OF A GOLDEN AGE

My mom and I love Anna Quindlen and have for years, along with Anne Lamott and a tiny canon of other women writers. Quindlen’s life story is fascinating: She is a phenom from way, way back who has matured into a humane, sophisticated commentator on her life at the tail end of the Baby Boom. She wrote One True Thing, which was Cannonball #5.

I found Object Lessons at a recent charity booksale and snatched it up. It is Quindlen’s first novel and bears some resemblance to her real life. Maggie Scanlan is twelve, making up for her flat, skinny preteen frame with fully teenaged inner turmoil; she is the granddaughter of a proud Irish paterfamilias whose son went emotionally prodigal by marrying an Italian girl. The older girls among her family and friends represent alternate paths Maggie’s life could take, with Maggie’s own mother showing her the option she finds least palatable at the novel’s beginning. As Maggie remains quiet on the sidelines, she realizes her life as a silent observer will limit her life as a potent and gifted doer.

This book is packed with great female characters, but it also contains a great deal of strong, realistic maleness in various forms: Maggie’s grandfathers couldn’t be more different, but each is fascinating; her father is meek, passive, pulled along by his father until his Italian wife acts as ace in the hole. The story’s setting is also an active character: 1960s Bronx and Westchester County, where emerging housing developments threaten the Scanlans’ combination of city wealth and bucolic homesteading.

In the meantime, the girls and women in her life fall by the wayside completely or come into focus, shifting Maggie’s center of balance until she must shut her eyes and reboot. I felt that Maggie was a bit precocious, but her trajectory here felt very earnest. She and her mother are contrasted against one another as they inwardly admit and take ownership of their more small, shameful impulses, and they alone are able to see one another’s feelings or transgressions. When they choose to protect one another, it’s clear they’ll forge ahead together with bittersweet, loving honesty and knowledge.

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Kinsey Millhone, a heroine I’ve read more than fifteen books about, may seem a strange follow-up to the classic Emma, but I chose her carefully for this. P is for Peril is one of the stronger Kinsey mysteries, involving a multilayered story and strong peripheral characters. More importantly, Kinsey is a self-sufficient modern woman who’s sworn off marriage and spends her days making assumptions about other people: She is the progeny of Emma’s smart on paper, stupid in feelings example.

A wealthy first wife comes to Kinsey to find her missing ex-husband, who at some point in the last few years left her for a stripper. He is a doctor caught in a breaking Medicare-fraud scandal who went missing nine weeks prior, just as the you-know-what hit the you-know-what. What at first looks simple turns out to be a total mess, with an embarrassment of riches as far as potential suspects go.

At the same time, Kinsey finds a too-good deal on some new office space with a pair of handsome brothers, one of whom is all up in her business with a Texas accent and a fixy carpenter thing Kinsey really likes. She also helps her apartment’s landlord Henry, a handsome and much-older gent she always kinda fancies, with a messy truckload of medical bills from a mutual friend’s elderly sister.

It gets very complex, the reader’s assumptions are established and then challenged, and Kinsey eats more crow than ever. She differs from Emma in that she is likable all along, and that her happy endings are not about happy matches for marriage. This one also had an abrupt, charming ending without any denouement and was paced to allow all the multiple intertwined stories to finish naturally. I was impressed with Grafton’s weaving skills, on top of her regular mystery-telling skills.

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WHOA WHOA WHOA. Look. I don’t mind that someone kept it a secret from me for the last decade that Jane Austen is amazing; I don’t even mind that my eighth-grade literature teacher — one of the worst teachers I’ve ever had — instead made us read Charles Dickens at age 13 though his prose is thick and overly wordy and Austen’s is straight, clean, utterly readable. All I can say is that I’m glad I read The Jane Austen Book Club and was told that I needed to read Austen in short order.

Let’s get back to the book. Emma is a timeless tale of a meddling young woman, the same as many I’ve known in my life but several-times-over more wealthy and with much more time for mischief. She goes through the story making misguided attempts to bring her friends and acquaintances together, romantically, and fails over and over. She is also comically haughty about the small rural community in which she and her father live, and on which she imposes a strict social hierarchy.

