OF A GOLDEN AGE

I am reading Jerry Spinelli’s 2007 children’s novel Eggs in sync with a sixth-grade boy, and he’s told me while we’re reading it that he isn’t sure what’s going on. He’s right — the plot is confusing or at least minimal, a framework upon which to hang two sad, interesting characters. I am not sure it succeeds, but I found myself caring about the two children and the idiosyncrasies each had developed as defense mechanisms.

David is nine, relatively new in town since the death of his mother less than a year ago. He lives with his father and grandmother and his reaction to profound, crippling grief is to clam up. The few times he speaks to his grandmother at first are to wound her, discouraging any further efforts at communication. Primrose is 13, fatherless, with an unreliable, sometimes uncaring mother who makes a living as a fortuneteller. She is pretty mean, hard to like, and just motherly enough that David grows very attached.

David is a natural, empathetic character — the way Spinelli describes David’s method for coping with his mother’s death is plausible for any real child. Further, David lets himself be carried along as only a nine year old can, speaks believable dialogue, and is not ashamed of his own fears or feelings. The problem with the book is Primrose, who may be a victim of insufficient character development. She is shrill and bipolar, acting out in truly odd ways and encapsulating the reason we dislike movies with too much quirk: Because the details don’t hang together naturally, I can’t suspend my disbelief and enjoy the story.

My favorite bit in the book came early, when David’s rationalization of his mother’s death is explained:

For David believed that if he went a long enough time without breaking a rule — a year, five years, twenty — piling up a million obediences, a billion — sooner or later, somehow, somewhere, a debt would be paid, a score would be settled, and his mother would come back.

And another favorite, at the book’s opposite end:

Of course, all of their words for a thousand years could not fill the hole left by his mother, but they could raise a loving fence around it so he didn’t keep falling in.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

I picked this book up at Goodwill. My friend Lindsey asked if I’d read it before. When I said no, she laughed and said, “Have fun with that.”

To be succinct: This is the worst book I’ve ever read.

It’s terribly written, badly plotted, bizarre, nonsensical, and not half as compelling as I imagined from its scandalous reputation. The completist in me was excited to spent 89 cents and add it to my repertoire, and really, I wish I hadn’t — instead of a satisfying guilty pleasure, this book is all boredom and clunky phrasing. One of the major reasons is the way Andrews uses the word “for” as a transition: Characters mill around and say things like, “I couldn’t believe it, for Momma had never spoke this way before.”

The advice I give everyone who ever asks me for writing or editing help is this: You don’t need to be a good writer, let alone a great one; you need to write so that your words don’t distract from your point. Andrews tries to curb the awful writing in her book with the frame that narrator Cathy has written it, that it is a “true story,” and that she hopes some publisher will take pity and print it. The only reason I can fathom this book reaching publication is the subject matter, and Andrews hits these huge topics — incest, rape, child abuse, destructive greed — with a wanton lack of respect.

Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Twenty-four-year-old Ellen Gulden is hardened and jaded, her opinions black and white, set in stone the way only young people can manage. Like all of Anna Quindlen’s writing, Ellen struck me as a shade of Quindlen’s real life as a gifted, brilliant young woman, and the real guts of One True Thing lie in Ellen’s lack of emotional intelligence to match her booksmarts.

Early in the book, Ellen’s mother is to spend a week in the hospital following a hysterectomy. Ellen narrates:

It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female — a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Her mother finds out she has swift-moving terminal cancer, and Ellen comes to live at the family home in her small hometown. She unwillingly steps into the life her mother chose and which Ellen cannot understand, a life in which her mother’s greatest goal was to make a beautiful life for herself and her family. She is an ideal housewife, pretty, put-together, and likable. She needlepoints, crochets, decoupages, stencils; she belongs to women’s groups and is well known around town. Ellen views these traits with clear disdain and relishes their oppositeness even as she learns to cook her mother’s elaborate signature dishes and finishes her mother’s delicate needlepoint flowers.

Ellen’s father has always been her hero, with their common ground in English, academic intellect, and blanket judgment-passing. But as she lives beside her mother from day to day, her perception of the accomplishments of each of her parents evolves considerably. Throughout the book, Ellen’s boyfriend Jon acts as an ongoing reminder of the person she was before, and when she starts to blanch at his crass remarks and criticisms of her mother, it’s apparent that Ellen is getting a clue. She and her mother begin reading books and discussing them, which alerts Ellen to her mother’s not-even-latent intellectual ability and her equally complex opinions on the subject Ellen lords over others.

Like most things I truly love, Quindlen’s writing lends enormous nuance to situations which seem, at first glance, to be definitely a certain way. I love her all the more for the ending she gives Ellen, which I won’t discuss in any detail; this book makes a very relevant statement without becoming maudlin or politicking, and much to my great satisfaction the story leaves Ellen in a better, less-clear place than where she began.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.