Bee Season, by Myla Goldberg (2000)
Winner of the Cutest Author Picture I've Ever Seen award, Myla Goldberg has written a novel filled with so much tension I had to keep looking ahead a page or two so that I wouldn't revert to an old nail-biting habit. Each member of the Naumann family develops an obsessive hobby, hobbies that involve suspense and sweat and a surprising amount of chanting. Eliza competes in spelling bees and then begins an intensive study of a transcendental meditation method involving the chanting of endless word permutations. Her brother Aaron discovers Hare Krishna and hides his new religion from his Jewish family, doing his hours of chanting in his closet and inventing a fictitious friend to spend time with when he's actually at the temple. Their mother Miriam is an obsessively tidy woman who spends every night cleaning because she only needs 3 hours of sleep a night; for years she's had an uncontrollable habit her family doesn't know about, and in fact has been leading an entirely secret life. The patriarch of the family, Saul, used to be dedicated to his son's future career as a rabbi, but has now turned all his attention to Eliza's studies. As a family, they have more than their fair share of intensity and lies.
Here's the problem with the book: at the end, nothing is resolved. It's supposed to be a sign of well-developed characters if you're left wondering how their lives continued after the end of the book (i.e., you believe they're real people)--but in this case, the story is actually unfinished, as if the author couldn't think of a way to end it so chose the cop-out method of ending on a note of drama rather than resolution. We have no idea what's going to happen to the messes this family has made. Only Eliza chooses an ending for her story, but even in her case the next step isn't clear. Is she going to continue with her search for the voice of God, or has she finished with that? She says she's been changed by an experience, but in what way? It's hard to complain without giving away important plot elements, but Miriam's life in particular is a complete mystery at the end (we never find out what she HAS been doing, just what she hasn't been; and there's no indication of whether she'll be affected by treatment), and it's hard to tell if Aaron is in a teenaged Finding Himself phase or if this life-change is a permanent one that's going to result in complete estrangement from his family. The book was terrific, but it needs another fifty pages or perhaps a sequel.
A Hole in the Earth, by Robert Bausch (2000)
It's natural that a novel written from a first-person perspective would be mostly about what the narrator thinks and feels. Why then do Robert Bausch's narrators annoy me so much with their "it's all about me" attitudes? If I'd read only Almighty Me (see review), I might have concluded that the author was deliberately making his narrator an obnoxious person. Two in a row makes me contemplate the "write what you know" school of thought.
At some point, introspection and self-evaluation turn into a skewed view of the world in which the narrator is the only person who matters; everything that happens, even to other people, is about the narrator. The narrator, rather than being a character whose point of view we happen to be sharing, becomes a self-conscious actor overly aware of his audience. Rather than going about his usual life, he comments on it self-deprecatingly for our benefit, expecting us to correct him. He cracks jokes for our benefit, expecting us to laugh. He points out the mean things those mean people do to him, expecting us to take his side. Fat chance, you jerk.
In A Hole in the Earth, even the other characters (who can't be explored in-depth because the narrator is too busy thinking about himself) start saying things like, "You know, this isn't about YOU." Which the narrator then turns into something that's about himself. The narrator blames "the Fates" for things that "just happen to him," when in fact it's perfectly obvious to the reader that he brings it all on himself. He tells his daughter's new boyfriend that his daughter has AIDS, hoping it will protect her virtue, and then feels sorry for himself when the daughter finds out and is angry; in fact he concludes that she's actually all upset because of what the boyfriend did to her, and justifies his actions by telling her that if she hadn't had sex with the boyfriend the lie never would have come up and she never would have known about it. He goes on to feel sorry for himself because he was such a good father all those years he paid for plane tickets to visit her, as if this cancels out his unacceptable actions.
His introspection doesn't even lead to anything useful: his conclusion that each of his thoughts and ideas is original and interesting is sadly incorrect. For example, he thinks that a therapist would "have a ball" with him because his theory that men and women should have casual sex is at odds with his feeling that his teenaged daughter should not. He also points out his amazing tendency to want only what he can't have.
