Hot Weather and Mostly Lukewarm Reading

The ridiculous heat may have affected my brain--or at least I'm going to use that as my excuse for a mini mystery binge this month. But I did manage one (short) classic and a couple of prize-winners. 

Mysteries

Extreme Prey, by John Sandford

The Good Neighbor, A. J. Banner

She's Not There, by Joy Fielding

212, by Alafair Burke

The Theory of Death, by Faye Kellerman

Wilde Lake, by Laura Lippman

The Sandford, Burke, and Kellerman books are installments in long-running series--none terrible, none really good. The Good Neighbor is something I got free on Amazon when I was a Prime member--and I got what I paid for. 

She's Not There is the story of a child kidnapping similar to the Madeleine McCann--a toddler daughter is snatched from a hotel room when her parents are having dinner in the restaurant downstairs. More than a decade later, the parents marriage has collapsed, they are still hounded by the press (especially on anniversaries), neither gets alone well with their other (older) daughter, and both are haunted by guilt--although the father, perhaps stereotypically, has found it easier to move on. When a girl calls to say she thinks she is their daughter, it causes even more strife, but eventually leads to a disturbing resolution of the crime. Okay but wouldn't recommend (and I'm getting tired of a mini-trend involving mothers being blamed when their children go missing).

Laura Lippman has written some very good mysteries--both in her Tess Monaghan series and in her stand-alone books. Wilde Lake is a stand-alone that focuses on Lu Brant, newly elected state's attorney in Howard County, Maryland. Her first case in office is a murder case that eventually leads Lu back to a series of terrible events during her older brother's senior year of high school (when her father was the state's attorney). Subplots involve new developments in the case that made her father beloved in the community and revelations about her mother's death. The themes of the book are important: the expectations we have of our heroes and the stories we create to cover the pain of our histories. But somehow the book doesn't quite work--too many coincidences, a dual narration (Lu as a child and Lu today) that isn't consistent, and an obnoxious protagonist. Not one of Lippmann's best.

Young Adult

The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate

The granddaughter gave me this Newbery-award-winning book for my birthday because she enjoyed it--and I can see why. The story is narrated by a gorilla named Ivan, who has lived for 27 years in a small glass enclosure in a mall. When his friend and fellow captive Stella the elephant becomes ill and is clearly dying, their owner brings in a baby Ruby to replace her. Before she dies, Stella asks Ivan to get Ruby to a zoo. He uses his artistic talent and his friendship with the daughter of the custodian at the mall to bring public attention to the animals' plight. It's a sweet story and is written in single-sentence paragraphs that somehow made me believe that might be how a gorilla used language. Kids who like animals will love this book.

Fiction

They Don't Mean to But They Do, by Cathleen Schine

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrow

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, by Ramonda Ausubel

They May Not Mean to But They Do is a funny but sad story about aging parents and their adult children's attempts to control them. As the novel opens, 86-year-old Joy is still working while caring for her husband, who suffers from dementia. Then her husband dies, she loses her job, a boyfriend from her past turns up, and her children, Molly and Daniel, start trying to control her (while being unable to control elements of their own lives). All of the characters are well-intentioned, and all of them make lots of mistakes. A depiction of Joy's apartment as seriously cluttered with mail and other papers Joy cannot deal with reminded me so vividly of my own nearly 92-year-old mother's dining table and desk (if you're reading this, Mom, sorry) that I came close to simultaneously laughing and crying. Definitely worth reading.

This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! has a similar theme. Harriet is an older woman whose husband recently died, after suffering with Alzheimer's. She learns he bought two tickets for an Alaskan cruise before he died, and she decides to go on the trip. Things don't go well and her estranged daughter decides to join her to rein her in. It turns out the daughter and her brother are trying to manipulate the mother for their own benefit; at the same time, Harriet is learning some disturbing things about her late husband. Chapters telling the story in the present are interspersed with "This Is Your Life" type narration describing, in second person (as on the old game show), various periods in Harriet's early life. I think the author intends the book to be funny, but mostly it just made me feel sad for Harriet. Schine's book is much better! 

Author Heidi Durrow is the daughter of a Danish woman and an African American man--as is the heroine of her novel, young Rachel. Rachel has recently begun living with her paternal grandmother and aunt in a black neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. She feels like she doesn't belong and her classmates are happy to reinforce that feeling. As she tries to cope with her new circumstances, she is also grieving for her mother, brother, and sister and recovering from injuries she sustained in the event that killed them: a fall from the roof of the apartment building where they were living in Chicago. She also wonders why she has not heard from her serviceman father, still stationed somewhere overseas. As Rachel comes of age, her back story is filled in through sections narrated by her mother, her mother's supervisor at her job in Chicago, and the neighbor boy who saw her brother fall past his window. Rachel will break your heart and make you think; as the mother of biracial children, I may be somewhat more interested in Rachel's story than the average reader, but everyone should certainly care because multiracial children are, in my opinion, the future. Recommended. 

