The Last Hundred Days, or Bad Places in Modern Times

I accidentally began a literary tour of countries undergoing--um, let's call them "growing pains"--in the modern era. For my purpose, I'm considering modern times to mean, roughly, my lifetime. It all started with the excellent The Cellist of Sarajevo which reminded me that I'd been distant witness to the Serbian nightmare in the early 90s while also pointing out how little I knew about the conflict. Then I moved on to Lisa See's book Dreams of Joy which gave me more insight than I'd needed into China's Great Leap Forward. (okay, I'm pushing the boundary definitions of "my lifetime" with that one).

Fiction is a powerful and usually pleasant way to learn about world hot spots, and generally the protagonist is just as much an outsider as the armchair voyager. But occasionally, non-fiction can be just as entertaining a way to learn about the world, as I discovered with Douglas Rogers' excellent memoir, The Last Resort. A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa. Rogers is the son of white farmers in Zimbabwe and while he emigrates to England and then NYC, his parents try to tough it out during Mugabe's land reforms (which mostly involve re-allocating white-owned farmland to black ownership--farmer or not). This memoir manages to be funny while still leaving me figuratively shaking my head alongside Rogers about how an African country that seemed to more or less have its act together could fall into such chaos in such a relatively short period (and yes, I know this is a one-sided view, but it is a memoir, after all).

Next stop on my tour came Romania, in the form of Patrick McGuinness' The Last Hundred Days. This is a novel about the waning days of Ceausescu's iron-fisted reign (side note: I learned to pronounce the dictator's name by watching Seinfeld) and is narrated by a lost soul young British man who finds himself posted to a university there without ever having applied for the position. His job really isn't the focus of the book--in fact, he immediately falls in with characters more interesting then himself and we never even learn our protagonist's name as he ricochet Zelig-like from one historical Romanian event to another. He becomes involved with a well-meaning British black market dealer, the daughter of a high-ranking political figure, some possibly idealistic and possibly self-serving person smugglers, and a sly old-school communist who despises what has become of his country. These friendships are not contradictory at all to the odd experience of living in a communist country so oppressive that escaping to Hungary was seen as a step up.

The Bucharest described here is one in which the past is being torn down literally overnight and replaced with cheap, modern (and very Eastern-bloc) style housing. Bucharest's modern parks were flat, planted with dwarfish shrubs and benches arranged to give the sitter maximum exposure and maximum discomfort. You never stayed long anywhere, harried on all sides by an invisible watchfulness. This is a country in which everyone is watching everyone else, with no privacy, and being caught at something, anything could result in a slow and unpleasant death, so people are naturally wary and rather worn down. At one point, a character looks around the room to determine who is the most likely government plant, but once he realizes that it is he, he's able to relax a bit. When things really hit the fan and uprisings begin, there comes a point when the army, the police, and the Securitate (secret police) are so busy watching each other during a "minutely planned display of spontaneous celebration" that no one has time to realize that the workers are out to get their dear leader, rather than to celebrate him.

This book isn't necessarily fun--there's no way to romp through such an oppressed country full of secret torture chambers and starving general masses--but The Last Hundred Days paints a pretty complete picture of life in the not-so-distant past, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a reminder of the conflict between the idealism of communism and the reality of life under it, a reminder that there are always those who profit when all are supposed to be equal. In the end, there are those drawn to hot spots, and not just in literary form.

Next stop? North Korea. There's a new book out called The Orphan Master's Son and it seems just the place to visit after Ceausescu's fall.

someday this pain will be useful to you

Peter Cameron's excellent modern version of The Catcher in the Rye, called someday this pain will be useful to you, is one of those cross-over books that everyone keeps chasing (Twilight, Hunger Games...). I assume the lower case letters of the title are both to appeal to The Youth and also indicative of how the protagonist James Sveck, feels about himself. The title comes from the motto of a camp where James once spent a couple of ill-advised weeks. Riveted myself, I kept trying to picture the high school student who would enjoy this story of a hyper-verbally precocious 18 year old, trying to sort his way in the world.

James Sveck's life is not one of deprivation--his divorced parents obviously both have plenty of money, even for NYC living--but the angst is real. There is nothing particularly unusual that has led James to his indecision about looming college and future life, and I was grateful that Cameron did not tie all of his protagonist's problems to 9/11, in spite of the location and age of the character. We are led to believe that the event has marked James, given that his school faced the destruction, but even he refuses to be defined by it and is irritated that everyone feels they own the event, the location, or even the date. He's particularly resistant when his therapist tries to draw him out:

"Well," she said, "how would you like to refer to September 11?"

"I'd prefer not to refer to it."

"Why is that?"

"It seems unfair that I have to explain why I don't want to refer to something you brought up that I have just said I don't want to refer to."

