Brief Book Reviews
10 May 2004
Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for
Uncompromising Romantics
Sasha Cagen
I thought I was quirky, and I’m definitely “alone” (as in,
“Are you ladies alone?”), but according to the quiz in the front
of this book, I am not “quirkyalone.” The twentysomething
Cagen coined the phrase a few years back when she
realized that she and all of her friends were single and happy that way. For a “tribe” that disdains
Cosmo quizzes, they’re sure fond of personality tests, sidebar clutter,
and pop psychology about finding one’s self. It’s basically like reading page
after page of those personals one sees on the Onion that are written
much more carefully than they’re read.
More like mirrors than windows, they say less about our loneliness or
even our pickiness than about our need to talk about ourselves. Unlike Cagen, I don’t see anything wrong with taking up
golf because your boyfriend likes it, and having a ceremony to honor
one’s “marriage” to oneself makes no sense to me. If I thought the opposite, I suppose
I’d be quirkyalone. I would never try anything new unless I
thought of it all by myself, and I’d “deconstruct” love
songs rather than be moved by them.
Cagen’s theory includes a sneaky clause so that quirkyalones can become quirkytogethers,
and lots of middle-class bashing (“quirkytogethers
do not wear matching sweaters”, we’re told). The Surrendered Wife aside, no one
wants to completely subsume their identity to a relationship. But that doesn’t mean one has to
issue a manifesto about how quirky and alone one is. Of course it’s easier to carefully
catalog one’s own interests, tastes, and personality traits than it is
to get to know and get along with another person. “Uncompromising
romantics” can only be in love with themselves.
Subwayland : Adventures in
the World Beneath New York
Randy Kennedy
Collected here are Kennedy’s New York Times
“Tunnel Vision” columns on one of the wonders of the modern
world, the New York City Subway. He
writes about the rail fan who reconstructed a motorman’s cab in his
bedroom, Coney Island pigeons who hop a ride on the F, the practice of
“pre-walking” (calculating exactly which car will position you at
the right staircase or exit door at your destination), and meeting cute on
the train. If you’ve ever
wondered who decides whether the Andean flute players or the breakdancers get the coveted performance spot underneath Times Square, this is your book. I especially liked the piece about a
photographer who takes pictures of people’s faces just as the doors
shut on them and they miss their train.
Shortly after reading this I was lucky enough to catch the
silver-painted man in his stock-still performance at Port Authority –
and I missed my train to watch him.
The Skeptic’s Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous
Delusions
Robert T. Carroll
In this compendium, organized in short,
alphabetized, entries, Carroll debunks both the obvious nonsense like Bigfoot
and spoon bending, and pursuits that otherwise intelligent people give
credence to, such as astrology, acupuncture, and belief in a divine being
governing the universe. His sensible
nature is bracing and refreshing: If psychics really had the powers they
claimed, he points out, wouldn’t they be highly sought after as
advisors to law enforcement officials and world leaders? He’s impatient with silliness, and gets
a little testy at times, but entertainingly so.
Good
Grief
Lolly Winston
This isn’t black humor, it’s
tasteless froth - Bridget Jones’s diary with a dead husband (and an
adorable one, too!) standing in for a weight problem. Sophie has a cutesy breakdown (impulsively
gives all her furniture to Goodwill, bakes nine pies), loses her job like
it’s a misplaced sweater, and moves to Oregon where her best friend
badgers because she’s been a widow for months already,
it’s time to take off the wedding ring and start meeting boys! A new low in chick lit: not only dumb but
offensive.
Name All the Animals
Alison Smith
Smith’s memoir makes Good Grief
slink off in shame; the story of her family’s coping with her older
brother’s death in a car accident at 18 is also the story of her
growing up and coming to understand her unusual parents, Catholicism, her
burgeoning friendship with a schoolmate, and the revelation of the dark
circumstances of her brother’s death.
Smith handles it all with a delicate touch; she’s a fine writer
and I’m sure we’ll see more from her.
Mystery Ride
Robert Boswell
A novel you can sink your teeth into: Stephen is
in love with his ex-wife Angela, but dating single-mom Leah; Angela’s
husband, Quin, is in love with Angela, but sleeping
with the loopy Sdriana; Stephen’s brother
Andrew is even a little bit in love with Angela, but busy being an architect
in New Mexico. Angela, for her part, has her hands full
with a total nutcase of a teenaged daughter, Dulcie,
and her own unexpected pregnancy.
Throw in Stephen’s enigmatic neighbor, Spaniard, her loose
cannon of a boyfriend Ron, and Leah’s daughter who falls simultaneously
for her boyfriend and for Jesus Christ, add a couple of unexpected plot
twists and a few completely bizarre scenes, and you’ve got a good
ride. Bonus: the title is from a Bruce
Springsteen song.
The Pilot’s
Wife
Anita Shreve
This, on the other hand, is a throwaway
novel. A woman’s pilot husband
is killed in a crash and she learns that he had a second family in England. When the representative from the airline
appears on our heroine’s doorstep, and before he’s even informed
her of the plane crash she’s noting that he has “an interesting
mouth”, we can see where this is going.
Give me a break.
