A Month In The Life: October 2024

Finally finally it has cooled down. We got some proper fall starting around mid-month, and even got a special guest appearance by the Northern Lights all the way down in Reno! The time change is just around the corner, family photos have been taken…the close of the year is increasingly nigh!

In Books…

• Shanghailanders: Told backwards in connected vignettes, this book relates the story of the Shanghai-based Yang family. Father Leo, who is Chinese, is an extremely successful engineer and businessman, while mother Eko is a Japanese woman raised in France whose artistic skill has built her a small but devoted following. Their three daughters are Yumi, bossy and mean, Yoko, independent and rational, and Kiko, artistically inclined like her mother. Portions of their stories are unveiled in each chapter, beginning in the future when the daughters are young women and going back to the wedding day when Leo and Eko, just starting out, joined their lives. There are a few chapters focusing on people outside of but involved with the family as well, their driver and their nanny. It is, for the most part, a quiet sort of book. There is drama in the stories, but a restraint to their feeling and the way that they are told that I found mostly effective but wished had occasionally been pitched up. It worked for my brain, but I wanted it to reach out and grab my emotions more. The storytelling structure also robbed it of some of its momentum…there is one story, for example, involving an incident with a gun that I found very compelling, but since the overall narrative is told backwards, I knew already that despite what seems like it could and would be a source of enormous tension just gets folded into the family’s mostly smooth life. We don’t spend enough time really burrowing into heads of any of the characters for it to feel like it reached its full potential as a character piece. We get tantalizing dips into their psyches only to move on too quickly to the next story. I was a bit puzzled by the choice to set the beginning in the near future without actually exploring what that future might look like beyond a few throwaway mentions of rising sea levels, autonomous cars, and some improved high-speed train technology. I was also confused about the title, which led me to expect a book that would feel more rooted in Shanghai, but much more of the Yang family’s experience seemed to be that of just…very wealthy people in a cosmopolitan city rather than localized much at all. I thought Juli Min’s prose quality was lovely, controlled but evocative, especially about the relationships between sisters, and it’s a promising debut. But it failed to ever become more than the sum of its parts.
• The Best of Everything: A bit like Sex and the City meets Mad Men, this book follows four young women who all work at Fabian, a fictional publishing company, in the 1950s. The lead character is Caroline, a smart and ambitious Radcliffe graduate ready to throw herself into her new job (and new life in New York City) in part to help her forget her heartbreak at being jilted by her college sweetheart fiancé Eddie after his post-graduation trip overseas was followed shortly by a wedding to another girl. Her roommate is Gregg, an aspiring actress who takes the publishing job to pay the bills but soon leaves to pursue both the stage and her tenuous romance with a Broadway producer full-time. Caroline’s best friend at the office is April, as beautiful as she is naive when she arrives from Colorado, also with token dreams of acting that are quickly abandoned. And April’s neighbor down the hall is Barbara, who married her high school boyfriend at 18, was pregnant by 19, and then was abandoned and divorced by her husband by 20, leaving her to care for both her widowed mother and young daughter mostly on her own, The work is a life raft for young women wanting to find success both professionally and romantically in a big city, but it comes with perils of its own, most especially in the form of lecherous bosses with wandering hands. Despite some offensive stereotyping that feels unfortunately pretty standard for the period in which it was written, this read as surprisingly modern in many ways: April’s boyfriend Dexter is a total fuckboy, Gregg is completely hung up on an emotionally unavailable man (who, to be fair, is very open about his emotional unavailability), Caroline dates a nice guy she knows she should be more into but just doesn’t have any real spark with, and Barbara finds herself head over heels for a man who is already spoken for. What feels jarring is how intensely these women, in their early 20s, are focused on marriage…a focus the novel accepts, with characters literally dropping out of the narrative once they’ve found a husband. Their story, apparently, is now concluded. The novel is also bloated, running to almost 450 pages when it could have lost 100 or so and been the stronger for it. We spend entirely too much time with April as she refuses to see that her boyfriend doesn’t actually love her at all, beyond the point where it becomes exasperating. It’s really only Caroline and Barbara who have storylines with much nuance. Gregg’s plotline is so truncated it could have been removed entirely. If you’re looking for a “women’s novel” in this rough timeline, seek out either The Group or The Valley of the Dolls, both of which feel much more fun. This one dragged too much for me to be able to recommend it.
