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.

Mudbound

I read this book standing up. I read this book waiting for pasta water to boil. I read this book one blissfully sunny day, with my feet up on the couch when I should have been outside. Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, is that good. I have friend Liz to thank for the recommendation, but I took my time getting around to it because a story about a Mississippi farm, post-WWII, with the inherent racism and share- cropping and unhappy southern women didn't speak to me. Well, I was wrong. This is an amazing book

Laura is a smart, educated, slightly pampered old maid (30ish) from Memphis who gets swept off her feet at last by a man who turns out to want nothing more than a piece of land to call his own, deep in the Delta. Not that he tells his new bride this. He takes this city-bred woman back to a place he wants to call Fair Fields but that his horrified wife and young daughters christen Mudbound, with good reason. Henry McAllen plunks them down on his dream farm, with no running water, no electricity, an iffy bridge that washes out civilization at the least downpour, and his racist, lazy, angry father to boot.


Laura does her best. She does well, but then you add in a young, smart black man just back from his enjoyed freedoms and responsibilities as a tank driver during the war in Europe and Henry's charming, damaged younger brother Jamie, and things go from tenuous to awful faster than you can say "yessuh."


The story begins at the end, with Pappy's death, a literary ploy that I usually hate, but I once the story proper began and I got a sense of his awfulness, I really couldn't wait for the old man to die. Hillary Jordan's descriptions and her voice rang so true that I caught myself marvelling at how people could have thought that way back then, as if I'd forgotten that, actually, the book was written in 2008.
Bad things happen, but there's good, too, and it wasn't as tragic as it could have been. The ending, while not exactly happy, allows for the future of both race relations in this country and, on a smaller scale, love. Jamie, the younger brother, is a tragic figure here. You want to like him--to love him even--but the character I trusted the most saw him for what he was, so there's fair warning. Before things can get too bad, Florence tries to run him out of town in the only way a black woman who works as a maid could resort to. I ran the broom over his foot three times. Said, "Sorry, Mist Jamie, ain't I clumsy today." The third time Miz McAllen gave me a scolding and sent me out of the house, finished the sweeping her own self. I didn't care what she thought, or him either. I just wanted him gone. But he didn't go, not even after I threw salt in his tracks and put a mojo of jimsonweed and gumelastin under his bed. He kept right on coming back, turning up like the bad penny he was.


That's our first inkling that Jamie will set into motion a series of tragedies around Mudbound and Florence knows she's got the most to lose in this business. After all, it's her son, just back from the war, who's already stretching himself well beyond the small world of Jim Crow Mississippi. He's not long for that world either. All Florence wants is to keep Ronsel safe and if Jamie needs to be gone for that to happen, then she'll move him along.


I love that the book doesn't make room for a big hugfest between the "good" whites and the "clever" blacks. Even Jamie, in his spiraling awakening, his confused about his seeming friendship with a black brother-in-arms. Florence may seem wise, but she's not about to give Laura absolution or much advice. She knows her place (of the era), but she knows times are changing and she will take charge where she can. I suppose Hillary Jordan takes some liberties with hindsight, but they aren't obvious. Laura is still the perfect little 1940s wife, even when she puts her foot down occasionally. Henry isn't a bad person, but he doesn't exactly dispute the racist attitude pervasive around him. He just doesn't approve of the local methods. It's a reminder that these "younger" characters are the bridge to the future, that the sixties are coming. It's just slow coming to the Delta. Perhaps the book's a bit sugarcoated, but it's got all the realism and tragedy I can handle and still love it. This may be the best book I've read this year.



Scene I enoyed:Laura and Jamie singing the Doxology over evil Pappy's dead body (Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow...).

The Family Man

Just because it's light and fairy tale-esque doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. C'mon, it's July! I had a good time reading Elinor Lipman's latest (until the end. More on that later. Maybe). I really liked Lipman's book My Latest Grievance and I kind of enjoyed The Inn at Lake Devine. I even thought about seeing the movie version of Then She found Me, but Helen Hunt's delivery is so flat and painful in the previews that I didn't. I also worried Bette Midler would do me in. The last time I enjoyed watching Bette Midler was in the video she did with Mick Jagger to Beast of Burden and I had little-to-no taste back then.

The Family Man was entertaining and Lipman gets a lot of the characters just right. The basic plot: Gay New Yorker Henry reluctantly reconnects through condolences with his ex-wife (remember back that far? When gays felt they had to "pass"?); Wife is a little nuts in an entertaining way (Denise is a hoot in Lipman's hands) and she's about to land in the (relative) poor house because of her scheming stepsons; Henry's grown stepdaughter is in the wings with really outlandish "career" plans; There's also a balding, wealthy, and socially-idiotic horror movie director. (Yep, he turns out to be more important than he deserves). Henry just wants everyone happy and for Denise to leave him alone, and eventually everyone ends up more or less where they should. Well, almost because, um, the ending wasn't quite right.

