Beginner’s Greek If I ever inaugurate an unintentionally dirty-sounding e-review series called “Straight to the author’s inbox,” the first one will be to James Collins, and it will read, “Hey James, how’s it going? LOVED THE FIRST HALF OF YOUR NOVEL! xo talk soon L.” (Note to all the publications who’ve cut their book reviews of late: I will provide these under your institutional umbrella for a reasonable fee.) Because while Beginner’s Greek contains some of the most devastating, vivid characterizations (and character assassinations) I’ve read in the past few years, its lovely prose is marred by the fact that the central characters, Holly and Peter–who meet on a flight, lose contact, and spend the next few years (and remainder of the novel) seeking the lost soulmate–are, compared to the surrounding cast, relatively anodyne constructions. While a bullying husband speculates about his ex-wife, visualizing the clotted hairbrush left out for guests that sums up her pitiable circumstances, Peter chases a veritable ghost, a lovely cipher with whom everyone is immediately enchanted, although all we know about Holly is that when Peter met her, she was reading The Magic Mountain. (“She’s a dead ringer for Garbo. She always beats me at chess. She’s first on every punchline. Her drink is Absolut.”) One of the things I love about Larry McMurtry is that he’s one of the few male writers who can portray difficult, irritating women whom men still manage to like. Collins crushes the women in his novel admirably, but his satire can’t hold up against someone who only gives other people crushes. James: EVERYONE is worthy of crushing. Leave the bewitching, blank siren for Roth. He’s probably trademarked her by now, anyway.
Eat, Pray, Love A sad truth for those of you out there seeking greater ones: Nothing is more boring than your epiphanies. (Even worse, sojourners–the more particular they are to you, the more they sound exactly like everyone else’s.) Such is the problem with Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through the particulars of her digestive, spiritual and moral humors–located, for your corporeal information, in the regions of Italy, India and Indonesia, respectively. It’s a bit of a punt to say the book is self-aggrandizing–how could a book focused on one’s spiritual well-being not be?–but it’s the grand the Richard Bachian strokes that provoke the reader beyond speech: “Simply put, I got pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute, and in that rush I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely.” (Simply put.) However, we’re a girl! Fish-in-barrel elements aside, of course we loved that someone would eat pasta, meditate and tool around Indonesia for a year to get over a broken heart. There’s a lot to be said for pasta in general. P.S. we leave the 16th.
Never Let Me Go If all butlers from England sound robotic and all English clones sound like butlers, does Kazuo Ishiguro need to stop giving characters affects flatter than a freshly ironed newspaper? These and other points of information plagued me upon my “completion” — you’ll get it — of the author’s sixth novel, wherein a prep-school love triangle worthy of a great piece of teen chick-lit is inexplicably ruined by the fact that the characters all have to give up their organs afterwards. Much has been made of this great “secret” — and, oops, spoiler alert and all — but it’s no more a secret than the fact that, if a girl tells you her boyfriend thinks you’re a slut, it’s a sure bet he has a huge crush on you. HUGE, Kathy, HUGE. Even a butler could see it.
The Furies It’s hard to know how to treat the work of Fernanda Eberstadt, whose gusty prose leaves the reader staggering back and forth like a pilgrim in a very high wind. The setting is Manhattan, the parties Gwen, a high-powered Russophile aiding in the democratization of the former USSR, and Gideon, an earthy puppeteer with a sanctimonious faith both in social activisim and Shabbos. The lovers crash, procreate, clash, and spin apart, their once-hot polarities suddenly reversed. Though the prose is more high-spirited — and high Mandarin — than the stuff of Diane Johnson or Louis Begley, the novel leaves the reader with the same feeling of being plunged into a dinner party of international sophisticates — an itchy mix of alienation and admiration. (The author herself? New Yorker and Vogue clips — check. Oxford-educated? Check. Lives in the French Pyrenees? Mais oui!) It’s all as cut-glass and sparkling as an inch-thick goblet — and it still leaves the reader wanting a drink.
The Position Meg Wolitzer gets no respect, and we have no clue why*. Maybe it’s because her novels are…clever? …Funny? ….Delightful? The Wife — not a novel within a novel, but a novel about a novel, a la Philip Roth — was not fluffy but skilled, the type of practiced comedy that fled the Borscht Belt stage right around the time duos singing from the soundtrack to Flashdance reached their height**. And speaking of the horrors of our childhood, The Position is also about a book; The Joy of Sex-esque Pleasuring, whose contents, like everything else that issues forth from parental fucking, destroy — or, at least, wholly render speechless for a few decades — the members of healthy nuclear family.
* Does she really get no respect or did someone just talk smack about her to us once? Well, it matters not — NO ONE MAY SPEAK ILL OF THE WOLITZER. Didn’t she date David Letterman and write for the much lamented New York Woman magazine? Hmmm, that was Merrill Markoe for that first one, there. Either way, respect.
The Interruption of Everything One of our first jobs as an editorial assistant at the Book of the Month Club was to write flap copy for a reprint of Terry McMillan’s Mama It was a classic first novel: autobiographical, a little clumsy, but with bite — not exactly the lead-in you’d expect for Waiting to Exhale, spot-on genre fiction, one of the great examples of aclassicfour. We had to give up after Stella, though, a great example of someone listing CDs they bought and what they ate for 200+ pages. Now we’re back, 3/4-heartedly. Interruption has all the McMillan tropes — the semi-distant mother who wants to be called by her first name; genial, well-meaning sons; buddies of varying levels of annoyance; dips into the ghetto from middle-class anomie. Marilyn, like most McMillan heroines, is trying to get her life together after realizing her sons are gone and her husband is boring; but she’s on a great quest to pursue a life of crafting, which, hot-glue aside, is not engaging. On the other hand, there’s a miscarriage, a senior romance, two kids with a methed-out mom, and a few other characters that keep the story moving. The boring husband, who remains boring and is inexplicably redeemed at the end, is a trope McMillan, like her character, should drop — not only does it never ring true, the marriage she slap-dash saves in the novel bears too strong a resemblance to McMillan’s own bond with the page.
I’m Not The New Me “If you’re a female and over 125 pounds, then you can have a fat girl story.” Lawd, ain’t that the truth. We’ve been terribly slow at getting Wendy McClure’s — aka Poundy’s — novel up here, mainly because we’re fat and lazy, or, at least, could find ten or twelve folks who’d tell you so. As you can guess by the title, McClure’s memoir is not a “Not only did I get thin, I got a book deal” memoir, but a meta-critique of the genre, an explosion of it, if you will. It’s also an explosion of the blogger-cum-memoir genre, since the book HAS stuff from the website but also talks about the process of BUILDING the website, so that if you look to your left for even a second, you might find that your ratty IKEA couch has been sucked into a black hole along with a cat and half the sandwich you were eating. (Wendy has been updating her blog with her book tour, too — this web stuff will BLOW YOUR MIND!!!!!) We realize we’re making it sound horrifying. It’s not; the book is FABULOUS. “We know how it happened,” McClure writes. “We get the ‘ate too much’ part. Now tell us the rest.” *
* Some of the rest includes the part about the boyfriend who steals the size-20 Lane Bryant Venezia bootcut jeans which turn out to look okay on him, which we know is on the website, but we can’t find it. Also these. You still have to buy the book, though.
A Changed Man In 1998, Francine Prose wrote an article for Harper’s reflecting on the massive inferiority of “domestic” women’s fiction entitled Scent of a Woman’s Ink. We have held it against her ever since, to the extent that we a) never read any of her fiction and b) as a student, smirked at her from the back row as she guest-lectured (as we have since, sadly, been smirked upon ourselves, though at far less illustrious institutions and only because we are boring). In any case, we have since been forced to reflect on our own massive inanity, as A Changed Man is easily one of the most delightful novels of the past year. As Mel Brooks proved long ago, for sheer entertainment, you CANNOT beat a Nazi — or skinhead, in this case, especially if he is under the wing of a great Jewish humanitarian, living in the spare room of a sex-starved single mother of two, and allergic to nuts.
