around a lumberman setting aside some acres of forest rather than cutting down all the trees that are home to the gnomes and their forest friends. Vaillant tells me that "these 'set-asides' were generally miniscule, seldom amounting to more than five or ten acres--nowhere near big enough to serve a significant conservation function for the ecosystem. Their primary purposes were recreational and symbolic--the briefest of nods to the great forest that had once stood there."
The Haida Indians' myths about the golden spruce are myriad and at least partially untranslatable, but Vaillant tells some of the variations that center on humans becoming trees, one a complete story about a boy and his grandfather fleeing from winter's destruction of their village and tribe, with the grandfather instructing the boy not to look back, and the boy disobeying and becoming rooted, eventually turning into the golden spruce.
The madness of the man who destroyed the golden spruce in an effort to protest the methods of modern logging is told in all its complexity and pathos. This is the part of the book that gave me some insight into why the friend who lent it to me finds it such a fascinating book, as she's a psychologist by day; there's a revealing passage about Hadwin seeing himself as a visionary:
"Nowadays someone who gets blindsided by such a sudden and mind-altering experience might call it an epiphany, an awakening, or a religious experience while a professional might call it a delusion, a hallucination, or a psychotic episode. The truth is often somewhere in the elusive middle, and yet billions of people continue to be guided in their lives by just such liminal figures--most of whom--like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and Brigham Young--are long and safely dead. Were they alive today, they might be languishing in a heavily medicated limbo."
Hadwin's symbolic act didn't produce the results he wanted in the local community; Vaillant reports that "most people up here feel about Hadwin the way people in the States feel about Timothy McVeigh: he's an outsider who came into their place and killed something precious." But since Vaillant published this book in 2005, the act's symbolic resonance has been amplified.
From the person who reacted with some degree of scorn to a handwritten sign on a dispenser in a midwestern campus restroom reminding me that "these towels come from trees" to the person who is now thinking about the many rolls of paper towels we use each week for cleaning out our rabbit cage, Vaillant's book has brought me to a new degree of tree awareness.
Do you have a pet book I should read? (I can't promise I'll get to it right away unless you bring it to my door.)
So when a friend of mine on FB recommended The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed, by John Vaillant, I told her I wanted to read it and she brought her copy right over to my house. Feeling like I'd better seize the moment, I plunged into it immediately, and fairly soon got bogged down. I kept plugging away, though, and discovered by the end that reading this book is like going to the opera--you really should know the story ahead of time. I think it would have been a better book if the newspaper story that appears in the epilogue had appeared instead in the prologue:
Picea Sitchensis 'Bentham's Sunlight'--Fresh Graft $20.00
NEW! A piece of history from a legendary 300 yr. old Golden Sitka Spruce growing wild on fog shrouded Queen Charlotte Island in Canada, sacred to the Haida Indians, with a tragic end. In 1997 a protestor felled this tree in protest to general apathy towards clearcutting. He disappeared before he made it to his court appearance, presumed dead, with only the remains of his broken and battered kayak to be found, and some rudimentary camping gear. A story that has it all--history, sacred symbolism, tragedy, mystery. Grafting material was taken from the downed tree and efforts have been made to graft on to the original rootstock.
There, now, you're ready to read this book. And it really is a fascinating story; I was glad, by the end, that it had been so enthusiastically recommended.
The prologue tells the story of someone discovering a wrecked kayak on an island near the Canadian border, and then the first chapter plunges into an explanation of the climate and conditions in "North America's coastal temperate rainforests"--you know, a bit north of where the photos of giant redwoods come from and where one of my favorite childhood movies, The Gnomemobile, was filmed. The first chapter ends by zeroing in on the Queen Charlotte islands and one particular tree that grew there, a golden spruce that was "sixteen stories tall and more than twenty feet around" and is described (in a later chapter) as a tree that had "peculiar radiance, as if it were actually generating light from deep within its branches" and was called "the Ooh-Aah tree, because that's what it made us all say."
