Old Mole Reading List

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 17:40:00 +0000

Some of my reader friends who have read or heard a number of my reviews tease me by saying that apparently I’ve never met I book I didn’t like. It’s true that I almost never review books that I think are bad; the truth is that I almost never even bother to finish books that I don’t like. Why take the time to read and review bad books when there are so many excellent ones out there. Well over thirty years ago when I was living with a reader who had a hard time not finishing a book once she had started it (as if she owed something to the book), I decided instead to codify my practice of letting books fall from my hands unless they gripped and informed me. Whether ten pages in, half way through, or even four hundred pages into a monster five hundred page novel, I loved the feeling of letting them float free and beginning something else. Better to waste four hundred pages of reading time than five hundred! No sense compounding the wasting of time.

I’m making an exception today, because the novel, A Reliable Wife, has been a national bestseller for sometime, and as a favor to readers, I want to warn them away from it. It’s billed as “a thrilling, juicy read,” “suspenseful,” “intoxicating,” “[a] glittering, poisoned ice cube of a tale.” Well, I have to admit that there is some suspense involved, and it is certainly a poisoned tale, but it is not a good one in any sense of the word. The characters, all of them, are utterly unbelievable, and some of the events described so preposterous that one wonders how or why an author would include them. Try to imagine a rich and successful man who, upon finding that his mail-order bride is trying to poison him, simply allows the slow poisoning to continue, knowing he is dying, but out of some sort of perverse love or loyalty, he turns his body over to the nursing care of his slayer. Or try to picture this same couple, living together and in some distorted way loving each other, witnessing a death that is horrible (if deserved), but then speaking not a word to each other for days. Eating together, living together, but absolutely mute in each other’s presence.

I often criticize male writers for what I see as a failure to create real women characters, but I would have to say that in this novel, Catherine Lane, the mail-order bride, is the most believable of all the characters, and one with whom the reader can occasionally sympathize. But to say she is the most believable of the characters is not to say much. The most unbelievable character is the incredibly wealthy Ralph Truitt who owns most of the town and affects the economic livelihood not only of those townspeople who work for him but of virtually all of them. For reasons I won’t even try to explain, this man who could choose between many women, either local or from a city or country of his choice, places an ad in a Chicago newspaper looking for a reliable wife, and what do you know, a beautiful and apparently innocent women answers his ad. Not, at least for this reader, a very believable beginning, and yet I was able (for a time) to suspend disbelief. But this was only the first of a series of events that would tax the credulity of most serious readers.

As mysteries go, this one does keep the reader turning pages, but mostly because almost all of the important information is withheld from him—hidden cards in the hands off a conniving author who tricks the reader by withholding information and then springing it on him as a magician would pull rabbits from a hat. Good mysteries manage to drop clues, allow the reader to make inferences and to help in the solving of the mystery. Not Goolrick; he keeps the facts close to his vest, and uses them every hundred pages or so to pounce on the reader with some new outrageous revelation.

So, if this is a bad book, why has it gotten so much press and sold so many copies? Well, it is filled to the brim with steamy (unbelievable) sex. There is a beautiful woman in distress, never mind that she brings the distress on herself. There are many twists and turns, illegitimate children, near-incestuous love affairs, European-style palaces built in an icebound Midwestern town. And lets face it, many people read precisely because the story is so extraordinary, so unlike lived-life.

I have to question my own motives in finishing the book at all. NPR’s Morning Edition called the book engrossing and addictive, and I suppose it is addictive. Even when I was angriest with the book and the author, I wanted to find out what would happen. NPR also says the book “Will leave you both chilled and satisfied.” It left me cold and profoundly unsatisfied.

Incidentally, it’s not quite true that I never give books negative reviews. I thought that the apparently forever bestseller, The Help, was exploitative and unconvincing, and that in many ways it whitewashed the very racism it was allegedly exposing. Minrose Gwin wrote a far better novel, The Queen of Palmyra, about the same time period, and I suspect it failed to be a bestseller precisely because it was so much truer—so much less glitter and without a happy ending. It will not be made into a movie as The Help was, but that says more about general movie-going audiences than it does about the quality of the books.

I also reviewed one of the many Harry Potter novels, partly because the religious right was so up in arms about the witchcraft element of those entertaining if rather shallow books. I noted that compared to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter was rather pale both in content and writing expertise. So my record is not pure; I have met books I don’t like, or don’t like much. I simply refuse to finish them, and it would seem unfair to review a book I had not even bothered to finish.

And now I intend to return to my regular ways and review almost only books that I think are really good, and why not, there are so many of them.

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The Little Bride by Anna Solomon

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:59:00 +0000

Some works of fiction leave the reader marveling over the imaginative powers of the author; such is the case with Anna Solomon’s debut novel, The Little Bride. We are introduced to the lead-character, Minna Losk, when she is sixteen and living in Odessa as a servant girl, but about to travel to America as a mail-order bride to an orthodox Jewish man more than twice her age. The time period is the tail end of the 19th century, and Minna hopes to escape not only the pogroms targeting Russian Jews but also the daily drudgery of physical labor involved in providing everything for a once wealthy Jewish woman whose wealth and health had deteriorated long before Minna at eleven years of age began to care for her.

While it is obvious that Solomon did a lot of research about the homesteading of Jews in the American west as well as of mail-order brides sent from Russia and other European cities to homesteading Jews, I am still stunned by her incredible imagination in creating and describing the journey of young Minna from Odessa to a sod house in South Dakota. The reader is introduced to Minna as she is undergoing a physical exam that has been mandated by her to-be rigorously orthodox husband. Shy and almost totally ignorant of sexual matters, she is subjected to a physical inspection by a Jewish doctor and his female assistant that Minna is later to describe as being inspected like a horse. Stripped and prodded and questioned in a cold, dark room, subjected to indignities that she had not even imagined, before finally receiving the stamp of approval: “’Unremarkable,’ said the doctor, and the hands closed Minna’s legs.”

From the dismal descriptions of a Jewish ghetto in Odessa where the inhabitants live in near constant fear of the next night-time raid by Russian soldiers, the reader travels with Minna across the Atlantic, steerage class, when nearly all the desperately poor emigrants are sea sick from the first day to the last, many dying before they reach the promised land. Minna sees New York for a day, sees Chicago from the windows of a train, and still dreams that a wealthy and handsome husband awaits her at the end of her journey. Instead, from boat to train, train to wagon and a trip though grasslands seemingly as vast as the ocean she just crossed until she arrives finally not at the fine house she had hoped for, but a rough sod house dug out of a hill in the flat sea of grass—dirt walls and floors, two step-sons, one of whom is older than Minna, and Max, her ultra orthodox husband who knows almost nothing about farming but who intends to create the new Jerusalam.

The men washed themselves in the same bucket she used to wash the dishes. The outhouse was made of crates, and stood only a few feet from the cave. There was little, within a few days, that Minna didn’t know of their habits and smells and noises. And yet no one had asked where she was born, or whether she had siblings or parents or any family at all, or what she had done with her life up until now.

I have to admit that this is a book I could not wait to finish, not because of curiosity about how it would end or wanting to read more of Minna’s bravery and endurance, but because of how utterly real and convincing Solomon’s descriptions are. While I admired the author’s incredible talents and Minna’s courage, I wanted to escape from the world that was being described to me. Like Minna, I wanted to be free, to breathe, to live.

Although raised as a Jew, Minna’s father was not orthodox, not really even a believer, so it comes as a series of shocks to Minna to see what is expected of her, what is expected of wives and woman even here in this new country. She does recall once as a child trying to follow her father into the men’s section of the synagogue, recalls the shame of being hauled out by the elbow and led to the dingy, lace-curtained women’s room in the back.

Minna cried until the woman next to her grabbed her hand, and leaned down to explain, in a friendly hush: “The man’s body? Contains his mind. The woman’s? Only a body. We are body bodies. Yes? Understand?”

Minna had not understood. But she remembered. And over the years she’d seen how her body became a body body. Each swell of flesh, each darkening, each sudden hair that appeared full blown, like a black moth from a chrysalis, made her more powerful and doomed. This was what made Max shake, she knew. To him, Minna was dangerous simply because she was she, and he was he.

Of course, I’m not going to tell you how this story ends, nor even try to describe the incredibly harsh winter Minna suffers through during her first year in the sod house—the cold, the hunger, the isolation from the world. Solomon describes everything with an eye to detail that makes this read like memoir. Remarkably, Minna does not hate these men whom she has been thrown together with, and she certainly understands them better than they understand her. One commentator described this as a love story, and while I think that is the height of hyperbole, Solomon does create a character who sees so much more than her own misery. Speaking of that horrendous, seemingly everlasting winter.

A calm fell over her limbs. She wondered if this was prayer. If prayer was nothing more than a giving in, like sickness—if you weren’t required to believe, only to stop struggling. The exercise grew familiar. The boys grew hair on their faces. And though Samuel’s was a full beard, and Jacob’s a layer of fuzz like a playactor might draw on, the hair made them look alike, and like Max, and Minna gave in to their merging, their repetition, as she gave in to the repetition of hunger. She knew that she loved them, the beards, the bodies, the men themselves. She saw them out of the corners of her eyes, she brushed them as she passed. They were furniture. You could love anyone, she thought, if you needed to. And in a curious way, not in spite of her need but because of it, because she was hungry and trapped, she felt safe.

I don’t think I have to add that this is not a happy book, perhaps not one to read on a dark winter’s night. But it is nevertheless a wonderful book, and I think we can expect great things from this writer.

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36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:30:00 +0000

If you ever look closely at the rational arguments for the existence of some god or other, I think you will find that only those who already believe on grounds quite other than reason or argument tend to be impressed by the arguments. The arguments, sometimes called proofs, are afterthoughts given to buoy up beliefs and to give them a patina of rationality. Rebecca Goldstein, who got her PhD. in philosophy from Princeton, is well aware of the above, but she also realizes how the lived life of religion, what some have called the phenomenology of religion, is far more important than rational arguments for or against the existence of a God. To put it another way, the psychology of religious belief is far more important and interesting than the logic of religious belief.

In her highly amusing and clever novel, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Goldstein has a lot to tell us about what has been dubbed evangelical atheism, Hasidic Judaism, some of the many absurdities of academic life, the current state of analytic philosophy, the split between reason and emotion, and much, much more.

Goldstein’s main character, Cass Seltzer, is a professor of psychology in a small eastern college which, like so many small colleges and state universities, suffers from what some have called the ‘little Princeton syndrome’. In its attempt to achieve the elevated status of a Princeton or Harvard or Yale, the mythical Frankfurter University lures big name academicians with promises of light workloads, generous salaries, lush offices and other perks. Jonas Elijah Klapper, as pompous and didactic as his name suggests, is one such academician hired by Frankfurter. Klapper’s encyclopedic memory and his love affair with himself have catapulted him to fame. The novel jumps back and forth between the mature and newly famous Cass Seltzer who has just written a book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, and the much younger Cass who, while struggling along as a premed student, finds himself bowled over by the excitement and breadth of the history of ideas, and more particularly by the compendious mind of the already famous Jonas Elijah Klapper. He changes his major and his university in order to sit at the feet of the intellectual giant.

The other central characters in the book are Cass’s early girlfriend, Rozlyn Margolis, who resurfaces in his life after he has become famous, and Lucinda Mandelbaum, “known in her world as ‘the Goddess of Game Theory.’ Lucinda is, pure and simple, a wondrous creature, with adoration her due and Cass’s avocation.” The beautiful and mathematically talented Lucinda, while trying to leverage more money and more privileges from Princeton by threatening to accept a monetarily huge offer from little Frankfurter, finds herself outmaneuvered and ends up, much to her dismay, in the psychology department of Frankfurter with the newly famous Cass.

While the novel suffers to some extent by overblown, one-dimensional characters, none of whom is quite believable, the underlying themes in psychology of religion, and insights into academic wars currently raging between computer driven number worship and an older humanistic view of the history of ideas, make up for the stylistic weaknesses of the book. It is no mistake that the title of Cass’s book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion is so close to William James’ famous, The Varieties of Religious Experience and Sigmund Freud’s essay "The Future of an Illusion". Although James was all in all unimpressed with the so-called proofs for the existence of God, he was very interested in what might be called the religious temperament and religious experience. Cass is adored by many undergraduates as well as intellectuals sympathetic to what has been dubbed evangelical atheism, but he, himself, is not really an ardent atheist, nor is he immune to the attractions of religious life. I think we can say the same for Goldstein. Her dismantling of the 36 arguments in an appendix to the novel is both insightful and amusing, and quite clearly she does not think reason can take us far towards religious belief. But that hardly ends the matter for her, since she sees clearly that logic has so little to do with religious belief or religious lives.

One central character whom I have not yet mentioned is a brilliant young Jewish boy, son of an Hasidic Rabbi and heir to the leadership of an isolated Hasidic community. His name is Azarya, and at the age of six he exhibits a mathematical genius that astounds Roz and Cass. It is quite obvious that Goldstein, who is herself gifted with a wonderful analytic and mathematical mind, is intrigued by mathematical and musical geniuses who seem almost to be born with their prodigious talents. Certain that his tremendous mathematical talents will wither and die if he remains in the isolated community of New Walden, when Azarya is sixteen Roz and Cass find a way to hook him up with a famous mathematician at Columbia who is equally impressed with his intellectual promise. But as Azarya himself sees, while it is necessary for him to leave New Walden if he is to prosper as a mathematician, it is impossible for him to leave his people and his role as future leader and Rabbi. And while it is in some sense impossible for him to remain in New Walden (he is not himself a believer in God), it is necessary—as a debt to his loved father and his loved community. An unresolvable paradox, impossible and yet necessary, necessary and yet impossible.

I read this book with a colleague of mine, and we found ourselves wondering why Azarya and New Walden were brought into the novel at all, since it seemed almost an appendage to the main storyline. But in retrospect, I think that Azarya characterizes a split in Goldstein herself, and a living proof that the logic of religious belief has so little to do with the lived life of religion or with the psychology of religion. No doubt Goldstein uses Azarya and New Walden to talk about the dangerous intellectual narrowness of fundamentalist religious beliefs and communities, but also to bring up the psychological benefits of religious community. Whatever she believes about the existence of God or the powers of reason to establish God’s existence, she is culturally Jewish (as are her main characters)—to leave behind the beliefs is not to leave behind the culture.

