Book Review: Astonished by Beverly Donofrio

Maybe we can think of crimes more disturbing than rape, but there is no need.  Rape is horrible enough.

But I've never given rape much thought.  Why would I?  I know of no one close to me who has been raped, and as a regular American guy more focused on education and auto didacticism, I've had no reason to delve into this dark corner of the criminal psyche.

And I didn't see it coming when I picked up Beverly Donofrio's latest title, Astonished.  Her first two memoirs, the movie-famous Riding in Cars with Boys and then the quieter Looking for Mary, told her tales of self-defeating attempts to live freely and boldly, to find both excitement and solace in a confusing world.  Her rape, however, permeates this book like oxygen in the air.  It reminds me of a time I went on a plane trip and was too cheap to buy a rolling suitcase, opting instead for a heavy duffel bag I carried slung across my shoulder - not the kind of thing you can forget is burdening you with every step as you walk a mile from Gate A to Gate WW.

Donofrio begins the book by expressing her bewilderment that such unspeakable evil would visit her in particular:

Even though I do know the important question is not why this happened to me but what I'm going to do now ... I was absolutely shocked that he chose me.  This was not supposed to happen; I was supposed to have escaped: I had hot flashes and liver spots and was finally in the final stretch.  I'd survived all these decades without experiencing this thing I dreaded as much as death ... 

In the past month I've followed friends on Facebook as they went through similarly shocking bouts with evil: two young girls undergoing multiple surgeries after a car crash, and a highly respected, generous man having a brain tumor removed.  Though they never said as much, I'd guess they at some point asked the same question Donofrio asked, the same question Job asked: Why me?  That question seems to lie behind the books title: Astonished that evil would visit me - ME!

Fortunately, Donofrio circles around that question while still moving forward, searching for a monastery where she can take up residence, if not formal vows, to find a place of peace.  Astonished is something of a chick book, perfect for that demographic (female, middle aged, middle class, NPR listener, etc. - the dang cover is decorated with bracelet charms, for gosh sakes), but she is a talented enough writer to rise above the solipsistic memoir genre and speak from the soul about her quest for peace honestly.  Honestly - she admits when she is petty and judgmental, and not in the sordid reality-TV way we know so well, but with a downright saintly humility.

And yet the rape hovers over the book like a blimp at a football game (apologies for the incongruous metaphor).  Evil is not something we really recover from, when it strikes so personally and deeply; not something we get over.  Still, Donofrio convinces us, we can go on.  We can seek peace.  And maybe even find it.

Book Review: & Sons by David Gilbert

I have finally put the pieces together.  You see, for years I have forced myself to read long, rambling, pointless novels that I was not enjoying simply because the literary establishment hailed the writer as the latest and greatest.  All along I figured something must be wrong with me - am I lacking literary sophistication? do I just not get it?  But now I have put together the pieces of this puzzle, and am glad to announce what picture it forms.

Let's take David Gilbert's & Sons (yes, the ampersand is part of the title, which makes life difficult in this computer age - Amazon has it listed as "And Sons" and you can't tweet #&sons but must spell it out as #andsons - but I digress) along with two similar writers, Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon. You probably remember Franzen from his dispute with Oprah when he spat on her selection of his 2001 novel, The Corrections, for her book club; and perhaps you saw the film version of Chabon's Wonder Boys.

These three have much in common: rugged yet soft good looks (Chabon's crystal blue eyes account for 72% of his book sales, and that's A REAL STATISTIC), a high literary bent, and long, rambling works with frustratingly inconclusive and meaningless endings.  (Their latest novels run an average of 554 pages.)  And they win prizes.  Franzen, for example, has collected the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and even a coveted spot in Oprah's revamped book club (they made up a decade after their initial spat).  I read Franzen's Freedom when it was the flavor of the month, Chabon's Wonder Boys a few years ago, and recently Gilbert's & Sons.

In all three cases, I suffered through their works like I would a trip to renew my license - tedious, barren, yet unavoidable.  Several times I tried to read other works by these modern masters (Time magazine labelled Franzen the "Great American Novelist") but could not stand more than 50 or 100 pages before giving up to read something more interesting, like the new issue of Wired or the ad copy on the back of the store brand granola bars.

