Buh-Lizzard!

I stood behind the glass door this afternoon and watched little Nora as she waited for the kindergarten bus. Wrapped in snowsuit, boots, gloves and hat, she worked in the fresh snow, throwing handfuls into the air and catching them on her hatted head like confetti. She looked down the street for the late bus, then looked back to me to wave and catch one of mine, then got down to the business of play again. Big armful-sized blocks of snow were carried to her snowbank work table, icicles retrieved from the cherry tree and stuck in the top, (hair? a crown?) a stick from the maple stuck to Snow Buddha's side. Or perhaps he was a frozen King Triton, after the mermaid movie that we watched again this morning.

This morning the village's miniature snowplow cleared the sidewalk where Nora stands and I'm kind of sad, even with the glorious sky and sun that have followed Tuesday and Wednesday's SnowMyGod Snowmaggedon of 2011. Yesterday I had carved out a wandering path from our front walk to the corner where the bus drops off the kids. Now the way is straight and broad. My homemade version may have been no more wide than the narrow width of a snow shovel, but its leisurely curves and clumsy chunks showed the craftwoman's effort. Like a sculptor's tool marks in the clay.

The last simile brought to you by Steve Martin's newest novel, An Object of Beauty, a lovely and lively tale of art dealers and collectors I'm reading set in the galleries and tony restaurants of Manhattan. Martin, whose memoir Born Standing Up I loved, describes the pre-millennium, pre-financial-crash art scene with the ease of an actual collector:

"Whether (the art of the '90's) was any good or not, the sheer amount of it -- to the dismay of cranky critics -- was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970's, art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete."

Martin's prose is chewy and delicious, well, until I hit the novel's 9/11 episode this morning. Stopped me dead in my tracks, and brought me back to the awful experience of reading the first half of Chris Cleave's Little Bee last summer. (At that novel's midpoint, Cleave puts three of his characters in a horrific scene so vicious and disturbing, every following action can't bear the weight of what horrors came before. I gave up when two lovers were arguing about his wife - how could we be expected to care about their petty squabbles after that unerasable image of the murder on the beach?)

An Object of Beauty hasn't lost me yet, just made me pause. I'll see if the ever-deft Martin can work his magic on the American tragedy that eclipses all others - perhaps he'll whip a cape over the disaster and distract me with some flash in the other hand. Or fit compassion into the cool hearts of his art lovers.

Deborah Eisenberg is a writer capable of handling the difficult retelling of New York's enormous blows in her story "Twilight of the Superheroes" from her recent Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. I've been reading this huge collection for months, after this high recommendation from my friend Christina, "She writes the way I think." I knew what Christina meant by the first page: "...for a moment that seemed endless I had been pulled down into a forgotten period of my life when I, too, had strained to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities." Honestly, I just want to hold up lines to show you - look at this! And this! And this from "Twilight:"

"Oh that day! One kept waiting -- as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real -- the intended -- future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened." Which is about as perfect a description of our collective post-9/11 disbelief, and more specific grieving, as I've encountered in a while.

I've read Eisenberg's story "Days" three times now, after the first reading kept killing me softly with its song. An unnamed woman of undetermined age and means of support stops smoking which begins a downward slide told in precise declarative sentences that made me laugh with their blackness. "I feel as if years of rage have condensed around the sides of my brain and are dripping down into it, forming pools in which all its other contents are becoming sodden and useless."

"The ruin that is (her) life" is slowly saved by an introduction to the YMCA and its cold pool and running track, its "little tropical hut" of a sauna. The woman seems to relearn how to think, like a stroke victim relearning to speak, and her small improvements are about as close as Eisenberg gets in this beautiful and ambiguous collection to a positive resolution.

I know this character's fury and confusion and hopeful persistence. Sometimes to me too, "it seems that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them." If you can laugh with me at that great line, you too could love this story and this book.

Room by Emma Donoghue

So happy to be discussing Emma Donoghue's masterful, gripping and funny novel Room with the From Left to Write book club this week. Initially, the premise of the book, told from the point of view of a five year old boy gradually coming to the understanding that he has spent his entire life imprisoned in an 11 x 11 foot bunker by his mother's kidnapper, gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Enough with the morbid fascination for extreme cases of violence towards women and children. Enough with "Click Here for photos of the house of horrors." Don't feed the dragon.

Room turned out to be something very different. Jack's mother, despite nearly nightly rape, emerges not as a victim, but a resourceful and stunningly brave heroine, whose inventive construction of a particular version of reality has not only kept her son from physical harm in their tiny world but protected his innocence and sense of well-being.

When Ma takes an enormous risk, the pages of Room became some of the most terrifying I've ever read. When I reached that point, it was after eleven at night, I was the last one awake and I stood in our cold bathroom, crying with fear, unable to take my eyes off the story.

Then things got surprising and even more interesting. The story does not end here, as a conventional thriller would have. And the pages that follow force us to see the world we live in from the point of view of a three-parts-civilized, one-part-feral child, who, despite all, appears to have escaped damage.

Both Jack's unique position to observe the oddities of our modern world (crocs shoes, predatory talk show hosts, the chaos of the mall, grandmothers hooting "yoo-hoo!" at the playground) and his undamaged quality that his mother's creativity was able to preserve allow the book's second half to become dryly funny and very much so.

Which is pretty amazing to me because here's the thing about safe. The topic of safety is pretty hard to make funny. People on safety patrol can be awfully sanctimonious. Safe is the derogatory word used to describe second-rate art.

As I write this I sit in front of window offering a high-rise view of a Chicago parking lot below. A little person in pink wanders alone in the aisle as her big people lock up their car. There are no moving cars in the entire lot, but I can feel an unpleasant tension. Parenthood heightens most parents' Spidey-sense and the added acuity can sometimes balance out with a decrease in the humor-sense. Heard any good jokes about vaccines lately?

Room resonated for me in so many ways. The memoir I'm laboring over has an ongoing theme of safety's folly - the well-intentioned hoops adults jump through to try to keep and preserve the children in their care, how physical and emotional safety can come to be at odds, the tension of safety vs. independence and self-sufficiency.

I wrote several paragraphs last night (which I intended to share with you, but left behind on the desktop of the aforementioned high-rise) about my mid-teen years when my aunt and uncle worked their darndest to construct elaborate ways to keep me physically safe and sound despite absolutely no efforts from me to be dangerous. I was the abstemious virgin in the family, whose favorite habit was reading, who hung with spiffy clean crowds and neglected to get her driver's license until she was eighteen.

My free time hours were busy with Girl Scouts, Key Club, French horn practice, writing original oratories about the importance of positive self-esteem and stuffing squares of black and white tissue paper into a chickenwire frame shaped to resemble Pepe Le Pew. (Pepe's levitating tail and the white smoke issuing from his ass ensured French club won the homecoming parade float first prize that autumn.)

The innocence of which kind of made my guardians' over-protection all the more ridiculous, but if I take even a half second to ignore my own irritation at the earliest curfew I knew and the harshest grillings when it was overreached and take another half second to look at my aunt and uncle's obvious motivations, all humor in the situation comes to a full stop.

Well, duh. If they could not control the awful recent past, if they could not take back the awful accident, if they could not even bring themselves to talk about it with the children who remained, the least they could do was try to control the already compliant girl who tried to see love in their strictures, since affection and pride came from them with more difficulty.

