Robert Parker's Now & Then

After my tremendous summer reading binge, my pleasure reading has tapered off quite a lot. It's amazing that a person can be so busy without even having a job. I still do my best to read books that people have lent to Pocket of Bolts, however. Now & Then was one of those. It was a fun book. Tough good guys manage to figure out and entrap very tough and clever bad guy. In this case: private detective and his psychiatrist girlfriend together with a rotating cast of amusing toughs... versus liar and identity-thief radical lefty intellectual crypto-terrorist.

The dialogue is spare and witty, the plot fast-moving. On the other hand, the "good guy" character development was pretty flat and lazy. Motifs (such as the "long ago adultery" theme) were hit hard and heavy-handedly. Also, everyone was quite cavalier about death. Still, really fun reading. A nice break from all the work!

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man

I was totally fascinated by this book. Norah Vincent, a masculine looking lesbian with big feet, decides to glue on some stubble and become a man for a year or more. She's not a transvestite; she just wants to know what men do when women aren't around. Her explorations in a variety of all-male contexts are fascinating. The idea of the project bears a certain resemblance to Nickeled and Dimed, but the deception feels more dangerous, and the eventual revelation of her true identity (when/if she makes it) is far more unsettling to her informants. The deception is difficult for her emotionally and identity-wise, and its psychological effect on her is clearly profound. Her account is honest and intimate.

What it all adds up to is that being a man is REALLY difficult, not just for her but for the men she interacts with as well. She makes much of how difficult it is for them to let their guard down, but they do let their guard down with her to the extent that she surely learns more as a man than she would have as a woman. Actually, another of the most revealing parts of the book is her attempts to date women as a man. She is shocked by how poorly she/he is treated, how intense and contradictory women's demands on men can be. Since she has dated women as a woman, her perspective on that is particularly interesting.

If I have an objection to the book, it's that her sample set, while interesting, is not representative of, say, the men in my acquaintance. It's hard to know for whom her generalizations hold true. Class seems a really important factor as well. Another difficulty with the book is that she doesn't seem like someone who has experienced a deep, meaningful, sexual relationship with a man. She talks about the severely limited emotional range that men are allowed to have, and the difficulties her informants have in their often-troubled relationships, how they feel both resentment and protectiveness toward the women in their lives. This is surely true for everyman some of the time and for some men all of the time, but when a heterosexual relationship is working well, I get the sense that it can provide an outlet for and shelter from at least some of the intensely difficult experiences she describes. (Presumably male homosexual relationships have the same potential, but I'm not qualified to comment.) In short, maybe most men have it as hard as she perceives they do, but perhaps the picture is a little darker than it should be nonetheless.

Pocket of Bolts, who was actually the one to buy the book, promises to read it soon and tell me what he thinks about her experience and conclusions--whether he thinks it holds true to his experience--so perhaps I'll post an update then. Certainly I'll be very interested to know.

The Secret Life of Bees

I really enjoyed this book quite a lot. Like Extremely Loud, it's the story of a childhood gone awry due to guilt and the death of a parent. The plucky inventiveness of the heroine Lily is of a much more aggressive type than that of little Oskar. Another way of looking at it is the contrast between the way an adolescent girl's way of dealing with life and a pre-adolescent boy. Lily, a young white girl in mid-60s South Carolina, escapes from her hateful father and rescues the only person who has ever loved her, her black nanny Rosaleen.

The book's great achievement is its refusal to idealize either Lily or Rosaleen. Lily may take a stand against racism--even a dramatic one--but race is a not an issue she has wholly sorted out in her own heart. As for Rosaleen, Lily often finds her frustrating, infuriating, even grotesque.

As for the place they end up, a bee farm to which Lily is led only by the mysterious image of a black Madonna, it is a mysterious and multi-leveled world of three troubled but loving sisters who have invented their own religion and live together all mixed up with beekeeping and bananas, a cello, a wailing wall, an old ship's figurehead, and the tragic sadness of the song "Oh Susannah." Lily, dragging Rosaleen with her, descends on them with no explanation but the most transparent tissue of lies, yet they accept her into their home and lives. It is both frustrating and fascinating to watch Lily being reborn through the insights and experiences she has there. The process is not without resistance from her worse nature, and the friction and trouble and difficulty of it all, the constant tension of racial difference, the imperfections of everyone and of the world, keep the book from being saccharine and sentimental. You don't always like Lily, or the other characters, but you certainly always find her believable!

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

This is one of rare times I actually read a new book, one that's on the bestseller list and all. I bought it in San Francisco to occupy the flight back from R*'s wedding. I had read the first page and found it charming.