Misfortune* It’s unfortunate that a book centered on a hermaphrodite should also peter out halfway through, but that’s the case with the debut novel of Wesley Stace, a.k.a. musician John Wesley Harding, possessor of one of the most beautiful web sites in recent memory. A kind of Victorian Middlesex — we don’t even want to think how many times that got dropped in marketing meetings — Misfortune has the juicy, tri-generational, multi-national breadth of the former without its narrative authority, as heroine Rose struggles to regain both her mansion and her (spoiler alert!) manhood. Artist Sylvie Covey‘s delicate drop caps (you can see the book’s last illustration here) are almost worth the price of admission, though.
* This is one of the reviews we did while inhaling way too many fumes from a very expensive hair gel, or something. Read the corrections here.
To the Power of Three We have a problem with Laura Lippman. A few problems, in fact, the first of which is that NONE OF HER BOOKS HAS BEEN MADE INTO A MOVIE YET. C’mon, Hollywood: Teens, Murder, Mad Writing Skillz*. Second on our list of complaints is the title, which we could never have thought of and which, for a book about three teen girls and a mysterious shooting, IS THE BEST TITLE OF ALL TIME. Thirdly, we would like to object to this. Stasio, just because a book is longer than 180 pages does not make it “boring”. That is all.
* The fact that we have seen many a Lindsay Lohan movie with the author herself should not be taken as a vote of confidence for teen movies, mean girls, or Lindsay Lohan, but only the act of giving Laura Lippman more money in general. Let us just add that that goes double for Lindsay Lohan.
Citizen Girl It’s not clear why Random House threw such a big hissy fit over publishing this novel. (Is it possible that publishing execs, a bit cash-strapped for nannies, felt this novel’s outing of rampant Xerox-and-memo abuse against lowly staffers hit a little too close to home?) The authors’ depiction of your average underutilized college grad’s first years out — first in a hemp-ish feminist nonprofit, then in a O-type startup that degenerates into a porn site — is un petit peu over-le-top, but that was the charm of Nanny Diaries, too. Like a teenage girl with her first tube of Maybelline, the authors color wildly — but charmingly — outside the lines. * **
* The REAL credibility problem with CG’S heroine is she’s a size 4 who “could be a model” who’s main concern with appearing in a bikini is her self-respect, not her cellulite. Let’s keep our character further than one bad hat away from Carrie Bradshaw, people.
** Unrelated: Why is one cover blue, one cover red? Can’t we leave that shit to Dave Eggers?
Aloft One day, someone will discover why Chang-Rae Lee’s psyche is tuned exclusively to the “I’m pushing 50 and my family hates me even though I tried to be a good father except I never really talked to my kids and all” channel (is it all the golf?), but until then, luxuriate in the densely crafted and crotchety person of Jerry Battle, whose internal stream of irritation keeps the novel’s melodramatic plot from, shall we say, (No.– Ed) going into a tailspin.*
* On a personal note, we would like to thank Mr. Lee for making moving back in with your folks — kids in all — and then putting in a pool fashionable again. The “Battle” was a little obvious, but that pool’s metaphorical significance hit us like twenty-ton bag of fish (Stop. — Ed) at the end — not easy in the era of The Swimmer and all. Salud.
Point Of No Return Have you been looking for a book that combines an anthropological examination of a small New England town with the vaguaries of lost rich-girl love with a desperate, almost frantic crisis revolving around a promotion at a bank? Have you ever suspected that such a book could be the best book in the world, with a heart-stopping last line that rivals Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider closing (“Now, there would be time for everything”) with its simultaneous blast of redemption and cruel irony? Well, have you? Look no further.
The Easter Parade There are only a few characters in all of Richard Yates’ fiction: the tippling mother with the lipstick edging out around the lines of her mouth; the weak, sensitive boy who is a constant trial (most of all to himself); the brutal alpha male who preys upon a former beauty; the women whose love affairs spin them into orbits ranging farther and farther from happiness. The worst thing to be in Yates’ fiction is a liar, and nearly all his characters cannot live up their ideas — much less ideals — of themselves. This is especially true in the story of Sarah and Emily Grimes, who wind up, respectively, as the dowdy battered wife of a useless brute and a spinster who, at 50, “still understands nothing.” It’s more fun than it sounds. It also may be the only novel in which a character teaches — as Yates’did for many years — at the Iowa Writers’ workshop. I would give my left pinkie to know if Yates, like the unsuccessful poet Jack Flanders, was left behind by his small-breasted girlfriend after a long, nasty winter, or if he merely filled in the lines around an actual poet he detested. There’s something both lovely and terrible in the idea of Yates creating an entire narrative to house the memory of a lover who left him.
The Plot Against America SPOILER SPOILER * We’d put down a serious wad of long green on the hunch that the plot of “The Plot Against America” did not, as many suggested, originate in a flight of fancy about what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had become President during Hitler’s rise to power, but rather in the child-inside-the-man Roth’s wish that the heroic aviator was not, as he assuredly was, a fascist sympathizer, but had actually been blackmailed by Nazis holding his supposedly kidnapped child through every horrendous concessionary speech. We only think that because it’s more fun to think so, but also because this thrillingly labyrinthine plot establishes that Professor Roth could definitely have a job writing for the TV series Alias, if he ever had a mind to.
B.F.’s Daughter We’re more than a little disappointed that we’ve reached the age of 31 without someone taking us aside, shaking us vigorously by the shoulders and hissing in our face, “You goddamn little fool, what are you doing walking around like an acceptable person when you haven’t read BF’s Daughter?” Like the souped-up Chevy that is John Cheever to Richard Yates’ Mercedes, B.F’s Daughter puts its wan shadow, Marjorie Morningstar, to shame. Though it takes place during WWII, it’s somehow indisputably modern. Also, it contains the line, “Nobody cares what happens to a girl if she’s on a yacht.”
“Already I’m feeling betrayed — and a little bored.” [Washington Post]
“You will learn a lot about the drinking patterns of articulate twentysomethings.” [Village Voice]
“Direct, rude and shamelessly ad hominem.” [The Scotsman]
“The other country in which blogs have really taken off is the United States…” [The Guardian]
We enjoy it. You can reach Old Hag for any good goddamn reason at all at theoldhag AT theoldhag DOT com.
A Manly Man’s Monster Novel(The Daily Beast, 6/25/2010) It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment one achieves literary success, but when Stephen King picks up the phone to interrupt your Good Morning America appearance to personally thank you for writing your latest book, you know you are in the ballpark.
Three Degrees Of Failure For The Recent Graduate(NPR’s Three Books, 6/22/2010) It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming, but Beach Week author Susan Coll is a master at finding wisdom in the unexpected.
Books to Steal From Your Teenager (O magazine, July 2010) Now that millions of adults have discovered the teen-focused J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer series, the concept of “intend audience” for books has changed forever. What makes a so-called teen title something even a mother could love?
HBOs Google Baby: Network of Surrogates, Egg Donors Remakes Childbearing(Politics Daily, 6/16/2010) Almost every time I ride the Path train from New York home to New Jersey, I find myself seated across from the same ad. There’s a jigsaw image of women’s faces — different races, beaming assuredly — and the text “Become a Dreammaker!”
Sure, We’re Marriage-Obsessed. So Why Aren’t We Hearing From the Men? (Politics Daily, 6/10/2010) In 1939, the director George Cukor gave us the campy classic “The Women.” Based on the novel by Claire Booth Luce, it was the glossy saga of a sweet wife whose husband is snatched away by his shrew of a mistress — that is, at least, until the wife grows her own talons and snatches him back. (Rent it! You will finally get the joke the next time your gay best friend extends his nails and intones, “Jungle Red!”)
