Americans in Space

A friend was lamenting recently that all books seem to be about death or depression (or both), but I'm beginning to think it has more to do with the books to which we gravitate than to some publishing conspiracy. Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible for writers to reach for the "easy" conflict of death (of child, of spouse, of a relationship) to craft a story, but if you take that all away, what's left? Humor? But, as they say, death is easy and humor is hard.

Which brings me to Americans in Space by Mary E. Mitchell. It's entirely my fault that I picked up a book about a woman trying to recover from the death of her husband so I can't complain about that aspect. I will also say that Mitchell doesn't milk this the way I've seen it done in other works of fiction. Kyle has been dead two years now and Kate and her children are trying to move on. Or rather, Kate is stuck where she is, her four year old son is wallowing in babyhood while her daughter, now a teen, is raging into an unpleasant future.

I like that this was less about the chaos of early grief and more about how to pull your life back together when you're ready. This is something that we all deal with to a certain degree, even without an unexpected death. Unfortunately, I didn't like Kate much. She wasn't assertive enough to be a high school guidance counselor of troubled teens. I was okay with her failures with her own children--heck that's practically a cliche, the crazy antics of the psychologist's children, for example--but her kids' behaviors were so outlandish that I found it hard to lay all the blame on the death of their father. I think this is perhaps what Mary Mitchell intended for us to see; that not everything in life is tied to a specific event. Kate eventually starts to take responsibility for who she is and how she faces life and I appreciate, too, that Mitchell doesn't exactly have a man swoop in and "save" Kate.

There is a man, though. I think we all dream that someone will put up with us and all of our flaws, but I think we also like to think that our flaws aren't that bad, so of course we'll find someone who'll love us (or find someone again, in Kate's case). It's a little painful to watch Kate flail about and do stupid things, like decide to leave her job, yank her kids out of school and drive to Texas to "heal" with her parents (whom she can barely stand). That made me a little squirmy and irritated at Kate for being so blind. It also made me wonder how the divorced father who had begun to pay her notice could stand it. That he sticks by her is every lonely woman's fantasy (he likes me, flaws and all!), but I'm not sure I could buy it.


This is a book that makes you feel pretty good about your own life and Mitchell does a decent job with some of her characters. I really enjoyed Marge, the perfect next door neighbor. I wish she lived beside me (even if she might or might not have an affair with my husband). The fact that Marge is carrying her own burden of sadness reminded me of what my same friend said: You have to let go of your own grief sometime because everyone at the grocery store is harboring something painful. If only, she said, we could walk around with signs that announced to the world our burden--widow, mother of a dead child, abuse victime...etc... Wouldn't that make it easier on everyone? Mitchell offers a counter to that when she shows that Kate, flaky and sometimes annoying, still manages to move beyond her pain and rejoin the world in a conscious way.



On a side note, I think Mary E. Mitchell looks just like a high school counselor--in a good way. The fact that she looks nothing like what I imagined her protagonist to look like says a lot about her ability to create a character and also, perhaps, a little about how unbelievable Kate is as a counselor.

Mathilda Savitch

Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato was supposed to be my nice light re-entry into good books after a couple of disappointments. I should have thought more carefully about this since the review on the back reads, in part: a stunning portrait of grief and youthful imagination. As husband Ben put it, youthful imagination can be fun. Grief, not so much.

Still, this is a remarkably good book. I think the most remarkable part is how convincingly Victor Lodato writes from the perspective of an 11 to 13 year old girl. I'm not entirely sure how old Mathilda is. Often she acts 11, but based on some of her activities later in the book, I'm really hoping she's 13 (and that still seems young). Mathilda is a very smart middle school student with a damaged family. Nothing too remarkable there. Her parents are professors who seem to love books more than paying attention to the life around them. Lodato perfectly captures the tedium of an early adolescent's evening at home in a bookish family when you are just desperate for something to happen, anything to break the monotony, but all you get is a fart from your loyal dog. Mathilda observes: Out of nowhere, [Luke] farts and one eye pops open. Oh, what's that? he wonders. Who's there? Some guard dog. he can't tell the difference between a fart and a burglar. And he's too lazy to go investigate.