A couple of years ago, I undertook a project to read Pulitzer and National Book Award winners. I'm doing it slowly--in part because there are a lot of them and in part because some of them just don't appeal. Tree of Smoke, the story of CIA operatives and collaborators during the Vietnam War, was one of those. And, in this case (unlike The Road, which I resisted but ended up admiring), my trepidation was well-founded. I don't think it's an overstatement to say I hated this book. Similarly, I disliked A Confederacy of Dunces, frequently referred to as a modern-day Don Quixote. Although I haven't read Don Quixote (I probably should), this is only true if Don Quixote was a narcissistic, idiotic, and abusive fool, as is Ignatius Reilly, the protagonist of Dunces. Definitely not worth the time.

In Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, we meet Edgar and Fern. They both grew up in wealthy families with parents who weren't warm--Fern's family was old money, Edgar's nouveau riche. As college students, they decided they didn't care about money--yet by the time they have been married for over a decade and have three children, they seem to be enjoying the life of leisure Fern's parents' money has given them. Then they learn the money is gone. Fern assumes Edgar will go to work in his father's steel company--but Edgar, who fancies himself a novelist, does not want to. Both essentially melt down and run away (without telling each other), leaving their three children at home with no supervision. Although I thoroughly disliked Fern and Edgar, I enjoyed the depiction of their hypocrisy and their meltdown--until Ausubel gave them a dose of sudden-onset maturity. Despite the letdown of the happy ending (I know--it's a weird reaction), I'd recommend the book. 

Classics

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

This classic novella is the story of hard-working traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who has the financial responsibility for his parents and his younger sister--but wakes up one morning as a horrible vermin. No one seems to wonder how or why this happened, they just try to construct a new way of living with a family member who is no longer human and without their income source. Gregor's sister assumes the task of taking care of him, but gradually she, too, tires of the task and begins to talk of killing Gregor. The parents wish they could move to another apartment, but they feel tied to their current quarters by Gregor's presence. While Gregor deals with his transformation dispassionately, he does begin to feel responsible for the problems his family faces. 

I read the novella as representing the dehumanizing and alienating effect of both family and work. It also poses ethical questions about how we treat others, even when their outer presentation becomes repulsive. Definitely strange, definitely worth a read. 

Nonfiction

Not for Bread Alone, edited by Daniel Halpern 

This book is a collection of highly variable pieces about food, from authors as wide-ranging as Alice Waters, Wendell Berry, M.F.K. Fisher, Michael Dorris, Colette, and many more. The topics are equally wide-ranging. My favorite was a Paul Schmidt essay about the meaning of oysters in Anna Karenina. Overall, however, there were more essays I found boring than ones I liked.

Pick of the Litter:  The Girl Who Fell from the Sky and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty 

Favorite Passages:

It's easy to smile just to make other people feel better. But when a person fakes happy, it has edges. Regular people may not see, but the people who count, they can see edges and lines where your smile ends and the real you, the sadness (me) or the anger (Grandma) begins.

     From The Girl Who Fell from the Sky

There are some things that can't be righted. . . . It's good to name them.

     From Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty

The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr . . . or Do I Really Hate Memoirs?

If you have read much of this blog, you know I quite often say I don't like memoirs. Indeed, I have tried to read two of Mary Karr's memoirs and been unable to get into them. So why am I devoting an entire entry--something I rarely do anymore--to her book of advice about writing memoirs? Because it caused me to think about memoirs and why I do or don't like them.

In the book, Karr intersperses chapters about writing (finding your voice, choosing details, structuring the narrative) with chapters in which she analyzes memoirs that she admires. Since I have no intention of writing a memoir, I'm not sure how useful the information is for potential memoirists, but some of it is quite useful to readers. For example, she breaks down the first two paragraphs of Michael Herr's Dispatches in a way that encourages me to be a more careful reader. Similarly, her discussion of voice motivates me to look more closely at voice as I read.

