Alias Grace

Alias Grace has been sitting on my shelf for a long time.  Even though I looooove Margaret Atwood, I was never able to get into it.  Also The Blind Assassin.  But, taste in books comes and goes, or so I've noticed, so, after a run of particularly great reads, I decided to give it another go.

It was like Margaret Atwood had just published another book, just for me.  I don't know what happened to me before, but I was absolutely mesmerized this time around.  It's based on the true story of convicted murderer (or, murderess, how shocking!) and Canadian, Grace Marks.  I did some research about her in advance, which I would recommend if you're going to read this book - only because so much of what Atwood includes is based on primary source materials.  You can, for example, read the confession and the trial notes online.

The story is told partly from Grace's point of view - she is in prison and asked to talk to a doctor, Simon Jordan (a fictionalized character) who is studying her case for criminal behavior.  This is in the late 19th century, when mysticism and seances and things like phrenology are actually considered fairly scientific, and the Freudian-style of the young doctor Jordan are considered slightly unusual.  Grace confesses not to have a memory of the murders she's alleged to have been involved with, but it's not entirely clear how trustworthy she is as a narrator.

I thought Alias Grace had a lot in common with The Handmaid's Tale, my benchmark of greatness for all books.  Grace is a lot like the handmaid, who is essentially jailed as well - restricted movements, at the mercy of those considered her betters.  Not surprisingly, there's a huge feminist aspect to this story - for example, much is made over the peculiarity of this female murderer.  What's interesting is that her inner monologue is steady, rational and completely reasonable.  Atwood even frames the story into sections titled with antique quilt patterns - Broken Dishes, Lady of the Lake, Tree of Paradise.  What could be more coded-female, or more perfectly rational? In comparison, the doctor's inner monologue becomes more and more shocking.  He casually fantasizes of injuring or doing violence to people he meets.  He has passing fancies of sexually humiliating practically every woman he meets, and yet he remains a pillar of society.

What's really quite amazing is how Atwood writes the entire book in the style of the late 19th century - no doubt about it, she is truly one of the greatest writers this world has ever known.  She writes:
They were feeble and ignorant creatures, although rich, and most of them could not light a fire if their toes were freezing off, because they didn't know how, and it was a wonder they could blow their own noses or wipe their own backsides, they were by their nature as useless as a prick on a priest - if you'll excuse me, Sir, but that was how she put it - and if they were to lose all their money tomorrow and be thrown out on the streets, they would not even be able to make a living by honest whoring, as they would not know which part was to go in where, and they would end up getting - I won't say the word - in the ear; and most of them did not know their own arse from a hole in the ground. And she said something else about the women, which was so coarse I will not repeat is, Sir, but it made us laugh very much.

Grace is manhandled daily by a couple of prison guards who describe at great length their intentions.  The descriptions are so filthy and so extenuated it's almost funny, and it kind of made me smile to imagine Atwood thinking of all the horrible, ridiculous, awful things these men could say.  Oh ho, says the one, that's what I like, a little high spirits in a woman, a little fire, they say it comes with the redness of the hair.  But is it red where is most counts, says the other, a fire in a treetop is no use at all, it must be a fireplace to cast enough heat, in a little cookstove, you know why God made women with skirts, it's so they can be pulled up over their heads and tied at the top, that way you don't get so much noise out of them, I hate a screeching slut, women should be born without mouths on them, the only thing of use in them is below the waist.

It's been about 30 years since Grace was accused of murder, when she was only a girl of 16.  Atwood explores the impact of imprisonment and the notion of forgiveness.  How can Grace pay for the crimes she may or may not have been party to? Through time, suffering, personal growth?  Near the end, Grace says, "It is not the culprits who need to be forgiven; rather it is the victims, because they are the ones who cause all the trouble. If they were only less weak and careless, and more foresightful, and if they would keep from blundering in difficulties, think of all the sorrow in the world that would be spared."  That odd statement is a good example of the kind of mystery that surrounds Grace until the end.  The wisdom she has was earned quietly observing the outside world through the bars of a prison.   "The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men.  And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong."

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

I just finished this AMAZING book, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, who recently was awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award. I read somewhere that it was Ruth Ozeki's favorite book from 2013 so that was just about good enough for me. Ozeki recommended not learning anything about it, although I must admit I scanned the summary on Amazon to make sure it wasn't about genocide in Rwanda or something. No offense to Rwandans, but, I mean, you have to prepare yourself mentally for those things. Genocide. God, I'm an idiot.

Anyway, after reading it, I agree, it is best to not learn anything about it, so, as I often encourage my small (but devoted?) readership, Please, stop reading now! Come back later after you've finished. Take Ruth Ozeki's and my word for it!
______

Alright, spoilers ahead.... Fowler does some interesting things with the narrative, like starting in the middle, then swinging back to the beginning and then wrapping back to the end again. But it's all driven by the main character's sort of inability to express parts of her life she's not ready to confront yet. So, when she begins (in the middle) she talked about being in college in the 90s, which I really loved because I went to college in the 90s. Fowler frequently drops a lot of cultural/scene setting elements, like a reminder that Hale-Bopp was gliding through, Dolly had just been cloned, Charles and Diana had just divorced...

