Bad Weather, Good Reading

October in Colorado is ending on a particularly cold and snowy note, but it is also ending with a couple of really good books (The Grammarians and Olive, Again), so the month redeemed itself!

Fiction

For a writer/editor who as a child thought that being a twin with a secret language would be unbelievably cool, picking up Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians was a no-brainer. After all, it's about identical twins Laurel and Daphne (oh, did I mention my name is Laurel) who are obsessed with language. Their closeness and idiosyncrasies set them somewhat apart from their families and prevent them from forming other close friendships. Yet, after attending college together and sharing an apartment in New York, they both marry, have a daughter, and eventually carve out language-based careers. Daphne becomes an editor and columnist who writes snarky pieces about writers whose language is insufficiently precise while Laurel is a teacher who writes poems and short stories based on the language of historic letters to the Department of War whose English does not live up to the standards of the pedantic Daphne.  Other than the sisters, the characters are not particularly well developed and there were some inconsistencies in the narration that bothered even me (this is the kind of thing my son the literary scholar usually has to point out to me). But I enjoyed the sisterly relationship, the word play, and the philosophical discussions of language and its uses enough to let me ignore any problems I saw. And, by the way, I no longer think being a twin would be that great.

I pick up every Elizabeth Strout book as soon as I can, so I certainly wasn't going to miss the new sequel to Olive Kittredge, titled Olive, Again. Like its predecessor, Olive, Again is a a collection of linked short stories. In some, the irascible Olive Kittredge, a retired math teacher who was widowed near the end of the previous book, is the central character; others feature her neighbors in Crosby, Maine, with Olive making a cameo appearance. Together, the stories in this collection add up to something not quite a novel but equally rewarding--an exploration of "coming into age," of loneliness, of friendship. Olive as a character continues to fascinate--she seems here to be gaining some degree of self-reflection, yet she continues to offend with her abruptness and condescension; perhaps that is why she feels so authentic. My favorite story is "The Poet," in which Olive sees a former student sitting in a coffee shop and joins her for breakfast; the student happens to be a former poet laureate but Olive is perplexed by her ratty sweater, bad teeth, and apparent sadness. When the woman later writes a poem that eviscerates Olive, the pain comes not only from the poem but from the fact that someone left the poetry magazine at her door, knowing how it would affect her. While there is much that is sad in Olive, Again, it is balanced with humor and the humanity Strout gives her characters. 

I thought I had already posted about Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, but either the post was imaginary or it has disappeared, so . . . The Nickel Boys is based on facts about a horrific school for boys in Florida, The Dozier School, renamed the Nickel School for this novel. The main character, Elwood Curtis, is a good student who is looking forward to better things in the future when he accepts a ride from a man who happens to be driving a stolen car; though an innocent passenger, Elwood is sent to the Nickel School, where he and other African American boys are hideously abused, sometimes killed. Although there is a novel-ish twist near the end, when we are learning about Elwood's post-Nickel School life, most of the time I felt like I was reading a nonfiction account, which was somewhat disappointing given the creativity of Whitehead's earlier works (particularly The Underground Railroad). Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book.

If you are a beer aficionado or are just looking for a "feel good" novel, you might enjoy The Lager Queen of Minnesota, by J. Ryan Stradal. I don't like beer and I thought the story was quite unbelievable, so didn't really care for it but can see that some people would feel differently.

I listened to Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein because the editors on the podcast Audicted recommended it. It's the story of two friends, Julie and Maddie, who are involved in war work; they are assigned to a secret mission behind enemy lines in France. Julie is captured and the first part of the book is structured as her confessions; the second part is a more straightforward narrative from Maddie's perspective. It's an intense story that not only educates about the work women did during World War II but also explores loyalty, friendship, and courage. Although I am somewhat tired of World War II stories, I nonetheless enjoyed Code Name Verity.

My friend Colleen recommended Problems with People, a collection of stories about the difficulty of connection.  While I admire author David Guterson's writing style, the stories mostly left me feeling dissatisfied.

Some reviews I'd read of Katherine Center's Things You Save in a Fire had led me to believe it was a more serious book than I found it to be. Essentially, it's a romance with some serious social issues--sexual assault, misogyny in certain professions--thrown in to give it some depth.

Classic

I have struggled with Margaret Atwood in the past (I think Alias Grace is the only of her books I have made it through), but all the attention to The Handmaid's Tale convinced me that I should read it, and I'm glad I did. The dystopian tale of women's subjugation is a terrifying look at what could happen in a religiously-oriented state run by people who hate women (does this now seem more possible than it did a few years ago?). The epilogue, which purports to be the minutes of a presentation at a historical association meeting, is both encouraging (Gilead no longer exists) and very funny, perhaps especially if you're an academic or even a semi-academic (as I might call myself). I am now looking forward to reading The Testaments and might even try some other Atwood.

