Juliet, Naked

I gave my husband a (requested) David Gray CD for Christmas, but we were away for the holiday and then he had to go back to work earlier than I, and blah, blah, blah...the CD was sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. Without thought, I ripped open the package, popped it into the player and then thought, uh-oh. This seemingly mundane act echoed the tipping point in Annie and Duncan's relationship in Nick Hornby's excellent Juliet, Naked.


Duncan is an obsessed mid-forties Brit who lives for any gleaning he can collect about his favorite cult-status American musician, Tucker Crowe. Annie is his long-term partner who lives for, well, um, she's not sure. Duncan gets the motherlode one day when the reclusive artist releases what are essentially demo tapes of his most famous album Juliet and the CD arrives in Duncan's mail slot. Annie gives it the first listen and suddenly everything that is wrong with her relationship with Duncan and her life in general comes out into the open. Words are said, competing analyses are written, affairs are occuring---although, as Duncan says: It's not...I wouldn't use the present continuous. There's been an, an incident. So 'Who have you slept with?' is probably the question. Or 'With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?'"

No matter, the damage is done. Annie betrayed Duncan by being the first to listen to Tucker Crowe's miraculous delivery and then compounded the betrayal by not loving it. Duncan, more prosaically, sleeps with another woman. This is the state of things in Gooleness, a dreadful and dead English seaside town which Hornby describes thus: It wasn't much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown...The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they'd been bereaved that morning.
Duncan procedes to sit on said beach and weep over several listens of the "new" Crowe album, dubbed Juliet, Naked. Annie decides to leave Duncan.

In the meantime, the real Tucker Crowe is quietly, anonymously living on a farm in Pennsylvania, watching and waiting as his various lives--that is, the children of his many wives and/or girlfriends--traips through what's left of his current life. And then he reads Annie's online opinion of Juliet, Naked.

Yeah, the characters all come together eventually and I worried a little about how all this would work and whether all the characters would be more damaged at the end of the story than they already were. But then I remembered that I was reading Hornby. I love that his characters can be what appear to be complete losers and either they don't realize it (so it's not a rent-your-clothing tragedy) or, more often, he gives them some spark, some redeeming quality that makes their loser-ness bearable. Yep, you end up liking them. All of them. And you want everything to work out; you just don't know how it can or will.

I've read everything from Nick Hornby that I could get my hands on and I only hated (and boy, did I hate it) How to Be Good. I could never choose a favorite, though. I've gotten musical advice from his Songbook, book suggestions from his columns in The Believer (his essays are collected in books), a thorough education on Arsenal soccer, and I've enjoyed his fiction. It's considered 'lad fiction' but I'm not sure why because unlike, say, the movies of Judd Apatow and countless American TV ads for cleaning products, the men may be slouches and losers and doughy, but the women are flawed too and it makes sense as to why they put up with the men in their lives.

Nick Hornby is such a great and fun writer. Any modern writer that mentions a newel post gets bonus points in my book, but that's just me being clever. Here's Hornby being clever: Annie announces she's "met" someone and Duncan replies, "You're seeing somebody? I'm...well, I'm aghast." If ever Duncan wanted to know the reason why people sometimes found him insufferable, she could point him toward that description of his inner turmoil. Who used the word "aghast" without irony? And, yes, the word aghast comes up again later.

Honestly, I'm not doing justice to how fun this book is. The characters--and there are a lot of them--are all great. Annie's not-very-good shrink (she's his only patient), Gav and Barnsey, the local dance stars, the staff at Annie's museum, Duncan...All nice. Hornby has a good ear for late-thirties, early forties angst and voice. He's slightly less successful with the older and American Tucker Crowe, but I forgive him.

As for my David Gray transgression, it was never mentioned in this household. I'd have the perfect comeback, though. After all, my husband got to read Juliet, Naked before I did and I "discovered" Nick Hornby before he did...

Await Your Reply

I don't think I've ever done this, but I finished Dan Chaon's book Await Your Reply and flipped back to the front and read it again. Well, sort of. I admit I picked through it and no, it wasn't because I was totally confused (I wasn't). I did regret not being able to read Russian though that was irrelevent to my enjoyment (but I am taking along the passage on Friday when I see a Russian-reading friend just to make sure). No, I started the book over to see how all the parts fit together. I loved every moment I was reading this book, but I wanted to make sure I had understood it all.

Chaon tells the story of the lost in society. Or rather, of those trying to be lost and stay lost or become someone else, reinvent themselves, destroy their old selves, become new or better than they were. There's college student Ryan who is handed information about his past that totally changes everything he's ever believed. There's Lucy Lattimore, recent graduate of a midwestern high school who dreams of better things when she leaves town with her former teacher (okay, mostly she's thinking of money, but she's also escaping her orphan past, her "slow" sister with pet rats, and being called "Licey"). There's also Miles Cheshire, entering his thirties and still searching for his lost twin who may or may not be a criminal mastermind, who may or may not be schizophrenic, who may or may not have killed people and defrauded institutions, but is most certainly a part of Miles and of Miles' very ability to exist. These stories and lives eventually intertwine which I feared would be contrived, but about half-way through (right about the time I was wondering if Miles was the schizophrenic one and whether or not his twin Hayden actually existed) I decided it didn't matter if the story ever felt contrived because each character was so wonderful.

The disparate points of view suffer from the usual switching narration in that sometime you don't want to let go of a character or situation to wander off and read about another, but those moments are short-lived. The patience it requires to read such a book pays off well because Chaon's writing is so nice. I was intrigued by each story.

A short warning: Await Your Reply starts off with a severed hand. The story of just how that hand came to be severed--which you have to wait quite awhile for--is truly horrifying, but this event is an anomaly in the book. Await Your Reply is not a violent book, though it's not exactly a happy book either. It's a look at the world and what we want our role in it to be. It is, in a strange way, a book about family and connections we make to each other and our attempts to create families out of acquaintances. It was a little sad to read that Dan Chaon's wife died of ovarian cancer just as he finished the book and I can't help but wonder if some of the gloom that pervades this book is a reflection of that. This is not an unhappy book--characters more or less end up as they should or could--and if the pieces of the giant puzzle don't fall in just the way you think they should, read it again. See if you can figure it out.

I also highly recommend Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, though in looking back at it, I'm reminded of the sad elements in that book (primarily the story of the girl in the mid-sixties who's in a home of unwed mothers). Chaon's writing is strong and his characters always interesting. I'll get back to you all on that Russian.

The BEST of what I read 2009

Well, here it is, for what it's worth: The books I liked best this year. There's a lot I still haven't gotten to, either because I'm holding out for Christmas presents or there was a long hold wait at the library, or I just haven't had time.

These are in no particular order, but Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby has to go at the top of the list. I couldn't wait to read it so pretty much it was on my list as soon as I knew Hornby had a new book. I've only ever read one thing by him that I've not liked, so Juliet, Naked was the expected success. I just finished it so I'll do a write-up soon.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff

In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, by E. Lockhart

Ex Machina: The first Hundred Days (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (non-fiction)

The Secret to Happiness by Sarah Dunn

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Obviously, I've written these all up so you can look up a more thorough explanation of why these reads are so great.

I'm still looking forward to Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, even though I abandoned his last book (The Bridge of Sighs). Still love Straight Man too much to hold one book against him.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon is also high on my list (and under the tree, I hope?) because I thought his You Remind Me of Me (2004) was brilliant.

I'm also going to throw in a few kids books that were popular in our house this year. I have to start with Mo Willem's Piggie and Elephant series, especially I will Surprise My Friend. This is a perfect book for early-ish readers but it's really fun to read out loud too. Kind of irreverent.
Speaking of irreverent, Jan Thomas is our new favorite picture book author. It's a battle between The Dog House and Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny. The pictures are fantastic and the story is silly and perfect to inspire even the most reluctant reader.

On the older front, my 4th grader laughed late into the night over Barbara Park's Skinnybones. He doesn't know anything about baseball, but he can relate to Alex, a smart mouthed kid who can't help but get himself into one scrape after another. It's a great fourth grade read, as is The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson. Yes, the over-the-top Herdmans from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever are back, but without all the potentially awkward-for-public-school religious bent (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Thanks for reading my posts this past year. I hope I've inpired some of you to pick up a few of these books along the way. Cheers.

The Audacity to Win

This isn't exactly a tell-all book. More like a tell-almost, for which I don't blame David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, because while honesty is a great thing, Obama still does have to work with a lot of the characters (Hillary Clinton, McCain, Biden...). On John Stewart, Plouffe said he was careful to be as honest and complete as he could because he felt that no matter how they voted, people would agree in the future that 2008 saw a historic election race and that there should be truth in the details. He says it better than I could here. So, yeah, read this for the inside scoop if you love campaign details, but not if you're looking for trash-talk about Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Reverend Wright or even Joe the Plumber. It's not that they're not in The Audacity to Win, but they're not Plouffe's focus.

