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Book 109: Seating Arrangements



“Transformation captivated Livia, but she was squeamish at the thought of changing her own life. To change would be to admit she’d been going about things all wrong. Her people noticed change, discussed it, speculated about its superficiality, its vanity. The only kind of change they understood was the flickering skin of the octopus, blending in with its surroundings, or the real estate flipping of the hermit crab, always shopping for a slightly roomier prison.”

Dates read: December 1-9, 2016

Rating: 5/10

I went to a selective university, where I changed my major right before my senior year and finished all of my degree requirements in two semesters. I took the LSAT with no prep classes. I went to law school. I took the Michigan bar exam (with prep classes, which is definitely why I passed it). I was a practicing litigator. I’ve made two cross-country moves to places where I knew virtually no one. All of these were stressful. And I’d do all of them again before I’d plan another wedding.

Don’t get me wrong, my wedding ended up being lovely and really fun (and I have the pictures to prove it thanks to my amazing photographer Lauren Lindley, who I will shamelessly plug because it’s my blog and I can and she travels everywhere to shoot, you guys!), but all the intricacies of planning it were awful. Interestingly enough, it’s not the bride in Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements who’s struggling during the wedding weekend. Even seven months pregnant, Daphne Van Meter is laid-back and serene. It’s her family that are the ones having a hard time.

Her father Winn is obsessed with both his failure to attain membership in an exclusive golf club and his long-standing crush on Daphne’s friend and bridesmaid, Agnes. Meanwhile, younger sister Livia is still reeling from a bad breakup. Another bridesmaid, Dominique, is trying to figure out if she still belongs in the New England WASPy world of her boarding school youth, when she and Daphne became friends. Over the course of the long weekend, the tensions roiling beneath the surface of the otherwise picturesque island gathering begin to escape their usual repression. There’s even a literal explosion!

Let’s start with the good. Shipstead’s prose is graceful and insightful, neither spare nor flowery but confident and perceptive. Quality writing can make up for a lot of ills, and Shipstead’s is damn good. The characters she creates feel real, and Livia and Dominique are sympathetic and interesting…especially Livia, whose raw heartbreak reminded me of my own tumultuous collegiate relationship. But where the book was held back from greatness or even real re-readability was its focus on Winn, by far the least compelling character in the book. Like the others, he’s drawn with psychological verisimilitude: everything she reveals about why he is the way he is makes sense. But that doesn’t change the fact that the way he is is unpleasant and off-putting, and I didn’t enjoy reading about him. Since his storyline makes up about 40-50% of the book, that was a real problem. I’m not necessarily opposed to unlikable characters, but I want them to be complicated and interesting. Winn is just a pompous social-climbing blowhard going through a midlife crisis. There’s nothing special there. For people who enjoy books about rich people behaving badly, you’ll probably like this book. And for the rest of us, there’s still a lot of good here. But for me, it mostly made me more interested in reading Shipstead’s other work.

Tell me, blog friends…do you like reading about rich people behaving badly?

One year ago, I was reading: The Guineveres

Two years ago, I was reading: Hood

Book 103: Invisible Man



“For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn’t worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they hardly saw me, that they would have begged the pardon of Jack the Bear, never glancing his way if the bear happened to be walking along minding his business. It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable…”

Dates read: November 10-13, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Awards/Lists: National Book Award, Time All-Time 100 Novels, New York Times bestseller, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

I’ve never been followed around a store by a salesperson. I’ve never been afraid when I’ve been pulled over. No one has ever treated me like I don’t belong pretty much anywhere I’ve ever wanted to go. No one has assumed that I speak for all other people that look like me. These, and countless other indignities I don’t have to suffer, are facets of my white privilege. I will never really know what it’s like to live as anything other than a white woman, and in the interest of learning about what life is like outside of those confines, I’ve found myself more and more drawn lately to stories about experiences of people of color.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shouldn’t be confused with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. While the sci-fi classic deals with literal invisibility, the unnamed black man who narrates his story in Ellison’s novel is only figuratively invisible. We meet him at the end of his story, living in a New York City basement that he’s lit up brightly by siphoning power from the utility. Ellison doesn’t belabor the metaphor…right from the start, the narrator tells us that it’s his status as a black man in mid-century America that renders him effectively invisible.

The novel is made up of his story and how he came to recognize his own non-entity status. And it hits you in the gut right away: the first incident he relates from his life is when he’s awarded a scholarship from a prestigious philanthropic organization in the small Southern town in which he grows up. He’s invited to a country club dinner to make a speech about his scholarship, but once he gets there, he and several other young black men are forced to fight each other and be humiliated chasing for electrified coins. Only after he’s been degraded is he allowed to give his speech and receive the scholarship and the briefcase. It’s a horrifying sequence, incredibly difficult to read, and the book is just getting started.

