The descent, and the struggle back

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Bantam Books, 1971)

One of the things that has made me nuts for years about this book was that I would see "bell jar" and think "bell curve" -- no matter what I did, I couldn't shake that immediate association, and who wants to read a book about depression while you're thinking about statistics and averages and such.

Welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen.

This paperback belonged to my mom, and apparently she bought it shortly before her 27th birthday. (It's weird to think of parents as being adults, but still younger than you are now.) None of this is particularly relevant to my review, but I did find myself wondering about the various eras of the book and how it was read... Plath's lightly fictionalized autobiography is about events in the early 1950s, was written mostly in the early '60s before her suicide in 1963, came out in 1971, and here I am reading it 30 years later. Our culture's relationship with mental illness has changed drastically over the past 60 years, and Plath's tale likely played some role in that. Would I have been her, or her alter ego heroine Esther, had I lived in a different time?

Which takes me to the point I wanted to make about this book all along. I was so struck by how much this book reminded me of The Catcher in the Rye. (Of course, I hated that book passionately, and quite liked this one.) Both seem to speak directly to young people, assuring them that others too feel that same sense of alienation from the world around them. (The list of artists and works that do this goes on and on, but for whatever reason, these two seemed perfectly paired.) Even more so, Esther Greenwood, like Holden Caulfield, has a strong (and to my mind unreasonable) abhorrence of hypocrisy and phoniness. This seems particularly strange coming from Esther, who plays the phony game so so well. But man does she judge other people harshly.

I'm babbling quite a bit. I'm glad I finally read The Bell Jar, and can more clearly consider its place in 20th century literature, and society more generally. I also wish I could know how my 16 y.o. self would have met it. Would she have had as little tolerance for Esther as she did Holden? Would she have any idea how much sympathy she would have for her a decade and a half later?

Faux sincerity

How I Became a Famous Novelist - Steve Hely (Black Cat, 2009)

Large swaths of this book are hilarious, particularly early in the book. I kept laughing out loud, and reading passages to my boyfriend. Very quickly he resorted to the "nod and smile," and yet I just kept repeating the funny parts more loudly, in hopes that my sheer enthusiasm for the funny would rub off.

The conceit is simple: a highly-educated but seriously adrift young man (Pete) is bummed out by his job writing essays for rich students, and even more distressed when his ex-girlfriend announces her upcoming wedding. And then he comes across a couple profiles of hugely successful authors - and decides that not only is their writing crap, but that they know it is crap, and are cashing in on an ingeniously con. So he decides that by the time the ex's wedding comes along, he will be a best-selling author.

The satire of current best-selling authors is fantastic. And as much as I admire Jonathan Safran Foer, the description of the obvious JSF stand in made me just about cry I laughed so hard. It was all beautiful. And our antihero's description of the creative process was amazing too.

Then the book (The Tornado Ashes Club) comes out, and things lost a little steam. Pete discovers that making it up the best-seller list isn't just about hitting all the marks, and that the literary world is more complicated than he may have envisioned. Somehow, his hit novel doesn't make him the belle of the ball at his ex-girlfriend's wedding. And when he meets people who really do treat storytelling with sincere reverence, even he realizes the shortcomings of his snark.

But will he really learn any "lessons" from his experiences? What do you think?

We're all a little mad around here

The Uninvited Guests - Sadie Jones (Harper, 2012)

2012 wrap-up coming tomorrow-ish, I hope. (If not, at least know that according to my blog count, I read 50 books this past year. Decent enough statistics.) Until then though, what better way to close out the year than a trip to the turn of the last century: Edwardian England.

This book reminded me of two things: a sitcom episode in which events spiral increasingly out of control, and one of those dreams in which you can't ever get to that thing that you desperately need to do, b/c other things keep happening. Now throw in a dash of Gothic ghoulishness.

It's Emerald's birthday. Her stepfather is away, trying to save the "family" home impractically purchased by Emerald's dead father. He - the stepfather - has only one arm, a fact of no major importance, but dwelt upon all the same. Emerald's mother is weird in that way 19th-century English literature mothers often are. Emerald's brother sulks, her younger sister runs around in a dirty nightgown, hatching schemes that only neglected youngest siblings do, and the housekeeper has only one more set of hands to put together a birthday party. And then there are guests: another set of siblings, and a wealthy farmer's son.