Furthermore, after going on and on about how much he wishes he had a good relationship with his daughter, he spends every conversation mocking her and making sarcastic comments, then saying he was "just kidding." He treats his girlfriend the same way. You can feel him nudging us thinking we'll laugh at his mean jokes and his "irony" (his incorrect word for sarcasm) but actually I was wincing and wishing he'd knock it off. Then he switches over to feeling sorry for himself because all the women he's ever loved have "abandoned" him, citing their various flaws and their lack of humor and understanding, when actually I could see their side of it pretty clearly: he would be impossible to live with for anyone not interested in sharing in the wonder of His Incredible Feelings. He says his wife claims she left him because of his gambling but he knows that's a lie because "no one breaks up a family over something so finally trivial as money," without having the barest understanding that gambling is not a money problem but much deeper than that.
When bad things happen to other people, he sucks everyone's attention to the more serious concern of how HE feels about it: his guilt, his inadequacy, his resentments. Then he feels sorry for himself because he's feeling sorry for himself, and wants us to reassure him that he shouldn't feel guilty about that. When he finally goes for the ultimate attention by disappearing, it seems like it must have been a relief to everyone he knows; and indeed, no one really notices or cares that he's gone. When he emerges, he thinks it's because all of the universe arranged an event dramatic enough to bring him back into the regular world. The man is an obnoxious self-obsessed asshole and I was angry or frustrated with him throughout the entire book. Exploring his mind is a waste of paper and a waste of time.
Out of the Blue, by Sally Mandel (2000)
For the odd-things-on-a-book-jacket file: an author description calling her "the beloved author of four novels," as if it's an obituary. The beloved author has now written a fifth. In this one, Anna Bolles is an athletic type struck down by multiple sclerosis. She lives with her mother now, and wonders if she'll be able to keep her teaching job as her physical and mental problems recur. At an art show she meets Joe Malone, The Perfect Man. They go quickly to bed and then get to the real good part of their relationship: the repetitive martyrish "I can't drag you into a relationship with a cripple" talks, complete with pining and self-sacrifice on both sides.
Despite incident after incident that set off red lights for me (Joe admits he "needs to take care of someone;" he doesn't stand up to his mother; he evades talk about family members and a past relationship with a total fox; he seems weirdly obsessed with the death of his grandmother four years earlier), the relationship is portrayed as the Once In A Lifetime variety. Many ominous foreshadowings (e.g., "There have been so many times that I've remembered that moment and clung to it for comfort" or "It didn't register with me at the time that there could be something sinister about that heavenly radiance") lead to practically nothing.
The book ranged from maudlin to Harlequin; it had its good points but I thought Anna was right when she thought their future together would be full of further martyrdom and sacrifice. That's apparently what they both like best anyway, though, so I say go to it.
Plain Truth, by Jodi Picoult (2000)
This is one of the best books I've ever thrown across the room. It's about a dead newborn found in an Amish barn, and a teenage Amish girl who says she wasn't pregnant and didn't have a baby despite the fact that she has to be rushed to the hospital for postpartum bleeding and has obviously just given birth. A lawyer named Ellie, who has just hit up against that wall of "This profession is not the Champion of the Wrongly Accused thing I imagined it would be," takes the case as a soul-healing remedy for all the criminals she's been setting free recently. One of the conditions of bail is that she has to live on the Amish farm with her client, and let's just suspend our disbelief for a minute or two because it's good for the story.
I love reading about the Amish, I love a good court scene--but the ENDING. If you've read this book and you understand what happened, I beg you to write to me and tell me, because I can't stop thinking about it. The book was so wonderful that it was all the more wrenching to come to the end and feel like I'd been left hanging. In real life we often don't get to know the real story, but in fiction that's what I demand. I want a little Belgian detective going minute-by-minute through the whole murder, or I want a main character to make a full detailed confession--but I DON'T want a shrug and a "we'll never really know, will we?" The barn light doesn't make sense 2-1/2 months before the due date; the lack of twine on the umbilical cord doesn't make sense; and we still don't know how the baby died. I don't usually contact authors, but this time I did: the author says, "The ending is what you make of it." No, I don't think so. I think the ending is what the author makes of it, since only the author knows the story and it's the author's job to tell it. My job is to judge the ending, not to write it.