The main character is a boy whose father was lost in 911. And then there's an old man, who has lost the ability to speak. Their stories are interwoven. I've always thought that kids who grow up in New York City are strange little hot-house flowers, and this kid is one for sure. He has incredible creativity and yet it is all strange. His ways of playing and of thinking are delightful but peculiar, almost decadently evolved but never mature. He is grieving but rejects the ordinary methods of dealing with that; instead, his quixotic quest is his way of dealing with losing his father and with the terrible secret he has about that day.

I have to warn you now that the book is not as long as it looks. Lots of strange graphical gimmicks. Blank pages, single sentence pages, unreadable pages, number pages, photos, colors, stuff like that. It's not as aggressively annoyingly pomo as it could be, though I was mildly annoyed. It is meant to give the texture of real life, to let you see more clearly through the characters' eyes, to make it feel documentary. Anyway, I liked the book overall and it even made me cry, which doesn't happen too often. I'd recommend it to anyone, but I probably wouldn't read it again. Many of the effects depend on unexpectedness (try to avoid spoilers!).

More Ann Patchett: Truth and Beauty

Though I finished Truth and Beauty just today, and there's a whole stack of finished books with prior claims to their place in the book draft, I decided to put it here as a follow-up to Taft, by the same author. Truth and Beauty is not a novel. It's an autobiographical account of the author's friendship with poet and memoirist Lucy Grealy. I picked it up for a dollar at a book sale, simply because I recognized the author's name. I wasn't sure I was going to like it much. I mean, the premise sounds a little grim: the author's extremely deep and intimate but heterosexual friendship with someone whose face and life are half destroyed by cancer, and who ends up dead of a heroin overdose.

To sum it up that way, though, is to be unfair to both the book's author and its subject. Lucy is brave and scintillating and impossible. Ann is patient and firm and full of wonder. The milieu in which they live, as creative writers who first struggle and then succeed, has its own measure of fascination. The whole thing in a way is an updated Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but without the ventriloquism. What leaves the most lasting impression in my mind, though, is the nuances of feeling in Ann's portrait of Lucy. She is far more generous to her subject than I could imagine being, though she doesn't omit the unbearable aspects of her beloved friend. She poured a tremendous amount of emotional energy into her friendship with Lucy, but she is also able to convey the ways she found it rewarding. Near the end, Lucy claims (pleasantly, without accusation) that Ann has done so much for Lucy because Ann wants to be the saint. By then, the reader is able to feel as deeply stung as Ann at the injustice of that analysis.

By the end of the book, I came away with the feeling that Lucy taught Ann a great deal about love. It was Lucy who was obsessed with love; from start to finish she could inspire it in practically anyone but could never understand or appreciate it. She always thought she was unhappy because "no one loved her" but in fact she was unhappy because she loved no one, not really; she didn't understand how. But Ann never says that outright. She hints it in a thousand ways but she never admits it in black and white. That's because Ann does know how to love and she loved her friend Lucy enough to give her the truest and most beautiful memorial she possibly could.

Taft

This book is really beautifully written. At first, the writing style reminded me a little bit of Kent Haruf's Plainsong (a spectacular book, by the way). But the subject matter is so different, of course the comparison ends of seeming idiosyncratic. Nickel, a brilliant drummer has given up his career and become a night-club manager for the chance to have a relationship with his son and his rightfully embittered wife, only to lose them anyway when his wife decides to move away. Unexpectedly a vulnerable young white girl and no-good younger brother find their way into the emotional void in his life and fill it with some of the worst kinds of trouble. The story is intercut with scenes from the earlier life of the girl and her brother, before the death of their father. Nickel is only a man; he makes mistakes, has moments of weakness and temptation. But what you get in the end is a strong meditation on the nature of fatherhood. The book hit the "fine balance" with what it took from you in the way of sorrow and what it gave back in the way of joy.

Emergency Sex

I found this book at random in a little bookstore-cafe with an idiosyncratic "recommendations" shelf. (I like recommendations so much.) The title, of course, is eye-catching. The rest of the book does not disappoint! It is the separate but intertwined stories of three UN peace-keepers, each with different skills and proclivities, but held together by a curiously strong friendship (nothing more--not a love-triangle story!). They are: a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker. At the beginning you think that three such eager and conscientious people will join forces and save ... well, if not the world, at least someone, or something. They do have their victories, but the victories are small in the face of a much huger futility. Is it the badness of human nature? of government any government? or just of UN bureaucracy? It's not clear. They're very much in the thick of things, even as they write.

