My review in under 50 words (under 100 if you count parentheticals):
It was a lot like Nobody’s Fool, only with a more robust plot and less Paul Newman (not because he wasn’t in the movie adaptation, which apparently he was, but because I hadn’t seen it and thus couldn’t properly picture him while I was reading). Still thoroughly enjoyable, though, if you enjoy stories about economicaly decrepit towns where the residents have rich if depressing interior lives.
I’ve been told by a reputable source that this book can be really hard to get into. And it really does lack any of those clingy hooks that make you feel committed to finishing a book whether you like it or not. It’s unrelentingly smooth, actually, with Russo rubbing the edges off the moments of drama by doing things like removing the main characters from the moment or even removing the event from the direct line of the narrative: instead of handing the reader a scene with an angry husband, a rifle and some punching, Russo literally stops the narration just before anything happens, and only shares the resulting chaos in ensuing casual conversations among the characters, and when something does finally happen at the horsetrack, our protagonist is in jail and misses the whole event. Although they’re all eventually revealed to us in the slow but inexorable way that gossip moves, we miss out on a steamy phone call between a mother and her son’s mistress, more than one affair and a death and only learn retrospectively about a little boy’s penis getting slammed by a toilet seat.
So it’s not that nothing happens, so much, as that the protagonist, a kind of charming and kind of jerky, down on his luck 60-something jack-of-all trades named Sully, doesn’t really see the point in worrying about it when big things do happen. He slips from mishap to mishap, occasionally punctuated by a bout of good luck and usually dulled by a steady diet of beer and greasy spoon food and often commented on by the townspeople who either despair of, rely on, or dismay of his very presence. I found the lack of self interest, on the part of Sully and on the part of the book as a whole, utterly charming – although it didn’t hurt that I know that he was played by Paul Newman in the movie, and nothing says charming like Paul Newman, RIP. It’s not a book worth slogging through, but only because slogging is so antithetical to the very nature of the book.
This book was a surprising treat. The format is three novellas, two of which are re-imaginings of the lives of literary characters Don Juan and Tristan and Isolde (Ysold in this novella). I don’t know much about the origins of either of these stories, so the re-imaginings were fresh tales for me. Both novellas were beautifully written and Millhauser evokes incredible visual images through his writing.
In An Adventure of Don Juan Don Juan travels to England to escape his reputation and find refuge at the estate of an acquaintance, Augustus Hood. The Don is weary of his existence and seeks a truly new experience. Hood is an eccentric Englishman who’s life work appears to be overseeing the creation of various worlds within his four thousand acre property. Millhauser describes these undertakings in detail and the reader is drawn quickly into this beautiful but artificial life. Amidst all the fake scenery Don Juan begins to experience true emotion as he has never been able to in his life thus far. The results are painful and though the story of Don Juan is dated, the human emotion in this novella is poignant and ageless.
The King in the Tree is the novella based on the story of Tristan and Ysold. Again Millhauser brings alive an ancient story by infusing it with undeniable emotion. Each character is sympathetic and real, but the love triangle they are caught in begs the reader to choose sides.
The first novella in this book, Revenge, is the only one that stands alone without a historic tale as its basis. The story is told in 2nd person which normally drives me mad. However, Millhauser makes it work in this seemingly innocuous story that grows more complicated with each room the narrator takes us into on her tour through her home.
One thing I really liked about this book was that each story really gained in momentum and substance as you got deeper into it. This worked well for me because I did not want to rush through the book as I am wont to do. The pacing allowed me to put the stories down and then get more deeply involved the next time I picked it up. I am looking forward to reading more of this author’s work.
The afterword to this copy of The Mill on the Floss describes it as “earnest, moral, and long” which, I have to say, aren’t necessarily my three favorite literary adjectives. But I was 80% sure that there wouldn’t be any dragons, and I figured I was due for an earnest novel after wallowing in fantasy and all that modern ironic stuff. I also really loved Middlemarch, although I read that a long time ago and on a train across Greece, which may have impacted my state of mind.