I have not said much yet about the bombastic Jonas Elijah Klapper or the very funny and irreverent Rozlyn Margolis, but both play very significant roles in the novel. Roz calls the allegedly great man simply The Klapp, and tries to warn Cass early on that his near worship of Klapper will lead to nothing good. We in academia have met many Jonas Elijah Klappers, and while it is easy to laugh at him and his pretensions, Goldstein also gives him some great lines and uses him as a mouthpiece for her own humorous asides about the Academy.

This is not a great novel, but it is often very funny and it contains much of importance about religious experience and warns against a too quick rejection of all that is so-called ‘spiritual’. There is a wonderful mind at work in this novel, not Jonas Elijah Klapper’s, but Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s, and it is well worth the read.

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The Sisters From Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 19:22:00 +0000

Good morning, I want to talk to you this morning about a wonderful little collection of stories by a woman who died years before they were published. Thanks to the perseverance of her husband and the endorsement of a number of well-known writers, the stories were finally published in 2010 under the title, The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay.

Beverly Jensen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2002 and died in 2003. She told her husband, Jay Silverman, that she felt she had been given writing talents but had not used them. In fact, over a period of sixteen years, between her part time office job and the raising of her two daughters, she had written a number of stories about her mother, Idella, and her aunt Avis. She had written them for herself, but after her diagnosis, she made copies for her two teenaged children and her three sisters.

With the help of Elizabeth Strout, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Russo and finally Stephen King, Jay Silverman managed to get the stories published. This little book is as much a tribute to his love and dedication as it is a celebration of Jensen’s story-telling talents.

The stories begin in 1916, when Idella is eight and Avis almost six. The setting is New Brunswick, Canada on a tiny farm on impossibly rocky soil near the sea. Their father had built it with help from his brother. “He put it on the high cliff overlooking the bay that pounded and raged beneath them. Mother had wanted it there…All the houses were slanted and gray and sparse-looking, sticking up out of the flat land like rotten teeth.”

The two girls share the little house and farm with their parents and one older brother, Dalton, their father insisting that he literally has to push the potatoes up out of the ground, and that the rocks multiply over night no matter how much time he spends clearing them. Already a hardscrabble life, when their mother dies after giving birth to yet another child, the two little girls are left to cook and clean for their father and older brother, the new baby sent off to live with relatives.

The two older girls get some respite from the almost impossibly hard life on the farm when they are eventually sent to live on another relative’s New England farm, a time during which they are able to attend school. But when they are still only eleven and thirteen, a hunting accident leaves their father bedridden for many months, and the girls have to return to New Brunswick.

Home. Back to the house and barn on top of the cliff overlooking the Bay Chaleur. What few trees there were about the house were all leaned over and bent from the cold, constant pressures of the winds that blew off the water. That’s how the people got, Idella thought, from living up there their whole lives—bent over and gnarled and hard, rooted in one place. The wind worked on people the same as it did on trees. It howled and bit, especially in winter, and scraped away at you. There was nothing to do but buckle over and try to get where you were going, which was never very far—to the barn or the field or the buggy to New Bandon, two miles down the road.

In spite of the hard lives, the light and laughter that shine through these stories as the two sisters travel back and forth between Canada and New England is enchanting. Tough girls who have learned from their own father and the men they grow up around just how mean and dangerous men can be, they nevertheless manage to carve out lives for themselves and to tame the men whom they allow to join them on their journeys.

I can only imagine how many times Beverly Jensen listened to her mother, Idella, telling stories about her beautiful sister Avis and the wild times they had. Each retelling planting some new seed in her daughter’s mind, providing some delicious new detail about the lives of these sisters welded together by struggle, but also by daring and a thirst for more life, for a different life.

While the men are hard working, hard drinking, and difficult to live with, the portraits painted by Jensen and derived from her mother’s stories are also forgiving and compassionate. The girls’ father sends them off to New England not because he wants to be free of them, but because he realizes that life without their mother is impossibly hard; the love he shows for his lost wife is luminescent. And he calls them back home only because he is bedridden and cannot keep the house and farm going without them. He sees the fear he inspires in his own daughters, but simply cannot be other than he is.

These days he knew that the sound of his boots was a different thing. There was some poor French girl on hand to hear them. Or Idella and Avis, poor mutts, in there trying to scrape something together for his supper. He scared them all. He couldn’t help himself. It was seeing them scurry around the table trying to put food out, afraid to look at him for fear he’d light into them, that brought it on—the temper, the hurt, the anger at the goddamned world that had taken Emma away and left him alone. It wasn’t them he’d be mad at. But it was them that got the brunt.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking of the hardscrabble lives these girls led, but what I came away with as a reader was the joy they shared, the strength they manifested and expected of themselves and of each other. These stories of ordinary people carving out lives in what can only be called dire circumstances are uplifting and somehow serve as social-political commentary as certainly as if they had been written as manifestos. I recommend them to you wholeheartedly. If you like Elizabeth Strout and Alice Munro, you will like Beverly Jensen.

Love Child by Sheila Kohler

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:56:00 +0000

Try to imagine yourself at seventeen, madly in love with a boy not much older than you, but knowing that because he is Jewish, and you the daughter of a not wealthy but nevertheless haughty, authoritarian father, you will never be able to openly date or marry your boy. The time is 1925, the place South Africa, and the young woman with the rather odd name of Bill is poised to grasp her freedom and elope. This is the setting for Sheila Kohler’s lovely but sad novel Love Child.

The reader is first introduced to Bill thirty years later when she is a very rich widow, living alone with her trusted servant and looking back over her life. The novel then jumps back and forth between Bill’s life in 1925, 1935, and the present, 1956. The elopement with her young man Isaac ends sadly and abruptly. She has made the mistake of seeking temporary shelter and a witness to their marriage by driving with Isaac to Johannesburg where her three much loved aunts live. Certain that the aunts will understand her deep love for Isaac and help the young couple in whatever ways they can, she discovers instead that their first allegiance is to Bill’s father, their brother; without Bill’s knowledge, her parents are summoned, and when they arrive, they quickly scare off the young man with threats of calling in the law. The marriage is annulled, and Bill is quite literally left prisoner with the three aunts. The one night consummation of their marriage leaves Bill not only an unwilling prisoner but also pregnant. The three aunts have been left the house in which they live and a very modest inheritance on the condition that they never marry, and now the aunts find themselves the unwilling captors of their renegade niece.

She gathered she was a source of embarrassment, a perpetual reminder of what they had forgone. She only added a burden to their already strained circumstances, not only the risk of scandal and shame but also, quite simply, another mouth to feed. The aunts came to regard her, she understood, as a daily affront to all they considered sacred: honor, dignity, and pride, to their upright and cloistered way of life. She was nothing but trouble, trouble brought on them by her thoughtlessness, her lack of control, a weakness of will, her moral deficiency.

Bill is held prisoner until she has her girl-child, and then without her realizing quite what is happening, the infant is whisked away the very night she is born and sold to a woman who runs an illegal adoption service. But Bill learns the details of this transaction thirty years later, and only then begins a search for her baby, her love-child.

Kohler is such a skillful storyteller that most readers will, I think, be captivated by the story and only slowly come to see that this is really a book about the subordination of women. Over time, Bill comes to see that her now hated aunts are as much victims of male ownership as Bill and her sisters are, and ten years later, when Bill takes the job of companion to a rich woman who is rather mysteriously ill and incapacitated, she comes to understand that it is not only poor women who are owned and controlled by men. Helen, the woman whom she is hired to look after, is the beautiful wife of a jealous and controlling husband. It takes Bill months to come to realize that Helen sees Bill not as a needed companion, but as a jailer and spy. The husband calls Bill to his study and entrusts her with the keys to house, the larder, the liquor cabinet, not because his wife is too frail to oversee her house and servants, but because he needs to control her in every way. Helen, despondent to the point of being suicidal, must not be allowed to drink alcohol, must not venture out on her own. What Bill first sees as protective love for his fragile wife, she learns soon enough to see as suffocating control.

“What’s the point of it all?” Helen asked at last. She said her whole body ached as if she had the flu. “If you knew what it was like to wake each morning and find yourself there with the same dull ache,” she said despairingly. She went on talking of the absurdity of her life, the pointlessness of her existence, with all these servants, who did everything for her. She said nothing appealed to her. What purpose would it serve: It all seemed senseless.

Bill comes to hate her role as jailer, and decides as far as possible to give Helen her freedom. But she understands all too well that she must be discreet in her granting of freedom, that she will simply be replaced by a new keeper if the husband is made aware of the conspiracy of the women in his house. Not only Bill, but her sisters, her brother, her entire family have become dependent on the money that Bill brings in from her job as companion.

As she comes to trust Bill more and more, Helen reveals how she was wooed and won by her rich husband, Mark. Helen has a son from a previous marriage; her husband died suddenly leaving her with a small boy “and a mountain of debt.” Although she had been a musical prodigy as a child, she was not talented enough to be a concert pianist. She had written some, even published, but is not even skilled enough as a typist to get a secretarial job. Mark rescues her, takes care of her son (though insisting that the son be sent off to boarding school), but the price is high.

He insisted on her being present whenever he needed her. She was never free to live her own life. She had to attend all his business dinners, his endless trips, to go to bed and to rise when he did…He insisted on sex at odd moments and in odd places…He would rip at her clothes, and thrust himself into her from behind like a wild beast…Afterward, she would get into the bath and scrub at her skin until it was pink, to get rid of his smell, his lingering presence, her shame.

Over time, Mark draws Bill into a kind of ménage a trois; she stays both because she and her family have become dependent on her income, and because she understands that she can help Helen only if she remains in her position. Eventually, as Mark comes to desire Bill more and more, demanding more and more liberties with her, they work out an odd and distorted agreement. Bill’s brother has counseled her to use Mark’s need and lust as leverage, to give him what he wants only in return for a stiff price. Although Helen remains in the house, she and her son still provided for, she grants Mark a divorce so that he can marry Bill and legitimize their relationship.

Bill also gives Mark what Helen could not—two sons who will carry on his name. When he, too, dies rather young and unexpectedly, Bill is left a very rich woman. Loveless but wealthy, her two sons away at school and distant from her both in interests and temperament, Bill is consumed by memories of that early and hopeless love for Isaac and of the love-child who was snatched from her.

Bill thinks again with sorrow of the important role of all the women in her life: the three maiden aunts, Gladys, her sisters, her mother, and Helen, of the secrets they have hidden, the silences they have kept, the lies they have told.

If you want to discover how she finally takes her revenge on her husband, her father, all the power-hungry men in her life, you’ll have to read the book.

The Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:47:00 +0000

It always feels a bit like magic to be swept away by a new author, caught up in the lives of fictional characters so thoroughly that they seem in many ways more real than the folks one is dealing with everyday. Maggie O’Farrell is a writer of extraordinary gifts, and although her 2010 novel, The Hand That First Held Mine, is the first book of hers that I’ve read, I intend to read everything she has written or will write. Indeed, I am now almost finished with an earlier novel of hers, and as impressed as I was with the book I’m discussing today.

This is really two very separate stories of women who live about a half century apart. We meet Alexandra Sinclair in the mid 1950s when she is twenty-one and just as her life is about to change forever along with her name. She is discovered by Innes Kent, thirty-four, an art collector and editor of a small art magazine, as she lies reading in her backyard in a small town in England. The oldest of several children, she feels constricted, claustrophobic, and somehow in limbo as she waits for her real life to begin. Turning her gaze from the overcrowded house she has grown up in, “She keeps only the sea in her sights. She has had a creeping fear of late that what she wants most—for her life to begin, to take on some meaning, to turn from blurred monochrome into glorious technicolour—may pass her by. That she might not recognize it if it comes her way, may fail to grasp for it.”

Within moments of this thought, Innes stumbles onto her; his car has broken down on a country lane, and while seeking help—a garage or at least a telephone—he spies the beautiful Alexandra. And although their conversation is soon interrupted by her suspicious mother, before he leaves the small town, Innes manages to slip her a note with his London phone number on it and a suggestion for a new name. Not Sandra, the shortened form of her given name adopted by her family although hated by her, but Lexie, a name more in keeping with the bright and energetic journalist and lover of Innes that she is about to become.

Next on stage, fifty years or so later, we meet Elina Vilkuna, a talented young artist who has nearly died just four days earlier while giving birth to a son via Cesarean section. After these two introductions, the novel jumps back and forth between the two women and the men in their lives. While the reader has some inkling that the two lives will in some way intersect eventually, part of the intrigue of the novel is trying to unravel the mystery that connects the two women. Both women are bright, both think primarily of their careers, their quests for meaning, and both find men (on the whole) to be a distraction from those quests rather than a fulfillment.

One thing that unites the women is that both find themselves pregnant without having chosen that course, and both find themselves not only unprepared for motherhood, but overwhelmed by it. Ted, the father of Elina’s son, is also thunderstruck by the birth of his son, but not so much by the burdens of fatherhood as by strange, unbidden memories that begin to surface—memories that seem to have nothing to do with the story of his life as presented by his parents, and indeed, some of which seem even to contradict that story. Elina finds herself dealing not only with her own weakened condition and a new baby, but with a psychologically fragile and oddly distant mate.

This novel is enchanting in so many ways; the language is rich and painterly. The descriptions of London life in the 50s and early 60s, and especially of the painters who congregated there, are fascinating. But while there are many threads in the novel, for me it is primarily the intensity of the two female lead characters and their reactions to motherhood that leave a lasting impression.

No doubt parenting profoundly alters the lives of both female and male parents, but I find that I can scarcely even imagine what it must be like for women, especially for women who never see motherhood as even a goal, let alone the goal, of their lives. O’Farrells descriptions of the early days of mothering are frightening, sometimes horrific, but also spellbinding. She talks about the special form of blinding love that some mothers have for their offspring so clearly that even I, an old and quite ignorant man, can grasp something of its ineffable significance. When Ted’s father asks Elina about how she is finding the whole baby thing, she wonders how to reply.