“Short Second Life of Bree Tanner”: Stephenie Meyer slays her own vampires (Salon, 6/8/2010) There are probably only two reasonable reactions to having your first two novels made into blockbusters. The first: to pop some bubbly and raise an eternal glass to your triumph. The second: to freak out at how far your characters have wandered since the good old days, when the only screen they appeared on was your own.
Will the iPad Change Publishing? Ask The Atlantic (The Millions, 5/3/2010) How far we’ve come since 2005’s dark days, when Atlantic editors winnowed fiction down to a yearly newsstand-only digest! The now-quaint rationale was, “Reporting consumes a lot of space.” But in fiscal year 2009, when book review sections shriveled and houses purged editors and authors alike, dreamy fabulists, note: the Atlantic moved forward to find space for fiction again. And we should watch what they do closely. Because, in the past five years, while other news mags stumbled to find a way to get readers to consume their space—the Atlantic’s so-sensible-it’s-revolutionary strategy has made them a model for how print and online can survive side-by-side.
Rielle, Oprah and Zen: America’s Truth-Off. (Politics Daily, 5/2/2010) Since the publication of “Game Change,” the revelations of a sex tape and the alarming photo accompaniment to Rielle Hunter’s GQ interview, we can safely say that dirt on the John Edwards scandal has entered an era of diminishing returns. America could handle the soap-worthy battle between a cancer-ridden wife and a wanton home-wrecker, but even the most salacious viewer knows that when the lady of the house takes off her pants and kneels next to the stuffed Elmo, it’s time to pick up your toys and go home.
Suzanne Collins–2010 TIME 100 (Time, 4/29/2010) Remaking society can take decades. But global rebellion is short work for sharpshooter Katniss Everdeen, who single-handedly foments a revolution in Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster young-adult Hunger Games trilogy. America likes its champions reluctant, and Collins specializes in that surly breed: her heroine trounces dystopic despots while chewing her cheek in self-doubt.
Ivy Love: Why Students Really Shouldn’t Sleep With Their Professors (Politics Daily, 4/7/2010) People are having sex at Yale? Amorously enterprising Elis everywhere must forgive me if that was my first reaction to Salon’s Broadsheet columnist Tracy Clark-Flory, who pooh-poohs the university’s recent prohibition against faculty at Yale having sex with any undergraduate student, not just one of their own. Though I love the idea of that New Haven campus roiling, like some Rona Jaffe novel, with inappropriate liaisons of all kind, as a former student I recall, in 1995, sex at Yale was a pretty dispiriting affair, made up mostly of drunken late-night fumblings in the common room with roommates asleep feet away and awkward next-day encounters in the dining hall. Duras’s “The Lover” it was not.
The End of Single Women(The Daily Beast, 1/05/2010) Given our culture’s fascination with getting to the happily ever after, why is it always so unsatisfying to hear from someone already there? Is it that details prized from the circumspect spouses are almost belligerent in their banality? (See Michelle Obama on Barack’s morning breath.) That the narratives themselves are so ludicrously one-gendered? (When’s the last time you saw a husband wrestle in print about a marital bed he still enjoys?) Or that a genuinely frank admission peskily seems always to herald a union’s complete demise? (Commence countdown on the wife half of the recent Times piece who admitted in the first paragraph to hating French kissing.)
In today’s movies, girls in peril face many horrors(The Los Angeles Times, 1/02/2010) At first blush, the heroines of the films “Precious,” “New Moon” and “The Lovely Bones” seem to have little in common — except that they all started out as characters in novels. Precious is an abused, teenage mother who can barely read. “New Moon’s” Bella is a vampire-in-waiting who lives to be courted by a glittering heartthrob of the undead. Susie, the narrator of “The Lovely Bones,” is the product of the kind of suburban idyll for which Kodachrome was invented. Yet despite these diverging narratives, these girls are deeply, sweetly ordinary. All three want to feel comfortable with what they see in the mirror. All three want the boy they like to kiss them. All three would prefer not to be social outcasts, all three want happy family lives and all three will never, ever get any of these things.
‘Staying True’? Most Marriage Memoirs Do Anything But (Politics Daily, 1/8/2010) Mary, I was interested to see your post about the release of Jenny Sanford’s memoir being pushed up to February. (Who knew she was writing a memoir?) I’d prefer that it be pushed back a few years, or that it were never written at all. Although you can’t make assumptions about what leads anyone to put pen to paper — perhaps Sanford is a secret memoirist who’s been itching to blow the lid off her marriage since the honeymoon — it seems far more likely that this is yet another contribution to the scorned-wives genre, where the spouse offers insta-insights for the benefit of an enthusiastic marketing department, not readers.
Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers (Politics Daily, 12/14/2009) A few weeks ago, two book critics held a hushed conversation via cell phone under cover of darkness. ”They better not do it again,” one hissed. ”I know,” the other sputtered. ”If it happens, I will just –” ”I know!” said the other. “SCREAM,” the first finished. “I WILL SCREAM.” The subject was the upcoming season of book awards; “They” was the mass of authors, critics and publishing professions who — including yours truly — dispense them.
Rise of the Alpha Female(The Daily Beast, 12/11/2009)
If nothing else, this year’s series of marriage-fracturing scandals has given us a definitive portrait of the 21st-century mistress. Historically, the creature has been understood as a kind of obligation-free sweetheart one installs in a convenient apartment after fondness for a wife has evaporated. Not so her modern counterpart. Instead of a peignoir-clad understudy who frees up the chief spouse’s time for redecorating and serving on charitable committees, 2009’s Other Woman is the pathetic extra who hangs around the craft services table, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star.
What Tiger’s Mom Saw (The Daily Beast, 12/5/2009) From what we know, Elin Nordegren and Kultida Woods have a pretty standard mother and daughter-in-law relationship. (When Tiger built Tida a house next door, Elin, according to Australia’s Herald Sun, insisted a stretch of water separate them.) But the news that both Tida and Nordegren’s mother, Barbro Holmberg, were on the scene on the day that Elin commandeered a priceless club to rework the rear window of his vehicle may indicate a happy new phase in in-law relations.
I’m Team Tsing Loh: Whither Germaine Greer, Indeed? (Politics Daily, 12/5/2009) I live in Jersey City, about as far from a Betty Draper’s magnolia petal-overlaid redoubt as you can get. But every morning, I am mildly taken aback when I find myself marching among a troop that is entirely female, women of my age and station, ranging from the harried to the glamorous, all pushing one or two offspring toward the park in an assortment of urban-optimized carriages. Really? I think.
Fatherhood Gets Hip (The Daily Beast, 12/01/2009) Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He’s not the Son, I don’t think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author’s somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don’t), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one’s offspring to head straight to sanctification.
‘Blame’ Pushes Past Tragedy To Self-Discovery (NPR’s Books We Like, 10/26/2009) When a character accidentally kills a mother and daughter within the first 20 pages of a novel, a reader might expect the author to dedicate the remaining pages to picking through the resultant mental debris. But in her third novel, Blame, Michele Huneven has something far more interesting in mind than a redemptive tale about learning to take responsibility. Instead, this thoughtful, arresting novel uses a tragic event to explore the more provoking question of whether, in blaming ourselves for the obvious, we’re avoiding our true responsibilities.
Sometimes, a Doll is Just a Doll (Politics Daily, 10/26/2009) Once a year, usually around my birthday, my mother laments my childhood Barbie trauma. “I should have bought it for you,” she says glumly. “You wanted it, and I should have bought it.”
