A Marriage Made at Woodstock, by Cathie Pelletier (1994)
Even if the library had not called when I was on page 140 to tell me it was my turn for the fourth Harry Potter book, I don't think I could have finished A Marriage Made at Woodstock. As it was, as soon as I hung up the phone I flung the book halfway across the room with a feeling of deep satisfaction that it was getting what it deserved. (When I say "flung across the room," what I mean is "tossed it gently onto a pile of pillows"--one must never be rough with a book, especially a library book or a book borrowed from someone else. But mentally, I flung it across the room.)
These two miserable people breaking up their miserable marriage are not worth reading about. Chandra, who is still lost somewhere in the immaturity of her long-gone youth, and Frederick, who has gone to the opposite extreme with his nitpicking and accounting software, are not only irritating but also boring, and they only get worse as they bicker their way towards a divorce. Chandra, cheating but "I'm not leaving for a man; I'm leaving for Chandra" gets more petulant and selfish and childish with every word she says, but at least she leaves and we don't have to keep company with her. Frederick, on the other hand, is all ours. He begins one of those slow descents into disheveled madness, and boy is it a drag to watch. When an accountant goes bad, look out. First it's a drink--at lunchtime! Then it's sleeping in--until 8:00! Finally he abandons his Tuesday grocery shopping altogether! *Yawn*
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike (1960)
Let me make sure I have the plot so far. First, a guy named Rabbit reminisces about his days of glory, which took place on a high school basketball court all of eight years ago. Then he goes home and bickers with his wife, insulting her while she's pregnant and thinking mean thoughts about how ugly and useless and stupid she is. Then he goes out to pick up his son (whom he refers to as "the kid"), and instead he gets into his car and takes off, driving all night long. At some point he turns around and comes back, looks up his old basketball coach who is a drunken mad lech, and the two of them pick up a couple of prostitutes who are even more unpleasant than they are. Fourteen pages into his sordid sexual encounter with one of the prostitutes, I felt as if surely the world had better things to offer than this loser and his sorry life.
The Saving Graces, by Patricia Gaffney (1999)
I don't know which I dislike more: women's groups that give themselves cutesy names or authors who invent such groups to get a book title out of it. As you might expect, there's a forced and unlikely source for the name, which you will have to read about so that the author can justify the group, the name, and the book title.
Like the other book of Patricia Gaffney's I've reviewed (see review, Circle of Three), the structure of the book is pure women's fiction formula: four friends, all charmingly and compatibly different, take turns telling the story from their own points of view. As usual with such structures, there is very little overlap: one woman is wide-hipped, pale, and red-haired, so another has to be petite, sallow, and dark-haired; one woman is sarcastic and cynical, so another has to be naive and trusting. I don't know how Patricia Gaffney gets away with this with me, but she does. Normally I hate this kind of thing, and I'm not saying I don't hate that element of her book, but there I was, enjoying the whole thing.
Nothing makes me crankier than having to give a good review to a book with such schlocky flaws. The four women may be stereotyped but their stories and their relationships are interesting, and the plot moves along in a satisfying way to a satisfying conclusion. The plots involve what I would call Women's Issues: disappointing/satisfying relationships/marriages, difficulty conceiving a child, psychological problems resulting from unsatisfactory childhoods, and breast cancer.
The Courtship Gift, by Julie Parsons (1999)
The title refers to an insect mating ritual that the madman of the story has read about. Apparently, a male insect will give a female insect the dead body of another insect as a courtship gift; the female is distracted by the gift while the male, er, propagates the species. Instead of thinking to himself, "Huh. And the human equivalent would probably be jewelry or flowers," this madman thinks, "Huh. Corpses. What a great idea." He begins killing men and then sleeping with the grieving widows/girlfriends. To sweeten the pot, he tells each woman something hideous her dead partner did while alive: having an affair, preferring little girls, etc. Each woman, female insect that she is, falls for this line, sometimes within moments of the funeral. Does this seem likely? Can you suspend your disbelief and accept that a woman who has just heard the news that her late husband had sex with 7-year-old girls would react by hopping into bed with the bearer of the bad news? Don't you think it's more likely she'd start with denial and then work herself into a fit and start cutting up her former husband's clothes, burning wedding pictures, screeching and throwing their wedding china against the wall?
Well, regardless of what I think would happen, these women fall for the irresistible combination of grief and betrayal and sickening deeds. The most recent in the series is Anna Neale, an entomologist who, considering she's familiar with the corpse courtship ritual, ought to be better prepared to defend herself against it. Her husband dies after being stung by bees that were delivered to him in an envelope, and after his death Anna discovers that he was a total stranger to her. I enjoy "living a lie" stories because it makes the death of the spouse so much less painful to read about. In this case Anna's husband was such a cad you wonder how he managed not to spontaneously combust in a cloud of evil.