After many chapters about the dangers of the waters off the coast of British Columbia, the history of logging in the Pacific Northwest, and the childhood and logging career of Grant Hadwin, the person who destroyed the golden spruce, you finally have enough background to understand the story of greed. After that you get to hear the story of myth and finally Hadwin's madness. The background is essential, though. One of the points of the book is that most people--certainly me--are even less aware about where the paper for their books and houses comes from than they are about the origins of the beef they eat. Not only that, but "there is another reason we are so far removed from this process...and that is because, in most cases, the process is so far removed from us. Old-growth loggers are latter-day frontiersmen letting the light into the last dark corners of the country; we don't see them because they are pushing deep into places where the bulk of the population wouldn't last twenty-four hours."
Vaillant made me think of other books I've read, like the one by Conrad Richter about prehistoric Ohio entitled The Trees. In fact, Vaillant observes that "out here, the empty spaces still look like wounds, like violations of the natural order, but back east--that is, from Chicago to Babylon--we find this hard to visualize because the clear-cutting happened generations before any of us was born. Treeless expanses look normal to us--'natural,' even."
Also, as I said, Vaillant made me think of that 1967 movie The Gnomemobile, which centers around a lumberman setting aside some acres of forest rather than cutting down all the trees that are home to the gnomes and their forest friends. Vaillant tells me that "these 'set-asides' were generally miniscule, seldom amounting to more than five or ten acres--nowhere near big enough to serve a significant conservation function for the ecosystem. Their primary purposes were recreational and symbolic--the briefest of nods to the great forest that had once stood there."
The Haida Indians' myths about the golden spruce are myriad and at least partially untranslatable, but Vaillant tells some of the variations that center on humans becoming trees, one a complete story about a boy and his grandfather fleeing from winter's destruction of their village and tribe, with the grandfather instructing the boy not to look back, and the boy disobeying and becoming rooted, eventually turning into the golden spruce.
The madness of the man who destroyed the golden spruce in an effort to protest the methods of modern logging is told in all its complexity and pathos. This is the part of the book that gave me some insight into why the friend who lent it to me finds it such a fascinating book, as she's a psychologist by day; there's a revealing passage about Hadwin seeing himself as a visionary:
"Nowadays someone who gets blindsided by such a sudden and mind-altering experience might call it an epiphany, an awakening, or a religious experience while a professional might call it a delusion, a hallucination, or a psychotic episode. The truth is often somewhere in the elusive middle, and yet billions of people continue to be guided in their lives by just such liminal figures--most of whom--like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and Brigham Young--are long and safely dead. Were they alive today, they might be languishing in a heavily medicated limbo."
Hadwin's symbolic act didn't produce the results he wanted in the local community; Vaillant reports that "most people up here feel about Hadwin the way people in the States feel about Timothy McVeigh: he's an outsider who came into their place and killed something precious." But since Vaillant published this book in 2005, the act's symbolic resonance has been amplified.
From the person who reacted with some degree of scorn to a handwritten sign on a dispenser in a midwestern campus restroom reminding me that "these towels come from trees" to the person who is now thinking about the many rolls of paper towels we use each week for cleaning out our rabbit cage, Vaillant's book has brought me to a new degree of tree awareness.
Do you have a pet book I should read? (I can't promise I'll get to it right away unless you bring it to my door.)
Monday, January 31, 2011
Running the Books
Our friend Miriam says it's hard to find books that Ron and I haven't read, so she sent us Running the Books by Avi Steinberg for Christmas. It was not a book I'd heard of, and definitely not one I would have picked up on my own, but it dovetailed with other things I was doing and reading.
