Sep
1
Cannonball #32: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller
September 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I’ll take “Things that hit close to home” for $500:
A very small university, Larken catered to the privileged painters, writers, critics, poets, and performance artists of the future. The teaching was not so much rigorous as expansive, the teachers stretching their courses to the point of deformity in order to encompass the whimsy of the students.
Rebecca Miller’s novel The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, conspiratorily rushed into a feature film a year after its publication, does my favorite thing: It creates and loves on a strong, intelligent woman protagonist. It also delves into the mind of her twentysomething daughter who is equally strong and intelligent with reactionary traits from her experiences as Pippa’s daughter.
Pippa is middle aged, married to a thirty-years-older man who has moved them into a “retirement village” where Pippa instantly becomes the youngest person she knows and feels surprisingly burdened by her newfound freedom and limited possessions. She looks at her husband and sees his newfound frailty and is reminded of the difference in their ages, I guess, although it is never illustrated why she feels this way or what her feelings really are.
He alludes to the way he rescued her from her earlier life, and in a framed middle section of the book we see the life he means — in which Pippa’s mother is a diet-pill addict with complex neediness issues and Pippa breaks free in an extreme way that almost alienates her as a relatable character. Paradoxically it gives her power, both personally and narratively, as she swirls through her life and lets a lot of things happen to her. Her one life-changing action excuses several years’ worth of passive nonresistance, and eventually, Pippa’s choice of a settled family life is a stark exercise of control over her own life.
I liked this book mostly because of Miller’s beautiful writing, which is thick with descriptive language but not choked by it. Her tone and choices completely suit Pippa’s mindframe as she experiences bored first-world problems in her new life as an unemployed housewife with children who’ve moved out. Nothing about Pippa’s life is familiar to me — especially not her reckless, horrifying life as a pre-matrimony twentysomething — but I still loved her and related to her dilemmas.
This book is kind of like the magazine Real Simple, which I also love, even though it has nothing to do with my life, even though the idea of curbing your busyness by buying hired help or expensive organizational furniture is alien to me. Because who isn’t pulled a little by the idea of a simple, elegant life full of single fresh flowers in spotless vases, of “easy” meals of shrimp or lamb chops alongside fresh asparagus? There is not glamor in a plate of spaghetti, unless, like Pippa, you put caught-daily Long Island clams on it.
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Aug
26
Cannonball #31: The Master Butchers Singing Club
August 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Last time I complained about slogging through a dud, and the best way to cleanse the ol’ book palate is with a real barn-burner. In a pile of stuff on one of my shelves I found a book my mom lent me: The Master Butchers Singing Club. My mom reads more than anyone I know and she has great taste, so I take her recommendations seriously.
Few books summarize themselves in a few lines better than this one:
No matter what they might have heard at the lumberyard, [Delphine] wanted to give the impression of an extremely respectable woman [...] A plain person. Trustworthy. Not a person who had a murderer for a best friend or who’d lived with a vaudeville acrobat or who had a gabby old souse for a father. Delphine, she wanted people to say of her, she’s awfully quick, but she’s solid and reliable.
This is a book of one-way loves that sometimes meet and sometimes don’t. It is also a story of small-town life before, during, and after the Depression; during and after both World Wars; and for a few close families of outsiders. Erdrich writes from some of her experiences as the descendant of German immigrants to the midwest and of butchers and of vaudeville. Her writing is rich and articulate without seeming stuffy, and matches nicely with the almost Steinbecky setting of this book, the dusty, wheaty flats of North Dakota.
It also has shades of Carnivále, HBO’s groundbreaking and therefore short-lived show about a Depression-era traveling show. To watch a small town is like watching a close-knit group of travelers, because everyone is moving forward together and in inadvertent lockstep by necessity. When one store succeeds or fails it can take the town with it; a tragedy in one family can make ripples through everyone’s lives. It’s difficult to write about this closeness and the way it bears out without becoming melodramatic or even maudlin, and Erdrich really shocked me with her skill. She even brings in a VERY LAST SECOND SURPRISE and it is the most natural, moving, sensible closure I can imagine for the novel.
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Aug
18
Cannonball #30: Smart Women by Judy Blume
August 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Is the title ironic? I will never know.
Writing reviews of mediocre books is the worst, because I don’t even feel moved to say anything. I’d never heard of Judy Blume’s 1983 novel Smart Women, which speaks to its (un)importance in the world — if I listed all the Judy Blume books I’ve read and truly loved, it would take forever and be annoying. But those are children’s or YA books, and Blume’s heyday as a writer for adults didn’t come until over a decade later with the impressive Summer Sisters. In fact, this book came out around the same time as Superfudge, which is also a book I loved.