Side note: When I was in college studying Art History at Indiana University, my professor showed a slide of the Bayeux Tapestry, which features a bunch of medieval folks pointing up into the sky with dopey looks on their faces, just like we were doing at night with our comet. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  I believe the Bayeux Tapestry features Haley's Comet, not Hale-Bopp.  But, whatever.  

I love that comet

So, anyway, the main character, Rosemary, mentions how her sister "disappeared" and her brother ran off many years ago, and she misses them and thinks about them, but in her family, they don't talk about their absence.  Eventually she says that her sister is actually a chimpanzee whom she was raised with as part of a psychology experiment.  Her dad's a psych prof at Indiana University.  Where I went to college!  So, part of this book takes place in Bloomington, Indiana, a place near and dear to my heart.  And, if Bloomington, Indiana appears in a book, I'm pretty much guaranteed to love that book.  Like... The Stone Diaries, for example, which is one of my Favorite Books of All Time.   

Fowler touches on a lot of themes in this book - including memory, language, solipsism, scientific study, what it is to be human or animal - but what's never really questioned by Rosemary is her relationship to this chimpanzee.  She's her sister, plain and simple, and their separation makes her feel like a person who's been ripped apart from her twin.  The image of a mirror, and the mirror test, comes up again and again:

"... some species, like chimps and elephants and dolphins, recognize themselves in the mirror and others, like dogs and pigeons, gorillas and human babies, don't."

Her brother also disappears - he becomes an animal rights activist - considered a terrorist by the government.  He says, "We need a sort of reverse mirror test. Some way to identiy those species smart enough to see themselves when they look at someone else. Bonus points for how far out the chain you can go. Double bonus for those who get all the way to insects."  He's accused of organizing a attack on SeaWorld (this is pre-Blackfish, by the way.  If you've seen it, you'll want to organize an attack on SeaWorld too.)  "I expect the allegations are true, although an 'attack on SeaWorld' might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two."

I'm not surprised this was a favorite by Ozeki because it had a lot of similarities to her work - literature that expands the reader's mind in a glory of language.  How we treat and live with animals is obviously a big theme in the book, and a relationship that I'm still thinking about, a week after finishing it.  The way Fowler writes about the consciousness of animals forces you to consider the way you treat all animals - not just the ones that kind of look like us, like chimps and apes, or the ones we live comfortably with, like dogs and cats, but all animals - with bonus points for insects.  

Be Safe, I Love You

Here's my review of Cara Hoffman's new book: Be Safe, I Love You about a female Iraqi war vet who comes home with PTSD.

I am crazy about Hoffman's So Much Pretty which you really must add to your to-read pile if you haven't read it yet.

The Promise of Amazing

I read The Promise of Amazing quite a while ago, and I'm trying to catch up on my reviews...   Somewhere I read a perhaps over-enthusiastic review of this book which caused me to actually purchase it (a somewhat rare occurrence for me as I usually get books straight from the publisher these days or else the library where I work.)  It's written by Robin Constantine and it's a YA book about a perennial  "good girl" who does what's expected of her and stays out of trouble.  She meets a boy who used to be a star but has made a few screw-ups and is getting a reputation for a "bad boy".  Grayson's a bit of an incongruous character who wears an elbow-patch blazer and has, unbelievably, an eyebrow piercing.  It's his very bad boy charm that Wren (good names, right?) is attracted to, having been pigeon-holed as a middle-of-the-road kid.

The characters never felt fully developed to me, leaning, instead on the sort of stereotypical tropes from John Hugh's movies of which Constantine is clearly a fan.  There are multiple references to Pretty in Pink and The Breakfast Club (not that there's anything wrong with that - I weep for a generation not weened on 80s movies - I mean, have kids today even seen Say Anything?)  However, there's a bit of a tidiness that rings untrue - Grayson, for example, has done something illegal for which he is eventually caught, however, due to some savvy moves by his dad he basically gets off scot-free.  This freedom from consequence is annoying in a YA novel.... but, I don't know.... they don't all have to be didactic, I'm just saying - in a book about two middle-class white kids, confronting their white privilege might have brought a bit more depth to the story.

Where Constantine does confront a social issue is in the tackling of Grayson and Wren's sexual pasts.  In a chapter written from Grayson's perspective, she writes, "I'd left Wren and her chai latte downstairs, making up some excuse about wanting to get my iPod so she could hear my favorite song from the latest Coldplay album.  In reality I was picking up in my room and figuring out how I could get her to come upstairs, since I pretty much wanted to devour her whole."  

