A man walks into a bar, gets drunk, sells his longsuffering wife and infant daughter to a stranger for five smackers. POW! What a hook. What a first chapter. The next day, he wakes up sober, repents, and walks to the nearest church. At the altar, he swears off drink for the next 21 years. He looks for his wife, but it's too late; she's gone. WHAT WILL HAPPEN!?

If I'd had a seat, I would have been on the edge of it. Fortunately I was sitting on the floor, watching the children in the tub. But I was riveted to the point that the children were in danger of hypothermia. That's a hook, my friend, worthy of a high concept Hollywood road movie starring Vince Vaughn and and Benicio del Toro. What, you don't think they would be good together? They would be GREAT together.

The Hollywood movie would then switch over to the wife with her new husband, see how they're getting on, and then switch back to the original husband, etc. Not this book. Instead, Hardy takes 19 years out of the story, brings us back to the wife returning to look for the original husband, daughter in tow. Okay. Now he's the mayor of a fine big town and one of the big time corn dealers as well. Rich, famous, well-respected, and still not drinking. From there, things go downhill, as you might expect from a Thomas Hardy novel. You will not be surprised to learn that the couple did not quietly reunite and live out the rest of their days happily and without notice. They were noticed.

Another thing I have come to expect about a Thomas Hardy novel is a female main character whose virtue or position is compromised in public court of opinion through no real fault of her own, but just because she was following a logical course of action, or acting under impulses we today would find quite normal. Tess, Sue, Elfride, all are caught both by cultural circumstances and mistakes that we all can see they should not make. The bad ends to which they come are both brought on by their own bad choices and dictated by the restraints of Victorian society, both high and low.

In this novel, there is no such character. Lucetta comes close to this, but isn't really central enough, or independent enough, to fit. I realized only when I was near the end that the main character was actually the man, or the men, the two men who share the title "Mayor of Casterbridge" during the span of the book. Then it all became clear. The main character, Michael Henchard, the man who originally sold his wife, is the one whose impulsive, passionate character and rotten choices seal his tragic failure -- he has more in common with Tess, actually, than the other women do -- uneducated, irrational, earthy, but bizarrely driven by good intentions. Donald Farfrae, the other mayor, has much in common with Bathsheba from Far from the Madding Crowd, as he also gets his final quiet happy ending, with the one he should have had all along.

It made more sense once I figured out I wasn't supposed to really like the females, because I didn't. I love the way Hardy writes women, particularly Sue Bridehead. Particularly the incomparable Tess. But the women in this book were unsatisfying. Maybe he just hadn't got there yet -- Sue and Tess were to come later. Bathsheba was ten years previous.

People who are not fans of Thomas Hardy are permitted to skip the previous three paragraphs. Oh, should I have mentioned this before you slogged through all that? Woops.

Here's a writerly note: The opening scenes of the novel are really an *excellent* example of how the pros used to do third person objective point of view, you know, just the human witness, no insights into anyone's thoughts or feelings, motives or past. The opening of the book was really SO amazing. I do so love Thomas Hardy. Just look at him there, with his moustache. You could just eat him.

I think now I have read all the Thomas Hardy I need to read. I've read five of his novels, including all the famous ones and one of the romances. It makes me a little sad. I remember when I first read his poem, "Neutral Tones," and I initially thought, what a dull little plop that was, but it really stayed with me, okay, I know this makes me sound like a SUPERFOOL, but I always remember that first reading of it. Here it is:

NEUTRAL TONES

by: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing….

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

Yeah! Makes you want to go out and write a bunch of valentines doesn't it! That's Thomas Hardy for you. Writer most likely to make you feel like rolling under the bed and rotting already. Bless his grey little heart.

Labels: books, literature, novels, thomas hardy, victorian

When Joshilyn gave me this book, a long time ago, she said that it was really two books mashed into one, and she felt sure I'd like one of them. I know I liked the second half much more than the first. So much did I not like the first half that I actually put the book down for more than a year. I liked the present sections more than the past, the dog sections more than the human. Which were the two books? I'm not sure. I picked it up again because I finally succumbed to the hook, and had to know how it ended.










Visit The Dogs of Babel on Amazon.com.

Labels: book reviews, books, carolyn parkhurst, dogs of babel, novels

To: Anne Elliott
CC: Elizabeth Bennett, Emma Woodhouse, Elinor Dashwood
Subject: He loves YOU. YOU are the one he loves.
Attachments: clues.xls


Dear Anne,

It is you that he loves. Obviously. He loves you, only you, and always you, to the end of his days. HOW do you not see this? You spend page after page, heart atwitter. A tiny gasp, a tiny sigh. Is it denial? Is it mental retardation? Or are you actually physically blind and deaf? Has all of your mild, sweet goodness clogged up your aural passages?


I know that you don't like to come right out and say things. I know you prefer to hint around and embroider wainscoating and use your eyelashes to communicate the intricate ticks and giggles of your soul. Your patience, your modesty, they cripple you. You flounder. You languish.


Here's news: If you weren't in a Jane Austen novel, where all comes right in the end, you would never be Mrs. Wentworth. Real men don't pine that much. Real men, if they pay attention to Louisa Musgrove, are doing that because they actually want to get busy with Louisa Musgrove. But you're okay. He's a Jane Austen hero, and that means in spite of all the completely contradictory evidence, he does really love you, you blind, deaf, ignorant fool of a woman. Please, when the truth comes out, take a minute to breathe and weep, and then give yourself a good smack, right on the head, because really, a cocker spaniel could see that he loves you, and only you. Louisa Musgrove? You have got to be freakin' kidding me.


Sincerely,
LYDIA


Jane Austen said that Anne Elliott was too good for her. Jane, Anne Elliott was too good for me too.


Let's face it, Jane Austen novels are not about suspense. There's a man and a woman, or there are two men and two women, and at the end of the novel the church bells will peal, and there will be joy. The pleasure in one of these romantic comedies, like most romantic comedies where the end is predetermined, is watching the characters muddle through, make their mistakes, rush around.