And then there are more. A train accident, and for some reason haggard survivors descent en masse to the house. In a series of events fairly reminiscent of Clue, the family shuts the survivors in a room and then tries to get back to the matter of the dinner party. Except increasingly creepy things start happening, and eventually all hell breaks loose.

The novel turns into something of a fever dream, until the fever breaks. And people awake, a little hungover, but really none the worse off, all things considered.

Something old, something new

The Singles - Meredith Goldstein (Plume, 2012)

This novel dips into two of my favorite genres: the chick lit (naturally) and the college-friends-in-their-lives-after-college that has the potential to cross into literary fiction.

And it's set at a wedding (a commonplace venue for the latter type mentioned above) - a time of hubbub and ridiculousness that feels familiar smack in the midst of the holiday season.

It's Bee's wedding. Don't get too attached to Bee though, because although there are all sorts of interesting hints about her and her relationships to the people around her, we really don't get to meet her much. It's really about the group that at most other weddings would be tossed together at the "singles" table, but for some reason aren't here: three college friends (one of whom is a bridesmaid), an uncle, and the groom's mother's friend (or rather, her son).

Chapters skip from the perspective of one to the next. Over the course of the evening, each undergoes a crisis (or two or three) and as they bump into each other, you get hints of the ways they might yet come to be one another's saviors. Although there are plenty of red herrings thrown in. And in the end (spoiler? I guess?) each emerges from Bee's wedding ready to enter a new stage of life, perhaps even more so than Bee herself.

Maybe I've done it wrong, but I've never had quite this experience at a wedding. But then again, that's probably for the best.

Sex and hockey in DeLillo's America

Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League - Cleo Birdwell (better known as Don DeLillo) (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980)


Apparently DeLillo has pretty much disowned this book, omitting it from official bibliographies and blocking its republication. (As a result, this book was tough to track down in a library.) I'm not entirely sure why. I mean, it's not great literature, but it brings in much of the absurdity that I found in White Noise (and one of the same characters, for that matter).

But I didn't read it because of DeLillo. In fact, if I remember correctly, I heard about the book well before I found out Birdwell was a pseudonym. You know me, I'm a sucker for hockey books. And for complaining about how unrealistic they are. And this one offers ample opportunity.

Cleo is a rookie for the Rangers. And the first woman to play in the NHL. So she gets a lot of attention, naturally. But apparently she is like Taylor Hall or something, the rate at which she seems to score. And speaking of scoring, there is plenty of that off the ice. It seems like everyone circling the team eventually succumbs to the belief that sex with her will ... I don't know, do something. And despite assertions that make her seem sorta meh about most, if not all these men, she is usually a willing participant. In some of the weirdest sex scenes I've read in a while.

And then there is the former player who shares her apartment, a man suffering from some bizarre affliction and whose search (aided by Cleo) ends with him spending months asleep in a machine. The way in which this whole scenario is normalized is what I remember best about DeLillo from past forays into his work. And it hints at something deeper than "Cleo plays hockey and has lots of sex." But I  just couldn't get my finger on it.

Behind the Scenes

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel
New York: Henry Holt, 2009

I was predisposed to like Wolf Hall for a few reasons: a) I like Tudor history; b) Man Booker Prize!; c) despite all references in the novel to Thomas Cromwell being an ugly, bulldoggish man, in my head he looks like this:


Anyway, I went on a treasure hunt just before Christmas trying to find it at the library, and got lucky (very lucky: at library #3, it was not shelved, but sitting randomly on a table. I looked around like a thief to see if someone had claimed it, then snatched it up and got it to the checkout desk as quickly as possible).

I watched The Other Boleyn Girl earlier this evening, and the experience made me really appreciate Wolf Hall even more than I already had. It (the novel) is textured and complicated, and really makes you feel the passage of time and the machinations that were involved in the dissolution of Henry's marriage. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was a pawn. Cromwell is a sympathetic character, but not entirely. He is conniving, and lucky, and flawed. But you like him well enough, so you root for him. Others have written (no links - too lazy) about how interesting it is that Mantel chose to make Sir Thomas More the great antagonist in the novel, and how this is a gutsy move. I have always found More to be a little obnoxiously holy, so this set up worked for me.

