The One That Got Away: Lisa Jewell Delivers Again

I figured it was time to start making a dent in all of those books I just renewed, and began with Lisa Jewell's Vince and Joy. This is the fourth book I've read by her, and they've all been terrific. I like her flawed, funny, vivid characters. I like the slightly offbeat scenarios. I like the way it all winds up working out in the end.

I'd have to say that there's a lot more sadness in Vince and Joy than in most of her other books, though. The title characters first meet when they're nineteen. Each is on a family holiday. Each already has a sad and difficult past. Vince had an underbite so severe, it affected his outward appearance, prevented him from chewing properly, and required surgery. It also prevented him from ever having a girlfriend, as even the most desperate and unattractive girls shunned him. Joy suffered a nervous breakdown due to the twin stresses of university applications and catching her father having sex with their neighbor in their kitchen. She had more experience than Vince, but it was thoroughly unsatisfying and repulsive.

But when they met, it was love at first sight. They spent a magical few days together that culminated in a shared first sexual experience. Then, Joy's family split in the middle of the night. Joy left a note for Vince, but as fate would have it, it rained all night, and all he could read was the phrase, "I feel so ashamed." Years later, he found out that what she was actually ashamed of was the fact that while they were having sex, their parents were getting drunk together and his father sexually assaulted Vince's mother.

But by then, their two roads had diverged. And sadly, neither of them wound up living a very happy life. Joy got married to a man she'd only known for a couple of months, who turned out to be weird, moody, anti-social and controlling. Vince settled with a woman who was almost the extreme opposite: an ex-club kid and hedonist who aggressively returned to her roots, going out every Saturday night for drugs and dancing even after their baby arrived. Fate throws them in each other's path quite a few times -- Vince finds Joy right before her wedding day and watches it from across the street; Joy bumps into Vince many years later, just as she's finally ready to leave her husband and he's about to get married.

But like the other books, there is a lot of brightness interwoven with what is overall, a rather sad tale. Many interesting characters linger around the edges of the drama: Vince's hippie roommate Cass, who looks for Joy in her crystal ball; Joy's oddball roommate Julia and her transsexual best friend Bella; Vince's cool young parents who start a second family; Joy's plain overweight mother with a surprising past that sheds light on her unhappy marriage. Jewell has a real gift for characters. They're usually archetypal enough to remind you of someone you've known, but they're not two-dimensional either. They don't just sit in their boxes of "frump," "hippie," and "campy". Jewell lets them out to breathe and run around, so that even at the end of a very sad story, you wind up feeling good.

Teh Funny: a BTT on Friday

Recent Funny July 30, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:48 am



What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?

This one's pretty easy. It would absolutely have to be Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman.

One of my fellow string players in orchestra loaned me this one (which reminds me, I've got to give it back to her, and get my book back as well). It had me convinced that someone out there is doing Klosterman a great disservice. An agent? A PR guy? I'm not sure. But not only did they give his novel a horrible, horrible dust jacket summary, they gave this great book an exceedingly stupid title. Not only do those three things sound dumb together, but the book only touches on the first and last, and doesn't deal with drugs at all. Oh yeah, and the back of this book is equally as dumb.

So what does the book do? Well, it sort of defies description. To say that it's a "pop-culture critique" makes it sound shallow and serious all at the same time, but I guess that about covers it. The book is a series of essays about a variety of elements of pop culture. I didn't agree with all of it, nor can I even relate to all of it (Klosterman is about 7 or 8 years older than me, and also a sports fan). But it was pretty much always funny. My favorite chapter was about The Real World, where he described a concurrent roommate situation:

In our lives...there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason, whatosever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the wall and vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.

I also enjoyed Klosterman's travels with a Guns n Roses cover band, and his accounting of how he managed to become the only person in his hometown ever fired from the post of Pee Wee Soccer Coach. It's a clever book about modern culture, and it's funny too. I like Chuck Klosterman.

