Lives of the Twins, by Rosamond Smith (1987)
This creepy little psychological thriller is missing one thing to make it great: an ending. We're all familiar with the gimmick known as a cliff-hanger: a dramatic cutting-off of the story as a way to get the reader to clamor for more chapters. This technique was never meant to be used at the very end of a story. When it is nevertheless used that way, my assumption is that the author couldn't think of a good ending. Books of this sort ought to have warning labels.
Jonathan and James are identical twins, both psychotherapists. They are estranged, for a reason that is a secret--something that apparently happened ten years ago or so. Molly Marks enters the picture as a client of Jonathan; when she and Jonathan begin dating, Molly begins secretly seeing James, first as a psychotherapist and then as significantly more than that. Each twin has his own side of the story of the estrangement, and Molly finds it impossible to know who is telling the truth. At first it seems clear that there is a "good twin" and a "bad twin," but soon those boundaries seem misplaced. In the end Molly finds herself in something more dangerous than the run-of-the-mill love triangle, and we leave her at the peak of the drama. The reader ends up knowing nothing. I hate that.
Extra credit: "Rosamond Smith" is a pseudonym for a well-known United States author. See if you can guess which one.
The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
When a group of boys lives on the same street as a household containing five teenaged daughters, it will surprise no one that these boys spend many a happy hour peeping and spying. As a group they obsess over the five sisters, with attention to detail I found tiring. On a tax form one might expect this sort of tedious, meticulous, relentless insistence on accuracy, but in a novel, I think we could leave some things unsaid. I don't need to know the weekly grocery list for the girls' family. I don't need to know the precise clinical description of every smell emanating from the sacred abode. I admit, however, that these details added to the feeling that this book was not fiction but actual fact: there was a "documentary" feeling to it. Often a book's narrator is omniscient; this book's narrator, in contrast, knows exactly as much as a usual outsider would know about a neighbor.
All five girls commit suicide in the space of one year. This on its own is enough to keep the plot moving. However, once I'd finished the book, I felt cheated: the carrot held in front of me for 249 pages was covered in a couple of pages, whereas the descriptions of the precise cleanliness of the house went on for chapters. I would have cared far more about their deaths if I'd felt I knew the girls better than I knew their clothes. Again, I'm aware this was a choice of narrative technique, but I prefer omniscience.
All Families are Psychotic, by Douglas Coupland (2001)
There are at least two kinds of fiction: the made-up-world kind (Harry Potter, science fiction, anything with talking animals/plants), and the real-world kind (relationships, families, divorce and death). When the latter tries to incorporate elements of the former, it's a tricky, tricky thing, and few authors can do it right. If it's done wrong, the reader is yanked uncomfortably out of the book by a long-shot outcome or an unlikely coincidence or a silly plot twist. If it's done right, it adds a touch of happy magic. I realize there can be differences of opinion about whether it's "done wrong" or "done right," but it seems to me that Douglas Coupland gets it right. Do we believe that someone can be cured of AIDS? No, not in this world as it is now. But in All Families are Psychotic, it's done in such a way that we want to believe it, and so we do. It adds a little lift to the book, making the real world a place where astonishing things can happen from time to time.
And that's just one example. This family doesn't suffer from the common cold, no: they get AIDS, terminal liver cancer, thalidomide birth defects. They don't work at a fast-food place: they become astronauts, they sell babies on the black market, they illegally transport genetic samples of endangered species and famous people. It's easy to see how a family like this might have trouble finding appropriate spouses, but do they have to choose a radical born-again Christian, a crazy never-potty-trained 18-year-old political activist who burns things, and a wussy look-on-the-bright side bore who says anything that comes into his head? Yes, it is perfectly natural. And it is perfectly natural that someone gets AIDS from a bullet that passes through someone else first; that someone accidentally picks up his father's new wife in a bar; that someone makes friends with a multi-billionaire black market king; that someone takes care of a campy former-Disneyland employee who is shot in a hold-up. In the hands of another author, these heaps and heaps of special events would be serious overkill, a pathetic attempt to spice up the plot. In the hands of Douglas Coupland, the completely bizarre becomes completely believable.