This experience, and the ones that the narrator has at a black college and then in New York are rooted in a fundamental denial of his humanity. He’s entertainment, or a tool, or an experiment, or just disposable. He struggles and fights and gets up after being knocked down over and over again, but he can’t escape the fact of his race and the broad social structures designed to keep him and other black men firmly in the underclass. And while things have gotten better today, it’s maybe not as much better as we’d like to think.

This is a hard book to read. Not because of the quality…Ellison’s writing is incredible. But it’s heavy and dark and the unending awfulness of what the narrator is subjected to is a lot to get your head around. I usually try not to get heavily into politics on this blog, but I read this book right after the 2016 election, and it really made me think about the racism that persists in our society. Despite the “grab them by the pussy” tape that we all heard, and the many sexual assault allegations against him, a majority of white women voted for Donald Trump rather than the candidate who has worked on women’s and children’s issues for her entire adult life. And while there are lots of factors that motivated people to vote for him, he was an open bigot as well as an open misogynist. It’s hard not to see that as white women “choosing” the interests of white supremacy over feminism. I’m not saying anyone in particular who voted for Trump is absolutely a racist or hates women, I think it’s easy to underestimate your own internal bias or internalized misogyny, a lot of it works on unconscious levels. If I were a black person in America, I have to think that I’d feel pretty invisible (at best) right now too.

Tell me, blog friends…what piece of fiction has especially resonated with you lately?

One year ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Two years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology 

Book 98: Border Child



“But this third pregnancy felt similar to her first, with daily morning vomiting, and the constant taste of bile lingering in her throat. Perhaps this baby, like Lilia’s first, would be a girl child. Little Alejandra would be almost four now. Is almost four now. She is almost four, Lilia told herself. Is, not would be.”

Dates read: October 12-15, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Like pretty much everyone else in America, I’m descended from immigrants. On my mom’s side of the family, the most recent immigrant was my grandmother, from Austria. On my dad’s, it’s my great-grandfather, from Poland. I have my whole family tree mapped out on Ancestry, I like digging into it and finding passenger lists and marriage certificates and thinking about how many people through history making certain moves at certain times that it took to end up with me, here and now. It’s kind of miraculous, when you think about it.

But the historic, boats coming into Ellis Island type of immigration that white people tend to think about isn’t the reality of immigration as it exists today. There’s a whole complicated series of visas, or, for some people from south of the border, there’s a fraught experience of smuggling oneself across the Rio Grande in the desperate hope for a better life. It’s the same reason our grandparents and great grandparents came, but it’s a different way of trying to make it happen. And it’s a tragedy during such a border crossing which underlies Michel Stone’s Border Child.

Hector and Lilia are a young couple in a small village in Mexico, the parents of a toddler son and an as-yet unborn baby. But they’d once had another: their firstborn, a daughter named Alejandra. Both Hector and Lilia had wanted more than what their rural town had to offer, and so Hector had himself smuggled to the US. Lonely and impatient, Lilia took Alejandra and attempted to cross herself. She was separated from the girl, and while Lilia made it, Alejandra vanished. They lived in the US a while anyways, ultimately being deported after a few years. They have their son and Lilia becomes pregnant again, and they try to move on, but a chance encounter with the one person who might be able to help them find out what happened to Alejandra leads Hector on a dangerous journey across the country to find out.

One of the reasons I read is to explore worlds outside of the one I experience as a married middle-class white lady in the US in this day and age. I picked up this book hoping for insight into the situation that drives people to try to cross the border, why they risk so much just to get into the country and try to stay. What I got was…not that. While it does get a little bit into what drove Hector and Lilia north in the first place, the book as a whole is just not very good, honestly. Neither of the main characters is given much depth, and the prose is flat. I’ve always understood one of the fundamental principals behind good storytelling to be to show rather than tell. Stone does exactly the opposite…he never lets a moment breathe, always has to put what should be subtext directly into text. There’s no subtlety or artistry to it, and it’s never more than a workmanlike reading experience. I was disappointed in this book, and wouldn’t recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…which of your ancestors was the most recent to come into the country where you live?

One year ago, I was reading: The Life of the World To Come

Two years ago, I was reading: Unbelievable

Book 97: The Life of the World to Come



“Fiona and I kept talking, kept living in this way, long after our friends had grown comfortably into their older, smaller lives. We claimed every experience for only ourselves: the first snow, the last rays of the day, every star we gazed at was ripped from the public domain- property of Fiona and Leo’s New Life Together, copyright and patent pending and no squatters allowed.”

Dates read: October 10-12, 2016

Rating: 5/10

We’ve all gone to pieces over a bad breakup, haven’t we? Tell me I’m not the only one. I had two rough breakups before I met my husband: one with the guy I dated off-and-on for three years in college, and one with the guy I dated off-and-on for a year in law school. I’m friendly with the both of them now, but holy smokes did I lose my brain then (sorry, everyone who had to deal with me). But I think a brutal heartbreak can, in the long run, be a net positive: it certainly helped me reflect on my own behavior in relationships, and think about what I actually wanted out of a partner, and somehow I ended up with the best husband in the world.

