Frisbee: A Book Journal

Moving to Wordpress

2011-08-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed posting at Blogger, but have decided to move Frisbee: A Book Journal back to WordPress. Please visit us at Frisbee: A Book Journal. The url is http://frisbeebookjournal.wordpress.com

Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton

2011-08-12T22:23:00.000-07:00

Bicycling vacation!

Summer travel. It’s not exactly a vacation. It’s WORK.

You carry two copies of a Jane Austen novel everywhere, one for your handbag and the other to lose in the hotel room (does that happen to you?); or open your Nook and discover Charlotte M Yonge’s The Daisy Chain, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and Irrepressible, a biography of Jessica Mitford, should you feel like reading them.

But back home you’re happy to sit down with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, a novel about a cotton factory and its workers, among other things.

I would rather read Victorian novels than almost anything. It's another century; characters struggle to be good; they deal with important social issues; and there are rocky romances. I'm astonished by how political Gaskell's books are. In North and South, Margaret, the heroine, becomes involved with a mill owner and striking workers. In Mary Barton, Gaskell's first novel, set in Manchester in the 1840s, she writes from the point of view of factory workers, documenting unemployment, social injustice, and the struggles of the poor. Mary is the daughter of John Barton, a brilliant, unemployed factory worker. He helps the poor, makes sacrifices to assist the starving, and is naively certain that if he points out the facts to Parliament they’ll bring relief to the workers.

Mary at 16 is a beautiful girl who finds herself a job as a dressmaker’s apprentice. It is the best she can do: her father won’t let her work in a factory, and he hates the idea of service because of class issues. Mary, who hopes to rise in the world, wants to be independent, but she is also a frivolous and immature girl. She dreams of rising in the world by her beauty. And that, as we aficionados of Victorian lit could tell her, is unrealistic.

Gaskell writes:

“I am afraid that Mary’s determination not to go to service arose from less sensible thoughts on the subject than her father’s. Three years of independence of action (since her mother’s death such a time had now elapsed) had little inclined her to submit to to rules as to hours and associates, to regulate her dress by a mistress’s idea of propriety, to lose the dear privileges of gossiping with a merry neighbor, and working night and day to serve one who was sorrowful.... She knew she was very pretty...so with this consciousness she had early determined that her beauty should make her a lady...”

There are many moving scenes in which John Barton helps the starving family of an unemployed "Methody" who is dying of of typhoid in a clammy basement. Gaskell vividly describes the streets brimming with slops and waste, and the damp freezing basement flats. Mary, good-hearted and hard-working, helps the hysterical widow and her children.

Mary has friends who are wiser than she. Margaret, a singer and a seamstress who is going blind (so Victorian, I know, but very sad), understands the connection beween poverty and disaster much better than Mary. Mary is very excited when one of the mills catches fire, and though Margaret cautions her about the danger and significance, they go to see the fire. When Mary witnesses her friend Jem’s trying to save his father from the flames, she understands it is not just a pretty sight. She faints.

But Mary gets involved with a mill owner's son. One knows that nothing good can come of that.

More on this later...

Bibliobits: Lorraine Lopez's The Realm of Hungry Spirits & Joseph Heller's Catch-22

2011-08-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

I found Lorraine Lopez's The Realm of Hungry Spirits displayed prominently on the new paperback table at a bookstore. On the cover a woman danced with butterflies. Was it chick lit? Was it a romance?

It is definitely not a romance. Lopez's enjoyable novel teeters on the edge of fluffy comedy, but also treats serious issues like class, unemployment, and Buddhism.

What happens when a woman becomes middle-class through education and suddenly her friends and relatives are a class or two beneath her? This is the situation of the frazzled Latina narrator, Marina, a middle-school English teacher who used to work in insurance. She isn't immediately in the market for love, having broken up with her sleazy boyfriend. Yet she must continue to deal with her family's and friends' problems, as those with less education seek her emotional support and free room and board.

Marina is so busy helping others that she can't solve her own problems. People keep intruding. Her unemployed nephew, Kiko, and his best friend, Reggie, jilted by Marina's sister, Xochi, live with her, and the living room smells of funky socks. Because Kiko's mother kicked him out, and because he is dyslexic, Marina is sympathetic, but things have gone too far.

Her ex-boyfriend Rudy's crazy friend, Nestor, wants to purify her house with some voodoo spell in return for a deposition supporting his desire to take away his children from their mother. (Marina refuses.) She is still in touch with Rudy's daughter, Letty, who has a nervous breakdown when her baby dies.

Here is an example of the witty, smart voice that can surprise one with its occasional sharpness.

"You wouldn't expect so many people to make it out on a Friday morning to attend a funeral for a five-month-old baby, but the chapel is so jam-packed with cristianos and the parking lot arrayed with so many motorcycles that it looks like a breakout session at Bike Week in Daytona. The place reeks with exhaust emissions, sweat, and stale cigarette smoke. I'm sure it means a lot to Miguel that his church group turns out big-time to support him on the day when he and Letty bury their son, but I can't help wondering where and if any of these people work. Who would hire them?"

And there is dating. While teaching summer school, she gets to know an attractive substitute teacher who is an artist. At the hospital, she meets a nerdy doctor who wants to date her. She is a little flustered when he invites her to take a nap with him. He means nap--literally.

Although Marina longs to be a Buddhist and reads the Dalai Lama, she has little time for prayer. Yet things may work out for her.

Lopez, a professor in the creative writing program at Vanderbilt, has painted a sensitive, vivid portrait of a first-generation college graduate.

Joseph Heller. Walter Kirn's excellent article on Joseph Heller at Slate was inspired by the 50th anniversary of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, an anti-war classic (and so much more), and by a new biography, Tracy Daugherty's Just one Catch.

Heller's daughter Erica Heller has also written a memoir, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, the Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22.

Time to get out the Heller.

Kurt Vonnegut

2011-08-08T20:28:00.000-07:00

I was astonished to learn that a high school district in Republic, Missouri, has banned Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. A 2010 complaint in the Republic School District said it spread "false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth."

Missouri must be the new literary capital of the world.

Vonnegut is controversial. Some dislike the meta-fictional elements in his work. For instance, in a book group I belong to, people hated the meta-fictional techniques in Timequake, a clever autobiographical novel in which Vonnegut himself is a character, a blocked writer who has been writing Timequake for ten years, and his alter-ego, Trout Kilgore, a failed science fiction writer, accidentally becomes a hero and is worshipped in a literary colony. (In the novel, timequakes cause people in 2001 to repeat everything they did in 1991.) Trout Kilgore appears in several of Vonnegut's other novels, too,including Slaughterhouse-Five.

Well, the students of Republic won't be reading Vonnegut in school.

But the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis is fighting back. They say they will send a free copy of Slaughterhouse-Five to 150 Republic High School students who email the website. The Vonnegut Memorial Library is also looking for donors to pay for postage.

Bibliobits: How Many Books?

2011-08-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

Another hot summer day. We were full of vim on our bicycles because the temperature was under 90. I would have preferred lolling around the house, but when all the days are hot, you know you need to go out.

At the coffeehouse where we drank iced tea, my husband informed me that he has seen me reading three books in two days. I informed him that I have seen him reading one book in two days.

Does it matter? Is one way of reading more serious than the other?

Well, it's true that I juggle books. I finished Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South in the car yesterday. I read a little bit of John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces in a lull. And I was reading a mystery today.

How can I explain this student-style multiple reading?

In Louise Erdrich's Shadow Tag, a short novel about a dysfunctional Native American family, the heroine, Irene America, the wife of a painter famous for his disturbing portraits of her, badly needs privacy. She writes one diary for him to find and one for herself. Even her reading style is private and independent: she reads the parts that nurture her and doesn't always finish books. And this drives her husband crazy.

Or something like that. I read this novel last year and hope I have the details right.

Although I'm not like Irene, I do read like this. I wonder: do women read serially more than men? The women bloggers I read seem to. Men seem less personal in their blogs, less revealing of their habits.

WHAT I WANT TO READ. My husband and I are sharing a copy of Patrick McGuinness's The Last Hundred Days, a Booker-longlisted novel published by a small press, Seren. Set in Bucharest in 1989, this lit thriller, according to the book jacket blurb, is about a "young English student... [who]finds dissidents, party appartchiks, black marketeers, diplomats, spies, and ordinary Romanians, all watching each other as Europe's most paranoid regime plays out its bloody endgame."

The first one to finish has to blog about it.

I also want to read Clyde Edgerton's The Night Train. I love this humorous Southern writer, enjoyed Raney and Walking across Egypt, and intend to pick up one of his others (though not necessarily the newest, because I believe I have one of his other novels around) before the end of summer.

Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South

2011-08-06T21:28:00.000-07:00

Rejuvenating lemonade!

It has been a hot summer. Beautiful, but hot. And I've been rushing around, traveling back and forth between two towns (again and again and again), trying to combine home life in one city with the obligations to an ill relative in another. I discovered there are not two of me, as you could have told me.

Pop lit saved me this summer. It's easy to rush out for 10 minutes for a gasp of contemporary "lite" fiction on a "break." But now everything is organized, and I am home again.

So I've turned to a relaxing Victorian novel--a rejuvenating novelistic "cocktail," which I "drink" along with fresh lemonade.

Rejuvenating Victorian novel!

Elizabeth Gaskell is a marvelous writer, who, like Mrs. Oliphant, was very popular in her day but is neglected now. Some readers dismiss her as sentimental and middlebrow, but her novel North and South shows she was as concerned about class as she was about mores and morals. North and South, first published 1854-55 as a serial in Dickens's Household Words, seems to me to be a hybrid: part romance, part portrait of a dutiful daughter, and part chronicle of the politics of factories in the industrial north of England. Gaskell's sketches of the striking workers are vividly drawn and haunting.

The novel does not begin with politics. Margaret Hale, the 19-year-old heroine, is happy in the beautiful rural village where her father is a clergyman. After Mr. Hale has a crisis of belief, he resigns from the Church of England. The family moves to Milton, an industrial town, where Mr. Hale works as a tutor to Mr. Thornton, the owner of a cotton mill who wants to learn Greek and Latin.

The North is smoky and gritty, and there are no trees. No one is happy, but Margaret must manage the household because her mother is very ill. A relationship develops between Margaret and Mr. Thornton--he falls in love with her, but she considers him rough. A strike brings the two both closer together and farther apart. Though Margaret knows a striking worker's family, and thus sympathizes with the men, she believes the Union is wrong. When the men throw rocks at Mr. Thorntons for hiring Irishmen, she runs out and stands in front of him, putting her arms around him to protect him, not because she likes him but because it is the right thing to do. She is hit by a rock.

Mr. Thornton and his mother interprets her action as love, and when Margaret refuses his proposal he is upset and his mother thoroughly annoyed. Margaret grows to respect Mr. Thornton.

There are also other subplots, but let me say that the factory politics and the relationship between Margaret and Mr. Thornton are the most interesting (so far).

I admire North and South, but Wives and Daughters is Gaskell's masterpiece.

Reading Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English & a Digression on the Booker Prize

2011-08-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Just so you'll know: Stephen Kelman is not James Kelman, the Scottish writer who won the Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late It Was, How Late. Stephen Kelman, who grew up in the projects in Luton, England, is longlisted for this year's Booker for his first novel, Pigeon English. I am almost through Pigeon English, the first book I've read on the longlist. And I WILL blog about it in this very post, after a digression on the Booker.

I love the Booker Prize. I love the betting, the blogging, and the book burble. But sometimes the conflict gets out of control. I glanced at the Booker Debate general discussion page, and was surprised (though why?) to see bloggers (you'll recognize some of them) and commenters quarreling and jockeying for position.

The moderator wrote:

"we are saddened to see the behaviour on this board. We will be contacting people individually today and are meeting today to discuss further action. Please return this to an open debate about the Prize and books in general - some of the personal comments from various members have been unacceptable."

It's annoying, really, to read boards like this, so I gave up on it. People behaving badly over the Booker? I have better things to do. The Man Booker Prize is not exactly brain surgery, nuclear disarmament, or global warming, so why not just have fun? But even Carmen Callil, a judge of the International Booker Prize, apparently went crazy this spring and resigned from the panel after bashing Philip Roth, the winner.

I am in the home stretch of Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English. Do I think it will win the Booker? No. It is a charming, often moving first novel, narrated by an 11-year-old boy. Some parts are well-written and effective, other parts cloying. It reads like a Y.A. novel, or a book club novel.

It is the story of Harri Opuku, a boy from Ghana living in the projects of London with his mother and sister, Lydia. He is trapped in a world of gangs and poverty, but this very innocent boy uses his imagination to protect himself from the violent reality. He pretends his speedy running is a superpower, enhanced by his off-brand trainers. There is a touching scene in which he draws stripes on his trainers to make them look like Adidas. And he and a friend, Dean, use binoculars to spy on gang members and try to solve a crime.

In the first chapter Harri is looking at the blood of a boy murdered in his neighborhood. He says:

"Me and the dead boy were only half friends. I didn't see him very much because he was older and went to my school. He could ride his bike with no hands and you never even wanted to see him fall off. I said a prayer for him inside my head. It just said sorry. That's all I could remember. I pretended like if I kept looking hard enough I could make the blood move and go back in the shape of a boy."

How can Harri survive? He knows how to fight and is a fast runner, but a gang bullies him into agreeing to help them attack an old man. He shies away at the last minute. A female gang member, while ironing his sister's hair, burns Lydia with the iron to make her shut up about something she knows. Harri thinks some of the gang members know about the murder of the boy.

Some scenes have actually made me cry. Astonishingly, I cried over a humorous, touching scene where he talks about superheroes and his friend Altaf's gift for drawing them.

"There's about a hundred superheroes in the world. Altaf knows all of them. He draws their picture and they're even better than his cars. Altaf can tell you about any superhero. It's his favorite subject. Spiderman is a superhero. That's how he can stick like a spider....

"Every superhero has a favorite power. Some of them can fly and some of them can run proper fast. Some of them are bulletproof or have rays. They all have names that tell you what's their favorite power, like Spiderman..."

If I have an hour to read, I get absorbed and appreciate Kelman's blunt style, which reads like English in translation (a very smart approach) and also translates Harri's puzzlement and escapism from the culture. But I have found that 10 minutes here and there isn't enough. You really have to sink into the book.

It's a good first novel, but do I think first novels should make the Booker longlist? No.

N.B. I haven't read a Booker winner since 2007. Sometimes I start to read the longlist, and by the time we get to the winner in October I no longer care.

Here are my picks for winners 2007-2010 (none won)

2008 - I picked three from the shortlist. Loved 2008! Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency, Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies.

2009 - A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book

2010 - Peter Carey's Parrott and Olivier in America

I just found my copy of Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, the 2010 winner, and can't imagine why I haven't read it.

What I'm Reading Now: The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma

2011-08-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

Sitting by the pool at Villa Frisbee (I made that up) we're still engaged in summer reading. Summer reading will soon be obsolete and metamorphose into "light reading." Well, perhaps we're not always light in the summer. We like to mix up classics, literary fiction, and pop. One day we may read Clifford D. Simak's science fiction classic, They Walked like Men, the next Lisa Alther's Kinflicks, and the next Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse.

As a last gasp at the end of the season, book reviewers and bloggers are recommending summer reading again. But, you know how it is, I have quite a stack on the coffee table already.

One of my favorite books of the summer is Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time, a historical fantasy that mixes elements of literary and pop.

The Map of Time is an astonishingly well-written novel, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor, and deals with time travel, romance, and H. G. Wells. I'm very enthusiastic about Wells, loved David Lodge's stunning historical novel about Wells, A Man of Parts (and wonder why it didn't make the Booker longlist), and am amazed that two novels about Wells should be published at roughly the same time. The Map of Time,
published in Spain in 2008, is newly released in the U.S. A Man of Parts will be published this fall in the U.S.

Set in the late 19th century, The Map of Time vividly delineates the possibilities of time travel, hucksters' exploitation, and couples separated by time and other factors. H. G. Wells, one of the main characters, is so popular after writing the best-seller, The Time Machine, that he is pursued by quacks, fans, and occasionally respectable readers. Out of the blue his home is intruded one night by Andrew Harrington, a suicidal Englishman whose prostitute girlfriend was killed by Jack the Ripper. His savvy, aggressive cousin, Charles, accompanies him. Charles says he knows Wells has a time machine and wants him to send Andrew to the past to save his girlfriend.

No wonder they believe, or want to believe, in time travel. A frustrated novelist owns a time machine-travel agency that purports to carry customers to 2000, where they can view a battle between human beings and automatons.

Imagine what happens when a brilliant, dissatisfied young woman falls in love with a man of the future, Captain Shackleton.

Palma also fashions a mostly accurate, partly fictionalized, biography of Wells. He charts Wells's rise from the lower middle class, from draper's assistant to science teacher to influential writer. Wells, a womanizer, had two sexually unsatisfying marriages, but his second marriage to his former student, Jane, lasted. Jane is a minor character in the novel.

The future and past are interwoven. There are many allusions to 19th-century novels, among them H. Rider Haggard's popular novel, Allan Quatermain, and to historical characters like Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, a famous Victorian deformed by disease (his skin was thick and his head elephantine) and rescued from a freak show.

This novel is utterly compelling and irresistible.

Summer of Eldercare

2011-07-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

It has been a difficult summer. Temperatures in the 90s, sweat and anxiety, and lots of travel to take care of an aged relative. She fell and broke her hip this week. She had surgery.

It shouldn't have been this way.

I knew the assisted living facility was wrong for her. I would often find her doing nothing, sitting on the edge of the bed in a darkened apartment.   She had no visitors. She claimed that the place was too far out (and it was, because her friends don't drive anymore). She complained that no one socialized at lunch. (They didn't. I sat at the table with them.)

"Where are they going? What do they have to do? They're not going anywhere," she would say when they got up and left immediately after eating.

She perked up when we took her to her house, where she had lived practically forever. There were Things She Had to Do.

It might have been different if she'd had home care, if she had been in her own home with her own things

I intervened last month at the assisted living facility when I learned that her primary doctor had recommended hospitalization and this request had been ignored by her caregiver. The assisted living facility nurses claimed they hadn't known about it.

"She has failure to thrive," they said. "We see a lot of this."

She was covered with bruises from falling. She had become too frail to get up by herself or go to the bathroom alone.   She had lost 15 pounds in two weeks. Her weight loss was the result of a serious health problem, not "failure to thrive."

It was a case of severe neglect. And she ended up in the hospital.

After much coaxing and detailed documenting of problems via email, I persuaded her caregiver to consider a nursing home--thank God, we thought--but it proved to be too much trouble for him. Like someone out of Middlemarch, he thought our offers to help were some kind of power gambit.

After the hospitalization, he returned her to the assisted living facility.

She fell at night. No RNs after 6:00. This facility was designed for people who are much more mobile. Was she able to push her emergency button?

And so she had surgery.

It is very difficult at the best of times to watch one's loved ones grow old. You think they'll be strong forever.

But it is horrifying to see what goes on in the system of eldercare. The problems are common; many families have the same frightening experiences; and unfortunately there is no regulation for assisted living facilities. They may be fine for people who don't need too much assistance, but unfortunately many are owned by development and real estate companies, and care varies.

Two books that have really helped me: The Good Caregiver by Robert L. Kane, M.D., and A Bittersweet Season by Jane Gross.

It is very important to do the research, no one knows this world until they're in it, and these books are superb.

A Year without Book Reviews

2011-07-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

A newspaper book review editor's office.

The L.A. Times has fired all its freelance book reviewers. Budget cuts, the editor says. The Guardian Books Blog is now written entirely by staff writers. Budget cuts, I imagine.

These cuts have an effect. This year, 11 of the books I've read came to my attention from book reviews. Book reviews, whether positive or negative, publicize books.

The New York Times Book Review is touted as the most influential book page. I no longer depend on it personally, though. I've been burned, not by critics, but by novelist reviewers writing too kindly about other novelists. It's not that I want unkindness, but neither do I want to rush out to buy a flawed book because I am too easily influenced by big-name reviewers. In other words, I have passed Book Reviewing 101 and have become impervious to reviews. Book reviewing is a tough job--it's no fun reading bad books--but, all the same, we look for the reviewer's true opinion and assessment of how well the writer has succeeded in achieving his or her goal in his or her genre.

