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...