The Grim Reader

I am out of my depth among Russian were-creatures

2012-01-27T08:40:00.000-08:00

The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

by Victor Pelevin ***

I have written about post-Soviet magical realism before, and with some trepidation; what does an American who was middle aged when the USSR dissolved in Boris Yeltsin's vodka glass (left) know about post-Soviet culture? So I have no idea whether this is a good book or not; for me, it's like listening to a lecture that is given half in English and half in some unknown language. It may have interesting moments, but the whole won't hang together.

At the surface, the book is about a 2,000-year-old werefox who makes her money turning tricks as a 17-year-old Chinese prostitute. A Hu-Li's tricks, however, are tricks of the mind, pure figments of her clients' imagination from which she derives psychic energy needed to survive. Ideally it works like this: A Hu-Li arrives looking like a demure, underage prostitute. She goes into the bathroom, transforms into a fox, and quickly whammies the client with her tail before he sees her in her fox form.

While the client lives his sex fantasy in a dreamlike state, A Hu-Li reads an improving book by the bedside, keeping an eye on the client, transforming before he wakes up.

Occasionally, however, the client wakes up before A Hu-Li transforms from her werefox state, and the client is so horrified he jumps to his death. After one such accident, A Hu-Li is forced to troll new territory for johns, and that's where she meets Alexander, a menacing officer who's a holdover from the Soviet era's secret police. He's also a werewolf. They find they can psychically and sexually satisfy each other. They even love each other after a fashion, but their politics, values and goals are at odds. They are, of course, the yin and yang of Russia itself. A Hu-Li is ancient, Asian, cerebral. Alexander is younger, European, materialistic, boorish, even. Their doomed love affair and A Hu-Li's eventual "moving on" to a new state of existence may say something about the imbalance Pelevin sees in the new Russia, but this is just my guess.

More interesting are A Hu-Li's frequent observations about Russia:

Russia is a communal country, and when the Christian peasant commune was destroyed, the criminal commune became the source of the people's morality. The proprieties of the underworld occupied the place where God used to live--or, to put it more correctly, God Himself was incorporated into the notional rules as a top c rominal authority. And when the final religious prosthesis, the Sovieit "internal Party committee" was dismantled, chap guitar tuned for prison songs set the musical range of the Russian soul.

Pelevin's book has a kind of dark humor and makes lots of allusions to popular culture,which A Hu-Li has observed in her dispassionate werefox way. But there is a sadness and sense of loss. Take A Hu-Li's riff on the Russian version of Cinderella, in which Khavroshka is helped by a brindled cow instead of a fairy godmother. When the cow is slaughtered, an apple tree with golden fruit and leaves grows from them, which makes Khavroshka's fortune:

The fairy tale contained a strange truth about the very saddest and most mysterious side of Russian life. How many times that brindled cow had been slaughtered. And how many times it had returned, either as a magic apple tree or an entire cherry orchard. Only where had all the apples gone? You couldn't find them anywhere. Except maybe by calling the office of United Fruit. But no, that was nonsense. "United Fruit" was the last century, but now any call would get lost in the wires on its way to some company in Gibralter that belonged to a firm from the Falklan d Islands that was managed by a lawyer in Amsterdam in the interests of a trust with an unnamed beneficiary owner.

Ultimately, Pelevin's book seems to ponder a culture whose memory of Old Russia is fading as it still defines itself by--in some way even yearns for--the now-gone Soviet era. How (or whether) Russia can rebuild itself, or whether it has run out of "apples" is the question. Liesl Schillinger's interesting feature on author Pelevin from the "New York Times" is worth a read for more info.

I become embroiled in a mystery in Geneva

2011-12-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

Mystery at Geneva***
by Dame Rose Macauley

It's hard to say exactly why this novella is so charming, but it has a lot of it has to do with Dame Rose Macauley's breezy style and absurdist take on global politics between the World Wars--politics that are surprisingly (and sadly) still current.

My guess, having listened to the novel in audio format, is that reading the story aloud also makes Macauley's voice "pop" more than it might if it were read silently.

The novel follows Henry Beechtree, a reporter for the London Bolshevist, who investigates the gradual disappearance of a large number of delegates to the League of Nations in Geneva, the most dysfunctional international body ever depicted in literature, I think.

It all seems straightforward cloak-and-dagger stuff, but Henry is not who he appears to be--and neither is anyone else.

Comparing Macauley with Muriel Spark is tempting, but Dame Rose is a little less likely to hit an artery than Dame Muriel.

I find dashed hopes in a writing class

2011-12-21T07:44:00.000-08:00

The Writing Class**
Jincy Willlett

A cynical, aging creative writing teacher pushing 60? Right up my alley, I thought.

After a good first chapter or two, this books descends into an exploration of the teacher's hidden isolation and grief, and her finding friends in the losers in her writing class, who get bumped off one by one.

I didn't figure out who the killer was until the end, but, then, when I found out, I didn't care.

I suffer through a Regency magical mystery tour

2011-12-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

Shades of Milk and Honey **
by Mary Robinette

Regency ladies manipulate glamours (think pliant threads of ectoplasm from some unseen netherworld) to beautify their homes. Plain but plucky Jane, a talented amateur in the art or glamourizing, solves a mystery and finds romance. Notable only for the magical realism elements. As Austeniana, pretty terrible.

I finally finish Mr. Peltier's tenth grading reading assignment

2011-12-19T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Scarlet Letter **
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

I was assigned to read "The Scarlet Letter," and I just now finished it, 42 years late. While I realize this is a Great Classic with Big Themes (nature of sin, redemption, collusion with evil, etc.), this book hasn't improved with age, experience, or an M.A. in literature. I don't know if Mr. Peltier will still accept my paper (or if he's even still alive), but FWIW:

Why I Hate The Scarlet Letter

By Jean

Chapter 1, The Custom House. I realize this is a kind of "stage setting," meant to give Important Context and all, but does it have to go on and on like that? If you are assigned to read this book for a class, skip it and read it AFTER the rest of the novel. Otherwise, you'll end up procrastinating this assignment for four decades like I did.

Archaic language. Hawthorne didn't use all these "betwixts," "prithees," and "perchances" when he talked to his friends. It seems fake. It IS fake, though maybe Hawthorne thought it was quaint. But it makes the characters seem distant and irrelevant.

Pearl. Did Hawthorne actually know any three-year-old children? They are not fey and intuitive. They poop their pants, pitch fits, and break stuff.

The scarlet letter. There is so much touching and fondling and reference to the scarlet letter that I felt Hawthorne should have been turned into some committee for the abuse of a perfectly good literary symbol.

That's all the time I'm taking in this life on this book.

I make a Dante-esque visit to Florida

2011-12-18T08:41:00.000-08:00

Swamplandia! ****
by Karen Russell

The Bigtree family lives on a swampy Florida island where they've run an old-school roadside attraction called Swamplandia! for three generations. A lot of what we find in Swamplandia! is fake. The first Bigtree was Ernest Shedrach, an Ohio miner who was suckered into buying the proverbial Florida swampland in the 1930s. Ernest, who later transformed himself into a fake Indian, Sawtooth Bigtree, made a going concern of Swamplandia! The place features cheap beer and ice cream, and a Bigtree museum of fake artifacts whose backstories change frequently at the whim of the Chief, Sawtooth's son. But the alligator wrestling is real, and so is the big nightly attraction in which Hilola Bigtree, matriarch, climbs a diving board and jumps into a pool of 70 gators and swims across without a scratch. Swamplandia! is a strange version of Paradise, but it is full of innocence and lack of worldly knowledge, at least for the three youngest Bigtrees, Chief and Hilola's children.

Here's a description from Ava, the youngest Bigtree and sometime narrator of the novel:

On Live Chicken Thursdays, a very popular and macabre attraction, the [alligators] jumped five feet out of the Pit to snatch the cloud-white hens suspended above them, tied by their talons to a clothesline. The [alligators] drowned and ate these chickens in an underwater cyclone called the Death Roll while tourists snapped photographs. ... I think my family traumatized generations of children and old women. And we girls must have inherited our forebears' immunity to gore, because Ossie and I could eat PB&J sandwiches during a Death Roll, no problemo.

Swamplandia! is not "the lion shall lie down with the lamb" variety of Paradise, but, given what's to come, it's a regular Eden until forces conspire to separate the family, who each take their solitary journeys to Hell, and from whence they end up in what I suppose you could call Purgatory, if you wanted to strain the analogy. In any case, it's clear that Paradise cannot be regained.

These journeys to hell and back take place in real physical landscapes. Brother Kiwi goes to work in a mainland attraction called, somewhat heavy-handedly, the World of Darkness; sister Osceola finds a spiritist manual and begins to hear ghost voices and runs off with a spirit lover wonderfully named Louis Thanksgiving, sister Ava in pursuit with a mysterious bird man. Grandpa Sawtooth is locked in a nursing home for biting a Swamplandia! customer. The Chief is also living in his own hell on the mainland, his whereabouts unknown to the kids.

But the journeys in the book are also interior. The three young Bigtrees are restive teenagers, and what teenager is satisfied with anything, even the relative paradise of Swamplandia!? There's a lot of growing up, but it's not all heart-warming. The hellish landscapes do a wonderful job mirroring the harrowing time that is adolescence. Most of it is scary as, well, hell, and therein lies a good deal of the charm and truth in the book.

Another point in the book's favor is Russell's lush style and imagery. It isn't magical realism, as it seems at first, but rather is so bedecked with symbols that conjure up echoes of primal themes of Western literature in fresh ways that the novel becomes a kind of treatise on notions of good and evil, sin and redemption, grace and the dark night of the soul. The beauty is, you don't have to know any of that to know that "Swamplandia!" is just a hell of a good book.

I read another Gaskell

2011-09-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

"Sylvia's Lovers" ***1/2
by Elizabeth Gaskell

Country beauty settles for dull shopkeeper when her jolly sailor is hustled into the Royal Navy by a press gang during the Napoleonic wars. Heartache ensues. Invites comparisons with Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles." Interesting, but not always successful social criticism by author Gaskell, a Unitarian. Ending is rather abrupt.

I'm discussing the novel over on LibraryThing.com. Feel free to stop by.

Previously read Gaskell's "North and South."

I plumb the subtleties of Henry James

2011-09-11T19:02:00.000-07:00

The Golden Bowl ****
by Henry James

I figured wasn't old enough to read "The Golden Bowl" until this year (and here it is the eve of my 57th birthday). The novel is considered by many to be Henry James' masterwork, and certainly its ever-changing points of view and revelations are almost excruciatingly subtle. I'm pretty sure that I would have to read the book several times to get all its delicate little nuances, which are pretty much why people love James or find him tiresome beyond endurance.

The set up is simple: American widower and millionaire Adam Verver and his grown daughter and only heiress, Maggie, marry, respectively, a brilliant American adventuress and an impoverished Italian prince. Unknown to the Ververs, Charlotte, the adventuress and the Prince, were lovers before their marriages, and the fact that father and daughter seem to be somewhat oblivious allows the lovers to take up their affair again.

***SPOILERS*** Eventually Maggie suspects an affair, showing she has some hidden depths. However, in order to spare her father's happiness, her confrontation of the lovers cannot be made directly. So, for hundreds of pages, we watch as an elaborate game of strategy plays out in which none of the players is completely sure of what the other players know.

It is also unclear who is being victimized and who is doing the victimizing. At first, the Ververs seem to be the dupes of Charlotte and the Prince. But as the story unfolds, the Prince and Charlotte seem to be viewed by the Ververs as errant pets, purchased like the baubles the millionaire collects for his museum back in America City--and to keep off more vulgar and predatory gold-diggers. There is also something unnatural, about Maggie's emotional attachment to her father, whom she esteems more than and certainly spends more time with than the Prince.

The book is claustrophobic in its analogies of silken leashes, gilded cages and circumscribed rooms as the affair between Charlotte and the Prince strains family ties, but also drags people closer together in webs of complicity.

I was struck by the relatively minor character, Fanny Assingham (could James NOT have been aware of the hideous associations in such a name?). She is a friend of the major characters and has something to do with introducing them to each other and setting events in motion--though to a lesser extent than she would wish. She is nothing so much as an officious Polonius figure who spends hours telling her husband, Colonel Bob, how magnificently or beautifully--two adjectives that occur frequently and with many shadings--various characters, including herself, will be in the face of various circumstances, though it's clear her interest in the lives of her friends is largely of a prurient nature.

Bob listens idly, chain smokes and helpfully asks Fanny the same questions that occur to the reader. One senses Bob has everybody's number well before anyone else does and would rather be playing bridge or having a snort at his club.

I liked him the best.

I learn that Henry James is funny

2011-08-31T18:27:00.000-07:00

"The Aspern Papers" *****

by Henry James

One of my favorite novels is "The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James. In fact, I've never really read anything by James I didn't like. "The Aspern Papers" is no exception--except I didn't read it, I heard it.

My first audio book!

"The Aspern Papers" is a mordantly funny story (there's James looking like Uncle Fester from the Addams Family, upper left) of a publisher who hatches what he thinks is a terribly clever plan to determine if the ancient lover of a minor fictional poet, Jeffrey Aspern, has any of the poet's yet-unseen papers he can inveigle out of her.

The publisher worms his way into Miss Bordereau's house, which happens to be in Venice, on the pretext of loving her garden--which he then has to take on the expense of renovating in order to maintain his fiction. He sends Miss B. and her odd niece, Miss Tina, flowers, thinking they will be so grateful they'll befriend him and fork over the papers.

But Miss B., though she must be 90, knows what she is about. She charges him exorbitant rent. She dangles Aspern artifacts in front of him. She nearly drives him to madness and crime.

In the end, the Aspern papers are within the hapless narrator's grasp, but at such a price he simply cannot pay it.

