Two lives, interwoven

Earthly Powers - Anthony Burgess (Simon and Schuster, 1980)

Backstory: for my 21st birthday, I got a collection of things from my birth year -- a bottle of port (still unopened), a VHS copy of Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (foreign language Academy Award winner), and a first edition of this novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker.

Cut to now, when I finally decided that while just having the book was nice and all, I really ought to read it. And at over 600 pages, it was a slog. (Especially with YA dystopias and engagements and colds and holidays and such to distract me.) And my description was probably less than glowing: "It's about a gay writer in the 20th century and his brother-in-law the Pope."

This is more or less accurate. It's about two intertwined families throughout the century, as narrated by the aging homosexual novelist. His brother was a comedian, his sister best described (for the moment) as the wife of an Italian musician. Said musician had one brother a businessman in Chicago, another a priest, and a sister who was a nun. Toomey (the author's) family came from British and French Catholic stock, and so faith (and sexuality) are interwoven throughout the novel.

We know from the start that Carlo the priest will eventually ascend to the head of the Church. But the path there is convoluted for them all. And because I read in small doses, Toomey's recollections from 1918 to roughly the early 1970s seemed to take almost the 50 years they spanned. Which is not to say the writing wasn't sharp and interesting, it was just dense. And heavy. It's an accomplished and successful family, but also a somewhat cursed one, and people's seemingly small and benevolent actions consistently have violent and dreadful ramifications that could not be foreseen. It gets a little rough.

But all in all still fascinating. And a lovely birthday gift, even all these years later.

Surveys!

Wife 22 - Melanie Gideon (Ballantine Books, 2012)

Another example of a book that got on my list somehow. I was at the library, trying to find something (unwarlike) for a weekend plane ride. And this was what was on the shelves. Of course, then I stuck to Thucydides on the plane, so got to this almost a week after I got back.

But then I blew through it. I didn't want to put it down.

Wife 22 is Alice, a Bay Area woman approaching a mid-life crisis. At the same time, her husband and children are having crises of their own. In her free-wheeling state of wondering what comes next, she finds an invitation in her spam folder to participate in a marriage study. The questions are open-ended (the researcher assigned to her case compares his job to what they do to songs at Pandora) and cover the past, the present, and the future. And as she goes through, her interactions with the researcher get increasingly personal.

Chapters are usually short, and the plot is presented in a variety of forms: first-person narrative, texts, emails, survey responses (without the questions!), and playwritten scenes. It's a difficult gimmick to pull off without feeling gimmicky, but I felt like it worked here, even when some of the social media facts felt un-true.

Don't want to give much more away, but I was enraptured by this tale of how a life and a love look from outside and from within.  

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.

Vaguely disagreeable olde England

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (Laurel Edition, 1944, 1945)

It's kind of fun to read old paperbacks. This one cost 75 cents when it was printed in 1965 (I think) and it is falling apart something pretty impressive. I think I'll be its final reader.

That sentiment is probably not true for the novel itself. (Obviously.) I am not crazy about Waugh, and it was a bit of a slog at the beginning. Lots of chummy gay college boys or something. Someone told me to not bother with the read and go straight to the movie, and I was sorely tempted. But I was glad to have stuck it through. Because after a spell it gets easier, and then suddenly, it gets much much easier. And without offering spoilers, I'm perhaps a little troubled by why I might find certain plots more agreeable than others.

That said, I still didn't have much affection or sympathy for any of the characters. It's been a week since I finished reading, and I had forgotten the narrator's name. He seems ... so distant, I suppose.

But! Onto the film adaptations!

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.

Oh dear

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon (Vintage Contemporaries, 2006)


Reading this book was either a fantastic idea or a kinda terrible one, I'm not sure which. Haddon is the The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-Time author - and this was a book that I liked less than everyone around me. Which meant I hemmed and hawed about this one. But amid all the ways I get distracted from my bookshelf, I'm really trying to make an effort to clear out those shelves and make room for something new. So here we go.

