It's All in the Telling

You would think a book starring a woman who lost her mother at an early age, was smacked around by her dad, raised dirt-poor, acted as a mother to her younger sister (who disappeared at age 16 and hasn't been seen for nearly 20 years), got pregnant at age 16 after being raped, and had recently resigned the police force in an economically depressed mining town to own and operate her own cab company -- such a book sounds utterly tragic, and no fun at all, right? Not if the book in question is Sister Mine by Tawni O'Dell.

The woman in question above is Shae-Lynn Penrose, who is a true survivor with a sense of humor, tough, smart and with a strong sense of justice (early in the book, she gets toseed from a bar for starting a fight with a man who neglects his kids). As I described above, Shae-Lynn's overcome a lot in her life, but through the course of the book, is forced to deal with it all afresh when two strangers come to town separately, each looking for the sister who had disappeared all those years ago. Shae-Lynn has believed that her father beat her to death, but the strangers seems to know Shannon, and even have pictures. It's not long before Shannon herself reappears on the scene, as if she'd only been gone for a few days, and is full of lies and contradictions.

Shae-Lynn spends much of the rest of the book unraveling what Shannon's been up to for the past two decades, and what the strangers want from her. She also spends it trying to help her friends. Her town is a coal-mining town, and a year earlier, five of her close friends made national news when they were trapped in a cave-in. They got a book deal and a movie deal out of it, but it hasn't improved their lives much. all are, in different ways, coping with the aftereffects of not only the trauma, but the short-lived fame. Shae-Lynn is also working out her complicated feelings towards one of them, and as if all this weren't enough, is also forced to deal with the man who raped her so many years ago, whose identity she's kept secret, even from her son.

While this book has some of the usual elements of "chick lit" (strong female protagonist, romantic subplot, liberal doses of humor), it goes a little beyond that. For one thing, this isn't a book about the bonds between women, despite the title. Shae-Lynn is more at home among men, and although she has good relationships with several women, she doesn't seem as strongly connected to them as she is to the men in her life. Although Shae-lynn is a mother, and acted as a mother to her sister all her life, the book isn't strictly about motherhood, either. Finally, there's a lack of glamour. Shae-Lynn's hometown is not a glamorous place. It's hard, dirty, and poor, and when Shae-Lynn talks with the wives of the miners, you can almost hear the practical haircuts and utilitarian clothes.

Serious sub-themes run throughout the book: economic exploitation (frequent mention is made of the lazy, entitled, man who owns the mines); military exploitation (the Marines work hard to recruit students from the high school, knowing that with little other opportunity, they're likely to hop on the chance to get out of town); child absue and neglect (Shae-Lynn's childhood is mirrored by a 12-year-old girl named Fanci, who we first meet when she's attempting to trade her 4-year-old brother for a cab ride to the mall, and who reappears periodically throughout the book); and the whole question of what the law does and doesn't allow (read the book and you'll catch this one).

I just happened to grab this one because it was in the "New Acquisitions" section, but I'm glad I did. O'Dell has apparently written two other books, and I'll have to look for them the next time I'm near a library. I wonder if she is going to write other books about any of the characters in Sister Mine. I think that Shae-Lynn is a strong and charismatic heroine and would enjoy watching her negotiate other challenges and situations. I hope she does.

Marlene Carvell II, as promised

Sweetgrass Basket did not take me very long to read at all. I picked it up on Thursday and finished it last night. It was excellent, though, and I can understand why it won several awards and is on the recommended reading list of a group that monitors Native American portrayals in literature.

Sweetgrass Basket is the tale of sisters, Mattie and Sarah Tarbell. Mattie and Sarah are Mohawk Nation and their mother has passed away. They were sent to Carlisle Industrial Indian School, which was a real place that existed in the early 20th century.

The white man's war on the Indians did not end with the signing of the peace treaty (incidentally, the document with the most signatures of leaders known to human history -- over 500 -- and held in the collections of a museum I used to work for). Although the shooting part of it may have been over, the beliefs that they posed some kind of a threat did not die so easily. These "Indian schools" were an attempted antidote to the threat. The overt idea behind them was that the schools would teach them useful skills needed to function in society. the real intent was to extinguish group identity and culture. Members of the same tribe were separated. They were not allowed to speak their native languages, nor were they allowed to have any "Indian things" from home. They worked extremely hard. Although truancy laws were a few years in the future and the average white child may have left school after 8th grade, some people stayed at these schools into their 20s, especially those who were older when they came to the schools.