The Ongoing Binge

In case you think I might have abandoned mysteries, such is not the case. Here are this month's time-stealers:

• The Liar's Girl, by Catherine Ryan Howard. This book about a young woman who returns to Ireland when the police ask her to talk with her former boyfriend, a convicted serial killer, has been nominated for some big prizes in the genre and I thought it was okay but not great. 
• All The Wrong Places, by Joy Fielding. At the end of this book, I felt the author was asking us to be happy about the protagonist's nasty cousin being the victim of a serial killer--don't think I'll read any more of Fielding's work.
• Here to Stay, by Mark Edwards. In-laws from hell come to stay with young married couple and bad stuff happens. Ugh.
• Leave No Trace, by Mindy Mejia. A counselor at a psychiatric facility becomes involved with a patient's efforts to escape and help his father in ways that strain credulity. Totally unbelievable.
• Bloody Genius, by John Sandford. I liked this latest title in the Virgil Flowers series better than its recent predecessors, perhaps because there was less womanizing (after all, Virgil's girlfriend is pregnant with twins). 
• 17th Suspect, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. What you'd expect from this series. 
• Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke. I like that Locke brings issues of race into the mystery genre, but this particular book had a kitchen-sink feeling to it--Locke threw in so many plot elements (a cover-up of a previous crime, problems in the marriage, exploitation of Native Americans, protection of squatters who have set up on property owned by African Americans) that I wished for a bit more simplicity. Still, I will continue to follow her work. 
• Still Midnight, by Denise Mina. This is book 1 in Mina's Alex Morrow series; I'm not sure I'll try another. 

Will I staunch the mystery binge in November? Stay tuned. 

Favorite Passages

There were no words for what she felt, the depth of the emptiness, the breadth of the emptiness, the emptiness of the emptiness. Words could only cloak what she felt. Words were supposed to illuminate and clarify.Words were meant to communicate information and feelings from one person to another. But today words stood numb and in the way. We are alone, Daphne thought, words can't change that.

--Cathleen Schine, The Grammarians (these were Daphne's thoughts following her father's funeral)

"When you get old," Olive told Andrea after the girl had walked away, "you become invisible. It's just the truth. And yet it's freeing in a way."

--Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again

Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.

--Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Talking to Strangers, The Dutch House, and Feelings of Inadequacy

This week I definitely felt my inadequacy as a reader. First, the finalists for the National Book Award came out--and I haven't read any of them, in any of the categories! And I read a lot!

Then I read a couple of very good books that I struggled with for various reasons.

Talking to Strangers

Malcolm Gladwell has such a genius for synthesizing cases and research that I always feel somewhat dense when I read his work. His new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, started with concern about the Sandra Bland case. In case you don't remember, Bland was the African American woman who was stopped for a minor traffic offense, was arrested after her interaction with an overzealous police officer escalated, and committed suicide in her jail cell a few days later. Something I had not known about her was that she had a history of depression and had recently suffered a grievous loss.

Gladwell's interest in the case led him to ask: Why do we so often go wrong in our interactions with people we don't know? This is not the question I would have asked if I were looking into the case--mine would have been more focused on how we can improve policing. But it's an interesting question, and Gladwell brings a large variety of cases to bear on the question, from a Cuban spy who goes undetected in the Defense Intelligence Agency for years, to Bernie Madoff, Friends, Amanda Knox, the creators of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Sylvia Plath, judges who grant bail, convicted sex abusers Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser, stop and frisk (or pretextual police stops), and more. From his examination of these cases and related research, he teases out three explanations for why we are so bad at understanding strangers:

--In general, we default to truth--that is, we tend to believe people are telling the truth.
--People are not transparent--their exterior does not always match their thoughts. Even so-called experts in reading facial expressions are often wrong. This problem can be exacerbated by cultural differences.
--People's actions are often closely coupled with place/context (e.g., suicides in Britain went way down when the way in which gas was delivered to homes changed, indicating that people's suicidality was tied to the availability of a particular method).

His analysis clearly indicates that people continue to cling to their misconceptions even in the face of evidence (this is in line with brain/learning research that we have known about in education for some time). He also points out that much of police training is based on misconceptions.

It's when Gladwell brings everything together to apply it to the Sandra Bland case that I don't follow, as it seems in this case many of the above general rules don't really have a lot of explanatory power. And he doesn't deal at all with the question that plagues society with respect to the many tragic police-citizen interactions in the past few years: racism. In the end, he sums up the police officer's mistake in dealing with Ms. Bland as "blaming the other person." Sorry, that seems to me to abandon all that has come before--but I respect Gladwell enough to wonder if I've somehow missed the point.

The Dutch House

I like Ann Patchett's work, and I particularly appreciated her prior novel Commonwealth, which was an autobiographical work based on Patchett's own complicated family. The Dutch House continues some of the themes from that work--children abandoned by their mothers, the cobbling together of family, memory and how it shapes people. The Dutch House is less complicated, however--two children are at the core: Danny, the narrator, and his older sister/surrogate mother Maeve. The title refers to the huge house that their father Cyril, a real estate developer and landlord, bought for their mother, a woman who was planning to be a nun before she met and married Cyril. Unsurprisingly, she hates the house and eventually abandons it and her family to serve the poor in India.

The children (3 and 10 at the time) are devastated, particularly Maeve, who has no one to be a substitute mother. She longs for her mother while Danny, over the years, becomes increasingly angry at her abandonment. When their father marries a younger woman with two daughters, the ultimate result is the children's banishment from the house, which haunts them as they become adults. Over the years, they spend a lot of their time together parked in a car outside the house reminiscing.  In the end, redemption, forgiveness, and (so the ending is not entirely happy and fluffy) grief.

The characters in this book are not as deeply drawn as in some other Patchett works and I think that relates to my feelings of inadequacy. I heard Patchett being interviewed on NPR (can't remember who was interviewing her), and she said The Dutch House was Maeve's story as told by Danny. But as a reader, I didn't see that at all--to me, it was Danny's story, often Danny's story of being manipulated by Maeve. Now I know this doesn't really matter, especially in reader response theory, but when you hear the author say the book is one thing and you can't figure out what she was thinking, you don't feel really insightful.

I liked The Dutch House, even though I don't think it was Maeve's story, but I have liked other Patchett works more.

Favorite passage:

But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House