‘Well’ She considers what to say. Should she mention the nights spent awake, the number of times she must wash her hands in a day, the endless drying and folding of tiny clothes, nappies, wipes, the scar tissue across her abdomen, crooked and leering, the utter loneliness of it all, the hours she spends kneeling on the floor, a rattle or a bell or a fabric block in her hands, that she sometimes gets the urge to stop older women in the street and say, how did you do it, how did you live through it? Or she could mention that she had been unprepared for this fierce spring in her, this feeling that isn’t covered by the word ‘love’, which is far too small for it, that sometimes she thinks she might faint with the urgency of her feeling for him, that sometimes she misses him desperately even when he is right there, that it’s like a form of madness, of possession, that often she has to creep into the room when he has fallen asleep just to look at him, to check, to whisper to him. But instead, she says, ‘Fine. Good, thanks’

Lexie and Elina, both passionate about what they do, both quite content being childless, and yet both metamorphosed by motherhood. I love both characters, wish that I could know them. I have not mentioned, of course, the mystery that unties them, nor do I intend to. Suffice it to say that it is not an artificial hook to keep the reader interested. The mystery and its solution are integral to the story and to its worth. I hope you will read the book and solve the mystery for yourself.

The Bad Girl by Mario Vargas Llosa

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:10:00 +0000

Most of you who are avid readers will already have read one of the many novels by the Nobel Prize winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa. For some reason, I had not been introduced to him until picking up a copy of his 2006 novel The Bad Girl. The ethicist and novelist Iris Murdoch reminds us again and again that egoistic selfishness is only one of many ways of being morally blind. As she shows us in novel after novel, anger, resentment, grief, infatuation, hatred, lust, all can return the gaze to the self in ways that make attention to others, which she sees as the essence of morality, impossible. I have to admit that for the first hundred pages or so of The Bad Girl, I saw this novel as simply another example of how so-called love (really obsessive infatuation) can lead one away from the social-political world and into self-absorption. And this is one very plausible interpretation/explanation of the entire novel. However, I think a careful reading shows clearly that the author, if not his lead character, has a keen eye on the political and social turmoil not only of his native country Peru, but of all of South America and ultimately of Europe and the world from the 1960s to the present.

The story-line is deceptively simple: Ricardo Somocurcio, a young Peruvian boy, falls in love with Lily, a mischievous, full-of-life Peruvian girl who appears in his life one summer with a story about coming from a wealthy family in Chile—the first of many stories and made-up backgrounds that she is to tell him over a lifetime. Ricardo has a rather simple ambition, which is to go to Paris to be educated, and then to live out his life there in what to him is the most glamorous and wonderful city in the world. He does not desire great wealth, or power, or even erudition; he simply wants to be a Parisian. From the first, Lily finds this an impoverished ambition; she wants to be rich, very rich, and to live in a style that only the rich can live.

This is the summer of 1950, and Ricardo is fifteen. Soon enough, the summer is over, and the lie about the wealthy Chilean background is uncovered; Lily and her sister are nothing but very poor Peruvians from a small, insignificant village. They soon disappear from the larger city Ricardo lives in and are forgotten by all but Ricardo:

I keep her in my memory, and evoke her again and again at times, and hear her mischievous laugh and see the mocking glance of her eyes the color of dark honey, and watch her swaying like a reed to the rhythms of the mambo.

Ricardo realizes his dream of moving to Paris, and because of a relatively easy command of languages, becomes an interpreter for UNESCO. In Paris he meets again one of the many incarnations of Lily, this time as Comrade Arlette, a freedom fighter who has been awarded a kind of scholarship to go to Cuba and receive guerilla training. Ricardo finds out quickly that Lily has had no conversion to political awareness, but has simply used the scholarship process as a way of escaping Peru and poverty. Because of passport and identity problems, she ends up having to remain with the other scholarship recipients and actually leaves for Cuba despite begging Ricardo to find a way to rescue her. And thus begins a series of perhaps incredible coincidences that bring Lily back into his life again and again over the next forty years, each time with a different name and very different economic circumstances, usually as wife or mistress to a rich and powerful man who has fallen for her flamboyant charms.

He knows her as Madame Arnoux, when she is married to a semi-wealthy Parisian, who himself stole her away from a Cuban military officer. And again as Mrs. Richardson, the wife of an even wealthier British businessman. And later still in Japan as the mistress of a rich and powerful Japanese man, Fukuda.

However, what is really interesting about this novel (quite apart from Ricardo’s obsession with the many Lilies), is the commentary Llosa gives of political and social life in Paris of the 60s, London of the 70s, and of world events from the 50s through the turn of the century as seen through the eyes of a Peruvian. Very little is said of the United States, partly because it seems such a politically backward and unenlightened country—increasingly powerful economically, but so conservative politically that it only adds to the economic woes of South Americans and of poor, disenfranchised people around the world. It is certainly not seen as the beacon of democracy and freedom.

I am no doubt betraying my own political myopia when I confess that I felt a great let-down in the 70s with the dissolution of the so-called new-left in this country and the abandonment of the high hopes for significant cultural and economic revolution that occurred as the Viet Nam war ended. Writers like Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and many others) revealed to me the much larger and longer struggles against economic oppression that had been going on all through the 20th century, continuing on into this one. Llosa’s novel again reminds me of a bigger picture and the need for continued struggle.

The hero of this novel is almost the same age as I, and he witnessed the same world events. While his eye is trained particularly to Peru and the nearly constant political upheavals that have occurred there since the 50s, by moving his hero to Paris and then having him work as a translator in London, Russia, and Japan, Llosa enables us to get beyond a narrow American-eye-view of both culture and politics. I find that not only refreshing, but also more hopeful and less pessimistic. Ricardo sees the declining influence of the Soviet inspired Communist Party in France, but also birth of “a left more modern than the French Communist Party.” In London in the second half of the 60s, he saw “the emergence of homosexuals from the closet, gay pride campaigns, as well as a total rejection of the bourgeois establishment, in the name not of the socialist revolution, to which the hippies were indifferent, but of a hedonistic and anarchic pacifism, tamed by a love for nature and animals and a disavowal of traditional morality.” He sees the rise of structuralism “in the style of Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, and then the deconstructionists like Gilles Deluze and Jacques Derrida, with their arrogant, esoteric rhetoric, isolated in cabals of devotees and removed from the general pubic, whose cultural life, as a consequence of this development, became increasingly banal.”

Yes, this is a simple, even a demented, love story, but it is also a long look at fifty years of cultural and political struggle. Lily, the bad girl, repeatedly refers to Ricardo as ‘the good boy,’ both because of his stubborn loyalty and his refusal to sacrifice his life to the pursuit of riches and power. And while Ricardo is neither a political hero nor a champion of the good, he does give us readers a broad view and in-the-end hopeful view of the world.

Hungry For The World by Kim Barnes

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 12:42:00 +0000

By the time I was thirteen…I would have come to understand that it was Eve who desired the fruit and its store of hidden knowledge, Eve who had damned us all from the Garden. Years away from that child sleeping in her mother’s arms, I would enter into my young woman’s life knowing these two things: by my gender I was cursed, and my mind would destroy me.

This we learn from Kim Barnes near the very beginning of her chilling memoir, Hungry for the World. Those of us who have escaped from fundamentalist upbringings immediately recognize a kindred spirit in this often heart-wrenching account, and cheer mightily as she tears herself free of the Pentecostal church and the well-meaning but authoritarian father who see’s himself as God’s appointed caretaker of his wife and children, especially his female children.

As a woman, she must compensate for the flaw of her gender by extreme modesty. Her hair was her glory and could not be shorn. For a woman to don pants shocked the male’s superior station. Her arms must be covered, her shoulders, her knees—any part of her that might entice, intrigue, attract, cause another to sin. Silence was her virtue.

For most of her young life, Kim is a dutiful daughter. She admires her nature-loving father and wants both to please him and to be like him. But one of his exhortations to her is to use her mind, to question and think for herself, and this seems to contradict the unflagging obedience that is demanded of her. She describes herself as being “ravenous for words.”

Words were jewels to be turned and examined for every facet, every refraction of light. The only absolutes were the legalities of my faith—the rules for behavior and salvation—and my father’s authority, his word that could not be questioned.

I wonder now if my father may have foreseen that the analytical skills with which he engendered me might someday lead me away from the beliefs he himself embraced. For even as he insisted that I think for myself, he cautioned me against thinking too much. To think was to know, but the desire to know more than had been granted was blasphemy.

Believing as her church told her that she was one of the chosen few and that “God would return to gather His chosen ones home…Dancing was a sin, as were smoking, drinking, rock and roll, swimming with the opposite sex,” she endeavored to make herself pure, to conquer the hunger for life that led her to books and to impure thoughts. After an early outbreak of will and disobedience led to her being sent away, banished for a summer to the home of a preacher who would try to save her from herself, she is reborn to her faith.

I remember how I lay on the floor of my narrow room and cried, then prayed. I felt the weight that was all my sins and worries and cares press me down, then fall away. It happens just this way: one moment, the horrid drunkenness of a life not right, of a soul bloated by neglect and transgression; the next, a feeling of lightness and sharp cleansing. Simply by letting go of my will, my stubborn refusal to submit, I’d been unbound, reborn to the Kingdom of God.

But her rebirth does not last; tempted by a boy in her church to touch in forbidden ways, she soon finds that she has not only alienated her father, but has simply been delivered into the hands of another boy-man who insists that he must determine her boundaries; she learns also that men are dangerous if they become angry. The lesson comes home yet again, “Above all, I must, for the length of my woman’s life, give myself over to the direction of another.”

Although a bright student with what seems to be a promising future in college and beyond, when she refuses absolute obedience to her father, she has to leave his home shortly after graduating high school.

Up to this point in her account of her young life, I was simply enthralled, by her skill as a writer, by her courage in going her own way, thinking for herself and rejecting the absurd and narrow dictates of her church and her father. I could hardly wait to finish her memoir and to encourage others to read it. But although she manages to leave both church and father, she remains so self-absorbed in her own struggle for identity that she appears not to notice the political world around her or the ways in which her struggles are a part of much larger struggles against economic oppression, sexism, and racism. She finds men who allow her to be like them, to hunt with them, drink with them, indulge in sexual desire, but she realizes almost nothing about the larger world that the reader supposes she hungered for.

In fact, she finally falls for an older man, David, who is very much like her father in wanting her total submission to his will; and again she decides that somehow her freedom, her identity, is to be found via submission to his kinky sexual appetites. She seems really to have learned very little from her break from religious fundamentalism. David is not only an avid hunter, he is cruel. He kills animals that he cannot eat, including an owl that he so wants to posses that he shoots it, has it stuffed, and puts it on his mantel as a show of his power. Together they shoot songbirds out of the sky; “I followed David’s lead, blowing the early monarchs and lacewings into velvet tatters. I remember being made uneasy by such casual cruelty, but I dared not protest. Just as when I’d watched John sight in the starlings and inky ravens, I knew that any emotional response on my part would compromise the place I held in the company of men.”

David wants her to submit to his will completely. If he needs her to give herself to other men (showing them the prize that belongs to him), she is to do it. She is not to question what he does when not with her, whom he sleeps with. And for almost all of the remainder of the memoir, we read of how she adjusts to the needs of the men in her life.

There is finally a hint of genuine consciousness towards the end of the book, a dawning realization that her struggle is like the struggle of others.

I lay on my bed, surrounded by my guns, my marksmanship medals, my karate certificates, library books piled high on the nightstand, at the bottom a copy of Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I did not yet know how this book would give me my first true taste of political awareness, how it would make me see my struggle in larger terms, give me membership in a common sisterhood.

She does go back to school, does become the writer who produces this memoir, but while I admire her skills as a writer, I remain skeptical of her wisdom and her understanding of political realities. For this reader, she is still the girl who wants to please her father and the cruel men in her life, even if that means taking on the very characteristics that forced her rebellion. Perhaps we will see how her escape and salvation play out in a subsequent memoir.

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:25:00 +0000

I want to talk to you this morning about an exquisitely simple and beautiful little book by the Norwegian author Per Petterson entitled Out Stealing Horses. On the surface, the story is about a sixty-seven year old man who decides to drastically simplify his life by moving to a rustic cabin in a small Norwegian town away from the city life he has known for most of his life. The reader friend who recommended this book to me called it a “quiet” novel, and I can’t think of a more apt description for this story of love between a father and his son. The pace is as quiet and slow as the life of the man, Trond Sander, but beneath the solitude and quiet of the approaching winter lies the tumult of his inner life where past, present, and anticipated future tumble and flow and boil like the river at the doorstep of another cabin—one that he inhabited fifty plus years earlier with his father. His mind moves between the two towns and two times with confusing rapidity. As the great author, Penelope Lively, who is obsessed by what it means to live in time says of the inner life, “it is all happening at once.” Just so for Trond, everything is happening at once as his present and past merge into a winter-white silence.

When I first began reading this book, the prose seemed so simple as to be almost wooden—no contractions, no obvious idioms. I supposed at first that the super-simplicity of the prose had to do with the translator’s attempts to be absolutely faithful in her translation. Indeed, I actually started the book a couple of times and put it down, spoiled by the wonderfully rich and complex writing of the modern women writers I have been reading. But fortunately I picked it up again when I had time to really let myself flow into the scenes described, and I was simply enchanted.

While city life has been the norm for Trond, he always remembers what it was like to live in a small town very near water. Although his family lived in Oslo, his father had somehow managed to procure a small cabin for the summers on a river that separated Norway from Sweden, and when Trond was fifteen, he and his father had left his mother and sister in Oslo to spend the summer together at the cabin. Although he cannot know this at the time, this will be his last summer at the cabin and also the last time he will ever see his father—unleashing one of the little mysteries that dogs him throughout his life. Perhaps it is the lost father that he hopes somehow to find when he decides all those years later to buy a rustic cabin on a lake, perhaps it is only the simplicity and quietness of life that he longs to recapture, but at any rate he feels compelled to make the move.

All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.

In that long ago summer, besides the coveted time with his father whom he loves and for whom he has the deepest respect, Trond also begins a friendship with a local boy who is adventurous, even reckless, and who brings out of Trond courage that he never thought he had.

What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking too much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible.

With this boy, Jon, Trond goes out to steal horses, though in fact they never intend really to steal them, but only to ride them within the fenced confines of their forest pasture. It is merely to satisfy their lust for adventure that they call this enterprise stealing horses.

As Trond begins to prepare for the long winter at his run-down cabin, memories from this long past summer crowd in on him, in many ways more real than the mundane events of his everyday life. Jon disappeared from his life that summer even before his father did, engendering another of the little mysteries that recur again and again in his adult meanderings.

