My library choices seem to have taken a turn toward humorous poetry--Suddenly Sixty and Dogfight in the same week. Dogfight is 154 pages long, and sustaining the rhyming for that many pages means that it sometimes lapses into, well, doggerel (sorry, couldn't stop myself). Some of the rhymes are quite clever, but when you see on the first page that Trillin has rhymed "dude'll" with "poodle," you know he'll stop at nothing.
Trillin intersperses the poetic narrative with shorter poems, such as "Adieu Santorum": The race will miss the purity/That you alone endow./We'll never find another man/Who's holier than thou." Occasionally, he makes a "Pause for Prose"; my favorite of these was "Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough."
Dogfight is funny--but probably only if you're a Democrat. Trillin aims almost exclusively at Republicans; while they provided plenty of fodder (or kibble) in 2012, even for a Democrat it's almost unforgivable that "They're going to put y'all back in chains" and "You didn't make that" "They're going to put y'all back in chains" and "You didn't build that" don't even get a mention.
Favorite passage:
Mitt Romney asked us all to contemplate
If we are better off than in '08.
Though he neglected mentioning our troops,
(Did Perry, watching, silently say "oops"?)
Mitt did speak well, but still did not illumine
The question on folks' minds: is this dude human?
Obama's speech was good, of course, whereas
Bill Clinton gave a speech with real pizzazz.
Upstaged? Well, yes, but by a speech with flair,
And not by Eastwood and an empty chair.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Monday, March 11, 2013
Suddenly Sixty and Other Shocks of Later Life, by Judith Viorst
I haven't read one of Judith Viorst's decades books for quite a while, perhaps decades. But Suddenly Sixty called to me from the shelf when I was at the library this morning. As with her earlier collections, the poems in Suddenly Sixty are far from perfect, but they are entertaining. Viorst has a way of identifying the anxieties and irritations of the stages of a woman's life--and writing about them in humorous rhyme. For example, "A Whole Other Stage" begins with the line "I've reached the stage where my lawyer, my broker, my allergies, and my president are all significantly younger than I" and goes on to recount such other indicators of the state of mind the 60s puts you in as worrying about cardiac arrest before infidelity when your husband doesn't answer the phone at 6 a.m. Even some of the titles made me chuckle: "So My Husband and I Decided to Take a Car Trip Throuogh New England" and "When Asked If I Thought That I'd Finally Got It Together."
Occasionally, Viorst veers into more serious territory, as when she writes about cemetery plots or asks if she did something wrong in raising the child who "is stumbling through jungles of bitterest black,/Lost in the fog that he buys,/ Wearing a rebel's disguise,/Unwilling, or unable, to come back." She also writes of the joy of having grandchildren:
He rushes to greet her,
His arms outstretched,
Joyfully calling her name,
When he sees her arrive.
Ah, yes. Viorst does know what it's like to be 60.
Favorite passage:
I wish you, I wish you
A dream worth the doing.
And fortune's face smiling
On all you're pursuing.
And pleasures that far far
Outweigh your small sorrows.
Arms opened wide to embrace your tomorrows.
(Wouldn't this make a good toast? I love a nice rhyming toast.)
Occasionally, Viorst veers into more serious territory, as when she writes about cemetery plots or asks if she did something wrong in raising the child who "is stumbling through jungles of bitterest black,/Lost in the fog that he buys,/ Wearing a rebel's disguise,/Unwilling, or unable, to come back." She also writes of the joy of having grandchildren:
He rushes to greet her,
His arms outstretched,
Joyfully calling her name,
When he sees her arrive.
Ah, yes. Viorst does know what it's like to be 60.
Favorite passage:
I wish you, I wish you
A dream worth the doing.
And fortune's face smiling
On all you're pursuing.
And pleasures that far far
Outweigh your small sorrows.
Arms opened wide to embrace your tomorrows.
(Wouldn't this make a good toast? I love a nice rhyming toast.)
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Wench, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Wench opens in 1852, with four slave women "vacationing" with their masters at a resort in southern Ohio. They are fascinated by the free blacks who work at the resort and stunned when they see the resort frequented by wealthier free African Americans within walking distance from the cottages where they are staying.
One of the women, Lizzie, is hoping to convince her master, Drayle, to free their two children, but she is unsuccessful; nor will he agree to sell his slave Phillip, who has fallen in love with a local free woman. Nonetheless, Lizzie has convinced herself that she loves Drayle. When a woman named Muwa tries to convince the group of slaves to make a run for freedom, Lizzie tells Drayle of the plan, and Muwa is brutally beaten and raped.