So you can see some of the challenges I'm facing trying to write the truth with both compassion and humor. Some days writing my story feels like constructing a jigsaw puzzle out of pieces of broken glass. And yet it's the joy in the past that I most want to convey, the joy in Jeanne and Chris's leap into the air next to the trailer, the joy that couldn't be extinguished, despite all.


You can find more posts about Room at From Left to Write.

The participants in From Left to Write Book Clubs receive from the publisher a copy of the book discussed.

Maddie Dawson's The Stuff That Never Happened

The From Left To Write Book Club discusses new books in a particular way - instead of reviewing what we've read, the contributors share their personal experiences that have been inspired, or, as in my case this week, dragged up by the text.

It was hard for me not to sit as judge and jury when reading Maddie Dawson's first novel, The Stuff That Never Happened. The story of a young adulterer stirred up all sorts of muck from the shallows of my history and it was not a fun time to recall. So I hoisted all my discomfort back onto Dawson's protagonist Annabelle McKay and read her antics with ire and a self-righteousness it was difficult to resist.

The illicit sex in The Stuff That Never Happened occurs between two married people, in the same home they share with their spouses and young children, but this flagrant cheating, for me, did not seem like Annabelle's biggest betrayal of her even-keeled yet distant husband, Grant. It was her casual lying about meeting with her old lover twenty-six years after the affair that felt even more deceitful and had me scribbling "LIAR!" and "O.M.G.!!" in the margins.

Like this passage, where Annabelle defensively misrepresents her reunion with the old lover to her husband: "Come on, this is ridiculous! Okay, fair enough, I saw Jeremiah Saxon. Twenty-six years have passed, and big deal! I run into him in a market, against all odds. And then, yes, I go for coffee with him. I sit in Starbucks with the man and hear about his boring, trite, dull life."

She omits the part about she and Jeremiah making out in the park, "like a couple of teenagers."

We've all heard the adage from a cheated partner: "It's not the physical relationship that hurts the most, it's the lying." Dawson's book brought this line roaring back into my head.

We all operate in the social world by interacting with the people around us on a bedrock of trust. Any question we ask of another human, from the innocuous ("Can I have this by Tuesday?" "Would you like fries with that?") to the most vital, ("How can I help?" "Will you marry me?") presupposes an answer that corresponds to a shared reality. We build our plans, our hopes, our work, our relationships on the presumed truth in those answers. That's why, when faced with a suddenly revealed lie, we can have a hard time understanding or accepting that we've been deceived. And that is why, when caught in a lie of our own, we can experience the deepest shame. We haven't just chosen the wrong words; we've ripped the social contract. We've messed with the rules of logic that run our world. And for the people we have lied to, finding out that their version of reality is broken can be torture.

When the man who is now my husband and I had been dating six months or so, we flew to Florida to meet his parents. I had never had such a well-matched boyfriend - he was kind, respectful, fun and funny, open about his imperfect past and willing to listen to me pour out long, if somewhat edited, stories of my own. And, most importantly, he seemed really into me. And he was gorgeous. (Still is, but back to our story...)

One night on Sanibel Island, during a lull in the family drama, Randy and I stepped outside to sit by the pool. My head was spinning from all the emotion and hasty intimacy at my first gathering of his unusually close family and I suddenly felt an urge to come clean to this man.

"I have something I need to tell you." And with that I fell silent. Here I was again, standing in front of a beautiful trusting man, the hard truth stopped up in my throat. But this time would be different. This time I would make good. I wouldn't change the subject and commit the sin of omission; I wouldn't slip into another lie to avoid an awful truth. I pressed on.

"I need you to know something about me. I have never been faithful in any serious relationship."

My announcement may have been immature dramatics or a compulsion to stir something up, but it was also true.

"Okaaaaaay...," Randy replied, still smiling. "Why are you telling me this? Is there something I need to know?"

"Oh, no! I'm not talking about now, with you!" I had to stop to think. "I'm not completely sure why I'm telling you this. I think...it's because...I want us to be honest with each other. And I don't ever want to go through that again."

I need to emphasize how much I really didn't want to go through that all again.

I don't know if Maddie Dawson has ever seen the face of someone she has hurt deeply or if the cuckolded husband of The Stuff That Never Happened is purely a work of the imagination. I hope the latter. No mind-blowing sex, no thrill of getting away with it, no sweetest taboo, is ever worth the pain or the long-living guilt of knowing you have inflicted that pain.

Maybe I wasn't confessing to Randy so much as professing - letting the man who I would marry know that I was done done done with cheap drama, that I had outgrown honky-tonk over-romanticizing. Letting him know that I could no longer believe in the excuses of loneliness, immaturity, confusion, deluded ideas about passion, bad examples, desperation, indecision, tattered self-esteem, cowardice, alcohol, or Billie Holiday. Letting him know that I had grown up a little since that stupid time in my twenties. And that I could now hardly recognize that cowardly lyin' girl, even though she was me.

Randy's response to my big reveal, "Well, you let me know if there's anything I should worry about," was the equivalent of a shrug. He would tell me later that he did worry a little about what I had said, but in the seventeen years since then, jealousies and suspicions (except about those two bitches, Ms. Bar and Ms. Work) have had little place in our relationship. Honest.

May it ever be so.

You can find more posts about The Stuff That Never Happened here, at From Left to Write.

The participants in From Left to Write Book Clubs receive from the publisher a copy of the book discussed.

Hope Edelman's The Possibility of Everything

The writers in the Silicon Valley Moms Blog group are discussing Hope Edelman's newest book today and I am thrilled. Although I've never met the woman, Hope Edelman's name and story feels as familiar as that of a friend. We are both around the same age, lost our mothers too soon, studied at the University of Iowa, and have two daughters. We married our husbands for the same reason -- as Edelman puts it in The Possibility of Everything, "he was the kindest man I'd ever met." And we both write, although her output towers over mine.

Her books have been on my shelf for years, their titles like a distilled description of the rawest part of my life: Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss; Letters from Motherless Daughters: Words of Courage, Grief and Healing; Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become.

The tone of these books fluctuates between that of an understanding counselor, bringing healing and understanding to women who grieve and that of a consummate researcher, analytical yet insightful. I have found much comfort there, but little of the messy emotions that have accompanied my own delayed grieving process. Motherless Mothers' index has no listing for "rage, drowning in."

Edelman's latest book, a memoir entitled The Possibility of Everything, exhibits a slightly less confident voice, but one I can relate to in even greater measure. It describes with great honesty a period in her life while she was taking on the most daunting of roles: first-time mother of a challenging child.

At a tense period in her marriage, Edelman's then-three year old daughter began exhibiting disturbingly aggressive behavior that the little girl attributed to the influence of her imaginary friend, "Dodo." Along with her understanding husband Uzi, Edelman used a family vacation to Belize to explore the powers of the country's natural healers to help her daughter and to explore the limits of her own credulity.

I'm not interested in debate whether Edelman's daughter was literally possessed by a supernatural spirit or not. I may be a confirmed atheist, but I'm not an evangelical one. Nor do I believe my skepticism can diminish the undeniable power in Edelman's descriptions of eerie behavior by the precocious three-year-old Maya, of her growing suspicions that something was seriously wrong with her daughter, and of the strange, yet strangely ordinary visits with Belizian spiritual doctors.

Who can deny that little Maya was receiving something she genuinely needed when Edelman anoints her child and rustily recites old prayers at the moving climax of the story? Perhaps whether the nature of that needed thing lies in the supernatural, the emotional, the psychological or a combination of these is less important than that Maya, and her mother, experienced a moment of healing.