What I still don't understand is the title. Wolf Hall. A place you hear about, as Cromwell takes an interest in the pale and retiring young Jane Seymour (oh, dramatic irony!) but which only makes an appearance after the final pages of the novel. Of course, it's at Wolf Hall that everything changes. For Anne Boleyn though, not so much for Thomas Cromwell, the king's right hand man. Unless perhaps that's where the end begins for him as well...

To sum up, the story of the man who rose from nothing to become as powerful as any man in England is as thrilling as it can be, considering the story has been told again and again, and we all know how it ends. It becomes clear how the forces of popes and princes - making history - are both unstoppable and yet easily swayed by those behind the scenes. I, for one, would rather be a Cromwell.

"Happinesses opted against" or, an iPod love affair

The Song is You - Arthur Phillips
New York: Random House, 2009

I was recently commenting that Phillips has written four very different novels, starting with the Eastern European ex-pat novel in Prague, and then an Egyptology mystery and a Victorian ghost story before this latest about the unlikely romance between a music fan and an up-and-coming singer-songwriter set in present-day New York City. Except that there are thematic similarities. I mentioned in one of those previous reviews that he likes to play with the subjectivities of reality as experienced by different people. That continues here, as Phillips layers actions and memories, such that you are constantly forced to re-conceive of what happened in the previous pages.

Plot brief: Julian is a somewhat-jaded tv commercial director who has lost his wife and son, his libido, and is struggling to hold onto memories of the power of song. Until he comes across Cait O'Dwyer, a young Irish musician who is about to make it big. Julian's estranged wife and Asperger-y brother are also lost and damaged, and so are the other men orbiting around Cait: her guitarist and collaborator, a policeman who much prefers Sinatra, and a washed-up rocker who grasps desperately at a chance to feel fame again. Phillips sets up a whole array of other storylines that could be, most of them freighted with a hint of impending menace. I read nervously, unsure when a misunderstanding - that subjective reality - would lead to disaster. Whatever disaster means.

The novel also contains some lovely musings on the power of music and the way certain songs elicit longing and evoke times and places. And how their power loses potency when called upon too often, or wrongly. It made me want to empty my iPod of all those podcasts and just trip down memory lane, one song at a time.

I can see the appeal of small-town life

Empire Falls - Richard Russo
New York: Vintage, 2001

They made a miniseries out of this novel the year after I moved to LA. I was taking the bus at that point, and I remember there were ads on benches everywhere. It was a little over the top.

The book itself is a little over the top though too. Except that it's also understated. Does this make any sense? It's about the life of a fading town in Maine, centered around Miles Roby, who was supposed to leave but didn't, and his family. It's slooooowly paced, except when it isn't, and the main narrative is punctuated with regular flashbacks that explain how it all came to be. You find yourself wanting a positive outcome for (most of) the characters, but just don't know if that'll happen.

This is one of those books where I think I might remember reading it - and the atmosphere it created - better than I remember the plot itself. I started it on a gloriously warm and sunny Thanksgiving afternoon, then spent a lovely portion of an evening reading snuggled in a beautiful hotel lobby. (And then finished it in bed at some point later.) The overall effect was tremendously calming.

Russo is a thoughtful writer, and I appreciated his style. A few of the moments that caught my eye:

• he "especially admired that they were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition."
• "What did you do when you were good at just one thing, after it turned out you weren't as good as you thought?"
• "And that's the thing, she concludes. Just becasue things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. 'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower."

And this last observation, by Miles's teen daughter, occurs just as the things that had been happening slow start to happen very fast indeed.

Geographic Misadventures

London is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
New York: Viking, 2006

This is kinda the best book title ever. Well, perhaps not ever, but still. And eventually, you actually find out what the title refers to. Anyway, this isn't necessarily the book I expected.

What I especially didn't expect was how creepily it seemed to be written for me, in order to smack me around a little and say, um, hello Erin. What is going on? Which is not to say that I've spent three years since running out on my fiance working in a fishing shop in Rhode Island and working on a documentary of fishwives. Or that my brother is about to get married to a girl he's been dating since I was in high school, except that he might be in love with someone else. Or that my brother has a hot older friend who is a chef, which may or may not be important to me.