I'm looking for more work; I spent the fall making the case that the local college should hire me full-time, or at least more than my current 1/6 time. That could be a very long-term project, so in the last few weeks I started looking around for other work I could do without having to commute. And then, of course, the high school finally put through enough of the paperwork that the director decided we could do an abbreviated musical this spring, so we're doing a little 90-minute, one set, contemporary costume, 7 song show entitled Olivia Twist. For coordinating parent volunteers (ticket selling, set construction etc.), listing and collecting props, writing synopses, ads, cast biographies, and the program, decorating the set, and being there for auditions, rehearsals, and performances, I will earn almost exactly as much as I make in a month at the 1/6 time job.
So as I'm still trying to decide what to be when I grow up, I started reading two books simultaneously. One made me cry with frustration and longing, about being the kind of idealized adjunct professor whose students become a sort of extended family--more on that later--and the other told me about what it's like to be a prison librarian. Well, I've tried the former, and as I read Running the Books, I imagined being the latter.
But I learned something from this book--I'm not a librarian at heart; I'm an archivist. At one point, a fellow prison librarian tells the author that he is, too:
"He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.
'They like everything,' he said, 'gum wrappers as much as books.' He said this with a hint of disdain.
'Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,' he said, 'they're too crazy to throw anything out.'
I think the line about gum wrappers is a bit much, but they are paper, and I do have to make myself throw away letters sometimes; there's a box of letters written by my grandparents to each other in my basement.
Books in a prison library are often used as delivery systems for notes, or "kites," and Steinberg saved some of the ones he found, saying that "there was some part of me that thought, Who knows, maybe these letters will be important to someone in the future? I majored in history and literature, and wrote newspaper obituaries. I spent many hours looking at letters and artifacts that some oddball had decided not to throw out. There is no history, no memory, without this."
The stories Steinberg tells about his experiences working in a prison range from the kind-of-heartwarming to the horrifying. When he tells about being mugged by a former inmate, he notes that "if this were an inspirational prison movie, this would be the point at which he would have given the money back to me, cried, and thanked me for believing in him....But that's not what happened." He finds that "a surprising number of inmates were the emotional age of children....it was almost the norm....I recognized a childlike earnestness is the inmate, aged thirty-six, who pleaded with me to give him tape so that he could stick his name, which he had printed out in a colorful, calligraphic font, to his school folder." He watches both male and female inmates hold baby dolls. He says that "In the library, I saw a murderer suck her thumb."
Although Avi Steinberg--a short, slight, intensely Jewish urbanite--couldn't be less like me, he manages to make me and any other bookish reader identify with him; one of the ways he does it is with intensely personal observations and the other is with finely-tuned humor. At one point, talking about how a prisoner reminds him of his grandmother, he observes that "the talking cure doesn't do much for me. I tend more toward the brooding cure."
Occasionally--very occasionally--I reacted to the meaning he invested in his job with the same kind of skepticism with which I react to anyone who is over-reaching for meaning. For instance, I couldn't quite buy the depth of meaning he invested in a note that read:
"Dear Mother,
My life is"
He claims that it is "a life indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white space."
Yeah, okay, but as he points out in other places, it could just be a letter written by a brutish person who got interrupted.
Like all good teachers, Steinberg learns from his students, and in his story about one named Jessica, he displays a sensitivity and earnestness that shows better than he can tell how out-of-place he was for a short while as an employee of the prison system. Another story that shows the kind of dilemma a prison librarian can find himself in is one about an inmate writing a biography who asks Steinberg for help, and how he has to weigh the risks:
"I kept imagining the tabloid headline, Outraged Parents: Our Tax Dollars Helped Our Teenaged Daughter's Rapist Write His Tell-All! The article would be accompanied by my prison ID photo, with my crew cut and my bewildered grin, bearing the caption 'I thought it was a good read.' These paranoid scenarios kept me up at night."
Sometimes you want to find a way to earn a living that will make a change in the way you live--and often when you feel that way, it's good to read a book that tells you all about that way of life so you don't have to experience its excitement and pitfalls on your own.
