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28 July 2006 Lori Lansens Of all the unusual physical
conditions human beings can be born with, possibly none affects one’s identity the way
being a conjoined twin does. With any other disorder, no matter how different your body is it's still yours and
only yours. Being permanently attached to another human being seems
intolerable. But like many things, it depends on what you’re used to, and people can adapt to extraordinary things—perhaps even see
them as an advantage. I recently
read about a trio of tan, blonde female triplets graduating from college –who share a single
purse. They aren't physically
attached, but they don't think of themselves as individuals to the degree
that most of us do. In Lansen's beguiling novel, Rose, the physically
stronger twin, carries her pretty club-footed sister Ruby on her hip. Because they are joined at the head
(separation would sever a crucial vein and kill them both), they've never
looked into each other's eyes, but they are so close that one can feel the
other blushing. The book is their autobiography, written as they approach
their milestone 30th birthday, and alternates between the voices of Rose and
Ruby. Odd, yet convincing, this novel is much more readable than Darin
Strauss’s
Chang and T.C. Boyle Boyle is
remarkable. How can he not only
publish novels as often as Woody Allen releases movies, but write in such
vivid detail about so many different places and times? This time it's Crunchy Cons:
How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical
free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and
their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save Rod Dreher Dreher realizes that
those otherwise misguided liberals might be onto something with organic food,
but his mean colleagues at the National
Review make fun of him when he goes to the farmer's market! I’m with him on the idea that greed is the deadly
sin that's strangling our country, and that conservatives ignore it and even
embrace it, choosing to condemn lust instead. I don’t understand his
assertion that liberals believe in
the perfectibility of humans, as opposed to the existence of evil. Seems to
me neither of those things exist—people are inherently fallible and always will be, but they're seldom
"evil.”
Anyway, this isn’t a book about
ideas as much as aesthetics; Dreher talks a lot about how great old houses
and fresh food are (no arguments there) and how junky our popular culture is
(amen to that) but he doesn’t
talk much about his conservative beliefs. There are hints: “We have no problem with guns, except in the hands of
criminals”
(but I assume he doesn’t consider his two
young children ‘criminals’?); and he’s a Roman Catholic and practitioner of ‘natural family planning.” It’s also hard not to notice his condescension to his wife when
she points out that it’s easy to be nostalgic
about home-cooked meals if you aren’t the one who would have to do the cooking.
Rejecting the dominant culture for conservative—especially
religious—reasons is nothing new (think of the Amish, or Orthodox Jews)
but how is it that a hard-working, loving family with simple tastes is seen
by our culture as requiring justification?
Why is a “conservative” with “liberal” tastes
baffling? Our black-and-white two-party political
system and our rejection of substance in favor of sound bites render the
Dreher’s lives incomprehensible—and threatening. People like
them, who know that cheap, new and flashy don’t make for a happy life, undermine our nation’s current economic mission to make the wealthy
as rich as possible at the expense
of the poor—a
mission that should shame any
thoughtful conservative. May many more
join them, before there are no old houses or small farms left. Anthony Giardina Five young men come of
age in a working class suburb of Jonathan Franzen Okay, I'm a little late
on this one, I know. I plead guilty to having judged a book by its cover:
this one is packaged like a big box of cheap mashed potatoes. The Halloween color
scheme and B-movie-title sans serif font are harsh enough, but the 50s-era
family photo combined with the title put me in mind of "The Timbertoes;" the Highlights cartoon about speechless
stick figures that was a soul-crushing bore for a child reared on “The
Electric Company”. I did check the book out when it was published, but
the very first sentence was a fragment, which set my teeth on edge, and
flipping through I saw e-mail exchanges reproduced complete with address line—too trendy and annoying. I don't even like brand
names in my fiction. But as each of Franzen's personal essays
