Envy

...by Kathryn Harrison. That's the title of the mystery novel. Envy. This is a freaky book; I can't think of any other succinct description. Harrison goes inside the head of Will Moreland, a forty-something psychoanalyst who is himself dealing with: the death of his young son, sexual unease between him and his wife, an absentee twin, a sex-crazed patient, his twenty-fifth college reunion, his father's new art career and new mistress, and surprising news from an old lover. And boy, it all fits together with quite a bang.

It's a bit much really, but she ties Will's life together so neatly that it's hard to begrudge Harrison her fun.

A couple quotes:

Will pondering: "I worry that my tendency to insist upon connections leads me to find significance where there isn't any. Create meanings that don't exist outside of my consciousness."

On his father: "Every once in a while his father makes an observation meant to prove he's not out of touch, leaving Will feeling less impressed than protective of whatever inspires this earnestness, because this is the quality that's most palpable when his father produces what he believes to be evidence of his being hip ... and it's the same quality that insures he'll never be hip."

In my last post, I spoke about how the novel was both cerebral and sexy. The sexiness also has a very creepy edge to it. So it's a dark book, but then again, envy is a dark emotion. And the envy that turns out to be the driving force behind this plot is as dark as it gets.

Teaser

I'm about halfway through a quite fascinating novel. I'm really intrigued by it, and not quite sure where it's going to take me. I like that. And because the book itself is a bit of a tease, I'm not going to tell you the title yet.

It's a very cerebral book, with a lot of discussions. This makes sense, seeing as how the main character is a psychologist. On the other hand, another overarching theme of the book is sex. Will (that's his name, a hint) is utterly consumed with thoughts of sex, but attempts to intellectualize the obsession. Analysis is in its own way pretty sexy. And everyone around him is as thought-provoking as he is.

I've been reading with a raised eyebrow. I like that.

The Curious Incident

This month's book club selection was Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an autistic teen's tale of solving mysteries both big and small. The title refers to the event that kicks off the action, Christopher's discovery of his neighbor's stabbed dog. After being wrongly suspected of the killing, he vows to solve the mystery. He finds himself dealing with the more mysterious doings of the human heart.

Haddon, who worked with autistic children, shows what I have read called an acute understanding of the autistic mind. And Christopher is a compelling and fascinating character. Sympathetic to be sure, but even reading events through his eyes, you can see how he must be a handful for the adults around him. Achieving mutual understanding is a painstaking and ongoing process.

I haven't fully fleshed out another observation, and so it may sound ridiculous, but I also felt this novel evoked magical realism. Seen through Christopher's eyes, the whole world is a little fantastical.

That's it for commentary now, but if anything comes out of the book club, I'll report it as well. And there are plenty of new library books awaiting me, so posting may pick up in the next few weeks, despite the holiday madness.

I skipped a book

Despite composing an entry in my head while walking to the office, I completely forgot to post on a book that I read last week. I blame tryptophan blues.

The book was Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue, another of the guilty-pleasure-art-historical-fiction novels that I keep coming across and reading as soothing and romantic intervals. This one chronicles the history of a Vermeer, beginning in the present day and journeying backwards to its germination. What you end up with is a very different conception of Vermeer - and "the artist" in general - than in the more famous Girl with a Pearl Earring. (For example, this has what I see as a more realistic view of how Vermeer must have felt about his wife, considering the passel of children they had. On the other hand, the relationship between Vermeer and Griet was far more delicious to read.)

The main story was the impact of the painting on people's lives, specifically why an array of owners felt that they couldn't live without it. Each found what it was they were searching for in the girl. It reminded me that art is a dialogue between the product and the viewer.

So while not the most important or memorable of novels, a sweet way to spend a little bit of time during a busy holiday season...

Boldtype

Other people do book reviews too! (In fact, I hear there are even other book blogs, such as Bookslut, but I am lame and haven't searched out proof.)

Anyway, Boldtype is a monthly newsletter by Flavorpill, and mainly distinguishes itself with a hipster vibe and independent, non-commercial streak. Also, each month has a theme - and like most themes, some work better than others.

November's newsletter is about kinship and the complexity of family ties. Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking received a nod from them as well:

Through her grieving, Didion comes to understand that death is not just about losing someone else; it's also about the loss of oneself. Time had stopped for her the day she married Dunne; then she abruptly awoke to her 71-year-old self, bewildered and alone. Now she has to navigate life without her lifelong partner's advice; now she has to make medical decisions for their terminally ill daughter. It becomes painfully obvious just how much she is a part of the people she loved.

