Up north

I found out J. Courtney Sullivan's second novel MAINE was about to come out through Twitter, as one does. Electronic galleys were being promoted specifically to romance bloggers, which struck me as odd since Sullivan's debut COMMENCEMENT, about four Smith graduates four years out of college, was described to me as making a big literary splash. And the more I read about MAINE, the harder pressed I was to find the romance in it because, spoiler alert, there really isn't one.*

Maybe "romance bloggers" was some kind of code for "people who enjoy ultimately evanescent, but pleasant books dealing with realistic problems." MAINE was very well-written, but if someone asks me in two years to summarize it, I probably won't be able to differentiate it from similar Jennifer Weiner/ Elin Hilderbrand families-on-Northeastern-vacation tomes -- which is different from saying I didn't enjoy it, because I did.

Like COMMENCEMENT, MAINE frames its world from the perspectives of four women, this time with a familial bond even stronger than college ties. At the beginning of the summer, Boston-born matriarch Alice Kelleher is up in Maine by herself at the cabin that has been in the family for fifty years, ever since her late husband Daniel won it in a bet. Unbeknownst to the family, Alice plans to leave the cottage and the now-incredibly valuable beachfront property surrounding it to a local Catholic church, but until then each of her children get a month: June is for Kathleen, long since moved to California to run a worm farm (!!!) but who plans to send up her daughter Maggie, a writer in New York. Maggie was hoping to bring her boyfriend Gabe, but they break up on the eve they were supposed to leave -- before Maggie had time to break the news that she's pregnant. July is for son Patrick and the perfect daughter-in-law Ann Marie, who by turns frets about Alice being lonely in the cottage and envisions the day her family will inherit it. (August is for third daughter Clare, who doesn't get much ink.) And as soon as everyone starts thinking how glad they would be to get up to Maine without interacting each other, you know their hands will be forced at some point.

Some of the details in MAINE are exact, and some are too exactingly precious -- like Ann Marie's obsession with her new hobby of decorating doll houses and entering them in competitions. O suffocating perfection is there. (But I for one appreciated the single telling detail of Gabe's friend who is described as saying "[Insert verb] this, motherfucker" constantly.) I just don't think that was enough glue. The one story that will stick with me is the revelation of a tragic incident in Alice's past that is explicitly given as how she ended up a great-grandmother instead of fulfilling her dream to be a painter in Paris -- and even given all that, her crustiness sometimes verges to nastiness.

The cloud hovering over the four women of MAINE isn't love at all, but rather money, and each woman's relationship to it. Alice owns the big house but reuses her tea bags, remembering how her father would threaten to beat her for not bringing home enough money from her job as a legal secretary during World War II. Ann Marie, from a similar background but insecure as an empty-nester, spends too much and frets about it, but not enough to make corrections to what she feels she deserves. Kathleen feels resented by the family for a special bequest in her late father's will, although she saw it as the price of independence from judgment for her divorce and AA membership. And Maggie, with a stable and flexible job, wonders if it's stable enough to support two, not even envisioning her future seaside retirement. In the end the women can talk about some of their contradicting attitudes, but not these.

Not growing up in a cabin-going family or culture is no impediment to having fun with MAINE, although those who did may be able to relate to the resultant tangle of family issues and roster of traditions such as outdoor showers and "summer people" versus the year-rounders. Better to read it closer to vacation than just after, though.

* There is, however, a hilarious anti-romantic figure in the young priest of the parish where Alice is bequeathing her property, who thereafter hangs around fixing stuff in the house and who Maggie has a brief crush on before realizing, right, a priest. No THORN BIRDSy stuff going on. Retroactive spoiler alert.

Your Assistance, Please

How many essays would you expect to find in a typical (consumer trade)
book of essays? Say 10-12?

