Salvation City

Sigrid Nunez' book about post-pandemic life in the midwest mostly made me want to wash my hands. A lot. Salvation City opens its arms and hearts to Cole, a 14-year old left orphaned after the big flu pandemic hits, but the book Salvation City isn't really about the pandemic or the panic or the flu. It is more of the struggle within Cole as he tries to reconcile is atheistic, scholarly parents--now deceased-- and his own upbringing with his new-found life among evangelical Christians. Still, I recommend sitting near some hand sanitizer as you read. It'll just make you feel better.

What I loved most, besides the great writing (and the squeaky clean hands) was that Nunez' Pastor Wyatt (PW to Cole) is neither a monster nor a god. He's a human being when such a character could be ripe for caricature or parody. Nunez makes Cole himself determine his path while never forcing him to reject one way of life for the other. The people who want to adopt him are good, good people, even if PW's wife isn't really intelligent enough to truly homeschool Cole. (Yeah, home schooling doesn't come off that well). And the community itself never did fall into the looting and terror that other areas suffered. In many ways, Salvation City really is a sanctuary, in spite of its obsession with the rapture. It's easy to see in post-apocalyptic times why one would believe that the end is near. Throw in advanced climate change, news from the "outside" world as falling apart, and even the stories Cole brings from his Dickensian orphanage days. Everything is tilted on its side so that even a simple camping trip can be fraught. Danger is everywhere, but hope lies somewhere. It's no wonder there's an obsession with so-called rapture children (They mostly seem blond to me, a lay person)

Nunez skirts around the disaster that many other author's would have chosen to embrace. The world hasn't ended--there's still email, electricity (if occasionally spotty), food, community spirit, a functioning government. But she gives hints that even the best planning for a pandemic was only good for a few weeks and the glimpse of what the big cities might still be experiencing, away from the safety of a religious community shimmer in the periphery of the novel. At this point, I gave up washing my hands and hoped for the best.

And this is a hopeful rather than despairing book. It is not a particularly religious book either. It is not an us against them look at survival. There is no one way, no one true path. Instead, it's Cole's chance to come of age, instead of stagnating in the aftermath of a deadly flu. It's a book that is sadly saturated with death, but it's not the end of the world, even if the rapture-ready narrate it.

Joe College

It's hard to fathom just how weird college life is until you've had some distance from it. When you're immersed in it, it's either the most awesome time in your life or the scariest, depending how well you assimilate. I mean, think about it, when else are you going to be surrounded by the smartest, most beautiful people, all in the prime of their lives, all your own age, all thrumming with youthful energy. Yeah, sure, some people have to work through college, some people are terrible at studying and that's stressful, but, hey! For the first and last time in your life, you have 24 full hours in a day to do what you need and want to do (that's thanks to the youthful energy).
There's also some weird stuff--like trying to reconcile your home life with your dorm life, your hometown persona with your masquerade as a smarty who actually does belong at, say, an Ivy League, but that's where great fiction is born.

Tom Perrotta (best known for Election and Little Children) must have been my current age when his novel Joe College was published and I cannot get over how well he captures what it's like to be, in his case (and his protagonist's case) at Yale in 1982. Danny is a classic middle class, New Jersey boy who gets plucked from his weird little suburban cul-de-sac life, and dropped into the equally weird world of higher learning. Oh, there's no question he belongs there intellectually, and certainly we don't meet him until his junior year so he's assimilated. Still, you can take the boy out of New Jersey, but you can't...well, you know. Back home, Danny drives his dad's Roach Coach luncheon wagon from one office park to the next. Back home, there are the weird little home-meals of bland middle America food, there's his father's pending hemorrhoid surgery, there's the secretary-league high school classmate whom he dates and then mentally dismisses among his Ivy League friends (not in the mean way that sounds). There are also some things more specific to New Jersey that contrast to Yale as well. Danny runs afoul of a gang of lunch truck thugs (only in NJ), replete with baseball bats, and Mafia-like leaders. I know New Haven has a bit of a run-down element, but I don't think it's quite the baseball bat, smashed headlights kind of run down that Danny meets back home. The description of the gang is priceless. Where Vito Senior [natch, they're Italian American] seemed avuncular and basically good-hearted, tired in a seen-it-all sort of way, Junior just looked puzzled and mean, like he suspected you were going to put one over on him sooner or later and wanted to wring your neck before you got a chance to do it.

It may seem that an Ivy League education insulates you from the rougher edges of the world, but it turns out that being brainy and privileged in one town, doesn't mean you can avoid getting beaten up (and having your lunch money stolen, as it turns out) in another town. You also don't get to avoid the sticky business of sleeping with a girl you don't have a future with, especially if it seems you are her future. That's real life versus college life.

And of course, Ivy League life brings its own oddities--Danny has wealthy friends who would prefer not to be, or they play at being poor, or they lie about who they really are because they know they can't possibly live up to their parents' expectations. Danny's parents are more or less stunned by Danny's college life while trying--poorly--to hide their bewilderment. Danny thinks of them occasionally when suite conversations turn so utterly from the real world. [I] was thinking of my parents, and the way my life sometimes seemed to embody their worst suspicions about college. Was this what they'd scrimped and sacrificed for all those years? So their son could spend his Tuesday nights drinking beer, smoking dope, eating weird food, and learning to see the assassin's side of the story [in this case, the guy who shot McKinley]?

Perrotta captures the bizarre late night discourses, the feeling that everyone else is in on "it" and somehow you're not, the anxiety of the first time you are told to mark up a text book--or worse, a novel (very strange, if you've gone to public school all your life) and the utterly uniquely collegiate phenomenon known as the a cappella singing group. No, I know there's a cappella in the 'real' world, it's just that there's a strange obsession and posession each student seems to have with their school's a cappella group. Perrotta might as well have been describing my own college's (male) group when he says, Resplendent in their formal wear, the Whiffenpoofs stood in a semi-circle in front of the nonfunctional fireplace, crooning "Surfer Girl" for their captive audience. One of them was black, one Asian, one short, one both short and prematurely bald; the rest looked like close relatives of Vice President Bush. And yes, they do the weird antics like dropping trou to reveal Hawaiin shorts, etc... The Whiffenpoofs have a pretty big role in this book, or at least, they pop up just as they do throughout one's college career.

Danny figures out his life, more or less, as one must with graduation looming. He doesn't always do the right thing and sometimes he just seems to skate along, but as he himself admits--after not getting his head bashed in by Junior--that sometimes he's just lucky. I think that's the point--you escape by luck from your middle of the road life and find yourself at Yale (or similar schools) and from there on, it can seem as if your life is touched by magic. That's kind of why some pay so much for a higher education. It's not the class work, it's the connections you make. I just enjoyed this foray back into that time, without my having to do the work or the sleepless nights.

The Widower's Tale

I've had trouble reading lately. Not because I don't have tons of times on my hands, but because Julia Glass' latest book, The Widower's Tale, was so absorbing, I wanted first to savor it and once I'd finished reading it, I found it hard to move on. This isn't really about a widower, exactly. I say that because I have a widowed friend who won't even touch a book with such a title. Yes, Percy Darling is a widower, has been for 40 years, and perhaps hasn't fully come to terms with his wife's death, but this book is more about the people around him than any personal sorrows he still harbors over Poppy's death.

I was struck again at how well Glass does in portraying such a variety of characters, how believable her gay, thirty year old preschool teacher is alongside 70 year old Percy. She also captures well Percy's 20 year old grandson and his dubious roommate, and the the landscaping illegal immigrant and various others. She must have taken my criticism of her last book very seriously indeed, when I felt she'd totally failed to capture a spry 90 year old in I See You Everywhere.

That's not to say I bought everything. I really didn't believe in Percy's late romance--not just because of the age gap, but perhaps because I simply didn't like the object of his affections. No, she didn't grow on me. Celestino, the illegal immigrant had a whiff of the "noble savage" to him which I found vaguely troubling and a little condescending, but I liked his character and his story line, so I forgive.

I appreciated the sense of danger that grandson Robert's roommate at Harvard brought to the picture with his extreme environmentalism, all while wishing to strangle him for throwing figurative monkey wrenches in Robert's well-laid plans. The characters are what drive this book, and they all revolve around Percy, recently retired librarian (at Harvard's Widener). I always like a literary host to any gathering and Percy fills that in spades, making witicisms, even when uncalled for, and gadding about his wealthy, landed gentry town. He agrees to rent his barn to a unfortunately named preschool--Elves and Fairies--while expecting to maintain his privacy and routine. The first thing to go, of course, is his habit of swimming naked in his pond. That is only the first of many of his habits to fall and at first it seems Percy will fail at retired life. He has events and people thrust upon him at uncomfortable regularity, but he's no true curmudgeon after all. He just plays one to the choir and meddles when he can. He is a good father to his very different daughters, a good friend and mentor to those who need it, and in the end, he holds the future of many in his still-capable hands.