The characters in these novels all have horrible relationships with everyone around them, especially family, and the plot just plods along without the characters learning or changing or even recognizing their self-defeating foibles.  Is that their point, then?  That humans are doomed to egotistical futility?  Seems so.  Why, then, are these writers so highly acclaimed?

That's what Gilbert's work helped me decipher.  You see, he and the others are superb wordsmiths - they can bang out sentence upon paragraph upon chapter of mellifluous prose.  It really is high-flying poetic writing.  But they are like potters who turn massive sculptures that, though technically exquisite, are repugnant and useless.  & Sons, for example, culminates with the narrator shoving the object of his jealousy in front of a bus because, if he cannot be an insider in the family he idolizes (foolishly), then he will cut off its flowering branch so the whole tree withers.  Really.  That's how it ends.  Oh, and the central character dies of old age without reconciling with any of the people he's hurt.  Now, modern fiction need not moralize or teach Sunday school lessons, but this work lacks the scope of tragedy, comedy, or drama - it just slouches from boring event to boring event until there is no story left to tell.

I am now free.  I no longer need force myself to read these high literary works which garner prize and praise for their beautiful prose when they leave the reader feeling drained of soul rather than filled.  Don't get me wrong: I don't yearn for happy endings and neat tyings-up á la Dickens or Irving; I simply want to enjoy reading fiction, even with a troubled intellectual pleasure.  Is that too much to ask?

Book Review: Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

The first recommendation for this book is its publisher: McSweeney's.  No other publishing house today - or in any time - is so serious about literature, so quirky, so willing to invest in promising young authors, and so darned successful at doing so.  Dave Eggers is their flagship writer, and their periodicals - the Quarterly Concern and The Believer - define innovation in both writing and design. And if you enjoy laughing so uncontrollably that chocolate milk shoots out of your nose even though you're not drinking chocolate milk, you must check out their Internet Tendency.

Michelle Tea's Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is perfect for McSweeney's because it defies categorization.  Much like Neil Gaiman's last book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Mermaid has all the trappings of a young adult title but is far more disturbing than what we'd want our young ones reading (at least I think, but in these days of Twilight and such, maybe that red line has shifted as well).  We have a young girl as the main character, an ordinary girl who discovers that she actually comes from a secret lineage of magical beings - a pretty common theme from Harry Potter to, um, other stuff like that.

However, the story owes a much larger debt to Neil Gaiman, and through him, to Diana Wynne Jones - indeed, even the main character's name, Sophie, comes straight from Howl's Moving Castle.

Stranger, though, was when I jumped to Michelle Tea's wikipedia page to learn a little more about the author.  At first I thought, oh, this must be someone else with the same name because this person "toured with the Sex Worker's Art Show" and "is the co-writer of the weekly astrology column Double Team Psychic Dream."  Couldn't possibly be the author of this delightful YA novel, however disturbing it may be at times.  But it is the same person.  Oh.  Interesting.

On an unrelated note, my one gripe with this book - surprising given the publisher's high standards for design - is the horrendous quality of the illustrations.  They appear to have been drawn by someone who simply cannot draw - each depiction of Sophie looks rather different from the rest, and his depictions of pigeons are so strained you can see the sweat drips on the page.  Illustrator Jason Polan's wikipedia page brags that he has been published in The New Yorker, but that was a single cartoon back in 2006 - something I'm sure his mother was quite proud of, but he's no James Thurber, and that's saying an awful lot.

But back to the book.  Mermaid is best suited for adults like you and I who now and then need to put aside Syria and global warming and our tribulations at work and home and indulge in a sweeping, gripping fantasy.  It veers off course unexpectedly and ends up galaxies away from where it seemed to be headed.  And it starts right on page one.  Sophie and her quasi-friend Ella are playing the pass-out game, where they take turns helping each other asphyxiate into unconsciousness.  While buzzing back to the world, Sophie sees a mermaid in the horribly polluted creek, and then is struck by a strange desire:

Suddenly, Sophie craved salt.  In the dry cave of her mouth, down her throat, which felt strange and thick, into her tumbling tummy, she craved a bag of pretzels, the rocky salt collected at the bottom, tipped straight back into her mouth - the reward, she thought, for polishing off the snack. ... Faster than her best friend could cry out in disgust, Sophie tugged her still-shimmering body to the edge of the water and plunged her face into it, mouth open, inhaling the dirty creek into her, the perfect, necessary salt of it obliterating the darker flavors of things she'd rather not think about.  The sharpest taste, salt; she felt it travel through her like a delicious knife, the shock of it cutting through her, making her want more more more.  She sucked at the creek hungrily, like a wild animal digging into its kill ... 