In Dan Cluchey’s The Life of the World To Come, Leo Brice is a anxiety-ridden pre-law senior in college when he meets Fiona Haeberle. Fiona is quirky, outgoing, mercurial, an aspiring actress, and she and Leo quickly become a couple. They move to New York for Leo’s legal education, she gets a job on a cheesy soap opera that films locally, and they’re happy. Or so he thinks. Right after he finishes the bar exam, though, she suddenly leaves him in the middle of the night for her co-star.

Leo is completely devastated, and while he tries to put himself back together, he begins a job with a small firm focusing on death penalty appeals. Leo recovers from his breakup as he gets involved in his case, defending a religious man convicted of an out-of-character murder many years prior…with a young, pretty co-counsel who makes Leo feel like there might actually be a life after Fiona maybe. The client is only a half-hearted participant in his own appeal, and his philosophizing helps Leo get his own life back together.

So when I was in college, Garden State was a super-hyped movie. I like it, but it hasn’t aged especially well…a lot of the self-conscious quirk on display has come to feel artificial. And it is, of course, the poster child for the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trend that was a big thing around that time. I actually think Natalie Portman’s Sam is one of the better-done examples of it, but it got a little irritating for a while there. This is relevant here because this totally feels like a screenplay that was written to be one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girl movies and then became a novel. Despite being so central to the plot, Fiona doesn’t really have much of a character. Any insight into who she actually is and what drives her is left for a cringeworthy conversation Leo and Fiona have years after their breakup, in which the now-famous Fiona calls her ex to ask if she was a good girlfriend and he gets the chance to take her down a peg (of course he takes that opportunity). It’s not presented as a gross moment for him, but rather as a moment of triumph, and that’s just one of the issues with this book.

Besides Leo not really being all that interesting on his own (tightly-wound lawyer gets dumped, gets sad, tries to rebound with a coworker…snore), the book doesn’t really seem to have a lot of direction or any real idea of what it’s trying to say. Breakups suck? Working on a death penalty case can improve your mental health? It’s cool to bang your coworkers if your boss eggs you into it? I’m not necessarily opposed to reading white-dude-navel-gazing if it’s done well, but this isn’t done well. If reading about a 20something dude mourn the loss of his girlfriend who’s more concept than person is something that sounds interesting to you, you might enjoy this book. If not, move along.

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever had a terrible breakup?

One year ago, I was reading: Sophie’s Choice

Book 94: The Circle



“Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.”

Dates read: September 27-30, 2016

Rating: 3/10

I don’t know about you, but a lot of my internet presence is tied to either my Google account or my Facebook account. It’s so hard to remember a million different passwords and logins when you can just authorize logging in through Facebook and not have to worry about it anymore. But we all know it’s not quite as innocuous as we’d like it to believe…we see the ads for that cute dress we looked at on our work computer show up on our home computer and know that we signed into the website selling that cute dress through Facebook. Technology and social media are awesome, but they’re also new. If we’re being honest, we don’t really understand the full ramifications of putting so much of our lives on the internet. We’re making a lot of it up as we go along.

In Dave Eggers’ The Circle, we’re ever-so-slightly in the future, and one large umbrella company has taken over most of what happens on the internet: all your social media and e-commerce goes through a TruYou profile, a product of The Circle. When Mae Holland, a recent graduate of an East Coast private liberal arts school who grew up in working class California, is able to get a job at The Circle through her friend Annie, she’s thrilled. The sprawling and luxurious Bay Area campus is beyond her wildest dreams and the company is at the forefront of every breaking new development in internet technology. She’s increasingly drawn into the world of The Circle as it encroaches further and further into formerly private arenas of life, and can’t understand her family and friends who resist the shifting landscape of the world.

Theoretically, this is a really good book, a modern 1984. When you hear about things like the lawsuit in Spain about the right to be forgotten, it really makes you think about how deeply the internet has enmeshed itself in our lives. The Circle illustrates how slippery the slope could be for it to completely invade all aspects of our existence…microchipping and GPS tracking children to prevent kidnapping, very small constantly streaming webcams to open up closed regimes, politicians livestreaming their professional duties to make government transparent. All of these things sound like they’re positive developments on the surface, but it creates a culture of constant surveillance.

Where the book fails, though, is the execution. Mae (short for Maebelline, which I thought was a nifty way to communicate what kind of people her parents were without having to spell anything out) is obviously meant to be an audience-insert character, like Twilight‘s Bella. But it doesn’t work here to the extent it works for Twilight…the characteristics Mae is given, ambition and a certain amount of selfishness, render her mostly unpleasant. She needs to be a compelling character to have us follow her down the proverbial rabbit hole, but she has no real personality. She seems close to her family in the beginning, but drafts away from them easily and without apparent regret. She has “relationships” with peers like Annie and her ex-boyfriend Mercer, but we’re not given any sense of history or any reason to believe that she’s actually emotionally connected to other people. The writing is clunky, with awkward phrasing all over the place. It’s extra disappointing because the ideas behind the book are there, and if it had been rendered better it could have been amazing. I understand why it flopped, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Tell me, blog friends…do you ever take technology breaks?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wolf In The Attic

Book 83: Bel Canto



“He made what he felt to be wild presumptions in handing over his suggestions, but what did it matter? He was a vice president in a giant corporation, a numbers man, suddenly elevated to be the accompanist. He was not himself. He was no one he had ever imagined.”

