The Girls

Emma Cline's first novel, The Girls, is the kind of book that you can't put down. It's also the kind of book, if you're me, that fills you with jealous rage that the author earned an increasingly rare 2 mil book deal with Random House at the tender age of...wait for it... 25.

The Girls swings easily between the present, where Evie is a reclusive woman who moves anonymously from place to place, serving as a caregiver when she can, and her 14 year-old self, growing up outside San Francisco.  Evie is staying at a friend's cottage when the friend's son shows up unexpectedly with his girlfriend. "She was in the cult," he says to the girl.  The younger Evie is ignored by her parents, her life an expectant kind of waiting.  "All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you - the boys had spend that time becoming themselves."  Evie meets a girl, Suzanne, whose seeming confidence attracts her, and when Suzanne's friends invite Evie to join them, she is happy to follow.

At "The Ranch", Evie meets Russell, and is drawn into the world that they have created, what seems to Evie like the pinnacle of 1960s peace and togetherness: people living free and happy. Evie wants Suzanne's approval ∴ Suzanne wants Russell's approval ∴ Evie wants Russel's approval. Evie is as unformed as a teenage girl can be, easily malleable by everyone around her.  "I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board."

Cline's book has the astounding insightfulness of Being A Girl similar to the mood and tone of The Virgin Suicides. Like Eugenides, she captures the tragedy of American girlhood and its potential dire consequences.  "The Ranch" and Russell, are, of course, Charles Manson and his decrepit squat.  After finishing The Girls, not knowing much about the Manson murders, I fell down an internet rabbit hole about the women who murdered Sharon Tate and others in 1969, and how close Cline's story is to the actual events.  Side note: one of Manson's "girls" died in prison at the age of 61, and two others, near 70, are California's oldest female inmates. I read too much about the murders, to be honest, articles for and against their parole, including a sort-of serial from John Waters, and remain unsure how I feel about the women's incarceration.

Cline draws the reader into the mystery of what Evie's role in the murders was.  While her involvement slowly unravels, the older and wiser Evie is observing again, with no small amount of dread, the feeling of the transient, drug-fueled experience of her friend's son and his girlfriend.  She sees in the girlfriend the too-willing desire to please her jackass boyfriend, how she puts off too easily her own needs and desires for whatever interests him.  Their uneasy connection, in parallel with the '69 story, seems fraught with potential violence.

I thought the book was incredibly written and it really made me think about so many things  - although, one of the things it made me question was the sensationalism of this type of crime and my own place as a consumer of its gory details.  Cline's book doesn't dwell on the details (thankfully!) but draws a clear picture of how easily young women can be manipulated - that's what's most frightening about The Girls.

Into the Forest

After I saw a trailer for Into the Forest and saw it was based on the "best selling novel" by Jean Hegland, I picked up a copy, always eager to read 1996's post-apocalyptic fiction.  In Into the Forest, you never really learn what event has caused the electricity to go out and all forms of government and communication to cease.  Nell and Eva, who live 30 miles from the nearest town in Northern California and were home-schooled, were already pretty separated from the rest of humanity when the lights are on, but when the power goes out, even their small connections are lost.

At first the sisters and their father subsist on the supplies they were able to build up from town and can from their garden, and as they run out of gas they enter a kind of fugue state of inertia and confusion, waiting for things to return to normal, waiting to be rescued.   

The girls are sort of living like the people in the really wonderful TV show, Last Man on Earth, where everyone is trying to desperately hold on to the society they knew before - maintaining homes, and standing around kitchen islands as if their refrigerators are still cold. Part of what makes that show so funny - going to the grocery and walking the aisles with a cart, or going to a bar to play pool, like everything is normal - is that we probably would do exactly that, as long as we could.

As it becomes evident that no rescue is coming, the girls slowly come to the realization that they've got to learn to fend for themselves.  The forest, on whose edge their house sits, was their childhood playground, but also dangerous - every time they went out, their mother would tell them not to eat anything.  It takes about a year for the girls to discover how much food and medicine is available in the forest. Hegland does a good job of drawing the reader into that realization, or perhaps I'm also so focused on sustenance coming from a store, that I also didn't consider all the food that could be had from the forest, and much better than the old canned vegetables the girls are eating.  For example, the girls tear apart tea bags to eek out a cup of tea every night, and when the tea runs out, they drink hot water.  It takes them so long to think of brewing the herbs in the forest into their tea.  It reminded me of this Louis CK joke where God is chastising man about working, and Man's like, "I need to buy food" and God's like, "There's food EVERYWHERE."

Into the Forest becomes really interesting when it dawns on the girls that whether or not the power comes back on, and it probably won't, the hopes and dreams they had then are no longer relevant to their lives - they become new-born when they enter the forest.

For the most part, I was really captivated by this book, I found a lot of similarities between it and The Parable of the Sower, another Northern Cal fave. I saw it compared to The Handmaid's Tale in a few places but it is not in any way similar to that great classic, aside from the post-apocalypse, whatever it was.  I wasn't crazy about (mini-spoiler) the fact that it ends with a baby, which is boring as hell and apparently the only way anyone knows how to end a story these days).  And, in order to avoid more spoilers, I'll simply mention that some weird-ass, *trigger warning stuff* happens that almost made me put the book down for good.

"What an act of faith and luck it is to pluck and taste  a little green leaf. With Eva standing beside me and our mother's warnings buzzing in my brain, I felt as though I were re-creating the history of humankind as I bent, picked a leaf, brushed a delicate coating of dust from it's surface, and took a nibble, so tentatively I think I expected it to burn my lips. But it had a cool, delicate, clean taste. It tasted sour and green, like chlorophyll, pickles, the evening air. It was a little tough, almost like lettuce that's bolted - but fresher, more alive."