In a Q and A with the Silicon Valley Mom Bloggers last week, Hope Edelman revealed, "when I committed to writing the book, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't try to sugarcoat the story to make myself look good. I wanted to write a true, authentic story that honestly revealed who I was—or who I think I was—ten years ago, even if I feel that I'm not exactly the same person now." She admits she "had to find courage and humility to write ... parts of the book."

The self-doubts and anxieties that Edelman fearlessly shares resonated deeply with me. My first daughter Mia worried me too, to a degree that I was nearly afraid to share. My compliant second daughter's first word was a lispy "Yes"; Mia's first word was "Duck." It took me a while to figure out that Mia was issuing a warning rather than naming a bird.

Mia has always been a dramatic child, full of passion and stormy moods. Even now at seven, tears can fall fast over spilled tea, over the prospect of homework and the promise of dessert only after the playroom is cleaned. Her tantrums at the age of three shocked me with their intensity. Her face would turn a terrible red, the screams seemed endless. But unlike Edelman, I connected the dots very early between the loss of my mother and the extreme distress I felt when my daughter's emotions overwhelmed her.

When Mia screamed and writhed on the floor like no child I had ever seen, I spoke to her in a voice that seemed that of an actress playing a role I had taken on without sufficient rehearsal. That voice fretted, pleaded, bargained, threatened, and occasionally stayed calm and let Mia and her emotions take their time. Another voice, the one I hear in my head, whispered, "Of course."

Of course something was seriously wrong with my daughter. Because something seriously wrong happened to her mother. My parents died when I was four. Becoming a mother myself for the first time brought up powerful feelings of grief I had not been allowed, by others and by myself, to experience when I was young. Tapping into these deep rivers of sadness, longing, questioning and anger at times has complicated my own efforts to be the good mother I want to be.

Like Hope Edelman's little girl, my daughters have asked, "Why are you so sad?" when they saw their mother in tears. My initial impulse to remain vague and to distract because the reality seemed too complicated and too frightening has battled with my desire to be emotionally honest and genuine, to be open about the past and my struggles with it.

Now that I have a little more parenting experience and the equilibrium and perspective that come with it, I know that I have to move beyond the simplistic idea that Mia and I are stuck in a terminal determination rather than moving on a journey of healing. I know I need to let my daughter be who she is without projecting my fears on her. I am getting better at stopping catastrophizing that things are worse than they may be.

When I asked Hope Edelman whether her daughter's internal struggles may have been a stressful reaction to Maya's limited understanding that her mommy had something terrible happen to her, she saw less of a direct connection. You can read her full response to that questions, and others, here.

My deep thanks to Hope for sharing her story with us all, for taking the time to discuss her work with the SVM bloggers and bringing our attention to the country of Belize. Edelman donated a portion of the book advance to a book drive for the library in San Ignacio, toward building two new classrooms in San Antonio, and as a high school scholarship for two children from San Ignacio, since only about 60 percent of the citizens of Belize can afford to go to high school.

William and the Christmas Moon by Laura Robinson

The sweet folks at Sawbridge Studios sent me a copy of local writer/artist Laura Robinson's book William and the Christmas Moon: A Shadow-Casting Bedtime Story a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to tell you about it; it is so so beautiful - but the time has flown. Now you'll just have enough time to run out before Christmas Eve, because believe me, you'll really love starting a new holiday tradition, sharing this special book with your children.

Robinson's poem-story of William's magical night journey is accompanied by exquisite cut out illustrations designed to be lit on the wall by a cunning little flashlight that comes with each copy of the book. You'll need two AAA batteries. The attached flashlight, which ingeniously hooks to the book with velcro, is best for the images. Our old Maglight distorted the projected shadows.

My girls were squealing with delight at the pictures projected on the bedroom wall; I was entranced by the delicate beauty of the images. Two deer drink water by a moonlit lake. Pinprick stars twinkle over a snowy village. As I read on, my girls fell silent under the spell of the picture show in the darkness. The line, "Darkness frees our eyes/To see what daylight can disguise," made me think that this was a perfect story for the eve of the solstice. And made me think with new gratitude about the very darkness that we work so hard to banish this season.

Robinson has used this lovely shadow technique previously in her book William and the Magic Ring. I'm getting a copy to put under the tree for the girls.

William and the Christmas Moon by Laura Robinson. Sawbridge Studios, 153 West Ohio Street, Chicago and Green Bay Road at Tower Court, Winnetka.

This Is Where I Take You To The Movies

We'll get back to our Scandinavian trip in a moment, but first we interrupt our travelogue for a few words about Jonathan Tropper's novel, This Is Where I Leave You. The Silicon Valley Moms Blog Group is featuring Tropper's new work for their book club today. Discovering that the book's topic is grief and family dysfunction nearly opened a big can of dread for me. You see, the particular SVM style of discussion is for the bloggers to write about how a book speaks to our own personal experience rather than to review it.

Not being able to hide behind the critical distance afforded by the position of a reviewer NOR being able to enthusiastically gush about a book I really loved is tough enough; now I had to go to the hard and thorny place, too?

Tropper's comic novel takes place during the seven days when the four adult children and mother of the Foxman family sit shiva (think a week-long Jewish wake where the family is expected to live together for the duration) for the father. The narrator son, Judd, has recently discovered his wife's affair with his boss and gets the news that she is pregnant on the heels of hearing of his father's death. Mayhem ensues as the family members fight among themselves and with their spouses and lovers, as ancient resentments are brought back into the light and a family "brand of irony and evasion" gets in the way of healthy grief.

Let's do a little checklist now, shall we? Let's see how the themes of this book can be related to my own familial "personal experience." Um, unresolved grief issues? Check. Adult siblings with communication "issues"? Oh, big check. Cute kids running around for sweet comic relief? Thank goodness, check. Clever and chatty characters who work their way through rivalries with fisticuffs, humor and big dramatic gestures? Uh, no, not really.

So as I read and laughed my way through Tropper's novel, I actually found myself relieved not to be reminded as much as I expected of my own dear troubled family. Rather I found myself thinking of some other families - people you may know as well. The Fockers, for instance.

Perhaps it was the cinematographic spectacle of scenes like the dinner when a grandchild proudly displays and then tosses the results of his potty training. Perhaps it was the complicated and smart quartet of siblings who bait and riff off each other in hilarious dialogue, throwing off lines like "That was great. Can you tell me another story about your period?" and "Let's face it, you're a little scary. You're actually scaring me right now. Your face looks very red. Are you even breathing? Is he breathing?" Perhaps it was Judd's recounting of the plot of a chick-flick he sees on a date - a perfect skewering of the current trite trend in Hollywood romantic comedies. Or probably it was the combination of all these, but something in Tropper's book kept bringing me back to memories of movies I've seen about dysfunctional families.

I was reminded (but not in a reductive way) of the messy families in movies I have loved, like Meet the Parents and the friggin' brilliant and underrated Flirting With Disaster (if you have not seen this movie, please, please, go out and rent/Netflick/Tivo it RIGHT NOW, whatever you need to do - you will laugh all the way through and marvel at the comic brilliance of Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda and Richard Jenkins who goes on an LSD trip that has to be seen to be believed. Sorry, let's get back...)

And thinking about great movies about dysfunctional families then started me reflecting on family movies I wanted to like but hated: Dan in Real Life nearly nauseated me with its airless and unreal family reunion, the whole pretty family enjoying games together and putting on a (gulp) talent show. Away We Go took the usually adorable John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph and made them smug and judgmental as a couple facing first-time parenthood.