I love novels in which everyone is rich (enough) and they eat good food and they fall in love appropriately (although not quite in this case). Henry is a wonderful main character. He's charming, owns great property, he's conveniently a retired lawyer (remember the scheming stepsons?) and he wants to take care of everyone. Sigh. Oh yeah, he's gay. His stepdaughter is only okay. She's supposedly 29 but acts more like 22 or so, but then again, I've probably forgotten what 29 is like. I'm also not sure why all books with gay characters insist on having a campy character, but it's sure not Henry in this one. Lipman finds him a boyfriend, though, which is all fine, but he's a bit much at times.

I love Lipman's chapter headings. She pulls phrases from the mouths of her characters and slaps them on the beginnings of each chapter so you have things like: I Hate You Still and Don't Look So Worried and So Soon? There are, of course, the occasional utilitarian ones like The Maisonette and The Human Condition, but Lipman is obviously having fun with her characters.

I wanted to spend more time with them even if daughter Thalia was making strange choices and getting on my nerves at times (okay, most of the time). Lipman gets everyone else just right.

Sample dialogue with preamble: Denise has just been cut out of her third husband's will because of an awkward clause in the pre-nup in which she has to be married for 25 years to inherit anything. Her husband dies within months of that line in the sand. When she goes to Henry (he was the closeted gay husband number 2), He tries to calm her, all the while trying to get away from her (remember, chapter one is titled: I Hate You Still and that's Henry talking in one of his less-than-perfect moments).

Henry says gently, "Denise? Is it possible that underneath these jokes there's a wife mourning the loss of her husband of twenty-five years?"
"Twenty-four! A major difference in this case, believe me.
"Do you want to invite me to sit down somewhere?"
Eyes welling, she presses an index finger against her lips and shakes her head.

"No, you don't want me to sit? Or no, you aren't in mourning?"
She shakes her head again.

"Too much? Too many emotions to sort out?
She nods and fishes a tissue out of her bathrobe pocket. She blows her nose and then asks,"Do you still like mushrooms? Because I have a pizza on the way."

And yes, that last line is delivered in exactly the breezy tone you're imagining.

Everything Changes

I think this is a guy's book (the first hint is the cover illustration) but I can't really imagine any guy I know reading it and I enjoyed it just fine myself. I've read two other books by Jonathan Tropper. He wrote The Book of Joe, about a successful writer who goes back to his hometown and faces the wrath of all his thinly-disguised real life characters. He also wrote How to Talk to a Widower which must have been forgettable because I have since done so. Still, I liked it enough to pick up Everything Changes.

The protagonist of this one, Zachary King, is at loose ends, though he shouldn't be. He's got a dull, but fairly lucrative job, a gorgeous and nice fiancee and he lives rent-free with his, um, eccentric best friend. Well, actually, there's the problem. His real best friend died beside him in a particularly gory car accident and Zachary finds himself pining for Rael's widow and adorable daughter, and hating the pettiness of his job and life, and getting cold feet for the upcoming wedding. Also, his absentee father shows up (demonstrably on viagra), trying to make amends. OR is he?

So, yeah, it's a book about a kind of mid-life crisis. Tropper's not as good as Nick Hornby at doing vaguely-adolescent-man-grows-up, but his characters and plots are likeable and the observations about the world in general are kind of fun. I really appreciated how realistic Tropper makes his children characters. That must be incredibly hard to do, even if you--the author--have models in your own home. Two-year-old Sophie is never painfully cute or painfully precocious (although she does watch Annie) and the late addition of a five-year-old rings true as well.


In the end, you want things to work out for everyone. I liked all the characters and was a bit anxious that it was necessary for someone somewhere to suffer, but I guess Tropper gets that all out of the way with the wrecked childhood (due to publicly philandering father) and death of best friend. After that, anything that had the potential to be awful, either rights itself or is comic, as in this scene with the briefly reunited nuclear family trying to resolve a conflict with a local bully. That's us. The Fighting Kings. What we lack in brawn we make up for in bizarre diversion, the strategically placed erection here, the surprise bald head there, and while your focus is shattered by the freak show that we are, we'll use the opportunity to bash your head in.


Did I mention that this is a guy's book?


Oh yeah, and Zachary thinks he has cancer because of blood in urine (did I mention...?) He finally goes in to get checked and has this exchange with his doctor:
"Everything okay?"
"Hmmm," he says.
You never, under any circumstances, want to hear your doctor say "hmm." "Hmmm" being the medical jargon for "Holy shit."

But remember, this is essentially a funny book, so don't fret too much for Zachary King. And Tropper does throw a few "other-gender-friendly" gifts, as in this exchange between Zachary and Rael's widow.
"You're doing okay, " I say.
"I'm a shitty mother."
"It's pronounced 'single.' You're a single mother."


Love it. So don't be too embarrassed if female (or introverted male or person who still lives with conservative relatives), to carry around a book with a tight-rope walking umbrella chastely(?)covering the nether regions of a penciled outline of a nude woman. You might just have a good laugh in the process. Besides, the paperback may have a different cover.