Uncategorized

If this novel hadn’t been for book club, I would have put it down after fifty pages or so. I simply couldn’t work up any interest in what happened, mostly because of the way the story jumped from one character to another, not staying with anyone long enough to do more than sketch out his/her character and story. By way of contrast, in Small Island Andrea Levy manages multiple viewpoints very well but she limits herself to four and stays with each one for chapters at a time. Here, having my attention dragged away from a character every few pages made it impossible for me to care about any of them.

Apparently there is no main character. The person we start with, Jerome, is promising and his situation interesting, but then—aside from a couple of walk-throughs—he disappears for the rest of the book. I also would have liked to hear more about his brother Levi, who again is beautifully set up and then abandoned. Or their mother who gets two or three good scenes. Or Carl, the young poet. Smith has come up with a plethora of potentially intriguing characters; she could have written an entire book about any one of them.

Another reason the book dragged was the triteness of the situation. Please. I am so sick of middle-aged men’s angst when they cheat on their wives with another woman and/or a student. My hopes for a different perspective from this young writer were dashed when she chose to present those scenes through the eyes of—yes—the cheating middle-aged man. I can’t tell if the author adequately captures a point of view so foreign to her; the man certainly sounds like all the other cheating middle-aged men in the canon of American Lit.

The sections set in England come alive in a way that the rest of the book does not. The description of Hampstead Heath in particular is fabulous. Settings on our side of the pond do not work so well. For example, the family’s house is described simply as “a typical New England house” yet it is clearly neither a triple-decker nor a Cape Cod nor anything else particular to the region. And the occasional misplaced British idiom voiced by an American character is further distracting.

There was another reason I hung on to the end. Having just written an essay on beauty, I was hoping for some interesting insights or shrewd questions about the subject, something a little more than the observation that men like to have sex with beautiful girls or that beautiful girls want to be appreciated for more than their looks even as they make use of them. Smith is certainly capable of going deeper: she gives us a brief but powerful description of a shy student’s thoughts about two pictures. Unfortunately, that is the student’s only appearance.

Another scene I loved involved another student revealing to a professor how students use references to tomatoes to describe their classes. Hilarious. And some of the family scenes, such as the mayhem getting everyone out the door in the morning, ring true. Smith uses body language well: an insecure young woman tottering to a party on high heels, a couple positioning themselves on a staircase while conversing. She succeeds, too, at capturing the feel of much of today’s media with all the frenetic jump cuts and samplings (a chunk of Forster, some Roth, a little Cheever). However, in doing so, she sacrifices the depth and multi-dimensionality that make characters and their stories come alive.

Many of these poems start with conversations with particular people (“Sylvia said . . .”; “Joe says . . .”) which made the poems appear glib at first. Casual conversations seemed to me unlikely material for poetry. But then I came to appreciate the solid base that the exchanges provided for his reflections.

In Zadie Smith’s On Beauty the poetry professor sighs because her students and her public are less interested in her current poems about trees and water and mountains than in the wildly successful poems of her youth that were about emotional—usually sexual—encounters. Now, me, I love poems like those by Mary Oliver and Louise Gluck that start with a bear or a forest flower and then take me to some unexpected and true insight.

Poems that I like best are those that come from some wrenchingly honest place and, being the kind of person I am, it is hard for me to imagine getting to that place in a social situation such as a barbecue or a conversation about a blues song. Yet Hoagland in “Two Trains” turns that conversation on its head several times before bringing it to exactly that place. I don’t even want to quote it because, without the buildup, the images won’t have the full resonance.

Another poem I liked a lot was “Man Carrying Sofa”. It gets to the heart of Hoagland's conversational, seemingly casual style where it describes “this ordinary life of ours” and the depth and complexity behind it. He talks about his resistance to the passing of time: “It’s January and I’m still dating my checks November.” After telling a friend he is sad, ” . . . I discovered / I really was miserable / —which made me feel better about myself— / because, after all, I don’t want to go through time untouched.”

With these lines, Hoagland has brought to light a great, unacknowledged need: to be marked by time, so that you can feel that you have actually lived. An authentic life requires scars as proof. He has helped me understand something that has puzzled me: why some people magnify even the tiniest of tragedies—a dead battery, a spilled coffee—into great drama, with themselves as the poor, put-upon victim. I thought it was just wanting to be the center of attention. I couldn’t believe they had ever suffered a real loss.

