The Fallback Plan, by Leigh Stein

The cover design of The Fallback Plan looks like a comic book, the blurbs on the cover stress the book's humor, and the first chapter opens with a very funny riff: "In June, the monsoons hit Bangladesh, Chinese police discovered slaves in a brickwork factory who couldn't be sent home because they were too traumatized to remember anything but their own names, and Dr. Kevorkian was released from prison. In other news, I moved in with my parents." And narrator Esther, a recent college graduate, does bring wry humor to the story...but that story is in fact a sad one.

Esther had a breakdown during her senior year while preparing for her first starring role in a college production (Blanche in Streetcar). Having graduated with a degree in theater, she has no prospects and is spending her time with a couple of ne'er-do-wells who spend their time drinking, playing video games, and smoking pot; Esther has a crush on one of these losers, Jack, despite the fact that he refers to her as "the Jewess."

Her mother then arranges a job for her babysitting the four-year-old daughter of Amy and Nate, a couple whose infant daughter died a few months earlier. Esther becomes fond of May and regales her with stories about pandas, surreal tales she envisions becoming a screen play. Esther also snoops around the house, developing something of a crush on Nate, although she rarely sees him for more than a few minutes. Amy, meanwhile, is clearly struggling in the aftermath of her baby's death, spending all day every day in the attic, working on her art, which proves to be a bizarre reproduction of the baby's room.

When Amy takes May and decamps to Arizona, Esther is once again left with nothing to do. Yet, in the final chapter, Stein seems to be suggesting that Esther is now ready for her "next steady step." For me, this did not ring true--of course, I may be too old for coming-of-age novels. I found myself identifying more with Esther's mother than with the heroine herself.

Favorite passage:

I've heard that only children remember less than children with siblings do, because we have no one with whom to corroborate our memories. I've had to appropriate my parents' memories of my childhood, their stories, true or not, because sometimes when I see old photos of myself I don't quite believe that's who I was. What appear to be the happiest years of my life in photo albums are the years most missing in my memory.

Quicksand, by Junichiro Tanizaki

Several years ago, my younger son, who is working on a doctorate in Japanese literature, made me a list (at my request) of Japanese works that I should read. I read several titles and then, for quite some time, ignored the list. He even added some books a couple of years ago, and I still managed not to read any of them. Recently, however, I decided to restart my education in Japanese literature and chose to start with Quicksand, by Junichiro Tanizaki.

Quicksand is narrated by Sonoko Kakiuchi, a young housewife living near Osaka in the late 1920s. Her lawyer husband bores her and a recent love affair has ended, so she starts taking classes at an art school. There, she meets the beautiful Mitsuko, with whom she is soon involved in an intense love affair. Over time, she learns that Mitsuko also has a male lover, Watanuki, and this discovery leads to increasingly strange complications. Mrs. Kakiuchi is clearly being manipulated--but by whom and for what purpose is less clear. Then her husband is drawn into the love ... square? rectangle? manji (a four-spoked Buddhist symbol and evidently the title of the book in Japanese)? From there, this story of obsessive love, deception, manipulation, and love suicide becomes even more surreal.

Mrs. Kakiuchi is telling her story to an unnamed "author" after a scandal has erupted and at least some of the other central characters are dead. Exactly why she is telling her story to this person is unclear to me--but it's hardly the only facet of the novel that I don't entirely understand. "The author" to whom Mrs. Kakiuchi is telling her story occasionally inserts explanatory notes--usually snide asides about the lack of taste among Osaka women. Because these notes are fairly frequent early in the book, I found it odd when they disappeared after the first few chapters. The book was originally serialized in 1928-1930, and I can see how the plot twists--and the somewhat lurid content for that time--would keep people reading. As a novel, however, I found Quicksand exasperating. Perhaps I am just not interested enough in obsessive love--but I see five more Tanizaki novels on that list, so I'll have more options to explore what is evidently one of this author's recurring themes!

Of interest:

According to Ian Buruma, writing in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/13/books/fatal-attractions.html), the book's "unique tone," which was written in upper-class Osaka dialect as it would be spoken by a woman, simply cannot be conveyed in English.

The Grief of Others, by Leah Hager Cohen

The prologue of The Grief of Others, titled "Last Year," is an elegiac recounting of an anencephalic baby's 57-hour life, as seen through the eyes of his mother, for whom we instantly feel great sympathy. Then Leah Hager Cohen moves us forward to "This Year," in which mother Ricky is considering driving into the Hudson River every time she crosses the river on her way home from work. But we begin to lose our sympathy for her when we realize her children, fifth-grader Biscuit (one of those nicknames acquired through a sibling's mispronunciation of a given name, in this case Elizabeth) and seventh-grader Paul are in deep trouble and her husband John is still reeling from the fact that Ricky did not tell him about the baby's difficulties when they were diagnosed midway through the pregnancy. Thus, he built the crib and otherwise prepared for the baby, while she knew the baby would die within hours of its birth.