Another little problem is that the length of the pregnancy is never quite pinned down. It's called "32 weeks," which is just over 7-1/3 months (32 weeks divided by an average of 4.333 weeks in a month), but it's also referred to as "6-1/2 months," "almost seven months," and "2-1/2 months early" (i.e., 6-1/2 months). The court scene, too, seems like it would benefit by some infusions of facts: I know little about the legal system so I wouldn't want to swear to this in court, but I doubt a witness would be allowed to start by saying, "Imagine if you will..." and then go into a dramatic and emotional and completely fictitious blow-by-blow account of the defendant killing her newborn. I can hear a lawyer shouting "objection" right through the pages of the book, and yet no lawyer does.
I'm so frustrated I can hardly stand it, because I loved the book but can't give it a good recommendation--and can't read any of the other books by this author, either, since they might let me down just as much.
Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger (1955)
This book is one long cynical lecture by disillusioned young people. Apparently Generation X wasn't the first generation to sit around chain-smoking and criticizing everything.
First Franny claws up her admittedly obnoxious boyfriend; then her brother Zooey claws up Franny; then Franny claws up Zooey; then Zooey finishes things off by clawing up Franny again. The monologues go on page after page, broken only by another detailed cigar- or cigarette-lighting scene. Conversations involving Franny and Zooey's mother include mostly insults towards the mother, including "fatty," "old," "stupid," and goddams and italics flung around like too much salt.
The characters make some good points but mostly self-condemning ones: the very things they criticize are the very things they themselves are doing. Which is exactly how it happens with Generation X, too.
Ten Things I Wish I'd Known--Before I Went Out Into the Real World, by Maria Shriver (2000)
I would like to begin with a lecture about how sick I am of hearing "before" and "Real World" in the same phrase, as if somehow there's a stage of life where you're living somewhere else. I don't have fond memories of my early school years, and if those years weren't the Real World I don't know what was. Nor was college the free pre-Real-World ride everyone who was no longer in college liked to say it was: getting out of college was a relief, not the plunge into icy cold water the Misery Patrol predicted. On the other hand, I have a young male relative, naming no names, who at the age of 24 complained with great feeling that paying all his stupid living expenses meant he couldn't use his money for things he really wanted to spend it on. So apparently some of us are familiar with the Real World from the moment we're born into it, and others of us actually do manage to live elsewhere.
Maria Shriver has written a book based on a speech she gave to graduating college students, the group of people most inundated with talk about the Real World. The speech was so popular, she expanded it into a book. If she weren't so likable, I would have to trash the book point by point. Some of the points are good, yes, but hardly fresh: "Be Willing To Fail," for example, and "Marriage is a Hell of a Lot of Hard Work." Furthermore, she leaves out a few important things, such as that sometimes people get totally undeserved lucky/unlucky breaks, and sometimes it will be you and sometimes it won't. And that sometimes being born into a family such as the Kennedys (as she was) can get you places you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. And that sometimes "starting at the bottom" is a good way to get to the top, and other times it's a great way to end up pigeonholed. And that sometimes being good at something means nothing and working hard gets you nowhere.
But she's so earnest, and many of her points are basically good starting points for a world view, and she made me laugh out loud several times--and after all the whole thing is really for college students so I won't trash it. Any more than I have.
The Fundamentals of Play, by Caitlin Macy (2000)
Pretentious, affected, and senselessly titled, The Fundamentals of Play is about the kinds of people who go to Harvard/Yale/Dartmouth, own yachts, and come from the right sorts of decently inbred families. Plot twists are either obvious from the very beginning or else ridiculously obscure. The characters are boring and shallow, and it seems as if everyone is named Kate, a name I can't believe authors are still using: it's like those parents who still used the name Jennifer even after the 6-per-classroom epidemic was underway. I didn't care about anyone in the book or anything that happened to them, and I think I missed much of the plot because I didn't go to Yale.