Quick Picks: Today's BTT

Been slacking on the BTT's lately, but today I have a deep need to continue to avoid pricing items for the garage sale. So, here goes:

Preferences July 23, 2009
Filed under: Wordpress — --Deb @ 1:41 am



Which do you prefer? (Quick answers–we’ll do more detail at some later date)

Reading something frivolous? Or something serious?
Paperbacks? Or hardcovers?
Fiction? Or Nonfiction?
Poetry? Or Prose?
Biographies? Or Autobiographies?
History? Or Historical Fiction?
Series? Or Stand-alones?
Classics? Or best-sellers?
Lurid, fruity prose? Or straight-forward, basic prose?
Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness?
Long books? Or Short?
Illustrated? Or Non-illustrated?
Borrowed? Or Owned?
New? Or Used?

Reading something frivolous? Or something serious? Frivolous, but not too silly and shallow.

Paperbacks? Or hardcovers? As long as it's a nice edition, no real preference.

Fiction? Or Nonfiction? Fiction, generally.

Poetry? Or Prose? Prose. Can't remember the last time I read poetry outside of Artvoice and The New Yorker.

Biographies? Or Autobiographies? Autobiographies. I like hearing the story in the person's own words.

History? Or Historical Fiction? A bad one of either is a nightmare. A well-done one of either is a dream come true. Why is history so easy to fuck up? It's interesting, for crying out loud. And yet, many still manage to make murder, revolution, war, illness and mysticism absolutely boring (I was thinking of the story of Tsar Nicolas here).

Series? Or Stand-alones? Generally, stand-alones. It's hard to sustain interest throughout a series and know when to stop. Harry Potter is one of several notable exceptions.

Classics? Or best-sellers? Both!

Lurid, fruity prose? Or straight-forward, basic prose? A happy medium is good here, too.

Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? Plots. I can't follow ramblings.

Long books? Or Short? A good book will always go by too fast. I've finished fascinating 700-page books in a matter of days, and I've given up the struggle with 120-page books after a couple of weeks.

Illustrated? Or Non-illustrated? More fiction writers should have their work illustrated. By virtue of what I read, I don't get many books with pictures in them. I felt the chapter art added a great deal to the Harry Potter books, and it left me wondering, why doesn't everyone do that?

Borrowed? Or Owned? Borrowed, generally.

New? Or Used? It matters not.

Damn, too fast. Oh well, that stuff isn't going to price itself...

A Nice Summer Read

image from State Library of Victoria, Australia
I have some pretty specific ideas on what makes a good "summer read." The book should be light, both in weight and in content (I once read the hardcover edition of Russell Banks' excellent novel Cloudsplitter on the beach. My arms were sore the next day). It should be the kind of thing that's easy to put down and leave at almost any point. It shouldn't be shallow, but should make you feel happy.

James Herriott's series of books on his life as a country vet in Yorkshire fit the bill beautifully. The books are a series of anecdotes about his more memorable cases and incidents in his life, so they're very easy to stop and start with. They're short, and out in paperback so they're portable. But the most notable thing about them is the deep vein of happiness that runs through them.

image from amazon.com
There are seven books in the core series. They roughly chronicle his life from a young vet, newly qualified and beginning the hopeless task of finding employment during the Great Depression (an era when the economy and the shift away from farming led to frequent ads in his professional journals that read "Experienced Vet, will work for keep."), settling in to life in Yorkshire, getting married, serving in World War II and having a child. But there's no particular need to read them in order. I just discovered the other day that I hadn't read the first one, somehow.

I took a break from the gloom and doom (thus far) of my library haul to enjoy it. It reminded me of all the things that were good about those books. Herriott's love for his profession and his surroundings seep into every word he writes. This being an animal practice, of course, many of the stories are very sad. Mallock, the "knackerman" who euthanizes large animals and renders their carcasses for a variety of uses, features prominently in the series. But a lot of them are amusing, too, such as his long relationship with his "nephew," Pekingese Tricki Woo, who sends him postcards and Christmas gifts, or their "cat about town" who made a point of attending all rummage sales, Grange meetings, and church socials in the town. Since Herriott had to make house calls at all hours of the day and night, there's ample opportunity for slapstick as well, such as the time he went out to see a cow in his pajamas and Wellingtons, then wandered exhausted and unfortunately penniless into a local diner and tried to get breakfast.

