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...