The family is in deep trouble when Jess arrives. Jess is John's daughter from a college relationship, who has spent only one two-week vacation with them in her entire life. She is now a pregnant college grad, who lies and tells them her parents kicked her out of the house. The Ryries welcome her--indeed, Ricky hopes that her willingness to let Jess stay with them and the kindness she shows the young mom-to-be will somehow convince John of her goodness.

Cohen tells the story from the perspectives of all five family members, plus a young man, Gordie, who came to the rescue when Biscuit fell into the Hudson. The family members' perspectives both in the present, last year, and eight years ago (the time when Jess vacationed with them) all contribute to an understanding of how the members of the family have lost contact with each other, a process exacerbated but not caused by the loss of the baby. While Gordie theoretically adds to the examination of grief, since he recently lost his father, I found his perspective and the subplot involving him unnecessary.

Yesterday, I read an article by Time magazine's book critic, Lev Grossman, on why endings of books are overrated (http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/04/the-nonsense-of-an-ending-in-defense-of-the-middles-of-books/); a book with a good beginning and middle, he says, is still a good book even if it has a bad ending. He might have had The Grief of Others in mind, as the ending is pretty bad. Not only does Cohen tie things up to neatly, in the last chapter she strangely begins to address the reader directly in a way that she hasn't before ("What else is there to tell? What else ought to be, must be, said?"). It's bizarre, as are a few other things I'll let you discover for yourself if you decide to read The Grief of Others because it is still a decent read, even with, to quote from Grossman, a "nonsense of an ending."

Favorite passage:

She was here on the spit because of them, because of the way her mother and her father had fallen down behind themselves. She thought of it like this, like the way a book can fall down behind all the others on a shelf, and in this way it's missing, only you don't know it to look at the shelf: all that you see looks orderly and complete. Her parents seemed like the books you could see: they smiled and spoke and dressed and made supper and went off to work and all the other things they were supposed to do, but something, a crucial volume, had slipped down in back and couldn't be reached.

What Is Novel Conversations Reading?

Here is what Novel Conversations is reading for the next few months:

March: The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein

April: Zietoun, by Dave Eggers

May: The Weird Sisters, by Eleanor Brown

June: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by Michael Lewis

July: The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

Incendiary, by Chris Cleave

Because we had a problem with the book we had picked for February and only three weeks in which to read, Noel Conversations decided to try something different this month: each of us is choosing a book written by an author the group has previously read and we'll see what kind of discussion we can generate.

So, because (as I've mentioned more than once on this blog) I absolutely loved Little Bee, I picked Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary. Incendiary is structured as a long letter written to Osama bin Laden by a young working class British woman whose husband and four-year-old son were killed in a terrorist bombing at a soccer match. Even before the bombing, the unnamed narrator was a nervous woman (in part because she spends many hours waiting for her "copper" husband to come home from defusing bombs), who calms herself with such activities as alphabetizing the food in her freezer and having sex with men she meets in bars. In fact, when the fatal bomb goes off, she is watching the soccer match on television while having sex with Jasper, a journalist who lives in an upscale development across the street from her block of flats.

In a panic, the narrator convinces Jasper to drive her to the stadium, where she is seriously injured trying to run into the stadium to search for "her chaps." After two months in the hospital, she returns to her flat and manages to get a job working for the anti-terrorism task force at Scotland Yard (making tea and filing). She becomes involved in an affair with her married supervisor, but Jasper and his "posh" and annoying girlfriend Petra, a style editor at his newspaper, continue to come in and out of her life as well. Both Jasper and the narrator are having serious post-traumatic stress, as is the narrator's lover. When her lover makes a startling revelation, both the narrator and Jasper spiral out of control. I won't say more about the plot because the spiral of surprising and horrifying events is an essential part of the reading experience. I will note, however, that while the book is very dark, there is also humor, as in a scene when the narrator pukes on Prince William's shoes during a hospital visit.

Cleave's novel is certainly a dark exploration of the effects of violence and tragedy on individual lives, but it is also a commentary on class and on how the UK (and by extension the US) response to terrorism has undercut the foundations of our democracies. While not as beautifully written as Little Bee (this narrator lacks Little Bee's lyricism) or as complexly structured, Incendiary is an equally troubling and thought-provoking work. I know I will not soon forget the narrator's pain, even though I don't know her name.

Favorite passages:

I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind.

Boy is a good smell it is a cross between angels and tigers.

London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks that The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners just took a deep breath and put the kettle on. . . .London's like me it's too piss poor and ignorant to know when it's finished. That morning when I looked down at the sun rising through the docklands I knew it for sure. I am London Osama I am the whole world. Murder me with bombs you poor lonely and I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better. I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.

I know you are a clever man Osama much brighter than me and I know you have a lot of things to get done but you ought to be able to get it done with love that's my whole point. Love is not surrender Osama love is furious and brave and loud you can hear it in the noise my boy is making right now while he plays.

