Brief Book Reviews
18 March 2005
Prep
Curtis Sittenfeld
Title aside, you know this novel is set in a prep
school because all of the girls’ first names are surnames, and all of
the boys’ first names are nouns.
Unfortunately, Sittenfeld has a problem
shared with many writers, even those who aren’t attempting to portray
the quirks of the upper class: her characters’ names sound nothing like
those of real people. Ever since I
was a kid this has driven me crazy. A
particularly annoying variant is an appellation like “Old Lady
Murphy” – no real person uses a moniker that is forgivable only
in a Hardy Boys mystery! One of many
things the Onion does very well is give the
people in its pages natural sounding names; I suspect they pull them from a
newspaper or phone book. Aside from
the name complaint, Prep is a pleasure. The narrator is a scholarship girl who is
equal parts envious of, resentful towards, and baffled by those teenage girls
to whom great-smelling hair, a knack for dressing themselves and the
attention of boys come without effort or surprise. Sittenfeld nails
this and many other things about adolescence, including the sometimes
gradual, sometimes startling realization that your perception of yourself is
completely different than others’ perception of you. Lee is introspective but not always
perceptive, easy to understand but sometimes a bit of a jerk; she’s the
only developed character in the book, but perhaps that’s fitting for a
novel about the self-absorption of the adolescent experience.
A Complicated
Kindness
Miriam Toews
Nomi Nickels is the same age as Lee, living in
roughly the same era and only a few hundred miles to the north, but
she’s a very different teenager with a very different story. Nomi was raised a Mennonite in a Mennonite
town in Canada, “a town that exists in the world based on the idea of
it not existing in the world…a kind of no-frills bunker in which to
live austerely, shun wrongdoers, and kill some time and joy before the
Rapture.” Her mother and older
sister have both escaped, but she and her father remain, not sure what to do
with themselves, and surrounded by a town full of bizarre, but never
precious, characters. Nomi has managed
to learn a lot about the outside world, but she’s still a teenager,
and, lacking a clear vision of what a better life would be, not to mention
the means to get there, she’s left with anger and sadness at her
abandonment by half her family, a burgeoning intellectual dissatisfaction
with her surroundings, a smart mouth, and a strong rebellious impulse. As a novel this is less than satisfying, as
all the important action takes place before it begins, but Nomi’s voice
is a delight, and unusual as her circumstances are, the basic human condition
is just as often the source of her trouble.
As she observes, reflecting on her fumbling attempts at love as well
as the loss of her sister: “some people can leave and some can’t
and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those who can’t
and I’m one of the ones who can’t.”
The Underminer
Mike Albo with Virginia
Heffernan
The narrator of this novel speaks in second
person, addressing our hapless and silent protagonist, whose story unfolds
through this distorted reflection.
The narrator is that all-too-common-creature to whom we’ve all
fallen prey (and may even have occasionally been): the “friend”
who wields a backhanded compliment, thoughtlessly gloats, and whose mere
presence makes one feel like a clumsy and possibly offensive failure. It’s a fast and funny read, a sharp
satire of conversation as well as of a certain sort of artistic New Yorker in
the 1990s - and the conceit is handled so well that we don’t even need
to know the characters’ genders.
PS: I’ve confirmed my hunch that it was Albo I saw perform with the comedy troupe Unitard a couple of years ago. I remember his monologues: as someone who
could be the Underminer’s target - a twitchy,
needy fellow who kept panicking that he’d lost his wallet; and as a
frenzied Flashdance imitator. His
performances lay desire and insecurity bare, his book is a send up of
aggression in the thinnest of disguises.
I picked up his memoir, Hornito, and didn’t read the
whole thing, but having grown up in the very same place and time he did, I
relived a bit of my childhood. He had
more of a crush on Steve Austin than I did, though.
3 February 2005
Blue Clay People:
Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge
William Powers
As an aid worker in Liberia with Catholic Relief
Services, Powers comes to see his mission - “Fight poverty and
dependency while saving the rainforest”- as less of a job description
than a riddle. He has a great eye and
ear for life in Africa: the people of a war
ravaged country making lives from almost nothing, the lurking temptation of
corruption, oddball expatriates, the vulnerability of animals, natural beauty
and man-made garbage. Over his two year
post he struggles with the balance between idealism and safety, the competing
interests of subsistence farmers and the fragile ecosystem, discomfort with
the neocolonial role he’s forced into, and whether he and his fiancée,
back home in upper middle class Washington,
DC, can reconcile their rapidly
diverging lives. It’s a deeply
personal story, and for Powers deeply personal means thinking constantly
about the rest of the world and his place in it. He can’t enjoy diamonds or fine wood,
knowing where they come from, but he also doesn’t need such material
luxuries. Liberia gave him something much
more valuable, something the rest of the world needs very badly: a Sense of
Enough.
Blink: The Power of
Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell
First hunches, while hard to justify, are often
more accurate than analysis. Not that
radical an assertion, but Gladwell explains it
thrillingly, leading us on a whirlwind tour of war games, the secrets of improv comedy, police work, autism, Chef Boyardee labels,
and more, more, more. But, hold on:
he’s saying that a successful car salesman must throw his first
impressions of a customer out the window.