What makes the wicked humor in this book pop is the fact that the reader navigates those Jamesian sentences with their piled on clauses and asides for you so that you don't have to read aloud to yourself, which is always a problem for me because I find myself taking on some kind of accent, usually Welsh or various English dialects (depending on the book) or Southern. Or lip read and look like some hick.

The story was adapted as a movie. Click on James' photo to read more about it.

I find T.C. Boyle less than thrilling

2010-12-14T16:27:00.000-08:00

The Women **1/2
by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle is better when he's writing straight fiction than biographical fiction. Compare, for example, the mesmerizingly wonderful "Drop City" to the mesmerizingly dreadful "The Inner Circle," a repugnant and splenetic look at the work of sex research meister Alfred Kinsey.

Boyle seems to enjoy writing about famous people with whom he has some sort of ax to grind--Kinsey, Kellogg-- and so it goes with"The Women," billed as a biography of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, but, in reality, is a biography of the four women in his life. Wright himself is almost absent from this treatment. I learned, for example, that Wright he liked to use soft pencils, eat plain food, had a domineering mother, and had a sense of entitlement such that he rarely paid his bills. In short, Boyle dismisses Wright as an an arrogant mama's boy, an essentially small-town guy with pretensions about his Welsh heritage (an interesting treatment from an author from a small town who changed his own middle name from plain old "John" to "Coraghessan" when he was 17).

The frame for the story is klunky and somewhat incredible; the narrator is a Japanese protege of Wright's, now an architect in his own right, writing a biography with footnotes from the memories of a colleague who worked at Taliesen with him. Fine, as far as it goes, but the point of view of the story is largely omniscient, and it seems unlikely that either the protege or his colleague would have such intimate knowledge of the inner thoughts of Wright's household members.

*** SPOILER*** The plotting of the story is equally klunky; it's told in reverse chronological order. In theory that makes sense because it allows events to lead back to the murder of Wright's lover, Mamah Cheney, and the burning of Taliesen I by a crazy butler, the most dramatic event in the book. But in telling the story backward, Boyle has to give away a good deal of what's about to happen.

Still, this is Boyle, whose passion and fluidity of language can make up for a lot of other drawbacks. One only wonders why he squandered the chance to "Kellog-ify" Wright and opted instead to write about the women.

I'm reading too fast!

2010-10-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

Quick updates on books recently devoured in a short period of time.

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren****
Ostensibly a political study based on the life of Huey Long, but with a big dose of Southern gothic thrown in. Prose so rich it's almost drug-like. Highly recommend the movie version with Sean Penn whose perfomance as Willie/Huey is riveting. Click pic above for clip of Willie's stump speech (and, yes, that's James Gandolfini who falls in the hog pen). The "ain't nobody ever helped a hick but a hick hisself" speech makes the hairs stand up on your neck.

"Borstal Boy" by Brendan Behan ***
Behan's memoir about being in a juvenile farm prison at age 16 for plotting to blow up some ships in Liverpool on behalf of the IRA. Despite Behan's swagger and resentment he offers charming accounts of being sucked into "Cranford" by Mrs. Gaskell, provided by the borstal's lending library, and offers unsentimental but humane observations about his fellow inmates from across Britain.

"The Witches of Eastwick"*** and "The Widows of Eastwick"** by John Updike
Despite it's fake feminist overlay, "Witches" is a fascinating examination of the devil in the person of the ill-made Darryl Van Horne, who is a kind of anti-creator. "Widows" is an extremely weak sequel in which the witches attempt to rectify things that happened in the first book, but ultimately it's more travelogue with a some spells thrown in than anything particularly interesting or insightful.

"Cotton Comes to Harlem" by Chester Himes**1/2Short, spare noir crime pulp with lots of spice.

"Mockingjay" by Suzanne Collins**
Final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. Initial juvenile dystopian had lot of interesting things to say about power, public relations, and image making, that devolved into a one-trick pony in the second installment, "Catching Fire." Sadly, the third book doesn't redeem the series. Collins seems unable to develop her characters so opts for torturing them in ever more inventive gladiatorial arenas. All that will provide jobs and fun for the Hollywood geeks who do special effects for the movies (which is where this story is ultimately headed). But there's just not much meat there when all's said and done.

"My Name is Number 4" by Ting-xing Ye***
Straightforward memoir about growing up in the chaos of China's Cultural Revolution. Ting-xing Ye's father was a factory owner before the Revolution, which put her family in a suspect position with the Communist Party. She was eventually forced to leave school to work on a cooperative farm where various political factions vied for power and played head games with the workers. The narrative is so detached that it seems dead in places--it's certainly no "Diary of Anne Frank"--but an interesting personal look at a strange and terrible historical event.

I spend time in bleak landscapes

2010-09-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

"Meeks" by Julia Holmes
"2017" by Olga Slavnikova

See reviews of these two modern dystopian novels in the latest issue of Belletrista.com.

I hear Harpo speak!

2010-08-14T08:46:00.001-07:00

"Harpo Speaks!" ***1/2
by Harpo Marx
I've always had a soft spot for anarchists, and "Harpo Speaks!" reveals the real-life Harpo Marx as the man I always imagined him to be--full of kindliness, decency, and canny intelligence.

Harpo's autobiography overlooks a lot--the perfidy of his brother Chico; his brother Groucho's bouts with depression; his obsessive stage mother, Minnie; and the tyranny of his dearest friend, Alexander Woolcott. But, then, you'd expect someone who viewed life as a kind of surreal joke (Harpo even had his picture drawn by the surrealist Salvador Dali, at left; click to read a Telegraph story about the pair's friendship) to be able to overlook a lot.

There are also gaps in the story. During World War I, Minnie kept the boys out of the draft by buying a chicken farm in Illinois because farmers were exempt. Harpo changed his name from Adolph to Arthur in the wake of anti-German sentiment during the wars. Although he was a secular Jew (and raised his four adopted children as Roman Catholics, his wife's faith), Harpo felt a deep affinity for the plight of Jews in Germany, whence his family had emigrated.

And the book completely ignores Harpo's and Groucho's longtime friendship with President Harry Truman. Truman had been a fan of the Marx Brothers, whom he'd seen on stage as a young man about 1910 in Kansas City. Both Harpo and Groucho seem to have lobbied Truman to allow more German and Austrian Jews into the country after World War II, urged him to run again in 1952, and Harpo sent Truman a photo of the Harry Truman Forest from Israel. (Truman was honored for being among the first to recognize the state of Israel.)

Most importantly, the book overlooks just how damn hard the Marx Brothers worked. Harpo mentions movie-making and the comedy schticks he and his brothers developed in the early vaudeville days mostly in passing. His book includes a funny story about doing gymnastics with Marion Davies at San Simeon. (He mentions casually that the Marx Brothers did all their own stunts, but forgets to mention that he and his brothers were well into their 40s at the time).

Harpo talks more about his love of music, his devotion to the harp, his beloved wife and kids, and his friends than show biz or his brothers. He seems happily bewildered by the fact that a boy who was thrown out of school (literally, froma first-storey window, by Irish hooligans) in the second grade was beloved by so many smart and influential people. He chalks it up to his being a good listener: "What could I possibly say to interest them?"

In "Harpo Speaks!" quite a lot, as it turns out.

I read a cautionary tale about social media

2010-08-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

@expectations

by Kit Reed ***

Given that social networking has burgeoned in the 10 years since Kit Reed wrote "@expectations," her cautionary tale about the dangers of virtual life is still surprisingly fresh and relevant.

Unlike the movie "Avatar," in which it's a GOOD thing when the main character morphs into his virtual self at last, "@expectations" explores the down side of virtual identity.

*** SPOILERS *** Readers will probably be able to suss out the virtual angle of the novel, which might have been a little harder to discern 10 years ago. But they might also be able to read about poor Jenny Wilder (a psychotherapist, ironically enough), who's having a virtual affair on a social networking site, with considerably more chagrin.

If you have access to a teenager's page on Facebook, you'll see that the kiddies are all over this, reinventing themselves sometimes daily with new pictures, often heavily Photoshopped, cool new names, and conversations in which they try out new double entendres and hip language. Meet them in real life, and they're still the scrawny or pudgy kids you see hiding zits behind their hair and trying to blend into the background in real life.

But FaceBook isn't just for kids anymore. Studies show that 50-year-old women are the fastest growing segment of the network. Most of my friends seem to be using FB as a kind of virtual "Grandma's Brag Book" or, worse, for inspirational riffs ripped off from the "Eat Pray Love."

How many of them might also have avatars other than their real gramma selves, I don't want to know. It would be too sad, though I can't say I wouldn't understand. Who among us wouldn't like to cast off the aging carapace occasionally and replace it with a cute 30-something self but with all the savvy and sass we've got at 50-something? It's possible through social networks, and some of the characters in "@expectations" do just that.

OK, Reed's novel might be a little TOO cautionary--there's a tittle too much melodrama for my taste--but it does force you to look at whether social networking is really all that harmless or therapeutic. There are some pretty twisted people, and Vinnie the ex-con (Azeath the super hero in virtual life) isn't the most twisted. In fact, the thread of his story is so predictable as to be banal, perhaps purposely so. Nope, it's the seemingly "normal" people who seem to get the most twisted up in virtual reality, twisted up so tight that they can scarcely function off line.

You probably know people like this. Even if you don't know you know them. Reed treats them pretty kindly and allows one or two of them to untwist in an ending that is both appealing and and surprising.

Click the pic to hear "Avatar" director James Cameron talk about "the uncanny valid," the point at which his half-animated, half-human characters become sympathetic characters. Maybe there's a counterpart to the "uncanny valid" on social networks?

I visit the original upper class twit

2010-07-31T11:44:00.000-07:00

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves ***

by P.G. Wodehouse

My first reading of Wodehouse was just a little spoiled from having seen most of the funny bits from "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves" in the wonderful Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry "Jeeves and Wooster" series on BBC TV (left). In fact, the two work so well as the idiot Bertie and his sanguine valet cum keeper, that it's hard not to hear their voices while reading.

In this installment, a relatively late one from 1963, Bertie purchases an Alpine hat with a pink feather of which Jeeves deeply disapproves. Needless to say, the hat will go. But exactly how and in the course of what near-miss matrimonial scrape Jeeves will coerce Bertie to be rid of said h., as Bertie might say, is Wodehouse's genius. Nothing is ever straightforward. Everything is trivial, which, of course, is why it's funny. Take, for instance, Bertie's "oiling out" of the dreaded Totleigh school treat (picnic):

Apart from anything else, I was remembering the story I had heard Pongo Twistleton tell one night at the Drones, illustrative of how unbridled passions are apt to become at these binges. Pongo got mixed up once in a school treat down in Somersetshire, and his description of how in order to promote a game called "Is Mr. Smith at Home?" he had to put his head in a sack and allow the younger generation to prod him with sticks had held the smoking room spellbound. At a place like Totleigh, where even on normal days human life was not safe, still worse excesses were to be expected. The glimpse or two I had had of the local Dead End kids had told me how tough a bunch they were and how sedulously they should be advoided by the man who knew what was good for him.

Much has been made of Wodehouse's pitch-perfect style in writing in Bertie's voice and about Britain in the years between the Wars. No one but Jane Austen did that kind of social satire quite as well.

I'm sure many tiresomely predictable diatribes have been written by critics about the subliminal homoeroticism in the Jeeves-Wooster relationship. I see nothing so innocent. In my estimation, Jeeves devotes most of his time to prevent Bertie's marrying anyone and thus inflicting more idiot upper class twits on the nation and weakening its gene pool. Jeeves does this so delicately, pampering Bertie's taste for liquor and comfort, that his victim never quite realizes he has become something of an overbred pet doted on by an owner that sees neutering as the only kind thing to do.

Here's Jeeves helping Bertie out singing "Minnie the Moocher" from the TV series. And, of course, if you're unfamiliar with the whole concept of the upper class twit, here's Monty Python to explain.

I read a YA thriller

2010-07-07T05:32:00.001-07:00

"I Am the Cheese" ***
by Robert Cormier

Robert Cormier is one of the nation's most challenged authors, and I mean that in a good way; "The Chocolate Wars" regularly gets some parents riled up enough to want to ban it from public and school library shelves because he writes about teenage boys as they are.

Cormier's books are sort of the equivalent of YA chick-lit for boys, a genre that needs its own catchy moniker (besides "dick-lit," which is all I can come up with on the spur of the moment). His books nicely capture the awkwardness, fears, and shame about a developing body as well as the mind that is trying to move from the oblivousness of childhood to more mature understanding. The fact that "I Am the Cheese" takes place, in part, in a mental institution underscores some of the emotional challenges of this age. There's also plenty of action.

This book didn't grab me--I'm not a teenage boy, and I don't really go in for a lot of adolescent angst--I'm one of the few people I know who disliked "Catcher in the Rye."

But Cormier does help me be a better friend to my teenage son. And, these days, teenage boys need all the friends they can get.

I go on a 4th of July roadtrip with Harry and Bess

2010-07-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure" ***

by Matthew Algeo

Over the July 4 weekend of 1953, Harry and Bess Truman set out from Indepedence, Mo., in a Chrysler New Yorker that Harry got at a deep discount from a local car dealer, to New York City and points east.

The Trumans had no pension from Harry's time in the White House, and presidents were not then afforded Secret Service protection. So the former first couple took off as private citizens--though delighted Americans recognized and treated them to everything from free gas and coke (see pic above left that will take you to the Harry S. Truman Library site) to a suite in NYC's Waldorf-Astoria.

"Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure" is a quick, easy read with lots of trivia about the sights Harry and Bess might have encountered along their route, interviews with people they met, and historical perspectives about how much the American roadways have changed in 57 years.

As a Boomer conceived just a year after Give 'Em Hell Harry left office, and a fan of the late president, I felt a bit disappointed with the lack of depth in the book. But this would be a great way to introduce GenXers and Millennials to a time they won't remember their parents--or perhaps even grandparents--discussing around the supper table.