They don't offer very much in the way of sweeping generalizations. Instead they offer a view from the ground, where torture and massacre and horrible prisons and disease and being shot at get almost the same amount emphasis as parties and friendships and sex and the difficulty of trying to fit in and being satisfied with one's existence. The really interesting thing is that the stage of world events and the sphere of the individual do not seem disjoint in this book. They are mutually responsive. I loved this book and stayed up all night reading it. The critique (of the UN, of the US, of pretty much everything) is scathing, but after seeing what they saw, you have to grant them the right to make that critique.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

This was a book loaned to Pocket of Bolts by one of his colleagues. Unsurprisingly, given my current obsessive greediness for reading material, I got at it first. This was two months ago now, and Pocket of Bolts still hasn't read it! Of course, I am so behind in my book draft that I finished the book back when it was still summer and now it is fall and I am only just writing about it... oh well.

It was an interesting book. I never would have chosen it myself. It was about India under Indira Gandhi, basically set around the time I was born (mid-70s). It tells the stories of coincidentally interacting lives: the major characters are two lower caste tailors, a widow, and a young college student who grew up in the mountains. Interesting minor characters also abound, however: the hair-collector, the rent-collector, the Muslim who teaches the tailors their work, the Beggar-master, the widow's arrogant and controlling brother, the proof-reader, the college student's lost friend... Each person's story is given in elaborate detail, and the stories all wind round and round each other.

The plot, which reminds me very much of a pattern seen in traditional Chinese novels, is one of coming together followed by dispersal. Each little episode furthers the story, and most of them add to the characters' suffering. The "fine balance" of the title refers to the ability to a balance between tragedy and redemption. There is a considerable amount of tragedy in the book, tragedies of every kind, but there is just enough redemption that you come away not quite all the way crushed.

Elizabeth George Mysteries

I read A Great Deliverance in Oregon back in June shortly before my wedding. An odd choice, given how dark and strange the story turned out to be, but certainly an effective distraction. On one level, it's a novel about class: the two detectives on the case are the smooth, aristocratic Thomas Lynely and the bitter, working-class Barbara Havers. The case itself has to do with childhood trauma and its unforeseen results. I liked the character development, the degree to which the detectives were also very human, not just fact-finders. The book started off very slow, but by about halfway through I was unable to put it down and spent about half the night finishing it.

I actually did the same with In the Presence of the Enemy a few weeks ago. It's the fourth in the series, numbers two and three being not immediately available in the used bookstore near my house. They're always pretty much self-contained anyway. Presence is a kidnapping plot. Some wobbliness in ability to produce age-appropriate inner monologue for the childhood is more than made up for by the gutsy choice the author made about halfway through. (I won't give it away, but I was surprised!) Not a perfect story, but thoroughly engrossing. Again, I thought character development in unexpected quarters (the newspaper editor, the politician's husband) to be a strong suit.

World War Z, Moo

I should first mention that these two books have absolutely nothing in common as far as subject matter is concerned. Max Brooks' World War Z (An Oral History of the Zombie War)is a futuristic story about what would happen if our world suffered an infestation of zombies, while Moo, by Jane Smiley, is a satirical but also at times kind-hearted story about the sins and redemptions of a small university community. You might say that the only thing these two books have in common is that I read them at the same time. This was because I am absolutely terrified of zombies ever since seeing the movie 28 Days Later, and I couldn't read World War Z before bed or any other time when I was likely to be nervous about things. Moo was very calming to read, while WWZ was thrilling and mesmerizing.

Actually, though, one other thing the two books do have in common is the use of a pastiche technique, one story made up of many different people's points of view. They are both trying to use the juxtaposition of limited perspectives to give a sense of total perspective, and that is fairly cool.

I have thought quite a lot about what underlies zombie stories, what psychological condition they are meant to grip (and chew) on. I decided that zombie stories are to a great extent about alienation: the feeling that there are people out there who look like me but who cannot be understood through analogy to myself; their actions are detrimental to my interests; they cannot be reasoned with; and--as things get worse--anyone, even my nearest and dearest, can get like this. Almost all zombie stories seem to have two major elements, first the metamorphosis of formerly close companions into zombifies, and second, the realization that (as conditions worsen) non-zombies become as deadly as zombies. Zombie stories are therefore an interesting example of something that contains both the symbol and the thing it's supposed to symbolize (I mean just in case you missed it, y'know?). Knowing the formula and recognizing its heavy-handedness doesn't make these stories less scary to me however!

WWZ's spin on the formula is interesting because what the author is clearly interested in is an allegory of global politics: nations responding to the crisis in ways that are characteristic of them. A further underlying significance of the zombie threat was also the problem of overpopulation. I'm not sure the author consciously meant that, but it makes some of the scenes more chilling if one uses "zombie" as a symbol for "undesirable excess population." (In 28 Days Later the formula could be summarized as "zombie" = "irrational violence".) Overall, though, the book haunted me only about a tenth as much as 28 Days Later did. Maybe it's not having to actually see all the nastiness.