So what do you get in The Audacity to Win? Well, it's a great story. Being from NH, elections are always huge for me, and this one in particular. I live literally around the corner (well, two corners, since I'm being literal) from the "coffee shop" in which Hillary cried and thus cemented her NH win in the primary. This was a devastating moment for we early Obama supporters, so I cringed a bit having to read this again, but I loved how philosophical Obama (and Plouffe) were at the unexpected loss. Plouffe quotes Obama as saying, " I actually think this is for the best...Sure, if we had won New Hampshire, we'd be in the driver's seat. But I'd be like a comet streaking across the sky. White hot. And comets eventually burn up...Now people can see how I deal with adversity, whether we can bounce back...And they want me to earn this. They don't want it to be so easy for someone like me and it probably shouldn't be."

Read this as arrogance, if you want, and some people will, but I see it more as a sign of how introspective and thoughtful Obama is. Throughout the book, this is how he comes off. Yes, he makes mistakes (flat debates in the beginning--he hated prep--some lines that came off wrong--the clinging to guns bit and the You're likeable enough, Hillary), but every time he could have gone the low road, Obama chose the high road. He never made hasty decisions. When he felt his campaign--in the heat of the action--failed his image of hope and change, he chastised them. But he also took responsibility for his own errors. He comes off as even more impressive in this book than I had already thought him.

Of course, Plouffe is a bit biased, but he does succeed in writing an "honest" book. He dances around the deep animosity between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp. He also hints strongly at their concern in picking Biden, that he would go off message too much and mangle things (as Biden himself admits he can. He was, after all, the one who first suggested Obama was a "clean" candidate, unintentionally implying this was unusual for an African-American). But Plouffe is clear that Biden and Hillary became formidable allies and he recognizes that.

There's a lot about the day-to -day stress of running a campaign and it made me more sympathetic to all those appeals for money we kept getting. This book brought back all the excitement and tension of the race, even while I read it with some sense of a 20/20 hindsight on the part of Plouffe. I liked the nitty-gritty stuff (skipped some of the numbers, though), loved the explanation of the delegate crunching the campaign did to win, and the role of the superdelegates. Lots of details, with humor occasionally thrown in (because, yeah, obviously they react to Sarah Palin). This is a great way to relive the highs (and, I suppose the lows, though who wants to relive those?) while getting interesting insight into a very unusual campaign and candidate. This would be a great gift for a political junkie on your list (um, unless he or she is wacky right- leaning and then I think you might want to go with a little book I've heard about that's coming out of Alaska).

On a completely unnecessary side note, I saw Plouffe read here in town (which was fascinating), but I was glad to find out his name is pronounced PLUFF because the way I'd been saying it in my head made the same sound as the French word for jumping into water. An apt enough metaphor for his taking on such an unorthodox candidate, but a distraction nonetheless.

Astonishing X-Men/ Amulet (book 2)

Whether you love Joss Whedon (Firefly/Serenity) or hate him (Dollhouse), you have to agree he writes a good story. He doesn't forget humor in even the darkest tales and he moves things right along. So it is with his version of X-Men. I've only read Volume 1, Gifted, because I checked it out of the library on a whim and by the time (later that day) that I realized how fun it was, someone else had taken out the other three volumes. In this town, we seem to all read the same things at the same time.

Anyway, I don't really dare say much about the X-Men universe. All I know I've gotten from the movies and from being a member of a houseful of superhero geeks who are currently really into (age-appropriate) versions of wolverine and the X-Men. Still, I really liked this volume. Cyclops seems to be trying to pull the team back together in Professor Xavier's absence. They've got Kitty Pryde back, Emma Frost (currently playing a good ? guy), Dr. McCoy (the Beast) and Logan (Wolverine) who only grudgingly joins in. Also a cool little alien dragon who tends to save the day. There's an evil and gross alien, there's a rumored cure for mutants, there are rumors of Jean Grey still kicking around somewhere and other characters coming back from the dead. There's some fighting and a bit of blood. Some funny parts. You know, the usual. Some of the humor comes from the errors in programming of the Danger Room. Dr. McCoy tries for Hawaii, but fails to specify size so they're all sitting around on rocks, dipping their feet into the simulated Pacific Ocean. Another time, Logan and Scott are about to get chewed out for swaggering and fighting (over Jean, still) and Emma Frost accidently, though appropriately, drags them into a giant pink dollhouse to do the yelling.

The art work is really good and leaves enough to the imagination that I wasn't grossed out or too confused. The stand alone pages are nice and fit in well enough without giving too much away. The only thing I didn't like was sometimes the flow of the story was confusing. Words appeared in one scene that really belonged to the next. I guess that's like the voice-over on a tv show, sometimes, but I didn't like it. I have enough trouble following graphic novels. I like the version of these characters and the clean art work, so I'll finish the series as soon as I can.

In the meantime, I picked up my son's book, Amulet, Book 2 of The Stonekeeper's Curse by Kazu Kibuishi which he and I have been waiting and waiting for since reading the sort of freaky Book 1. He didn't like the beginning of book 1 because the father of the family dies in a horrible car accident (car slides off cliff) and it made me think I was a bad parent for letting him read this, but the rest of the book and this one too is a great quest book. Young siblings Emily and Navin slip into another dimension or world and they become supposed saviours of the way life used to be. In book 2, they must fight the evil Elves who've taken over an already cursed town under which the inhabitants are turning into animals. There's a funny scene in which we see the close up of a furry rabbitty-mouse doctor's face, saying: Hmmm, I'm afraid you're right. Next scene we see his patient and the doctor continues: You're turning into a slug. And the patient is a boy with eye stalks growing out of a perfectly normal face. But this isn't a scary/bad thing since the whole town is mostly made up of creatures at this point.

The walking house is one of the coolest things from the first book and it's back here, though slightly less cool because it's not new and it gets kind of wrecked. It's straight out of a Miyazaki movie. The coolest thing here is the fox bounty hunter who leads Emily further along on her quest to be the next stonekeeper. He's like the baron in The Cat Returns movie (Studio Ghibli) with a touch of the Disney Robin Hood fox. Though my favorite character is still Miskit, the animated stuffed pink rabbit, complete with a patch on his ear. Love him. In this volume, Emily must learn to control the stone before it controls her, she's trying to save her mother who was poisoned by an octopus in the last book, and the elves grow (literally) more evil. It still ends on a cliffhanger which is annoying since it'll be another year before the next book comes out, but I highly recommend this series for any budding (9 and up) fantasy readers (and their parents).

Secrets to Happiness

Ahhh, this is just the novel if you've been in a fairly heavy rotation of depressing books. Sara Dunn's book is what Good Grief by Lolly Winston wanted to be. The characters are great, the story is light enough to be fun without being condescending and you get inside the heads of all kinds of people. The story is ostensibly about Holly Frick, the author of a long-remaindered book with the embarrassing title Hello, Mr. Heartache. She's also the author, or at least contributor, to a few remaindered relationships, including a somewhat recent divorce. So, yeah, this is a relationship book, but don't even begin guessing who ends up with whom in the end because it's not as straight-forward as a Jane Austen.

Along with Holly, we meet her best friend by default, Amanda, Amanda's slipper-footed, sleepy husband, an arrogant, hamburger-eating Buddhist named Jack, an ex-, ex-boyfriend with mother issues (but not the kind that freak you out as a reader, necessarily), an overweight gym employee, a lost single woman named Betsy who is everything you'd expect from the name, but with more depth than you thought (also she went to my husband's alma mater. It's always nice when the little schools get a shout out). There are a few other fringe characters, including an over-medicated gay TV writer, a vet, and a dog with a brain tumor. I'm probably missing a few , but it's not confusing to keep them straight. It's all fun as they navigate their NYC world, fall in and out of relationships, and find out what other people really think of them. I love the ambiguous ending because even when I read light stuff, I don't necessarily want the happy ending spelled out for me. This book is more like life where everything is ongoing even if it doesn't have all the heavy lifting of our own boring little existences.

I recommended this to friend Denise who was recently lamenting that every book seems to be about people being miserable. Since she is the one who introduced me to Sarah Dunn through The Big Love (which I don't remember much, but in my defense it was years ago), I was happy to pass this on to her. Any misery is short-lived in Sarah Dunn's books.