My all-time favorite story was about the small farmer who had an epidemic sweeping through his stock. It looked like he was going to lose everything to this hopeless, untreatable illness when Herriott asked for permission to experiment with a new drug sample he'd just received that was supposed to work miracles. Overnight, the calves all returned from death's door, and antibiotics had come to Yorkshire.

The books I have belonged originally to my grandfather, and were among the last he read. I do hope they're still in print, because they're very enjoyable and pleasant for any animal lover to read.

Life After Genius: Another Cheerful Work

I finished Life After Genius by M. Ann Jacoby a couple of days ago. It was the other seven-day book I checked out. It was not as depressing as Bufalo Lockjaw, but not what you'd call a pick-me-up, either.

The book is the tale of young Theodore Mead Fegley, a genius from a small Illinois town. He has recently fled from college on the eve of his presentation of his work on the Riemann Hypothesis to the mathematical elite and also of his graduation at the young age of 19. His parents, whose expectations for him are sky-high, are not overly pleased to see him, especially since he won't tell them why he's there or what happened. His uncle is downright furious to see him.

Bit by bit, we learn why as we travel back through Mead's life: a life defined by his mother's sky-high expectations and strict regimentations, consisting mostly of hard study and cruelty from his classmates. He is the son of the local undertaker, with a dorky first name, the youngest in every class, and strictly discouraged from maintaining any sort of social life. One can only imagine (and understand why he immediately adopted his middle name as his first when he left for college). Mead takes us through it all. The destruction of his science project at age 12 by some older kids, his mother's almost violent reaction to the only C he'd ever earn, the envy he felt towards his same-age, much-cooler cousin Percy, and of course the events that led up to his sudden departure from college.

It's hard to craft a decent novel based on a "secret", but M. Ann Jacoby has done it. Throughout the beginning of the novel, all the reader cares about is why Mead has committed this act of supreme self-sabotage. Especially once you get to know his mother better, whose picture is next to the word "domineering" in the dictionary. But then, you start to get interested in Mead. How so many people had invested so much in him. How ripe for exploitation he was. How the most advanced mathematics came easily to him, but basic social skills were elusive.

The rest of his family is pretty interesting, too. It comes out that his uncle hates him because he holds him responsible for Percy's recent death. His aunt's seeming neutrality turns out to have disturbing roots -- she's not coping with the loss of her son well at all, and not very much in touch with reality, so not really able to form an opinion. During the few days over which the book takes place, Mead takes his place in the family, and comes to see what a part of it he was all along, despite feeling isolated his entire life.

If you've almost forgotten about the driving events of the story by now, you're not alone. Towards the end of the novel, it wasn't that I'd lost interest in them, but that another story had started to emerge that was equally compelling. By the time Jacoby wraps up the original story of manipulation and betrayal, you realize you pretty much knew all the facts. Well done, indeed. Still, I'm taking a break from my library pile to spend some time with some more cheerful fare in the form of the James Herriott books.

Economic Depression, Assisted Suicide and Despair: A Fun Summer Read

The paradox of Buffalo winters is that they actually drive people outside, despite frostbite-inducing temperatures. If you're a suburban homeowner (or sometimes even an urban one), you have NO FUCKING CHOICE but to drag yourself out there and snowblow or shovel your driveway. If you're a city-dweller, you may be outside just because that's where you generally are anyway: walking home from the bus or the Metro, running errands too close together to keep moving your car, what-have-you. The faces of these people are utterly locked down, betraying no other emotion than determination to survive until they can get inside. That's where Greg Ames gets the title of his novel, Buffalo Lockjaw.

If you're from Buffalo, about half of your friends have moved away. Maybe you yourself have moved away. At any rate, Thanksgiving is the one time of year when you can generally count on seeing everybody. Christmas is always laden with family obligations, including the cooking and shopping. Despite the best attempts of marketing gurus everywhere, Easter never really caught on as a secular holiday, too. Memorial Day, Labor Day, the 4th of July are all big going-away holidays. And New Year's Eve is generally only celebrated in bars. But Thanksgiving is the holiday of reunions, and on this particular one, protagonist James Fitzroy confronts his life.

