How we go on

Tell the Wolves I'm Home - Carol Rifka Brunt (The Dial Press, 2012)

Some books seem to drain you completely, drawing out all sorts of emotional and psychic energy and replacing it with a sort of melancholic emptiness. And of course they tend to be beautiful, because I don't think that trick would work if there wasn't beauty.

It's the mid-1980s, and AIDS is a mysterious and terrifying scourge. And adolescence - as in pretty much every time people - is mysterious and terrifying. So June has it rough, and enters into a relationship with the only person who could possibly have loved her lost uncle as much as she did.

Except what makes the book work is that it's about a whole host of other relationships too. June and her uncle, sure, in flashbacks to the moments before he knew he was sick, or before she knew, or before the end came. And June and Toby, of course. But siblings are maybe more important - June and her sister, and June's mother and uncle. Growing up and changing puts more pressure on those relationships than perhaps any others.

All of which is a weak description of some of the forces that left me so wrung out. Not in a crying way, although it probably would have helped to weep, but in the way that stresses how much more beautiful are the souls that were cracked and broken, and then stitched and glued back together.

I can't help myself

Loving Lady Marcia - Kieran Kramer (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2012)

I am sorry, but I'm not sure how you resist a romance novel series starring the Bradys, three sons and three daughters, brought together when their parents married and somehow formed a family... you get the idea. It's been probably 25 years since I've seen The Brady Bunch, so I'm sure there were allusions all over the place that I missed. (I barely noticed Alice.)

Anyway, that's pretty much the most important thing to say about the book. This one's about Marcia, unlucky in love as a girl, and now trying to prove her independence, except for this guy who keeps getting in the way. The rest of the siblings still to come...

Paris, with a stench

Nana - Emile Zola (trans. George Holden) (Penguin Books, 1972 [1880])

Once upon a time (college) a friend recommended this novel. She was a great reader of classic literature, and while I forget the details, this was among her very favorite.

Nana is a courtesan. Or more than a courtesan, rather a force of nature. She takes Paris by storm, attracting lovers and riches. And spending both just as freely. And around her, constellations of other courtesans and the well-born men who keep them, constantly trading places in some whirling dance. And anyone who ascends from the gutter to rise as high as Nana does... can her end come with anything other than a fall?

This novel is highly readable. It's well-paced and rarely bogs the reader. I confess that a lot of French literature makes me very sleepy - this did not. On the other hand, I can't tell if Zola hated women, or just hated sex. Nana is less a person than a creature, almost like an exquisite tiger kept by a prince. She acts according to her whims, pouting and smiling and changing moods on a dime. She gives up her body for money, or for laughs, or out of pity, or... Zola's descriptions often verge on the grotesque. And the sights and (especially) smells of anywhere that women gather... those go well past the tipping point.

These two qualities made for an unsettling reading experience. I enjoyed reading, and I was curious about the fates of the characters, and yet I found them all reprehensible (Zola's intent) and found Zola himself fairly repugnant. Why so hateful?

Good intentions

The Road to Wellville - T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin Books, 1993)

I have a fairly sensitive digestive tract, so the idea of a whole novel dedicated to Kellogg's Sanitarium, where the wealthy went to be indoctrinated with vegetarian ideals and all manners of enemas and the like.... well, it didn't strike me as the best plan.

But T.C. Boyle is a pleasure, and so I survived the icky parts that made me uncomfortable. Here we go -- we're at the turn of the last century, when Kellogg and Post and the like were making up new cereals and pills and everyone was a health nut looking for the key to living healthfully (and forever). Sound familiar? [Actually, one of the funniest things to me about reading this was how half of Kellogg's meals had major amounts of gluten.]

John Harvey Kellogg is a major character, as self-righteous and awful as you'd probably expect. Will Lightbody is one of his patients, dragged to the Sanitarium by his wife, who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever quack strikes her fancy. Charles Ossining has also come to Michigan to make his fortune in the health industry, except he finds that staying afloat in a glutted market is more difficult than he may have imagined.

And the games begin. A whole feast of minor (and mid-major) characters flood the stage, and an awful lot happens in a year. And each character appears on a roller coaster of ups and downs, suffering wild setbacks and imagining massive victories. Which is particularly exciting, since they are essentially all working at odds.

On a side note, was struck by Goodloe Bender, the confidence man. It is probably coincidence that he shares a last name with Ilf & Petrov's Ostap Bender, the comic con man of the early Soviet era. But I thought of him throughout. And since I've also been working on a project to organize my Russian books, now I want more than ever to go back and see that Bender in action.