The Zookeeper's Wife

A review I read of Diane Ackerman's account of Polish Christians hiding Jews during WWII was very provocative, making much of the fact that Jan and Antonina Zabinski hid their "guests" in empty animal cages, but reality doesn't offer quite so literal and tidy a metaphor.

That's not to make any less of the really horrifying existence of Polish Jews and others deemed unacceptable by the Nazis. Jan and Antonina are what you would call animal people. Yes, they're in charge of the Warsaw Zoo, but they are so into their animals and their jobs that it's a little hard to see where their home ends and the grounds of the zoo begin. Their house is full of "pets" and assorted sick zoo animals. They live and breathe for their animals. Oh, and their son, Zys (which, by the way, means lynx). And when the Nazis attack Warsaw, they watch in horror as their zoo (unfortunately rather strategically placed for both the defenders and the attackers) is decimated. What animals aren't killed outright, are carted off by the victors to enhance their own zoos (the Nazis are strangely into conservation and nature). The left over few--the inappropriately exotic, the dull, the overly cumbersome--are used for an organized hunt.

Jan and Antonina and the other zoo employees listen in horror as the animals are killed for sport just outside their door, but this is still only the beginning of their story. Ackerman rather casually drops in that they are members of the underground and soon their semi-defunct zoo turned Nazi pig farm (there's some irony for you), turned Nazi fur farm, soon becomes a center of an underground railroad system of safe houses. Their proximity and somewhat easy access to the infamous Warsaw ghetto allows them to, in the end, save over 500 people from certain death.

The book is full of the sorts of subterfuge many Poles became adept at during the occupation. Ackerman makes much of the Zabinskis knowledge of animal camouflage to explain how well they played their roles in the underground. But in Warsaw, life was all about camouflage. Everyone was hiding something, even if it was just a way of keeping themselves alive. There was even a beauty salon secretly teaching Jewish women how to "pass", that is, how to camouflage their Jewish looks and ways. The subtleties of this are completely lost on a modern American, living in a liberal town, but the descriptions drive home the hazards of living in Poland at that time.

The risks that Antonina and Jan and many others faced defies belief, but this is a story with a more or less happy ending (if you can ignore that Poland got swallowed behind the iron curtain for so long). You root for the Poles, even those in the Ghetto, while fully knowing the annihilation that awaits Warsaw. As a reader, you keep your head down and hope that at least your main characters come out okay. You still hope for young Rys' pets to help save him from the horror of war even while, one after another, they meet unhappy ends. (Their ends are not always due to the war either since the drunk hamster is just as sad as the piglet shot by soldiers.) You still want all the guests to live, you want the teacher in the Ghetto to escape from the train taking him "East". Not all of the small stories are happy so you have to look at the big picture.

Interestingly, Antonina explains their own survival away as "luck" on her part but feels her husband was "brave." I suppose that every Pole must have felt some version of that as well. One of the most horrifying moments for me was when Antonina is forced to watch as her young son is led away by soldiers. It is hard to know how one would react in similar circumstances and this scene is towards the end of the war when, presumably, they're fairly worn down, but I was shocked by the lack of emotion the author allowed for. Ackerman is culling from the woman's diaries, but still. I felt this lacked a certain amount of drama, but I guess that's non-fiction for you. The other thought that I returned to often was that the elder Zabinskis carred cyanide pills with them at all times. This made sense from their position as underground workers with knowledge that would endanger hundreds of others, but all I kept thinking was: Who would take care of their son Zys if they killed themselves? I guess that's the selfish question of an outsider.

The Zookeeper's Wife was a perfect follow-up to my book group's read last month of The Madonnas of Leningrad. The fiction of that book was glaring when compared to the reality in this book. This is not a depressing book because, I suppose, Ackerman focused on nature, and the return of life each year. I don't want to say this was a "gentle" war story, but it was easier to find hope in the pages than in many other books about Warsaw at that time.

Admission

I am really glad I don't have a kid heading toward college any time soon. Reading Jean Hanff Korelitz's fictionalized account of working for Princeton University Admissions brought all sorts of anxiety-inducing images of what it's like for kids to get into (admittedly highly selective) colleges these days. Admission was actually a lot of fun at first. Each chapter begins with a presumably fake, but believably varied excerpt from an application such as: "My favorite saying is 'no guts, no glory' I can't recall who said it first, but whenever I'm in trouble or facing a big challenge, I think about this saying." Or "I have engaged in a myriad of activities at my school, none more meaningful to me than accompanying the A Cappella choir." Really, they're all special in their own way and usually tie into the chapter.

Portia Nathan is a 38 year old veteran of two admissions jobs (Dartmouth and Princeton). She's not burnt-out but she is at a crossroads in her life. The fact that she's been living the past 16 years with a professor at Princeton (sans marriage) comes out to the reader only after she sleeps with a former classmate from Dartmouth whom she meets for the first time on a recruiting trip. He works for a weird little alternative school in rural NH and you just know the kids she meets there are going to cycle back into the story in ways that the kids she meets at Deerfield Academy on the same day are not. So, yeah, all is not necessarily happy and settled with Portia, in spite of early appearances.

I loved the sense of getting inside information. Portia insists (often and relentlessly to desperate parents) that there's no rule book or secret formula for kids to get accepted at Princeton, but this book almost shows that there is. Still, admissions officers come off as almost glamorous and thoughtful and fair. It certainly seems an exciting, if exhausting, job even if most of the time a lot of people hate you and find you supremely underqualified to hold the balance of their children's lives in your hands.

A lot of the book is very interesting and the characters are all good: Portia's reactionary, uber-liberal (but secretly wealthy) mother living in Vermont via Northampton, MA (bastions of liberalism, of course); Portia's live-in lover English professor, their barely-social good friend who is a philosopher, the nutty professor who finally loses it spectacularly...the list goes on because Korelitz has a good ear for dialogue and voices. The kids she meets (and there are tons of them) are generally believable and recognizeable without making them caricatures.

Things do fall apart in the book. I can almost mark the section that caused my first sinking feeling that there was going to be a really contrived coming together of all sorts of loose ends. Not all of my connect-the-dots predictions came true, but the fact that one of them did (and it's a biggie) kind of ruined the book for me. Still, by all means, read this for the entertainment and the writing (which is pretty good). Also, if you know New England at all, it's a lot of fun. I grew up practically in the embrace of Dartmouth so I loved walking the streets with Portia, recognizing all the landmarks, though I've got a few picky things to say about that, too. If she's going to be hyper-specific about landmarks and streets, then she can't turn around and make places up completely. The Ice Cream Machine did NOT in any believable way become a Hemp Emporium (which Hanover, NH probably couldn't support anyway) but a very tasty Indian restaurant. But I'm just being picky, of course, and an author can make up all she wants.

I love her description of NH as it is seen nestled strangely between ultra-liberal Vermont and Massachusetts. To be sure, NH has changed dramatically since my childhood, so much so that I was confused for a moment when she called it the "reddest of red states" but she's spot on: Vermont was Massachusett's natural sibling, its cousin up north. One drove up to Vermont to visit friends, and friends of friends, and to attend music festivals and solar energy festivals and peace festivals. But nobody you knew lived in New Hampshire, land of Live Free or Die. Over there they were too busy incubating right-wing politicians and shooting their guns to take much of a look at solar energy or--God forbid--peace. Love it! Just don't read that to my uber-liberal New Hampshire mother, or her peace group.

Her Fearful Symmetry

Just in case you've forgotten your Shakespeare or your O'Henry, along comes Audrey Niffenegger to remind you that messing with life and death, ghosts and resurrection always ends badly. Well, maybe not exactly badly for everyone, but certainly there are unintended consequences to actions even from beyond the grave.

Her Fearful Symmetry isn't as good as the excellent The Time Traveller's Wife, but that would be hard to follow up. True to form, though, Niffenegger's characters are fascinating. Notice I didn't say likeable. There are two creepy sets of twins, a handsome, crossword puzzle setter with severe OCD, an apparently perfect lover left bereft by his long-time girlfriend's death, some very serious-about-their-jobs cemetery tour guides/care takers, a kitten and--oh, a ghost or two.

Elspeth dies early on. In fact, the first chapter is called The End, so I'm not giving anything away. Still, as you might expect in a gothic-style novel, she does tricky things with her will and estate, sending for her estranged twin nieces to come live in her London flat after her death. The twins are down-right creepy in their twinness (images of those twins seen briefly in The Shining come to mind). First of all, they're mirror twins (same features, in revers including placement of the heart), their daughters of a twin, they dress exactly alike--even at the age of 21. They sleep together, the do everything together. It's weird. But they're at loose ends so they come willingly enough to occupy their unknown dead aunt's aparment. There they meet Robert (eventually), Elspeth's lover and arguably the best or nicest character in the book. They also become friends with Martin, their OCD neighbour who's pining for his wife, recently decamped to a place where she doesn't have to sidle just right through a doorway or watch her husband scrub floors for hours.