Doomsday Book

I was actually hesitant to read another Connie Willis book after To Say Nothing Of the Dog, because I loved it so much and didn't want to be disappointed.  How could another book live up to the sheer genius of that comic novel that made me LOL on practically every page, look up countless references about the Victorian period, start seriously studying bird stumps and sit down and have a serious think about Schrodinger's Cat?

So with no small amount of trepidation, I started Doomsday Book (1993).  Immediately: I'm hooked - why have I never heard of this author before now?  In Doomsday, a young historian, Kivrin, uses the "net" to go to the Middle Ages.  It's her life's goal to go there, and she's studied middle English, learned how to milk a cow, ride a horse, and dirtied her nails sufficiently to fit in.  Her tutor, Mr Dunworthy (also in To Say Nothing of the Dog, although this book takes place before that) is very reluctant to see her go because the Middle Ages are a 10 (very dangerous), especially for a young woman travelling alone.  Before she leaves she's given inoculations against illnesses of the time, and has a translater implanted (similar to the babel fish in Hitchhikers).  However, when she arrives in the middle ages, she immediately becomes very ill and also can't communicate with the "contemps".

One of the things I love about Willis's books is that the science is really simple - there are just a few terms the reader will need to grasp: the net, slippage, the drop, the fix.  Of course, it's deceptively simple. For example, the theory of Schrödinger's Cat plays heavily in this book - people love repeating that Schrödinger intended the thought experiment as a joke.  The cat-bit, yes, that's meant to be ridiculous, but superposition is not.

Meanwhile, back in the mid-twenty-first century, the lab tech who ran the drop also becomes seriously ill, and moments before he keels over and starts a pandemic in contemporary Oxford, he mumbles that something's very wrong.  Dunworthy wants to bring Kivrin back immediately but can't because of the convergence of academic politics, the pandemic, and the Christmas holiday.

In the 14th century, Kivrin is taken in by a family, nursed to health, and tried to find the location of the drop so she can return safely.  Doomsday flips between the treatment of illnesses in both centuries, and the misconceptions about the middle ages that flummox and delight Kivrin.

Doomsday becomes a nail-biting mystery about illness identification, a reflection on superposition, a real joy for anyone interested in language, and even an apt comparison to the crucifixion and the place of religion in our lives.

To Say Nothing of the Dog

I recently discovered Connie Willis and I am so in love with her.  I started with To Say Nothing of the Dog, a comic sci-fi novel - one of the funniest, smartest books I've ever read.  Ned is a(n) historian  who works in futuristic Oxford, where time-travel has been discovered and summarily relegated to historians, having been found unuseful for anything else.  Ned has been overworked by his employer, who has him frantically searching for a "Bishop's bird stump" which has caused him to experience "time lag". In search of a rest, he goes to the Victorian period, where presumably he'll be able to do nothing but relax in serene environs.  One of the side-effects of time-lag is "maudlin sentimentality".  To test him for the affliction, a nurse asks him to describe a card. "It appeared to be a postal card of Oxford. Seen from Headington Hill, her dear old dreaming spires and mossy stones, her hushed, elm-shaded quads where the last echoes of the Middle Ages can still be heard, murmuring of ancient learning and scholarly tradition, of--"

Before going to the Victorian period, a co-worker assigns an easy job for him, to return an item that mistakenly brought through the net and should be returned immediately to avoid space-time continuum anomalies.  Unfortunately, Ned is experiencing such an advanced case of time-lag that he doesn't hear the instructions properly.  Immediately upon arrival in the 19th century, he finds himself involved in rather complex and increasingly ridiculous machinations involving
his simple assignment.

I could go on about this book for the rest of the decade but what should really do is just read the book and trust me when I say it is more about history than sci-fi, and touches lovingly on Jeeves and Wooster, reverently on Sayer's Vane and Wimsey, and ever so gently on one of my favorite themes: quantum physics.

Between the World and Me

We read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coats for bookclub.  Coats won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction last year and was listed in just about every top 10 of 2015 list that mattered.  I suppose it's a type of epistolary non-fiction, as it's written as a letter to his teenage son.  He begins by recalling how his son cried after the policeman who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO went uncharged for any crime. "...I didn't hug you, and I didn't comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within that all of it."  Coats writes about his own childhood in Baltimore, and how much difficult it was for him to protect his own black body - the preoccupation he had to have every time he left the house, the knowledge of what areas were safe, how his own parents were incredibly strict with him.  "Black people love their children with a kind of obsession," he writes, "You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made."

As a white reader I really appreciate the perspective Coats brings to this topic - reading his first-hand account made the reality of so many people's lives more vivid for me. As a white reader, it would be all too easy to argue against what Coats is saying - for example, he talks about living in NY in the early 2000s and walking around with his baby in a stroller, and seeing white children on tricycles, "The galaxy belonged to them" he writes.  I'll admit I found myself wanting to argue, like so many white people do, *I* was never handed anything.  I *wish* I had the opportunity to ride my tricycle down a Manhattan street like I owned the place.  But, not only is that ignoring my huge privilege of growing up in a white body, it's completely missing the point of what he's saying.  So, while I'm really ashamed that I had the instinct to argue, I'll admit that I had it, because I think it's important to acknowledge just how ingrained these prejudices are.

Coats book is doesn't hold a lot of hope, but I think it's exposure will lead more people to come to a greater level of understanding.  The heartbreaking repetition of all of the deaths in the past few years - Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Gardner, to name a few - that have lead to the Black Lives Matter movement give the book a sense of immediacy, although, as we all know, these needless deaths are nothing new.

May We Be Forgiven

I read A. M. Homes May We Be Forgiven at the insistence of my sister, who said it was her favorite book of last year.  It is an absolutely ca-razy book for the first 350 or so pages.  This guy Harold is having an affair with his sister-in-law.  He has a contentious relationship with his brother George, who is the head of a tv network and an asshole.  One day George comes home, finds Harold and his wife sleeping together in his bed, and picks up a lamp and slams it on her head.  George gets sent to mental institution instead of jail, being rich and white and having a team of lawyers.  Harold stays in their house, feeding the pets, and taking on increasing responsibility for George and Jane's children. 