It's your typical dysfunctional British family, I think. Dad's retired and trying to figure out what to do with himself, Mum is working in a shop (and that's not all), and the kids are both in bumpy relationships. Katie decides to get married, and this makes everyone crazy, b/c the man in question is considered a working-class dolt, more or less. Except "makes everyone crazy" brings me to pause, because the bigger story in this book - for me at least - is whether or not George (Dad) is indeed going mad.

One day coming out of the shower, he sees a rash of sorts on his hip, and immediately diagnoses himself with cancer and undergoes an ever-escalating set of measures to distract himself from the question, to avoid getting it looked at, to get it treated (maybe) by a doctor, to keep it hidden, to tell everyone, etc. In short, George's condition looks quite a bit like mine. Which made him as a character particularly touching. And infuriating.

He makes lists, he passes out, he makes decisions that run the gamut from "sure, I can understand that" to "God no, please someone stop his brain right now." What's sort of fun though, although "fun" is probably the wrong word (although the book is funny too, don't get me wrong), is that his family members are each engaged in the same sort of mental gymnastics. Which makes me think that maybe I'm not alone. On the other hand, they also have no time or space for sympathy for his plight, which pushes right up against the reassurance of my last sentence. Sigh.

And here, a fairly spot-on description of one of the (many) mental processes that accompany this kind of panic attack: "He assumed ... that he was going to suffer some kind of organ failure. It seemed inconceivable that the human body could survive the pressure created by that kind of sustained panic without something rupturing or ceasing to function."

But on the other hand, the whole book isn't one prolonged exposure to the howling fantods (oh and go here for more). It's also several lovely moments of self-realization, self-delusion, and joining and rejoining of bonds between family/lovers/etc. Like this happy little moment: "We're just the little people on top of the cake. Weddings are about families. You and me, we've got the rest of our lives together." And not to give too much away, but George.... I think he's going to be okay.

Hope & Faith

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka (Penguin, 2005)


So the two sisters are Hope & Faith (except the family is Ukrainian, so they are Nadezhda and Vera) - this is important enough that it gets spelled out. Their elderly widower father decides to marry a voluptuous Ukrainian immigrant, to help her get her papers. And because he is in his mid-80s, and utterly infatuated with this woman who makes him feel like a man again. The sisters, unsurprisingly, are not excited about this plan.

So he marries, and then everything (predictably) goes to hell. And much of the book is a tale of how they are going to get rid of this monstrous woman, sprinkled with occasional questions of whether one should admire her tenacity and/or have sympathy for her striving. But what it reminded me of was - of all things - Catch-22. I felt that same profound discomfort and unease while reading, that same sense of being trapped in an illogical world, where life was profoundly unfair. Through the looking glass, I suppose. Or like life in the USSR, for that matter. I kept reading because I wanted to know how it played out, but I felt... well, icky.

Then, somehow, it picks up a lot of speed. Maybe because you start learning more about the trauma of the family's past. This is a family whose origins can be found in the Terror, and the terror famine, and then the War and the German camps. And somehow, being reminded of all that made me feel somehow safer. I grew to believe that Lewycka had too much sympathy for her characters to make them truly suffer again. Writing that, I can see how it doesn't make much sense, but it's how I felt all the same.

And, because in a way it both wraps up the novel and a broader project in my life to consider the importance of the narratives we create to make sense of our experiences:

I had thought there was a happy story to tell about my parents' life, a tale of triumph over tragedy, of love overcoming impossible odds, but now I see that there are only fleeting moments of happiness, to be seized and celebrated before they slip away.

Every Unhappy Family

Freedom - Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

The opening lines of Anna Karenina came into my mind unbidden after I read the final page of Freedom. It occurred to me that there is something tragically beautiful in the tale of an unhappy marriage. Tragic, obviously. But there's real beauty there too. In the misunderstandings and the fears left unspoken, or spoken backwards. Why is there so much poetry in it?

Anyway. I liked this novel quite a bit more than I expected. I liked The Corrections, and this promised to be pretty similar (and was!), so I'm not sure why I was surprised. But I was all the same. Maybe I just didn't think I was in the mood to like something that received so much hype.