So right on the first few pages we have several things we wouldn't want our daughters doing, but written in the most captivating manner imaginable.  And that's the core of this book - the story truly captures your imagination and leaves you hungering for more; like Sophia and her salt craving, you'll find yourself tipping back the pretzel bag to enjoy the last, sharply stinging bits of this book.  Fortunately, Tea has promised this to be the first in a trilogy, so we have those tangy treats to look forward to.

Book Review: Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

While I grew up loving reading, not until I hit my late teens did I become a reader, the sort of creature who prefers the company of books to the company of people.  At the time, I felt such a fierce devotion to books as whole, contained works of art, that I could never skip sections or abandon even the driest read.

But now I have no such trouble - indeed, I often check books out of the library with no intention of finishing them, of just reading the first few chapters (The Signal and the Noise, anyone?).

And that's how I recommend you read Scott Barry Kaufman's important new book, Ungifted.  In sections.  Or maybe just the first few chapters.  Though you may want, like I did, to wade all the way through its deepest waters.

Early on, at the end of the first chapter, he develops and lays out his central premise: "Greatness is not born, but takes time to develop, and there are many paths to greatness."  Emphasizing that educational labels can not only influence but derail children's self-concept and thereby shape their destiny, Kaufman argues against simplistic definitions of intelligence that draw, in our president's phrasing, a red line separating the gifted children from the ungifted - that by calling a select few (less than ten percent at my school) gifted, you define the other ninety percent as not gifted.

The book draws upon and is interwoven with Kaufman's own experience as a bright young man who did not perform well on his IQ test and ended up in the euphemistically named Resource Room across the hall from the kids he felt a strong and justified affinity for, the gifted students.  And, as a teacher of gifted students myself, I sympathize with Kaufman's negative opinion of the gifted label: I start each year by explaining to my gifted group and their classmates that every one of them has many gifts, but we only have tests for certain types of reading, mathematical, and creative abilities.

Here's where you get to chapter skipping, though, if you'd like.  Remember how Gore lost popularity points because he was, as journalists pegged him, a policy wonk?  Well, Kaufman is a neurological psychology wonk.  The bulk of the book is clogged with dense research reporting, as such:

Without activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex, the spontaneous generation of ideas can bypass executive control and flow directly through the anterior cingulate pathway into the motor system to produce a creative response.  According to the researchers, "deactivation [of the lateral prefrontal cortex] may have allowed a defocused, free-floating attention that permits spontaneous unplanned associations and sudden insights.

Right.  Of course.  And these two heavyweight sentences are about, of all things, how jazz improvisation works.  So maybe check out after chapter four, if your pulse does not quicken at phrases such as "reduced latent inhibition" and "lateralization of brain functions."

But don't let the headiness of the book detract from the brilliance of Kaufman's message: "children who are stamped with an enduring label are being fed a fixed theory of intelligence, which dramatically influences their motivation, how they approach learning, and how they handle setbacks.  Many important skills aren't being developed because we are cultivating erroneous beliefs about how abilities develop."

So, when you read Ungifted, feel free to skim over some of the dense research reporting, but don't skip so much that you miss Kaufman's call to action.  We need to challenge and change our concepts of what constitutes intelligence - make them scientifically based - and start recognizing the gifts in all our children.

Book Review: Amy Falls Down by Jincy Willett

" ... she was, just for an instant, ... impressed by her own arcane powers ... "

Reading Jincy Willett's wincingly comic novel, Amy Falls Down, I couldn't help but think of that Springsteen classic, "Glory Days."  The gist of the song - and this book, in a way - is how strange we are to yearn for a past which we've painted gold, rather than engage with the present day.

Aren't we all, in the flush of some youthful success, impressed, just for an instant, by our own arcane powers?