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro (2001)
Few of these beautifully written and artfully crafted stories left me with enough joie de vivre to get out of my chair. In one, an old man brings his increasingly senile wife to a nursing home and watches with growing dismay as she, forgetting she has a husband, takes up with another resident. In another, teenaged girls trick a spinster into thinking she is receiving love letters. Even when things turn out all right in the end (a rare thing), the feeling is still something like this: that people settle for what they can get; that no one truly achieves either Happiness or Love but can only watch longingly as it passes them by; that no one is particularly interesting or likable but only tolerable at best and intolerable at worst; that discontentedness is the human lot in life. Even if you believe these things to be true, you may not find satisfaction in reading about it.
Things You Need to Be Told, by The Etiquette Grrls (Honore McDonough Ervin and Lesley Carlin) (2001)
I own every Miss Manners book in hardcover, and would never question her wise authority. However, Monday mornings find me at the Etiquette Grrls website, checking out the latest in Prepiquette. Not only am I a New England girl myself, I am an Appreciator of Emphatic Capitals (which the Grrls call "Random Capitals" but they are Not Random). On the site, I find myself skimming because the Capitals are So Pervasive: Nearly Every Word is Capitalized, and That is Hard To Read for More Than a Few Words. The book has evidently benefited from the hand of an editor, and the capitals are charming and amusing rather than Overwhelming.
I enjoyed the entire book immensely, laughing out loud many times. For the most part the Grrls agree with Miss Manners in content, but their style is..... Well, it is hard to put a finger on. Other reviewers have called it "in your face," but please, must we resort to that sort of catchphrase? Besides, I'm sure that's not accurate: the phrase connotes a certain hand-on-the-hip, finger-waving-in-the-face, "Don't you be talkin' to me 'bout no..." sort of attitude that is antithetical to what the E.G.s represent. The E.G.s, I'm sure, have more class and style than that. These are grrls who wear Docs and Urban Decay, drink gin-and-tonics, and have special "See You In Hell" outfits; they speak Franglais ("un peu tacky"), smoke, and idealize the 1920s. They do not leap from their chairs and have to be restrained by security personnel.
Since I am familiar with their website, I expected the book to be similar: mostly questions from Dear Readers and answers from Etiquette Grrls. There is none of that. Instead, subjects are essay/textbook-style and include:
And of course, subjects also include the basics you might expect, such as:
The book may be aimed at the Young Set: high schoolers (or prep schoolers) and college kids, single people in their twenties with no children--but those of us who are Older Than That can still find plenty to interest and amuse.
Wake Up, I'm Fat!, by Camryn Manheim (1999)
Ignore the silly title, if you can. Ignore that exclamation point; ignore the irritating suggestion that you should "wake up." This is, after all, a book written by an actor; the title cues us that we are reading autobiography and not literature, and reminds us that the author is an actor and not an academic, MFA or no MFA (though, okay, the degree in mathematics is impressive). What I'd like to draw your attention to is the fact that this is not a book written "with ____". That is, presumably Camryn Manheim wrote the whole thing her own self. So let's give the girl some credit, because she did a good job.
I realize not everyone enjoys celebrity autobiographies, which can be an unpleasant combination of bitching and bragging. Most celebrities had a pre-celebrity life, and what great satisfaction it gives them now to list all the people who turned them down or didn't believe in them. Parents and siblings are revealed to have been not entirely supportive of the child who dreamt of being a star. Casting agents are shown to have made grave errors. Meanwhile, names drop like flies: who was at what party, which director said something complimentary, which fellow actor is a good, good friend.
So obviously you shouldn't read a celebrity autobiography unless you can revel in this stuff. You have to want to know the resentments and glories of the celebrity, and want to hear only one side of how it happened. And if you do enjoy that sort of thing, and if you are interested particularly in Camryn Manheim, I can heartily recommend this book. In fact, I was not hugely interested in Camryn Manheim when I took the book off the library shelf, but now that I've finished it I find myself wanting to go look at pictures of her baby. She's an appealing, charming person, the sort referred to as "real," and she has that eyelash-batting, press-loving, pose-striking enthusiasm for publicity that makes a celebrity-follower feel good.
You should be prepared that weight is a factor in most of the anecdotes and discussions. Perhaps the title already hinted at that to you. Camryn Manheim is what our society considers fat; though frankly, looking at her photos throughout the book, I find it hard to consider such a radiant person in terms of weight. By the time I finished the book, I was looking at the "thin" people next to her and thinking they could stand to gain a few pounds to get rid of that gaunt look.