Valentina and Julia also meet the neighborhood which includes the lovely Highgate Cemetery. Niffenegger clearly spent time here and does a wonderful job of making it sound beautiful and appealing to both the living and the dead. When I finished the book, I was extremely tempted to send a contribution (as requested) to help maintain this lovely place (I was gently mocked for this by friend Alyssa).

So, yeah, the cemetery is important, but it turns out that's not the only place ghosts hang out. Yep, the dead aunt is still hanging about in the flat. Niffenegger has some interesting ideas about ghosts, though the why isn't ever made clear. Maybe we're supposed to assume that ghosts are everywhere in England, which would explain why apartments over there are so cold and draughty. Ghosts who haven't figured out how to get out the door are still hanging about their old homes, drifting through people in the hopes that someone will leave a book open or turn on the TV so they don't stay eternally bored.

But things aren't all fun and games for the ghosts or for the living. The creepy Valentina and Julia have some mysteries to solve and have to find a way to become their own person; Robert has to deal with his pining for Elspeth; Martin has to make it out his door...someday; and Elspeth also has a few things to settle. Never underestimate a ghost is all I can say.

This book is both wonderful and disturbing, dark and creepy, and sad and icky. Who doesn't desperately hope to become reconnected with the love of your life, or to have childhood mysteries solved from thin air? Niffenegger explored some of this in The Time Traveller's Wife, and she's very good at portraying eternal love that isn't bound by things like time and space or, say, death, but this is a different book from her first. It doesn't have the freshness of Time Traveller's Wife, but Niffenegger puts her stamp on the afterlife. She's not just connecting dots here and it shows. The characters and perhaps the mystery will draw a reader in, and the end is very satisying. I'm not saying it's a perfect ending, but each character's conclusion seems somehow just right.

Ex machina (Vol 1 and Vol 2)

I was so excited when the library finally got this series from Brian K. Vaughan because I'd really enjoyed Y:the last Man (see Blog 9/25/08). In Ex Machina (and the library only has two volumes so far though I know there are at least 7 out now with another one due in December), Vaughan gives us Mitch Hundred who is mayor of NYC by way of civic engineer turned failed superhero. Yep, he's a failure at that because even though he gets blasted by something weird under the Brooklyn Bridge (didn't you always suspect?), that allows him to "talk" to machines, he struggles to fulfill his perceived destiny to help humankind. Turns out New Yorkers find "The Great Machine" kind of a nuisance and want him arrested for zipping around in a goofy outfit, trying to help the police do their jobs. But then, Sept 11 happens and Mitch becomes mayor (conveniently an independent).

Volume 1 sets this story up but it moves back and forth in time (which I usually hate, but it works okay in graphic novel form--the titles help) and we never get the full story on any of the threads we're following. We know something happened under the bridge, we know that only one tower fell on September 11 and we get some background on Mitch's friends and associates. I loved Volume 1. Volume 2 starts to fill in some stuff, but it gets really gory and violent which I don't like at all. I just read those parts with slitted eyes and made the best of it. I don't care much for the artwork in this series--I miss Pia Guerra and Jose Marza' work in Y, though Volume 1 gives a nice overview of the models Tony Harris used for the characters in Ex Machina. I appreciate that there's a great story, but art is obviously really important in this format, and these pictures are just a little...off. I mean, the angles are fine, there's tension and all, but, well, for example, his "young people" look old and frankly, that's a problem. Also, Mitch is supposed to be so handsome, but yeah, it depends on the frame. Not consistent enough. I'm probably nit-picking, though, because it's not like it's painful to look at.

I love the vaguely parallel universe--it's recognizeable, but different. I'm completely hooked on how Hundred can talk to machines which turns out to be more convenient than you'd think. Would-be assassins have to use increasingly unsophisticated weapons, and political enemies can't even hope to listen in on conversations. All the wit from Y is still there and there are some nice "perfect world" issues, along with great mystery and misdirection. Still, I don't need so much eviscerated dog and people stabbing themselves with pens. I'm hoping Volume 3 moves away from that because I'm definitely hooked on the story.

The Madonnas of Leningrad

In the afterword of her novel about a woman with alzheimers recalling the siege of Leningrad during WWII, Debra Dean writes that she was "supremely unqualified" to write it. She claims she had only recently heard about the horrible, three year siege in which millions died of starvation, she spoke no Russian, and her knowledge about art history was only general. This is how I felt upon reading the novel. Not that the author was unqualified, but that I knew little or nothing about alzheimers, little or nothing about the siege, little or nothing about the artwork found in the Hermitage in St Petersburg (Leningrad, at the time), but that Debra Dean seemed like a pretty good guide.

We meet Marina just as her mind begins to close doors on the present and drift into the days when she was a guide at the grand museum in Leningrad. Dean describes alzheimers as the world made into book form. "When the page turns, whatever was on the previous page disappears from view." Intriguing, and not yet terribly depressing, because you can sense the book is still there. But then Dean pulls back and Marina's husband's reaction is revealed and you realize the stress of living with someone you love who is slowly abandoning you for the dark days of living in the basement of a war-destroyed city.

In 1941, Marina's job as guide at the Hermitage was to help pack and transport the museum's collection to safety during those first giddy weeks pre-invasion. The exhaustion, the dismay, and the fear are counter-balanced by the strange exhiliration of something big about to happen.
But as winter sets in and they watch helplessly as the entire food storage system of Leningrad is destroyed by German bombs, any hope for a short war disappears into hunger and something close to despair. Dean doesn't perhaps do justice to the despair, but I suppose it's because her main character stays strangely upbeat throughout. She gives hints that Marina has always lived a bit in her head which made me wonder if this is something that can be said about anyone with alzheimers. If Marina was always a bit dazed and dreamy and out-of-it, does that preface her alzheimers as an old woman? Or is that merely a novelist's attempt to be tidy?

There are some bits of humor in this novel, though not many, given the subject. Marina is at the wedding of her granddaughter and slips back into the past, remembering the "food" they ate, including "blockade jelly" which was melted-down joiner's paste. Her daughter-in-law can't quite get her head around her eating glue and thinks Marina's alzheimers is confusing her. "This was during the war?" she asks. "Yes, dear." Marina smiles. "We didn't eat it before. It wasn't THAT good."

Marina also describes living with her uncle in the basement of the Hermitage, along with many others, and having to endure his snoring. She was kept awake another several hours, her fatigued brain snared in the drama of his next breath...She can't help but think of it as an extension of his pedantic character, that even in his sleep he must be listened to. Marina doesn't have to listen for long to her uncle, though, as her family and friends begin to slip away one way or another.

The humor, like food during the siege, is what you make of it. To keep herself occupied during the first cold winter of starvation, the task which Marina gives herself is to recreate the Hermitage in her mind so that she can still give tours of its bare walls. This laborious memorization at a time of severe deprivation perhaps works a bit as the crosswords and sudoku are supposed to. These too are supposed to stave off our own alzheimers. Is all that effort what kept Marina alive during the war when so many others died? Is that what keeps her at home with her devoted husband so long after it becomes clear she cannot stay in the present? It's a lovely thought, to have art into which one can retreat in times of either mental or physical duress. Debra Dean may have felt unqualified, but she paints a tender and interesting picture of a survivor.

The Class/ Entre les murs

I love reading about imperfect teachers. It's somehow reassuring, though I suppose I should be alarmed from a parent's point of view. You mean, my kids' teachers might not be more than human? The class, by Francois Begaudeau is a semi-autobiographical look at a year in the life of a middle school teacher in a tough-ish Parisian neighborhood. It's been translated into English, but more interestingly, it's a pretty decent movie.

I can't judge if the book is well-written since I was just focused on reading the French text, but it's definitely very readeable, and was fascinating for the comparison it gave me between the middle schools I have known and taught in, here in the United States, and the attitudes and setting in at least one particular school in Paris. This one point is probably the most important: They serve champagne or wine at staff meetings. Ah, think of the possibilities at our own staff meetings if a sip of alcohol were encouraged. How much more relaxing to discuss difficult students--or, as they do in this book--how to remedy the balky coffee machine sittuation.

