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14 July 2005
Children Playing Before
a Statue of Hercules
edited by David
Sedaris
You could sell the local
phone book for $24.95 if it had David Sedaris’s name on it; he didn’t write
these stories, merely selected them, but even if they hadn’t been as good as
they are this book would have done just fine. In his introduction he steps out of character and we get
that little surprise of realizing that a celebrity is also a real person who
goes to the movies and reads books just like the rest of us, and enjoys some
things that are nothing like the art they create themselves. Then again, these selections do skew
towards stories about preternaturally wise children saddled with incompetent
parents – stories of manners and mores rather than bleak despair and
anomie. There are modern
classics from Flannery O’Connor and Dorothy Parker, even-more-modern classics
from Charles Baxter and Lorrie Moore, and a couple of experiments from Jincy
Willett and Frank Gannon, which, thankfully, succeed. This collection can be read for some
of the best of the last century’s short fiction, or for clues to how
Sedaris’s mind works (is it only coincidence that three of the stories
feature characters named Edith?), or simply for the cheering discovery that
David Sedaris has excellent taste as well as enormous talent.
7 July 2005
True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
Michael Finkel
New York Times
reporter Michael Finkel, undone by his hubris when he falsifies a source for
a story, loses his job and retreats to Montana to lick his wounds and figure out
how to start his life over. He
learns that, in a bizarre coincidence, a man named Chris Longo, accused of
murdering his wife and three young children, had been apprehended in Mexico
where he was living as New York Times reporter Michael Finkel. In jail in Oregon and proclaiming his
innocence, Longo agrees to correspond with Finkel. These two men, each in confinement, each accused of lying
and yet each obsessed with the truth, begin, through phone calls and letters,
a relationship that is both friendship and something darker and more
dependent. Finkel, in his
disgust at his own mistake, needs Longo so he can feel morally superior to
someone – and, of course, so he can publish this book and revive his career –
and Longo, who if his defense is unsuccessful will be sentenced to die, needs
someone to talk to, and possibly more.
As Finkel slowly reveals Longo’s story, the tension builds to a
heart-stopping ending.
The Right Stuff
Tom Wolfe
As long as I’ve been
alive the space program has been a well-established and exotic endeavor, the
stuff of movies, akin to deep sea diving – all about adventure, not
transportation. Meanwhile,
commercial aviation has been steadily transforming the miracle of flight into
a horror show of short tempers and stale air, worse than being trapped in a
crowded elevator for several hours.
So it’s always seemed odd to me that rockets had anything to do with
airplanes. Wolfe makes the
connection, even taking us, with Chuck Yeager, to that in-between place at
the edges of the atmosphere where the sky glows purple and the sun and moon
shine at the same time. It’s
sobering to see how the driving force behind the space program was an
obsession with being first (not even best, but first): as a nation, to prove our superiority
to the Russians; and among the original seven military men turned astronauts,
to be the one to make the history books. Wolfe is fond – a little too fond! – of the exclamatory
interjection, but this book is way better than the loud and coarse Bonfire
of the Vanities.
Just Add Hormones
Matt Kailey
Kailey is an unusual FTM
transsexual – as a woman, he actually got his breasts enlarged, thinking he
would feel more feminine. Not
simply a man trapped in a woman’s body, Kailey seems to fall somewhere closer
to the middle of the gender continuum – he now considers himself a gay
transman. Dating is tough (as he
jokes: “What do you call a gay man without a penis?” “Single”) but he considers that a
fair trade for being one of the lucky few to have experienced life in both
sexes. Dean Kotula’s The
Phallus Palace is another good book about FTMs – lots of personal
stories, and pictures. I wasn’t
interested in the photos of the surgery, but the paired photos of balding
guys in middle age and in dresses at their senior proms are fascinating.
The Wonder Spot
Melissa Bank
Oh, this book gives me
such a headache! It’s not
a novel! It’s a handful of
stories cobbled together, ostensibly featuring the same characters, although they
might disappear willy-nilly and then re-appear having undergone drastic
personality changes. And they
all have the same droll sense of humor; they don’t interact so much as trade
quips. Sophie Applebaum is our
apparently feeble-minded heroine whose lack of personality, talents or
redeeming qualities isn’t just in her insecure imagination – she doesn’t seem
to have the most basic life skills.
And yet every time she turns around some cute feller is wooing her in
an episode worthy of a Seventeen magazine short story. It felt soothing going down, yet it
left me feeling cranky and a little bit had. Sure, I read the whole thing, willingly, but I’ve
been known to enjoy unclogging my drain, too – and on the bus, reading a book
is much easier.