I liked watching Emma, and Elizabeth, and Elinor and Marianne. But not Anne. I didn't like watching Anne. Anne made me impatient and irritated. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm just a dreadful person, incapable of appreciating the sensitive spirit of Anne. I know this novel is all about the subtle. And most of my friends seem to like it. I, however, was not able to love this book, although I know I should. Anne was too good, Louisa Musgrove was too annoying, and Captain Wentworth was just impossible.


You know what? In the end, they got together. Don't blubber about me spoiling the ending. No one was shocked. I was glad it all ended well, but this time, instead of weeping with joy, like I did for Elinor and Marianne, I snapped the book shut, BAM. Enough already. This time, she took it too far. Bless you, Jane Austen, you do better with sass.

Labels: book reviews, books, Jane Austen, novels, persuasion

Labels: angela's ashes, book reviews, books, frank mccourt, novels

Well, this was a silly little book. A book that treats writing like Juliet Binoche treats acting. That is to say, with a lot of insubstantial intensity, and mystic eyes. You can read Sin in a sitting, and get up feeling pensive, taciturn, and violent. Or you can read it in little chunks over a period of weeks, while you're giving your children a bath, like I did, and every time you open the book you have to remember how serious life is, how morbid, how dire, how dramatic. How everyone uses small sentences, and feels things deeply, so deeply.

I read it before, years ago, and recently somehow via some used book shelf it came back into my life. The same edition too. Page 169 still seems to bear the blush of shame after my shuddering eye-roll. The last few lines:

These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please, answer me.
Answer me, as I leave you now.
As I leave you.
As I leave.

The only work of fiction I've seen trying to end on an echo effect, like a power ballad from the 80s. If the ending seems unforgivable, you should know that there are other disastrous lines in the book too. Like this one:

Hours later, Dominick lay on top of me. And whispered love again. And again. Perhaps the music in his own head made him deaf to my silence.

"Deaf to my silence"? That's one of those lines that sounds complex and interesting, but in reality means nothing. Like Juliet Binoche again. She can be thinking of her grocery list, but as long as she fires up her "piercing depths" eye lock, you'd think she was decoding the fate of the world. Hart knows how to ratchet up the drama in the way a scene sounds, even if the plot is really a rather standard soap opera chain of events. Adultery, death, rivalry, hatred, love, etc. The pounding drum in the language, the constant syntactic reminders that This! Is! Dramatic! actually diffuse the drama from her character's troubles, much the way a soap opera's soundtrack can make light afternoon fare out of murder and betrayal.

I am simultaneously reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, and Sin does not bear up well in contrast, since McCourt's delivery of disaster and wretchedness is at low volume, with no fanfare, no sonorous words, no short sentences drifting off into black. Unfair comparison, maybe, but... still.

SIN

Labels: book reviews, books, josephine hart, novels, sin

Labels: billy bathgate, books, contemporary, e.l. doctorow, novels

When I acquired The Sacred and Profane Love Machine I also acquired The Black Prince, and when I was disappointed by the former I was still determined to try the latter. After all, Iris Murdoch has been so effusively praised by people I respect. Maybe the first book was an anomaly.

I read a few chapters of The Black Prince and had trouble going on. Everyone was so unsavory. Everyone had a hole in their stockings and a bit of pink marbled flesh protruding. Or greasy hair. Or was pallid and sweating. I mean everyone. With one exception, the entire cast were middle aged English people, ruthlessly portrayed in all their greying sagging glory by a middle aged English novelist, the main character, Bradley Pearson. Everyone was foul and mean and preoccupied and irritable. But not in entertaining or interesting ways -- in ugly little sour ways. Halfway through the book I was just having to force myself to continue. After all, Kate Winslet played her in the movie based on her life. I owed her at least to finish the lousy book.

I will tell you that the book improved dramatically halfway through, and continued to get better and better as it bounced along toward the ending. And then I will tell you that the ending really did redeem the whole book, made it very retroactively interesting in terms of what a writer is, what fiction is, what "truth" is, what a reliable narrator is and isn't, and other complex questions.

The book is very smart, and it does at the end pull back its scalp and reveal there is a large and whizzing brain inside, which has been there all along, under that peeling, sparse scalp. The problem here is, friends, that you have to read a whole lot about the ugly and small agendas of a lot of people you'd rather not get to know, in order to understand the point that's being made about art. As to the apparently thrilling (to critics) question about whether or not the narrator is a homosexual in denial, I don't think that's really interesting or relevant. I'd rather hear more people discussing whatever the heck happened to him at the end, and who P.L. was. All that seemed much more mysterious than the gayness. But then, discussions of whether people are gay or not don't tend to fascinate me (take note, friends, this extends to Herman M.).



The Black Prince is a book I enjoyed having read, but not a book I enjoyed reading. It is an experimental book, all the more so because it appears to be a very traditional book. Things are not always as they seem -- take heart if you are toiling through this novel by choice or on order from an educator -- there will be a payoff, and it will all end eventually.

Labels: books, contemporary, iris murdoch, novels

Labels: audrey niffenegger, books, contemporary, novels, time traveler's wife

Apparently everyone else on earth read this book in high school, and saw the movie too. Alright, well, I went to a Lutheran high school, and explaining the catheters made out of condoms (and reused!) might have given my freshman English teacher a few more questions than he was happy with. Not that he would have been thrilled about my ending a sentence with with. Twice. Actually he was really cool, and let us do Lord of the Flies as a feature video set in the hallways of our school. But I digress.

I found this book at the thrift store and bought it to read, and at the exact same moment, Veronica found it at her father's house, and took it home to read. This kind of literary synchronicity cannot be ignored. There must be significance.



Ken Kesey said he was too old to be a hippie and too young to be a beatnik, but he and his gang, the "Merry Pranksters" raised plenty of hell in their day, despite their lack of a popular category. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was his first novel, written mostly in graduate school, which gives everyone a little bit of undeserved hope.