Okay, but on to the students. I've always been under the impression that in French schools, they certainly don't bend over backwards to encourage students who don't fit the norm. I suppose it "helps" that after middle school, the kids are sorted out into vocational or college tracks so it's easier to teach to your group. I'm still under that impression after reading this book and seeing the movie although it's interesting to note that the teacher in the movie comes off as much more sympathetic and dedicated than the one in the book. The guy in the book is always tired and a bit cranky. The movie's class is less disciplined (althought not, I should add, from an American perspective) than in the book. I can't believe they still stand when an adult enters the room (although in the movie, the principal has to remind them to do this and then gives a little speech about how that's not a sign of subjugation but of respect). The kids are mouthy and culture proud. They are mixed in their feelings of being or not being "true" French. They want the teacher to stop using the name Bill for all his sample sentences and replace it with Rachid or Aissata. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bill in French sounds very similar to the word for "crazy" so there's a great scene in which the teacher is not sure if the kids are calling him crazy or not.
And he does make some mistakes. He gets so fed up with the behaviour of two girls on student council (apperently, they get to sit in on grade discussions for the class) that he says they're acting like, um, whores, I guess. Imagine how well that goes over. The teacher in me cringes (and empathizes), but at the same time, HELLO. They're not your pals and they're crazy with hormones and have their dander up all the time at that age. Try having a little less champagne at the next staff meeting, maybe (or more).

I learned all sorts of things about the system of education in France, some of which I found intriguing and some of which horrified me. It was nice to get a modern glimpse at another school culture.

Bad Mother

Say you are lying in bed late-ish on a Sunday morning, reading Ayelet Waldman's book Bad Mother (A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace) and you decide to get up and make your kids waffles. No, not the frozen ones you had been contemplating, but the real ones, using whole wheat flour because, yeah, the book is making you feel a little guilty. So, does this make you a good mother? Well, what if as you're serving the waffles, you're yelling at everyone because it's all about the timing and NO ONE is helping! Okay, bad mother?

Actually, I'm cheating a little because I haven't finished reading this book and I might not even read all of it. It definitely seems like a pick-and-choose-your-chapters kind of book. I also don't recommend reading this as a nursing mother or as the member of a family whose laundry for the month isn't done (ever!), or if your even remotely grumpy about your husband's career or hobbies. Since I don't fit those categories for the time being, I read a couple of chapters and had a few amusing Aha moments.

In the chapter called Free to Be You and I (that should ring some bells for many from a 1970s childhood), Waldman talks about having been skewered for writing that she might love her husband more than she loves her kids. Actually, this chapter is about sex and housework. She's trying to explain how it seems men use sex to wind down after a stressful day whereas women, not so much. "What men who describe spending an afternoon with their children as 'babysitting' need to realize is that after an evening spent rushing from work to the grocery store, back home to cook dinner...then folding a load of laundry while supervising homework (and yes, thank you for doing the dishes, but it's not like you cured cancer; don't act like you deserve the Nobel Prize), before getting the kids to bed, packing their lunches for the next day, and then sitting down at the computer to answer twelve e-mails from the first-grade room parent...fill out and submit the nursery strategic plan survey, and create an Evite for the birthday party you've left yourself less than a week to plan, most women just aren't in the mood."

Having or not having sex with your husband is not, of course, an indicator of good mother or bad mother, but it does indicate if there is balance in your life. Even Waldman admits that her own wonderful marriage has gone through the ususal ups and downs. And I think we all know that you can love your husband or your kids more than life itself and still want to get away from them. This is not being a bad mother, but we sure do like to look askance at anyone who admits this need out loud.

In those early days--especially when nursing around the clock--my friends and I admitted we just needed 24 hours away from our families in order to be better mothers/wives/people. I don't think it ever happened for any of us but not because we were particularly "good" mothers. It was just too impractical, too much trouble, too much pumping ahead of time, never mind the discomfort that would follow. And we were tired.

My kids tell me on a daily basis whether I'm a good mother or a bad mother, entirely dependent on whether I've instantly fulfilled their wish of the moment (bought them a toy, made dutch baby for dinner, sewn up a little stuffed pig who's losing his beads) or asked them to do something that simply ruins their lives (clean up, wash their hands with soap, or--the worst--leave the house for some activity that only I can see will serve the greater good that is their future, like say, go to the library or go hiking). So, see, I don't really need anyone else in society passing judgement.

But this book isn't all about the way we judge ourselves or each other. It's just a provocative title and you should pay more attention to the subtitle. I loved the chapter on the torture of homework (Drawing the Line). I skimmed through one about dealing with daughters because I don't need to care. Ditto for the invective against dodge ball because it seemed too obvious (and my kids love dodge ball). So there's a little for everyone in here. I

love non-fiction that can be read in a non-linear way and can (mostly) make me feel better about my life. Next weekend, I'll try another real breakfast, but maybe without the yelling, and I already know I won't have to wash the floors then. Already done that today and with spousal help to boot. Peace and harmony reign in the household and it's all good.

Secret Son

There's a Guy de Maupassant short story about a couple of destitute families who are each approached by a wealthy couple eager to "purchase" a child. The thinking is, these families have too many children, the wealthy couple is childless, and who wouldn't want the best for their child? One family refuses out of love for their youngest. The other accepts and their boy is brought up happily and becomes healthy and wealthy. The other, well, he stays with his loving family and remains poor and uneducated. That's not the end for Maupassant, of course. In the very end, the boy whose family loved him too much to give him up, is bitterly angry at the opportunity for wealth and betterment that his family denied him by keeping him close. Maupassant never met a character he didn't want to twist.

This story came to mind as I read Laila Lalami's Secret Son. In the beginning, Youssef is living a life like many other young Moroccan men of little means. His mother loves him, has sacrificed all for him, he has friends in the slums where he lives, he has studied hard and is accepted to college so in many ways, he's better off than most. Except. Except. When he gets the opportunity to meet the father he never knew was alive, and he sees how the other half lives (because naturally, his father is one of the elite in Casablanca), he is forced to choose between two worlds.

Or at least we think he must choose. When his father convinces him that school is a waste, I hesitated to trust him. When his father keeps him secret from his current wife and balks at telling him much about his half-sister, you almost know things are bound to get ugly.

Still, what is there in the slums for Youssef? Surely, even his mother must see that? The somewhat shady group called The Party is moving in to his old neighborhood, bringing some good (health, free tea, some education) to the area, but with suspect motives and some preaching against lost morals. Even Youssef's mother doesn't trust them and she has never liked her son's friends. Youssef gets a good job through his father, abandons his mother to live the good life, and forgets his friends. Still, these friends are dead ends anyway so isn't that good?

Of course things go wrong. Youssef isn't particularly political but all politics are, of course, personal, and yes, he becomes wrapped up in things bigger than himself. When young Americans reach a dead end--no jobs, a lack of educational opportunity, no opportunities in general, they tend to turn to drugs or murder, I suppose. Apparently in Morocco, they turn to terrorism or political assassination. Youssef resents his mother for trying to keep him in the slums (and she is a bit sneaky about the whole thing), but he resents the world his father represents, once it is clear that his place is unattainable within that world.

I'm not saying Lalami is Maupassant, or that she twists her characters (or our loyalty to those characters) as much as that writer does, but there's a touch of despair and desperation in her characters that seem believable and remeniscent of the great writer. It's a bit hard for a westerner to understand all the nuances of class and the appeal of religious zealotry in the portrait she gives of modern Morocco, and I'm not sure Lalami draws a straight enough line for Youssef from beginning to end, but it is easy to understand his eventual desperation to find a way out of a dead-end, by any means necessary.

A great line as Youssef is watching his slummy neighborhood flood:...just a few feet away, knee-deep in water...a man and his two sons turned the corner toward him, carrying a chipped divan base, a torn mattress, and a table...They were moving to an uncle's house, the boy told him. It was the worst thing in the world, Youssef thought, to lose everything and, at the same time, to have everyone see that you did not own anything worth saving.

I also liked the proverb Youssef's friend quotes to him when he is trying to discourage Youssef from pursuing a rich co-ed. Everyone should know the size of his teapot. Proverbs always sound wise in translation, don't they?

Check out Laila Lalami's short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, as a great read and a little window into the Moroccan/French world. I've given it as a present to several people.

In The Heart of the Canyon

One by one, the guests staggered off the bus into the hot morning sun. Their clothes were clean, their hats straight, their skin pale and freshly shaved and smelling of sunscreen. Eager not only to be of use but also to make a good first impression on the guides... Let's just say that, obviously, nobody stays squeaky clean at the end of the raft trip down the Colorado in Elisabeth Hyde's great book. They don't all make a good first impression--or subsequent impressions--on the guides either. But, as is true of any basic fiction, everyone ends up somewhere different at the end.