The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker still have energetic book sections. They recognize reviewing and book news as an art, and also publish articles about old or out-of-print books.

The Guardian is eccentric, never afraid to eviscerate even a famous writer's book (and these negative reviews often send me searching for the book). The Washington Post has an excellent crew of in-house critics. The New Yorker is, well, The New Yorker.

Of course there are other venues. Many bloggers take contemporary literature seriously. But sometimes they are "compromised." (Have I been watching too much "Battlestar Galactica?") Sometimes they're doing obvious PR, out of naivete or to return a favor. Some may actually be PR people. If they're bookstore affiliates, watch out. Every time you click on one of their links to a bookstore and buy something, anything, they profit. It may not be by much, but it's something. (By the way, I'm not a bookstore affiliate.)

What would I do if I had to do without book reviews for, say, a year? I suppose I'd go back to the system I had in the old days. Most of the new books I read, by the way, are not the result of reviews. A few new books are bought on impulse, a few inspired by recommendations at Amazon or The Barnes & Noble Review, a few from prize longlists. The older books I pick out according to my own system.

We need our book reviews, though.

Bibliobits: Tigers, Werewolves, & Dogs (Oh My!)

2011-07-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

A tiger with jaw wide-open...

2011 is the year of the tiger trend in literature.

There is Tea Obreht's Orange Prize-winning novel The Tiger's Wife, narrated by a doctor on a mission to inoculate children at an orphanage in the Balkans. When she learns by phone that her grandfather has died and that she must pick up his things at a clinic in a remote village, she recalls his tales about an escaped tiger in the Balkans, and of the woman who, according to village gossip, was the tiger's wife.

Then there is Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills, a heart-rending Indian family saga in which one of the characters is named the tiger's husband.

There are also two memoirs with "tiger" in the title, Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger.

Now the tiger has appeared again, not in the title, but in the text of the Booker-longlisted novel, Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie. The jacket copy tells us that Jaffy Brown, an eight-year-old street urchin in London's East End, "finds himself face-to-face with an escaped tiger, which swiftly takes him in his jaws. The tiger's owner, the great Mr. Charles Jamrach--famed importer of the world's strangest creatures--boldly struggles to free the boy from death's gasp."

I plan to start JM soon.

Werewolves. I bought Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver because I love the cover. So shallow! But that's how it is sometimes. Shiver is a paranormal romance, the first in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series. The melancholy, romantic, witty tone is similar to that of Stephenie Meyers's Twilight. Twilight was the first of these popular Y.A. vampire romances, as far as I know. It was a matter of time before werewolf romances caught up.

In Shiver, 17-year-old Grace lives in a town where a wolf recently killed a teenager. As a child, she was attacked by wolves and saved by ayellow-eyed wolf. The yellow-eyed wolf is actually Sam, a werewolf who works summers in a bookstore. When the townspeople set out to kill the wolves, Grace tries to save them.

I've only just begun it, but so far so good.

Dogs. Although I'm not really writing about animal lit, I decided to add a note on dogs to the jottings on tigers and wolves. Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov is the best dog novel of the 20th century and one of the best Russian novels. Ruslan is a bewildered prison dog set free after the demolition of a Siberian gulag’s camp. Trained to guard and herd, he misses his terrible master, doesn't know what to do, where to find food, or where to live. With the other dogs, he haunts the train station and awaits new prisoners. Although some of the prison dogs gradually become tame and find masters, Ruslan cannot adapt. This is a very sad book, I cried and cried, and it is my top animal book of all time. There were repercussions for Vladimov for writing the political allegory.

Biking for the Booker

2011-07-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

It's hot. We don't live in the South and aren't used to the high 90s. After days and days of 97, 92 seemed like nothing.

We had to get out of the house before it got hot again. A short bike ride. What could be more energizing? And after reading the titles on the Man Booker Prize longlist, we wanted to go to the library anyway.

We briefly had to play Control My Lane through a narrow orange-cone-construction one-lane stretch. ("Controlling your lane," or riding in the middle, is what expert bicyclists say you should do anyway. It was a harrowing experience.)

By the time we got downtown, we needed to drink an entire bottle of water. Our hair was damp, mooshed down by the helmet, and uncontrollable. Our summer pajamas fashion was frazzled by heat. But many fellow patron/bicyclists had identical limp t-shirts and pajama bermuda shorts, and we exchanged empathetic looks.

I found exactly one novel from the longlist, Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie.

The longlist includes:

• Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending
• Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side
• Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie
• Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers
• Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues
• Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats
• Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child
• Stephen Kelman Pigeon English
• Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days
• AD Miller Snowdrops
• Alison Pick Far to Go
• Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb
• DJ Taylor Derby Day

Not yet published in the U.S. are the Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Alan Hollinghurst, Esi Edugyan, Patrick McGuinness, Jane Rogers, and DJ Taylor.

It's like this every year.

The Booker is fun because the list goes through so many public weedings and reconstructions, like a literary version of American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. And we often discover excellent books, like Sebastian Barry's The Sacred Scripture, A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book, and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss.

But, being so busy with the longlists, I haven't read a prize winner since 2007.

Keith Donohue's Centuries of June

2011-07-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

The success of Keith Donohue's new novel, Centuries of June, will depend heavily on your attitude to short stories. This surreal, wickedly humorous narrative, told from the point of view of the narrator, a dying man who has fallen and hit his head on the bathroom floor, is laced with short stories. If you like ghost stories and magic realism, this is for you.

The ghosts of seven angry women invade the bathroom and then tell their stories, among them a folk tale about a woman who falls in love with a bear, an epistolary story about the Salem witch trials, a tale of American slavery, a filmic montage about baseball, and noir fiction. There is an eighth woman waiting in the wings, but her story is different.

Does this sound confusing? It is difficult to describe; hence my lateness in a review of a book I started...in June, appropriately. Each story is set in June in different centuries of America. And though we don't learn the narrator's name is Jack till the end of the book, I will call him Jack to cut through the post-modern anarchy.

One of the most important characters is an old man who appears sitting on the edge of the tub. He may or may not be Jack's father, and saves his life by warning him about the entrance of each homicidal woman. Jack nicknames him Beckett, and their dialogue is occasionally like Waiting for Godot. They talk wittily about the women (Jack says they showed up on bicycles, sang and danced for him, and then went to bed with him). When Jack asks who has redecorated downstairs, Beckett suggests faeries, changelings, gremlins, or two tramps.

"His sarcasm perplexed me, but I did not press the point. Beckett had saved my life five times, yet possessed a preternatural relationship with the five would-be assassins, cozying up to them in my absences. Nonchalant to the essence of my predicament, he seemed awfully familiar, yet his true identity shifted in mysterious ways. One moment he reminded me of my deceased father, the next I was sure he was the spirit of Samuel Beckett come to wait with me for a truth that would never arrive. I could not tell if he was friend or foe, and as these thoughts raced through my mind, he smiled dumbly at me, as though content to let me stop and ponder it all."

Donohue said in an interview that he was inspired by Gustav Klimt's painting of eight women in bed. In Centuries of June, all eight women have been sleeping in the same bed. One by one, except for the eighth woman, they enter the bathroom and try to kill Jack.

Klimt's painting

In one scene, Jack fixes a hole in the attic by covering it with a print of a painting by Klimt. I wish a reproduction of Klimt's painting were on the cover.

I am not really a short story reader. I admired Tea Obreht's beautifully written The Tiger's Wife, a novel interwoven witha series of tales about tigers and a deathless man, and Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination (which I learned about from Donohue's review in The Washington Post), a morbid novel told in six short stories linked by a woman's journal. Louise Erdrich's novels, of course, are always linked stories. Donahue's novel has the strengths and weaknesses of this form.

My two favorites, the folk tale, "The Woman Who Was Married to a Bear," reminiscent of Louise Erdrich's stories, and "The Woman Who Danced the Vaudoux," a story of slavery, could be stand-alone stories. But others, "The Woman Who Caught the Gold Bug and the Silver Fever," a story of the Gold Rush, and "The Woman Who Lost the Flag," a story of baseball, mystified me. These two women's stories did not particularly seem like women's stories to me. The magical American history of women could perhaps have been better represented.

The ending winds things up, but seems a bit precious. Wait...there should be more. An editor should have asked for more. It's all very detailed, and then it ends abruptly. I wanted more of Jack's story from Jack's point of view.

Donohue is a very good writer, and though this novel isn't quite for me, it is because I only want to read two short stories a year, and I have now read three novels of short stories in one year. I'll have to look at his future work. He is also the author of The Stolen Child, a fantasy much touted a few years ago, and Angels of Destruction.

Life's a Beach: Diana Gabaldon, George R. R. Martin, & Winston Graham

2011-07-24T19:54:00.000-07:00

Life's a beach whether you want it to be or not when the temperature is this hot. I keep cool in my butterfly-print shortie pajamas (wearable to the grocery store), drink iced tea in glasses with cocktail umbrellas, and download beach books onto my Nook. (Southern energy-saving tip: Keep the windows closed during the day and open them at night when it cools off. If it doesn't cool down, turn on the AC at night.)

The BEACH BOOKS are, of course, the most important items on the list. I have spent hours choosing just the right books.

Number One on My Nook. I'm very much enjoying Diana Gabaldon's Dragonfly in Amber, the second book in the Outlander series. You can't go wrong with Gabaldon if (a) you're a woman, (b) don't feel like reading the George R. R. Martin books but want a trendy series, (c) like historical novels, (d) like romance, (e) like time travel, or (f) all of the above.

A friend urged me to read the Outlander series. "Jamie!" she said. "Jamie!" Jamie is apparently the sexiest guy in fiction since the priest in The Thorn Birds (or something like that). There's a woman named Claire who steps into the cleft of a standing stone and accidentally time-travels to eighteenth-century Scotland, where she meets Laird Jamie and has political and historical adventures. My friend loves these books so much that she went berserk over the 20th year anniversary of Outlander this summer and tried to bribe a bookseller to sell it to her before the publication date. To please her, I read the first book awhile ago and thought parts were well-written, but parts were trashy romance.

I lam glad I transcended my supercilious gotta-read-literary-fiction attitude, because Dragonfly in Amber is better than Outlander. It starts in 1968, with Claire, an American doctor, and her 20-year-old daughter, Brianna, visiting Scotland. Claire wants to tell Brianna that her father is Jamie of the 18th century, not Frank, Claire's 20th-century husband, a historian who recently died. But how can she make Brianna understand?

Okay, the book is not perfect, but it's lots of fun. One minute Claire is freaking out in a graveyard because she sees Jamie's gravestone, the next she has told Brianna and a young historian who has fallen in love with Brianna the truth (the historian believes her), and the next we've flashbacked and time-traveled back to prerevolutionary France in the 18th century,where Claire and Jamie have fled, because Jamie was condemned to death by the English. Now they are secretly working to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie's efforts to regain the Scottish throne. And Claire and Jamie frequently go to bed. Detailed sex scenes, but not that sexy. But you get used to it...and the historical novel part is great.
Fun pop lit! Love this one (so far).

Number Two on My Nook. George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, the first in A Song of Fire and Ice series. George R. R. Martin has saved the publishing industry this summer, or so I understand from all the articles about A Dance with Dragons, the fifth in the series. Stores expected e-books to do well, because there is a ravening fan base, but found to their surprise that fans really wanted the physical books as well. Paul Ingram of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City said of the series, "It's Harry Potter for everybody."

I didn't like the Harry Potter books, but I loved Twilight. So I understand where this is going, though I'm not in on this trend.

I tried and failed to read A Game of Thrones a few years ago after a bookseller told me he would give me my money back if I didn't like it. I didn't like to tell him I didn't like it, and I ended up giving my paperback away.

But you know how it is. I have to read the first one now. I need to know what I'm missing. So I've downloaded it onto the Nook. I'm a fan of science fiction and fantasy, so we'll hope it takes this time.

Number Three on My Nook. Winston Graham's Poldark books. My friend Ellen of Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two loves this series of historical novels set in the 18th century. She has written about both the books and films. Visit her blog for much about the series; she even taught the first book, Ross Poldark, this spring.

Very enjoyable, well-written, and I adore Poldark, an impoverished aristocrat who returns to Cornwall from the Revolutionary War with a limp only to find he's lost his girl to his cousin, Francis, that his house is a shambles, and he needs to refurbish a mine so he can revive the local economy and his own income.

Marriage in He Knew He Was Right & The Year of H. G. Wells

2011-07-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

When Trollope's characters marry, they want the whole package: love, sex, and money. But there is confusion in Trollope's He Knew He Was Right; some of the female characters want to sacrifice themselves for their lovers. Before or during their engagements, Dorothy Stanhope and Caroline Spalding decide to abnegate their claims to marriage. Dorothy doesn't believe she should marry Brooke Burgess because her aunt threatens to cut him out of her wil. Caroline Spalding, an American, fears rumors that say her nationality will ruin Mr. Glascock's social standing.

As you can imagine, love prevails for many of Trollope's couples.

When women won't make sacrifices, however, look at what happens. Emily andher husband, Louis Trevelyan, are in love. They have money, a baby, and are very happy. But they separate after Louis becomes pathologically jealous of Colonel Osborne, Emily's father's best friend, a flirtatious man in his fifties who visits too often and who has allegedly brought discord to other married couples. Louis says Emily has disgraced him, and Emily refuses to apologize for innocent behavior.

So Louis banishes Emily, her sister Nora, who lives with them, and their child to a house in a village far from London; he will take them back only if Emily admits her fault.

Nora is distressed by the break-up of her sister's marriage. Nora is in love with Hugh Stanhope, an impoverished political journalist for a penny paper, but she desperately wants money. She hopes to marry Mr. Glascock, Lord Peterborough's heir, a man with whom she has been thrown together at parties, but she cannot love him. Morally, she decides she cannot marry a man she does not love, though she very much regrets this.

There is plenty of comedy. Arabella and Camilla French, two spinsters who are almost mythic monsters, set their caps for the same man, Mr. Gibson, a clergyman. What happens I will not say, but the sisters are horrifying, and at the same time very funny. In a way I feel sorry for them: they are portrayed as foolish women who throw themselves at men, but it is their only chance of escaping life with Mother. The other women are not mocked, of course, because they are lovely and men want them.

100 pages to go.

This is THE YEAR OF H. G. WELLS. Earlier this year, I binged on Kipps and Tono-Bungay, two of Wells's realistic novels about the rise and fall and rise of lower-middle-class heroes.
I also read David Lodge's A Man of Parts, an excellent historical novel about Wells. I'd love to see this nominated for a Booker.

I just picked up Spanish writer Felix J. Palma's The Map of Time, a novel set in Victorian London in which H. G. Wells is a character. I bought it at Borders--probably the last time I will visit a Borders since all the stores are going out of business.

Since The Map of Time is partly about time travel, will I have to reread The Time Machine?

Notebooks & The Daily Stats

2011-07-20T20:12:00.000-07:00

I take notes out of habit and boredom, a practice formed in grad school, when at any hour of the day or night I might have to look up a Greek word like kakodaimon (evil genius) while reading Aristophanes's The Clouds. Later I bought hardback notebooks, but cheaper, lighter-weight notebooks are better for traveling. On a recent shopping trip, I bought inexpensive composition books (love the yellow one! Only $1 at Target) and slightly fancier paperback Apica notebooks.

Bess Streeter Aldrich's house

I use the blue Apica notebooks most often because they fit in my purse. There are quotes from Our Mutual Friend, indecipherable marginalia on Caroline Gordon's stories, "The Last Day in the Filed" and "One Against Thebes," and notes on our visit to Iowa-born novelist Bess Streeter Aldrich's home in Elmwood, Nebraska. Aldrich (1888-1954), author of A Lantern in Her Hand, grew up in Cedar Falls, graduated from Iowa State Normal School (now University of Northern Iowa), taught for several years in Iowa and then supervised student teachers in her hometown, before marrying lawyer Charles Aldrich in 1906. He bought a bank in Elmwood, Nebraska, where they moved in 1907. Here are some of my notes:

"Built house (where museum is located) in 1922 for $7,000. Piano came on steamboat. Visited Green Drug every day to socialize and pick up mail. One bad Christmas, when there was no money, the Aldriches made gifts for children and put them in a big pine barrel: wooden checkers game, log rocking horse, dolls, homemade doll dresses...."

We use another Apica for a bicycling journal. Huh! I never remember to write anything down. Bicycling is...boring...good exercise...relaxing...what else can we say? My husband sometimes remembers to record our rides.

Then there is the big notebook for tracking health care problems. During a relative's recent hospitalizations, I wrote down vital stats, notes on conversations with doctors and nurses, and health and behavior changes.

"Are you a nurse?" someone asked when I rattled off stats over the phone.

"No, no." What can you say? It's a matter of trying to understand the language of medicine, and going over the notes to make good decisions.

And so the notebook-writing goes on...

Bibliobits: Anthony Trollope, Typos, & Literary Centenaries

2011-07-18T20:54:00.000-07:00

For two weeks I've been reading Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right. I carry it everywhere in my purse and in my bike pannier in case I need a Trollope break. Although I have also been reading some excellent contemporary novels, I love Victorian novels and this is possibly the best book of the year. Of course I say that every year about whatever Victorian novel I'm reading, and last year it was Trollope's Can You Forgive Her?

Not everyone is at home in 19th-century England. My husband, who grew up reading Celine and Dostoevsky, loathed English novels until he discovered Dickens. But if, like him, you have a prejudice against Austen's dry wit, Dickens's rhetorical flourishes, and Thackeray's chatty asides, Trollope, with his energetic prose, extraordinary plots, and arresting characters, may be your man.

He Knew It was Right centers on marriage. Emily Rowley, the vivacious and strong-minded daughter of the governor of the Mandarin Islands, and Lewis Trevelyan, a Cambridge graduate, gentleman, and poet, separate after two years of marriage. Louis asks her to stop seeing Colonel Osborne, a man in his fifties who likes to flirt; Emily refuses to obey Louis because she's innocent and Colonel Osborne is her father's oldest friend. Colonel Osborne complicates the situation by enjoying the mischief and continuing to visit her even when she is banished by Louis with her baby and sister to live in a rural village.

Louis hires a detective, loses his health, and goes slowly mad. Although we pity him, it is impossible to feel empathy after he kidnaps their child.

I must admit, I prefer Emily's sister, Nora, who lives with the Trevelyans. It is clear that she is there partly so she'll have opportunites to marry well. Mr. Glascock, the future Lord Peterborough, falls in love with her, but though Nora wants to marry money, she is in love with Hugh Stanhope, a failed barrister who is a successful political writer for a "penny newspaper." Nora's parents oppose the marriage because of his financial situation. Many other characters face the same difficulties: financial problems and family opposition.
It is ironic that the couple with no financial difficulties, the Trevelyans, are the ones who have emotional difficulties.

Typos. In the July 17 edition of The New York Times, Virginia Heffernan explores "The Price of Typos" in publishing.

As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

Literary Centenaries. 2012 is the centenary of poet Elizabeth Bishop's birth; Tennessee Williams's birth; Nobel winner Czeslaw Milosz's birth; Irish writer Flann O'Brien's birth; and the publication of The Secret Garden.

Notes on My Vacation and Borders

2011-07-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

You get up at dawn on vacation. Since your husband is up at 7, he thinks you should be up at 7. He says the two of you must take a bike ride before it gets too hot. IT WILL BE 97 DEGREES BY NOON.

You say you won't ride without coffee, and point out that even the Deathless Man in Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife gets to drink coffee. Your husband says you should sell The Tiger's Wife.

Starbucks at 7:30 isn't much as much fun as you'd hoped. You read in bed till 3 and didn't expect to get up till 10. There are a lot of people in suits, looking as crusty-eyed and exhausted as you feel. (Don't they wish they were going on a bike ride at 7:30.)