• Romantic Outlaws: What Mary Wollstonecraft is most known for, these days, are two things: having written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and for having giving birth to Mary Godwin, who went on to become Mary Shelley, wife of poet Percy Shelley and author of Frankenstein. The elder Mary died within days of the birth of the younger, her second child but her first legitimate one. If (like me) this is as much or maybe even more than you already knew about both Marys, Charlotte Gordon’s work will introduce you to two legitimately fascinating women. Gordon structures her book in alternating chapters following each Mary, which helps her build the parallels between them: each one followed her heart and made choices that were wildly outside the bounds of what was considered socially acceptable for women in their time. Wollstonecraft, radicalized by her father’s abuse of his entire family into believing that women are people and should be treated like same, made a living as a teacher and then as a writer, went to Paris to see the French Revolution firsthand, refused to leave even when the heads started coming off, fell in love and had a child outside of marriage, published several successful books…and then came back to her native England, where she fell in love with a fellow radical political philosopher William Godwin. They married when she became pregnant despite such an action being outside of both of their ideals. Mary Godwin grew up revering the memory of her lost mother, fought with her stepmother, ran away with her father’s already-married benefactor Percy Shelley at only 16 years old (and brought her stepsister along), had a child out of wedlock and lived through that child’s death, had a second child out of wedlock, made friends with Lord Byron, wrote Frankenstein, got married in an ill-fated attempt to help her husband look more respectable as he fought to gain custody of his children after his first wife’s suicide, argued constantly with her stepsister who almost certainly at some point was sleeping with Percy, had more children, lost more children, and then lived through her husband’s death by drowning. Both women found themselves on the outs with polite society. Both women made some objectively bad decisions. But both were remarkable in their refusal to bow to the social pressure to conform to expectations despite the very real consequences they experienced for that refusal: money woes, in particular, were constant parts of their lives. The structure, switching back and forth between Wollstonecraft and Shelley, worked well for me. Not only did it make clearer the similarities in the ways the two women chose to live their lives, but it also helped keep the book from feeling like it was dragging…always a risk when the page count gets over 600 (it’s close to 550 pages of actual text before references). Despite its length, though, I found Gordon’s writing refreshingly unstuffy. She refuses to engage in speculation for periods where the record is thinner, but neither does she indulge in it wildly. She presents the most supported ideas, presents some short arguments for which of those she believes and why, and moves on. I can’t pretend it didn’t start dragging near the end or never bored me, but for the most part it was lively, interesting, and informative. I enjoyed it and would recommend it!
• You Should Have Known: Grace Reinhart Sachs has a nice litle life. She is married to Jonathan, a pediatric oncologist who manages to remain generally upbeat despite his emotionally demanding job. Their preteen son Henry is smart and polite. She enjoys and is good at her work as a marriage counselor…so good, in fact, that she’s just written a book, called (naturally) “You Should Have Known”, about how people ignore the negative information in front of their faces early on about the people who become their partners and doom themselves to unhappy relationships. That little life implodes spectacularly when one day, she gets the news that Malaga, a woman she had only a passing acquaintance with, and whose son is a fourth-grader in the same ritzy prep school where Henry attends seventh grade, was murdered. Her husband is out of town at a conference, and as she tries and fails to get ahold of him, she is increasingly uneasy that he isn’t getting in touch with her…and increasingly unsure that he is where she thinks he is at all. Things develop more or less predictably from there. In a basic plot sense, this is a fairly typical domestic thriller: a murder, a suddenly missing-in-action husband, a double life slowly revealed. But it doesn’t necessarily seem like Jean Hanff Korelitz was intending to write a traditional thriller. It moves too slowly, and there aren’t nearly enough cliffhangers. Instead, she seems to mostly want to place the reader in the head of this particular woman experiencing this particular series of events, more of a character piece than the tightly plotted elements that usually accompany a thriller. Some of what she does works well: I think the choice to keep Jonathan’s voice almost entirely out of the narrative (we do not “see” them interact except for a few banal texts