One crazy thing after another happens, in what feels like maniacal farce.  It's quite funny, despite the violence, and occasionally tender, despite the fragile humanity of so many of the characters.  Ultimately Harold becomes not just the guardian of the children in name but in his heart and theirs.  Where they had a distant relationship with their parents, he creates a close one for all of them, until they have a very large extended family of relative strangers.  I was deeply drawn to that aspect because I firmly believe you create your own family - it takes care and investment - but I see it as an obligation to myself and my own little community to build a network of supporting and caring around us. 

Truthfully I thought the book was about 100 pages too long, although the last 100 serve as an extended opportunity to define the terms of this new family Harold is building.  It's almost too sweet an ending for what started with madcap plotting.  I was very interested in how Homes wrapped race into this story - essentially it's about a very wealthy, white, Jewish family in New York/New Jersey that are largely immune to answering for their crimes.  Harold's truly enamored with what he frequently refers to as "the other", for example, the Chinese family he has lunch with in Manhattan or... I hate to give too much away... some other characters of color in the book.  While the non-white characters at first feel like a sort of clumsy inclusion, most of them become part of Harold's created family.  "May we be forgiven" becomes an incantation for Harold, a plea for forgiveness for past wrongs, a promise to do better in the future.

A Month of Italy

My sister-in-law gave me this book called A Month of Italy.  It's written by Chris Brady, who started the pyramid scheme called Life Leadership my brother and sister-in-law are currently enthralled of.  God bless 'em, they probably thought, "She likes Italy, here's a book on Italy, what could go wrong?" and under that good faith I did make a relative effort to read this damn thing and I was curious what kind of covert message hid inside that might make me want to throw aside all reason and join a goddamn pyramid scheme.  I was not able to read every word, finding the writing and sentiment offensive from literally the first page, but I honestly did make a valiant effort at skimming the damn thing.

Page one starts with a little slut-shaming for no good reason aside from it's probably good to put women in their place.  "One young lady, in the early bloom of her maturity and obviously intending to be sexy, is wearing a dress so tight old women shake their heads while young men find reasons to stop and turn."  Italian women (and men), according to Chris Brady, wear bathing suits entirely outside the realm of human decency, and to make sure, spends plenty of time looking at them. Basically he and his family go to Italy for a month, drive around in a small bus with their 4 or 5 children and generally make asses of themselves, gives a big speech at the end about how much the trip changed and restored him (unclear how) and how a bunch of people said "You should write a book about it" so he did.

As far as I can tell, Chris Brady, who claims to be some kind of leadership guru, makes most of his money writing shitting books which are pawned off on unsuspecting souls like my aforementioned bro and his wife. I'm truly curious about hearing what happens at this frequent "leadership" meeting they attend but they don't like to talk about it.  Possibly they pick up tips like the ones I found on Chris Brady's blog post entitled 6 Mistakes Public Speakers Make like "Being Boring" or "Being Nervous."  No joke. So, no "leadership" stuff in the book, no overt Christian stuff until the acknowledgements, just a bunch of crap about how the food is so good you can literally walk into any restaurant and it'll be good (not true) and how everyone should go to Italy for a month to really relax.  The tone-deaf persistence that not everyone can afford to go to Europe, much less spend a month there driving from resort to resort with 6 people is downright offensive, especially since this guy's business is preying on cash-poor people like my brother with the promise that they're going to be "leaders" one day.

Lulu in Marrakech

Lulu in Marrakech (2008) is by Diane Johnson, of Le Divorce fame.  I'm a fan of Le Divorce and bought a bunch of Johnson books one day which I've been slowly going through.  Lulu in Marrakech is about a young woman, an American spy, who goes to live with her boyfriend in Morocco at the behest of the CIA and await orders.  She's a low-level spy so mostly she's just supposed to keep her ear to the ground and listen for gossip.  Her British boyfriend owns a riad (a historic guesthouse) and they have many visitors from England and France.

Post 9/11, there's a lot of talk about charitable organizations that really fund terrorism, and a bit of drama re: a French Muslim teenager who is hiding in Morocco because her brother suspects she's no longer a virgin and threatened to kill her.  Lulu and her friends are naturally appalled, and do what they can to help her.

The spy-stuff felt purely extraneous - what I like about Johnson is how she explores different cultures, and she certainly does in this book - the food, the souk, the riad, the music, dance, etc.  Unfortunately Lulu is a bit of a boring character (despite being a spy in Marrakech????) and mostly moons around about her boyfriend and imagines how easy her life would be if she could just marry him and have babies, although Johnson doesn't give her a break for that.  "How easily I could be melted into wifehood, that time-honored refuge and slightly unchallenging calling - I even yearned for it deliciously. I could even stay in my job, could tell him about it."

There's a focus on the treatment of women in muslim culture, particularly the practice purdah, wearing the veil, and so-called "honor killings".

Maybe because of the way she writes - first person past-tense, she reminds me a bit of Austen or a Brontë - the story moves slowly and traditionally and has a very comforting rhythm I like.  The front of my copy reads "A sweet confection of a novel." which, to me, is kind of insulting, but that is fairly accurate - not too deep but certainly not moronic, it is a nice confection of a novel.

The Secret Chord

Geraldine Brooks's latest book, The Secret Chord, is about none other than King David, from the Bible.  Yeah, this David:

Michelangelo

Side note for Art Talk: What's your favorite David sculpture?  Most people are going to say Michelangelo, right?  But, don't forget about this bonkers sculpture by Bernini, which is possibly the sexiest sculpture ever?

Bernini 

But, if I'm being honest, I have to say my favorite is Donatello's David, which is beautiful, a triumph, a homo-erotic masterpiece if one ever existed, and hilarious.  I mean: That hat!