Some of Dave's pronouncements can be a little pedantic. Emmy is full of deep thoughts and meaningful realizations. But it worked, and, again, it slapped me around a little. Some examples:

• You don't always know what you'll remember. And, still, it was starting to seem to me that -- if you paid close enough attention -- you could sometimes predict moments that were going to turn out to be important, moments that would stay with you. [This is just the beginning of a reverie about the times "already existing closer to memory than reality"]
• You can't really feel anything entirely unless part of you doesn't know it's happening.
• There are moments when you can feel something fall down inside of you, and never rise up in exactly the same way again.
• I said a small, silent prayer of gratitude that tonight was going to end. Not gracefully, maybe, but eventually.
• I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it -- and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you go there? Didn't it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?
• Never. I will never be done with you. I will never be able to think about you and hear about you and not totally -- totally -- miss you. [and more thoughts about her former fiance and her intensely complicated relationship. Not with him, but with the version of him that she's held ever since she left him. And later...] I'd remember [him], and I'd remember him wrong. And that was probably when I'd miss him the most.
  
• I really wish that I could begin to describe what it was like seeing her being seen that way by him. It was like watching a memory.
• If this were all we'd have to remember this day by, wouldn't it end up looking like this was the only way it was ever supposed to be? So maybe I was wrong to be questioning it still. What did I know about the way things came together? Maybe they had to come this close to falling about first.

So you see? In fact, the whole thing almost made it hard for me to concentrate on the will he/won't he plotline that ostensibly drives the whole book. And perhaps it does. Perhaps it takes other people's dramas to force Emmy out of her holding pattern. And if that's the case, what are the implications for a girl like me?

I'm so glad I missed the 70s

The Ebony Towers - John Fowles
New York: Signet, 1974

I'm not sure how I ended up owning this book. But once upon a time I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and liked it. And more recently (well, 8 years ago, but still...) I read The Collector, which I found incredibly disturbing.

This collection of works is kind of sexy, in the way that I now imagine English sexiness to be, a little awkward, far more matter-of-fact than sex today, and awkward again for good measure. Too long to be short stories, but too short to be novellas, they are something in between. And they are meditations that take place at least as much in the characters' heads than in any action. What action occurs is mediated by thinking and overthinking. And each one turns on a mystery which is left unresolved, because Fowles is trying to tell us... what?

Anyway, for the first 100 pages, I had missed that this was a collection and not a novel. Which was a little disappointing, because I had already charted the path of the title story's "novel," and felt a little cheated when it ended abruptly. On the other hand, I was glad it ended, but I found the characters so annoying, so self-indulgent. There's a bit near the end where David, the married man who had decided he is IN LOVE, has an existential crisis because the girl wouldn't sleep with him. (Oops, spoiler.) Anyway, I was going to quote parts of it, but I just can't.

I'm dwelling on the negative. There was lots to like in the reading. Had I come across these stories in The New Yorker, one at a time, and in that NewYorkershortstorycontext that I don't know how to define but changes my readiness to accept certain conventions, I would have enjoyed myself a lot more. As it is though, I just found myself glad to have made it through another book that I can now remove from my shelf.

A descent into...?

Atmospheric Disturbances - Rivka Galchen
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

This book had been on my To Read list since sometime last year, but it got bumped to the library request list when it appeared as a Slate audio book club selection in May. (Then I had to wait to actually get and read the book, so finally just listened to the podcast last week.)

This is one of those books that's so clever that I sort of feel like I won't be able to say anything sufficiently clever about it. But not in an annoying way, just in a "it is what it is" sort of way. Leo is a psychiatrist, which somehow gives him enough mental credibility that you want to believe him when one day an impostor comes home instead of his wife. Despite being right to almost the slightest detail, he knows she's not his Rema. So he goes off looking for here, and gets caught up with the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, with which one of his clients (also missing, like Rema) claims to be a secret agent. Long story short, the line between what is real and what is in Leo's head is constantly shifting as the simulacrum tries to persuade Leo to come home to her.

I expected this to be mostly a meditation on the ways in which we fall out of love, or love changes, and the person you loved is suddenly gone and replaced by someone else. It's a great metaphor. But it's that, and more and less than that too. It's about perception and love and loss and the lies we tell ourselves and those around us, and the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing another person. And it's about the ache you feel for Leo (and his wife) when you see how he almost loves this replacement Rema, and wants to love her, and yet there is this block that prevents him from seeing her for who she is.