One aspect of Karr's perspective that annoyed me was that she takes a lot of shots at fiction (whether out of defensiveness or genuine belief that memoir is superior, I don't know). She says that memoir is harder to create and more truthful than fiction. She seems to see fiction as blurred memoir, saying at one point that "even" a fictional character can feel like the reader's pal. I would disagree with all of these claims, but perhaps the claim that most helps explain my oft-stated aversion for the genre is the motivation she attributes to memoirists: to "recover some lost aspect of the past so it can be integrated into current identity." Integrating the past into current identity is a worthy pursuit--particularly for therapy. But if it results in a book, that book does not necessarily deserve to be published.

Indeed, I think that memoirs written in order to find the truth of one's past are the memoirs I don't generally like, especially if they are about sad childhoods and alcoholism/drug addiction. Perhaps the first 100 such books served a purpose--helping people with similar problems/life experiences work through their own search for an integrated identity--but enough already. I find these books tiresome. I suspect Mary Karr might think I am in denial--but I had a pretty decent childhood and have dealt with any lingering issues from childhood privately. Similarly, addiction is not part of my story. I just don't find such accounts rewarding in any way. And I mostly don't read them anymore--except when an author tricks me by, for example, calling her book Fiction Ruined My Family. Now if that were really the truth of her story, I could for sure get into it, but it was just another tale of alcohol and bad decisions.

Here I must admit that a very few memoirs have had emotional resonance for me--the writer experienced something difficult that had some similarity to an event in my life and wrote about it in a way that helped me process my own feelings (quite importantly, these authors did not whine--compare Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking with Joyce Carol Oates's annoying A Widow's Story).  As I think about memoirs I have liked and disliked, I find that I  like memoirs in which the writer has done something interesting with his/her life that I enjoy learning about; of late, these have often been works by chefs (Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson and Grant Achatz's Life, on the Line come to mind). I also admire (though don't always totally understand) memoirs in which the writer draws parallels between his/her life and events in the larger world, essentially making the writer's life a metaphor for more global issues. Examples here would include When Women Were Birds and Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams and Nobody's Son by Luis Alberto Urrea.

So I have resolved to stop making the blanket statement that I don't like memoirs and avoid those memoirs I know I will not find meaningful, hoping that there are other folks who will find these books resonate with them. I guess I should thank Mary Karr for that.

Favorite passage:
Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.

What Is Novel Conversations Reading?

So I haven't been to Novel Conversations since January, but I'm still tracking what they're reading. Here's their slate for the rest of the year:

July--My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry, by Frederick Backman
August--What Alice Forgot, by Liane Moriarty
September--Clara and Mr. Tiffany, by Susan Vreeland
October--One Book One Broomfield choice
November--The Kitchen-House, by Kathleen Grissom
December--no book
January 17--A Fall of Marigolds, by Susan Meissne

Midsummer Reading

It's not really midsummer yet, but for me the Fourth of July always feels like the point when the remaining days and weeks of summer are going to race by rapidly. Still, I am hoping those days and weeks bring some good books. In June, most of my reading was uninspiring, but Cormac McCarthy's The Road rose above the mundane. 

Mysteries

Angel's Tip, by Alafair Burke
Corrupted, by Lisa Scottoline

I have read some of Alafair Burke's books over the years but recently decided to give her Ellie Hatcher series a second try (I had apparently read the first title in the series years ago, though I remember very little about it). Ellie is a New York City homicide detective who has risen very quickly through the ranks, causing suspicion among her colleagues. But her partner, J.J. Rogan, a dapper African American detective, backs her up, even when she goes off in some odd directions while trying to solve the case of a murdered college girl on spring break in Manhattan. Okay but not a great mystery by any means.

I did not care for Corrupted, the latest entry in Scottoline's series about an all-female law firm in Philadelphia, a series I think I may have to abandon. While Scottoline brings in a current issue--corruption in sentencing juveniles to for-profit prisons--The Good Wife did the same topic better. The part of the story that focuses on a romance senior partner Benni had with the uncle of a young miscreant is utterly ridiculous. So not recommended.

Young Adult

Among the Barons, by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Belzhar, by Meg Wolitzer

Among the Barons is number 4 in the Shadow Children series recommended by my granddaughter. This one involves the hero of the series--Luke--being forced to become involved with the family of the young man whose identity he's assumed as a way of avoiding detection as an unlawful third child. The family has money (ergo "The Barons"), and Luke cannot figure out why they want him around. As usual, he doesn't know who to trust, evil deeds transpire, and you are as confused at the end of the book as when you started. My granddaughter claims that, by the seventh book, I will understand everything. I am forced to trust her.