For me, the legacy of great pain has been to make all other setbacks and sadnesses merely trivial. As Garrison Keillor said in a wonderful monologue about a boy and his horse (I’m quoting from memory here): “I know what bad is, and this isn’t it.”

Actually I read this book a few weeks ago for book club. If I remember correctly, everyone enjoyed the book, although some of us (myself included) found the beginning with its extended flashback a little slow. The main narrative takes place in 1948 and weaves together the stories of two couples: Hortense and Gilbert, who have emigrated from Jamaica, and Queenie and Bernard, whose English middle-class life has been disrupted by the war.

We found the treatment of race particularly interesting, the almost unconscious racism Hortense encountered in trying to find a teaching job, the contrast of Gilbert’s experience as a member of the RAF with his treatment after he was demobilised, the way U.S. soldiers behaved toward Gilbert as a British soldier versus the way they behaved toward their own compatriots of color, Hortense’s own prejudice against darker-skinned people.

What I liked best about this book was the language. Levy manages to capture the feeling of dialects—Jamaican and English—in a natural way, without mimicking them (something that will make me put down a book). She uses word choice, the rhythm of the language and occasional characteristic interjections to convey the peculiar voices of her characters.

Another area that we found interesting was the generational effects of war. Levy juxtaposes Bernard’s experience in WWII with his father’s in WWI. Both came back changed. This period—the end of WWII—is not one that I’ve read much about. However, I have thought a lot about what happens after a war is over. How do you come back? I think there is no way to come back from an experience like the Dust Bowl or the Somme except like Piero della Francesca’s Christ. That hard resurrection. That devastated face. You come back with something broken, something hardened. And the guilt of being the one who comes back.

How do you live among the ruins? At the end of WWII, England struggled with many challenges: the country’s impoverishment from the war effort, the destruction of London from the blitz, the loss of empire. As an American, I wonder where a country finds its identity when it is no longer the most powerful country in the world. I think about Spain and Turkey in the 16th century, The Netherlands in the 17th century, Austria in the 18th century, England in the 19th century. I think about Italy, what it must be like for a Roman citizen to go out in the morning and walk past the ruins of the forum, to live with the reminder of how great your country once was.

In The English Nation: The Great Myth Edwin Jones says that—despite its treasured images of bulldog individualism—England for centuries defined itself as part of a community of nations. Before Henry VIII cut ties with Catholicism and Catholic nations, England was fully integrated into the life and culture of Europe. Jones suggests that a return to community building could transform England. I have to echo his plea for a renewed commitment to the common good. It’s needed to balance the individualism that drives so much of the U.S. as well. It’s needed to check the capitalism that creates a Dust Bowl or writes people off as unnecessary in a post-industrial economy. It’s needed to find solutions for the extreme poverty that afflicts so much of the world and sends immigrants on journeys such as Hortense’s and Gilbert’s. We just have to look beyond our small selves.

The title of this book caught my attention. In wondering what could have been the worst of all the hard times people have suffered, the Depression years in the U.S. were the last thing on my mind. My parents were children of the Depression, and they always talked about it in the “in my day we walked ten miles to school barefoot in the snow” sort of way, which made me write off a lot of it as hyperbole.

This book shocked me. I’d read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in high school, but it had never occurred to me to wonder about the people who didn’t leave the Dust Bowl. Egan makes the book come alive by anchoring it with the stories of a handful of people, from the boom years through the years when it all turned to dust.

It’s a distressing story on many levels. Last week I mentioned the hucksters who drew homesteaders to the plains with false promises. There were also aggressive Government programs and incentives to settle more people in what had been previously designated the Great American Desert, fueled by “scientific” formulas for “dry farming” that swore prairie could be turned into productive farmland.

Another factor was unchecked capitalism: an international syndicate had been formed to set up the huge XIT cattle ranch and, when returns were not what the investors wanted, they started selling off the land, aggressively marketing it as farmland. Knowing what we know now about ecological systems, I found it physically painful to read about the grasslands that had evolved over thousands of years being recklessly torn up to plant wheat, wheat that later moldered in huge piles next to full silos because the bottom had dropped out of the wheat market.

When David Simon spoke last week at Loyola College on the future of American cities, he was pessimistic. He said that the core issue was that there was a whole group of people whom our post-industrial society had no need for—now that the factories were closed—and was therefore willing to write off. The same could be said of the sodbusters of the 30’s. Their land destroyed, their cows and horses choked to death by dust, their equipment repossessed by the bank, they struggled to survive on yucca roots and tumbleweed.

