Drama in Verse

The Golden Gate - Vikram Seth (Faber & Faber, 1986)

It's a novel. Composed of sonnets. 300 pages of sonnets. All of the ababccddeffegg rhyme scheme, although he fudges some rhymes. Oh, and at the end, we see "pain" over and over again. But we also have rhymes for words like Dinkelspiel (hey Dink!) so I can be in a forgiving and still admiring mood.

Here's the thing. This book languished on my shelf for years because I am bad at reading poetry. I get bored, I meander. But when I finally picked it up, I was shocked at how quickly I got into the rhythm of reading it. Occasionally I'd have to stop to admire the construction, or I'd trip over some perceived awkwardness of meter, but the story is so compelling.

I kept saying it was like "Eugene Onegin meets a CW show," but in fairness, Onegin itself is like a great big soap opera. (Seth takes a moment to ask the reader's forgiveness for presuming to follow in Pushkin's footsteps.) My fiance quickly gave up as I tried to get through the interweaving story lines (this guy is dating this chick and his friend is with her brother except then there's a cat and also... etc.) which was disappointing, because I wanted someone to join me in fascination of the train wreck of these people's lives.

People, by the way, who weren't all that different from me. It's the early 80s, so the economic and political climate is a little different, sure, but you're still dealing with highly educated men and women in their late 20s, trying to figure out their place in the world, often colliding together and breaking apart.

So as not to ruin the fun of the plot for anyone who might actually pick up the book one day, I'll leave it there. But I found it shockingly moving. And also quite funny. Much of a chapter concerns the battle between boyfriend John and the grumpy cat who first laid claim to Liz, years earlier. (Made me glad my two boys love each other.) And you can pretty much guess who's going to win that one.

Undiscovered County

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America - Bill Bryson (Perennial, 1989)

This was my other travel book, although I didn't get to it until the plane ride home. But it was nice to "return" to America with Bryson and his journey from the center of the country out to the edges and back again.

This isn't my favorite of the books I've read - the humor seems a little meaner somehow - but it was fascinating to live vicariously as he drove down little roads and got lost. His search for the perfect small town was marred by bland, homogenous motels and diners as well as by crassly commercial tourist traps. And yet he regularly came across beautiful and interesting sites.

Coming from California, I have to remind myself (if I bother) that there's a whole rest of the country that sees my state as pretty much a foreign land. And this was likely even more the case a quarter century ago. So I'm glad for Bryson's reminder that there's a pretty fascinating (and boring, or fascinatingly boring) land out there between the coasts.

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.

A Glittering Void

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2004)

...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.

First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.

The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.

Murder and strange times

Duplicate Keys - Jane Smiley (Fawcett Columbine, 1984)

I like Jane Smiley a lot. I haven't read all that much by her, but seeing her was pretty much always a highlight of the LA Times Festival of Books. So when I finished 2666 and needed something witty and lighter, I saw this on my bookshelf and grabbed it.

Then I read the back cover.

It's about the aftermath of a murder within a circle of friends in NYC, circa 1980. I thought to myself, this is probably not the right book for right now, but I read it anyway. So really, is it the book's fault that I didn't like it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm discovering that I don't like much of the fiction that I read from the 70s and early 80s. I can't identify with the period, and it just seems so foreign. So that's probably part of it.

Anyway, it's a pretty good mystery. Alice, a librarian (and I'm not sure what I think about the portrayal of the profession), finds two friends shot when she comes over to water the plants. While part of a tight-knit group of friends, she finds that the group's bonds have been stretched to (and past) the breaking point. And while she is trying to find her way through the aftermath of the killings, she also shows that she's essentially in love with her best friend, is still trying to recover from her divorce, likes or doesn't like the new guy she starts sleeping with, etc. I found Alice's mind difficult to keep up with - she was a big bundle of self-contradiction. Which would normally be fine, but it didn't work for me this time. Also? I totally knew who the killer was. Maybe it wasn't supposed to come as a surprise?

While Alice is being vaguely bipolar, she also has a lot (a LOT) of conversation with her friend Susan, the longtime partner of one of the dead men. And Susan has this to say:

But what if your self damages the other person? People look so discrete, as if they are a certain way. But obviously, a lot of the time that you're mad at them for being a certain way, it's actually you who's making them be that way.

Hmm. Food for thought. And now I have to go soak this book so I can document my efforts to dry it for a class assignment. Fun! :)