I read a couple of semi-entertaining vampire novels

2010-06-17T06:34:00.000-07:00

"Dead Until Dark" and "Living Dead in Dallas" **1/2
by Charlaine Harris

If I had to sum up Charlaine Harris's Sookie Stacked, I mean, Stackhouse books on which the TV series "True Blood" is based, that word would be "opportunistic."

I will say that the first two installments I read--"Dead Until Dark" and "Living Dead in Dallas"--are better than anything in the "Twilight" series because Harris's books are a) shorter and b) have more sex. And it's not that I don't enjoy the vampire genre; in fact, I enjoy it so much that it bothers me when authors who grind out formula novels throw in a few bloodsuckers just to cash in. And I think that's what's going on here.

Sookie's a mindreading barmaid from northern Louisiana. She's ashamed of her gift (mind reading, not waiting tables) which often fills her head with too much information, especially on dates. How, she laments, can you get in the mood when you can read your date's mind? Hmmm. I think she's not really exploiting the possibilities here, and it seems like a pretty lame way to explain her attraction to vampires, who can't be "read."

Anyhow, she does meet a vampire, Bill Compton--yes, you read that right, a vampire named Bill--an ex-Confederate soldier who gives talks to the local Fallen Sons of the South Historical Society and sort of stalks/courts Sookie.

Harris tries to freshen up the vampire genre with a couple of potentially interesting ideas. In Sookie's world, vampires have new legal status as "disabled" Americans (sunlight/food allergies). Synthetic blood from a Japanese manufacturer is available, but most vamps prefer the warm human type. To get it, they live run nightclubs with semi-clever names like Club Dead for the vamp-curious and tourists. Also, vamp blood has quite a kick, and criminal "drainers" pose a danger to the vampires in an interesting twist in which the hunters become the hunted.

Still, northern Loosyana being what it is, the Stackhouse books are full of of a lot of Southern hick types we've seen before in shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard"--horny lunkheads, stupid sherriffs, sassy black fry cooks, and bigots who want to keep those uppity vamps in their place. There are also shape shifters and an appearance by The King which is played for laughs that just don't make it. Moreover, Sookie's first-person narrative is very uneven. Sometimes it's in character--and can be very funny with a kind of dry wit--but often Harris slips into a charmless neutral voice.

What's most disappointing, though, is that, despite the possibilities Harris has given herself, Sookie and Bill essentially solve rather pedestrian murder mysteries together. Yeah, Sookie can sometimes get a clue from her mind-meld thing, and Bill has super-human strength, speed and sexual prowess. But I found my mind wandering too often to larger questions about the whole fascination with vampires these days: What does it says about our society--or at least men today--when impossibly hunky undead demons are preferable to real live guys?

Here's a song about that very thing by Shallow Day.

I read a bunch of dystopians for 'Belletrista'

2010-06-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

My friend Lois has an online mag devoted to women's lit around the world, Belletrista, and I recently wrote a feature on dystopian novels for the site this spring. (Great picture, BTW, of an apocalyptic storm moving in over Brisbane.)

Click pic or link to read about:

"Anthem" by Ayn Rand

"The Carhullan Army" by Sarah Hall (published in the U.S. as "Daughters of the North"

"The Unit" by Ninni Holmqvist

"After the Flood" by Margaret Atwood

"Thinner than Thou" by Kate Reed

"The Slynx" by Tatyana Tolstaya

I take a break from the blog ...

2010-06-17T06:19:00.000-07:00

... but that doesn't mean I haven't been reading. Posting some updates today.

I play "Who Am I?" with Jennifer Egan

2009-08-20T07:09:00.000-07:00

Look at Me ***1/2
by Jennifer Egan

The peremptory title of Jennifer Egan's novel, "Look at Me," invites you to play a game of "Who am I?" with the characters.

All the people in this novel are plagued by some sort of identity problem. Charlotte the model has lost her face in a car accident and now struggles with the fact that she is completely unrecognizable. Not horrifying in any way, perhaps as beautiful as she once was, but in an entirely different way. But having used her face as her livelihood for so many years, she can't quite figure out who she is now.

Charlotte the teenager reinvents herself at a new high school after a disastrous sexual encounter at her old one.

The enigmatic "Z," a sleeper terrorist has assimilated so well into American life that he has begun to lose his original identity and sense of purpose.

Moose, the blockheaded high school football hero morphs into a brilliant and and entirely nutty college professor.

As the plot weaves the characters together, characters not only struggle with their own identities but those of others. None of these characters is exactly who he or she seems to be to someone else.

"Look at Me" is, at heart, a novel of ideas, an exploration of what identity means in the early 21st century. Toward the end it veers into dystopian territory. The skillful plotting and attention to detail make the novel perfectly readable and thought-provoking. But the novel fails to engage on any kind of emotional level. The characters are not so much real people as emblems of the way modern life erodes identity. It's all fascinating, but in the end, somewhat emotionally arid.

One closes this novel thinking "glad I'm not them" rather than turning the "Who am I" game on himself.

I run through two Austers like a hot knife through butter

2009-07-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

"Oracle Night" ****
"The Book of Illusions" ****1/2
By Paul Auster

Paul Auster's novels, "Oracle Night" and "The Book of Illusions" illustrate how the writer's experiences stretch into the imagination and onto the page or screen. The fictional work becomes a kind of ectoplasmic extension of the writer, a creature not exactly real nor severed from its creator, but one that can effect independent and sometimes profound change in the writer and the people and events of his life.

Or, to put it less metaphysically, both the act of writing and the created work change the life of the writer and those around him. In Auster's novels, writing is change-making, risky--even dangerous. In "Oracle Night," author Sid Orr seems to disappear quite literally into a story he is writing. In "The Book of Illusions," Hector Mann's life abruptly ends as a direct result of inviting his biographer, David Zimmer, to view some of his hitherto unseen movies.

What makes these two books such engaging page-turners is the fact that the bigger themes--writers and their writing--are written as classic crime noir novels. Take this bit, for instance, where David Zimmer is summoned to Hector Mann's ranch by a mysterious woman, Alma Grund. Zimmer is not inclined to take Grund up on the invitation. And after making a melodramatic and emotional plea (think Brigid O'Shaugnessy in "The Maltese Falcon") to Zimmer to accompany her, Grund changes tactics. Zimmer narrates:

I can't explain where this knowledge came from, but whatever premonition or extrasensory alertness took hold of me when I saw that look in her eyes, I knew that she was carrying a gun in her purse, and I knew that within the next three or four seconds she was going to stick her right hand into the purse and pull out the gun.

It was one of hte most sublimely exhilarating moments of my life. I was half a step in front of the real, an inch or two beyond the confines of my own body, and when the thing happened just as I thought it would, I felt as if my skin had become transparent. ...

The gun was in her hand. It was a small silver-plated revolver with a pearl handle, no more than half the size of the cap guns I had played with as a boy. As she turned in my direction and lifted her arm, I could see that the hand at the end of her arm was shaking.

Well! How can you resist 300 pages of thrills like that--steamy encounters in hidden brothels, private sex shows, hopped up junkies who seem to know more than you do about your wife, a guy who gets trapped in a secret library while cataloguing a collection of the world's phone books for a crazy retired cabbie in Kansas City, two midgets pushing wheelbarrows of film toward an acrid conflagration of burning celluloid. Sure, it's ludicrous on one hand, but on the other, just describing the various plotlines in that last sentence made me go all woozy and craving another hit. Plus the characters all have cool noir names like Sid and Hector and Sylvia and Frieda.

Haven't encountered such heady reading since Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books (and there she is, above left, looking like one of Auster's enigmatic heroines and clearly entertaining some mordant joke). Click the pic to read Michael Dirda's fine article about her literary life.

I lose interest before the fat lady sings

2009-07-14T08:57:00.000-07:00

Bel Canto
By Ann Patchett **

Terrorists in an unnamed banana republic take international hostages at a birthday fete in the vice president's mansion in Ann Patchett's hugely overrated "Bel Canto."

The title derives from the fact that a famous opera singer is among the hostages, and singing looms large in the relationship that develops between the hostages and terrorists. And the title is really the cleverest part of this book.

As the weeks drag on, it's clear the hostages won't be released soon, nor will the government cave in to any terrorist demands. Terrorists and hostages fall into a kind of detente, something like friendships develop. A little Eden, even, seems to be blossoming as the garden within the walls of the mansion becomes overgrown. It's the kind of symbol Gabrel Garcia Marquez would have known what to do with. Patchett merely sends everybody outside to weed and prune the flower beds with the mansion's fancy silverware.

Moreover, the international hostages are mostly sketchy stereotypes. The Russians smoke and tell long loud stories, the French cook, the Japanese are inscrutable, the Latino vice president is a natural at houskeeping and gardening, and the diva is, well, a diva.

There is virtually no character development here, and few emotional peaks (though Patchett does nicely capture the kind of ennui that might settle in during a long and hopeless siege). Oh, sure, when the Frenchman's wife is released, he realizes how much he's always loved her. The vice president realizes he is not really cut out for a political career. The Japanese polyglot who become invaluable to the group as a translator gains a newfound sense of worth. But nobody really questions their basic assumptions about class, humanity, gender roles or faith.

The novel is imbued with an impending sense of doom brought in periodically with the food and medical supplies by the hangdog Swiss Red Cross representative, and everything ends with the kind of bang you saw coming from the git-go.

The "surprise" bittersweet epilogue in Italy is just hokey.

I spend a lovely evening with Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare

2009-07-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare ****
By May Sarton

I love novellas. They give you an evening's worth of entertainment without keeping you up past your bedtime, and "Miss Pickthorn and Mr. Hare: A Fable" is a wonderful read just before falling asleep.

Sarton is better known for her poetry, which she talks about in "Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing," a novel I didn't much like (reviewed here). But "Miss P and Mr. H" is as unpretentious and natural as "Mrs. Stevens" is awkward and contrived.

It's a simple story: Old Miss Pickthorn is enjoying retirement in solitude, translating Horace and eating crispy apples when the elusive Mr. Hare takes up residence in an old henhouse across the road.

Mr. Hare's residence annoys Miss Pickthorn; his shack is barely habitable, it poses a fire hazard, the noise of his repairs bugs her. She puts on her kid gloves--gauntlets--and heads off to the village selectmen's meeting to demand that they take action. They do. They contemplate adding to the village coffers by taxing it as a residence if Mr. Hare can make the place livable. But they don't tell Miss Pickthorn that. They're too afraid of her.

Gradually, Miss Pickthorn begins to grow accustomed to Mr. Hare, even to find comfort in the nearness of someone else. She begins to have neighborly feelings about him. To worry about him. Even to protect him.

The names "Pickthorn" and "Hare" capture the essence of each character's personality and remind one that briar patches provide friendly if prickly cover for rabbits. But otherwise, there's nothing remotely contrived or "literary" about the story. It's full of commonplace objects--an empty Altoids tin pulls the final threads of the story together--that turn into elegant little emblems for the characters' inner lives.

Delightful.

I leave 'Villette' for travels elsewhere

2009-07-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

"Villette"
By Charlotte Bronte

The gaps in my acquaintance with English literature are few, but I have largely avoided the overwrought Bronte sisters (with "Jane Eyre" as the shining exception), so much so that I was surprised to learn that "Villette" is not the name of the title character, but the town in which the story takes place.

I quit reading this novel on page 138--with several hundred pages yet to go--because my patience with looking up end-note translations of French dialogue just didn't seem worth it given the book so far.

The novel opens well enough, with the introduction of Lucy Snow and her friends and relations in England. These people drop out of the picture somewhat precipitously (I presume I would have met them again had I bothered to continue reading).

Inexplicably left penniless, Lucy's stint as paid companion to an elderly lady ends when the old bag dies before providing a promised pension. Acting on an offhand comment that Continental Europeans sometimes seek English governesses for their children in order to teach them the language, Lucy sets sail for a town called Villette, which seems to hover between Flanders and France, where she falls in as governess and then English teacher for the sneaky Madame Beck who spends a lot of time going through her employees' desks and wardrobes and wears "silent slippers," the better to spy on people.

Madame Beck is a great character, but Lucy treats here with a kind of insufferably smug English Protestantism. There is a lot of criticism of Catholicism, Catholic education, Continental childrearing, and French provincialism in general (except for the lovingly described food and generally fine weather).

There are also a lot of wearying descriptions of clothes.

About the time I ducked out of the story, a love intrigue seemed to be developing between one of the school's coquettes and, possibly, the dishy Dr. John, an English physician. I just really didn't care.

I celebrate the 30th anniversary of "Hitchhiker's Guide" by actually reading it

2009-06-21T06:04:00.000-07:00

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ****
By Douglas Adams

I get turned off by excessive hype about a book, so it took me 30 years to read Douglas Adams' sci-fi/satire. (Click the dolphins left to see the "Thanks For All the Fish" number from the movie, which was pretty terrible except for Sam Rockwell's hilarious Beeblebrox.)

The book defies summation to a large extent, but I can say that it's the story of a pedestrian Earthling, Arthur Dent, who is whisked off the planet just before its destruction by a race of intergalactic bureaucrats and who has subsequent adventures in outerspace while trying to come to terms with Life, the Universe and Everything.

But, really, who cares about the plot? People read this book for Adams' sly riffs on technology, the enduring success of mediocrity, and the essential cravenness of humans (and other higher life forms). I especially liked his hammy send-up of the pseudo-science that permeates more earnest sci-fi books, like this explanation of R-speed:

R is a velocity measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with the health, mental well-being and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly an almost infinitely variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed taken as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility, this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers and even death.

Dent's picaresque adventures are punctuated with explanatory interruptions from a kind of avuncular Omnicience who isn't clearly identified. Sometimes he reads from the "Hitchhiker's Guide," which Arthur has to help him with his interstellar travels, and he just explains things to us. Like here:

Vogon poetry is, of course, the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grnthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning," four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. ... The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.