When I wax philosophical, I occasionally wonder to what extent we exist outside of our relationships with others and how we are perceived by them. And by that measure, losing a loved one is clearly losing a part of ourselves. Also, loss is always a love story. Definitely will make it on my list.

Nothing else *particularly* caught my eye, but isn't that how much collections of book reviews go? As I remember, and dig through my inbox, I will be trying to share with you some other people's book reviews.

Which reminds me, feel free to comment/e-mail me if you want to recommend books or put something up here.

Erin reads the LA Times: pre-Thanksgiving edition

Thus far in my Times reading:

"[A] very surprised William T. Vollmann received a National Book Award for fiction for his widely praised novel Europe Central," a book on my "to read" list; another likely future read, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, also won honors. In the same article Anne-Marie O'Connor considers whether book awards have become too commercialized to be meaningful anymore.

Norman Mailer nevertheless made an impassioned defense of recognizing literature:

Mailer said it is important to celebrate the kind of serious literature that has imbued societies with powerful but intangible rewards, but is endangered today.

"Would England be a great nation without William Shakespeare?" Mailer asked. "Would Ireland be entering a period of prosperity today without James Joyce?"

But before boys get to be Mailers (hopefully without the bad attitude about women), they have to grow up readers. And shockingly enough, they have their own book clubs. A Virginia middle school has launched Club BILI (Boys in Literacy Initiative), with boy-friendly selections. The goal?

to help close the literacy achievement gap between boys and girls. The club focuses on books that appeal specifically to boys and includes read-aloud sessions, visits to elementary schools to promote reading, and trips to see movies based on the books they read.

On average, boys score seven to 11 points lower than girls on standardized reading comprehension tests. The discrepancy isn't limited to the United States — a study by the University of York in Britain found it exists in 22 countries. Scientists say boys are born with biological differences that make them read later than girls, though they eventually catch up. Boys also have a harder time sitting still for long periods, studies show.

Prevailing attitudes toward reading don't help.

"Society has created an aura about reading that it's a girl thing and it doesn't fit into adolescents' persona," said Jodie Peters, a reading peer coach at the school who co-founded Club BILI after coming upon a book about the gap called "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys." "We want to fight that."

It also turns out that the available reading in schools doesn't appeal to boys: Teacher and co-founder Rob Murphy noted that "the boys really hated the books that we were making them read in classrooms. There were a lot of female protagonists, and it was hard for them to make the connection with some of the plot lines."

It's too bad to think that youth reading ends up gender segregated, but it's better than the kids not reading at all. And fortunately, there's always Harry Potter...

Fabulous Fabulist LA

In this past Sunday's LA Times Magazine, Alan Rifkin muses about the fantastical Los Angeles brand of literature that is "the only American fiction that's really worth reading." (Sorry, after this Saturday, the link probably won't work anymore)

I don't subscribe to that notion, and I'm not even completely sure that I would like most of what he mentions, but I think there is a Hollywood/LA/desert sensibility to the city's writing (and the city itself) that is a little like a shimmering mirage, one that can be beautiful or grotesque - or more often, both at once. According to Rifkin, it was more like this in the 30s through the 60s, but it's still there, and still inspiring authors.

Two thought-provoking quotes:
Rifkin on the difference between the coasts: "They get that we're closer than they are to the vortex."
Rafael Luevano, an area religion professor: "The Anglo mind might be giving way to the Latino influence of magic, myth and symbol."

And a brief selection of titles that come up as Rifkin's examples: Evelyn Waugh, "The Loved One;" Carolyn See (Carolline's favorite), "Golden Days" and "Slipstream;" Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat novels; Joy Nicholson, "The Road to Esmeralda"

A SoCal girl at heart, maybe I should give these books a try. I have read a Carolyn See novel - The Handyman - and can now see how the magical realism truly reflected this crazy city I call home.

Stop Hurting America

When Jon Stewart said that on Crossfire, I wanted to stand up and cheer. I can get so tired of punditry and fighting.

What I wish, however, was that more talking heads were actually coming up with concrete suggestions and ideas. Sort of like what Bill Maher did in his 2002 When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden, a collection of posters (updated versions of WWII ones) and essays about what the government would be saying if it chose to be straight with the American people. His suggestions run the gamut from obvious (we need to wean ourselves from our oil dependence) to politically incorrect (racial profiling in airports makes sense) to unexpected (ladies, give up your blood-soaked diamonds). It's dated in many ways - a lot has happened in 3 years, even if we haven't had another terrorist attack in the United States - but still carries relevance today.