Through a flashback, we learn how Lizzie and Drayle's "relationship" started and see the bizarre role that white women play in these twisted domestic arrangements. Drayle's wife Fran physically attacks Lizzie, tries to sell her, and finally seems to accept her place in the household. At the same time, she alternately rejects and coddles Lizzie's two children.
In 1853, the four women return to the Tawawa House resort with their masters and, without revealing everything that happens, it can safely be said that the visit is packed with dramatic developments. When Lizzie returns to the Drayle plantation that summer, she does not believe they will return the next summer, and yet they do--this time with Fran in tow. Through the events of the final summer, Lizzie begins to develop a an independent sense of self and has, thankfully, awakened to the impossibility of meaningful love with a man who "owns" her.
Wench is in many ways surprising and, while it is not a great novel, it does open the reader's eyes to the complexities of the sexual and domestic arrangements among slaves and the families that "owned" them.
One of the women, Lizzie, is hoping to convince her master, Drayle, to free their two children, but she is unsuccessful; nor will he agree to sell his slave Phillip, who has fallen in love with a local free woman. Nonetheless, Lizzie has convinced herself that she loves Drayle. When a woman named Muwa tries to convince the group of slaves to make a run for freedom, Lizzie tells Drayle of the plan, and Muwa is brutally beaten and raped.
Through a flashback, we learn how Lizzie and Drayle's "relationship" started and see the bizarre role that white women play in these twisted domestic arrangements. Drayle's wife Fran physically attacks Lizzie, tries to sell her, and finally seems to accept her place in the household. At the same time, she alternately rejects and coddles Lizzie's two children.
In 1853, the four women return to the Tawawa House resort with their masters and, without revealing everything that happens, it can safely be said that the visit is packed with dramatic developments. When Lizzie returns to the Drayle plantation that summer, she does not believe they will return the next summer, and yet they do--this time with Fran in tow. Through the events of the final summer, Lizzie begins to develop a an independent sense of self and has, thankfully, awakened to the impossibility of meaningful love with a man who "owns" her.
Wench is in many ways surprising and, while it is not a great novel, it does open the reader's eyes to the complexities of the sexual and domestic arrangements among slaves and the families that "owned" them.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Silver Sparrow, by Tayari Jones
Dana Lynn Yarboro announces in Silver Sparrow's first paragraph that her father, whom she calls James, is a bigamist who was already married to Laverne when he met Dana's mother. He also has another daughter, Chaurisse, the legitimate child who gets to call her father Daddy. While Dana and her mother Gwen know all about James's first family--they even "surveil" the house from time to time--Laverne and Chaurisse know nothing about them, and James insists it remain that way. If both girls are selected for a summer science program or hired for a summer job at Six Flags, Dana must give up the opportunity to protect Chaurisse. Dana, who is smart, feisty, beautiful, and precocious, understandably resents being the "secret" daughter and rebels by hanging out with an older, abusive boy, smoking weed, and engaging in other inappropriate behaviors. While she resents the chubby and apparently bland Chaurisse, she also finds herself creating opportunities for their paths to cross.
Then Tayari Jones tricks us by switching narrators, giving Chaurisse--to this point a seemingly dull girl--the second half of the book. Chaurisse, it turns out, is struggling as much as Dana is. Her reputation has been ruined by gossiping church ladies, she has no friends, and she is acutely aware that she does not excel at much of anything. When she meets Dana while they are both shoplifting at a drugstore, she is excited to have made a friend, especially one who is so pretty and confident. When the two start hanging out together, it's only a matter of time until the s(*& hits the fan.
Silver Sparrow is not the most gracefully written or originally plotted book, but Tayari Jones does make us feel the sadness visited upon Dana and Chaurisse by their parents' actions and, in Dana's case, by the secrets she is forced to keep. These sisters need each other--and they need more from their parents; it's heart-breaking when their needs are ignored.
Favorite passage:
Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too.
Then Tayari Jones tricks us by switching narrators, giving Chaurisse--to this point a seemingly dull girl--the second half of the book. Chaurisse, it turns out, is struggling as much as Dana is. Her reputation has been ruined by gossiping church ladies, she has no friends, and she is acutely aware that she does not excel at much of anything. When she meets Dana while they are both shoplifting at a drugstore, she is excited to have made a friend, especially one who is so pretty and confident. When the two start hanging out together, it's only a matter of time until the s(*& hits the fan.