The Widower's Tale does offer a sense of endings and sadness, as befits its title, but it's not of death or absence. It's more that the choices we make in life become our story.

What to read while proctoring state tests

October is a really tough month at work because my day is spent watching kids fail at the required state tests. Sometimes I'm allowed to read parts of the test to them, but most of the time, I have to sit beside them and (supposedly) cheer them into doing their best on tests that are overwhelming and meaningless to them, but very much a component of what funds my job.

So, yeah, sometimes I read at work.

I started reading Alan Brennert's Moloka'i which is a novel about the leper colony on one of the islands that eventually became Hawaii. This was my book club assignment and I was intrigued because it wasn't something I would ever pick up. Confession: I have serious issues with books that have a lot of bodily fluid talk in them. I suppose that makes me a bit of a prude, but there you have it. The only thing I remember about Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is that the protagonist had a big nose that was always oozing something or other. So much for a masterpiece. Obviously a book about leprosy was going to be a challenge.

Actually, the oozy bits and sloughed off body parts weren't the problem in this book and I forged ahead. In fact, I almost finished it, but I thought the writing was pretty bad. The author couldn't decide on a point of view so there were vertiginal swoops from one character to another, sometimes within a paragraph. I kept going because the story was definitely intriguing--the life and times of a 7 year old girl sent away to live on Moloka'i when leprosy was considered a dangerous and infectious disease. Parts of this life were fascinating and parts were, frankly, quite dull. After awhile I didn't care anymore. Plus I was stuck in a small, windowless room with kids failing to read the word "mechanical" and so unable to help pass a test that essentially funds my job. I needed something more light-hearted than leprosy.

Fortunately, my office is next to the school library, so between tests, I picked up a copy of Roderick Townley's The Blue Shoe, which is on this year's Great Stone Face Award. The subtitle of The Blue Shoe is A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes, and it was fantastic. I read 3/4 of it while "working". I've only read three of the books on this list, but this one's a clear winner. Hap Barlo is a gifted thief, sent to do hard time on a distant mountain full of evil humans and angry blue-faced Auks (dwarf-like characters). He is doing penance for feeding a beggar in his home town--begging being a criminal offense. As the narrator puts it--and it's an intrusive narrator--Did I mention that the poor were arrested in Aplanap? They were. Well, beggars were arrested. You could be poor all you wanted and you'd be left alone. But if hunger forced you into the streets to beg for a coin, large men would come and cart you to jail, and from there, they'd ship you to the north side of the next moutnain, a peak so tall its top was perpetually covered in snow and surrounded by swirling clouds.

Hap doesn't really mind being sent to the mountain, as he hopes to reunite with his formerly-begging father, but it is a bad place. Eventually, aided by the love of his thirteen-year-old life, some Auks and the women who love them, some luck, and some magic, Hap sets things right, while showing up the obnoxious mayor and his wife. The mayor gets a great description. The narrator flatly refuses to say his name--claiming it is unpronounceable--but lovingly describes the scary wart on his brow that helps keep the villagers in line. Imagine what is wife--Ludmilla the Large is like. All the characters are amusing and well-written so that's half the treat. The ending is disappointing, but I guess most kids' books are that way. Definitely The Blue Shoe is a great escape if you're ever stuck doing some mind-numbing work that depresses you to boot.
I like to think I'm inspiring the testing kids to read more and therefore pass the test next year.

In the meantime, I've moved back to the adult world and onto Julia Glass' excellent The Widower's Tale. More on that when testing season is over.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

We have famously short-term memories as a culture. This is why political ads work so well. We forget that it was the other guy that put us where we are today. But being stupid about the recent past isn't supposed to apply to me so it was with increasing embarrassment that realized how little I remembered about the Bosnian conflict as I devoured Steven Galloway's excellent book, The Cellist of Sarajevo.

Galloway himself admits his book isn't thoroughly accurate and the reader is left with little information about the conflict or its roots. What he offers instead is a profound look at life in a modern war zone. I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't reading about WWII and that I had watched some of this on television, in a very recent lifetime.

The book is divided by point of view. We are introduced first to the cellist, a man finally so devastated by the senseless killing around him that he vows to play Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for 22 days straight at the site of the most recent massacre. Galloway bases this character on a real person so you get a whiff of authenticiy. As the cellist begins his vigil, we are introduced to three other characters-Kenan, a father and husband just trying to get drinkable water to his family (an odyssey in his wartorn city), Dragan, a pensioner, trying to get his daily bread (literally), and Arrow, the sniper recruited by the "defenders" of Sarajevo to take out the "aggressor" snipers targeting civilians throughout the streets. Each chapter begins with one of these characters highlighted while the other names recede into a grey type. I loved this detail, even though it wasn't that difficult to keep the characters apart, a real gift from an author. The visual was just a nice way to begin a chapter.

After months of watching their beloved and beautiful city become ruins--a city hitherto best known for its role in the start of WWI--it comes down to this: Each character daily weighs what might keep him or her alive. If you're dressed as a penguin, is a sniper more or less likely to choose you as target? Kenan contemplates this very thought as he runs with his water canisters strapped to his back, Do the men on the hills tend to shoot at people they find funny, or spare them? If the person who crosses the intersection before you is killed, do you stand a better or worse chance of making it across? What if the sniper misses? Is he having a bad day, or is he playing with you? And, in the Arrow the sniper's case, she wonders, is she a killer or a defender? And what is she defending, exactly? In the end, the character of Dragan phrases it this way: Is the real Sarajevo the one where people were happy, treated each other well, lived without conflict? Or is the real Sarajevo the one he sees today, where people are trying to kill each other, where bullets and bombs fly down from hills and the buildings crumble to the ground?

Author Galloway begs his characters to find and keep their humanity while their lives have become little more than those of scurrying rats. The few animals--dogs mostly--who appear all seem strangely more settled by this new world of danger, while the humans themselves are regressing. The question is, will one cellist's work and stubborness be enough to remind them all of where they've come and who they truly are? And will we the readers pay attention long enough to remember that humanity exists even under the most savage conditions.

The Imperfectionists

It turns out that if it takes me more than a week to read a (relatively short) book, there's a good chance I'm not enjoying that book. Sadly, that's what's been holding me up. I was stuck reading Talking to Girls about Duran Duran. I thought I would love that. I mean, DURAN DURAN! I wasn't as crazy a fan as friend Heather in junior high, but I had all the posters on the wall and in my locker that my meager allowance offered. Plus, it promised to be a pleasant romp through memory lane of that 80s music that more or less formed me. Turns out, not so much. Just couldn't get into it.

Enough about badness and on to the book that I devoured in two days: Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. The story is told by different characters, all working at an international newspaper based in Rome. Each story is a little bit depressing, but it's all set in Rome so you're willing to put up with a bit of dissatisfaction on the part of the characters because you can't beat the gig. That's pretty much how they feel about their lives, too. One character even realizes that the reason he's with his younger, very attractive girlfriend is that he can offer her a nice apartment in Rome in which she can sit around. He says he can't imagine she'd give him the time of day in a cheap apartment in Boston, for example. As difficult as their jobs might (or might not) be, each character seems to realize the luck or the allure of their current positions, even as they angle to do more than say, write obituaries. Each character has a sad little experience or awakening, even if it's not as tragic as the one that befalls the obituary writer, Arthur Gopal, and each story is neatly turns us back to the office.

My favorite character is probably Herman Cohen, partly because his awakening is more positive than some of the others and partly because he's chief copy editor who's internal publication (called Why?) collects all the misspellings and errors made by the writers over the week. I relish that little detail and can relate to it while being grateful that I don't work with such a nitpicker myself.

I did skip one chapter, the one on Winston Cheung, the Cairo stringer, because I could sense it was going to be the sort of chapter that would haunt me, leave me feeling sorry and responsible for this young man's failures. I'm sure it's good, but it's not for me. The revenge chapter towards the end was brutal but kind of fitting, and one I'm sure a lot of randomly down-sized employees could enjoy. I did kind of regret that there wasn't some big bringing together everyone chapter at the end, though there is closure, of sorts. I was just left wanting a little more.

The book is really a collection of glimpses into the slow decline of newspapers in general, but it's a nice little ride. It reminded me a bit of season 5 of HBO' s The Wire, the one that focused on the newspaper in which you got all the personalities, the grasping aspirations of the individual journalists, their realization that they cannot transform lives or their city merely through print, and finally, the end of the newspaper as they know it. That was one of The Wire's strongest seasons, and Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists, follows a similar path, in a very different manner. And in spite of the negatives, it still made me dream of living abroad and writing for a living. Just maybe with a bit less personal drama and fewer things going wrong.