Then you realize you don't have to bike ANYWHERE unless he drives you to Borders afterwards. He agrees.

Borders. Our Borders closed recently, and I just read at Reuters:

Borders Group Inc inched closer to liquidation on Sunday after a bidding deadline passed without offers, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Bids for the second-largest U.S. book store retailer Borders were due at 5 p.m. Eastern Time Sunday ahead of a bankruptcy court auction scheduled for Tuesday, the paper said.

I inhaled Borders, have missed it the last few months, was happy with the ambiance, noted the number of people hanging out in the cafe, and felt sad that it will probably be the last time we're in a Borders store. The book selection is small now: no more Trollope, no John Sayles, and much more pop lit. Some plastic plants by the information desk were partly wrapped up in garbage bags. Somebody was taking books OFF the shelf.

They did have the book I wanted, though.

What I'm Reading Now & What I Want to Read

2011-07-16T19:58:00.000-07:00

WHAT I'M READING NOW: Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, which is not to be confused with other new books with "tiger" in the title: Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills, an Indian family saga; Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a memoir about Chinese child-rearing; or Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger, another memoir about parenting.

The Tiger's Wife won the Orange Prize this year. Obreht was one of the New Yorker 20 under 40 writers last summer (though that means little to me).

I'm very glad I picked up this novel--wouldn't have done so if it hadn't won the Orange Prize--as Obreht is a very accomplished writer. The Tiger's Wife is a short, graceful novel, laced with magic realism, and narrated by Natalia, a politically-oriented doctor whose youth in the Balkans was shaped by war and by her grandfather's magical stories of tigers and the Deathless Man. Between grieving for her grandfather, a doctor who recently died, and picking up his personal effects at a clinic in a remote village he was mysteriously visiting, she inoculates children in a village orphanage by the sea and, like her grandfather, begins to hear magical stories.

It's very good. Though I am surprised this won the Orange Prize, I'm enjoying it very much.

BOOKS I WANT TO READ. I have "firmed up" my reading list for July. Naturally, there are other books I'd LIKE to read when I've finished everything I PLAN to read.

1. The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy. It is Mervyn Peake's centenary year, and I would very much like to reread his fantasy novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Illustrated by Peake, this edition will be reissued in September by Overlook. I last read Peake's trilogy on a camping trip, and because I never slept--nearby campers partied all night--my inclination was to sit by the lake in a daze and read instead of hiking, boating, fishing, and all those other fun things. Finally I got a good night's sleep in a motel and then I enjoyed the park.

2. A. S. Byatt's Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (a new novel published in the UK in September). Here are two lines from the Amazon description: "Recently evacuated to the British countryside and with World War Two raging around her, one young girl is struggling to make sense of her life. Then she is given a book of ancient Norse legends and her inner and outer worlds are transformed."

3. Felix Palma's The Map of Time. H. G. Wells is a character in this science fiction novel. According to the book description: "The Map of Time boasts a triple-play of intertwined plots in which a skeptical H.G. Wells is called upon to investigate purported incidents of time travel..."

Jonathan Yardley's Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited

2011-07-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

I was pathetically reading in the bedroom, the coolest room in the house, the fan blasting the hot air OUT the window, because I couldn't close it and then turn on the air conditioning.

Fortunately, Jonathan Yardley's new book, Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited, kept me occupied until my husband came home and closed the window. Doesn't this book have a great cover? I found this gorgeous Europa paperback while I was looking the other day (in vain) for Rachel M. Brownstein's Why Jane Austen?

Yardley, a book reviewer, columnist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, has been at The Washington Post since 1981. The Post has many good critics--Michael Dirda (another Pulitzer winner), Ron Charles (a National Book Critics Circle winner), and Carolyn See (novelist)--where did they get them all?

Second Reading is a collection of columns that appeared in The Washington Post between March 2003 and January 2010. After Yardley lost the column he had written "for more than two decades...for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained," he came up with the idea of writing a column about books from the past. It became an autobiography of a lifelong reader.

Yardley writes:

"It didn't take long for me to realize how much fun it was to reach back into my reading past--as you'll see, the word 'fun' appears frequently in these pieces--or to discover how much pleasure it gave many of the Post's readers to be offered discussions of (mostly) worthy older books. The fixation of journalists on the new and trendy is a forgivable occupational hazard, but it neglects the interests of readers who want something more substantial than the Flavor of the Day."

These well-written, intelligent columns are more like essays than "pieces." Yardley's writing is elegant and addictive. He is what I consider "old school": the son of a headmaster, a scholarship boy at prep schools, editor as a student of the paper at The University of North Carolina, and author of biographies of Frederick Exeley and Ring Lardner. Excellent education, not that that necessarily means anything, because few can write this well. (My own working-class roots are more like Michael Dirda's, but I admit I DID teach at a prep school after graduate school.)

The first essay is about John P. Marquand, a writer of satires of the WASP world. He won a Pulitzer in 1937 for The Late George Apley. Yardley focuses on H. M. Pulham, Esquire, a novel about a Harvard-educated conformist looking back over his life. He loves Marquand and believes he is neglected for all the wrong reasons, for his "smooth technique" and popularity. He says, "It is ludicrous that the Library of America, which smugly proclaims itself guardian 'of America's best and most significant writing,' finds room for ever less significant work yet turns up its nose at Marquand."

I have read several of the books Yardley rereads, but have NOT read even more of them. The 60 essays include reviews of Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch, Ellen Glasgow's The Woman Within, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, John D. MacDonald's The Dreadful Lemon Sky, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Louis Armstrong's Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Jim Brosnan's The Long Season, Bernard Malamud's A New Life, Allen Tate's The Fathers, and Noel Coward's Pomp and Circumstance.

I especially like his essay on John D. MacDonald and believe I will add one of the Travis McGee books to the night stand.

Sonya Sones's The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus

2011-07-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

In Sonya Sones's lovely new novel in verse, The Hunchback of Nieman Marcus, the narrator is a woman in midlife. Sones's light verse is both poignant and powerful. The witty narrator, Holly, who is just entering her fifties, confronts hot flashes, empty nest syndrome, and her aged mother's need for a long-distance caregiver. I am not only charmed by Holly's quirky outlook, but empathize with her sense of loss: no more babies, not that she'd wanted any more; the sense that she and her husband have remained together because of their daughter; and her shock when her mother calls to say she has fallen out of bed and cannot get up.

On Holly's 50th birthday, which has been "rushing at me/like a cinderblock wall while I try/in vain to slam on the brakes," she has her first hot flash.

It happens for the first time
on the very day I turn fifty--

a scrim of sweat
cloaks my body,

beading on my upper lip,
misting on my forehead,

gathering in a steaming pool
between my shoulder blades

as if a tiny cup of liquid lightning
in each one of my cells

has just bubbled up, burst ablaze,
and cremated me,

flashes
to ashes,

bust
to dust.

This is light verse, yet it strikes close to the bone. Many of these feelings are covered up because no one wants to hear them. Menopause is a relief-- no more tampons or sanitary pads--but at the same time it means you're not young anymore. In our family we all have early menopause, which makes one feel MORE freakish.

And how about the time at the supermarket when the hunky cashier looks Holly up and down? She thinks he's flirting, but then he asks if she wants the senior discount.

She calls herself the hunchback of Neiman Marcus after she glimpses herself in the mirror and notes the beginning of a dowager's hump.

I glance in a mirror at my own posture
and am appalled at how
my head's jutting forward,
as if it's trying to win a race
with the rest of my body.

I'm stunned by the gorrilla-esque curve
my spine seems to have taken on,
as though determined to prove
once and for all
that evolution really did happen.

The light verse is engaging and well-wrought, though sometimes as a novel it breaks down. There isn't much conflict or plot. But it is "chick lit" for women of a certain age, very good of its kind, and I liked it very much.

BBBs, B&N, & the "New" Guardian Books Blog

2011-07-13T08:31:00.000-07:00

What is the Best Big Book (BBB) of the summer?

Some may pick the 20th anniversary edition of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander, as did a friend who attempted to bribe a bookstore employee to sell it before the publication date; some will recommend David Foster Wallace's posthumously published novel, The Pale King; others will read cover-to-cover the revised Escoffier: Le Guide Culinaire, the French chef's culinary bible.

I'm time-traveling to Victorian England, where I would undoubtedly have been a maid instead of a lady, despite zealous genealogical claims that we rode on the Mayflower and are related to...whom?

My pick of the summer is Anthony Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, an 822-page pageturner about marriage, money, and male chauvinism. Jane Smiley recently recommended it in The Barnes & Noble Review. A longtime fan of this masterpiece, I knew I Couldn't Go Wrong and pulled it off the shelf.

In 1869, when He Knew He Was Right was published, Trollope was at the height of his powers. His pitch-perfect prose is the perfect vehicle for the delineation of the complex loves and losses of his richly realized characters.

The novel focuses on the marriage of Emily Rowley, daughter of the governor of the Mandarin Islands, and Lewis Trevelyan, a Cambridge graduate and poet "who possessed 3,000 pounds a year of his own, arising from perfectly secure investments." They are happy in London for two years until Colonel Osborne, Emily's father's best friend, visits too often and is too blatantly flirtatious. He has annoyed other married couples in London, according to rumor, and drove one husband to whisk his wife away to Italy.

But Emily, who does not flirt back and points out that he knew her as a baby, is enraged when Lewis tries to bar him from the house.

"When he had endeavored to make her understand his wishes by certain disparaging hints which he had thrown out as to Colonel Osborne, saying that he was a dangerous man, one who did not show his true character, a snake in the grass, a man without settled principles, and such like, his wife had taken up the cudgels for her friend, and had openly declared that she did not believe a word of the things that were alleged against him."

The couple eventually separates: Emily will not end her relationship with Colonel Osborne, and Lewis, though he knows she is innocent, does not believe that the relationship should continue. He arranges for Emily, their baby, and her sister Nora to live in a village with the Stanhopes, the mother and sister of Lewis's best friend, Hugh.

Lewis will not compromise, nor will Emily. And we watch Lewis slowly go mad.

The correlation between the Emily-Lewis-Colonel Osborne triangle and other romantic triangles is fascinating: Nora, Hugh, and the wealthy Lord Glascock; Hugh's sister Dorothy, the clergyman Mr. Gibson, and Brooke Burgess, Aunt Stanhope's heir.

Barnes and Noble. How fast can a bookstore change? The local Barnes and Noble began to compete with Borders about five years ago, expanding its backlist and stocking "intellectual" (?!) books as well as pop.

Borders closed in May. Suddenly B&N has fewer comfortable chairs, less enticing displays, and no copies of small-press books like Lynne Tillman's Someday This Will Funny and John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun. It is now a (smug) seller's market. B&N needs competition.

Guardian Books Blog. First, let me say how much I like the Guardian books blog.

Do you like the "New" Guardian books blog? I still haven't gotten used to the redesigned books page, which seems awfully busy and unclear. As far as I can tell, the "new" version of the books blog marks the occasion of firing the freelance writers.

Now only staff writers will write the blog, according to Guardian staff writer Sarah Crown. A. L. Kennedy's blog entries and those of several other writers were really "columns," not blog entries. Columns will be integrated with the articles on the books page.

I'm confused and only hope I'll see the freelancers' writing again.

Hannah Freeman, another Guardian staff writer, blogged this week, "We turn the Guardian First book award longlist over to you and we ask to see your battered books, there may not be much time left to post your suggestions for other series, articles or reviews, but if you have an idea you'd like us to know about, this, as ever, is the place to post them."

That's called commenting.

Bring back the old blog.

On the Vacation Circuit: Clifford D. Simak, H. Rider Haggard, & Other Genre Writers

2011-07-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

Hommage à Seurat by Jonathan Burton

It's hot!

Crank the air conditioning up and thank God for summer reading. Old paperbacks, rescued out-of-print books, and Anything Genre can help you transcend the mugginess of July for a few hours.

Here's a list of what I'm reading for fun.

Clifford D. Simak's Ring around the Sun. So you never heard of Clifford D. Simak?

He's one of my favorite American science fiction writers. A journalist by profession, Simak (1904-1988) won three Hugo awards, a Nebula, and was named the third Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for his "pastoral" science fiction, which emphasizes humanity, rural areas, and the ecosystem rather than technology.

In 2009 I "rediscovered" his lost classic, They Walked like Men. A wisecracking journalist discovers that aliens are taking over the earth--by buying real estate. It's a witty and scary premise.

I picked up Ring around the Sun at random, and it is similar to They Walk--but mutants are at work rather than aliens. Their inventions of the Forever car, Forever house, everlasting razors and everlasting light bulbs are destroying business or saving the world, depending on your point of view. The hero, Jay Vickers, a writer, embarks on a quest to rediscover his childhood after a friend (who turns out to be a mutant) advises it. Chased by xenophobes and persecuted for a murder he didn't commit, he manages to visit another world and...

I'm still reading.

H. Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain. H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) lived in Africa for six years and wrote 34 adventure novels. His fans included Robert Louis Stevenson, Kipling and Orwell. Allan Quatermain, the hunter hero of several of Haggard's novels and short stories, first appears in King Solomon's Mines (known to many through the Stewart Granger-Deborah Kerr movie). Using the map of a dying treasure hunter, Allan and his two friends, Charles Good and Sir Henry, search in Africa for Sir Henry's brother, who had journeyed to find the legendary diamonds of King Solomon's Mines.

King Solomon's Mines made Haggard's fortune, and he wrote the sequel, Allan Quatermain, in two months. Three years after his adventure, Allan Quatermain, now over 60, invites his two friends travel to Africa again.

"...for years and years I have heard rumors of a great white race which is supposed to have its home somewhere up in this direction, and I mind to see if there is any truth in them. If you fellows like to come, well and good; it not, I'll go alone."

It's very exciting and plot-oriented--not particularly well-written, but it doesn't matter, because it's pure entertainment, and some of the landscape descriptions are actually inspiring. In the first 100 pages, Allan and his group come upon a Scottish mission near the gorgeous Mt. Kenia. The garden is the most beautiful they've seen, a mix of English and African flowers. But when Flossie, the daughter, goes out on the hills with her nurse and some servants to find a rare lily, she is kidnapped by the Masai, who are mysteriously pursuing the Quatermain party. Only the brilliant strategy of Umslopogaas, a former Zulu general and brilliant hunter, ensures Flossie's rescue.

Haggard wrote several sequels to this novel and they are great fun.

You can also find his books free at Project Gutenberg.

And I'm happy to take recommendations for other summer books!

R.E.M.'s "Walk Unafraid"

2011-07-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

It's too hot to write, so here is an excellent video of R.E.M. singing "Walk Unafraid" instead.

The Good Caregiver by Robert L. Kane

2011-07-08T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)--"My Generation," The Who

Elder Care in the U.S. is inadequate.

When an aged relative became seriously ill, we were suddenly long-distance caregivers. We knew nothing about the health care options for a person who could no longer live on his or her own. We only vaguely understood the differences between assisted living and nursing homes. As you can imagine, some assisted living facilities have excellent amenities. Others do not. Unfortunately, it is all too easy for a novice to get conned by slick facilities competing for the business of our aging population.

The designated primary long-distance caregiver chose the first place he visited, a facility owned by a commercial real estate management and development company. The rest of us, being good, if reluctant, shoppers, had our doubts. According to Robert L. Kane's The Good Caregiver, real estate development-owned assisted living places are sprouting up all over the country to cash in on the burgeoning demand for Elder Care. Sometimes the buildings look good, but these unregulated facilities don't always deliver on care. Of course there are many excellent ALFs, but it's buyer beware.

It turned out there was no communication between the Place That Shall Not Be Named, her doctors, and the main caregiver. I was horrified on a recent visit when I accompanied the relative to a doctor's appointment and learned hospitalization had been recommended by her primary doctor a week ago, that neither I nor the Place knew anything about the recommendation, and that the nurses had only learned the extent of her weight loss from the driver.

Is this the place for your relative? She is in the hospital again.

In despair I bought The Good Caregiver: A One-of-a-Kind Compassionate Resource for Anyone Caring for an Aging Loved One, by Robert L. Kane, M.D, Director of the Center on Aging at the University of Minnesota. This short accessible handbook can help anyone struggling to make good decisions about long-term care for aged relatives.

Kane writes about family self-assessment, dementia, home health care, visiting nurses and aides, case managers, common illnesses, money and the law, and the differences between assisted living facilities and nursing homes. He provides excellent checklists and interview questions, and the appendix has a helpful list of websites and resources.

Who knew that home health care could be arranged even for people with Alzheimer's? That assisted living facilities are unregulated, that some look good but are run by cynical developers, and that all must be investigated on a buyer-beware basis? Who knew that nursing homes (which also vary significantly and must be shopped for on a comparison basis) are regulated and their ratings available at Medicare Nursing Compare, a database which provides detailed information on the performance of every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country?

He also addresses the politics of aging:

"Easy access to quality choices in elder care will require major shifts politically, economically, medically, and individually.

"We need massive citizen demand for reform. Maybe the time has arrived for this. After all, things won't get any easier in the coming decades. Our population is aging, and spending on long-term care for the elderly is projected to more than double over the next thirty years... No politician is speaking out about this, and meanwhile as pointed out by Peter Strauss, chairman of the Elder Care Task Force of the New York Business Group, the costs of caring for these older people is impoverishing middle-income Americans."

When I called the Center on Aging to get information about the Place That Shall Not Be Named, Kane talked to me on the phone. He spends an amazing amount of time talking with people about Elder Care.

His book has helped our family. Certainly reform is needed so the aged can live out their lives with proper care.

Kinflicks

2011-07-07T21:00:00.000-07:00

Lisa Alther's Kinflicks, a comic novel published in 1976, is riotously witty and satiric. Browsing at Virago, I discovered it had been reissued and decided to give it a try (though I think Virago's American selections are often very odd). I am utterly glued to Kinflicks, am surprised at the seriousness beneath the comedy, and didn't want to get up to make dinner because I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO GINNY BABCOCK.

Alther adeptly charts the fluctuating identities of her characters through the feminist changes in society of the '60s and '70s, and though she does it with a light hand, she explores their real angst.

The heroine, Ginny Babcock, is sad and confused when she returns to Hullsport, Tennessee, ostensibly to visit her mother in the hospital. In reality she has left her husband and child and doesn't know what to do next or where she will live.

Alther delineates the rocky relationship of Ginny with her mother. Mrs. Babcock has a clotting disorder, is resisting taking her medication, and screams at Ginny. Why isn't Ginny dying instead of Mrs. Babcock? Ginny has always done the wrong thing and Mrs. Babcock always did what she was expected to do.

This outburst is realistic and at the same time startling because the mother-daughter relationship is so often sentimentalized in popular fiction. When Ginny tells her mother about trying to save baby birds that fell through the chimney at the cottage, and the parent birds' subsequent refusal to feed them after she puts them in a tree, she and her mother make peace. Mrs. Babcock says, "Things like that used to kill me when you children were little. I'd put them up in the trees, and the cats would get them, and you could never understand why nature was set up that way. And of course I never knew what to tell you because I don't understand either."

Ginny is not primarily absorbed in her mother. Driving around her hometown, she has flashbacks to the past. She morphed from cheerleading flag-swinger to black-clad moonshine-swilling girlfriend of a semi-literate hood to intellectual student at a women's college to passive lesbian to adulterous wife and mother.

Alther's writing is straightforward but effective. The incidents are just offbeat enough to make you feel that the story is unique, while at the same time feeling a flash of recognition.

For instance, after a motorcycle accident, when Ginny's father forces her to apply to women's colleges, she tries to discourage Worthley College from accepting her.

"In a last-ditch effort of defiance, I wore a black, too-tight straight skirt; a black cardigan buttoned up the back with a Do-It Pruitt pointed bra underneath; Clem's red dragon windbreaker, the tatters of which I had carefully stitched together upon finding them among Mother's cleaning cloths; black ballet slippers; and Clem's huge clanking identification bracelet."

Doesn't that sound like all of us? Heavens, would we have considered a WOMEN'S college? Thank God, in the midwest, no.

More on this later.