The Outside World
Tova Mirvis
A cheerful but not lightweight story about two
Orthodox families, one Modern Orthodox and bemused by their Ba’al Teshuva son who
returns from a trip to Israel with a black hat, the other very frum and frantic about their oldest daughter who harbors
secret ambitions and is chafing at the pressure of rapidly becoming an old
maid at 22. The kids meet in the
middle and fall in love, and the families have to figure out how to get
along.
Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman
Zac
Unger
Unger, our likable memoirist, is smart and
self-effacing and a gung-ho firefighter after he answers an
ad on a bus stop and finds his calling. He gets ribbed in his Oakland department
for having grown up in private school on whole wheat bread and encouragement
to discuss his feelings, but he proves himself, and gives us a marvelous look
at firehouse culture along the way.
And now I know the difference between a fire engine and a fire truck
(which I plan to use to impress five-year-old boys).
Jew v. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
Samuel G. Freedman
In the US, secular in theory yet
permeated by religion, Jews are as likely to have cultural conflicts with
other Jews as they are with non-Jews.
Freedman looks both at subtle neighborhood friction, and high-profile
cases such as the Orthodox students who sued Yale for requiring them to live
in coed dorms, examining the tension between the desire to present a unified
face as Jews, the resentment against those who are perceived as wanting to benefit
from secular culture without making concessions to it, and the deep
differences between a secular and Torah-based worldview. His discussion of the near-disappearance of
Yiddishkeit institutions is especially
illuminating: formal American Judaism are now almost
entirely religious, leaving a gap for secular Jews who love Judaism and want
to pass it along to their children.
Not surprisingly, there are few clear answers, and sadly, the
divisions among Jews seem increasingly unbridgeable.
What
Are You Looking at? The First Fat
Fiction Anthology
Donna Jarrell, Ira Sukrungruang, eds.
A mixed bag, some new stuff, some very old, and
despite the aggressive title, none of it shocking. Notable for two short stories: Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Erin McGraw’s Ax of the Apostles.
Noonday Demon: An
Atlas of Depression
Andrew Solomon
Solomon is high-wire artist of a writer; his
prose is so beautiful that it takes you a while to realize he’s
recounting a story of how he treated his father like garbage or broke his
boyfriend’s jaw. His book is
packed with insights on depression and mental health, but while I acquired
new sympathy for and understanding of those suffering from depression,
it’s heavy, dark and dense – that, combined with my mistrust of
Solomon’s dramatics, proved too much for me.
Things You Need To Be
Told
The Etiquette Grrls:
Leslie Carlin, Honore McDonough Ervin
I thought the popularity of this book and its
sequel, More Things You Need to be Told, was an encouraging sign,
since Lord knows we need more etiquette (I’m constantly startled by the
number of people who think it’s appropriate to force innocent
bystanders to listen to their cell phone conversations, and dismayed at the
resultant rapid deterioration of public life.
Who knew there’d be a public habit more annoying than
smoking? If everyone’s so mad to
protect their privacy, why I have to listen to them yammering away about
everything from their finances to their sex lives?) These “Grrls”,
however, have a broad definition of the term and feel entitled to outlaw
cropped pants for men and set strict limits of one ponytail per woman. Written in a smug tone to boot, these
books give etiquette a bad name.
20 February 2004
The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
As silky smooth and delicately sweet as a mango lassi – and as chilly. The first novel by the acclaimed author of
the short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies is about
a Bengali couple who immigrate to the US, and their son, Gogol Ganguli, whom
they’ve saddled with a burdensome name, a legacy from his
father’s past. The novel begins
with his parents’ arranged betrothal and ends with Gogol
into his thirties in the present. Lahiri is a short story writer, master of the quick
sketch and the allusion, and she approaches this novel like an express train
ride, breezing along with a few enticing and carefully selected details here
and there, and slowing down every once in while for a pithy observation. Her characters move effortlessly through
life, falling in and out of love, succeeding at school and work, partaking in
the delights of Boston, New
York, and the New England
countryside. Finishing it is like
waking from a pleasant, cardamom-scented dream that quickly fades, leaving
little to think about.
Stern
Men
Elizabeth Gilbert
Two islands off the coast of Maine are locked in a lobstering
territory feud that is older than any of the residents can remember. Ruth Thomas is a young woman who was raised
by her father on the island, and who is smart enough and tough enough to
leave and never look back. Yet she
returns after boarding school, to the motherly Mrs. Pommeroy
and her brood of seven boys, to the doddering old Senator and his hunts for
hidden treasures in the sand, to her nemesis, the slithering Cal Cooley, and
to a golden young lobsterman who doesn’t say much, but doesn’t
have to. The eccentric islanders are
so oddball and their dialogue so fresh and quirky that it’s hard to believe this is
fiction. The novel has the sweet
uplift of a romance, and the delightful weirdness of dark comedy. Gilbert is an amazingly assured writer, a
journalist by trade, and I’ll read absolutely anything she writes.
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian
Trail
Bill Bryson
Almost on a whim, Bryson set out with an
overweight buddy and several pounds of canned goods to hike the Appalachian Trail.
They didn’t get very far, but the story of their misadventures,
along with various infobits about history, urban
planning, the weather, etc. between Georgia
and Maine
make for a great read. No one is
better than Bill Bryson at making you learn and laugh at the same time. I read this five
years ago, and even today I can be lying in bed at night and a scene or
phrase from this book will cross my mind and I’ll crack right up. How can you beat that?
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