The Information Officer

Apparently I'm reading about small islands in the Mediterranean, specifically during wartime. In the wake of Sadie Jones' Small Wars, I picked up Mark Mills' The Information Officer which taught me a lot about Malta, a country I'm not sure I could have placed with any degree of confidence just a week ago. This is a different war and different place from Smith's Cyprus novel. Also it was a different style and genre.

As if the story of a small island being bombed to bits (in spite of the Maltese and their "indominable spirit") during WWII didn't offer enough drama, Mills drops in a couple of murders, a psychopath, and hints of secret and secretive agents. In some ways I liked that the war was "just" a backdrop to every day matters (such as murder) because it fit along with the image we have of Malta, a country that has apparently resisted one onslaught after another. The Germans are the current attackers in this book, along with the apparently half-hearted Italian neighbors, but it's also (as in Smith's Cyprus) the British presence that is causing some of the trouble.

As in any mystery, I became extremely paranoid about every character, including the protagonist, Max, who is the titular propagandist for the British. He's a nice character and interesting in a dull, heroic way, but no one was safe from my suspicions once "sherry girls" start getting murdered. In a mystery, it can go one of two ways. Either it's the obvious bad guy and it's just a matter of why and how, or it's out in left field, a sort of the-butler-did-it scenario. If you're lucky, the author brings you along for the ride whichever way he or she chooses to go. I wasn't totally satisfied with the killer in The Information Officer. I suppose authors who choose to "surprise" you almost have to write the early chapters as if they have no idea who the killer is, but then it's hard to accept the result. I guess I like hints, though Mills is decent enough at red herrings--as I said, I became suspicious of everyone--but I'm not sure I'm convinced by the results.

Still, The Information Officer was a good glimpse into a country I knew nothing about, a good example of life in wartime, and the writing was good so I'd probably read another book by the author.

Small Wars

Sadie Jones' Small Wars is a stealth book. At first, it seems like it's going to be your typical slow-to-build story with lovely writing, kind of a dull plot, but something you'd learn from if you read carefully--a style that could also describe a certain kind of Englishman, really. I didn't always feel like picking it up, but I could never put it down and I ended up loving this story of family life in war-time Cyprus, a time in the 1950s when the British were still trying to hold onto "their" little Mediterranean outpost.

Clara Treherne is a good wife who goes out with her two young girls to join her army major husband in Cyprus, She really is a good wife and tries to be brave and tries to not mind that he's off interrogating the locals for terror connections. She tries to become friends with the other wives even though they are not nearly as good as she is. And her husband is a good, good man, too. Hal is one of those morally upright career soldiers who believes in duty and country without being pedantic or insufferable. He's a good leader of men and believes himself to be a good husband, though he definitely depends on Clara's efforts not to cause a scene or a fuss or to complain or to admit to being scared.

So, these are good people, trying to do what they believe is right and just. It turns out, of course, that there is no good and just in war, particularly not in the guerilla type war that the Greeks and Turks, the Cypriots, are waging against each other and against, especially, the British presence. Bad things happen. Bombs are laid on pristine beaches, old men or boys are beaten for information and women are their usual casualties of war. Things degenerate in a slow but steady slide, leaving Clara and Hal slightly bewildered at how this all could happen, how they could find themselves at such cross purposes from all they believed about their jobs, their country and their love for each other.

There are some fairly brutal and sad scenes, though Jones never makes us feel like voyeurs to a horrific highway accident. Instead we share first Hal's and then Clara's fear or disillusionment. When it all becomes too much, when they are lashing out at one another to avoid admitting to their fear and confusion, Hal finally sends Clara and the children to safety in Damascus. But of course, that turns out to be where danger lies and their world is turned suddenly upside down.

This is not a tragedy in the classic sense. There's no grand and dramatic ending. It's more like life and growing up. Both Hal and Clara have to come to terms with the reality of their roles and to let go of the blind optimism they once held. On a grand scale, it feels a little like the cultural shift from the golden-hued nostalgia of the 1950s to the grungier, earthier 1960s. It's not that the shift is bad in itself, but it's a dramatic change in thought and style of living. So it is with Hal and Clara at the end of Small Wars.

One of the things Sadie Jones does brilliantly is to show us two sides to events. She manages to pull off sympathy for both Clara and Hal (and for various other characters), even while we see how poorly they go about executing their decisions. There's a constant theme of misunderstanding, or at least, misinterpretation of each other's moves. When Hal finds a talisman given to Clara by another soldier, what is he supposed to think? But we know the truth. When Hal sends Clara to Damascus, she feels it is a dismissal because he doesn't want to be with her, that somehow she has failed him, but we've already seen what leads Hal to this heart-wrenching decision. The lack of communication is evidence enough to how bad things have gotten for both of them, and there's some question near the end if they'll ever find themselves or each other again. These are the "small wars" that they're fighting, I suppose, but they all add up to the big one.

I wasn't completely happy with the ending. I really wanted the bad guys to get what they had coming and I wanted the good guys vindicated and treated as heroes. Sadie Jones does it better, though. This is a British book, after all, and not everything is black and white, so the characters are left reshaping their lives to fit the new reality of the day. A beautifully written, unsentimental book about the every day shifts in marriage and the inevitable sadness there is to any kind of war-time life.

The News Where You Are

I had a really smelly copy of this book which made it hard to get into. Sometimes library copies have obviously been in the home of a smoker, or several smokers, but Catherine O'Flynn's book The News Where You Are smelled like someone had rubbed it up under their armpits and only then had they blown second-hand smoke through its pages.

So, yeah, it was hard to pick up. I was also afraid it would be yet another book about a man having a mid-life crisis, which seems to be the rut I've fallen into for some reason. And yes, it turns out it IS about men having crises--not necessarily mid-life, but certainly about life. It's about vanity and lack of vanity and whether or not we should cling to the past or embrace the future. The story opens with a murder--a hit-and-run--but the mystery behind that is less interesting than you think it's going to be. Our symbol for all that is right or wrong in life is in the form of protagonist Frank Allcroft.

Frank is a local news anchor who has stayed local well past the time most in his profession move on to bigger and better. Frank is happy enough where he is, though contented is more of the word. Or maybe lazy? Or is it stuck? He's not unhappy, in spite of some sad or stumbling events at the moment. His mentor Phil has just been killed in a car accident at the age of 78 and at the same time, Frank's famous father's buildings are slowly being demolished around Birmingham, UK. The juxtaposition of losing his father figure and the architectural link Frank had to the distant father he barely knew would be enough to send anyone into a tailspin. But Frank doesn't really spin. He's too solid in his outlook. His depressive mother does her best to finish him off (mentally), but she's too amusing for him (or us) to really believe she's depressive. His wife wins the award for the least jealous, most supportive wife in literature and so it is his various female co-hosts who are left to express anger and resentment at the slow slide women feel in a profession built on looks and youth. As well as to point out how stupid TV news--with local color! --is becoming.

Frank takes his job very seriously and seems to enjoy it and his life. He answers every letter and email unless they are "outright abusive or threatening" (company policy). One letter, written in all lower case is from someone who claims to have seen him going into a liquor store and then to have followed him to a house of ill repute. The "friend" reminds him that "jesus is watching and so am i."

Frank obviously isn't a shabby, closet drinker who pays for prostitutes when off air. No, Frank is the sort of man who pays for someone else to write really bad jokes that he then bungles on air. This is what Frank is known for (to everyone except the letter writer, obviously). He inherited his joke writer from mentor Phil and felt too kind and obligated not to continue the arrangement, knowing full well that he can't deliver humor the way Phil could. He's earnest in an non-annoying way and he's not much of a trouble maker at all so he's not sure how to answer this particular email.

Frank wondered if he should mention in his reply that he'd never been in that branch of Oddbins. He wondered if that mattered...He thought about the shabby man who had been followed in error. He liked the idea of having a double out there absorbing the sidelong glances and the harmful thought waves. He imagined the man as his tireless protector, his clothes shabby from pounding the city streets 24/7 as Frank, taking the odd drink to fortify himself against the baffling comments people shouted out to him.

This sort of thinking is exactly why he ends up doing PA events for just about anyone who asks, and why he is still happy enough at his job. In some ways, Frank is a refreshing character--someone who is just as he appears to be, without being dull. A tricky balance for a writer to pull off, but I think O'Flynn manages it well.

The mysterious death of Phil was a bit of a let down, but this book never was about Phil anyway.In the end, the important characters come together unexpectedly, Phil's death is resolved, Frank grows up, and all is well in the heart of England.