Most of the action seems to revolve around Kate, an empty, childish, frigid, self-absorbed girl all the guys go nuts for. The author explains that the reason I don't like her is that I'm a girl and girls don't like Kate, an explanation that fits neatly into a rubbish bin with the "you're just jealous" thing men and pretty women bring up whenever a pretty woman is a bitch and a less-pretty woman objects. Kate, as I say, has nothing to recommend her, and yet she has at least four men (plus a dark-horse fifth who's so dark-horse he never even runs in the race) competing in their languid, half-soused, "oh, no, after you" style for her favors. Which she begins to accept because she wants to get married; she doesn't particularly care to whom, and in fact when one fiance backs out she keeps all her wedding plans the same and just substitutes a new groom. End of story.
Who CARES about these people? A good author can take a dull, everyday life kind of plot and make it a can't-put-down kind of read; a poor author has to throw in drugs and liquor and parties and secrets and affairs and theft and cigarettes and pregnancies and money and fast cars--and STILL can't make the book worth reading.
I Hope You Have a Good Life, by Campbell Armstrong (2000)
Few things are more touching than a real-life story about the reunion of a mother and the daughter she gave up for adoption, unless it's the real-life story of how both mother and daughter are dealing with cancer. This is the true story of the author's ex-wife, Eileen, and the daughter she gave up before she met him, Barbara. It's also the story of Eileen's illness and death, and of Barbara's illness. If only the author hadn't used the book as an outlet for his guilty feelings over how he'd treated his wife (he drank, did drugs, had affairs, and eventually left her for another woman)....but perhaps many people losing a loved one can identify with those feelings, and at least he has the perspective to realize that despite his strong feelings, his pain is nothing compared to hers. What I'd like to know is what happened to Barbara after the book ended.
The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love, by Joan Medlicott (2000)
Three older ladies are living in a boarding house, suffering mildly under the hostile bossiness of Olive, the caretaker, when one day one of the ladies inherits an old farmhouse from a cousin. At first it's enough of an adventure for the three women to make a short trip to see what the farmhouse looks like (with Olive calling their families and the families responding with bossy interfering concern). Once there, they see great potential in both house and town, and soon they've decided to renovate the house and live in it. They run into their share of problems along the way: one woman has a knack for getting into a deserted area and then losing all strength and sense until she has to be rescued; another woman falls in love and the other two women wonder if she'll marry and leave; distant relatives come with a claim on the house and must be thwarted; their children raise huge fusses about various things; and a little plumbing problem causes an unbelievable level of panicked fluttering. Through it all the women discover trite truths about themselves ("I've never put myself first in everything;" "Older people still have ideas, interests, dreams"). The book ends on a happy, secure note, with all three women settled in for the long term and feeling as if they can take care of whatever life brings. It also ends with a recipe for sugar cookies. The constant freaking out over such small things as one woman's love interest spending a forced half hour with another woman (resulting in woman #1 "wanting to wish the two of them happiness" and "realizing that all his loving words were lies") is wearing, but the book is well-intentioned and interesting enough to carry through to the end.
Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher's First Year, by Esme Raji Codell (1999)
Expecting to hate any book in which a first-year teacher "cut through all the pedagogic red tape," I was pleased to learn a lesson. It's true that there are a number of self-congratulatory sections on how the author knew the real way to get children to love learning whereas parents, administrators, and veteran teachers were only out to thwart and stunt. Still, the primary focus is not on how someone fresh out of school knows better than people with experience, but on the teaching style and thought processes of the author, a woman so charming and funny that I laughed out loud an average of once per page and felt delighted with everything she did. Her self-congratulation is mediated by her equal willingness to be self-critical.