None of this is in the book, exactly. Rather, it tells through Mattie and Sarah's eyes (in alternating chapters, and in Carvell's trademark free verse style) their experiences at the school. Mattie is the elder of the two, and although she is an immediate social and academic success, she has a hard time following the rigid, military-style rules at the school and constantly finds herself in trouble. Sarah is better at doing as she's told, but struggles with her classes and takes longer to fit in. Neither girl is happy -- none of the students seem happy -- but they are fitting in well enough when a small incident gets blown out of proportion by the truly sadistic school head, and leads ultimately to tragedy.

My copy of the book was signed by the author. She signed it: "Children everywhere have stories that need to be told" and I think that sums up this book very well. One thing that angers me about the story of the Native American and the white is that we whites have never been honest about it, the same way we have about slavery. You learn about slavery and civil rights in grade school, but often have to wait until college to learn about the attempted extermination of Native American tribes. You hear vague allusions to the whites and the Indians not getting along terribly well, but they never really sit you down and tell you why. And as a result, Native American reservations are among the most desolate places in the country. Name any social problem: alcoholism, suicide, teenage pregnancy, unemployment and you'll always find it at a much higher rate on a reservation than in the general population. Carvell's books would be excellent tools for bringing the story into a classroom. They are both classified as "young adult" and both very readable and as enjoyable as is decent given the subject matter.

Please, no more sex with minors!

After reading the third book on this theme in less than two weeks, and choosing to ignore what this might say about me, I'm ready to give this theme a rest. I don't care if I never read another book about a 40-year-old fucking a teenager ever again, and that's a sentence I never thought I'd utter!

Before I turn my back on it, though, I'm going to post about What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. I had been dying to read this book ever since I saw the movie starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. I enjoyed it, but not as much as I expected.

The book is about twin obsessions. The one that drives the plot is the art teacher Sheba Hart's interest in a student named Steven Connolly. The interest starts out as professional (he displays a talent for art, but is unable to take her class because he is in special ed., so she agrees to help him after school), takes a turn towards the sexual, but surprisingly, winds up being a one-sided crush on Sheba's part. Sheba actually falls in love with him, which causes him to back off.

The other obsession (as those who have seen the movie will know) is Sheba's colleague Barbara Covett's feelings for Sheba. Barbara is the narrator of the book, and her feelings towards Sheba are bizarre and complex. Barbara has never married, and alludes to another strong friendship with a woman that ended badly, but you don't exactly get the impression that she's a lesbian either. Her interest in Sheba is something else altogether. In the movie, Barbara comes off as more twisted and obsessive, where Sheba is a basically good woman with bad judgement in her choice of companions -- ALL of her companions.

In the book, Barbara portrays Sheba as selfish, vain and flighty. The movie depicts Barbara as being an emotional vampire, but in the book, Barbara's actions and feelings seem more understandable, given Sheba's alternating fits of dependence on her and ignoring her altogether. In one breathtakingly callous moment, Barbara has stopped by Sheba's house, dreadfully upset because she just learned she'd have to put her cat down. During the conversation, Sheba's underage paramour calls up and asks to meet. Sheba chooses to leave her friend alone with her grief, her friend who has kept her secret, given her advice and acted as a good sounding board.

I think everyone's had a friend like Sheba Hart -- although probably not one with as big a secret as she had. In college, mine was a brilliant, charismatic, borderline alcoholic with a propensity towards casual sex, although one of the guys I thought she'd slept with repeatedly told me later that they'd never actually had sex because she'd always start crying and he'd hold her until she fell asleep. I liked her a lot, I thought I had something to offer her and had a lot of fun being around her, but she just started to suck the life out of me, because it was always all about her. Always. If I made other plans, she'd fuck with them, but would never hesitate to ditch me if something better came along.

It makes me wonder, though. I wound up walking away, but what made Barbara Covett stay? (Heller has a lot of fun with names: Covett (she does, Hart (she wears hers on her sleeve), Pabblem (the principal of the school, and the perfect word for Barbara's opinion of his new-age, touchy-feely educational and management theories). Also making cameos in the book are a Rumer, a Bangs, and a Hodge, the last of which is depicted as very dull and foolish). Was it loneliness, the desire to be needed (things get to a point where no one else could help Sheba), some sort of twisted love? The reader can decide.