The Three Weissmanns of Westport

I'm one of those people who reads Jane Austen as if making a yearly pilgrimmage. I'm devoted to her books, having read Pride and Prejudice something like 10 times, though I'm not nearly as obssessed as some people. I don't, for example, generally pick up books that are continuations of her books, sequels, or books in which the new author has thrown in some superfluous sea monsters or zombies. No, I'm a bit of a purist, but I'll admit I like the predictable romance. Cathleen Schine's The Three Weismanns of Westport is not a predictable romance, but it is a retelling of Sense and Sensibility, molded to fit a modern age, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Betty Weissmann and her two middle-aged daughters are exiled to a run-down cottage due to impending divorce and career implosion. Actually one daughter goes along simply to keep an eye on her sister and mother who happily float outside of reality, particularly economic reality. This is the Eleanor character while Miranda plays flighty, romantic Marianne. The matriarch has a much bigger role here than in Austen's book and she's very entertaining, for example as a lady of leisure and wealth discovering infomercials for the first time. Betty had begun watching daytime TV and found it extraordinarily informative and reassuring. There were so many problems in the world she had never though of, and so many products to solve them.

Betty pretty much pretends she's a widow when her husband of 50 years dumps her for a younger woman and she really doesn't have a head for playing poor, though she enjoys her Costco fake fire and the coziness of playing at widowhood, even while she tires of cooking for her grown daughters. Strangely, Betty is more planted in the world, more astute, than flighty Miranda. Miranda's literary Agency has imploded (in a James Frey sort of way, replete with Oprah visit), but she has no concept of money or what to do. When she finds the beach too short for mournful walks in foul weather, she buys herself a kayak in which to storm the seas, so to speak. Never mind that she's never been in a kayak before or that they have no money. How can she deny herself what she knows is so good for her soul?

Annie is the voice of reason, or tries to be, but she's often drowned out by her sister's histrionics and her mother's devotion to both her former husband and her new-found life of "deprivation." Besides, of course, Annie is suffering from her own problems and doesn't feel allowed to express them. She's the solid one, she's the one who pays the bills and expects exactitude, ever tamping down her family's excesses. It's a lonely struggle for all of them, even as they live unexpectedly cheek by jowl.

Men show up eventually, as they do in any good Austen novel. Some of them less appropriate than others, some that you think you can read a mile away (either because you know your Austen or because they're a type), but Schine twists Austen's plot to fit the modern age so that the ending isn't quite the one we expect. The characters and the hangers on are all fun, even the villains. It's especially fun if you know Sense and Sensibility because it was great trying to sort out who was who. If you can't face reading Austen, just rent the Ang Lee movie. Sure, Hugh Grant minces around in a rather strange way that I'm sure I used to find charming, but Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet make up for this, and it's all about the women anyway, isn't it?

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

My friend Liz had an open house for her 80th birthday at which she asked everyone to take a minimum of 5 books from her vast and excellent collection. I was happy to find Helen Simonson's first novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, as one of my "gifts." I was afraid it would be too precious--and the first page wasn't very reassuring--but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can't wait to see what else Simonson writes. At 68, the British army major, or as he puts it, Major Ernest Pettigrew, Royal Sussex, retired. Rose Lodge, Blackberry Lane, Edgecombe St. Mary, loses his brother and falls in love almost simultaneously. He has complicated feelings left over from his relationship with his brother, some unresolved resentments over a divided inheritance, specifically in the form of a pair of rifles given their father by the Indian Maharajah, pre-independence. His new romance is also fraught with complications, namely in the form of object of his interest. Mrs Ali is not only Pakistani but a mere shopkeeper. Scandals all around, in both a British and inter-generational way.

What's wonderful is that Simonson is never condescending to any of her characters. Just when you think she'll resort to a bit of caricature, she pulls back and comes at the character in a different and unexpected way. I love that the poor Major, who could easily have been a buffoon of a "proper British gentleman (or a harmless old git, as one character calls him), but instead he is a polite man who gets pulled into increasingly difficult social situations and uses his politeness and his ready wit to sail through. He is a cautious man and resents having to deal with every new complication with his increasingly unhinged extended family and his new Pakistani friends, but feels he has no choice and so always does the right thing. His caution extends to the slow, almost painful courtship of Mrs. Ali. After inviting Mrs. Ali's dour and potentially fanatical nephew to stay in his guest room (thus, he hopes, further entwinning himself with the woman), he wants to celebrate, but he can barely allow himself this pleasure. He was tempted to celebrate his own boldness with a large glass of scotch, but as he reached the kitchen he decided that a large glass of sodium bicarbonate would be more prudent.

At times, the major appears more elderly than his 68 years, but as his life becomes more complicated with duck shoots gone awry, a vehement save our neighborhood contingent, the half-crazed sister-in-law, the naked greediness and social climbing of his son, and perhaps most disastrously, the annual dance and dinner at The Club, the major holds true to himself. In the end (his last stand), he seems more his age--solid, smart, and ready for action. His wit never deserts him so that in the most dire moments, he still responds in a British way, "I do try to avoid killing ladies, no matter how psychotic they may be."

And he gets on with his life.

Losing Charlotte

All the 80s teen movies took place in suburban areas with exotic sounding strip malls and stores I'd never heard of. Growing up in smallish town New Hampshire, I felt both totally uncool and totally aware that all the cool kids lived somewhere in the Midwest, probably near or in Chicago. Nothing ever happened in our town and there was never going to be anyone famous that I could say, Oh I knew him/her when...Although, there was apparently a kid from my class who went on to star in some ABC After School Specials (unconfirmed). Then I went to Middlebury College. Definitely a great school, loved it, but frankly no one was going to move and shake the world from there. Or if they had gone there, they'd already moved and shaken the world long before I got there (yeah, we've got some famous alums). We had decently well-known profs, too. I'm not denying it, but I still felt like it was all happening elsewhere.

So now I want to give a big shout-out to a Middlebury Alumna (who is younger than I, as all successful people seem to be these days). Heather Clay's first novel, Losing Charlotte, was a really nice read. No, it has nothing to do with Middlebury (or with New England. In fact, she only credits Columbia University---well, of course--for her writing career).In this book, Charlotte is the crazy sister, the interesting sister, the dramatic sister, the one who is going somewhere. Knox is the boring one who stays down on the family racehorse farm in Kentucky and pretends to be middle class and work with kids who have difficulty reading. She admires and resents all the room her big sister takes up, but is still willing to drop everything when Charlotte is set to deliver twins early. The family jets up to New York to be on hand, and then, yes, tragedy strikes. Suddenly, there's a vacuum to be filled and the parents are unable to step up. Knox begins to find a way to fill this space and to make peace with her lack of interest in children, her lack of commonality with her brother-in-law, and the absence of her sister.

I know it seems that it that the end will be predictable, but Clay does a great job of twisting our expectations. She doesn't answer everything, but satisfies everyone's story (or nearly does). She's done her research (and I hope it's not first-hand) so that the NICU scenes are painfully realistic. I've spent far too much time in neo-natal intensive care units myself and I did read these scenes with a lump in my throat. The fact that I could get through these is both a testament to time's healing and, I think, to Clay's matter-of-fact realism. So, yeah, there are some tough moments in this book, but it's a satisfying read and got me back on track after frittering around with mediocre books.


I'm too old to have crossed paths with Heather Clay and anyway, we probably would have traveled in different circles at school, but I'm glad to see Middlebury on the literary map with a new generation, even if it's thanks to Columbia's fine-tuning.

The Hundred Foot Journey

Any book with descriptions of food has a head start on being a good book. That's my general assumption anyway. Richard C. Morais' book, The Hundred Foot Journey takes place mostly in the kitchen, either a French restaurant kitchen or an Indian kitchen. A goat cheese and pistachio souffle gets its own couple of paragraphs with words like minced and crusty and whipped egg whites, purification, miraculously, elegantly, artistic swirl. All good cooking words, and, by the way, good writing words. Still, I didn't much like this book. It had all sorts of potential, but didn't quite show up. The fact that I read about it while waiting for the dentist probably should have warned me away.

The writing isn't the problem, the story of a young Indian who moves with his crazy, grief-stricken family from the chaos of Mumbai to the Alpine hills of France to start a restaurant isn't the problem either. The only problem is that I'm sick of emotionally detached protagonists. If they don't care, why should I? Early on, Hassan Haji explains that his (future) failures with women is due to the murder of his mother. Well, okay, but his mother wasn't a strong enough character for me to care about that either. Hassan is always getting picked up by older women and having a great time in his rise to a owning his own Parisian restaurant, but he never stays with them, they're never important enough. When an old lover shows up, he dispatches her without a second thought. And he makes me not care either.