This is how unbookening is supposed to work

Selected things my brother can do better than me:

• Mini-golf
• Multivariable calculus and beyond
• Get rid of books he's already read or has no plans to read

Yeah, those are his stacks (taken last weekend when I was home). In my possible defense, as an econ/engineering major he clearly doesn't understand the true meaning of a good library.

Gary Shteyngart's Somewhat Sad, Occasionally True Story With Some Lovers In It

Gary Shteyngart's third novel suffers from the crowded market of the subgenre where he's located it. The lovers who people his love story belong to a highly commercialized dystopic future America, where every corporation is a megaconglomerate of several names, citizens use their smartphones called "apparati" to hawk the brands they like and new graduates aspire to a job in Retail if they can't place themselves in Media. In short, a world close enough to our current state to jostle, while also having gone through some undescribed political upheaval that has left the U.S. at the mercy of China (oh, wait) and deeply in debt (oh, wait). There's also a South American war in there, somewhere.

A fair amount of cultural critique can still be pulled out of the hypercommercialization of the U.S., and I would not want to be the person to claim that vein has been exhausted. The trouble with SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY is that the critique doesn't do much that's new, and hijacks the narrative to the point that the super sad true love story itself is lost. Lenny Abramov, the New Yorker who narrates most of SUPER SAD TRUE through journal entries he is instructed to keep by his boss, is kind of an aberration to this world for his love of books. Not that he believes himself better than anyone else; in fact, he knows far worse, as whenever he walks into a bar or other public place people dole out ratings on his personality and fuckability (not so great).

(How long till the makers of Grindr add that functionality? Soon enough that I emailed someone who actually uses it and asked whether it was already there. [If you are reading this at work and you don't know what Grindr is, do not look it up at work. Or at all, if you are my parents.] [Just kidding, they never read this.])

In short, Lenny is a hopeless case, slightly disappointing to his Russian-Jewish emigrant parents, who is on the verge of losing his job in Post-Human Services, a department that culls very rich people and treats them to live forever. (The ethical ramifications of this business are fairly underdiscussed.) But his luck seems to turn when he meets recent college graduate Eunice Park on a business trip to Rome. Eunice is from a different generation, aspires to wear the coolest brands and writes slangy communiques to her best friend in southern California about how she met this guy she really doesn't like that much, only, she's going to stay in his apartment anyway. (Among other things, she's shocked to find him reading Tolstoy instead of just streaming the movie of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE like her last date.) Lenny calls it love.

So, boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl is persuaded to stay with boy. It's at this moment that Shteyngart begins world-building so furiously that the boy and the girl are, while still present, shoved to the side. The more elements that are added, particularly along the politico-economic axis, the less relevant Lenny and Eunice's relationship seems, even though they are still living through the thick of what turns out to be a very bad time to live in New York City. (A subplot about Eunice's sister's potential political awakening seems to have had a part cut out, although it may have added some useful context.)

And these new elements are emphasized to the point that it seems like everything is emphasized except the love story. In a way, the repetitious branding mirrors Lenny's not-totally-requited absorption in his new girlfriend, but the 18th time he mentions that someone is sporting clothes from popular-in-the-future retailer "JuicyPussy," the joke is over. (There were similar bits in the 2006 movie "Idiocracy," for example.) The gradual awakening of Eunice to books and a more literate existence is interrupted by new slang terms introduced deep in SUPER SAD TRUE that don't add any more context to her world than what we already know: Kids in the future are stupid and they don't read things that aren't on screens. On some level, it feels like Shteyngart just wanted to revel in that stupidity instead of wielding it as a cultural cudgel.

There are some very lyrical, touching "Love Among The Ruins" passages in SUPER SAD TRUE that escape the author's constant need to overdeliver on his dystopia, but the epilogue to this book, as sort of another shell, demonstrates what's really important here. And that's why it doesn't feel necessary to rule on Eunice's ultimate motives or whether Lenny was better off taking her in when she gets to New York, or the ultimate products of Post-Human Services. The conclusion that it sort of matters, as literary motivator, is insufficient for this reader.

