Hue and Cry by James Alan McPherson

I’ve been reading a few other things — I finished A Theory of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez and started The Word is Very Near You by Martin Smith, and I am reading Edmund de Waal’s The White Road. But this past weekend I paused to read James Alan McPherson’s Hue and Cry. I read it because this is the latest book club selection for A Public Space (you may recall they kicked off what has now become a series of worldwide reading “together, apart” events with War & Peace in the spring.

Hue and Cry was James Alan McPherson‘s debut story collection, published in 1968. It is a tough read — about, as Yiyun Li said during the online discussion of the book, epics out of ordinary lives. She and Lan Chang both knew and studied with McPherson, and later taught alongside him, and their insights were really interesting to hear. Talking about “Hue and Cry,” the last story in the collection, the two discussed how overwhelming it felt to read. They shared that this feeling stems from the way McPherson is so honest about the characters, Margot and Eric, who want to change the world and very clearly cannot, and about the forces (as Change said) and fate (as Li said) of society overwhelming them. Hue and Cry also has strange, (Chang and Li called them Greek-chorus like) omniscient passages at the beginning and end of the story, and this voice asks the same question in the first and last lines:

“But if this is all there is, what is left of life and why are we alive?”

Chang notes that the rest of the book prepares us for how devastating this story is, because there are so many little ways the characters deal with struggle and disappointment. There is so much racism, and misogyny, and homophobia. Both Chang and Li commented that McPherson wasn’t these things; he simply noted them and wrote about them honestly.

They both admired “Gold Coast,” about a young Black janitor and an old Irish janitor in a building near Harvard square and said it just has everything a story should have. Several people commented during the discussion that “A Matter of Vocabulary” is striking; both of these stories are really honest about the hardships people face and the harshness in the world. Yiyun Li said something very interesting about the difference between William Trevor, who looked around at the a beautiful town or village and wrote about what was wrong underneath the beauty, and James McPherson, who looked around at the harsh world and wrote about the beauty underneath.

I liked “A Matter of Vocabulary,” which is about two young brothers working in a grocery store, and “On Trains,” which is very short but as Yiyun Li noted still conjures a whole world in a brief train trip. “A New Place” really seems to capture what it’s like to be young, disillusioned by the world and unsure of what to do with yourself but sure a change of scene might help.

I’m glad I read Hue and Cry, even though it is painful, especially at a time when the world’s harshness has been so in focus. But it was interesting to hear the perspective that if we look closely, even at the devastating things, we can see beauty.

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Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat

Do you recall my saying I need to read something more uplifting? This isn’t it, especially. I love Edwidge Danticat‘s work. If you’ve been with me here at bookconscious for a long time you know I’ve reviewed Claire of the Sea Light (beautiful, a “delicate” book about human frailty) and The Dew Breaker (which is about a torturer — and yet Danticat portrays him with “psychological depth”). So when I saw Danticat had a new collection, Everything Inside, I ordered it for our library.

Her writing is still all the things I’ve said before — masterful, delicate, musical, rich — and her characters are multidimensional. The stories in this collection are not brutal, per se, but they peel back the curtain on the brutality of the world at large. This book explores the immigrant experience from several angles. Many of the stories are about love, and what we’ll do in the name of love, but they are also about other ordinary experiences — coming to terms with a parent’s dementia, dealing with post-partum depression, learning a family secret, trying to understand a friend or loved on who acts in a way we don’t expect, trying to be an adult, dealing with loss.

You definitely shouldn’t miss it. And maybe, reading it now is a reminder that for many people around the world and right here in the U.S., the experience of insecurity, illness, family strife, isolation, and fear is actually normal life.

 

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This Close by Jessica Francis Kane

I was tidying my shelves this week in order to fit in a couple of used bookstore purchases from a recent trip to Arizona and came across a short story collection I hadn’t yet read, This Close by Jessica Francis Kane. I have to admit I can’t exactly recall how this book came to be on my shelves — possibly it was on a free cart, or a purchase at the Five Colleges Book Sale. At any rate, it looked good so I decided to give it a try.

This Close is a story collection, with a few stand-alone and two sets of linked stories. Many of the stories deal with someone young who we meet again as their older self. Parent-child relationships, especially with grown children, also feature prominently in this collection. Loss is a strong theme — not only of loved ones through death or divorce but also loss of health, loss of control, loss of pride.