Dates read: August 25-27, 2016

Rating: 8/10

As I’ve become an adult, I’ve realized how hard it is to make friends outside of school. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. But there’s something about being regularly a part of the same group of people all the time that gives you the chance to get to know each other, and get past the initial niceties and get to be friends. There’s obviously people that you’re never going to bond with, but there are people who you just need to see often enough to start realizing that you enjoy each other’s company. And the experiences you share give you something to naturally bond over.

The unexpected bonds that can grow between people is at the heart of Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. Katsumi Hokosawa, a Japanese industrialist, is having his 53rd birthday party in an unnamed South American country. The country has invited him to this party, to be held at the Vice President’s mansion, in the hopes that he will invest there. He has no intention of doing so and declines…until he finds out that they have secured the performance of Roxane Coss for the party. Hokosawa is an opera devotee, and Coss is the world’s foremost soprano. So he and his translator, Gen Watanabe, make the trip. No sooner, though, has Coss finished her performance than all the lights go out. Suddenly, the partygoers find themselves surrounded by young men bearing arms. They’ve come to abduct the president, and when they find out he’s not there, they’re not quite sure what to do but take the 200+ guests hostage.

The hostages are winnowed down over time to the 39 most important men, including the vice president, ambassadors, businessmen, and of course Hokosawa himself (along with his translator) and Roxane Coss. Days go by, then weeks. Gen the translator finds himself very busy indeed as the guests and the soldiers get to know each other inside the mansion. Relationships of all kinds form: one of ringleaders and Hokosawa become chess partners and teach one of the young soldiers, another soldier with a beautiful voice becomes Roxane’s student, romantic entanglements form (it turns out not all those soldiers are boys, after all). Always the question looms: how will this all end?

This is the first time I’ve read Patchett, and she’s a gifted writer: her prose is sensitive, deeply felt, lyrical. She has a strong sense of character, and besides the ending, no action the people she creates on the page (and she creates people, complete with their own emotional truth, rather than just “characters”) feels false. Even the people she spends less time with feel complete and real. The novel is well-paced and plotted…after the initial high drama of the home invasion, little else happens in terms of events and the action unfolds naturally from the unveiling of personalities and the growing bonds between the people at hand.

What keeps this as a very good book rather than great one, for me, is the very end. The action that two people take is…jarring. Trying to contextualize it in terms of what those two have gone through, you can understand that a rash decision might be made, but it still feels off. And it bugged me a lot, because I’d so loved everything that came before and to close on that sour note didn’t feel right. It’s 98% of a great book, but it could have been 100% of one and that is frustrating.

Tell me, blog friends…does a wonky ending ruin a book for you?

One year ago, I was reading: Missing, Presumed

Book 81: The Last One


“The production team tries to get everyone out, but they’re on Solo Challenges and widespread. There were contingency plans in place, but not for this. It’s a spiral like that child’s toy: a pen on paper, guided by plastic. A pattern, then something slips and- madness. Incompetency and panic collide. Good intentions give way to self-preservation. No one knows for sure what happened, small scale or large. No one knows precisely what went wrong. But before he dies, the producer will know this much: Something went wrong.” 

Dates Read: August 22-23, 2016

Rating: 9/10

Someone I went to high school with was on Survivor while I was in law school. Watching it to watch him was the first time I’d seen the show, which has been on since I was in high school. I didn’t know the guy in question very well…I’d been in the advanced math class with his brother, but the contestant himself was a year or two behind me. Before watching it, I couldn’t understand what drew people to it…a hotel without TV is about as close to wilderness survival as I want to find myself. But as I watched it until the guy I knew got voted off (which was quite late in the process), I started to get it a little. Proving yourself against physical and mental odds has driven human achievements like climbing mountains and running marathons and exploring new worlds from time immemorial.

The reality show at the center of Alexandra Oliva’s The Last One promises to make Survivor look like child’s play. The producers have a summer-blockbuster-sized budget and are planning to get three episodes per week on the air. There’s no set end point…once all contestants but one utter a quit phrase to be taken out of play, it will be over, with the final person standing winning $1 million. Since it’s the first season, no one knows what to expect. After a series of intense group challenges complete with expensive props and head games to thin the heard a little, the contestants are broken up and sent on solo challenges. They’ve been told to expect to not see even camera people (the production has drones and hidden cameras), so when one of the contestants, known as Zoo, finds herself wandering alone for a long while, she’s not too disturbed. What she and the other contestants don’t know is that as they’re out there, a global pandemic is decimating the population of the country and the world.