But I'm not evaluating TIWILY's suitability as a screenplay here. Instead, I'm thinking about how art helps us get through imperfect life and get beyond overwhelming emotional pain. There's some awful stuff that the characters in this book are facing: ruined hopes, infidelity, betrayal, infertility, loneliness. But our reading experience is a happy one - we are buffered by the pleasures of the plot, the cleverness of the dialogue, the amen truths of a wise narrator.

"People need someone to blame. I had failed her in some fundamental way, and she simply couldn't bring herself to forgive me....So now we've each done something unforgivable and the universe is once again in perfect balance."

It makes perfect, crazy sense.

For most of my life, books and movies have been the way I've been able to face pain that was too extraordinary to touch in real life. Movies were my emotional education: People cried on the screen, families embraced, couples had arguments that cleared the air. The experience of watching Ordinary People was like watching a documentary about real lives, not an abstract and fictional entertainment. At home, silence, closed doors and small talk were the way to push away the mess of emotion.

When I was thinking about this post, I asked my husband to brainstorm dysfunctional family movies with me.

"Ordinary People," he said.

"Oh, that's a good one. Of course. But I'm trying to think of comedies."

"They're all comedies."

Oh my wise husband. It's so true. You have to laugh at the horrors families inflict on themselves; it's the only way we can go on.

Some good summer reading...

I'm tearing down the back stretch of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, but already sad about the upcoming end of the ride. Such a pleasure. An adventure story of two Jewish travelers at the end of the 10th century, making their fortunes in the wild and dangerous lands between the Black and the Caspian seas.

"I am not overly encumbered by principle," the wraithish and moody Zelikman defines himself. "I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief..." He and his companion, the giant Abyssinian Amran, share a love of elephants, their horses and their weapons, and a talent for squeaking out of tough situations. Although the hearts of both have been hardened by this vicious time, Amran has a bit less melancholy than his companion. The two find themselves kidnapping, then rescuing, then following with an army under the command of a young Prince, bent on restoring his lost kingdom.

The adventure is nearly non-stop, slowed only for a few moments here and there of resigned reflection; the suspense is breathless.

Here is an example of Chabon's deliciously chewy prose. Amran, in the middle of a scheme to retrieve his buddy's stolen horse via stampede, contemplating the chance to again save the young prince: "The melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars...It was the business of the world, Amran knew, to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away. After long years of blessed absence, the return of merciful feelings toward what was, after all, only another motherless and fatherless child, struck Amran, bitterly, as a sign of his own waning powers to live life as it must be lived."

Some luscious chapter titles:
Chapter Thirteen: On Swimming to the Library at the Heart of the World

Chapter Fourteen: On the Melancholy Duty of Soldiers to Contend with the Messes Left by Kings

Chapter Fifteen: On Following the Road to One's Destiny, with the Usual Intrusions of Violence and Grace

Beginner's Greek, a novel by James Collins

A book cover blub and reviews compare James Collins' Beginner's Greek to the novels of Jane Austen, but as I was reading, the only Austen moment that came to mind was by way of Andrew Davies' Pride and Prejudice when Lizzie writes, after an unflattering but entirely accurate description of Lady Catherine's daughter, "I'm sorry to be hard on any of our sex, but there it is." I do want to be supportive of a first-time novelist, but I really hated this book. Randy got so sick of my disgusted snorts as I was reading it in the car that he threatened to throw it out the window.

Beginner's Greek works so hard creating a protagonist that is affable and loveable, that I absolutely despised him.

Julia leaned forward. "Tell me something....You haven't said a word about your career. How come?"

"Oh," Peter said. "Well--I save that for when I am going out to dinner with a woman for the first time. We'll talk about it-- that is, I will--for pretty much the entire meal. I mean, not every minute--you've got to order and so forth. Also, when a woman and I are in each other's arms after...after...you know, I like to tell her about it. It's beautiful."

"What if someone asks you what you do?"

"I've always wanted to sort of draw myself up and say with a withering look, 'I am a gentleman.'"

You might wonder, like I did, if this conversation was intended to be laughable, but it's followed by the so literal lines: "Julia liked Peter. Over the months and years, she had always been happy to see him, and, in fact, he had worked his way into her heart."

Peter Russell meets the woman of his dreams on a plane, but because of an unexplained loss of a piece of paper, he loses her to his best friend. Never mind his own lack of courage that prevents him from admitting his feelings or protecting the woman from her philandering husband. It was the paper's fault!

So he marries another woman he doesn't love.

When the philanderer is dispatched by a bolt of lighting (my favorite moment of the book), our weenie has this lovely thought about his wife: "He could flip Charlotte in a year, and nobody would care."

Yeah, right, a gentleman.

In conventional, non-experimental fiction, to earn the right to be the main character, you need some kind of pluck, or gumption or special quality - something, anything! That sets you apart from the million other Joes and Marys out there. But this Peter can't do the right thing - he can't do much of anything - it has to be done for him. His wife runs off with another man and Peter, for over-complicated and implausible reasons that are all in his head, even with all obstructions conveniently whisked away, can't tell the girl of his dreams that he loves her. He can't figure out a way to stand up to his bully boss. But he still gets the girl, watches the boss get his comeuppance and in a dinner party scene that explains the title of the book, manages to impress a table of scholars, business titans and cultural elite.

"Peter emerged as sort of a mascot of the table. Two people would be discussing something--a movie, a political issue, the economy, the human condition--and then they would turn to him and ask him his opinion. Peter found himself able to talk with perfect ease on any subject at all."

This may sound cruel, but instead of Austen's work, the book that I was reminded of, actually, was A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's crappy novel that he couldn't sell and so falsely labeled a memoir. ("At first I made an effort to fit in, but I couldn't pretend, and after a few weeks, I stopped trying. I am who I am and they could either like me or hate me. They hated me with a fucking vengeance....Got first DUI. Blew a .36, and set a County Record. Went to Jail for a week.") I couldn't take Frey's self-consciously hard-ass persona and where else but in the fantasies of an insecure male ego do scenes like this live?

Would you like my copy?

The Armillary Sphere by Ann Hudson

I met Ann Hudson on visiting day at my oldest daughter's Montessori school. Our three year olds were off exploring the classrooms while the parents waited in the gym so Ann and I struck up a conversation about favorite Chicago neighborhoods, cupcakes and writing. I found out she is a poet, with a newly published book of poetry from Ohio University Press. How cool is that? I ran out and bought the book immediately and I must tell you - I loved it. Her poetry is beautiful and true.

The title of Hudson's book of poetry, The Armillary Sphere, refers to an instrument used in the early days of astronomy to study the circles of the heavens visible from earth. You see the sphere in the 17th century Flemish allegorical oil painting on the gorgeous cover of Hudson's book. The painting depicts in precise detail a cluster of precisely rendered birds before a skyscape of angry storm clouds torn apart by Apollo's sun-chariot. In the foreground, a luminous nude woman holds a bouquet of feathers in one hand and in the other, the tool of the book's title, an object made of golden rings that reveals the answers of the celestial bodies. Like the poetry in this book, the image glows with great beauty, possibility, mystery and meaning.

Despite the obscure name, Hudson's lovely writing is poetry for real people, poetry of real women. I've been getting a poem a day from the Academy of American Poets this April and most of them are really beautiful, but murky in a deliberate way that makes the reading experience pleasant but fleeting, something I'll barely remember. Not so with Hudson. She shot right up into the ranks of my favorite poets - Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, Emily Dickinson - who write of worlds I recognize, who talk to me about the way I live in it.

