But I don't want it

This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman (HarperCollins, 2011)


Meet the Bergamots. First Liz(zie), a trained art historian who became increasingly mom-first, and now, in NYC, mom-only. Then Richard, whose career in academia seems on an unstoppable upward trajectory. And Jake, the teen son. Finally Coco, the spirited kindergartener. They are transitioning, with varying degrees of success, from life in upstate Ithaca to Manhattan.

And then there's a night with two parties. Liz takes Coco to a sleepover at the Plaza, where she (and the other moms) get totally wasted. Yay. And Jake goes to a party with his friends, gets sad when he sees the object of his affection with her boyfriend, gets drunk, and draws the advances of the young hostess. He allows her attention, until he suddenly doesn't. And handles it like most boys would, which is to say like a jerk.

And there you have it. A Saturday morning with two hungover Bergamots. Except then Jake's make-out partner creates an awfully graphic web video to prove that she's old enough for him. And then all hell breaks loose.

Listening to Slate folks discuss it (here), I was intrigued by their final conversation, a debate over why and how the single click of the "forward" button untethered everything. It's hard to say for sure whether all the fissures of Liz's dissatisfaction and Richard's growing impatience would have been evident had the plot been presented in any other way. The first page (plus) is a description of the video, and it looms over everything that follows, leaving the reader waiting in some amount of anxiety. As a result, I saw how while nothing was broken, neither was it particularly strong. But that's just me.

I grew less enchanted with the book as it went on. The characters just kept so firmly to their established patterns, wearing out some weird groove that made me more and more frustrated. And then, suddenly, Schulman wraps up. She flashes forward several years, so we know what shakes down from the crisis. And ends with a coda chapter, the teen ingenue all grown up, or more grown up. But it's weird, because we've never really met her before. And now, we're not quite sure who she is, or what to think about what she unleashed when she hit record on her webcam.

Glittering Despair

Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion (Pocket Books, 1970, 1978)


Things I learned from this novel: the late 1960s and early 1970s kinda sucked. I mean, we glamorize them now, with all the free love and flowers and Woodstock and consciousness-altering drugs and activism and stuff. But there was also a lot of using drugs and sex to mask all sorts of pain, and hiding things away, and being corrupt in Hollywood.

I think I am too far outside the time to really understand this novel, because it seemed like Maria had a shitty childhood, made it to NYC where things were shady, fell for the director who cast her in a film where she was gangbanged, and then he made it big and she really didn't, mainly because her husband insisted on institutionalizing their daughter, and then there were affairs and affairs and affairs and eventually someone gets killed. Or dies of his own hand. Or something.

I can't say that Didion's prose isn't evocative, because it was bitterly painful to read, to go into Maria's desperation. So she accomplished what I believe was her vision. It's a successful book. But 40 years later... I find myself lost.

Dead Tired

Deadlocked - Charlaine Harris (Ace Books, 2012)


We know who Sookie will end up with, right? It's decided. So at this point the series is just taking us down the long winding road that leads us there. Preferably with a whole bunch of new supernatural creatures, all of whom seem to feel the need either to protect Sookie or to do her harm.

But that's fine. It was pleasant enough to rejoin Sookie's world for a few days, and celebrate her birthday with her. Life in Bon Temps is moving forward, and it seems like some loose ends are tying themselves up. Which makes me wonder if the next installment of Sookie will be the last.

Old New York, NOT Don Henley

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (Barnes & Noble Classics, 1920, 2004)


Despite not actually having the same name at all, I spent a lot of my time reading this book while humming along to the mental soundtrack of "The End of the Innocence." And any other Don Henley songs that came up in my head. Also, I saw the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer back when it came out. So I had a hard time displacing those characters from my head, even when they didn't feel quite right.

First off, the casting? I bought DDL as Newland Archer. Actually, that seems just about perfect. Pfeiffer I'm a little more meh about. And then there's Winona Ryder as May Archer (nee Welland). Wharton keeps stressing how Archer views her as being like the Goddess Diana. And I can't think of an actress who inspires that thought less in me. On the other hand, from what I remember, she nails the whole forced innocence thing.

But this isn't a movie review, and I really shouldn't be reviewing movies I saw almost twenty years ago, and when I was awfully young too. So, on to the book.

I'm not going to go into too much analysis, possibly because I'm lazy. Instead, going to be sorta solipsistic. First of all, there were ways in which this novel felt very Russian. Maybe just because most of the 19th-century novels I've read in the past several years (that were not Jane Austen) were Russian. (And yes, I know that this was actually written after WWI, so this may be a really weak point.) Or maybe it's that Mme Olenska reminded me of Anna Karenina. I'm not really sure. But more importantly, it was honestly such a pleasure to read this. I forgot how much I enjoyed the classics. I may be adding more of them to my list.