In a twisted way, something I admire about Bill Maher is how frequently I disagree with him. Because he doesn't fit neatly into any ideological box that I can think of, I usually believe that he's sincere about what he says. And I believe that he is sincerely angry at our government for not asking - not demanding - more of us. This nation is at its greatest when it pulls together, standing as one even as it respects individuality; even as this is a little too let-the-mighty-eagle-soar for me, I agree with the main point. We can and should do more; and our leaders can and should tell us that. So kudos to Maher for being willing to anger all sides because he's fighting for what he truly believes in: America.

(Also, he's convinced me: I don't need diamonds.)

All Alone in the New South Africa

My first Nadine Gordimer novel - a book club selection - was None to Accompany Me, a transitional novel. It came just a few years after she won the Nobel Prize, and in the midst of the stupendous upheaval that accompanied the end of apartheid and white hegemony. The novel is set in this tumultuous time and details several lives, but concentrates on Vera Stark, a strong and practical lawyer who has worked for black land rights.

Hers isn't an uplifting tale, although it is a sensual one. A woman deeply in touch with her sexuality, she left her soldier husband for a sexy artist who takes his place, and continues to find sex with her husband and a new lover powerful and fulfilling. (Though much of this is told in flashback) She's not so good at the emotional level though, and the intensity of her lover/husband's need for her repels her, as do the intimacies of her children and other family friends. She is passionately independent: having none to accompany her is her choice, not that of those around her.

But beyond Vera, this is a novel - written in the immediacy of the moment, coming out the year of the election that brought Nelson Mandela's ANC to power - about lives in flux, about how victory up-ends expected roles, and brings both expected and unexpected change.

The book got a fairly sour review during our club's discussion, and I think that is both fair and unfair. This is a difficult book to like; however, I think that it gains power when thought of in the context of when it was written and pubished. And I think that its very difficulties, the challenges, matter as well. That said, I hear July's People is a more auspicious pick.

The Apple's Bruise

This collection of stories by Lisa Glatt is not for your lighthearted moods. It's not quite dark (unlike Mary Gaitskill's "Secretary," which has none of the whimsy injected into the film version) but it doesn't sugarcoat.

The men and (mostly) women in the stories are involved in an array of unbalanced relationships - between friends, lovers, and others who come in and out of one's life. The first, "Dirty Hannah Gets Hit by a Car," is about a little girl and the bullying older girl who torments her. Another story is about a couple attempting to recover from the husband's injuries from lightning strike; two others feature the internal struggle between maintaining one's integrity and giving into what will make a loved one happy, whatever happiness really means. It is not surprising that most of these relationships are also troubled, and while it's not clear precisely what the future holds for these various characters, it's difficult to imagine a series of happy endings. Satisfactory ones perhaps, but not happy.

Glatt's is an intriguing voice. And the stories easy to read. She has also written a novel, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, and I'll be reading that to see how she holds up over a longer length.

War is bad for children and other living things

I delved back into history by exploring one of my favorite twentieth-century topics - the less popular history of WWII. In 1997, Iris Chang released The Rape of Nanking, creating a stir among my roommate and several other Chinese-Americans in my freshman dorm. The massacre, rape, pillaging, and destruction of a city and hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants in 1937, years before WWII would come to Europe (and even longer before it would reach American shores) is a story that needed to be told, to resurrect memories of the past and learn from them.

Chang writes:

Whatever the course of postwar history, the Rape of Nanking will stand as a blemish upon the honor of human beings. But what makes the blemish particularly repugnant is that history has never written a proper end for the story.

And despite the attention that Chang and others brought to the topic, it is still, as she calls it, "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II."

As far as the writing goes, Chang does not spare the reader a full share in the horrors of what occurred. It's gruesome, and turned my stomach a few times. (What is frustrating is how familiar to other atrocities it sounds. How often in the course of human history have we treated our fellow man and woman so brutally. Why do we do this? Why do we continue to?) More prosaicallly, perhaps, she constructs her narrative in a clever and effective manner, retelling the events from the perspectives of the Japanese invaders, the Chinese victims, and the expatriate Westerners who risked their lives to help save the people of Nanking. Each section illluminates a different aspect of the invasion, massacre, and occupation.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I admire Chang's determination to tell a wrongly overlooked piece of history as well as her decision to use her voice to demand that the world avert their eyes no longer. If I have any qualms (and how difficult it is to voice them about a book so harrowing), they would regard the insertion of authorial emotion. Chang's insistence that the reader acknowledge the horrors of the Rape of Nanking is so strong that the Rape becomes almost an event unique in human history. She is careful in the epilogue to state that the Japanese are no more prone to evil than others, that "human being can [easily] be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." Yet that consciousness, that the Rape of Nanking took place in a war of atrocities, in a century of atrocities, in a history of atrocities, is sometimes missing, and could have strengthened the moral authority of the book.