Silver Sparrow is not the most gracefully written or originally plotted book, but Tayari Jones does make us feel the sadness visited upon Dana and Chaurisse by their parents' actions and, in Dana's case, by the secrets she is forced to keep. These sisters need each other--and they need more from their parents; it's heart-breaking when their needs are ignored.
Favorite passage:
Love can be incremental. Predicaments, too.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Frances and Bernard, by Carlene Bauer
2013 has gotten off to a slow start reading-wise, both because I've been watching too many movies (thanks to the son who is egging me on to watch all the films on AFI's 100 best films list) and because too many of the books I've read have failed to excite me. But I feel like Frances and Bernard is going to change the year's direction.
Frances and Bernard is an epistolary novel, featuring the letters exchanged between two young writers who meet at a writer's colony in the late 1950s and continue their acquaintance through correspondence (reportedly inspired by the lives of Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor--but very much a creative work of fiction). Frances is a novelist, living with her working class family in Philadelphia; Bernard is a poet, raised in an upper class family in Boston, where he now lives with a roommate. Frances is a devout Catholic, Bernard a recent convert to Catholicism, and many of their early letters discuss religious topics (e.g., "Who is the Holy Spirit to you?"). Then Frances moves to New York, and their exchange perks up with her descriptions of living at the Barbizon. Of course, they also discuss the progress of their writing.
Just as the book starts to get a bit bogged down in what feel like overly intellectualized exchanges, the pace picks up. Bernard has a breakdown and loses his faith. Shortly thereafter, he moves to New York and their letters become less frequent, but we are kept informed of their activities through letters to friends and editors. And what do you know? Frances and Bernard become lovers, something Frances has resisted because she does not believe that a woman can write and have a family.
To retain some surprises for anyone who decides to read the book, I won't say more about the fate of their relationship, but I will say I was moved by these two characters and their efforts to define themselves, their work, and their relationships (with each other, with family, and with God) in the face of the challenges of mental illness and the restricted roles of women at the time. I should note that I am positively predisposed to epistolary novels--I find the device of placing the character as the writer of letters, when well done, creates a particularly authentic voice. So I came to Frances and Bernard with positive expectations. While I felt there were some flaws in the way Bauer constructed the book (e.g., we normally get both sides of the Frances-Bernard exchanges, but occasionally a reply is omitted; we get selected letters involving other correspondents only when Bauer wants to give us some new perspective on a situation), the voices Bauer created were elegant and individual.
At dinner the other night, I was trying to describe Frances and Bernard and my friend Barb responded, "You're not drawing me into this book, Laurel." If this review doesn't draw you into Frances and Bernard either, I would just say: Give it a try.
Favorite passages:
The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter.
My people, for better or worse, taught me to hide what was too difficult to bear.
Frances and Bernard is an epistolary novel, featuring the letters exchanged between two young writers who meet at a writer's colony in the late 1950s and continue their acquaintance through correspondence (reportedly inspired by the lives of Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor--but very much a creative work of fiction). Frances is a novelist, living with her working class family in Philadelphia; Bernard is a poet, raised in an upper class family in Boston, where he now lives with a roommate. Frances is a devout Catholic, Bernard a recent convert to Catholicism, and many of their early letters discuss religious topics (e.g., "Who is the Holy Spirit to you?"). Then Frances moves to New York, and their exchange perks up with her descriptions of living at the Barbizon. Of course, they also discuss the progress of their writing.
Just as the book starts to get a bit bogged down in what feel like overly intellectualized exchanges, the pace picks up. Bernard has a breakdown and loses his faith. Shortly thereafter, he moves to New York and their letters become less frequent, but we are kept informed of their activities through letters to friends and editors. And what do you know? Frances and Bernard become lovers, something Frances has resisted because she does not believe that a woman can write and have a family.
To retain some surprises for anyone who decides to read the book, I won't say more about the fate of their relationship, but I will say I was moved by these two characters and their efforts to define themselves, their work, and their relationships (with each other, with family, and with God) in the face of the challenges of mental illness and the restricted roles of women at the time. I should note that I am positively predisposed to epistolary novels--I find the device of placing the character as the writer of letters, when well done, creates a particularly authentic voice. So I came to Frances and Bernard with positive expectations. While I felt there were some flaws in the way Bauer constructed the book (e.g., we normally get both sides of the Frances-Bernard exchanges, but occasionally a reply is omitted; we get selected letters involving other correspondents only when Bauer wants to give us some new perspective on a situation), the voices Bauer created were elegant and individual.