Free Advice Friday: Help! My spouse is writing novels!

Interesting Dear Prudence question this week:

Q. How Much Hobby Sharing Can Spouses Expect From One Another?: As strictly a hobby, I write fictional novels in the evenings after my daughter goes to bed. I am a stay-at-home mom more by circumstance than by desire, though I have loved being there for my daughter. This activity has given me a chance to step into a fictional world for a few hours a night and something to do as my husband is fooling with his computer modeling, music, various artistic pursuits, or video games for the evenings after a day of work for him. I try to be supportive of his hobbies. Is it too much for me to ask for him to read what I write? The only friend I have I feel comfortable enough to read what I write is visually impaired and does most of her reading through audio books. He just never gets around to it when I do ask. I gave him an early draft of a novel I was messing around with and have since finished two sequels to it. I know they will never go farther than taking up memory space on my laptop hard drive, but I still want it to be the best I can make it, and to me that includes having someone I love and trust read it.

A: In her recent memoir, Joyce Carol Oates reveals her late husband didn't read her novels. Of course, she wrote a novel a day, so maybe it was too much to ask. If you even harbor secret dreams of someone besides your spouse reading your work, I think you need to get braver and join a writing circle, or take a class in which others are forced to read your work. Your husband may be the most sensitive, brilliant reader you'd ever encounter and he's unkindly refusing to be your Lionel Trilling. Or he may be thinking, "I love her, but if I have to read one more word about a sexy werewolf, I'm going to kill myself." Don't make reading your trilogy a test of your marriage.

Dang, First Mr. Joyce Carol Oates, that is harsh. (RIP.)

Reading on the Road: Sea of Tranquility edition

I'm off to a wedding in which the bride is, and I hope she doesn't mind me saying this, the biggest Jane Austen fan I know. Back when we were unfinished young ladies yearning to put our hair up, sitting in the drawing room dreaming about Mr. Darcys past and future, contrasted with the quality of the gentlemen who at that time would not dance with us at balls and whose calling cards were so often grievously misspelled... but I digress.

She didn't go for the Regency Wedding option in the end, but I'm fine with that. Wouldn't be as fun doing the above-pictured in England anyway.

I'm taking my Kindle and a few paperbacks, including A BEND IN THE RIVER and A RAGE TO LIVE, because I have some epically long flights ahead. It's an unfortunate redundancy packing-wise but shouldn't be too much of a luggage strain. I look forward to returning no longer "Printer Paper White" but at least "Acid-Free Paperback Buff." ("Seventies Paperback Yellowed" is to be avoided for a number of reasons. "Amazon Carton Brown," impossible.) Enjoy the automagical (TM Shauna Reid) blog updates in my absence.


Photo: emma_maria

Ladies believe everything they read, psychologist says

Heh! A British psychologist says romance novels cause women to (article illustration somewhat NSFW) have "unrealistic sexual expectations" and behave in reckless ways. According to an abstract published in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, romance novels stress female characters being "awakened" to awesome sex with absolutely no complications and deemphasized use of birth control, which leads female readers to believe that they can have all that, because everything in fiction is true:

While Quilliam admits that more recent Mills & Boon novels are truer to life, with female characters holding jobs and addressing challenges such as disability and domestic violence, as well as enjoying "many and varied" sexual activities, "still a deep strand of escapism, perfectionism and idealisation runs through the genre."

(Cultural note: The article refers to Mills & Boon which is the British equivalent to and now subsidiary of Harlequin.)

See, ladies? Escapism is dangerous for us! Women and their crazy ideas! They're so gullible, they think those books are true! Why that's like men thinking they can be like Chev Chelios... which gives me a great idea:

Michael Bay's action films should come with a health warning, according to a report published in an academic journal.

Blaming big-budget blockbusters for unprotected sex, unwanted murders, unrealistic physical expectations and social breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that "what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Jerry Bruckheimer than by the Family Planning Association", advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that "sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the movie tickets – and pick up reality."