This verbal jousting is par for the course for James, throughout the book, whether with his father, who thinks he isn't manly to have ordered salad for lunch; with his older sister who has decided to change the pronunciation of her name because her family's pronunciation of it is "a subtle and insidious form of child abuse."; or with his mother, just back from a failed attempt at a new marriage in the city she hates most in the world: Las Vegas. She had claimed it would be "fun," but as James observes,

Whenever my mother said anything was, or would be, "fun" you could take it as a warning that said thing was not nor would be at all fun, and when I remind my mother of this--I use the example of her telling me that the sailing camp she had forced me to attend the summer I was twelve would be "fun"--she admitted that sailing camp had not been fun for me but that was no reason why a honeymoon in Las Vegas would not be fun for her. Such is the ability adults--well, my mother, at least--have to deceive themselves.

And yet, his mother returns to New York, early and unmarried.

James' best sparring partner is his beloved grandmother who encourages and advises him in life and love, although not in an annoying or cloying way, but simply by accepting his rather old-fashioned ideas of the good life. For example, James wants to buy an arts and crafts style house in the middle of the country somewhere. Obviously, this sets him off from his peers (who are non-existent in this summer-before-college setting), nor does it particularly bring him closer to his unrequited crush on the man who runs his mother's art gallery. This crush and James' attempt to connect with another human being whom he thinks means the world to him, leads to sad and painful grown-up lessons. Still, this is a YA novel, not a study in existentialism. James will survive intact and grow stronger. As his grandmother puts it: "Having bad experiences sometimes helps; it makes it clearer what it is you should be doing...the difficult thing is to not be overwhelmed by the bad patches. You mustn't let them defeat you, You must see them as a gift--a cruel gift, but a gift nonetheless."

This book is much funnier than The Catcher in the Rye ever tried to be, and therefore perhaps better-suited to our times. James Sveck is likable and not prone to sarcasm or heavy-handed irony. He'd simply like everyone to speak correctly, say what they mean, and let him buy a house in Ohio if that's what he decides he wants.

Still Alice

Imagine that you have the kind of intelligence it takes not just to attend Harvard University, but to teach there as a tenured professor. Imagine now that yours is not just any field, but linguistics, the minutia of how language works. Oh, and you're also really, really good at it. This is the case for Alice Howland in Lisa Genova's novel, Still Alice. Alice is turning 50, she's at the top of her game--so much so that her marriage and the troubles and successes of her grown children are less important to her than her ability to shine at a conference. That's not to say that family is not important to Alice, it's just that she thrives on the intellect of her career.

Now, imagine your life beginning to blur around the edges just a bit. You forget the meaning of some of the cryptic notes on your to do list; you lose a word or two during a lecture. No problem, though. You're tired, over-stressed, jet-lagged, worried about your actress daughter with no college education. Alice barely registers these blips, and then eventually, almost casually, blames menopause, quietly mourning her youth. But one day, she goes for a run and gets lost just a few blocks from home, in Harvard Square no less, a place she knows as intimately as her front steps.

The diagnosis is grim:early on-set Alzheimers. Terrible for anyone, incomprehensible for someone like Alice who has always lived inside a brilliant, inquisitive mind. Alice is so freaked, she's almost in denial, which is understandable, but she also doesn't share the news with her family, not even her husband. There's a weird moment at a cocktail party during which I thought her husband had already guessed, but that turned out to be a red herring. Alice's choices and behavior are sometimes hard to fathom, but most of her reactions are believable. It's hard to imagine how one would or should react to learning such a diagnosis. Who am I to question Alice's reactions. Occasionally, I wondered if Lisa Genova meant to portray an unreliable narrator--after all, Alice does have Alzheimer's disease, and that does add an interesting discussion point. Still, when I read the "guide for book groups" at the end of this book (always a little amusing). was left wondering if some of the questions are so open-ended because the author herself left too many fuzzy questions for the good of the book. I do like that there's no pat ending because, how could there be?

When I cracked open this book--in a mad rush to read it for a book group--I immediately bogged down in despair. How would I get through a book about a woman descending into dementia? There was no positive outcome possible. Still, I read on, and am so glad I did. It was like my resistance to watching the James Cameron movie, Titanic. I knew the end and it wasn't good, so why would I want to watch the movie? But stories like these are all about the characters. There is also, I suppose, a certain amount of voyeurism, or even a "there-by-the-grace-of-God..." mentality. Lisa Genova's book was moving and affirming in the power of the mind and the power of family and love. Like Titanic, there is an inevitable end, but it's the journey there, and the details of the stories of those left behind that make it worth a read.