In an interesting and perceptive technique, in the chapters that are presented in the third person, the contestants on the show are referred to by nicknames, like Engineer and Air Force and Asian Chick. Our protagonist, Zoo, is so called because she works at a wildlife center. We come into her story in media res, as she discovers an abandoned supermarket and scavenges for supplies. She steps over what she assumes are very well-made prop bodies. The reader knows that people are dying in large numbers and those bodies are almost certainly real, but out of touch with the outside world, what can Zoo think but to assume that it’s all part of the game? Which is exactly what she does think, in the chapters that are told from her perspective. Knowing that the point of the show is to push her to her limits and drive her to quit, she pushes through a bout of severe illness and an attack by a wild coyote, among other things, by rationalizing them as just tricks by the producers.

The obstacles she faces and the turns her journey takes are best left to discovery by the reader. If you’re anything like me, you’ll get to them quickly. This is the first book I’ve read in a long time (even of ones I’ve really enjoyed) that’s honest-to-goodness kept me up at night to read more. Most of the time, books I blow through really fast have a lower rating, because when I don’t like I book I’m more inclined to push through it as rapidly as I can so I can move on to something I might like better. This book I raced through because I genuinely didn’t want to put it down. I read it at lunch, while I got my oil changed on my car, while I was waiting for a meeting to start. The power of the human mind to convince itself of whatever it wants to is not to be underestimated, and the suspense of waiting to see when it would be that Zoo would finally see that the world around her was in real trouble keeps the narrative tension low but constant (her inability to see is literal as well as figurative…early in the book, her glasses are damaged and that helps the suspension of disbelief that the actual magnitude of events doesn’t impress itself upon her sooner). I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it!

Tell me, blog friends…have you ever known anyone on a reality show?

One year ago, I was reading: Zodiac

Book 77: The Lords of Discipline

 
“To walk in the spire-proud shade of Church Street is to experience the chronicle of a mythology that is particular to this city and this city alone, a trinitarian mythology with equal parts of the sublime, the mysterious, and the grotesque. But there is nothing to warn you of Charleston’s refined cruelty. That knowledge must be earned. No gargoyles hang from the sides of St. Philip’s or St. Michael’s. No messages are in the iron scrollwork of its gates to warn visitors like Poe, Osceola, me, and you.”

Read: August 7-12, 2016

Rating: 10/10

When I’m grabbing my next book to read, I’m not reaching into a bookshelf and snagging whatever catches my eye. I have a spreadsheet. I have SO many unread books that it’s really the only way to keep it together. I try to alternate hard copies and Kindle titles, and try to read about three ARCs for every five backlist titles. Since I’ve bought a lot of books over the years, it’s the only way I’ll be able to make sure I actually read all of them…without making myself do it, a lot of the older stuff would just pile up as shiny new things stole my attention away. Sometimes this means I read books I’m not actually super interested in anymore. That’s okay, because it also means there are some total gems, like Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline, that I snagged on Kindle sale years ago and forgot. I honestly don’t even know what drew me to buy the book in the first place, military school coming-of-age doesn’t really speak to me, but I’m really glad that I did buy it because I loved it.

Will McLean is about to start his senior year at the Institute, a military academy in Charleston (based on the Citadel, Conroy’s own alma mater). He didn’t really want to go, but promised his father he would before his father died and gets a basketball scholarship anyways. He’s not distinguished himself as a military man during his time there and doesn’t plan to enlist and ship out to Vietnam as so many of his classmates intend, but he’s almost made it through and is closely bonded with his three roommates, especially native blue-blooded Charlestonian Tradd St. Croix. Will is a quasi-outsider…while he’s Southern and from an Institute family, he’s also Catholic and an athlete, and probably the closest thing to a liberal on campus. Which is why he’s assigned to look after incoming student Tom Pearce, the first black student to ever enroll, and protect him from the threat of a mysterious group called The Ten, who are deadset against integration. As Will’s final year unfolds, he relives his own traumatic freshman year and we see how he’s been shaped (sometimes against his own will) by the experiences he’s had at the Institute as he tries to look out for Pearce, investigates The Ten, and falls in love with a troubled young socialite.

First of all, Conroy is an incredible writer. His plotting and pacing are masterful. He covers a lot of territory (freshman hazing, two suicides, a love affair, an investigation into a shadowy group, the experience of participating in organized athletics), but it never drags, nor does it feel overcrowded. Drama drives not from the mystery plot (which really only picks up in the last 20% or so of the book), but from experiences and relationships. The prose is strong and sure, lyrical without verging into purple territory, poignant and resonant. I have to imagine that Conroy loves Charleston as much as his protagonist does, because much of his most sweeping and sentimental prose is dedicated to the city and made me want to take a visit there myself.

