Let the Great World Spin

It's so hard to come down from a good book (Mudbound, in this case) so Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin could have suffered from the rebound. Fortunately, it turned out to be an excellent transition book. Great World takes some work, I'll admit that. There are a lot of characters, though they're fairly easy to keep track of--I won't say to keep separate because it turns out they all come together.

McCann uses Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers (see the movie Man on Wire) as a framing device or a focal point for his motley collection of characters. While Petit is plotting and then executing his walk above the world, the rest of New York is going about its business. The prostitutes are getting picked up in the Bronx for existing; their self-appointed protector and Irish monk Corrigan is trying to save them while also choosing between his God and the woman he loves; Corrigan's brother is watching him in bewilderment as he fades away; women from different walks of life and different bouroughs are coming together to mourn their sons killed in Vietnam; and a young artist and her husband are driving home after a rough night of cocaine (there was so much cocaine still pumping through our bodies even at that hour that we felt there was still some promise). Their ride is what sets the world in the book spinning and all these characters are brought together, even if they don't all physically meet.

McCann's writing can be a bit much, especially in the beginning. He writes: Hours and hours of insanity and escape. He's describing the projects in the Bronx, but what does that mean? Feels like he's trying too hard at first, but later, I stopped noticing some of those tics. I didn't mind: ...the morning already ovened up and muggy. And later I found many, many images or turns of phrases that I loved. For example, the women who get together to mourn their sons over breakfast are from the extreme of the Bronx projects to Park Avenue. Claire is a little embarrassed for Gloria, who lives in the projects, but not nearly as embarrassed as she is to admit to the group of very ordinary women who don't know one another all that well, that she lives on the Upper East Side. ...and then Janet, the blonde, leaned forward and piped up: Oh, we didn't know you lived up there.

Up there. As if it were somewhere to climb. As if they would have to ascend to it. Ropes and helmets and carabiners.

Of course, anybody who's ever tried to traverse NYC knows how long it does take to get from one extreme to the other. Maybe you do need special equipment. How nice of McCann to put it metaphorically.

This book is hard to describe because it has so much going on, but I loved dipping into the lives of all the different characters. Sometimes it was hard to let go of one character to read about the next because I wanted to follow the story I was in, but then a chapter or two later, we'd catch up again. In the end, Let The Great World Spin, jumps ahead to 2006. I like that there's no mention of the towers long gone by that point and McCann doesn't mention Philippe Petit either. Instead we get a young woman making her way to Claire's Upper East Side home in a sort of homecoming and we see that the world has spun on its way, casting off or flinging far and wide the various characters we'd gotten to know in the 1970s section of the book. It's an intriguing book for a patient reader.

side note: The cover is really neat, drawn by Matteo Pericoli who is known for his pencil drawings of skylines. He's got a book of the skyline of Manhattan which came out awhile ago now but is worth a look.

Mudbound

I read this book standing up. I read this book waiting for pasta water to boil. I read this book one blissfully sunny day, with my feet up on the couch when I should have been outside. Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, is that good. I have friend Liz to thank for the recommendation, but I took my time getting around to it because a story about a Mississippi farm, post-WWII, with the inherent racism and share- cropping and unhappy southern women didn't speak to me. Well, I was wrong. This is an amazing book

Laura is a smart, educated, slightly pampered old maid (30ish) from Memphis who gets swept off her feet at last by a man who turns out to want nothing more than a piece of land to call his own, deep in the Delta. Not that he tells his new bride this. He takes this city-bred woman back to a place he wants to call Fair Fields but that his horrified wife and young daughters christen Mudbound, with good reason. Henry McAllen plunks them down on his dream farm, with no running water, no electricity, an iffy bridge that washes out civilization at the least downpour, and his racist, lazy, angry father to boot.


Laura does her best. She does well, but then you add in a young, smart black man just back from his enjoyed freedoms and responsibilities as a tank driver during the war in Europe and Henry's charming, damaged younger brother Jamie, and things go from tenuous to awful faster than you can say "yessuh."


