It was a beautiful fall day

The sun was shining, and I settled in with my classmates for my first class with a legend of my graduate school. My graduate school is about 40 years old, and this professor had been there for nearly 30. His style was to have everyone pick a different book each week and report on it, so we'd learn from one another. His comprehensive lists of excellent books were legendary. The way some alums talked about them, it sounded like they were practically planning to get them bronzed. He only kept us for a few minutes that day, but before we left, he confided to us his desire to read every book ever written. "I keep trying," he said, "but the bastards keep gaining on me."

Two days after that, we were all at a barbeque when one of the other professors gathered us all together. She had some terrible news for us. The legendary professor had been killed in a car crash that afternoon.

Sometimes I wonder, did he waste much time on crappy books? Did he push through books he knew he wouldn't enjoy, just to get to the end? I'll never know. But in his memory, I have decided, to my great surprise, to set aside Last of the Southern Girls by Willie Morris, only 20 pages in. It's a weird book -- it doesn't sound like him. I think maybe he's at his best when he's drawing more on his own life, like in My Dog Skip or Taps. I know he had a successful career as an editor before he wrote either of those books, and I'm sure he's had experience around the Beltway, with women like Carol Hollywell, but he's failed to suck me in. I will continue to love him for the two books listed above and for My Cat Spit McGee, but I think I'll have to forego this one, in the recognition that no one's perfect, life is short, and better books await.

Wish You Were Here, as promised

Despite not being Notes on a Scandal, this book had several things that attracted me to it. First, it shares a title with one of my favorite Pink Floyd songs. Second, it's by Stewart O'Nan, who wrote The Circus Fire, which I liked more than was decent for a book about one of the worst civic disasters in the country's history. Third, it is set near where I grew up, in Chatauqua. Sounds like a winner to me.

The book made me terribly sad. I do try to be careful about spoiling the endings of books I write about here, but I will go out on a limb here and let everyone know in advance that the dog survives the entire book, even though he's old, and even though he ominously gets left alone several times. Don't worry. He's not a metaphor for aging and loss. He is just a dog.

The sadness centers around the rest of the family. This family, the Maxwells, have been coming to a cottage on Lake Chatauqua in the southwest corner of New York State, for decades. With the death of the father, Henry, the mother (Emily) decides to sell the cottage, but brings everyone back there for one last week. "Everyone" consists of her sister-in-law, Arlene; her daughter Meg; Meg's two children, Sarah (about 13) and Justin (about 9); her son Ken; Ken's wife Lisa and their children Ella and Sam (roughly the same age as Meg's children).

During the week, we see the complex family bonds sometimes shift subtly, and at other times get more firmly knitted into place. Ken has a separate persona for his sister, his wife, and his mother, and he never really resolves this during the week. In fact, the reader can tell that he'll continue to struggle with it until the death of at least one, if not two, of the principals. In contrast, Meg has always had a tumultous relationship with her mother, but it appears as though they are finally starting to reconcile.

The week at the cottage represents the end of a phase in their lives. For Meg and Ken, it's a realization that they really are all grown up, their dad is gone, and that their allegiances must now lie with the families they've made, not the family they grew up with. For the older generation of Emily and Arlene, it's the end of their lives itself that is staring them in the face. They've seen the area change and lose its quaint feel, they've watched their friends get old and die, they know that the new owner of the cottage may knock it down altogether.

This sense of loss throws the rest of their lives into sharp relief. Ken is a struggling photographer who works in a development lab for $8.50 an hour. Meg is a recovering alcoholic, freshly divorced, struggling financially, faced with the horrifying prospect of starting it all over. Both take long, hard looks at their lives during the week, and both come up wanting. The hopefulness is in Emily and Arlene, whose choices have been made, and who are relatively content with the way their lives have gone, even Arlene, who never married or had children.

This book could've been horribly sappy, but Stewart O'Nan has managed to avoid this trap and get to the real emotions underneath. I would imagine that most people would be able to find someone to relate to in this book. I enjoyed it and was sorry to finish it.

I'm going to visit my boyfriend this weekend, so I'm not sure when I'll start a new one. As always, I will keep you posted!

This Week's Library Haul

So this afternoon, I had a wicked headache. The Simpsons reruns people fucked up and reran the same episode they had on Friday, so I quit fighting it, took a couple of aspirin and went down for a nap around 6, to try to sleep it off. I woke up at 9. It's now almost 2 here and I'm not even tired. Which means the same thing will happen tomorrow. So, I'm posting again, this time about my library visit this weekend. Miraculously, the mean librarian didn't bark the closing time at me the minute I walked through the door, snarl at me about my overdue fines, or shut the lights off on me when I was in the stacks.