The perceptive observations here seem snatched between real-life obligations and hours of salaried work. In "Architect," with a few strokes, she paints a vivid picture of a big-egoed boss: "He wants to fill my desk/at work and home."

In "Equinox," a thrilling poem about standing still and changing at the same time, Hudson writes, "We try to downsize,/slough off old clothes, bad books,/mementos we nest our houses with/to anchor us to where we've been./It doesn't matter that this never works."

Many of the poems create a vision of an urban life that drowns one in its exhausting routine, makes the poet "feel empty/of anything interesting to say," but even here Hudson finds perception and beauty. It is in sensation that the poet finds something to trust: in the morning light, or a "scruffy/dog, who licks his gray muzzle,/then bites at nothing in the winter air." Or a swim at midnight: "to forget all/but the instant, and your body/in it.

I'll say it again; I loved this book. I loved the rich imagery, how Hudson captures that elusive feeling when you are half-way into a dream but fighting to stay awake: "A suck of darkness, a roar in your ears,/and you slip under, lit by a great flurry/of wings, streaks of copper/and black pressing your lids." I loved her reimaging of the story Eurydice as that of the long-suffering wife of a rock star. I loved how the poet untangles complicated feeling - here is what it is like to be a teacher to adolescents and so the object of their gossip and imagination:

I'm the next toy
come to life, after the doll they dressed
and undressed with their friends.

Barbies they twisted into flat,
un-organed sex with plastic Ken,
then abandoned, naked,

in the Dream House to sleep it off,
wiser and looser in the joints.

The Armillary Sphere by Ann Hudson from Ohio University Press

Recently Read

From Ken Kalfus' audacious A Disorder Peculiar to the Country:

"At the corner, chewing a frankfurter, whose oily, gamy texture he barely noticed, Marshall reflected on this promiscuity that threatened the society on which it thrived. He could be killed. His children--. Somebody was at work right now. Bacterial grains were being milled and coated with silica to minimize their electrostatic properties. Pentaerythritol tetranitrate was being molded into the bottoms of running shoes. Turbaned men were even now double-clicking obscure, awesome icons."

Can you believe the above comes from a comedy? The blackest of black comedies. Now that we are finding the words to work September 11 into American art, to integrate it into our lives rather than have it sit like a stone on our hearts - are we ready to use it to laugh? Are you ready for a scene where an attempted suicide bombing becomes absurd, then nearly domestic and cozy?

The New Kings of Nonfiction is not new (half the essays are 20th century) nor written by kings (Susan Orlean and Coco Henson Scales make enjoyable contributions. I won't try to make a lame joke about Dan Savage.)

I won't review The New Kings of Nonfiction. I can't review a book I have not finished and probably will not finish. David Foster Wallace's hyper-essay, "Host," was written and designed to be read on-line; in print, it is unwieldy and irritating to wade through. Most of James McManus' essay about high-stakes Vegas poker games is written in obscure terms - reading it is like trying to eat a bowl of thick soup filled with unidentifiable chunks. I will say the rest is pretty great - Mark Bowden's "Tales of the Tyrant" explains the person of Saddam Hussein to you. And Dan Savage always makes me happy, especially here, where he tries to join the Republican Party.

Here's an excerpt from Lee Sandlin's amazing essay "Losing the War." Sandlin's essay, along with Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, should be required reading by every American high school student.

"But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a 'battle.' It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders--the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded."

The Kings (and Queens!) book gives an edited version of "Losing the War." The entire piece is here.

New from William Styron

William Styron is my man. I feel a personal bond with the writer who died in 2006; he has been my guide on some formative literary experiences. In the space of four brief pages, Styron's essay "Death Row" moved me permanently from my place on the fence about the death penalty to the conviction that killings authorized by the state are as barbaric as the crimes they claim to punish.

Styron accomplished the nearly impossible by describing the experience of profound depression in his memoir Darkness Visible. "My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnamable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world." When I read his identification of the illness as "a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by (in William James' words) 'a positive and active anguish,'" I felt connection and relief - here is a name for the pain - here is the beginning of understanding.

I have lots more to say about Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, (I have a love-hate relationship with both these books for very different reasons) but right now I'm telling you about Havanas in Camelot, a collection of short pieces, some found in Styron's papers after his death. He writes, often with great humor, of his friendships with JFK, James Baldwin, Terry Southern and Truman Capote and an episode with a misdiagnosis of syphilis. It's not a major collection, nor always a satisfying one - some stories seem cut short by his lack of notes or memory -- but I loved the chance to connect again with a favorite writer.

Here is what he says about the adaptation of Sophie's Choice into film: "When I first saw the film it was a joy to note the smooth, almost seamless way the story unfolded in scrupulous fidelity to the way I had told it; there were no shortcuts, no distortions or evasions, and the sense of satisfaction I felt was augmented by the splendid photography, the subtle musical score, and, above all, the superb acting, especially Meryl Streep's glorious performance, which of course is already part of film history." He continues (what writer whose baby has been adopted by another could not?) with a lament for all that was not included, but I think the film only benefits by omitting the lengthy comparisons of Sophie's butt to pieces of fruit and the scene where she gives Stingo a handjob on the beach. The Godfather and The Bridges of Madison County easily refute his claim that "for the true experience one must return to that oldest source - the written word--and confront the original work" but I wouldn't deny the writer a preference for his medium.

The collection ends with an essay from 1990 (the same year Darkness Visible was published) that is a reverie about the dumpy village on Martha's Vineyard he called home. After witnessing his horrific war with the demons of mental illness that robbed him of sleep and pleasure, I read with satisfaction evidence he had recovered the ability to enjoy the world again. The book concludes with the words, "And at night to fall gently sleep to the far-off moaning of the West Chop foghorn. . . . Vineyard Haven. Sleep. Bliss."

No Country for Old Men

All the reports of disturbing violence in this film are keeping me away, but I couldn't resist when Randy brought home the book. I plunged in and emerged a couple of days later, not uplifted, but glad my head was full of words rather than visions of cruelty. By the fifth page McCarthy creates horror and by the twentieth, almost unbearable tension. The two qualities are not unrelated, of course. Every scene, even the peaceful one here and there, is haunted by the menace of hitman-serial killer Chigurh, an unstoppable force and a strangely compelling monster.

I have a Coen brothers story. When I was a film school, I met a guy with thick black-framed glasses and spiky hair named Don Skahill, who made and worked on some interesting student films. A couple of years later, I heard through a friend that Skahill got a job as a script flunky on the Coen brothers film Fargo. The brothers had started production, but they hadn't yet cast a tiny speaking role. So Don asked if he could try out, but one of the Coen's told him, "I don't want to do a conventional audition for this. Surprise me."

So Skahill watched and waited and one day saw his opportunity. He burst into a room where the bros were working and called out in earnest and energetic Minnesotan: "May I have your ticket, please!?" It was the character's single line and his reading won him the role. It's actually an important moment of the film - the sight of his corpse is what William Macy, as Jerry Lundegaard, is reacting to in this often-shown still.

The McCarthy book did remind me of the earlier film. They both show us the tender relationship between a law officer (Fargo's Officer Marge Gunderson, the novel's Sheriff Bell) and spouse and contrast that rockbed safety and comfort with grotesquely meaningless violence.