The difference was the response of the Government. Franklin Roosevelt emerges as a hero of this story, alongside the people who fought so hard to stay alive. His acceptance of the emerging ideas of conservation and ecology, his willingness to invest in efforts to reverse the damage, and his commitment to helping people survive made him an icon to his suffering citizens and a model for us.

The people weren’t just waiting for handouts; they pulled together, worked hard, helped each other out. Their story is as inspiring as the stories of polar expeditions such as Scott’s and Shackleton’s, but equally as distressing: great feats of endurance and courage that should never have been necessary if the people had not been led (or misled) into such peril. And the Dust Bowl was perilous: suffering drought, bankruptcy, duststorms and plagues of grasshoppers, the sodbusters surely earned the title of this book. But hard work and cooperation can only get you so far. Sometimes you need the safety net. Pure capitalism destroys societies; it needs social controls to keep it in balance.

Set in a dying town in upstate New York, The Last Good Chance is about that peculiarly American activity of reinventing yourself. Jack, who grew up in Lakeland and became famous as an urban planner by writing a book castigating the soulless urban environment, returns to Lakeland to spearhead a waterfront development that promises to re-invigorate the town. Anne, his fiancée, follows him, leaving behind the lively NYC art scene to paint in the barn of a house she and Jack rent outside of town. Steven reports on local news and longs to make his mark in the journalism world so he can get out of dead-end Lakeland. Harris is Jack’s brother who never left town. The story focuses on these characters and their struggle to create authentic selves.

Barbash captures the bleak hopelessness of a New England mill town where all the mills have closed and the jobs have evaporated. What Jack brings is hope. His plans for a festival waterfront development catch the imagination, not just of the townspeople but also the national media. Suddenly it seems possible that the town can indeed recreate itself as a desirable destination.

Reading about Jack’s ad campaign, featuring photos and stories of this future town, seemed eerily familiar to me. It echoed the false promises I’d been reading about in Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time about the Dust Bowl and the charlatans who lured unsuspecting homesteaders out to the High Plains with assurances—outright lies—of existing infrastructure, fertile farmland, and sufficient water.

Yet Jack seems like an honorable man, a man who genuinely wants to help his hometown. It takes so little to turn a place around. I’ve seen it in Baltimore: one person who was somehow able to make people believe in his vision for the city has actually gotten people to move back to the city. However, I’m not sure a festival marketplace is the way to go. I was not a fan of Harborplace when it was first suggested, feeling that the money could be better spent in improving city services. Although it has been more successful than I predicted at remaking Baltimore as a tourist destination, its prosperity has not spread beyond the harbor.

A few years ago I went to the Dover Fish Fest where my son and some friends had been hired to sing sea chanteys. Port Dover is a small town in Ontario on Lake Erie, known in the early 20th century for its lakeside ballroom. The Fish Fest was a wonderful quirky celebration that drew a lot of people. There were none of the booths I seem to see at every craft show and town festival, selling fried dough, pottery, wind chimes, etc. Instead, Dover gave us the best of itself. We wolfed down fish and chips with salt and vinegar that we got from shacks near the pier. We watched the tugboat pulls and cardboard boat races, cheering on our favorites. We ducked into pubs for a pint and some singing. Best of all was the Port Dover Harbour Museum. Although it may sound boring, it was anything but. The exhibits brought to life local legends and true stories related to Dover’s fishing industry, Lake Erie shipwrecks, and the War of 1812 that kept me fascinated for hours.

At the time, I had been reading Jane Jacobs and other urban planners, so I was curious about the way this town marketed itself. It seemed to me that the best thing was to stick to what was unique about your town. However, I think now that the false promises may have potential as well. After all, the settlers who arrived in Boise City to find only stakes in the dust went on to build the city anyway. Jack’s vision for Lakeland resonated with its citizens and gave them a reason to believe that they could shape their future.

This nonfiction account of the life and work of Paul Farmer raised a number of questions for me. Paul Farmer is a doctor who could have cashed in his degree from Harvard Medical School for a lucrative practice anywhere in the U.S. Instead he chose to start a clinic in a small town in Haiti, a poor area even for that impoverished country. He started out treating tuberculosis and AIDS but soon realised that he also had to deal with source causes such as poor housing and lack of education. Through the foundation he started, Partners in Health, Farmer and his close associates went on to start programs in countries like Peru and Russia, as well as addressing global health concerns in fora like the World Health Organization.