As for Moo, it had its downside in that it descended into a certain amount of stereotyping. On the other hand, the interactions among partially stereotypical characters were often funny and unexpected. There were so many balls being juggled that I didn't really mind them not having all that many individual features. The book portrayed academia as a system that is basically broken but manages to limp along because some of its parts work very well (like the all-powerful secretary to the Provost, Mrs. Walker), well enough to (just barely) compensate for those parts that work really badly. Most people, including the students, just do their jobs in a mediocre and ordinary sort of way, occasionally rising above their ordinary selves to do something better. (And occasionally sinking lower.) The end result is that most wickedness gets some punishment, and most goodness gets some kind of small reward. But it happens in such a muddling way!

I wonder if academia is really like that? Well, even if it is I probably will only ever have the kind of partial view most of the characters in Moo do, so I suppose I won't have to worry overmuch about it!

The Mission Song, Spook Country

I'm a little behind with the book draft, as I finished John LeCarre's The Mission Song quite some time before the wedding, I think in early June. It was a really good one, though. One complaint I have about LeCarre (whom in general I adore) is how he sometimes takes everything away from you at the end, leaves not even a shred of anything good. This is especially true of the later stuff, The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends. Both of which, don't get me wrong, I read avidly. But I couldn't be satisfied, because they were SUCH total downers. The Mission Song is really desperate and doesn't leave you much but it does leave you something. I found the main character interesting in his abilities and his flaws. The love affair was perhaps a little less convincing, but not bad either. I liked seeing LeCarre stretch to portray a biracial hero. It was a stretch, maybe not all the way convincing, but not bad either. Overall, I'd rate the book about like The Taylor of Panama, not quite up with my all-time favorites, the Smiley series and Single and Single. Yes, I've read nearly everything by LeCarre, though I'm still working through a few of the more obscure ones...

William Gibson's Spook Country, which I read slowly over the time I was in Hawaii and after I got back, was less inspired. I would say it's William Gibson phoning it in. That's not to say it wasn't pretty exciting in places, because the guy does really know how to tell a story. It's just that, well it had a few problems. One was thinness. None of the characters seemed really human. They were just collections of character traits and psychological ticks, which was especially disappointing in the characters you really wanted to care about, like Tito, Milgrim, and I guess Hollis to some extent. Lots of storylines going at the same time. They were juggled smoothly enough, but there was so little--even no--personal connection among them. They connected event-wise, plot-wise, but not in any human way, except superficially. That made them all seem solipsistic, locked into their individual and unconnecting worlds.

Biggest turn-offs: rockstar card was overplayed (I just don't care enough about made-up fans of made-up bands); the fascination with Google and wireless networks, which make the book feel dated before it's even dated--come on, it's science fiction, make some shit up; also, the spy stuff felt very unreal, especially compared to LeCarre. Of course, it's not really fair to compare Gibson out of his own territory to LeCarre in his own territory. But then again, Gibson ventured there and probably should have read more LeCarre (or Graham Greene) before doing so. Favorite bits: action sequences with the odd Cuban god-figures, and the Cuban-Chinese characters in general. It was a page-turner, but it really didn't measure up even to some of his other later stuff, like Pattern Recognition.

Shop Girl, The Brooklyn Follies

I finished Shop Girl about a week ago I think. I read it all in one day. It was such a touching story, which somehow reminded me of myself (even though I have not much in common with the heroine) and how hard it was to deal with being early twenty-something. Also it surprised me how serious a book it was for having been written by someone whom I think of as a funny-man. Like most romantic comedies, there was a significant role reserved for fate or chance or coincidence. But the personal development of the characters remained the most important thing. Nothing happened to them that was really beyond the pale of what they deserved. And in the end it turned out to be really satisfying.

Bought The Brooklyn Follies on impulse in the airport and read it on the plane. It was fairly light and charming, although it did not always hit the mark. The parts I liked least were the pontifications on politics and on private worlds. Those were uncomfortably jarring. The rest was all right. I mean, certainly it kept me turning pages, though if you ask me to point to some favorite section or aspect I'm not sure that I could. It was the "fascination with people's stories" thing, which was narratively a little too foregrounded. It's just not always as interesting on a meta-level as writers sometimes think it is. On the other hand, I did really enjoy the idea of an entire compendium of follies, which the first person narrator occupies his spare time compiling. I also liked the multi-generational "lost sister" motif, which seemed like an homage to The Sound and the Fury (a book I only just recently read). In any case, as airplane reading, no complaints.