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.

Juliet, Naked

I gave my husband a (requested) David Gray CD for Christmas, but we were away for the holiday and then he had to go back to work earlier than I, and blah, blah, blah...the CD was sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. Without thought, I ripped open the package, popped it into the player and then thought, uh-oh. This seemingly mundane act echoed the tipping point in Annie and Duncan's relationship in Nick Hornby's excellent Juliet, Naked.


Duncan is an obsessed mid-forties Brit who lives for any gleaning he can collect about his favorite cult-status American musician, Tucker Crowe. Annie is his long-term partner who lives for, well, um, she's not sure. Duncan gets the motherlode one day when the reclusive artist releases what are essentially demo tapes of his most famous album Juliet and the CD arrives in Duncan's mail slot. Annie gives it the first listen and suddenly everything that is wrong with her relationship with Duncan and her life in general comes out into the open. Words are said, competing analyses are written, affairs are occuring---although, as Duncan says: It's not...I wouldn't use the present continuous. There's been an, an incident. So 'Who have you slept with?' is probably the question. Or 'With whom did this possibly one-off incident take place?'"

No matter, the damage is done. Annie betrayed Duncan by being the first to listen to Tucker Crowe's miraculous delivery and then compounded the betrayal by not loving it. Duncan, more prosaically, sleeps with another woman. This is the state of things in Gooleness, a dreadful and dead English seaside town which Hornby describes thus: It wasn't much of a sea, of course, if what you wanted was a sea that contained even the faintest hint of blue or green; their sea seemed committed to a resourceful range of charcoal gray blacks, with the occasional suggestion of muddy brown...The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull, and the vacationers who still, inexplicably, chose to come here when they could fly to the Mediterranean for thirty quid all looked as though they'd been bereaved that morning.
Duncan procedes to sit on said beach and weep over several listens of the "new" Crowe album, dubbed Juliet, Naked. Annie decides to leave Duncan.

In the meantime, the real Tucker Crowe is quietly, anonymously living on a farm in Pennsylvania, watching and waiting as his various lives--that is, the children of his many wives and/or girlfriends--traips through what's left of his current life. And then he reads Annie's online opinion of Juliet, Naked.

Yeah, the characters all come together eventually and I worried a little about how all this would work and whether all the characters would be more damaged at the end of the story than they already were. But then I remembered that I was reading Hornby. I love that his characters can be what appear to be complete losers and either they don't realize it (so it's not a rent-your-clothing tragedy) or, more often, he gives them some spark, some redeeming quality that makes their loser-ness bearable. Yep, you end up liking them. All of them. And you want everything to work out; you just don't know how it can or will.

I've read everything from Nick Hornby that I could get my hands on and I only hated (and boy, did I hate it) How to Be Good. I could never choose a favorite, though. I've gotten musical advice from his Songbook, book suggestions from his columns in The Believer (his essays are collected in books), a thorough education on Arsenal soccer, and I've enjoyed his fiction. It's considered 'lad fiction' but I'm not sure why because unlike, say, the movies of Judd Apatow and countless American TV ads for cleaning products, the men may be slouches and losers and doughy, but the women are flawed too and it makes sense as to why they put up with the men in their lives.

Nick Hornby is such a great and fun writer. Any modern writer that mentions a newel post gets bonus points in my book, but that's just me being clever. Here's Hornby being clever: Annie announces she's "met" someone and Duncan replies, "You're seeing somebody? I'm...well, I'm aghast." If ever Duncan wanted to know the reason why people sometimes found him insufferable, she could point him toward that description of his inner turmoil. Who used the word "aghast" without irony? And, yes, the word aghast comes up again later.

Honestly, I'm not doing justice to how fun this book is. The characters--and there are a lot of them--are all great. Annie's not-very-good shrink (she's his only patient), Gav and Barnsey, the local dance stars, the staff at Annie's museum, Duncan...All nice. Hornby has a good ear for late-thirties, early forties angst and voice. He's slightly less successful with the older and American Tucker Crowe, but I forgive him.

As for my David Gray transgression, it was never mentioned in this household. I'd have the perfect comeback, though. After all, my husband got to read Juliet, Naked before I did and I "discovered" Nick Hornby before he did...

Await Your Reply

I don't think I've ever done this, but I finished Dan Chaon's book Await Your Reply and flipped back to the front and read it again. Well, sort of. I admit I picked through it and no, it wasn't because I was totally confused (I wasn't). I did regret not being able to read Russian though that was irrelevent to my enjoyment (but I am taking along the passage on Friday when I see a Russian-reading friend just to make sure). No, I started the book over to see how all the parts fit together. I loved every moment I was reading this book, but I wanted to make sure I had understood it all.