So this is what passes for entertainment in the Savitch household and you can just feel Mathilda straining to be "awful" as she puts it. She wants to be bad. This seems normal at first--given he age--but then it comes out that her older and adored sister has been killed, brutally shoved in front of a train, and suddenly the passive, bookish parents are revealed as distant and possibly alcoholic. Mathilda is straining not just to break out of the monotony inherent in early adolescence but screaming simply to be heard by her parents. Lodato often has his other characters telling Mathilda to stop yelling, even though the reader (and Mathilda herself) has no idea that she's raised her voice.

Mathilda is not an entirely reliable narrator. Some of her unreliability is due to her age and some is due to denial. Lodato gives her a very convincing voice. For example, when she's explaining why she doesn't like horseback riding--which her mother and sister love(d)--she says it's due to the horses themselves. It was their long heads that worried me. Plus their chompers were also an issue. The way their mouths twitched and moved sideways when they ate. They seemed like maybe they had mental problems. This just seems like the kind of reasoning a girl that age might indulge in.

And Mathilda should know from mental problems, but she's a typically self-centered middle school girl so she saves her character sketches and judgement for the kids around her. Oh, and for her mother whom she, unsurprisingly, currently hates. Mathilda puts a certain amount of energy into torturing her mother, for example, sending her an email from her dead sister's account (talk about being 'awful'). She also attempts to solve her sister's death, partly by contacting the boys Helene was friends with, in one form or another. Mathilda also starts reaching out to the closest boy in her orbit, the boy next door, and her parents are just absent enough to allow this, but Mathilda is not as "awful" as she hopes to be. Something holds her back and it isn't just the tragedy of her sister's death. (The book is set in the near and believable future in which terrorist bombings in this country become almost commonplace. Mathilda ruminates on what drives the terrorists while also being openly irritated that everyone grieves publically for victims of the bombings while she and her family must grieve her sister's death in private)

The book is a bit unsatisfying because we sort of want everything cleared up and instead we get an immature character trying to pull all her own threads together. Mathilda gets the end that she thinks she wants, and even, yes, matures a bit, but Lodato leaves many secrets intact. A very convincing portrait of grief and adolescence,if not altogether satisfying book.

Book

Robert Grudin's Book is evidence that you can't go back in time. It's further evidence that we are different people at age 20 than at age, um, well, a lot older than that. I have been vaguely obsessing with Book for many years because I remembered it fondly as a clever, clever thing in which footnotes try to take over the story. This memory led me to read Mark Dunn's Ibid (which was not very good, unlike his excellent Ella Minnow Pea, but I digress). The footnote memory was apparently the sum total of what I retained from Book. I couldn't even remember the title or the author. I knew it was out of print and we'd long moved from the library where I had first encountered it so I gave it up for lost, I gave it up to the past. I probably should have left it there, but the sedution of Google and its mysterious means of collecting and finding information proved too great. Suddenly, just before Christmas, I was the happy owner of a piece of my past.

Well, I finally delved back into Mr. Grudin and I spent the next week or so wondering what the heck kind of person I used to be that I had so loved this book. I remembered chuckling my way through it and although there are some funny bits, I can't grasp now what my 20ish self found so hilarious.

Book is a meta-novel and as such is way too complicated to explain properly. The gist of it is that Professor Adam Snell disappears from campus and it becomes apparent that someone is trying to "kill off" his bizarre, remaindered novel and its provocative character along with the man himself. Yep, that's it. The story is steeped in campus politics, particularly English department politics, the tension between theorists and "traditional" English professors. As it's put in Book, between those considering literature itself, and not the theoretical manipulation of literature, [to be] the paramount element in an English degree. The depiction of the theorists is quite funny, actually, but it was a LOT funnier when I was a freshly minted English graduate from a school that had just gone through the upheaval of paring down its Comprehensive English exam from 300 works of literature with which we were required to be familiar, to a mere 80 that featured authors who still make Harold Bloom apoplectic.
The theorists in Book eventually form their own department and spend their days, gleefully uninterrupted by students, theorising and writing and commenting on one another's interpretation angles. The fact that their new offices are in a building which smells so bad they have to wear surgical masks, only adds to the fun.