I think the novel is brilliant for two reasons.

First, there is the narrator. The book is told, not by the main character, or by a disinterested narrator, but by a crazy person. So all the descriptions of the ward, Nurse Ratched, the crazies, are filtered through this altered consciousness. Kesey stays just on the correct side of being cute about it. Cuteness would have killed it, but as it was, Bromden's narration perfectly cranked up the feeling of being in another, twisted, horrific world. No external voice could have accomplished this. His point of view, maintained throughout, also helped us see the change in his mental state, happening so slowly that we almost don't notice it, without being told about it. So, at the end, we believe he is fully okay to go out into the world, although we witnessed the extent of his initial lunacy, because we also witnessed his progression back to functionality.

The second reason I loved this book was for its hooks. Instead of an either/or hook (will the world be saved? will the lovers unite?) there was a complicated engine. Because Bromden is pretending to be deaf and dumb, the very first page of the book presents a compelling reason to read on -- will he eventually speak, what will make him speak, and what will he say? The other question, "Will McMurphy defeat Nurse Ratched?" is also complex, beyond a yes-or-no answer, because the battle is being fought on such strange territory.



I read McMurphy as explosive humanity, glorious deviance -- the ability to see through rules and definitions to the agendas behind them. Therefore dangerous to stability and predictability that these rules and definitions provide. I read Ratched as establishment, enforcer, the hand on the lever that runs the gears. She could not suffer McMurphy because he understood her and was not afraid of her. In the book, as in life, she possessed the ultimate weapon, because even though she is an ideological fraud, she has all the physical power.

Veronica read a lot more gender issues into the book, which made a lot of sense as soon as she explained it to me. There was a viscious smart professional and a friendly stupid whore, and really no other women portrayed in the book. McMurphy could be read as the ultimate heroic male -- beyond the manipulation of the stifling woman, but ultimately brought down by her.

A few words about the movie:

Great. Brilliant. It did not have the same message as the book, and it did not have the same intensity. Having read the book just before I saw the movie, I didn't feel like a lot of the movie made sense without the stuff in the book, but taken on its own terms and without that prejudice, it was fantastic. Because of Jack Nicholson. He is an amazing actor. I mean, that's kind of retarded to say, at this point, but having just seen him in The Departed and now this, it is so interesting to me how he can play two different characters, and use all of his signature expressions, moves, inflections, etc, and still have the characters be so essentially themselves. It's a mystery!

Labels: books, ken kesey, movies, novels

Labels: Alice McDermott, books, contemporary, novels

Everyone always says, O Iris Murdoch. Brutal, brilliant, irascible Iris Murdoch. She is so blazingly legendary. I watched the movie, "Iris," as I do slavishly watch all movies Kate Winslet graces, and I realized, I am supposed to love her. But I had never read one of her books, though I always meant to. Recently I picked up two Iris Murdoch books -- this one and The Black Prince, from a friend's book trading shelf. I was, I am sorry to confess, underwhelmed. Now I will say that I read it with great interest and at times felt very can't-put-it-down. But it did not delight me.

This book was brilliant realism. It was about a love triangle and some children were involved. One of the characters, Montague Small, was original in my experience -- I have not met a character like him before. There was a lot of anguish, and a depth of experience that was engrossing. I can't say I enjoyed reading the book. Taking a step back from the oppressive entanglements and all the emotions, I realized that the same characters and landscape, in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, would be hilarious. It is, in a way, bizarrely the same universe. P.G. Wodehouse is brutal, but so deeply cheerful. Murdoch's treatment is so close, so smothering, so dark. I was expecting more of the satire, less of the despair.

I will move on to The Black Prince -- I've already started it. It's hitting me a little like Humbert McHumbertson, so I dunno if I'm going to get the haw haw haw I'm looking for. Having read such a staggering lot of P.G. Wodehouse, since I was a little kid, and seeing the British upper class skewered in this very la-la pass-the-port way and hasn't everyone got a ridiculous name, it was maybe good for me, or something, to see this grittier and less raucous version of it. I mean, it's probably considered obscene to even compare these two writers, and I'll be met outside by a few stern feminists and beheaded for failing to appreciate Iris Murdoch. I said I would give her another shot. I have the next book in my bag. 'Kay?

Labels: books, contemporary, iris murdoch, novels

First let me say that I read this book very quickly and kind of hungrily. It has a very specific voice and a kind of ethos that was very addictive, when I was reading it. I came away thinking, wow, what a masterful control he exhibited over that mess of material. I have to stand back and sincerely congratulate him for that. This book was deliberate, measured, never even remotely hysterical, unrigorous, or disconnected. I kept examining the method he used to get there, and found myself focusing on specifics. Sentences were manipulated in consistent and repetitious ways. For example, I remember specifically the quote, "Moving is as easy as changing your mind. Changing your mind is as easy as moving." That construct recurred. The narrator kept saying that some word or other was "perhaps too strong a word." There were a variety of different language constructions that made the book feel very specific, very contained. Like repetitions of objects or behaviors, like what the characters were eating or how they moved through their house. The "Snaggy Scree" bar recurred. (Which led me to look up "scree," and it means "bunch of little rocks around the foot of a mountain.") I found myself fascinated with these little manipulations, because while it *seems* like it would become tiresome/obvious/heavy, they were sprinkled in at a wavelength that just barely allowed you to forget about them before they popped up again. So they were comfortable, like being comfortably inside the book. Very well done. I can't think when I've seen second person present tense successfully managed without being kind of hyper and indulgent. This may have been the key to it. Control. Well, imagine that.

The book is about a couple who move from urban New Jersey to extremely rural Idaho, and take advantage of their safely remote location to invent a pregnancy and a child, satisfying the folks at home who are sufficiently distant and can neither verify nor disprove their claims. Apparently the pressure to reproduce (produce?) is really really intense. The wife is a photographer. The husband is a writer and web designer. The grandmother they are placating is supposed to die soon, but will she die before they have to make a visit?