Two of the Deadliest, edited by Elizabeth George

Award-winning mystery writer Elizabeth George tasked an impressive roster of female authors--Nancy Pickard, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippmann, Marcia Muller, Carolyn Hart, and Wendy Hornsby, among others--with writing short stories about people motivated by lust and/or greed to nefarious deeds.

The first three two stories are effectively creepy. In "Dark Chocolate," by Nancy Pickard, a woman frosts and eats an entire cake as she waits for her husband to come home; as she eats her way through the cake, the reader becomes aware of the horror within her house. "The Offer," by Patricia Smiley, is the story of a young woman in LA for a job interview; she accepts a limo ride intended for another person with a similar name who is also in town interviewing for a job. She intends to head for her own hotel once they get downtown, but she allows herself to assume the other applicant's at the fancier hotel...with bizarre results. Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes about an electronic stalker in "E-Male." When the stalker discovers that the object of his intrusions is in danger, he must find a way to help her without revealing his own guilt. These are just three of the stories in the collection that really work--they build suspense (or horror), they develop interesting characters, and they do reveal the workings of greed and/or lust, all within just a few pages.

Of course, some stories are less effective. A few have rather silly romantic twists. Others are too obvious or simply not engaging. At the end of the book, George presents stories by five writers who "are either largely unknown or who have not been published before." Unfortunately, I didn't find any of these stories very effective. But they're short--and you can always skip ahead to the next story.

Favorite passage:

. . . Brad really harshed on my mellow. ("Can You Hear Me Now?" by Marcia Talley, who introduced me to this phrase I may just have to work into conversation.)

The Story of Beautiful Girl, by Rachel Simon

Rachel Simon (author of Riding the Bus with My Sister) has personal experience with a family member who has an intellectual disability. She brings that knowledge to The Story of Beautiful Girl, along with a sense of horror about the ways in which the disabled were treated in institutional settings little more than 30 years ago.

The book opens on a rainy night in 1968, when an odd couple shows up at the door of retired teacher Martha Zimmer--an African American man who is deaf and a younger white woman who is beautiful but seems unable to speak. Mrs. Zimmer provides dry clothes for the couple, who are obviously in love; as they emerge from the layers of wet clothing, she sees that the young woman is carrying a newborn baby. Within minutes, however, the police and officials from the "Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded" show up. The man escapes, but the woman is put in a straightjacket and hauled away. As she is dragged from the house, she manages to whisper to Martha Zimmer, "Hide her."

Martha takes the charge from this stranger to heart and immediately makes plans to leave her home with the baby. Drawing on a network of former students with whom she stays in touch, Martha sets out to keep the child, whom she names Julia, from being captured by men from the school. At this point, the story is told on three parallel tracks--Martha and Julia's life on the lam; life at the school, told from the perspective of both the young mother Lynnie and a good-hearted employee named Kate; and the cross-country adventures of the deaf man Homan, who is trying to get back to the school but keeps getting sidetracked.

Homan is bright but cannot communicate except in a sign language that no one else knows. He ended up confined at the School after a period he called "The Running," when he was fleeing from people who killed his brother. After his escape from the school, he has another long spell of running, with many frightening experiences; yet he also meets a number of people who treat him kindly. The same is true for Martha and Julia; while their lives are not totally easy, they are helped by and encounter many lovely people. And through one of her former students, Martha is able to start the process that brings sorely-needed reform to the school. The depiction of life at the school is grim--yet even here, Lynnie was able to fall in love with Homan, whom she thinks of as Buddy; make a good friend in Doreen, the child of a famous playwright and actress (perhaps based on the story of Arthur Miller and his son); and develop her skill as an artist with the help of Kate. Yet she yearns for both Buddy and her child and must still deal with the two sadistic guards who repeatedly intimidate her, the filth of the facility, and the fear of knowing what can happen if you don't go along.

Simon does a good job of helping readers understand the thought processes of two people who cannot communicate with others and don't always understand what is going on around them--and she imbues them with great dignity. She also casts light on a disturbing and too-little-known aspect of our recent history, the treatment of the disabled in state-sponsored institutions. Given that context, the book could be extremely dark, Simon manages to make the story one of redemption and the power of the human spirit. While I was reading the ending, I was thinking to myself, "This is a bit hokey,"--and yet I was moved (in fact, I shed a tear or two on the plane where I was reading the book--kind of an embarrassing moment).

Favorite passages:

Learning to speak again had been a long process made up of many tiny steps, each taking endless afternoons of frustration. Luckily, everyone who mattered to Lynnie had grown used to what Doreen had dubbed "Lynnie-talk" . . . the reactions of others were actually another lesson she'd learned about change. When change happened to an individual, it happened to everyone around her--sometimes in ways she wished for, though sometimes in ways she wished against.

The sky was crying outside, and as she watched the drops come down, she thought: A rainy day can actually be a very important day. And a small hope isn't really small if it makes a lost hope less sad.