At dinner the other night, I was trying to describe Frances and Bernard and my friend Barb responded, "You're not drawing me into this book, Laurel." If this review doesn't draw you into Frances and Bernard either, I would just say: Give it a try.
Favorite passages:
The blackness is a hand that passes over my face to draw me a bath of heavy, ache-riven sleep, and if I want to come out of it I have to make a constant effort to see what is going on around me and then decide if I want to care about where to put my feet and hands. Impatient only for something to drag me off into unconsciousness. No desire even to write. I look at typewritten drafts, and the sentences slide off the paper and trail off into the distance; the sentences break up into letters, hovering like a cloud of gnats over my typewriter.
My people, for better or worse, taught me to hide what was too difficult to bear.
Friday, February 22, 2013
Everyman, by Philip Roth
Everyman opens at the funeral of the unnamed protagonist; as the brother and children of the departed speak, we gain a basic framework of his life--born in 1933, the second son of a jeweler and his devoted wife, worked in an ad agency but harbored a desire to paint, married and divorced three times, the father of three.
After this somewhat clunky introduction, we enter the mind of the "everyman" in his last years, as he reflects on his life. He recalls every medical crisis from his hernia repair as a child to a burst appendix misdiagnosed as "envy" to the recent spate of surgeries to keep his cardiovascular system working. Ironically, the recent frequent hospitalizations have led to envy of his brother Howie, whose robust good health the everyman resents so profoundly that he has stopped talking to Howie (who was in every apparent way an exemplary brother).
His alienation from Howie is hardly unique, as his daughter Nancy is the only real relationship in his life. The everyman (or everyroth as one reviewer dubbed the protagonist) also reflects on his sexual history, right up to his attempt to pick up a twenty-something jogger not long before his death; while he claims to be a "good boy," his sexual history suggests otherwise. His declining health and lack of human relationships contribute to increasing loneliness, a loss of interest in the activity he thought would sustain his retirement--painting, and a sense of deep humiliation about the indignities of growing old. When he considers options for moving from his Jersey Shore senior community to NYC or California to be near family, the lives of those family members make such a move impossible, stranding him in his isolation.
I do not consider myself a prude, but I have always found Roth's depiction of sex off-putting (the liver scene is all I remember of Portnoy's Complaint), and my squeamishness holds in Everyman. That is a minor complaint, however, as Roth's meditation on the cruelty of aging resonates deeply; everyman strikes the reader as a profoundly selfish man, but perhaps that is how we all end our lives.
Favorite passages
Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
After this somewhat clunky introduction, we enter the mind of the "everyman" in his last years, as he reflects on his life. He recalls every medical crisis from his hernia repair as a child to a burst appendix misdiagnosed as "envy" to the recent spate of surgeries to keep his cardiovascular system working. Ironically, the recent frequent hospitalizations have led to envy of his brother Howie, whose robust good health the everyman resents so profoundly that he has stopped talking to Howie (who was in every apparent way an exemplary brother).
His alienation from Howie is hardly unique, as his daughter Nancy is the only real relationship in his life. The everyman (or everyroth as one reviewer dubbed the protagonist) also reflects on his sexual history, right up to his attempt to pick up a twenty-something jogger not long before his death; while he claims to be a "good boy," his sexual history suggests otherwise. His declining health and lack of human relationships contribute to increasing loneliness, a loss of interest in the activity he thought would sustain his retirement--painting, and a sense of deep humiliation about the indignities of growing old. When he considers options for moving from his Jersey Shore senior community to NYC or California to be near family, the lives of those family members make such a move impossible, stranding him in his isolation.
I do not consider myself a prude, but I have always found Roth's depiction of sex off-putting (the liver scene is all I remember of Portnoy's Complaint), and my squeamishness holds in Everyman. That is a minor complaint, however, as Roth's meditation on the cruelty of aging resonates deeply; everyman strikes the reader as a profoundly selfish man, but perhaps that is how we all end our lives.
