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.