What I did like was how Constantine frees the characters from their sexual "baggage" instead offering a vision of a more sexually empowered teen that's able to experiment and move on.  One of Wren's girlfriends says, "What I'm getting at is - so what if he's been with other girls? It only means he's experienced. You've been with other guys - is he all jacked up over that? We're sixteen... this is how it's supposed to be."  Ultimately this YA novel wasn't really what this adult reader was looking for but I suppose it did have some promising aspects.

All the Birds, Singing

Here's my review of All the Birds, Singing, on Newcity.  This book was totally amazing, I loved it SO. MUCH.  I first read and excerpt in Granta's Top 20 British Authors.  I believe Evie Wyld is actually Australian/British, but who's quibbling?  Her chapter was the standout of Granta and I was dying to read the whole book after I read it.

Panic

Panic is the name of a game played by high school seniors in heather's small town. The winner gets a pot that all seniors are bullied into contributing $1/day their last year of school, whether they want to or not. The game is extremely dangerous. It begins with participants leaping off a cliff into a quarry, and ends with a game of chicken in cars, though the years, players have been killed or maimed, but they keep playing the game because they feel like it's the only way to escape life in this nowhere town. Sounds a lot like the Hunger Games, right? Except it's not a dystopian future and the game's not mandatory. But it is an impoverished town with little to no options for young people to strive for, and Heather's even got a saintly younger sister she feels responsible for and an incompetent mother that can't care for either one of them.

 Heather falls into a job helping a local woman care for her chickens and farm animals and starts, for the first time, to trust an adult parental figure and experience a type of stability for the first time in her life. This woman improbably has two tigers on her farm, rescues from... somewhere. It brings to mind, naturally, that age-old saying by Chekov: If you introduce a tiger in the first act, it had better go off in the second act. 

I've read Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall previously. I'm not nuts about her writing style, I find it slightly unsophisticated, like a YA novel that is definitely intended for a young audience. Her heavy handed foreshadowing, the obvious conflicts of the love interest are just a little tiresome.

Stephen King recently announced that he was self-censoring his short story, Rage, because it seems to have influenced a number of real-world school shootings. The story will not be published in reprintings of the compilation. I found it interesting that that story came out while I was reading Panic, which explains how to make a car bomb, "easy as making salad dressing", and describes a game of Russian Roulette. I think Panic is unlikely to garner any more publicity than The Hunger Games, particularly because it's main audience is girls. Ultimately I wouldn't necessarily recommend Panic to mature readers but I can see it being appealing to younger readers.

Bark

Lorrie Moore, you can do no wrong.  I loved your book, although I wished half of it hadn't been published already in the New Yorker.  Here's my review of Bark on Newcity.

Last Days of California

The Last Days of California was a fantastic little book!  Here's my review on Newcity lit.

Little Failure

My review on Newcity Lit.

I really enjoyed this memoir - it made me want to read Super Sad True Love Story again as well as everything else Shteyngart has written.  AND, check this out - I tweeted my review and Shteyngart "favorited" it.  (Also my friend Amber. Isn't that cute how she has three followers?  I have like, 7 times that!  haha  There is, alas, no "Shteyngart Bump."

Salinger Contract (2013)

My review of the Salinger Contract by Adam Langer on NewCity Lit!

This book felt like it was written just for me.  Really enjoyed it.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh (2013)

My review of Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh on Newcity Lit!

The Circle (2013)

My review of Dave Egger's The Circle on Newcity Lit!  In which I declare that Eggers has invented a new type of fiction because I am a horrible journalist.  

Guide for the Perplexed (2013)

Here's my review of A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn over on Newcity.  Once again she's written a beautiful book about a fascinating subject - a great return to form for her!

2013 In Review

In 2013 I read approximately:

39 Books,
35 Fiction and 4 non-fiction,
with 33 by women and 6 by men.

I wrote 16 reviews for Newcity Lit.

That's considerably less than 2012, when I read 54 books.  I suppose it's not about quantity.... Did you know I didn't read a single book for all of December? That's unprecedented.  I've had this terrible illness that made it quite painful to read.  I did manage to read the three pilfered Salinger stories, though.


My favorite reads were...

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel (2012).

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran (2011), a bit silly but so funny.  Every page was delightful.

Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin (2008).  All hail the great and powerful!

So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman (2011) - this book actually had a huge impact on me a reader and a feminist this year...

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (2013).  Seriously, this woman is taking it to another level.

Claire deWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran (2013) who is out there KILLING. IT.

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum (2013) who I had the honor of interviewing.  Another book that had a HUGE impact on me.

Most Looking Forward to:

Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman (April)
Secret Place by Tana French (maybe?)

I missed the boat on:
Tampa by Allisa Nutting and I never managed to read Diabetes with Owls.  Need to get my hands on those...

Life After Life

Here's my review of Life after Life on Newcity Lit!

These are a few quotes I didn't include in my review but really want to remember.

Ursula found it very odd to think that up above them there were German bombers being flown by men who, essentially, were just like Teddy. They weren’t evil, they were just doing what had been asked of them by their country. It was war itself that was evil, not men.  Although she would make an exception for Hitler. ‘Oh, yes,’ Miss Woolf said, ‘I think that man is quite, quite mad.’

