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.