Her comments follow a recent claim that big-budget shoot-'em-ups can "dangerously unbalance" their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing "more and more men who are clinically addicted to action movies" and that "for many men, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships."

Writing in the latest issue of the academic magazine, published by the British Medical Journal, Quilliam said that the messages of "the Arnold Schwarzenegger/Sylvester Stallone movies of the 1980s and Bruce Willis/ Jason Statham/ Matt Damon As Jason Bourne Only movies of the '90s and '00s," which typically see "the hero returning from certain death, and then abandoning himself joyfully to a life of mass murder and endless trouble-free bloodshed in order to cement his badassedness," run "totally counter to those we try to promote."

Ahhhh, much better.

Stealing that term.

COWORKER: Do you have the third Stieg Larsson? [We've been talking about these books for weeks ever since she picked up #1.]
ME: Sorry, I have no idea where it is.
COWORKER: No worries. I guess I'll have to stop being a library fugitive and pay my fees. 

85. Joseph Conrad, LORD JIM

Sigh.

I started this book on Dailylit way back in, oh good grief, July. Along the way somewhere I got behind and the emails piled up -- it was even one of my reading regrets of last year -- but I was too stubborn to delete them, so in a fit of inbox-clearing I finished the last 40 or so installments last week. Might I have just lost momentum unable to regained in the time between when I started and when I finished? Might I believe that because someone whose tastes I respect gave this book 5/5 stars on Goodreads? Yes, and yes. I might. But I still maintain that the essential content of this book could be contained in a short story... wait no... how about a limerick? (Spoilers.)

Jim did a bad thing when he fled,
"So unfit for duty," they said,
Then to Patusan folks
He was happily yoked, 
But sadly now Lord Jim is dead. 

(Brushes shoulders off.) 

In slightly nicer prose: Jim was a lively up-and-coming sailor when he and his crew decided to abandon ship and all their passengers in an accident, rationalizing that the passengers would probably die anyway. Unfortunately, they didn't, and Jim's career is ruined, so he takes a series of jobs in outer Indonesia (...I think?) where people don't know what he did and thus still respect him.

The trouble is (and I suppose, the fascination for people who like this book) that the book is largely narrated by Marlow, that's HEART OF DARKNESS Marlow, whose obsession with Jim seems to stem from the fact that he doesn't understand him. Why is Jim constantly striving to prove himself to other people as a result of this long-ago mistake, in which he was not alone? Marlow doesn't know, thus we don't know, and his usefulness as a tragic figure waxes and wanes (mostly wanes!) in the degree to which we care about these answers.

Maybe my moral compass is a-spin but perhaps Jim's "unknowability" as displayed in this book is due to the fact that everyone around him is super racist, and doesn't care about all those passengers he abandoned because they weren't white. Just a thought! So the burden of his guilty conscience drives him to earn the respect of others who the people around him think, "Well, they're not so important, who cares about them?" (Marlow's emphasis on Jim's likely non-white common-law wife supports this theory. There's a discussion we could have along the lines of fidelity vs. racism and the white man's sexual burden of non-monogamy toward any non-societally-blessed pairing, if I were willing to go back and dig up the relevant passages, which I'm not, but you can.)

Or maybe Jim just liked living in Patusan where people looked up to him, rather than being forced to reintegrate into civilian life. Maybe that was his best prospect after all. By the end of LORD JIM I didn't really care how Jim had gotten there, had drawn my own conclusions long before Marlow was finished a-tellin'.

Conrad is probably spinning in his grave right now due to his limericization, but he will have his revenge as I still have one more of his books to get to on this list. But that's not going to be next, because I just can't face the guy.

Ellen VS. ML: 54 read, 46 unread

Next up: After getting into another rantfest about V.S. Naipaul at book club last week, I'm thinking it's time to crack my copy of #83 A BEND IN THE RIVER. Let's see who writes like a lady now!