The characters Conroy creates feel real…we obviously spend the most time with and are asked to identify the most with Will, but he’s not perfect or beyond reproach. Even the person who’s ultimately revealed as the “bad guy” has motivations that make sense. He places those characters in high-stakes situations without turning it into the lurid melodrama it could spill over into with less control. It’s just a fantastic novel and I’m adding everything Conroy wrote to my TBR and I recommend this book highly to anyone, even if you don’t think you’d like it.

Tell me, blog friends…has an author ever painted such a lovely picture of a place you feel inspired to visit there?

One year ago, I was reading: We Need To Talk About Kevin

Book 75: The White Tiger

 “If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!”

Read: August 1-3, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), Man Booker Prize

Here’s a weird thing: I am actively pro-spoiler. Which you’ve probably noticed reading this blog…I try not to be gratuitous, but I will spoil things if it’s necessary to talk about what I want to talk about regarding a book. I maintain that if your work (and I’m including movies and TV here) doesn’t hang together if you know the Big Plot Twist, it’s because it’s not very good in the first place: the characterization, the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the pacing…if those aren’t there, you don’t have a well-told story, you just have a plot twist. Discovering the why is always more compelling for me than discovering the what.

Which is why I have a soft spot for books, like Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, that tell you their big plot twist right up front. We know at the end of the first chapter that our narrator Balram, a former servant turned entrepreneur in India, killed his former master. What unfolds over the rest of the book is the story of why. It’s the story of India in the modern day, a place of desperate poverty but also extravagant wealth, where ancient temples are just as much a part of life as smartphones. Balram is born into poverty in a rural area, and even though he seems destined to become a laborer, he resists the forces (including his family) that try to keep him in the underclass as long as he can. He finds himself a position as a driver for an upper-class landowner, and eventually moves with one of the landowner’s sons to New Delhi to be his driver there.

New Delhi fundamentally changes both that son, Ashok, and Balram. Ashok has been educated in America, and treats his servants more or less like people. As he gets more and more sucked into the mire of his family’s business (they’re in the coal industry, and Ashok does a lot of running around with briefcases full of money to drop off with various politicians and officials), he becomes harder and harsher. When Balram is nearly forced to take the fall for a bad accident caused by Ashok’s wife’s drunk driving, Balram realizes that even as far as he’s come from his roots, he’s still not really safe. As long as he’s poor and a servant, he’ll always be expendable. But in order to get out of his situation, he needs money, and the money he has the easiest access to? Those briefcases that he’s driving Ashok around with.

It’s a dark satire, and after reading a lot of Serious Literature, I appreciated its wit and liveliness even more than I otherwise might have. But I would have enjoyed it no matter what. It’s an epistolary novel (Balram writes to the prime minister of China, who is visiting India at the time, to explain India’s entrepreneurial spirit), which allows it to skip around in time a little for maximum impact…we know that he’s committed murder and gone on to start his own business, but how (and why) did he do it? How did he get away with it? What exactly does he do now?  The organic tension propels the book forward without being too mysterious. Balram is an indelible character, and I really appreciated the way that Adiga developed Ashok as well, portraying his moral decay even though we only see him through Balram’s eyes. It’s a quick read that manages to be thought-provoking while still being entertaining.

 Tell me, blog friends…how do you feel about spoilers?

One year ago, I was reading: Enchanted Islands

Book 74: Masha Regina

 
“The wind of time blows in two directions. It’s the rare person who feels its current parallel to his ongoing life. It’s a special skill to catch time wafting, from the future, on your cheeks. In the emptiness between the train carriages, Masha felt- her fingers went icy from the certainty of that sensation- as though those ten minutes on the jolting train carriages, with her on one side and the boy on the other, would become a sort of tuning fork for her happiness.”

Read: July 29-August 1, 2016


Rating: 7/10

I can’t imagine how hard it must be to be a professional translator, especially for literature. I took two years of Italian in college, and even the simple school exercise of translating song lyrics was rendered often frustrating because of the inability to directly translate in a way that makes actual sense. Even something as simple as “I miss you” (mi manchi) literally translates as “you are missing to me”. It’s essentially the same thing, but it takes the focus from I to you, making it feel softer somehow (at least in my overly romantic brain). Translating an entire book? Eep.

Translating Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina must have been an especially delicate endeavor, so props to Lisa Hayden. Levental spent five years writing the book and it’s obvious that he chose each word carefully. Hayden’s translation is lush and evocative…obviously I can’t read it in the original Russian, but it’s hard to believe that it suffered any real loss being taken into English. Masha Regina is the story of the titular woman (her given name is actually Maria, but she’s almost exclusively referred to by her nickname during the course of the novel), from about the time she’s a teenager to well into her adulthood. It’s hard to tell how old she’s supposed to be by the end, exactly, because the novel progresses in a loosely linear way but with lots of digressions backwards and forwards and it can be hard to tell at any given moment where we are in Masha’s life. It works when you’re reading it, as long as you’re paying attention, but it makes it hard to summarize the novel in a straightfoward way.