‘Jaws’: Celebrating Sand, Sex And A Really Big Fish (NPR’s All Things Considered, 8/26/2009)
You’re supposed to feel guilty when you secretly like the movie version of a book better than the book itself, but in the case ofJaws — a book I read and reread long before I was allowed to see the film — I’m far more embarrassed to admit I prefer the novel. Because while Jaws the movie is a bone-chilling update on Moby Dick, Jaws the novel is more like Peyton Place by the sea. Everyone swears like a sailor, and the hunt for the shark comes a very distant second to a bunch of hot summer trysts.
Buck Up: Life Lessons From Young Heroines(NPR’s All Things Considered, 6/10/2009) You might think of girls’ fiction as one big Cinderella rewrite — that scullery maid who finally gets her night at the ball. But if you’re seeking tips on weathering the economic crisis, your daughter’s bookshelf may be better than Suze Orman. When they’re in a tough spot, teen heroines tame wolves, survive in garrets and live out nine-month snowstorms — without a tiara in sight.
Personal Yet Dazzlingly Eclectic ‘Notes’ On Race(NPR’s Books We Like, 3/3/2009) In 2002, Eula Biss published a slim book of prose poetry, The Balloonists. Arresting and singular, itsflat, affectless recounting of seemingly disparate events could have been mind-numbing but for the author’s dazzlingly intuitive leaps, in which these odd juxtapositions lead to startling illumination. Biss brings that same alchemy to Notes from No Man’s Land, a collection of essays that examines race across North America, from the media’s view of Katrina victims, to the curiosity of American emigres flocking to Mexico City, to the fate of a Chicago neighborhood teetering on the edge of gentrification.
Marriage By the Book (NPR’s Best Books of 2008, 12/29/2008) If previous years’ bookshelves were crowded with woeful tales of single living, 2008 marked the year of marriage; even Anna Karenina, the ne plus ultra of domestic dissatisfaction, got back into the act, returning as a resident of Rego Park in Irina Reyn’s What Happened to Anna K.
Revolutionary Road (The Chicago Tribune, 12/27/2008) I discovered Richard Yates under circumstances the author would have found irredeemably precious, on a residency at Yaddo, working my way through the library of former residents. The desiccated copy of “Revolutionary Road,” its spine half-flaked off, told the unapologetically bleak story of Frank and April Wheeler, a husband and wife in 1950s Connecticut suburbia who are alternately battened by insecurity and misplaced superiority. “Revolutionary Road” was dire without being maudlin, erudite without being show-offy, and cruel yet correct. It was masterful and it was not pleased with itself in the least, and it was exactly unlike every character it depicted.
When Will There Be Good News? (NPR’s Books We Like, 9/29/2008) Most thrillers cast their murderers from a dependable trinity: Lecter-like mastermind, garden-variety psychopath or misfit bent on revenge. But in the third in a series of mysteries featuring the shambling, world-weary detective Jackson Brodie, novelist Kate Atkinson takes on a depressingly real-life boogeyman: the guy who kills women and children.
Just After Sunset (NPR’s Books We Like, 11/13/2008) After years of advocacy from fans and critics, several appearances in the New Yorker, and the 2000 publication of his marvelous On Writing, it is now generally agreed that Stephen King is as “literary” as any moody Whiting-award nominee. If King’s new short-story collection, Just After Sunset, is any indication, he too seems to consider the matter settled. Like a character in one of his own novels who has vanquished the bogeyman and emerged into daylight unharmed, the author has deemed it safe to put down his highfalutin pen and return unapologetically to his lurid, gore-spattered roots.
Stephenie Meyer: The Twilight Series (The Chicago Tribune, 8/2/2008) Roughly once a decade, one or another of the media’s form of the undead — genre — struggles to reinvent itself. This usually takes place in the teen market, the only slice of the pie that receives a crop of newbies with some regularity. Even still, lately, an enormous number of replicants has been served up to the unsuspecting.
Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love(NPR’s Books We Like, 7/29/2008)
Kitchen-table fiction, wherein a cozy author tells the story of a culture through its food, is as easy to find as a packet of Splenda. But Lara Vapnyar’s second short-story collection, the follow-up to her debut, There Are Jews in My House, is a stunning petit four (it’s a slender 160 pages) in a world of saccharin.
Certain Girls (NPR’s Books We Like, 6/30/2008) Jennifer Weiner’s 2001 debut smash, Good In Bed — which is the kind of book you buy for a plane ride, then are surprisingly pleased you did — introduced us to the agreeably mordant Cannie Shapiro, who, overweight, scorned, and inadvertently on the way to motherhood, writes her way out of a hole and into a career and marriage with a naughty best-seller. (Yes, it’s meta.)
The Brotherhood of S.E. Hinton (The Chicago Tribune, 5/31/2008) “S.E. Hinton is a girl?” my friend’s husband, incredulous, asked me last weekend. It wasn’t the first time. Given the fact that the author’s “The Outsiders,” her iconic work, is still read in classrooms across the country, and that her particulars—she published the work when she was 17 as, yes, a girl—are splashed on nearly every copy, it’s a perplexingly enduring question. Perhaps for readers of any age it’s still difficult to believe that this profoundly diligent explorer of male adolescence, the woman who brought philosophizing, switchblade-bearing toughs with way too much hair oil and free time onto every teenager’s bookshelf, probably did it in a bra.
Fine Lines [Jezebel.com] Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
The Late Show(The Lost Angeles Times, 11/11/2007) “Mother is gone / only Things remain” reads the epigraph to “Classic Layer Cakes,” one of the central poems in David Trinidad’s confection-laced collection, “The Late Show” (Turtle Point Press: 110 pp., $16.95 paper). The Denise Levertov quote could easily serve as the epigraph to the entire work. Trinidad is a meticulous curator of pop-culture flotsam — silver-screen sirens, Barbie, ’60s-era lip gloss — and his autobiographical verse is a graceful, merry wink to gay culture. (In “A Poem Under the Influence,” he goes so far as to declare, “To this day, if I can fit ‘pink’ in a poem, I do.”) But “The Late Show” is an hommage to both Hollywood and Trinidad’s own ghosts flickering across the screen. Chief among these are his mother, dead of cancer, and his lover, poet and artist Joe Brainard, whose 1970 work “I Remember” used that phrase as a jumping-off point and spawned a poetry workshop standard. “The Late Show” is a kaleidoscopic “I Remember” where now-gone players from the poetry world — James Schuyler, Tim Dlugos and Rachel Sherwood — make apperances, bracketed by Trinidad’s usual ready referents: actress Thelma Ritter, the Lana Turner version of “Imitation of Life” and Water Wiggle. Trinidad uses a jumble of forms to evoke them all: sonnets, odes, sestinas, free verse, with nods to Neruda, Wilde, Dickinson and Plath. (At times, quotes from Trinidad’s friends rival the snappy patter of screenplays: “He’s been crossed off guest lists I didn’t know existed.”) It’s no accident that the forms at which Trinidad excels — pantoums, sestinas — do not propel a narrative forward but circle back, repeat, emphasize. “The Late Show” is less a monument to the past than a salvage. Like the adult narrator of “Classic Layer Cakes,” who scours flea markets to acquire the complete set for a Deluxe Reading Barbie Dream Kitchen, Trinidad scours his own past for each cracked, orphaned accessory.
Wherein we arrange Times headlines in verse to bring you secret messages from the paper of record.
Fiction Chronicle (The New York Times Book Review, 4/8/2007) Take a young man, successful but lacking in experience. Add a woman, opaque and mysterious, her past a dark negative the narrator holds up to the light, finding only his own reflection. Throw in a war, a disillusioned journalist as the antagonist whose world-weary asides counter the young man’s tedious ignorance. It’s an old story, made fresh by the first-time novelist Michael FitzGerald….
Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy (New York Times, 12/17/2006) EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain.
Confessions of a Memory Eater (The New York Times Book Review, 9/17/2006) Is it a coincidence that an author who seemed to have reached the apex of her popularity a decade ago has come back on the scene with a novel in which a memory pill allows a professor to return to his own golden days? Possibly, though the literary chameleon Pagan Kennedy charges into the future with impressive dexterity, even as her latest character is sucked back into the past.