I think I love You

I was never a David Cassidy fan. I was a bit too young and he looked a little creepy by the time I did see pictures of him. I even sort of missed the craze over his half-brother Shaun so I never did the whole lunch box, pillowcase, poster thing. Still, I understand it. I was an 80s kid and my room was all Duran Duran. In I think I love You, Allison Pearson captures the life of a 13-year old misfit in the backwaters of Wales, crazy about David Cassidy. I say misfit, but who isn't at that age? Still, this one gives the term a run for its money. Petra is a cellist, for heavens sake and she's not allowed pop culture in the home. Her German mother unknowingly named her after a tv dog so she gets barked at in school. Even her mother's German-ness is a liability in a country that still remembers WWII in 1974.

The one thing that saves Petra is her friendship with Sharon over their mutual adoration of David Cassidy. And yes, like all other things at that age, both the friendship and the adoration suffer under betrayal.

The other important character is Bill, a recent graduate with a good and useless degree who, in essence, becomes David Cassidy for a magazine and ultimately creates the David Cassidy Quiz that will someday change Petra's life. But it doesn't happen right away because Petra's mom has no tolerance for pop music, pop stars, or anything that doesn't reek of high culture so that when Sharon and Petra do, amazingly, win the chance to meet their idol on the set of the Partridge Family, they don't even know it. It takes another 25 years for them to collect and everyone, everyone is a different person by then.

I really enjoyed this romp through fandom, youth, and middle-age. Pearson's writing is wonderful so that even when I saw some of the coincidences a mile away, I forgave her and enjoyed the ride. Her eye for what makes 13 torturous is perfect as when she has Petra explain why she could never dare disagree with a friend's opinion:...you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you'd be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist."

And Bill, who cannot believe he has degraded himself to ghosting for a pop star who doesn't even know he's being ghosted has his little tantrum, comparing the fans to "peasants from 1321. You give them a bit of dead badger skull and tell them it's the funny bone of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they fall down in a dead faint and give you everything they own, including the cow. I am writing for peasants." And then he recovers, even becomes a little protective of his alter ego. This is what the world of fandom does to you.

Worlds collide not once but at least twice over the 25 years of this novel. Don't worry if it seems predictable or contrived just come on, get happy...

Okay, I couldn't resist that one.

The Devotion of Suspect X

Japanese thrillers are apparently exhausting. My husband and I independently picked up two different, translated mysteries at the library only to discover that the first three pages were devoted to the peripatetic wanderings of the protagonist. Still, while he quit under the weight of trying to follow a character through the maze of Tokyo, I pursued Ishigami on his walk to work as a high school math teacher in Keigo Higashino's book, The Devotion of Suspect X. The route along the river does turn out to be somewhat relevant to the plot, but it did take a long time to get there.

Ishigami is a brilliant mathematician who has taken a job as a maths teacher mainly in order to devote more time to his own work. There simply isn't enough time in the day with all the distractions in life to solve the unsolvable. That's a plot point that comes back later, too.

One of the welcome distractions from the dreary business of despairing over non-math students having to take math comes from Ishigami's middle-aged neighbor. Yasuko is a pretty, single mom who used to work in a club. She's moved on to a better life selling bento boxes, but she can't outrun her good-for-nothing ex-husband. Things happen, lousy husband is killed, Ishigami comes to the rescue with a plot worthy of his spectacularly mathematical brain. Everything would be fine if he were only matching wits with Kusanagi, the assigned detective, but throw a genius physicist into the works and you've got a cat-and-mouse of intellects. Yukawa, the physicist, is better known as Doctor Galileo and is a recurring character in Higashino's books and movies. In this case, he's also a former classmate of Ishigami's so, as they say: this time it's personal. But whether he wants to clear his old friend, Suspect X, or not, is a big part of the plot.

The brain play is as exhausting as tracing a route through the city. There were definitely times where I no longer cared about the mystery, but I kept reading because that's what you do in a mystery. I thought I knew the who, I thought I knew the how. So what was I waiting for? Ishigami becomes creepier as the story goes along and I was annoyed by that. Oooh, how original--the vaguely autistic genius is a stalker! But, suddenly (and it does take a while), the plot twists again and nothing is quite as it seems. The book ends in a somewhat Twilight Zone, or Hitchcock way (trust me) so I forgave the cultural stumbling blocks I had to navigate.

This is not a seat of your pants mystery/thriller, but I ended up enjoying the aesthetics of a Japanese-style mystery. Apparently Keigo Higashino is a critically acclaimed writer as well as a best-selling author in Japan, just be prepared to commit to reading his books.

Good-Bye and Amen

Beth Gutcheon makes a risky choice in this novel, a follow-up on the family in Leeway Cottage. Good-Bye and Amen is not just written from the perspective of the family members but, seemingly, from everyone who's ever had any contact of any sort with the Moss clan, including some sort of presiding spirits from the 'other side'. Yes, it's crazy at first, the voices (well-labeled) occasionally interact, as if answering each other's questions or they hint at an event yet unseen, and everyone gets anything from one line to a few pages. I felt very disoriented at first, then realized how aptly it echoed the chaos of that clan. Eventually, I fell into the rhythm of the voices and really enjoyed the style and the book.