The narratives are simple — a mother and her young son preparing for a yard sale, a woman grieving her daughter who can’t stay away from a drugstore where they’d had an unsettling encounter with a stranger, a daughter hosting a surprise birthday dinner for her father. But they often feature an odd twist — in the opening story, a young man in New York ends up looking after a small boy whose mother and grandmother run his neighborhood dry cleaner’s because he can’t figure out how to say no. A woman who prides herself on her skillful driving hits a parked car. Neither is entirely implausible but Kane explores what happens when our attempts to live an orderly life go awry.

The language in This Close is simple, without wasted words. Nothing overwrought, nor especially beautiful or lyrical, and yet, in these ordinary lives and plain words, Kane seems to expose the fragility of being human. To me that is really a sign of good writing, when straightforward language still manages to move or transport the reader. Her characters are sometimes stuck or caught being with people they don’t really want to be with, they hurt each other or themselves, they stumble and suffer and struggle or they just get carried along by life’s events rather than the other way around. Interestingly, even though all of this is painful, Kane’s stories didn’t make me cringe or feel like they were exposing too much or ripping off a bandaid.

If you enjoy short fiction, this is a good read.

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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi

I admit I downloaded What Is Yours Is Not Yours thinking it was by the same author who wrote A Tale for the Time Being – and in fairness, their names are similar. Ruth Ozeki wrote the latter. Helen Oyeyemi wrote the former, and it was a happy mistake on my part because her work is new to me. The last day of my South Carolina trip was rainy and this collection of trippy, braided short stories (linked seems too light a term for the way the characters and themes are entwined) was a lovely diversion.

Keys and books appear throughout the book, and some of the characters appear again years after we first meet them. Some settings are fairy tale-like, others seem to be set in the regular world, others in some sort of strange in-between. There are a lot of people who might fit into an ordinary world doing their best in the stranger ones – in “Books and Roses” and “Is Your Blood as Red As This” there are both ghosts and people, and in the latter there is a section told by a wooden puppet of sorts (the setting is a puppetry school).

Despite all the otherworldliness, much of what Oyeyemi writes about is very familiar – a young man whose family wants him to work at their hotel, a young woman wondering who her biological parents are, a college student annoyed by a male club who plots a prank (they swap out books written by men for books by women – my kind of prank) with her own female only group. And many stories about love and longing; two that really got me are “‘Sorry’ Doesn’t Sweeten Her Tea,” about teen siblings whose pop singer crush beats a woman, disillusioned by the response of other fans as well as the star, and “Presence,” about a married couple of former foster kids who are now psychologists.

Perhaps these recognizable human feelings are why even though the stories are so much like a dream – they make sense when you’re in them but are hard to explain when you wake up – the book is still not hard to follow. A good rainy afternoon book, and I’m curious to read more of Oyeyemi’s work.

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Seconds, The Purple Swamp Hen and One Man Guy

I read a couple of good books and listened to a third last week as part of the book bingo challenges I’m doing at the library where I work and my local public library. But, The Computer Scientist has planted the idea in my head that maybe it would be good for me to deliberately not finish either book bingo. I haven’t decided for sure, but I’m reading whatever I want this week whether it fits a bingo card or not.

I read a graphic novel from the offspring formerly known as Teen the Younger, Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley, who wrote the Scott Pilgrim series. It’s the story of Katie, a young woman who is a chef with a successful restaurant, about to open a new one. Things are not going well with the renovation (something I, in the midst of a kitchen remodel that hit a much more minor snag this week, can identify with), or with the rest of her life. A strange encounter in the night leaves her with mushrooms and a note that tells her she can write down a mistake, eat a mushroom, go to sleep, and wake up with a new life.

Like any good fairy tale there’s are a couple of “witch” figures — house spirits, in this case. The heroine has to make several mistakes with the magic and things have to get much worse before they get better. It is a very enjoyable read, with interesting and vivid art, that moves along quickly.