I'm looking for more work; I spent the fall making the case that the local college should hire me full-time, or at least more than my current 1/6 time. That could be a very long-term project, so in the last few weeks I started looking around for other work I could do without having to commute. And then, of course, the high school finally put through enough of the paperwork that the director decided we could do an abbreviated musical this spring, so we're doing a little 90-minute, one set, contemporary costume, 7 song show entitled Olivia Twist. For coordinating parent volunteers (ticket selling, set construction etc.), listing and collecting props, writing synopses, ads, cast biographies, and the program, decorating the set, and being there for auditions, rehearsals, and performances, I will earn almost exactly as much as I make in a month at the 1/6 time job.
So as I'm still trying to decide what to be when I grow up, I started reading two books simultaneously. One made me cry with frustration and longing, about being the kind of idealized adjunct professor whose students become a sort of extended family--more on that later--and the other told me about what it's like to be a prison librarian. Well, I've tried the former, and as I read Running the Books, I imagined being the latter.
But I learned something from this book--I'm not a librarian at heart; I'm an archivist. At one point, a fellow prison librarian tells the author that he is, too:
"He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They're pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.
'They like everything,' he said, 'gum wrappers as much as books.' He said this with a hint of disdain.
'Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,' he said, 'they're too crazy to throw anything out.'
I think the line about gum wrappers is a bit much, but they are paper, and I do have to make myself throw away letters sometimes; there's a box of letters written by my grandparents to each other in my basement.
Books in a prison library are often used as delivery systems for notes, or "kites," and Steinberg saved some of the ones he found, saying that "there was some part of me that thought, Who knows, maybe these letters will be important to someone in the future? I majored in history and literature, and wrote newspaper obituaries. I spent many hours looking at letters and artifacts that some oddball had decided not to throw out. There is no history, no memory, without this."
The stories Steinberg tells about his experiences working in a prison range from the kind-of-heartwarming to the horrifying. When he tells about being mugged by a former inmate, he notes that "if this were an inspirational prison movie, this would be the point at which he would have given the money back to me, cried, and thanked me for believing in him....But that's not what happened." He finds that "a surprising number of inmates were the emotional age of children....it was almost the norm....I recognized a childlike earnestness is the inmate, aged thirty-six, who pleaded with me to give him tape so that he could stick his name, which he had printed out in a colorful, calligraphic font, to his school folder." He watches both male and female inmates hold baby dolls. He says that "In the library, I saw a murderer suck her thumb."
Although Avi Steinberg--a short, slight, intensely Jewish urbanite--couldn't be less like me, he manages to make me and any other bookish reader identify with him; one of the ways he does it is with intensely personal observations and the other is with finely-tuned humor. At one point, talking about how a prisoner reminds him of his grandmother, he observes that "the talking cure doesn't do much for me. I tend more toward the brooding cure."
Occasionally--very occasionally--I reacted to the meaning he invested in his job with the same kind of skepticism with which I react to anyone who is over-reaching for meaning. For instance, I couldn't quite buy the depth of meaning he invested in a note that read:
"Dear Mother,
My life is"
He claims that it is "a life indefinite, unarticulated, open-ended. An unfinished, unsent letter. An infinity of white space."
Yeah, okay, but as he points out in other places, it could just be a letter written by a brutish person who got interrupted.
Like all good teachers, Steinberg learns from his students, and in his story about one named Jessica, he displays a sensitivity and earnestness that shows better than he can tell how out-of-place he was for a short while as an employee of the prison system. Another story that shows the kind of dilemma a prison librarian can find himself in is one about an inmate writing a biography who asks Steinberg for help, and how he has to weigh the risks:
"I kept imagining the tabloid headline, Outraged Parents: Our Tax Dollars Helped Our Teenaged Daughter's Rapist Write His Tell-All! The article would be accompanied by my prison ID photo, with my crew cut and my bewildered grin, bearing the caption 'I thought it was a good read.' These paranoid scenarios kept me up at night."
Sometimes you want to find a way to earn a living that will make a change in the way you live--and often when you feel that way, it's good to read a book that tells you all about that way of life so you don't have to experience its excitement and pitfalls on your own.
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