relatively early in the proceedings) is a successful one. It creates a kind of claustrophobia, getting us stuck much more firmly in Grace’s head, and lets the reader imagine the way he might have deceived his smart, observant wife over the course of their nearly two decades of marriage, where trying to create the kind of interactions that would make it make sense could have been extremely challenging. As I was reading it, I found it engaging enough to hold my interest and keep me turning pages. But there was too much that fell apart on further reflection. Henry is bafflingly even-keeled about the sudden unexplained disappearance of his father, his mother’s obvious distress, the whispers of his peers, and his eventual removal from everything about the home environment he once knew. Even a “good kid” is going to have a meltdown in there at some point. Grace is also frustratingly passive. Despite her character being centered around her keen perception, every time she’s presented with an opportunity to ask more questions to someone who clearly knows something she doesn’t (the school’s headmaster, her husband’s former colleague), she literally walks or even runs away from them. Even after being interrogated by the police and presented with evidence of her husband’s duplicity, she looks into the study where he stores his paperwork and…doesn’t go inside to see what she might find. There is burying your head in the sand as a defense mechanism, but what Grace is doing is on a different level. The eventually revealed story behind her best friend having distanced herself also makes no real sense. The pacing is very strange. We spend nearly a quarter of the book’s length on Grace’s participation on a committee putting together a fundraiser for Henry’s school…some of which does the valuable work of establishing who Grace is and the circles in which she and her husband move, but much of which is just excess detail that doesn’t actually amount to anything narrative-wise. A halfway decent beach/airplane read, but not enough there there to really recommend it.
• Death on the Nile: This is my second Agatha Christie mystery, and while I did not find it quite as good as the first one I read (Murder on the Orient Express), it was an enjoyable read. Linnet Ridgeway has what seems like a perfect life: she is young, beautiful, incredibly rich, and being courted by one of England’s most eligible bachelors. But when her good friend Jacqueline, who doesn’t have any money, comes by with her fiancee Simon to ask for a job for the latter, well…one thing leads to another and only a few months later Linnet and Simon are married and headed to Egypt for their honeymoon. But they have a problem: Jacqueline is turning up everywhere they go and Linnet in particular is badly rattled. The newlyweds (and their sad, angry shadow) find themselves on the same Nile River cruise as detective Hercule Poirot, hoping for a relaxing vacation. Instead, one dramatic evening ends with Jacqueline having shot at Simon, who is wounded in the leg, and when the morning comes, it is discovered that Linnet is dead from a shot to the head. But the person with the best motive (Jacqueline) has been monitored all night. So who’s done it? Only Hercule can figure it out, and he’d better hurry because Linnet is not the only one to meet an untimely end. This felt very similar to my previous read in this series: a wide cast of characters with an intriguing set of backstories, red herrings, a “closed set”, some cringy racial stuff that was all too typical for a book written by this sort of author in that particular time. It’s an engaging book and easily held my interest with little clues coming up here and there. I am terrible at figuring out the end game and this was no different, I had no idea what the solution was going to be. It does not aspire to be anything more than an appealing mystery novel (very plot-forward, light on character development, solid dialogue but otherwise no great shakes on the prose front) but it succeeds at what it’s trying to do. I liked it and I would recommend it!

In Life…

• I turned 39 (and so did my husband): This is really only remarkable in that next year marks 40. I’m finding it curious how little I really care about that, at least thus far. A milestone, I guess, but like…just another number. I used to be pretty into birthdays but I’ve just found them less and less something to make a fuss about as time goes on. I do like cards (and let’s be real, presents) and feeling a little bit special but I don’t need a fancy dinner or a party. Who knows, maybe by this time next year I’ll be disavowing these words and writing all about my big to-do!
• I went to Skate America: Another skating season, another competition! Though neither of us were all that jazzed to go hang out in suburban Dallas, Canada’s competition was being held in Nova Scotia which would have been a travel nightmare for me, so off to Allen, Texas it was for me and my best friend. The skating was a blast! Seeing Bradie Tennell return to competition, watching Ilia Malinin stretch his already incredible talent in new ways, finding some new pairs teams to be interested in, my bestie and I showing each other the best comments on Twitter/Reddit…live skating is always really fun! Allen, however, is not a place I ever intend to return.