Big Books

2011-07-05T20:38:00.000-07:00

Here is a recent photo of new 600-page-plus books in my TBR pile: The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, War and Peace, and John Fowles's The Magus. Somehow I am reading BIG BOOKS this summer and astonished my husband by carrying a HUGE paperback in my bike pannier yesterday.

"How many times have you read War and Peace?"

"I'm not reading War and Peace."

Then there are the big books I'm still working on.

John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun--good historical novel; give it the National Book Award; I'll probably be working on it all year.

Lisa Alther's Kinflicks. Virago reissued this in 1999, and I thought it was extremely funny when I read it in 1977.

R. F. Delderfield's Theirs Was the Kingdom. Popular novel, second in the Swann trilogy.

Elizabeth Jane Howard's Slipstream. A memoir.

Then there are the books I accepted from PR people ONE YEAR AGO (none of the above, and not all of them are big, but I have declared a moratorium on gifts from publicists because I rarely read them). One of them is H. Rider Haggard's Alan Quatermain, a good summer read (I LOVED King Solomon's Mines! REALLY), and I should get to this soon. And then what about all the OTHER Alan Quatermain books?

I've finished some of my big books this year: David Lodge's A Man of Parts, H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay, Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, Bleak House, Maugham's Of Human Bondage, Nancy Hale's Prodigal Women, Jean Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry, Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills, and...

Some more that I can't think of.

The Book and the Brotherhood

2011-07-04T20:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I appreciate Iris Murdoch's novels. Sometimes I don't quite. The Sea, the Sea, a poetic, philosophical novel about a retired actor and his obsessions, won the Booker Prize in 1978 (I reviewed it here) and is truly a classic.

The Book and the Brotherhood, published in 1987, is richly chaotic and intellectual, if you like this kind of thing. A radical group of middle-aged friends who have known each other since Oxford have long supported Crimond, a brilliant impoverished political writer at work on a very long book. The group's interactions, obsessions, and love affairs are sometimes fascinating, but the talk can also be wearing. Although I liked the odd conversations in The Sea, the Sea, I found parts of The Book and the Brotherhood tedious and repetitive.

The novel begins at Commem Ball at Oxford, and for the first 53 pages we observe the friends' relationships and learn their history. There is dancing, but they also talk about Marxists, Platonists, Liberation theology, and the New Philosophy.

Gerard, the leader, is gay; the wealthy Rose is in love with him; Jenkin, an unmarried schoolteacher, is sexless; and Duncan, a diplomat, was half-blinded years ago in a fight with Crimond over his wife Jean.

Crimond, who is insane and enjoys Russian roulette, ruins a few lives. After he dances with Jean at the ball, he runs away with her again. Eventually he tries to persuade Jean to drive her car into his at top-speed so they can preserve their happiness in death.

Murdoch also describes the younger generation: Tamar, Gerard's young cousin, is persuaded by her mother, Violet, to leave Oxford; Gulliver, a failed writer, is slightly older and self-destructive; and Lily, a wealthy woman,wants to get to know the intellectual group.

What is to be done now that Crimond has destroyed Duncan's marriage? Will Crimond's book ever be finished? The committee meets and cannot decide what to do with him.

Murdoch's writing is excellent, but 607 pages is too long. You have to read a lot of dialogue like this:

"I am left to burn, I am left to die...For God's sake, Tamar, don't leave me, stay with me, tell those wicked wicked people to go away! What have they to do with us? You're all I have--I've given you my life!"

Perhaps three books of Murdoch's (I also read The Bell) are enough for this year.

Traveling, Reading in the Car, & Mansfield Park

2011-07-03T20:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we drove four hours to our destination. We came, we saw, we conquered; then we turned around and drove home. I know, it's insanity, but there are a lot of explorers who also want to avoid Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" at a free concert on the 4th of July weekend.

And we chatted along the way.

There was lots to talk about. The state government almost shut down this week, the new Tom Hanks-Julia Roberts movie was declared a flop, the Republicans are raging about their evangelism (what happened to separation of church and state?), and, by the way, what baseball team tied for first place?

I guessed Omaha. Guess what? Omaha doesn't have a team.

Then there were various personal things.

But after awhile, we were thoroughly tired.

This was my cue to read. But what can you read in the car?

I read one page of John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun. I admire this book, but after 300 pages I'm thoroughly sick of politics. Don't worry, this isn't the only book I rejected. I stared at Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club. Adorable, yes? But these linked stories don't entice me. Sorry, Karen, but you know I liked Sarah Canary and The Sweetheart Season.

So what can you do? I didn't like the men's book; I didn't like the women's book.

I switched to Austen's Mansfield Park.

I've been reading Jane Austen all summer since a doddering V. S. Naipaul denounced her. (I hope that was just foot-in-mouth disease.) And this time around I love Mansfield Park. It used to be my least favorite.

Fanny Price, the reserved, mousy heroine of Mansfield Park, is smouldering with love under the surface but is also highly moral. MP is not a comedy--I've resigned myself to that. Then you realize Fanny is nothing like Elizabeth Bennet or Emma, and you stop worrying about it. Austen is not going to entertain you here the same way.

Don't writers get sick of themselves? Persuasion also was more serious.

The Crawfords, who move in and flirt with Fanny's cousins, are amusing, but they're slick and sometimes hurtful, and as the novel goes on, we understand Fanny's dislike of them.

Miss Crawford urges Fanny to marry her libertine brother, but her argument is fraught with inconsistencies that prove Fanny's good sense.

"...I look upon the Frasers to be about as unhappy as most other married people. And yet it was a most desirable match for Janet at the time. We were all delighted...but he turns out ill-tempered, and exigeant, and wants a young woman of fiver-and-twenty to be as steady as himself. And my friend does not manage him well; she does not seem to know how to make the best of it."

So we're relieved that Fanny loves Edmund. Mr. Crawford is like Frank Churchill, only really corrupt, the kind of guy you'd want to avoid in a Gothic novel.

Catching up, What I'm Reading, What I Want to Finish, and What I Want to Read

2011-07-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

Not quite in Katharine Hepburn's class...

My husband told me a friend was coming over in an hour. Having been out of town, I'd hoped to relax and read Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Club. Oh my God--what? Hospitality! Did we have any drinks to offer? How about cookies? Found some cranberry juice and realized the home-baked cookies were gone. Rushing here and there, I crossed my fingers in the hope that lights out would hide the mess.

I quickly CLEARED ALL SURFACES OF BOOKS (my main approach to cleaning) and vacuumed. Then I polished three tables. I recommend creamy lemon polish. So shiny!

Then I spilled spaghetti sauce on my shorts and rushed to the bedroom to change my clothes only to find nothing but jeans available for the 96-degree night. So there I was in sweaty jeans, having also located a bra and clean t-shirt, and glided out to the porch as he arrived. Well, at least the vista from the front door had a nice, clean look.

"Hi, hi" to the husband's friend and then they went out to the coffeehouse anyway.

WHAT I'M READING. I began Elizabeth Jane Howard's Slipstream: A Memoir. I've enjoyed her novels and was curious about the memoir partly because of her marriage to Kingsley Amis. Isn't it astonishing how celebrity buzz makes a difference?

Howard's memoir is rapturously written, unsentimental, and enthralling. Her childhood in the '20s and '30s is not idealized. It is characterized by little parental involvement, nice governesses and good teachers, learning Shakespeare, staying in the country at her grandparents' home with her cousins, many fears of people and being left alone, friendless for years except for siblings, and eventually attending a domestic science school with a friend.

Here is an account of one Christmas.

"Christmas Day of my sixth or seventh year had been a haze of excitement. There was feasting and everybody was smiling. There were wonderful presents that were deliciously divided between things I'd always wanted and things I'd never even hear of, the best being a little toy pony with real pony fur, and a cart for him to draw, and a stable for him to sleep in. Suddenly, after tea, a stroke of doom--a ripple of departure in the room, an acceleration of bonhomie and then the blinding moment when I realized that both my parents were going away, that minute to a place called Switzerland for a holiday. They'd kissed me and had gone. I was left sitting on the nursery floor surrounded by a sea of presents and undulating waves of tissue paper. In vain did various aunts and uncles point out their generosity to me. The gorgeous presents became valueless as the front door distantly slammed."

Poor Jane!

I am nowhere near the end of this memoir.

WHAT I WANT TO FINISH. I am determined to finish Keith Donohue's Centuries of June, a strange novel of magic realism and linked stories I took a shot at last week. And by the end of July I will have finished John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun, which is very good, well-researched and quick reading, but simply got lost in the pile.

WHAT I WANT TO READ. Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl in the Blue Beret, a historical novel "about a World War II pilot who returns to France to find the people who helped him survive."

Lynne Tillman's new collection of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny. I enjoyed her very funny novel, American Genius.

Startled by Book Art

2011-06-30T10:32:00.000-07:00

Book Art: Has Iowa City Gone Too Far?

I was out of town and needed something to read other than Jane Austen. Only War and Peace would do on a hot day in Iowa City. Naturally my copy was in my living room at home.

So I went on a tour of bookstores and ended up startled by gigantic book art.

Murphy-Brookfield Books, a lovely used bookstore with a huge literature selection and a tortoiseshell cat, had the Pevear-Volokhonsky, but I needed a smaller copy for my bike pannier. I was on my way to another bookstore when I was gobsmacked by art. A gigantic statue of the Stieg Larsson trilogy loomed above me.

Had Iowa City gotten carried away with its status as a UNESCO City of Literature? Was a sculpture of a thriller near Iowa Book & Supply a comment on the decline in reading?

And then I found the other statues: One of Marilynne Robinson's Home (she lives in Iowa City, so I get it), another of Treasure Island, and...

It turns out that this exhibit of 25 statues, known as BookMarks Book Art in Johnson County, was the inspiration of Iowa City library director Susan Craig. The statues are on display through October and will be auctioned off in November to benefit the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, Iowa City Public Library, Coralville Public Library and North Liberty Community Library.

So you see it's all rather sweet. You can see the statues here.

And I did find my copy of War & Peace.

Was It Mud? Jane Austen, Nancy Drew & Trixie Belden

2011-06-25T21:19:00.000-07:00

He fixes another bike tire.

I was in the middle of Mansfield Park. It was a cold, wet day and I didn't plan to go out.

When my husband suggested that we take a bicycle ride on the trail, I reluctantly closed my book. Green fields and woodland scenes flashed past us as we rode, but I was musing about Henry Crawford, a rakish character who has announced his intention to win Fanny Price's love.

He told his sister a couple of chapters back:

"No, I will not do her any harm, dear little soul! I only want her to look kindly on me, to give me smiles as well as blushes, to keep a chair for me by herself wherever we are, and be all animation when I take it and talk to her; to think as I think, be interested in all my possessions and pleasures, try to keep me longer at Mansfield, and feel when I go away that she shall be never happy again. I want nothing more."

I was indignantly evaluating Henry's chances when my bike wheel began to roll sideways in a squishy way. Was it mud?

"I think it's flat."

"No, it can't be flat."

On Monday his tire was flat. On Tuesday my tire was flat. On Thursday his tire was flat. Yesterday mine was flat.

It takes him five minutes to fix it. It takes me 12 hours.

"There isn't any glass; it just seem deflated," he said.

It's a mystery. It's been this way all week.

"Maybe kids are going into the garage and deflating the tires."

"That would be a pretty tame crime."

Years of reading Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden made me a shamus. Nancy or Trixie would find a forgery gang based in our garage, hiding the evidence of currency inside our inner tubes. I think thieves were hanging out in Nancy's attic or Trixie's club house...or was that in a chalet on a ski trip?

In real life, we'll just keep our bikes on the porch for awhile.

Tapped Out, Bookstore Reading Tickets, & What I'm Reading Now

2011-06-24T20:52:00.000-07:00

I went to Barnes & Noble. It had been a month since I'd been in a Barnes & Noble. I needed to fill up my pannier with books.

So I went to the mall in my chic bicycling clothes. Bicycle helmet: check. Bicycling gloves: check. Sneakers rather than bicycling shoes: check.

You can imagine the wandering, the browsing, the dipping into various books. I had a pleasant time drinking coffee in a comfortable chair and skimming parts of Monica Ali's Untold Story, Bella Pollen's The Summer of the Bear, Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie, William Deresewicz's A Jane Austen Education, Adrian Murdoch's The Last Pagan: Julian the Apostate and the Death of the Ancient World, Noelle Hancock's My Year with Eleanor: A Memoir, and Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest.

I decided to keep the spending in the $40 range. Very reasonable for a shopaholic. So I cheerfully went up to the cash register, expecting to be treated like a queen. BUT GUESS WHAT?

I was tapped out.

"I'll try another card." Laughing.

But I cut up my other card last winter.

There must be another card, I thought, looking at my collection. I expected a card to appear.

Could I use my LIBRARY CARD?

"I wasted all that time shopping," I said. I abandoned my books with some amazement.

BOOKSTORE READING TICKETS. Would you pay to attend a reading? I used to ORGANIZE readings, so I'm curious. Some independent bookstores charge $5 or more now because audience members, instead of buying from the indies, rush home and order from Amazon.

WHAT I'M READING NOW.

Centuries of June by Keith Donohue. Although I never got around to his much-praised first novel, The Stolen Child, I decided to try his new book, Centuries of June.

It's part science fiction, part literary novel. It begins with a man on the bathroom floor, bleeding from a hole in his head.

"Falling seems to have happened in another lifetime. Even as I tumbled, stupefaction began to gnaw at me and consume all. In that nanosecond between the blow and timber, my mind began to hone in on the who and the why. When the hardness struck bone, just at the base of my skull, an inch above my neck, when I began to lose balance and propel headfirst to the floor, my vision instantly sharpened as never before. All the objects in the room lost dimension, clarified, flattened as if outlined in sharp bold black, a cartoon of space."

His dead father appears. A ghost? And then eight furious women, who have parked their bicycles in his yard and are resting in the bedroom next door, enter the bathroom one by one and tell their stories.

I love the first story, a Native American story set in Alaska, "The Woman Who Married a Bear." It very much reminds me of Louise Erdrich's fiction. The second, "The Woman Who Swallowed a Whale," is about a shipwreck and a girl who is dressed as a boy.

Very different, surreal, and I haven't read enough of it yet to judge, so more later.

BiblioBits: Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife & Susan Howatch's Starbridge Series

2011-06-23T18:17:00.000-07:00

Chester Morris and Norma Shearer In "Divorcee," based on Usula Parrott's "Ex-Wife"

I finished Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, an interesting Jazz Age novel, if not a masterpiece.

In 1988 the Plume American Women's Series reissued Ex-Wife, with a fascinating introduction by Francine Prose and afterword by Parrott's son Marc. Parrott won and lost small fortunes off her novels and women's magazine fiction in the '20s and '30s, according to Prose and Marc Parrott, but also endured blackmail attempts and at forty was accused of smuggling a 23-year-old soldier out of military prison in the rumble seat of her car. Her novel Ex-Wife, which she wrote between her first and second marriages, was published anonymously in 1929. It sold 100,000 copies, she was eventually able to claim it under her own name, and it was made into a movie, Divorcee, with Norma Shearer.

Parrott's cool, understated narrative is faintly reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett's Thin Man books (though it is not a mystery). Parrott's elegant narrator, Patricia, an advertising copywriter and assistant manager, is always poised and always good company in speakeasies, but she is heartsick over the separation from her husband, caused by one infidelity, fictionalized by her to hide the fact that it was with his best friend. Her husband, too, has been unfaithful, but what's good for the gander is not good for the goose. She muddles through the divorce with the help of her divorced roommate, Lucia. Real happiness is not necessarily the lot of these ex-wives.

Parts of the novel, as Prose points out, are almost shocking. "At moments we feel that Patricia is telling us slightly more than necessary, that some of this is intended to scandalize." Patricia talks so honestly about the lurid making out in the clubs--her husband's kissing "beautiful shoulders" of other women--as if she is expected to accept it. In a way it reminds me of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City.

Virago Press, Capuchin Books, The Feminist Press, Any Reprint Press: publish this book at once, please! It's a great popular book of its kind.

Coincidentally, at the end of Ex-Wife, Patricia is reading H. G. Wells. I've been reading him, too. The book? The World of William Clissold. Never heard of it.

Susan Howatch's Ultimate Prizes. I am devouring Susan Howatch's Starbridge series, an excellent series of six pop novels about the Church of England in the 20th century.

Susan Howatch's early bent was for Gothic novels and family sagas. In 1980, after she settled in Salisbury, she became interested first in the Salisbury Cathedral and then in Anglican Christianity. The six resulting novels are set in Starbridge, a fictional Anglican diocese not unlike Salisbury. Although it is not on the level of Trollope's six-book Barsetshire series, perhaps part of the inspiration was Barsetshire.

The priest/clergyman narrators of Howatch's pageturners are unconventional, highly-sexed, and hubristic. They have crises, but also find romance. Charles Ashworth, a Cambridge academic who investigates the much admired Archbishop of Canterbury's unconventional household, is the narrator of the first book, Glamorous Powers. What he finds out leads to a breakdown and eventually to romance. In the second book, Glittering Images, Anglican monk Jonathan Darrow, a psychic, is the narrator. He decides to leave the monastery and undergoes a kind of psychological and psychic transformation.   He also meets a woman.

In Ultimate Prizes, the third in the series, Neville Aysgarth, an Archdeacon, has a similar crisis. A Yorkshire draper's son who has spent his life "chasing prizes," under the influence of an uncle who took over the family after Neville's father died, he gets everything he wants: the perfect career, perfect wife, and perfect children. He insists that all is well, but then meets and falls in love with a rich young woman at a dinner party, Dido. They write letters, supposedly about religion.

Neville's "perfect" wife, Grace, a very nice woman but exhausted by Neville's social demands, five children, and the political life in Starbridge, shortly understands that Neville is in love with Dido. When she dies, Dido becomes his second wife, and all hell breaks loose. Neville's identity crisis leads to counseling by a monk. And monks and Anglocatholicism are abhorrent to him; he is strictly a Protestant Church of England clergyman.

The series is fascinating. I recommend it to anyone who loves a good story: you don't have to be religious.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

2011-06-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

Ursula Parrott's Ex-Wife, a compelling novel about divorce, unflinchingly captures the sadness, numbness, and confusion of a heroine still in love with her ex-husband. This hip, deadpan, pitch-perfect novel, published in 1928, is surprisingly contemporary.

Parrott begins the novel:

"My husband left me four years ago. Why--I don't precisely understand, and never did. Nor, I suspect, does he. Nowadays, when the catastrophe that it seemed to be and its causes are matters equally inconsequential, I am increasingly disposed to the belief that he brought himself to the point of deserting me because I made such outrageous scenes at first mention of the possibility."

Set in New York during the Jazz Age, Ex-Wife describes the aftermath of the destruction of the narrator Patty's marriage by a combination of drinking, infidelities, and sexual misunderstandings. Patty, an advertising copywriter, is madly in love with her husband, Peter, a newspaperman, but they go drinking and dancing every night and occasionally kiss other people. When he sleeps with someone else, Patty is upset but dares not complain, but when she sleeps with someone else, he never forgives her. And when Patty's dull virginal friend Hilda visits, Peter falls in love with her because of her apparent virtue and constant bad-mouthing of Patty. He leaves Patty after six months.

Patty moves in with Lucia, a divorced friend who tries to help her survive the wreck. Patty has her heart set on getting Peter back, and spends all her extra freelancing money on new clothes so that she'll attract him. Lucia tries to explain that it is unlikely that Peter will return. He has ditched the virginal Hilda for a sexy woman named Judith.

"Men...men are always coming back from little excursion trips--but once they start on world cruises...

"...About the excursions and cruises--I mean that a man, really in love with one woman, often can go tripping off blithely but briefly with another, simply because she has a stirring voice or wide innocent eyes. He comes back then, to the woman, sometimes improved, even. But once he embarks on a tour, child, he's going to forget perhaps, what city he started from, and certainly what that city had that was unique, among all the scenery he's seen since."

It's true. Once the touring starts, you end up like Jane, H. G. Wells's wife, who had to put up with an "open marriage."