The Mill on the Floss is, as promised, an earnest story about Maggie Tulliver, a young girl growing up in semi-rural England in the early 1800s, faced with a temperament that is strictly at odds with the rest of her family, an intellectual curiosity that is rarely fed and, as time goes on, financial problems with her family and a remarkable number of romantic complications for a book that ends before she hits her 20s. Throughout the book, Maggie strives to align her desires and views of the world with those of her family and lovers (used throughout the book in the least physical way possible) and constantly comes up short; it is in many ways an epic story of her vacillating between passion and asceticism and never finding a balance that wins her the approbation of the brother she loves kind of desperately – indeed, she seems to sink from one social mistake to the next pretty rapidly.
The most curious part of reading this book for me was how little I was able to root for any of the characters. I’m not sure if I couldn’t pull myself into alignment with a Victorian sensibility, or if Eliot wrote them as intentionally unsympathetic, which is sometimes the sense I got from her narrative voice, or if she was just trying to capture the reality that some situations are just untenable, that when a young girl is asked to accept or reject the friendship of her father’s enemy’s son that it’s impossible to pick a side between the virtues of friendship and those of family responsibility. Maggie is faced with a series of harshly unpleasant choices, particularly for a sensitive teenager (a category that didn’t really exist in the 1820s, of course), and rather than wanting desperately for her to make one choice or the other – if she makes the happy one, it’s a romantic novel, if she makes the unhappy one it’s a tragedy – the reader instead must suffer alongside her as she dreads making either one. (Apparently George Eliot herself had a long relationship with a married man, making her something of an expert in these inescapable moral and emotional quandaries). I’ll agree that the book is earnest (and long!) but it’s certainly not moral an Aesopian, proscriptive kind of way: rather, it exposes the fragile emotional center of morality and how it fails to take into account the complicated relationship between personal desires and social demands. It’s pretty emotionally gripping, but if you need resolution, prepare to be disappointed.
Normally, I wouldn’t review a fantasy novel, largely because I often feel a tiny bit shameful about reading them. I think it’s because I spent such a large portion of my pre-teenage years gleefully reading and re-reading, well, books that had dragons in them (and other things! I also read other things about, like, Okies or Vietnam or depressed poets). As this was the same time that I listened to New Kids on the Block and pegged my jeans and had giant, pink, plastic-framed glasses, I am suspect about all of my judgment from that time. Also, the library tends to shelve romance, science-fiction, fantasy, and mystery paperbacks altogether in the side of the main room they might as well label “books for people we assume don’t enjoy real literature.” So, I’ve tried to hide my recommendations under the labels of cyberpunk (Gibson) or indefinably good (Bull), but the sordid truth remains that sometimes I really do enjoy a long, epic saga and sometimes those come with magic or ogres or, yes, a dragon or two.
The Dragonbone Chair, and its attendant sequels, is really not as dragon-y as the title would suggest: it’s (as the genre demands) the very long story about an unlikely hero (a kitchen scullion named Simon) and a bunch of his unlikely companions (a princess, a troll and his wolf, a bunch of dukes and knights, and some mysterious immortal folks) trying to save their moderately unlikely world from total annihilation. Despite his twee tendencies toward the names in his alternate universe (do you really have to you’re your winter months ‘Novander” and “Decander’?) and an unappealing tendency to including the lyrics to ballads his characters are singing to pass the time, Williams actually avoids a lot of the pitfalls that can come from following the strict boundaries of the genre (and, believe you me, in that misspent youth I read plenty of books that wallowed in those pitfalls). He compelling conveys that characters can have doubts and misgivings without being paralyzed from action and he doesn’t shy away from the absolute misery of participating in an epic quest – lots of eating crappy food and sleeping in the forest and getting lost in the dark and not knowing if your loved ones are safe. And he tries to keep the dei ex machina to a bare minimum, which is quite a feat if you’re going to include immortals and dragons and the like.
Phew. I feel so much better for having gotten this secret reading habit off my chest. Maybe I’ll go dig out some peasant blouses and listen to Paula Abdul.
Chuck Palahniuk, whose name I have really no idea how to spell and even less idea how to pronounce, is best known for writing the book Fight Club, but I also think fondly of him as a local literary superstar from when I lived in Portland. In addition to his novels and non-fiction essays, he’s also written some travel guides of the Northwest and made more than one appearance at Powell’s while I was in the area.