The story begins at the end, with Pappy's death, a literary ploy that I usually hate, but I once the story proper began and I got a sense of his awfulness, I really couldn't wait for the old man to die. Hillary Jordan's descriptions and her voice rang so true that I caught myself marvelling at how people could have thought that way back then, as if I'd forgotten that, actually, the book was written in 2008.
Bad things happen, but there's good, too, and it wasn't as tragic as it could have been. The ending, while not exactly happy, allows for the future of both race relations in this country and, on a smaller scale, love. Jamie, the younger brother, is a tragic figure here. You want to like him--to love him even--but the character I trusted the most saw him for what he was, so there's fair warning. Before things can get too bad, Florence tries to run him out of town in the only way a black woman who works as a maid could resort to. I ran the broom over his foot three times. Said, "Sorry, Mist Jamie, ain't I clumsy today." The third time Miz McAllen gave me a scolding and sent me out of the house, finished the sweeping her own self. I didn't care what she thought, or him either. I just wanted him gone. But he didn't go, not even after I threw salt in his tracks and put a mojo of jimsonweed and gumelastin under his bed. He kept right on coming back, turning up like the bad penny he was.


That's our first inkling that Jamie will set into motion a series of tragedies around Mudbound and Florence knows she's got the most to lose in this business. After all, it's her son, just back from the war, who's already stretching himself well beyond the small world of Jim Crow Mississippi. He's not long for that world either. All Florence wants is to keep Ronsel safe and if Jamie needs to be gone for that to happen, then she'll move him along.


I love that the book doesn't make room for a big hugfest between the "good" whites and the "clever" blacks. Even Jamie, in his spiraling awakening, his confused about his seeming friendship with a black brother-in-arms. Florence may seem wise, but she's not about to give Laura absolution or much advice. She knows her place (of the era), but she knows times are changing and she will take charge where she can. I suppose Hillary Jordan takes some liberties with hindsight, but they aren't obvious. Laura is still the perfect little 1940s wife, even when she puts her foot down occasionally. Henry isn't a bad person, but he doesn't exactly dispute the racist attitude pervasive around him. He just doesn't approve of the local methods. It's a reminder that these "younger" characters are the bridge to the future, that the sixties are coming. It's just slow coming to the Delta. Perhaps the book's a bit sugarcoated, but it's got all the realism and tragedy I can handle and still love it. This may be the best book I've read this year.



Scene I enoyed:Laura and Jamie singing the Doxology over evil Pappy's dead body (Praise Him from Whom all blessings flow...).

The Family Man

Just because it's light and fairy tale-esque doesn't mean you can't enjoy it. C'mon, it's July! I had a good time reading Elinor Lipman's latest (until the end. More on that later. Maybe). I really liked Lipman's book My Latest Grievance and I kind of enjoyed The Inn at Lake Devine. I even thought about seeing the movie version of Then She found Me, but Helen Hunt's delivery is so flat and painful in the previews that I didn't. I also worried Bette Midler would do me in. The last time I enjoyed watching Bette Midler was in the video she did with Mick Jagger to Beast of Burden and I had little-to-no taste back then.

The Family Man was entertaining and Lipman gets a lot of the characters just right. The basic plot: Gay New Yorker Henry reluctantly reconnects through condolences with his ex-wife (remember back that far? When gays felt they had to "pass"?); Wife is a little nuts in an entertaining way (Denise is a hoot in Lipman's hands) and she's about to land in the (relative) poor house because of her scheming stepsons; Henry's grown stepdaughter is in the wings with really outlandish "career" plans; There's also a balding, wealthy, and socially-idiotic horror movie director. (Yep, he turns out to be more important than he deserves). Henry just wants everyone happy and for Denise to leave him alone, and eventually everyone ends up more or less where they should. Well, almost because, um, the ending wasn't quite right.