I really enjoyed this book. A great, fast read (though thank goodness for the handy "cast of characters" page at the beginning because there are a lot of them). I loved the sense of dread throughout. You just know something's going to happen, but this is no River Wild or Deliverance (uh, good thing). Really, it's just about...a dog. No, not Cujo, not some evil being. Well, actually, that's a possibility. All I can say is, watch that dog!

JT is on his 125th run as white water guide and maybe he's had this kind of crazy group before and maybe he hasn't. He's got the old experienced couple. Oh except, one of them now suffers from Alzheimers; He's got the "expert" on everything; He's got the happy, happy Mormon family; the single 50 year old who doesn't do well in groups, the young frat boy who can't swim; and the 250 lbs teenage girl whose mother is trying desperately to bond with her on this twelve day journey. The dog, they pick up along the way.

I loved Amy, the fat girl (her own label) best. Hyde occasionally throws in excerpts from Amy's diary complete with overuse of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I loved it. So believable. Amy's really smart, too (perfect SAT scores), but she's got a few problems. Well, don't they all. Most of the characters are well drawn and you understand where they come from and where they end up. I guess on a trip like this, it'll either bring you together or tear you apart. Either one would make a good story, if done well. Hyde does a nice job of making the trip sound fun, all the while, making you dread the next page. It didn't exactly make me want to sign up--too much drowning potential, not enough showers, and I'm pretty sure I would have hated everyone in the group, but they do make an interesting set of characters without being too cliched. It's an exhausting ride down this river--forget the white water. The dog really doesn't help.

An Expensive Education

For several days, my son wandered around the house repeating "An Expensive Education" outloud. The title to Nick McDonell's book had led to a discussion of the cost of college and I'd touched a little on the double meaning in the title, but I wasn't fooling myself too much. What had intrigued my son about the cover was the silhouette of the machine gun that serves as the letter i in Expensive.

Nick McDonell made a little literary scene with his debut novel Twelve because he was only seventeen years old at the time. I liked the book except for the epilogue which felt tacked on by a seventeen year old unsure of his readers. That's the editor's fault who, presumably, was not seventeen years old. Well, McDonell has grown up a lot and An Expensive Education is a long way from the NYC prep school world of Twelve. We're taken from the expensive education of various characters at Harvard to their various world experiences that turn out to be expensive to their souls, lives, or psyches. There are a lot of characters, though I read this in a very disjointed manner, so I can't attest to whether it was my fault or the author's fault for cramming so much in. The plot does revolve around various conspiracies--The CIA, the Saudis, the academics--so I think we're supposed to be a little confused.

I love how fresh the campus experience feels in this book--it helps that the author is barely out of that environment. I'm even willing to buy some of his Africa undercover experience, though I never got a real sense of the land or area, as if the author didn't know that much either. When a village is blown up in what seems unrelated to a CIA visit to the freedom fighter stopping there--but nonetheless perpetrated by Americans--one of the best moments, is our main man finding a mug from his Alma Mater. Way out there in the bush, the middle of nowhere, in a camp of rebels, there's a mug from Harvard. Of course we know that an explanation and a tie-in will surface eventually (and McDonell takes his clever time), but I liked the thought that Harvard's influence in everywhere....

I had two thoughts as I read: I'm glad I didn't go to Harvard, even if it would have given me connections that set me up for life (um, especially, apparently, if you want to work for the CIA), and I'm so glad my kids aren't college age yet. The stress, both socially and academically, seemed much worse than being tracked by an assassin in remote parts of Africa. I did love one minor character's observation on being a poor international student on campus. Their visas allow them to work only for the college so they mostly clean rooms as part of the dorm crew. The introductory meeting looked like an abbreviated European Union of reluctant janitors. A Scottish piano virtuoso, two Irishmen, half a dozen girls from Eastern Europe who were either short and stout like potato balls or tall and thin like dune grass on the Baltic. There was a Norwegian and an Israeli, both of whom had fulfilled their required military service before coming to Harvard and liked to talk about it.

The large cast of characters, the ambiguity of the good and the bad, and the roles that various members play in the fight against terrorism (perceived and otherwise, personal and world-wide) can make for a confusing read, but it's also a perfect example of the real world chaos inherent in such a fight. You may think you know everything because you come from the World's Greatest University (as dubbed by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam), or you teach there, or you wish you'd been there, but you are just another pawn in someone else's game. Just like everybody else. McDonell has grown a lot in his endings since Twelve, and there are several story lines that don't tie up neatly or even nicely and a final page that you might hope is ambiguous, but is pretty clear. Yeah, that machine gun cover sort of sets that up, doesn't it?

Billy Collins

I've been a real sloth with my reading lately--either rereading old stuff (kinda' fun) or starting and abandoning various crappy novels. Yesterday, in desperation and not wanting to get out of bed on the last day before my schedule takes a turn for the crazed, I grabbed a Billy Collins book of poetry within reach. Ah, poetry, nothing like it on a rainy day and for a gloomy mood.
Actually, that's not at all what Billy Collins' poetry is like. He makes me want to be a better writer. No, not poetry. God no. I gave up any illusions in that direction my freshman year in a course with Julia Alvarez. Billy Collins has such crystalline images of the every day world that he takes away any difficult reputation poetry might have. I own three of his books (always buy poetry books or no one will write it anymore. It's not like it's lucrative) and I'd be hard-pressed to choose a favorite. I've almost peed my pants reading some of his poems ("I chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of Three Blind Mice") which might, unfortunately, say more about me than I should let on. Other times, I've been brought up short by his perfect rendering of a moment in my own life (Most recently, "On the Death of a Next-door Neighbor"). Mostly, he's funny, though. Poetry works for every moment in life and reminds us to look and admire the small things. I like way too many of his poems to do them any justice here. I feel like a novice star at the Oscars, forgetting to thank my husband in my anxiety over forgetting no one. So I won't even try to touch on the good ones. Simply, I fell for Collins over "Another Reason I don't keep a Gun in the House."

The neighbor's dog will not stop barking.

He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark

that he barks every time they leave the house.

They must switch him on on their way out...

Buy the book (Sailing Alone Around the Room) and read the rest for yourself. It doesn't have to be a rainy day.

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

This fun read was on display in the adult section of the library and it was only after I was zipping along in it that I noticed it was labeled a "teen" book and even had a sticker claiming it an honor book for the Printz Award (young adult). I guess I should have guessed from the title, but all I can say is this is a great cross-over novel by E. Lockhart, a fun summer read (though I can't help thinking of the Lockhart from Harry Potter when I hear the author's name)

Frankie Landau-Banks is a precocious girl at boarding school in the present day, but boarding school always gives a sense of being a throw back in time and Frankie is really into PG Wodehouse which also gives it an old-fashioned feel. Any book that quotes Wodehouse is going to appeal to me anyway, and Frankie so admires his wordplay that she starts to use what she calls "the neglected positive" of words. That is, if you can be disgruntled, than why not use "gruntled" to mean the opposite. If you can be inept, than at times you must be "ept." That's one of the things I love about Wodehouse, and how cute to see a teenager doing the same thing. But yeah, that makes her a bit of a geek. She makes up for her intelligence and skewed sense of humor by being beautiful, but she's still not appreciated by all. Frankie's okay with that. She wasn't a person who needed to be liked so much as she was a person who liked to be notorious.

Here's what Frankie does that ends up making her notorious (and not very well-liked): She infiltrates the somewhat silly and not entirely effectual "old boy" network known as the Loyal Order of the Bassett Hounds. Her boyfriend is the co-king of the secret order and at first she is a bit envious of his secret-from-her role, and later she is annoyed by how lame the group is and how much better she could run it. Stealthily she takes it over, pranks and all. Her best pranks cause the headmaster to give a "tedious speech...explaining that there were appropriate and inappropriate ways to express a desire for change in one's community, and there were appropriate and innappropriate ways to express artistic inclination; and the two were different kinds of expression with different appropriate contexts. However, neither one should involve the infiltration of abandoned buildings, playing with electricity, the mockery of invited guest lecturers, or the delivery of perishable food to public spaces at inopportune times."
Frankie is both the kind of girl I would have loved to be and realistically dumb in some of her desires and actions.

It's mostly gentle pranking she initiates, though there are some deep consequences for her and those around her. The book is a realistic portrayal of late high school age without being dully normal. I love Lockhart's description of one of the characters: He was "Alpha in the morning," unshaven and scraggle-haired, taking up space just in the way he loaded his tray with breakfast--dashing across the room for butter, calling to the caf lady to please yelp at him when the new bacon came out, drinking his tea while he waited for his toast to pop, balancing his tray under one arm like a football." I didn't know this kind of character until college, but I recognize him. Frankie's a teen in many ways, and I'd be curious to hear feedback from an actual young adult who read this, but E. Lockhart writes a book that any age can enjoy.

