About one month down, roughly three to go to get through the 83rd Legislative Session! It turns out session with a baby is a very different ballgame than session with a toddler, so the whole family is adjusting in real time.
In Books…
- Last Night at the Viper Room: The subtitle on this one (“River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind”) made me expect something that was about the Hollywood of the era examined through the lens of the life, films, and death of River Phoenix. That turned out to be a mistaken apprehension. Instead, this book serves overwhelmingly as a glowing biography of River, who lived an atypical life for anyone, much less a movie star. Born to hippies John and Arlyn Bottom (who eventually changed their surname to Phoenix) and followed by four other children, River spent many of his childhood years in Venezuela with the Children of God cult, infamous for its encouragement of sexual behavior in children. Despite acknowledging that River often lied in interviews, author Gavin Edwards decides to regard as true the claim that River made to have been molested at age 4, locating this as the center of the trauma that the actor was trying to bury with drugs. River’s brother Joaquin has refuted the claim, and honestly the childhood he had would have been traumatizing either way: both before and after the family left the group, he and his siblings sang on street corners to earn enough money for five children and two adults to scrape by. The pressure he was put under to earn what he and his loved ones needed to survive continued once they returned to the United States, as River started to appear in commercials and television shows. He had a real and untutored talent: Stand By Me, of course, made him a star, and he was just 18 when he was nominated for an Oscar for Running on Empty. He never spent a single day in a classroom, either for regular school or acting lessons, and Edwards traces his addictive behavior to his instinctual Method acting technique…and a desire to bond with his increasingly distant father, an alcoholic. What seems to have started out with booze and weed as a young teenager turned into an on-and-off heroin habit, and while Phoenix was capable of delivering great performances still (as in My Own Private Idaho), he became increasingly less engaged with his film career. He was only 23 when, as many know, he died after overdosing on a speedball at The Viper Room, a club infamous for being owned and regularly frequented by Johnny Depp in his peak indie-cool Tim Burton era. There are asides, every so often, about Hollywood at large and River’s contemporaries, but they are separated by long segments devoted exclusively to River. There are so many places this could have gone to root itself more deeply. The long history of the exploitative nature of child stardom, and the ways parent-child dynamics in families even much more stable than the Phoenixes can go awry when your 14 year-old is paying your rent. There are some nods to the drug culture at the time, with references to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the rise of “heroin chic”, but the connections are only surface-level. Similarly shallow references are made to the changing ecosystem of the movie industry, with Quentin Tarantino and the Weinsteins beginning their ascent. But it’s never tied together, never critically examined. Nor, for that measure, is River himself, who is portrayed as an open-hearted, sensitive idealist, in an almost “too pure for this world” way. Apart from not being what I wanted it to be, I just don’t think it succeeds in creating a compelling narrative, so I can’t recommend it.
- Orbital: The International Space Station orbits the Earth sixteen times every twenty four hours. Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel follows one day in the lives of six astro/cosmonauts, who are Russian, American, British, Japanese, and Italian, and whose vessel is never explicitly named as the ISS but obviously is intended to be. They float. They think about their loved ones. Chie, the Japanese astronaut, learns that her mother has died and she will not be back in time for the funeral rites. They make reports back down to earth about the progress of an enormous, destructive typhoon. As a different team of astronauts make a journey to the moon, many on the ISS reflect on their professional envy, their childhood dreams of stepping on that satellite unlikely to ever come to fruition even as it brought them to their current situation. They all watch a movie together. It’s a meditative book, focusing less on the astronauts themselves than the reflections prompted by their experiences watching the earth from orbit. It recounts moments both small (the way they all share food, despite strictures against so doing) and large (watching the typhoon tear across populated areas), emphasizing the power of human connection, despite or even because of the pure chance that creates those connections. Harvey’s writing leans heavily on the wonder of it all, the way the astronauts come to find their daily experiences becoming mundane but the sight of the pale blue dot from their windows retains the power to shock them back into awe at the perspective they get to see, one beyond the understanding of all but a very lucky few. If I’m being completely honest, I’d say I’d hoped for this book to be mind-blowing and was slightly disappointed to find it merely quite good. Despite its abbreviated length (only a little over 200 pages), by the end it managed to feel like it was getting a bit repetitive. There’s a loveliness to the prose but it taps the same well over and over. I liked it but did not love it.