Donatello wins everything

It's been a long time since I studied King David (like, back in Vacation Bible School from my Lutheran youth) I ended up reading this book pretty much side-by-side with the chapters about David in the Bible (1st and 2nd Corinthians and 1st and 2nd Samuel, mainly) to remind myself what was authentic.  Brooks does not stray far from the original scripture, filling in, as she does in her marvelous way, the details of the story.

David's an slightly unusual story - there's little-to-no evidence today that he actually existed, however, even Brooks stipulates that it's unlikely he's merely metaphorical because he's such a flawed character. In the Bible, God loves him, which is why he goes from being a lowly shepherd boy to king of Israel.  In many sects of Christianity he's seen as a kind of parallel to Jesus Christ, being from Bethlehem, becoming a king from a low position, and loved by God etc.

The story is mainly told from the perspective of Nathan, the seer (who also was meant to have originally told 1st and 2nd Chronicles).  Nathan worked for David, because he had a vision (after David and his men killed his family) that David would eventually be king.  Nathan's visions are legit and David keeps him as a kind of advisor.  Nathan interviews people in David's life in order to write his biography.

One of the first people Nathan talks to his David's brother, who talks about how David slayed the famous giant, Goliath.  Just luck, according to him, but the way he tells the story is extraordinary:

David slings another stone, and Goliath can feel  the breeze as it passes. He dodges out of the way of it, and he's in all that armor, so he stumbles, and everyone laughs at him - his own and ours both. David's the only one not laughing. He's in some kind of a state, trumpeting away... ' this very day the Name will deliver you into my hands'- and more of that style of thing- it just poured out of him- the kind of high-blown words your kind comes out with: 'All the Earth shall know there is a God in Israel...' Not the kind of thing you expect out of the mouth of a shepherd boy.

Things really get crazy in the story of David when he takes Batsheva as a wife.  Brooks has a wonderful way of flipping traditionally male stories into the story of the women supposedly standing on the sidelines (March, for which she won the Pulitzer, is a great example, of course).  I had a great hope that any page the POV was going to switch to Batsheva or some other woman, but that doesn't happen.  The story of Batsheva (Brooks uses the Hebrew spelling for names/places) goes like this: Batsheva's is the wife of Uriah - David's general. While he's at some war, she's taking a bath on her roof, David sees her and sends for her, she gets pregnant.  David sends for Uriah and tries to get him to go home and have sex with her real quick, but for various reasons he won't.  So, David sends Uriah back to war with a note for another soldier that says, send Uriah out on the front lines, and don't help him.  Naturally, he gets killed, and David marries Batsheva.  Somehow throughout history, Batsheva has come to stand for a sort of wanton, beautiful femme fatale.  In Brook's hands, Batsheva explains that she was on her roof trying to find some privacy when guards came from the king to collect her, what choice does she have but to go.  Roofs, by the way, are historically the only place where women in closely monitored cultures could enjoy relative freedom & fresh air.

Jan Massys 1562

There are, by the way, a lot of hilarious painting of poor Batsheva taking a bath while creeper David looks on from a distant window.

After the Batsheva incident, David's family life really goes to shit with his many wives and many children.  Nathan makes some predictions that David's kids are going to be nothing but trouble. One of his sons rapes his half-sister, Tamar.  Then another brother kills the rapist.  Then eventually that brother tries to overthrow his father and probably has sex with all of David's concubines up on his roof.  Meanwhile David's like, "Boys. What are you gunna do?"

So, a book that sends me to secondary sources, trolling Google images and figuring out Hebraic names and places?  What could be better?  Told with Brooks signature insight and beautiful prose, The Secret Chord is a fascinating read that tells an ancient story in an extremely accessible way.

Go Set a Watchman

I loved To Kill a Mockingbird even when I "was forced" (not really) to read it in 6th grade (or maybe 7th?) and, to make a conservative guess, I'd say I've probably read it at least 10 times since then. Anyway, I was all kinds of excited about Go Set a Watchman coming out, despite the ethical implications of its publication. I will also immediately read the lost Salinger books if and when they ever come out.

There have been a lot of terrible reviews, which is really pretty ironic because apparently Harper Lee's hatred of the press kept her from further publishing ventures and some reviews have been vicious. Like this rather harsh tweet from Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker said the book was a "failure as a novel."

I'm not even sure 50 Shades of Grey was a "failure as a novel" despite being, you know, what it is.  

So, what's so terrible about this book? It has very little plot structure - basically, a 26 year old Scout returns to Maycomb, Alabama to find that her elderly father spouts racist nonsense about the NAACP and black people not being responsible enough to vote. The Onion summed it up nicely: "Atticus shocks readers as a white man who has become a conservative blowhard with age." Scout sits in the same courthouse where she watched her father defend Tom Robinson, only, now her father and erstwhile boyfriend sit idly by while a racist asshole eggs on the town's menfolk. Jean Louise is naturally distressed to find that her father hero is not the person she thought he was, and then the book becomes a series of conversations in which her boyfriend, uncle and father gently mansplain that their racism is necessary and beneficial.

"Look, honey. Have you ever considered that men, especially men, must conform to certain demands of the community they live in simply so they can be of service to it?" Scout's response to this is steady denial, but mostly heartbreak - that the town and people she held dear can hold opinions so different than her own. That's a sentiment that really hit home for me. It's not unusual for me to hear relatives I love saying stupid, racist things when I go home. It's not unusual for my small hometown to be in the news for some idiotic racist act. Those things hurt worse than the acts of casual racism they are, because I feel like I learned some of my core values there - compassion, respect, acceptance. Scout feelings mirror mine: "Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me - these same, these very people."

So while Go Set a Watchman isn't nearly the masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird is, it certainly doesn't fail as a novel - I think it fills a quite useful place as a novel in expressing this, yes, slightly juvenile idea that our heroes have flaws - and that discovering that can be part of growing older and growing wiser. I would have benefited from learning that when I was in 6th or 7th grade but I found it gratifying to read it now.