Book Club To-nite!

This was a bittersweet book club for me, as it will be my last with this group since I'm moving 150 miles away at the end of the month. But it was an excellent one to say goodbye with!

Tonight was rather different. Tonight, we welcomed author Marlene Carvell to talk about her two books, Who Will Tell My Brother? and Sweetgrass Basket. Carvell lives and works in the area, and it was a real treat to hear her talk about them after having read them. Well, I read the one, anyway: Who Will tell My Brother?

The most striking thing about her novels is that she writes them in free verse. I know of no one else who does this, and it gives them a very different feel than anything else. As she talked about her journey in getting published, I felt pleased that something like this was able to see the light of day at all. I had avoided watching American Idol until this current season. I had hated the show all that time, but decided to actually see it and find out why. I had my answer during the first few auditions I saw, when Simon, Paula and Randy were actually coming out and telling people: "You've got the look that record companies love" or "You'll be very easy to market." I wasn't so naive as to believe that marketing had nothing to do with their decisions, but I hadn't thought that was ALL there was. So reading a book like Carvell's is a pleasant oasis amidst all those pink-shoe books you see at Barnes and Noble these days.

As Carvell herself said, to say that Who Will tell My Brother? is a book about a Native American boy who tries to get his offensive high school mascot changed is to oversimplify, although that is what the book's about on a very basic level. It also follows the journey of Evan (the young man in question) towards understanding his heritage, and (as Carvell also said) is about how people treat one another. Changing a school mascot sounds like such a small thing, but in the book (and the real-life experience of Carvell's son the book is based on), people dug in, people ridiculed him and treated him horribly. The Board of Education actually voted to keep the mascot -- after repeated appeals, they not only not listened to him but actually voted to keep the mascot. He got picked on at school. And ultimately, the mascot did not change. But Evan succeeded in changing people's minds, and several of his classmates stood with him at graduation through the mascot's offensive dance on the field.

The treatment of Native Americans at the hands of whites is one of the most shameful episodes in American history -- only the treatment of blacks even comes close. The difference is that attitudes towards blacks have changed, and that the story from slavery through Jim Crow and Brown vs. Board of Ed. is taught in school and well-known to all Americans, whereas we as a society have never really faced up to the systematic destruction of Native life and culture. Unless you live near a casino, you generally just don't hear about them. Politicians never court the "Native American vote." There's no "Native American Music" section at Borders, no Native American market segment. We've never really given them a way to fit in, although we have alternately romanticized and vilified them. Carvell is white, but her husband is a member of the Mohawk tribe and has a painful family history. His aunt was taken from her family and placed in a boarding school for Native American children, where she was forbidden to speak her native language, cut off from her family, and kept away from any classmates who happened to be from the same tribe (her experiences form the basis for Sweetgrass Basket). His grandfather ran away from a similar school and had to work his way back home. He changed his name from a typical Native American last name when he'd applied for a liquor license and gotten denied. He applied under his new last name and was granted it. And while Who Will tell My Brother? is a novel, her own sons suffered through many of the same experiences as each tried and failed to get the mascot changed.

If you're wondering, though, there was a positive ending IRL. Her son's cause resonated with the eighth graders in the district, and as high school students, a group of them banded together to fight for change. The school board promised them that if they did a list of things over the course of the school year, they could change the mascot, but refused when the students came to them having completed the list. The students went to the media, a special school board meeting was called, hundreds showed up, the mascot got changed, and there was an unprecedent turnout of high school seniors who were 18 at the next board elections and they voted out the president. They kept the name -- the Marauders -- but the mascot itself is now a wolf. The real-life Evan, meanwhile, is now studying for the bar exam, and is involved with a tribal court out west.

Carvell's third book is in pre-publication and doesn't deal with Native American issues. She is working on a fourth, but didn't tell us much of what it was about. It was a fascinating evening with her, however. I'm going to pick up her other book tomorrow (sexual exploitation fest 2007 having come to an end). I'll report on it soon!

To Catch a Predator...or not

On the heels of Lolita, I read another excellent Jodi Picoult book, Salem Falls. The book is meant to be a version of The Crucible for modern times. I've never read The Crucible, so I can't really give an opinion on her success or failure, but the book was good.

This is the fourth book of hers that I've read, and I think one of her real strengths as a writer is her characters. Since her books are typically legal dramas, it would be easy to set up "good" characters and "bad" characters, but hers are always real, conflicted people with elements of both.