But Franzen writes the type of novel that tends to lower all my defenses. It is big and sprawling and delves deeply into the inner stories of most - if not all - of its characters. (Why do we not really get to know Jessica Berglund though?) Benefitting from something approaching omniscience, we get to see the bigger picture that the characters can't. And to wonder if it will become clear to them. And if such a thing really matters.

I suppose it is to be expected that I would think of Tolstoy, as Patty's experience of Natasha Rostova guides her thinking about fidelity to her husband. (Franzen - or Patty at least - provides a very different reading from my own about the triangle(s) of Natasha-Pierre-Andrei-that other jackass.)

I made a couple other notes, mainly about amusing cultural references like Conor Oberst, but nothing of great note. I am sorry to have forgotten a few of the other themes I had wanted to touch upon. The trouble with big books, I guess.

Airborne Toxic Event

White Noise - Don DeLillo (1985, Viking Penguin)

At some point while reading, I started a mental list of "Things this book reminded me of," but because I didn't write it down, I now only remember Catch-22. This is disappointing, b/c I was planning to arrange this whole post around this list.

Instead, I'll have to talk about my vague sense of dis-ease while reading. I have to figure it was carefully cultivated. The talk of death and emergencies, the constant hum of non sequitur from background televisions or radio, the terribly sophisticated contentiousness of the children, and the regular interspersion of brand names... ugh, I feel a little uncomfortable again just thinking of it all.

[Sorry, just took a break to have dinner and also to randomly watch this video of my '07 Ducks]

Okay, in short. Dude invented the field of Hitler studies, which he teaches at a Midwest college. On his fifth marriage to a woman who has also had several. Many many children from all the various pairings - some live with them, others don't but make appearances. Then there's an "airborne toxic event" that forces the family to evacuate, and also prompts a couple of my favorite moments of the book. In one, Gladney tries to reassure his family that things'll be fine b/c this sort of thing happens to poor people of color, not to college professors. In another, an organization charged with planning simulations of emergency response is attempting to respond to the real thing, in order to practice for their real work of simulations. (The later simulation is also kind of awesome.) Gladney ends up exposed to the toxins, which spins off into how both he and his wife respond to the threat of death.

Among the points of interest were Gladney's assertion early in the novel that "all plots tend to move deathward," which he isn't even sure he believes but which he revisits again and again; the ridiculous discussions Gladney has with a fellow teacher, the last of which poses the question of "how does a person say good-bye to himself;" and the need of non-believers for believers to exist somewhere out there.

So in the end you end up with a satire, of a world that doesn't feel dangerous or meaningless per se, but which is deeply discomfiting. It's funny, but somehow not humorous. It's also strangely dated. None of DeLillo's themes have been rendered irrelevant by the trends of the last 25 years, and yet they feel so worn, as though we've already grown weary of them. Too many readers have followed in DeLillo's footsteps, perhaps, so what may be legitimately original is sadly no longer so for me.

A portrait of the president as a young man

Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama (Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004)

I'm not the first to ask, but I still have to wonder if Obama thought he would run for president when he wrote this book. Not so much because of the cocaine and racial tension, but because he is so thoughtful and honest (at least, he comes off as honest) about his own personal struggles with his identity. I don't read a lot of political memoir, but I gather than overcoming one's demons is a popular trope in the field. But this seems like more than that. It's a different kind of journey.

Anyway, it's frustrating to now, a year after Obama's inauguration, be reading the memoir that everyone else read back in 2004 or at least by 2007. In part because there was a lot I already knew, but in part because you realize which parts didn't garner attention. I heard about Jeremiah Wright (obviously) but not about how what it was like to search for a spiritual home while working with - and seeing the flaws of - so many of Chicago's church leaders. Or about what family meant to his relatives in Africa, and the tensions of responsibilities. I also found myself wondering so much why I always thought of his mother's daughter as his sister, but his father's children as his half-siblings. What are my own biases?