Talk Talk (The Baltimore Sun, 7/23/2006) What’s the cost of being 20 minutes late for a dentist’s appointment? Running a stop sign? Having a cross word with your boss? In the real world, maybe an extra hour in the waiting room; a $40 ticket; getting the fish-eye for a week at work. But in T.C. Boyle’s new novel, Talk Talk, these inconsequential events do not pass into the realm of the quickly forgotten. Instead, they are the small jagged snips that unravel three people’s lives.
The Whole World Over (The Baltimore Sun, 6/11/2006) One might think that a novel spanning the art of cookery and Sept. 11 (or, as the Library of Congress has it, “1. Women cooks-Fiction. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001-Fiction.”) might take its title with a decent pinch of salt as well. But Julia Glass’ The Whole World Over, the follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Three Junes, means to live up to its title, double connotation and all.
Carry Me Down (The Baltimore Sun, 4/9/2006) If we got rid of the child narrator, would anybody miss him? Surely his characteristics have gone from enduring to inuring. First and most foremost, there’s his fractured family, usually in the form of a drunken father and an ineffectual mother – one overly close to her charge, mourning a great and fragile beauty. His parents have often produced an alternately raging and principled older brother, already dead or soon to die, and a preternaturally innocent young sister, who utters gnomic statements and, if the older brother lives, is not long for this world herself.
Rust and Bone (The New York Times Book Review, 12/25/2005) It may, as the conventional wisdom goes, be harder to write comedy than tragedy–but it’s also easy for a writer to shoot for the second and hit the first. That’s what happens in Craig Davidson’s short-story collection, where the author plunges a child under the ice and into a permanent coma, rips the face off a dog, lets a killer whale bite off his trainer’s leg and finally snaps a character’s manhood in two in a series of unsuccessful attempts to win the reader’s sympathy that are equal parts amusing, appalling and just plain gross.
The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming (The Baltimore Sun, 12/25/2005) At these times Perlman often attempts to save himself with a poetical flourish. The widow in “Manslaughter” lies down among dusty salad leaves in a supermarket after the jury renders a not-guilty verdict, her “life marked down, drastically reduced.” In “The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine,” the narrator, a lawyer, intones that the “terms of the contract” with his ex-love were “partly oral, partly implied and partly imagined. It has been breached in a way that makes its further performance impossible. I am entitled to treat it as an end, but I am unable. There is damage.”
On Beauty (The Baltimore Sun, 9/18/2005) When an established author updates a classic, it’s generally considered bad form to spend the great majority of your reading sniffing out salient “Aha!” moments. But On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, a vigorous homage to Forster’s Howards End, not only invites, but demands, such sniffing. The author — whose debut, White Teeth, catapulted her into the kind of galactic literary orbit of which lesser authors, crashing and burning through unearned advances, can only dream — has transposed her countryman’s novel of love and class in turn-of-the-century England into a treatise on race and class in current day America.
An Atomic Romance (The Baltimore Sun, 8/28/2005) When we begin Bobbie Ann Mason’s An Atomic Romance — the author’s first book in a decade — the life of hero Reed Futrell, ladies’ man, chemistry buff, and outdoor enthusiast, is, both metaphorically and literally, up in the air. The self-dubbed “Atomic Man,” a longtime employee of a uranium-enrichment plan, has just found out that his workplace may or may not have stockpiled its own employees with neptunium and plutonium. His girlfriend Julia, an amateur biologist, may or may not have completely called it quits with him, peeved not only at Reed’s blind trust in his superiors at the plant, but at his choice of a contaminated camping ground for their recent romantic excursion.
Lunar Park (The Baltimore Sun, 8/21/2005) Bret Easton Ellis needs no introduction. Not because his first novel, Less Than Zero, was a “zeitgeist touchstone,” or because he has been profiled in “every magazine and newspaper that existed,” or because his name is as “recognizable as most movie stars’ or athletes’.” No, it is because, for those of you who may not be aware of these facts, the author notes all of the above and more in his handy 30-page preface to Lunar Park, which constitutes his sixth novel, or, if you will, a gathering of “controlled, cinematic haiku.”
We’re in Trouble (The Baltimore Sun, 5/1/2005) In the sizable acknowledgments section of this debut short story collection, it is safe to say that only the dentist has been cast out of the warm circle of the author’s gratitude. Christopher Coake gives the ubiquitous nod not only to current and former partners, his family, his agent, and his editor, but also to the entire writing faculty of two MFA programs, all of his fellow workshop participants in each…
The Professor’s Daughter (The Baltimore Sun, 2/13/2005) The author whose biography nearly mirrors that of her protagonist plays a dangerous game. Memories have as good a chance as imaginings to bloom into a successful piece of fiction, but a novel in which circumstances and characters are readily identified can seem like a half-hearted memoir. In Emily Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter, the sections that diverge from the author’s life are by far the most absorbing, and the specter of the author – who, like Emma Boudreaux, was raised in Princeton, attended Yale and, as the product of a black father and a white mother, looks neither white nor black – rises so frequently, one wonders why one genre won out over the other.
Home Land (New York Times Book Review, 1/30/2005) Few activities are as likely to bring on a fit of depressive jealousy as leafing through the back pages of one’s alumni magazine. While you molder in a studio apartment, stuck in a dead-end job, your former classmates are founding clinics in Thailand, cranking out best sellers and unveiling major new paintings — as well as bearing exceptional children. You thought you’d be a success, or at least have a chance to make a decent stab at it while you were still young. Sorry.
Check-In (Caketrain Books, 2005) Winner of Caketrain Journal‘s 2004 Poetry Chapbook Competition. Forthcoming in August 2005 from Caketrain Books. Check website for updates and ordering information.
Shadowed(Bantam Books For Young Readers, November 2004) SOPHOMORE YEAR. HARDER classes. Nicer dorms. Stronger friendships. And Sydney Bristow’s biggest mission yet: retrieve top-secret KGB research in Berlin. But someone else is on the job. Someone people keep confusing with Sydney.
Unlubricated (New York Times Book Review, 10/24/2004) It might not seem possible — to say nothing of advisable — to write a comic novel about Sept. 11 and its aftermath, but that’s what Arthur Nersesian has given us with ”Unlubricated,” his sixth novel, an urban caper about a would-be actress…
Runaway (New York Magazine, 10/23/2004) No one would ever mistake Alice Munro for an author of delicate sensibilities. (In “Carried Away,” from 1994′s Open Secrets, a man plucks a recently decapitated head off a factory floor.) Still, a grim streak runs through Munro’s new collection, Runaway, greater than the physical carnage of her earlier work…
The Summer Guest (Washington Post Book World, 8/22/2004) The telling moment in Justin Cronin’s debut novel, the 2002 PEN/Hemingway award-winning Mary and O’Neil, occurs when the female half of the title heads out to terminate an unplanned pregnancy.
Old Hag is the work of Lizzie Skurnick, a writer, editor and current reluctant
resident of perhaps the greatest failed industrial city of all time...more...
Make of it what you will, but the Twitter-born fracas over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom proves one thing without a doubt: the American literary establishment are size queens.
Their collective pulse races at the sight of muscular doorstopper filled with realism. (Especially following a ten-year dry spell.) They can’t agree on large sales versus long shelf life. They’re critical heavy-breathers: witness New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus fervently laud Freedom’s “capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.”
I’ll be talking tonight with author Marcy Dermansky, childhood neighbor, giver of Canal Street hand-me-downs, tonight at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene at 7:30 about her wondrous novel, Bad Marie. Easily accessible by 2/3/4/5/a/c/g. (The bookstore, not the novel.) Will they have wine? Let’s hope. Map below, mainly to give me a chance to embed something, which doesn’t seem to be working anyway.