And Fargo and No Country for Old Men both collide worlds. Innocence meets guile for the first time and approaches with a small confused smile, sniffing the sulfur. A gas station clerk asks Chigurh, "You all getting any rain up your way?" The antelope hunter Moss returns to the desert crime scene - where he recovered a million dollars in blood money! With a jug of water! Too good or too stupid to live? Discuss. Look at Lundegaard's face. He's tasting the bile of panic and the juice of the serpent's apple.

Funny Mind, Body, Banjo

Long before his elegantly odd hosting of the Oscars, long before his penning and portraying the remote and wealthy Ray Porter in Shopgirl, long before his New Yorker essays, there was "Grandpa bought a rubber." If you are of a certain age, the memory of Steve Martin's joyful warbling of this hootenanny non sequitur can't help but reduce you to adolescent giggles again.

Martin's new memoir, Born Standing Up, offers an intimate view of the early years of what must be one of the most unusual career trajectories in show biz - from child magician to philosophy student, from San Francisco hippie comic to stadium filling superstar. Martin generously offers insight into how each of these experiences was formative for his comedy - a unique blend of absurdity, brilliant and energetic full-body mimicry, and a send up of old time show biz conventions. His act, he reveals, was "a parody of comedy. I was an entertainer playing an entertainer, a not so good one." The skilled banjo playing only added to the head-scratching strangeness of it all.

What was interesting to me was the contrast of this memoir's fine writing with the more simple quotes of familiar old bits from his routines. Martin's prose is lovely, dark and deep, but on stage, his jokes themselves needed not much more than a simple framework upon which his malleable body worked. There was a world of hilarity in his wild but practiced gestures and perfect mugging. Remember his bit about taking a drug that made him small, while he mimed driving behind a giant steering wheel, then tried to convince a cop that he was "large, man, large!"?

Fall Pleasures

1. Opening the shades and curtains for the morning light and warmth.

2. Planting bulbs. Actually bending over to break through the cold hardpack with my bulb planter is a bit of a pain in the ass, but the girls do help a little. Nora can drop in a handful of fertilizer; Mia tries to guess which end of the anemone bulb should face the sky. Like so much in this season of descending darkness, the pleasure lies in the hopeful anticipation. We're composing a love letter to spring, who is far away, visiting another hemisphere.

3. New Project Runway!

4. The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown. Good reviews sent me to this book by the controversial former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Brown's research is impressive. She writes as a former friend of the princess, yet one who is neither star struck by her celebrity nor made bitter by the famous woman's all-too human qualities. Brown analyzes with great perception the Princess's cultivated and yet real vulnerability and the complicated relationship she had with the press that helped millions to identify with and love her, but also led to her tragic death.

"Diana's desire to rescue a marmoreal (Me: That's "marble-like." I had to look it up. What a great word.) royal trudge through some comatose British institution with a more spontaneous act of human flair is the thing that made her visitations such a triumph. Plus, her understanding of the emotional dimension of Charles's commitments often made more of a difference to how the Prince was received than any amount of briefing and planning. Diana instinctively seemed to know that the only power royalty has left is the power to disappoint, and she never did, either with her physical presence or in her responsiveness to human detail."

5. Making apple head dolls. We read Elisa Kleven's book about a girl who makes a new friend from an old apple. So we peeled and carved Granny Smiths and soaked them in lemon juice. Now, they sit in a warm oven, growing older and more wrinkly and smiley by the day.

6. Watching the changes in our neighbor's ginko tree. I've heard these trees drop their leaves all at once. Does "all at once" mean in one day? On the count of three? Hopefully, we'll be there for the party.

Around the House and In the Garden

Around the House and In the Garden is a lovely collection of essays about “heartbreak, healing and home improvement” by Dominique Browning, a divorced mother of two sons.

Lest you fear, as I did for a couple of minutes, that the writer’s day job as the editor of House and Garden magazine would have you stumbling as you read over designer names you feel like you should have heard of, or French terms for fancy furniture you’d never want in your comfy home, don’t worry.

Yes, there is a reference to a prie dieu, (hm?) but Browning reassures in each brief essay that meaning lies in the love, the comforting habits and the beauty created within a home rather than the sticks of furniture inside its walls.

The writing comforts and sustains, even as Browning takes us on her painful journey of deciding to leave her marriage, tearing a home asunder, grieving the emptiness, and working towards healing. There is agony on the way. When her son compares her to his father’s new wife, the normally gentle and equanimous author hisses, “Don’t you ever talk to me about that woman again,” and you feel the raw wounds of parent, child, family, home.

But spring returns with its crocus blooms, light enters the rooms again and Browning rediscovers joy in life and its beautiful objects. She writes, ". . . Even though, after several years of being on my own, and still taking to my bed on occasion, overwhelmed, I fell alive again. Attuned to the lives around me. I see beauty, again, and I feel the spirit pulsing in the things of everyday life."

In the spirit of how beloved things of this world can work pleasure on you, here are some of my favorite things this week:

1. Far friends who keep in touch and remind me that “Everything you need has been given to you and is inside you.”

2. The plastic parakeet on a tiny perch on our kitchen counter who chirps via motion sensor each time I walk by. He keeps me company and I don’t have to feed him or clean up his poop. What better pet?

3. Mad Men, continuing to please way past its pilot (ha! Good luck with THAT, Pushing Daisies!)

And 30 Rock, funny as ever (Tina Fey calls her ex-boyfriend and a woman answers so Tina pretends to be a survey company. “How old are you? . . . How much do you weigh? . . . When was the last time you had sex? . . . Well, who are YOU!? . . . No, who do YOU think YOU is?!” Hang up. I’m snorting with laughter.)

And one-third of Tell Me You Love Me – the couple-with-kids storyline. Forget the other whiner characters; this is the plot to follow. It’s an utterly moving portrayal of two good people who are working their butts off to be good parents but have become stymied by the mysteries of each other’s desire. The kitchen table with the kids is their safe cottage; the bedroom is the dark forest where they are lost.

4. Our Toyota hybrid. Because I don’t have to feel guilty driving Mia to school in an internal combustion engine, and waiting in carpool line I get to play with the computer map in the dash, and the CD player. The energy graph that tells me my mileage by the second is my coach in amateur hyper-mileaging as I coast to stops, and confuse other drivers by keeping within the speed limit.

5. Recently spied bumper stickers:

“Isis, Isis, Rah Rah Rah!”

“Mental Illness Runs in Every Family.” I don’t know why this last one makes me smile, but it does.

6. A Mate Latte with almond. “Mate has caffeine, but it is water soluble, so it’s not as much a shock to your system as coffee,” said the Argo Tea woman. I don’t know what she meant, but mmm, it’s good.

7. My khaki-green Free People shirtwaist dress from Crossroads Trading Company. It’s my go-to dress for almost any casual outing. Recycled! Cheap! Flattering!

Shopping at this place does make me feel a bit like the crazy old college-town lady who wears too much rouge and thinks she's still one of the kids, but I get to overhear delicious bits like this in the coed fitting room.

Guy one: Did you try on these True Religions shoes? They’re too small for me.

Guy two: I think these are women’s True Religions. (Pause) I don’t care. They look good.

The Corrections

Last month in Michigan I was not so much reading The Corrections again as galloping through it at a pace to keep up with the anxious frenzies of the neurotic and endlessly hungry characters. I carried the book with me everywhere, read while I brushed my teeth, held the book open with a jar of Ponds while I dried my hair. But when I carried it down to the stream where the girls played, Randy offered a correction of his own. “Engage!” he called out, then went back to focusing the girls in his viewfinder.