Tracy Kidder’s prose is as absorbing as any novel. I particularly appreciated the structure of the book. It starts with Kidder’s first meeting with Farmer and chronologically follows from there, with detours as appropriate. Kidder folded in background information on Farmer and his associates just when I as a reader wanted it.

One of the questions that Kidder raised was the inefficiency of Farmer’s methods. We discussed the book in my book club, and one member believed that Farmer’s intensive hands-on approach to health care—Kidder described Farmer taking a whole day hiking out to make a single house call—limited the scope of his achievements. Farmer could have used his growing renown to better purpose by devoting himself to global health concerns or by institutionalizing his work. Several people believed that Farmer’s work would not live on without him. But another person said that Farmer’s practice of dealing with the patient in front of him grounded him and enabled him to accomplish as much as he did.

Kidder described Farmer sacrificing his entire life to his work, which raised questions for me. Being married to a genius or a saint is no picnic. Farmer had a wife and child living in Paris, but we didn’t hear much about them and it sounded as though Farmer rarely saw them. He never seemed to relax either, spending all of his time seeing patients, traveling extensively, and raising funds. Do you have to give up everything else in order to do good work? I’ve tried to make Emerson’s motto “To think is to act” my own, but how far can you, should you take right action?

One member of my book club said that the book made her aware of the luxury and waste in her life. She thought she should sell everything she owned and give it where it might do some good. Of course, it would just be a miniscule drop of what was needed and might accomplish little. However, I did think that an unsung hero of the book was Tom White who devoted his entire fortune to financing Farmer’s ventures. Without White’s money, Farmer would not have gotten very far. And I most admired the way Farmer was undeterred by how the problems he addressed were huge and ultimately unsolvable.

On the other hand, self-sacrifice can be a trap. In The Birds of Paradise —a remarkable novel and one of my favorites—Paul Scott wrote about how seductive it could be to make a burnt offering of yourself. Not only can it feed the illusion of your own importance, but it becomes a way of avoiding other decisions and other responsibilities. However, if Kidder’s account was accurate, then Farmer was not concerned with his own glory, only with the health of the patient in front of him, a single person, not a theory or the public’s acclaim. My friend was right: that is the way to stay grounded.

A good read. Lippman spins a complex tale featuring her PI, Tess Monaghan, and finishes it off with an ending that satisfies my need for resolution while leaving some threads intriguingly loose—hurry up with that next book!

At the same time, she plays a bit with the conventions of the mystery form. For example, Spenser may have Hawk, but Tess’s sidekick is a truly frightening preppie princess from Greenspring Valley. Hilarious. Also, in this book Lippman foregoes the now almost obligatory physical assault on the PI, substituting a form of attack that is more realistic and—for me—much scarier.

She keeps the pace brisk without sacrificing the characters and sense of place that make her books so interesting. Of course it helps that they are set in Baltimore. The places she talks about are places I frequent and (in most cases) have frequented since the days when the only Lippman I’d heard of was her father.

Why is it so much fun to read a book set in a place I know? A familiar setting helps bring the story to life, especially when (as in this book) the author mentions recognizable local events and people. Certainly it’s easier for me to visualise a scene in a coffeehouse where I’ve spent way too much time or a park where I’ve walked my dog.

Most of all, I find it immensely satisfying to have my own observations reinforced. Lippman, like Anne Tyler, like David Simon, like John Waters (hey, my mom said to say hi to yours), like Barry Levinson, portray the Baltimore I know. You may think some of their characters and stories are off-beat, but I’m telling you, it happens here.

Okay, enough about motherhood already. I picked up this book because it had been recommended to me as a mystery. A hundred pages in, with no mystery having appeared, I set it aside. That’s twice as many pages as I usually give a book that doesn’t grab me, but I found parts of it funny and hoped it would get better.

Set in Hollywood, the book is about two men whose paths keep intersecting. Frank Bones is an on-the-verge-of-failing comic who is obsessed with sex, drugs and the Kennedy assassination. Lloyd Melnick is an insecure sitcom writer, obsessed with sex, status and not embarrassing himself.