So this is what I got. I really wanted Notes on a Scandal but they didn't have it. I will have to special-order. But I did wind up with:

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips (mostly because I wish I was one!)
The King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser
The Last of the Souther Girls by Willie Morris
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith (second time's the charm!)
Wish You Were Here by Stewart O'Nan

The last one is the one I started with. So far, it's pretty good. I got it because I liked his book The Circus Fire, and because it was set in Chatauqua, near where I grew up.

We'll see how I do with these. Last time, I got through all but two. I started Loon Lake by E.L Doctorow shortly before it was due, and it didn't move me enough to pay the fines on. I quit Salad Days when I realized it wasn't about the Douglas Fairbanks I was thinking of (I wanted to know about the silent-screen star who married Mary Pickford and built Pickfair; this was about his son). So four out of six isn't bad. Look for something on Stewart O'Nan's book later this week.

The Poisonwood Bible

Last week was such a stressful week. Although I had the book club book plus a couple of 14-day loans, I wanted comfort, not yet another mountain to climb after a long day. The size and subject matter of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver might make it seem like an odd choice under the circumstances, but not to me. I really love that book, and have read it repeatedly over the years. I recommend it to anyone who will listen. Tonight, that includes you.

To simply say that it's about an American family who travel to the Congo as missionaries and witness the end of colonial rule, the murder of the newly elected prime minister, and the installation of a ruthless and venal dictator is to strip all the meat off the bones of the book. Although that is its basic outline, it is not an "issue" novel, not set to cram lessons down your throat but to expose the facts in the intimately intertwined histories of the Price family and the Congo, and let readers decide for themselves where to lay their sympathies and blame.

The Price family has six members, and each, except for Nathan, gets the chance to tell their side. Nathan is the family's driving force, a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher determined to deliver salvation to the heathen Congolese through Jesus. His wife, Orleanna, married him at a young age, and is just trying to cope the best she can. Rachel is the eldest daughter and is what we called back in the fourth grade a "girly-girl": she frequently locked horns with her father on topics like nail polish, dating and skirt length. She is just shy of her 16th birthday at the opening of the book and her attempts to cope in the Congo, where they don't even have indoor plumbing, add levity to the more serious moments of the book.

Next in line at only 18 months younger than Rachel are twin girls, Leah and Adah. Both are extremely bright and academically oriented. Leah is outgoing and tomboyish, worshipful of her father, and religious. Adah suffers from hemiplegia. Her chapters are the most intriguing, for her affliction has freed her mind at the same time it's crippled her body. She can read and write backwards and forwards, and enjoys making up palindromes to suit the situation at hand. The book is her sole confidant; although she can speak, she elects not to, for the most part, and will write when she has something to say. Ruth May is the youngest of all, only five when the book opens, and views the world with a typical young child's perspective. As things go from bad to worse for the Price family and the Congo, she becomes a poignant symbol of sacrifice and loss of innocence.

And things do indeed, go from bad to worse. Epidemics of disease, plagues of driver ants, draught, famine and flood ravage the village of Kilanga where the Price family has set up housekeeping. Nathan is poorly suited to the work of witnessing to a foreign culture: he is a poor listener and a loud talker, and manages to alienate most everyone of influence within the village. This makes him angrier and more stubborn, harder on his family, and more determined to save every soul in Kilanga. Although most of the missionaries leave shortly after Independence, Nathan refuses to, despite the pleas of his family, even after tragedy strikes both the Prices and the new Republic of Congo, shattering the Price family and scattering them across two continents, never to reunite.

There are many, many things that are remarkable about this book. The characters are the main thing. They do pass the Maxwell Perkins test: if you were to meet Orleanna, Nathan, Leah, Adah, Rachel or Ruth May on the street, you would know them at once and know how you'd want to react. They are complex, they are "real people", defying easy judgement. You dismiss Rachel at first as merely the court jester, then condemn her as an opportunist, but ultimately come to understand her. Orleanna comes across at first as a stereotypical cowed, submissive housewife, but as her personal story unfolds, you admire her strength. Even tyrannical, cold Nathan, who hits has family and punishes his girls with The Verse (he gives them a Bible verse to start with and they have to copy that, and the next 100 verses, with the last one revealing their sin), becomes a more sympathetic figure when we learn that he was at Corregidor during World War II, and was the only man in his company to escape the Bataan Death March and to survive the war.

I also admire the technical achievements of this book. Kingsolver has done a staggering, wide-ranging amount of research into Congolese language, culture, history, and geography, and has been able to juxtapose it all with the Christian Bible. In Adah's chapters, it seems as though Kingsolver has trained several languages like you would a poodle: English, Kikongo, and French obligingly roll over, turn around backwards, shake hands and play dead in her able hands. To borrow a phrase from Rachel Price, it is a sheer tapestry of justice that Kingsolver didn't win the Pulitzer for this book. I give it my highest recommendation.