More from the Goon Squad

Returning to Egan.... I listened to Slate's discussion and had a couple takeaways.

First of all, I really need to join a book club. I wanted to be able to chime in on that discussion several times.

Second, I learned from them that the PP chapter got a lot of buzz (both good and bad) and I was gratified to hear that it worked for them as well. They also discussed the ways in which we see characters at various points in their lives (and filtered through different perspectives). Where I didn't talk about this before was with respect to the "flash forward." We don't just know what happens to characters by meeting or hearing about them again (or before), even within a story we are suddenly taken years into the future and told what becomes of a person. For example, we get Sasha's story when she's around 30 and again in college, but then we see her at 19 where we find out where she is in her 40s. (This is good, b/c it gives us a foundation to understand the next chapter, written in her daughter's voice.) But the flash forward doesn't always necessarily serve that kind of narrative purpose (the book club's example was finding out what happened to the grandson of an African tribal dancer, who appears as a very minor character much later, which I hadn't noticed) and I found it intensely comforting somehow. More so, I think, than they did.

And finally, not related to the podcast, I couldn't get over the fact that Alex and Sasha are both diminutives of the same Alexand(e)r(a), which made their date seem strangely awkward. (Probably just because I've used both as nicknames.)

Feeling Redundant

Armed Gunmen, True Facts, and Other Ridiculous Nonsense: A Compiled Compendium of Repetitive Redundancies - Richard Kallan (Pantheon Books, 2005)


I'm a huge snob about you're and your. And there are plenty of other written tics that make me crazy. But I think I'm pretty laissez faire about the things that bother the true purists. And so I'm not sure what to make of Kallan's book. Rather than any kind of diatribe about our propensity to include extraneous words, it's simply a list of some of the most frequent offenders. (For example: see title) They come with cute definitions - "Hidden Pitfall: A pitfall unannounced by bells and whistles" - and charming illustrations by 19th-century illustrator George Cruikshank. Also a plus: I learned that these are technically tautologies, which helped me understand that word a bit better. This is good, given that my previous definition was something like "it's like when you define the word illustration by saying something that is illustrated." So yay. On the other hand, I found some of it pretty judgmental. I'll grant you that saying "6 A.M. in the morning" is absurd, but "twelve noon" is not. Please trust me on this one, unless you too have been stuck in an Italian airport because your ride misunderstood and is coming twelve hours from now.

Story + story + story = novel?

A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010)


This book won a bunch of awards. (Or a least the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer.) And I had been sitting on a Slate Audio Book Club podcast since last August. And fiiiiinally I got around to getting a copy.

Here's where it turns out that I had already read a bunch of the book. Probably a third or so. Damn New Yorker. About three stories in, I found myself really frustrated. None of this was really new. Sigh, grr, etc. But then, this is where the structure of the book kicked in and argued its case. For it's not just a collection of short stories. It's a collection of stories that tie together and interconnect. A character in one story reappears in another. And while it seems like the threads that connect them are weak and few in number, they build upon one another, and you realize that you're getting the rich backstory to a throwaway line from 150 pages earlier.

We start in what is roughly the present, then dive back, then way back, then hang out somewhere between the 70s and now for awhile, and eventually finish in the future. Each story uses its own devices - third person, first person, at least one tale told in the second-person you. Another is an article (of the DFW persuasion) detailing a celebrity interview we already know (from however many stories previous) ends badly. But then there's chapter 12, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," written by an adolescent daughter of characters we knew before. It's essentially a PowerPoint presentation, and it's tremendously effective for all that it's gimmicky. I waxed poetic about this to my boyfriend, venturing out into a reverie on why all the white space is so meaningful in a story about pauses and what is left unsaid. And so he's taken the fall for you, who only have to know that I had lots to say - of varying coherence - on the topic.

And I love the idea that in the not-so-distant future, this is how I children will tell stories. That in its own way, the PowerPoint can be a surprisingly eloquent medium. And then I lost it in the final story, which takes place roughly in that same period(ish). It's a mildly dystopic future NYC that looks quite a bit like Shteyngart's, in which handheld devices have kinda taken over (with a bit of Brooklyn hipster resistance thrown in too). For whatever reason, this felt overdone. Or at the very least out of place with the rest of the book. Ends get tied together, sure. But I didn't need this final story to feel the heft and power of the whole.

(next post coming after I actually listen to the audio book club podcast, scheduled for tonight's drive home...)