Lullaby is a super dark short novel about an investigative journalist with a tragic and shady past who gets caught up following clues he’s found at the home of six infants who died of SIDS and ends up having to confront the power of his own suppressed emotions – but in rapid, action packed way. Along the way, he meets up with a real estate agent who sells haunted homes, her new-age, semi-nudist assistant and the assistant’s anarchist boyfriend. Palahniuk doesn’t spend much time lingering on emotional fallout but, like his narrator, pays attention to the tiniest details and paints a vivid picture of people’s internal lives nonetheless; I was particularly struck by the simmering rage he manages to convey as the real estate agent marks a path through a furniture warehouse by gouging deep lines and arrows into furniture with her expensive rings. Palahniuk doesn’t worry too much about making the characters loveable or charmingly quirky, but they do come across as depressingly real possibilities – not the kind of people you like to think of yourself as, but the kind of people you worry you just might be if you weren’t able to get your priorities quite in order.
Stranger Than Fiction is a collection of essays which Palahniuk groups into “People Together,” “Portraits,” and “Personal” – which is to say, stories about groups, stories about individuals, and stories about Chuck. Like Lullaby, the writing is crisp and spare, short sentences in short paragraphs and not really dripping with adjectives. I found the style slightly hit-or-miss in this context. “The People Can,” about life on a navy submarine, really benefited from the style, which felt like it captured the constrained life of six months under water, but “Frontiers,” about steroid use, just felt herky-jerky and unfinished and “In Her Own Words,” based on an interview with Juliette Lewis, just made me feel like Lewis was kind of a jerk – which I imagine was not the intention of the piece. Still, Palahniuk (I think I’m finally getting the hang of typing that) really endeared himself to me over the course of the book, which gives a charming view of what his life has been like, struggling to be a writer and then being faced with unexpected success, dealing with his father’s murder and trying to make sense of what people do to make themselves happy. And the book is worth reading if only for the introduction, which is a really insightful take on whether or not writing is a solitary venture.
I have many happy memories of devouring Dahl’s young-adult novels and short stories – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, but also Matilda and James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. They were all particularly satisfying for a child because they coupled fairy-tale-level evil adults (child-eating witches and child-torturing headmistresses and child-abusing aunts) with charmingly realistic, if astonishingly clever, children who managed to wrestle happy endings out of horrid situations. In his short stories written for an adult audience, Dahl maintains the same cleverness but gleefully abandons happy endings for brutal irony of the type O. Henry would have appreciated.
Forgive me for ruining one of the stories in the service of a review, but if I may illustrate: the contrast is most distinct when one compares the short story “Champion of the World” with the children’s book “Danny, Champion of the World,” which offer two permutations of the same plot, about poachers catching pheasants by feeding them raisins stuffed with sleeping pills. The plan is clever and seems to go off well for both sets of protagonists, but no one seems to have planned for what will happen when the birds wake up. While “Danny” (as I recall, aided by Wikipedia) ends with some absolution for our plucky youngster, who is able to still get his revenge on the evil pheasant hunters and walks away with a few pheasants for dinner, in the short story an infant (in whose carriage the sleeping birds were hidden) is terrified by a cloud of pecking pheasants and the poachers resign themselves to a failed endeavor.
And so it goes for Dahl’s heroes: hoisted by their own petard, generally, with a real “n” shaped story line. Someone is down on their luck, plots himself into good fortune and then, inevitably, runs afoul of the laws of the universe. The form could get a little repetitive, and as a reader you quickly find yourself looking for the flaw in the plan, trying to anticipate how a scheme to buy antiques off of unwitting farmers or extort money from widows or store one’s brain after death could go awry. But Dahl is really an enjoyable writer, and unfailingly just that much more clever than the protagonist and so the stories fly by but still evoke a pained wince at each final turn.
This collection also contains a very different genre of stories, from his collection “Over to You,” which are realistic (and presumably semi-autobiographical) recountings of British pilots during WWII. While they’re also well-written and richly characterized, I found myself skimming them in a haste to get back to the more dramatically ironic stories in the rest of the book.
I picked this book up on a whim. I was in the memoir/autobiography (what is the official difference?!) section and just picked it up and read the flap. I was intrigued and made an impulse buy. Wow. It is so hard for me to say what another person would think of this book because I just found it so moving subjectively. I feel like the writing must be good because I have certainly been known to get distracted from a good story if it is written badly. But really I just felt such a strong kinship with the main character and found the similarities between our lives striking.