Well, he's a busy man--first leaving his family after a terrible accident (which doesn't seem to affect him that much), moving in with the family's arch enemy to learn "proper French cooking", leaving her to pursue his restaurant dreams in Paris, and then of course, he's busy, busy, busy with restaurant life.

Morais has got some nice details about restaurant life, life moving on from tragedy, life around food, life in France (and even some good descriptions of life in Mumbai) so The Hundred Foot Journey is a decent read, especially if sense of place is appealing to you.Just don't expect to love or understand the main character.

The Singer's Gun

I heard Emily St John Mandel read about a month ago at our local bookstore and was intrigued by The Singer's Gun with its theme of escaping your identity. The book takes awhile to get where it's going but when it gets there, it gets there with a vengeance. Anton Waker and his cousin Aria make a decent living selling fake social security numbers and fake coveted American passports. Of course "decent" isn't quite the right word and eventually Anton wants out, especially after September 11 when it dawns on him that it isn't just sad immigrants yearning for a better life who might benefit from their products. His disillusionment begins to show when his cousin says, "We'll stop doing business in this country...when it's no longer legal to carry our product." She's being funny--not that she has a sense of humor--trying to point out that at least it's not drugs or guns, but Anton replies, "It's never legal to carry our product...And what other country would we do business in?"

And so Anton begins to extricate himself from the family-approved business. He obtains a Harvard degree--not in the usual way (but in a maneuver borrowed from an acquaintance of the author); he rises quickly in the business world of New York City, but not so quickly as to draw attention to himself; he falls in love and plans a wedding (three times, in a funny bit I heard read by the author), and then his carefully constructed world begins to implode. It turns out, Aria isn't ready to go solo.

We know bad things will happen eventually, but we don't know the what and the how. Can we ever really leave one life behind to start another? To a certain extent, we all try to escape our past, if only by growing up, but how drastic an escape do most of us have to make? The Singer's Gun is no classic gangster novel, though it has some of those elements. It's not even fully a "good guy does good" novel because Anton's not that good. Sure, he has standards, but most people do. You don't exactly root for him though there's nothing to dislike openly.The way the novel is constructed takes us back and forth in time and Emily St John Mandel does a nice job of setting us up with one expectation only to reveal later the true reason for a character's actions. That adds to the slower pace, but the pay off is interesting. Just don't expect to love anyone along the way.

What I read on my summer vacation

I spent a couple of weeks vaguely trying to use a French keyboard and mostly gave up. Sure, there are only a "few" differences, but they turn out to be fairly flummoxing. A comma in place of an M really does change the meaning of a word. I typed so many accidently Zs that I seriously wondered if that letter's prominent position is the root cause of the cartoon French accent.

I did read a lot of good books, though not as many as I thought I would. Yep, there was beach time to consider (and unlike the New England Atlantic, the Mediterranean is a swimable temperature) and lots of soccer to watch. Also, I have a terrible history of choosing really depressing books to read on vacation. I even managed to choose a plane crash book. Fortunately, I finished that one hours before the Air France ticket counter we were standing at was closed due to a "suspicious package." Once on the plane we were given aggressively detailed emergency instructions of dubious help. Did I mention that the plane in the book followed our same trajectory in reverse? Try going over Nova Scotia with all this in mind.

The plane crash book is Birds in Fall by Brad Kessler. It's the story of a plane crash (duh) and the family members who come to the island off Nova Scotia to grieve and to move on. When I began the book, I was afraid it read too much like a college writing exercise--multiple perspectives, lyrical writing, each character a short story that must somehow mesh in the end. I only perservered out of lack of any other book...and it paid off. Yes, the writing is lyrical, and yes, some of the mourning is hard to read, and yes, the ornithologist does make everyone feel better by teaching them about bird migration--there are some big hints to this, including several quotations and references to metamorphosis. But, all this aside, it's a good read and I came to care about several of the characters. Kessler begins, interestingly, with a chapter from the perspective of two of the passengers in the doomed plane, but it isn't scary or horrifying (um, mostly). I even learned some nice Greek mythology (most of which is not "nice"). I just recommend being earth bound when you read it.

I also read David Nicholls' One Day which I really loved, though also depressing for a vacation. I picked up John Scalzi's Your Hate Mail Will be Graded--a collection of his blog posts from Whatever. Excellent, entertaining, but perhaps better in small doses. Isn't that the point of a blog?

I read a terrible Ian Rankin--his first John Rebus book, Knots and Crosses. Truly bad, especially since I like his other, later ones. I left this one overseas, stuffed in among other abandoned books, not to be revisited on another trip.

I finished The Singer's Gun by Emily St John Mandel.

On the flight home, I began Michael Chabon's essays, Manhood is for Amateurs, which is good and thought-provoking.

I've got a huge list of things to finish and begin before the end of summer, though I'm hoping I pick up some light and fluffy stuff now that I'm all rested from vacation...

Book Hype

My father-in-law recently built and installed two floor-to-ceiling bookcases in our living room. Even when we sorted through and dispersed some of our collection, we found that we quickly filled these cases. When FinL visited again, he expressed some concern over the sagging in one of them, but pronounced them sound. Do you see where this is going? Today, one of the shelves collapsed.

This is not a reflection on my FinL's work, but it is an illustration of the fact that it is indeed possible to own too many books. I'm a happy supporter of my local independent bookstore, but I also love my library and after today's experience, I have to love my library more often than I visit my bookstore. The problem with loving the library is that I sometimes wait months to read the "hot" book. I have some weird panicky quirk that makes me loathe to get a book put on hold for me, so I'm really at the mercy of how quickly my very literate community gets through the book(s) of the season. Sometimes I've come by a book so late that the hype has freaked me out to the point that I don't like the book, don't get what all the fuss was about (The Lovely Bones). Other times I just enjoy reading something at my own pace. I recently finally got my hands on two uber-hyped books and had very different reactions.

I finally read Kathryn Stockett's The Help (about a year behind schedule) and I really liked it. I had given up on it when I saw that there were 36 holds on the first book returned (out of 10) at the library. Then I more or less forgot about it. A colleague handed it to me recently and so I read it. I didn't have that same shuddering realization that I'd had with Hillary Jordan's Mudbound, that shock at realizing how recently we still discriminated so openly against people of color, but The Help was a good read. I was a bit disappointed by the ending because it felt like the black maids were sending the poor little rich white girl out into the bigger world while they'd stay and take the heat. That was the first time that I felt I was reading a book about blacks that was written by a white person and I'd gone in skeptical. I'd listened to a panel of readers on the Diane Rehm show awhile back who had really enjoyed the book's story, but each had agreed that Stockett didn't get the speech patterns right. They said they forgave her quickly because the story was such a good one. So, yeah, I was nervous, but in the end The Help earned the hype.

Then, recently, I ran out of books to read. I was floundering, really. There was a ton I wanted to read, but not necessarily buy. I noticed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on our now-collapsed shelf and thought, why not? EVERYONE loves this book. I knew nothing about it, having purchased it for my husband based entirely on the hype at our local bookstore when it first came out. I'd even bought him the next two for Christmas and birthday, but I knew nothing. I wasn't enthusiastic, though, because I'd really disliked Smila's Sense of Snow. Husband Ben assured me it wasn't much like that, but I pictured cold and slow. I was further discouraged by having looked at it a year ago and discovered that the first 20 pages was about banking. Yep, 20 pages of Swedish banking (or something very much like banking). This time around, in desperation, I skipped all of that and plunged in.

Well, I didn't know about the torture and the rapes. How could I? I had female friends who raved about this. Everyone loved this book.

To me, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a fairly standard thriller/mystery, and I was very intrigued by the main plot--finding out what had happened to young Harriet Vanger so many years ago. I even liked the setting. In fact, I was ready to visit Northern Sweden, even in the cold of winter. It sounded lovely--never mind that every woman in the country is at risk for being locked up somewhere and tortured by the perverted, twisted men that apparently run all the big businesses and lawyer firms. So, since I had to find out about Harriet, I read on. The characters are decently interesting, though Blomkvist is a bit bland. The "girl" herself is okay, though husband Ben says she becomes too amazing by book 2. The setting is different, but you have to be ready for the gruesome details (which aren't actually too detailed). I won't be reading the next book, and I honestly don't get what all the fuss is about.
Now, I'm off on vacation, so inspite of my vow to quit buying books until the shelves are repaired, I've stuffed suitcases full of new books. Here's to happy beach reading, without all the hype.

Book signings

I went down to our local bookstore the other night to hear Dan Chaon read and I learned how to pronounce his name (It turns out it's shawn). That, of course, wasn't why I slammed down a burrito and ran out the door tossing out homework instructions and bathing advice to my children. I went because I couldn't get enough of Await Your Reply (which I've already raved about on this blog). My pilgrimmage was rewarded by hearing Chaon read a deleted scene that is included in the paperback edition of his novel. A deleted scene! I love it. And it added a tiny piece of the puzzle to a story that is nothing but puzzles. Plus there was another writer sharing the stage with Chaon, Emily St. Mandel, and she was charming, funny, relaxed, and I'll end up buying The Singer's Gun if not her first book, Last Night in Montreal.