Brooklyn

The first thing that struck me about Colm Toibin's novel, Brooklyn, was how young his protagonist is to sail away from her small Irish existence to Brooklyn, NY, all on her own. This book takes place in the 1950s (I'm pretty sure) and while there's a rich tradition of leaving your home and starting life in a new place, this book was the first to make me realize what exactly that would mean to a young woman (who might be twenty, but I'm not sure) in a time that lacked easy transatlantic travel, let alone communication systems.
Encouraged by her accomplished (but single) older sister, and aided by a Brooklyn-based priest with local ties, Eilis leaves the narrow comfort of home that offers little hope for a future, to begin life as a single young woman working in a big department store in NYC.

Her trip across the Atlantic is perfectly depicted as absolutely horrible. Sure, in the great tradition of such novels, she's befriended by an older, wiser woman, but that doesn't help for seasickness combined with homesickness. Eilis makes the mistake of eating food her first night on the ship and is very ill. She is prevented from using the shared bathroom by the calculated thoughtlessness of the neighbours and she resorts to using a mop bucket in the hallway her first night. Later, her bunkmate retaliates against the neighbors which is funny, but doesn't help Eilis feel less sick. After another night of constant retching, Eilis was exhausted: the liner seemed to hammer against the water. But then the sea became calm and Georgina [the older and wiser woman]...met the couple in the adjoining cabin and made an agreement with them that neither side would prevent the other from using the bathroom, but they would instead attempt to share it in a spirit of harmony now that the storms were over.

This is the sort of thing that Eilis, a relatively sheltered young woman, has to deal with on her first time away from home. It is easy to imagine that it's only to get worse when she starts her new life. I think I would have cried every night. Even though Father Flood has arranged her arrival, her job, and her home in a boarding house. Eilis has left everything she knows and expected of her future for a new and unexpected world. She seems surprisingly brave throughout.

But this is not a depressing novel and Eilis gets on fine--helped by many--and life in Brooklyn seems pretty good, apart from the homesickness. Eilis deals with the different personalities at her boarding house, advances in her studies and her work, and starts to fall in love (I think). Here begins the only flaw I found. First of all, I will say I'm impressed by how well Toibin captures a young woman's voice. That is usually hard for a man to do properly and I was convinced. But every time he gives Eilis some gumption, I think he's moving her forward as a character, and then, no, she sinks back into a passive sort. The Italian she begins dating seems perfect in many ways--though there are some mysteries about him that are never explained--and yet, Eilis holds her feelings back. She seems to go along for the ride, even though she seems happy and, um, active in her relationship. When she brings Tony home one night, the landlady (understandably for the time period) is furious with her. The other girls try to find out what is wrong with their landlady's humour:
"What's biting her?" Patty asked.
"I think I know, " Diana said, looking at Eilis, "but as God is my witness I heard nothing."
"Heard what?" Patty asked.
"Nothing," Diana said. "But is sounded lovely."
I thought that was a really sweet exchange, both period-appropriate and a reminder that not everyone was a prude back then.


So, anyway, things seem great with Tony, and Eilis adjusts well to American life, and all seems good, and then, as things do in Irish novels, tragedy strikes at home and Eilis has to make a life-altering decision or two.
Except that she doesn't make any decision. I wanted to kick her. It didn't seem fair of the author to have Eilis grow up so quickly and become so interesting and resourceful, only to stuff her back down into a child-like "it-was-all-a-dream" state. Choices are hard, but you have to make them or you're not living.


The writing is great, though, and the characters are well-drawn and there's a great sense of the Irish community in "the new world". It was nice to read something Irish that wasn't about poverty and bad luck. It's more a story of chosen immigration rather than one of despair. Toibin wonderfully captures the emotions of being torn between two countries or even two cultures. I just wish his character hadn't ended so flat even while the ending to his novel was good.

A Fortunate Age

Ah, to be young and in New York City in the 90s. Of course, I was only in Boston and quiet old New Hampshire at the time, but I get the idea. I loved Joanna Smith Rakoff's book A Fortunate Age. She says she wrote it as an homage to Mary McCarthy's The Group which tells a similar story of college graduates in New York, but is set in the 1930s.

I will say A Fortunate Age was a little hard to get into at first. There are a lot of characters and I had trouble keeping them straight at first, and then, almost immediately, there's a fairly weird sex scene that made me wonder what kind of book I'd wandered into (not that it's a bad scene, just completely unexpected by me). Once I got everyone straight, I couldn't wait to read it (I was on vacation so it wasn't hard to find time) and I desperately didn't want it to end.

A Fortunate Age begins with a wedding and--in a mockery of Shakespeare who liked to keep these separate--ends with a death. It's not a tragedy, it's not a comedy, but it is a life. Or several lives, as it follows a group of recent Oberlin graduates. And they sure pack a lot into the years between 1994 and 2001 (and no, it's not really a novel about September 11, so don't get all worried about that "death" at the end). People get married, sleep around, have affairs, work for poetry magazines, host their first BBQs, buy apartments, get acting jobs, lose jobs, write books or fail to write books, have babies, don't have babies, deal with crazy (sometimes literally) family, and generally move into adulthood whether they want to or not. Almost everyone gets what they deserve, except for two characters who are unfairly served. Tuck should have gotten worse and Lil should have gotten better than she did. But this is life.

When I finished the book, I remarked to husband Ben that there sure was a lot that happened to these people, but then I reflected on my group of college friends and realized we've had more or less the same number of "dramatic" life events, deaths included. It just seems more contained in novel form. And everything seems so hopeful when you're in your twenties, even if you're broke and confused. Looking back on that time, one character reflects about herself: In May, Emily would be thirty. Her moment of greatness--or that particular sort of greatness--had passed, hadn't it? But the moment had existed. She was sure of it. There had been a window, a brief exhilirating time when something might have happened--when she might have become (so painful to think of it now) if not a star, per say, a---what?"

Actually, I love the ending to Emily's story, so she should stop complaining, but I love also her thoughts here. I used to call being 28 the magical age. It seemed like every character on TV and in books I was reading at the time was 28 and it seemed that was the year for something to happen. (It didn't, but my life is pretty good now, so I don't feel cheated). You just think you are special and destined for greatness, when really all you want is to be happy and loved.

There are villains in this story, but no real heroes since it's just about life, really. There are truly good people and good friends and then there are a few that try to suck happiness away from you. Sometimes they succeed, but mostly not. Lil, the first to marry, says: ...If she left Tuck, what would keep her here, in New York. Her job, her friends, yes, but what were such things compared to a marriage? She'd thought friendship so important before she married, but now she felt that her friends didn't really know her--couldn't really know her the way Tuck did, even if that knowledge made him hate her. If we're lucky, we keep our good friends and move into good marriages/relationships. If not, well, there's room for that too in A Fortunate Age.

I definitely have to read The Group, now, though I'm a little hesitant because it's long (lazy and not on vacation anymore) and it was written in the 1960s (about the 1930s) so I'm afraid I'll become irritated by the attitudes toward women. When Lil (in the 1990s) gets angry because her husband says he never asked her to cook dinner every night and she says: "But we have to eat...What would we eat for dinner if I didn't cook?" Didn't he see that this was the point of being married? To eat dinner together, to make a life together, out of small things? Well, I can relate to this. But set in the context of a book about 1930s graduates of Vassar, will I be offended by a similar exchange? or just think: plus ca change... (actually, I probably won't think that because I've never used that phrase out loud in my life except when it was the title of a college text I had).

There are a lot of parallels apparently, In this book, the group's nemesis in college is described thus: Her prolonged exposure to academe had lent her a too-warm sense of her own intellectual superiority and sophistication, which, in turn, led her to regard her fellow students with unconcealed disdain. She adopted a world-weary pose in all her classes, even the Honors seminar...sighing whenever someone asked a question she found particularly elementary, and periodically trying to catch the professor's eye, so the two might commiserate over these sad products of the American education system...( Don't you HATE her? and know her) But then, here comes the real world, and you find yourself a mommy at a playground with unfriendly other mommies and a familiar face shows up and, yes, it's your nemesis, but you're so, so grateful, that there's someone there that remembers you when you were smart (although she probably sighed and eye-rolled over your questions at the time) that you find yourself happily following her home for a playdate. This is exactly what happens to Sadie in A Fortunate Age, a scene that is almost identical to one in The Group. (Plus ca change...?) Emily Bazelon made this connection for me in her column on Slate.com (about the dreaded playdate in general), which is really why I think I should read The Group soon.