In The Country of Ice Cream Star

In the Country of Ice Cream Star is one of the best books I've read this year! Even though it's like so many post-apocalyptic novels right now - a young girl in the not-so-distant future battles adversity, etc, it's terribly inventive and original. A plague has wracked the United States, killing a huge majority of people. Little pockets of people remain in this area called "Massa" - all the survivors are black. No one lives for more than 20 or so years. The entire book is written in a kind of patois invented by the author, Sandra Newman. It reads like this:

Fat luck been the story of this year. Snares ever struggling full, and every arrow find a turkey. Any a sleeper street we did maraud, that street did give food. We war like twenty guns, but no one injure. Sling our hammocks in the crowns of sycamores like secret birds, and rest there, chattering and smoking, noses to the stars. Children forgot the taste of hunger and the touch of fear.

The language is beautiful. Sometimes she gets around to explaining what words mean and sometimes you have to just figure it out - I LOVE that. It took me about three times longer to read this book than it normally would have for a book this size, but I loved every minute.

Ice Cream is a girl of about 16 who lives in the woods with a bunch of other children. Nearby live some "Christings", also a group of people that live in an old factory called Lowells, and an army of boys.

Ice Cream's people are called Sengles and they're known for being amusing liars and brave soldiers. "We flee like a dragonfly over water, we fight like 10 guns, and we be bell to see.  Other children go deranged and unpredictable for our love."   Her brother gets sick with the illness that causes people to die at a young age and she is trying to save him.  They find a white "Roo" who claims his people have access to a cure.

I'm going to get slightly spoiler-y below, so stop reading if you don't like surprises.

I got a mad, irrational crush on the NewKing Mamadou, just like Ice Cream. They say hateful things to each other and fight, then have sex in his tent on animal hides kind of like Brad Pitt in Troy? (Or so I imagine.) As king of the armies, Mamadou takes part in this ritual they've created with the Christings where they take one of their women to be a "simper" - basically a harem of women at the mercy of the army boys.  After the ritual turns into a violent abduction, Ice Cream is furious with her sometimes-boyfriend.  Although he doesn't rape the simpers, he gives his tacit agreement to the army boys who do.  Controlling women through rape is a persistent theme in the book and Ice Cream is ever-aware of this threat.

Eventually Ice Cream and the roo, Pasha, make their way to the City of Marias where Ice Cream is convinced to play the role of Maria and Pasha, her white Christ. This part is pretty complicated but really fascinating, especially in terms of race, religion, and policing of virginity.  Based loosely on the tenants of Christianity, it really helped me recognize, in a way I oddly haven't before, how dramatically practices of religion change over time.  Because lifespans are so short, and generations are basically flipping on fast-forward, things change really quickly.

Coincidentally, my friend told me how she was reading Laura Ingall's books to her kids and Laura described a typical Sunday in which they wouldn't so much as ride their horses to church because that was considered breaking the practice of the church so they walked the whole way. That was just a little over 100 years ago but today the only people not flipping on their electricity on the Sabbath are orthodox Jews.

There are a few interesting articles out there on the book worth checking out - also a bit spoiler-y, so wait until you're done reading if you want.

From the NYTimes: a surprisingly negative review that I nevertheless enjoyed reading because of a couple of hilarious zingers, like "It’s not revealing too much to report that the readers most likely to enjoy this novel are those who can tolerate nearly 600 pages of pidgin English and those who are nostalgic for the Cold War." and "At times, this can sound a bit like Jar Jar Binks narrating an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road." I really totally disagree with that, but it's still pretty funny.

A great interview with Sandra Newman in the WSJ and and another interview that touches upon her decisions regarding race and her invented patois and also some charming bits about how much she loves the book (she naturally very proud) and also reveals... there's a SEQUEL coming!

A God in Ruins

Kate Atkinson has written a delightful "companion novel" to Life After Life (my review). The 2013 Costa Award winner (formerly the Whitbread Award) was a challenging read, at least until you figured out the rhythm of things.  In comparison, A God in Ruins is child's play - or, better said, it's Atkinson doing what she does best: a rich, gothic tale of a British family.  This story is told from Ursula's sweet brother's POV, and it only has one timeline.  

There are a few little jokes re: Ursula's restarts which are rather amusing, like her saying "Life and death are completely random, that much I have learned." Her brother, Teddy, is such a great character - loving and warm and very very British.  He was a fighter pilot in WWII, and married Nancy, who you may remember from Life After Life.  They have a daughter, Viola, who is a stark contrast to her parents.  She's kind of a hippy, lives unhappily on communes and raises two children, poorly.  She's always snidely insulting her father about organic produce, etc, which, of course, he is no stranger to him, but he didn't grow up calling the food they grew in their own garden "organic".

Many parts of the book are actually super-exciting, and I had quite a few edge-of-my-seat moments, as if I was watching a wild action movie.  Her descriptions of Teddy's flight battles, near misses and a crash or two are so exciting.  Even though I've never seen the inside of one of these planes and what sounds like an impossible number of people squeezed into little cubbies here and there, it was so vivid.

Atkinson does not present the Allied soldiers as the sainted figures they are often portrayed as.  Teddy questions the indiscriminate bombing they do and grapples with what he's done in a way his few of his fellow surviving soldiers are willing to do years after the war.  "By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination."