Middle-aged divorcees Margo and BB become friends and then lose each other when one dates the other’s ex-husband: Really? It doesn’t play out much more interestingly than that in the long form, and I was bored by all the main characters, who were either stockish or actively obnoxious. Margo’s teenage daughter Michelle had enough attitude to fuel several nu metal albums and was way, way beyond the behavior of anyone I’ve ever met, even AS a teenage girl. Margo did gross things and BB was a total headcase, neither of them acting these parts out in a relatable way.
I don’t know, it was a fast read and wrapped up pretty nicely, but it all felt stupid and pat. During the ongoing conversation about the equally pat and indulgent qualities of Eat, Pray, Love, I wished this tale of middle-age crisis had more substance. Instead, it had all the me-first priorities without the beautiful locales.
On the other hand, reading Smart Women made me want to run back into the arms of my favorite female writer — ANNE LAMOTT. She has a new one out and I need to get my hands on it. It is also about a mother and troubled teenage daughter, but I know Lamott can handle that relationship expertly.
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Aug
8
Cannonball #29: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
August 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I’m typing and deleting and retyping ideas here as I reach for an analogy to suit this book. It is one part I Am the Cheese, Robert Cormier’s shocking novel of a boy’s series of psychological . . . revelations? But the other part, I’m not sure of — I think Ishiguro is going for the measured feeling of a detective novel, the kind of detached logician embodied by Sherlock Holmes but also represented by wave after wave of Poirots and Lynleys and Morses and alikes over the years.
Ishiguro does not succeed with this book. It is a little too baffling to be fully realized or sucked into, the tone too antiseptic, the narrator too unreliable. Christopher Banks, a British expat raised in Shanghai until the disappearance of both of his parents, becomes a successful and somewhat famous detective in London before deciding he needs to return to Shanghai and find his parents after many years have passed. He doggedly insists they are still alive after twenty years and even more bafflingly is convinced he is going to play a huge role in preventing the involvement of China and Japan in both the Sino-Japanese War and the impending Second World War.
In the meantime, he has somewhat adopted a young orphan girl, and has a skittering ongoing friendship with an orphaned adult woman in London. These two characters are supposed to bear significance but are only outlined and hinted at, and they end up acting as tools for Christopher’s various instincts and strange beliefs about his life and his mission as a detective. I will not say more because the events are confusing enough to read for yourself, let alone to have spoiled in advance by a review.
I don’t know, as usual, Ishiguro writes beautifully and I found the book compelling if not that rewarding. Will it stay with me the way the other three books I’ve read have? No. And in fact, it feels like a rehash of the tone of Remains of the Day mixed with the political subtexts of both Remains and Artist of the Floating World. The raw materials of Ishiguro’s story are exciting and fresh — he purports to write “international novels,” and does so, repeatedly, more successfully than any author I can think of — but something about When We Were Orphans made me feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied. And Christopher Banks absolutely made my skin crawl.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
Aug
7
This is a fun, fast little book about English and some of its requisite quirks. I liked the title when I spotted it at some thrift store or book sale, and Richard Lederer is a pretty famous wordplayer with a fair passel of cachet on these matters.
I was expecting more of a simple list-like book of examples of usage or something like that, but Lederer writes in essay form about some positive and negative attributes of the English language. He offers up many examples of the phenomena he describes and draws conclusions about, for instance, the way English accepts words from all other languages and absorbs them into common usage.
He makes some recommendations for writing, too, promoting both poetry and effective, simple language:
Here is a sound rule: Use small, old words where you can. If a long word says just what you want to say, do not fear to use it. But know that our tongue is rich in crisp, brisk, swift, short words. Make them the spine and the heart of what you speak and write. Short words are like fast friends. They will not let you down.
The part I liked best was when Lederer commented on which words derive from which languages — Anglo-Saxon terms are typically brief, French terms more gestural or figurative, and Latin or Greek terms more precise. Think about fear, terror, and trepidation, or ask, question, and interrogate.
Lederer devotes the last dozen or so pages of the book to a series of notable quotations about language and words, some from writers I’ve never heard of. My favorite of these is from Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle:
The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.
Words are subject to trendiness and overuse the same as any fashion or food or occupation. To look at language both as a fresh, living organism and one of humankind’s most deeply rooted histories takes a big-picture view that we sometimes lose in an era when new (absurd) words crop up every day and more and more people fall out of love with high-quality writing and communication.