The story is told in 12 sections, each starting out with a photograph, first of the wife, then of the fake baby. The book forces its "you" character to examine questions of authenticity by examining these old photographs of his wife as a baby, now faked by him to represent the fake child. (And in a secondary (tertiary?) way faked by the author to represent this fake autobiography -- WHEW!) What are they now? What were they then? He is examining in his own work the life of Virginia Dentatia, who died making the point that a human female body cannot survive the surgeries necessary to literally look like Barbie. So there's that. Real, fake, remembered, imagined, felt, dreamed, produced, reproduced. I thought it was acutely interesting to compare photography with having babies. I thought the whole book was extremely smart, very challenging, and also very grounded.

My only difficulty probably stems from the fact that I am a mother of two small children, and yes, I used to live more the "life of the mind" and yes, I do live now more the "life of the diaper." Am I defensive about giving up my whatever for my something else? Just as the book refuses to draw clear lines between autobiography and fiction (the author is also from New Jersey, living in Idaho, married to a photographer named Andi, and has no kids), I claim the right to refuse to draw a line between my strictly literary response to the book and my personal response. You could say I'm troubled because it's all. so. true. Or you could say I have a really admirable academic distance from the topic. Either way.

The narrator indulged in a lot of whacking away at some easy targets: kids at the mall, toddlers with runny noses, idealistic new parents, etc. The loathing. The eye-rolling. The revulsion. Yes, I do understand that when I am reading a first person narrator, I am not hearing the author's private thoughts, and I do not obviously blame Lance Olsen for this narrator's lapses into this kind of minor meanness. I like Lance Olsen a whole lot. But those pot shots did color the way I read the rest of the narrator's ideas about children and "reproduction" -- the fact that the examples he chose to use were so obvious and so thin. Show me a traditionally beautiful example of parenting and point out its weakness -- I love you. Show me a hackneyed example of of weak parenting (kids at the mall: so demanding! so impatient! so irritating!) and crow over it -- not so much. If he had taken a picture of a mother reading to an attentive child, and turned it inside out, shown how it was foul, shown how it was lies, that would be something.

I think any parent reading this book would look at this narrator and say, "You just don't get it." As it was, you just come away thinking that it's like trying to explain sex to a virgin -- unless you experience it, you just don't know. I thought for a while that he was going to fall kind of in love with his fake child, and have some kind of epiphanic moment, but thank god he didn't -- that would have been tragic on the other side of the spectrum. I think that the character did have some extremely redemptive moments, and by no means did I reject him based on his feelings about kids with runny noses (who really likes them anyway). There was a character in the book who had a child, Nadie, that I think the main character didn't actively despise. Certainly the wife character managed to pet the kid's hair. Seeing the way the couple responded to this one "good" example of parenting really illuminated how deep the damage was, as manifested in some of the "broken" photographs, that led them to the state they were in. Which was Idaho. And the ability to make up a baby and then kill it. I ended up thinking that in some ways his wife was his child, and he was hers.

This book was a really engaging read, from start to finish. Ask the poor souls who reached me on the phone while reading it -- I was yakking about it to anyone who would listen. The premise is wonderful, the intellect is inspiring, and the prose is so so so right. Buy, read, and rant.

Labels: books, contemporary, lance olsen, novels

What’s amazing about this book is that Mazza can unfold such a tiny piece of the world into such an interesting shape.

Her characters aren’t talking politics in Madrid, they’re not having epiphanies in the desert, and they’re not redefining cyberspace. They’re small women in a small part of the world, doing an insignificant job, governed by an insignificant boss, serving people who can’t respond. Instead of choosing, for her subject, people who usually find themselves being written about (those who are categorically superlative in some way – hidden or otherwise) she chooses two minimum wage nurse’s aides in a hospital for the severely disabled. Mazza doesn’t glorify these lives –she doesn’t give them secret insights or hidden depths. They remain, outside the book, invisible. They do not articulate their own ideas about their lives or their problems. They do not triumph and they are not destroyed. What's superlative about these women emerges in a small flower for a short time, and then fades. But it emerges in excrutiating clarity.

Part of the fascination of reading _Disability_ is in seeing “behind the scenes” in an unfamiliar setting – in this case the hospital, where the children have names like “Boardboy” and “Scooterboy” and the characters detail their experiences with the work. The administration is predictably idiotic, prescribing hearing therapy for deaf patients, and most of the aides are lazy and neglectful. This book, however, is not about how severely disabled people are treated in state hospitals. The book is about taking two women, really any women, *any women at all*, and finding a story in them, finding “enough” for a novel – proving them “worthy” of having a book written about them. It’s about taking up a hypothetical challenge – I dare you to write a book about *these two souls* and doing it in a way that had me turning pages intensely and reading at stop lights.

It may surprise you that the book is so compelling, given its small and honest scope, its lack of irony or plot twists. This is a story about women, told by a woman as only a woman could truly tell it. I think it’s exactly what we heard about in “A Room of One’s Own” – who cares about what the Prime Minister is doing – we want to hear about the girl behind the counter at the hat store. I think Virgnia Woolf would be very proud.

Labels: books, contemporary, cris mazza, novels

I didn't know about this book but found it on a friend's bookshelf and was surprised I'd never heard of it. It is a dystopian sci-fi novel, set in the future, but written by a Russian in 1920, before Lenin died, before Stalin rose to power. It was instantly banned by the Soviets, as it is an agonizing criticism of the idea of collective identity. In the book, the people have numbers, and nature has been shut outside the city, and all walls and floors are glass, and everyone lives by a "Table of Hours" which prescribes the activities for the day.

There are plenty of plot-summarizing reviews of the book around. Also, check out the author's portrait, by Boris Kustoviev via Wikipedia. It looks like someone photoshopped his head onto an old drawing. Odd.