_____

He prodded his enormous tongue, like an ox’s, against the portcullis of her teeth and she was amazed to realize that he was expecting her to open her mouth and let the tongue in.

____

“Long, lazy days like these will never come again in your life. You think they will, but they won’t.”

“Unless I become incredibly rich,” Ursula said. “Then I could be idle all day long.”

Mad about the Boy, Bridget Jones #3 (2013)

I finished Mad about the Boy a month or so ago, but I've been sick and haven't been up to writing very much.  After re-reading BJ 1 & 2, I was excited to get back into Bridget's universe, but, something about me is that I don't really like change that much, and Bridget had changed a LOT.

I'm going to talk about what may be considered a spoiler, although, several months after publication and the fact that the spoiler was basically on the cover of the New York Times, I'm not too bothered by it.  But, if you don't know ANYTHING about a certain Mr. Darcy and you DON'T WANT TO KNOW, you'd better hit the road...

So, as nearly everyone knows, Mark Darcy is DEAD at the beginning of the book.  Some jerks ran around posting it on every blog and online news headline in the world so it was nearly impossible not to know.  Especially if you're in my book club and I announced it in a drunken stupor.  If one had not heard the, yes, devastating news that Mr. Darcy had died, it would have been quite dramatic to read the first bit of the book because Fielding does do a great job of jumping right into Bridget's life with two kids and a boyfriend while only slowly allowing the reader to discover what happened to poor Mark.

The boyfriend is young - 30?  and she calls him Roxster, based on his twitter feed.  While she and Roxster are a good match, the age difference is difficult for both.  Bridget, 51, is nevertheless as immature as ever.  I admit I laughed for several days over a funny exchange between Bridget and Roxster wherein she texted, "Well, I'm just sending the most GIANT FART WITH EXTRA STINK right out of my bum" to him.

Mad About the Boy has lost quite a bit of edge with this (slightly) more grown-up Bridget.  Just as an example, aside from the constant reference to head lice, Bridget's new model of fashion is this Disney kid's tv show called Good Luck Charlie, which I only happen to know about because my 9 year old neighbor loves to watch it when she comes over.   It's a harmless, milquetoast program that the Bridget of old wouldn't have anywhere on her radar.  So, whatever - I mean, I'm the asshole that thinks I'm too cool for Good Luck Charlie and therefore Bridget Jones is less edgy.  For me, part of fun of those first books was relating to Bridget and I just have much less to relate her now.  But, that doesn't mean the book isn't funny and genuinely moving.

So... about those kids.  I think I would have liked Mad About the Boy if I had kids myself, but since I don't and because I loved singleton Bridget so much and also I think books with small children in them are generally like, beyond lame, I was a bit disappointed.  I suppose it wasn't as terrible as I had feared - where Fielding is more satirical than sentimental she excels.   Fantastically witty, Fielding finds great ways to satirize the state of parenthood today.  Says another mother at Bridget's child's school, "I used to be a CEO of a large chain of health and fitness clubs, which expanded throughout the UK and into North America. Now I am CEO of a family. My children are the most important, complex  and thrilling product I have ever deployed."  And just as Bridget's younger self was dogged by the idealization of the "perfect" couple, her status as a female, single parent is low in a world perceived to be filled with "complete" families.  Her own friends say things to her like, "'What I mean is that for a single man of Bridget's age, it's a total buyer's market. No one's knocking at Bridget's door, are they? If she was a middle-aged man, with her own house and income and two helpless children, she'd be inundated by people wanting to take care of her. But look at her.'"

One of my favorite aspects of the book was how Bridget responds to fashion.  Like myself, Bridget remembers the days when a completely black outfit was not just completely reasonable but quite chic.  Her response to skinny jeans, flowing scarves and oversized handbags is pretty hilarious.  "I now realize everyone has floating bohemian scarves double-looped round their neck.  Is odd, though, when remember all the years Mum and Una spent trying to 'get me into scarves' and I dismissed them as old-lady accessories rather like brooches."

Like the two first Bridget Jones novels, Bridget is unwittingly quite successful in her career.  In this third book she is "updating of the famous Norwegian tragedy Hedda Gabbler by Anton Chekhov" (purists will recognize a few gaffs in that sentence.) I love that Fielding continues to look back into literary history for strong female characters, spinning them into a hilarious, modern version.

A favorite line:
"It's always nice to meet someone more badly behaved than oneself."

Vocabulary Gems:
Brits call Boy Toys "Toy Boys"!

Berk: fool, prat, twit. "The usage is dated to the 1930s. A shortened version of Berkeley Hunt, the hunt based at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. In the Cockney rhyming slang, hunt is used as a rhyme for cunt giving the word berk its original slang meaning."  (via). Apparently not an offensive term despite it's origins.

Curiosity: Fielding thanks both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in the acknowledgements but not Renée Zellweger.