What we construct with words can feel new forever — Carlyle’s line still zings even from the 1800s, and even if Shakespeare’s language trips you up sometimes, his turns of phrase are often timeless.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
Jul
28
Cannonball #27: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
July 28, 2010 | 1 Comment
It’s official at this point that I’m going to become a raving Ishiguro fan, an espouser to strangers, and I will not be afraid to make a fool of myself about it. I love this man’s writing. The two books I read before this were strong, connective stories of people experiencing realizations in their recognizably ordinary lives. Never Let Me Go is as strong if not moreso, with an alternative-history-via-science-fiction twist that I feared would feel gimmicky. It absolutely does not.
Narrator Kathy opens in the present and offers her story in bits and pieces, framed in hindsight. She and her two closest friends at boarding school grew up in great secrecy and in unique circumstances. They are shaped by those circumstances in symbolic ways that come out more concretely than the average schoolday scars. Ishiguro’s use of this extended metaphor reminded me of another of my most favorite romantic science fictions: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (It also reminded me of the much more lightweight movie TiMER, which is worth checking out even though it’s a more traditional romantic comedy.)
In Eternal Sunshine, Michel Gondry showed us what could happen if we got to act out a prevalent, latent relationship fantasy: What if I could completely wipe out an entire memory of a person, to alleviate the unrelenting pain the memory causes me? Would the resulting holes in my mind outweigh the desired numbness?
Spoiler alert. Turn back now. But seriously, read this book.
Ishiguro offers Kathy and the man she loves the distant chance to win back a few good healthy years after being kept apart in their youth. On paper this sounds like a late-in-life cliche but Kathy and Tommy are barely 30 and unwitting participants in an imaginative Nuclear Age-spawned program to clone people and harvest their organs over time. Crueler still, each “donor” is kept alive and as healthy as possible through donations of two, three, or four vital organs, adding an increased element of mystery and unpredictability to any romantic feelings.
Kathy and Tommy feel the impending doom and pressing of the passage of time everyone else feels, but for them more than almost anyone it is literal. At 31, Kathy is an exception because she hasn’t yet been asked to make her first donation, and one of Ishiguro’s great unanswered questions in the book is why anyone is selected at any time. The unanswered questions are a great coup because they illustrate how seamlessly Ishiguro works this fantastical notion into his story.
It isn’t a novel about clones or organ donation. It isn’t a novel about the politics of postwar England or the science involved or even of the ethics of cloning. Instead, it is a classy, beautiful novel about a handful of special children and the adults they become, with the same feelings of missed opportunity and potential that everyone has. As in Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s first-person narrator reveals big meaty everythings in the course of her plain memories of school and what came after. She is a pleasure to learn about and relate to.
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Jul
22
Cannonball #26: O is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton
July 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I don’t know, Sue Grafton.
By now, you and I are tight, and you know I’m sold on the Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I love them, and also you, and mysteries in general, and stories about strong women in general.
So I’m going to level with you: I did not like this one. I really did not like it at all, and I feel a little bad about it, but it is the only true misstep in the series so far. There were way too many characters I could barely keep straight, way too many similar-looking conversations with strangers at the bar, way too many shoutouts to a past life that I did not feel I knew enough about to care about.
My review isn’t long because I don’t have much to say. Grafton writes my most consistent favorite books to pick up anytime, when I’m tired of reading something more challenging or can’t get into another book. This time I could barely get through it and found myself feeling annoyed by the idea of bringing it with me to read.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
Jul
6
Kazuo Ishiguro is a wonder. His book Remains of the Day was part of my twentieth-century British literature class in college, and we marveled at the easy way he portrayed this stuffy, clueless butler as he made self-realizations over the course of the book. When I picked up Artist of the Floating World, I didn’t realize it would be thematically similar, but this book is just as successful.
Where Ishiguro excels is in the unreliable narrator. I’m starting a third book now but am not far enough to make any observations, but I’ll compare to, of course, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. Where Kinsey has no self-censorship apart from basic decency, Masuji Ono is guided by etiquette in his life in postwar Japan. As a retired artist and father of two twentysomething women, he must audit his own image while looking for an agreeable marriage match for the younger daughter. Before that, though, he grapples with the realization that his daughters believe he has something to hide or moderate.
Ishiguro writes beautifully, and Sensei Ono speaks in a believably semiformal, respectful way. The difference between his older, more deferential daughter and the younger, more outspoken daughter is clear in their conversations with their father. Sensei Ono flashes back to various points in his career as an artist and talks with several former colleagues who now have mixed or negative feelings toward him. I won’t reveal anything more because Sensei Ono’s realizations are what make the book so enthralling.