The book has as its obvious shelfmates Anthem by Ayn Rand and 1984 by George Orwell, but it is more lyrical, more hysterical, more stream-of-consciousness. I suppose Orwell's prose is stronger and Rand is certainly more direct, but I actually loved its dreamy and confusing style, and didn't mind not knowing what the hell was going on a lot of the time. It seemed more true that a journal entry from this future world, with its strange premises and priorities, would read as confusing and boggling to me. Sometimes I didn't know which end was up, and it almost felt like the narrator was writing blind. I think that was intentional and masterful. One of the best and most convincing aspects of the book was that the narrator didn't always seem in control.

This book begins with the narrator not only a willing part of this world without individuals, but an enthusiastic supporter of these ideas. He isn't grimy and hopeless about it all (ahem, Winston Smith?); he's a cheerleader for the system. Of course, it all goes terribly awry.

It occurred to me as I was comparing those three books that the oppressive, dystopian system never seems to break down for these people because of acquisition of material wealth. It doesn't break down because they don't like being told what pants to wear either. These characters, denied property, denied privacy, denied choice, do not rebel to get their own TV or to get their own bank account or their own window shades. They rebel to get their own girl. It's always love that breaks the system down, that sends the main character tangentially off, destroying himself to be alone with the woman he loves. Interesting. I wonder if that is really true. Maybe it just makes good books, to say that people will give up fortunes but not give up a mate. We'd have a harder time cheering for the grey little cog in the machine, who breaks out of his place so he can triumphantly and emotionally buy a Corvette. Love makes a good novel. But is that really how it would work? The characters in We are allowed to bed whoever they want -- they just have to register and receive a "pink coupon" to make it happen. Would people really bring the world down around their ears just to reinstate monogamy?

books yevgeny+zamyatin dystopian+fiction russia

Labels: books, novels, scifi, yegeny zamyatin

Here we have a book that I don't fully understand. However, I feel like I probably would understand if I really thought about it hard enough, and read enough ancillary documents. Possibly I'd need a good night's sleep and a Coke. It's all wrapped up in the artwork of Marcel Duchamp, and it takes place in three different times -- 1949, 1969, and a hypothetical 2069, which actually takes place in one of the characters' scifi novel. The most interesting thing to me about the book right now, and I'm about 50 pages from the end, is how the events in this scifi novel strangely mirror the events in the 1949 part... I like that kind of shadowing. It's also kind of a comfortable read, for me, because I feel like this is familiar territory in a way, and I don't really feel the need to scrub my eyes, refocus, and understand every line. I have to tell you that when I read the first few chapters, and began to formulate my reactions in my mind, I found myself saying something which is probably very crude and unliterary and wrong -- yes, another FC2 type of book, in a phrase: Poop and penises, lovingly described.

Here are some links about it, written by people more diligent than I apparently am, who have perhaps had more recent sleep or fewer recent toddlers:

Golden Handcuffs Review, if you scroll down past the poetry, has two book reviews of it and then a possibly related (?) piece by Toby Olsen with an amusing first line.

New Pages has a review of it.

You can't discount a book with a Robert Coover blurb on the back, can you? I get the feeling that Toby Olsen is a very entertaining guy to sit next to at dinner. I'm just a little weary, at this point in the book, of the different ways of saying that prostate pain is like a knot in your testicles.

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I am not into saying bad things about small press writers. However. One of the main characters spends the last 100 pages wearing a diaper. And the narrative not only refers to the diaper constantly (as in, "He shifted his diaper.") but also has the character feeling the urge to urinate, and then urinating painfully into the sand. Like... all the time. This character must have been pounding 40s right off camera, because he peed more than a male dog on a walk down fire hydrant alley. So... I'm not weeping or anything that it's over. It was an interesting book. It made me, at the end of the day, feel a little bit dumb about my ignorance of contemporary art, and a little bit tired of the whole diaper/prostate/urination/testicles thing. Husband postulated that the thing was maybe revised on a laptop in a urologist's waiting room.

BUT! It's a unique interesting book and I'm going to write a positive review of it. I'm sure Olson's other books aren't quite so relentlessly crotch-o-centric.

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The story takes place in three different times... 1949, 1969, and a fictional 2069, where characters in a sci-fi book being written in 1969 follow a parallel storyline to the plot unfolding in the "real world." Beyond this interesting and unusual structure, the book introduces us to an odd grouping of characters who are engaging and genuine, wracked as they are with various medical problems.

Ultimately _The Blond Box_ is about the art of Marcel Duchamp, and the best function of this odd narrative is providing a thoughtful, hypothetical context for his strange art. It's like a different way to write about an installation, instead of a scholarly article, instead of a critical review, a novel that positions the art in the center of a system that explicates it in the unusual way it demands.

Labels: books, contemporary, novels, toby olsen

When I was gathering my big stack of contemporary fiction titles to read this summer, this was one of the ones I held up to my husband and said, "Oh, for heaven's sake, get a load of this." I thought it was one of those books, that makes you work so hard to "get it", and gives you half a sneer in return, and I won't put a finger on what I'm talking about or give an example, but you KNOW you have read them, I think I've even written some short stories like this, and so I know what I'm rolling my eyes about.

Here's a description from the back jacket:

The first part of Forgetfulness is a fictional monograph on the life of the Austrian modernist composer Anton von Webern (1883-1945).The collage-work monograph unfolds in a Webernian sequence of events and silences combining quotes from Webern, his friends and associates, and various historical and literary figures with short scenes, monologues, dialogues, newspaper articles, and theater and film scripts. The result is a lyrical panorama of early twentieth century Vienna.