- Doctor Zhivago: Yuri Zhivago is a traumatized child when the book bearing his name begins, having found himself an orphan after the loss of his beloved mother. His father, a once-wealthy man, had left them behind long ago to spend all his money chasing pleasure. He finds himself in the charge of his uncle Nikolai, who eventually places him with a Moscow family, the Gromekos. Yuri is raised as a beloved member of that comfortable family, eventually marrying their daughter Antonina and completing his studies to become a doctor. Another unfortunate child brought to Moscow is Larissa Guichard. Her father is also dead, leaving her and her brother in the care of their mother Amalia. Amalia is the mistress of the powerful and well-connected lawyer Komarovsky, who helps the family establish themselves while also starting to groom Larissa (or Lara, for short). As she grows into a beautiful teenager, he begins to abuse her and fancies himself in love with her. She does not have feelings for him and in order get out of a situation she is increasingly unhappy in, throws herself into marriage with Pasha Antipov, the son of an imprisoned revolutionary who has long-since adored her. Both are starting to find some stability and happiness when their lives are upended by the Russian Revolution. Pasha feels trapped in his marriage to Lara despite his love for her and escapes into military service, where he goes missing. Lara trains as a nurse and searches for him, winding up working in the same camp alongside Zhivago, where they finally become acquainted as part of the same medical team after having had glancing encounters in their earlier lives in Moscow. A few years later, Zhivago and his wife and children travel to a remote town in the Ural Mountains where they once owned a large estate, which has of course been nationalized but where they hope to escape from the perils of the city to live simply on the land. Lara has also ended up there with her daughter after Pasha’s reported death, and it is then that the two begin an affair, which is broken off when Zhivago is kidnapped by a band of Red partisans to serve as their doctor in their continued warfare against the Whites. He escapes, however, and is reunited with Lara…but their happiness cannot last. This is certainly an important novel, but for me, it wasn’t an especially good one. For as much time as the narrative spends with Lara and especially Yuri, their inner lives are not well-developed. As a reader who enjoys character, I was hoping to be immersed in Yuri and Lara’s perspectives of a fascinating time, when their world shifted irrevocably under their feet. How do they find the strength to go on without succumbing to despair? What do they really think of the battles between Red and White? In this book so reknowned for their romance, why, even, do they love each other? These questions aren’t ever really answered, because what drives Yuri and Lara doesn’t seem to be what Pasternak is interested in exploring in his narrative. Instead, what I got from it was a portrait of the chaos and trials of living in the post-Revolutionary world as an adult who had come of age before it had happened. Like presumably many Russians, there was tentative hope for the world that could have emerged from the ashes, destined to be forever unrealized because the world that actually came to be took a decidedly worse turn. I’m not sure if it was my translation (I read the Peavar/Volokhonsky), but I felt like both the plot and prose were resisting my attempts to enjoy them. The narrative doesn’t have a lot of momentum, and the writing lacked a sense of sweep that would have given its epic ambitions more oomph. Like many Russian novels, this one will likely be confusing to those without context around Russian naming conventions. I’m relatively familiar with them and even I noted at least a few times when the same character was referred to by two different diminutives within just a sentence or two. I did learn much more about the time of the civil wars following the Revolution than I had before. It’s not that I don’t appreciate having read this, I do. I just wish I’d actually liked it more.
- The Favorites: Katarina Shaw is only four years old when she watches, rapt, as American ice dancer Sheila Lin and her partner, Kirk Lockwood, win a gold medal at the Olympics. She begins skating shortly thereafter, dreaming of being just like Sheila…even more so when she makes an unexpected comeback to the next Games, snagging another gold despite having become a mother of two in between. Kat wants to be an ice dancer just like her hero, but her small rink outside of Chicago is not teeming with potential partners. At least, not until she’s nine and Heath Rocha, a foster kid at the rink for a hockey program for underprivileged youth, spots her from the stands and is entranced. The two team up, despite him having no resources at all and Kat’s family having scant few themselves, and fall in love, bonded close together by Kat’s goal of skating glory and their hardscrabble circumstances. They manage to qualify for US Nationals when they’re 16, hoping against hope they can leverage their performance skills (he, especially, has some real deficits in the actual skating) and electric chemistry to grab the attention of a sponsor. Instead, they attract the attention of Sheila Lin herself…now the coach of her twin children, Bella and Garrett. Lin offers them a place in her exclusive ice dance school in Los Angeles, training alongside the siblings. Saying yes changes their course of their lives forever as they start to rise in the ranks, climbing ever closer to the Olympics and maybe even the gold medal Kat has wanted as long as she can remember. But nothing is fair in love, war, or figure skating. A retelling of Wuthering Heights, Layne Fargo mixes in a dash of Taylor Jenkins Reid, a bit of the dynamism of Canadian ice dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, and some Tonya Harding vibes to freshen up the story for the modern era. I read Wuthering Heights back in high school and didn’t especially enjoy it. Its depiction of a set of characters who make each other romantically miserable felt melodramatic even as a teenager. so I enjoyed the ways Fargo changed some of the dynamics within the narrative with her book. Kat and Bella Lin are rivals, and Heath is a component of that rivalry, but ultimately they compete more over their shared ambition to win everything they can as skaters. Kat’s relationship to Heath is profoundly important to her, but achieving what she can on the ice is even more so. It’s definitely a page-turner, the oral history plot device and relatively short chapters give it a lot of momentum. But honestly, I failed to really get drawn into the story the way I was hoping, in part because of the relatively shallowness of the characters. Each has a few defining features but the only one whose head we really get into is Kat’s, where we find little but drive towards gold. As a person who does seriously watch figure skating, I was prepared to be irritated by an unrealistic depiction of the sport, but though there are some relatively minor quibbles, Fargo gets the broad strokes right. It’s an enjoyable read, perfect for the beach or an airplane!
In Life…
- My sixth session began: I honestly do enjoy my job but it’s been hard. Since C abandoned his nap several months ago, he goes to bed very early so there are days when I hardly even get to see him and I feel a lot of guilt even though I know it will be over soon.
- C is three!: He’s sweet and silly and growing so so fast! It’s hard to believe that it has been three years already since he was born. It feels like just yesterday that he was fresh and new and had no idea what it meant to be alive in the world and now he’s a whole person with his own thoughts that he feels very free to share with us (including demands for “Abracadabra” by Lady Gaga)! I can’t wait to find out who he continues to become.
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