About Yvonne, by Donna Masini (1997)
I find it depressing to read the kind of book in which the narrator mentions it every time she puts her hand down her pants. I don't like to be that personal with a character I've just met; I don't like to picture the author sitting at her word-processor writing it; I don't like to picture the author's editor marking the section for spelling and punctuation errors. At first I cringe; later on I feel sick about the whole idea of anyone ever being sexually attracted to anyone else---yet other reviewers are writing paragraphs for the book jacket about how the book got their libidos "mooing for release" (I'm sorry to say I'm quoting verbatim). Words like "erotic" and "sexy" and that old classic "horny" are used by other reviewers so liberally that I wonder if I'm the only one missing something. It's like when I read Sting's review (since when is Sting a book reviewer?) of Interview With the Vampire and was astonished to find that he found all that moaning over blood to be irresistibly sexy. Meanwhile I was a vegetarian for six weeks and still feel uncomfortable around V-8 juice. With reluctance I leave one of my favorite topics and go back to reviewing this particular example of hand-down-the-pants literature.
The plot isn't half bad. Terry finds out that Mark, her husband of five years, is having an affair with a woman named Yvonne. I'm sure there are many women in Terry's shoes who would get a little obsessed about Yvonne, wondering what her last name was, how Mark met her, where they were meeting, and so on. Few women, however, would copy Yvonne's keys, break into her apartment, steal an outfit, then wear that outfit to Al-Anon meetings using Yvonne's name. I get nervous during breaking-in scenes and so I always had to skip ahead to make sure Terry didn't get caught. The ending is left a little vague, but you'll probably have some feeling about how things will work out.
Compatibility Test: Would you say that your libido "moos"?
God Said, "Ha!", by Julia Sweeney
Normally I stay away from books written by comedians. The text ends up being no more than a transcript of a monologue; there are wide margins, several blank lines between each paragraph, and a font big enough to qualify for the Visually Impaired shelf. Colloquialisms like "I mean," and "Don't get me wrong" proliferate. Don't get me wrong---I mean, this book is no different. You'll have to put up with a lot of that kind of no-longer-pleasingly-sassy thing if you want to know more about Julia Sweeney, and I'm willing to allow for the possibility that you don't. Someone who saw me with this book said, "Julia SWEENEY?!? As in PAT?!? Since when does she have something to say?" Put that whiny androgynous loser right out of your head (antecedent is your call). Julia Sweeney had a rough year: she got a divorce, her brother got cancer, she got cancer, her parents moved in with her until Julia's brother died, and her cat left her for a quieter home. Somehow the book manages to avoid self-pity, though there's a pompous section about population control and adoption. The rest had several laughs per chapter, especially when Julia describes her parents or her cats, and I grudgingly admit that now and then I had to take out a tissue.
Compatibility Test: I don't think you have to want to know more about Julia Sweeney, or even know who Julia Sweeney is. I suppose you'd have to be nominally interested in Someone Else's Life.
Delta Style: Eve Wasn't a Size 6 and Neither Am I!, by Delta Burke
I liked Delta Burke better when I thought of her as Suzanne Sugarbaker and didn't realize she was having constant nervous breakdowns and identity crises off the set. That was a little snippy---I just finished the book and I got so tired of reading about her search for self that I'm having trouble remembering why I read all the way to the end. It's coming back to me: the pictures. I read it for the pictures. I enjoy looking at snapshots of actors I'm familiar with. I also enjoyed getting some tidbits about the show Designing Women. For example, Delta is married to the actor who plays Dash Goth, her character Suzanne's second ex-husband. Jean Smart, the actor who plays Charlene, is married to the guy who plays Mary Jo's boyfriend J.D. That picture in the show's intro of a younger Suzanne winning a beauty contest is a real picture of Delta winning one of many beauty contests she actually won when she was younger---and, as she'll tell you time and time again, when she was a starving size 6. I agree with many of the platforms Delta stands on here, all the stuff about how women shouldn't have to be skinny to meet a cultural ideal perpetuated by models who are actually physical oddities rather than achievable ideals---but I guess I'm tired of hearing about it. Can I still be a feminist if I don't want to talk about it quite so much anymore? I also noticed that Delta's principles don't always carry through: her sketches of "pretty ladies" are all physical-oddity-sized. Furthermore, I don't think Delta realizes how many times the things she's saying have already been said. When she mentions using fat to hide from her sexuality, or feeling like she "didn't fit in" in high school, I begin to think that she doesn't realize she's not giving us fresh psychological chow. Her tips for psychiatric treatment, too, are of the believe-in-yourself, be-yourself, love-yourself nature parodied all over the planet by now. Because of this, the book has a motivational-speaker flavor: nothing new, but said with tons of pep and charm. Then there's the "Appetizer or Facial?" section where Delta shares her favorite beauty treatments, and the "Clothing Tips From Someone With a Line to Promote" section where Delta tells you how to dress the "lady of size" body using, oddly enough, clothes from the Delta Burke Design collection.