Salem Falls is the tale of Jack St. Bride, ex-private school teacher, ex-prisoner and current dishwasher. Jack was the victim of some unfortunate circumstances: he helped a student get some birth control pills. She developed a crush on him, and wrote a diary of the relationship she imagined them having. Her father found it, along with the pills, and the dominoes all fell from there. Jack is now adrift, with no home or job to go back to. He lands in the small Massachusetts town of Salem Falls, gets a job as a dishwasher, falls in love with the diner owner (Addie) and tries to put his past behind him. Megan's Law makes that rather difficult, though, and thanks to his instant notoriety, he finds himself once again wrongly accused.

His accusers are a quartet of teenage practicioners of Wicca. It's clear from the moment you're introduced to the girls, however, that the chief accuser, Gillian Duncan, is really the one driving everything for the girls. Her father is the richest man in town, and the others trail contentedly in her wake, whether it takes them to the occult, or to phony accusations of rape.

I think the book would've been better if Picoult had explored the bond between the four girls more. They were the most interesting characters in the book to me. I've always found the concept of unquestioning allegiance interesting, maybe because it's so opposite to my own nature. The slowest parts of the book involved the attorneys on both sides of the case. The book would not have suffered at all from their omission. The other characters are vivid and interesting, though: Addie, once a victim of rape, diner operator and mother to a dead child; her father, Roy, who transforms from the town drunk to his former self during the course of the book; police chief Charlie Saxton, whose daughter is one of Gillian's quartet and who has to come face to face with his own past and the truth about his daughter in the course of his investigation.

They have been discussing the idea of building a "civil confinement" facility in my state for sex offenders who are deemed extremely likely to offend again. The whole project gives me the creeps, and I wonder why sex offenders, in particular, seem to loom so large in our minds. In the 80s, everyone was afraid of Satanists. 20 years later, it seems to be sex offenders that we all fear. I've often wondered why, and I don't have a good answer, except that maybe they embody the concept of "lost innocence" that we as a society seem to be concerned about. The feeling is that kids are mature earlier than ever, even biologically speaking, no one hides their porn-viewing or strip-club visiting, you can use all kinds of swear words on prime-time TV and 2/3 of all movies released are rated R. Juvenile sex offenders, perhaps, are the loss of innocence come to life, and while parents are basically powerless against the internet and swear words on TV (or FEEL powerless against these things), they feel they can do something about sex offenders in the community. But I'm interested in hearing anyone else's theories.

Later in the week, we'll be exploring sex between a minor and an adult from another angle in Zoe Heller's What Was She Thinking? or Notes on a Scandal. Or perhaps another angle will present itself, but I'm sure the sex will creep in there. Stay tuned.

To Catch a Predator

About a month ago, I was at the library checking out books (hey, that reminds me of an errand I have to run tomorrow). I didn't really know what to get and came across Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. It was one of those books I'd been meaning to read in a non-specific way, or perhaps felt as though I should read. After all, it's a huge cultural touchstone. "Lolita" has kind of become a generic term for what we less elegantly called "jailbait" in college, and those of you who remember the whole Amy Fisher-Joey Buttafuco thing will remember the nickname the press gave Fisher: Long Island Lolita.

I'm not really sure what I expected from this book, but I was surprised anyway. The basic plotline runs like this: Humbert Humbert, a European man who realizes early on that he's sexually attracted only to prepubescent girls, comes to America and rents a room in Lolita's house. He becomes obsessed with her and marries her mother, who dies one month after their wedding. He ferries Lolita around the country for a year, then they settle, then they pick up and move again. He ultimately loses her (I am not spoiling much; it becomes clear early on that he is writing from prison and Lolita is no longer in the picture).

Humbert Humbert is a thoroughly unlikeable character. All the creepiness aside, he is, to put it bluntly, an asshole. He really hates women, and doesn't even really like Lolita that much. He wants the reader to pity him, but can't even cast himself in a sympathetic light. It's telling that you never get a sense of Lolita as a person. His characterization of her utterly fails the Maxwell Perkins test: you would never know her should you meet her on the street. Often, when you see this, it's a sign of poor writing. In this case, it's another clue to Humbert Humbert's character. He wrecked his life (pathetic as it was) over Lolita, permitted himself to break laws and violate social standards, yet his desire for her is similar to one's desire for an SUV or a Prada bag. He just wants, wants, wants, and schemes to have. And when he gets it, he's not satisfied: he either worries it will slip away (he controls every aspect of Lolita's life very tightly) or he picks it apart, looking for flaws (he and Lolita fight constantly).