Favorite passages
Nothing any longer kindled his curiosity or answered his needs, not his painting, not his family, not his neighbors, nothing except the young women who jogged by him on the boardwalk in the morning. My God, he thought, the man I once was! The life that surrounded me! The force that was mine! No "otherness" to be felt anywhere! Once upon a time I was a full human being.
Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris
The Unnamed has an interesting premise that draws the reader (or, in my case, the listener) into the early sections of the book. Tim Farnsworth is a successful attorney in New York City but, as the book opens, he is experiencing the second episode of a strange disorder that numerous medical specialists have been unable to diagnose: he cannot stop himself from walking. He sets out and walks for miles, then collapses wherever he is--in a field, on a park bench, on the pavement behind a convenience store--to sleep. When he awakens, he calls his wife Jane and she comes to pick him up. The strain on their marriage is, understandably, severe, and the stress on their teenage daughter Becka is also considerable. They resort to physical confinement to stop the walking, but it does not stop the condition's negative effects--Tim loses his partnership at the law firm and Jane becomes an alcoholic.
When Tim goes into remission, they resume their lives, but in a changed way. Tim has a much reduced position at the law firm, Jane goes to rehab, they move out of their large suburban home into a apartment in the city, and they have sex in public places. Things go relatively well for several years, until Tim relapses again. This time, Jane declines to go out and pick him up after his first walk, and Tim does not return home. He suffers a psychotic break--some of the text in this section features stream-of-consciousness arguments between Tim's brain and "the other" (presumably his body). He ends up in a mental hospital and, when released, keeps walking (he will never enter remission again). Jane and Becka are essentially absent from this part of the book until Jane becomes ill with cancer, and Tim tries to walk his way back to her from the other side of the country; this is the first time he's tried to direct his walking in any way, and the process is grueling. He ends up in the hospital only a few miles from where Jane is being treated, but he eventually is released and reconnects with Jane. I'll leave a few plot elements undisclosed, just in case someone reading this post decides to read the book, but suffice it to say that the ending is not uplifting.
While I liked the first section of the book and thought the premise was intriguing, most of the book was a bit of a mess: Tim's philosophical ramblings make little sense (to me at least); there is a mystery having to do with a case Tim is working on early in the book that reemerges from time to time but never goes anywhere; the depiction of Jane's response when Tim returns is unbelievable. And the writing has problems--the tone and style are uneven and there are inconsistencies: for example, at one point, Ferris says that Tim had never observed the landscapes he walked through--yet there had been many descriptions of those landscapes and the places he wished he had been able to stop but was prevented from doing so because of the compulsion to walk. Ferris reads the audible version of the book himself, and I found his narration flat. In fact, near the end, I fell asleep several times while listening.
Favorite passage:
He stood in the doorway, a nostalgic stranger.
When Tim goes into remission, they resume their lives, but in a changed way. Tim has a much reduced position at the law firm, Jane goes to rehab, they move out of their large suburban home into a apartment in the city, and they have sex in public places. Things go relatively well for several years, until Tim relapses again. This time, Jane declines to go out and pick him up after his first walk, and Tim does not return home. He suffers a psychotic break--some of the text in this section features stream-of-consciousness arguments between Tim's brain and "the other" (presumably his body). He ends up in a mental hospital and, when released, keeps walking (he will never enter remission again). Jane and Becka are essentially absent from this part of the book until Jane becomes ill with cancer, and Tim tries to walk his way back to her from the other side of the country; this is the first time he's tried to direct his walking in any way, and the process is grueling. He ends up in the hospital only a few miles from where Jane is being treated, but he eventually is released and reconnects with Jane. I'll leave a few plot elements undisclosed, just in case someone reading this post decides to read the book, but suffice it to say that the ending is not uplifting.
While I liked the first section of the book and thought the premise was intriguing, most of the book was a bit of a mess: Tim's philosophical ramblings make little sense (to me at least); there is a mystery having to do with a case Tim is working on early in the book that reemerges from time to time but never goes anywhere; the depiction of Jane's response when Tim returns is unbelievable. And the writing has problems--the tone and style are uneven and there are inconsistencies: for example, at one point, Ferris says that Tim had never observed the landscapes he walked through--yet there had been many descriptions of those landscapes and the places he wished he had been able to stop but was prevented from doing so because of the compulsion to walk. Ferris reads the audible version of the book himself, and I found his narration flat. In fact, near the end, I fell asleep several times while listening.
Favorite passage:
He stood in the doorway, a nostalgic stranger.
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