Eventually, the reader discovers that the simple life of this man and his dog, a man who intentionally isolates himself, refusing even to get a phone or to inform his now adult daughters of his whereabouts, is full of little mysteries. Even the cabin of his memories, the one on the river dividing Norway and Sweden, was no accidental find made by his father. Instead, the cabin and his father played a part in the resistance to the German occupation of Norway, though Trond comes to learn of this piecemeal and with next to no help from his father. And he learns more a shadow of the events than the events themselves.

What I have not really mentioned yet is the love between father and son, and the immense respect that flows both ways in that relationship. In order to witness that love and its profound impact on the boy, one must read the book. It is not a vocal love, nor does it manifest itself in grand gestures. Instead, it is in day to day interactions between the two, the freedom that the father extends to the boy, the refusal to reprimand or to overtly criticize, and the insistence on teaching by example, that allows the reader to see the glowing love. So intense is this early training (although even that word connotes too much control) that throughout his life when Trond is confronted with a difficult task, he closes his eyes and approaches the problem as he imagines his father would have—slowly, patiently, methodically.

What I do, which I have never let anyone know, is I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself and grows visible, and that’s what I have done for as long as I can remember, as if the secret lies in how the body behaves towards the task at hand, in a certain balance when you start, like hitting the board in a long jump and the early calculation of how much you need, or how little, and the mechanism that is always there in every kind of job; first one thing and then the other, in a context that is buried in each piece of work, in fact as if what you are going to do already exists in its finished form, and what the body has to do when it starts to move is to draw aside the veil so it all can be read by the person observing. And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever.

Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:55:00 +0000

I want to talk to you about another collection of short fiction by a young and very talented writer by the name of Maile Meloy. This collection has the intriguing title: Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It. Most of the short story writers I have been reading in the past few months write about city life and the economic and emotional problems of young folks trying to carve out meaningful lives in the harsh times they find themselves in. This collection, too, is about young people here and now, but almost all the stories occur in rural settings in Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota and other western states. The writing is sparse and deceptively simple—a kind of realism I don’t expect from young writers. Indeed, as I began reading her stories the first writer who came to mind was Hemingway, although I think the emotional intelligence of Meloy’s writing far surpasses that of Hemingway. The writing, itself, is subdued, the pathos emerging from the events described rather than the language used.

The very sparseness of the writing and the patience of the writer in developing the plots make it difficult to get a flavor of the stories by quoting passages, so I will simply have to briefly describe a couple of the stories trying to capture enough of their allure to get you to pick up the book and read it. The first story, “Travis, B”, is about a young man who contracted polio as a child and is left with a hip that does not work quite right, seeming to destine him to a life of little physical activity. However, his response is not one of protecting his vulnerable body, but instead of riding and breaking horses from a young age. “… he broke his right kneecap, his right foot, and his left femur before he was eighteen ... From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.”

After leaving home he takes a series of jobs bailing hay, feeding animals through harsh winters, and simply surviving. To escape the utter isolation of his winter job, he goes into the nearest town, and simply following a group of people he sees walking into a school, he finds himself in a classroom where the teacher, Beth Travis, has been hired to teach adults about school law. What follows is a kind of love story, though with no grand conclusion, no wedding bells, no happy-ever-after. And yet there is something about the naivete and earnestness of Chet, the young man, as he attempts to woe the attorney that is both charming and sad.

In another story, “Lovely Rita,” a young man named Steve takes a job at a nuclear power plant that is hated both by the town-folk and by the workers in the plant. Although unable to admit his attraction to Rita, a girl he and his friend Acey meet at a local bar patronized by the plant workers, he manages to set his friend up with the girl. Even after a freakish accident at the plant leaves Acey dead, Steve is unable to confess to Rita his attraction, but he does discover that Rita wants to find the father who abandoned her as a youngster, and unable to think of a way to get enough money to hire a private investigator, she decides to raffle herself off to the plant workers—five dollars a ticket, the winner getting lovely Rita for the night. Seeing Steve as her only friend, she enlists him to sell the tickets to the workers at the plant. Like the first story described, this one ends pretty much as it started—Steve’s love for Rita undeclared. But again the loneliness and emptiness of the characters emerges so clearly via the flat, unsentimental prose.

In another story, “Two Step,” Alice, the wife of a doctor at the local hospital, invites a woman doctor, Naomi, who works at the same hospital to her home for morning coffee. In fact, what she wants to discuss is her conviction that her husband is having an affair with someone at the hospital. Alice, herself, wooed the doctor away from a previous wife, convinced his already having both a wife and a child was a technicality given that they were soul-mates who were simply meant to be together.

“The whole soul mate idea,” Alice said bitterly, “is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.” She paused, looking out the window. “If I knew who it was, I would get down on my hands and knees and I would beg her to go away, just go away and leave my family alone.”

Of course, the twists and turns in the story have to do with just who the other woman is, and I’m not about to tell. But as in the other stories, the simplicity and near flatness of the prose contrasts so incredibly with the pathos of the story.

As for the intriguing book title, Meloy opens the volume with a poem by A.R Ammons:

One can’t
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way I
want it.

For most of the sad characters in this collection, they do not get it both ways, nor any way at all.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 02:43:00 +0000

On the front flap of Danielle Evans debut book of stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, it says that she “explores the nonwhite experience in contemporary America with honesty, wisdom, and humor.” She certainly does that, and she seems equally at ease whether speaking in the street dialect of a fifteen-year-old girl in New York, the polished academic English of a young biracial woman attending Columbia, or the agonized voice of an African-American soldier trying to live with the memories of his time spent in worn-torn Iraq. While I agree that her stories are honest and wise and sometimes funny, they are also chilling, precisely because she does tell the truth—about race, about class, about culture. What better day to celebrate telling the truth than Martin Luther King Junior Day; I’m certain he would be proud of Danielle Evans.

Often when talking about short fiction, it is difficult to find passages in a single story that somehow communicate the substance of the whole; not so with Evan’s remarkable book. I think simply quoting a few passages from the first story, “Virgins,” will both make most readers want more, and also warn that this is not a book meant simply to entertain. Erica and Jasmine are two fifteen year-old girls looking for a little excitement by sneaking off to go clubbing in Manhattan. Armed with phony IDs, they make it into a club, not really looking for men or sex or trouble, but just the thrill of getting in and saying afterwards that they had been there.

There were a whole lot of men we were supposed to stay away from according to my mother: rap stars, NBA players, white men. We didn’t really know any of those kinds of people. We only knew boys like Michael who freestyled a little but mostly not well, who played ball violently like someone’s life was at stake, or else too pretty, flexing for the girls every time they made a decent shot, because even they knew they would never make the NBA, and we were all they were gonna get out of a good game. The only white men we knew were teachers and cops, and no one had to tell us to try and stay away from them, when that was all we did in the first place, but my mother was always worried about something she didn’t need to be.

Of course, along with the phony IDs, they also had to make up phony stories about who they were and what they did—sometimes claiming to be college students, sometimes store clerks or waitresses or photographers. “It was easy to be somebody else when no one cared who you were in the first place.” Making the mistake of leaving the club with older men and going to an after party in the Bronx, she and Jasmine find themselves surrounded by much older guys in an elevator headed for an eighth floor apartment. “I kept waiting for the thing that would stop us, and then I thought, Nothing will stop this but me. So I ran, out of the elevator and down the stairs and out the front door and down to the bodega on the corner.” Saved for the moment, she calls a boy her age whom she can trust, begging for a ride home, and he manages to talk his brother into driving him into the city to pick her up. Unable to go home without being caught in the lie told to cover up her nightclub adventure, she talks her friend into letting her stay at his house. Alone finally on the couch offered and thinking of what might be happening to her friend Jasmine, the older brother reappears and puts an arm around her.

You know, you’re too pretty for me to leave you on the couch like that,” he said, pulling me toward him. I didn’t know that, but I did understand then that there was no such thing as safe, only safer; that this, if it didn’t happen now, would happen later but not better. I was safer than Jasmine right now, safer than I might have been. He kissed me, hard, like he was trying to get to the last drop of something, and I kissed him back, harder, like I wanted to get it all back. The noise in my head stopped and I didn’t have to think about anything but where to put all the pieces of my body next.
Afterwards I was embarrassed because he was embarrassed, and I knew I couldn’t stay there….

No such thing as safe, not for Erica, not for Jasmine, not for any of the girls in these stories. The matter-of-fact acceptance of their fates is as startling as the events that occur.

At least for this reader, Evans is equally convincing when speaking with the voice of an African-American man back from Iraq on some sort of medical leave and trying to sort out his life, to understand where he has been and where he might hope to go from here. Georgie, the young man, seeks out his old girlfriend, Lanae, who is now living with one of his old boyfriends; Lanae has a young daughter whose father is neither Georgie nor the current boyfriend, and a string of circumstances lead to Georgie’s taking on the role of baby-sitter for the girl, Esther. Nightmares, memories, flashbacks of his time in Iraq crowd in on him, and his mother worries that his babysitting Esther will bring back bad memories of dead children he had seen in Iraq. “The truth was Esther was the opposite of a reminder. In his old life, his job had been to knock on strangers’ doors in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and convince them to trust him….Two sisters were sitting in the dark, huddled on the floor with their parents, when Georgie’s unit pushed through the door. Pretty girls, big black eyes and sleepy baby-doll faces.”

Can you imagine what it would have been like to return to the house a few days later to discover the entire family, father, mother, and both girls dead—their throats slit. Perhaps the victims of fellow soldiers, but more likely killed precisely because they had been seen talking to the Americans, talking to Georgie and his cohorts? Any wonder that Georgie is having a hard time finding his way, a hard time understanding what he and his country are responsible for?

No wonder that in another story, “The King of a Vast Empire,” a young woman who is obsessed with the news, addicted to bad news, finds herself unable to keep quiet even when making love.

The worst of the news she thought was appropriate to share in the middle of sex, and when I say worst I mean: dismembered child soldiers, bomb victims burned beyond recognition, elderly women beaten and raped…
Without bothering to put her clothes on, she’d proceeded to explain to me, not for the first time, that really, all pleasure was perverse, that it was perverse to enjoy anything in such an awful world, that any moment of happiness was selfish when infinite horror was always happening somewhere else.

I hope I have not concentrated too much on the dark side of these stories. Many of them are also funny and sweet. I started them one day and finished them the next; the book was hard to put down. One commentator tells us that Evans is telling us “what it’s like to grow up fast in a slow changing country.” And if growing up fast sometimes evokes wonderful humor, it also can seize up the heart.

Double Vision by Pat Barker

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 13:40:00 +0000

Unlike Pat Barker’s horrible/wonderful depiction of war up close in her now famous Regeneration trilogy, her 2003 novel, Double Vision, has its setting far from actual theaters of war, but war and its effects on everyday people are still dominant themes. This novel is set in the English countryside and begins with the story of a sculptor, Kate, who has been commissioned to do a sculpture of Christ, though she is not herself a believer. Kate’s husband, Ben, has recently been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan where he was on assignment as war reporter. In just the first few pages of the novel, Kate, herself, is badly injured in a road accident. Behind schedule and with a rapidly approaching deadline for completion of the sculpture, she is forced to hire an assistant, and thus begins one of the threads of this rather complex novel. We soon discover that Peter, the newly hired assistant, is more than fascinated with Kate’s work. In fact, he begins to display behavior much like that of a stalker, and this relationship between sculptor and assistant adds an aura of suspense to the entire novel.

Without giving away much of the novel, let me say that there are two other characters central to the story: Stephen Sharkey, a photographer who, like Ben, has covered 9/11 as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Justine, the daughter of the local vicar. Stephen is living in a cabin on land owned by his brother while he attempts to write a book on the role of war reporter and photographer, and Justine is hired by the doctor-brother and his busy career-oriented wife to help with the young children and maintenance of the main house.

Having been a rather close friend to Ben, it is not surprising that Stephen looks up Ben’s widow, Kate, when he finds himself in quite close proximity to her, and they begin a series of discussions on war reporting as well as their relationships with Ben.

Stephen is clearly in limbo, not sure that he wants to continue in his life as photographer of grisly war scenes, but unable to see beyond it. My hunch is that the character of Stephen allows Barker to address what is the central theme for her in this novel: namely, the motivations of war reporters and the role they play. Certainly, being around Kate and talking about her recent loss of Ben stirs up these questions in him, but it is the much younger Justine who asks him the tough questions.

‘You don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt, do you?’
‘Not often.’
‘The truth is, you’ve been digging around in violence so long you can’t see anything else.’
‘I see you.’
‘Do you?’
Stephen sighed. This was a surprisingly married conversation to be having with a girlfriend. It had the intense acrimonious pointlessness that only comes from long years of cohabitation.
‘Why do you do it?’
‘What?’
She jerked her head at the girl who was talking to camera. ‘That. Be a war correspondent.’
‘Foreign.’ The distinction mattered. He was damned if he was going to call himself after an activity he despised.
‘You covered a helluva lot of wars.’
‘They were there to be covered. I didn’t start them.’
‘You know there’s a Barbara Vine book called A Dark-Adapted Eye? That’s what you’ve got.’
‘Now you’re being silly.’
‘No, I’m not. People get into darkness, to the point where it’s the light that hurts.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Why did I do it? Adventure, proving myself, proving I could take it—and once that wore of, which it does, very quickly, being in the know. That sort of thing.’
She was looking at him scornfully.
‘Yeah, OK. I know—pathetic. But why do you think people become doctors? Pure altruism? I don’t think so.’
‘Why then?’
‘Knowledge. Access to secrets. Power.’
‘Not the only reasons.’
‘There are plenty of good reasons for being a war correspondent. Witnessing. Giving people the raw material to make moral judgments.’
‘But you said yourself, the witness turns into an audience, and then you’re not witnessing any more, you’re disseminating.’

While there are many twists and turns to this novel, including a simple and convincing love story, I think Barker mainly wants to talk about wars and about the way they are presented to the so-called folks-back-home. The ways in which television homogenizes and sanctifies war, both by what it shows and what it omits.

I haven’t mentioned just how this novel evolves into a kind of mystery thriller, and I don’t intend to give anything away. But while the plot is interesting and the suspense palpable, it is really war and countries that wage war that is at the heart of Barker’s interest. Let me close with one other quote from the book on a day when Stephen is trying, not very successfully, to get on with his book.