What we do get of Lolita does not come off very well, either. She's moody and bratty, and she's also extremely manipulative. Her story does not have a fabulous ending, and one can only speculate what kind of effect her strange teenage years had on her. She's certainly not entirely innocent, though: she seduced Humbert Humbert, and he was not her first, although she was only 12 at the time.

What we have here is basically two unlikeable individuals trapped in a relationship that is destructive, sickening, and unhealthy, even if you were to imagine it as a relationship between two people of the same age -- and yet, you can't look away. Over 50 years after its initial publication, Lolita still has the ability to fascinate, to shock, and to raise questions.

I was at the beach this evening and saw some girls, about the same age as Lolita is at the start of the book, wearing short shorts and tight-fitting tank tops. It made me think about this book, and about the current hysteria surrounding internet predators and child molestation. There's a great outcry to preserve the "innocence" of children, but how innocent are they -- then, or now? What kind of message do you send when you dress young girls up in clothes that would make a barfly blush, and yet expect men not to even think about looking? How, and why, do people become pedophiles anyway? There are no easy answers to these questions, either now or when Lolita was first published, but if we as a society are serious about preventing child molestation, it would behoove us to start thinking about them.

What's My Name, Fool?

I am not a sports fan, never have been. I enjoy seeing playoffs for things, especially if a team from my hometown is involved (although they always lose). I like the Olympics, particularly the figure skating. Sometimes I swim or ride my bike in the summer. That's about it.

What's My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States by Dave Zirin may seem like an odd choice of a book for me, then. I started reading reprints of Zirin's column at commondreams.org, primarily because visiting that website (even if you're a liberal too) is a lot like being shouted at, and I needed a break. I don't know how conservatives tune into things like Rush Limbaugh and the O'Reilly Factor. Don't they give you headaches? Anyhoo, his column seemed to go deeper, to acknowlege that the sports industry and the individual players within it are part of a larger society.

Zirin's book is about sports and politics. When I told this to my boyfriend, he gave a common response of sports fans: "There shouldn't be any politics in sports." Zirin addresses this point in his book, and counters with the bald fact that like it or not, they're there. His book opens with explosive chapters on Jackie Robinson, Joe Lewis, Muhammed Ali, and John Carlos and Tommy Smith's Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics to show how sports played an integral role in the civil rights movement. In the Robinson chapters, he notes how some whites, in seeing him get booed and harassed by their fellow Caucasians, deliberately differentiated themselves, cheering for him and acting disgusted at the harassers, introducing the notion that overtly racist behavior is unacceptable.

He next travels to sports and labor, discussing the introduction of free agency into baseball, and contrasting it with the boxing union, which is only a few years old and up against an entire system designed to exploit the boxer. These chapters, on labor and racism, are the strongest points of the book. The chapter on gender, and the chapters dealing with modern resistance to racism and war, are much more diffuse and have an anecdotal feel to them.

There is a smattering of stories from college-level sports as well as professional. He covers some Big Stories: the death (and posthumous exploitation) of Pat Tillman, the steroid accusations against Barry Bonds (surprisingly, he believes Bonds and defends him), Kobe Bryant's rape trial, the brawl between Ron Artest and a fan. But you also find many lesser-known tales: former Notre Dame basketball player Danielle "D-Smooth" Green, who went to Iraq and came back without her left hand; basketballer Adonal Foyle, who founded a campaign-finance reform organization called Democracy Matters while he was an undergraduate; the death of DC high school football player Devin Fowlkes, who might have survived the gunshot wound had the city not closed the nearby trauma center for lack of funds (although they had the money for a new sports stadium).

At some points, the book felt a little simplistic. Zirin makes his points with lots of force, which is a good thing -- no one wants to read a wimpy book. But sometimes he pushes too hard and overestimates the effects (positive and negative) of the actions or inactions of those he's profiling. But his writing is always engaging. He likes the colorful similie: "more racist than a Bob Jones University course syllabus;" "more technical fouls than a Dennis Rodman with Tourrette's syndrome;" "folded faster than a rib joint in Tel Aviv." Like all good color commentators, he's good at getting at the human side of the game, even when the human side is none too pretty to look at. I look forward to his next effort.