Some points:

• I noted some similarities - in title mostly, but also in style - with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, and was annoyed with the book club for pointing out the same thing and making me feel less original.
• Completion error: "with any incomplete perception - and needless to say all perceptions are incomplete - the observer 'fills in' by extrapolating from experience. Or from desire. Or from desire's other face, aversion. So basically, we focus fuzzy images by transforming them into what we expect to see, or what we wish we could see, or what we most dread to see." I love this quote in its own right, but I love it even more for Leo's further statement of being reassured that he knew right away that the impostress wasn't Rema instead of falling into completion error, without having considering that he is just committing the opposite completion error.
• Too lazy to check whether Leo's attribution to Freud is accurate, but he credits Freud with the belief that "there's always a thicket of past people between any two lovers." Leo then goes on to disagree, but really, isn't love about sorting one's way through the thicket in order to truly find each other?
• The book gets surprisingly and randomly funny toward the end, perhaps to mitigate how tragic everything is starting to feel, with a set of mistranslated drinks on a menu: Bloody Girl & Bloody Great. Also "I crash." (The first two seem to be sangria, the last maybe cocoa?)

And so that's it. Clever to be sure. But also quite touching. And disturbing too. But it was melancholy and yearning that stuck with me.

It's not really about cricket at all

Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
New York: Pantheon Books, 2008

Right before I started reading it, I found this Wonkette description of Netherland:

Recall last summer: it was the summer of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, the most important book liked by people wearing the most important-looking glasses. It seems O’Neill has journeyed from that wire-rimmed menagerie of the psyche to Politics & Prose, where all such odysseys of the soul must, and do, eventually terminate.

And I thought to myself, that sounds about how I remember the talk about this book. And while I generally don't wear glasses (current facebook profile pic aside), I figure that since I like the sort of books those people like, it's a good thing I've finally checked this out from the library. Oh, plus, it's a 9/11 book, and I'm kinda fascinated by those. (Like this one and this one.)

But just like it's not really about cricket, it's not really about 9/11. Except it's not not about them either. It's about love and loss and rediscovering oneself. And - and this is what makes it most about 9/11, for me - it is a love story about America, and NYC specifically. What is it about America that keeps pulling people toward it? Why are we a nation of immigrants?

I found Hans a lovely and thoughtful - albeit lost - narrator. It's as though he serves almost entirely as a mirror to hold up the world and the other characters he sees. But anyway, a few of the lovelier observations from Hans:

• Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become too small to contain my misery.
  
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• I was possibly the only person contained by the apparent world who was unable to see through it.

And, finally, "my secret, almost shameful feeling is that I am out of New York - that New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin." Which reminded me of nothing so much as E.M. Cioran:

All that is not Paris being equal in my eyes, I often regret that wars have spared it. [...] I shall never forgive Paris for having bound me to space, for making me from somewhere.

Which is a lot for a city to shoulder. But if any cities can, they are NYC and Paris. And what of my City of Angels? In what ways is it so much like and unlike the others? Could a different Netherland be set here?

Hyper radiance?

The Uses of Enchantment - Heidi Julavits
New York: Doubleday, 2006

So I actually went and looked up Bruno Bettelheim when I found out that Julavits borrowed the title from him. Fairy tales allow children a safe way to come to terms with fears and darkness. Do we ever really stop being children? In Julavits' novel, which I'm not totally certain I can discuss coherently, most of the characters are engaged in similar acts of attempting to empower themselves to be the masters of their story.

There are three narratives, set in 1985, 1986, and 1999. In the "present," Mary Veal is back in New England for her estranged mother's funeral. Her family has yet to forgive her for what happened over a decade ago, but she has held out hope that maybe her mother understood and forgave. This is juxtaposed with "What Might Have Happened" in 1985, when Mary disappeared, a willing participant in her abduction, and the notes taken by her therapist during a series of sessions early the next year, when he notices inconsistencies in her story, decides it is all a lie, and makes her the case study for his theory of hyper radiance. So it's difficult enough to tell what really happened, if a phrase like "what really happened" even makes sense. But then you realize that pretty much everyone is lying, or at least willfully ignoring what doesn't fit. And by the end you are kind of dizzy. And yet.... Julavits is smart and interesting and so are her characters. I was engaged start to finish. Frustrated as often as not, but engaged.