On Friday he’d broken off in the middle of a discussion about the bombardment of Baghdad in 1991—the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of son et lumiere display {sound and light show}, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He’d found it disconcerting at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies—traditionally reluctant to wage war—when the human cost of battle is invisible: Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship: it had been imposed in both world wars. But, in the first, nothing could hide the arrival of the telegrams nor, in the second, the explosion of bombs. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that allied casualties were minimal or non-existent, and ‘collateral damage’ couldn’t be shown. These wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home.

I haven’t even mentioned Barker’s analysis of two-career with children families, nor her beautiful take on why and how good relationships require faith and risks. There is so much in this novel. I’m glad I read it; I hope you will.

Vanishing and Other Stories by Deborah Willis

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 13:30:00 +0000

Once in awhile a writer comes along who is so good that it’s almost startling. Deborah Willis is one such writer, and I would be very surprised if she does not become a very well known and well respected author. Vanishing and Other Stories is her debut book; I would not have guessed this had I not read it on the cover.

All of the stories in this little book are quirky, edgy, sometimes even bordering on sinister, but all are convincing. Sometimes the lead character in a story is a girl or young woman, in others, it is a mature man, but no matter the gender or the age, one instantly believes in the legitimacy of the voice. Alice Munro (whom I consider the greatest living author) says of this fellow Canadian writer: “The emotional range and depth of these stories, the clarity and deftness, is astonishing.” Just so, and the astonishment continues through each story.

It’s always impossible to capture a book by reading a few key passages, but even more difficult (I think) when talking about short fiction. Nevertheless, let me try to describe a couple of the stories and to at least hint at their profundity. In one story, “Escape,” we are introduced to a middle-aged male research doctor whose wife has recently died after a four year struggle with illness. He has no real idea how to live, how to be. The lingering illness and eventual death of his wife has left him rudderless, almost faceless. He has no interest in old friends or his home, and very little even in his work; he spends a lot of his time simply driving in unfamiliar towns looking in on the lives of others. He has the sense that he is slowly disappearing, and is as unconcerned about this as about the rest of his life. Like so many characters in these stories, he is simply, almost painlessly, vanishing.

On one such outing, he drives into the parking lot of a casino in a small town that has very little other than the casino, decides to enter in order to use the urinal, and then drifts to a blackjack table and listlessly gambles for three hours. Though he is not really a gambler and has as little interest in winning as concern at losing, he becomes a regular customer—always seeking out the same table and the same blackjack dealer. “This is how he lived his life now; everything was accidental. Everything was inevitable.” He appreciates that no one there knows him, no one talks to him. “The staff deal with people the way they deal with money: with immunity, without judgment.”

Eventually, he becomes interested in a woman dealer, although interested is too strong a word. He finds her blandness, her indifference, oddly comforting, and in a sense he begins to stalk her. He follows her out into the parking lot when she goes for cigarette breaks, even follows her home one night, though with no real intentions of getting to know her. She refuses to give him her real name, although eventually she begins to talk with him on her breaks, tells him about a past life as a stage magician. She languidly performs card tricks for him, lets him find cards that she has secreted into his wallet or pockets. As he pressures her for her name, she asks his, and when he tells her it is Tom, she replies:

“I feel I’ve known you for my whole life Tom…It’s like we’ve been married for decades.”
“That’s probably not a good thing.”
“You must not be married…Or you’d know that marriage isn’t good or bad. You just fall into it, like any habit.”

Like all the stories in this collection, this one does not build up to some dramatic conclusion, some final exchange between the two that finally allows the man to escape his doldrums. And yet there is a kind of progress. She finally reveals her name, Mabel, and he goes back to his condo, cleans out his neglected fish tank, and seems about to emerge from his faceless state, to reenter life—a modest salvation perhaps, but a salvation of sorts.

My reader friends who claim to hate short stories because they feel somehow shortchanged or cheated, and the better the story, the greater the sense of fraud, will not, I fear, be cured by reading this book. As with Alice Munro, it seems that each story could as well have been a novel, and one that would have been wonderful to read. Fortunately, though I was once one of those who avoided short fiction, I now find myself tantalized by the very things that used to irritate or disappoint me. Turning a page to see how the story will continue, how the lives will sort themselves out, instead there is only a last page, a suggestive final line. And yet the story is better for that, better because there is no resolution. Like real life, there is no neat beginning, no resolution, no end. There is only life as it is lived. And sometimes, there is only sadness that one knows will continue. In the story “Sky Theatre,” a beautiful young girl, envied by her girl peers and sought after by the boys, is suddenly, unexpectedly, injured, paralyzed from the neck down. The lead character in this story, a not so pretty and not so popular girl is left to ponder permanence and change.

But suddenly we saw that life was not the still water we’d believed it to be. Mary Louise had been going about the same middle-class, suburban, privileged existence that we led—except that hers was even more privileged than ours. She must have had our same unthinking confidence in the future, until her destiny swerved like a canoe caught in a current. She’d once possessed something elusive and unmistakable, something beyond even beauty—maybe charisma, maybe grace—and that something had been wrenched from her. Fortune’s wheel had turned. I found this terrifying. I found it comforting.

And perhaps that’s where I should end; I found these stories to be terrifying; I found them to be comforting. I intend to read whatever this person writes.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:54:00 +0000

There is no doubt that Ian McEwan is a great storyteller who won’t hesitate to tell rather bleak and creepy stories in order to make points about the human condition in general and contemporary life in particular. At least for this reader, there are times when the creepiness of the story trumps the profundity of his psychological analysis (The Comfort of Strangers jumps to mind), but in the rather foreboding tale, Black Dogs, the reverse is true. While on the surface the story is one of the long unraveling of a genuine love relationship between two people of different temperaments, I think McEwan is really trying to raise and discuss intelligently a split within the human psyche.

The surface story is one of two young lovers who, shortly after the end of World War II, quit their government jobs in England, declare their allegiance to the Communist Party (which they could not have done while still employed by the state), and set off to discover for themselves post-war Italy and France. Bernard and June Tremaine, convinced that the end of the war will also signal the end of capitalism and the beginning of a mass movement towards socialism, decide to hike and walk the towns and countryside of France and Italy as a honeymoon present to each other before returning home to help in building the new world.

Their tale is told by their son-in-law, Jeremy, who is living in the Europe of the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having lost his own parents in a road accident when he is only eight, he has an eye on the parents of his friends, fascinated by intact families and by what makes some marriages click while others fray and unravel. Jeremy finds himself deeply attracted to both Bernard and June, though they have long lived apart.

Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest. In Bernard’s company, I always sensed there was an element missing from his account of the world, and that it was June who held the key. The assurance of his skepticism, his invincible atheism, made me wary; it was too arrogant, too much was closed off, too much denied. In conversations with June, I found myself thinking like Bernard; I felt stifled by her expressions of faith, and bothered by the unstated assumption of all believers that they are good because they believe what they believe, that faith is virtue and, by extension, unbelief is unworthy, or at best pitiable.

The deep division between June and Bernard, as well as their abiding love for each other, fascinates Jeremy, and he sets out to write the memoirs of June via interviews conducted on her deathbed.

It is important to remember that McEwan, himself, is no friend of the great religions of the world. A defender of his compatriot Christopher Hitchens, and at least somewhat sympathetic to a group of intellectuals sometimes dubbed The Evangelical Atheists (e.g., biologist Richard Dawkins, neuroscientist Sam Harris, and philosopher Daniel Dennett), McEwan understands clearly the dangers of religious fundamentalism. However, he is suspicious of the wholesale dismissal of all that gets called spiritual and of exaggerated claims by some scientists that the lens of science has already (or will very soon) see things as they are in themselves and forever render as both absurd and unnecessary talk of a spiritual realm.

The black dogs of the title are no doubt metaphors for wild, irrational evil in the world, but June faces them also as living, breathing, attacking beasts that she encounters on a hiking trail in Italy. She has been momentarily separated from Bernard, who is straggling behind, literally on his knees in the dirt studying some biological life-form that is new to him. And while, once the two are reunited, he is all sympathetic concern towards his young bride and the frightful experience she has just had, this event and their reactions to it set the stage for their inevitable turning away from one another. June, having survived this ordeal without the help of her husband, learns from it that she has courage, that she can if necessary stand alone, “That’s a significant discovery for a woman, or it was in my day.” Over the course of years as they return to London and begin a family, Bernard devotes himself to parliamentary politics and to what June sees as “faith in abstract principals according to which committed intellectuals think to engineer social change.” June turns inward and to the practical and immediate. They buy a small, unimproved vacation property in France to which she retreats. She studies the mystics, studies wild flowers, returns to London less and less often.

Jeremy serves as a kind of mediator between these two loving and yet incompatible people, able to listen to both, partly because he finds parts of himself in both of their worldviews, and yet is himself unable to synthesize and make compatible the disparate sides.

As the family outsider, I was both beguiled and skeptical. Turning points are the inventions of storytellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth. Seeing the light, the moment of truth, the turning point—surely we borrow these from Hollywood or the Bible to make retroactive sense of an overcrowded memory. June’s ‘black dogs.’ Sitting here at the bedside notebook in my lap, privileged with a glimpse of her void, sharing in the vertigo, I found these almost nonexistent animals too comforting.

No doubt Jeremy serves a special purpose in this little novel; his is the voice that allows McEwan to continue the inward struggle between cool (even cold) rationality and a sense of something different, something more, something not to be named or neatly cordoned off. Gifted writer and intellectual that he is, McEwan does not in the end attempt a reconciliation, a convenient blending of the alleged contradictories. He is willing simply to present them, describe them, and leave them in suspension—not to be homogenized.

Bernard and June often talked to me about ideas that could never sit side by side. Bernard for example, was certain that there was no direction, no patterning in human affairs or fates other than that which was imposed by human minds. June could not accept this; life had a purpose and it was in our interests to open ourselves to it. Nor will it do to suggest that both these views are correct. To believe everything, to make no choices, amounts to much the same thing, to my mind, as believing in nothing at all.

Next Of Kin by Johanna Trollope

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:54:00 +0000

There are some writers who provide readers a kind of oasis of hope and solace even when writing about an unpredictable and in many ways menacing world. Johanna Trollope is one such writer, and her novel Next of Kin leaves the reader with a kind of guarded optimism in facing an uncertain future. At least on the surface, this is a story about how families adapt to grief and loss, and even if that were all there is to the novel, it would be well worth reading. Trollope creates characters who seem real, situations that seem in some way or other universal, and moral dilemmas that retain their complexity even as she points the way towards a resolution.

I don’t know about other readers, but I like reading authors who describe our current historical situation and who are willing to reveal the many casualties of contemporary life, in short, writers who choose to tell the truth rather than simply entertaining us or allowing us to escape real life. That said, I have to admit that many writers brave enough to describe the world as they see it also sometimes leave the reader with a sense of despair and hopelessness, since the authors are unable to mask their own cynicism as they describe the world around them. After reading a series of such books describing city life and some of the horrors it contains, I find myself yearning for something that is more positive, something that leaves room for hope and encourages actions that might create a future better than the past. So I turn to writers like Trollope as much for relief as for enlightenment, and she seldom disappoints me.

Next of Kin is about an extended family of British farmers, two brothers, one of whom continues with his parents to produce crops, and the other who chooses instead to begin a stock farm for both dairy and meat production. Both brothers find themselves competing with agribusiness and thus borrow over and over to purchase machinery and equipment that allows a kind of marginal competition in the new world they find themselves in, but in fact brings them ever closer to financial ruin and loss of their farms.

The novel really begins with the death of the wife of one of the brothers. Carolyn, or Caro as she is called, is an American who wanders to England in her early twenties in an existential search for some sort of meaningful life and a kind of permanence that she has never achieved with her own alternative culture parents and their nomadic existence. There she meets and marries her dairy farmer husband, Robyn; they adopt a daughter and then slowly but inexorably drift into separate lives lived under the same roof. The other brother, Joe, marries even later than Robyn, quickly has two children with his very non-farmer young wife, and builds what his parents and others see as a successful and thriving farm; his parents live their lives through him. He is their hero and their hope.

What neither Joe’s parents nor his wife understand is that he has been secretly borrowing for years, attempting to keep up with the demands of contemporary farming, and all the while barely keeping in check a dark, brooding anxiety and sense of hopelessness. For reasons never made clear the death of his sister-in-law Caro destroys a desperate hope he has been able to maintain, and shortly after her death, he shoots himself in a shed at his parent’s home.

Trollope’s deep understanding of human nature and of familial relations comes out in her descriptions of how the other characters in the novel react to Joe’s death. That the parents have lived for and through their son Joe is apparent in their devastation at his death. And his young wife, Lindsay, who has been trying for all of her years with Joe to reach him emotionally, eventually in desperation trying to warn her in-laws about his underlying psychological turmoil, is both devastated and bitter when her warnings go unheeded and her husband flees in the only way he can.

In this story of loss and change, there is one character who plays the role of catalyst for getting the family to move from petrified grief to a kind of healing and carrying on. She is an unlikely candidate for heroine—a punked up city-girl who knows nothing of farms or farm life and who does not even cook or clean for herself. Zoe, the city girl, enters the action via becoming the London roommate of Judy, the adopted daughter of Robyn and Caro, and inviting herself along on a visit to the country.

No doubt, some readers will see Zoe as bit too idealized, a too convenient free spirit brought in from the wings to get the family members to admit feelings and to begin to really talk to one another. But I found her to be almost believable, and a rather ingenious way for Trollope to bring in her own views on grief and change, on parenting, on what gets called conventional morality, even on the whole issue of biological, so-called ‘real’, as opposed to adoptive (unreal?) parents.

I find the end of the novel to be optimistic and uplifting, although the best Robyn can do in order to actually stay on his farm and continue being a farmer requires him to sell his land and lease it back (just as his parents have always leased the land they farm). Each of the characters in the novel is brought to some sort of realization, one could even call it enlightenment. As Robyn tells his daughter Judy that she can come back from London, can stay on the farm if she chooses, though he must sell the land and hope to lease it back, she remarks, “Even though it’s so hard. Even though it’s always been so hard?”

Yes….I wouldn’t want to live any other way now. I suppose I may have to, one day, but I’ll only give in at the last ditch.

While I must admit that as a reader I run to Trollope in order to relieve momentarily the gloom and doom of so much excellent contemporary fiction, I get more than the relief I had hoped for. I learn about people, about families, about relationships, and even when what I learn is sad and sobering, it is also tinged with hope.