Ah, but there's the mystery of who is trying to kill Adam Snell, the original author of a poorly received (certainly by his colleagues) novel. Also, how does one go about destroying a work of literature in an effort to erase its heroine along with its author? The killer is dubbed Libricide. Yep, there's a lot of that kind of thing going on, that kind of word play, I mean. There are more GRE-ready words in this book than I've heard in awhile. In a recent post, I was commenting on Nick Hornby's managing to work in the term newel post because I found that so unusual. But how often do we see "pusillanimous" or "bibulously" dropped into casual conversation? The language in Book adds to the feeling that there will be an exam at the end of this, to see if the reader not only followed the many threads and layers of the story, but also managed to pick up some literary theory.

In the end, I could see why I once so enjoyed Book. All the language and nitpicking literary theory was a reminder of my own supposedly scholarly days, but I don't think I much liked it this time around. I didn't really like the main character much, mainly because I thought the book he'd written sounded really annoying to read and I could see why no one liked it (oh, but that turned out to be due to poor marketing. By the end, everyone was falling over one another to promote it). I didn't quite buy Libricide's motivation (more literary theory?), though I enjoyed a lot of the minor characters and the writing. For instance, Harold Emmons, professor of Renaissance literature, raised his grizzled head from a volume of Hermes Trismegistus to greet an apparition that was neither expected nor welcome. Glanda Gazza, who never knocked, marching stoplessly into his office. Also, in speaking of, well, pusillanimity: For whatever reason, you fell back, and the world looked sour and grim to you, sometimes like a crouching beast, sometimes like a cardboard facade, with tiny holes for the convenience of unfriendly eyes.

Interesting stuff, so it's not due to poor writing that Book is out of print. I suspect it's a bit too weird--like the fictional Adam Snell's masterpiece--and also clearly a book for a specific time (about 20 years ago). It doesn't age well. And the much-remembered scene of footnotes taking over? A minor bit, and the footnotes fail.

That Old Cape Magic

Normally, I am not one to bash a book. What's the point? I also figure that if I bother to read the whole thing than the book obviously has something going for it. That said, I think it's okay to be disappointed by an author.

Richard Russo had a string of books that I loved. I even liked his short stories and those aren't my favorite genre to read. I admit I got bogged down in Bridge of Sighs and now that I've finally finished his latest, That Old Cape Magic, I think I know what has happened. I've been saying all week (to my patient husband who gave me the book in the first place) that Russo simply got old. There's more to it than that, of course. What happened, I think, is that his quirky old loser characters from his earlier books, that were so interesting and loveable as long as you weren't related to them (Sully, anyone?) shifted and became his MAIN characters and we were somehow supposed to accept their life choices. And there's more. What Lucy Lynch from Bridge of Sighs has in common with Jack Griffin in That Old Cape Magic is that neither character ACTS. They simply react. I felt like Russo spent all of his effort just telling us stuff instead of showing us anything. It felt like a basic lesson in a writing workshop. Griffin particularly is teetering between post-middle age ennui and full-blown alzheimers. I don't think he's supposed to be and it isn't fun. It isn't even interesting.

Jack Griffin goes to two weddings in That Old Cape Magic. They more or less frame the book. He is a former screen-writer turned respectable college professor who still wrestles with his parents (both in the flesh and in spirit) and his wife as well as himself about what he should do with his life. He has spent his whole adult life running away from his childhood and his parents' way of life, but never figured out where he was running to and so is left to sift through what is genetic and what is by choice.

There's a lot of generic stuff here, though I think if I were closer to Griffin's age, perhaps I would relate better. Even if you don't like his characters, several of them are well presented, but it's lacking a lot of the humor of his earlier books. Griffin's parents are mean, awful people with none of the loveable, old loser attributes of characters from his other books. And Griffin is so passive that I just wanted to slap some life into him. Do something! Do something wrong if you must, I thought, but do it. Do anything! It was a frustrating book to read.

We see a flash of old Russo when an entire wedding party crashes through a faulty handicap ramp and ends up in various states of disarray and dismay, but you have to wait a really long time to get there. That's good stuff, though.
I highly recommend Straight Man (campus politics), Nobody's Fool ( I still quote from that. Fantastic characters), Empire Falls (though that gets a little dark), and the short story collection, The Whore's Child.