Freedomland and some others that I barely read

I half-assed my way through three books in a row. It's just been a terrible month for books. First, my book club was reading American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. Now this is a book that I was very eager to read about 8 months ago and then, well, Obama won the election, we saw the backside of the Bush dynasty and suddenly, I didn't really care about a fictionalized account of the former first lady. Still, it was book club, so I gave it a shot. My overall reaction was:WHY BOTHER? Why write this? I feel like Sittenfeld (and I rather liked her book Prep) was just trying desperately in real life to understand why someone like Laura Bush could possibly marry someone like George Bush and this book was the result of her therapeutic musings. I think friend Corinne summed it up best at school pick-up when she said, "It's kind of trashy." We tried to think of another word, but that sort of fit it. A weird expose about a woman we don't really know or care about (anymore). Also it was creepy because the character isn't really Laura Bush (duh). But hey, satisfy yourself--youthful car crash, abortion (gasp!), pyramid schemes, white trash friends...there's a little of everything, but probably not much real insight into the former occupants of the White House. I didn't read every word and most of it out of sequence, though I still intend to talk a lot and forcefully at book club.

Next book I didn't really read: The Bloodstone Papers. Wow. The writing in this was great. I was marking all sorts of passages. I think my favorite was:I was hello loved on Barrow Lane y a bleach blonde prostitute in a purple vinyl mac and white stilletos.
But then I got bogged down. This is one of those stories that moves back and forth in time (too much for my little brain, Time Traveller's Wife notwithstanding). I was really interested at first because it's the story of Anglo-Indians in the forties and in present-day(ish) London. I learned interesting things like that Anglo-Indians are an actual race. That is, the narrator has to explain that his parents and his parents' parents and their parents were all Anglo-Indian (formerly known as Eurasian) and that he himself is not simply the product of a mixed-race marriage. There's great political stuff, but there's also a mystery I didn't care about and much beating up of poor horse-and-buggy cab drivers. I prefered Glen Duncan's Death of an Ordinary Man which I read years ago on a washed-out weekend getaway in a cozy inn in Camden, Maine. I may have been influenced by my surroundings then, but remember, Duncan's writing is lovely.

And finally, Freedomland, by Richard Price, which I actually count as a book I read because I read more than 3/4 of it. Price is a writer who has a brilliant ear (or eye) for a scene. Half his perfect scenes in Lush Life were throw-away, having little to do with the plot, but were brilliant local color. Freedomland is no Lush Life. Also, I never, ever want to go to New Jersey again. Just kidding. Still, it's like watching The Wire (with which Price was also connected). You can't help but think of Baltimore as a horrible place. Freedomland takes place in the ghettoized housing developments similar to the setting for Price's book, Clockers (also a good book and a good movie, though I read/saw that years ago, so who knows?)Freedomland is about a missing child. Another topic I'm not super-keen on reading. White, damaged woman accuses black carjacker of making off with her child asleep in the back seat. Now, having grown up near(ish) Boston and remembering the infamous Charles Stuart incident, I was primed to doubt her story even without the flap information. This book was just sad, in the end, without enough great characters to make it a good read. Credit to Price for capturing the heat and irritation and sense of community that exists in these marginalized neighborhoods. He just does it better in Lush Life (One of my top 2008 reads, btw).

Here's hoping for some better luck with reads in June.

Gemma Bovery

This is another Posy Simmonds graphic novel, though not as good as Tamara Drewe. With this one, I think she was getting her feet wet with the whole classic-set-in-modern graphic novel genre. The text to picture ratio was too high and the characters were too similar looking to the ones in Tamara Drewe. Also I feel like she didn't trust her readers to follow the parallels to Gustave Flaubert's best-known work (probably a legitimate concern) so she spelled everything out. The nosy, creepy local baker shouts from the rooftops the similarities between the new English couple Charlie and Gemma Bovery and the literary couple Charles and Emma Bovary. On the other hand--and I loved this--Simmonds leaves great loads of French untranslated, or succinctly translated, so that a lot of the colorful French is left intact like an Easter egg for bilingual readers to enjoy. I don't think that detracts from the enjoyment of the story.