"Hitchhiker" is not laugh-out-loud funny as the book jackets and reviews promise; it's more like having a few beers with someone who is clever and amusing. Clearly an out-of-the-box thinker, Adams creates a fantasy context to explain Life As We Know It, thereby rendering it utterly ridiculous. For instance, it turns out that Earth was created as a lab experiment by white mice, one of whom, Frankie, offers what amounts to the thematic climax of the book:

... there comes a point, I'm afraid, where you begin to suspect that if there's any REAL truth, it's that the entire multidimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending another 10 million years finding that out, and on the other hand, just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.

Don't forget your towel. Don't panic.

I visit dark satanic Milton

2009-06-19T11:23:00.000-07:00

North and South ***
By Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell has enjoyed a little uptick in popularity since the BBC adaptations of at least three of her works, including "North and South," which prompted my interest in reading the original novel.

Sadly, "N&S" does not rise to the level of anything by George Eliot, by whose work I measure all other Victorian novels that delineate that fine, nineteenth century sense of self-sacrifice and moral virtue. Neither does "N&S" measure up to Dickens, whose social criticism is leavened by wonderful (often wonderfully awful) characters like Miss Havisham, Mr. Dick, Fagin, Magwich, and the Aged Parent. Nor, as a stylist, does "N&S" match anything by Wilkie Collins, whose really just a thrill writer, but does it so well that you feel you're reading something "improving."

On the other hand, I kept referring to the original publication date of "N&S"--1854--because it offers remarkably modern observations about the tensions between labor and capital, and the often pig-headed mindset on both sides.

Young Lovely Margaret Hale has been routed from her bucolic home of Helston in the south of England to the dark satanic Milton ("mill town," get it?). During visits and teas and parties, she listens to the mill owners complain that the workers don't understand that installing safety equipment or raising wages must be balanced against profit margins that provide the work in the first place. During charity visits to the poor side of town, she listens to workers complain about the difficulties of maintaining their loyalty to the union in the face of lost wages and illness caused by breathing cotton fluff.

As the daughter of a former clergyman (not to mention the creation of the Unitarian minister's daughter and wife that Gaskell was), Margaret has Moral Uprightness on her side and urges both sides to try to work together. Her appeal is not completely lost on mill owner John Thornton, who rose from the ranks of the working class to become a successful mill operator. He also has the hots for Margaret.

"N&S" has lots of exciting moments--a strike, a riot, the arrival of Irish scabs, land speculation. And there's a general general sense that we're no longer in an England where the class system is based on blood heritage so much as on commercial success.

But there are also several distracting side plots involving a brother on the lam from the Navy for mutiny, religious dissension among the clergy, an invalid mother, drama with Cousin Edith and family, etc. Gaskell's romantic descriptions of Mr. Thornton's manly feelings and Margaret's proud demeanor and swanlike neck also get to be a bit much. Worst, though, is Gaskell's rendering of north country dialect, which attempts to capture rather than suggest speech patterns--sort of a cross between Hagrid and Long John Silver. The dialect slows the reading mightily in spots, and I was never quite able to "hear" the working folks' voices in my head.

My advice is to rent the BBC miniseries, which follows the novel very closely and stays true to its flavor but without some of the drawbacks outlined above. Plus there's the dishy Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton.

I live through a year of the plague

2009-06-10T10:33:00.000-07:00

Year of Wonders ***1/2
By Geraldine Brooks

I'm a fan of PBS's "Secrets of the Dead," a kind of forensic/archeology show for the morbidly inclined, and "The Mystery of the Black Death" is one of my favorite installments.

The program focuses on the village of Eyam, England, which was hit by plague in the 1660s. Parish records helped scientists track down survivors' descendants to find out whether something in their genetic makeup gave them immunity to the disease--and whether those resistant to HIV might have the same genetic makeup. An utterly fascinating science story.

A little less fascinating is Geraldine Brooks' novel, "Year of Wonders," which explores the social and psychological effects of the plague in a fictional village based on Eyam. Soon after the first cases of plague break out, most of the residents--from the town drunk to the medicine women, Quakers, Puritans, C of E partisans, ministers, miners, farmers, housewives--agree to quarantine themselves within the town's boundaries until the illness passes. A nearby village leaves provisions at the boundary stone, but the citizens are mostly cut off from any help from or communication with the outside world.

The set-up is great, but the dramatic tension in "Year of Wonders" is curiously slack, perhaps because it's not that difficult to predict what's going to happen. Unlikely heroes will arise, friendships and enmities will shift, beloved leaders will prove to have feet of clay, adversity will strengthen some and drive others mad. And, of course, many will turn to superstitious explanations for the plague's cause, and where scapegoats are sought, scapegoats can usually be found.

Maybe I've seen "The Crucible" just too damn many times, but as events unfolded, I kept thinking, "Yup, saw that coming a mile away." Except for the ending, which struck me as just far-fetched.

Part of the problem here is the first-person narrative. Anna, a local housewife, is a reliable and astute observer of events, but she doesn't seem really "there," and perhaps that derives from Brooks' own training as a reporter. Using the detached reportorial style just doesn't lend itself to this story, which requires that we understand not only what Anna perceives, but how people feel about it. Shifting points of view might have been a better narrative choice.

Brooks does shift POVs in her later (and better) novel, "March" (reviewed here). I look forward to reading her latest, "People of the Book."

I take a virtual tour of the Indian subcontinent

2009-06-09T16:12:00.001-07:00

Love Marriage by V. V. Ganeshananthan ***
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy ****
Bitter Sweets by Roopa Farooki ***1/2
The Unknown Errors of Our Lives by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni ****

I devoted May to a mini-reading project--exploring women's voices from southwest Asia, two from India ("The God of Small Things" and "Unknown Errors of our Lives") and one each from Bangladesh/Pakistan ("Bitter Sweets") and Sri Lanka ("Love Marriage").

Western news coverage might lead readers to believe that the subcontinent is rife with political and religious upheaveal. And politics and religion do make appearances in these novels, as well as issues of race and gender. But the stories themselves revolve around family dynamics that are more universal than regional--infidelity, generational tensions, cultural snobbery and, most often, secrets.

In "Love Marriage," a Sri Lankan-American family moves temporarily to Canada where dying Uncle Kumaran, a Tamil Tiger, has been smuggled to a safe house. While the family does not condone Kumaran's terrorist activities, they hope to find some reconciliation in his final illness.

The story is mostly told by Yalini, Kumaran's niece, a pretty typical American college student, who sometimes finds herself adrift and confused in Toronto's Tamil community. Yelini's counterpart in the novel is Jenani, Kumaran's daughter, who has lived in Sri Lanka all her life and whose marriage is being arranged from Kumaran's death bed.

The sudden immersion into Tamil culture allows Yalini to learn more about her Tamil roots. She knows and loves her mother's strength and forebearance, her father's kindness. But it is only in talking with Uncle Kumaran that her family history opens up. The rites of Jenani's wedding and Kumaran's funeral become a kind of Confirmation ceremony for Yalini, linking her more closely to her own heritage.

Arundhati Roy's tragic "The God of Small Things" also deals with an uncle, Chacko, who once lived in England, married an English woman with whom he had a daughter, then divorced her and moved back to India to the family home. His aunt, Baby Kochama, browbeats everybody, especially Chacko's sister and her boy-girl twins, Estha and Rahel. The family is nominally Christian, though they follow and are affected by Hindu customs and caste prejudices.

Whether you like the story itself (I did), the novel is worth reading for its style and structure, which marries Joseph Conrad's exploration of the dark effects of colonialism and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism that springs out of dank, moldy and jungly places. The novel explores the preternatural communication between the twins; the haunted History House, where an Englishman had lived, "gone native," and finally shot himself in the head; and in the family's mixed-up feelings about its Christianity and English connections.

Roy's narrative starts on the edges of the story and pulls the whole thing together, strand by strand, like a net, where, at the center, the reader learns about the story's central tragedy. In less talented hands, the novel would be a mess, but the book is both challenging and rewarding.

Roopa Farooki's "Bitter Sweets" is a more straightforward story revolving around three generations of a Muslim Pakistani/Bangladeshi family living in Dhaka and London. Family relations are complicated in the way of Western soap operas that moves from the melodramatic to the absurd.

In a nutshell **SPOILERS FOLLOW**, the indolent Bangladeshi Henna is betrothed to the handsome Rashid Kareem. They have one daughter, Shona, who elopes to England with the Pakistani Parvez, a boy Shona's parents disapprove of. Shona and Parvez try for some years to have children, and eventually have twin boys, known by their middle names Omar and Sharif (an intentional joke on their parents' part). Meantime, Henna has transferred her affections to Rashid's brother, Aziz. Rashid, knowing but never acknowledging his wife's unfaithfulness, meets an English woman, Verity, on a business trip and they enter a bigamist marriage. They have a daughter Candida. Shona teaches French at an English school where she falls for the headmaster Dermot. Sharif falls for his aunt Candida, not knowing they are related.

"Bitter Sweets" explores the nature of lies and their corrosive effects on human relations, an effort somewhat marred an ending that's so sunny it stretches credulity, but by that time you've become so attached to the characters you don't care.

"The Unknown Errors of Our Lives" offers nine short stories that focus largely on second-generation Indian immigrants, who often must straddle two cultures making them unable to fully navigate in either.

In the title story the artist Ruchira, living in America, has agreed to meet a man recommended by her aunt:

Not only is the boy just two years older than our Ruchira and handsome looking, 173 centimeters tall, and holds a fast-rising job in the renowned Charles Schwab financial company, he is also a nephew of the Boses of Tullygunge--you recall them, a fine, upright family--and to top it all he has intelligently decided to follow our time-tested traditions in his search for a bride.

Aunt Kamala's enthusiasm and pride in her recommendation of the 173 centimeter Biren reads like an advertisement--too good to be true. And, of course, he is.

In "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," an elderly Indian widow comes to live with her Americanized yuppie children and grandchildren. Her letters to friend Roma back in India paint a happy picture of the family, but as Mrs. Dutta feels increasingly isolated from and puzzled over the behavior of her American family, the letters become more honest and yearning.

Divakaruni's style is straightforward and her images suggest the jumble that her immigrant characters must deal with: Quaker Oats and alu-dum and samosas; Desh magazine and American television news; the the legend of Queen Padmini and Shakespeare's "As You Like It"; saris and business suits.

This is a road all our American ancestors have traveled, and for all its exotica, it feels remarkably familiar.

I finally "get" a graphic novel

2009-04-30T12:13:00.000-07:00

Rex Libris Volume One: I, Librarian ***1/2
By James Turner

I nominate the adventures of super-hero librarian Rex Libris as a remedial text for old ladies like me who just don't "get" the gestalt of the graphic novels with which their teenage sons line the ratty nests of their loft beds.

I mean, if there's anything that's going to help me "get" it, it's the excitement of discovering references to St. Augustine, Bertrand Russell and Lady Murasaki tumbling among the pages with onomatopoeics like "cha shik," which approximates the sound of an AK-47 being assembled.

Rex (doing something brave above left) lives in a world of goofy comic-book sci-fi. For instance, the Middleton Public Library where Rex is head librarian, sits atop a cosmic hot spot (think Buffy's Hellmouth) that releases characters from books occasionally. Librarian Circe (yes, THE Circe, who has lost interest in the whole sorceress of seduction schtick, but does occasionally turn rowdy patrons into pigs) has to contend with a party of Goths who have jumped their pages and have to be calmed down by reading "The City of God" until they dissolve back into their books. Meantime, Rex, an immortal like Circe, muses occasionally about his long career as a librarian which started at the legendary library of Alexandria.

In this tome, Rex must visit the planet Benzene V to retrieve an overdue book (and $7 in overdue fines) from an evil overlord named Vladox. The novel manages to convey the role libraries and freedom of information play in a free society without being at all preachy. Library funding woes are also part of the plot line.

Introducing the five installments in this volume of Rex's adventures is Rex's fictional publisher, B. Barry Horst, who functions as a fine satire on comic publishers--and perhaps even the taste of the average comic reader. While fighting characters emanating from books, tracking down inter-planetary book heisters, Rex also spends a fair amount of time fighting off Barry's idea to jazz up Rex's adventures with extra guns, Eastern martial arts and busty Amazon warriors.

Now that my kid has seen me read an enjoy a graphic novel, something called "Hayate, Combat Butler" has appeared on my bedside stand. Could there be any clearer signal that an over-50 mom has just moved into the ranks of somewhat-cool? No, there could not.

Thank you, Rex Libris--information freedom fighter, intergalactic space traveler, and bringer together of generations!

I encounter a good book with unnecessary elements of magical realism

2009-04-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

The Riders ****
By Tim Winton

Fred Scully is good-hearted but not-very-bright Aussie. He's busy fixing a hovel in Ireland on a whim of wife Jennifer, who up and leaves him and daughter Billie, though it takes Scully some time to process this info. (Like I said, he's not very bright.)

**SPOILERS** We never really know what happens to Jennifer, though it is gradually revealed that she has the kind of magnificent and bloodless selfishness that puts her in the pantheon of truly heartless women of literature like DuMaurier's Rebecca and Lillian Hellman's Regina. But the story isn't really about Jennifer. It's about Scully searching for her across Europe, often often finding mutual acquaintances who seem to know where she is, or at least seem to know her far better than Scully ever did, but who refuse to give him more than innuendos and hints. In tow with Scully is Billie, 7, who has been traumatized nearly to the point of speechlessness by Jennifer's abandonment, and to whom horrendous things happen that mirror Scully's damaged emotional state.

Winton has a beautiful prose style. Three weeks after reading this book, I still remember some of his phrases--for example, the "sunsilvered" patina of wood left to weather--little jewels of words that, like a whiff of savory sauce from the kitchen, remind you how hungry you are for prose that rises above the prosaic.

