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29 September 2003
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Audrey
Niffenegger
I can’t remember the last time I was so absorbed in and moved by a
novel. Henry DeTamble,
born in 1963, is the only known person with a genetic disorder that makes him
a “Chrono-Displaced Person” – one moment he is at his job in a Chicago library, the next he is whipsawed
through time, landing naked and hungry in a completely different place and
time. He’s often sent back to
his past to revisit painful
memories, but also has the chance to teach his young self the things he’ll need to know to
survive as a time traveling adult,
and to meet his wife, Clare, an artist, when she’s just a girl. When she
meets him in real time, she’s the one who already knows all he’s told
her about their future, but to him she’s a stranger.
This book is so carefully thought out and skillfully written that once
you accept the premise of time travel and a the
causal loop of a pre-determined world, it all holds together remarkably
well. As Henry and Clare’s relationships builds in layers of time experienced in a
different order by each of them, we wonder if time travel is just a physical
expression of the power of memory, and a weird and extreme manifestation of
the out-of-syncness any couple has to learn to
accommodate. Niffenegger
even provides a plausible sounding biological cause for Henry’s disorder, and has
her characters discuss free will versus
determinism. For those who thrill to
the mind-bending conundrums and little frissons one gets from time travel
books, there’s plenty here. But it’s not all fun. Time is a
force throwing Henry around, imprisoning him between his known future and the
past he’s doomed to relive.
The book reads like a modern literary fairy tale; it’s also science
fiction, and, at its dark climax, a
horror novel. There are flaws: the
characters are a little flat, Clare and Henry’s voices, which take
turns narrating, are confusingly
indistinguishable in their high-flown Rilke-quoting
tone, and there are a couple of tiny inconsistencies spottable
in the plot if one thinks about it very carefully. All completely forgivable, given the feat
of imagination it took to create this marvel of a book. It’s begging to become a
movie.
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer
In 1984 Brenda Lafferty
and her baby daughter were murdered by Brenda’s husband’s brothers, Ron and Dan, who claimed to be acting
on instructions from God.
Fundamentalist Mormons, the Lafferty brothers perceived the
independent-minded Brenda Lafferty as a threat, and convinced of the divine
inspiration of their actions, never expressed remorse for the murders. Krakauer has a
great reputation, which he and his publisher capitalize on, transparently,
with a big rock under blue sky on the cover of this book and a weak attempt
to draw an analogy between “extreme
religion”
and mountaineering. I’ve come to realize
that the quality of his books is determined by the power of their subjects
rather than his writing. Yet even
being centered on a grisly murder linked to a religion that once embraced
polygamy and was started by a talking angel wasn’t enough to bring
this one to life. The profile of the Church of Latter Day
Saints is getting higher all the time, not
least because of the election of their members to public office. Mormons number over 11 million worldwide
and their numbers are growing fast. Among the major world religions,
Mormonism is by far the most recent, started long after the invention of the
printing press and even after photography, and is the only American-grown faith. Krakauer stresses
the distinction between fundamentalist Mormon sects and mainstream
latter-day-saints who distance themselves from
Fundamentalism and polygamy, between the squeaky clean students at Brigham Young University
and the man who abducted Elizabeth Smart.
He tells the remarkable story of how an evening spent listening to his
brother preach “the word of God” abruptly
transformed Ron Lafferty from admired family man to rabid, vengeful
killer. But mostly he leads us on a
long slog through the names and dates of Mormon history. Krakauer asks the
pivotal question on page 294: “If Ron Lafferty
were deemed mentally ill because he obeyed the voice of his God, isn’t everyone who believes in God
and seeks guidance through prayer mentally ill as well? This is, after all, a country led by a
born-again Christian, George W. Bush, who believes he is an instrument of God
and characterizes international relations as a biblical clash between forces
of Good and Evil.” Excellent point. I think it’s just that some
people are crazy or sick, in a human
way only, and they use religion, be it Christianity or Islamic
Fundamentalism, to justify what they do.
Certain personalities are more vulnerable to the God myth, and to
using it in a twisted way, but since religion and God are human inventions,
only humans are responsible for their actions, and they must answer to the
human laws of right and wrong.
A Window Across the River
Brian Morton
Morton may be my all
time favorite author. Reading him is like having my mind read; no one else
can make me smile, or even blush, with recognition at seeing on paper things
I didn’t think anyone else
thought about. I won’t say I’m disappointed in
his third novel, but I think he can do better. Unlike his second novel,
in which his characters acted and reacted against each other and themselves,
this one introduces a cast and then sits them down in their darkrooms and
studies to brood. Nora is a moderately
successful writer in her mid-thirties who struggles between her desire to
take care of the people in her life and her compulsion to write about them
with a clear and cold eye. Isaac, an
old lover who is back in her life, is a photographer who never quite
fulfilled his potential as an artist. Nora’s relationship with
Isaac compels her to set her pen to
him, and he doesn’t take it well. So what
happens? Not much. Supposedly Nora makes Isaac look bad, but
he comes off looking better than she does.