But readings/signings are a bizarre little thing. It must be awkward for the writer. Writers tend to spend a lot of time by themselves, crafting sentences in the confines of their own minds and/or tiny rooms. Not always the best way to prep for public speaking. It can be weird for the host, too. What if no one shows up? A friend who worked as a liaison for writers at another small bookstore once spent a horrible few hours with a photographer who refused to talk to anyone who even looked as though they were coming near his signing table. He wouldn't even chitchat with her. He had a gorgeous book of photos of Paris but I guess the expression "it sells itself" doesn't always hold. If you really want to hear how hard it can be for even the most enthusiastic author, read David Sedaris on the subject of hawking a book at a Costco. It's probably better if the author has no ego.

And of course, it can be weird and fraught for the audience. I was at Dan Chaon with a friend who told me her embarrassing moment at a Steve Almond reading recently. She admits herself that she is just a bit overly obsessed with Steve Almond so you'd think she'd be pleased to be singled out by him at a reading. Uh, well, not if it's because she's stumbling in late (babysitter issues) to sit in the front row and not if it's because Almond (who is a very funny guy) decides to point this out in a helpful manner. Apparently he announced, "Well, if that isn't disruptive," as she slunk in across the creaky, old floor.

I once coughed my way through a reading by Susan Minot. And I don't mean a polite little cough into a delicate handkerchief. This was in college and I had developed one of those upper respiratory infections that someone with good insurance and maybe a mom's advice would have had looked at, but no, I felt I just had to go to this reading. Did I sit discreetly on the end of a row? Hell, no! I was a big fan! I sat in the very center of the crowd. I'm sure everyone, including Susan Minot hated me within five minutes, and probably still uses me as a negative example when they blog about author readings.

And of course it also turns out that there is such a thing as a stupid question and you'll hear a good many of them at readings. I heard someone ask why an author always used the same name for characters. Was this a special person in the author's life? Well, no, because it turned out the author had only used that name once and in only one book, so, um, wasn't really sure how to answer the self-proclaimed greatest fan's question. Sometimes you just get a lot of would-be writers in the audience who monopolize the author to glean tidbits of wisdom interesting only to their own narrow needs. And there are always people who ask for clarification of painfully obvious plot points. Still, it's worse if no one asks a question so at times, you just hope that some fan will come in clutching a well-worn book and announce that the work spoke directly to their soul. No, really, it did.

I don't get to as many readings as I would like. In fact, I'm missing Ann Beattie tonight and Beattie is a writer I greatly admired in college. She was the epitome of 80s short stories and who I wanted to be. I think it's even good to go to the no-namers, the locals. Yep, I saw Dan Brown before he was DAN BROWN because he's a local (or was, I should say). At the time, I mostly liked the cover of Angels and Demons and he worked right upstairs and we were kind of just filling the room. That night, I learned more than I'll ever need to know about the Masons, but I never did read his book(s).

I've seen authors who wouldn't shut up. I've seen authors who clearly need to update their jacket photos. Or maybe not. It's a bit like radio personalities. They have a voice and then there's their actual presence. It can be a bit jarring. Still, I wonder if they look out at us--dumb, adoring, bored, yearning--and think, My God, are these my readers?

Doors Open

You're just a regular guy--okay, not regular, regular because you've made a killing in the tech world--but you're youngish and you're a little bored and you have a couple of friends who have the same hobbies as you, mainly you all like fine art. Did I mention you're bored and you have a lot of money? What if one of your buddies comes up with a seemingly brilliant plan to "free" some fine art from the clutches (and locks and keys) of the local (Edinburgh) banks? Would you do it?

Husband Ben loves books about regular people who get involved in high crime. Things like Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (made into a decent movie) or Mark Bowen's real-life story of an accident involving a Brinks truck, Finders Keepers. I've passed Ian Rankin's Doors Open to Ben because I'm thinking it's right up his alley. Rankin is a good writer who happens to write thrillers--or rather, police procedurals. I've always enjoyed his Inspector Rebus books, but he retired his hard-drinking, insubordinate character in last year's Exit Music. Probably about time, too. So it was with great pleasure that I found myself deep into this one-off about Mike Mackenzie trying to pull off a bank heist (but only for art's sake, of course). How many people have been sitting around a pub (or the national equivalent) with a bunch of buddies and thought, "yeah, I could do that."? That's pretty much what Mike was doing, and what his friend Allan hoped they were doing, and then Professor Gissing pushed them to do more than speculate about it.

Turns out there's a lot to pulling off a big robbery. I will say that for all the things that go wrong (and, yeah, duh! They do go wrong-ish), Rankin makes it seem achievable. Or, I guess I should say, he makes the whole plan more or less believable. There were some scenes where my tv-inspired mind was screaming, "NO, obviously the cops will trace you when you do that!" but I was along for the ride (and wrong to worry, in a few cases). I also decided that much of police work depends on coincidence--you happen to know something about art, or you happen to have been tailing a criminal element and he runs into an art lover and then you put it all together when some art goes missing...Later, I thought this might not be true, but I bought it while I read it.
I'm glad Ian Rankin stayed in the game without having to resort to sticking his creaky old Inspector Rebus into new and increasingly unlikely scenarios.

I'm wondering if husband Ben (a software engineer himself) will recognize himself in this particular scene? One of the recessed lights in the kitchen needed replacing, too, but it was a halogen thing and fiddly to install. Mike would sometimes joke that when the last bulb fizzled out, he'd have to find somewhere else to live. This pretty much describes how Ben's office ran for years, getting dimmer and dimmer as the engineers opted to move existing lightbulbs to burnt-out areas, rather than, God forbid--purchase new ones and install them properly. For this moment alone, I bow to Rankin's knowledge of human nature among the software set.

Where You Are

This is a reread of Where You Are by George Constable, but so worth it for the mood I was in. Lake Stevenson is a tidy young old man. I have no idea how old he's supposed to be-late 20s, mid-thirties?-- but he seems perfectly content with his vaguely bacheloresque life. Content, it seems, until an elderly aunt dies and bequeaths him a stately house in the fancy part of town. Okay, that's normal enough, but there's a catch. The catch is Randall, the aunt's beloved springer who comes with the house and must remain in said house for the remainder of his days (and he's still relatively young).

Ah, dilemma, what's a tidy soul to do? Lake loves his apartment, loves his life, thinks he loves his girlfriend...Then again, accidents happen. Maybe they happen especially to small dogs whose brains appear pretty tiny.

I think I want Lake's problems even though he himself is not very likeable. He's a little prone to lying, though he claims not to do it on purpose, this embellishing--like telling someone his name is Luke Stephenson instead of Lake Stevenson. A bit awkward later when he has to confess. So, I don't want his flaws, necessarily, but I don't mind having to deal with a wealthy woman's bequeathal, even if it involves some moral quandaries (In spite of appearances and suggestions, no harm comes to any dogs in the telling of this story).

I definitely want Lake's job. He has started his own company whose sole purpose is to make directions user-friendly. Just the sort of neat and tidy job that a neat and tidy oldish young man might excel at. In my case, I just think it's an amusing line of work. There are some entertaining before and after exercises on manuals his company is redoing, but I love this scene when Lake is trying to forget his dog/house/old aunt/girlfriend troubles by immersing himself in work. Lake devoted half an hour to analyzing a booklet on worker safty in a lumberyard. It had been produced by someone in the lumber company and was riddled with problems--cryptic warnings, a blaming tone, afterthoughts. At one point a phrase seemd to link higher pay to faster work. A plaintiff's lawyer would love it.
This reminded me of the farmer I worked for a couple of years. His wife, thank goodness, ran the farm stand, because if Jake had been left to it, he would never have made money. He once put up such a dire, hand scrawled sign about the evils of peeling back his corn without first purchasing it, that we had to rip it down in the dawn hours lest he get arrested for threatening bodily harm on the wealthy customers innocently hoping for produce. Some people simply shouldn't try to explain things in writing. Or they should hire Lake Stevenson to do it for them.

In Where You Are, Lake kind of bumbles along, making mistakes of the non-written variety, failing at this and that in his personal life, offending people left and right, but you know in the end, that he will do the right thing. Whatever that may turn out to be.