He incorporates a lot of dialogue, which gives the book a feeling more sometimes of a novel, b/c you know much of the dialogue is reimagined in order to get at what Obama felt to be fundamentally true, even if it's not quite what happened. This is something I've always found fascinating about autobiography.

And Obama is often a beautiful writer, and as I said before, a thoughtful one. Such as in passages like this:

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

It's been a challenging year for Obama, and I can't guess how the remainder of his term will play out. But reading this book reminded me why it was so important that we elect him.

A heartbreaking work of ... oh, wait

A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews (Counterpoint, 2004)

I've already told the story of how excited I was to finally track down this book (with the correct author and title), and I even managed to related to hockey, since that's what I do. What I haven't done is actually write about the experience of reading the book.

It was like one extended sucker punch. I felt so protective of Nomi, so much desire to somehow fix it for her. And I couldn't. I mean, obviously, since Nomi is a character, but still.

Let me back up. It's the 1970s, in Canada, in a small Mennonite community not that far from the US border. Nomi, at 16, lives with her dad, because her mom and sister each left within months of each other, about three years earlier. Both father and daughter are broken, utterly. Nomi deals like you might expect: she fantasizes about New York, smokes cigarettes and pot, listens to rock music, has an older boyfriend, shaves her head, gets in trouble at school.

But it's more than that. Toews elegantly handles what may actually be the easy part: showing how the community and its sensibility has damaged her family. While Nomi isn't the only teen who rebels, clearly, she is further adrift than the others. What makes Nomi's story so powerful is that she is so often unflinching in her assessment of how things have fallen apart, and yet the ways in which she tries, when she needs to, to spare herself or her father or her best friend the worst of it. To be cliche about it, she reminds me of nothing so much as a wounded animal that's still trying to be tough.

I didn't even bother trying to note remarkable and representative passages. There's something on virtually every page. At random:

...every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.

Hmm. The problem here is that they are too long to reproduce here, and they lack context. But to give you the best sense of it, here Nomi explains the impossible decision her father would have faced had her mother stayed in town in the face of excommunication: shun his wife, or leave his faith? "He was stuck in the middle of a story with no good ending. He had the same disease I had." You're not sure if you should pray, since prayer has done so much harm already, but if you did pray, you would pray for a cure, a way for them to find a suitable ending to the story.

WASPS!

Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor - Tad Friend (Little, Brown & Co., 2009)

Carolline says I am obsessed with WASPs. This may be true. I have fantasies about living in a Ralph Lauren ad. (That pic is not the best example. Anyhoo...) I also really like cable knit sweaters. However, I am pretty sure I do not live well on the East Coast. So....

Tad Friend is a staff writer for the New Yorker, so obviously I like his writing. (I don't understand why he's their Calif. writer when he's based in Brooklyn, but whatever.) He's also a Wasp. (I like it better all capitalized, like in the previous paragraph, but I'll bow to his usage for the rest of this post.) He's from what may prove to have been the last generation of Wasps to actually be Waspy. The book is a memoir of his family, on both parents' sides, and the wacky, wonderful, and often tragic turns their lives took. I added it to my list based on a recommendation that made it sound hilarious. It is not hilarious. It is however entertaining and often touching.

Among the themes that appear again and again: abandonment, emotional distance, drinking, thrift, not quite living up to promises of success, divorce and remarriage, homes that had names, and lots and lots of nicknames. The narrative is told out of chronological order, which was absolutely the right way to tell it. There are ways in which there is a grand narrative of Tad moving from childhood through to his post-college years, failed relationships, and eventual marriage. But mostly we move back and forth through years and between families. I had trouble keeping people straight at times, even with the very welcome family tree at the beginning of the book.

In some ways an elegy to a world that is slipping away, I think Friend ultimately paints a hopeful picture of the future. Not because he has embraced his Wasp heritage, or rejected it, but because he has made his peace with it.

I don't read a lot of memoirs - it's not really my genre, which is strange since it's history, after all - but I liked this one. It felt like the world it described, and allowed me to feel it too.