Rachel Sontag grew up in a middle/upper class Jewish home with an extremely emotionally abusive father, a passive and potentially mentally ill mother, and a sister who found a way to disappear instead of bearing the brunt of her father’s cruelty. Rachel struggles to survive in this environment and becomes increasingly self aware of how she has been forced to cope and how these coping skills stop being effective outside the strange world that is her family.
While Rachel’s father is overtly emotionally abusive, telling Rachel that he wishes she was never born, that she is scum, etc., her mother at times acknowledges her father’s “sickness” (as they call it) and at times is entirely complicit in his abuse. When Rachel’s mother asks her, “What do you want from me?” Rachel thinks, “I wanted her. I wanted Mom to be someone she wasn’t, to take on a strength she never possessed, to do what I hoped I would have done in her situation. I thought that mothers were naturally inclined to protect their children, and she was failing. I thought she should have expected more from love, and I held her to my own standards of love, which were conceptual and formed merely in opposition to hers and had yet to be tested in the world.” Rachel’s mother repeatedly reminds her that “This is your family. No family is perfect.” And Rachel vacillates between a fierce love for her and a need to abandon her trust in her mother.
While Rachel is desperate to escape her home she is also trapped by thinking how difficult it would be to make it on her own. After a brief stint in foster care she decides she will make it through the next two years by shutting down and spending as much time away from home as possible. She makes it through those years and finally erupts into the world outside her home and into the realization of what those years have done to her. She discovers that she has yet to find what she is actually interested in and what she actually wants out of life after so many years trying desperately to anticipate her father’s next move and to protect herself from his abuse as best as she can.
Rachel spends some time after she leaves home trying to understand her father and have a different kind of relationship with him. In thinking about his past she writes, “When I look at photographs of Dad at his prom and on his bike and in the very first apartment he shared with Mom, I think maybe he was just too young. That Dad hadn’t finished growing up himself before I came along. That he didn’t know how to relate to children, so that when we demanded to be children he lost all sense of what to do. Maybe Dad had never seen me as a child, or maybe he had and wanted me to remain one forever. Or maybe it never sunk in that I was meant to become someone, that in the same way God had created man, not indentical to God but in God’s image, Dad had created me, so that I could create myself. I know that in raising us the way he did, Dad saw himself as a model for right. how badly he wanted us to arrive at our destination without straying too much from his path.”
Because her father continues to be abusive even in a long-distance relationship, Rachel eventually completely severs contact with him and concentrates on forging new relationships with her sister and mother. She has difficulty forgiving her mother, “Unlike her, Mom’s children would have a family. Even if that father was cruel. Even if that family was a skeletal facade of what a family was supposed to be in Mom’s imagination, a dream still caught in response to her own childhood. Mom didn’t protect us because we weren’t her priority. Although I disagreed with her decision, I could understand it, yet I couldn’t help but see it as a question of character. And the older I got the less I could excuse it…But the fact was she could have left and she didn’t.” Despite these realizations, Rachel works on accepting herself, her mother, and her sister for who they all are.
I was struck time and again by the similarities both in Rachel’s situation to mine and the similarities between our coping mechanisms and our work later in life to reflect on what made us the way we are. In the end this is a painful story of a family and the pain of leaving parts of that family behind to begin to form a life of your own making.
When I decided to read Skipping Towards Gomorrah, I thought I’d better pick up Slouching Towards Gomorrah too, in order to be fair and balanced and all that (side note: apparently the phrase is a reference to a book of Joan Didion’s essays, titled Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but I had to draw the line about how many books to include in this essay somewhere, even if Joan Didion insists on intruding herself on every book review I write). Unfortunately, I grossly overestimated my tolerance for Robert Bork’s brand of morality, and so I only made it through the first ten pages and even at that, felt like I’d been repeatedly beaten over the head with a hard-cover copy of Atlas Shrugged for hours. Bork – the only Supreme Court nominee whose last name has become a verb, that I know of, although I’d be curious to know what it would mean to “Ginsberg” someone – is pretty much a jerk, which I knew, but he’s also an inconsistent and confusing jerk, which was more than I could take. The major complaints he lays out in (the first ten pages of) his introduction are that liberalism is 1)too egalitarian (think affirmative action) and 2)too individualistic (think legalization of marijuana). To counter these trends, of course, he recommends that the right-thinking citizens of the country press for it to be, respectively, more individualistic (merit alone should determine college admission) and more collectivist (the right of the many to protect their children from drugs should supercede the right of the few to get high). I’m not quite sure how you’re supposed to figure out which side to be on, unless you read some comprehensive listing by a ratified neo-conservative. Honestly, the whole mess made me really sympathetic to the libertarians who, if nothing else, are vehemently consistent in their reasoning.
