Admissions

I picked up this book because of a misunderstanding my father-in-law had. First, I will say he never reads reviews/blurbs about books he hasn't read (for which I make gentle fun, of course), but he did read what I'd written about Jean Hanff Korelitz's book Admission under the impression that it was about this book, Admissions, by Nancy Lieberman of which he had heard. Personally, I wasn't going to touch this book at all because I certainly didn't need to read about over-priviliged NYC parents desperately trying to get their progeny into the best schools so they wouldn't have to risk rubbing shoulders with--shall we say-- people like my kids.

It turns out, though, that this is a fun, albeit over-long book. It was a strange follow up to my last read, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, offering, as it does, a more conventional outsider's view of what it's like to live in NYC (at a certain income level, mind you). Like O'Neill (um, sort of), Lieberman uses "outsiders" to show us our way. Lieberman's outsiders are Helen who lives on the poorer end of high society among private school families, and her close friend Sara who works in kindergarten admissions at The School. Sara has a modest income and no kids, but she's in the thick of the madness. Helen and her husband are artistic (art critic and food channel producer) and they have one child who is graduating from The School and into a private high school, if only she can get in...somewhere. So, the stress on the two ends of the admission process is pretty much the plot, but throw in an increasingly bizarre head of school, a flirtation with the end of a marriage and a handsome widower, a few increasingly wacky parents and some appealing teen characters, and you've got a story.

The characters are generally interesting and well-differentiated, which is good because there are a lot to keep track of. I found the two Heads of School fairly hard to believe, although at least one of them was supposed to be drunk on power so her behavior had a source, I guess. Her affectation for sprinkling every pronouncement with French was amusing, as was her constantly passing off take-out food at school events as something she'd cooked herself. Lieberman does get carried away a bit, as when she has the denouement occur on a harbor cruise, a school even that had been christened "A Night To Remember." So, there's a major hint how that will go. Okay, yes, my prom had the same theme, but generally anyone who hears "A Night to Remember" in connection with a BOAT is thinking: Titanic. Kind of lame. Lieberman uses a lot of heavyhanded stunts like that, like naming the schools things like The Very Brainy Girls School, or The Bucolic School. Maybe that's some NYC humor, but it's a bit tedious after awhile.

Admissions was entertaining, a little silly, and a little over the top. Also, a little dull, really, but I found that I was sorry when I was done with the characters. I wanted to know the next chapter, how it would all shake out when they moved on to their new schools, new careers, new lives. I guess I should go ahead and thank my father-in-law for getting me to read Admissions. Now, I wonder if he'll read it...

Netherland

In her great book, The Family Tree, Carole Cadwalladr used cricket as a metaphor: Life as a game of cricket. That seems about right to me. Intense periods of boredom. Rules you don't quite understand. And a few, very few, moments of pure, unadulterated joy. Well, Joseph O'Neill's book Netherland also uses cricket as a metaphor, but his narrator is a bigger fan than Cadwalladr's is and his cricket is a way for the displaced to find their way in a post-9/11 NYC as foreigners.

No fear, though, you don't need to know a thing about cricket to enjoy this book. If nothing, the book gave me further insight into the bizarrest of games, my knowledge of which had been heretofore informed by school novels by PG Wodehouse and by watching games on the college lawns, as played by the Pakistani, Indian, and lone British student..

O'Neill's Hans van den Broek is already used to being out of place when we meet him. He is a Dutch finance wizard and has followed his British wife via London to NYC where they have a baby and then their world falls apart when the towers go down (mercifully, this happens off-page). His wife uses this disaster to decamp to her parents, young child in tow, so that she doesn't have to explain that their marriage had already become a sham of sorts.

Hans stays behind and wanders NYC, even more of an outsider now that he is unmoored from both his apartment and his family. He seeks solace in the Staten Island Cricket club and falls in with the taxi drivers, entrepreneurs, and financiers that make up the club. He sees the white uniforms gathered on a crumby, non-regulation pitch as a metaphor for these collected foreigners of different nations trying to make order of their lives in the new world. He himself has to learn "american cricket" (which apparently requires more aggressive pitching, for example). He spends his days making insane amounts of money at his job, his nights roaming the somewhat suspect areas of NYC, and his weekends playing cricket. It is through cricket that he meets the shady but captivating Chuck Ramkissoon, and it is through Chuck that Hans eventually finds a way out of his shell and into the world. He comes to care about what is happening around him and to, at last, engage in the world, even if he never quite fits into it.

We're supposed to see Hans as disengaged throughout the book, as exemplified by his outsider status as well as by his slowly receding marriage, but mainly I saw Hans as a thoughtful, open-minded character and I thought his wife was extremely annoying and unthoughtful. I thought O'Neill brought a very nice eye and ear to the "unknown" NYC and I enjoyed seeing the city through different characters than the usual.

This book first came to my attention when a friend of mine told me President Obama read it and said it gave him insight into the immigrant experience in this country. And sure enough, there's a quote from him on a sticker affixed to my paperback copy. I hope, if nothing else, the president took some notes on the frustrating and amusing trials of poor Hans trying to get his license at the DMV. We may not be able to welcome all to this country, but maybe we can get everyone driving, even if their names are spelled differently on their two pieces of identification.