I sound harsher than I mean to. It is a truly stunning work.

More Erin reads the LA Times...

This week the Business section: the Times reports that

Major book publishers have quietly begun selling directly to customers over the Internet, a move that could transform the trade by putting them in competition with online retailers such as Amazon.com.

It's not clear to me exactly what this will mean, but it could create a new amount of cooperation, rather than competition, between publishers and retailers. Either way, the losers in the transaction will probably continue to be independent bookstores. I can't say that I'm a big help to their business model, as I tend to browse rather than buy, and am cheap and check books out from the library instead of plunking down my cash. But on those rare occasions when I'm willing to purchase, I go small and local (unless I have a gift certificate to Borders).

Erin reads the LA Times so you don't have to

Today's Book Review section raves about Jane Smiley's new offering, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Referring to Smiley's "unmediated voice - blunt, uncompromising and witty," the review details the path that led the author to a year of reading that spanned the history of the novel, and what she learned about what has changed, and more importantly what has stayed the same. It's a defense of the novel:

if there's one thing she believes, it's that reading fiction broadens our sympathies and stretches our imagination so we understand that even bad guys have their reasons.

I heartily enjoyed listening to Smiley speak back in April and so plan to gather even more of her thoughts by reading this book.

Also, Adam Gopnik, of New Yorker fame, has branched out into the world of young adult literature with The King in the Window, about an American boy's adventures in Paris. I loved (and heartily recommend - and may even lend) his collection of Parisian esays Paris to the Moon, and thus agree with the reviewer: "The only question ... is an obvious one: How long must readers wait before Gopnik writes a Parisian novel aimed at his legions of adult fans?"

The pen is mightier than the machine gun

The LA Times Magazine takes a look at the recent spate of memoirs written by soldiers returning from the action in Iraq. After hemming and hawing a little bit about the quality of an immediate response, without the years of gestation and rumination that apparently make for a good war memoir, Michael Slenske decides that these books are good for the American people, who need to have the real war brought into their homes. For confirmation, he turns to none other than John McCain, who opines:

Most historians would agree that definitive histories are written at a minimum of 20 to 30 years after a conflict is over. But that doesn't detract from a personal account of an individual's involvement. ... Firsthand experiences are always helpful in contributing to the knowledge of people who haven't been there.

Plus, speaking as a historian, I know that these memoirs will be a treasure trove for the historians of the future when they write about the Iraq war. (Of course, they will have to take into account people's biases and motivations, the pressures of publishing, etc. but good historians will do that. Good readers now should attempt to do so as well.)

My favorite description of any of the memoirs comes courtesy of Kirkus Reviews, which said of Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq: "If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book." The Times article also includes a great excerpt.

I don't know that I'll be reading any of these any time soon, but I definitely agree that we should be listening to the soldiers as an important voice in the conversation on the war.

Nostalgia

One thing that I don't recommend when you're reading a fictional memoir about high school is to receive several boxes of childhood stuff from your parents who are moving. This past Monday, somewhere in the middle of Lee's (from Prep, see last entry) sophomore year, my dad appeared with a box of dance trophies, a pile of random school papers, certificates, and diplomas, assorted other stuff, and all four of my high school yearbooks. I spent part of the evening with the book from my senior year, finding all the pictures of me, marvelling again at my classmates who were votes "most popular," "best hair," etc. (I didn't even remember quite a few of them), and wondering about all of the ways my high school experience was both wonderful and terrible. How much I could identify with Lee (and could identify the popular perfect people at TOHS who had their counterparts in Prep). How much I have grown since then, and how much I cherish that growth, but yet can still miss how much I felt part of that community.

In the end, I felt that it allowed me to finish reading Prep in a different way; it complicated the novel a lot. You can both love and hate high school, and I think that Sittenfeld should have emphasized that more. She should have teased out more of how some people only belong to a community when they are physically removed from it. Above all, though, I wish she hadn't ended with a little "where are they now?" about some of her main characters, although thankfully she spared us her protagonist's future.

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book. It was a fun read, replete with all the secondhand discomfort and recognition of the embarrassing things that you did when you were a teenager. It'll be interesting to see what Sittenfeld - currently teaching at a private school in DC, just up the street from my old apartment - takes on next, and how she grows (or doesn't) as a writer.