The second part of the book takes place in Vienna on May 1st, 1986, shortly before the election of Kurt Waldheim as President of the Austrian Republic and shortly after the Chernobyl disaster. The three simultaneous, intertwining monologues of an archivist, a retired opera singer, and the author of the monograph, revisit the themes and events of the first part, commenting on postwar conceptions, analyses, and revisions of the period during which Webern lived, while continuously haunted by the specters of Waldheim and Chernobyl, the persistence of crimes that are immanent, unpaid for, or only dimly, disingenuously recalled.

There was more. Also, flipping through it, I saw that part of it was divided into three sections on the page, between "Soloist" and "Composer" and "Archivist" and I anticipated a fractured narrative, with time jumping around, and thought it would be a pain in my ass. I MUST BE GETTING OLD. I ADMIT. I WAS CRABBY ABOUT IT! I wasn't really jumping up and down, anxious to crack into it.

WAS I WRONG.

I read this book while I was coming down with the flu, and as sick as I was, and as miserable as I was, and as much as I just wanted to close my eyes and think of clean snow, I COULDN'T PUT IT DOWN. I have never had a reaction like that to a book this experimental. I've thought they were funny before, brilliant before, even engaging, but I have never read a book without traditional characters or plot with such avid determination from cover to cover.

This book is gorgeous. I can't explain it properly, but... it's incredible. That three section part that I was so belligerent about reading was genius. Instead of feeling distracted and irritated, it was actually fun to kind of read around on the page, then turn it, then read around on the next page... the formal experimentation totally worked. And all the mixing of different texts and characters and times and places really WORKED. It formed a picture, at the end of the book, that could have been rendered in no other way. And that's the point of experimental fiction, right, to do something in a new way that couldn't be done in the old way.

It was beautiful, beautiful, ever word on purpose, every image worth looking at, every page a study. This book offers the reader a massive pay-off for the diligence involved in reading an experimental form. The thing is... the challenge in this book is not even like work. Go buy it, read it, see how it's done.

Labels: books, contemporary, michael mejia, novels

I'm three chapters into this and have a few things to say as I trot along:

1. The book is so much easier to read than the others I've read in this summer challenge that it's like eating yogurt after eating mueslix.

2. I think I've figured out Mazza's strength. I've read a few of her other books, most recently Indigenous which was about growing up as a Southern California native. That book is REALLY interesting, for the same reason I think I'm interested in this one: Mazza takes you into an unfamiliar world -- like the interior of an orchestra, or life in marching band, or working in a hospital, or in this case a ranching town in Wyoming. Instead of filling you in, in some patronizing irritating way, on the way things are, she just lets the way things are penetrate the text. So, you have this feeling of keeping up with the book, and figuring things out as you go. Like playing a game without a manual, and you know you'll just figure it out. the novel is very confidently, firmly written, so you don't have to think, well what's this lingo? What's going on? You just get immersed. It makes her books very memorable too, because you feel like you learned something -- that sounds so dumb -- but you feel like you learned something via experience, not via information.

3. All three of the novels I've read have to some degree been about filing in the lines of a mystery that's in the past. In this case it's something with the main character's sister and mother. It makes me very aware of the line being tread between giving the reader a mystery to unravel, and playing "What have I got behind my back" with the reader, rationing out clues and past scenes in just the right doses. This novel is coming from a lot of different directions -- it can kind of make you feel like skipping forward through the past sections. I suppose that's what it's like with any book where the past is a mystery.

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Reading a book by Cris Mazza is like being set down into someone else's life. This is what novels can do for you that non-fiction books can never do. It's what novels should always do, of course, but Mazza does it so expertly that picking up another of her books is like preparing to go on a trip. There's that same anticipation. Whether it's the world of dog shows, or inside a rehab hospital, or playing in a symphony, or in this case doing wildlife research in the badlands, the immersion is immediate, complete, and seamless. Instead of holding your hand and patronizingly explaining the details, Mazza just slides you in next to one of the characters, and the life you're living unfolds with the natural progression of the plot. Would I ever have known all the details of playing in a marching band, without reading Cris Mazza? Would I have ever thought it could be that interesting?

Another experience this book affords is the ability to like and understand someone that in your usual life you would either ignore or reject. Mazza's main character in _Girl Beside Him_ is rough, irritable, and unpredictable. He's violent and sometimes mean. By all indications, he should be the most unlikeable main character in the history of novels. Not only do you not like the guy, but reading along, you have no doubt that if he met *you* he would definitely *not* like you either. However, by the end of the novel, I was really cheering for this guy, really wanting him to have something resembling a normal, healthy interaction with another human being. I'm not sure, in the end, if I got that, and I'm not entirely sure I understood the ending. However, putting the book down, I felt like I'd been somewhere and had seen something that I never would have looked at before.

Labels: books, contemporary, cris mazza, novels

I'm about 50 pages into it.

It's making me ask myself things like... why are books written? Why are books read? For years I have tried not to read anything written in this century, with very few exceptions including material I am critiquing for friends. I have read a few things but in general I haven't, especially I have tried to avoid other "experimental" writers because I'm afraid of being influenced, etc. I know that is not in the spirit of postmodern piracy and we're all very collectively conscious and text cannot be owned or authored or whatever, but this is just me. I read 19th century fiction, or else I read like... Jan Brett books to my kids.

So this is the first experimental fiction I've really read in a while. I have a few thoughts.

I think that readers naturally try to romanticize things. We try to imagine the settings as beautiful (or at least sublimely ugly) the characters as deep and true, and beautiful, and we want to believe there is significance. We're on the author's team, automatically, because we bought the book (or at least we're spending time to read it). It seems to me, and I could be completely wrong, that this author is trying to undercut my subconscious but earnest attempts to romanticize things in this book. I'm not allowed to believe the main character is beautiful or nice or even wise. Smart, she is. The smartness is packed into every crack of every sentence, with extra smartness crammed in around the edges. And a big fat dollop of smartness on top. Maybe it's droll of me to want there to be some romance here, and I mean, gauziness, not like... true love or anything. I want something to drag me back to the book after I eat dinner, make me consider staying up all night to finish it.