Punctuating the story are the riders of the title, who first appear to Scully as as a ghostly-but-corporeal army seemingly searching for something in a ruined castle keep near the cottage in Ireland. Like Scully, the riders seem to be on a quest for someone or something. Like Scully, they show up too late, in empty places.

The riders represent what has been lost. That they don't disappear suggests the lasting scars of Jennifer's leaving that Scully and Billie must live with. Nevertheless, Billie and Scully do not join the riders nor succumb to the restlessness of a futile and neverending quest.

At least, that's what I think the riders are about.

Frankly, as elements of magical realism, the riders are clunky and self-conscious, dream wraiths wholly out of place in a novel about a man who is generally without much imagination and firmly rooted in his five senses. They mar an otherwise beautifully written book.

I am disappointed by two good authors

2009-04-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Dedication **
By Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin

"Dedication" follows Katie, whose high school sweetheart-turned-rock-star has hit the big time by writing songs about their teenage sexcapades. Katie feels Jake's songs are ruining her life, a flimsy premise for a 400-page novel, since it’s now 15 years post-high school, and Katie moved away from her hometown long ago and no longer travels in circles where anyone would suspect where Jake got his material.

On top of that dumb premise, when Katie learns that Jake has turned up in their home town, she flies there to make him regret using her as his muse. How Katie plans to do this is unclear, but it seems to involve leather boots with kitten heels and black cashmere sweaters.

I realize that chicklit is obligated to “talk about the clothes,” but “Dedication” goes beyond obligation. Open any page of this book and find stuff like this: "I hear a moan escape as he registers that I stand before him in only the white thigh-highs Laura and I painstakingly picked out at Victoria's Secret yesterday."

**SPOILER** Toward the end of the novel, Jake manages to woo Katie back with a big sapphire ring, and they head off to his New York penthouse for three days of the horizontal bop, until Jake's ex-girlfriend's goons show up to strip the place of her stuff, and Jake’s jacked-up personal assistant and publicist starts taking over Katie's life. There is a brief brush with Nicole Kidman as she and Katie try to escape the paparazzi.

And Jake is revealed--to anybody too dumb to see where this is all going--to have devolved from mere manipulative teenager into whackadoo superstar hooked on weird Hollywood diets, health fads and dope.

In their better efforts--“The Nanny Diaries” and “Citizen Girl”--McLaughlin and Kraus have veered into stereotypes that are passably satirical (the Boomer parents, the fashionistas, boyfriends who think with organs other than their brains, etc.).

But "Dedication" doesn't just veer. It crashes and burns.

I try to review Octavia Butler

2009-04-01T11:18:00.000-07:00

Wild Seed ****
By Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler's books don't fall into neat generic types, and they have plots and characters that are freighted with social baggage. Which, of course, is part of their fascination and what makes them hard to review.

So let's say, for the sake of discussion, that "Wild Seed" is a kind of mythological exploration of what it means to be human across a landscape of race, gender, (pro)creative urges, culture, and the cycle of life and death.

The protagonists, Anyanwu and Doro, are not fully human, though they started life in the usual way.

Anyanwu is a shape-shifting healer who was born into and lived for centuries in an African tribe. Her survival depends on her adaptability--to change age, species, and gender. She can see into the the bodies of creatures with minute clarity, heals herself over and over, and can heal others--but cannot prevent death. She has had many children, many husbands. She has kept them healthy, but watched them all die. She has grown wise but more vulnerable emotionally.

Doro is a shape-stealer, wearing out bodies and need new ones periodically. This, of course, kills the body's original inhabitant. He cannot adapt to his environment, and so tries to dominate it. He is rootless, a man without any kind of religion, ethics, principles, culture, art. He has knowledge but no real wisdom.

Doro is also a slaver. He collects "interesting" people--those with strange powers like telekinesis, telepathy, special strength--and he cross-breeds them, in-breeds them, trying to create a race of super humans. He is charismatic in the way that Jim Jones of the poison Kool-Aid was charismatic, more concerned with power and control than with love and nurturing.

Anyanwu allows herself to become enslaved by Doro through a kind of deal. She has many children who have inherited some of her powers. Doro will leave them alone if she joins his community. For Anyanwu, it's a poor exchange. She is able to buy her African children's freedom, only to make more children, whom she cannot protect, for and with Doro.

Let's say, for further discussion, that "Wild Seed" is a yin/yang myth, in which both Doro and Anyanwu have complementary powers. But their relationship does not develop into anything harmonious. They are bound by an adversarial tension, by Doro's need to control and Anyanwu's need to protect. It is sometimes joyful, but often angry and bloody. It is not always clear who has the upper hand, who is leading, who is following, who is passive, who is active.

Or let's say that "Wild Seed" is a sacrifice-and-redemption myth. Except that the nature of the redemption is only partially transformative, tensions only lessened. The characters, by the end of the book have moved to a new plane, power and needs have shifted, but are things better? And if they are, will they remain so?

Or let's say that "Wild Seed" is a kind of Brechtian exercise in the alienation effect. For all its scope of human drama, Doro and Anyanwu are not real characters but metaphors for the human condition, which Butler dispassionately and very thoroughly dissects. We are allowed to watch as she works to pull out heartstrings, nerves, muscles, and brain matter and see that humanity is always changing but never becoming, always journeying but never arriving, always on the verge of despair but never quite giving up hope.

Or let's say that ... no, let's say you read it and tell me what you see.

I give grudging praise to a Sarton novel

2009-03-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing ***1/2
By May Sarton

Poets may not be able to translate their skills to the novel (and vice versa), and this lies at the heart of the problem with May Sarton's 1965 book.

Although "Mrs. Stevens" succeeds in shedding light on the way its fictional (and somewhat autobiographical) F. Hilary Stevens approaches her calling as a poet, the narrative ranges from verbose and vague to embarrassing in its emotional earnestness. But, then, trying to reflect a poet's sensibilities and process are difficult things to capture without grasping for words, sometimes in vain, and revealing the often intimate experiences that fed the poetry.

The novel story takes place over two days. On day one, Mrs. Stevens prepares to be interviewed by a magazine writer, noted for his ability to draw out literary types, and his female assistant. On day two, following the interview, Mrs. Stevens continues a running conversation with a neighbor boy, a college student who feels called to the poetic life having fallen in love with his college professor.

In both the interview with the magazine writer and the student, Stevens tries, in two different ways, to explain the nature of writing poetry.

In the interview, Mrs. Stevens attempts to describe how each of her poetry books was inspired by a muse, usually another woman. Each muse teaches her something new about how to look at life or how to use language to reflect life's experiences. We are to understand that Mrs. Stevens' poems seek not to dwell in the particularity of her own experiences--where so much modern poetry founders--but to transcend personal experience to speak to some universal truth.

No samples of Mrs. Stevens' poems are given anywhere in the novel. The lack of poetry frees Sarton to talk purely about the writing process, from experience to completed poem. And it challenges the reader to imagine Mrs. Stevens' poetry for himself, though I confess I could only get a very vague sense of what these poems might be like (though that might say more about me than Sarton).

The narrative is also likely to evoke some of the reader's own experiences with literature. For instance, the title suggests T.S. Eliot's mermaids "singing each to each." The phrase "a room of one's own" appears fleetingly in Mrs. Steven's discussions with the magazine writers. And certainly there is more than a little of Wordsworth in Sarton's natural imagery of sea, stones, birds, plants, her contemplation of emotions and passions recollected in tranquility.

With its long passages of conversations and dramatic reveries, "Mrs. Stevens" might have made a better drama or film--albeit a long and talky one. Setting, costume, gestures are so well drawn that you get a vivid physical sense of the action. And the presence of real people might underscore the gifts bestowed and toll taken on the poet and those around her.

In the end, despite my frustrations with Sarton's novel, my interest in exploring her life and poetry was piqued, and I look forward to reading more later this year.

I am pleasantly baffled by "Sarah Canary"

2009-03-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

Sarah Canary ****1/2
By Karen Joy Fowler

On the surface, "Sarah Canary" is a picaresque, episodic novel in which three characters--Chin, a Chinese immigrant; B.J., an escaped mental patient so emotionally erased that he no longer has a name, just initials; and Adelaide, a women's rights activist, chase the mysterious title character in the Pacific Northwest in 1873.

The theme of each chapter is introduced by a kind of historical introduction. For instance, Sarah Canary is committed to a mental institution at one point, and that episode is preceded by a short discussion of how madhouses were funded and operated at the time. This structure will be familiar to readers of E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime."

But where Doctorow's novel is essentially historical fiction, meant to tease out the great themes of twentieth century America, Fowler seems to be trying to say something about myth and story.

Sarah Canary is scarcely a real person, simply someone whose erratic journey takes the characters in circles as they try to sort out fact and fiction. Within each episode, someone tells a story, and someone else recognizes the basic elements of the story. Chin's story about a goddess who seduces humans into a night of love that lasts 100 years resonates with B.J. as the story of Rip Van Winkel.

What do these stories mean? Can they be understood in some universal way across personality and culture? And why do we tell them?

Chin, who eventually returns to China, writes:

We imagine ourselves as creatures of destiny. We listen to stories and forget that the listening also tells the story. The story we hear is ourselves. We are the only ones who can hear it.

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story. They all tell us that nothing is meant to be.

That nothing is meant.

That nothing is.

They tell us nothing. We dream our little dreams, dream that we are dreamers--while all about us the great dream goes on. Sometimes one of the great dreamers (i.e., Sarah Canary) passes among us. She is like a sleepwalker, passing without purpose, without malice or mercy. Beautiful and terrible things happen around her. We discern symmetries, repetitions, and think we are seeing the pattern of our lives. But the pattern is in the seeing, not in the dream.

We dare not waken the dreamer. We, ourselves, are only her dreams.

"Sarah Canary" offers a fair amount of insight to anyone reading Fowler's later and more well-known novel, "The Jane Austen Book Club." In that novel, characters are almost but not quite reflections of Austen's own heroines. But the fates of Fowler's characters owe less to the fates of their counterparts in Austen and more with the way they themselves interpret the stories of their Austen doppelgangers.

In other words, Austen is the story, and the characters listening to the story tell the story. The story they hear is themselves.

OK, so all of the above sounds kind of half-baked the way I tell it because I'm just not that Zen, but "Sarah Canary" bears re-reading and re-thinking, all the while being a really engaging story on the surface.

I say good riddance to the vampires

2009-03-14T09:12:00.000-07:00

Breaking Dawn (#4 of Twilight Series) **
By Stephenie Meyer

Sad to say, the last installment of the Twilight series is fairly disappointing. Exploration of deeper themes that are foreshadowed in previous installments--the meaning of humanity, the value and consequences of moral action, or vampirism as a metaphor for the closeted, marginalized or "differently abled"--generally peter out into a limp "true love will find a way" teen romance begging for a Celine Dion soundtrack.

For anybody who still cares **SPOILERS DOWN BELOW!**

Human Girl and Vampire Boy get married. Vampire Sister obsessed with haute couture "does" the wedding. Her her excessive fashion spending is excused because she donates a lot to Good Will (I'm not making this up).

Vampire Family now resembles upwardly mobile Republican WASPs with charitable impulses, good skin care regimen, nice threads, tastefully decorated home and classic car collection. You can almost picture their Christmas newsletter, with the whole fam in matching sweaters gathered round the tree with their golden retriever, Buckley.

Human Girl and Vampire Boy get laid. Finally. But Vampire Boy feels guilty for unintentionally rough sex and decides to nobly deny himself marital pleasures and distract Human Girl with exhausting swims in the coral reef to look at pretty fish.

Too late, though, as three days into the honeymoon, Human Girl is puking and showing a baby bump. Worry wart Vampire Boy is sure this will kill her and takes her home for an abortion. She has other ideas.

Wolfman takes over narration, since Human Girl indisposed with high-risk pregnancy, thus providing best narrative sequence in the book. Wolfman actually talks and think like a teenage boy--e.g., fights with other werewolves over bags of Doritos, tells blonde jokes to haughty Vampire Sister, and has rebellious confrontations with Alpha male in his wolf pack. This segment ALMOST makes up for Weird Science gibberish from Dad Vampire, who tries to explain the genetics of vampirism, as they all wring their hands over Human Girl's impending delivery of Monster Baby. Human Girl is in bad shape (think "Rosemary's Baby") until Wolfman suggests she drinks some blood. Because seven vampires who LIVE on blood and are expecting a half-vampire baby cannot figure this out. Duh.

Human Girl finally becomes Newly Born Vampire Girl. In the most graphic, psyche-scarring obstetrical scene I have ever read (puzzling given Meyer's unwillingness to write about anything sexual that happens below the collar bone), Human Girl is badly mangled in delivering Monster Baby. Only way to save her is to render her Undead while she's unconscious, thus detracting from the drama of whether she should "convert" to vampirism and, worse, taking the final decision away from her, leaving it to the men to handle.

When Human Girl wakes up as a Newly Born Vampire Girl, she and Vampire Boy discover that they share a taste for mountain lion (awwww), and she learns how to suck the blood out of an elk without getting her blouse messy. Doting Vampire Sisters and Brothers babysit Monster Baby.

Former Human Girl's love for Wolfman is resolved when Wolfman "imprints" (finds his life's soulmate) on Monster Baby. Imprinting is explained in another book in order to prevent it from sounding like pedophilia (think Mr. Knightley hanging around waiting for Emma in the Austen novel). Anyway, that gets rid of Wolfman as a problem for Vampire Girl et ux.

Vampire Girl and Vampire Boy have great vampire sex in cottage Vampire Mom designs just for them as a wedding present. Newly Born Vampire Girl squeals with delight when she realizes she will have hot 18-year-old bod forever, "every woman's dream." Vampire Sister fills closets with more couture.