Amy, the novel's main character, enjoyed a brief and minor celebrity - extremely brief and extremely minor - as a young writer, but has since slipped into a torpor where the closest she comes to writing is slowly filling a notebook with potential short story titles from snippets of phrases she catches in her dull days.  She fears failure, and so she dare not risk trying - not beyond titles, anyway, titles which stare vacuously at us atop empty pages.

Perhaps it's just me, but I suspect it's a facet of the human condition to savor a glorious moment from our early days, once to be impressed by our own arcane powers, and thereafter to live in fear that we will never again achieve such heights, molehills though they might have been.

Amy, however, falls down.  And bumps her head.  On a birdbath.

From this accident, she rediscovers writing and is rediscovered as a writer - she is born again, albeit accidentally.  She finds her voice, sings again, taking those infertile lists of story titles and opening them like umbrellas full of rain, pouring out words and ideas.

Can success then be a simple accident, a mishap, a misunderstanding?  We'd like to claim our brilliance and industriousness brought us to greatness (such as our greatness is), but secretly we know that we benefited from forces outside our control and design.  Maybe we should ban the concept of greatness from our vocabularies and philosophies, and just allow people to do what they do without being measured against some ridiculous list of eminent ones: Einstein, Picasso, et al.

What damage do we inflict upon our children by telling them "You can be the greatest, you can be the best," when we know that 99.99% of them will hover in the range of average accomplishments.

I read the obituaries every day, and even the most accomplished of our locally deceased will vanish to living memory once everyone who knew them passes on.  Yet we yearn for greatness as the path to immortality.  How silly.

No wonder this is a comic novel, for this is a comedic life.

Book Review: Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Telling my son about Neil Gaiman's latest book, I struggled to come up with the essential adjective - you know, the way (Southern) "Gothic" describes Flannery O'Connor or "piquant" describes Christopher Hitchens.

I tried "eerie," but so much of the book was filled with hopeful longing, and the sweetness of childhood, that the word wilted the second it left my lips.  All of its synonyms failed, as well: unearthly, otherworldly (though that one comes close), creepy, odd, freakish.

Yet Gaiman has given us scenes like this between a once-affectionate father and his seven year-old son:

     He didn't say anything in response.  The bath was full, and he turned the cold tap off.
     Then, swiftly, he picked me up.  He put his huge hands under my armpits, swung me up with ease, so I felt like I weighed nothing at all.
     I looked at him, at the intent expression on his face. He had taken off his jacket before he came upstairs.  He was wearing a light blue shirt and a maroon paisley tie.  He pulled off his watch on its expandable strap, dropped it onto the window ledge.
     Then I realized what he was going to do, and I kicked out, and I flailed at him, neither of which actions had any effect of any kind as he plunged me down into the cold water.

I almost used ellipses to omit the paragraph describing the father's clothing, but realized that it was elemental to the scene's brilliance (and terror).  The details: light blue shirt, maroon paisley tie, and the care he takes to spare his watch though not his child - these heighten the tension, as we already suspect that something horrible is about to happen.  That descriptive break slows the pace and lets us inside the boy's innocent thoughts.  And his feeling of weightlessness contributes to the effect, both thrilling and chilling, yet also hearkening back to his younger years when his father would have swept him up and carried him more often, and more affectionately.  Brilliant.  And terrifying.

Yet those adjectives, even in combination - or ghastly, shocking, appalling, and so on - ignore all the tender scenes refulgent with the beautiful innocence of childhood, as on the narrator's seventh birthday:

     My parents had also given me a Best of Gilbert and Sullivan LP, to add to the two that I already had.  I had loved Gilbert and Sullivan since I was three, when my father's youngest sister, my aunt, took me to see Iolante, a play filled with lords and fairies.  I found the existence and nature of the fairies easier to understand than that of the lords. ...
     That evening my father arrived home from work and he brought a cardboard box with him.  In the cardboard box was a soft-haired black kitten of uncertain gender, whom I immediately named Fluffy, and which I loved utterly and wholeheartedly.
     Fluffy slept on my bed at night.  I talked to it, sometimes, when my little sister was not around, half-expecting it to answer in a human tongue.  It never did.  I did not mind.