The Bone Season

I read this review on NPR that gave The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon some high praise - "There's a distinct Margaret Atwood-style wash to Shannon's dystopian universe" they said.  "The new J. K. Rowling," they said.  Let's not get carried away.  The author is 21 and has gotten a 7-book deal and a film in the works, but I don't think we're looking at the next Harry Potter.  

It takes place in an alternative/futuristic London where some people, like the main character, Paige, have magical powers, but they are outlawed.  Paige is arrested and taken to a secret land where some other alien-types keep the magical people as slaves and suck up all their energy and whatnot.  Paige's "master" is some brooding old dude that glares at her all the time like Heathcliff and... can you guess what is going to happen???? 

Shannon invents a fairly large vocabulary as well as world (there's a glossary I was rather annoyed to find at the end - but, I never skip ahead...) so if you like that sort of thing you may find The Bone Season right up your alley.  It's really quite complex, I wonder what her notes looked like.  

Ultimately I found it wearisome - there were no surprises in the romance area and once the introductions were made to all the ins and outs of this universe, I just didn't find the story that compelling. 

Who knows, maybe this series is going to blow up - maybe as the books and the author age, it will grow into itself.  Anyone else have a different experience than me with this book?  

Flight Behavior

We read Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver for book club.  Everyone agreed it was a perfectly fine book but we didn't have a great discussion.  Often a book everyone merely enjoys has a kind of bland reaction.  No one's offended, but no one's world has been rocked.  That's a bit unusual for Kingsolver, who has rocked my world before.

Flight Behavior is about a young mother who lives on her in-law's property with her husband and babies.  Monarch butterflies have altered their flight path to migrate in their Appalachian home.  So, it has a lot to do with the environment and global warming, and a bit with globalism.

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt inspires some real adoration in her fans.  I was 100% willing to jump on the bandwagon after reading some amazing reviews of The Secret History. Tana French cites Tartt as an inspiration and I'm crazy about her.  So, I read The Secret History this summer and to tell the truth, wasn't quite sure what all the fuss was about.   I have relatively fond memories of The Little Friend, which I read back in 2007 and wrote a really worthless review about.

So, anyway, still eager to fall head-over-heels, I read The Goldfinch.  Here's my review in Newcity Lit.  I thought parts were outstanding and over-all it was too long, to greatly simplify a not-so-simple book.  I love that she uses this actual painting as a jumping off point - creating a narrative around a (fictional) history of that work.  I suspect, although I honestly have no idea, that there was some really higher-level Marxism shit going on in the theory of this book but, ha! ha! I am not a Marxist expert!  Particularly near the end, she becomes extremely theoretical about spending time with art work and the capacity of an experience like that to change a person, but more than that, it seemed quite related to the ownership or possession or consumption of things of beauty that led certain people (wealthy ones!) to afford that experience.  Anyway, I would be much obliged if anyone with expertise in that area would like to weigh in.  Or I suppose I could break down and go read the wikipedia page on Marxism.  Ugh.

Also of note was epigraph she included that I had never read before:

We have art in order not to die from the truth.-Nietzsche

Whoa.   I need to think about that for about the next ten years 'til Tartt's next book comes out.

The Goldfinch (Het Putterje), 1654
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of this lovely article I read in Harvard Magazine about patience, and art, and looking.  By coincidence, it also features a small animal on a chain.

John Singleton Copley’s A Boy with a Flying Squirrel, 1765

The Lowland

Here's my review of The Lowland on Newcity Lit.  Jhumpa Lahiri is a beautiful writer but I didn't love this book.

Claire of the Sea Light

Here's my review on Newcity for Claire of the Sea Light.  I'm a huge Danticat fan - this is a fine addition to her ouvre.

The Likeness

After I read In the Woods, by Tana French, I had that terrible I don't want it to end feeling, and skedaddled over to my local bookstore for The Likeness. That book switches POV to Cassie, Rob's partner from the previous book.  Cassie's out of sorts because of the cock-up that her last case turned out to be, but she doesn't really drop any spoilers about the case, so it doesn't matter if you read these books out of order.

In the beginning of The Likeness, Cassie's boyfriend, Sam, calls her and asks her to come to this location, where it turns out this woman who is the spitting image of Cassie lies DEAD. Her former undercover boss is there, and he has already hatched a plan to send Cassie into the dead girl's life to find out who the murderer is.

Thereafter follows about a hundred pages of Cassie waffling about whether she wants to do it, and then studying the girl's life so she can fit in - I was kind of like let's get ON with it.  Also, let's face it, the whole premise is just ridiculously unlikely.  But, whatever.  Go with it.  When Cassie does move in with the girl's roommates, who live in a ramshackle but beautiful old house in the Irish countryside outside Dublin, the book is essentially unputdownable, just an addictive ride to the end.