In the end, even Dilys, the mother of Robyn and Joe, the person who is perhaps the most devastated by his suicide, the most hopeless, comes to some sort of resolution.

Change and loss, she said to herself, change and loss, like a chant, over and over, life carrying you away, carrying things away from you, then bringing them back, some little thing you didn’t look for, didn’t know you needed until you saw it washed up there, waiting at your feet. Change and loss. And growth. Growth where you had never looked for it before, never thought to look.

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Ghost Road, by Pat Barker

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:54:00 +0000

“Murder was only killing in the wrong place.” So reflects Rivers, the therapist who is a central character in all three of the novels in Pat Barker’s incredible World War I trilogy. Ghost Road is the third of the trilogy, and the one for which she received The Booker Prize, though Regeneration, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the prize and any one of the three would have deserved the prestigious award.

This is not a glorification of war book. Instead, it talks of the war and the battlefield in graphic and horrible detail that shows the bravery of the men who fought, but also the corruption of the British class system and the money interests of big business, especially as the war drags on long after if should have with men dying not to secure the victory, but to line the pockets of business men who are more interested in profits than the lives of soldiers.

Many of the characters in the novel, including the therapist Rivers, are drawn from actual historical figures. In fact, this novel actually moves back and forth between the battlefront, the hospital where Rivers treats both the physically and psychologically wounded, and cultures in the south seas where Rivers spent time as researcher and doctor before the war started. The so-called tribes he dealt with were descendants of head-hunting people and both the heads brought home from raids and the captives brought back from those same raids played pivotal roles in their cultural lives.

Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the people’s lives. Head-hunting was what they had lived for. Though it might seem callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most tremendous fun and without it life lost almost all zest.

It is no accident that Barker compares the head-hunters with atrocities of the war. While we may excuse the actions of the warriors in World War I while condemning as barbaric the head-hunters, Barker is less quick to judge.

As you might guess, this is not a happy book, but then none of Barker’s books is happy. Just as her earlier novels focused in on blue-collar workers and their struggles for a decent life given the brutality of market economies, so too in this one she focuses not on officers but on enlisted men who have everything to lose in fighting the war, and yet very little to gain by its so-called successful conclusion.

Besides the sadness of the events, the grimness of the novel is accentuated by Barker’s simple and often harsh prose. Billy Prior, who is another genuine historical character who appears in all three of the novels, is unashamedly bisexual. Many of the sex scenes she describes are cold and repelling, and yet there is honesty in her prose that shines forth. Like the prostitutes who are the focus of her second novel, Blow Your House Down, there is nothing sentimental about Prior’s descriptions of his sexual relationships with either men or women; sex is simply a part of life, sometimes bartered, sometimes given as a gift, sometimes taken on the fly.

For this reader, both this novel and Regeneration were most interesting because of the accounts of the varied and horrific sorts of physic conditions suffered in the trench warfare of World War I, and the surprisingly compassionate care William Rivers gives to the men whom he encounters at Craiglockhart’s, the British hospital where the wounded are sent to be ‘fixed’ and sent back to the front. Of course, when Rivers succeeds, his charges are sent back to the French front, not because they are truly healed, but because they can, at least, talk again, or walk, or sleep without impossibly horrible dreams.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think—at least not beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

…the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now—any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think’s the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

Perhaps I have described this book too bleakly; there is warmth and even humor in it along with the chilling battle scenes. While I have to admit that I am ready to move onto something less intense, less troubling, this is a book all of us should read. Indeed, every book of Barker’s I have read has been well worth the time and effort. She is one of the finest writers alive.

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Love and Summer by William Trevor

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:04:00 +0000

I want to talk to you about an author who is new to me, though he may not be to you or to most avid readers. His name is William Trevor, and I want to talk about his 2009 novel Love and Summer. Trevor’s novel The Story of Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002; I intend to read that novel soon.

Everything about this little novel is understated. It is set in a small Irish town and the surrounding countryside, and is about as simple a story as one could imagine. It is as if the writer never raises his voice, never indulges in pathos, simply tells the story of a young orphan girl, Ellie, raised by nuns and, as was common practice, sent out as a servant to a small farm after a tragic accident left the owner of the farm both widowed and childless. Eventually, as the girl settles into the routines of the farm, Dillahan, the farmer whom she serves, asks her to marry him, and she does. “It was kindness—so it had seemed to her, and still did—when she had been offered marriage; it would have been unkind on her part if she’d said no.”

Quite by accident, Ellie runs into a stranger to the small town, a photographer, Florian Kilderry, who is himself an orphan, though his artist parents died when he was already grown. For a married woman even to be seen in the presence of an unmarried man, and a stranger no less, is quite out of the ordinary. But Ellie cannot help the rush of infatuation she feels for this man so much closer to her age than the older farmer whom she has married. Florian is in the process of selling the house and land he has inherited from his parents (and cannot really afford to maintain), and intends then simply to leave Ireland and strike out on his own.

And thus begins a summer of love for the two young people, a love as simple and innocent as can be imagined. What Ellie does not know, cannot know, is that she is a kind of stand-in for a girl Florian knew in his youth, Isabella.

The reader is also introduced to other characters in the small town, one of who is the daughter of a relatively wealthy family, known in the town simply as Miss Connulty. Miss Connulty also fell in love as a young woman, but the relationship ended in a pregnancy and secret abortion, at which time her Catholic mother spiritually and emotionally ostracized her daughter and distanced herself from the husband who aided the girl in obtaining an abortion. It is no wonder that Miss Connulty takes great interest in Ellie and what she sees as the perilous circumstances she is falling into.

Williams is exceptionally gifted in his ability to draw believable characters with whom the reader identifies and to describe what are really tragic events in their lives but with calm and apparently emotionless prose. He also creates an aura of suspense, of foreboding, such that the reader is on tenterhooks, hoping for the best but expecting the worst. And still, despite the mystery and the tension, the writing is so low key, so quiet.

At first Ellie is shocked that she has allowed herself to be seen talking to this strange man, ashamed at what the nuns who raised her would think of such conduct. But soon, though she realizes that others might see her, might jump to conclusions, she puts such concerns aside. “Anyone could have seen them and she hadn’t cared.” For a time, she decides that should she run into him again, she will simply cross the street to avoid him, will not allow such foolishness to cause distress to her husband or bring shame on her. But when their paths cross again and Florian suggests that she does not remember him, all thoughts of avoidance are instantly dashed.

She felt the colour mounting in her face, as it had before. Her thoughts became disordered, as they had become then too, perverse and separated from her, as if they were not hers. She wanted to say that of course she remembered him. She wanted to say that she wondered about him, that she had tried not to, that she had known she should not. She wanted to say she had known immediately who it was when he’d said hullo.

Compared to the flame of most modern day romance novels, this little book is so tame, its characters on the whole so decent and considerate of others. There are no real villains, no heroes either, simply people trying to make the best of their lives. And yet Trevor is incredibly astute and meticulous in describing the inner lives of his characters, and so aware of the enormous changes in Ellie’s emotional life after she meets Florian, changes in her attitudes towards the more or less arranged marriage she is in , and towards the future she can anticipate.

Of course, I will not give way the ending of the book, nor will I tell you much more of the story. In the end it is the emotional intelligence of the writer that is most important, the actual course of events much less so. Suffice it to say that it is a beautiful little story of loneliness and isolation, but also of hope and loyalty. My suspicion is that once you have read this book of Trevor’s, you will want to read lots more. I know that I do.

Union Street & Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:33:00 +0000

Those of you who know of the author Pat Barker probably know her through her Regeneration trilogy, the last of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. As I have done with so many novelists, I came to read Pat Barker long after she had become famous, but once I began to read her, I realized I just had to read everything she ever wrote. When I picked up the two books I’m talking to you about today, Union Street & Blow Your House Down, reprinted as one volume after she became famous, I had no idea that they were the first of her published works. How wonderful to stumble on these books and to see that long before she became famous, the articulate voice and the depth of insight were already in place.

Reviewers praise Barker for the meticulous research that preceded her trilogy about the trench warfare of World War I. She obviously researched the two books I’m discussing today as well, but the research was way more up close and personal. All the stories in these two volumes are about poor, working-class Northern England women and girls and the incredible lives they endured. Barker, too, is from a working class town in Northern England, raised by a single mother who had to struggle to keep food on the table. These are not happy books; even the language is harsh and spare, because she speaks in the dialects of the women about whom she is writing and whom it is obvious she knows very well. None of her characters are typical heroines, and yet it could not be more obvious that Barker sympathizes with and admires her characters. She writes of young girls who are raped or molested, forced into a kind of adult life when they are still only children, of women who marry too young to men who haven’t the slightest idea of who the women are or what they dream. Like their fathers before them, these boys-pretending-to-be-men take out their frustrations on their young wives, first with words, and then fists, and finally simply with their absence. The women are left to fend not only for themselves, but for the too many children whom they cannot bring themselves to abandon. She writes of an old woman battered by life and left to die in an unheated flat, preferring cold and near starvation to the horrors of the health-care facilities that would be her next, and final, destination.

Her home. They were taking it away from her. The dirt and disorder, the signs of malnutrition and neglect which to them were reasons for putting her away were, to her, independence. She had fought to keep for herself the conditions of a human life.

She was calm again. What she wanted was simple. She wanted to die with dignity. She wanted to die in her own home. And if that was no longer possible, she would go away. She would not be here waiting for them when they came.

Union Street, her first novel, published in 1982, is really a series of stories about these women and their interconnected lives, all of who live within a short distance of each other on Union Street. And while the women, unlike many of the men, remain with the children and do their best to provide for them, they cannot hide the resentment they feel not only towards the men who have left or who drink themselves into stupors every night at the local pubs, but towards the very children they want to nurture and protect. Barker describes in horrific detail the work lives of some of these women—some who work on an assembly line cake factory, others who spend every day in blood and feathers working in a chicken processing plant. No wonder that many finally turn to a better life, that of prostitution, which has its own horrors and dangers, but affords them an almost livable wage and a chance to spend more of their time with their children. In fact, Blow Your House Down, the second of the two novels, is all written through the eyes of working class women who have turned to prostitution as a better alternative to the nasty, low paying jobs they leave behind. Each story is riveting and utterly convincing; Barker knew these women (or women much like them), and her accounts are sympathetic rather than condemning. In the voice and language of the characters, she reveals so much about the inner lives of these women. Hard, struggling lives in many ways, but one cannot help but admire the strength, insight, even the humor of these women. One of the young women, Jo, describes the cake-making assembly line she works on.

The noise was horrific as usual. There was no possibility of conversation. Even the supervisor’s orders had to be yelled at the top of her voice and repeated many times before anybody heard. At intervals, there were snatches of music. It was being played continuously but only odd phrases triumphed over the roar of the machines. Some of the women moved their mouths silently, singing or talking to themselves: it was hard to tell. Others merely looked blank. After a while not only speech but thought became impossible.

Descriptions of work in the chicken-processing plant are even more horrible—the smells, the blood underfoot, the chickens swinging overhead on conveyer belts. And Barker does not spare the reader; she describes what she sees, what she has seen, with almost brutal accuracy.

While I think it is important to read these books when you are feeling strong, and to give up all hope of happy endings and cozy resolutions, this is social-political writing at its very best. She does not have to be didactic; she simply describes what she has lived and seen. I will leave you with a final quote from the story of Muriel, a woman in her early twenties who already has three children and a husband who is sick unto death.

She had never been able to take happiness for granted, perhaps because she had lost her father while she was still a child. She must always be aware of time passing, of the worm that hides in darkness and feeds upon innocence, beauty and grace. John’s hands on her breasts, the children asleep upstairs: nothing was to be taken for granted. Love, security, order: these were achievements painfully wrested from a chaos that was always threatening to take them back. She remembered the children playing in the lamp-light. Life was like that. Her life was like that. A moment in the light. Then the lamp goes out, the circle is broken, the chanting voices are silenced forever.

The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:25:00 +0000

“It’s not that I didn’t remember what I saw. It’s that I didn’t know what I was seeing.” It’s 1963 in Mississippi, and Florence is ten years old, almost eleven. Although the above quote refers to a particularly horrible and devastating event that Florence witnessed, it could be used as a description of almost everything that happened to her in that summer of her life. Florence is the eyes and ears of Minrose Gwin in her novel, The Queen of Palmyra; it is a wrenchingly sad novel, but then it is about events that are, indeed, wrenchingly sad.

A few months ago I reviewed another novel about this same time period in Mississippi, and I felt a great deal of ambivalence about that novel; it was Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help. In that novel, a well-off young woman who aspires to being a writer decides to write a book about African American servants as seen through the eyes of those women in order to expose what they really thought about their white employers. What bothered me about that novel was that the heroine, the woman writer, gets those servants to take grave risks by telling their stories, while she, herself, incurs very little risk, but stands to profit by the risks of others. And while Stockett is once removed from the writer heroine of her story, she, too, it seemed to me, stood to profit from the pain and struggles of others while incurring little risk on her own. I would have felt much more comfortable had the author been African American—more comfortable with the heavy dialects she uses for the voices of some of her characters, more comfortable with her (perhaps audacious and presumptuous) descriptions of their inner lives.

I have none of those reservations about Gwin’s novel, because this book is so clearly the world as seen through the eyes of the little girl. Yes, like Stockett’s character, Florence is mostly raised by and cared for by an African American family, one of who happens to be the woman servant (cook, housekeeper, babysitter) of Florence’s grandparents. But the relationship between Florence and the black people in her life seems so much more honest and conflicted than those described by Stockett.

Quite understandably, this novel has been compared to Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is like that novel in how consistently and convincingly the voice remains that of a young white girl looking out at a confusing racist world. But unlike Scout, the heroine of Lee’s novel, Florence’s father is not an attorney who defends the civil rights of a falsely accused black man, but instead a well known member of the local clan, and only slowly does Florence come to understand that the little club her father belongs to (and the play costumes he dresses up in when he goes to meetings) is feared and hated by those in the world she most loves.

One more quick point before telling you just a bit about this novel, on the jacket cover one author and critic says of this book that “it is the most powerful and lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird.” My first reaction to that excessive praise was to wonder if the critic had somehow forgotten to read Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Yes, this little novel is a wonderful if frightening look at a racist world through the eyes of a sad and abused little girl, but simply does not, and cannot, compare to the accounts written by the authors mentioned above. Nor, I think, would Gwin welcome such a comparison.