This book has a hook -- it's not lacking in a plot question. But I think the questiony lesbiany relationship burgeoning in old letters is maybe supposed to be the hook. There is also the question of whether the main character will find the painting she wants to find. The thing is... she's kind of rough. She puts on sweaty shirts. I *realize* okay? I realize that I'm not being very pomo and whatnot abotu this. But... I feel differently about reading a book where not only does the main character judge how sweaty her shirts are before putting them on, and sit down naked on the bathroom floor in grit, but that the narrative tells me that pointedly, as if... this is the kind of book you are reading, where the women's shirts are sweaty. Like... in your face, reader.

I am going to finish reading this book -- it's a challenge. There is quite a bit of great, great writing in this book, and I will have more to say later.

**********************************

I finished it.

Right about page 100, my interest began to pick up significantly. I started having that urgent feeling like I had to know what was going on and finish the book. That feeling is the reason I read books (the reason most of us read books, I bet) and it was a relief when that kicked in. In my exalted opinion, page 100 is a bit late, and if I hadn't been committed to reading this, I would have put it down.

Having got to the end now, I think I do understand what Sheffield was doing. The book is about how women (as represented by the main character Stella), and also readers of fiction that's been written by a woman, assume that men are the villains, that the central female character (Stella's mother), especially if she is artistic, beautiful and from a disadvantaged background, must be the noble victim. This novel takes that expectation and turns it on its ear.

The novel is a mystery, and the reader has to reconstruct what has happened in this strange, exotic family, and figure out, as Stella puts it at one point, "who hurt who." While Stella herself is trying to figure it all out, from old letters and from talking to key players, the reader is always two steps behind her. One step behind, because we have to figure out what Stella already knows, which she does not openly tell us, and two steps because the style of the Stella sections is so difficult to unravel, almost purposefully obscuring what is already pretty murky. It takes a lot of work to get to the bottom of this mystery, and some of it I still don't quite understand... I just didn't pay close enough attention, maybe, to tie up all the loose ends.

The Stella sections are in present tense, and are my very least favorite type of stream of consciousness, where the character seems to think about each step she is taking, literally, where every motion or breath triggers a song lyric association, where there is just a swirling flood of thoughts surrounding the slightest action. Nobody thinks that much, that coherently (even thoug it reads as incoherent) and it makes for a very disembodied, difficult to picture narrative. The book's strongest sections, however, are letters from Stella's aunt, Judith. Those sections are great, at times excrutiatingly emotional, in spite of the fact that they *seem* to be written in a more detached, less immediate and personal style. I connected more with the letters in their stiffness and formality than I did with the rushed breathiness of the present time sequences.

For those who are willing to work this book has rich rewards. There is a very unpretentious and ungauzy portrayal of an artist who comes off as brilliant and believable at the same time. There are lots of motifs that pervade the book, affecting you on that almost subconscious level where you connect ideas as you read. The idea of the missing eye, for example, resurfaces throughout, connecting with many parts of the book and anchoring the theme of absense, invisibility, and what is unseen but still there. I really liked that. Also the idea of value, of copying, of replication, centered around the Winslow Homer that the main character is seeking and played out in her mother's art as well. I liked the idea on page 135 about how two photographic prints of a nonexistent original could hardly be said to be copies of each other. There were lots of smart, interesting ideas in the book, buried under the 'cuz' and 'gotta' and 'gonna' and 'yeah' language that Stella flooded us with.

Once the book takes a hold of you, its grip is firm. I did not love the present tense sections, but I loved the contrast of the letters from Aunt Judith. They were like islands of great writing in a sea of Joycey crazyland sometimes. I didn't like some of the things that Stella did, that seemed completely irrational and weird (like trying to seduce Uncle Buck or reading her own letter last -- I thought she might read her own letter first, and try to *kill* Uncle Buck) but I appreciated how omplicated the puzzle really was, after all the mud had swirled away. The underlying message, too, I think, is a treasure worth unburying.

Labels: books, contemporary, elisabeth sheffield, novels

It took me a long time to read this. It wasn't a book where one thing leads to the next in a single plot that you follow from page to page. The plot is more like a spiral that circles through five main characters in various states of poverty in a small Southern town. The owner of an all night diner, slave to nickles and daily routine. The black doctor, powerless to inspire his neighbors to follow his ideas about birth control or politics. The teenage girl whose family runs a boarding house, dirt poor, ignorant, and an unnoticed musical prodigy. The deaf/mute jeweler who has no one to speak sign language with. The labor agitator, frustrated to violence by the circumstances of those he sees around him. The book goes around and around through the lives of these, people, following them for one year. For all of them, in this year, bad goes to worse. There is uniform decay, devastation, disappointment... it is a bleak bleak landscape that only gets more grim as the book goes on.

It's written brilliantly. There are lines in the description of the people specifically, of the milieu in general, of the zeitgeist, that are just exquisite perfection. Descriptions I will remember and take away with me, into other books, into my understanding of the South during the depression. Her handling of the point of view shifts, around the town, and how the different characters' worldviews are reflected in the quality and nature of the narrative... it's nothing short of genius. I can't even think of a crack to make about this book, because it was so completely shatteringly good.

Nothing I ever want to read again. I could get the same sensation of hopelessness, ignorance, waste, and want by... wait... WHY would I want that sensation? Why don't I just go put my head against the sidewalk and flatten it with a sledge hammer?

It's a book that I should have read, and I'm glad I did, and I'm glad it was written, but now I want to eat strawberry ice cream, and read P.G. Wodehouse, and kiss my kids.

Labels: books, Carson McCullers, novels

This book has been stopping up the works around here. I read it, I digested it, I had thoughts about it, but for some reason I haven't felt quite prepared or qualified or informed enough to just comment on it and get on with life.