Nora barely engages in her life; at least Isaac does in his, however
sloppily. Morton is extremely deft at
describing those little moments of misunderstanding between people, at
articulating those feelings of shame or failure that keep you lying awake at
night. He has a gift for creating
characters who are artistic and critical, idealistic
and vulnerable. He just doesn’t
give them enough to do. But like any
of his books, Window is well worth reading for observations like this:
“Nora
knew of one infallible way to find out what she really thought of someone, but it wasn’t an operation she
could perform at will. Occasionally she’d remember some
remark without being able to remember who’d said
it, and when she tried to figure out
who it was, before she could conjure up a face or a name she would get a feeling
about the person, and this feeling represented the truth of her emotions.” Morton’s work is rich with
such treasures.
Absolutely American: Four Years at West
Point
David Lipsky
Lipsky resisted his assignment from Rolling Stone
to visit West Point and write an
article. He ended up spending four
years there and writing a book. For
those of us who observe the military from afar with a mix of gratitude and
unease, this book is an education. Lipsky follows a group of cadets through their four years
at the academy in the late 1990s, when West Point,
like many American institutions, is grappling with seismic shifts. There is a practical problem: more and more
cadets are going to West Point for an
education, serving their time, and then leaving for the civilian world rather
than making the military their careers.
There is also an ideological struggle: on the one hand is the military
tradition of a cohesive, all-male culture, on the other, women are enrolling
in record numbers, (while African-American representation in the officer
corps is nowhere near proportional to their numbers in the military in
general), and the political correctness of the culture at large is
infiltrating the academy, speaking a completely foreign language and wreaking
havoc. In a culture where leadership
has come to mean either being the “most”
(richest, best looking, coolest) or self-righteously browbeating with empty
phrases like “family values”, it’s good to know that there’s at least
one place where integrity is the highest standard. Cadets learn to lead by example, and there
is no compromising on honor, character or honesty. Lipsky makes his
admiration for the institution clear.
He gets a little stuck – we seem to hear over and over about one plebe’s
struggles to run two miles in the required 15:54, but this is an eye-opening
look at a world that to many is foreign, even while
it is thoroughly American.
What Was She Thinking? Notes on a
Scandal
Zoe Heller
The scandal is art
teacher Sheba Hart’s affair with a
fifteen-year-old male student, but the
heart of this story is Heller’s artful and amusing portrayal of the dynamic of intimacy and competition in friendships among women. The novel has the perfect narrator in
Barbara, an older teacher and a very solitary person; Sheba is the most exciting thing
to enter her life in years and commands her full attention. Barbara is able to coolly appraise others’ motivations as well as her own; she is aware of her
fundamental loneliness and her attempts to use her friendship with Sheba
to slake it. This is a satire of
academia and the media age, and a comedy of middle class manners, yet the
romance between teacher and student is realistic, down to grass in the hair
and a spat over a crude comment. The novel’s light feel is deceptive; as Barbara realizes that despite her
clumsy attempts at connection, she is ultimately alone, it’s hard not to find a
lump in the throat.
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Firoozeh Dumas
Dumas’s memoir tells of growing up Iranian in America. She mostly plays it like “my wacky foreign
family meets the friendly but
not-too-bright Americans,” and it’s good for some laughs, if not much more than that. Dumas is a teenager at the time of the hostage crisis: “My family got asked
about the hostages so often that I had to remind people we weren’t hiding them in our garage.”
Seabiscuit: An American
Legend
Laura Hillenbrand
Wow! I find horses unappealing, riding them
unnatural, and both thoroughbreds and jockeys pitiable, and I couldn’t stop turning the
pages of this. It’s sports writing at
its finest.
Ultimate Fitness: The Quest For Truth About Exercise and Health
Gina Kolata
New York Times
reporter Kolata is obsessed with exercise, and she
gives the impression that she’s going to deliver the definite numbers on such questions as how high a heart rate is needed to
burn fat or how many lifting reps are required to build muscle. But as we could have guessed, results are
inconclusive, and anyway, Kolata is more interested
in waxing euphoric about the joys of spinning. It’s not her fault our
bodies don’t
come with owner’s manuals and we have
to learn everything about exercise
and health by trial and error. There
are some interesting anecdotes about this learning process; it’s always good to be
reminded that things were once very different, that what we take for fact was once considered
fallacy, and vice versa. Around the
same time people thought that tomatoes were poisonous, they thought that
running would kill you. Even in the
sixties, a fitness author out for a jog was pulled over by the police because
they thought he must be a fleeing criminal.
On the other hand, in the early 20th century there were
celebrated female weightlifters. Some
good tidbits are here, but the best advice is still not enough to fill a
book: eat your vegetables, move your body, and get enough rest. Now if I could only stop singing the author’s name to the tune of
a certain Rupert Holmes song…
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