Florence’s mother is much more aware of the nighttime activities of her husband than is Florence. And although she is in many ways (and for good reason) afraid of her own husband, she does what she can to warn the African American community when she knows the local clan is gathering. Those affected admire her bravery in passing along the warnings, though they wonder about how she can remain with her husband, and cannot quite fathom or totally trust her. Florence’s grandparents are also decent folk who treat their black employees well, even to some extent stand up to the local clan, but they are themselves locked into a world that sees separation of the races as inevitable.

Although I don’t want to give away too much of the story, it is not surprising that Florence’s mother eventually has to escape from her husband, first with alcohol, then via an attempted suicide, and finally by other means. Unfortunately, she leaves poor Florence behind to deal with a father who continues his late-night meetings, and who visits her in the night, placing a heavy hand on her stomach. Florence is as unaware of the meaning of her father’s visits to her bedroom as she is of his club meetings. Finally, he takes her to one of the meetings, even has her own little outfit sewn for her, proud of his own role as a leader of the local clan and wanting his daughter to share his pride. Passed around, tickled and teased by the smelly, scary old men, she slowly begins to realize that there is something sinister in these meetings and in the “play-clothes” the men wear.

I didn’t know what miscegenation and some of the other words meant until I had looked them up in the dictionary later that night, but the whole letter and pictures made me feel scared about Daddy in a way I hadn’t before. Yes he could be mean and ill tempered and hurtful when you aggravated him, and yes I was sick of him coming into my room at night, and yes I knew it was him that Mama was running away from. But this was somehow different.

As the opening quote implies, all of the ugliness is out there to be seen from the beginning, but it is only through her dealings with her real family, the African American family that raises and protects her, that she is finally able to interpret what she has seen all along.

In the end, I thought this was a superb little book. While the reader does realize once in awhile that there is, after all, a grown woman looking back to tell the story of Florence, in the telling the voice is consistently, unwaveringly, that of a young lonely and confused little girl. The novel shines with authenticity.

Solar by Ian McEwan

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:08:00 +0000

Ian McEwan’s newest novel, Solar, has already generated a lot of commentary, much of which is critical. Some accuse him of a kind of flippancy for combining the grave topic of global warming with the absurd and ribald sexual affairs of his lead character, an aging and cynical Nobel prize-winning physicist. On the contrary, I think his switching back and forth between environmental issues that he obviously takes very seriously and the ugly and yet comedic life of his main character shows a deep understanding of human nature as well as of the ways in which greed and ignorance drive world markets and scientific research and threaten the lives of humans and other species on the planet.

Michael Beard is McEwan’s fictional physicist, and the reader is introduced to him as a scheming husband, seething with jealousy as his fifth marriage is crumbling. Throughout all five marriages Beard has cheated on his wives, but now he is outraged that his fifth very attractive wife has decided to turn the tables on him. He wants her back, wants her to love him again, though he knows even through his pain that were he to get his wish, his old ways would quickly return. Beard is seriously overweight, drinks far too much alcohol, is engaged in no new or productive work, and lives primarily on the laurels of his now distant accomplishments. One of the things I admire about McEwan is his ability to display clearly how brilliant accomplishment in one area of a life can be, and very often is, combined with absurd ineptness or worse in other areas. Like his British predecessor, Iris Murdoch, McEwan understands all too well how brilliance and folly often combine in the same person. Murdoch’s famous and accomplished philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil is so good at what he does that he is able to provide rather profound insights even in ethical theory, an area of philosophy that he remains skeptical about, and yet in his personal life, he is a scoundrel who attempts to seduce his own granddaughter.

At least for this reader, while there are sections of the novel that are, indeed, darkly humorous, even uproarious, the book is not a comedy. Yes, even great people are flawed and often enough lead personal lives that are ugly and immoral. In many ways, Beard’s habits mirror the habits of greed-driven markets. He is a metaphor for the world we find ourselves in. He is smart enough to know that he is eating and drinking his way into an early death, but his understanding does nothing to dissuade him from his disastrous course. So, too, it takes very little smarts to understand that economies dependent on fossil fuels and on constant growth are rapidly producing and consuming us into oblivion, but that understanding seems to have little effect on the course that history is taking. Michael Beard is unable to wake up and do something to change his life; McEwan hopes that his readers are not.

Only slowly and due both to historical accidents and his own crumbling finances does Beard take up environmental issues. He is much more concerned with his own life than with the future of the planet, “But…was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached.” Happenstance delivers into his possession the research notes of a colleague and catapults him into researching new sources of energy.

Deploying techniques and materials still only talked of in nanotechnology, the idea was to exploit direct energy from sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using special light-sensitive dyes in place of chlorophyll and catalysts containing manganese and calcium. The stored gases would be taken up by a fuel cell to generate electricity. Another idea, also taken from the lives of plants, was to combine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with sunlight and water to make an all-purpose liquid fuel.

I found the sections of the book on global warming and photovoltaic energy to be fascinating, and I also loved McEwan’s humorous but perceptive asides on deconstructionism and how it has entered the academic world of science as well as the arts. As Beard and a group of physicists listen to a woman professor of science studies explain how genes are really socially constructed and do not exist outside the domain created by geneticists and their technical language, they politely avoid exchanging glances:

They tended to take the conventional view, that the world existed independently, in all its mystery, awaiting description and explanation, though that did not prevent the observer from leaving his thumbprints all over the field of observation.

It is pretty clear that in this case, McEwan’s sympathies lie with the physicists who believe that there is a real world out there that we are trying to understand and describe.

I think McEwan is one of the really great writers of our era. He is what I call a maximal user of the language; he supposes that his readers will be able to understand big words and difficult concepts. While he laughs at his lead character and pokes fun at the absurdities of human lives, he certainly sees himself as a being who is chock full of contradictions and driven by competing forces.

I will leave you with a quote from the book where Beard is trying to convince a group of investors that they should be investing in solar-energy research rather than in finding the last drops of oil on the planet:

An alien landing on our planet and noticing how it was bathed in radiant energy would be amazed to learn that we believe ourselves to have an energy problem, that we ever should have thought of poisoning ourselves by burning fossil fuels or creating plutonium.

Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in a heavy rainfall. This man is dying of thirst. He has an ax in his hand and he is felling the trees in order to suck sap from the trunks. There are a few mouthfuls in each tree. All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing. So why doesn’t he tip back his head and drink the rain? Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:48:00 +0000

Jeannette Walls tells us that she had intended to write about her mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona, but the more she talked to her mom about those years the more her mother insisted that it was not she but her own mother, Lily, who had lived the truly interesting life and the one that deserved to be described. Jeannette resisted at first, since she had been only eight when her grandmother died, but she had been hearing stories about her grandmother all of her life, over and over. Finally, Jeannette gave in and decided to write what she calls a true-life novel about her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith.

In many ways this book is even more captivating than Walls now famous memoir, The Glass Castle, and I think it also provides a perspective on her own mother, Rose Mary Smith Walls, that is in some ways lacking in the memoir. Lily Casey Smith was born in 1901 in west Texas, and spent most of her life in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Her father was an intelligent man who understood horses even better than he understood people. He had been kicked in the head by a horse at the age of three, and from that incidence had a life-long speech impediment and a gimpy leg. The speech impediment and the limp led to his being not only misunderstood by others, but often being seen as mentally impaired. He would return from town enraged by his inability to make himself understood by men much less mentally agile than he. Since Lily was around him from birth, she could understand everything he said, and very quickly she became his right-hand ‘man,’ both in helping him to train sets of carriage horses and in speaking for him to the outside world. When she turned five, she began to help him train the carriage horses, and soon she was in charge of breaking the horses.

I was in charge of breaking the horses. It wasn’t like breaking wild mustangs, because our horses had been around us since they were foals. Most times I simply climbed on bareback—if the horse was too skinny, its spine sometimes rubbed a raw spot on my behind—grabbed a handful of mane, gave them nudge with my heels, and off we went, at first in awkward fits and starts, with a little crow hopping and swerving while the horse wondered what in tarnation a girl was doing on his back, but pretty soon the horse usually accepted his fate and we’d move along right nicely. After that, it was a matter of saddling him up and finding the best bit. Then you could set about training him.

It was during those years that she learned from her father, “Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.” She learned her lessons well. Her father also told her that what she had to figure out first was what her purpose was, and then set about fulfilling it. Always an avid reader, Lily became passionate about education, although the bit of formal education she got at thirteen at Sisters of Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe was interrupted when her father failed to pay her tuition. When she asked if her younger brother, Buster, was also taken out of school, her father replied simply that a boy needs a diploma, “And anyway, we need you on the ranch.”

Still, Lily was convinced that her calling, her purpose, was to be a teacher. When she was fifteen, without even having an eighth grade education, she passed a government test that had been set up to find teachers due to a severe shortage caused by World War I. She traveled five hundred miles alone, on horseback, in order to get to Red Lake Arizona where she taught fifteen students of all ages and abilities. Since there was no teacherage attached to the one-room school (as there would be in other schools she taught in), she slept on the floor of the school in her bedroll. “Still, I loved my job. Superintendent MacIntosh hardly ever came around, and I got to teach exactly what I wanted to teach, in the way I wanted.”

The end of the war meant the return of young men both to fill teaching posts and to return to the factories where women had been holding down jobs that paid higher than teachers’ salaries. This combination meant that there were more qualified teachers available (at least in terms of education), and Lily was fired. Still, she had discovered her purpose, and from then on she taught at a number of tiny schools in isolated towns of Arizona and New Mexico. When she could scrape together the funds, she would attend university for awhile, loving every minute of it and finding it to be like a vacation compared to the hard life of helping her father run a ranch. She also traveled alone to Chicago, conned into a marriage there to an already married man, escaping from him and the big city after a year and returning to the southwest. As soon as she could, she learned to drive a car, and not long after that, how to fly a plane. Unlike her father, she realized that the future prospects of carriages, and carriage horses, was dim. “What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.”

And Lily climbed aboard. She taught in a tiny Mormon community until she was fired for teaching the girls that there was more to life than arranged marriages at thirteen. “You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being broodmares dressed in feed sacks.” And although she married a lapsed Mormon, a so-called Jack-Mormon, the closest she ever came to Mormonism was her married name, Smith. She and her considerably older husband ran auto repair shops, managed large ranches, and she taught here and there, off and on, both to help support the family and to fulfill her purpose.

The charm of this book rests in the way Walls captures the spirit and voice of her grandmother. The prose is sparse and unpretentious. It describes the landscape and the hardships of life in language that is at once brittle and beautiful. As one of the commentators on the book says, Lily Casey Smith “is one astonishing woman…a half-broke horse herself who’s clearly passed on her best traits to her granddaughter.”

THROW like A GIRL by Jean Thompson

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:31:00 +0000

Until the last few years I had what was very nearly an aversion to short stories. As one reader friend of mine says, they are tempting, but just as you get sucked in, the story is over. So if the stories are good, they leave you wanting more, and if they are not so good, seem simply a waste of time. Passing time instead of really reading.

Had it not been for incredible writers like Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and Carol Shields, I may still have shunned short fiction, and thereby missed out on reading Jean Thomson. Like the above writers, Thompson writes about us, ordinary people neither rich nor famous. But unlike Munro and Strout, Thompson’s characters are mostly city folk very much caught up in the now of frenzied city-life, economic insecurity, bleak predictions, abandoned hopes.

Almost all the stories are in a very intimate first person, inside the mind and body of the narrator immediately. I could easily review the book simply by giving first lines of stories. Each announcing a character and set of circumstances all of us readers recognize, sometimes with a sigh or in-taking of breath, sometimes with the nod of the head. “Jack Pardee signed his enlistment papers in May, right after graduation. The Army recruiter had been working on him for most of a year.” Her story “Lost” begins:

I was twenty years old and about as pretty as I was ever going to be, although I didn’t know that yet. I had long long hair, all the girls did. Mine was nearly down to my waist. It swung across my back like a bell. I had nice legs. There was always some boy I was crazy for, always trouble with some boy. There was never any useful purpose to it. I could never figure out what to do with them, besides wanting them to distraction.

Always her characters are ordinary folk, but her skill at description is anything but ordinary, her never heavy-handed political asides always on the mark. Thompson understands at a deep level the despair that grips more and more people and at younger and younger ages. In her story “Pie of the Month,” one of only a few where there is an author behind the scene commenting on the characters, Mrs. Colley is a woman who has been widowed for many years, and has grown into her solitary life. As the title of the story suggests, she bakes pies, tries to understand the world that keeps changing around her, avoids listening to news: “It was all so worrisome, and all so completely beyond your control.” Mostly the news was about wars, and about things blowing up “in a place you’d never been, or sometimes never even heard of, you first thought what a terrible thing it was, followed by relief that it had nothing to do with you, really, followed by a vague guilt at feeling relieved.” The final lines of the story sum up the views of Mrs. Colley:

You wanted so badly to believe that life was basically good, that people were basically good. And Mrs. Colley did believe it. She might not go around announcing that she was wonderful and blessed, but she reminded herself often that there were many terrible places she could have been born into but had not. Nothing abnormally bad had ever happened to her personally or was likely to happen except for, eventually, dying, oh well. But nowadays there was so little you could trust to stay good, as if there was a pinhole at the bottom of the world and all the best things were leaking out of it.

While this set of stories makes it obvious that we are a global village, and that corporations are bigger than countries, “…it isn’t really countries that fight Wars now. It’s corporations,” Thompson is at her very best when she is describing the inner lives of women relating to other women, and trying, trying, trying to understand their relationships with men. In the title story, “Throw like a Girl,” the narrator, Gail, has just heard about the cancer death of her girlfriend from youth—her first love in all the most important senses of that word. “Janey was the wild child, the one who couldn’t wait to do too much of absolutely everything. It wasn’t appetite or depravity, just the fear that she might be missing out on something.”

At one point in the story Janey, who has been newly initiated to sex, asks Gail if sex is supposed to hurt. And after a few stumbling attempts to get at what is behind the question, Janey blurts out, “I think he was trying to make it hurt.”

That made me queasy, I guess it shocked me. We didn’t like thinking of ourselves as vulnerable, breakable, controllable objects, even if that was exactly the way some people saw us. I said that it wasn’t right, what he’d done, and she said, Yeah, she knew. But she was still mulling it over, keeping something back. “What?” I said.