Compatibility Test: Designing Women fan, like to look at pictures, don't mind a little shameless self-promotion.
The Best of Cemetery Dance, by Richard Chizmar
Does the title already give you the sneaking suspicion that this book is not for everyone? Cemetery Dance is a magazine of what I suppose we will call "dark fiction." Some of it is horror in the Jamie Lee Curtis / hockey mask sense: really big knives and really descriptive gore. Some of it is horror in the what-evil-lurks-within-the-hearts-of-men sense. None of it is appropriate reading for just before bed. If you like scary stories but can't hold your breath long enough to read one of those badly-in-need-of-editing Stephen King marathons, this is a great collection of horror with built-in potty breaks. The big names like Stephen King and Dean Koontz are the ones given press on the cover, but there are dozens and dozens of less-well-known names that whup S.K.'s and D.K.'s rich successful butts. There are even a few---get this---female writers represented, an oddity in the horror genre.
Compatibility Test: Only if you know already that this is your sort of thing. Please don't choose this moment to try horror fiction for the first time---and if you go ahead and do it anyway, remember the rules: no reading after dinner, and there's no shame in nightlights.
Hot Numbers, by Jean Simpson (1998)
Yippy skippy, it's another book claiming that everyone can be put in a category based on things he or she has no control over. This time it's your birthday and the name on your birth certificate (even if that's "Baby Girl," or if they spelled your name Tiffffany because of a stuck key).
I dutifully figured out my name number, my personality number, my heart number, my lesson number, and my year number, without ever understanding the "science" behind numerology. The author gives credit to Pythagoras, but somehow I feel he's been misunderstood. How could the guy who came up with the Pythagorean Theorem (What do you mean, "Pythagor-what?" It's c-squared equals a-squared plus b-squared, you math-class-sleeping fool!) also come up with the idea of giving arbitrary numbers to arbitrary letter selections, and then giving arbitrary meanings to the results? It doesn't seem like his style.
The fun part of the book was looking up the "meanings" of all my numbers, which, in the few cases when they were "right," were for big insights like, "Sometimes you have trouble making decisions," and, "Sometimes you need time by yourself." Is there anyone not described by these things?
There was a time in my life when I would have flipped over this book: young teenagers love meaningless insights from strangers and silly games they can do in their notebooks during class. Long since past that stage, I found the book silly and even ridiculous---do they seriously expect anyone with any sense to believe in this? No, I guess they don't, considering how many pages they gave to explaining again and again the extremely easy mathematical formula for figuring out your numbers.
Compatibility Test: A brooding, suggestible personality; a pen that writes in pink or purple; hearts/circles/smileys dotting every i; inability to talk to the opposite sex without giggling or acting bored.
Shampoo Planet, by Douglas Coupland (1992)
There came a point---and it's difficult to pinpoint just when it happened, but it was while I was still in my own 20s---when I stopped being interested in what people in their 20s had to say about the world. There are individual people in their 20s I still have time for, but as a group, as an Entity of People Who Have Something To Say, I'm finished with them. If you have not yet drunk your fill at the fountain of flippant cynicism and elitist anti-elitism, dip a saucerful at the font of this book.
The star and narrator is a man just past 20, at that precious age when everyone who has gone before is seen in the brilliant light of youthful idealism to have been ignorant and self-serving. He and his girlfriend weep at the destruction of trees, but couldn't care less about the feelings of human beings---and, can I point this out, take no steps to change the fact that trees are being destroyed, only mourn their passing and accuse others of being responsible for it. They despise the wealth of "the Grandma and Grandpa Generation," but are angry that it isn't being given to them for the service they're providing by existing. They expect to get creatively-fulfilling, high-paying jobs after obtaining educations that qualify them to baste turkeys.
Their disdain for anyone not following The Magic Twenty-Something Formula is intense: people who wear polo shirts, people who use excessive hair-care products, people who travel---all are fine as long as they're in their twenties, uncool losers if they're any older. The Cool People do things like speak in faulty Old English (example: "'Tis it not...," as if 'Tis doesn't already mean "it is"), have Cool Nicknames, ensure Good Hair Days, and place lighthearted, sneering bets on what year pandas will become extinct.
Oh, it's satirical, you say? It's supposed to be intensely annoying, that's the point? Yes, I see, how very droll and clever and BEING IN YOUR TWENTIES.
Keeping style true to content, the chapters are about 2 pages long and contain such choice phrasings as: "Another day: San Francisco and wooden houses painted the color of children's thoughts," and, "In my ears I hear a noise, and this noise is the sound of the color of the sun." Yes, yes, I can feel the deepness and meaning, now go Know Everything somewhere else.