Pause. This isn't precisely what I want to say about this novel. I started writing in one place, and ended up somewhere entirely different. (Which is maybe not unlike what happens to some of these characters are they lose and regain control of their own narratives?) But rather than edit and re-think and try to get it right, I'll just end with the recommendation to read it for yourself.

Regency Vacation

Austenland - Shannon Hale
New York: Bloomsbury, 2007

I hadn't been to the library in ages. (Like since February probably.) So I was really excited a couple weeks ago to trek up to my local branch and see what from my "to read" list was in stock. And I was in the mood to find a book that I could read that afternoon. Hence, Austenland. (And how awesome was it when two hours later my friend e-mails and says, "My mom says hi. She wants to know what you're reading," and I had to respond, "um, Jane Austen fan lit.")

This was cute though, and a lovely weekend afternoon read. Jane (not the name I would have chosen, but whatevs) is about my age, and totally identifiable to a reader like me. She's single, relatively successful, and might be slightly obsessed with Mr. Darcy. Her great-aunt decides that Austen is keeping Jane from finding happiness in the real world, and bequeaths a vacation to an English resort where guests live in an Austen novel. With actors, and love affairs, and all sorts of ridiculousness. Jane goes, with the plan of getting Mr. Darcy out of her system forever, and being able to move on. And really? Do I have to say any more of the plot?

Another nice touch was that each chapter begins with the tale of one of Jane's loves, which run the gamut from the boy who kissed her in pre-school to her former fiance.

While nothing inspired by P&P can ever possibly be Bridget Jones, much less the real thing, this was a charming effort.

Like reading a dream

The Vine of Desire - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

When I was in college, I went through a phase where it almost felt like I could get enough literature by South Asian female writers. Really this was pretty much just Divakaruni and Arundhati Roy, but in my head it was much more. Anyway, I heard both authors give readings on campus, which was lovely. And what I really liked about Divakaurni was that she was based in the East Bay, so everything had an extra tinge of familiarity. And there was a lyrical quality to both writers, where things seemed lush and rich beyond themselves. (This is also a trait I have ascribed to Canadian writers, thanks to Michael Ondaatje and Joy Kogawa.)

I digress. Vine of Desire is a follow-up to Sister of My Heart, which I read in college and do not remember AT ALL. Fortunately, the novel stands alone just fine. The main characters are friends, sisters essentially. At the opening, one has lost the baby she was carrying and is adrift. The other has lost her husband, so that she could keep her baby, and is likely drifting. Anju, the former, insists on bring Sudha and the baby out to California. This despite knowing that her husband has nurtured a desire for Sudha. So now you have three injured souls (and an adorable baby) in a single apartment. And no one is capable of communicating in any truthful fashion. And obviously things go badly.

The plot isn't much of a surprise. But the writing is simply lovely. Chapters come in different forms, different styles, and we see the perspectives of not only Anju and Sudha, but also Anju's husband Sunil, Sudha's suitor (if that's the right word) Lalit, and even the baby Dayita. Divakaruni is extremely compassionate toward her characters, and you ache for each of them, over the pain they feel and the pain they cause.

When sex isn't sexy

The Rachel Papers - Martin Amis
Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984 (originally published 1973)

I went back and checked. It doesn't actually say "romp" on any of the cover blurbs. That was my imagination. But still, I feel like I was misled to expect a sort of screwball sexy comedy, British-style. Plus, I really liked Time's Arrow (spoiler alert on the link).

So. Charles is about to turn 20, about to go to Oxford, probably. He was sickly and effeminate growing up, and has decided to prove his virility by being almost monomaniacally focused on sex. Which I guess isn't that unusual for young men. But it's a scary look into their minds.

I guess I just found him troubling, and sad. His notebooks and careful over-thinking prevent him from really experiencing life as it happens. And really seeing himself and other people. He is a (very) little like Chuck Bass, although I am only making that comparison because I just finished watching Gossip Girl.

Anyway, romp it was not. Slightly painful journey into the mind of a neurotic young man? That's more like it.