19 May 2005
Seven Blessings
Ruchama King
What a little gem this
novel is! It constantly caught
me off guard with its sly observations, unpredictable plot twists, and
simultaneously irreverent and holy (that is, quintessentially Israeli)
worldview. Jerusalem’s matchmakers
have their work cut out for them, between an Orthodox American woman in her
late thirties, never married and a bit of a loner, an American man, newly
Orthodox and with impossibly high standards, and the nice Canadian guy “with
a twitch.” The matchmakers
themselves are on their own journeys – one reviving a too-comfortable
marriage, another turning to Torah study after a lifetime of homemaking. A realistic view of how tough it is
to be single and Jewish, yet also buoyantly playful - a real treat.
The Glass Castle
Jeannette
Walls
There are tough childhoods, and then
there’s what Walls and her three siblings experienced at the hands of their
absurdly neglectful parents.
Neither her alcoholic father nor her artistic “excitement addict” mother
held steady jobs or would accept any government support or charity, so in
their impoverished West Virginia coal mining town they were scorned as the
poor family. When the kids
weren’t being electrocuted, falling out of moving vehicles, or catching fire,
they risked starving to death, as their parents simply didn’t bother to feed
them. Walls gives weight to the
few good things – her parents loved her, in their own way, and encouraged her
intellectual development (though formal schooling wasn’t a priority), and her
siblings worked as a remarkably united and determined team, eventually
engineering their escape. With
such a traumatic past, Walls’s detachment isn’t surprising, but her
matter-of-fact account of her bizarre upbringing keeps the reader at an
unsatisfying distance, and makes her book little more than an exercise in
voyeurism.
21 April 2005
A Changed Man
Francine Prose
This novel goes strong
for 407 pages and then completely tanks in the last 10.
In Prose’s world,
everyone’s inner life – from the living legend Holocaust survivor heading a
feel-good foundation funded by rich guilty liberals, down to the teenaged
pothead writing a report on Hitler - is composed of snarky thoughts about
everyone around them. Is such a
cynical crowd really going to embrace a supposedly reformed neo-Nazi on first
meeting and send him home that night to live with a single mom? A satire like this can get away with
such a flimsy premise, so I kept reading to see which cultural sore point
Prose would probe next with her sharp pen. But when she tacks on a fairy tale ending for the
characters she’s just finished thoroughly yanking around, the book stops
being clever ridicule and spins off into the simply ridiculous. Recommended, if you stop before the
last chapter.
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress
Susan Jane Gilman
This coming of age
memoir begins with the author’s Free to Be…You and Me childhood on the
Upper West Side and stretches through a less-than-auspicious start to her
career in journalism. It peters
out a bit at the end, but whose life wasn’t more fun before she had to grow
up and get a job? Gilman makes
merry fun of mean girls, hippies, and, most of all, herself, and she’s made
an admirable effort here to write about something besides chasing boys (okay,
so she writes about chasing Mick Jagger instead, but that’s arguably not the
same thing). Lots of laughs and
an occasional insight, which is way more fun than the other way around.
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Back in 1992 I spent an evening
with a woman, who, in showing me her bookshelf, said of Lonesome Dove:
“I had to be forced to read this, but I’m so glad I did.” I added it to my mental long list,
and while I didn’t have to be forced, it did take me 13 years to get around
to it. I even owned a paperback
copy for a little while, from some dollar-a-bag library sale; now that I’ve
read it I marvel at how a world was contained in that little book that sat on
my own shelf for a year or two.
A book is so much more than its physical manifestation; particularly
in the case of a novel, such a small and simple object seems to have only a
passing connection with the world that the reader inhabits while reading, and
that lives on in the head when the book is finished. The well-loved library hardcover I
borrowed, at 850 pages, can’t be held in one hand while standing on the
train, so for a couple of weeks this was my evening reading, a ritual
accompanied by peanut butter on toast and my kitty by my side. The saga of a late 19th
century cattle drive from Texas to Montana is frequently coarse, terribly
sad, and at times, frankly, a horror novel. The West is dirty and dangerous and could well be another
planet compared to now; all travel and all communication is on foot or
horseback, but the land is vast and empty and the people few, so if you want
to speak to someone you just wait for him to show up in the next town a
couple hundred miles away. Or
maybe you’ll even spot his horse on the horizon. Sure, some of the characters came from central casting,
but McMurtry has a lot more going on here than it seems at first. There is senseless violence, there is
often justice, and almost no one is happy. Now, when I sit down with my toast and my cat to read in
the evenings, I remember that my days with the Hat Creek Outfit are over, and
miss them like a friend who’s moved away.
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