James lives in New York and has a stable but much-maligned job writing greeting cards. He's 28 and single. He's home in Buffalo visiting his mother, who is committed to a nursing home as a victim of early-onset Alzheimer's and unable to do the simplest tasks for herself at the young age of 56; his father, who's selling the family home to move into an apartment alone; and his older sister, who lives in Portland, OR, and has always outshone him.

But, this being Thanksgiving, he also visits the people and places of his youth. He drives around town listening to his "Buffalo ethnography" that he worked on in his early 20s. He stops by the improbable outdoor barbecue at his friend Brickteeth's (also present: his friend Mattress Lips). He gets threatened by some wannabe thugs he grew up with ("You stay away from Corrinne! She doesn't want to see you!") and the entire time, is steeling his nerve to do what he believes to be the right thing and put his mother out of her misery.

If you like books with a strong sense of place, you might enjoy this one. Ames stacks local references sky-high so that they nearly topple. I wonder if that would bother other people, if they want to scream "WE GET IT!!" after watching James ease his car out of the Wilson Farms lot on Elmwood and Allen down to Jim's Steak-Out. The story would not have been weaker for losing a few of those references, although I admit it thrilled me when I realized that one part of the action happened only feet from my house. The great Buffalo flavor comes from the excerpts of Jim's ethnography project. One man told him about all of his rituals surrounding the Buffalo Bills games in the early 90s -- his lucky shirt and underwear, the precise moment at which he'd eat a hot dog with mustard, the number of high-fives after every touchdown and field goal that all contributed materially to the success of the team. The guy sounded like the father of everyone I grew up with. Many "subjects" also noted the influence of the psychiatric hospital on the street life in the city.

But there's also the main plot to content with, a plotline that's almost violent in its sadness. My own grandmother died of dementia, and it's a horrible thing to watch. James is haunted by the fact that early on in the progress of his mother's disease, she mentioned the notion of suicide to him and he talked her out of it. His mother was an expert nurse who had written one of the definitive nursing textbooks, and was an outspoken advocate of a patient's right to die. So James knows her stance. He knows, in his heart, what's right. It's just a matter of doing it.

There's also the matter of James' own future. His boozy, shattered romantic past returns bit by bit throughout the course of the novel, as does his issues surrounding his family and his place within it. Refreshingly, James does not seem to have many issues surrounding his greeting-card job. It's everyone else in the book that finds it a ridiculous way to make a living, but James seems to be essentially satisfied with it.

This was definitely an excellent book that really made an impact on me, and probably will for a while to come. If you're looking for a cheerful summer read, this is most emphatically not the book for you, however. But it's very well-done and certainly destined to be at least a local classic.

Yesterday's Library Haul

Usually, when I go to Central, I see something interesting and bizarre that's worth sharing on the blog. Yesterday, it was just the usual mix of people, though: moms with young children; people who are homeless or close to it; poor people taking advantage of the free internet to either look for jobs or pick up women on Myspace; recent immigrants teaching themselves English in the children's section; teenagers hanging out in one of the few adult-sanctioned hangouts (what parent could possibly turn down a request to be dropped off at the library?); older women getting their book club books, etc. And me, hauling out all I can carry as usual:

Vince and Joy, by Lisa Jewell, whose books are always light in a good way.
Sid Vicious: No One is Innocent, by Alan Parker. People in my area have been reading Slash's book like mofos. It's been checked out constantly. I read Nancy Spungen's biography years ago and figured I'd give Sid a try, too.
Steinway and Sons, by Richard K. Lieberman. It was in the music section, too.
Three Junes, by Julia Glass. Amazon.com keeps telling me I should.
Life after Genius, Ann M. Jacoby. An interesting-looking 7-day book about a child prodigy-turned-dropout.
Buffalo Lockjaw, by Greg Ames. Profiled a few weeks ago in our local alternative paper, written by a native. I always enjoy books set in the area. Another 7-day book, which means I need to get reading!
The Smallest People Alive, by Keith Banner. Bunch of short stories.
Popular Culture and High Culture: an analysis, by Herbert Gans. Goes under my "Most Likely Not to Be Read," but I think about that sort of stuff a lot, so I figured I'd check it out.

There we have it. I have until the 31st to read or renew!