Ex-wives have ugly stories. I was an ex-wife for a very numb year and a half.

Ex-wives' lives often revolve around finding new boyfriends and husbands. Long hours of work and Saturday mornings at the art museum cannot while away all the hours of the day. Nor can blind dates with attractive ex-managers of rock bands who drink a little too much nor never-married CPAs who are referred by friends of friends of friends make up for an ex-life.

My favorite ex-life story?

When I was going through a divorce, for some reason I didn't tell anyone at work. One of my acquaintances found out and set me up on a blind date with a doctor. Since I've never cared for money, it didn't occur to me that he was a "catch." One minute he was gushing about taking me out on his sailboat and then suddenly he observed outside the movie theater: "There are sure a lot of Jews around here, aren't there?"

I was aghast. And after the movie started, I couldn't stand it and left.

As a lefty, I really can't stand anti-semitism, racism, sexism...any of those things.

The very fact that I was sitting in a theater with a complete stranger who stood for everything I hated showed that I was not myself. It is tough being an ex-wife because you're used to being with someone and suddenly you're in a world of strangers.

I am no longer an ex-wife.

I haven't finished Ex-Wife, but have a feeling it will not end happily.

H. G. Wells & David Lodge

2011-06-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

On a recent bicycle trip, my husband and I were riding uphill and sweating. Until we got our Gatorade, we needed a common subject, a distraction from the heat. My husband just started reading H. G. Wells's comic novel about a bicycling holiday, The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll. And I am halfway through David Lodge's excellent historical novel about H. G., A Man of Parts.

The common component: Wells and bicycling.

I read many "Grade B" novels by the likes of Wells. My husband scorns such writers unless he comes across a reference in somebody's book, or a comment on a blog.

Under somebody else's influence...

I have not inspired him, though I've been maundering about Kipps and Tono-Bungay lately. He found the reference to Wells's novel in Robert Penn's It's All about the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels.

Wells's protagonist of The Wheels of Chance, Mr. Hoopdriver, a draper's assistant, can barely ride a bicycle. Like Mr. Hoopdriver, H. G. Wells was a draper's assistant (for awhile) and a bicyclist. The hero of The History of Mr. Polly was also a draper's assistant and a bicyclist. And in Kipps, the draper's assistant/protagonist's life changes when a playwright runs into him with a bicycle.

I'm sure there's bicycling in other novels, too.

About Lodge's A Man of Parts: it's a staunch and solid book but really takes off in Part 3. The episodes with the Fabian Society-- E. Nesbit, her husband Hubert Bland, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, etc.--are completely absorbing. Then there are the women he has affairs with: Violet Hunt, a feminist novelist, and Amber Reeves, a feminist who had a daughter by Wells and who was the inspiration for the heroine of Ann Veronica (a novel considered so shocking it was rejected by his publisher).

His poor wife, Jane, with whom he was very much in love when he married her, had to put up with so much. A brilliant science student of H. G.'s in his teaching days, she had an affair with him while he was married to his first wife and then they married. Ironically he had many affairs during their marriage and told her about them--he was promiscuous, so they had a "free" marriage--but he always came back to her. She was the mother of of his children.

But then so were Amber Reeves and Rebecca West the mothers of his children.

I must read some more Wells soon to complement Lodge's book.

Housewives, Prom Queens, & How to Be a Woman of the 1960s and 1970s

2011-06-18T21:01:00.000-07:00

Nora Johnson

I recently ran across Nora Johnson's excellent 1988 New York Times article, "Housewives and Prom Queens, 25 Years Later." She reread several women's novels from the 1960s and '70s, saying that she "finds [her] history in novels."

I know what she means.

Among the 19 novels she reviewed were Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife, Lois Gould's Such Good Friends, Lisa Alther's Kinflicks, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, Marilyn French's The Women's Room, and Alix Kates Shulman's Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

These women's novels, both the good and the bad, the classics and the dated, are historical records of the Second Wave of feminism. Being a housewife could drive you crazy; getting out of the house could save you. If you didn't conform to societal standards, the received wisdom was that your husband and children would be unhappy. Simone Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique encouraged women to be independent, to work and fulfill themselves. The anti-war movement also inspired women to question authority.

The feminist novels explored sexuality as well as everyday life. These authors wrote as explicitly about sex as Henry Miller and Philip Roth.

I am surprised by how many of these books I have read. In the '70s, I read mostly 19th-century novels, but also enjoyed popular novels of the time. Some of my favorite women's books were:

Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. Anna Wulf, the heroine, cannot integrate the many facets of her life as an unmarried independent woman and writer in a society that expects women to marry and sublimate their ambitions. She records in five (?) notebooks her history in South Africa, her masochistic affairs with married men, years in the Communist party, etc.
Marge Piercy's Dance the Eagle to Sleep. Teenagers in a future society rebel against the draft and the system. I love many of Piercy's books, but don't dare look back at this.
Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. A steamy, funny novel about Isadora Wing, a psychiatrist's wife who accompanies him to Vienna for a conference (though she is afraid of flying) and encounters a Laingian analyst who sexually changes her life.
Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife. The heroine, Bettina Balser, keeps a funny, sad diary about her life as a dissatisfied New York wife and mother. She has an affair with a playwright, who is also unsupportive. I absolutely loved this book. NPR used to have a local nightly show in which the three classical music DJs took turns reading books aloud: Diary of a Mad Housewife was one of the novels.

Lessing's and Kaufman's have stood the test of time: I'm not sure about the others.

Nora Johnson, herself an excellent novelist and memoirist, the author of The World of Henry Orient, Uncharted Places, and Coast to Coast: A Family Romance, also intelligently differentiates between "women's novels" and "feminist novels." She writes,

''Womens' novels'' accept the ''society'' as it is. Confessional, domestic, they deal with traditional women's matters - love, marriage, children, the emotional life. The feminist novel cuts deeper, burns with mysterious pain that is sometimes transmitted into black humor.
Since I lived the life of a housewife-heroine myself during those turbulent years, caring for small children in a suburban house, my response to this feminist fiction was primal and only half-critical; I listened for cries that matched mine, novelty and hope (however illusory) in the dark night. Now, a decade or so later, some of my old favorites seem dull and polemical, and others that eluded me then have widened, deepened, and now seem very fine.

I'll have to reread one or two of these.

Bridesmaids

2011-06-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

We wanted to see a chick flick. We wanted a romantic comedy set in Tuscany, or maybe Niagara Falls. So we went to the mall, where our choices were Super Eight, Green Lantern, Pirates of the Caribbean, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, X-Men, Kung Fu Panda, Hangover 2, or Bridesmaids.

Bridesmaids

Bridesmaids it was, and we loved it. It's a grungy Saturday Night Live-style Pride and Prejudice, crossed with You've Got Mail, Sex and the City, and Bridget Jones. If you have two X chromosomes, and you love Jane Austen, you must see Bridesmaids. My guess is that the there are no ACTUAL allusions to Austen, but I have become an Austen nut since V. S. Naipaul trashed her. The banter is worthy of Austen. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo have written a hilarious and sweet contemporary satire of the craziness of weddings, women's friendships, and dysfunctional romances with men.

Kristen Wiig, an SNL comedian who played Jill in Knocked-Up (which I didn't see), stars as Annie, a down-and-out baker whose cake shop in Milwaukee just closed. Annie's British roommates, obnoxious Gil, and and his overweight unemployed sister, Brynn (there go my fantasies of British thinness and perfection), take advantage of her financially, insisting that she pay half.

Worst, Annie keeps having sex with her attractive ex-boyfriend, Ted (Jon Hamm of Mad Men), who doesn't care about her and tells her in the morning (if he lets her stay that long), "I don't know how to say this but I really want you to go."

The best thing in Annie's life is her friendship with Lillian, played by Maya Rudolph, another SNL comedian. Then Lillian breaks the news. She's getting married.

Annie is happy for her, but confused. As maid of honor she plans showers and bridesmaid dress fittings. Everything goes awry when she takes Lillian and bridesmaids to a Brazilian restaurant, where they get food poisoning--and there is a gross-out scene, to keep the men awake, as my husband says, and to appeal to the very young, as I say.

One of the bridesmaids, Helen (Rose Byrne), a perfect corporate wife, competes with Annie for Lillian's friendship. And may I say I don't think she's as funny as the other bridesmaids? The others are all so quirky, but she is stiff. We want to hate Helen, and we do hate Helen for awhile. I guess that's the point of her stiffness.

Annie meets a nice Irish cop (Chris O'Dowd), but she can't take him seriously because he LIKES her. Yes, I know, but isn't this the way it goes sometimes? He encourages her to return to baking.

She alienates everyone but finally learns about friendship and turning her life around.

This is a comedy classic for the 2000s. At least I think so. Of course I'd have to see it again to make sure.

Six stars out of five!

David Lodge's A Man of Parts & Michael Dirda on Wells

2011-06-16T21:02:00.000-07:00

Some of us read reviews this spring of David Lodge's A Man of Parts, a historical novel about H. G. Wells, in The Guardian and Telegraph. Some of us prepared for the September publication in the U.S. by reading Wells's Tono-Bungay, an overpraised novel about class, advertising, and science that has not made our Wells canon. Some of us even tracked down an advance review copy of A Man of Parts. Yes, I am enjoying my advance copy of Lodge's novel and will give you a preview.

Although bulky historical novels are not my favorite genre, my interest in Wells exceeds my distaste. I became a Wells groupie a few years ago, when, curious about his popularity (i.e., affairs) with some of my favorite writers, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Rebecca West, I read some of his charming comedies, The History of Mr. Polly, Ann Veronica, and Kipps.

H. G. Wells

In Lodge's entertaining new novel, he vividly records the highs and lows of Wells's career and personal life. Wells, who started life as a draper's assistant, like the heroes of his comic novels, The History of Mr. Polly and Kipps, rose from housekeeper's son to science teacher to writer of articles and reviews. When The Time Machine was published in 1895, he became a best-selling novelist.

Wells seems to have been a bit of a sex maniac. Married twice to women he couldn't satisfy, or who were frigid (Wells's conclusion), he had multiple affairs. His second wife, Jane, agreed to an open marriage because she didn't care for sex. She insisted that he tell her about his affairs.

As a socialist, Wells attempted to influence the Fabian Society (a group of socialists who meant well but never acted, in his view).

Lodge enlivens his straightforward narrative with experimental bits and pieces. The dying Wells looks back over his life, and answers questions of an imaginary interviewer-interlocutor only he can hear. His answers contain biographical information and link the longer sections of chronological narrative. This technique is oddly reminiscent of Wells's own combination of radical ideas and stodgy style,. You can't hope for much with Wells's style--he's all about story and ideas--but Lodge doesn't have to use pyrotechnics to create a believable Wells.

A Man of Parts begins in 1944 at Hanover Terrace in London, where Wells has bravely remained throughout the war. Other houses in the area are boarded up.

"Only one house, number 13, has been permanently occupied throughout the war by its owner, Mr. H. G. Wells. During the London Blitz of 1940-41 he was frequently teased with the suggestion that this might prove an unlucky number, to which he responded, consistent with a lifetime's contempt for superstition by having a bigger "13" painted on the wall beside his front door. He stubbornly refused to move to the country, saying 'Hitler (or in male company, 'that shit Hitler') is not going to get me on the run,' and stayed put in Hanover Terrace as, one by one, his neighbors slunk off to safe rural havens and their houses were occupied by sub-tenants or left empty."

He knew all the fascinating people of his time: Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris, Henry James, the Webbs of the Fabian Society...so many people. Lodge's characterization of E. Nesbit, the author of children's classics, is brilliant. A founder and fellow member of the Fabian Society, she lived an unconventional life with her husband Hubert Bland, also a writer, and Alice Hoatson, their housekeeper who gave birth to two of Hubert's children (raised by E. Nesbit with her own two children). When Wells, a shit to his wife, went to stay at Nesbit's house two weeks before Jane gave birth because he couldn't face the pregnancy scenes, he wrote in the morning in a separate part of the garden where Nesbit wrote, discussed their intimate lives, and played charades with the family.

Of Nesbit Lodge writes:

"She reminded you of Rossetti's languorously pensive maidens....On occasion she would smoke a cigar. But she was also energetic and athletic... He felt that in many ways they were kindred spirits. Edith was as prolific and work-driven as himself, and she too liked to writer her quota of words in the early part of the day in intense solitary concentration, and then be free to exercise and amuse herself for the rest of it in company, the more the merrier. Like him she was impulsive, restless, easily bored, and subject to sudden changes of mood."

I'm very much enjoying this.

Michael Dirda's Reviews 2 of H. G. Wells's Novels. Michael Dirda, a reviewer for The Washington Post and a columnist for the Barnes and Noble Review, has recently reviewed The History of Mr. Polly in The Washington Post and Tono-Bungay in The Barnes and Noble Review. New editions of Wells's books have been published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Rereading Persuasion and The Bed-Reading System

2011-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

There are Persuasion people.

Their favorite novel is Jane Austen's Persuasion, the story of Anne Elliot, a 27-year-old heroine who regrets having broken off her engagement at 19. Then she meets her former fiance again by chance.

I am very fond of it, though on this reading I found it almost too abbreviated.

Rereading Persuasion on a recent trip was challenging. Like Anne Elliot, I was organized: I took two copies, a small reading copy for my purse and and The Annotated Persuasion, edited by David M. Shapard, for reading in my room.

But I stayed in an uncomfortable room in an almost empty house. How I wished for furniture and lamps! I had the choice of reading in bed or cross-legged on the floor in the living room.

Sitting scrunched against the wall under the only lamp in the house, I could not get comfortable. Then I tried the bed. The mattress, bought in about 1960, is so lumpy and soft that it almost doubles up and the springs hit your lower back. OW.

Back to the living room floor? Really uncomfortable.

I finally created a bed-reading system.

1. Drag lamp from living room to bedroom.

2. Remove the boxes and stuff off the top of the bookcase so I can move the bookcase very slightly and plug in the lamp.

3. Roll two blankets behind pillows for back support.

4. Put pillow under legs.

When I eventually perfected my bed-reading system, Persuasion was a pleasure, though it is sketchier and more minimalist than, say, Emma and Pride and Prejudice. It is also the shortest of Jane's novels. Austen was writing it in 1816 when she became ill, and, though she finished it before she died, perhaps she did not have time to revise it.

Anne Elliot is one of my favorite heroines. She is quiet and sensible, a little like Fanny Price of Mansfield Park. She is good-natured, has a sense of humor, and is the most dependable character in the book, with the exception of her former fiance, Captain Wentworth, and his friends. Anne is the one you want at your sickbed, or to organize a challenging social situation. On the other hand, the UPPER upper class--Anne's family, her father, Sir Walter Elliot, her sister, Elizabeth, younger sister, Mary, and Lady Russell, her late mother's best friends--are proud, sometimes silly, and often show bad judgment. Lady Russell had opposed Anne's engagement because Captain Wentworth, at that time, had not advanced to the gentlemanly rank of captain.

Sir Walter and Elizabeth go to Bath to save money (they are in debt), and Anne stays behind for a few months with Mary and Lady Russell. Captain Wentworth's sister and husband have rented Kellynch-Hall, the Elliot's house.

Keep your eye on Elizabeth's cunning companion, Mrs. Clay, and Anne's warm-hearted but arch friend, Mrs. Smith. Remember Harriet Smith in Emma? Could Harriet have grown up to be an amalgam of the two?

When Anne meets Captain Wentworth again, it is not an instant romance, but romance develops (I will not tell you between whom, or how it all turns out).

But, as you can imagine, the ending is happy.

I'm home after the short trip, and thank God we have plenty of "reading systems," lamps and furniture, here.

Living with an Athlete, Long Distances, & A Trip down the Raccoon River Trail

2011-06-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Raccoon River Valley Trail: Redfield, Iowa

Living with an athlete can be fun, or the reverse. Do you want to golf, bungee-jump, white-water raft, or whatever it is they do?

Or would you rather be reading Jane Austen?

I was in training for a 10K and couldn't imagine why. Were any of my friends doing this? No, they were in air-conditioned living rooms reading The Cider House Rules, watching Masterpiece Theater, or eating takeout pizza. I finished several 10Ks that summer, encouraged by my husband. I was curiously proud of myself, because so unathletic was I that my gym teachers had even corrected my jump-roping. Yes, I jumped too high (like Icarus, flying too near the sun, I presume) but now I was one of hundreds running the Don't Fall Run, The Freedom Run, and God Know What the Others Were Called.

So thanks to my husband for improved athletic self-esteem.

Then there was the biking.

I agreed to accompany him on a 400-mile bicycle trip. How hard could it be? I could ride. There was training: overnight trips carrying tents and sleeping bags and such on the back of the bike. Then there was the trip. Was it fun? If you consider bicycling up mountains, eating variations on the HUNGRY BICYCLIST SPECIAL at diners three times a day (steak, eggs, and pancakes), and crashing in a tent at 6 p.m. outside of Natalie Merchant's hometown (Jamestown, NY) because bugs were circling the campfire, then fun it was!

I do like bicycling, in a low-key kind of way. On summer weekends I enjoy our bicycle trips. The landscape is pretty, it's nice being outdoors, and pedaling for a few hours is a good way of clearing the detritus out of your mind.

My routine with my sprained foot has been: limp out the door, get on bicycle, and glide to wherever I have to go. Amazingly it hasn't hurt my foot to pedal.

THE WEEKEND RIDE. Yesterday we rode 32 miles on the Raccoon River Valley Trail. The rail trail extends 56 miles from Clive to Jefferson, and, per usual in Iowa, goes through woods and farmland. The stretch from Waukee to Adel is beautiful and soothing: a few miles of prairie, then a cool downhill for some miles through the woods. If you want to stop at Adel (population: 3,682), you can ride to the town square, eat in a fancy restaurant, or go to the public library. Then the next stretch is mostly downhill to Redfield (pop: 833), a smaller town but a bicycling hub, with a renovated depot for bicyclists.

Of course it's all uphill on the way back.

John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun; Michael Dirda's Review of Tono-Bungay

2011-06-10T20:12:00.000-07:00

John Sayles's entertaining new novel, A Moment in the Sun, is a literary beach book, though too big to take to the beach. (I wish it were a paperback.) This ambitious historical novel begins in 1897, on the brink of the Spanish-American War, and is expertly threaded with stories of Americans, Cubans, and Filipinos. The characters are linked by the advent of war, politics of war, and the aftereffects of the Civil War. It is set in the Yukon, Wilmington, Fort Missoula, the Philippines, Cuba, Tampa, and Hong Kong, to name a few of the places.

Sayles's research is apparent, yet this novel isn't onerous. His sentences are short and robust. He doesn't attempt pseudo-19th-century prose, the nemesis of many a historical novel, but writes in the vivid present tense. He weaves the details of the history into the narrative. You may be surprised by how much of this turns up in dialogue.

There are dozens of characters.

It begins with Hod, who has worked as a miner and at every other unskilled job to save enough money to seek gold in Alaska. In Alaska he ends up working with cons, though he tries to stay honest himself. Later, after leaving, he hooks up with Big Ten, an American Indian who has also seen the underbelly of America. Their odyssey of search for work illustrates the futility and poverty of the down-and-out life of the invisible classes. They dig beets with Mormons, work in mines, and get arrested for riding the rails.

Two of my favorite characters are Junior and Royal, an African-American doctor's son and a servant's nephew who enlist in the colored 25th Infantry of the U.S. Army at Fort Missoula "in hope of heroic actions when there has been little more than monotony and cursing and scutwork of the lowest variety." They also serve as members of the Black Bicycle Corps, founded because of General Miles's belief that the bicycle could in some instances replace the horse. (You can read about the history of the Corps online here.) They ride from Fort Missoula to St. Louis.

Since I am a bicyclist, I'm thrilled by this chapter, "Sojourner" (pp. 69-72), told in the form of a letter by Junior to his father.