Beyond the story itself, Ishiguro’s novel is full of images of pre- and postwar Japan, cultural touchstones of Sensei Ono’s life. He speaks to some invisible contemporary reader, mentioning parks as they appear to him “today” (in the late 1940s) and as he remembers them from decades past. Ishiguro uses a delicate touch and Sensei Ono’s nostalgia reminded me of the way my grandfather talked about the past. This weekend at my parents’ house we read a paragraph my grandfather wrote on the back of a photo from 1929, describing everything as if he were speaking to an audience who wasn’t familiar. Sensei Ono speaks this way and draws you into his complicated life and memories of a Japan in crisis.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
Jul
3
Cannonball #24: T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton
July 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Noticing a theme? T is for Trespass is Sue Grafton’s twentieth novel in the so-called alphabet series.
This Kinsey Millhone mystery deviated from the form in a way I’m not sure I like. Instead of telling the whole story through the eyes of classic narratrix Kinsey, Grafton puts parts of the story in the perspective of the sociopath antagonist, Solana Rojas. Solana steals an identity and uses it to push and manipulate an elderly man into surrendering his accumulated financial assets by positioning herself as sole caregiver.
The story itself is solid, feels relevant, and is thought-provoking in a way few of the other novels are. This is not an easily identifiable case of outright theft or wrongdoing, and watching Kinsey spin her wheels as she tries to convince other people what’s going on — after even she didn’t identify some of the red flags — translates directly to the reading experience.
Grafton also explores the nature of aging by contrasting the victim, a small and disagreeable elderly gent of unstable health, with Kinsey’s landlord and his siblings, who are all an unbelievably healthy bunch in their 80s. I appreciated that Grafton brought someone in who is not thriving and who is also not particularly likable, because he contrasts with Kinsey, who is irascible but ultimately goldhearted. I think the sociopath character is also intended to teach Kinsey a lesson, because they share some important traits: very little family, a cunning knack for predicting others’ behavior, a disconnect from certain everyday emotional trappings.
Kinsey ultimately differs in her approach to life. She claims to feel disconnected but her heart beats loud and vibrant for the people she loves, the same as it does for the near-strangers whose unlucky or unfair situations cry out to her sense of justice. I am curious to pick up U is for Undertow to see if Grafton shows any lasting impact on Kinsey, or how the victim from this book will be portrayed, if at all.
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Jun
30
Cannonball #23: R is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
June 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment
You may recall our last visit with Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton’s believably tough lady P.I. living an exciting life in late-’80s southern California.
I also recall the dozen-plus previous books in the series. The surprising thing is not that I’ve stayed with them this long, because I’ll follow characters I like through the miasma of poor-quality writing, TV seasons, or movie franchises. Grafton’s writing and storybuilding requires no such charity or caveat, because each book is distinct, with a few real standouts. Both Q and now R succeed with the help of Grafton’s peripheral characters — she introduces outsiders as a way to create and move the story, while we rely on Kinsey to reliably narrate and do her reluctantly-meddling best.
Kinsey is, of course, still one of the most interesting and respectable female leads I can remember. She’s great at her job and has a strong conscience, often considering aloud the difference between what’s legal and what’s right and making difficult choices. In R is for Ricochet, Kinsey is dispatched by a local wealthy elder to retrieve his daughter from prison after a pretty lengthy stay for embezzlement or something. The daughter has a gambling problem and the carpe-diem disease, along with memories of a love affair with a serious lout who’s moved on to her best friend. Whoops.
Hijinks ensue, and in this case Grafton delves into the world of international banking and money laundering, which is interesting stuff. At the same time, she puts Kinsey in the character’s most uncomfortable position: Interested in romantic companionship, rather than that of the peanut butter and pickle sandwiches she spends most evenings with. Watching Kinsey behave awkwardly, and Grafton’s descriptions of Kinsey’s emotions and sensations around someone she likes, is a delight:
Here are two things I hate to have men do:
(1) Tell me I’m beautiful, which is bullshit manipulation and has nothing to do with me.
(2) Look into my eyes and talk about my “trust” issues because they know I’ve been “hurt.”
Here’s what Cheney did: He put his arm up on the seat back and picked up a strand of hair from the top of my head. He studied it with care, his expression serious. In the split second before he spoke, I heard a muffled sound, like gas jets igniting when a match is struck. Warmth fanned up along my spine and softened all the tention in my neck.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.