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Brief
Book Reviews
7 February 2003
Girl meets God: A
Memoir
Lauren Winner
If Elizabeth Wurtzel were into God instead of
drugs, she would have written this book. Winner is the daughter of a
Reform Jewish father and a Southern Baptist mother and was raised Reform
Jewish. She converted in her late teens to Orthodox Judaism, and then
after college became an Episcopalian. In her memoir, as in Wurtzel’s,
we are treated to a sensitive and insightful exploration of the
narrator’s every thought and state, while we have the nagging sense
that outside her head, a path of destruction follows in her wake.
Amidst the thoughtful discussions of Rabbinic law and Christian theology,
Winner will throw in a casual mention of crazy and mindless sex with a
visiting ex-boyfriend, or the fact that a family that once practically
adopted her will no longer speak to her. Winner takes herself very
seriously, even when she’s poking fun at how her Christian conversion
was inspired by Jan Karon’s schlocky Mitford series, and at times her
memoir is like a good chat with a girlfriend. Once she steps into the
Christian world and begins to speak of grace and being saved by the Son of
God, however, she enters territory that those who don’t share this
worldview can’t comprehend. Religion as community, as way of
life, I understand, but believing in resurrection, transubstantiation, and
supernatural intervention in human life requires a dramatic psychological
transformation, not unlike drug addiction. The most resonant parts of
the book are when she describes her painful rejection by Orthodox Jews for
being a convert, and later, the pangs of her loss of Judaism. As she
strives to be closer to God, she suffers the divisions among His people.
6 February 2003
Blue Shoe
Anne Lamott
Again, with the Jesus business!
Lamott’s novel is much like her non-fiction, but with the edges
softened. This one has a plot that moseys along, weaving together
divorce, family secrets, and romance, liberally sprinkled with Lamott’s
trademark one-liners. To Mattie Ryder, the main character, Jesus is
somewhere between a lovable dreadlocked potluck-attending neighbor and a
therapeutic safety net, a WWJD bracelet for when she wigs out. And she
wigs out a lot. I don’t know where the religion stops and the
therapy starts, but Lamott is intent on revealing every wicked thought she or
her characters might ever have had, and then making her passel of friends and
fellow parishioners come to the rescue. She’s funny and
self-deprecating and endearing enough that we’re glad they do.
The House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III
A young woman, left by her husband and
turning to drugs, botches her mortgage payments and has her house foreclosed
on her. It’s sold for a song to a family from Iran, a former
Colonel now forced to do highway clean-up work to feed his wife and
son. The woman wants her house back, the local sheriff gets mixed up in
the case, and with the woman, and begins to self-destruct, and in a superbly
character-driven plot, things turn ugly. This was an Oprah book, and
I’m told that when they discussed it on the show everyone was rooting
for the woman. I was behind the Iranian family myself. See what
you think.
Fourteen:
Growing Up Alone in a Crowd
Stephen Zanichkowsky
Zanichkowsky had a tough childhood.
He was the eighth of fourteen children, and even if his parents hadn’t
quickly been overwhelmed by the enormity of their brood, there’s no
indication that they would have been interested in spending time with any of
their children as individuals. The real story here isn’t the numbers;
in The Color of Water, James McBride writes glowingly of being one of
12 children raised single-handedly by a formidable mother; even with the
added complication of being the Black children of a Jewish woman in the
1950s, he describes his childhood as a positive one. Two more babies
couldn’t have been what tipped the balance in Fourteen; there
was precious little love to start with. Zanichkowsky doesn’t take
the lesson about overdoing it; his magazine article about his family in the Atlantic
was sufficient, the book is superfluous. I felt for him as an ignored
little boy, but disliked the man he’s grown into; he seems to take
prurient delight in discussing his sexual attraction to his sisters, and
tosses around clueless observations like “some said Father Kruzas was
gay, but I was the cutest teenager you could find and he never tried anything
with me.” Read this as a reminder that suffering does not make
you noble.
30 January 2003
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
Somehow this novel narrated by a murdered fourteen-year-old
girl is rarely creepy and never maudlin. It dares to conceive of a heaven
that seems both obviously accurate and like a secret revealed, and of an
earth with both sobering pain and soaring magic. By the end, you’ll
believe.