I didn't realize Belzhar was a YA title when I downloaded it on OverDrive (I'm only familiar with Meg Wolitzer's adult novels). It's the story of five teenagers who've been sent to The Wooden Barn, a boarding school for "fragile" young people; they meet in a class, "Special Topics in English," that is focusing on the words of Sylvia Plath. Their teacher gives them antique journals in which to write during the semester and, when they write in them, they are transported back in time to before the trauma that sent them to The Wooden Barn. They call this "place," Belzhar (say it out loud and you'll understand how they got this name). As the end of the semester approaches, they must find a way to live in the present. I found the premise silly, but it's possible that kids in their early teens (there are numerous references to sex, so I wouldn't recommend it for younger kids) might find it engaging.

Classics

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

I tried to read Catch-22 when I was in college, but I just couldn't get into it. Recently, my son and I exchanged some "favorite" book lists and this was on his list, so I decided to give it another try, this time in audio book format. I did succeed in finishing it, but I didn't really enjoy it. Yes, it's an on-point satire of war and the military bureaucracy. Yes, it is at times quite funny. But it goes on way too long, providing more evidence for my argument that satirical novels should be limited to around 300 pages (Catch-22 is over 500). And, as with other male writers of his era, Heller writes about women in a way that is degrading; of course, one can argue that he is only reflecting the attitudes of the male characters in the book but surely there could be a female character who wasn't simply a toy/foil for the men.  If an intrepid reader wants to give the book a try, I might recommend not going with the audio book--so much of the dialogue is shouted that listening to the book wore me down (and, on a side note, the reader makes Yossarian sound like Alan Arkin, who played the role in the movie, which I found somewhat odd).

Fiction

The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
LaRose, by Louise Erdrich
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories, by Patricia Highsmith
Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishigura
Vinegar Girl, by Anne Tyler
Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave

The Dispossessed was another of my son's recommendations, and I found it interesting if not exciting. The protagonist is a physicist named Shevek, who is seeking to develop a General Temporal Theory. He lives on Antarres, a planet inhabited by people who broke off from their twin planet Urras, led by the anarchist Odo. While Antarres purportedly has no government, but the waning of its revolutionary spirit has created a culture of conformity, and Shevek's research, which flies in the face of accepted thinking, is not well accepted. He therefore decides to travel to Urras--an unheard of decision--to continue his research and open scientific communication between the two societies. But he struggles on Urras as well. Alternate chapters detail Shevek's life on Antarres and his life on Urras, playing with time and the relationship of events in the two phases of his life. The novel is not at all plot-driven; rather, it is a novel of ideas--ideas about time, science, the structuring of society, human relationships, the environment, the effect of scarcity on society, and more. I'm sure I missed a lot of what LeGuin is saying, but I enjoyed the opportunity to think about these ideas.

I used to read a lot of Louise Erdrich, though I was always kind of scratching my head and wondering what exactly she was trying to say in her complicated tales about Native American life and mythology. So I stopped reading her for awhile; then I read her three most recent books (Shadow Tag, The Round House, and Plague of Doves) and found them much more firmly rooted in the present and ergo easier for me to grasp; I admired all three. I was therefore disappointed when LaRose fell flat for me. It's the story of two families the Ironses and the Ravitches (the wives are half-sisters). When Landreaux Irons accidentally kills five-year-old Dusty Ravitch, he and his wife decide they must give their five-year-old son LaRose to the Ravitches as reparation. Both sets of parents (and Dusty's sister) suffer as a result of these events, and their suffering is made worse by the actions of another man, whose son is being raised by the Irons family. Family history woven into the story reveals how boarding schools that separated Native American children from their families scarred the children, both mentally and physically. As I write this description, I am thinking "I should have been really engaged with these characters" . . . and yet I wasn't.

The Road is a grim depiction of a post-apocalyptic world in which a man and his young son are trekking across the American West, surviving on their wits and good luck. The man loves his son (their wife/mother committed suicide) and tells him they are "the good guys," but the son begins to question that description as his father uses violence against other survivors they encounter. As I was listening to the book, I told my son I was afraid the ending was going to be too devastating for me to handle, but instead it was almost too upbeat. Still, I really liked The Road both for McCarthy's gift for description and the depiction of two sad but somehow inspiring characters in the midst of ruin.

Included in the Patricia Highsmith collection are two novels--Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt. I knew the general outline of Strangers on a Train but had never read it or seen the Hitchcock film based on it. Several things about the book surprised me--that the "strangers" had not really agreed to the plot, that the man who committed the first murder was so clearly deranged, that the story had homoerotic undertones--dark and suspenseful (though also dated). The Price of Salt is in some ways more interesting, as it is essentially a lesbian love story that Highsmith published under a pseudonym. I can see that this book would have been groundbreaking in the early 1950s, but, sadly, I found it as annoying as I would find a love story in which a much younger woman is emotionally abused by a man she loves (other readers don't seem to have found Carol as manipulative and abusive to Therese as I did but I thought she was despicable). I guess I will now watch the recent movie Carol that was based on the book--perhaps it will make me change my mind. The short stories included are varied--I enjoyed some, found others really strange, but then I'm not a short story person.