Here are some vocabulary words I looked up which I write here for your amusement and my own edification.  Will I remember them better now?  Who knows?  Below I will write some spoilers so read on at your own risk!

sobriquet - a nickname
entente - a friendly understanding
LMF - low moral fiber, acronym used during WWII
cauled - a type of cap
coup de foudre - an unexpected event. Literally, a bolt of lightening
tenebrous - dark, shadowy
braw - Scottish slang - good or fine. Derived from "brave"
widdershins - Scottish, in a direction contrary to the sun's course, considered unlucky
cadging - British - to ask for or obtain
au fait - having a detailed knowledge of something
pulchritudinous - I always think this word is the opposite of what it really means: beauty
spivvy - British - a man who makes a living by disreputable dealings
sprog - British, child
Far Breton

I have to say, the end of A God in Ruins hit me kind of like the end of Mad Men.  I was like GODDAMNIT! and SHE DID IT! and I was furious and exhilarated all at once.  As the walls fell down around Teddy and the horrible things Viola had done righted themselves and whole characters simply vanished all I could do was read in amazed, slack-jawed awe as Atkinson pulled on a string and unravelled the whole thing. What a fucking genius, honestly. In the author's note, Atkinson writes "I like to think of A God in Ruins as one of Ursula's lives, an unwritten one. This sounds like novelist trickery, as indeed it perhaps is, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of trickery."  She goes into a little bit of a lecture about the label of fiction and people's reactions to "new" styles:  "Personally I think that all novels are not only fiction but they are about fiction too. (Not, I don't think, as post-modernly self-referential as it sounds.) I get tired of hearing that a new novel is 'experimental' or it 'reinvents the form,' as if Laurence Sterne or Gertrude Stein or indeed James Joyce never wrote a word."  Later she writes "If this is a refutation of modernism or post-modernism or whatever has superseded post-modernism, then so be it."  Her defence of the style of her book feels pointed, and I'm not sure if I missed out on some literary spat or she just doesn't like being labeled.  I like what she says about all novels being fiction, and I think what she means by "they are about fiction" has something to do with creativity and creation itself. If anyone has any other thoughts, please share them!

Mislaid

I was a big fan of Nell Zink's runaway success, The Wallcreeper (my review).  I paid cold cash for a hard cover book (something I haven't done for ages) to read Mislaid right away.  It was ok.  Not great.  But also brilliant.

First I should say I think Nell Zink is such an interesting character, and I doubt I'm the only one who secretly wishes she and I could have an intense email relationship like she supposedly still has with J. Franzen whereby she tells me fantastic books I should read and somehow, I guess, she thinks I'm pretty interesting too.  And then we make jokes about how bourgeois it is to be written up in the New Yorker. (But, really, you should read the article.)

Mislaid has a lot of brilliant lines.  One thing Zink certainly excels at is effortlessly weaving in lots of Big Themes - in this case: race, higher education, wealth, The South, destiny, queer identity, expressions of knowledge and like, a million other things.  Look, I'm mildly embarrassed that I actually know very little about lit theory (I got a useless art history degree instead of a useless lit degree) so I'm merely pretty sure about this... but I think that Mislaid is mostly, if not completely, satirical.  As such, everything was wry and distant and I never felt too invested in any characters since I was seeing everything through a smirk.

A few months ago I made a hairbrained guess about what I thought this book would be about after reading the synopsis and was way off.  In Mislaid, Peggy marries Lee (both are gay) and they have 2 children.  For really no good reason, Peggy runs off with the daughter and lives with her in utter squalor for about a dozen years as two black people (They are both white. And natural blondes.)  Many absurd things happen and then the most absurd thing happens and then, ta da: everything pretty much works out ok. I suppose I might be grouchy about it if I didn't absolutely guffaw through the last 100 pages. Zink flings so many zingers there's nary a soul or institution that walks away unzung.

Something that struck me about both Zink's books is how slender and yet all-encompassing they are.  She's concise in her acerbic wit but doesn't spare words either. After a page-long description of the local dump (compared to Dante's Inferno, natch), she writes: "Mayonnaise is an irresponsible splurge when you don't have a fridge, but there are small sizes available, especially in places where people live hand to mouth and 'large economy size' is regarded as a long-term investment that would tie up needed capital."

I can't wait to read her next book.  Since she supposedly wrote both these books in a matter of weeks it might not be long.

French Milk

French Milk, by Lucy Knisley (pronounced "nigh-zlee") is, on the surface, a charmant little graphic novel about a girl's month-long trip to Paris with her mother.  It's biographical - she turns 22 in the story, and I believe she published it at age 22 as well.  She's almost preternaturally into food and writes lovingly about baguettes and cheeses and wines.  At 22, I was most interested in any pizza that was free.  I ate cheese out of a box.

Her drawing style was quite similar to Jeffrey Brown, who I like quite a bit.  (Oh, it looks like they both went to the School of the Art Institute at the same time...)  The book is interspersed with what appear to be (surely?) purposefully terrible photographs.  To tell the truth, although I found the book charming and the drawings were adorable and I liked all the food bits, Lucy comes off as a super-privileged kid who does way more complaining about her life than you'd think someone who was lucky enough to spend a month in Paris should.  While I admire her honesty and sort of bravery to put her whole self out there, it really lacks a maturity that only comes with, well, age.  Of course, the reverse is true as well: it sort of perfectly encapsulates the sort of self-absorbed, woe-is-me attitude of the privileged 20-year old.  It's sort of like the first season of Girls - really strikes a chord with a lot of women, but lacks diversity and wallows in narcissism. Nothing illustrates her youth better than the inspiration for the title - she loves the milk in France and guzzles it like a toddler. As I read French Milk, I wondered how she felt about it now.  And look what I found in a recent comic:

It looks like her style has changed quite a bit, and, just as I suspected, she appears slightly mortified by her work from 7 years previous.  If I had anything in print from when I was 22, I can tell you I would Simply. Die.  It would be embarrassing beyond measure, so, in the end, I really admire Knisley for having the courage to put herself on the page.  It looks like she's written quite a few more graphic novels and I look forward to reading more and seeing how her art and her perspective have changed.  

How to Build a Girl

One of the things I loved about Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl is that it's a real journey. Joanna makes a bunch of stupid decisions and most of the time acts like a total idiot, but in the true spirit of a bildungsroman, she's allowing herself the freedom to experiment, and, importantly: start over. The real beauty is that Joanna's journey allows the reader to see the full range of possibilities for any young girl (or boy, I suppose) and lands in this very open-arms feeling toward experimentation in life.