Chaon tells the story of the lost in society. Or rather, of those trying to be lost and stay lost or become someone else, reinvent themselves, destroy their old selves, become new or better than they were. There's college student Ryan who is handed information about his past that totally changes everything he's ever believed. There's Lucy Lattimore, recent graduate of a midwestern high school who dreams of better things when she leaves town with her former teacher (okay, mostly she's thinking of money, but she's also escaping her orphan past, her "slow" sister with pet rats, and being called "Licey"). There's also Miles Cheshire, entering his thirties and still searching for his lost twin who may or may not be a criminal mastermind, who may or may not be schizophrenic, who may or may not have killed people and defrauded institutions, but is most certainly a part of Miles and of Miles' very ability to exist. These stories and lives eventually intertwine which I feared would be contrived, but about half-way through (right about the time I was wondering if Miles was the schizophrenic one and whether or not his twin Hayden actually existed) I decided it didn't matter if the story ever felt contrived because each character was so wonderful.

The disparate points of view suffer from the usual switching narration in that sometime you don't want to let go of a character or situation to wander off and read about another, but those moments are short-lived. The patience it requires to read such a book pays off well because Chaon's writing is so nice. I was intrigued by each story.

A short warning: Await Your Reply starts off with a severed hand. The story of just how that hand came to be severed--which you have to wait quite awhile for--is truly horrifying, but this event is an anomaly in the book. Await Your Reply is not a violent book, though it's not exactly a happy book either. It's a look at the world and what we want our role in it to be. It is, in a strange way, a book about family and connections we make to each other and our attempts to create families out of acquaintances. It was a little sad to read that Dan Chaon's wife died of ovarian cancer just as he finished the book and I can't help but wonder if some of the gloom that pervades this book is a reflection of that. This is not an unhappy book--characters more or less end up as they should or could--and if the pieces of the giant puzzle don't fall in just the way you think they should, read it again. See if you can figure it out.

I also highly recommend Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, though in looking back at it, I'm reminded of the sad elements in that book (primarily the story of the girl in the mid-sixties who's in a home of unwed mothers). Chaon's writing is strong and his characters always interesting. I'll get back to you all on that Russian.

The BEST of what I read 2009

Well, here it is, for what it's worth: The books I liked best this year. There's a lot I still haven't gotten to, either because I'm holding out for Christmas presents or there was a long hold wait at the library, or I just haven't had time.

These are in no particular order, but Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby has to go at the top of the list. I couldn't wait to read it so pretty much it was on my list as soon as I knew Hornby had a new book. I've only ever read one thing by him that I've not liked, so Juliet, Naked was the expected success. I just finished it so I'll do a write-up soon.

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

A Fortunate Age by Joanna Rakoff

In the Heart of the Canyon by Elisabeth Hyde

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks, by E. Lockhart

Ex Machina: The first Hundred Days (graphic novel) by Brian K. Vaughan

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell (non-fiction)

The Secret to Happiness by Sarah Dunn

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

Obviously, I've written these all up so you can look up a more thorough explanation of why these reads are so great.

I'm still looking forward to Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, even though I abandoned his last book (The Bridge of Sighs). Still love Straight Man too much to hold one book against him.
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon is also high on my list (and under the tree, I hope?) because I thought his You Remind Me of Me (2004) was brilliant.

I'm also going to throw in a few kids books that were popular in our house this year. I have to start with Mo Willem's Piggie and Elephant series, especially I will Surprise My Friend. This is a perfect book for early-ish readers but it's really fun to read out loud too. Kind of irreverent.
Speaking of irreverent, Jan Thomas is our new favorite picture book author. It's a battle between The Dog House and Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny. The pictures are fantastic and the story is silly and perfect to inspire even the most reluctant reader.

On the older front, my 4th grader laughed late into the night over Barbara Park's Skinnybones. He doesn't know anything about baseball, but he can relate to Alex, a smart mouthed kid who can't help but get himself into one scrape after another. It's a great fourth grade read, as is The Best Halloween Ever by Barbara Robinson. Yes, the over-the-top Herdmans from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever are back, but without all the potentially awkward-for-public-school religious bent (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Thanks for reading my posts this past year. I hope I've inpired some of you to pick up a few of these books along the way. Cheers.