“I let him think I kind of liked it.”

I didn’t want to hear that either. Because I understood why girls did such things, even a bold, harum-scarum girl like Janey, understood why we went along with so much, were anxious to please, laughed when nothing was funny, kept silent when we should have spoken, bent ourselves into obliging shapes, did the things that shamed us, even as Janey was ashamed. There was some desperate and unlovable creature that lived inside us, and we had to keep it fed.

Thompsen understands relationships, understands the inebriation of new loves, understands the peculiar flatness that often infects old ones. Her story “The Woman Taken in Adultry,” begins,

I had two daughters and a husband who didn’t notice things. I was lonesome. Sex isn’t always about sex.

My husband was no trouble. Never had been. I’d grown used to stepping over and around him the way you might a large dog sound asleep in the doorway. You start out being married together and you end up being married apart. I’m convinced that’s the truth for most people, if they were honest about it.

As I went back over these stories tagging pages with lines or paragraphs I wanted to share, I soon had dozens of book-marks inserted. I even thought of simply naming the book and author and then stringing together quotes, quite sure that would be a sufficient lure for serious readers. In any case, talking about her as a writer will never be anything like as scintillating as reading her. I leave you with the opening lines of “The Brat.”

She hated her mother and she hated her father to, at least when he was around to be hated. She hated school and all the snotty girls who put their heads together giggling and talking big and showing off their nail polish and their new shoes and new cell phones and whatever else they bought bought bought.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:43:00 +0000

I have said before that I think Alice Munro is the best living writer anywhere. She continues to worry her many devoted readers by telling us that she is through writing, but up to now, she has continued to write and to publish. Somehow, I can’t imagine her living and not writing. Her latest collection of short fiction is entitled Too Much Happiness, and it was published in hardback in late 2009. I would be willing to bet that not many of her fans could hold off for the paperback copy; she is just too good.

From the beginning of her career, many of her stories have been quirky, describing circumstances that one would not usually dream up, let alone witness. In this latest collection, some of the stories are so odd that I, at least, found myself disturbed by them, wondering why she chose to write them. Perhaps an article in the newspaper caught her attention, and she felt the need to flesh out the short article, give it a context. At any rate, each story, even the oddest ones, has the ring of truth to it. Despite the title, there is not much happiness in most of these stories, but they grab and hold the reader.

As usual, she writes about what would be called ordinary people and usually of small towns. And although each of the stories is quite short, each gives the impression of being a sketch of what could have been a much longer piece, could have been a novel. Although Munro often begins with a single incidence, she then has an almost uncanny ability to describe or spin out threads reaching back to the past and hurtling towards a future. One story, “Child’s Play,” begins with a summons to a quite old woman, Marlene, from a friend of the same age, Charlene, who is gravely ill. But why is she reaching out now after so many years without any contact? Only gradually do we learn why Marlene feels obliged to respond to the summons despite the long hiatus in their friendship, why she still feels an odd intimacy with her. “This intimacy I’m talking about—with women—is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill feeling, denial, disgust.” But this is an intimacy of a different sort, one that requires a response.

I found myself both interested in and troubled by the stories long after I put the book down, driven to return to some of them in order to look for early clues to the bizarre track the story would take, and often enough finding that clue in the first pages, sometimes the first lines, of the story.

I absolutely refuse to give away any of the twists and turns of these marvelously written stories, but I do want to comment on the last of the stories and the one for which the whole collection is named, “Too Much Happiness.” Munro, herself, must have become intrigued by what she had discovered about a real-life woman, a late 19th century Russian mathematician by the name of Sophia Kovalevsky. There is no doubt that she was a marvelous mathematician, famous even in her own day and at a time when few women were encouraged or even allowed to study and teach high-level mathematics. The story begins with a quote by Kovalevsky: “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Kovalevsky is so talented, so ingenious, that she wins a prestigious award, The Bordin Prize. All papers for the award had to be submitted anonymously, and had this not been the case, it is more than highly unlikely that she would have won it, unlikely that any woman would even have been considered for such an award in a science dominated by men.

The compliments quite dizzying, the marveling and the hand kissing spread thick on top of certain inconvenient but immutable facts. The fact that they would never grant her a job worthy of her gift, that she would be lucky indeed to find herself teaching in a provincial girls’ high school.

What becomes obvious in this story is not only Munro’s fascination with this woman mathematician, but her fascination with mathematics itself, and the ways in which it resembles, or can resemble, great works of art. "Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.” And how remarkable that Kovalevsky was ever able to study and do the scholarly work that she did, having to lie and cheat even in order to get out of Russia and to the teachers and universities that would facilitate her discoveries “because no Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country without her parents’ consent."

No doubt Munro did loads of historical research preparing to write this rather long short story, but no amount of research could account for the details in her story, the descriptions of the interior life of Kovalevsky. Instead, it is Munro’s splendid imagination, her ability to spin out lovely quilts from mere threads of historical information that accounts for the richness and completeness of the story. As one of Kovalevsky’s friends remarks to her in an attempt to comfort her regarding a relationship with a man, “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind….When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” Just so, and Munro carries with her not only the sparse details that can be gathered from newspaper articles or historical accounts but all the rich life that her imagination furnishes to flesh her stories out. She is simply unparalleled as a writer of fiction.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Heidi Durrow

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:18:00 +0000

Today I want to talk to you about an exciting local writer whose book, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky is due out next month. I was fortunate enough to receive a press copy, and once I got it, I dropped everything else I was reading and focused in on this little book. In her acknowledgments, the author, Heidi Durrow, gives thanks to Barbara Kingsolver, who apparently was instrumental in helping her win the 2008 Bellwether Prize for best fiction manuscript addressing issues of social justice. Like Kingsolver, this is a writer who insists on social, political content to her writing, and while she also weaves a very good story, it is obvious throughout that the story is secondary to the message, and that the message is something this woman has lived as well as observed.

The story is about Rachel, a teenaged biracial girl who is trying to deal with the racist society in which she lives, and at the same time with the death of her mother and siblings. Born in Europe, with a Danish mother and an African-American father, she understands little of how Americans (as well as much of the world) act towards racial and ethnic minorities until she moves to Chicago, and then, after the death of most of her family, to Portland to be raised by her dad’s mother.

While the story is primarily about Rachel, the writer does quite a credible job of telling the story through the eyes of several characters, even managing to write through Rachel’s deceased mother’s eyes via journal entries found and narrated by Laronne, a sympathetic Chicago neighbor. Another young character, roughly Rachel’s age, is a third or fourth voice in the story. Known by the name Jamie as a youngster, and later choosing the name Brick for himself as he enters the world on his own, he is a witness to tragic events in Rachel’s young life in Chicago, and then re-enters and even in some sense saves her years later in Portland.

Reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, here is a young girl with bright blue eyes and pale brown skin who encounters racism in so many of its various forms. It is obvious that Durrow, herself, is maddened and frustrated by the confusion of color, eye color, skin color, hair color with the stereotyping of huge groups of people. And while she realizes how derogatory so many of the words are that refer to color, she also finds terms like African-American odd and inaccurate. Most of the so-called black people she knows have never been to Africa. She lives in Chicago with a Danish mother, but it would seem odd to call herself Danish-American; she knows a bit of Danish picked up from her mother, and certainly she treasures so much of what she remembers of her mother and her mother’s attempts to protect her and her biracial siblings from racism, but she isn’t Danish. And when she looks down at her own skin, it is not black, nor is it white. Indeed, in what sense is she even American? Certainly America is a country that has not been kind to her mother, nor to her siblings, nor to her.

I don’t intend to give away much of the plot of this book, though it not really the plot that drives the book. Instead, what Durrow manages to do is show how individual people can make a huge difference in the lives of children—can quite literally save them simply by compassion and really paying attention. And it is not only people of color who can and do make a difference, it is instead those who understand the absurdity of basing anything on skin color or economic condition, who try to understand the world they find themselves in, and to act. Brick is a character who makes a difference, and it is never quite clear just what the whole story is about his ethnicity. We know he loves his heroin addicted mother, though he finally has to leave her to save himself, and that he knows next to nothing of his absent father—Indian, Hispanic, brown, black, white? We know Brick is saved from alcohol and drug addiction by a man of color, Drew, who has found his own life by acting on behalf of people whom the dominant society would prefer simply to throw away. And we see the domino effect of such individual salvations as Brick keeps a focused eye on Rachel, catches her as she begins to fall, shores her up, sees her for the wonderful and bright and worthwhile person she is.

It is a sad story, and Rachel’s life is a sad life, but she learns from her choices and the choices of those around her. She discovers that her beauty is dangerous, met with envy and resentment by girls her own age, both black and white, and interest of the wrong sort from boys and men of all colors. Even the rich young white man who works on the streets and at a shelter, seeming genuinely to care for others and really not to judge by color or wealth, cannot stifle the urge to make sexual advances to Rachel, to use alcohol and charm in order to be with, really to take, what he calls his little Mocha girl. He, too, another man who sees her color and her beauty first; she must wash him out her skin and out of her life.

Brick, certainly much more loving towards Rachel than Jesse, the rich boy, is careful not to confuse lust and love—careful to distinguish his own wants and needs from hers. Yes, he loves her, maybe is even in love with her, but his concern is for her and who she is. In Rachel’s words:

Brick puts his arm around me. When he looks at me, it feels like no one has really seen me since the accident. In his eyes, I’m not the new girl. I’m not the color of my skin. I’m a story. One with a past and a future unwritten.

I think I won’t say more of this book except to say that I hope you will pick it up and read it. The writing is good and straightforward, though I think we can expect even better writing from her in the future. Perhaps some of the plot seems at least a bit strained, the story a bit too much in the service of the message. But given the thousands of books that are written and consumed simply in order to entertain a more-or-less unthinking audience, it is a pleasure to read such a serious book by such an obviously bright and compassionate young woman.

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides

feedburner@sitenoise.com (Larry Bowlden) — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:32:00 +0000

Sometimes I hear about a book for months, even years, before I finally pick it up and give it a try. My students and my serious reader friends have been urging me to read Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, for a very long time, so it may be old news for many of you by now, but having finally read it, I find I just have to talk about it today.

There is so much to be learned from this hefty novel, and while perhaps the most important theme is that of the many children born with ambiguous sexual organs and lumped together under the ambiguous title of hermaphrodite, there is also a wealth of information about historical struggles between Greeks and Turks, as well as about how the American automobile industry has, from its inception, treated its workers, and how the decline of that same industry has decimated cities. It is an ambitious and sprawling novel, but it also has the homey feel of a family story, and my prediction is that once you give it a hundred-page trial, you will be unable to put it down.

The main theme of the novel is announced on page one: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Fortunately for us readers, this twice born being, first named Calliope and only much later renamed simply Cal, found it necessary to trace his lineage and his story back to his grandparents who fled from a war-torn Greek island in the 1920s and landed finally in Detroit where they began their family. And so the first several hundred pages of this novel are about the miraculous escape of his grandparents, their eventual settling in Detroit, and the grimy and tumultuous history of that great American city.

Calliope’s grandfather, Lefty Stephaides, worked first for Ford Motor Company, though the complex of buildings was known to local residents simply as the Rouge.

And then the Rouge appeared against the sky, rising out of the smoke it generated. At first all that was visible was the tops of the eight main smokestacks. Each gave birth to its own dark cloud. The clouds plumed upward and merged into a general pall that hung over the landscape, sending a shadow that ran along the trolley tracks; and Lefty understood that the men’s silence was a recognition of this shadow, of its inevitable approach each morning.

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

On the factory floor, my grandfather was trained for his job in seventeen minutes. Part of the new production method’s genius was its division of labor into unskilled tasks. That way you could hire anyone. And fire anyone. The foreman showed Lefty how to take a bearing from the conveyor, grind it on a lathe, and replace it. Holding a stopwatch, he timed the new employee’s attempts. Then, nodding once, he led Lefty to his position on the line. On the left stood a man named Wierzbicki; on the right, a man named O’Malley. For a moment, they are three men, waiting together. Then the whistle blew.

Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling around the factory, through clouds of metal dust, its acid fogs, until another worker fifty yards on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds). Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent heads, huge spindles pound steampowered fists. No one says a word.

This description continues for several pages, as eloquent as Charlie Chaplan’s movie Modern Times in expressing the essence of the assembly line and its soul-sucking noise and repetition. We also hear of the so-called social workers Ford sends out to spy on the home conditions of the workers, telling them how to brush their teeth, how to raise their children, whom to avoid if they wish to continue working for Ford Motor. If there are too many families living in one apartment, that, alone, may be grounds for dismissal, since these audacious spies have decided that living in such crowded conditions makes for unreliable employees, and there are always more interchangeable workers to fill the ranks.

This novel would be worth reading simply for it social commentary and its description of the birth, life, and slow-death of cities like Detroit, but equally fascinating is the story of the thousands of children born with two sets of sexual organs.

Because of certain genetic and hormonal conditions, it was sometimes difficult to determine the sex of a newborn baby.

The chief imperative in cases like mine was to show no doubt as to the gender of the child in question. You did not tell the parents of a newborn, “Your baby is a hermaphodite.” Instead, you said, “Your daughter was born with a clitoris that is a little larger than a normal girl’s. We’ll need to do surgery to make it the right size. {It was} felt that parents weren’t able to cope with an ambiguous gender assignment. You had to tell them if they had a boy or a girl.

A doctor in one of my classes confirmed that during his early days as a military doctor, determination of sex was done simply on the basis of appearance. If the penis was too small, the baby was pronounced to be female; it the clitoris was too big, the baby was pronounced to be male. Never mind that in the first case, undescended testes would cause a new crisis in adolescence (as was the case with Callipoe), just as hormonal changes during puberty would cause similar crises in the stipulated males who suddenly developed breasts and other secondary sexual characteristics of females. Over hundreds of years, various criterion have been used to determine gender: in the late 1800s looking at gonadal tissue under a microscope was deemed to be the definitive test; if it’s testicular, the person was a male, if ovarian, female. But a later discovery determined “that gender identity is established very early on in life, about the age of two. Gender was like a native tongue; it didn’t exist before birth but was imprinted in the brain during childhood, never disappearing. Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.”

That there is no tidy answer to this question of male or female, nature or nurture, and that finally it is more a matter of stipulation than discovery emerges clearly over the course of this wonderful book. The only way to get to whole story is to read the book.