Consequences

I've been thinking about getting old and what that means. My mother and I have both had significant birthdays this month, my husband's grandmother is now confined to bed, and my mother-in-law's uncle died yesterday. All of these events, tumbling together have me thinking about how the generations move on. Penelope Lively's book Consequences traces the lives of three generations of women, from pre-WWII to present day. Lorna escapes her parents' upper class life in London for the love of a young artist, great before his time. Their daughter Molly sails through an unconventional youth to become her own woman sometime in the 1960s. Her daughter Ruth struggles more than her mother and grandmother did to find her path, but each finds happiness in bits and pieces.

Lively tries to tie the women together but I didn't see much resemblence. This isn't so much a book about legacy as it is about the familial ties we create. Traditional family is absent, if not often rejected as Lorna, Molly, and Ruth forge ahead. These women all had to get on mostly on their own so there's a sense of sui generis to their successes and occasional stumbling blocks. What matters here are the characters and Lively is brilliant with these. The best lines go to Lucas, a constant friend from Lorna's early days with Matt, the love of her life. Lucas is no patriarch although he nearly outlasts them all, but his presence is everywhere. He counsels and loves Lorna, Molly, and Ruth through the years in his own haphazard ways. He's an accidental father and father figure, but never really steps up or changes who he is. In a less certain author's hands, he would have been made the gay uncle. Instead, Lively makes his presence essential without overshadowing the role of the women who are her focus.

When Molly reports she's lost her job as librarian, Lucas says, "Was it the turquoise skirt, and those earrings? I always felt you didn't dress the part."

"No, it was Lady Chatterley's Lover," Molly explained. [she'd scandalized the trustees by suggesting a lecture on banned books--remember, this is London in the early 60s and D.H. Lawrence's book had gone to trial]

Lucas sighed, "Well, I suppose you can argue that you fell on your sword for freedom of speech. An interesting entry for the curriculum vitae..."

When Molly rejects her maternal grandparents' lifestyle, she tells Lucas, "I think I have dropped out of the upper-middle class. I can't seem to fit there at all."

"I shouldn't worry," said Lucas, "It's called social mobility. Mind, it usually operates the other way--upward rather than downward."

When Molly's daughter Ruth passes the age of 43, long outliving her grandmother's final age, she reflects, Youth was gone, then, which was occasionally dismaying but a truth that could be confronted, and faced down. More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: What was it that was not chosen?

I loved reading about the different lives of these women and they did all seem to make choices, in spite of Ruth's reflections. They are all granted their happiness even if it doesn't last as long as they would have liked, or even if it is unexpected, unintended happiness. This is a great book for multi-generational discussions and between Consequences and Family Album (as well as Heat Wave from years ago), I am firmly back in Penelope Lively's fan camp.

K2 Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous MT

Today's news--or yesterday's news--is that the first woman to climb the 14 highest mountains in the world (all over 26,000 ft) completed her quest on Annapurna. Annapurna seems to be the last mountain for a lot of people in this rarefied club of completely insane climbers. Ed Viesturs, who wrote (with David Roberts) K2:Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain, almost got hung up on Annapurna. That mountain almost became his Waterloo, but when he finally summitted in 2005, he became only the 6th person in the world to join the 14 club. So now, Oh Eun Sun of South Korea is another first.

But Viestur's book focuses on K2 and there's a reason he calls it the world's most dangerous mountain. It's not a "savage" mountain, as some climber/writers have termed it. It's not some malevolent being, but the fact remains that in an era when summitting Everest becomes almost humdrum (apparently), K2 remains the province of experts, and of very few succesful summits. Usually statistics give me a headache and my eyes glaze over. I forget whether the number was 400 or 4,000 (or even 40). I'm embarrassingly useless with numbers, but this statistic stuck with me: In 2008, 290 climbers reached the top of Everest, while only 18 reached K2. More sobering are the deaths to success ratio. Only 1 died on Everest that year while 11 died on K2. If you look at the all-time successes versus deaths on the two mountains, 1 in 19 died on Everest while 1 in 4 died on K2. Not very cheery, so why do people do this?

I'm the first to admit I'm an armchair ice climber. In fact, give me Antarctica survival tales to really perk me up. Just don't ask me to set foot outside my own house if the wind is whipping up a storm of snow in the dead of winter. I do love hearing about other people's efforts, and--unlike some--I prefer a good success story to a crazy cartwheel into the void. Better yet, give me a crazy cartwheel that is arrested by a well-timed ice ax, and I'm happy. Or give me a lost, snowblind climber (like Michel Parmentier who waited in vain for his climbing partners) who is talked down K2 in a storm by another climber working from memory! Chamoux got on the radio and did a remarkable thing: he tried to talk Parmentier down, giving him the "beta" of the route from memory..."Keep right, keep right, don't veer to the left, then straight down for perhaps two, three hundred metres...over" Turning to the others in the dome tent, with the radio off, Chamoux said, "He has perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that he finds the ropes. If not..."

Viesturs has everything in this book. I thought it would get boring and/or repetitive once he stopped writing about his first-hand experience, but not once did I get bored. He covers the earliest efforts in 1902, he writes about the 1938 and 1939 expeditions and the horrible 1954 first summit that spawned a decades-old feud and lingering bitterness. He also covers the deadly summer of 2008 in which a horrible percentage of summitters--or near--summitters came to very bad and/or unknown ends. I like Viestur's tone. He oftens says he doesn't like to second-guess other climbers or air dirty laundry, as he calls it, but he subtly explains how he might have acted differently or he gently tries to rehabilitate some climbers whom he believes were treated harshly. This book is full of facts without being dry and it has reignited my interest in reading more.

My only complaint was that it was very hard to keep the characters of each expedition clear. I would have liked a nice appendix which listed dates and names and any "firsts" or interesting discoveries that came from each expedition. Still, this is a nice overview of the history of K2 and a reminder that climbing such heights is still for the skilled, the dedicated, and the (perhaps) slightly unhinged.

Here's Viestur's on The Daily Show just after he became the first American to climb all 14 8,000 Meter mountains.

Family Album

Have you always wanted a large family, fantasizing about the giddy happiness of your progeny as they play in the manicured yard? Would you love a top-rated kitchen? Do you desire to pull off gourmet meals (that said multiple children will eat sans complaining)? Okay, but what if that came with a few secrets you had to keep, a blind eye you had to turn, an aloof husband, an inscrutable au pair who's long outlasted her original purpose for hire? What if those 6 beloved children scattered as far as the earth could take them? Oh, except for your favorite child, the ne'er do well, addicted child who was never at fault for all the paths on which he was led astray.

In Family Album, Penelope Lively builds this world up and lets time tear it down. Alison doggedly insists she has created a perfect childhood for each of her grown children. She loves her home and hearth and doesn't quite understand why they don't all come home more often. We get the kids' perspectives in here as well. Most of their memories are decent--there's the usual sibling rivalry and their father's lack of attention, there's some scary-seeming cellar game that turns out fairly tame, but the children seem to have come out more or less unscathed. . They don't, however, share their mother's enthusiasm for Allersmead, the family home--or for children and cooking, for that matter--and they look a bit oddly on Alison and Charles continuing to rattle around in the old Edwardian house, not quite moving out of the 1970s and still housing their au pair, Ingrid. Why she's still around isn't really that much of a mystery, though Lively takes her time explaining her presence. This is more a book about what we take and what we leave of our happy/unhappy childhoods.

My favorite character is Charles, the patriarch, though he's more like a distant uncle who shuffles in and out of the lives of his wife, au pair, and children. He's a scholarly writer, who bypasses the usual path to scholarship (teaching is somehow beneath him). Ironically, his greatest publishing triumph is a book on adolescence and youth, though he has very little idea of his own children's lives as they grow up, not even fully aware of their ages at times. Sarcasm is learned early and applied often among the inmates of Allersmead. He's a great character because he's not evil, and not a bad father in his own way (I guess). There doesn't seem to be much room for parenting with Alison on site anyway. Any left over mothering or parenting is taken up by Ingrid. Not that Charles minds. He's too busy in his own head to pay attention to what goes on around him. He's an interesting character.

All the grown children are drawn differently enough to keep them straight and I've always loved a book that shows trajectory from youth to adulthood, I love seeing the neatness of: this is who I was and now here I am. There's nothing too neat about their lives, though, and the veil is slipping even from Alison in her dream state. She's got talent to spare in the kitchen and so she herself is never made ridiculous. I appreciate how rounded Lively developed each character. It's a good read.

Years ago, I'd read Heatwave by Penelope Lively and I loved it, loved the twist at the end, but after that I'd never found anything else by her that I could finish. Family Album has started me back into her books.

**The picture I've posted of the cover is not the cover I read from. It must be the British version, but I liked it so much better than the American version. The friendly chaos better captures life in Allersmead, both as it was (sometimes) and how Alison wanted it.