It’s not unusual for me to round up, every week or so, whatever pale fire I have managed to effuse into the surrounding atmosphere in the interval, but as the young ones say, this shit was crazy, yo! Especially since it was surrounded by six-hundred other randomers. (Ask astrologer if Saturn something?) Anyway, I am an anal archivist kind of person, so must organize and list despite breadth of reach. Some of this is merely incidental and no need to be interested unless you are. However, at the end, there is something very, very funny.
1. At this year’s Book Expo America, I, Libba Bray, and other teensperts talked about YA and adult crossover lit. BEA just posted the panel. (For the fidgety, at around 7:00, I and the audience of librarians crack up about teacher/student sex. 6:54, just about.)
2. My good friend Dana Stevens and I spoiled Saltover at Slate. (Say that three times fast!) We spoiled Eclipsea little while ago. In both locations you will also find Dana’s wonderful reviews.
3. The tireless #seriouslyhowdoesshedoit blogger Booking Mama published a very nice review of Scout, Atticus and Boo, a tribute to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, for which documentary filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy interviewed luminaries such as Dan Rather, Oprah Winfrey and — *cackles delightedly cuz decidedly non-luminary* — me! Please check out McDonagh Murphy’s site for some interesting clips/links and to pre-order DVD, god help me.
4. I weigh in on The San Diego Union-Tribune‘s axing its book section.
6. I know, I’m stalling. But okay, so THAT WAS CRAZY, RIGHT? I was just meeting my monthly quota! Anyway, I list !!!!!THE SCANDAL!!!!!! here mainly to give thanks for our nation’s commenters, who have lost me two entire days of work but are SO FUNNY I CAN’T STAND IT, as well as insightful and wise and all those things people meeting monthly quotas can only vaguely hope to be, one day. I hope the people running the internet make sure they archive comments? Whispering mean things while someone else is speaking is always the better part of valor.
I’m going to link to some places I thought were ESPECIALLY FUNNY because they are just good readin’, period, but I actually appreciated all of youwhoweighedin because I live in a basement apartment, and the light in here is bad, and 100K+ views of this nature is as good as it’s going to get.
a) People of Twitter! Thank you for reading, as well as hashtag #BUSINESS.
c) People of Unfogged! You are very funny. Like, IRL, though I guess this is not IRL, is it, ha ha! Who are you? I’m so intimidated by you! WHY DON’T I KNOW YOU ALREADY. (Appending “On America” to any terminal adjective that takes an “on” is my new “…in bed.” “Drunk” is probably the only one, but I’m sure it’ll get lots of use!)
d) People of Shakesville! So many, many portmanteaus for “douche.” I’d forgotten! #thankyou #DOUCHECANOE
e) BEAUTIES of Jezebel! You are often/always hilarious but this was sort of above and beyond. Too many to count but this parody of the CEFAD in question might deserve a company car:
“The fourth time I read it out loud in a shouty faux-Shakespearian voice, and was interrupted by my next door neighbor who felt I was disturbing her barking chihuahua. The fifth and sixth times were mostly taken up with an effort to find a DaVinci code hidden in the text, by reading only every second word, and then every third… then the seventh time I read it in character as a space-lord from a neighboring galaxy. The ninth time I was huddled in a corner of my bathroom sobbing into a disused hand towel chosen by my ex-wife ten years ago, before my life was destroyed.
“And then on the tenth time I vomited and decided to write you back, you lucky lucky girl. Now let me tell you everything that is wrong with you.”
* I would last here like to wish congratulations to the broom and gride in question. I’m doing it in teeny teeny type because enough already. But the internet is happy for you. We hope you are drunk…on America.
UPDATE: 10 MORE I MEAN. Taking position here my vast critical capacities have exercised eminent domain over math part of brain. I really did once do physics!
LS: I didn’t notice it particularly at the time, but when I look back, I see that almost every story in each of the collections was about some alienated young woman alone in Europe, or some other foreign-seeming outpost. Turmoil and deprivation: Weimar Germany, Vichy France, etc. (I still can’t forget the one where a girl spends the summer on a farm with German immigrants, and the wives all stand behind their husbands and serve them from the back while they eat.) There’s also, of course, Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft,” in which a mother steals a purse from a single woman who’s not quite able to connect with men for her daughter, who is younger and is. I can’t remember exactly what she says as she walks past her in the hallway — something like, “You don’t need it,” in this very intense way that indicates she knows what she’s doing is technically wrong but also philosophically right. It’s horrible.
JC: Have you returned to that place?
LS: I haven’t. I sometimes wonder what’s happened to it. I read all the books in this bar called Pod Lubim that had just opened next to the university, and this waiter was always bringing me Becherovka and asking me to tell him about what was in whatever book I was reading, which was difficult considering he spoke three words of English and I spoke no Czech. It was sort of a bizarre place — very sleek and modern, with very “arty” pictures of naked women all over the walls etc., but 35 cent Pilsner and surprisingly good food.
Okay, I literally found a pic of me and the waiter! I think his name was Milosz? He was very much with the pushing of the plum concoctions. As you can see I am reading Pat Conroy there, and NO ONE FANCY.
Posted by altehaggen in Lit-ish @ Monday, June 28, 2010 12:53 pm | |
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It’s so weird to crosspost w/Shelf Discovery and Old Hag. It makes me feel a bit Tara, but both sides seem perfectly at ease with each other, if their host body is not. Point: I’m bringing back Plotfinder from Fine Lines, and I wrote about it on the Shelf Discovery blog, but now that Old Hag is open is seems I should point to it here. Alors, here’s the whole post too this time, and we’ll work out who lives where in the near future:
——————
One of the great sadnesses about leaving Jezebel’s “Fine Lines” series behind is that I also had to retire the Plotfinder series, in which you all sent me your mysterious queries — “Girl on a bus who eats bean sprouts and peanut butter sandwich?” “The Divorce Express!” — and we all solved them.
Plotfinder was one of those weird items that sprang up organically almost from the first column, and I’ve often wondered if it’s because strange details and covers are so much more likely to endure — “Blue dress, orange dress, girl who says Avenue of the Americas instead of Sixth Avenue?” from “The Trouble With Thirteen” are especially persistent with me — than actual titles at that age. Someone could probably do a neurological study on it, and I am not that person! I am just the person in possession of about 100 unsolved queries who was always like “I’ll add it to the queue” and then let it languish for an unacceptable period.
Yesterday I found yet another trove of used YA — this one in Seaburn Books, in Astoria — and was like WAIT — why am I not posting a cover and a Plotfinder with some regularity so we can all enjoy the mystery and wonder thereof? In any case, I am now going to do so. Since I literally have 96 I should probably do one once a day but we’ll space them out. I’ll also see if I can get my publisher to donate some “Shelf Discovery” copies for the winners. For now it is all for the honor and the glory.
Feel free to answer HERE, or to friend Shelf Discovery on FB and answer there. You can also send me an email at jezziefinelines@gmail.com.
These first two come from Betsy P. and Ashley T.:
The book was set in Maryland. The heroine was a cheerleader/all around good girl who gets auctioned off, in a charity auction, to the school bad boy (drag racer) who gets her to skip school and help clean his car. They start to go out and her horizons get broadened by seeing that he is smart, etc. A secondary plot line is her trying to get into Mt. Holyoke and getting wait listed. She also has a brother at Yale who is becoming a hippie and questioning the family’s values and lifestyle.
The book ends with a pregnancy scare and the girl deciding to go to a small school in VA. She and the boy break up and she moves on with her life, but not the one that she took for granted she would have.
My guess is that it was published in the early 70′s. The cover of the book showed a Peter Max bedspread and a princess phone. How I can remember these arcane details and not the character’s names is a mystery to me.