"'The bicycle requires neither water, food, nor rest,' General Miles has written, and at times it appears that the same qualities are expected from the colored soldier. Our training at the wheel is additional to our other duties at the fort, so as you may imagine only the most intrepid (some would say 'ambitious') of the enlisted men stepped forward. Lt. Moss's quest this year was a sojourn from Missoula to St. Louis (over 1,000 miles as the crow hobbles) and back, to demonstrate that the only limit of this method of transport is human "spunk" and endurance."

These characters eventually fight in Cuba in the war. It's very sad: Royal accompanies a wounded friend, Little Earl, who was recently "saved" in a Christian tent revival in Tampa, to the chaotic field hospital. They have done what everybody else has done, running, shooting, surviving longer than some, and it has been for--what?

Sayles, an independent filmmaker, has won many awards at film festivals and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lone Star. He is also the author of novels and short stories, including Dillinger in Hollywood and The Anarchists' Convention.

I'll be reading this slowly this summer and hope to check in again.

MICHAEL DIRDA & H. G. Wells. Michael Dirda reviewed H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay for The Barnes & Noble Review. I am thrilled it's getting play nationally. I just read this in May myself.

Of course my favorite Wells is Kipps, which I also recently read, and since I wrote better on this than on Tono-Bungay, will link you to my blog review of Kipps here.

Rereading Pride and Prejudice

2011-06-09T18:09:00.000-07:00

How many times can one read Pride and Prejudice?

Since Austen wrote six novels, it's possible to reread them every year. Janeites read Pride and Prejudice countless times. Members of JASNA (Jane Austen Society of North America) discuss it frequently at conferences. The Pride and Prejudice board is the busiest discussion at The Republic of Pemberly (a Jane Austen internet site with the subtitle: "Your haven in a world programmed to misunderstand obsession with things Austen).

I just reread P&P myself, for the God-knows-how-many-timeth.

When I last blogged about P&P on June 2, 2009, I concentrated on the character of Elizabeth. I said, "Elizabeth Bennet is curiously modern, vivacious and witty, but also bitchy (in a good way), an outspoken young woman who can charm or sting, and who speaks her mind, unintimidated by wealth and the class system."

A friend and I used to argue about P&P. Was it greater than Emma?

"Yes," she said.

"No," I said.

Now I say sometimes yes and sometimes no. It is a very great novel. Emma is my favorite, a sharp, complicated comedy about misunderstanding and misbehavior, but perhaps the charming Pride and Prejudice is more symmetrical. And certainly readers like Elizabeth Bennet more than Emma.

Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse are similar. Both are smart; both are critical. Both are outspoken; both have great senses of humor. Both have a tendency to misinterpret characters. Elizabeth misunderstands Darcy and Wickham. Emma misunderstands Harriet, Mr. Elton, and Frank Churchill. Emma crosses class boundaries and has the potential to damage lives by fantasies about matchmaking.

This time through P&P I was enchanted. I was lost in Elizabeth and Darcy's satisfying romance.

The Annotated Pride and Prejudice, annotated and edited by David M. Shapard (Anchor Books), enhanced my delight. The text is on one page; the notes on the facing page. I read the text in my old paperback, because I found the facing notes in the annotated version too distracting. Then I went back.

It is doubtless redundant for scholars, but is a nice companion to the text for the common reader. Some of his notes are entertaining mini-essays on historical background, plot, literary techniques, and style. Shapard is a very good writer. If you read the notes down the page without a break, it is almost like reading a prose poem.

Shapard himself says in "Notes to the Reader," "First-time readers might prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction."

I am by no means a first-time reader of Austen, and sometimes he wastes my time defining the nuances of words like "dull," "impudent," and "hesitate."

But, as I said, I like the expansions on the text and background. Here is a sample of a note on Volume III, Chapter XI, p. 599.

1. Since Mr. Bennet was unwilling to go to Brighton, which would be at most 75 miles away, it is hardly surprising that he does not wish to voyage to Newcastle, which would be at least 200 miles away--and this is not even counting his disinclination to see Wickham and Lydia.

Interesting, yes? It's like having a conversation with another reader.

Blogger Fashions: When Lit Meets Pop Meets Blog Talk; & Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic

2011-06-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

Book bloggers design fashions.

Not Can-Do Cardigans, Whatever Skorts, or Kickit Bermudas. We're talking about bookish fashions. Book bloggers influence, reinforce, and sometimes create trends in bookselling.

Ellen at Ellen and Jim Have a Blog, Two suggests we might enjoy Linda H. Peterson’s Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetic and Politics of Life-Writing, and perhaps we'll rush out and buy it. Jacket Copy writes about a new release of John LeCarre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and it reminds us we've neglected him lately.

Publicists also send bloggers free copies of books they want to promote. So there might, for instance, be a rush of certain books getting reviewed by the bloggers at the same time.

And there is an altruistic blogger fashion of writing zealously about books that are not in fashion. Lost, cozy, or middlebrow classics often are featured.

We read our share of classics, but middlebrow mysteries are getting us through the night. It was 95 degrees today. We're not from Texas; we're not used to it. A splash of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic, set in Corfu, is refreshing. The heroine even saves a dolphin.

Middlebrow Writer of the Month: Mary Stewart.

Mary Stewart, consigned to the ghetto of romantic suspense, deserves more acclaim for her well-written mysteries than she receives. Unlike Daphne du Maurier, who is now hot due to Virago's and Sourcebooks' reissuing of her books, the popular Mary Stewart has never been out-of-print. Yet somehow Stewart, a very good writer who was a lecturer in English literature before she married and who quotes Shakespeare freely in her novels, is classed with Victoria Holt rather than du Maurier. New attractive trade paperback editions have recently been published by Chicago Review Press and Hodder and Stoughton, and that should boost her popularity with those who have rejected Stewart
sbooks in "romance" editions.

In This Rough Magic, the witty, likable narrator, Lucy Waring, an out-of-work actress, escapes gray London to visit her pregnant sister, a banker's wife, in Corfu. Phyllida says she'll name her baby Prospero if it's a boy.

I laughed. 'Poor little chap, why on earth? Oh, of course...Has someone been telling you that Corfu was Shakespeare's magic island for The Tempest?'

"As a matter of fact, yes, the other day, but for goodness' sake don't ask me about it now. Whatever you may be used to, I draw the line at Shakespeare for breakfast."

In the bay, a tame dolphin approaches Lucy. She realizes the classical stories about dolphins who play with humans are true.

"And here, indeed, was the living proof. Here was I, Lucy Waring, being asked into the water for a game. The dolphin couldn't have made it clearer if he'd been carrying a placard on that lovely moon's-horn of a fin."

Then she hears a humming sound and realizes it is a silenced rifle. Someone is trying to kill the dolphin. She jumps in front of it furiously to stop the shooting and is determined to find the shooter. Why would anyone shoot a dolphin? Could it be one of their neighbors? Surely not Julian Gale, a beloved actor who retired to Corfu after a breakdown and who often quotes The Tempest. His son, Max, a sullen composer of a score for The Tempest? Or Godfrey, the charming photographer (of work unrelated to The Tempest)?

Smuggling, dolphin rescues, romance, and murder occur in this fast-paced mystery. Stewart's intelligent, upbeat voice is charming and entertaining. This is one of my favorite Stewarts--a great place to start.

Jane Austen's Emma

2011-06-06T20:21:00.000-07:00

Last week in an interview, V.S. Naipaul slammed Jane Austen. After admitting he considered no women writers his equals, he said of Jane Austen that he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental taste of the world."

And though mannerly Janeites suggested we should ignore Naipaul, I've never been a mannerly person.

I was inspired to reread Emma.

I wondered aloud to my husband if Naipaul had READ Jane Austen. It occurred to me that maybe he just PRETENDED. My husband pretends he read Jane Austen for a course long ago, but he is certainly vague about whether it was P&P or S&S.

"I wonder if he's read Emma," I said thoughtfully. "Because if he'd read Emma, he would know Jane's not sentimental."

"Well, I've read Emma," my husband said.

This made me laugh, because I know he hasn't.

I carry Emma on a bike trip.

I do think Naipaul should read Emma under the tutelage of Diana Athill, his editor, an award-winning writer whom he also trashed in the interview.

Oh well, I don't care what he reads.

Rereading Emma seemed a proactive response to his very silly words.

Emma is a satiric novel about misunderstandings and misbehaving. The heroine Emma's hilarious misinterpretations of relationships and manners are at the center of the novel. But other characters behave badly, too: Frank Churchill, a charming young man who visits his father, Mr. Weston, after living for years with an uncle and sick aunt, has a secret and takes advantage of Emma and the Westons. After he writes the word "blunder" in a Scrabble-like game to alert another character to a social mistake, Austen repeats the word "blunder" frequently fast and furiously in regard to other characters, like Mrs. Elton, a vicar's wife and merchant's daughter with (of course) bad manners, who attempts to control the society in Highbury.

The characters are humorous, if not likable, and this is one of the fastest-paced anti-romances in the English language. (Okay, there is romance, but it's really about settling down in society.)

Austen wrote of Emma that she was a heroine "which no one but myself would like."

I love Emma. And Austen certainly describes her merrily.

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years with very little to distress or vex her."

Thus Austen begins her masterpiece.

Emma, a brilliant young woman and underachiever, needs a friend after her intelligent, good-natured governess, Miss Taylor, marries Mr. Weston and moves a mile or so away. Since she has no other equals in the small town of Highbury, she spends time with Harriet, the "natural" daughter of no one knows who at a local boarding school. Emma means to improve Harriet, but it is so much easier to make love matches than read. Emma thinks Mr. Elton, the young vicar, should fall in love with Harriet.

Only Knightly, a 37-year-old bachelor, dares to take on Emma and suggests that she is doing Harriet harm by attempting to yank her above her class and give her unrealistic ideas.

Yes, there is a lot about class.

And about Jane Fairfax, Emma's equal, who, like Frank Churchill, has been living away from Highbury for some years. She lived with the Campbells, friends of her late father, and has returned to Highbury to stay with her grandmother and aunt.

Jane IS Emma's equal. Yet they don't like each other very much. Jane is reserved and takes few chances. Jane can do everything perfectly: play the piano, sing, etc.

And though everyone blames Emma for not socializing with Jane Fairfax, Jane does seem dull.

Readers disagree about Jane Fairfax.

I've written too much about plot and not at all about the style, but of course it has been written about by so many others and I also blogged about it in 2009 (here). I read this again and again because Austen's writing is perfect. Austen is more Emmaish than Jane Fairfaxish, sharp, witty, and merciless, but she also has perfect morals.

The T-Bone Trail

2011-06-05T08:54:00.000-07:00

It's summer. Warm and green: 88 degrees. Go outside in shorts, t-shirt, and helmet. No jacket. Finally. Explore the bike trails.

But don't forget your Jane Austen book, because after V. S. Naipaul's denunciation of her Tuesday, it is necessary to read her again.

Yesterday we rode 36 miles on the T-Bone Trail, a railroad flatbed trail which extends from Atlantic to Audubon. It is one of the tamer, flatter trails in Iowa. Not up for a challenge? This is the trail for you. It runs through the valley of the Nishnabotna River. The scenery is typically rural and mildly pretty, cornfields and undramatic woods. The T-Bone Trail is named after T-Bone Days, a summer festival in Audubon (population: 2,332). The trail was built on a spur of the Rock Island Railroad from Atlantic to Audubon in 1878 to transport cattle to the stockyards in Chicago.

We rested on a bench outside the Red Barn diner in Exira and snapped a pic of this wooded avenue from a distance because we were too lazy to go back.

Here we are in the "true country." Birds, badgers, and chipmunks. It's like riding through your grandpa's farm.

The trail ends in a park outside of Audubon, where there is a giant statue of Albert the Bull. I sat here and contemplated it while my husband rode to a convenience store in search of Gatorade.

I read Emma, too. Just Albert the Bull, Jane Austen, and I.

On our way back we snapped photos of these ponies and goats.

I couldn't persuade my husband to go off the trail to visit the Nathaniel Hamlin Park. We saw the brick house and the sign from the trail and I was very keen on touring it. I looked it up later on the internet, however, and it says it is a historic farm, which is perhaps not my kind of thing. Nothing about Nathaniel Hamlin. And nothing about the house.

Oh, well, another time.

BiblioBits: V. S. Naipaul vs. Jane Austen; Nicola Griffith on Women in SF

2011-06-03T20:01:00.000-07:00

V. S. Naipaul, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, has made an ass of himself. In an interview, he denounced Jane Austen and women writers.

You don't want to meet great writers. Really you don't. When I did PR for readings, I bobbed around with water bottles, wrote the introductions to be given by the profs and bookstore owners, and observed the writers' interactions with their fans. Most were pleasant and considerate, but occasionally they were arrogant.

I never dealt with a writer who said that Jane Austen wasn't his equal, though.

Naipaul told the Royal Geographic Society in England on Tuesday that no women writers are his equals and that he "couldn't possibly share [Jane Austen's] sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world." He also said that he could tell within a paragraph whether writing was by a woman.

Not this again.

I admire Naipaul's novels. I agree with many of his political views, but does that make him a great writer?

He is not in Austen's league.

Compare the brilliant opening of Austen's Emma to the opening of Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas.

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her."

Austen establishes her character's interests and social position in one beautifully balanced sentence.

Now look at the opening of Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas.

"Shortly before he was born there had been another quarrel between Mr. Biswas's mother Biptu and his father Raghu, and Bipti had taken the three children and walked all the way in the hot sun to the village where her mother Bissoondaye lived. Then Bipti had cried and told the old story of Raghu's miserliness: how he kept a check on every cent he gave her, counted every biscuit in the tin, and how he would walk ten miles rather than pay a cart a penny."

Ahem. Sort of awkward.

My husband has read all of Naipaul and has also read Paul Theroux's memoir of his friendship with Naipaul.

He summed up this latest flare-up: "He's an ass."

Nicola Griffith on Women in Science Fiction. Nicola Griffith, an award-winning science fiction writer, noted that when readers listed their favorite SF writers in comments in The Guardian, only 18 female writers were mentioned. 500 writers were listed.

She seems to think IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. She thinks the gender parity is closer in the U.S.

She writes:

"Clearly, women's sf is being suppressed in the UK. Oh, not intentionally. But that's how bias works: it's unconscious. And of course sometimes it's beyond a reader's power to change: you can't buy a book that's not on the shelf. You can't shelve something the publisher hasn't printed. You can't publish something an agent doesn't send you. You can't represent something a writer doesn't submit. Etc."

She also lists the women mentioned in the comments:

Ursula K. le Guin
Joanna Russ
Julian May
Gwyneth Jones
Doris Lessing
Virginia Woolf
Anna Kavan
Marge Piercy
C.J. Cherryh
Mary Gentle
Anne McCaffrey
Mary Russell
Lois McMaster Bujold
James Tiptree Jr.
Karen Joy Fowler
Zenna Henderson
Margaret Atwood
Diana Wynne Jones

Mary Stewart Marathon

2011-06-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

When I was nine, I knew I would grow up and be Nikki of The Moon-Spinners, a Disney film starring Hayley Mills. I would find myself in Crete, and then I would fall madly in love with Mark, played by Peter Mcenery.

The novel by Mary Stewart was even better. The heroine is Nicola, not Nikki, a charming secretary at the British Embassy in Athens.

Since my discovery of Mary Stewart's novels, I have not needed to travel. I open the books and find myself in Crete, Austria, Corfu, Scotland, or Turkey. Stewart's detailed travelogues must have sent women running to the scenic villages and cities she so beautifully describes, but at age nine it wasn't possible for me. I must admit I've never had a vacation quite like those of Stewart's
intelligent, beautiful heroines, who stumble upon crimes and live by their wits, until something physical gets in their way--like a villain.

And of course they fall in love with the rugged, not terribly charming heroes. Her novels are discreetly sexy. No explicit sex scenes.

So I am on a Novel of Romantic Suspense Vacation (or Gothic Novel Vacation), reading some old favorites, and would be happy to receive some suggestions of other Gothic authors to read.

As for falling in love--Mary Stewart knew what we wanted. It was not supposed to go like, "I met him at a party," "I met him at the office," or "I met him while handing out cups of Gatorade during a triathlon."

It was supposed to be like a Mary Stewart novel.

A. An unemployed actress on vacation in Corfu, you fall in love while saving a dolphin. (This Rough Magic)

B. A veterinarian who learned from a newsreel that your husband was in Austria at the scene of a circus fire, you hurry there and discover while treating an old circus horse that it was actually a stolen Lipizzaner stallion. (Airs above the Grounds)

C. A strange man in a cafe in Athens insists on giving you the key to a car. It's a case of mistaken identity, but you want to see Delphi. And then you meet... (My Cousin Michael)

By the way, there are new editions of Mary Stewart's novels, by the Chicago Review Press in the U.S. and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK.

Penelope Mortimer's My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof

2011-06-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

Penelope Mortimer's My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof is dark, chic, and multi-layered--one of the more demanding overlooked feminist novels of the '60s. Published in 1967, it is faintly reminiscent of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. In both novels, a writer tries to compose her life through endless writing in a notebook.

Mortimer's novel is short, only 224 pages.

tri

Penelope Mortimer

Mortimer's more traditional novels, The Pumpkin Eater (NYRB) and Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (Persephone), are still admired, but My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof, reissued by Virago in 1989, is out-of-print. It is a difficult read, as it is also (partly) meta-fiction: the story of a writer's sexual identity interwoven with her notebook writings and how she edits what she writes. The narrative voice is third-person limited, and the notebook, written in quotation marks, is stream-of-consciousness.

The heroine, Muriel Rowbridge, is a lovely young woman, a writer for a women's magazine. She does not want to resemble her boss, "the General," who is held up mockingly as an unfeminine professional. But the General has allowed Muriel to write columns on whatever interests her. After breast cancer and a mastectomy, Muriel is sent on a press trip.

The novel covers the short trip to Canada, on which she is expected to go on guided tours, attend receptions, and interview people, mining the experience for her magazine column. But Muriel is cynical. She is painfully conscious of her artificial breast and does not consider herself quite a woman anymore. She misses her married lover, Ramsey, with whom she broke up.

Instead, she writes endlessly in her notebook. She runs away from scheduled events. And she becomes, on different levels, involved with three men.

Godfrey, a married English journalist and a Catholic convert, is a new friend. He is concerned about her. He talks about God and she thinks he wants her "confession."

Robert, a Canadian, has a sexual affair with her and falls in love. He is the first man she tells about her mastectomy. He helps her accept herself by telling her not to wear the artificial breast.

And then she falls masochistically in love with a married filmmaker, Macneish, who has only the most casual interest in her. Her infatuation resembles a crush: it is a repetition of her love for Ramsey, the married man in England.

In the course of the novel we learn about different kinds of love and work. She understands she should choose love rather than rejection.

Although I admire Mortimer's style, parts of the notebook are mawkish and repetitious. But then Mortimer shows us that these are Muriel's rambling notes: she repeats some of the notes in a more polished version later--and they're literature.

So the book is about love--and meta-love. And work.

This is a book that improves on rereading. There is so much here.

Sports Injuries & Reading Penelope Mortimer's My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof

2011-05-30T19:08:00.000-07:00

It's Memorial Day. The U.S. Day of the Dead. You mourn for somebody, though everyone's so scattered that there's no one left in your hometown to put flowers on the grave.

It's also the Start of Summer: And since you didn't plant a tiki torch in your back yard, or go to a Hawaiian theme or pool party, you need ice cream.

Especially after all the sports injuries.

The whole family is wrapped up in ace bandages. Feet, ankles, and knees are wrapped. Some have cool black bandages, others worn-out beige deals. I haven't the faintest idea how to wrap them. The idea is to keep the muscles tight so nothing hurts. But then it cuts off the circulation.

They're all out running, bicycling, or playing badminton in their ace bandages--and won't stop unless the doctor puts them on crutches.

"That never worked for me," says my husband about the bandaged frantically playing sports.

Try RICE: Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation.)

READING. I won't be done with Ulysses by Bloomsday. I'm pencilling in July 4 as my "due date." But I did some reading this weekend.