Big vampire showdown finale. Monster Baby moves from infancy to toddlerdom in a matter of weeks, and head vampires from Italy are afraid she'll blow vampire cover to the humans.

Some good back story here about how child vampires are invariably feral and can't keep their vampirism in the closet so are summarily executed. Meyer ducks the moral implications of killing vampire children, though, by making Monster Baby only a half-vampire who CAN control blabbermouth urges, so she is spared.

Other half-human/half-vampires are discovered. Vampire Girl learns to flex her new Undead powers which greatly enhances already great vampire sex. For eternity.

Hang out the garlic and pray this is the end of the series.

I slog on with the vampires, realizing I am experiencing a Cultural Phenomenon in the Making

2009-03-10T09:11:00.000-07:00

Eclipse (#3 of the Twilight series) ***1/2
By Stephenie Meyer

** SPOILERS** Some character development at last!

Vampire Boy becomes far less two-dimensional in Book 3. He's thoughtful. He struggles to be less bossy and controlling. He is a worry wart. He makes Human Girl wear a motorcycle helmet. He helps with the dishes.

Human Girl remains, if anything, even less developed, the book's most serious weakness. Gone is the dim and slightly endearing klutziness (convenient and deft way to explain away the constant injuries incurred by hanging out with the Undead). Instead she's either clueless to the dangers of strange vampires or stands around helplessly in oh-dear-whatever-shall-we-do mode when dangers turn up.

Literary references to "Romeo and Juliet" in Book 2 give way to brief discussion of themes from "Wuthering Heights" here, which help explain the nature of the love triangle between Human Girl, Vampire Boy and Wolfman.

Full disclosure: I thought "Wuthering Heights" was about the dopiest book I'd ever read as a teenager, and the intervening decades have not rendered its jacked-up emotional turmoil more palatable. On the contrary, my urge to bitch-slap Cathy and put her on mood stabilizers has increased with my advanced age.

However, the overwrought romantic sensibilities of "Wuthering Heights" actually do make sense when applied to the kind of intensities involved in a Human-Vampire-Werewolf troika. And Meyer, wisely, doesn't strain the comparisons.

Anyhoo, Vampire Boy continues to be the hottest thing going, never any real doubt who Human Girl is going to end up with. Sex becomes an overt issue in this book, with Vampire Boy refusing to consummate their love until he has married Human Girl in order not to endanger her soul or his. Assuming he HAS a soul to endanger.

Meyer is weakest when she tries to probe theological territory of ensoulment, but she's firmer on general morality. The pitfalls of having sex with a vampire invites readers to look at sex as loving and non-exploitative in a way that's both refreshing and unpreachy.

Vampire Boy's down-on-his-knees proposal with his mother's engagement ring is too much, but I try to remember that this is a book for Young People who may still harbor these kinds of fantasies.

So much for the romance.

Lots of backstory and lore in this installment. Legend of how the Quileute Indian warriors became werewolves and why they hate vampires, more info on newborn vampires, (watch the crime reports in your daily newspaper, shiver shudder), how vampires die, and why Vampire Sister Rosalie dislikes Human Girl.

As usual, last third of the book has the most action, including exciting visit from the creepy little emissary from the head vampires in Italy, show-down with the vendetta-seeking Vampire Victoria, and, of course, high school graduation!

I and the vampires are joined by werewolves

2009-03-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

New Moon (#2 of Twilight series) ***
By Stephenie Meyer

**SPOILERS** In this second installment, Vampire Boy ditches Human Girl, and she finds solace in Wolfman for the first two-thirds of the book.

If you've read the first book in this series, you already know who Wolfman is, but it takes Human Girl SO many pages to figure it out that it's painful. I mean, if you already know there are vampires out there and have one for a boyfriend, is it REALLY that much of stretch to conclude that some of your other friends could be werewolves?

Characters don't get a whole lot more depth, but Human Girl does some interesting meditations on how her situation compares with Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." She not only explores the "what ifs" of some of the Bard's minor characters, but also riffs on teen suicide in a way that's more realistic and sobering than Shakespeare's romantic take on love and death.

Exciting final third of the book in which Human Girl saves Vampire Boy from the head vampires (think Borgia Popes) who live in Italy and feed on American tourists, which may or may not be intentionally funny (I laughed out loud).

Less smoldering foreplay in this book, what with the disappearance of Vampire Boy for most of the story, though things heat up a bit at the end. Chastely, of course.

I start hanging around with vampires

2009-03-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Twilight (#1 of Twilight series) ***
By Stephenie Meyer

OK, before I start telling you what's wrong with this book, let me say that I'm over 50 and I REALLY want to be a vampire as Meyer has conceived them--perfect body (to attract potential prey), flawless memory, wisdom of the ages, graceful, fast, immortal, and with special talents that would help me see into the future of, say the stock market, so supplemental Medicare insurance and retirement income problem solved!

That said **SPOILERS APLENTY FOLLOW** "Twilight" is an uneven read about a teenage girl who meets a teenage boy who turns out to be a vampire, except that he and his adoptive family (coven) decide not to prey on humans (inside joke, they refer to themselves as "vegetarians").

Vampire Boy and Human Girl meet when she transfers to a new high school, but owing to his blood lust, always beneath the surface, and her trust issues, it takes them awhile to become friends and fall in love.

Eventually Vampire Boy, who's built like the proverbial brick outhouse, has the chiseled looks of a GQ model and car to go with, and wants the Human Girl because she smells good and he can't read her mind like he can other people, which is apparently a turn-on.

The romance is hot but chaste. The kiddies can't consummate their relationship because a) this is a book for teenagers who aren't supposed to have sex, and b) Vampire Boy would probably bite Human Girl and turn her into one of the Undead, though, for reasons I described above, I can't really see a downside to this.

After about 300 pages of sexual frustration, which you will either piss you off or keep you up reading this until 4 a.m., Meyer finally kicks in a plot line involving the good vampires having to save Human Girl from some bad vampires, and that is pretty exciting and nicely plotted.

So what's not to like?

The characters, particularly Human Girl who narrates the book, is kind of mousy. And Vampire Boy, while he has a nice bod and dresses snappy, really doesn't seem to have much upstairs to recommend him. They're kind of vapid, really, which is maybe why I can't remember their names (OK, his is Edward--like Eddie Munster!--but I'm blanking out on hers and I don't reall care enugh to go look it up).

The back story about the vampires is great, as far as it goes, but leaves you wanting a lot more. Edward almost died in the 1918 flu epidemic in Chicago until he was bitten by a kindly vampire doctor and taken on as an adoptive son. Seems like there might be a historical teaching moment there, but no details.

The moral questions underneath the story are good. What do the good vampires gain from not preying on humans, which is clearly contrary to their natures? Are they damned if they do prey on humans if that's how God made them? Is it right for Edward to listen in on other people's conversations telepathically? Should he try to transform his girlfriend into a vampire (you KNOW she's begging for it by the end of the book) so they can be together? What about the head vampire's policy of feeding on humans only when they're at death's door and and would otherwise die?

But all these interesting elements that, in 400-plus pages, could have been more keenly developed, remain woefully underdeveloped.

Perhaps Meyer was simply dazzled by the vampires she invented. They do that, you know. Remember how Bela Lugosi as Dracula was always telling women in diaphanous lingerie to "look eento my eyes ..."

I encounter some strange and engaging short stories

2009-02-26T12:23:00.000-08:00

The Fat Man in History ****
By Peter Carey

"The Fat Man in History" contains 10 dystopian/sci fi/fantasy short stories connected loosely by theme and recurring images, especially the color blue--blue sheets, blue birds, blue fingernails, blue hands, blue bucket. (Coincidentally, Fernando Botero, one of my favorite artists, painted a fat man in a blue suit; click on the pic to go to Botero's home page.)

Some stories pick up on some aspect of modern life (or life as it was in 1970s when the stories were written) and follow its trajectory to a worst-case scenario. Thus in the title story, fat people are scapegoated in a post-revolutionary society as symbols of the selfishness, sloth, and greed of the old materialistic regime. A group of fat men plot to rebel by living down to societal expectations and eating their tormentors. They are egged on by a lissome rent collector, with secret purposes of her own.

Other stories examine the tensions between social order and chaos. In "The Puzzling Nature of Blue," a bureaucrat suggests that some dangerous amphetamines--one of its milder side effects is turning the extremities blue--be stored in a heavily guarded warehouse on an isolated island populated by natives nobody cares about (think Bikini Atoll). When the bureaucrat finds himself on the island, he discovers that the island's indigenous leaders all have blue hands, and that the warehouse has affected the island’s power structure in unexpected ways.

In "The Chance," the alien Fastalogians come to Earth and set up a lottery (whence the title) wherein Earthlings can change their appearance and physical capabilities, but without any guarantee that that change will make them better. Great for the Fastas, since nobody is ever satisfied with the transformation, and that means they buy more Chances (sorta like people hooked on plastic surgery). Enter the Hups, a group of rich and beautiful people out to use the Chance to turn themselves into physical grotesques, thus extolling the ugly and changing prevailing aesthetics about beauty.

A few of the stories seem designed to be more evocative than comprehensible, like a dream or a nightmare you can't shake. In "Peeling,” a man on the dole fantasizes about his eccentric female neighbor, who buys dolls, pokes out their eyes, shaves their heads and covers them in white paint. (I briefly thought it would be kind of cool to buy up rummage sale dolls and try this, a yen I found both compelling and creepy.) The woman also wears many layers of clothing, which, when peeled away, hide unexpected hidden layers. Clearly, the story is meant to explore the nature of fantasy and sexual idealism. But there are darker tones of sexual predation and death.

Generally a refreshing and challenging read.

I re-examine Alcott's world with Geraldine Brooks

2009-02-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

March ****
By Geraldine Brooks

"March" is the parallel story of Mr. March, the mostly-absent father from "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott.

Total disclosure: I confess that "Little Women" was, for me, an acquired taste. I despised the book as a child, rejecting it as preachy and prissy when I was 12. When I was 35 and actually made it through the book, I realized that a large part of what I had rejected in adolescence was my own Unitarian upbringing, where all actions had moral consequences that had to be endlessly inspected, parsed, and talked over. At 35, I was able to overlook a lot of what had irritated Adolescent Me and see a realistic and engaging story about a family of women trying to be humane and decent in hard times.

ANYway, having overcome my aversion to the prissy side of Alcott's "Little Women," I was better able to overlook Mr. March's even prissier narrative--one that Brooks developed from reading the writings of Alcott's father, a philosopher and educator who founded a failed utopian community.

From the first **SPOILERS FOLLOW** it's clear March's fierce idealism has two sides. He's always trying to be moral and decent, but he rarely thinks of the consequences his actions will have on Marmee and the girls. One recalls the old adage about the road to hell being paved with good intentions. And March is clearly on that road when he enlists in the Union Army in his 40s and leaves the fam at home without means of support.

As an army chaplain, March makes cheerful noises about his sacrifices--as well as the sacrifices he demands of others.

Of his beggary, he writes:

I had come in stages to a different belief about how one should be in this life. I now felt convinced that the greater part of a man's duty consists in abstaining from much that he is in the habit of consuming. If I prolong my dark hours by the consumption of costly oil, then I waste both the life of the beast slaughtered for the purpose, and the clarity of mind which comes from timely sleep. If I indulge in coffee then I pay to pollute myself, when instead I could have had a cleansing draught of water at no charge at all. None in our household ate meat, but now we learned to do without milk and cheese also, for why should the calf be deprived of its mother's milk? Further, we found that by limiting our consumption to two meals a day, we were able to set aside a basket of provisions from which the girls were able to exact a pleasure far greater than sating an animal appetite. Once a week, they carried the fruits of their sacrifice as a gift to a destitute brood of German immigrants.

This kind of logical idealism is, of course, shattered by the chaos and ambiguities of war and his meeting up with his own imperfections. We already know what the outcome of the girls' connection to the German family will be.

Briefly, Marmee takes over the "March" narrative, at the point in "Little Women" where she is called to Blank Hospital in Washington, D.C., to care for her sick husband. In a display of temper hinted at in "Little Women," she grows weary of the invalid's breast-beating over his failure to do more, and thereby sums up the conflict in March's soul:

Marmee: You are not God. You do not determine the outcome. The outcome is not the point.

March: Then what, pray, is the point?

Marmee: The point is the effort. That you, believing what you believed--what you sincerely believed including the commandment "thou shalt not kill"--acted upon it. To believe, to act, and to have events confound you--I grant you, that is heard to bear. But to believe, and not to act, or to act in a way that every fiber of your soul held was wrong--how can you not see? THAT is what would have been reprehensible.

March: Leave me now. I need to sleep.

Summarily dismissed by March, Marmee leaves to care for the ailing Beth, but not before challenging March to get better and, more difficult, to accept that he cannot save the world, win the war or solve racial tension. But that, broken as he is, he can save their family. We all know the choice he makes, and that choice helps him overcome and (to use a favorite Unitarian word) transcend his notions about strength, weakness and success.

Added bonus are Brooks' human renditions of Thoreau and Emerson, who were the equivalents of Sts. Peter and Paul of our Unitarian Church when I was growing up.

Now that he's dead, I make a last attempt to like Updike

2009-02-11T07:19:00.000-08:00

Gertrude and Claudius ***1/2
By John Updike

Queen Gertrude has been married to King Hamlet for 30-some years, an arranged affair she was bullied into as a teenager by her father for the usual dynastic reasons. Her seeming placidity with this arrangement hides the fact that she is bored, bored, BORED doing needlework and reading French romances in the solar, and doesn't much like her only son, Prince Hamlet, a sarcastic little creep now 30 and still avoiding real life by hanging out in grad school, or its medieval equivalent, in Wittenberg. (Updike wasn't the only one to parley the Hamlet story into some money. Late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley made some cha-ching off "Hamlet" in the poster left. Click on the pic to visit Beardsley at Find A Grave, your one-stop source for finding the final resting places and obits of your favorite celebs. Updike's over there, too.)