The matriarch of the Moss family is long-dead (though unscattered) in Good-Bye and Amen. Sydney Moss dominated Leeway Cottage and the Maine summer home by that name, and she was not a nice person. In Good-Bye, it's the turn of the next generation, her grown children--Eleanor the seemingly well-grounded eldest, Monica, the ever-hungry-for recognition middle child and Jimmy, the prodigal son. And their families, of course, because time marches on; even someone as permanent as Sydney Moss doesn't live forever.

The story really centers around Monica and her husband, a former star lawyer who chucked it all to become an Episcopal Priest. Norman Faithful has the name and the oratory for such a role, but he severely lacks the humility to truly succeed. We're here to watch him fall by the end of a final summer at the Maine Cottage, but we get all the back story in the meantime.

I'm a bit of a sucker for sweeping family dramas and this one delivers. I loved reading about all the accidental and intentional clashes with so many different personalities, all the while grateful that I didn't have to deal with anyone of the characters personally. I'm glad that the "spirits" don't show up often. It's almost as if Gutcheon decided half-way through that her characters can tell their story themselves without the need for an omniscience beyond the grave. I couldn't relate to them and didn't care about them. They weren't even giving any great insight.

I loved that one section of the book is a photo album purportedly of the different generations of the Moss family. I think that was a clever little way to round out the characters. I suppose they come from the author's own family which is another gutsy move.

Gutcheon is a fun writer and clever. Norman Faithful is a pain in the neck, but she gives him some decent lines: America in Bermuda shorts is not a pretty sight, he says about the summer view. His own laziness makes a good story as well, like when he tells the church secretary to do a search and replace on a funeral program used for a woman named Mary to be used for the funeral of a woman named Edna. As one character tells it" ,..and then obviously didn't proof it, because we found ourselves on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna. You wouldn't think it was funny if it was your mother's funeral." So, yeah, Norman is a drag, but I was glad as a reader that his fall didn't come too soon.

I may have to go back to Leeway Cottage, to revisit these characters.

Heat Wave

Putting a mother and her grown daughter in side by side cottages in the English countryside, even if only for the summer, is a recipe for disaster. Pauline is the 55 year old voice of Penelope Lively's novel, Heat Wave, and her tenants are her 29 year old daughter, her 14 month old grandson, and--most importantly--the daughter's husband. Maurice, like many of Lively's male characters is peripheral since her focus is often on the generational bonds (some good, some destructive) between women, but his actions are the center of Heat Wave.

Maurice is a writer of popular historical non-fiction-- jaunty travel guides on popular culture-- and Pauline, regretfully, is the one who first introduced this man to her daughter. Maurice is closer to Pauline's age, but he's a charming seducer. We don't see the charm, of course, because Pauline is our already-jaded guide to life with Maurice, but it's certainly hinted at.
While Pauline watches with increasing despair as her daughter begins to understand all those weekend visits with a certain Carol--whose boyfriend is editing Maurice's book--she cannot help but reflect on her similar position years ago.

Pauline's somewhat passive-aggressive battle with Maurice is, in many ways, her effort to make up for her failure to act against her own ex-husband, another flamboyant academic. The difference this time is she wants to protect her daughter in a way she failed to do when Theresa was a child. In ways, Pauline is stronger now, and Maurice is a more distant target for her smoldering anger. Also, apparently the heat wave is the very match that that anger needs. There's a massive, raging storm during the denouement. That, naturally, signals the end of the oppressive heat, and spells certain doom for smarmy, philandering husbands.

Lively puts in touches of humor throughout the book, often where you least expect it. For example, in the middle of her personal turmoil, Pauline finds herself having to advise a young writer living "half-way up a mountain in Wales" whose book she's copy editing. She simply tells an acquaintance she's currently "putting commas in a story about unicorns,' but she's also talking this young man out of destroying his marriage and giving up on writing, and she does it well. We may not relate to the characters in Heat Wave, but we can see why they have friends. I just didn't find them all that likeable. Maurice, obviously, is not to be liked, but even Pauline is difficult to take at times. She's secretly irritated by her daughter's passivity--in career, in parenting, in choice of blindness--but Pauline recognizes the same in herself. Neither of these women is trapped the way some women might be. Theresa is a stay-at-home mother by choice--she had a successful and creative career. Pauline is independent and intelligent. Any cages around them are psychological and self-built. Lively often writes about how memory and our pasts can trap us and Heat Wave, an early book, sets us up to enjoy her later books in which we find some characters to root for.