Geographic Misadventures

London is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
New York: Viking, 2006

This is kinda the best book title ever. Well, perhaps not ever, but still. And eventually, you actually find out what the title refers to. Anyway, this isn't necessarily the book I expected.

What I especially didn't expect was how creepily it seemed to be written for me, in order to smack me around a little and say, um, hello Erin. What is going on? Which is not to say that I've spent three years since running out on my fiance working in a fishing shop in Rhode Island and working on a documentary of fishwives. Or that my brother is about to get married to a girl he's been dating since I was in high school, except that he might be in love with someone else. Or that my brother has a hot older friend who is a chef, which may or may not be important to me.

Some of Dave's pronouncements can be a little pedantic. Emmy is full of deep thoughts and meaningful realizations. But it worked, and, again, it slapped me around a little. Some examples:

• You don't always know what you'll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that -- if you paid close enough attention -- you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. [This is just the beginning of a reverie about the times "already existing closer to memory than reality"]
• You can't really feel anything entirely unless part of you doesn't know it's happening.
• There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again.
• I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually.
• I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it -- and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you go there? Didn't it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?
• Never. I will never be done with you. I will never be able to think about you and hear about you and not totally -- totally -- miss you. [and more thoughts about her former fiance and her intensely complicated relationship. Not with him, but with the version of him that she's held ever since she left him. And later...] I'd remember [him], and I'd remember him wrong. And that was probably when I'd miss him the most.
  
• I really wish that I could begin to describe what it was like seeing her being seen that way by him. It was like watching a memory.
• If this were all we'd have to remember this day by, wouldn't it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling about first.

So you see? In fact, the whole thing almost made it hard for me to concentrate on the will he/won't he plotline that ostensibly drives the whole book. And perhaps it does. Perhaps it takes other people's dramas to force Emmy out of her holding pattern. And if that's the case, what are the implications for a girl like me?

Hey Lauren Lipton, please write another novel

It's About Your Husband - Lauren Lipton
New York: 5 Spot, 2006

With the exception of some weird Twilight madness that overtook me last fall, I really don't read multiple books by the same author all at once (and by "all at once" I mean within 6 months or so). I tend to spread them out. But occasionally I make exceptions. And since Mating Rituals... apparently got to me so much, I decided to inaugurate my new library card (hello Huntington Beach!) with Lipton's earlier novel.

Let's see. Iris is a newly-unemployed transplant from the San Fernando Valley to New York. (Why oh why does everyone knock the Valley so much, btw?) Because apparently the fact that she confuses twin sisters is a sign of her awesome detective skills, she somehow gets herself hired to track Sister #2's husband, who may or may not be having an affair. And, predictably. mayhem ensues. Oh, and puppies. Two of the main characters are a pug and a Jack Russell terrier (Awww).

One thing I will say about this novel that I really needed is that there really aren't any evil characters. (Is that a spoiler? It might be.) You go through thinking, oh, well this person is a cad/bitch/psycho/whatever, and then they aren't. They're just misguided, or a little selfish, and human, and forgivable. So that's nice. In the middle of stressful life changes and moves and end-of-semester workloads, it's nice to visit a world where good things happen.

Since Lipton's second novel just came out earlier this year, I'm not expecting anything new anytime soon, but when it does come, I will read it. Ooh, and hey! she's working on her next novel. And it's going to be "literary!" Yays all around.

I'm so glad I missed the 70s

The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974

I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.

This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?

Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.

I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.

I heart Michael Ondaatje

Anil's Ghost - Michael Ondaatje
New York: Knopf, 2000

I went through a Canadian phast in my late high school years. While this was largely due to a certain hockey player, it also included a love affair with Ondaatje's The English Patient (both novel and film) and Joy Kogawa's Obasan. I had dreams of moving to Vancouver and having a big dog and taking him on walks to Stanley Park. All of which is introduction, of sorts, to the Canadian Ondaatje's 2000 novel about his native Sri Lanka.

I read it in Denver, and the cold weather and warm family atmosphere made for a gripping counterweight to the book's sultry temperatures and political chill. You understand why Anil left for England, America, etc., and work to understand why she returned to practice forensic anthropology, investigating the murders and atrocities committed by political factions within and against the government. You also work to understand the two brothers who accompany her, one an anthropologist, one a doctor, both destroyed both by their own pasts and the turmoil of their country.

It's hard to say that a lot happens, in the traditional sense of the word. I found myself thinking, well this is where I would go with this plot, and then remembering that Ondaatje is a lot less trite or more interesting than I can be. His prose is lyrical and haunting and quiet and disjointed and all sorts of other good things. Had I not been on vacation, I might have noted passages to share; instead you will have to take my word for it.

In short, he's gorgeous, and I was unsettled and unsatisfied in an entirely satisfying way.

What was sexy (and what wasn't) in medieval England

The Illuminator - by Brenda Rickman Vantrease
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005

I kinda hate it when I wait awhile between finishing a book and blogging about it. I forget things. I stop caring. But I can't just skip it, not that whatever readers actually exist out there actually care. But I digress, as usual.

The Illuminator is probably much more about the a widowed noblewoman than the title character, a former noble who know creates the beautiful illuminated illustrations on religious texts but who also works with the heretic texts of proto-Protestant John Wycliffe. Life is all sorts of perilous for everyone in late 14th-century England. And the novel's plot feels the need to reinforce the point by letting bad things happen to good people. (That's not too much of a spoiler, right?) Anyway, in order to safeguard her home and lands with the protection of a nearby abbot, Lady Kathryn takes in the illuminator and his daughter. She's a single lady, he's a single dude, and she also has twin boys the same age as the girl. Oh, and there's an evil sheriff, an evil bishop, a female religious recluse, a dwarf, and a servant girl who can read auras. Mayhem, predictably, ensues. Also lots of pride.

But lest I make this sound like fluff, it's really not. It seems fairly well historically grounded, and I didn't feel like it was too anachronistic. I found the sympathetic characters sympathetic, and rooted for them. Vantrease's style is quite pretty, and during a stressful period, I found the quite different stresses of this world a comforting escape.