(PS - Friend's appraisal of certain attitudes toward privilege and success and working too hard made me aware of the ways in which places like Stanford still embody parts of the Wasp ethos. This could be a longer discussion, but I'll leave it at that.)

Family Histories

Rain of Gold - Victor Villaseñor
Houston: Arte Publico, 1991

A friend, recommending this to me, describes it as the book that made him want to be a history major. (For me, that was pretty much a foregone conclusion - probably because of this book from my childhood that no one else has ever heard of - but I had a similar experience reading this.) Much as I love history, these kinds of books are few and far between, so I decided I would go find Rain of Gold after my semester ended.

And then I found out it was 550 pages long. And I questioned my resolve. There's a lot I want to read coming up; was I sure I wanted to devote so much time to this book about a Mexican family that eventually settles in California? But then I sped through the book. I could barely put it down. Victor Villaseñor's parents are the two protagonists in this unlikely love story, though the lifeblood of the story likely belongs to his grandmothers, two women who battle to keep their families alive and together through upheaval and violent change. The foreword, just over 2 pages long, is important, so don't skip it. Here he explains how these stories were part of the air he breathed growing up, and how he brushed them aside as he got older, as we all do, until he had a family of his own and realized "how empty I'd feel if I couldn't tell my own children about our ancestral roots." But even more importantly, he explains why the narrative is told in a melodramatic style that is sometimes reminiscent of magical realism. It makes sense then.

What works even as everything threatens Juan Salvador and Lupe and their families again and again is that you know the end - you know that eventually there will be Victor, and then this book. And as a result, history seems fated, preordained.

And finally, while the scenes is Mexico when Lupe is a little girl are perhaps the most vivid of the entire book, I was particularly interested in life after the two families make it to Southern California sometime in the early 1920s. My family first settled in Los Angeles around 1950, so learning more about what it was like - for Californians of all races - during the Prohibition era was fascinating.

Nothing lasts forever, not even an Infinite Summer

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996

I finished the book three weeks ago, but wasn't ready to write about it, to really be finished with it. But it seems like there's no better day that on the first anniversary of Wallace's death to take a stab at wrapping up my time with the novel. For now anyway. I won't try to memorialize DFW here, since Infinite Summer (and others, I am sure) have already done a far better job of that. But know he's been very much on my mind.

But the novel. My book is battered and bruised. It was a little roughed up before, since it was a borrowed used copy. But now I'm a little embarrassed to give it back. I also don't want to have to return it. This is the physical copy that I read. That means something. (I also feel this way about my copy of Fall of a Sparrow, which is why I spurned my mom's gift of a nice hardback edition.)

I have run my mind ragged trying to figure out what happened and what it all means. I'd come close to an epiphany, and then it would shimmer and disappear. And that's okay. I don't really mind anymore. I'll read it again someday, and maybe I'll see something new. I'm sure I will see something new. But it won't offer all the answers either.

I mainly just read and read. And didn't stop and note funny quotes or moments that I particularly wanted to go back to. So when I did write on my bookmark, you would figure those moments would be important. And they are, except now I look at them and I don't know what I wanted to say. What I do know is that they are all about Hal. Hal through the lens of Mario. Hal and sadness and irony and and Avril's awesome definition of existential ("vague and slightly flaky"). And Hal & Mario talking almost past each other.

'I feel like you always tell me the truth. You tell me when it's right to.'
'Marvelous.'
'I feel like you're the only one who knows when it's right to tell. I can't know for you, so why should I be hurt.'
'Be a fucking human being for once, Boo. I room with you and I hid it from you and let you worry and be hurt that I was trying to hide it.'
'I wasn't hurt. I don't want you to be sad.'
'You can get hurt and mad at people, Boo. News-flash at almost fucking nineteen, kid. It's called being a person. You can get mad at somebody and it doesn't mean they'll go away.'

It's so.... it's too big to talk about. I wish I could, and it makes me crazy a little that I can't. If I had specific questions to answer - if this were an essay exam where someone asked me something like "Compare and contrast the archetypal roles that mother- and father-figures play for the main characters" I would have something to say. But to just try to get over 1000 pages into a single post, or even several posts, it's too much.

