Book-Book (Read It)

Book Review: Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

I was beyond excited to read Allison Bechtel's second graphic memoir after the magnificent Fun Home, but I was disappointed. Perhaps because I am so skeptical about psychoanalysis, I was annoyed and /or bored with the long passages about Bechdel’s therapy and her infatuation with the theories of Donald Winnicott.  When Bechdel reaches into the past with clarity and concentrates on specific details about her mother, it was interesting.  Much of the rest left me cold

I remember at the end of Fun Home I had tears in my eyes, but with this one I’m sorry to say I was emotionally unmoved by the story and intellectually confused. That possibly reflects my intellectual shallowness. But I'm not sure that it does.

Book Review: Defending Jacoby by William Landay

I seldom read suspense novels but I do enjoy courtroom dramas and true crime on TV, so I thought I would get this best-selling book a try. Once I got over the fact that everything that causes me to love a book was missing: complex characterization, rich settings, interesting language -  I enjoyed the book for what it what it is,  a good, fast-paced story.

The "Jacob" of the title is the son of a Massachusetts assistant district attorney who is been charged with the murder of a classmate. His parents are of course sure of his innocence, but the reader is not so sure. The courtroom setting and the legal maneuvering is fun to read, but what really makes the book stand out are the family dynamics. Essentially this is a cross between a legal thriller and We Need to Talk about Kevin -  if that book had been narrated by the clueless father. It's not remotely as interesting and well-written as Kevin, but it's a satisfying read.

Book Review: The Finishing School by Gail Godwin

Godwin's 1984 novel is about a 14-year-old girl who is infatuated with her 40-something neighbor, the sophisticated Ursula DeVane. Justine Stokes is bored and lonely, having moved to rural New York State with her recently widowed mother. She is instantly smitten with the eccentric Ursula, who encourages the attachment. We know from the beginning of the novel that things do not end well.

I loved this book for the same reason I loved Unfinished Desires (2010). Godwin writes about intelligent women, seeking self-knowledge and wisdom in relation with each other. Even self-consciously feminist novels - and this is not - too often depict women in relation to men or to their children, despite the fact our relationships with other women are a key part - maybe the most important part? of our inner lives. Godwin respects the complexities of women's relationships and does not romanticize them.  I also admire how Godwin doesn't do our thinking for us and does not cast judgment on the characters she has created.

Book Review: A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

As mentioned before, I'm smitten with this mystery series set in the charming Quebec village of Three Pines.  This one concerns the murder of a perfectly horrid woman who is trying to market herself as a sort of New-Age Martha Stewart. The only flaw is the Rube-Goldberg murder scheme. The method chosen to kill the victim is so agonizingly complicated as to strain all credulity, and I started fantasizing that Indiana Jones would show up and just shoot the lady and be done with it.

Book Review: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth

This novel about a teen-aged lesbian sent to a Christian re-education school is a YA book that adults can read without feeling that they're reading down. It's a good story, told with due regard to nuance and not at all like the After School Special you might expect. Cameron is an enormously appealing character, with some tooth but also with great vulnerability.  The reader is obviously invited to sympathize with her.  But the Christian de-gayers are not portrayed as monsters, although Cameron's counselor Lydia seems modeled after Aunt Lydia, the terrifying enforcer of Patriarchy in The Handmaid's Tale.

I'm guessing this book is a tough sell.  It's obviously aimed at the YA market, but some schools and libraries may be reluctant to shelve it with YA because of sex, language, and quite a bit of pot smoking. My library was ready to shelve it with adult fiction, but I felt strongly that teens should have easy access to the book without having to come to the librarian and ask for it.

Book Review: Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

This slender novel, translated from the Norwegian is one of those slow reads that I generally prefer, but for some reason I failed to appreciate it. It's about an elderly man who has retired to an isolated cabin, only to find himself living next to a neighbor from his boyhood, with whom he shares painful memories.

The prose is beautiful, but beautiful in uneven ways: sometimes as plain as Cormac McCarthy in The Road, and sometimes very florid and descriptive. I wonder if the translation has an impact on that; that was the same criticism I had of Orhan Pamuk's Snow (which my book group renamed "Slow.")

