She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy seems to have approached collecting the poems in this volume as a task to help cope with the onset of middle age, looking both back and forward and using poetry to "weave the choices we have already made into the changes we want to bring to our lives." The book is organized into sections that represent the phases of a woman's life, as well as aspects of our lives that define who we are: falling in love; making love; breaking up;  marriage; love itself;  work; beauty, clothes and things of this world; motherhood; silence and solitude; growing up and growing old; death and grief; friendship; and how to live. It was intriguing to read that Kennedy found two sections for which the number of poems available was smaller than she expected: work and friendship.

This is not my favorite collection of poems--perhaps too many "classics" for my taste--though I certainly found a number of works I enjoyed or was inspired by. However, what I found really interesting was thinking about what sections I would organize such a work into. I'm quite sure I'd have fewer sections devoted to love-related topics and more, perhaps, to childhood, family, and other activities through which we give meaning to our lives. And, one might ask, would the sections be different for a book about a man's journey through poems? Fun mental exercise.

Favorite passages (that were new to me in this collection)

. . . from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
From "Youth," by Osip Mandelstam, translated by W.S. Merwin

I watch  my son's face like a clock;
he is the time I have.
If I choose this window, this black-and-white notebook,
I must appear to be what I am:
a woman who has chosen a table
between her sleeping child
and the beginning of everything.

Fron "At the Cafe," by Patricia Kirkpatrick

"Summer with Monica," by Roger McGough
Away from you
I feel a great emptiness
a gnawing loneliness

with you
I get that reassuring feeling
of wanting to escape

The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit

When I checked The Faraway Nearby out of the library, I thought it was a memoir of Solnit's experiences as her mother descended to the depths of Alzheimer's and then died. At first, the book matched my expectations, with Solnit using a mountain of apricots given to her by her brother just as their mother was having a health crisis as a symbol for stories of the unripe, the ripening, and the rotting. But then suddenly Solnit is on her way to Iceland, riffing on the story of Frankenstein and the family history of its author. As the book progresses, she occasionally returns to her mother's story and recounts her own experience with illness, but mostly she reflects on stories that were meaningful to her during this period. In fact, she describes the book as "a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then." These stories range from the life of Buddha, to Che Guevara's radicalizing time at a leper colony, to Icelandic myths (there is even a mini-essay about moths that drink the tears of sleeping birds running along the bottom of the pages)--and the meanings of these stories for Solnit and others--the "questions about how to tell and how to listen"--are the real focus of the book.

Frankly, I had simply no idea what meaning to give many of the stories Solnit tells and retells. Indeed, I struggled with The Faraway Nearby--I had to renew it twice, which is a fairly unusual occurrence. Several times I asked myself, "Why am I continuing to slog through this odd conglomeration of stuff?" But then I would come across something that set off a "ping" of recognition, making the struggle worthwhile. For someone who is has a less prosaic turn of mind, I can imagine this book being very rewarding. For others more like me, perhaps a "pick-and-choose" approach to reading the book would be a better use of time.

Favorite passages:
I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is a balm to loss, trouble, and ugliness.

Books are solitudes in which we meet.

. . . we imagine that gifts put us in the giver's debt, and debt is supposed to be a bad thing. You see it in the way people sometimes try to reciprocate immediately out of a sense that indebtedness is a burden. But there are gifts people yearn to give and debts that tie us together.

When the Killing's Done, by T.C. Boyle

When the Killing's Done is a darkly ironic tale based on actual events involving the Channel Islands off the California coast. The book opens with a gripping account of a 1946 shipwreck--newlyweds Beverly and Till Boyd, along with Till's brother Warren, sail out of Santa Monica for some weekend R&R; then bad weather hits, the boat capsizes, and only two-month-pregnant Beverly survives. She washes up on the shores of the island of Anacapa--and then must survive a week beset by the rats that have overtaken the island, survivors of a much earlier shipwreck.