I put the paperback down in the sand right next to me, watched the girls who were content to splash and wade without my help. I didn’t say a word.

It was a moment worthy of the passive aggressions and petty retaliations of Jonathan Franzen’s book. You know how you start to live the book you are currently reading, thinking in the patterns of the narrator, seeing the world through characters’ eyes?

I sat there in the sand, the book inches away from my hand, and stewed. I stewed at the memory of Randy sitting in the car with his Ipod earlier that day while I led the girls down the peach orchard lanes.

Then the lovely parts of the memory took over and I forgot all about the man and his technology. The girls and I picked fat and perfect peaches from ripe clusters on low trees. I was surprised by the effort needed to tug one from its tough stem on the branch. I was amazed by the luscious crunch when I bit into one - the perfectly ripe peach was as crisp as an Asian pear. “Why are the peaches at the store so soft?” I asked Randy later. And why are these magical trees that bear perfect fruit not in every backyard? Sally tells me that the pruning shape is called open center, like a goblet, with lots of space between branches. Pruning seems the skill that separates the farmer from the gardener.

Anyway, The Corrections. Great ideas on every page. Before kids, during my first read, I thought I recognized in-laws who shall remain nameless. This time around, I wince to recognize my own relationships.

I still relish with sick glee the chapter about Gary, the older Lambert son, locked in vicious battle with his wife over which one will be more sympathetically sane and which one will wear the mantle of “clinically depressed.”

Each character of the twisted Lambert family is both a neurotic cartoon and yet utterly recognizable. Contemptible and yet sympathetic! Except the daughter Denise. Her face remains blank to me. Closeted lesbian, executive chef, dutiful daughter, love adventurer? Don’t get her. Her chapter reads like mild Judith Krantz with dated pop culture references, recipes, thrilling sex, descriptions of fancy digs. Forgivable in the company of such other pages.

What did you think of the ending? Does it offer eternal hope or senselessly blind ignorance about what little is left in a wasted life?

Summer Reading

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Before reading I knew this much – On Chesil Beach tells a brief story of one difficult wedding night between an inexperienced British couple in the 1950’s.

(And this: The library’s waiting list had 100 people! Who can wait that long? And who adds their name after number, say, TWENTY?)

And this: Ian McEwan is a master.

After Atonement’s hot sex scene in the library – a scene so well realized that it supports the entire surrounding story, after the patient attention to minute and telling detail of Saturday, I had great confidence in McEwan and great hope for his newest book.

Expectations confirmed.

A frightened bride and her over-eager new husband, two children really, who cannot break through their own shells of need to enter the mystery, work, sacrifice and imperfect joy of marriage. Deeply, deeply sad.

Half way into the fascinating back-stories of Florence and Edward, I had to stop and ask that age-old reader’s question: how does he do it? I started examining sentences, looking for verbs. The description is lovely, yes, but it must be the action words that propel our reading.

First, a passage about Florence’s distance:

“She turned back to him. ‘I was curious about you.’

“But it was even more than that. At the time it did not even occur to her to satisfy her curiosity. She did not think they were about to meet, or that there was anything she should do to make that possible. . . . Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All those years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.”

Look, nothing spectacular by itself. The verbs, commonplace. But in context, everything. Piercing understanding.

Now Edward:

“A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was brain-damaged and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor.”

Do you see it? Feel it? The syntax alone, only a tool, does not matter – it is the way McEwan wields it on my history, yours too? Does the passage bring you back to this moment of separation, probably in your teen years, a moment of terrifying freedom and possibility and sadness at what you were deliberately leaving behind?


The Bitch in The House: 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage, edited by Cathi Hanauer

A collection of essays with the common denominator of anger doesn’t sound like a great read for someone seeking peace and balance. But The Bitch in the House has a lot to offer for enlightenment, especially for mothers who are battling the image (self-imposed or cultural) of the serene queen of the home with the frustrating realities of work, child care, and partner relations.

The collection opens with mostly younger voices. I didn’t relate much to these briefer essays. The women here write of expectations of marriage or relationships that seem as close to me as Venus. I did not picture myself setting up house with a man; I rarely pictured myself as a bride. Those fantasies seemed too conventional, too Barbie, too uncomfortable. (Nascent feminist stirrings? Misapprehension of the nature of marriage? Some self-esteem issue? I’ll work that out with my therapist.)

Anyboo, once I got to the second section “For Better and Worse,” about the meat and heat of permanent partnerships, I became more engaged. Catherine Newman, with her typical humor and candor, argues against marriage to the father of her two children. Finding out she identified as lesbian for years before finding her Michael feels like sharing a confidence with an old friend.

By the time we work up to mother anger and the fear of its power in the central section, “Mommy Maddest,” I felt at home. Here, in Kristin van Ogtrop’s “Attila the Honey I’m Home” and Elissa Schappel’s “Crossing the Line in the Sand: How Mad Can Mother Get?” is what I have been searching for, true and familiar stories of frustration beyond control. Here I find the fury that is missing from Hope Edelman’s Motherless Mothers, with its mild tone and maddening calm. (Edelman does let loose a little more in her contribution here.) I almost weep at finding sisters who share their struggles with nearly unbounded outrage and overwhelming guilt over the worst crime of all –collateral damage to our children.

These essays made me wonder how many of the frustrations that vex mothers today are ancient and how many emerged with our recent gains earned in the workplace and society. Do stay at home mothers today feel more isolated than ever? Do working moms feel new stresses of competition, as well as the pressure to make their house a home? Without ever wanting to return to that time, do we miss the imagined community and collectivism of another generation, when Mom at home always knew women like her were right next door?

The established and experienced voices of Ellen Gilchrist and Vivian Gornick wrap up this collection best with wisdom and lovely prose. Gilchrist, a mother and grandmother, and Vivian Gornick, single and without children, offer contrasting but hopeful portraits of women thick in the continuing fight for personal independence, maturity and balance.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

“That’s a white cabbage butterfly!” called Mia, fresh from her Creepy Critters camp at the Botanical Garden. I’m proud and pleased. My friend Christina says West Nile has destroyed many of birds that serve as the butterflies’ natural predators. Seen many crows lately? No, come to think of it.

Here in our neck of the woods it’s been a summer of animal encounters. Cicadas, butterflies, chipmunks and bunnies have all invaded our yard. The “tip-mokes”, as Nora calls them, even made it into our kitchen.

One twilight this July we watched three mature rabbits feed in our backyard. They chased each other, and one leaped startlingly high in the air. A tiny baby rabbit hopped close by, his head barely higher than the blades of shorn grass. Did this sight inspire me to pick up Watership Down AGAIN?

It must have been my fourth reading – I loved this as a kid. And once again, it delivered. A barn burner, a page turner, a great old-fashioned adventure story, whose main characters happen to be rabbits. Fiver, Bigwig and company set out to escape a vision of disaster for their old tribe and establish a safe warren of their own. The band of bunnies on the march reminded me of nothing so much as Saving Private Ryan, with its own engaging heroes, comedians, strategists and tired foot soldiers.

There are hair-raising raids and escapes, funny folk tales, fascinating passages of bunny lore and culture. The thrilling climax is written with tension-building cross-cutting worthy of Griffith. And the story brings up larger issues about the environment and our place within it.

“Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens, and Toadflax answered, ‘That wasn’t why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.’”