Read A Fortunate Age with patience and nostalgia. Or, if you're a more recent graduate, read it with wide-eyed surprise at how easy it was to get a job post-graduation back then. Enjoy.

Wit's End

I really enjoyed Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, though I'd been reluctant to read it originally (embarrassing title). I hadn't intended to pick up Wit's End because it had gotten mediocre reviews, but I was on vacation and it was in paperback and I thought it would be a nice light read, which it more or less was.

Wit's End is about a damaged-by-life goddaughter reconnecting with her somewhat reclusive--though really just private--famous, murder mystery writing godmother. Addison is known for meticulously planning out the central murders in her many books by designing elaborate dollhouses of the crime. So, yeah, she's eccentric, and she's collected a few eccentrics around her: the beloved mailman of questionable mailman qualities (except discretion, I suppose); the formerly alchoholic, formerly homeless housekeeper; the housekeeper's perpetually angry and money-obsessed son; some devoted dogwalkers; two over-weight and yappy Dachshunds; a few stalkers; and now, her 29-year old orphaned goddaughter, Rima.

Fowler does some interesting things by trying to make this a meta-novel. It's hard to tell where and when Addison's books intrude on reality, especially since one of the characters in her most controversial book shares a name with Rima's recently deceased father. There's also fanfic to sort through, chatrooms, blogs by various members of the strange household (though not, thankfully, written by the dogs), and some nearby mysteries that involve both fictional and nonfictional versions of Rima's father and friends. Yep, it's a little confusing, but Fowler seems to be having fun with writing a pseudo-mystery about a mystery writer. All is not what it seems. Um, except when it's exactly as it seems.
The ending, while not exactly satisfying, is an ending well-suited to Fowler's "virtual reality" explorations. I'm glad it didn't end up with Addison being a murderer or Rima finding the love of her life (not that kind, anyway). I worried about that throughout.

The writing is kind of fun, too. Fowler notes all sorts of little funny moments, from the description of how awkward it would be for a fan to break into Addison's studio, to the housekeeper's winning of the Lord of The Ring Trivial Pursuit game and then washing the dishes with the ring of ultimate power on her hand, "thus proving herself extremely unclear on the concept of total world domination." Rima also tries to figure out how the two short little dogs ended up on her bed after a night of over-indulgence (on her part, not the dogs) at the local bar. Maybe one could have stood with its front paws on the bed frame while the other scaled its back in some unlikely dachshund Cirque de Soleil, but even then there weould be only one dog in her bed, not two. Nice, throw away image.

So, the book was okay. A decent vacation read, anyway, and I certainly seem to have taken a lot of notes for a book I didn't really love. I also had trouble moving on, afterward. The book made me want to read a good mystery or two. It wasn't as fun as The Jane Austen Book Club (which I recommend, if anyone has missed it at this point). I was surprised to notice that Fowler had two other books out as well. I'm curious what those are about, but I probably won't read them. After all, vacation is over now.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot

I am just back from one of those perfect vacations in which you spend all day doing outdoorsy, Maine kind of things, and the rest of the time on the couch or the playground with a book (or three). I read two books I really enjoyed and one I didn't really like (but I'll be nice) so it'll take me awhile to get caught up here.

I started the week with Sarah Vowell whom I love (see February), though this is an older book (2002) and not quite as good as Assassination Vacation. In one of the essays in The Partly Cloudy Patriot, she provides the best--or at least most succint--definition of a nerd that I've come across. She writes, Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends that I know. That has a certain appeal to it, doesn't it? It's not all about Star Trek ears and D&D is it, now? Could be books or lace tating or, in Sarah Vowell's case, visiting famous sites of assassinations or other vaguely creepy historical things. As she writes about herself when she goes on a pilgrimmage to Gettysburg, You don't cross state lines to attend the 137th anniversary of anything unless something's missing in your life.

But, see, just by writing that, and showing her obssessive nerdy side, Vowell inspired me to learn more about the Gettysburg address. She got me feeling all nerdy and interested in something I've never even thought about (aside from the first 6 words in Lincoln's very short speech). Fortunately, I ran across a kid's book of the event in a museum we were visiting over vacation. See, I didn't have time to delve whole hog into Lincoln's words. I just needed the junior version, with a bit more detail than Vowell gives. The speech is, indeed, only 10 sentences long. Look it up.

But Vowell doesn't write just about her obsession with Lincoln (See Assassination Vacation for that). These essays range from her disappointment with the 2000 election, to what it means to be a patriot, to family Thanksgivings, to--my favorite essay--the difference between American cowboy mythology and Canadian Mounted police practicality.

Sarah Vowell professes to a bit of an obsession with our neighbors to the north. Being a history enthusiast, she's charmed by their practical, low-key approach to all things politic (she's ignoring the 1970s and their Quebec independence 'troubles', but never mind). She writes, Achieving independence from Britain gradually and cordially, through polite meetings taking place in nice rooms, Canada took a path to sovereignity that is perhaps one of the most hilariously boring stories in the world (though not really, when Vowell takes it on). She quotes someone else as to the difference between the settling of the hotheaded American West with all of its gunfights and frontier law, and the necessity of taking off several layers of mittens in order to duel in Moose Jaw in the early days. She tries to goad a Mountie into admitting how "not cool" they are (according to Americans) and when the Mountie accidently lets on that maybe Mounties are just that much better than American police, he "feels so bad about this little put-down that he repents, back-tracking about how 'there's good and bad in everyone'...and that 'Canadians are no better than anyone else.' "
This is what I love about Sarah Vowell: Not only she gets people to talk to her about sort of weird stuff, but she listens enough to their answers that she can present it with humor while imparting her geek---um, I mean nerd---knowledge to us, her readers.

Read The Partly Cloudy Patriot for Sarah Vowell's inimitable and fascinating voice that captures the weirdness of current events and life in general, but stay for her father's mesmerizing snake hunting story. Ah, snakes, movies with subtitles, Gore v. Bush, Tom Cruise, and nerds. A little something for everyone.

Let the Great World Spin

It's so hard to come down from a good book (Mudbound, in this case) so Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin could have suffered from the rebound. Fortunately, it turned out to be an excellent transition book. Great World takes some work, I'll admit that. There are a lot of characters, though they're fairly easy to keep track of--I won't say to keep separate because it turns out they all come together.

McCann uses Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers (see the movie Man on Wire) as a framing device or a focal point for his motley collection of characters. While Petit is plotting and then executing his walk above the world, the rest of New York is going about its business. The prostitutes are getting picked up in the Bronx for existing; their self-appointed protector and Irish monk Corrigan is trying to save them while also choosing between his God and the woman he loves; Corrigan's brother is watching him in bewilderment as he fades away; women from different walks of life and different bouroughs are coming together to mourn their sons killed in Vietnam; and a young artist and her husband are driving home after a rough night of cocaine (there was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise). Their ride is what sets the world in the book spinning and all these characters are brought together, even if they don't all physically meet.

McCann's writing can be a bit much, especially in the beginning. He writes: Hours and hours of insanity and escape. He's describing the projects in the Bronx, but what does that mean? Feels like he's trying too hard at first, but later, I stopped noticing some of those tics. I didn't mind: ...the morning already ovened up and muggy. And later I found many, many images or turns of phrases that I loved. For example, the women who get together to mourn their sons over breakfast are from the extreme of the Bronx projects to Park Avenue. Claire is a little embarrassed for Gloria, who lives in the projects, but not nearly as embarrassed as she is to admit to the group of very ordinary women who don't know one another all that well, that she lives on the Upper East Side. ...and then Janet, the blonde, leaned forward and piped up: Oh, we didn't know you lived up there.

Up there. As if it were somewhere to climb. As if they would have to ascend to it. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

Of course, anybody who's ever tried to traverse NYC knows how long it does take to get from one extreme to the other. Maybe you do need special equipment. How nice of McCann to put it metaphorically.

This book is hard to describe because it has so much going on, but I loved dipping into the lives of all the different characters. Sometimes it was hard to let go of one character to read about the next because I wanted to follow the story I was in, but then a chapter or two later, we'd catch up again. In the end, Let The Great World Spin, jumps ahead to 2006. I like that there's no mention of the towers long gone by that point and McCann doesn't mention Philippe Petit either. Instead we get a young woman making her way to Claire's Upper East Side home in a sort of homecoming and we see that the world has spun on its way, casting off or flinging far and wide the various characters we'd gotten to know in the 1970s section of the book. It's an intriguing book for a patient reader.

side note: The cover is really neat, drawn by Matteo Pericoli who is known for his pencil drawings of skylines. He's got a book of the skyline of Manhattan which came out awhile ago now but is worth a look.