I do love a good summary, though, so I’ll take a crack at it. Masha is an artistically gifted teenager living in a small, decaying town in the Russian countryside. She doesn’t necessarily know what she wants, but she knows she doesn’t want to get stuck there like her parents, and when she’s probably about 15 she manages to get her parents to send her to St. Petersburg to go to boarding school. On the train to the city, she meets Roma, another teenager who’s heading back to his own studies in the city. He helps her get to her school and she falls a little bit in love with him, which she continues to be even as she has a long-term relationship with one of her teachers and he rejects her when she comes to see him. It’s only later in their lives, after they’ve graduated and begun working towards careers in filmmaking (she as a director, he as a cinematographer) that they finally get together and become romantically as well as professionally involved. Their relationship is tempestuous, and Masha becomes pregnant with their child shortly before she leaves him for good, taking up with an older German actor while he romances a former school friend of hers.

Although it’s Masha’s story and she’s a fascinating character to spend a couple hundred pages with, it’s never quite clear what drives her. At the beginning it’s a desire to escape the drudgery she’s surrounded with, which she does both through art and eventual literal escape. And then it’s a desire to stay escaped, working her way to catch up with school so she can stay in St. Petersburg, building a name for herself as a director. But once she’s got a solid career, her artistic expression seems almost more like a compulsion than a drive or a passion. The cool shell she built herself to keep her propelling through her early life eventually traps her…she doesn’t know how to deal with adversity besides creating a film and throwing herself into the making of it.

As I read, I found myself mostly focusing on the way fate seems to play a role in the construction of a life…Masha’s life particularly, but all our lives, really. Masha’s chance connection on the train with Roma as a teenager reverberates through her entire life. She gets into directing after accompanying a friend to an audition for an acting graduate program. I know how in my own life, my trip to Nevada was supposed to be a three-month thing until I met my husband doing voter registration. The big things matter, of course, but the little coincidences of our lives can be even more meaningful, in the end. Masha Regina is beautifully written (maybe a little overwritten) and mostly pretty compelling, but the sum of its parts is more than the whole, somehow.

Tell me, blog friends…what little things ended up making a big difference in your life?

One year ago, I was reading: The President’s Club

Book 72: The Fugitives

 “He asked her about her background and education, her hopes and dreams, and she was, like everyone else, a sucker for the hypnotic draw of her own hopes and dreams, and she was, like anyone who’s benefited from a certain amount of luck and apparent self-knowledge, a sucker for the opportunity to appear unregretful about the ones she’d given up on.” 

Dates read: July 23-25, 2016

Rating: 7/10 

It’s easy to romanticize small-town life. The close-knit community, the cute little houses and shops, the feeling that bad things don’t happen here. Even when you grow up in a small town and can’t wait to get out into the world (*raises hand*), you can find yourself falling into that pattern of thinking. Speaking from my own experience, it’s kind of two-sided: when you live in a city, you want the imagined coziness and comfort of a small town; when you live in a small town, you want the imagined opportunity and anonymity of the city. When you’re unhappy with your life where you are, the allure of the opposite is even stronger.

The idea that you’d be an entirely different person if you just lived somewhere else is one that has a lot of instinctive appeal. And trying to run from who you are by changing your location is what drives the characters of Christopher Sorrentino’s The Fugitives. Sandy Mulligan leaves Brooklyn in the wake of a nasty divorce and sets up shop in Cherry City, Michigan (a very thinly disguised Traverse City) to recover and finish his long-awaited next novel. But he’s got a bad case of writer’s block and his most literary activity is going to the library to watch a man called John Salteau tell Native American folktales. Salteau is also what brings Chicagoan reporter Kat Danhoff back to the area she grew up in…her long-lost best friend who never left home thinks Salteau might be a mobster in disguise and Kat can’t resist a juicy story that might break her out of a boring professional beat. But eventually both Sandy and Kat find out what anyone who’s ever moved knows: you can’t escape your problems that way, because you’re still yourself wherever you go.

Which isn’t to say that anyone ever stops trying it. The themes of identity and the futility of trying to run away from it are strong and immediate: Sandy is a writer who can’t write, and Kat is a Native American who does her best to avoid talking about her heritage. Sorrentino presents them both at first as flawed but relatable people: Sandy had an affair, but went back to his wife and went to couple’s counseling to try to put it back together even if it ultimately failed, Kat cut ties with her formative years and the people in them to escape poverty and aimlessness. But as the book progresses, the layers are pulled back and the truth is uglier than it might seem: Sandy left his wife for his mistress for a time, he’s deeply unconcerned about his ex-wife and their children, he blames his former mistress’s husband for their affair as much as anyone. Kat married early to an older man and treated him with cruelty, she’s emotionally withholding to her current husband, she’s a serial adulterer herself. It fits with the way we get to know people in real life: we’re presented with the story they like to tell about themselves, but over time the deeper stuff comes to the fore. For most people the deeper stuff isn’t quite that dark, but it’s the same kind of idea.