I saw the film Remains of the Day years ago and remember it as being a very sad depiction of a man whose emotional life was stunted by the role he had to play as a butler. Because my son described the book as "goofy," I decided to read it and, while I'm not sure that's the word I would have used, it definitely has a more comic/ironic tone. Stevens, the protagonist, has been the butler at Darlington Hall for decades, first serving Lord Darlington, now serving an American who has bought the estate and operates it with a much reduced staff. After receiving a letter from the former housekeeper, Stevens takes some time off to drive cross country to her home, hoping she has decided to leave her husband and might return to work at Darlington Hall. As he drives, he reflects on the meaning of the word dignity, an essential trait of a great butler in his view; on his relationship with his late father, also a butler, and Miss Kenton, the housekeeper; and on his experiences serving Lord Darlington. In his encounters with people on his trip, he several times denies having worked for Lord Darlington, whose reputation was sullied by his pro-German stance leading up to World War II; each time he feels guilty about doing so but cannot admit to strangers that he spent his life serving a man unworthy of the sacrifices he made. So, as this description should make clear, the book is about what I remember the theme of the movie being--but the tone is different (unless I am remembering the film incorrectly). I did enjoy the book and plan to rewatch the film to check my memory!

In 2015, Hogarth Press launched a project to have Shakespeare plays retold by modern authors (I'm not quite sure why someone would think that is a good idea). Vinegar Girl is purportedly a retelling of The Taming of the Shrew (which, sadly, I have neither read nor seen performed--and I took a semester of Shakespeare in college!), set, of course, in Baltimore. Our modern Kate is a college dropout, working as an assistant preschool teacher (she often acts about as mature as her students and is perpetually on probation) and taking care of her eccentric scientist father and obnoxious teenage sister, both of whom show little respect for Kate. Then her father has the idea to arrange a marriage between Kate and his colleague at the lab, whose visa is about to run out. The kinds of adventures you'd expect in an Anne Tyler novel ensue. Tyler does try to twist the sexism in The Taming of the Shrew on its head, but it didn't quite work for me. I feel about this book as I did about Curtis Sittenfield's retelling of Pride and Prejudice--amusing but essentially just light entertainment.

I loved Chris Cleave's Little Bee and liked Incendiary a lot; Gold, a story told in the arena of sports, fell flat.  Everyone Brave Is Forgiven moves back to looking at how people deal with violent conflict, in this case World War II. At the heart of the story is Mary, an 18-year-old girl from the privileged classes, who signs up at the War Office as soon as war is declared. She is assigned to be a teacher--but, when her students are evacuated, the head teacher tells her she is not needed or wanted in the country. With the help of the school district head, Tom, who becomes her lover, she gets her own class of students whom no one in the countryside will take in--disabled and black students. Through Tom, she and her friend Hilda meet Alistair, who is serving on the front. All four characters experience great trauma and loss (one of them is killed, while the other three are seriously injured and face numerous challenges--some of which they handle in ways that don't seem realistic), but the book ends on an upbeat note. While I was intrigued by the story of black entertainers and children in London during the War, the four main characters did not hold my attention. Perhaps there have just been too many World War II books lately. Or perhaps historical novels aren't Cleave's forte. Whatever the reason, I can't recommend Everyone Brave Is Forgiven.

Nonfiction

When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi

By any standard, Paul Kalanithi was a high achiever, his degrees in literature, medicine, and neuroscience so numerous and impressive as to be downright intimidating. In his mid-30s, he was chief neurosurgery resident at Stanford Hospital, about to embark on what would assuredly have been a remarkable career. Then he was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and decided to write a memoir; about half of the slim book is a recounting of his life before the diagnosis, half of his life as a doctor with cancer. An afterword by his wife tells of the rapid decline after two years of treatment and of his death. Kalanithi was a talented writer and his story is moving; while many reader reviewers have said they found inspiration in the book, I'm not sure I have taken anything from it other than profound sadness. Still, I would recommend the book.

Pick of the Litter: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Favorite passages:

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grade and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.

From The Road, by Cormac McCarthy


When he played his father's music, he was almost back home. But a tune had no fixed place in time. It was a city before the eternal. It was only ever a joint.

From Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave


When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

From When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalinithi (parting words addressed to his infant daughter)