Most of the French is translated, though some of it still reads like a translation, the words not quite right somehow. I would think that would be a hard thing to pull off as an author, but Simmonds does it wonderfully. I love that the horrible baker spends a lot of his time with a good English-French dictionary trying to make head or tails of the deceased Gemma's journals. There's a great scene when he's trying to translate "wanker" and can't find it. Wand...wane...wangle...want...merde, ce n'est pas la. He has better luck (and a better dictionary) with "snogging."

Joubert the baker is an extremely creepy character. He becomes obsessed with Gemma and her trysts, to the point that he's spying on her. He's repulsed and also fantasizing about her, about becoming her lover. Simmonds refines this character in Tamara Drewe, as the writer-in-residence who's less creepy but knows all. She even draws them the same. It was easier to see that characters good points, even if you didn't like him much.

This story follows the familiar Emma Bovary plot and, yes, there's death and guilt and boring provincial neighbours, and debt and sex, and more guilt. But there are some nice, modern twists and an English angle. It becomes less of a morality tale and less depressing than the original. The throw away ending is really stupid, though. In the last paragraph, Joubert wonders about the new neighbours replacing the Boverys. They're English too, like the Boverys. A couple. He's older than her...Her name is Jane. Jane Eyre. LAME. Don't say I didn't warn you. At least Posy Simmonds didn't pursue this little thought and went on to write/draw the superior Tamara Drewe.

It's hard to talk about the writing in this without the support of the artwork, but I did like this excerpt from Gemma's diary:No reason at all I get totally freaked. Today it started with seeing a tick in the bracken--remembered ticks are bad news. Also bracken spores give you cancer. Then couldn't stop hearing every rustle and twig snap behind me...started thinking: Rabid animals...rapists...French murders, like in the papers--killer is always local half-wit garagiste or else bloke in a coat who asks the time. I love 'half-wit garagiste'. The string of illustrations that accompany this are great.

I hope Posy Simmonds keeps going with this genre because I'm having a lot of fun with her work so far. Things have been a little grim this spring so I'm having trouble hitting the right tone in my reading. I think good graphic novels are a perfect antidote for the time being.

Bruno, Chief of Police

I'm always a bit wary of authors who write fiction about a culture other than their own. Too often they get the subtleties wrong, or they try to throw in tidbits of language for "color" and spell things wrong or use it wrong (I've blogged that before), but Martin Walker does live in France and I'm happy to report he does a nice job with his story of a small town police officer investigating a brutal murder with racial overtones in the Perigord region of France.

At first, I was afraid I was reading something along the lines of the quaint Rule Against Murder (which I more or less savaged in February), but Bruno and his neighbors are much more interesting and authentic than anything Louise Penny created in her Quebecois series. An elderly Algerian is murdered, execution-style, and his body desecrated so that it seems that the racial troubles of the big cities have at last reached the small town of St Denis. As Bruno investigates (or follows the big dogs in their investigation), he learns more about the ugly history of France during both the Occupation and the Algerian War.

The enthusiastic role of the Vichy Government during WWII is well-known and documented, though reluctantly acknowledged--if acknowledged at all--but some of the nastiness and brutal racism that surrounded the attempt to hold onto Algeria as a colony, is less-well known, at least to me (though my father fought in that war). It was both fascinating and ugly to read about this. I'm a big fan of learning history through fiction, as long as it's with a grain of salt, and this book provides a lot to think about and to pursue.

It was almost refreshing how open and believable the casual racism was in this small town. There are no big Kumbaya speeches, though Bruno offers a hint of that. Even he knows to tread carefully when lecturing on Arab integration. The varied reactions to the murder was a reminder of how far France has to go (though I'm not throwing stones--I was viewing it more as an outsider, with curiosity). The ambiguous feelings the townspeople have towards the murdered and his family seemed realistic to me. He's one of us, they say. Sort of. But we didn't even know the victim. Who is French? What does that mean? Is France separate from the European Union or part of it? Do the laws have to apply to all or can St Denis pick and choose which ones from Belgium they want to follow? They do like their unpasteurized cheese, after all.