In cold Elsinore, Gertrude wonders what she might have done had her life been more self-directed, and she decides to explore that via an affair with the king's brother, Claudius, who is a rich world traveler, urbane, and has always had an eye for her.

Gertrude bullies the treacherous Polonius--the novel's best character--into letting her use his isolated lodge (with stuff he's fleeced from Elsinore) as a love nest. Still desirable to her husband, Gertrude discovers that her affair with Claudius adds zing to her marriage. Having two lovers gives her a sexual power that she enjoys wielding.

Clearly Updike intends his story to be sympathetic a) to medieval women used as marriage pawns and b) to women on the cusp of menopause who wonder what it would be like to cut loose just one last time.

But while it’s true that desire doesn’t fade with face and figure, most women in their 50s have the intelligence not to waste their time and energy on trying to fan the flames of adolescent lusts. One yearns to tell Gertrude to quit reading those French bodice-rippers, break up with Claudius, and take up some kind of social cause. For all its feminist veneer, Gertrude is more Updike's idea of a middle-aged fun-bunny (he was 60 when he wrote this novel) than a real reflection of women in middle age.

More interesting than the book's half-baked feminist slant is the way Updike uses both Shakespeare’s play and its source material for the novel, making the book both a stand-alone story and an exegesis of Shakespeare's play. Which is clever, but it doesn't really help the novel.

For instance, many characters have three names--Gerutha the girl becomes Geruthe the lover, and finally Gertrude, Claudius's queen--because their names in the various sources for the play have different names. The name changes introduce each of the three phases of Gertrude's life in the novel, so I suppose that's an allowable literary device, though my cynicism about Updike makes me wonder whether it's also a chance for the author to show off his knowledge of primary sources.

Updike, to his credit, takes care to use some of Shakespeare's diction--"rotten," "reechy" and "bodkin" appear at interesting junctures in the text. But--and this is always my personal problem with Updike--his depiction of human passion is often deeply repellent. Here for instance, a jealous Claudius tells Gertrude, just come from King Hamlet's bed, "I should beat you. I should pound the pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut."

Lovely.

And there's more in this vein, but some of you may have just had your breakfast.

R.I.P., author. I really did try to like you.

I am bored with Helen of Troy

2009-02-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Helen of Troy **1/2
By Margaret George

That Margaret George can write a 700-page book narrated by the famous Helen of Troy without revealing much personality or excitement must be a feat of some sort, but not one that would recommend the book to anyone. (There's Liz Taylor as an equally boring Helen of Troy in a version of Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus." Click on Liz to read a free version of that play on line.)

For long, long pages, Helen is a bored teenager. She chafes at wearing the maiden veil which hides her beauty and protects her virtue. She grows weary of the dozens of suitors who show up in Sparta to woo her. Then for many more long pages, she is a bored young wife with occasional piques of vexation. Her sex life with Menelaus is a dud. She feels distant from her daughter, Hermione. In fact, the only creature she shows much enthusiasm for is her pet snake.

Paris is a 15-year-old boy, an impulsive brat, and a braggart when Helen, 25 meets him. Their pairing strains credulity. I realize things were different in ancient Greece, but have 15-year-old boys changed so much that any kind of elixir made by the gods or Budweiser would render them objects of desire to a mature woman?

Honestly.

As for the grand passion that was the catalyst for the Trojan War, it's all pretty diaphanous drapery, soft sighs, scented rooms, harp music and tender kisses. I've seen more convincing passion in a Cialis commercial. Not surprisingly, then, the Trojan War, the big climax of the novel, has all the harrowing excitement of a bridge tournament.

OK, maybe that’s a bit harsh.

But if you want anything approaching the realities of the war that the women of Troy might have faced, you have to go back a few thousand years to Euripides' "The Trojan Women" (now available online free!), in which the women of Troy gather one last time to mourn their dead menfolk, the loss of their homes, and to face their futures bereft of each other's solace in new lives with their Greek captors who will rape and enslave them.Who can read Talthybius' cruel speech to little Astyanax, son of the slain Hector, clinging to his mother, Andromache, and begging not to be thrown from the towers of Troy, and not be moved:

Come, child, leave fond embracing of thy woeful mother, and mount the high coronal of thy ancestral towers, there to draw thy parting breath, as is ordained. Take him hence. His should the duty be to do such herald's work, whose heart knows no pity and who loveth ruthlessness more than my soul doth.

Ain't nothing like this in Margaret George.

I quickly dispatch Sarah Waters

2009-01-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

Fingersmith ***1/2
By Sarah Waters

A thoroughly enjoyable page-turner about the Victorian underworld. But when all's said and done, it's pretty much Wilkie Collins with lesbians.

I realize I am not romantic about the Tudors

2009-01-12T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Constant Princess **1/2
By Philippa Gregory

Philippa Gregory takes scant information about the short marriage between Prince Arthur and Katherine of Aragon (Michael Sittow's portrait of Katherine before her marriage to Arthur is at left) and heats them up into a roiling froth of sexual awakening, dreams of a new Camelot and a fair amount of anachronistic nonsense. Like most romantic historical fiction, Gregory's falls prey to making the romance the prime mover behind historical events.

Gregory's interesting construction of political events that historians are still arguing about redeems the book: Was Katherine lying when she claimed to have been a virgin when she married Henry VIII, a key point in their divorce trial? To what extent was she a political pawn? To what extent did she manipulate events herself?

Some historians are quick to dismiss Katherine as a "good Catholic girl" who simply did what she was told, and who was unable to leave England after Arthur's death because her father-in-law Henry VII had taken all her money. What's often overlooked is that Katherine's childhood was spent on military campaigns and that she herself led a successful rout of the Scots while Henry VIII was away fighting in France.

Gregory also draws lively portraits of Henry VII and his mommy dearest, Margaret Beaufort, both of whom were obsessed with money and legitimizing Henry's claim to the throne--largely because they had neither. The pair of them were about as lovable as a pair of crocodiles, but they were pragmatic and shrewd and laid the foundation for strong and sane rule in England, which Henry VIII sadly botched.

In some ways, Elizabeth I was the true heir of Henry VII’s hopes for England, and, oddly, she is more Katherine’s heir than anyone’s. The two queens had a fair amount in common--ambition, shrewdness, intelligence, and a knack for knowing when to act and when to lay low. And it would have mortified them both to admit it.

I find bad history in "The Mists of Avalon"

2008-12-28T07:36:00.000-08:00

The Mists of Avalon ***
By Marion Zimmer Bradley

The stilted language in "The Mists of Avalon" is a terrible drawback for anybody who really wants to enjoy the book. Yeah, I know Bradley was going for a style reminiscent of Mallory's "Morte d'Arthur," since this is a retelling of the Arthur myth from Morgan le Fey's POV, but often it just sounded like pretentious Yoda speak a la, "Do not you know that torturing syntax makes the book speak as would a bard of old?"

At least there were no "wot ye wells," though, thank you God.

The book is also long on extolling the virtues of ancient British paganism, which is Goddess-centered and controlled by the priestesses of Avalon who are the kingmakers of Britain, and who also have handy skills like the Second Sight and who control the Mystical Regalia (a cup, a plate, a sword, but no Holy Hand Grenade) in which the power of the Goddess resides.

Christianity, which is in mortal philosophical conflict with the ancient religion as the book opens, somewhere at the end of the sixth century, is narrow-minded, male-centered, and bent on imposing sexual hang-ups and a sense of sin on the natives. At its head is Patricius, former bishop of Ireland (yep, ol' St. Patrick), who comes off as a scheming martinet.

For several hundred pages, things continue in this vein: Goddess good, life-affirming, and woman-centered, as embodied by the self-directed and sexually liberated Morgaine. Christianity bad, misogynistic, and sexually repressed, as evinced by the whiny and frightened Gwenhwyfar (Guenivere to you).

Some of this is just bad history. For instance, nobody knows much about the Druids or the place women had in the ancient heirarchy of Britain (the legends of Boudicca notwithstanding). The Druids didn't write anything down. All we know about them are what Roman outsiders wrote (not much) and what archaeological sites have revealed. Which is that the Druids were big on human sacrifice that involved slow disemboweling or throwing a hog-tied victim into a mushy peat bog, but all that is conveniently glossed over here.

Also in truth, St. Patrick was himself British/Welsh, enslaved by the Irish, escaped to France where he converted, and then returned to Ireland to preach brotherhood and freedom of slaves to the Irish. (Those interested in the history of women do well to study what the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons did with Christianity as handed down by their Irish missionaries, how they revered their abbesses, who ran monasteries that were comprised of both monks, nuns and large, well-fed lay populations, and became the premiere sites of literacy in Europe.)

I confess I "Moby Dicked" this book--that is, I skimmed over a lot of the less interesting and tiresome bits--though I'm glad I stuck with it as the book takes an interesting turn in the final 200 pages, with a truly spectacular and grandly ambiguous appearance of the Holy Grail, which presages a major cultural shift in Britain.

In the Epilogue, ***SPOILERS BELOW*** Morgaine, old and alone, the Goddess's last partisan, realizes that the schemes of Avalon to control Arthur's throne have been in vain, that the powers of the diety, whether Goddess or Christ, cannot be controlled by man or woman, priest or priestess. In the end, as the ways of Avalon die, Morgaine sees that she has been as as narrow and bigoted as Gwenhwyfar, that the spirit of Christ and God have merged, that her Goddess, which is only half of the godhead, is still alive in the kindly nuns who tend her sister Viviane's grave and in the Blessed Virgin to whom women take their troubles.

It is a transcendent and generous ending, and one that made me glad I didn't give up on the book.

Sorta.

And from medieval tapestries, I move on to Titian's Venus

2008-11-13T11:59:00.000-08:00

In the Company of the Courtesan ***1/2
By Sarah Dunant

In 1527, the prostitute Fiammetta Bianchini and her dwarf servant, Bucino, flee the sack of Rome and rebuild their business in Venice in this high-class jewel heist mystery.

Dunant's Venice is strewn with real historical artifacts--the Venus of Urbino by Titian for whom Fiammetta is the model; fake jewels produced by the Murano glass factories; a book depicting sexual positions with accompanying dirty sonnets that has been banned in Rome. (Prostitutes and artists have a long association. Click the pic for a recent Reuter's article about this topic.)

Venice itself is the main character of the novel, a kind of Shopkeeper Queen, willing to let unsavory businesses and heresies thrive on a small scale so long as they stay under the wire and don't attract Church authorities. She is Fiammetta writ large, in a way.

The Shopkeeper Queen herself relies on her husband the Doge to deal with her subjects so she herself can go about the business of preparing pilgrims for their trip to the Holy Land, trading or fighting with the Turks as circumstances demand, and generally greasing the wheels of commerce.

Characters swirl around the Shopkeeper Queen's canals, piazzas, churches and campos, their fortunes rising and falling, of concern to Queen Venice only where the supply and demand are out of balance. Besides Fiammetta and Bucino, the book is full of colorful characters--a blind healer specializing in keeping whores youthful and disease-free; a Turk collecting curiosities and lovielies, including human ones, for Suleyman's court; the clientele of the high-class brothels; the gangs allowed to street fight on special holidays; the men who dredge the canals when sewage build-up impedes commerce; the Jews in the Ghetto, cutting endless deals with the Shopkeeper Queen to maintain their relative safe haven and earn a living, but not too good a one.

The cavalcade of images and characters above ought not to suggest that the book is poorly plotted or devoid of human drama. There are unexpected turns of events aplenty, appearances by all Seven Deadly Sins, and the gamut of human emotions from love to hate, from fear to courage.

Dunant's well-tailored narrative style seems almost wasted on what amounts to high-class pulp fiction. Lookit this description of Rome, where the book opens, for instance: "On the evening streets, our louche, loud city had closed up like a clam." My gosh, alliterates and everything!

But even the first-person narrative by the dwarf Bucino does not save the novel from a kind of detached point of view, as if we are seeing people and events from the eyes of Venice itself. Without her, the rest would simply not exist.

I spend some time with medieval tapestries

2008-10-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

The Lady and the Unicorn ***
By Tracy Chevalier

If I'd been assigned to give this book a title, it would have been "Hendy Nicholas Designs Tapestries While Screwing Around in France and Belgium." The book is peopled with a lot of the same characters you find in "The Canterbury Tales" and with many of the same plot lines--bedding and birthing, trade rivalry, bawds and drinking, and true love unconsummated.

But Chevalier knows a lot about late medieval tapestries and art history, and it was fun to see her weave a story (as it were) around the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. (There are six of them, each for one of the five senses plus an extra. Click on the famous unicorn in capitivty, left, to visit a cool medieval bestiary that includes the unicorn.)

Wisely, the tapestries remain the main "characters" of the book, and Chevalier doesn't muddle that focus with a lot of sub-plots and side tracks. There's just enough human drama to underscore the time and effort it took to make a tapestry by hand.

And there are interesting glimpses of the political scene in the waning years of the Middle Ages, too: Leon the Jewish merchant whose family converted (or maybe not) to avoid persecution. Jean de Viste and his family, who bought their nobility by toadying up to Louix XI. The Brussels Weaver's Guild and its powers and rules, which include proscriptions against women learning the trade. The cloister and its increasing reliance on women with large dowries to keep the operation running.

A light and engaging read.

I find no "fun" in this family dysfunction

2008-10-09T11:56:00.000-07:00

In the Fold ****
By Rachel Cusk

"In the Fold" minutely dissects the dysfunctionality of two loosely related upper-middle-class English families in which the principals are mostly 30-somethings. It's one of those books where nothing really happens; rather, things are revealed, slowly, carefully, like layers of diseased tissue peeled away and exposed in some meticulous and cold-blooded autopsy.