After I read In the Woods I read a bunch of interviews by French trying to find out more about the unsolved mystery she leaves at the end of that book.  I discovered that The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, has been influential to her.   (Also that she often doesn't know who the murder is when she starts and works it out as she goes along, also that she might revisit the unsolved mystery in the future!!!!!!)  I didn't love The Secret History, but French captures the greatest aspect of that book in The Likeness, which is this group of oddball, brilliant, friends, as close as can be, that, as as a reader you would like to be friends with, even though one of them is most likely a murderer.  And, that's exactly the problem Cassie has - after moving in with them, she quickly falls in love with their way of life, with their easy relationships with each other, with their wonderful house - and, despite the fact that one of them just might have killed her likeness, the urge to spend the rest of her life with them is almost irresistible.

It's pretty amazing that French crafts these mysteries without knowing how they're going to end - she must go back and do a lot of editing - becau
se her books are so smooth - when she wraps things up, everything falls into place in a extremely satisfying way.  I think the only thing that might improve the whole experience for me might be to listen to her next book on audio because I would like to hear the whole thing in an Irish accent.

The Housemates, shoulder to shoulder, graceful and inseparable as a group in a painting and all with the same fine bloom of light on them, like the luster on old beeswaxed wood. It was only over that first week that they had turned real to me, come into focus as separate individuals with their own little quirks and weaknesses.  I knew the cracks had to be there. That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.  

Good Kings Bad Kings

Oops - I thought I posted this a long time ago.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Susan Nussbaum about her new book, Good Kings, Bad Kings, which is probably one of my top five fave books from 2013.

The book is about some young people that live in institutionalized homes for disabled people and really opened my mind to what happens in places like that, and really turned my mind against institutionalization as well.  I love a book that makes me think that hard.  Her book is brutal, but actually very very funny.

It was so nice to meet her, one of the more pleasant interviews I've ever done.

Here's the article that Nussbaum mentions in the interview that inspired the title.  And these are the organizations in Chicago she mentioned that do great work with the disabled community:
Access Living
Equip for Equality

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

I love love love these Claire DeWitt mysteries by Sara Gran.  If you like mysteries in any way, I urge you to run out and buy both her books and then spend the next year in agony like me, waiting for the next one.  Here's my review of Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway on Newcity.  (Here's my review of Claire deWitt and the City of the Dead.)

Night Film

This review of Night Film is much better than mine but he really gives away the store.  I have this personal standard that I really don't want to give much (or anything?) away in a review - especially for a new book I think people will or should actually read.  So, I make a pretty hard time for myself trying to give a good impression of what happens generally so people can get an idea if it's for them or not.  I don't know - maybe that's not the best thing to do.

Anyway, here's my review.

My Dumb Dirty Eyes

My review of My Dumb Dirty Eyes on Newcity.  Lisa Hanawalt is a really terrific artist - check out her work and her Instagram.

Bridget Jones

Recently I reread Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason for book club. I haven't read them for about 10 years so it was fun to revisit them, and read back-to-back. This time around the social satire of both books really struck me more than ever before. And they're just so, SO funny. The humor really holds up. I laughed and laughed. Fielding is so great at writing line after line of really hilarious sentences and situations:  "Realize it is no longer possible for smokers to live in dignity, instead being forced to sulk in the slimy underbelly of existence." 

or

"How many alcohol units to do you drink a week?" said "Rebel": Brad Pitt-style whippersnapper fitness assessor as I sat trying to hold in stomach in bra and pants.
"Fourteen to twenty-one," I lied smoothly, at which he had the nerve to flinch.

 Personally I think The Edge of Reason is even funnier than the first book - the bit in the Thai prison and the interview with Colin Firth are sososososo funny. But, I think there's a lot more to these books than lolz - what I find most impressive is how they're absolutely steeped in British literature tradition - BJD is, of course, based on Pride and Prejudice and The Edge of Reason is loosely based on Persuasion.  In England there is also a long history of serialized novels in the papers, and that's also how BJD began in 1995.  So while the books are often dismissed as the first "chick lit", I think the reality is that Bridget Jones is an incredibly smart satire firmly rooted in British tradition, continuing a trend Jane Austen started several centuries ago about the difficulty single women face in a world where (heterosexual) coupling is the normative expectation.

So, as you may or may not know, Helen Fielding is writing a 3rd Bridget Jones novel (!!!!!!!) called Mad About the Boy, due out in October. Judging by the cover art (little toys, stuffed bear) everyone thinks there's a baby in this one... Truthfully, I hope not, because I find mommy fiction really boring and I hate stories that end like and they had a baby and that's the end because what more could you possibly want out of life? I did a bit of internet snooping and Fielding has two kids, so, I wouldn't be surprised if the story goes that way. ALSO, did you know that a follow-up to the 2nd book was published in The Independent, serial style, in 2006? In the 2006 version (spoiler alert), Bridget Jones has like a short break up from Mark Darcy, meets Daniel in a bar and immediately gets sprogged. I tried really hard to read it but it was kind of boring and it ended pretty much as I have previously described. But, you can read the whole thing if you want to.