While Joanna could never really be described as a role model (quitting school, lots of v. casual sex, drugs, etc) she's a child of wild imagination, determination and reinvention - what amazing qualities to find in any character, much less a real-life person.

All my life, I've thought that if I couldn't say anything boys found interesting, I might as well shut up. But now I realize there was that whole other, invisible half of the world--girls--that I could speak to instead. A while other half equally silent and frustrated, just waiting to be given the smallest starting signal - the tiniest starter culture- and they would explode into words, and song, and action, and relieved, euphoric cries of "Me too! I feel this too!"

The story of Joanna is quite similar to Moran's own bio - a young woman from Wolverhampton grows up in a "council house" (that's like subsidized housing in the UK, I guess) and becomes a successful rock critic as a teenager. Moran goes to some pains to illustrate that this is a work of fiction, which I merely note because I'm obsessed with art that borrows heavily from the artist's life, and I also have the radical idea that we shouldn't label book types. (Alphabetical by Last, à tute!) See my review of The Wallcreeper for more of my V. Important Thoughts on this subject.

Just as I lol'd and hell yeah'd through How To Be a Woman, so too did I alternately lol and nod in sage agreement with Moran's spot-on assessment of girls' growing up in the 90s. Another theme, near and dear to my heart, is the role of the critic. Joanna finds it more fun to eviscerate the bands she reviews, until she realizes that her "bile-filled persona" makes working-class kids like herself feel ashamed of the thing they love. "I started writing about music because I loved it. I started off wanting to be part of something - to be joyous. To make friends. Instead I've just, bafflingly, pretended to be a massive arsehole instead." I've had a similar trajectory in writing book reviews - long ago I found it easier and more amusing to write what I thought was a devastating review - but for the last few years I've tried hard to write about the positives, even of books I hate. It's harder and it's not as fun, but I'm not spewing infective into the world. I love reading, and the idea of other people finding what they want to read. I never want to stand in the way of that.

I am also not ashamed to admit I learned some new words (and not just for my special lady area! In one glorious page she referred to her "wedge", "fnuh" and "toilet-parts") Here are a few I picked up:

Frangible
ontic
ignominy
Hebridean
Blag
loo roll*

Moran writes, "So what do you do when you build yourself-only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things? You rip it up and start again. That is the work of your teenage years - to build up and tear down and build up again, over and over, endlessly, like speeded-up film of cities during boom times and wars." Even though she specifies that it's the work of "your teenage years" I'm not so lucky to be finished yet. But this book gives me confidence to keep working on that girl.


*Meanings
Frangible: Fragile
ontic: of or relating to entities and the facts about them
ignominy: public shame or disgrace
Hebridean: people from some islands off Scotland
Blag: To obtain something by dubious means - I wish I knew the derivation...
loo roll: Toilet paper! Isn't that the best?

Maisie Dobbs

So, you know I love a British mystery. I can't remember where I heard about Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs, but I think it was described as something like Downton Abbey with a detective which was enough to make me purchase the kindle book that moment.  Also Kindle has this thing where they sell you the audio book for a few dollars more.  So, I ended up listening to it.  

At first, it was great - what could be better than a British accent reading me to sleep every night?  But, it turns out I was falling asleep immediately, and not just because I'm bone tired from a long day making the proverbial donuts but because Maisie Dobbs is boring as hell.  

It is a lot like Downton Abbey in that Maisie starts out "downstairs" until her benevolent overlords recognize that she's really smart and pay for her to be taught by a tutor in addition to doing all her regular work.

Anyway, she gratefully takes the education, is pretty successful, for some reason joins the nursing squad for WWI on a whim and falls in love with this doctor.  Thus begins a long and chaste flashback to the war years and a lot of goopy, sentimental talk about "our boys" and sacrifices etc.  In the flashforward, you see that Maisie is alone, so obviously perfect doctor boyfriend died.

So, the mystery Maisie is trying to solve in the present has to do with this retreat that some guy has set up for wounded and disfigured soldiers, even though the war's been over for 10 years.  Maisie is very sympathetic to these people and the author goes to great pains to show what a sensitive soul she is to the veterans by never staring at their scars and recoiling in horror and whatnot.  Then she pulls back her hair and shows a friend that she's got a crazy awful scar on her head too, only her hair covers it up.  THEN! What happens but in the last few pages, she goes to a country hospital where perfect boyfriend's been all along?

And some shit about "tissue paper armour" that protected the memory of the past.  That's bullshit!  True Love doesn't care if you're in a wheelchair, speechless, with drool running down disfigured face! My God, at least go visit him once or twice in 10 years, Maisie!  

The Singing of the Dead

I visited a friend for the first time and spent a long time looking over her beautiful bookshelves, asking about authors she had collected and learning a bit more about her.  Bookshelves are the window to the soul, aren't they?

She loaned me The Singing of the Dead, by a mystery writer I'd never heard of before - Dana Stabenow.  This is the 11th book in the series and I definitely want to read more!  The lead character is Kate Shugak, an Aleut, a detective/contractor who lives in Alaska and recently lost her husband.  Kate is feisty and sad and doesn't put up with shit. She's hired by a political campaigner (another Alaskan native woman who's running for office) who is getting threatening letters.   Kate doesn't really care about the politics but she needs the money and they pay well.  

Alternately, the story of a prostitute in the very early 20th century, gold-rush days in Alaska is told.  She's murdered.  Kate learns about this woman and discovers her connection to the campaign.   I like Kate because she's so passionate - she gives a little speech about the limited opportunities for women in that period, without birth control, the right to vote, etc.  "Who cares what the founding mothers of our fair state did to get here, to stay here? What else was there to do for a woman back then? Wife, mother, maid, that was it. You were born, you got married, you had a bunch of kids first because there wasn't any way not to and second because the kids were your social security, and then you died, usually way too young, most of the time in childbirth. What did you do if you were a woman and you didn't want that?"

