The Call

The book: The Call, by Yannick Murphy.

The reAction: Excellent.

What I was thinking as I read it: I thought Yannick was a man. I wonder where in Vermont this takes place?

Why I'm writing like this: the book is set up this way.

The Call is from the point of view of a veterinarian--preferably large animals, though he'll put down a cat if you appeal to his conscience. Each section begins with the word "Call" and then a brief description of where he's off to. The subcategories are usually "action" ,"result", "what I say", "what I was thinking." Occasionally Murphy lets us in on what other people are saying on or after these calls. This may seem like a schtick that could get old, but it doesn't. It also could make you think the book's just about a middle-aged family man going about his days--and it sort of is--but there are a couple of mysteries and a near-tragedy.

For one, the doctor's son is in a hunting accident and two, he has repeated, somewhat humorous encounters with what might be a drone from the nearby air force base or might just be a spacecraft. Both his efforts to find the wayward hunter who shot his son and to get to the bottom of the spacecraft mystery are greeted with typical Yankee terseness because of course he asks his neighbors about both. When he's not driving owners and their sheep to the doctor (or tricking his wife into doing this), or dealing with a collicking horse, or putting down a recalcitrant horse that refuses to face the way it's owner thinks it should and ends up toppling into its grave on top of the thoughtful owner, the doctor is swimming, pondering life, trying to keep his family safe and together, and hoping for the blessing of a life well spent. It is only when a new visitor shows up that the good doctor finds his real calling (yes, pun intended). The story doesn't really take a turn with the appearance of the stranger, but the doctor's character is reinforced.

The writing is believably sparse, but thoughtful, humorous, and surprisingly descriptive for such a limited format. Here's a typical example (if any of the book can be called typical):

Call: castrate draft horse

Action: Pulled out emasculators, castrated draft horse.

Result: Draft horse bled buckets...Owner said she had never seen so much blood. It's okay, he's got a lot of blood, I said. She nodded. She braided the fringe on her poncho, watching the blood.

Thoughts on the drive home: What's the point of a poncho if it doesn't cover your arms?
What he wife cooked for dinner: Nut loaf.

What I ate for dinner: Not nut loaf.

This is a quick, engaging read and I'm sorry I ever thought Yannick was a man. That would be underselling how well the author gets inside her main character.

Not Much Just Chillin'

Possibly the best line in this book about "the hidden lives of middle schoolers" is: "Somebody stole my agenda," they tell [the principal] when they lose it, as if this is an item with potential black-market value." This so captures the self-centered yet disorganized culture of middle school, complete with the paranoia that everyone is out to get them and that they are not responsible for anything that goes astray or wrong. Not much just chillin', Linda Perlstein's study of a particular middle school in Maryland during these early aughts, is not for the fainthearted. In fact, it might not even be for the parents of a middle school student (too stressful!) but it definitely helps for teachers to read it. Some of the lessons to be drawn, as she follows a handful of kids through the year, are obvious (disorganization, peer pressure, hormone freak-outs), but others are more unexpected. We see how the curriculum itself does a disservice to the kids it is meant to reach. This is only becoming more so, with the pressure from above for a school to do well on standardized tests. Middle school kids are naturally curious about the world around them, but usually only as it specifically relates to them. Yet, the curriculum and the short day leave little time for exploration and everyone--teachers, kids, administrators--feel ragged as a result. They feel like they're always playing catch-up or pushing along, even while aware that some are missing the lessons.

In this book, the events of September 11, 2001 leave the teachers unsure how best to handle the day. Many of their students have parents who work in or near the Pentagon, but they are, after all, middle schoolers, somewhere caught between babies and adults. Such an extreme example of the delicate balance faced each day by educators served as a reminder that emotion--usually overdone or seemingly inappropriate to the moment--is forever at the forefront of a kid between the ages of 11 and 14. It was fascinating and disturbing to see how the kids handled the filtering news of that day.

Not that the whole book is despairing, or even vaguely of the "what the heck do we do with these crazy kids" type. These kids were perhaps chosen for their potential, as if Perlstein could see that they would grow up and be stronger people. In spite of the chaos of their home lives or their hormones, these were not all lost kids and it was reassuring to glimpse the future adult in the growing pains these kids go through every day.

Some of the slights they deal with or the academic struggles are painful to read, but there's hope--there's hope that they get from their families, their dedicated teachers, and even the very peers who can't help but torment each other. The only really heartbreaking moment comes from Eric, the bright boy with the most dysfunctional home life, who admits to being too lazy to try for the GT classes he's offered (GT here is translated as gifted and talented, but from what I could tell, it was more of an honors track than truly for the gifted). He's one who's perpetually "just chillin'" though he doesn't feel that he is. When his grades begin to plummet, he says he doesn't care because he knows what he's capable of, it's just that he hates school. He feels like he should be judged on the work he could do, not on whether or not he uses pen to do his homework (which isn't allowed). At one point, when he's fooling around in class and missing the directions, he says to the kid next to him: "I could be in GT." I found that incredibly depressing. The self-delusion is complete at this point and adult readers (and probably all of his classmates) see it for exactly that. It's a depressing fall for a kid with such potential, though Perlstein makes sure to cheer up her readers with an epilogue.

All in all, not much just chillin' is a fascinating, easy to read portrait of a suburban middle school with a healthy cross-section of class and race. While it's short on answers or technical explanations, it is a great reminder of how wonderful this age can be as kids throw off their babyhood to explore their future selves.