This is water

(aka an update on Erin's own Infinite Summer)

I'm a member of that generation that has a hard time with sincerity. Whenever feelings get a little too real, we need to say something caustic, ironic, to back away. Is this a generational thing, or a cultural thing, or just part of being young? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found it again yesterday while reading about Mario Incandenza:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. (p. 592, btw)

And that's the thing about Madame Psychosis for him (and prob not just him) - she talks about "stuff that is real."

Because I suspect we all secretly crave that sincerity, even as we are embarrassed by it.

So this is the real thing I read 2 pages before, about Mario, that just pulled and pulled at me:

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

Oh, and the title for this post? That's from here.

"On beauty and being wrong"

On Beauty - Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2005

I like Zadie Smith. I like her characters. They are rich and interesting and thoughtful and flawed and confusing. And not really all that much like me. At least, I don't find myself identifying with their foibles. Which is maybe why they interest me so much - they are entirely new people to learn about.

So On Beauty... is about a family. The middle-aged British professor, who is sympathetic despite being an intellectual prick, so far as I can tell, and engaging in a whole variety of stupid and hurtful actions. His wife, described by another character as being like an "African queen," big in body and spirit. Three children, all finding their own identities and wrestling with questions of being mixed-race and middle class. And another family, that of another professor, a bitter rival of the first. And the ways their families mix and interact.

In both this novel and White Teeth, I felt Smith was far stronger in developing her characters and setting a stage than in moving the plot along. The climaxes seemed strange and perhaps forced, as though they couldn't live up to everything that came before. But if you read more for character and less for plot, that becomes less of an issue. You have to leave the characters and hope for the best for them, rather than trust that Smith will bring them where you want them to be.

PS - a favorite moment: "When [the cab] arrived, the driver's door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question: 'Is it you?' "
I don't know why, but I love that.

"This bright brute is the gayest"

...of his novels. This is how Nabokov described King, Queen, Knave, which he first wrote in exile in the late 1920s and which his son translated into English in the 1960s. Set in Berlin, the king is the moneyed entrepreneur Dreyer. He's a bit of a buffoon, like the caricatures of Germans in French literature from the late nineteenth century. (I did a paper on this in grad school. Don't ask. Actually, you can ask. It was really fun to read kids' books that made fun of Germans in Alsace.) The queen is his wife, Martha. She's kind of a cipher, beautiful and cold and bewitching. Except maybe also not that attractive. The knave is our naive (and any pun there is an accident of translation) Franz, Dreyer's nephew, who has come to Berlin for a job at his uncle's store and soon becomes a fixture in the Dreyer household.

I started reading and got swept up in it immediately. I loved the way it was so much a product of a gay and glittering and yet not-so-glamorous time. And so entirely Russian, even as it was set in Berlin with German characters. But then, after a few days, I found myself distracted, and picking up other reading material when I got into bed. The last 50-60 pages came well after the rest. And it shouldn't have gotten boring. I put it down right in the middle of a murder plot. So what happened?

I can't answer the question. I - or the book - just lost momentum. Sometimes that happens. When I finally did get to those last few pages, it came together in a perfectly satisfactory way. I can't complain. But all the joy and passion in my reading was gone. Strange. But still, for the first 100 or so pages in particular, it was a delight.

Oh, and this was my fourth and final selection for the Russian Reading Challenge. I do have one more bonus entry though before the year is through.

Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

I've had some time to get over being disturbed by the whole Drench-a-Wench thing. Certain commenters didn't help, but I am being zen about it all. And so I finished reading Jess Winfield's My Name is Will.

I enjoyed the novel - Winfield is witty and evocative. And his two young Wills are human and flawed and clever and likable. (I have also had fun listening to Winfield on the NYT's Book Review podcast, which has utterly out of date archives, and on KQED Forum.)