And that physicians should rely on an
algorithm, not their impressions, to determine whether a patient is having a
heart attack. And that unless
you’ve spent years becoming an expert on taste, your impression of a
sip of soda is completely useless even in telling what kind of cola you
yourself like. Hmm. Plus, doctors who are likable don’t
get sued – interesting, but where does that fit in? And the section on speed dating would have
been more interesting – and helpful – with a look at whether
first impressions were accurate predictors of happiness with a partner. Still, Gladwell
gives us so many juicy tidbits and so many “Aha!” moments you
feel like you’re cracking the code to the human brain. Ethical and practical considerations aside,
we’d all love to get a shot at researcher John Gottman’s
Love Lab: after watching fifteen minutes of a couple having a conversation,
he can predict with 90% accuracy whether they will still be together in
fifteen years. So what if this book
falls apart under close scrutiny? Blink
is a blast, and can be read in the time it takes to wash and dry a load of
laundry.
Muscle: The Education of a
Bodybuilder
Samuel Fussell
Fussell, the skinny Oxford-educated son of intellectuals, moves to New York in the early
eighties and has his sizable paranoid streak triggered by the predatory
aggressiveness in the big city.
Desperate for armor, he joins the Y and overnight becomes a
bodybuilding fanatic, pumping iron and gulping supplements until he’s
exhausted. His obsession balloons
along with his muscles; he quits his job and moves into a windowless
apartment from which he only emerges for twice-daily forays to the gym. His appetite still unquenched, he moves to
California, becomes the hardest working man at Gold’s Gym, begins the
inevitable steroid injections, and soon catches himself screaming in a
‘roid rage at fellow grocery store shoppers -
but by then he’s too far gone to care.
By the time he begins competing he’s starving himself so
severely that he can’t stand unsupported and won’t brush his
teeth for fear the sodium in toothpaste will cause him to retain water. Fascinating as a portrait of an obsession,
but it has almost nothing to do with weight lifting, just as it reveals that
competitive bodybuilding has nothing to do with health.
Brother Iron, Sister
Steel: A Bodybuilder’s Book
Dave Draper
I didn’t think Fussell
was much of a writer until I picked up Dave Draper’s book –
whoa! What a goofball. He’s weathered into a kindly looking
mountain of muscle, a great improvement over his youth when he must have been
the inspiration for Rocky in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Draper’s jovial but commanding voice
grew on me. He clearly loves his
lifelong pursuit: the simple clarity of pitting everything he’s got
against heavy weight, a firm grip on a solid bar, the rush of blood to a
pumped muscle…and he knows you’ll love it too. Lots of sound advice from the master
– he’s been lifting since he was eight years old!
Magical Thinking
Augusten Burroughs
Let’s cut to the inevitable comparison to
David Sedaris, another funny, socially awkward gay guy from a dysfunctional
family: Burroughs isn’t as good a writer or observer, but may be a more
honest one – some of the things he says and does are appalling, but his
pieces on his partner, Dennis, are touchingly candid and sweet. And it’s refreshing to find someone
who doesn’t think it’s cute to be kicked by a five year old while
her parents pretend they don’t notice.
10 December 2004
Mystic River
Dennis Lehane
If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief
that every cop, thug, teenager and working stiff in Boston can lapse into an
eloquent soliloquy on the meaning of life after a sip of beer, then
you’ll enjoy this. It’s
clear from the start that something bad has gone down, but it doesn’t
all click into place until the end – and it’s a nauseating
click. I found the beginning just a
little slow, but once it picked up I couldn’t put it down.
The Inner Circle
T. C. Boyle
Much better than the recent movie, in which Liam Neeson, with what must have been great difficulty, played
a thoroughly unsexy Kinsey, bounding around like a
cross between Pee Wee Herman and Eraserhead. Neeson’s
Kinsey is a big puppy dog, not the perpetually tumescent monomaniac the real
Kinsey seems to have been, and for all the red-state opposition to this film,
it barely flirts with anything that would challenge the heterosexual love
story at its center. The book, though fiction, is probably more like the real
story, meaning stranger and more complicated, as well as racier. It too focuses on a mostly-monogamous
marriage between a man and a woman, and it’s
here you’ll find the best sex scenes in the book. Therein lies a lesson that Kinsey, for all
his groundbreaking work, never seemed to grasp: sex without a story is just
body parts.
Men and Cartoons
Jonathan Lethem
If, like me, you like the idea of Jonathan Lethem
more than actually reading Jonathan Lethem, this is a good small dose of
short stories. The guy created a
detective with Tourette’s, writes about
growing up in New York City
and navigating the simmering cauldron of race relations, and has a quirky obsession
with superheroes – so why is he so boring? Check out “The Vision” and
“The Spray” from this collection.
Men in Cartoons:
Kyle’s Bed And
Breakfast
Greg Fox
Think Dykes to Watch Out For with six-pack
abs and not a brain in its head. Kyle
runs a bed and breakfast for gay men, attracting tormented Irish priests with
sexy accents and closeted baseball players in see-through uniforms. It’s silly and campy and takes itself
just a tad too seriously, but it means well, and is easy on the eyes.
Family History
Dani Shapiro
A made-for-TV movie bound between covers. Her memoir, Slow Motion, about her
emergence from a haze of alcoholism and a suffocating family, is better.
|