I learned a little bit about Alaskan history and perhaps a tiny bit about Alaskan natives (two subjects I knew very little about) so I really appreciated the Alaskan angle. I'm kind of surprised this hasn't been made into a TV series - I could totally see like a show like Wallander or The Killing out of this. 

Let me know if you've read any other Stabenow that you love!   

Dept. of Speculation

I sped through Jenny Offill's slender Dept. of Speculation quickly - I wish it had lasted longer, but it's 177 pages felt like a little treasure - one I'll surely return to many times.

The book felt utterly fresh and new, despite the timelessness of the story, the trajectory of youth, dating, marriage, children, near-divorce, etc.  Offill is very funny ("I found a book called Thriving Not Surviving in a box on the street. I stood there, flipping through it, unwilling to commit.") and insightful ("The undergrads get the suicide jokes, but the ones about divorce go right over their heads."). She does some really interesting things with POV - the book moves from first person to first person plural, then to third and then back to first person plural again (I think there might be a bit of second in there too).  Somehow she makes all these transitions very smooth - you might not even notice if you're not a POV Geek like I am.

Although Offill works through a number of interesting themes, one of the big ones that stuck out for me was the simple fact that maturity leads to greater understanding - sometimes it's devastating and sometimes it gives you the strength to make it through heartache.

I highly recommend this terrific little book - it was a real joy to read.

Parable of the Sower

I've been wanting to read more Octavia Butler ever since I picked up Fledgling in Seattle a few years ago.  For book club I recommended Parable of the Sower and everyone really loved it.  I didn't know much about it, except that it's apocalyptic and Butler is awesome so I didn't really care.  It was written in 1993 but takes place in 2024 after a series of disasters both environmental and medical.  The United States still exists, but there are very few working public services and basic necessities are very expensive.  Lauren, 18, lives on a compound with her family and some other families outside LA, but they are constantly under attack from people outside the walls.

Lauren's dad is a preacher, but she's been formulating her own religion and writing down how her belief system works.  She calls it Earthseed.  Apparently Butler meant to write a number of Earthseed books but died after the second one.  (Here's an interview with Butler on the subject.)  To tell the truth, the bits re: the religion were a bit much for my tastes.  Every chapter started with a poem or something from the book of Earthseed or whatever and halfway through I quit reading them.  They were so... earnest.

Eventually Lauren's compound is attacked and almost everyone is killed, so Lauren starts walking north (up the 101!) where things are rumored to be better.  Along the way she meets people and invited them to join her if they wish and tells them about her made-up religion and doesn't allow anyone to make fun of it.  Because it's reasonable and Lauren really has her shit together, many people are willing to join her.

Despite being so young, Lauren studied survivalism and is very savvy about negotiating the road and the journey.  You see her building a new community as she walks up the freeway - it's multicultural, diverse, spiritual and strong.

Oh yeah, Lauren is a "sharer", which means she can feel other people's emotions and pain.  This is largely a disadvantage in the dystopian future because if someone gets knocked in the head and she sees it, she feels like she's been clubbed in the head too.  It also makes her really enjoy sex because she feels her own pleasure and the pleasure of her partner.  Empowering sex was a big theme in Fledgling too.  Butler really had her finger on the pulse of popular fiction but brings such an intellectual spin to the stories.

If you have a Butler book to recommend, please let me know!

Caleb's Crossing

I listened to an audiobook of Geraldine Brooks's Caleb's Crossing (2011).  Listening to a book is so different than reading one that I would hesitate to say that I "read it".  I'm a big fan of Brooks since March, which is absolutely brilliant.  I actually wasn't crazy about the reader, Jennifer Ehle.  She's an actress and really put her heart into reading this, but it made for slow going and many time I was like, Ugh, I should just read this with my EYES because it was taking so long.  That's impatience for ya.

Like a dummy, I didn't realize that Caleb's Crossing is based on a true story until the moment I finished it.  I guess I should have realized, it being Brooks.  It's about a young girl who lives on an island - Martha's Vineyard, in the early 17th century.  Martha's Vineyard had a large native american population back then.  Some white settlers came and mostly had a harmonious relationship with them, although a lot of colonization was going on. Bethia Mayfield befriends a Wampanoag boy about her age, Caleb.  He is eventually educated by her father, who is teaching her brother too.  He stopped teaching her around age 9 because girls don't need no book learnin', but she managed to educate herself by cleaning nearby the lessons.

Imagined portrait of Caleb via

Bethia is fictional (I think?) but Caleb is based on an actual historical figure, Caleb Cheeshateaumuck, who is eventually accepted into Harvard College and the first Native American to graduate there.  Bethia allows herself to be indentured in Cambridge to support her horrible brother because she thinks  it's God's will.  Despite the fact that she is the greater scholar, her brother is acknowledged as her mental and personal superior, and he makes life fairly miserable for her.  She and her friend Caleb are socially inferior, being, respectively, a woman and a "savage" - both subject to the whims of the white, male population.  Bethany is an interesting character because she's very motivated to learn as much as she can, and she's frustrated by her place in society but she's also very loyal to the confines of her Puritan religion and, as such, does not rock the boat too much.  She accepts a certain amount of futility.

Anne Bradstreet is a oblique character in the book - she's the aunt of a student in Cambridge and Bethia is familiar with her work.  I love some of Bradstreet's poetry, and even almost got a line tattooed on my arm before I wimped out.  Turns out Bradstreet is a bit of a problematic figure, in terms of her feminism or not - being very much a product of her time, that's certainly understandable.  And that's why it's practically impossible to get a tattoo.

Ultimately I wish I'd read Caleb's Crossing with my eyes, parts really dragged for me but I think that was a matter of the audio.   As usual, Brooks's language is poetic and beautiful. She utilized archaic terms in Bethia's journal-like entries which really allowed me to feel immersed in this time period I'm not very familiar with.