There’s a mother metaphor here. Perhaps one mother’s pest is another mother’s bunny. Perhaps there’s a story here about a tired and distracted mother who can sometimes become Farmer Magregor, thinking only of protecting her own harvest, forgetting how natural is the playfulness and mischievousness in her own backyard creatures.

Great America

After our great day at Kiddieland, I’ve had theme parks on the brain. Now I’m starting to think I live in one. Our village has the charming details they try to replicate in an ersatz Disneyland Main Street – sidewalks that curve around the century old tree trunks, brick streets, iron lampposts straight out of C.S. Lewis.

And the theme park population of big-eyed cuddly characters who give you hugs? I live with two miniature versions.

I felt the Magical Sense of Wonder that Disney tries to bottle up and sell when Mr. Nicki came to our door the other afternoon. Around dinnertime, I heard a soft knock and some strummed chords through the screen door. Was it our ukulele-playing neighbor? A singing telegram from my extravagently thoughtful husband? No, it was a genuine traveling minstrel! The girls were wide-eyed, a little shy, but game while Mommy giggled at the funny lyrics. Nora even danced a little.

Here’s a sample:

Some people say you’re weird cause you’re covered with slime!
And you’re a boy and a girl at the very same time!

Earthworm! Earthworm!

If they cut off your head it might not grow back
So keep it in your tunnel when the birds attack!

Earthworm!

The title “Nerds and Weirdos” didn’t sound promising to me, but the actual song had a great message and an infectious beat:

Without the nerds and weirdos we could never get along
Cause the nerds made our computers and the weirdos write our songs!

How could I ever been so blind to see
That everyone’s important in this world?
Including me!

Mr. Nicki plays Sunday, July 15, 6:30, at CJ Arthur's in Wilmette and at 1:00 on Sunday, July 22 at Centennial Pool, 2300 Old Glenview Road, Wilmette.

You could say Suburbia is an adult “Great America,” with the teen pleasure we wrung out of death-defying thrills replaced with their adult opposites: comfort, ease, community, security. And, like kids gorged on funnel cakes and Coke, we can still fall prey to a surfeit of sweetness.

Tom Perrotta writes of this discontent in paradise in his 2004 novel Little Children. A Hollywood darling, Perrotta has had his novels Election and Little Children adapted into smart moneymaker films.

The perfectly named novel Little Children introduces us to a crowd of suburban characters acting out the needy and self-centered behavior that is blameless in a child, but potentially tragedy-making in grown-ups.

Sarah, our main character, carries the sullenness of an adolescent who thinks she is alone in feeling underappreciated and misunderstood as she begins an affair with another stay-at-home parent she meets on the playground.

The pages of Little Children fly by. Perrotta writes a great football scene. I loved the killer last paragraph. A perfect ending.

Nine Jewels

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro. Vintage Books USA, 2001. 336 pages. ISBN 9780375727436

A collection of nine short stories about the lives of Canadian women, memory’s power, the heart’s survival, imperfect love.

With a few strokes, Alice Munro creates specific internal worlds, familiar yet unique. Piercingly perceptive observations of the way people think and act and feel are uttered in simple language.

“Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, lean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies.” (from “What is Remembered”)

I read this collection shortly after it first came out in 2001 but picked up the book again this spring because the new film, Away from Her, is getting great reviews. The film, directed by young actress Sarah Polley, (have you seen her in The Sweet Hereafter? She sings, too!) is based on Munro’s short story, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” the final story in this book.

“Bear” describes the last chapters of Fiona, a dynamic and intelligent woman losing her sense of the past and of Grant, her loving, but casually unfaithful husband. When Grant plans and carries out an act of tremendous and arguably selfless love, I was satisfied by his comeuppance (or is it another rationalized betrayal?) but also moved by the continuing mystery of what we will do for love.

Something fascinating happens in the last few lines of the story – the proper names drop away into an anonymous “he,” mimicking the processes of Fiona’s slipping mind. The differences between the men are collapsed; the love becomes borderless.

Just as often as she creates a coincidence or an ironic conclusion worthy of O. Henry, Alice Munro will make a beautiful situation that seems without any obvious place in the narrative arc. Later, I’ll realize how the meandering path has been carefully designed, each detail telling. Each facet of the jewels in this collection has been polished for maximum brilliance.

Of the drapes her husband hangs after her cancer diagnosis, Jinny, in “Floating Bridge” reflects, “she knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve pretty much the same purpose, when anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind.”

In the title story, a cruel trick played by two young girls on one girl’s simple housekeeper, is turned on itself in a gratifying way. In less deft hands, this ironic conclusion could have felt leaden and vengeful. But Munro gives one of the girls this reflection: “It was the whole twist of consequence that dismayed her—it seemed fantastical, but dull. Also insulting, like some sort of joke or inept warning, trying it get its hooks in her.” This kind of doubling back, to look at the oddness of fate and human behavior, keeps me in the faith of the story’s world. Strange twists do occur in this big old world, Munro reminds us. We believe her.

(There was one Munro story, not in this collection, so it’s not really fair of me to mention, that pushed the neatness of coincidence beyond palatable. I will mention it, though, because it shows how difficult it is to tread this tightrope of irony. And because this is my review, on my blog, goddammit. In “Tricks,” from the 2004 collection Runaway, a mentally-disabled twin makes a casual gesture that a woman misconstrues as rejection from his brother. Her entire life is changed by a device creaks like an antiquated machine. But that is another book.)

Here, in this masterful collection filled with pleasure and wonder, Munro creates stories where the past stirs the passions of the present into swirls sometimes murky, sometimes clarified.

One World

The Crazy Hip Blog Mamas are writing about their favorite good causes this week. Yippee!

I want to share the work of an astounding person and his life-saving organization, Partners in Health. I first encountered Dr. Paul Farmer when I read Tracy Kidder’s excellent book, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Kidder chronicles Farmer’s life work. He paints a portrait of a doctor who is not only a miracle worker of treating infectious disease, but also a genius of innovation and organization in breaking the cycle of poverty that makes millions vulnerable to those diseases.

Dr. Paul Farmer says he has had “the great privilege of working as a physician” in what some may call the most hopeless places on earth: Haiti, ravaged by AIDS, tuberculosis and poverty; war-torn Rwanda; the ghettos of Peru; Russian prison. Farmer’s efforts and the accomplishments of Partners in Health transform these bleak corners of the world to places of hope and possibility.

With an unflashy name, and an unconventional vision, Partners in Health seeks health and care solutions in these countries by “Whatever It Takes.” This is not the kind of medical practice we are familiar with in America with our scheduled appointments, business-like office visits, prescriptions, pharmacies, insurance cards, end of story.

Partners in Health designs care solutions that address the underlying problems that create health disasters. The system is changed, or at least circumvented, not coddled. The person’s life is treated, not just her disease.

Here is Dr. Paul Farmer with a patient at the Zanmi Lasante clinic in Cange, Haiti.

Farmer and PIH’s work is undertaken not simply out of sentiment, but from a place of empathy and solidarity. “When a person in Peru, or Siberia, or rural Haiti falls ill, PIH uses all of the means at our disposal to make thm well – from pressuring drug manufacturers, to lobbying policy makers, to providing medical care and social services. Whatever it takes. Just as we would do if a member of our own family—or we ourselves—were ill.” (PIH website, 2006)

“Tout moun se moun” say the Haitians. Everyone is human. When Randy and I went to Asia pre-kids, when we took the girls to Mexico, we would look at the sky, the light and say, “It’s another world.” Look at this little girl's face - it’s not.