The books are about a girl who lives on an island off the coast of Maine. In one book, she goes to school barefoot and is shamed by her teacher, whom she later learns to appreciate and who learns to appreciate her. In another book, she goes to the mainland for high school and decides against accounting in favor of the college course. Perhaps also In that book, she saves her money to buy “the book of knowledge” that she sees advertised in a magazine and desperately wants.
If you missed either of my pieces this week, I reviewed Justin Cronin’s delightful The Passage, and also recommended three books to NPR you can use to feel better about failing immediately out of the gate after graduation. I even responded to a piece in which I was quoted because I disagreed with the conclusion! Now I am off to write yet another piece for the fledging, underpaying web culture monster, the landed gentry of which I was hanging out with on a well-stocked roof in Soho last night, wondering how this all had HAPPENED. Is anyone else weirded out how quickly every publication installed that Facebook social app? Is anyone under the impression the site can’t pull all your info when you’re logged in, for the most part? I did just want to put that out there as a warning before I badgered you yet again to click all the recommending options nonetheless.
Posted by altehaggen in Lit-ish @ Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:53 am | |
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Though my thoughts on this have now now been unproductively percolating, like an increasingly viscous pot of coffee, for an entire two days, I did want to make sure I responded to Ruth Graham’s Slate piece on Christian YA novels, which argues, ”If you look past the Bible-study scenes, young-adult novels from evangelical authors and publishers are offering their young Christian readers a surprisingly empowering guide to adolescence,” concluding that “Amid all of this piety…are explicitly positive—even feminist—messages like positive body image, hard work, and the importance of not settling for just any guy—that present a grounded alternative to the Gossip Girl landscape.”
Those familiar with my reading history will not be surprised to see I disagree, and not only because I think reducing literature to a tool for lifting the self-esteem of strangers must be the most maddening crime to have been visited on authors in this century.
My point of greatest disagreement with Graham runs along the question of morality. This to some extent is my fault, as I used the word myself when I told Graham that I think we live in a very moral era. Graham — not without reason — uses this to wonder if Christian YA not only embraces our moral era but is in some part the cause of it.
I don’t know if that’s true — possibly — but I brought up the word “moral” as an explicit pejorative, and maybe I should have said “uptight,” which is what I really meant. (And by uptight, I really mean that, in the Ice Castles of my youth, the heroine could happily have sex with her boyfriend and an older newscaster, and now no one can do that anymore. I can dig up some other examples if you need them.) Because, while you can find a number of YA novels from L’Engle to Blume to Paterson that struggle with religion, morality and, for lack of a better word, what we can call the soul, contemporary Christian fiction doesn’t explore morality so much as define it. And in this, it’s worse than Gossip Girl, because while that series revels in its tarty vacuity, Christian fiction is equally sex-, boy- and status-obsessed, but it cloaks these concerns in an aura of uplift.
I’m just going to go through some of Graham’s examples and conclusions and sketch out my disagreements therewith, as it is BROILING and I’m not sure integrating my reactions coherently is a suit in my deck at this juncture. Which is to say, I think I say “bespeaks” 18 times below — I’m sorry:
In the newest books, old-fashioned values are embraced for newfangled reasons. Modesty is endorsed, not because of shame, but because of self-respect and practicality: Protagonist DJ in Spring Breakdown opts for a one-piece swimsuit over a teensy bikini because, “I like to swim. And I like to move around.” Besides, another character reflects later, “Sometimes subtle is sexy.”
I’m all for the moving around part, but I must say, the need to smugly defend suiting up for maximum movement at all indicates a different underlying imperative. (Unlike this pack of whores near this body of water, I, really and truly, not only like to move around but have conveniently accomplished this while not looking like a whore. You whores should try it sometime.) The second comment truly nails it. Yes, sure, subtle is sexy. But wait — if we’re being moral, aren’t we not supposed to be focused on BEING SEXY? And if we are, for God’s sake, let’s not hamstring ourselves with one-pieces.
Work matters, too…Protagonists spend a lot of time contemplating “God’s plan” in their lives, a message that reinforces long-term goals. Cindy Martinusen-Coloma’s sensitively written 2009 novel, Beautiful, features a high-schooler who hopes to go into international law. When her father tells her that her parents worry about seeing her head off to a war zone someday, she replies, “I’ll tell Mom it’s what God wants me to do.”
Okay. Call me a bad person, that just sounds to me like she’s going to lie.
Even in matters of the heart, these Christian books are encouraging girls to have personal agency. Take Candace Thompson, the protagonist of Debbie Viguié’s 2008 novel The Summer of Cotton Candy. “We’re not kids forever,” she tells her summer fling, discouraged by his aimlessness. “I may not know what I want to do with my life yet, but I know I want to do something. … Sooner or later you have to take responsibility for your own life, and I’m trying. What are you doing?” When he asks what this means, her answer is “I want a guy who values the same things I do”—a pretty excellent guideline for teens of any religious background.
I think it’s fine not to want to date a big lox — Um, I want a guy who gets off the couch — but wanting a guy who values the same things as you do, at that age, bespeaks a certain parochiality that mistakes certainty for knowledge. Engaging with people with conflicting values is one of the joys, privileges and challenges of adulthood, ones you miss when you shack up with someone who agrees with you on every point. What the hell do you know, anyway? You’re a teenager. Talk to Mr. Aimless in 5 years — you’ll probably see him differently.
…the larger takeaway from the Christian books is not that girls should imagine themselves as subservient wives, but that they should prepare themselves for adulthood. Certainly heroine Candace Thompson sees marriage as her ultimate goal when she is choosing a boyfriend. But she also wants someone “who valued what she did, would take her seriously, would help her grow as a person, and would love and respect her.” That’s not a girl preparing for a life as a doormat; it’s a girl learning about the importance of emotional strength. It’s a girl who refuses to settle for a so-so boy who is not on track to be a good man. As far as girlish escapism goes, it’s better than holding out for a Prada purse.
In this sentence may lie the seed of a future nightmare, but I’ll strike out anyway and say, I hope to hell my daughter, as a teenager, is dreaming of Prada purses, not respectful husbands. Of course dreaming of a Prada purse is silly — but what are your teen years for if not to be vain, unrealistic, impractical, self-obsessed, and silly? (I STILL would love a Prada purse.) And while a purse may be a craven, gold-digging goal, it’s a goal in support of one’s self, ultimately enriching and enjoyable — one in which you desire, not one in which you worry if you are being correctly desired.
It’s also a goal without enormous consequences. “Emotional strength,” shmength — ask a married lady: a husband, good or not, is not ultimately a vehicle for validating one’s respectability but a whole other human, a project, a partnership. Yes: if you compare the values behind wanting a respectful husband and wanting a purse, of course, a nice husband wins. But in both cases, when you’re a teenager, an object of desire is but a representation of an aspect of self — and as a talisman, a purse is more appropriate than a person. It’s far more escapist — and disempowering — to pretend that’s not so.
I don’t think Christian YA should be snatched out of girls’ hands any more than I do copies of Twilight, but let us accept its bubble-gum nature, acknowledge that its stabs at modest sexiness, moral ambition, co-conscious exploration and marital liberation are as unrealistic as the dream of Prada — and as unlikely to give a girl pleasure. In short, it’s hard enough to be a teenage girl without object lessons around swimwear. Let’s help them get through it in one piece.
I know, I know, the end of men. No worries — at NPR, bastion of liberalism, they still have many advocates. (P.S. this slow drum beat of male uplift accompanies ANYTHINGI do for NPR, even by NPR. I have written responsestoit, in my time.)
Here, however, I do especially love the mix of gentle remonstration and peeved outrage:
Justin Swanson (swanje) wrote:
It would be refreshing for NPR to suggest at least one book with a male protagonist…
Danielle Foushee (DFoushee) wrote:
I saw the headline for this story and immediately thought there might be something here that would interest my brother, who has struggled since college. Too bad you only profiled books geared towards young women. I’m sure there are plenty of young men who could stand to read something they could identify with.