So we'd have to pair up contrasting descriptions, such as "warmhearted" and "eerie," but even then the pairing fails to show how tightly Gaiman interweaves the beauty and terror of the narrative.  I suppose resistance to simple description makes a work worthy of our praise.  And praise this work we must.

Book Review: I Wear the Black Hat by Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman subtitled his book, "Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)," and that word "grappling" aptly describes the tenor of this work.  He wrestles with the concept of the bad guy as Jacob wrestled the angel: a somewhat confusing contest with no clear victor.

Early on, after conjuring up the classic picture of a villain as the man in the black hat who ties the pretty young woman to the train tracks, he defines a villain as someone who knows but does not care.  It's a strange definition.  Though it covers the greedy industrialist dumping chemicals into the river, it seems awfully passive - knowing, not caring - states of thought and emotion, rather than actions.

But I think Jesus would agree with this definition, however imperfect it might be.  Evil comes from the heart, and the hands simply carry out its intentions.  The man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her.  It is not what goes in a person, but what comes out, that poisons him.  Yet the definition must be as flawed as our perceptions of what constitutes good and evil, and not only philosophically, but in the ways we live these concepts out in ways ranging from the music we loathe to the people who disgust us; and, conversely, the music and people we adore and admire.

Take a divisive figure like Bill Clinton.  People will condemn and defend him for reasons political and moral, never convincing anyone to change their views.

[Clinton is] the kind of man you could trust to lead the world, but not to drive your wife to the airport.  He was a tireless, talkative, highly functioning sex addict.  When his affair with Lewinsky was on the verge of exploding nationally, he continued to deny its existence to every single person he worked with ... If described to someone with no memory of the recent past, the villain in the Lewinsky scandal seems stupidly obvious ... It should be a simple equation.  But it isn't. ... The larger vilification was ultimately split five ways.  Mr. Clinton, of course, was first against the wall.  But Monica Lewinsky was next, and she was hammered just as aggressively (and with much less justification).  So was Linda Tripp, Lewinsky's comically untelegenic gal pal who coerced her into detailing the affair while secretly taping their phone conversations.  So was Kenneth Starr, the obsessive lawyer who spent most of the nineties trying to destroy the Clinton administration and forced the American public to participate in his quest.  And so was Hillary Clinton, a person who did nothing wrong ... 

So with the advantages of hindsight and distance from the turmoil of the news cycle, can we today peg the villain in Clinton's travails?  Yes, each of us can, but each of us would do so differently and for differing causes.  Some would make the argument that the question is moot - why stamp labels on these people, "good" or "bad," oversimplifying a highly nuanced story (which others would argue never should have made it beyond the Oval Office).

Klosterman explains why we need to identify a villain in this case:

[Clinton] lies about it to the entire world, is exposed as a liar (and admits this on television), is impeached by the House of Representatives, and jeopardizes both the reputation of the office and the memory of every positive thing he accomplished as president.  It should be a simple equation.  But it isn't.  Clinton's impeachment worked to his short-term political advantage ... the public saw this as excessive and unjust.

Perhaps we can return to Klosterman's original definition of a villain: someone who knows but does not care.  Like a president who knows he compromises his office and legacy for the sake of some fleeting pleasure, but does not care.  Like a young woman who knows she's doing something wrong but is too entranced by power to care.  Like her friend who knows betraying someone for a moment of fame is wrong, but does not care.  Like a lawyer who knows the whole charade is ultimately meaningless yet pursues it like a captial case just to inflict harm on the president's reputation.  Like a wife who disregards her husband's philandering because she cares more about her own rise to power than this "loveless House of Cards agreement."  But surely the villain should be Bill Clinton, yet he remains "the person who is perceived the least negatively" but "is the person who was the most irrefutably immoral."

But why?  Klosterman blames it on our "looks-based, superficial society," and that we eagerly gloss over Clinton's indiscretions because he is (or, at least, was) one handsome devil, and he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut on the topic.  It was Lewinsky, Tripp, Starr, and Hillary who tried to garner clout and advantage from the debacle, but Bill smartly shut up and moved on.

So our ideas of villainy - our very ethics - can be swayed by good looks, charm, and a good job of feigning innocence.  It's not easy to know who's a villain when the bad guys refuse to wear the black hat.