I think it's because I have this image of George Sand, this just ass-kicking supergenius female from the intimidating past, leaning over my shoulder, saying, "Don't you GET IT you moron? It wasn't just about cabbages and true love. It was about so! much! more!" The truth is, unfortunately, that unless the imaginary spectre of George Sand wants to clue me in, I'm not sure what else is here besides the cabbages. And the true love.

Well, there's the prologue. The prologue, which addresses the reader directly, is about how noble and wise the peasants of rural France are (were) and how their lack of intellect or ability to understand their circumstances doesn't interfere with their feeling of important feelings, and experiencing of deep emotion. Isn't that nice? Those sweet, precious peasants and their silly dumb heads.

Sand takes the prologue to rhapsodize about them and how cute they are, with their toil and whatnot, and then tells a pretty story about them falling (without consciousness) in love with each other. Finally, she takes a few more pages (a lot more pages) to just unapologetically savor the peasants' cute rituals. Marriage rituals.

The truth is, I really liked the book, up until the plot quit and the "I miss the cute peasants I used to look down on in my youth" themes came to the fore. I expected something raunchy, loud, scathing, or at least edgy. This is not that. It's a sweet love story, flavored with a lot of local color. So George Sand was a surprise, for this postfeminist. I'm not sure I'd love to read another of her books, but I'm glad I finally found out what she was really writing, under all that scandal and wild living.

Labels: books, George Sand, novels

I started reading _The Mill on the Floss_ today. I read it a long time ago. In fact, I read it when I was about 8. Some of it my mother read to me, and some I read on my own. Two things I thought about, reading this today.

1. I can't *BELIEVE* I was trying to read this when I was eight. Maybe I have been getting stupider, my whole life, and at 8 I was some kind of precocious smartybrains, but it boggles my mind how an eight-year-old could have made it through any of this book. Just reading the dialect... takes a lot of concentration. Maybe I *have* been deteriorating. Disturbing. Or not. Strangely, the first chapter has a small girl (her father lovingly calls her a "wench") reading books too hard for her. Like _The History of the Devil_ by Daniel Defoe. Okay, that one I didn't get to. I can *remember* reading this book, like... I remember how I envisioned the mill. Ridiculous. I am purposefully picturing it differently now, to thwart my eight-year-old self who couldn't possibly have read this lousy book.

2. I like this part: "Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance in order to compass a selfish end are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist; they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow parishioners to be guilty of them." It goes on, but the gist of the passage is that most people are too stupid to be intentionally wicked. Nice!

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I think, to begin, that Maggie did not ever love Stephen. Obviously, she never loved Phillip. The love story of the book was between Maggie and Tom. I don't mean any kind of icky illegal brother/sister whatever. I do think that if she had had a larger sphere of experience, more people to know, more exposure to the world, she would have found someone to feel truly "in love" with, in the way that Phillip and Stephen were in love with her. In the passionate, married, adult kind of way. However, she never did find that kind of love. Her love for her brother was the only one that was true. That was eternal, endless, that she would give up everything for, that would have been completely sustaining for her.

Look at the structure of the love story for Tom and Maggie. They were together, they were separated by events and circumstances, they came together in the end -- it's a classic story arc for a very traditional love story, except that it's as if the genders are reversed.

Mmm... more later. Children.

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When I say it's like a gender reversal... I mean a reversal of the traditional stuff that you expect to happen in a romance novel. Tom is the one who rejects Maggie for being "bad" as he pursues his relentless morals and virtues. He sends her away, corrects her and refuses her for all her traits that he sees as flaws. Ultimately, as they come together at the end, he sees (I think) that she was essentially herself, and that the flaws were actually her consistency with her own strange (to him) nature. So, Tom is kind of the girl, and Maggie is kind of the man who redeems himself at the end through a heroic, pure act. And they die in each others arms. I mean... come on. The inscription on the tombstone of their shared grave is: "In death they were not parted." That's what you'd expect to see on the grave of two lovers. Stephen and Phillip are just distractions... obstacles and problems. THey aren't really love interests. They're things that keep Maggie from Tom, things she does to disappoint him and alienate him.

You know, this story kind of reminds me of A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy. I have to reread that one, I guess. There was some kind of a train ride or something, reminding me of Maggie's float down the river with Stephen. I just can't remember how it all went together. This is why I need to reread these books.

SO. Baby needs convincing that she really does need a nap. I have more to say, shockingly enough.

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Two more things and then I'm done with The Mill on the Floss and I'm on to The Haunted Pool by George Sand.

1. Eliot doesn't have any problem with all her characters sounding alike, except of course the ones that are supposed to sound funny. How is it that Tom and Maggie speak like articulate educated children while their parents speak like such funny bumpkins? Wouldn't they talk like their parents, at least until they went off to school? And then still pretty much? Maggie and Tom sound alike, as do Phillip and Stephen and Lucy. The aunts do have mannerisms that separate them, and of course Bob Jakin and Mr. Tulliver have unique diction. Again, this reminds me of D.H. Lawrence and the way everyone was able to really express everything so exquisitely, in spite of the fact that their parents and teachers were such dullards. Amazing.

2. I think that bringing the aunts and uncles and parents and children all together at the beginning of the book was a great and risky move. Writing a scene like this, with so many characters all new to the reader, would be a real forehead-cracker. Eliot tackles it with her weapon of choice -- exhaustive detail in description. I read that Eliot was one of the first of the Victorian fiction writers who really went all out on the visuals -- painting with words was a highly valued trait in Victorian fiction. So, in making you see the buckram sleeves and the fuzzy hairpieces and whatever else, Eliot is introducing you to these characters with visuals you can hang your information on. Also, bringing them all together with the catalyst of Tom's prospects in education forces them all into their most opinionate mode... so they can be their most exaggerated selves. Going to their individual houses and showing them to the reader in their own settings would have been easier, but less effective. Throwing them all together, guiding the reader through the chaotic scene with detailed descriptions, and making them fight it out -- that gives us everything we need to begin on these characters, in a few concentrated scenes.

Labels: books, george eliot, mill on the floss, novels