Marriage and Other Acts of Charity

Being parted by death is what happens if a marriage works, writes Kate Braestrup in her new memoir, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity. This statement is received with awe by the young Maine State Warden and his fiancee as Braestrup councils them, pre-nuptials. This is part of her job as chaplain and she knows both marriage and death, as well as what it's like to be parted from marriage by death. Her last book was the excellent and moving Here if You Need Me, a reflection on the untimely death of her state trooper husband and her subsequent path towards ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and then Maine State Warden chaplain.
Marriage is a messier collection of thoughts on marriage and love, and yes, sex (here, as delivered to middle school students). It's perhaps easy to be maudlin with death if you've never experienced true grief, but I think love is even harder to pin down--your choice is to be sappy or depressingly realistic. Braestrup strikes an admirable balance, though I suppose it helps to focus on marriage to make her points. Marriages tend to be complicated and inscrutable.

There are some great observations, written elegantly, as when Braestrup writes, I bear witness to the ways in which love resurrects itself in the face of loss. Braestrup is, after all, a chaplain so that much of her thinking about love also encompasses love of God, but she's Unitarian, so the writing and reflections are of a more spiritual nature than they are of edicts found written in Biblical stone. When she meets a part-time pilot who fears more than anything the helplessness of a plane crash, the falling through the ether untethered, she suggests he could look on the experience with curiousity rather than one of fear and hopelessness. Perhaps this seems quaint or neat or religious, but I take the same comfort the pilot did when Braestrup says, If I ever fall out of an airplane, I hope I remember to be curious. Since it's my last adventure, I hope I actually pay attention.

There's no pretty way to have a loved one back after death. No matter how much we think we wish that, it can't and shouldn't happen. Just ask Stephen King and countless others (I'm thinking of an X-Files episode). Braestrup writes, We can't have our dear dead ones back, not as they were, not as we loved them. It isn't the beloved that resurrects. It's love itself. Instead, if we are able to love again, open our hearts to love, we keep that loved one close. It's like a little legacy from a lost one.

Braestrup has her eyes wide open about the difficulties of love and marriage and she's honest and harsh with herself about her first marriage and doesn't allow Drew's death to make him perfect either. That doesn't diminish the pain of her loss, but it sets her up for a new relationship. They'll always be messy. Just ask the porcupine. Apparently, porcupines mate for life and chaplain Braestrup and a warden contemplate the sadness of roadkill porcupines when they're out working one day. We sighed and were silent for a moment, imagining a porcupine grieving in some dim, bewildered way, beside a road-killed mate. Just don't try asking a game warden how a porcupine mates. You'll get the joke answer that particular question deserves. Maybe relationships are all prickly and dangerous. We just have to stay relaxed and keep our sharp fur lying low.

Rooftops of Tehran

This novel of "forbidden love" seemed like it would be a perfect follow-up to my forced reading of Wuthering Heights, and it was, though the forbidden love wasn't quite as advertised. I got started on my Persian kick with Persepolis (books and movie) by Satrapi, and then friend Whitney suggested Dalia Sofer's Septembers of Shiraz, which I really enjoyed. Mahbod Seraji's Rooftops of Tehran is set just before the Iranian revolution, in 1973 and most of the action takes place in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood. 17-year old Pasha spends many of his days and evenings on his rooftop with his friend Ahmed, mooning over the girl next door. Beautiful Zari is betrothed to Pasha' mentor, a man known affectionately as Doctor, so Pasha is naturally conflicted by his emotions. Plus there's the whole repressive society issue.

Actually, what was so interesting about Rooftops of Tehran was the insight it gave into Iranian life. When my fourth grade son saw the cover, he was surprised to see so many buildings. He said it didn't "look like Iran". Never mind the lack of worldly knowledge I've clearly imparted to him, because he has a point. I think that here in the west, we tend to lump Iran in with other Islamist societies and we can easily forget how European Iran was, especially when the Shah was in power (no, I'm not pining for those days--I realize he was a dictator). There is a funny moment, in fact, when one of Pasha's teacher talks of how much he admires Americans for their discipline (remember, this is 1973) and I was a bit smirky about that until the teacher went on to illustrate his point by citing the fact that "everyone stops at stop signs, even when there is no car coming from the opposite direction. That's discipline for you. Discipline means respecting the rules regardless of the circumstances. We don't even stop at red lights in this country." He also mentions the well-placed trash cans on American streets. I guess if that's what he means by discipline, he has a point. I never thought about how orderly things are in this country (especially in light of the tea parties and the shouting at the president that seems prevalent today). I think of Switzerland as orderly and of Italy as chaotic. I always sort of think of us Americans as essentially lazy, but it is true that we do tend to follow rules. Pasha himself agrees silently with his teachers, at least in so far as admitting that Iranians are cheaters. Everyone in school cheats, or feels justified cheating because they themselves have been cheated. He sees it done perhaps more in the spirit of sharing, but he understands his teacher's point.

Still, Pasha, and particularly Ahmed, are chafing under the old rules of their lives, along with the rapidly changing ones enforced by the dreaded SAVAK--or secret police. Bad things happen, revolution is in the air, and people are killed or hurt. There's a sense of dread permeating this book as I worried about each character, but it wasn't nearly as harsh as Septembers of Shiraz. I was, in fact, surprised by the normalcy of the lives these characters lead. The relationships among the young and the old of the street are very interesting, particularly well done is the deep friendship between Pasha and Ahmed. It's not often that I've read such a nice, easy friendship between two young men.

I will admit that the ending was a little lame. The novel floats between Pasha in some kind of mental hospital in 1974 (don't let that discourage you, as it almost did me), and the summer of 1973, so we know something awful has happened. The fact that the characters move on from this 'event' is both good and interesting. I saw the 'event' coming from a mile away and didn't like it, but I'm not sure how else Seraji might have ended his novel. It's still greatly worth reading for the education and insight you get about Persian society.

Every Last Cuckoo

Grief is a very personal thing. I am often suspicious of authors who offer up grief as art or entertainment even while I am grateful for their efforts to frame such emotion with words. Kate Maloy's book Every Last Cuckoo offers two parts: the life 75 year old Sarah had with her husband and the life she leads after his sudden death. While there are a few examples that scream "first novel" (like her laborious explanation of why two characters don't meet in the driveway upon arriving simultaneously), Maloy writes a wonderful story of what it is to grieve and then to move on.

After Charles dies,Sarah begins to collect an assortment of characters into her life. In some writers' hands this could be too contrived to be believed. Another writer might have made these refugees who begin to fill Sarah's house "wacky", as if to jolly her out of her grief (and I had some fear this would be the case when the Israeli writer moves into a cabin on the property and proceeds to indulge in naked meditation), but Maloy keeps them all believable. First, comes Sarah's own granddaughter, sick of butting heads with her mother. Lottie adds a few of her fellow 17 year olds, adrift from their own families. Then there's a family displaced by fire, and a domestic violence case (the denouement of that particular story is a stumble on the writer's part, but it's minor enough). There are also tidbits of Sarah's own family who move in and out of the Vermont farmhouse Sarah and Charles have lived in for forty years. Oh, and about that Vermont setting: Maloy wrote this book with a grant from the Vermont Council for the Arts and thus, I assume, on location. This shows. Her depictions of Vermont, especially its nature, were wonderfully evocative. So realistic, I felt I knew the very spots of woods in which she hiked.

Friend Alyssa suggested the book to me. She had been particularly moved by how appealing Maloy makes growing old seem. In a description of their life together, Sarah says, "the grumpy Charles emerged more often than he used to, but, then, so did the grumpy Sarah, So, for that matter, did a broader spirit in each of them, a ferocious joy. There was more to being old than she had ever expected." That's a nice promise and Alyssa kept surprising herself by relating to a 75 year old woman. I love that Charles requests a catered lunch after his memorial service. My life was not haphazard, he wrote [in his will]. Haphazard is, however, precisely what Sarah's life threatens to become after his loss, but for the force of unexpected friendship. The bulk of the story is not about Sarah's loss, but about what she she is forced to make of her life after Charles is gone. Her husband expected this of her when he wrote "She will be in pain, but she is strong and a gifted alchemist. She will turn her grief into new forms of grace and courage." How sweet to have the time to write your goodbyes and your benediction. And while Charles would perhaps not recognize his reborn wife, one assumes he would approve.

I first picked up the book to see if it was something to suggest to a recently widowed friend because I was intrigued by the suggestion of a good life after the death of a loved one. Having finished it, I'm not sure whether I will recommend it or not--partly because grief is so personal--but I will recommend it to my mother who always wished (and still does wish) for a life of collected friends around the table which is how Sarah's story ends. Every Last Cuckoo is, ultimately, not a story of grief, but of love and friendship and a really nice read.