Danielle, if your brother has reached the point where my commentary on NPR plays a significant part in his life path, I am very sad to tell you he is by definition SOL.
Posted by altehaggen in General @ Wednesday, June 23, 2010 10:10 am | |
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Metafilter posted my post! I love Metafilter*. However:
I actually make it a practice to never respond to comment streams just because…well, I feel like the article is the place where you got to speak your piece, and the comments are where commenters get to speak theirs, and if you wish to observe the integrity of your article, don’t treat it as an ongoing conversation.
Also, comment streams have their own weather, and if you don’t like it, wait a minute — which is to say, someone else winds up posting the thing you meant to say, anyway.
But since I did just start actively blogging again, I’m feeling a little manic, and I was interested in how my little desideratum about blogging was received by those who are not paid to love me, I will respond, if only because the aggregate response seems to illustrate how thoroughly the world I was talking about has vanished.
1. This is a piece by an author who is annoyed at not getting more attention for her blog from the big game.
Okay. Say what you will — that is explictly the opposite of what my piece is about, and even if you misunderstood my own narration of the events in question, I am eminently Googleable, you know, in all my big-game glory in that room of dozens.
My piece was about how it’s nice to be a blogger and be plucked from your blog to write for different media, but also odd. First, it’s odd because you’re asked to write for that medium, not to blog for it, but yes, as flexing your muscles in a different space is to some extent the story of all freelance writing, that’s not that interesting.
But what is singular is that in 2003, when my blog began to attract notice, I was asked to write for a media that also made snide comments about bloggers and their ability to write with great regularity. Now, that media has fully incorporated blogging as a medium, but not bloggers as an expert class. It’s weird, and annoying, to old-school bloggers who were beaten and pampered, and despite blogging’s ubiquity continue to be.
2. This is a piece by a writer who cannot write.
a) Well, what do you want me to say? It’s baroque. It’s filigreed. You like it or you don’t. You’re not into Thackeray, I get it. It’s not agrammatical, though, and a run-on sentence and a LONG sentence are absolutely not the same thing, something I will observe to my dying day, both asked and unasked, as one blogger, under God, drinking my coffee in relative peace on this cold gray day, etc., etc.
b) You are correct that it is RIDDLED with errors, though. I should get my sister and a friend to proof everything I do. My BOOK is riddled with errors! So embarrassing.
However, as master of big-game media!!! I can say this is not a function of laziness, but really a function of writing reams and reams of things, constantly, for a living, under a deadline. I used to copyedit and proof for a living as well, and I’ve learned it’s just impossible — for me, at least — to do both. Once my writing emerged error-free and fully formed and it just doesn’t anymore.
In my old age I have found I really like it when I get a chance to do a massive second or third draft, particularly when I’m reviewing. Blogging is quite different though, and there is a hummingbird effect you may or may not like. It was a voice VERY MUCH IN VOGUE when I began, not so much today.
However, even with a copyeditor, and I love copyeditors and proofers, love love love, errors always get through. O magazine just changed a subject in a piece of mine to a He from a She three times, and the error went through, even though that writer is eminently Googleable. O is like the MOTHERSHIP of copyediting and proofreading. So blame me if you like, and I would love it if any of you would like to give my posts a read. The part of my brain that used to prevent “plane” from becoming “plain” is out of service.
I will correct those errors you pointed out though. I’m also losing my eyesight, and my hearing. Have pity.
3. That was a lovely little artic–
THANK YOU.
And thank you all — it’s very nice to be back, and very nice to see MetaFilter paying attention to my return at all. God, I see standards have risen since the days when I could just patch together my Cry List. Oh, I can’t find my Cry List. It was popular, in its day. Those of you worried that internet items you’ve written will haunt you until the end of your days, don’t.
Under normal circumstances, I would never be asking you for money. We monkeys
consider this an act of coarseness, a vile human quality. But extreme circumstances have forced my hand, and now I must appeal to whatever spirit of charity nestles in your so-called soul.
I’m not sure how much you know about time travel. I will assume next to nothing and not confuse you with time dilation and the twin paradox. In any case, during routine maintenance of the temporal deflector console, I found myself transported from the future and landing in a place you call New York City. You may wonder what the future holds for humanity. The short explanation is: you will all be dead. A peaceful, civilized society is ruled by monkeys. If it’s any solace, please know that evolution has done its proper work.
I know, I know, I just drafted a massive complaint of those bitches of the MSM yanking my pony. I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy the drama, though! Here’s some recent work:
At the behest of Salon, I Kindle’d Stephenie Meyer’s latest and concluded that, by the third novel-to-movie, the bubble’s off the champagne:
Mega-popular writers today have a hard row to hoe. Fame that, in the old days, would have crested with a spot on morning television has morphed into a sort of media free-for-all. Hollywood and TV attack fresh young authors like tasty kill. Fans treat their works and the authors themselves like some massive World of Storycraft, spinning off reams of their own fan fiction and commentary and pestering the author for updates. It’s not surprising that even the most gracious scribe might do the narrative equivalent of heading off to a cabin in the woods...
It drives me nuts that people don’t get that SATC is kitsch. I’m also interested in how, though we have a zillion shows about marriage, no men are allowed to be in them. This is being interpreted by commenters as some reactionary critique of womankind, which it is not — but vale! Here’s my piece for Politics Daily, my favorite place to commentararize:
Yes, you critics mildly confused by the dramatic headgear, vast apartments and frequent jettings-about of the ladies of the “Sex and the City” franchise can put down your poison pens. It’s an hommage to “The Women” — not an embrace of the fruits of Wall Street. Still, what passed for a witty take on marriage in 1939 makes slightly less sense nowadays. While the gay community is scrambling to get the state benefits that are supposed to accompany a lifelong commitment, heedless beneficiaries of them are fleeing the institution in droves. If that two-year run of sex scandals didn’t make the point, Al and Tipper’s breakup, and now their eldest daughter Karenna’s, too, should have prepared us at last to revisit the idea of till death do us part. The problem is, the husband still doesn’t seem to be part of the equation…
Also, this month I am in O! I love O. I can’t tell you how much I love O; I am a subscriber and everything; I gain vast knowledge from that advice column; I skip Suzy because I’m scared to think about my money. I love O!
And the one thing I do not love about O is that they do not make an effort to be online any more than my Grandma Sally. Actually, if I had a Grandma Sally, even she would be way more online, O. Click here for my contribution. This is illegal but you can subscribe and should, too.
It’s not clear why Random House threw 
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment one achieves literary success, but when Stephen King picks up the phone to interrupt your Good Morning America appearance to personally thank you for writing your latest book, you know you are in the ballpark.
It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming, but Beach Week author Susan Coll is a master at finding wisdom in the unexpected.
Remaking society can take decades. But global rebellion is short work for sharpshooter Katniss Everdeen, who single-handedly foments a revolution in Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster young-adult Hunger Games trilogy. America likes its champions reluctant, and Collins specializes in that surly breed: her heroine trounces dystopic despots while chewing her cheek in self-doubt.
I live in Jersey City, about as far from a Betty Draper’s magnolia petal-overlaid redoubt as you can get. But every morning, I am mildly taken aback when I find myself marching among a troop that is entirely female, women of my age and station, ranging from the harried to the glamorous, all pushing one or two offspring toward the park in an assortment of urban-optimized carriages. Really? I think.
Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He’s not the Son, I don’t think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author’s somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don’t), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one’s offspring to head straight to sanctification.
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain. 
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.
Make of it what you will, but the Twitter-born fracas over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom proves one thing without a doubt: the American literary establishment are size queens.
One of the great sadnesses about leaving Jezebel’s “
I know, I know, I just drafted 