I love novels in which everyone is rich (enough) and they eat good food and they fall in love appropriately (although not quite in this case). Henry is a wonderful main character. He's charming, owns great property, he's conveniently a retired lawyer (remember the scheming stepsons?) and he wants to take care of everyone. Sigh. Oh yeah, he's gay. His stepdaughter is only okay. She's supposedly 29 but acts more like 22 or so, but then again, I've probably forgotten what 29 is like. I'm also not sure why all books with gay characters insist on having a campy character, but it's sure not Henry in this one. Lipman finds him a boyfriend, though, which is all fine, but he's a bit much at times.

I love Lipman's chapter headings. She pulls phrases from the mouths of her characters and slaps them on the beginnings of each chapter so you have things like: I Hate You Still and Don't Look So Worried and So Soon? There are, of course, the occasional utilitarian ones like The Maisonette and The Human Condition, but Lipman is obviously having fun with her characters.

I wanted to spend more time with them even if daughter Thalia was making strange choices and getting on my nerves at times (okay, most of the time). Lipman gets everyone else just right.

Sample dialogue with preamble: Denise has just been cut out of her third husband's will because of an awkward clause in the pre-nup in which she has to be married for 25 years to inherit anything. Her husband dies within months of that line in the sand. When she goes to Henry (he was the closeted gay husband number 2), He tries to calm her, all the while trying to get away from her (remember, chapter one is titled: I Hate You Still and that's Henry talking in one of his less-than-perfect moments).

Henry says gently, "Denise? Is it possible that underneath these jokes there's a wife mourning the loss of her husband of twenty-five years?"
"Twenty-four! A major difference in this case, believe me.
"Do you want to invite me to sit down somewhere?"
Eyes welling, she presses an index finger against her lips and shakes her head.

"No, you don't want me to sit? Or no, you aren't in mourning?"
She shakes her head again.

"Too much? Too many emotions to sort out?
She nods and fishes a tissue out of her bathrobe pocket. She blows her nose and then asks,"Do you still like mushrooms? Because I have a pizza on the way."

And yes, that last line is delivered in exactly the breezy tone you're imagining.

Everything Changes

I think this is a guy's book (the first hint is the cover illustration) but I can't really imagine any guy I know reading it and I enjoyed it just fine myself. I've read two other books by Jonathan Tropper. He wrote The Book of Joe, about a successful writer who goes back to his hometown and faces the wrath of all his thinly-disguised real life characters. He also wrote How to Talk to a Widower which must have been forgettable because I have since done so. Still, I liked it enough to pick up Everything Changes.

The protagonist of this one, Zachary King, is at loose ends, though he shouldn't be. He's got a dull, but fairly lucrative job, a gorgeous and nice fiancee and he lives rent-free with his, um, eccentric best friend. Well, actually, there's the problem. His real best friend died beside him in a particularly gory car accident and Zachary finds himself pining for Rael's widow and adorable daughter, and hating the pettiness of his job and life, and getting cold feet for the upcoming wedding. Also, his absentee father shows up (demonstrably on viagra), trying to make amends. OR is he?

So, yeah, it's a book about a kind of mid-life crisis. Tropper's not as good as Nick Hornby at doing vaguely-adolescent-man-grows-up, but his characters and plots are likeable and the observations about the world in general are kind of fun. I really appreciated how realistic Tropper makes his children characters. That must be incredibly hard to do, even if you--the author--have models in your own home. Two-year-old Sophie is never painfully cute or painfully precocious (although she does watch Annie) and the late addition of a five-year-old rings true as well.


In the end, you want things to work out for everyone. I liked all the characters and was a bit anxious that it was necessary for someone somewhere to suffer, but I guess Tropper gets that all out of the way with the wrecked childhood (due to publicly philandering father) and death of best friend. After that, anything that had the potential to be awful, either rights itself or is comic, as in this scene with the briefly reunited nuclear family trying to resolve a conflict with a local bully. That's us. The Fighting Kings. What we lack in brawn we make up for in bizarre diversion, the strategically placed erection here, the surprise bald head there, and while your focus is shattered by the freak show that we are, we'll use the opportunity to bash your head in.