The Orchid Thief:
A True Story of Beauty and Obsession
Susan Orlean
For four years this book hovered outside my
radar – Orchids? Yawn. Oddly enough, there is a large subculture of
people who are absolutely obsessed with them. Orlean’s book is a New
Yorker profile hothoused into a full-length work– slim and
repetitive, but packed with quirky characters and bizarre trivia. I picked it
up because Adaptation, the movie about writing the screenplay for the
book, intrigued me, being the latest offering from the director of the
enthrallingly freakish Being John Malkovich, and I thought the way to
get the most out of the film was to have just read the book. The Orchid
Thief is one of the last books that would seem to lend itself to a movie,
as it has no plot and is mostly anecdotes about dirty real estate schemes and
monomaniacal botanical explorers, but Orlean’s prose is lush and sweet
smelling and made the white pages glow with the green of the Everglades. As
with any good book, what I really wanted was to not stop reading it, to step
into it, and now I had that very opportunity. What’s more, since the
movie is about making the book into a movie, it’s basically a
continuation of the reading process. I tried to time it so that the
transition would be seamless; ideally I would finish the book on the subway
ride to the theatre. Didn’t quite happen that way, since I
couldn’t put the book down and ended up reading it in one afternoon,
but three days later I saw the film, and I can’t imagine what I would
have made of it if I hadn’t read the book. Adaptation not only
doesn’t have a plot, it doesn’t have any content. Nicolas Cage
does a terrific job of playing dissimilar identical twins, and there are a
few laughs and a couple of vague ideas, but it’s also upsetting in
parts to no particular end. And in that, I imagine the scriptwriter would
say, it’s kind of like life.
29 January 2003
Normal: Transsexual
CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom wrote a piece for the Atlantic
Monthly last spring about male crossdressers, then tacked on a few
paragraphs about female to male transsexuals and intersexed people, slapped
two covers on it and called it a book. Her subject is inherently fascinating,
but there’s so much more to say. I’m keenly interested in anyone
who straddles two different worlds of any kind, and in sex and gender and
physical anomalies, and by simply keeping my eyes open I’ve come across
much more interesting stories than are included here. Her thesis, that nature
is meant to produce variety, and that to try to fit everyone into one
clear-cut gender or the other can be psychologically and physically damaging,
is sound. Her Atlantic piece is a critical look at the strained lives
of predominantly Christian conservative women married to ex-military guys who
have a need to wear dresses and makeup, and how the husbands’ getting
in touch with their feminine side means they can’t help with the dishes
because they’re doing their nails. Why not spend the same time on FTM
transsexuals, and tell us about Pat Califia, longtime outspoken feminist who
became a gay man a few years back, and has two children with his partner,
another gay man who used to be a woman but gave birth before he had his
equipment changed? As for hermaphrodites, what don’t we want to know? I
hate to see anyone pad a magazine article into a full-length book, and Bloom
could have done just a little research and come up with some really
interesting stuff, no padding required. To sell a magazine article for $23.95
a copy, that takes balls.
24 November
2002
Good in Bed
Jennifer Weiner
Sheila Levine is Alive and Living in
Philadelphia
Weiner can’t seem to make up her mind
what story she wants to tell about 28 year old writer Candace Shapiro. Is
this a goofy farce about a feisty reporter’s encounters with
celebrities? A psychological study of unrequited love and a woman’s
troubled relationship with her father? A wry commentary on being a larger
woman? A dark tragedy about violence and a child in jeopardy? A sweet urban
romance? Weiner is at her best when she captures the way people really act,
however harsh, such as when Cannie’s grieving ex-boyfriend lures her
into a sympathy fuck during a shiva call. She’s at her worst when she
indulges in her fantasies about how people act: a movie star hunk is charmed
when Cannie calls him anonymously on his cell phone; a screen diva runs into
her in a bathroom and becomes her best friend and fairy godmother; her diet
doctor turns into a stammering schoolboy when he meets the wisecracking,
zaftig Cannie. A book shouldn’t have to be consistent or limited in
tone or theme any more than life should, but the parts where Weiner coasts
are a letdown compared to the parts where she pushes herself and tells it
like it is.
11 November
2002
The Last American
Man
Elizabeth Gilbert
While few books have truly changed my life,
some, like this biography, have inspired me to seriously rethink it. Eustace
Conway, born in North Carolina in 1961, has lived most of his life in the
woods. Strong, graceful, a gifted horseman, he is good - even phenomenal - at
everything he's ever tried. Driven since childhood by a belief that he is a
Man of Destiny, he lectures tirelessly to schoolchildren and business people
on how they can learn to live in harmony with nature and its physical laws,
lessons no longer taught in modern American life. He wins admirers and
inspires imitators with ease, but it breaks his heart to see how the young
people who come eagerly to his camp don't even know how to hold a hammer. We
have heard many times, and require little convincing of, his ideas about
modern humans living in boxes with deadened souls, alienated from nature, in
contrast to his cyclical, natural, authentic life. It is true that
contemplating the life Eustace leads - growing or hunting everything he eats,
sewing the buckskin he wears, constructing buildings without nails and
doctoring animals on his own - leaves a typical modern American feeling
thoroughly incompetent. Yet, while he has mastered life in nature, life with
other human beings has not come easily to him. He is distant from his family,
has few friends, drives away most of his worshipping disciples with his high
expectations, and at the age of forty has never found the mate he desperately
craves. Gilbert, a brilliant and funny writer, paints a complicated and
compelling portrait of this larger-than-life figure. Eustace Conway may be
behind his time, or he may be ahead of it; he may just be too much for this
world.
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