Earlier:

• Conrad vs. Conrad
• My review of THE SECRET AGENT
• Conrad sure loves the ladies!

Spotted on the peoplemover

When I'm looking at other people's books, it's not a prestige game.
Really! I may be judging but I'm not competing, exactly. I like to see
what's out there. I'm not judging against me (normally because if I'm
looking, I'm not reading myself, for whatever reason).

...But if I did play it that way, I would have been bested on my
flight tonight. Two brunettes in the second row of the plane, one
reading FREEDOM (I would say "in hardcover" but it isn't in paperback
yet, so that's redundant), the other with Frank Bruni's BORN ROUND
face-up on her iPad. Both great choices.

My middle seatmate is one of the last to board: 19 or 20, black curly
hair, black T-shirt, black jeans, traveling with a guy who I realize
on deplaning is probably his father. (Before all I could see was his
plaid shirt, and it was an ambiguous plaid. Dad-or-hipster plaid.)
Before takeoff he fidgets with an iPod Nano, one of the newish square
ones, then pockets it and takes out ULYSSES. In hardcover. He even
took the jacket off. Kids these days!

He broke from its spell only to explain the merits of Aftereffects Pro
versus Photoshop to his probable-dad. Well played my friend.

Top 10 Books Of 2011 So Far (The Freedom To Judge!)

Published in 2011
Kate Christensen, THE ASTRAL
Tina Fey, BOSSYPANTS
Douglas Kennedy, THE MOMENT
Jim Knipfel, THE BLOW-OFF
Arthur Phillips, THE TRAGEDY OF ARTHUR

Published earlier
Brooke Berman, NO PLACE LIKE HOME
Vera Brittain, TESTAMENT OF YOUTH
Glen David Gold, CARTER BEATS THE DEVILKathrine Switzer, MARATHON WOMAN
David Foster Wallace, THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

Unbookening #FAIL

Checked out 6 books from the library
Bought 3 books at the Housing Works sale
Received 9 books to review
18

Donated 3 books
Lent out 2
Returned 7 to the library
12

Too much awesomeness. That is all I can say. On the bright side, I have 2 books checked out from the library. Just 2! I bet that's the least I've had out since I moved. So Project Read or Return Your Library Books went pretty well.

This cartoon is hanging above my desk in my childhood bedroom right now. I completely forgot it was there and when I walked in at 1AM this morning I had to sit down I was laughing so hard. (New Yorker, 2004)

"But next morning, at the first bend of the river shutting off the houses of Patusan, all this dropped out of my sight bodily, with its colour, its design, and its meaning, like a picture created by fancy on a canvas, upon which, after long contemplation, you turn your back for the last time. It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested, in an unchanging light. There are the ambitions, the fears, the hate, the hopes, and they remain in my mind just as I had seen them--intense and as if for ever suspended in their expression. I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones. I wasn't going to dive into it; I would have enough to do to keep my head above the surface. But as to what I was leaving behind, I cannot imagine any alteration."
-Joseph Conrad, LORD JIM

Reading on the Road: "Is it the Fourth?"

Well, no, TJ, and thanks for reminding.

These past weeks have just been one long road to Suckville over here, so I didn't even try to pack light this weekend. I no longer care about whether my plane is going to make weight or how irritated my seatmates will feel. I'm taking two hardcovers (review) and my Kindle (so I can finish some half-begun books like Courtney Sullivan's MAINE and Bella Pollen's THE SUMMER OF THE BEAR) because I just don't have the energy to decide. If previous holiday weekends are to set the tone, I'll probably have plenty of time to get to each as I am slow-roasting in my parents' backyard. (For best results, turn every half-hour.)

I'm also packing my copy of 2666, because it looks like single-book book club is really going to happen this summer. I plan to propose in the first order that we give the club a catchy name, like The Future Or Bust. That's probably the point at which I am voted out of single-book book club. Que sera, sera. 


What are you reading this weekend?