It’s an intriguing literary device and makes us only slowly question the reliability of our narrators. Well, narrator, because only Sandy is written in the first person, but Kat’s perspective isn’t written much differently despite being in the third person. We’re also invited to question their reliability when Sorrentino goes back and tells a story of their interaction from the perspective of the other (which is occasionally a little confusing but you get used to pretty quick).  Who’s telling us the “real” version? Are either of them? The novel has a lot of merit, but it’s ultimately frustrating because it felt like with more vigorous editing it could have been great. I’m generally unbothered by prose that tends toward the purple, but even I was raising my eyebrows at how often there were overwritten run-on sentences. But overall, it’s an engaging character-driven read…if you enjoy books about bad people, anyways.

Tell me, blog friends…have you found it easy to “start over” if you’ve moved?

One year ago, I was reading: Dead Wake

Book 70: The Last Picture Show

 “It took a rich, fast crowd to go swimming naked, and Jacy always prided herself on belonging to the fastest crowd there was, moral or immoral. Indeed, for a rich, pretty girl like herself the most immoral thing imaginable would be to belong to a slow crowd. That would be wasting opportunities, and nothing was more immoral than waste.”

Dates read: July 17-19, 2016

Rating: 9/10

The town my dad grew up in is dying. Has been for years. Little place in the western Upper Peninsula that’s been slipping ever since the copper mining left. Then the paper mill closed. Then they re-routed the highway so you don’t have to go through town. Now all of the schoolkids, K-12, can fit in one building, businesses are closing down for good, and it seems more and more likely that one day Ontonagon will just cease to exist.

But it’s still scraping along right now, and in that it’s like Thalia, the fictional Texas town where Larry McMurtry sets The Last Picture Show. Oil keeps Thalia together, provides roughnecking jobs for the local working class boys, and keeps the town’s wealthiest family, the Farrows, in their relatively cushioned niche. Gene and Lois Farrow’s spoiled, beautiful teenage daughter Jacy is the apple of every boy’s eye and when the story starts, she’s chosen her blue-collar classmate Duane as her boyfriend. She doesn’t really have especially strong feelings for Duane, but she likes that he’s in the backfield on the football team and that he adores her and buys her things. That he’s poor enough to piss off her parents is icing on the cake.

But the book isn’t really about Duane. It’s sort of about Jacy, but it’s really about Sonny, Duane’s best friend, and their senior year in high school. Sonny is just kind of drifting along without much direction, being mediocre at sports and crushing on his best friend’s girl, until he finds himself in an affair with Ruth, the football coach’s neglected wife. He’s thrilled to be getting laid regularly and fond of Ruth, but their affair triggers something deeper for her. Stuck in a bad marriage she made to rebel against her parents, she feels seen and desired for the first time in her adult life, giving her back some of her dampened inner fire but also making her heart-wrenchingly dependent on the attention of a teenage boy. And when Jacy sets her sights on Sonny, well…heartbreak is in order.

One of the things that struck me particularly about this novel was the lack of romance in the way that McMurtry dealt with sex. The experience of sex for the characters ranges from the purely transactional (both Sonny and Duane sleep with hookers) to the deeply meaningful (the way that Ruth views her assignations with Sonny). It felt more honest than either treating it consistently as either a purely physical exercise or A Mystical Union Of Two Souls. There’s even a range of feeling about sex within the characters themselves: for example, Jacy sleeps with the besotted Duane as a means to an end of losing her virginity to be more attractive to another man and coolly leaves him shortly thereafter, but she’s genuinely hurt when she has sex with the local pool hustler because she feels real desire for the first time in her life and it turns out she’s just a a way he’s acting out towards his own lover. It hits on the way that sex actually works in real life, with a wide spectrum of meaning depending on the content, and it’s just part of why the novel rings so true and so real.

Sonny’s not a bad guy, despite his sometimes cavalier treatment of Ruth’s feelings. He’s just young and is still feeling his way into becoming an adult. Which is pretty much everyone’s situation, including the adults themselves…it’s the rare coming-of-age story that doesn’t neglect the older generation. The idea that we’re all just trying to figure out how to be a grown-up is what gives the novel its power. I loved this book and the way it took you inside the character’s heads (mostly Sonny, Jacy, and Ruth, but a few others) and let you see situations and other characters from different perspectives. It creates a sense of people, not just characters, on the page. It felt like a tour of loneliness, in a way: everyone in the story is lonely and trying to deal with that loneliness in their own way. Everyone’s grasping at something they think will help that seems tantalizingly just out of reach. Which isn’t just small-town life, to be certain, but cities seem to have more to offer to distract from that emptiness. The people of Thalia, though, just have their aching hearts. It’s not a long book, but I found it so compelling that I blasted right through it. Simple but vivid prose and emotionally honest characters made it hard to put down.

Tell me, blog friends…is it harder to be lonely in a small town or a big city, do you think?

One year ago, I was reading: The Group

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