Compatibility Test: Member of the cult of Being In Your Twenties.
Virgin Fiction, by Rob Weisbach Books (1998)
At first this seemed like such a great concept: every story written by someone under 35 who had never been published. Mmmm, fresh meat.
Perhaps another moment's thought would have given me: If they can get published only in a book of people who have never been published, isn't that like making a separate grading curve for all the people who flunked the exam? After reading this book, I can tell you that the answer to that question is yes. Reading this anthology is like having to go through an editor's reject pile to make sure she didn't miss anything good.
I don't think I enjoyed a single story. Most were dreamy, the kind of thing you feel in English 101 expresses your poetic nature and inherent effortless talent. Look, you say, the words are just pouring from my pen! Sexual remarks and bizarre, uncharacteristic actions are thrown in to prove that the writer is not just a writer but a Serious Writer Breaking Down the Barriers. I read one story after another, hoping each time that this next story would be the one that would interest me, but each was as dull as the one before. These writers have technical talent---they're certainly the ones who would be getting A+ grades in English 101---but the stories don't absorb, involve, or entertain.
A more minor point: is it perhaps just a little bit tacky to have a picture of a cherry on the cover?
Compatibility Test: By the time you've finished "Trout Lake" and "C-Clamp," you'll know whether you should bother to go on.
Jo's Girls, by Christian McEwen (1997)
Practically every woman I know claims to have been a tomboy as a child, but they're confusing "being a tomboy" with "being a child." It's normal for all children, girls and boys, to run and play outside, to make mud-pies, to get scabby knees, and to make a lot of noise. What makes a girl-child a tomboy is something that goes a little further.
Perhaps she wants to be a boy, or wants to look like a boy. She may be angry that she's a girl, or may choose a boy's name to be called instead of her own. She might hate to play with other little girls, and suffer because the boys won't let her play with them. This book covers the whole range, including the girls who are normal active children right along with the genuine tomboys. Partly this is because some of the contributions were written when being a normal active child was not normal for a little girl. Little girls stayed inside and didn't want to get their dresses dirty---so wanting to run around or yell or wear pants qualified the child for tomboy status.
Christian McEwen has collected the works of a number of female writers from a number of countries and time periods on the subject of being a tomboy; some are excerpts from fictional accounts of tomboys, others are essays and journal entries. I don't agree with the conclusion that many of the authors come to: that tomboys are suppressed and forced into a more feminine mold---but then, I've never been a tomboy and wouldn't know. I made mud-pies, but I never wanted to be a boy. When I read Little Women, I admired Jo but wanted to be like Meg.
Compatibility Test: You wanted to be like Jo.
Grandmother and the Priests, by Taylor Caldwell
Not only do you not need to be Catholic to love this book, you don't even have to approve of religion in general. You can feel that the whole thing is a load of oats and still get a kick out of the stories. "Grandmother" is not a major player. Her role is to own the parlor and the personality that draw the priests to her home to tell their mysterious tales. Her granddaughter, too, has a minor role: hers is to listen unobtrusively and write the stories down when she is older. The priests are the main characters, as each tells a chapter's worth of thrilling, entertaining, thoroughly absorbing story about something that happened to him or to another priest who told him about it. If you're not Catholic it is somewhat helpful to read the Foreword, which gives an inadequate paragraph or two explaining terms. The author is probably Catholic herself and doesn't realize how little non-Catholics are likely to know about Catholicism. However, you'll be able to get through it just as easily as you can get through the Scottish and Irish dialect even if you're not Scottish or Irish. I highly recommend the book to just about everyone. It's one of the best reads I've had in a long time, and this was my third time through it. I'm searching my mind for any reason why anyone wouldn't like it, and I can't think of a one. I hope that if you read it and don't like it, you'll let me know so that I can add that objection to the review.
Compatibility Test: Ability to translate following phrase: "But the men are sae busy these days, Faether MacGregor."
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm
In this novel of the apocalypse, the way the end comes about isn't important, nor is a lot of the information such books usually dwell on such as how many people die, how many remain, what the cities look like afterwards, and why it happened. One large family of over 300 people knew that the end was coming and planned for it. They went into diversified fields so that when the end came they had essential skills and equipment for survival. When the entire family was sterile from unspecified end-of-the-world-related causes, they were prepared for that, too, and began cloning themselves. Experiments done before the end of the world revealed to them that the first few generations of clones would be perfect, but after that there would be problems of sterility, life-expectancy, and brain development. What they hadn't anticipated was that the clones would exclude their makers and become their own species of people, considering themselves separate from the "humans." The last of the original family dies off, and we skip ahead a large number of years to a time when the clones have established a new society, a society built on the rule than the group always comes before the individual. The turning point occurs when a child is born secretly to a woman who has accidentally discovered her independent self. The child is brought up for five years in secret, and when he is discovered is already past the point of being conditioned the way the clone children are. The rest of the book covers this child's impact on the society, and what he does to try to save it. Well-written and interesting, but sometimes it seems as if there are sentences or paragraphs left out. I notice that the author is described by other reviewers as having "a spare quality to her prose," so perhaps it's deliberate.