Well, even though I'm not excited about the possible continuation of that particular story line, you can bet I still want to be one of the first to get my hands on that book!

The Secret History

The Secret History had been popping up on a lot of "recommended" lists for me and I finally got around to reading it.  I thought it was going to be my kind of book - I love a school book/coming of age-ish tale like I love peanut butter and chocolate.  Although I read the whole thing, I didn't entirely love it, and in fact I kept thinking any minute it was going to get really good - but, I hate to say, it never did.

It's about this relatively poor kid from California who goes to a prep school out east and studies Greek with this small, oddball group of students and a single professor.  The other students seem like they're living in the early 20th century so it was some shock when I realized the book was actually taking place during the late 70s (I think).  They seem to imagine themselves in Gatsby-esque light - calling each other Old Sport and drinking martinis and whatnot.

It turns out these kids tried to have an honest-to-god bacchanalia where they went out of their minds and "escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being."  So, they spend a long time trying to find the right combination of drunks and alcohol and meditation/fasting, and eventually they achieve it:

It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know...

Except, in their altered state, they somehow kill a farmer, out in the woods.

All these kids are really entitled, except for the Californian, who wasn't involved in the bacchanal  but keeps their secret.  One of the kids in the group (also not involved) figures out that they killed man and starts tormenting them and extorting them.  So, they decide to kill him too.   You'd think with all this murder and bacchanalia stuff the book would be terribly exciting, but parts were quite dull, and I found myself skipping pages at a time, which I really hate to do.  If the book were HALF as long, it would have been much more interesting.

Tartt had done an rather incredible amount of research, however, and I really did enjoy her insertion of Greek and other languages - the greek language is like a secret code that these students can use to communicate with each other anywhere they choose - absolutely no one understands what they're saying.  So, even though I found the book rather boring, it was punctuated by this love and reverance of language and words that I really appreciated.

Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can i make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel's second "comic drama" Are You My Mother? is ostensibly a memoir of the artist's mother, but it's more of an incredibly introspective viewing of the relationship between mother and daughter.  

I was a big fan of Bechdel's Fun Home (it was one of my favorite reads in 2008), in which she ingeniously wove literary classics to her families story, at once elevating the comic genre as well as exposing the universality of her story.

Are You My Mother? also makes frequent references to literature, like Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, Sylvia Plath's diaries and much, much more. Bechdel chronicles her own interest and experience in therapy & analysis and is well-read in psychoanalytic writings.  She's particularly interested in Donald Winnicott, a contemporary of the Bloomsbury group.  I'd never heard of Winnicott but I guess he's a follower of Freud, and came up with the idea of "object relations" and "transitional objects".  I know a little bit about these theories from my mommy friends, and also my sister, who would always say to my nephew before she put him to bed, "Pick out a transitional object" even when he was a tiny baby so he'd go to sleep calmly.  

So, intentionally, Bechdel's book is extremely self-reflective and, I fear, might cause many readers to interpret it as sort of ... narcissistic.  I don't know.... narcissism is kind of a derogatory term, and I think she makes a fair case for her kind of absolutely true writing.  Intellectually, I like her exploration of what it is to tell your own story or someone else's - particularly someone who's unwilling.  I honestly don't think Are You My Mother? is a memoir at all, but rather an adult working through the idea of the object relation and identity between herself and her mother.  What's revealed along the way is a glance into this strange relationship they have - Bechdel talks to her mother almost every day on the phone (a fact most people would interpret as a strong relationship), they have a huge psychological distance between them. Bechdel actually sits at the computer and types out most of what her mother says.  Also, she says they haven't embraced since she was a young child.  Also, her mother is openly ashamed of her daughter's sexuality and encourages her to hide it, or write under another name.   Parent Fail.

Anyway, while intellectually i appreciate her style, it's overwhelming to read that level of self-scrutiny.  I mean, she starts out each chapter with a recurring dream she's had followed by a Freudian interpretation.  Why it's so boring to hear about someone else's dream, I don't know, but, oy - so boring.  I still think she's a genius and I love what she does with her art and her craft, but I was a bit turned off what reads as self-involvement.  (I write.  On my blog. Which is all about me. And my thoughts.)

such a pleasant opinion

I've had a few interesting comments on my blog recently - this one is quite nice - it was on my review of Faithful Place:

Thanks for sharing such a pleasant opinion, piece of writing is nice, thats why i have read it fully

Why, thank you!  I appreciate it when people read my thoughts fully.  I attempted to return the favor, but, alas, the site is in Chinese (I think).  It is called "Louboutin Shoes" but it is about food.  I have always wanted a pair of Christian Louboutins.  Gah, like these, maybe...

I also received a response to my scathing review of The Professor and the Madman that was so defensive I suspect it was written by Simon Winchester himself:

This sophomoric and self-indulgent 'review' neglected to mention that this book is an account of how the Oxford English Dictionary came into existence. Future readers may want to consider that the use of 'mad' connotes something rather different for British English speakers, like Mr. Winchester, than it does for the Yankee author of this 'review'.