There is a lot going on here: tragic accidents, wartime heroics, adultery, and logging - don't forget the logging - but the tale is told so quietly, so subtly, that I got a little impatient - it seems I'm in an unsubtle mood for my reading these days.

Book Review: Horns by Joe Hill

I really enjoyed Joe Hill's first novel, The Heart-Shaped Box, because it was genuinely scary as well as a good story.  Horns disappointed me, because it wasn't scary at all, although parts were gruesome and there were far too many snakes (I think books and movies should have an S rating for those suffering from ophidiophobia).

The protagonist of the book, Ig Perrish, wakes up from a drunken sleep to find that he's grown horns. He discovers that his horns give him insight into people's worst impulses, and also give him the power to take revenge against the murderer of his lover. It's an inventive story, but it started unraveling at the end - I grew bored with the violent climax and confused by the metaphysical twist. Plus, I found the character of Ig a bit cloying. When he wasn't acting like a pitchfork-wielding demon, he was a bit of a choirboy.

I'll read Joe Hill again, but this one just didn't do it for me.

A Slow-Books Manifesto

Maura Kelly wrote a piece in the Atlantic recently that has librarians in a tither.  Her Slow-Books Manifesto argues in favor of reading classics and good literature instead of potboiler thrillers and romance novels. It's hard to imagine this as controversial, but some of today's librarians are allergic to the very idea of good literature, and they certainly don't believe that a librarian's role is to promote quality over junk.

The librarians reacting against this piece present themselves as under siege by elitists, but really, the Atlantic piece is an outlier.  Our whole culture encourages us to read fast-moving genre books. On the other hand, people who read literature are generally mocked as elitist eggheads, same as it ever was. In my 20-year library career, I've never encountered flak from colleagues for reading mysteries or horror novels, but I was called a "literary snob" when I was caught reading Flaubert. On the Fiction-L listerv, the books that bring me joy were derided as a "slog," as "earnest" and "self-improving," and were contrasted unfavorably with genre books that are "fun."

What an odd notion, that literature is not fun. Anyone who believes that either has not read enough literature, or has not read it well enough.

Book Review: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Here's a book that will bring some comfort to those suffering from Downton Abbey Withdrawal Syndrome.  The narrative spans several generations of well-educated, well-to-do Brits and their connection with a young poet who died in the Great War.  Cecil Valance is famous for one poem, Two Acres, about the charms of an English country house, and, most readers assume, of its female inhabitant.  The reader learns in the opening pages that Cecil is in fact having an affair with the young lady's brother, a fact which a subsequent biographer is determined to ferret out.

It's a very enjoyable read that goes down like candy, in spite of its leisurely pace.  I was worried at first that the generational tales would be purely episodic, but they end up swirling around a number of themes, most obviously the fragile nature of "truth" when talking about human lives. It's telling that the character we come to know most intimately is the biographer, while his subjects are more elusive.

Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker for The Line of Beauty, and now I suppose I have one more title to add to my wish list.

Book Review: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Out of sheer cowardice, I've avoided The Handmaid's Tale for 25 years, but it's a book club pick, so I had to confront it. As we all know, it's a dystopian novel about an America taken over by patriarchal theocrats.  The narrator, Offred, is a Handmaid, whose only role in society is to breed. Most women are forbidden to read and write, although they are read conveniently doctored passages from the Bible, such as "Blessed are the silent."  The women with some measure of protection in this society are the shallow, trivialized and lonely Wives, and the smug and humorless Aunts, who act as the patriarchy's enforcers against their own kind.

The narrative is so constrained as to be claustrophobic, as if the reader is experiencing the world with her vision restricted by the uniform the handmaidens wear.  The tone is, of course, dark, but there are touches of arch humor. Sadly, it feels relevant today, although some passages evoke specific controversies within the second-wave feminist movement for those of us who were there. I'm guessing that younger readers will miss the critique of cultural feminism and may not fully appreciate the porn-wars theme.