Since watching him and the rest of the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform Hamlet was such a part of my childhood - and really the only part of the Faire other than the cinnamon sticky buns and lemon shaved ices that I liked - I feel this odd possessiveness. Like, I knew this guy (or my mom did? Whatever.) back before other people did.

So, reading the novel ended up being only about 20% reading the novel - and I'm sorry about that! I wish I could have experienced just as it is, like most readers probably will. Instead it was revisiting my childhood. (I would have been 6 at the time of the book, and hanging out in the Glade reading a totally unperiod book and sulking about how my costume wasn't pretty enough. And 2 or 3 years later the Agoura Faire would be bulldozed and I would be dancing and the Faire would be irrevocably past.) I was amazed by how clearly I remembered the small details - the potholes and the "5 miles per hour" signs at the entrance to the site, the huge tankers that sprayed water on the paths to keep the dust down, the rough locations of various stages and areas - that Winfield mentions during Willie's drug-induced stay at the Novato Faire. And it reminded me again of how different my early childhood was from that of my friends, whose parents hadn't spent the weekends playing high-caliber dress-up. And reminded me of all the things I did and didn't like about the experience. And more than anything, how it shaped me, and how long ago it was. How I am 3 years older than the swaggering Russian diplomat who came to Elizabeth's court and met my mother. And how strange it is to see my childhood in print.

So I guess Jess that I have to thank you for that.

Oh dear lord

From My Name is Will:

He probably would get laid at the Faire. He'd been to a Renaissance Faire once before, near L.A., a few month ago - May, was it? - and he'd gotten lucky, way lucky. Jesus, he'd fantasized about it dozens of times since. There was this game, Drench-a-Wench, that involved sling-shotting a wet sponge at an array of wanton maids sitting on a little bleacher of hay bales. If you hit one, you got a kiss. He'd wondered how long that game could possibly last with a new STD being discovered every day. Just for fun, he'd played. [He hits and kisses some blonde, and that was fine and then notices an exotic brunette checking him out, and she says...] "Truly, I am shocked, sir. Paying for thy kisses when thou couldst surely get them free."

Lovely. Just lovely. Anyone wondering how I came to exist, there's your answer right there.

When someone else's life hits too close to home

Yesterday I had some free time between work and a meeting, so I happily sat down with my tea latte (and later a scone) and finished John Lanchester's Family Romance. Somehow I had it set in my mind that it was a novel, so I was surprised when I first opened it and discovered it was a memoir of the author's English & Irish expat parents. And their secrets.

Lanchester's mother is the more compelling parent, not only because she had an enormous secret and a fascinating pre-mom life. She was also a more dominant character in his life - and much of the book is about how Lanchester makes peace with her and all of who she was. His father is somehow blurrier, and I found him sorrowful, a man who never stood up and made his own destiny.

It's a fascinating book about relationships and families. The secrets we tell our loved ones, and the secrets we allow to be told. But the final 50 pages I read on Wednesday changed the whole book for me, and turned it into something far more personal. Suddenly I could identify intensely with Lanchester - as he begins to write about his struggles with anxiety, struggles that began while in grad school at Oxford. Now in addition to being an only child and having a mother with a past that she didn't share in full (although I made that connection late) we both knew what it was like to suffer through a panic attack, and to know that another one was right around the corner. To live with that strange and unreasonable dread. His descriptions of the physiological and the mental response were so real to me, I find myself floundering as I search for the right way to phrase the recognition and empathy I felt. But now it was no longer a book about him, it was also a book about me, and that altered my reaction to it in unexpected ways.

So, since I can't recapture what the book was to me before, I will share a few passages from the first half of the book that struck me:

about his father - "The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person, almost as much as loving them does, but differently. Love has many textures. W.H. Auden said - it was one of his most beautiful ideas - that when you love people you are seeing them as they really are."

hmm, this one is also about his father - "You may think that most people live inside their own heads, but plenty of them don't. In fact, if you do think that, you're almost certainly one of the minority whose primary life is internal."

Strange how his mother was the more vibrant, real of the pair, and yet it was in writing about his father that Lanchester most touched me.