I guess I did skip over the part about how the book is indeed an account of how the OED came into existence, although I rather think the title, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary sums it up nicely.  I don't think I've ever been called a "Yankee" before.  Made me feel like I was being told off by Foghorn Leghorn.

But, I do find it quite amusing when people don't agree with my opinion on books.  Sometimes if there's a book I really LOVE and I give it to my sister or my friend and they don't LOVE it, I get mildly bummed out for about three seconds.  I don't think I've ever gotten pissed and started started placing words in unnecessary quotations as a result.  What's pretty interesting is that, at my book club, for example, if everyone has the same general opinion of a book, we sometimes have a boring conversation.  But if, more likely, everyone has a different impression, we often have a rousing, funny, thought-provoking, (respectful) conversation.  I love that. 

Faithful Place

I read Tana French's Broken Harbor last year and finally got around to reading another one of her books - Faithful Place.  Is Tana French my new favorite British Isles Lady Mystery Writer?  I think so!!!

Faithful Place is about this detective, Frank Mackey, whose family finds his old girlfriend's suitcase in an old rundown house in their neighborhood.  Frank and the girl were going to run away together to London 20 years ago, but she never showed up at the meeting place.  Frank is on very bad terms with his family and has hardly talked to them in the 20 years since.  But, after the suitcase is found, he ends up spending quite a bit of time with them and some of his old acquaintances  trying to solve the mystery of what happened to his girlfriend.

French has a kind of nifty trick going on - her main characters are a rotating group of men from a police squad in Dublin.  In Broken Harbor, the main character is "Scorcher" Kennedy - he's a minor character in Faithful Place.  In fact, Mackey doesn't like Kennedy and claims to have given him his nickname, for being a dick in a soccer game or something.  I checked in Broken Harbor, and Kennedy claims that the nickname is positive - a result of his scorching goal.

One of French's greatest strengths is dialogue - reading Faithful Place feels like sitting in the corner of a bar in Dublin and listening in on conversations.
"She left us a note, sure. To say good-bye. The Shaughnessy young fellas and of the Sallie Hearne's lads brought it round, the next day; they found it in Number Sixteen. It said right there, she was off to England. At first we thought the two of yous..."  In this case she turns a 20 year old relationship between teenagers romantic and sweet.  She also manages to write these terribly complex characters - I mean, Mackey's actually a sort of horrible guy, he's so out of touch with his emotions he spends most of his time physically constraining himself from punching people.  Or alternately looking for fights so he can punch someone.  I mean, yuck, I wouldn't want to spend two seconds with a person like that - but she gives you a glimpse of where they came from and the next thing you know, you just finished a 400 page book in one sitting.

Point Your Face at This

My review of Point Your Face at This, by Demitri Martin, is on Newcity Lit!

The Interestings

My interview with Meg Wolitzer is up at Newcity Lit.  It was a real pleasure meeting her - we had a great talk about her new book and feminism!

The Professor and the Madman

Last year I read HHhH, which is amazing, and, to paraphrase myself (to paraphrase Eric Stoltz in Kicking and Screaming) it's basically made the average historical non-fiction completely unbearable for me.  The amazing thing about HHhH is that the author doesn't call it "non-fiction", despite the fact that the entire story IS true, because he acknowledges that his own bias in retelling the story changes it.  Even as he's recounting how these two spies are being fired upon by like, hundreds of Nazi's, he won't even suppose that they might be scared.

In The Professor and the Madman, all kinds of supposing is going on.  Author Simon Winchester freely associates as he images conversations and emotions throughout his best-selling non-fiction book from 1998. We amused ourselves at book club by reading out the most egregious of these presuppositions - mine was "Mrs. Merrett had no reason to be concerned: She assumed, as she had for each of the twenty previous nights on which her husband had worked the dawn shift, that all would be well."  Really?  A lady thought that, every morning for twenty years in 1871?  That was page 10... I had a long way to go.

For me, the most annoying thing about Professor and the Madman was this offensive language Winchester insisted on using regarding people with mental illnesses.  It's quite clear that the so-called "madman" had schizophrenia, however, he refers to him as "mad" or consumed by "demonic mischiefs"and so on (not to mention prostitutes were referred to as "whores").  I think that he was going for an over-all tone of 19th century yellow journalism or the penny-dreadful, but it's really unclear what purpose it serves.  

The most ridiculous part was where he implies that the "madman" had a sexual relationship with the wife of the man he killed, even while prefixing it with "No suggestion exists..."  What a bizarre thing to write!  Because this man and a woman were possibly in a room alone maybe once, oh, good lord, they probably/well could have/certainly could have/but probably didn't have sex.  Thus I rend my garment and cry out in rage.  

Overall, I found the entire book completely offensive - I mean, the basic premise is CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? A MENTALLY ILL PERSON HELPED WRITE AN IMPORTANT BOOK??? As if the mentally ill are incapable of contributing to society.