For All Those Stuck in a Rut

If the past few months have taught me anything, it's the frustration of living a stalled life. Sometimes the desperation overwhelms you to the point where you practically dive through the closed, second-story window in an escape attempt. Other times, the lethargy overwhelms you to the point where you sit in a chair for 45 minutes, debating the merits of making a cup of tea before you ultimately decide not to bother.

If you're in that situation -- unhappy but unable, for whatever reason, to make a change -- Everything Must Go by Elizabeth Flock might be a good read. the book tells the non-story of Henry Powell, a one-time high school football star who is now (and forever, it seems) an assistant at a moribund, locally-owned clothing shop. Henry had the chance to go to college, even went for a semester, but got recalled to home by his father, who was worried about his mother. He has been there ever since (he's close to 40 when the book closes), chatting with his former classmates when they drop in for the holidays, following their successes and failures in life, occasionally sneaking the quick drink at the local watering hole before checking in on his aging, failing parents.

The book hopscotches back and forth in time, giving the impression that so little happens in Henry's life that it's difficult to distinguish one year from another. And unlike many books about people stuck in ruts, Henry does not come thundering gloriously out of his, although the book does close on a hopeful note. Perhaps it's more realistic that way -- I think ruts are often endemic to people's personalities, especially a 15-year rut like the one Henry Powell experiences. Still, Henry has his dignity, and his small happinesses. He's never someone you warm up to -- he doesn't pass the Maxwell Perkins test of being able to recognize him on the street -- but you do root for him. I was shocked to realize halfway through, that I'd tried to write this exact short story acouple of years ago, without any luck. I swear that I'm not bitter that Flock succeeded where I did not.

If you're stuck in a rut, this book will not "cheer you up" in a simple manner. It will, more than likely, give you someone to feel superior to ("Holy shit: At least I managed to go on a few dates between the two Bush Administrations!" or "This job may not be much, but it's better than working in a decaying clothing store!"). It will also galvanize you to action. Not wanting to be another Henry Powell, you'll do what you can to ensure this rut is only a passing phase and not your life.

You are Doing a Puzzle

You are sitting at the table, with the pieces of the puzzle. You don't know what it's going to turn out to be, but the pieces are the prettiest pieces you've ever seen: magenta, electric blue, lime green, crimson, vermillion, shimmery gold, muted silver and cerulean. Lots and lots of cerulean. When you're finished, the picture they make is both so clear that you don't see how you could've missed it, and utterly, utterly beside the point.

So it is with reading Nicole Krauss's book,The History of Love. My friend Sophie recommended it to me a long time ago, and I finally got around to reading it. I was surprised to find, as I started the book, that I'd read part of it already: it was published in The New Yorker as a short story a few years ago.

The story follows the lives of two individuals who couldn't be more different. Leo Gursky is a Polish Jew, an old man, a retired locksmith. His story is very sad: his true love, from his village in Poland, escaped the Nazis and came to America before he did. She was pregnant with their child but did not know it at the time. He wrote her letters every day. She wrote him letters every day. Neither set connected with their recipient. By the time Leo managed to escape the Nazis, she had given up on him, and had married. Another man was raising Leo's son, and she had come to love him. Leo never did marry and was waiting to end his days alone, hoping only that he won't die on a day where no one has noticed him, and making petty scenes in public to ensure this.

Alma is a teenager. She lives with her brother, known as Bird, who believes he is a holy man and is constructing an ark in a vacant lot for the next great flood. Alma and Bird's father died when they were young. Their father was a wilderness expert and to honor his memory, Alma spends much of her time researching and writing about how to survive in the wilderness. Their mother, a translator, fell into a deep depression after her husband's death, from which she never really recovered.

The thread that binds Alma and Leo is an obscure book called The History of Love. I can't say too much more about how without ruining it for you, and I know I've made the story sound rather grim, but trust me when I assure you that it doesn't leave you feeling that way. There is a warmth, a realness, to both main characters. Their respective losses are a part of who they are, but they don't define them. The story doesn't come into focus until the final chapters, but like I said, it's almost beside the point. Alma, and Leo, themselves are the point of the story, and they are brilliant. I enjoyed this one a lot and will be sad to return it, despite the $13.75 in fines I recently learned that I owe, for various things.

Stop this Clock!

Plastic bags consumed this year:



This is how many plastic bags have been used this year alone. Ewwww!!! In honor of Earth Day, I'd like to encourage you all to visit http://www.reuseablebags.com and consider buying a tote to take to the store with you, or at least reusing your own plastic bags. I do this, and the morons around here always look at me like I've got three heads: "Um, do you, like want these bags, ma'am?" But that's OK. I was worried about this reaction until I saw a man a few years ago in the grocery store, who brought along his own bags like it was nothing. If I can be that person for someone else, it's worth having to explain to every idiot on the planet why there already are plastic bags on the belt with my groceries, and how they got there.

Counter courtesy of http://www.reuseablebags.com