[Novels] of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman

Can there be too much of a good thing? Why yes, yes, there can be. I am not late to the love of Pride and Prejudice, but I suppose I'm fairly late to reading the enormous number of parody/worshipful/slavish copycats/tangential stories that arise from an obsession with Jane Austen's best-known novel. It's not that I'm unaware of this cottage industry--quite unlike P.D. James who has just written Death Comes to Pemberley, and admitted her obliviousness in this terribly cute way on an interview with Morning Edition:

James, who is 91, explains how she began her Austen sequel: "When I started, I said to my PA, 'We should look on the Internet!' ... she does all these clever things which I don't do — and see how many other people had written sequels. And we were amazed, absolutely amazed."

So, I haven't read Death Comes to Pemberley, partly because an Austen-obsessed friend warned me off, but I did pick up Pamela Aidan's trilogy that imagines the events of Pride and Prejudice from the point of view of Darcy. The first one, An Assembly Such as This, was delicious, just what anyone who loves Elizabeth Bennet could have wanted. Aidan satisfyingly explains Darcy's mystifying behavior towards the woman he is obviously meant to marry. A librarian in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (something so perfect about that!), Aidan captures the humor Austen fans have come to appreciate without resorting to anachronism (the way the 2005 Keira Knightley movie did). and brings some minor characters to the forefront to help round out Darcy's true and private character. According to Aidan, he is not just governed by his status and his family expectations, but has never even learned to be easy in company, never expected that he need be, so burdened by status and responsibility. Even when he tries on what comes so easily to his friend Bingley, Darcy fails to read social situations properly. He is, according to Aidan, trying with Elizabeth, but he's not got a clue : All in all, he was rather pleased with his foray into the unfamiliar realm of flirtation, he says at one point. But of course, he's only further offended Elizabeth in this scene, much as he does with his bungled first marriage proposal.

I skipped book two, Duty and Desire, which, according to the back covers the "silent time" of Austen's novel. Aidan's imagination probably fills out Darcy's character admirably, and I do appreciate that she grounds her novels in the events of the day (Napoleonic Wars, political intrigue) because Austen's books are, essentially, romances and therefore out of the real world, but I don't really care that much about Darcy when he's not dealing with the Bennets.

The third book, These Three Remain, takes Darcy back to Elizabeth, meeting her at Rosings Park, and deals with his hand in the dreaded Lydia/Wickam affair. Neatly done, and I loved Darcy's friend Dyford, Lord Brougham, who along, with Darcy's cousin Richard Fitzwilliam, help him see the errors of his ways toward Elizabeth. Yes, yes, that would be the Darcy approach, wouldn't it?Dy had skewered him with sarcasem. Only you, my friend, would make the lady's general unfitness the leading topic in a proposal of marriage." Because, of course, Darcy's argument when Elizabeth took him to task for his poorly executed attempt was to draw himself up and say, "Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own"

Yes, well done Mr. Darcy. Girls love that kind of charm. Turns out, he's not quite the gentleman he believes himself to be, and these novels allow us to poke holes in him, just as Elizabeth does in Austen's novel.

Aidan is smart to force Darcy to open up to his friends, to unwind that pride he holds so tight. These are romance novels of a most superior kind, much like Austen's own are. They are the perfect recipe for deep winter days by the fireplace, with or without the middle novel.

The Impossible Dead

Ian Rankin (forgiving his first novel), is a thinking man's mystery writer. He writes not so much mystery as police procedural. There aren't explosions on every page and there's a lot of driving around and drinking of Irn-Bru (or something stronger) in his books. I liked the Inspector Rebus books enough to read most of them and I've read a couple of his one-offs, but he's got a new series going here about The Complaints--the police who investigate other police for wrong-doing and ethical violations. Needless to say, these rotating members are less than popular, if not outright despised by other officers. The first in the series, obviously titled The Complaints, was almost boring in its minutia, and reading it was made more difficult by Rankin's insistence on using despairingly similar names for half his characters. Still, I finished it because I generally like procedurals and I do think he's a good writer.

I'm happy to say that the second book about Malcolm Fox and his fellow "Complaints," has an actual mystery and a lot of forensic archeological digging through paper. The Impossible Dead zips right along. I'm less happy to say that I decided I don't really like the main character. Fox is too bland. Where Rebus was a drinker (disturbing enough at times), Fox is a teetotaler who begins his evenings with something called appletizer. His personal life is depressing to the point of being boring and so I can't get too caught up with his fate. He's at his best digging through papers or keeping his two partner/subordinates from bashing each other. (Rankin again makes life difficult for the reader by giving them the names Kaye and Naysmith--there's no excuse for names that begin with the same vowel sound and have similar spelling). Fox is at his worse when running through the woods to escape an angry man with a gun. I don't buy it. I can't picture him in such a situation and Rankin doesn't help by not painting a more physical picture of his protagonist. I pictured a guy in a suit with bad teeth and a pasty complexion from bad food, stumbling along while chases by a similarly incongruous man. Call me American, but if you're going to have action, make your characters either hopeless in a chase or disturbingly cool about it, not somewhere in-between.

Still, I liked the digging through the past (1980s) when the Scottish Nationalist Party was employing less than legal means to achieve their goal of separatism. How far we've come in our definition of terrorism, though there's no discounting homemade bombs, whatever year they were set. Nobody's a good guy in this; everyone is flawed and everyone has something to hide. I suppose that's to be expected in a novel built on the premise of police corruption. How high up it goes and how far back it's safe to dig, is what keeps this story moving along. Just don't get too excited about the run through the woods.

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.