Anna reacts to the corpse/betrayal issues by sleeping with Matthew Makepiece, Official Wacko Madman, and during their relationship comes upon the truth about her nice new boyfriend. Escaping him isn't easy and takes about 115 pages, but I don't think I'm giving anything away to tell you that she succeeds. I thought the book was an entertaining, suspenseful read, despite little reality issues such as, if that package came from a legitimate company, why wouldn't it have some kind of return address on it?
Celeste Ascending, by Kaylie Jones (2000)
Celeste is an alcoholic, and this is the first strike against the book. It's a struggle to get through page after page of life from an alcoholic's point of view: the loss of control, the hazy grip on reality, the fight to hold on to consciousness, the difficulty remembering what happened the night before. It's depressing and it's icky, and although it makes alcohol consumption seem stupid and nauseating, it also makes me feel as if I need a stiff drink to get through it.
Making things worse is Celeste's abusive, workaholic, controlling, boring fiance Alex. It's not that Alex is so obnoxious, or that the relationship between Alex and Celeste seems so unlikely and unworkable, it's that it's DULL and REPETITIVE. All we needed to know about Alex and Celeste could have been condensed into three or four pages, but instead we return to them again and again to read more of the same thing we've already read.
The only breaks in the monotony are Celeste's memories of past friends and relationships--though since everyone she's close to dies or disappears, it's difficult to believe that Celeste is not somehow responsible. In real life, "we just lost touch" is a more normal reason for losing touch; not everyone leaves because of suicide, fatal accident, or permanent misunderstanding.
Meanwhile Celeste pines for a sexy reprobate named Nathan, who might be everything her alcoholic heart desires but still isn't worth his salt. What will happen to our Celeste? Don't hope for the moon, but at least she doesn't die or disappear. (And incidentally, can anyone tell if she's gone 10 days or 18 days without a drink? It keeps flipping back and forth. Is it that the editor missed the error, or did I misunderstand?)
Big City Eyes, by Delia Ephron (2000)
The teenagers who speak Klingon in this book gave me little flashbacks to my high school cafeteria table, where the boys would spend every lunch period learning new Klingon words from a battered paperback book while the girls did what teenage girls usually do, rolling our eyes and laughing too loudly and saying "Oh my GOD!!"
It's possible that by indulging in this little reminiscence I've given away that I was not someone who sat at The Popular Table. Did ANYONE sit at The Popular Table? Over and over I've heard people say with a little self-pitying laugh that they never sat at The Popular Table, but I've never heard anyone say that they did. Perhaps there was no Popular Table and we all just made it up to elicit sympathy in our introspective and cynical 20s.
Big City Eyes is about a journalist who moves to a small country town from the big city, mostly with the idea that she is saving her teenaged son from drugs and violence and sex. They're not in the small country town for five minutes before drugs and violence and sex start popping up all over the place. Lily finds a drugged naked body in a supposedly deserted vacation home, and then she starts having an affair with a married policeman. Meanwhile her son Sam is having sex and doing drugs with a rude girl who looks like a boy and won't speak to anyone except in Klingon, a very rude language in case you're not familiar with it from your lunch table. And then that drugged naked woman from the vacation home turns up dead in a shallow grave. The solution to the crime is lame and unsatisfying, almost as if the author got to the end of the book and thought, "Hey, I can't just keep hanging around in the main character's guilt-ridden adulterous mind, I need to wrap up that thing about the corpse!" The unlikely and sudden resolution to the mother/son relationship also seems like an afterthought. I liked the book anyway, since I think Delia Ephron is a writer who has the kind of dry humor that sneaks up on you when you're thinking of the book afterwards--but I'm not sure she took the time to do one of those little "plot maps" that the teachers made us do in high school English.
The Tale of Murasaki, by Liza Dalby (2000)
This is not the kind of book I was eager to get back to. This is the kind of book that I didn't mind reading but didn't get much joy out of, and eventually led me to wonder, "Is this going somewhere?" Murasaki, for those of you not up on Japanese history, is the woman who wrote The Tale of Genji, a series of stories about a dashing man who seduces woman after woman. In fact, according to The Tale of Murasaki, a fictional account of Murasaki's life based on her actual poems and some journal jottings, the stories actually started as a little fantasy between two young girls, a little fantasy that led to a relationship and a certain amount of play-acting. Later, Murasaki writes the stories down at her girlfriend's request, and the stories catch the eye of others, leading to Murasaki being given a position at court to entertain the empress. Before the court appointment, Murasaki broods about her future, her dislike of men, her reluctance to marry the man chosen for her, her relationships with women, and the futility of her life. After the court appointment, Murasaki broods about her future, her past, her dislike of men, her relationships with women, the intrigues and scandals of court life, and the futility of her life. This is the part that goes on and on: the endless brooding, the endless introspection, the endless composing of small depressed poems. And, in the end, it didn't really go anywhere. I did enjoy the interesting tidbits about Japanese life, but if that's what you want you'll get more out of another book by Liza Dalby, Geisha (see review).
Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me, by Karen Karbo (2000)
Has the world gone mad? Here's yet another book that says that pregnancy is 10 months long! And she cites the "40 weeks of pregnancy" as evidence! Even though when she counts back "ten months" to find out when the baby was conceived, she ends up with a month nine months earlier! Please see my previous diatribes on the subject (diatribe 1 and diatribe 2, to mention a couple) to understand why this is such a stupid thing for people to think; I don't have the energy to tackle it again. Except to say that I can't believe such a stupid idea gets published time and time again. It's so stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid! I'm going to need a minute to myself here.
Is the rest of the book good? It's hard to even remember, but it must be because I gave it "Book of the Month" status (granted, the pickings were slim). I'll start by mentioning a funny review from the book jacket: "If Carrie Fisher wrote with depth as well as wit, she would probably turn out to be Karen Karbo." Considering that Carrie Fisher is an author several times over, doesn't this seem a little catty for a book jacket? It's like printing on a Maeve Binchy book: "If Danielle Steel had talent and humor and imagination, she would probably turn out to be Maeve Binchy." I enjoyed such a frank and original sort of review, especially on a book jacket where the comments tend to be overly safe: "funny, wise; wonderful narrative voice" and "underneath the lightness is a deeper, moving truth that never lapses into sentimentality." I did think the book was funny; I'm not sure about the wisdom or the deeper, moving truth, but I laughed many times--and didn't always know exactly why something was so funny, it just was. "Wry," the book jacket calls it.
The book is about a woman named Brooke who has an infant daughter, and about Brooke's friend Mary Rose who is pregnant by a married man. Brooke struggles with her unhelpful husband, a man who "babysits" his daughter and doesn't want to change her diaper; Mary Rose struggles with the lies her married boyfriend tells (the marriage being one of them, since he said he was divorced after 15 months when in fact he's still married after 15 years), and also with the lawsuit the boyfriend brings against her to get custody of the child Mary Rose is carrying. So you can see where a little wry humor would be helpful. And everything turns out great in the end, which I appreciate in a fiction book. I would put the book high on my recommended list if the editor had had a second cup of coffee that morning and caught the "10 months" error.
Quickening, by Laura Catherine Brown (2000)
Not being depression-prone myself, I have trouble empathizing with page after page of downward spiral. It's difficult for me to imagine that when life gets bad, some people withdraw that way: drinking, smoking pot, staying in bed all day, skipping classes left and right, unable to get themselves to go to work. I know it IS that way for some people, but that doesn't mean I can read about it without wanting to deliver a swift slap. "Maybe a big bucket of ice water would help get you out of bed. I'll be right back," I find myself thinking at these fictional characters.
Mandy Boyle comes from what we can safely call a dysfunctional home: her father is a drunken freeloading bum, and her mother is a crazy delusional hypochondriac. Mandy manages to find within herself the oomph to get a college scholarship to tear her out of this environment, but that one action apparently depletes her reserves: for the rest of the book she's a big soft dreamy clam who makes stupid aimless decisions left and right. When her father dies unexpectedly, Mandy immediately starts dredging up repressed childhood memories of her wacko mother sexually abusing her. This is too much for her and she retreats into a world of pot and alcohol and filthy bed sheets, managing to drag herself to the surface only to have sex with strangers. Eventually she wanders off with some guy she met in a bar, and goes to live with him in HIS pot and alcohol and filthy bed sheets, leaving college behind without really making a decision about it either way.
A defining quote is when Mandy is standing on the roof of the apartment building, angry with her boyfriend and with the world "because life had arranged itself like this." When I read that thought of hers, it became even more clear to me that Mandy's life had NOT "arranged itself like this"--Mandy herself had made every rotten decision along the way, and she could now take all the blame upon her own clamlike self. I came to hope for some sort of epiphany for Mandy, but when it came it was as weak and meandering as could be expected. I found the character of Mandy unpleasant and inconsistent, floaty and irrational, and most of all uninteresting and depressing. The title Quickening is supposed to be a reference to a fetal developmental milestone ("when a fetus first shows signs of having a life of its own"), and I agree that that's about the maturity level Mandy reaches.