in The New Yorker held me in
greater thrall, I realized I was likely missing out by not reading his
acclaimed novel. And I was. This is a Big Book: up-to-the-minute modern, critical
of our advertising and marketing-saturated culture, technologically savvy,
yet marbled with fantasy and bizarre comedy, and, at its heart, a story of
families. Franzen can even get into the mind of a child. He does his best to
disprove Tolstoy's assertion; his unhappy family is far too similar to so
many others I've seen. There are many ways to be a failure, though, and he
shows us a few of them, tackling the many shades of schadenfreude, the
ever-shifting balance of power in the complicated bargain of marriage, and
the difference between dignified and stubbornly foolish. I did have the
uneasy feeling that at times he might be mocking his characters—he
doesn’t
quite get close to them. But it’s a great book, the kind that leaves echoes of
language in your head after you've stopped reading it, and that you can't
wait to get back to. The
Devil in the Erik Larson Late 19th-century Self-made
Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Norah Vincent Vincent goes undercover
as a man to explore a bowling league, a strip club, a monastery, online
dating, etc. She gains muscle mass and develops a technique for faking a
convincing five o'clock shadow, but her natural gestures, which are perceived
as mannish in a woman, come off as effeminate when she’s portraying her
alter ego, Ned. She says she finds it
hard to be a man, but she’s really finding it hard to be a woman living as a man, and that's not the same thing. If the
majority of men really found it so difficult to be men, they would live
differently. Vincent doesn't seem to like women very much, given her
irritation with her online dates. For some reason, she insists on revealing
her real identity to everyone whose trust she’s earned, letting them know she’s tricked
them—and it's a wonder she doesn't
get beaten up for it. Sebastian Junger When Junger was an
infant his mother hired a workman, Albert DeSalvo, who even at the time
seemed a little too intense. One
wonders—it
being 1963 and the city in the grip
of the Boston Strangler—why she wasn't more wary of
him than she was. Then a neighborhood woman is sexually assaulted and
murdered and a black handyman, Roy Smith, is sent to jail, while the
Strangler continues to terrorize the city.
Later, DeSalvo confesses to the being the Strangler. Both men died in prison in the 1970s. Was Smith—who insisted he was innocent—wrongly convicted? Surely
racism played a part in Smith's conviction, but the evidence that he's guilty
of the crime is hard to refute. Could
the Strangler have been guilty of the crime for which Smith was sent to jail?
Was the Strangler DeSalvo, or someone else who was never caught? In any case, Junger and his family are
very lucky to have only brushed up against this dark stain on the Ann Patchett In this fictional
version of a 1996 incident in *** Summer Reading: The Light Stuff Awake Elizabeth Graver I have a weakness for
novels featuring unusual medical conditions.
In this family, the younger boy has xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP,
which means that his skin is extraordinarily sensitive to light. Living in a
house with taped-over windows and home-schooling at night can be lonely. So
when the family finds find Curtis Sittenfeld Where Prep was
a solid, fleshed-out novel, this is clearly some notes pulled from a drawer
and thrown together to ride the crest of her first book's smash success.
Hannah Gavener is even more obsessed with boys than Lee Fiora was—she thinks of nothing else.
This may be what being a teenaged girl is like, but that doesn't mean
it makes for enthralling reading. The one angle that Sittenfeld nails is the
injustice of being dominated, which happens all too often to the young,
single and female; Hannah has to choose between enduring shoddy treatment by
her sister's slightly jerky boyfriend, or objecting to it—and being
perceived as the jerk for doing so. Emily Giffin Yuppies Claudia and Ben
marry, comfortable in their glamorous careers in publishing and architecture,
and in their mutual disinterest in having children - until Ben changes his
mind. So they divorce. But Claudia misses him; getting flown to
Italy by a sexy older publicist is fun and all, but it’s not True Love. Might it
be worth it to her to have a kid just to get her husband back? There's a scary thought. A few good lines, and some modern fun
(obsessive Googling as oxygen for the flames of jealousy), but mostly silly
and forgettable. |
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