Did I mention that this is a guy's book?


Oh yeah, and Zachary thinks he has cancer because of blood in urine (did I mention...?) He finally goes in to get checked and has this exchange with his doctor:
"Everything okay?"
"Hmmm," he says.
You never, under any circumstances, want to hear your doctor say "hmm." "Hmmm" being the medical jargon for "Holy shit."

But remember, this is essentially a funny book, so don't fret too much for Zachary King. And Tropper does throw a few "other-gender-friendly" gifts, as in this exchange between Zachary and Rael's widow.
"You're doing okay, " I say.
"I'm a shitty mother."
"It's pronounced 'single.' You're a single mother."


Love it. So don't be too embarrassed if female (or introverted male or person who still lives with conservative relatives), to carry around a book with a tight-rope walking umbrella chastely(?)covering the nether regions of a penciled outline of a nude woman. You might just have a good laugh in the process. Besides, the paperback may have a different cover.

A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy

Wouldn't A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy be a totally offensive non-fiction title (as husband Ben thought it to be)? It's a novel, though, and it takes place at Sussex University in England during the 1970s so I guess it's about a "girl". The girl in question is Susannah, a twenty-year old involved with two men, studying philosophy and unexepectedly pregnant and contemplating abortion. The book flap makes it sound as though Susannah actively seeks guidance from the philosphers she's studying, but it's more that as she tries to decide what to do with the men and the pregnancy, she delves into her dissertation (which sounds like something a little different from what we Americans mean by that--it's basically a year-end paper, I think). she discovers that everything she reads relates back to her pregnancy dilemma. Nietzsche's human's secret destiny is like an unsuspected pregnancy, she reads; Kierkegaard goes on about Abraham's sacrifice of his child Isaac; and even her friend talks about the sadness of the orphaned baby elephants she's hoping to save during her internship in Africa. There was also something about Hegel, but I've forgotten it now.

In any case, reading A Girl's Guide made me glad that a) I didn't come of age in the 70s b) I'm not pregnant, considering abortion and c) that I didn't get a degree in Philosophy in spite of the best lobbying efforts of my extended family. I think I got a good dose of it from reading this book. It's intriguing to see how the basic contemplations of meaning of human life take on new meaning for Susannah in her own dilemma, but in general it's too much navel-gazing for me.

Susannah tries to come across as worldly and the opposite of "straight" (the vaguely amusing term she uses to discuss boring, mainstream students), but like many women in the 70s, she kind of has to work at figuring out her independence. She needs to ditch her "older man" boyfriend, and probably her younger fellow student as well. She unexpectedly decides to insist on getting called Ms when the nurse wants to call her MRS (repeatedly). She calls the doctor on his sexist comment. So we've fallen by the wayside, have we? For a moment, I was nonplussed. I stared at him. He was a florid man with a big, meaty face and fat, stubby fingers. The I said, "No, we haven't."

But Susannah really isn't a firebrand and she comes to all this self-awakening slowly, late, and calmly. She just begins to take control of her destiny, just as Kierkegaard suggests to her in a really weird dream. You can't sit out the dance, he says. So yeah, she "comes of age" in the age of the ultimate "coming of age" for women.

It's not a dreary book, by any means. Susannah's a little annoying in her meandering, wide-eyed, almost innocence, but she's funny and the author gets several things spot on. The description of choosing carefully which bar you'll wander into to find friends is really funny. You need two exits, otherwise everyone will see you come in, look around and turn to leave. With two exits, you can walk through and no one will know you weren't sitting at the bar before leaving. So true. I still feel weird in busy, unfamiliar bars.