The one scene I found disturbing involves another teacher's plan for dealing with a student who repeatedly responds to commands with "s**k my d**k"--and even though the teacher wasn't Esme, it was disturbing to me that Esme seemed to approve of the plan, whereas I would say that a teacher should never use a bluff she can't follow through on if called upon to, and that this particular bluff could land a teacher in jail, witness or no witness. That one distressing moment aside, I highly recommend the book as an entertaining read for almost anyone, but particularly for people who have some connection to the school system: parents, teachers, school administrators, etc.
Innocence, by Jane Mendelsohn (2000)
Deliberately obtuse writing is so annoying, but I'll tolerate it if things are made clear at the end. That's why I rush to tell you that unlike many books that put dark hints over genuine content, this book at least doesn't expect you to figure out the ending on your own. The problem with the ending, actually, is that although it was refreshingly clear, it re-categorized the book for me from adult fiction to juvenile fiction. Teenagers would get a huge kick out of the creepy plot line involving grown women who are equal parts jealous of and dependent on beautiful young teenaged girls, but grown-ups might find it too silly to be scary. The tea bag thing, for example, was supposed to be a shocking/chilling revelation but I actually laughed out loud. So too with the moment when Beckett rearranges the letters on the nameplate. Pure junior-high-level thrills. (Teenagers would also enjoy the silly pseudo-dramatic short-chapter format: 199 pages are divided into 52 chapters.)
To avoid being blamed for dark hints myself--but without giving away anything crucial--the plot is this: Beckett is a teenaged girl, recently motherless and recently the new kid in school. She learns that the beautiful female students keep making suicide pacts; but as she becomes a beautiful girl herself, she begins to suspect that "suicide pact" doesn't explain it. If only Beckett weren't so inclined to metaphor, we'd be able to tell the true creepy stuff from the regular tangle of an adolescent's mind. Still, after awhile the various strings of the web become apparent even to us, and as Beckett says, "What matters isn't whether something is real. What matters is if it is true." If you can allow that distinction to exist, the book is at least an entertaining read--even for grown-ups.
Jackie by Josie, by Caroline Preston (1997)
Since the plot of this novel is that a graduate student named Josie is hired to do research for a trash book about Jackie Kennedy, I didn't know if it was fair to hope that I wouldn't have to read very much about Jackie. I'm as mildly interested in the Kennedys as most U.S. citizens, but I prefer to segregate my interests: I get my gossip from People magazine, and I get my fiction from novels. (Go ahead. I'll wait while you make a witty remark about knowing which is which.)
This novel does contain information about Jackie, but mostly it's about Josie. Josie is a graduate student whose dissertation stalled when she had her son Henry, while her husband has gone on to live the life they both expected to lead. Just as they're about to move to California, Josie gets a job offer from Fiona Jones, a Kitty Kelley type. She takes it, and she and her husband Peter plan that she will stay behind with Henry for the summer while Peter goes on ahead with the move. Things get a little out of hand at this point, as Peter's friend Monica coincidentally decides to move, too, and won't it be convenient that she can share a truck with Peter for the cross-country trip. And then Monica thinks she's being stalked, and isn't it convenient that she can move in with Peter. It isn't long before Josie feels as if Peter and Monica are the new husband and wife team, and yet what can Josie say? Monica is going to California too; wouldn't it be ridiculous to take two trucks? Monica's in danger; shouldn't her friends give her protection?
While struggling with this snowballing situation, Josie is also dealing with her mother, who is drinking too much and living with an ex-convict; her bossy older sister, who feels Josie needs to take matters in hand; and an attractively geeky researcher, who is working at the same library and putting on the moves. I liked the book and didn't mind the Jackie Kennedy parts.