That's not to say there isn't a plot--everything builds to a climax in which a cruel financial conspiracy is revealed, though it doesn't come as that big of a surprise, since there have been broad hints about what's going on throughout the book. There's also a fairly long and depressing denouement, the reading of which is sort of like watching the pathologist try to smooth the dead tissue back into place and stitch it up into something the mortician can work with.

The financial conspiracy, however, isn't the family's only malaise and isn't really even what destroys it in the end. Rather, it's a kind of syndrome of modern life that starts with boredom that builds up in hermetically sealed sterile new homes, or in picturesque flats purchased by Mum and Dad. Wives fill their time in material acquisition or the perfection of the body, but eventually tire of that in favor of staging ever more violent little dramas in which they verbally and physically abuse their husbands. The husbands, completely blindsided by the hysterics, simply cringe and curl more tightly until they threaten to implode emotionally. Small children are by turns ignored or forced to watch these histrionics until they begin to stutter or lose the ability to speak at all.

In the end, this is one of the most beautifully written, sometimes even witty, descriptions of a world in which there is no moral compass, no spiritual direction, and hardly any kindness whatever. I'm not sure if it's black comedy, cautionary tale or commentary on modern life. It's almost impossible to put down (I read it in one long sitting), and one of the most depressing books I have ever read.

Oooh, and another good econo-dystopian-sci-fi!

2008-09-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

The Futurist ****
By James P. Othmer

Protagonist Yates is a futurist, once full of the youthful optimism that earned him a rep as a motivational speaker with profitable companies. As maturity tempered his optimism, the rah-rah messages became more cautious, thought-provoking. And nothing kills a motivational gig like navel gazing.

Yates’ engagements dwindle. Money dwindles. So as the book opens, Yates is back to the rah-rah, now a pastiche of stolen ideas and embroidered anecdotes that make the companies happy and himself miserable.

In an alcohol-fueled moment of truth, Yates reveals himself as the charlatan he is at a big futuristic do in South Africa.

"The Futurist" is a novel of ideas-or at least an exploration of what we know, or what we invent, and to what ends we manipulate the present to create the future we want. We want, goes the book's main theme, to know what, when and where, but we really don't care about why. Which, of course, is the most important question of all. The book is also full of wonderful shady characters, like the Johnson brothers, whose affiliations are murky and who are part of a vast conspiratorial web of indeterminate shape and texture in which Yates is trapped.

**SPOILER** The irony of the book's ending is as frustrating as it is ironic; Othmer forces the reader to speculate about Yates' future, to become a futurist, even as Yates himself has made speculating about the future his career.

It seems none of us, not even the omniscient narrator and author, really knows what will happen next.

I enjoy an econo-dystopian-sci-fi

2008-08-20T11:52:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Government ****
By Max Barry

In "Jennifer Government," the business of America is business--with a vengeance. The book opens with a marketing plan to drive up the price of Nikes by withholding the supply until demand is whipped to a fever pitch, and then float rumors that a few will be released to select stores at $1,000 a pair. In reality, stores will be flooded with the things, and the company will make a killing--quite literally. Because part of the marketing scheme includes liquidating a few low-income kids who will supposedly be killed for their shoes, thus making the products literally "to die for."

Jennifer Government, a former advertising exec turned government agent (everybody takes the company name as their surname in this book), is out to stop Nike, but uncovers a much larger plot between two customer loyalty programs out to force big companies to choose sides and create mega-monopolies, which make the Nike shoe plot look positively quaint.

Like all dystopians, this one is a cautionary tale that warns about the insidiousness of advertising, marketing and explores the nature of brand loyalty beyond reason. It's what real marketers and advertisers are studying up on right now.

It's also an indictment of the work ethic that pushes people to be available to their jobs 24/7--they pretty much have to in order to pay the fees it takes to get medical care, police protection, and use the roads--things that used to be funded before taxation was abolished.

The world Max Barry has created seems outlandish, but eerily familiar. That's because he hasn't pushed the boundaries of current reality all that far.

Jumpy narrative style adds tension and excitement to the final chapters.

I decide chicklit novels should have a 200 page limit

2008-08-14T11:48:00.001-07:00

My Latest Grievance **1./2
By Elinor Lipman

Lipman follows the chicklit formula--smart, sassy chick rolls her eyes and learns to deal with people to whom she is clearly superior, but nevertheless loves.

In this case, the chick is a high school student being raised by stereotypical Boomer professors at a small women's college with socialist/utilitarian with doctrinarian ideals they're trying to pass on to their hip high schooler.

Equally stereotypical is the dad's first wife, a flaky dilettante who comes to work at the college, ostensibly as a house mother, but is on the prowl for Husband #2.

The hip smart daughter is taken with Wife #1 and each tries to mentor the other with just one damn thing following another to a crescendo of mayhem that is supposed to be a humorous take on real life, but gets kind of grim, if you ask me.

Of course, hip chick turns out being the smartest cookie in the jar, and the other characters benefit from her smart-ass wisdom, and are dispatched pretty summarily in the final chapter.

This book is too long--chicklit editors really need to keep their authors to a strict 200-page minimum so that the kvetching doesn't overbalance the wisecracking and turn into a great big whine--but was readable, unlike "The Devil Wears Prada."

I am disturbed by "The Red Panda"

2008-08-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

Like the Red Panda **
By Andrea Seigel

Protagonist Stella's observations in this book about high school hell and alienation are sharp and on-target. The plot, however, is fraught with almost unbelievable trauma and coincidence.

Like that Stella's parents died from a cocaine OD at her 11th birthday party and her only boyfriend is a sweet dope dealer. And every character is uniformly horrid or weird--usually both. Stella's foster parents never warm to her and eventually turn outright hostile, other students don't take to her, adults at school are completely self-absorbed, and her grandfather is a manipulative son of a bitch.

It's hard to know if people are really this bad or this is only what Stella sees in her detachment. It's an interesting narrative POV, but ultimately fails because it provides no insights into the larger world outside (or even in) Stella's head.

I suppose that we are supposed to feel sorry for Stella in her detachment and numb despair. But I didn't. Neither was I moved by the ending, the irony of which is like a crowbar to the back of your neck.

Ultimately, it's a troubling book, both in its depiction of life and as literature. Not my cuppa.

I meet a latter day George and Martha in the Carib

2008-07-30T07:30:00.000-07:00

Becoming Strangers ***1/2
Louise Dean

Annemieke wishes her husband, Jan, would die faster. His original "six months to live" prognosis has dragged on to six years, and their jaunt to a resort on a tiny, unnamed Caribbean island will be (she hopes) their final one.

But Annemieke’s feelings for Jan are complicated. She sets out to make this vacation as miserable for him as possible, stirring up lies and sexual dramas that become ever more devious and destructive. After all, he'll be dead soon, and then whom will she torture?

Jan has put up with this behavior for years. He's sympathetic. Long suffering. He reads the Bible and long historical treatises. He also knows that total passivity bugs the hell out of Annemieke, driving her to ever more reckless behaviors.

Classic Edward Albee George-and-Martha stuff so far.

But instead of pairing Annemieke and Jan with young guests who will eventually become like them, as Albee does in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," Dean introduces an octogenarian duo. George is spry, physically and mentally. Dorothy prefers to spend most of her time drinking tea in their room.

George meets up with Jan, complains about Dorothy, about her reading, her secrecy and furtiveness. He begins to admit to more intimate things, affairs and flings, hankerings. Wonders where his life took wrong turns. Jan murmurs consoling words.

The claustrophobic and contained world of the resort magnifies tensions, enmity, resentments, illness, both physical and mental. Love and hate are served up in equal measures. Which will each character choose?

It's not hard to guess, and the last 50 pages require the reader to flog his interest somewhat to stick with the end, in which each of the characters “gets theirs” in somewhat anti-climactic fashion.

I find hope for posterity, or at least a future for literature

2008-07-10T11:31:00.001-07:00

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius ****1/2
By Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers' memoir about his parents' deaths--they both died of cancer within six weeks of each other when he was 21--and his assuming guardianship of his 7-year-old brother is hilarious, touching and gives me hope for Our Young People Today.

Eggers' parents were a bit of a mess--a drunken and unpredictable father, an often angry and frustrated mother--and he and his two older siblings make a touching agreement that they will give their little brother, Christopher or "Toph," a better childhood.

Easier said than done.

Eggers pitilessly describes his shortcomings as a guardian--he can't cook, doesn't have a great job, is late all the time, goes to Toph's school open-houses hoping to score with single moms, and selects apartments based on how far he and Toph can slide across the wooden floors in their stocking feet.

In short, Eggers is still a boy himself, trying to launch a brilliant magazine writing career with all the bravado overbalanced by lack of discipline and experience of most 20-somethings. But Eggers is also fighting off fears of sudden death and the kind of horrific fantasies any parent has when they leave their kid with a new babysitter.

The book goes on at times--Eggers is a master at stream-of-consciousness, and he has a hard time knowing when to turn it off. But there is not a false note in this book, not one. It is exuberant but measured. You never hear fanfares at the triumphs, strings when the going gets tough, or twiddling flutes at the light-hearted moments.

At heart, this is a book about a man who loves his brother enough to let that love turn him into a better man.

And that's exactly the kind of schlocky thing Eggers and Toph would expect a 50-something female reader to think

I spend part of July being bored "Aloft"

2008-07-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

Aloft **1/2
By Chang-Rae Lee

Jerry Battle is battling (get it?) a mid-life crisis while he lives in comfortable early retirement on the profits of his family's landscaping business. He's also battling his essential passivity--his comfortable life has never demanded much from him--and now he's losing loved ones in various ways and he knows he needs to get his butt in gear.

But Jerry prefers to see the world from high up in his airplane than to live life on the ground, hence the title (“Aloft,” get it?).

Despite these somewhat heavy-handed touches, “Aloft” is, at heart, a melodrama/soaper, albeit a very writerly one. Lee’s sentences are long and meandering, almost intricate little stories within themselves that are marvels of style, but ultimately exhausting to read.

A good editor would have insisted that Lee cut out the many extraneous characters and cut the book by about 100 pages.

I much preferred Lee's "A Gesture Life," about a Japanese soldier in World War II coming to grips with the exploitation of Korean "comfort workers," forced into the sexual servicing of Japanese troops.

I revisit "Brave New World"

2008-06-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

Brave New World **1/2
By Aldous Huxley

What would a dystopian library be without "Brave New World"? It's pneumatic!

In a nutshell, “Brave New World” is the world of the not-so-distant future where the state engineers babies like in that that stupid Zager and Evans “In the Year 2525” song to happily perform the tasks society requires to run smoothly. There is no God, motherhood has become a dirty word, and everyone stays happy with drugs and sex. As in all dystopian utopias, there are malcontents who have to be weeded out to keep things on an even keel.

Having read this book about once a decade (so I’m on my fifth read), I'm coming to the conclusion that “BNW” is pretty overrated. The "Orgy Porgy" scene is godawful contrived, and so is the overwrought business about mothers.

However, the rise of jingoism, materialism and enforced happiness still have something to say to us now, and on my recent read-through, I found the breakdown of family ties more disturbing. Perhaps that’s because I’ve had my own child in the intervening years.

However, I think Ray Bradbury covered similar themes to better effect in "Fahrenheit 451."

I face facts with David Guterson

2008-06-04T11:23:00.000-07:00

Snow Falling on Cedars ***
By David Guterson

I heard David Guterson on "The Diane Rheam Show" on PBS and figured it was time I read this book, which is beloved by many.

The frame for this story is the murder trial of a Japanese-American accused of murdering a white man. It's set about a decade after the end of World War II, when racial feeling among whites and resentment over the internment of Japanese citizens were running high.

At its most compelling, Guterson's narrative explores the nature of facts: Can anyone have all the facts? How does one decide what facts are relevant? What does one deduce from the facts to hand? What does that say about one's prejudices? What happens when people withhold facts? What happen when people don't want to face facts?

The book is saved from a deus ex machina ending (mostly) by the protagonist's moral dilemma about withholding or presenting a key fact.

The book's weakness is a tendency for Japanese characters to show stereotypical traits like stoicism, inscrutability, a preoccupation with tradition. The author seems to struggle to fully realize the female protagonist; he often seems distracted by her exotic beauty and actually compares her to a geisha at one point.

Spare me.

I bid farewell to Nuala O'Faolain

2008-05-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

Are You Somebody? ****
By Nuala O'Faolain

Nuala O'Faolain, who died May 8, attempts to come to terms with being Irish in "Are You Somebody?" and I can't give any more coherent review to this memoir than that. Whenever she seems about to uncover some insight or point about Irish life, her answer forks into several possibilities and ends with "I don't know." I have, in fact, never read a memoir in which "I don't know" appears so many times.

The Irish (and Irish-Americans) can be divide into two camps: 1) those who revel in their heritage, own copies of "Riverdance" and the Irish tenors, and 2) those like author Mary McCarthy who revile it. (O'Faolain says McCarthy "feared the sogginess of the Irish so much that even when the plane stopped over in Shannon, she wouldn't get out in case she was sucked into the bog.")

O'Faolain comes down somewhere between reveling and reviling. Her narrative is matter-of-fact--her journalistic roots show here--generally clear-eyed and often self-lacerating. All that gives the memoir a ring of truth. And yet the episodes presented here, wonderful as they are--life in a Catholic girls’ school, mammy’s drinking, da’s philandering, a walk with the dog on Christmas Day, a fleeting connection to the Irish past on an archaeological dig--leave the reader feeling that O’Faolian has not presented the whole truth.

The last chapter, "Afterwords," in which O'Faolain discusses the effect of the memoir on her life and those who have read it, is problematic. The narrative goes all muzzy and fey, as if she'd had a few too many down at McDaid's, and holding on to the literal truth just got to be too much.

Maybe in the end that’s what Irish-ness is: too much.