The wonderful part of all this, besides that it reminded me of the sweet meddling of high-school and college friends and their matchmaking, is the way Austen voices each character in the story. Emma is so righteous and passive-aggressive that she fringes on unlikable, if she weren’t counterweighted by the utterly sane Mr Knightley — they would make a good comedy team, he the straight man, she the flibbertigibbet. Emma’s father is paranoid and of delicate health, which comes out in his frequent laments over the women in his life who have married away: he refers to them all as “poor so-and-so,” as if they’ve come down with a life-threatening illness.

And in this small town, Emma and her father are the superstars. When Emma makes an awful remark to an old family friend, Knightley points out to her that others will follow as she leads, even if she intended the comment in good humor. I loved the contrast between outward Emma, so seriously denying every compliment and dodging people’s praise, and private Emma, thinking herself their better and absorbing every good word as if it were her last.

I loved this book, and read it as quickly as one can read a 450-page book from the early 19th century. The language wasn’t off-putting at all and Austen’s faux-haughty tone added great depth to the story and character development. In fact, I laughed out loud a lot of times at the tiny society Emma cultivates and culls down to a few, only to find that her ideas of appropriate matches are a complete disaster. Not even the brightest, most cerebral girl in town can choose for others what they must choose for themselves.

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Jerry Spinelli still captures neurotic youth in bloom better than almost any writer, and has done so for many years, but I’ve found that many of his books lack a solidity and complete package. Like Eggs (reviewed here / here), Smiles to Go features a solid, finely voiced main character surrounded by an odd plot and a lot of one-dimensional secondary characters. Whether the book is worth reading depends on whether you’ll relate to the main character.

Will Tuppence (stupid name alert — there are only six Tuppences listed in the phone book anywhere and they’re all in one city) is an earnest know-it-all with no emotional IQ. He’s a freshman in high school, with both a male and a female best friend and a family from whom he keeps his distance for some reason. He thinks everyone is out to annoy him or drive him crazy, and he has to think very carefully about almost all the everyday emotional experiences in the book.

The specifics of the story are not that important, and they’re symbolic and metaphorical in a way typical of YA fiction. The ending feels a little forced and abrupt but satisfies Will’s little journey.

I don’t know, I don’t know. This review sounds negative but I really did like the book, and Will reminded me of myself as a freshman — going through the motions of growing up and behaving responsibly, but lacking complexity in realms that were a little less concrete. Will is a very smart kid and the book begins with his fixation on the idea of proton death, which seems more important to him than any of the people I know. I hope Spinelli’s lesson here is not that the smart kids shouldn’t be so smart, but rather that our personalities and angles must exist in harmony.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Most people aren’t very familiar with Percy Shelley, a Romantic poet whose talents are counterweighted by his ego and biography. His most famous poem is Ozymandias, a compelling work for a variety of reasons: its intensely visual language and vivid diction; Shelley’s implications as to the staying power (or lack thereof) of political glory; the fast-life-early-death tale of Shelley himself, and the surpassing fame of his one-hit-wonder second wife (daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) whose legal name may as well be “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

For me, the most important takeaway from “Ozymandias” was always the more permanent nature of art and the influence of its creator on the legacy of its subject. When you trust your image in the hands of your court sculptor, in a vaguely phrenological sense, that person holds complete control over what the future will hold for you and how your character shows in the pose, expression, and demeanor of the sculpture. In this case, Shelley’s vision is completely fictional, but speaks to our feelings of impermanence in the temporal world. Like Yukio Mishima, Shelley studied the place where action and art merge.

Zastrozzi is one of Shelley’s earliest works, a short Gothic novel published when he was an 18-year-old student at the Eton School. In it, aristocratic Matilda (a blend of Annie Wilkes and Kathryn Merteuil) steals both the man she loves and the woman he loves, and does so with the help of her bosom friend Zastrozzi.

Matilda pulverizes her true love Verezzi by swearing that his lover Julia has died, and when Verezzi takes the news so badly he nearly dies, she has to step up her game in order to win him to her side. She sweeps him off to her estate in southernmore Italy so the warm weather may revive him; she acts a particular way in order to cultivate his dependency and gratitude, with intentions to somehow alchemize these feelings into love. Matilda pursues and manufactures the moment when action becomes love: she alters the circumstances of Verezzi’s life with her resources and her bare hands until he turns to her out of Stockholm syndrome.