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith (2000)
Archie, an easy-going United States white guy, and Samad, a domineering Bengali brown guy, are bound together by their experiences in World War II. After his marriage collapses into a nightmare of his wife's mental illness, Archie decides (based on the flip of a coin, his usual method) to commit suicide. He's saved at the last moment by a kosher butcher who says his property isn't licensed for that sort of thing and that if Archie wants to die he's going to have to have his blood drained first. This last-second redemption gives Archie a new lease on life, and he takes his old friend Samad's advice to marry a younger woman. He marries Clara, a Jamaican woman less than half his age, and they have a baby girl named Irie. Samad and his wife Alsana also have children, twin boys named Magid and Millat. What's the plot of the book, beyond this? There are too many plot threads to pull out just one or two primary ones. There's Irie's long-term crush on Millat, and the relationship Irie and Millat form with an intellectual middle-class family that wants to improve their lives. There's Millat's involvement in a religious/political group. There's Samad's struggles to make his vices mesh with his strong religious principles. There's Millat's time in another country, and his difficult return, and his alienation from his twin brother. There's Clara's mother's strong dedication to her Jehovah's Witnesses faith. There's Samad's arranged marriage to Alsana, and their combative relationship in which disagreements are frequently resolved by a tussle in the garden. For me, this was the kind of book that I liked while I was reading it but was never eager to return to. Certainly I'd recommend it, but it required some motivation to make it to the end. The writing was remarkably clear and mature; characters wonderfully formed.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells (1996)
Do any women actually have friendships like these? Groups of four women, fast friends from childhood until death, with nicknames for each other and for their group? I've never known of any real groups like this, but there are so many books that use it as a plot line, such situations must exist. In this book, the group of women is the Ya-Yas, and the reason for the story is Sidda, the daughter of one Ya-Ya. Sidda is 40 years old when she humiliates her mother to a large newspaper and then has cold feet about marrying her fiance, deciding she "doesn't know how to love." This silly line gets the drama she wants, including a scrapbook from her still-furious-about-the-newspaper-thing mother full of clippings and memorabilia from the Ya-Yas' childhoods and adulthoods. Flashbacks from Sidda alternate with flashbacks from Vivi, her mother, and with those of other Ya-Ya members. This can get confusing, since it requires a narrator switch to another generation; you're reading along and suddenly you think, "Well, why didn't she call one of the Ya-Yas to help her?," and then you remember that this is Vivi telling the story so all the Ya-Yas are still young children. It's also easy to forget that Sidda doesn't know most of the things revealed by Ya-Ya members; those stories are triggered by Sidda's trip through the scrapbook, but the stories are told only to us, the readers, not to Sidda.
An abundance of walking around naked (does no one ever wear clothes?) and an excess of references to angels put this book in the "vacation reading" category. The relationship between Connor and Sidda is the stuff of sitcoms, all clever one-liners and coupley in-jokes. Especially ridiculous are their love scenes, which are written with such clenched-teeth determination to be sexy that they end up laughable. Even worse is Sidda's, er, "self-love" scene, where she gets turned on reading a seed catalog; I'm sorry to report that the word "blossom" becomes a double entendre.
This book also forces me to make a declaration: the "flamboyant gay male friend" role is overused, particularly by female authors in their 30s-50s. I'm sick of it. It's as bad as the "main female character named Kate" problem. It's probably intended to demonstrate how free-thinking the author is, but it reminds me of all the books written awhile back that considered themselves liberated and open-minded for having characters who Weren't White. The author would be so pleased with him/herself that he/she wouldn't be able to quit mentioning it at every opportunity: "his chocolate-brown complexion," "her beautiful kinky hair," "his African blood," etc., until their efforts to be unprejudiced were so deliberate and exaggerated that they came full-circle and bit them in the behind. So too with the gay male friend role. A man can be gay without mentioning the hotness quotient of any guy who comes into conversation (or adding "honey" or "girlfriend" to the end of said remark); a man can also be gay without planning weddings and designing clothes. The emphasis placed on the stereotype is getting offensive, and it's time to knock it off.
The book wraps up with an enormous dose of sickly sentiment that surely no one believes is going to save a mother-daughter relationship built entirely on drama of the tantrum-and-sulk variety. So now you think I hate the book, is that right? Well, it's just so much easier to criticize the bad stuff than to explain the good stuff. I could skim the icky sex/angel/sentiment crap and revel in the rest of it. I'm leaving it in the "vacation read" category for some unrealistic situations, but that doesn't mean I didn't like it.