The melting pot growing pains extend to the British who have moved to town as there's a nice parallel in the long discussion over what constitutes a true English meal (of which Bruno has heard nothing good, of course). For example, if the fish is from Scotland, does that count as English?

As a character, Bruno is a little flat, but likeable, and after all, his role is almost to fade into the town itself, to become friends with everyone while standing as moral center and authority figure. A tough enough role. He's liked by most, heroic to some, a romantic figure to others, and he does alright. I love that he's rescued by a few well-placed Black Belt moves from a young female inspector down from Paris. How French.

The ending isn't pat, exactly, and I like that this book is part of a series. There's a lot of countryside still to explore, more good food to eat (French), and more women to fall for Bruno's simple life. I don't know where you go in a series after a bizarre murder like this one and I do hope Walker doesn't turn St Denis into a strange little bastion of unbelievable crime, but if he does, he's got a good character in Bruno to hold it together.

The Other

I love when books I read tie into one another without any intentional effort on my part. In the case of David Guterson's book, The Other, the tie-in is more humorous than actual since its story of rich kid-turned-recluse takes place in the same general area as Twilight. The story is too serious for me to have spent much time worrying about John William being stalked by vampires, but it did cross my mind. It's also a book about hiking--extreme hiking, in some ways--and that evoked The Honorable Bandit. The narrator even talks about why he hikes, why that urge to "put one foot in front of the other." Nice and tidy, my reading is.

The Other seems like Guterson's way of squaring away the true story of Chris McCandless that Jon Krakauer covered so well in Into the Wild. Not that I've read that, of course, because as much as I love Jon Krakauer's writing, I also love to limit my exposure to overly depressing topics like young men dying of starvation in the Alaskan woods for no particular reason. I didn't see the movie either. As I read The Other, I felt like Guterson had been trying to process the idea of an uber-wealthy young man who rejects all worldy goods and comforts and takes to the woods. I felt almost that he'd had to write a fictional version in order to square away the true story.


The story is narrated by Neil Countryman, John Williams class antithesis and his only apparent friend. Neil is John William's enabler--for better and probably for worse. He aids and abets John William's gradual disappearance into the wilds of the Northwest, hiking periodically in to his cave dwelling with trappings of what JW calls "hamburger world." Not that JW rejects the ramen noodles, bacon, eggs, Doritoes, etc... On the contrary, he wolfs them down, but as he does so, Neil looks around his increasingly eccentric friend's woodland home and envies how capable and accomplished JW has become at living off the land. Looking at his woven baskets, Neil says," They were so neatly done, so adroitly crafted, that I felt bad abut myself just looking at them. Here he'd been going competently native, under those trees and in these woods, while I'd been analyzing "Gerontion" in a college library carrel."


Because over the course of their friendship, Neil, against the seeming odds, is the one who goes to college, travels the world, becomes educated, while it is JW who seems to be slipping back into the "simpler" life of Neil's working-class roots. JW mocks his friend constantly for having given into the easy contentment of the material world, He derides him for failing to write thatGreat American Novel he's always on about. JW implies that he himself is living the real life while Neil fritters away his life--in fact, sleepwalks through it.


But of course, it's hard to ignore that JW is not that mentally balanced either. Neil tries hard to ignore the evidence and remains loyal to the end. I suppose we're supposed to see the irony in Neil becoming a "real" writer at the cost of his friend, becoming rich off of John Williams hyper-intellectual torment, but some of that gets lost because all talk of novels and movies based on John William's hermit life made me think of Jon Krakauer and the subsequent movie of Into the Wild. Yeah, I thought, it's been done. When Neil protests, "they'll never make a movie about a hermit" I thought that was a little cheap of Guterson, because, yeah they will. They did. And your book was published after that.


So, read this if you are still trying to wrap your head around Into the Wild. Or if you've ever thought about running away from it all. Or if you've ever fantasized about coming into an unexpected fortune. Or, even, if you want to know more about Gnosticism than anybody really needs to know.


Image I related to and made me read the whole book for the writing: Losing [a race] is like knowing that, in the movie scene where a thousand die but the hero lives, you're one of the obliterated.