The book strikes comical notes, and often. Young Shelley was aware that Gothic horror was a spit-upon and lauded genre, but embraced it anyway and did so with art and moxie. I’m guilty of some descriptor-slinging in my life as a lady of letters, and I recognize a fellow slinger:

She again went to Verezzi’s apartment, but as she approached, vague fears lest he should have penetrated her schemes confused her: but his mildly beaming eyes, as she gazed upon them, convinced her that the horrid expressions which he had before uttered were merely the effect of temporary delirium.

I count eight adjectives or adverbs in that one sentence, not to mention the thicket of helping verbs. Temporary delirium indeed!

The book is short and fast, and its characters say such ridiculous things I couldn’t help but love it. The ending takes a characteristic Gothic twist, and also, it is very fun to say “Zastrozzi” over and over. Zastrozzi. Zastrozzi. Leave the gun, take the Zastrozzi.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

Let me stall a bit while I think of what to say.

Nearly two years ago I devoured John Steinbeck’s late-in-career travel memoir Travels with Charley and, later that year, took a road trip across America’s northeastern quadrant. Steinbeck’s prose walks a line between the all-out terseness of Hemingway and the more ornamental nature of other writers, and because of that he embodies my favorite writing rule: Don’t let your writing distract from your point. (Maybe you remember this from when I read Flowers in the Attic?)

I read all but the last ten pages of Of Mice and Men while waiting for a wake. The son of one of my dad’s oldest friends died at age 25 after a difficult and terrible cancer battle, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and even now completely lack vocabulary to describe how I felt or feel. This book took my thoughts away and replaced them with a similar sadness that somehow felt more complete, less ragged, because Steinbeck puts his characters in the middle of situations where they must grieve and, more importantly, gives each of them the words and the breathing room they need.

George and Lennie work as transient laborers on various California farms and ranches; in my mind they resembled Jonesy and the other rousties from HBO’s truncated epic Carnivále. Lennie has a mental disability of some kind, and has a damaged or impeded sense of his surroundings as he lumbers through them. At the book’s beginning he has killed a mouse by petting it to death, and he and George have new plans after somehow finding trouble in their previous locale.

George cares for Lennie, and while the other characters describe George as smart, his most relevant trait is his bottomless kindness toward his friend. George realizes he relies on Lennie just as much as vice versa, and by watching out for him George remembers what family means, how people can matter to each other, and the value of another person who shares your backstory and everyday experiences. The other laborers gravitate toward the pair because they don’t understand the bond George and Lennie share; why would George weigh himself down with this big galoot who doesn’t have any sense? They particularly draw the attention of the story’s wannabe alpha male, the boss’s son, who shares an actual legal partnership with his wife but spends his time trying to impress and pick fights with his underlings.

The story is short, and reads fast. Explaining even a little bit in detail would take something significant away, because the momentum and well-paced storytelling are like another character, an observer at the ongoing campfire. In fact, the prose and plot structure make the story feel like it’s been kept in the back pocket of one of its characters, carried from one job to the next, and pulled out during the first card games and conversations with fellow laborers. The story seems significant not only to the reader but to the other men in the story, and their respect for each other and the difficulties of their situation in the Great Depression makes this one of the most compassionate pieces of writing I’ve ever seen. There is no pity here, but there is enormous compassion.

The best place to start with Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian is this: It is the twelfth book in my Cannonball roster, but takes up more than a sixth of the total pages so far. It is a LONG book and the prose is dense. It is also a lush, loving book involving more research than I can begin to fathom: Even if Kostova made up the entire thing, to place it in history and make it credible requires a lot of thought and digging.

The result is cerebral but passionate. I turned the pages as quickly as possible, both because the plot was compelling and because the writing had polish and verve. Kostova mimics Bram Stoker’s Dracula in style, and her book is set just long enough ago, among a crowd of just-removed-enough academics, that the innocent, distant tone of classic Gothic narrators suits it. Primary narrator Paul is a sort of nonprofit diplomat, traveling all over Europe and allowing his sixteen-year-old daughter to tag along. He reveals a story in bits and pieces and built with the help of letters and journals.