I really liked Netherland and felt the whole time that I was meant to learn something about how we move in the world, both in our own spheres and how to shift into the sphere of 'the other'. O'Neill writes perceptively, and intelligently. This is not a quick read, but one to be savored and pondered.

Something Borrowed

So, I read a chick lit type book. It's vacation so I guess I can do what I want with my time. Emily Giffin's book did get me thinking about Jane Austen, actually. Not because there's much in common, mind you, but I was trying to figure out why I was so irritated by Giffin's main character, Rachel. Partly I had trouble with her name. Rachel. Don't get me wrong, I like the name Rachel. One of my cousins is named Rachel and it's perfectly lovely, but it just doesn't seem right for a fiance-stealing 30 year old, big firm lawyer. Anyway, her name is not what made me think of Jane Austen. I was irritated by Rachel because she is incredibly passive and I've decided this is a trait I can't stand in a character even if that character gets the opportunity to transform by novel's end, as all characters should.

What makes Jane Asuten's books still resonate today is that her characters are anything but passive. In fact, they generally seem anachronistically active in their own lives. There's a reason that Persuasion is arguably the least popular Austen novel. You just want to throttle Anne for sitting around and missing her opportunity at love and life. She's no Elizabeth Bennett or Emma. Yes, those are flawed characters, but for heaven's sake they have a personality.

Darcy has more of a personality (it's always easier to write the 'villain'), but she is generally unlikeable in Something Borrowed, so much so that I saw it as a further flaw in Rachel that they'd ever been friends to begin with. Certainly it was hard to believe their friendship had lasted into adulthood. There's something about old friends, but there's also such a thing as growing up and out of Indiana and into a life in NYC. I know it's been awhile since I was 30 (not THAT long, but still...), and I was certainly never single at that age, so what do I know? But these women didn't act their age. I mean, honestly, how much awkward kissing on a couch happens at that age?

Giffin seems to have written a whole series with embarrassing titles like Something Blue and Something New (or whatnot) and I had to hide the cover of this one under my other serious books at the library (yes, yes, I'm sad), but the titles are almost redeemed by the fact that the next book, Something Blue, seems to be narrated by Darcy herself. Apparently it's her chance to tell her side of the story after her supposed best friend steals her beloved fiance. I'm a sucker for multiple view points of the same story, (though I probably won't read the next installment) so this seems clever to me.

Darcy's definitely the more interesting character. Dex is your basic good guy and Rachel is utterly boring in many ways so I'm hopeful that Giffin lets the girl you love to hate really rant on in Something Blue. She's got a lot to say and may remind readers of Eleanor's younger sister in Sense and Sensibility or, more likely, Elizabeth Bennett's horror of a sister, Lydia. NOT that I'm really comparing Emily Giffin to Jane Austen, but, you know, you could...

**I just discovered that Something Borrowed, the movie, will begin filming this spring. Of course it will. It probably will make a very entertaining movie. They'll just have to cast a good personality for Rachel (and not overdo Darcy's worst qualities).**

The End of the Alphabet

I never would read skinny books as a kid and so I was at first chagrined at how embarrassingly slight C.S. Richardson's book The End of the Alphabet proved to be. That it turns out to be about the death of a man, or rather, about his last bit of life, was somehow both sad and appropriate. Sad that the tail end of a life could be neatly encapsulated in a mere 119 smallish pages. Appropriate because dying is not something you want dragged out. I didn't mind the anemic size of the book once I began to read.

Ambrose Zephyr, at 50, is suddenly dying of some undisclosed and vague illness. He and his wife Zipper Ashkenazis (yes, yes, there's a lot of play on the alphabet. Obviously.) embark on a month-long tour of last places to see, in a roughly alphabetical order. A is for Amsterdam, H is for Haifa sort of thing. Things, of course, don't go quite as planned. After all, just because you are "given" a month to live, doesn't mean you should plan a 30 day Grand Tour.

I love that Ambrose and Zipper seem to spend most of their travels doing separate things. That just seems like a normal couple thing to do, once you've been together, childless for as long as they have. Ambrose turns out to be a mostly solitary man and Zipper is too sad at her impending loss to put up with his carefully rationed conversation (yes, ironically). They bicker, they explore, they share their findings (sometimes). This seems a gentle way to die. There's no talk of money, expense, disappointment in what they see (though their route was chosen carefully). They get tired and dirty, but nothing like real travel can be. It's an almost idealized view of the Grand Tour. Oh, except for the dying part.

In many ways, The End of the Alphabet is a fairy tale. It isn't really until close to the end of the book, that we even get much sense of the time period in which it takes place. It's clear that it's post-war, James Bond is mentioned at last, and then a reference to the 70s, but Ambrose and Zipper are both old-fashioned enough that it felt as though the story could take place any time between 1920 and present day, with a slight edge given to the late 1950s. Everything seems so orderly and elegant in this book. It seems that dying grandly (though discreetly--the characters are British, after all) is the perfect way to go.