Compatibility Test: An interest in apocalyptic literature and/or cloning.
The Last Voice They Hear, by Ramsey Campbell (1998)
Why do psychopaths always have to be so campy? They can go around behaving like normal people on regular days, but the instant they're in Psychopath Mode it's all mincing and chortling and "oh, my, what a delicious little crime, I've been such a naughty, naughty boy." This is not an area I'd like to personally research, but I'll bet that very few of the criminals locked up would be caught dead frolicking.
The Last Voice They Hear has a traditionally one-dimensional villain of the playful and irrational variety. He kills happy older couples in a gruesome way. The explanation? Go ahead, take a stab at it. Why, yes, he was abused as a child and his parents never did really love him. An area that could have used a little more detail is what exactly was so horrible about the abuse he suffered and why did this lead him to kill happy older couples? It's true that some nasty things happened to him, but nothing as bad as what's on the Jerry Springer show. I can see how that abuse could have led a person with psychopathic tendencies to stalk and kill other child abusers---but why nice old couples with loving families?
Furthermore, why did this abused child grow up blaming his non-abused brother? The brother was four years younger, wasn't even in high school by the time the abuse ended, and always loved his brother and stood up for him and wanted to be with him. Nevertheless, our evil villain blames him for everything and targets him for torture.
I like my nasty psychopaths to make sense, and I don't think that's too much to ask. From what I've read on the topic, most of them are highly intelligent and highly rational. (I'm as surprised as you are to hear myself lobbying for fair psychopath representation.)
Also, it toasts me to see the author being credited with his "ability to create psychologically complex characters." These characters are about as complex as clams. The ending, too, is predictable and simple. Satisfying, perhaps, in its finality, but unreasonably neat and tidy considering the subject matter. In fact, after 373 pages of plotting and planning, the ending is a wet fizzle.
Generations: A Century of Women Speak About Their Lives, by Myriam Miedzian and Alisa Malinovich (1997)
Miedzian and Malinovich are a mother-daughter team who interviewed women from three generations to get this highly satisfying and interesting collection of personal histories and anecdotes. The first generation includes women born from 1900 to the early 1930s; the second generation includes women born from the mid 1930s to the early 1950s; and the third generation includes women born from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. This collection doesn't choose only the women who will make a good impression: the whiny, self-important, psychobabbling, self-centered, unreasonable, obnoxious, and silly are mixed right in with the patient, brave, ambitious, accomplished, perceptive, and insightful.
Martha Stewart---Just Desserts: The Unauthorized Biography, by Jerry Oppenheimer (1997)
Bitchy, bitchy, bitchy. I don't like Martha Stewart much, either, but there is something so unattractive about a bitchy man.
I'd be more inclined to believe this tale of Martha Stewart's imperfections if Oppenheimer wasn't so obviously reaching: does the fact that Martha's older brother was conceived between the time his parents eloped and the time they had their big formal wedding really reflect badly on Martha, or for that matter on anyone? Why does Oppenheimer try to imply that this makes the boy illegitimate? And if Martha Stewart has been through an unpleasant divorce and we hear only her husband's side of the story, doesn't it make sense that it would seem as if she were completely to blame for everything? And if someone tries to stop the publication of a completely unauthorized biography, does this make her a person with something to hide? For heaven's sake, I wouldn't want an unauthorized biography published about me, either, but that doesn't mean I beat children and steal groceries. (Note to unauthorized biographer: I don't.)
What makes me so mad is that I really wanted to hear the dirt on Martha Stewart, but this book forced me to take her side again and again. Thanks a lot, Oppenheimer.
The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897, by Beatrix Potter (1966)
The most interesting thing about Beatrix Potter's journals is that they're written in code. She made up her own code-alphabet out of English, Greek, German, and imaginary characters, and became fluent enough in it to write it in cursive. She used the code from the age of 15 until the age of 30. I was mildly interested in the content of the journals, but more interested in the code. People interested in art may enjoy her insightful comments about various artists and paintings.
Emma: The Many Facets of Emma Thompson, by Chris Nickson (1997)
I wasn't quite interested enough in Emma Thompson to read more than halfway through the book, but what I did read seemed acceptably well-written and well-organized. If there is a flaw, it's that the book concentrates more on Thompson's movies and husband than it does on her personality or non-movie-related experiences. I was interested in the woman, and all I read about was the actress.