Another funny bit is when an attractive French student sings (and plays!) a song for Susannah. He's pretty good-looking and obviously wants to sleep with her but the song is really bad. It's just that the song was so awful. There was no question of my fancying anyone who could write a song like that.

And, it being an English book, there's a bit about bad food as well (fruit cake, no less!) After about half an hour, I went to the buffet car and got a cup of tea and a piece of fruitcake. British Rail fruitcake is so horrible that, once you've eaten a piece, you didn't feel like eating anything else, however hungry you were. I was starving and I didn't have much money, so it was just what I needed.

It may seems trite, but I liked the lesson of one of Susannah's dreams. She's hiking with Kierkegaard and he's regaling her with philosophy, but points out that the path is narrow and she has to continue on alone. This of course, signifies that she has to decide for herself what to do with her life and her pregnancy, but she doesn't want this responsibility. But when the swaying bridge breaks, she realizes she has to go on. She may be trapped high on the mountain with no return, but she knows there's no turning back anyway and she'll be fine on solid ground up ahead. I didn't need to read any philosophers to figure this out, but it's a nice reminder to live life fully and to forge ahead. The alternative is to stagnate.

I guess this could count as a smart beach read. The title's a little embarrassing, I suppose, but you would feel like you're learning something (philosophy!) while you read what is essentially a "I have two boyfriends, what do I do" novel.

I See You Everywhere

I'm pretty sure this is my book club book for next month, but we're a little lax these days, especially with summer coming on. I really enjoyed Julia Glass' book, The Whole World Over, perhaps more than her better-known Three Junes, so I've been looking forward to reading I See You Everywhere. This is ostensibly the story of two grown sisters and their relationship, but it felt more like the story of two separate people with competing personalities. I suppose that's what life does to siblings once they grow up and out of the house, but I kind of wish I'd gotten more of a sense of how Clement and Louisa were the same, why where they came from made them who they are. Isn't that the point of a "family" novel? These sisters were just too different.

Louisa is the practical one. She has to be right and she's downright cranky about other people's mistakes or flaws (And she'll correct them). I saw some parallels to my own personality that I wish I hadn't because I didn't find her very likeable. She does soften as the book goes on (it spans the years between 1980 and 2005). Clement, in contrast, is the free-spirit, the sister who can't and won't be pinned down. Both sisters seem to know what they want, but Louisa for all her practicality and caution seems to take much longer to reach the life she thinks she should be living. And even then, it's not exactly what she had imagined. I like that. I don't know anyone who lives the way they thought they would, but some of my friends reach a close enough variation. I don't say that in a bad way. I think, unfortunately, that as we grow older, we realize we aren't really losing the dreams of youth (so to speak), but changing them to fit reality. You could see this as sad or you could see it as life. Towards the end of the book, Louisa says: As we grow older, however, our tragedies diminish in their grandeur...Because tragedy...proliferates all around us. Your boss succumbs to lymphoma. One friend has a stillbirth, another loses an eye. Someone's parents plummet off a cliff while driving on vacation in Scotland. Another friend's sister-in-law, the mother of a newborn baby, drops dead on a treadmill at the gym. You begin to understand that there are no quotas for hard knocks. It's not, alas, like you've used up your allotted share. You're simply growing older and this is how it is. One day you're no longer hearing "oh my God I can't believe it!" You're hearing "These things happen" and "There but for the grace of God." (Really? Plummeting off a cliff in Scotland?)

Not that this is a book about tragedy, though like life, this book has its share of--shall we say--transitions. It is not without humor, either. I love the scene that semi-explains the title. Louisa gets a typically garbled message from her mother to call her sister, though she won't be able to speak with her, she's told. Just call her "here." and Louisa calls the number, having no idea that Clement is, not for the first time, in a hospital after a terrible accident. But I call the number, I'm frantic, and this woman answers, 'I see you?' as if I'm supposed to answer, 'Aha, but I see you, too!' Like a game of some kind. All I can say is 'You see me? How?' But of course it's the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and although it's funny to the nurse and to the reader, Louisa is furious at the casualness in the face of her sister's potential death. Louisa does not really have a sense of humor, though she does mellow over time.