Bleak House: done. Didn't I tell you I'd finish? I love this book.

Ruth Suckow's The Folks: abandoned. I decided not to reread it because I'm not attending the Ruth Suckow Society meeting. I do recommend it. It is a very good novel about small-town life, in the vein of Bess Streeter Aldrich rather than Sinclair Lewis.

Penelope Mortimer's My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof: halfway through.

I'm enthusiastic about Penelope Mortimer (review of Long Distance here). Married to John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole of the Bailey books, she was a fascinating, progressive person. She was a journalist and novelist who had an open marriage and six children by four different men. She wrote sometimes for The New Yorker and was film critic for The Observer in the late '60s. But she is best-known for her novel The Pumpkin Eater (NYRB), which was adapted for a film by Harold Pinter. Another novel, Daddy's Gone A-Hunting (Persephone), is also in print.

My Friend Says It's Bullet-Proof is a third-person narrative with long stream-of-conscious sections meant to be the heroine's notebook. Muriel Rowbridge, a women's magazine writer, recently had breast cancer. She is depressed by her experience and her artificial breast, which she thinks sets her apart from other women. On a press trip through Canada, one of those awful things where you're scheduled all day for lunches and tours, Muriel writes in her notebook. (I once did Austin that way.) And she meets men: unavoidable as the only woman on the trip.

This is one of those novels that repays you as you read. Stick with it. It seems a bit digressive at first, but it becomes apparent that everything is there for a reason.

I'd love to read her other books, but they're not readily available. Maybe one of these days I'll come across cheap copies.

Memorial Day Weekend & The Outdoors

2011-05-29T18:09:00.000-07:00

It's Memorial Day Weekend. You have to have a picnic. Just go to Martha Stewart.com. See all her Memorial Day recipes? Tuna nicoise sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, portobello and tomato sandwiches on ciabatta bread, etc.

But some people will not eat so much as a piece of fried chicken outdoors.

My husband refuses to eat outdoors. Yet he is outdoors ALL THE TIME on Memorial Day weekend.

Early morning: Tinkers with his bicycle in the back yard. One of his bicycles. I don't know which one.

Afternoon: Bicycles 100 miles or something.

Late afternoon: Mows the lawn or digs up a new garden patch. We have quite a few fenced-off places and a scare owl to scare away the rabbits.

Here is my day.

Early morning: Am I awake yet?

Mid morning: Loll around reading Bleak House and as usual wish I could be Esther. She is my role model. If only I had read BH when I was young...

Afternoon: Put the barbecue beef in the slow cooker and attempt to cook it on low, as it says.

THEN I HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH MY HUSBAND.

"It's Memorial Day weekend. Let's have a picnic."

No interest.

"We can eat our barbecue beef sandwiches outdoors."

No interest.

"We can get new garden chairs and sit outdoors."

Interest. So long as eating isn't mentioned, he's happy outdoors.

I told you the Adirondack chair fiasco. We left them out all winter and they cracked.

So we thought we'd get cheap plastic Adirondack chairs at the hardware store, but alas they do not fit in our out-of-date energy-saving car (long may it last). We got the other chairs through the mail. We realize we will have to order the chairs.

Or shop.

We accidentally shop. We go to the garden center to buy some flowers. The ground has been so wet that I haven't been able to plant them yet (though the veg garden is in).

We found folding lawn chairs for only $19.99. They're quite comfortable.

We got some flowers, too.

Then I came home and realized that the barbecue beef was never going to cook on slow. I ended up cooking it on high. Do you have this slow cooker problem?

It was delicious and tender by six. And my husband brought in some lettuce from the garden.

No picnic, though. No eating outside.

Memorial Day Weekend.

The Sauk Rail Trail & The Beginning of Summer Reading

2011-05-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

The Sauk Rail Trail

It was raining, raining, raining, so we drove to Swan Lake State Park in Carroll, Iowa, north of the rain showers. The Sauk Rail Trail runs 33 miles from Swan Lake to Black Hawk Park in Lake View. Formerly a limestone trail, it used to be a tough ride in parts, but it is newly paved. On June 11, its Grand Opening, or Grand Concrete Paving, will be celebrated with a ride and a free lunch.

The limestone trail was completed in 1989 and used to be called the Sauk Bluebird Trail. The new no-nonsense name, Sauk Rail Trail, describes what it is--a railroad bed converted to a bicycle trail.

It is a lovely, effortless ride now that the trail is paved. We rode 35 miles, from Carroll to Carnivon and back. We saw bluebirds, goldfinches, and two scary-looking snakes--I shrieked and barely avoided running over them. We took a break in a park in Breda, reading and eating Gummy Bears and M&Ms. The return was difficult, pedaling into the wind, but we eventually coasted into, if not quite a valley, at least a more protected area.

We have never seen so many bicyclists on this trail. It is Memorial Day Weekend, so many are camping in the state parks, but there were also casual day-trippers like us. Swift RAGBRAI teams, laid-back stolid bicyclists like ourselves, young and old couples, professional-looking guys on recumbents, casual people out for a short ride, and fast bicyclists with boom boxes to inspire them to ride faster.

We stopped in front of this small farm. Isn't this goat adorable? There were also ducks, chickens, and a prehistoric-looking bird we couldn't identify. I put away my camera before I spotted the pigs. We see them so seldom now: most are shut up in factory farms.

We saw a LOT of windmills. Fun fact: Iowa is the second largest producer of wind energy in the U.S., after Texas. In 2010, 15.4% of electricity in Iowa was generated by wind. Wind turbine parts are manufactured in Newton, Cedar Rapids, and West Branch. We're all about the wind here!

Here's the railroad bridge where we stopped and turned back.

Here is some grafitti on the bridge.

SUMMER READING. I took Bleak House along for my bicycling break. There is much reading of Victorian novels around here, and I often read favorite parts of books, but right now I am reading BH sequentially. I am near the end: Richard, though still deluded by the life-destroying properties of the never-ending Jarndyce v. Jarndyce suit, is now ill and vaguely realizes that he may have chosen the wrong path. Woodcourt, Esther's friend, attends him, and he says:

"Woodcourt, I should be sorry to be misunderstood by you, even if I gained by it in your estimation. You must know that I have done no good for a long time. I have not intended to do much harm, but I seem to have been capable of doing nothing else. It may be that I should have done better by keeping out of the net into which my destiny has worked me; but I think not, though I dare say you will soon hear, if you have not already herd, a very different opinion. To make short of a long story, I am afraid I have wanted an object; but I have an object now--or it has me--and it is too late to discuss it."

Poor Richard!

Material for a Bad Memoir

2011-05-27T20:48:00.000-07:00

I spent a night at The Women's Center when I was 16.

I wasn't a member of the WLF (Women's Liberation Front), but I knew about it. A friend's mother was a member of a collective--we babysat for their kids during consciousness-raising group meetings--and recommended Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. We favored equal pay for equal work, legal abortion, and free day-care on demand. Several of us volunteered at a co-op day-care center founded by university students. A lesbian collective lived on the top floor of the day-care center, and, though we thought they were eccentric--the gay kids at our school weren't out--we tolerated them.

I didn't know where to go. My parents were getting divorced, and on the day of the divorce the parent I lived with moved into a lover's house in a tiny town.

"You can come, too, if you want."

There was no real enthusiasm. My step-parent-to-be had double-locked me out of OUR house over the lunch hour so they could have sex. I wasn't enthusiastic about their menage. The town where the step-p-to-be lived was so tiny that boys drove their tractors past the houses of girls they liked.

So I announced at the day-care co-op that I was looking for a place to live. There were so many kind, altruistic people in the '70s that a couple of families, and even the collective, invited me to live with them.

After living for awhile with an extremely nice family, I moved in with a teacher. Of course this was a fatal move, because he said he "loved" me--something I found both embarrassing and flattering--obviously so he could have sex with me. This wasn't an uncommon situation for teenagers living without their parents. Nobody shouted statutory rape, and indeed my friends and I didn't know what that was. Unscrupulous "hippies" of this era--and most I met had scruples, so don't get the wrong picture --of course were allowed to do anything they wanted, and it was all about love and freedom. One of my friends, also on her own after her parents' divorce (she rented a room in an old house), ended up having sex with the sex education teacher.

"Humbert Humbert," as I will call the unstable pedophile, was a shifty junior high teacher who not only seduced/statutory raped me but also taught me to "rip off stuff" (i.e., shoplift). We were, I believe, "putting it to the man" when we stole Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book or an embroidered Mexican shirt. This didn't make much sense to me, because I believed stealing is wrong, and am grateful that my middle-class common sense returned and I ceased to accompany him on "shopping" trips. He wasn't really a political person, though the leftists tolerated him, because they couldn't really reject anyone, however nerdy, who claimed to be a leftist and a feminist, etc.. He had been demoted from the high school where he taught to the junior high after the principal became aware that he had seduced one of his students. (Her situation was similar to mine: she moved in with him when her parents moved away so she could finish her year of high school. She moved out shortly thereafter.)

I guess he and his friends thought this was some cool, hip arrangement: a 33-year-old man living with a teenager. Yet it didn't take a genius to figure out I wasn't happy. I had a yeast infection, I ceased to do ANY school work (thank God I went to college, because I discovered I really liked learning), he seldom gave me a chance to read, my favorite thing, or see my friends, because he was so insanely jealous, and I had a crush on a boy at school but my living situation was in the way--and I couldn't figure out to get out of it because I had nowhere to go. (Or so I thought: I'm sure I could have gone back to that nice family.) I only told my closest friends about the relationship, because I was embarrassed.

Actually, it was a very sad story.

So one night I stayed at The Women's Center. The center was sponsored by the university, and sometimes there were poetry readings there. I vaguely knew the volunteer--did she live in the collective above the day-care center? Anyway, she was as kind as she could be, and let me stay in the attic.

I didn't figure things out. I was 16. But I knew one thing. I wasn't going to stay with "Humbert" forever. As soon as possible, I would move out.

And I did.

Long Books: Lost It!

2011-05-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

A pile of five books. All of them long. Bleak House, Kristin Lavransdatter, The Folks, Theirs Was the Kingdom, and A Moment in the Sun.

I wonder why I never finish anything. Well, I have finished nine books this month. Shorter books. Wandering around the house in pajamas, I start to clean the dining room. Then I sit down and plan to finish these five books instead.

THESE BOOKS MUST BE FINISHED IN THE NEXT MONTH, EVEN IF I DON'T FINISH ULYSSES BY BLOOMSDAY.

Ulysses is that other long book I'm reading.

The five books in the pic comprise 1,037 pages + 1,131 + 717 + 798 + 955 pages = 3,921 pages. I've finished 739 + 492 + 55 + 387 + 143 pages = 1,816 pages.

I can't imagine why I picked so many long books. Usually I alternate a long book with a couple of short books, but I'm carried away by my love of classics and sagas. I mentioned D. H. Lawrence the other day and immediately got out my copy of Women in Love.

No, no, no!

I'm not the only person with the multiple book bug. Many bloggers have so many books going that they sound--well--non compos mentis.

"I read about a third of a lot of books," a librarian admitted to me.

I like to finish books.

Here is the prognosis of my finishing the Five Above in June:

1. Bleak House is a masterpiece, and I am in the home stretch. Prognosis: *****

2. Kristin Lavransdatter is another favorite. I finished rereading the first in the stunning trilogy last winter and then stopped halfway through the second. It's just a matter of getting back on the horse. Prognosis: *****

3. The Folks. I won't attend the Ruth Suckow Society meeting this year, but I might as well read The Folks in case I feel like hitching 300 miles with a strange member to attend the book discussion. (Strange to me, that is. Last year I sold my spare copy of The Kramer Girls for $45 to a member. Pretty strange!) Prognosis: ****

4. Theirs Was the Kingdom. Last year I read Delderfield's engrossing novel, God Is an Englishman, the saga of Adam Swann's founding of a wagon-transport business in the 19th century. This is the sequel. It's about his family, children growing up, and not quite as good as the first but a good bedtime story. Prognosis: **

5. A Moment in the Sun. I started reading John Sayles's new historical novel. It is a swift, easy read, because the filmmaker knows how to shape a story, so don't be intimidated. It might easily take me through July, though. Prognosis: ****

Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells

2011-05-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

I recently read H. G. Wells's Kipps and was astonished by how good it is. I'm not interested in Wells's science fiction, but in the first decade of the 20th century he also wrote very good comic realistic novels about lower-middle-class heroes. The characters' experiences with work, and his observations on class, are still pertinent to modern life. Kipps is a masterpiece. Henry James also loved it: in 1909 he called it "the best novel in the last forty years." Think David Copperfield crossed with fairy tales and socialism.

I'm halfway through Tono-Bungay, another of his comic novels, and am loving the experience. Like Kipps, it is part bildungsroman, but it is also a satire of advertising. Wells was one of the most influential English writers at the beginning of the 20th century, and Tono-Bungay, though much less subtle than Kipps, is equally political, and some parts are remarkably well-written. It is very easy to see his influence on D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, and even James Joyce.

The novel gets off to a slow start. The life of the narrator, George Ponderevo, has been determined by his effervescent, ingenuous, impulsive uncle, the inventor of Tono-Bungay, a harmless concoction sold as a sort of pep drink through brilliant ads. At 45, George reviews his life and considers his rise and fall and the variety of people he met through his uncle's business.

"I was my uncle's nephew, and my uncle was no less a person than Edwar Ponderevo...

"I was his nephew, his peculiar and intimate nephew. I was hanging on to his coat-tails all the way through. I made pills with him in the chemist's shop at Wimbleburst before he began. I was, you might say, the stick of his rocket; and after our tremendous soar, after he had played with millions...after my bird's-eye view of the modern world, I fell again..."

George is a rebel. The son of a housekeeper at a house called Bladesover, he showed his "social insubordination" at 14 when he refused to apologize for "pounding" an aristocratic boy. Banished from the house, he is sent first to his mother's cousin, Frapp, an insipid baker who spends most of his time praying. When that doesn't work out, he goes to Uncle Edward, owner of a chemist's shop. Edward moves to London after he loses his and George's money through speculation.

What will happen to George? His life of unrewarding, limited work is mapped out for him. George, a science student, attempts to escape his through a scholarship in London, where he quickly loses interest in his studies and narrow career options and begins to think about socialism and love. His best friend, Ewart, a sculptor whom he knew at school, soliloquizes about socialism, individualism, and even a utopia where women are not put on pedestals but are allowed to live in their own city and pursue their own interests, visited by men they choose. I very much like Ewart's originality, and his occasional flippancy about his ideal of socialism, which he admits will never work, but sometimes Wells tries too hard to educate us: these are mini-essays.

Money becomes important when George's girlfriend, Miriam, refuses to marry him. Miriam, a sexless woman who is a rabid conformist, has the same fascination for George as Maugham's green-skinned, sickly, moronic waitress Mildred in Of Human Bondage has for Philip.

George goes to work for his uncle's Tono-Bungay factory. And that is the beginning of the social conventions and misery of Georgge's unhappy marriage.

I'm not done yet, but am enjoying it.

And here is Wells's sketch of some of Uncle Edward's ads for Tono-Bungay, included in the text. Sorry, a paw got in the way when I was photographing it.

I Begin John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun & Finish Cindy Jones's My Jane Austen Summer

2011-05-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

My John Sayles book arrived by Fed/Ex.

There was a knock at the door. I'd expected the book by mail or UPS in the afternoon, when I could intercept it and recycle the box before anyone noticed. But it was lunchtime.

"WHAT'S THAT?"

Well, I'm not Lucy Ricardo. "It's John Sayles's new book."

My husband was pacified. If I don't read it, he will.

My family is not supposed to know I buy books. Everyone knows I vowed not to buy books until next year. I reserved my B&N membership card for coffee and cut up my Amazon VISA card. I would borrow everything from the public library or a university library.

I lasted six days.

Yes, I have bought a "few" books since February.

Sayles, known for his independent films, novels, and short stories, has a new novel out, A Moment in the Sun. He is on a national book tour. Maggie Renzi, his companion, creative partner, producer, and fellow actor, is blogging about the tour here.

My husband decided I should write a review and submit it to newspapers in all the cities left on the tour.

Punitive!

"I haven't read the book. It's 955 pages. It's too late to send it to Blah Blah Blah..."

These things have to be planned. I did like the idea, though. If I read, say, 200 pages a day... Impossible.

Anyway the publicity is already excellent.

So I'll just blog about it in my lazy way.

VERY light reading: Cindy Jones's My Jane Austen Summer.

Ellen was so enthusiastic about Cindy Jones's witty new novel that, yes, I had to read it. She classifies this as a "kind of novel that comes out of Jane Austen's fiction." I consider it high-end "chick lit" for Jane Austen lovers, set in contemporary times.

Ellen writes:

"Unlike most of these that I've read there is a vein of deeply felt genuine emotional hurt and melancholy shown to be a justified reaction to the conditions of modern life for young women; like Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary the novel attempts a consideration of the irresolvable challenges, inadequate choices, and problems and consequent traumas young women face today, including the basic one of how to survive (support yourself) decently if you do not marry."

As Ellen says, the comedy runs deeper than that of many Jane Austen spin-offs. There are delightful parallels between Mansfield Park and My Jane Austen Summer. But Lily, the witty Texan narrator, is so traumatized by personal losses that people suggest she see a therapist. She has broken up with her boyfriend and stalked him. She has lost her job for reading Jane Austen novels in her cubicle. And her father is marrying the woman who moved in a week after Lily's mother's death.

So what better plan than to sell all her things and go to a Jane Austen festival in England? Vera, a bookstore owner who plans the festival every year with her husband, allows Lily to attend free under the vague titles of actress/business planner. Theater re-enactments of Mansfield Park, the JA novel of the year at the festival, are the main attraction, and especially funny are the theater-within-a-theater scenes. Lily learns about about the "Fanny Wars" (Fanny Price is the heroine of MP), the scholarly and fan disagreements. And she wants desperately to play Fanny in the play.

"Staring uncomprehendingly at the pages of my book, I imagined myself as Fanny Price, the poor cousin, brought as a child to live in the home of her rich uncle. I have always loved Fanny Price. Of course, I knew I wouldn't play the lead, but I kept imagining myself in the part. Whenever I read, I always assumed the protagonist's part.... Had I been born in an earlier century, when people appreciated special qualities like mine, I would be beautiful and confident, and travel in higher circles. Edmund would have fallen for me."

At one point Lily writes a one-woman show about Jane Austen's lost letters. And, as in MP, she falls in love with an Edmund-like character who is studying to be a priest (and secretly writing a vampire novel).

The writing is only so-so, but the novel is very, very funny. Excellent summer reading.

The Shopping Challenge

2011-05-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to shop.

I'm very casual myself. I used to dash into the Gap and assemble an outfit in minutes. Sweater, skirt, jeans: easy. Department stores took longer, but I ventured in and asked for help for special occasions. A suit, please (though I never wore it AFTER the interview), or a black dress for a night on the town.

Needless to say, I'm never the first in line for a sale. I'm not very keen on browsing under fluorescent lights.

Evey other woman in my family loves to shop.

Here is my shopping challenge. My mother has shrunk. All her summer clothes are too big. I want to buy her just a few things.

Here's what I'm finding online: low-cut tight t-shirts, low-cut shirts with an empire-waist maternity cut, or tunics with a strange asymmetrical cut. I'm not looking for t-shirts, or billowing tunics. I need something with collars or turtlenecks. Maybe a little POLYESTER. Something that doesn't have to be IRONED.

Can anyone suggest a catalogue? Orvis isn't quite right. Bean and Lands End are NATURAL FIBERS. J. Crew is too fashionable and Penney's is too casual. There must be a designer who works between an action-packed afternoon on the Appalachian Trail and a Reese Witherspoon impersonation party. (No offense to Reese Witherspoon: she's lovely, but my mother is not her age.)

CLOTHES FOR THE MATURE WOMAN.