These unattractive main characters simply did not interest me. I didn’t care what happened to them. And the satire about Hollywood—though occasionally quite funny—was too broad to keep me reading. I’m sure if I knew more about television shows I would have picked up more references, recognised more caricatures of Hollywood celebrities, and found the book more amusing.

I don’t get the whole celebrity thing. Who cares? I remember visiting my sister in L.A. many years ago. She invited her friends over to meet me, but all they could talk about were what celebrities they had seen around town, like kids trading baseball cards. They told me that if I was REALLY lucky, I might catch a glimpse of Jack Lemmon crossing the street. Oh boy.

I have looked at some of the gossip shows on tv, but couldn’t work up much interest. Anyway, knowing too much about actors distracts me when I’m trying to watch their films. There are few actors who can actually make me forget who they are and what other roles they have played. I don’t want to be thinking about their love lives or fashion sense when I’m sitting in the movie theatre.

Even though this book was not to my taste, I’m sure it is to others’ or it wouldn’t have been recommended to me. I’ll donate it to the library or put it on the book exchange shelf at the coffeeshop.

Now a motion picture, I first read this book when it came out and reread it recently. I’ve always enjoyed mysteries by P.D. James, their texture and intelligence. This book was equally well-written and I certainly found the premise interesting. However, by the end, I was disappointed to find the symbolism a bit heavy-handed.

The details of what a world without children might be like seemed completely believable, particularly the women who pretended dolls were their babies. What is this need to reproduce? I had both my children before I was twenty-five and—if circumstances had been different—could easily have gone on to have or adopt a half dozen more. It wasn’t that I wanted someone to love. Just the opposite, in fact; I was horrified to find that I would have to pay attention to another being every single minute of the day and night. Nor was it the reason some of my pregnant eighth-graders cited: “I want someone who will always love me.” Hoo-wee, I thought, are you in for a surprise!

My reason for having children was that the picture I had of my life—what I wanted my life to be like—included them. Of course, it also included a farm in the mountains, which I don’t have, but there you go. I expected to like my kids. What I didn’t expect was that I would adore them, each of them a miracle.

There are also all kinds of side benefits. Children gave me a great excuse to haul out my favorite picture books, play duck-duck-goose, and ride merry-go-rounds. Of course, the kids also took me on the roller coaster at Hershey Park, which scared the socks off me, but you get the bad with the good. Reliving childhood, a childhood that I could create, delighted me. Luckily for me, my kids not only went along with my crazy games but also were smart enough to ask me questions I couldn’t answer. As grown-ups, they’re pretty great to have around too.

If I hadn’t had children, I probably would be a morose and self-centered drama queen. Kudos to James for being able to imagine a world without children. It chills my bones just to think about it.

A series of letters from a woman to her husband, parents of a boy responsible for a massacre at his high school—I half-expected this book to be impossible to read. However, the narrator’s voice drew me in. Her ambivalence about becoming a parent seemed believable. The fact that she made a lot more money than her husband, yet had to be the one to stay home with the baby immediately attracted my sympathy. She seemed like someone I might know, one of my friends, although outside of a novel I probably would have gotten tired of her relentless self-centeredness.

I’m pretty gullible, completely snowed by people in books and in life, so I assume a narrator to be reliable unless overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary. Here there’s not enough evidence either way to decide. Was the mother correct that her son was born bad? Or was the father right that the child was normal but twisted by his mother’s distrust, no, dislike? I always blamed children’s behavior on their parents, until I had kids of my own and saw what strong personalities they had, right from day one. So I could believe either proposition about Kevin.

I know parents—my own mother being a prime example—who believe that all small children are out to get their parents and every interaction is a power struggle. Equally, I know two families where the parents—reasonable and pleasant people—have a child who from birth was at war with society in general and the parents in particular. Since the other kids are reasonable and pleasant, I have to absolve the parents of blame. Of course, one sibling’s upbringing can be very different from another’s.

We can never really know what goes on inside another family. That’s one reason I’m grateful for novels like this one that describe lives I haven’t lived. Even Kevin tugged at my sympathies. His explanation to the reporter for the murders (whether phony—as his mother believed—or not) reminded me of the monologue at the beginning of Trainspotting which also made me see the world a little differently. What seemed most real to me in this book was the way that Kevin was the only one who truly understood his mother.

By the way, those two wayward children I mentioned? Both have come around to having a loving relationship with parents and siblings. So, who knows?