Decades later, Beverly's granddaughter Alma Boyd Takasue is taking on the rats. An ecologist working for the National Park Service, she is heading up an effort to kill off the invasive species (rats) so the native birds can thrive. Once that is accomplished, she plans to move on to eliminating the feral pigs that are ruining the ecology of another island, Santa Cruz. Among the animal activists opposing the National Park Service efforts to restore the islands' ecosystems through massive extermination campaigns is Dave LaJoy, a rage-fueled misanthrope. (Dave's name is as ironic as Alma's pregnancy as she heads up a hunting campaign that leads dead pigs festering across Santa Cruz.) Dave's early efforts are designed to thwart the NPS--e.g., by feeding the rats vitamin K, which will counteract the poison the NPS plans to drop on the island to kill the rats. As his schemes go ever more horribly wrong, he turns to more of a prankster campaign, introducing other species to the islands--but his luck remains spectacularly bad.

Boyle intersperses the story of the escalating conflict between environmentalists and animal lovers with back story on Alma's mother, the child shipwreck survivor Beverly produced, and Dave's girlfriend Anise, who lived on one of the islands as a child;  an account of another couple who were killed in a boating accident that seemed completely unrelated to anything else in the book (obviously, I missed something); and background on the ecological issues on the islands.

I actually learned a lot from this book, which I also found bleakly entertaining (if that is possible). The ethical issues raised were clear, although they might have been more compelling had Dave been given some tiny modicum of humanity.

The Hundred-Year House, by Rebecca Makkai

For the first few chapters, I thought The Hundred-Year House was going to be a humorous novel about a young couple who can't quite get it together. Doug and Zee are living in the carriage house of her mother Grace's mansion. Both are academics, but Doug doesn't have a job. Instead, he is supposedly working on a book about the poet Edwin Parfitt, who at stayed at the mansion decades ago when it was an artists' colony. In reality, however, Doug is picking up some much-needed cash by writing books for a series  aimed at middle school girls and scheming as to how he can get into the mansion's attic to access the files from the colony--both activities unknown to Zee. Meanwhile, Zee's stepfather Bruce is stockpiling supplies for the disaster he anticipates when Y2K hits, and he invites his son Case and daughter-in-law Miriam to live in the second carriage house apartment because Case is also out of work.

Then the book takes a turn for the dark. Zee launches a scheme of her own to open up a teaching job for Doug at the university where she teaches by planting pornography on a colleague's computer. Case endures a series of accidents as soon as he arrives at the estate. His wife Miriam, a mosaicist, is affected by the ghost of Zee's great-grandmother Violet, a longstanding myth of the property. Miriam and Doug become increasingly close, hatching a plot to make an assault on the attic archive. The characters go from amusingly directionless to alarmingly unmoored. Yet, when things come to a head, the outcome is not as bad as I feared--and we're only half way into the book.

The second half starts a generation earlier, in 1955, when Grace was newly married to her first husband, George. In successively shorter sections, we get a glimpse of two even earlier time periods--shortly after World War I when the artists' colony was hosting Edwin Parfitt and in 1900 (coyly ending the book with a section "Prologue") when the ghostly Violet is being brought to the mansion to part her from her lover in the family's home base of Toronto. Each of these sections uncovers secrets and reinventions that would have stunned Doug and Zee had they understood the history underlying Doug's research and Zee's life.

Makkai has a gift for creating characters who at first appear to be eccentric and then show the less endearing side of that eccentricity (remember the librarian in The Borrower?); unfortunately, some of the characters then become close to caricature. The backward chronology she employs in this novel works as a way of conveying the theme of reinvention--after all, if you aren't who you think you are, why not reinvent yourself?  But by the end, I found myself expecting the twists before they came--perhaps there are a few too many. Overall, I'd give The Hundred-Year House a mixed review--some interesting characters, an innovative structure, a compelling theme, but it doesn't quite come together.