(Ten pages of) Bork’s book also made me increasingly appreciative for Savage’s funny, light, and just-a-touch meaty book. Committed to the idea that the founding fathers really meant it when they promised us “the pursuit of happiness,” Savage chases down happiness – or at least takes a good long look at other peoples’ happiness – in the form of the seven deadly sins: going gambling to get a look at greed, or spending some time at a swingers’ convention to understand lust. On the whole, it’s a meditation on whether anybody else gets hurt if a few million Americans decide to pursue some happiness, from being fat to shooting guns to going to a gay pride parade (high on ecstasy, natch).
And if there’s one thing that Savage is careful of, it’s hypocrisy. Of course, he has the advantage of having read and been disgusted by Bork’s book, but his chapter on gun ownership in particular recognizes how difficult it is to draw the line between personal-freedoms-that-make-you-happy and personal-freedoms-that-imperil-everyone-else (of course, he’s much more concerned about people’s safety than their everlasting soul). Savage is not an unrestricted hedonist, but he’s clear about his logic. And even if he hadn’t been, his book is a lot more fun than Bork’s.
This book was a genuine pleasure: compelling and gripping and interesting and engaging. I know I’m being a little empty in my compliments here, but I was just so pleasantly surprised by how good it was that I’m in a hurry to make it clear that I liked it a lot – in fact, I’m looking forward to getting just enough distance from it that I can read it again, but more slowly this time and with a little more lingering over the details I might have skipped in a hurry to find out what the hell was going to happen to these delightful characters.
Quite the opposite of Life of Pi, I kind of thought Territory was going to be not very good, judging by its book jacket description: “Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 is the site of one of the richest mineral strikes in American history, where veins of silver run like ley line sunder the earth, a network of power that belongs to anyone who knows how to claim it.” I mean, it’s no tiger in a life boat, right? But here was my chance to have learn, once and for all, about the consequences of judging a book by its cover – after picking it up three or four times off the library’s “Staff Recommendations” table and putting it back down, I was finally convinced by the blurb on the front from Neil Gaiman, whose work I love: “Emma Bull is really good.” (I will also add that only after finishing the book did I realize that I have actually read, and reread, another novel of hers, in a totally different style, and that I also quite enjoyed that one.)
On the surface, Territory is a fantastical historical fiction novel, about what might have been going on in the town of Tombstone leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral, if it were the case that certain people had magical powers. See, even my description makes it sound pretty crappy, or at least fluffy and stupid. But the historical landscape is flawlessly researched and seamlessly introduced to the reader. And each of the characters emerges as so strikingly real that the element of fantasy doesn’t seem fantastical at all: if Wyatt Earp can bend the people of Tombstone to his will with his mind, well, it’s not all that much odder than the frontier justice being meted out to cattle rustlers or suspected cattle rustlers, or the way women have to handle their precarious position in a town full of well-armed and mostly drunk men, or the mysterious workings of Tombstone’s Chinatown. The moral center of the book is Mildred Benjamin, a Jewish widow raised in high society in Philadelphia, with dreams of being an author and a pragmatic mind set – and Bull’s choice to give so much attention to this woman in a novel about a gunfight would also seem fantastical, but it’s not a feminist revision of history where we learned that the women were calling all the shots (pun intended), because the novel is also populated with Chinese prostitutes and brazen mistresses and subdued wives and ceaseless gossips, to Mildred is just one face of what women could actually have been doing in Tombstone in 1881. You know, if certain people had magical powers.
Like Neil Gaiman’s excellent American Gods, there’s something refreshing about how Bull inserts the magical into the mundane, reminding me that it’s possible to read science-fiction that’s not overwrought or too caught up in its own cleverness. And that when it’s not, it can be a real joy to read in its own right.