The presence of these and of “primary sources” give Kostova’s story a great postmodern edge, and as I read I felt like I was watching over the main characters’ shoulders as they explored. It helped that Kostova is a gifted suspensist, because this book scared the hockey sticks out of me a LOT, moreso than anything I’ve read since my Stephen King heyday. In a way, the scariest part of the book is how convincing Kostova is when describing a group of intellectuals descending into a supernatural epic. These are really educated, skeptical people and for some reason they are handpicked as victims of a villain who’s incredible in every sense.

It is rare to be surprised and pleased by the creativity of a vampire book, or any supernatural-evil book, or any epistolary (framed by fictional letters) book, or, let’s face it, any book. The mystery and horror genres in particular suffer tropes lightly, but this is the most interesting horror I’ve read since House of Leaves blew the genre apart with its own brand of postmodern braindrain.

I loved this book, if you couldn’t tell already. My love of horror writing runs deep and old, and it’s clear Kostova’s done her research in the nonfiction and fiction areas of vampire lore. If vampires don’t interest you, turn back. If history doesn’t interest you, double turn back. Most of all, if you’re expecting some underdeveloped Freudian back-room sex metaphor like Twilight, I can certainly show you a new moon of your own.

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(Longest Cannonball post title to date? Methinks yes.)

My parents know I’m obsessed with food, and to that end my mom gave me Erica Bauermeister’s novel The School of Essential Ingredients. It is newer than the Jane Austen Book Club and follows a very similar format: A small group of overlapping characters share a common event, in this case a cooking class. They have a leader, though, and she works in place of the omniscient narrator, guiding characters toward one another, directing their parallel lives into intersecting ones. The relationships described in the book’s course, or forged in its course, are satisfying enough.

But the real star of this show is the food — luxurious, emotionally loaded descriptions of fresh ingredients and the fragrant experience of cooking. Bauermeister brings her A-game and slathers it on thick. If you love food you will love this food; if you love this food you will love the characters she draws to interact with it. More than that, Bauermeister builds a great deal of legitimate food information into the book, along with a healthy and slightly laissez-faire attitude toward cooking. Because yes, baking is a series of ratios and requires scientific precision, although it can still be filled with love and adaptation and creativity. And no, building a fresh tomato sauce is not the same slave to process.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.

When a book I like is made into a movie, I value the not-a-movie-tie-in copy all the more — it makes me feel sad and cheap to read a book that’s wearing a big “Now a Major Motion Picture!” sticker. Of course, George Clooney isn’t on my copy, and who could ever say that’s a fair trade?

Walter Kirn’s 2001 book Up in the Air followed one of my most deeply loved favorite books, Thumbsucker. Up in the Air fell on my deaf ears by necessity: I was no adult, and the corporate world held no interest for me. After his previous novel of poignant teen angst and even orthodontia, how could I relate to this new novel? I couldn’t, and my disappointment steeped for eight years.

“They’re making a movie out of that book I hate?” I said many times in 2009.

Kirn’s book faced an unusual obstacle, as far as I could see. His wonderful other novel was made into an okay movie, and now the adaptation of a book I disliked was raking in huge awards buzz. But the descriptions of the movie never matched with my memory of the book, and I had to reread it to remember one way or the other.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I can say the book is exactly as I remembered: neurotic, complex, populated with empty people. What I see now that I didn’t before is that Kirn affects this tone on purpose, draws his world with people you dislike or barely notice, populates his main character’s mind with the most bland, Michael Scott preferences masquerading as his ticket into the high-rollers’ club.

Ryan Bingham works as a “transitions” man: he comes in after a firing to do recognizance and triage. At the book’s beginning, he believes he’s approaching a juncture in his career between his previous job and a new, mysterious role at a smoke-and-mirrors business consulting house. He is also attempting to break the one-million-mile mark as a frequent flier and has a then-unheard-of “digital assistant” device to coordinate his entire schedule.