Favorite passage
By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

Memento Mori, by Muriel Spark

Nearly all the characters in Memento Mori are over the age of 70; all, of course, are British--some from the upper class, others who were/are their servants. Many have been receiving strange anonymous phone calls in which the caller says "Remember you must die." The voice of the caller varies from person to person--some say he has a lisp, some that he is old, others that he is young or foreign. The reactions of the recipients of the call are equally varied--Dame Lettie, the first to receive the calls, is driven nearly mad by them while her sister-in-law Charmian is not in the least perturbed. The police cannot determine the source of the calls or, indeed, whether the calls have actually happened or are some kind of mass delusion. Retired Inspector Henry Mortimer says the caller must be "Death itself." 

As the elderly Brits deal with the evoked and real presence of death in their lives, Spark also gives the reader a view of servants trying to manipulate/blackmail employers into appearing in their wills (and those employers constantly changing their wills--one character leaves 22 wills behind when she dies), husbands and wives hiding long-past infidelities and resentments from each other, a self-styled geriatrician attempting to study aging in a naturalistic manner, and the humiliation of life in a nursing home. The frequently shifting third-person narration gives the reader the opportunity to get inside the heads of multiple characters--most of whom avoid thoughts of death by preoccupation with their individual plots/obsessions. 

Despite the potential darkness of the subject matter, the book is quite funny . . . and then one of the characters dies suddenly and violently. This event gave me a jolt--but the book continues in the same satiric manner to the end, when the author wraps up with a description of how all the characters eventually died. 

Memento Mori has been described as "one of the great novels in the 1950s," but that feels like overstatement to me. It's an amusing jab at certain types of British characters but I didn't find it particularly insightful about death, as some reviewers evidently did. 

Favorite passage

Godfrey's wife Charmian sat with her eyes closed, attempting to put her thoughts into alphabetical order, which Godfrey had told her was better than no order at all, since she now had grasp of neither logic nor chronology.

Letters to Ann: The Korean War, 1950-1951

John Francis Hughes was an Army doctor deployed to Korea during that conflict of the early 1950s. This book features the illustrated letters he wrote to his four-year-old daughter Ann. The letters and not particularly skilled drawings are charming, suggesting a warm relationship between father and daughter and a wonderful attempt to stay connected while serving overseas before the days of Skype (although Dr. Hughes did pester the poor child about wetting her pants to a degree a modern parent would find excessive).

The letters are interspersed with quotes from official Army reports on the conflict, historical accounts of the war, and Hughes' photographs taken in Korea. Taken together, these pieces provide some small insights into the Korean conflict (about which I find I know little), but the book is more a tribute to the family relationship than an educative text about the war (the editor is Dr. Hughes' daughter-in-law).

Letters to Ann reminds me of a Shutterfly book an overachiever would make for a family member. I enjoyed looking at it, but it didn't have the impact I thought it might.

Favorite passage
By the way, I got a new jacket and I won't let the rats get this one.

Funny Girl, by Nick Hornby

The Funny Girl of the novel's title is Sophie Straw, nee Barbara Parker, who decamps from Blackpool in 1964 to become a comedy star in London. She lucks into an audition for a BBC comedy show with serious problems; rather miraculously, the writers and producer listen to her input and they end up with a hit show--Barbara (and Jim)--that runs for four years.

Besides Sophie/Barbara, the novel has four other important characters. Her co-star Clive is a shallow twit who has trouble separating his character from himself. Writing partners Tony and Bill first met in jail, picked up for soliciting gay sex while doing their national service. Since then, however, Tony has married (albeit not entirely successfully on the sexual front) while Bill leads the life of a gay man in a Britain where homosexuality is a crime. The fourth member of the team is Dennis, the producer/director of Barbara (and Jim).

Barbara (and Jim) is based on the notion of class conflict--Barbara is a northern working class girl while Jim is a well-educated Londoner who works for the Labor prime minister. Tony and Bill spend hours trying to figure out how to wring humor from that situation once the novelty has worn off. Meanwhile, Dennis must defend the show's "low-brow" humor from attacks by high culture mavens.

Not all that much really happens in Funny Girl and the book doesn't explore the themes it sets out in any depth. It's a feel-good, almost sentimental book featuring Hornby's humor and excellent dialogue.  Not Hornby's best by far, but if it's not made into a movie, I'll be very surprised.

Favorite passage:
Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.