Game Cange

Game change was the perfect antidote to the downer books I've been cycling through. The breezy romp through the 2008 campaign is perhaps a bit too gossipy for the likes of, say, my husband, but I learned a lot in a fun way. One unexpected outcome was that I came to understand Hillary Clinton and her motivation during the very ugly primary campaign when I--an unabashed Obama supporter--started to feel actual hatred toward the woman. Reading this book made me understand her a bit better. Heilemann and Halperin capture her as well as could be expected for such a complex character.
Edwards comes off as a delusional ass and I felt a bit dirty reading the sections on his campaign because the whole thing was awfully tawdry. The sections on McCain were sort of sad because he just seemed so lost (and yes, bitter, angry, old, confused, tired...). Sarah Palin came off as unhinged. I always thought she was vapid and undereducated, delusional, perhaps but I didn't realize she was borderline insane.

But this is an extremely honest book and even Obama, the eventual winner, is hauled into the light and his weaknesses exposed. Game Change was a great companion to David Plouffe's book (December 2009 post) Audacity to Win. Plouffe claimed he'd tried to write a clear-eyed, honest book, which I believe he did, but he was still kinder to Hillary Clinton and Obama (now Secretary of State and President, respectively, so he has to be kind of nice) than Heilemann and Halperin needed to be. Obama comes off as so confident as to border on arrogance. There are hints that his campaign did indeed indulge in some dirty tricks which Plouffe either glides over or exhonerates Obama of having any part in them. Still, as honest as the journalists are, the president still comes off well and certainly appears the best of the bunch in Game Change.

Reading this, I began to admire Hillary Clinton while I remained horrified by her blindness and vengefulness during the campaign. She comes off as smart, disciplined, driven, and as truly believing that Obama will not only be a bad president but will be eaten alive by the Republican machine come the general election. This helps explain why she stayed in so long. She truly believed she would be a better president (all bets are off as to how she feels now). On the other hand, she comes off as completely blind to the mood of people, she runs a terrible and dysfunctional campaign, and both she and Bill Clinton come off as petty and vengeful. She hates confrontation to the point that she fires her staff via email. There's a great scene to illustrate her unwillingness to take control of her own campaign and its flaws when her staff is trying to warn her of the damage Bill is inflicting on her campaign. It's the day after the debacle in South Carolina (where Bill Clinton is widely viewed as having injected race into the campaign) and Hillary's senior staff says, We have a problem. If you can't control your husband in the campaign, how are you going to control him as president?

"Well, someone will have to talk to him," Hillary said.

"YOU need to talk to him," the advisor replied.

"I can't talk to him," Hillary said.

After her surprise win in NH, Hillary chalks it up to going negative, something both she and Bill argue needs to be done more often. Everyone else, EVERYONE, chalks up that win to her softening up, especially with the tears in the cafe in Portsmouth, NH. (I didn't cry, [Hillary] kept insisting). Her staff tries to use the movie The Queen to explain what happened in NH. "You know how, at the end, Queen Elizabeth becomes sympathetic when she displays her humanity?...That's what happened in New Hampshire.

Hillary looked uncomprehendingly at [him], as if he were speaking Portuguese.

Obama, in contrast, just gets smarter with every loss (and win). By the time, he and McCain go to Washington to deal with the financial crisis, he is in full presidential mode, and is seen as such by his party. As soon as he clinched the nomination of his party, he convened a bunch of high level meetings on economics that were run like post-grad classes. Yes, he was cramming, but in direct contrast to the Republican nominee for VP who was cramming to understand why North Korea and South Korea were separate.

Heilemann and Halperin are as kind as they can be with Sarah Palin. She comes off as motivated, but completely out of her depth. She crams information like there's no tomorrow, writing everything onto index cards to such an extent that there are moments describing her as surrounded by unwieldy stacks of cards. Still, she only worked on things she liked (loved the meet and greet, hated preparing for the debate or the interviews). She is like a petulant child or a depressed person for most of the campaign, except when she's out among those who love her. She worked her rope lines hungrily...lingering over every hand she touched. Otherwise, Palin was demoralized, isolated, and confused. On her plane, when confronted with any uncomfortable topic by her advisers, she was still dropping her head and refusing to respond, even as they stood there awkwardly waiting for a reply.

If you'd been in a coma for a year and your only access to the campaign were this book, it becomes quickly apparent who will win. There's a real race between Hillary and Obama, but there's no such thing between McCain and Obama. McCain comes off as not really being up for the job, even by his own staff. It's a sad ending to watch such a man lose his way so publically. His private life was shocking to me, but I never harbored too many illusions about the man and anyone in a coma wouldn't be too surprised either.

Game Change is extremely well-written (except that they use the term "game change" way too much. There were several words I felt compelled to look up in the dictionary (I'm not trying to scare anyone off--this doesn't by any means imply it's written in an unpleasantly scholarly way) which was refreshing and in contrast to the occasional tell-all vibe.The level of access these reporters had is incredible. I leave readers to discover all the details and the funny bits. Enjoy.