When I was a child, she shopped a lot. She was very particular. She would bring home many different outfits for me to try on because I was so bored in dressing rooms. I never cared what I wore until my adolescence, which was spent in jeans and t-shirts, Dr. Scholl's exercise sandals, and an old Army jacket. That must have been a trial for her.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Philip Roth & The Man Booker International Prize

2011-05-21T21:33:00.000-07:00

Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize on Wednesday.

The Man Booker International Prize is a newish, Nobelish prize, and we were glad he won. Founded in 2005, it is awarded only every two years: 60,000 pounds. A major award.

This year, however, there is a hitch. One of the three judges, Carmen Callil, founder of Virago Books, ran like a Greek tragedy heroine into the spotlight. She told the Guardian she had quit the panel because she strongly disapproved of giving the award to Roth. It was a 2-1 decision. She dislikes his books and said he "“goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every book."

"Is the Man Booker International a made-up prize?" my husband asked.

"No, it's like the Booker, only everybody qualifies!" He does know the Booker Prize.   "She says Roth is 'narrow.'"

In an essay in today's Guardian, Callil wrote that the prize should not have gone to a North American because Alice Munro won it last year--and, by the way, she said Munro deserved it. She said the prize should honor a writer in translation and she had "researched the writers of China, Africa, India, Pakistan, the Arab World, Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and more."

See what I mean? Nobelish.

In light of the fact that she hates Roth I am stunned that a compromise was not made, but her argument about North America is weak. It is nonsense to talk about North America as one culture and to group Canadian and American literature together. They are different.

She says her dislike of Roth is not a feminist distaste, but a dislike of his themes:

"There are great moments in Roth's work. He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there."

I respect her opinion of Roth, but disagree. American Pastoral is one of the great novels of the 20th century, or was last time I looked. A few years ago when I strove to read more male writers, I was equally impressed by one of Roth's earlier novels, Letting Go.

I don't understand how three judges could not have compromised. All for one and one for all! Right?

Corn in My Accent & Why I'd Rather Be Reading Ruth Suckow

2011-05-19T21:00:00.000-07:00

Living in the Midwest is delightful until you try to explain. Then you hedge.

Small towns and small cities. No bumper-to-bumper traffic and Rush Hour is a joke. Every day is Ride Your Bike to Work Day (if you have studded tires in the winter). You can get Starbucks AND that specialty of the midwest, pork tenderloin sandwiches. And there's nothin' happening after the 10:00 news. Lights out! No bags under anyone's eyes.

You can live quietly well.

When you said as a youth that you didn't belong here someone scornfully asked if you meant you were going to New York.

"I mean Bloomington, Indiana," I said. "I love university towns."

And I moved there. It's lush, hot, and very green. I loved it. I left to find work in a city, but I wish I'd stayed and been underemployed. It would have been rewarding to work at Howard's Bookstore, hang out at the Runcible Spoon, and attend films at Bear's Place. A professional! Why? I can't imagine what was going through my mind.

And then--you may ask--why return to the Corn Belt?

Suddenly my tone changes and it's a brisk Top 10 list of things to do: the State Fair(s), the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, RAGBRAI (a cross-Iowa bike ride sponsored by the Des Moines Register), Brown County in Indiana, visiting Willa Cather's childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska (actually a five-star activity), Amish country, birdwatching--think sandhill cranes--in Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska, the Black Hills, the Root River Trail in Lanesboro, MN., and...

I'm stumped.

"There's corn in my accent," as one of my students once said.

ALL IOWA READS. I've temporarily abandoned my All Iowa Reads book: Stephanie Kallos's Sing Them Home. The novel IS enjoyable, and I will return to it, but it's magic realism laced with cuteness, which I can't take right now, and a Welsh-Nebraskan funeral that goes on for 100 pages. And I have to finish Ulysses by Bloomsday, June 16.

An important midwestern book discussion is coming up on June 11 in Cedar Falls. The discussion of the little-known Ruth Suckow's novel The Folks is sponsored by the Ruth Suckow Society. I loved the book years ago! Of course I won't be at the meeting. Last year they forgot to notify me. And I had even paid $25 to be a member.

And yet I don't think it's a scam. :)

Suckow, born in Hawarden, Iowa, in 1892, was the daughter of a Congregational minister and lived in many small towns in Iowa during her childhood. Her short stories and novels, comparable to Bess Streeter Aldrich's and Willa Cather's, were popular in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.

She went to high school in Grinnell, Iowa, earned a bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Denver, and then studied beekeeping. She returned to Earlville, Iowa, and ran a small apiary for six years, spending her winters in Greenwich Village. She began to publish stories chronicling life in midwestern small towns.

H. L. Mencken, who edited some of Suckow’s early stories for Smart Set, encouraged her to write her first novel, Country People (1924).

Her 1942 novel, New Hope, is a fictional account of Hawarden, Iowa, at the turn of the century. It is in-print, published by University of Iowa Press. Her most famous is The Folks.

Their publication by the University of Iowa Press is largely due to efforts of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Society, which meets once a year to discuss one of her books, and this June will discuss The Folks.

Bleak House in an Adirondack Chair

2011-05-18T21:07:00.000-07:00

I picked up my copy of Bleak House, which I last blogged on in December, and snuck it out to the back yard to read in the sun. The Adirondack chair is split up the back and down the arms after being out all winter, but so far so good--it didn't actually collapse--and we will replace it with a cheap plastic chair.

Why Bleak House again?

It is Dickens's best novel. It is akin to a day at the spa. It is a desert-island book. I love the rich rhetorical language of Bleak House, the satire of the law (beware of the legal system and the people who abuse it), Dickens's endearing humor, empathy, and the heterogeneity of his truly original characters. I love and admire the courage and charm of Esther Summerson, whose narrative takes up a big chunk of BH.

The characters' relationship to the legal case Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has shuffled on for generations, defines and shapes the action of the novel.

"Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the case; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit."

Dickens, while trashing the injustice of Chancery law, teach us morals and how to behave. Morality is detached from the law as practiced in Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Victorian England. The heroes and heroines resist the bureaucracy and greed that drive the judicial system and the lawyers to divide and conquer the heirs and drain money through legal costs; but some very good, ethical characters, like the mad Miss Flyte, spend their lives haunting the court with their papers and (imaginary) cases. (Miss Flyte, an eccentric little woman who befriends the main characters, says she will free her pet birds when her case is settled, and wistfully hints that her friends should avoid Chancery.) Esther and Ada, two of the three wards of John Jarndyce of Bleak House, understand that Jarndyce and Jarndyce will never be resolved, but the third ward, the charming, weak Richard, cannot settle down to a profession because he believes that he will one day inherit money.

The villains are truly villainous, and some are connected with the law. The evil Mr. Tulkinghorn, a well-connected lawyer, misogynously persecutes the beautiful, silent, proud Lady Dedlock, the wife of one of his clients, for no better reason than that he can. Guppy, a law clerk, also attempts to blackmail her, and is abashed when his evidence burns. Some characters die, directly or indirectly, through their connection with the law.

Some of the characters have alter egos or doppelgängers, in David Copperfield. Esther, like David, is a writer, though her writing, of course, is private, while he becomes a professional. Skimpole, a cold, witty man who claims he is a "child" in money transactions, leads Richard into penury, actually kills a boy, and claims he has no responsibility for debts or to people like John Jarndyce who pay his debts. Skimploe is the doppelgänger of the eccentric, good-natured Mr. Micawber in DC, who is genuinely helpless about money matters and preaches the hazards of debt to David.

Dickens is not only is the best writer in the English language, but also promulgates ethics through this novel of social realism. He examines the complexity of the ties of family--the best families are artificial and extended, like John Jarndyce and his wards, or the Turveydrops after Caddie's marriage--the unjust persecution of unwed mothers and the poor, the hypocrisy of Mrs. Jellaby's philanthropy--and I can't help thinking of the tangled web of Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea (which I haven't read) and the two (?) people in Montana who are suing him for the price of his books, and though I don't know the facts of this sad case, a class-action suit by readers seems a greedy and frivolous response.

Bleak House is like life.

Looking for John Sayles's A Moment in the Sun

2011-05-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

I spent the afternoon looking for John Sayles's new novel, A Moment in the Sun.

Sayles is best known for his independent films, among them Return of the Secaucus 7, City of Hope, and Lone Star. He has won many awards at film festivals and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lone Star.

But he is also the author of novels and short stories, including Dillinger in Hollywood and The Anarchists' Convention. According to a reviewer in Publishers' Weekly, his new 955-page novel, published by McSweeney's, "recalls E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, Pynchon's Against the Day, and Dos Passos's USA trilogy."

OK, I'm in.

John Sayles

I respect Sayles. I respect McSweeney's. My husband cheered when he found out the book was not available for the Kindle or the Nook. I love long novels. And I need to read something by a man, because only 32% of the books I've read this year are by men. (My husband won't allow me to count Anna Karenina or Bleak House, because I've read them three times in five years.)

So let's hope Sayles's new book is one of my picks this summer. But I ran into trouble trying to find it.

My choices for bookstore-browsing are: Barnes & Noble.... Oh, and did I say Barnes & Noble? There is also Beaverdale Books, a tiny, clubby bookstore where you end up having to order everything.

Borders recently closed here.

And did I say we have Barnes & Noble?

There were no copies. I searched the store. I checked the computer. The clerk offered to order it for me.

I politely said no, explaining I wanted to LOOK at it before I bought it. He said he would order a copy anyway.

But it's puzzling. I doubt that I'm the only person in town who wants to read Sayles's novel. Does the local B&N have any say or is a kind of "B" stock automatically shipped to small cities?

I can't find an excerpt online, either. Not at Amazon or McSweeney's.

Here is a slapdash note to McSweeney's.

Dear McSweeney's:

Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree and Shakespeare Wrote for Money are brilliant. Dave Eggers's What Is the What fascinated my family a few years ago.

But I can't find a copy of A Moment in the Sun in XYZ town. Would it be possible to read a short excerpt online before I order it?

Oh, wait. I broke down and ordered it from Amazon.

Sincerely,

P.S. Amazon is running low: it says it will ship in 10-13 days.

The Iowa Center for the Book, Oprah's Book Club, & Other Book Group Hashings

2011-05-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

I am a bookaholic. I read all the time. I read discreetly when company is watching Lark Rise to Candleford. I read in the middle of spring cleaning, and when someone drops in I pretend there are not FIFTEEN BOOKS ON MY COFFEE TABLE. I read on bike trails during bike breaks and breakdowns, and when my husband's derailleur broke, I naturally read a book while he rode my bike at a dizzying pace to retrieve our car. I was not bookless today at the coffeehouse, where, despite the hiss of espresso and steamed milk, I began Stephanie Kallos's Sing Them Home, the All Iowa Reads book.

In 2003 The Iowa Center for the Books developed the All Iowa Reads Program. Every year a novel is selected, and the idea is that Iowans read it and public libraries host discussions. The Center tries to select readable, accessible books with a midwest connection, and most of the books have been pretty good. (The first two were crap, but perhaps they realized they'd underestimated readers, because the quality rose.)

They are:

2011. Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos
2010. Driftless by David Rhodes
2009. The Rope Walk by Carrie Brown
2008. Digging to America by Anne Tyler
2007. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio by Jeffrey Kluger
2006. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2005. The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
2004. Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken
2003. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger

Sing Them Home is very enjoyable. Set in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, it is lyrical and engaging, laced with magical realism, reminiscent of Garcia Marquez and Louise Erdrich (though not, so far, quite in that class). Part One--"The Tornado Storm Project:--begins with a storm. Everyone in town is disturbed by the barometric pressure.

"There are grumpy toddlers, too, throwing tantrums, caterwauling in unison. Family pets all over town are nervous and misbehaving--fluttering, howling, hissing, gnawing, mauling lace curtains, and mangling good leather shoes even though they know better. Premenstrual girls are arguing with their mothers, moping in front of the television, or daydreaming on polyester bedspreads behind violently slammed doors.... Afternoon trysts are not going well. Noses tickle without relief. The carpenters in town curse and measure again, curse again, measure again."

Mayor Llewellyn Jones insists on playing golf in the heart of a storm. Even the town's dead--who witness the townspeople's mistakes from the cemetery, and, between thunderclaps are chanting, "Cornhusker one...Cornhuskers two...Cornhuskers three"--wonder what Jones is thinking. He is struck by lightning and, as he dies, his golfball arcs into the sky and never falls to the ground. And when the Jones children return to their hometown, I assume they must come to terms with their history.

As I considered the many state reading programs today, I wondered how much influence Oprah had on them. She started her book club in 1996 and won a National Book Award in 1999. Certainly she inspired book groups across the country and may well have galvanized the formation of One Book programs this century.

I used to belong to a very good book co-op book group (which I started!), where we took turns picking books and leading discussions. I also attended an Oprah book group at a chain bookstore. The readers were nice women, and the Oprah picks were excellent. They included Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, Toni Morrison's Song of Soloman, Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Sue Miller's When I Was Gone. Then Oprah cut back--who could blame her?--so the Oprah book club at the bookstore floundered, desultorily selected a few losers like Anna Quindlen's The Blessing and a couple of chick lit titles, and, without the organization of Oprah, faded away.

When Oprah goes off the air, we won't have a TV heroine to remind people to read. The women who attended the Oprah book group at the store were already readers, but I guarantee that some were reading better books because of Oprah. And think of all the non-readers who read them.

And so the book groups fold. Borders has closed and the readers are all online now.

What next?

Bloomsday Confessions & an Incidental Buffalo Travelogue

2011-05-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

Bloomsday Buffalo

One year my husband and I attended Bloomsday events at a pub in Buffalo.

Bloomsday, June 16th, is an annual celebration of James Joyce's Ulysses. Of course it's best to attend in Dublin, but if you live in the U.S. you can still have a wonderful time. The events of Leopold Bloom's day (Ulysses takes place on June 16) are celebrated in at least sixty countries. There are readings, re-enactments, walks, one-act plays, Irish dance, and more.

We were passing through Buffalo, visiting friends. Buffalo is a lakefront city, known for Rust Belt unemployment and the iniquitous Love Canal. What they don't tell you is that there's a gorgeous lakefront, a city park called Delaware Park (350 acres near Delaware Avenue, Buffalo's Mansion Row), many excellent art museums, a Frank Lloyd Wright historic house, a great public library, and the Anchor Bar, home of the Buffalo chicken wings..

There is also an enthusiastic James Joyce group.

The year we were there it was 40 degrees. It was global colding that summer. In the bar there were people milling and thronging, drinking beer, leafing through books, and listening intently to enthusiastic readings by volunteers on the small stage. You could feel their ardor.

We're in the Midwest now. There are Bloomsday events in Kansas City and Chicago, but I've been looking on the internet in vain for closer events in Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, or Wisconsin, so tell me if you know of any.

This year my goal is to finish Ulysses before Bloomsday (which may end up as a quiet day of reading in our home).

I thought there was plenty of time. I couldn't find my book, so I started reading the 673-page Project Gutenberg edition. It was eerie, but it didn't feel right. My hair was practically standing on end. At first I thought it was the e-book layout. Then I flipped back to the beginning. And of course the Project Gutenberg edition is "based on the pre-1923 edition." Passages have been elided.

My copy!

My husband told me he would buy me a new copy if I made ravioli tomato soup. While I was busy chopping vegetables, he found my book. It's not the Gabler edition, which they use in Buffalo, but the 1961 edition. The passages I remembered are here.

I'm amazed by what Joyce went through to get his book published. Sylvia Beach, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore in Paris, published Ulysses in 1922. Joyce later signed on with another publisher, leaving her in debt. Then there were the obscenity trials. My copy has the 1933 decision of the "U.S. District Court by Judge John M. Woolsey lifting the ban on the entry of Ulysses into the United States."

I should probably read some criticism this year, too. Any suggestions? (Something under $20.)

Blogger Outage & Notes on Tiger Hills

2011-05-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, I took the night off from blogging. No, I don't wear pink.

A Blogger outage is not necessarily a bad thing.

I planned to write a blog on Sarita Mandanna's Tiger Hills last night. I clicked on the sign-in button. Nothing. I learned that Blogger was "unavailable." Maintenance. One of those slots when Google mechanics tinker and tune. I cheerfully went about my business and smugly got in an extra hour of reading.

Today. Same thing. Only worse. My blog entry on Kipps disappeared.

I read a couple of Blogger statements about a (possibly bungled) routine repair job. Blogger said it temporarily deleted entries posted Wednesday. And it said it would restore the posts.

And it did! My Kipps post showed up again a few minutes ago.

And a good thing, too. Because I didn't back up the post. I'm careless when it comes to keeping copies of blog entries.

But it also teaches you what's important. Would it matter if my post on Kipps disappeared? Yes, to me. Not to anyone else. Except in the sense that someone might visit the blog and decide to read Kipps. It's not, however, a stampede kind of situation. It's not: Pentagon down! Or: Elizabeth Arden down! (I'm more concerned about the latter than the former.)

I could have written on my computer last night. Heavens, what is the computer for? But it struck me that I had very little to say about Sarita Mandanna's readable new novel, Tiger Hills, a plot-driven Indian family saga reminiscent in parts of Gone with the Wind. I wrote a few notes.

Here they are:

Tiger Hills was a best-seller in India and a Channel 4 Book TV pick in the UK. It is easy to see why. I picked up a copy at random (I liked the cover) to read in the B&N cafe and ended up buying it. I raced through the opening pages of this engaging novel, set in Coorg in Southern India from 1878-.1940 The first 100 pages are charming and lyrical, introducing the main characters, Devi, the first girl to be born in her family in over sixty years, and Devanna, a shy brainy neighbor boy whose friendship with Devi helps him cope after his mother's suicide. Throughout the novel, comedy and romance are interlaced with tragedy. And Devi's and Devanna's stories are intertwined.

From birth, Devi is bold, mischievous, beautiful, and spoiled, while Devanna is quiet and studious. Mandanna's buoyant narrative sweetly skims the border of magic realism.

“Devi had only to frown and her grandmother, Tayi, would come running, bribing her with salted gooseberries and cubes of jaggery until she deigned to smile again....When the family realized that Devi was fond of fish, come rain or shine, Tayi would be at the weekly shanty so early that the vendors would still be setting out their wares.”

Then, at a “tiger wedding,” a rite honoring Devanna’s cousin, Machu, a hunter who has killed a tiger, Devi falls in love with Machu. Years later, she sets out to seduce him at a religious festival. Devanna, who is also in love with Devi, is oblvious and assumes he will marry her. But the selfish subliminal homoerotic love of a priest at the local mission school destroys Devanna's future. Wanting to keep him nearby, he destroys a letter suggesting Devanna go to Oxford and directs him to an Indian medical school instead. By that act, the priest ensures that Devanna will endure years of suffering which will, in turn, wreck the lives of Devi and Machu. (Imperialists have a genius for ruining lives in India; a selfish seductive Englishwoman later ruins the life of Machu's son.) And the horrifying "ragging" (repeated beating and rape of Devanna that no one reports ) at the Indian medical school is so terrifying that I almost couldn't read it.

A very sad novel. I had to stop in the second hundred pages and almost didn't finish the novel because I was so depressed by what happened to Devanna. Somehow the essentially romantic framework of the novel seemed the wrong place to encounter tragedy: it shifts abruptly from near-magic realism and romance to brutal descriptions of violence. Oddly enough, it is Devi, not Devanna, who turns into a monster (and she, of course, has her reasons, but Devanna's destruction was more complete.) Mandanna doesn't hesitate to turn Devi, a once willful girl, into a selfish, cruel, and insensitive woman. She acquires a coffee estate and makes a lot of money, but is ruthless in her personal relations and wrecks several lives through her emotional abuse. She is a terrible mother, wasting all her affection on Machu's child by another woman and disliking her own son. The son she favors is spoiled; the other loses his confidence through her abuse. And Devanna, the real victim, remains in the background, horrified tht the tragedy that destroyed him so utterly wrecked Devi.

The impact of Devi's cruelty on the next generation is shattering. History repeats itself in a way. People pay heavily for involvement with her. But there is redemption.

Mandanna's writing is exuberant, the plot is fast-paced, and one cares about the characters. I respected the complexity of the different threads of the novel. An absorbing summer read.