Clement mellows over time, but not in a good way. I didn't quite buy the end to Clement's story and I felt like the end of the book tried too hard to tie the sisters together, but I haven't reached that age yet, so maybe I'll find it more believable some day.

I'm not sure Julia Glass got the diffferent ages right, in fact. I suppose that's the trick in a decade-spanning novel, especially told first-person in competing voices. I didn't quite believe the characters as 20 and 24 year-olds, though I found the parents mostly believable throughout. There's a random post-elderly aunt (grandmother?) thrown in at the beginning who seems like she'll have a bigger part than she does, but I wasn't convinced she was 98. (Wishful thinking on Glass' part?). As the sisters age, they become more believable, or else I adapted to their personalities.

Louisa, not being practical for once, says "Everything's an omen, I can't stand it."

Ray, the boyfriend says, "Superstition's the easy way out."

Okay, so we can read into everything or go along for the ride. If you're lucky, your life will be worth a story or two.

Devil May Care

What fun! A reinvented James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks "writing as Ian Fleming." (hunh?) This has got everything the old books had: Monkey paw disease! A Rube Goldberg-rigged tennis match to the death! Exotic locales! Weird "futuristic" machines! The obsession with fine clothes, lots of cigarettes, though, strangely, not much sex.
I don't know if Austin Powers ruined or saved the whole Villain Monologue of Great Plans while hero is being slooooowly killed by yet another Rube Goldberg inspired contraption, but the Death Monologue is back in this outing. Perfect. Gorner, the villain, does say: I'm not one of those idiots who looks for a protracted or picturesque death for their arch-enemy. A single bullet is good enough for British scum like you. But then doesn't follow through! Yay!
His own death, however, is, um, picturesque. There is some pretty gory stuff, more so than what I remember being in the original novels. Sure, I remember Tee-hee slowly breaking Bond's pinky back then and some other vicious stuff happened in the old books, but I had to avert my eyes (or at least skim) several passages in this one. Then again, I'm a wimp about violence.

Bond races off to Tehran, Paris, Moscow (at the height of the Cold War, mind you, which is so quaint now). His mission? Um, to save British youth from the dangers of marijuana. Well, there's more to it, but Bond is vaguely out of touch and old in this book. He's a bit surprised by the "hippies" in London. Yep, this Bond is a bit tired, a bit worn, and getting a little old and scarred.
The villain he faces is typically maniacal, has a huge ego and a weird affliction (monkey paw in this case! Does that really exist?). He doesn't want to take over the world so much as he wants to destroy England. He's got a typically convoluted plan that naturally involves Bond. There's a "girl" of course. Twins, actually. Every man's fantasy, as Scarlett says herself. There are dank cells, derring-do, and skin-of your teeth escapes. Underwater scenes that will hurt your lungs. Torture, death, and lots and lots of alcohol. I'm talking pitchers (!) of martinis. It's a wonder, Bond can save the world, half in the sauce as he must be.

One weird thing was the obsession with mentioning the washroom. The author was forever having the bad guys take Bond off to the "washroom." I kept thinking they wanted him clean (some villains don't like dirt), but remembered that means "bathroom" in England, so then it just seemed like a weird thing to keep bringing up. I mean, no one goes to the bathroom in novels unless it advances the plot, which Bond's frequent trips never did. Perhaps the evil henchmen felt sorry for his bladder due to his level of alcoholic intake.

It took a bit to get used to M being a man (as he always was in the books) because I've grown so accustomed to Judy Dench in that role in the movies. Oh well. Scarlett, the love interest is fairly modern and holds her own, so that balances things. This Bond is no Daniel Craig, but still worth rooting for. After all, he has to save England.