For his flakiest sister’s upcoming wedding, he spends exorbitantly and begins a stock portfolio for her. When his sisters call they ask where he is and he frequently lies; he isn’t sure why it matters where he’s calling from, and chooses a city to assuage a worry whose origins he doesn’t understand. At some points he gobbles pills by the handful, at others he wantonly mistreats the few people who like and recognize him; but again, a suspended-animation manchild is no different from an adolescent when it comes to likable behaviors.

Bingham’s eagerness and absolute devotion to the corporate “Airworld” in which he lives make it hard to resist him, and the way he comments inwardly about all the people he remembers, all the ways he tries to make a good impression, it all made me root for him despite myself. He knows what clout fakingstance and posturing hold in his chosen field, watches others as they behave affectedly:

His painful, frostbitten feet explained the slippers, but the bubbles he blew were the purest affectation, intended to show that he plays by his own Hoyles. He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can’t make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

The book is a roast of corporate zeitgeist, of the talking heads whose shortest thoughts make up entire books, and of what we each lose by taking one step too far into that hype and altered reality. I also got a warm, anti-busyness feeling as Bingham’s completely planned journeys and meetings began falling apart, although he has great adaptability and takes the obstacles in stride. The obstacles themselves form an interesting subplot, and it speaks to Bingham’s nature that his greatest adversary is the same corporate culture responsible for his success. When he suspects someone is out to get him, it isn’t a someone at all. It’s a whole company without a face.

A lady appears in the book, but is not significant except in the red flags sent up by Bingham’s treatment of her. There is also no junior colleague, no plans to change corporate M.O. — in fact, Bingham states at the beginning that he’s leaving his job and has submitted a resignation. The idea of sending a colleague he must rely on for a new way of doing business is contradictory to the book’s message and makes me wary of the movie. Kirn explained it this way on All Things Considered:

In this case, a whole new character had to be introduced. A sort of sidekick had to be given to a lonely hero who spends most of the time in the novel observing and thinking about his world. But now we had to give him a chance to talk about his world.

If you work in the corporate world, I suspect you will like or at least relate to this book. If you’re interested in comeuppance by proxy, some karmic punishment for an ascetic corporate life, then step into Ryan Bingham’s office. It isn’t an office at all, and yet houses his many, many issues.

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

In my nerdy travels I’ve never read Jane Austen, although her books seep into our consciousness from nearly every angle, the most obvious being repeated and high-quality movie versions. My very favorite of these is Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility starring Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet. Because wow. Unfortunately I hold a serious grudge against the Brontes that accidentally overflowed into Austen, and someday hope to get over it like a grownup and read at least one of her books.

The Jane Austen Book Club is a lovely book, classy and smart, full of interesting female characters. Author Karen Joy Fowler opens with a short description of the version of Austen each person in the book club hopes to read (a romantic? an independent spirit? a means by which to make sense?), and she peppers their conversations in the book with legitimate literary opinions. The most wonderful and largely unsung qualities of this book is that its characters choose to read challenging literature in their spare time. They have jobs and other interests and decide that it is worthwhile to read Austen for fun.

Their reading group has six members, five women and one man, and the man is considered, not mocked, as an outsider both in a group of women and in the world of Austen. An unseen collective narrator makes asides about the man’s copy of Austen’s “collected novels,” and how it is, sniff, pedestrian. For anyone who’s ever known or been a book snob (FULL DISCLOSURE: GUILTY OF BOTH), this should be mildly embarrassing to see in print. And I imagine that’s the point. There is also a section in which the club attends a charity event where they’re seated with a contemporary writer, and the way Fowler contrasts the mystery writer with each club member’s attitude toward Austen, and books in general, really sings.

I wished the book was longer, which is a good sign. I also bent over the corners of half a dozen pages, another good sign.

One of the women, Sylvia, is recently divorced and has a 30-year-old daughter, Allegra. Her thoughts make up my favorite moment in the book:

Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children — happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way. Allegra had always been plenty interesting enough. Time for her to be happy.

The other night, Nathan and I talked about the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, and why it succeeds — the characters are allowed to have unhappy beginnings, middles, or endings, and their stories breathe and flex. Fowler’s characters do the same, simultaneously having unhealthy relationships and judging other people’s, making poor decisions and commenting on those around them. I identified with their attitudes and warmed when those attitudes were challenged and reformed.

For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.