Blank Slate

Man Walks Into a Room - Nicole Krauss
New York: Anchor Books, 2002

After the excitement of Stanford and Venice Blvd, I was able to get down to concentrating on the rest of Krauss' novel. It's haunting and minimalist and bizarre. It's not as deeply moving as The History of Love, but beautiful and interesting in its own right. The main character, Samson, a lit professor in his mid-30s, is found walking through the desert with no idea who he is. After a brain tumor is removed, his memory returns, but only through age 12. The last two dozen years: empty. But he embraces the emptiness, and his experiences as he puzzles through what it means and what it's worth to make connections with others make for a challenging and thought-provoking read. A couple moments that I highlighted:

• wanting to say to his estranged wife, with whom he cannot remember falling in love:

  "Tell me, was I the sort of person who took your elbow when cars passed on the street, touched your cheek while you talked, combed your wet hair, stopped by the side of the road in the country to point out certain constellations, standing behind you so that you had the advantage of leaning and looking up? and so on [...] But he didn't ask because he didn't know if he wanted the answers."

• on loneliness: "How can a mind know how alone it is until it brushes up against some other mind? [...] and now the magnitude of his own loss was impossible for Samson to ignore. It was breathtaking."
• and do I agree with this or not? How can you know for certain? "The mind cannot abide any presence but its own."
• Oh, and the epilogue. Which I wasn't expecting, but which completely fit.
  

"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.

Tiny Tim, grown up

Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
New York: Perennial, 2004 (trade paperback)

I stopped reading books for about a month. I got distracted by things, such as:

• the inauguration
• work
• magazines (1, 2, 3)
• school
• a trip to the ER (albeit a largely unnecessary one)
• old tv shows about teen detectives

But this past week I was ready for an actual book again, so picked up one that has been on my bookshelf since my "Auntie Mame" (and yes, someday I will actually have to read the book and/or watch the movie) gave it to me for Christmas probably 5 years ago.

The book? Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, a thriller about the grown Tiny Tim and his efforts to save a young girl from a sexual predator. Interspersed among the action, and Timothy's quite touching relationship with two strong-willed and yet vulnerable urchins, is enough backstory to catch us up on what happened in the years after The Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart. Tim is still trying to make sense of his relationships with his father and his benefactor, each of whom projected their own sense of whom Tim needed to be. Now, he's still trying to figure out his own identity. And finds it, unexpectedly, through his interaction with the two children.

The story moved quickly, and did not feel close to 400 pages. Yet it's not an easy read either, per se. It's an evocative, and disturbing, at times confusing, yet ultimately satisfying novel. And for a girl who hasn't particularly liked revisiting Dickensian London for probably 10 or more years, it was an unexpected pleasure.

Lost in Translation (going for the easy pun)

The Translator, by Leila Aboulela
New York: Black Cat, 1999

This book is seriously beautiful. And soothing. Even when Sammar, the main protagonist, is agonizing over circumstances and sad, it is oddly calming. Which reflects the role that Islam plays in Sammar's life, sustaining her through a tragic loss, her reawakening and love (which forms the actual substance of the novel), and the way her growth is challenged and reaffirmed.

Sammar's faith was actually the most difficult aspect of the book for me. I just could not relate. And the fact that a happy outcome depends on bringing another character into the faith... well, it was hard for me. But also an excellent reminder that my secular humanist view of the world isn't the only one.

A couple passages that I found worth noting:

Benches. White curved metal, each and every one bore a placard, In Loving Memory of this person or that. As if people must die so that others can sit in the Winter Garden.

An observation that just hit me as funny and poignant. And on the second page no less, setting the tone for this reader for the rest of the novel.

On the strange paradox of time passing:

The days were numbered. They dwindled and by their nature could not increase. But they were not normal days, they expanded as if by magic, they stretched out like trees, and the hours passed like the hours of a child, they did not flicker or melt deceptively away. She thought that it was not true what people said, that time passed quickly when you were happy and passed slowly when you were sad. For on her darkest days after Tarig died, grief had burned away time, devoured the hours effortlessly [...] Now each day stretched long and when Rae spoke to her a few words, when they only saw each other for a few minutes, these minutes expanded and these words multiplied and filled up time with what she wanted to take with her, what she did not want to leave behind.

(Also, back in the day, I read this other love story titled The Translator. Also recommended. Ooh, and you can read my review of it for the Daily Cal. I used to have a lot more to say, I guess.)