The other book I read, The Purple Swamp Hen is a short story collection by Penelope Lively, whose How It All Began I loved, as well as Dancing Fish and Ammonites.  I love short fiction and this collection did not disappoint. The title story is one of my favorites; it’s told from the point of view of the unusual bird depicted in a Pompeii fresco, who tells about the decadent and mostly unkind humans in villa before the Vesuvius eruption. Which is not as weird as it sounds. I enjoyed the whole book really, but another standout was “The Bridge,” which deals with a long married couple living separate lives mainly because they have parallel memories of a tragedy, which allows one to move on and the other to remain stuck with holding that memory at bay. Lively is a genius at depicting human nature in all its faulty glory in a few brief pages.

I listened to the audiobook version of  One Man Guy by Michael Barakiva. It’s the story of Alex Khederian, an Armenian American teen whose strict parents are both a source of pride and frustration. Alex has to go to summer school even though he passed all his classes, because his mom and dad want him to be in honors classes like his older brother. There, Alex gets to know Ethan, one of the charismatic older students from the rowdy crowd at school known as the drop outs. Alex admits they’re not much in the way of troublemakers given that he lives in a fairly affluent school district in New Jersey. But Ethan drags Alex on a forbidden adventure in the City and in no time they are inseparable and Alex is taking chances he never dreamed of.  It takes Alex’s best friend, Becky, to help him see how he really feels about Ethan. As in any good romantic comedy, a mishap causes a minor disaster — Alex’s parents ground him, possibly ending his relationship. Will love prevail? Will the Khederians trust Alex again? Will he make honors? A funny, sweet, but not overly treacly, love story that attempts (fairly successfully) to deal with multiple cultures: suburban New Jersey high school, gay New York, and Armenian American. I was hungry after listening as Barakiva includes mouth- watering details about the Khederians’ favorite meals.

I’ve moved on to a book I heard about on The Readers earlier in the summer, that I don’t think actually fits any book bingo squares. I can resist the urge to fill every square. Really.

 

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Vacation reading: After Rain, The Peabody Sisters, Gramercy Park, and Wildwood

Ok, Wildwood: a Journey Through Trees I mostly read before vacation, but finished on Saturday. Roger Deakin, who died before this book was published, was a fascinating man. He renovated his Elizabethan farmhouse, which was more or less a ruin when he bought it, and was well known for his nature writing. What I most enjoyed about Wildwood is his delight in his subjects, whether the rooks in a nearby wood, the people who love the natural world as he does, artists, trees, hedges — he was apparently insatiably curious about the planet and the people on it and I learned all kinds of interesting things as I read, from how cricket bats are made to where apple trees originated. I found this book while shelf-reading (a project in libraries, in our case undertaken every summer, whereby staff compare a list of books that should be on the shelf to the actual books on the shelf, to check that they are where they should be). It was a serendipitous find of the highest order. I’d like to read Deakin’s other work, if only for the language. Here’s a bit from a chapter on a trip to the Pyrenees:

“We collect sweet, fresh chestnuts, easing them from their hedgehog husks. Following a steep-sided holloway veined with the exposed roots of beech, holly, hazel, chestnut, maple, ash, and oak, we drink from the woodland springs. As noon approaches, crickets begin singing hesitantly, and young lizards venture on to the sunny track.”

Even if I wasn’t already interested in his subject (and I am a little bit tree mad since reading The Hidden Life of Trees), I’d read that all day.

On our vacation to Maine last week — the first weeklong trip the Computer Scientist and I took alone in nearly three decades — I packed only a few books. One I’d been wanting to read for some time: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism by Megan Marshall. I reviewed her book about Margaret Fuller back when I was still writing a column, but this book came to me via my neighbor, who loved it. You may recall I wrote here about her family inviting me to choose books from her collection after she died — this was one of those titles. I’d been waiting for a good time to read it. I figured a week in Maine was a good time to take on a meaty history book and it was. I really thoroughly enjoyed it, both because the Peabody sisters are fascinating women and because I love learning about the history of New England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marshall spent twenty years working on this book, explaining in her introduction that she had to learn to read the sisters’ handwriting and that of their family and friends in order to complete her research. I really respect the effort that went into the book, and the fascinating details of the may interwoven lives the Peabody sisters touched. If you don’t know much about them, the eldest, Elizabeth, coined the term “transcendentalism” before any of the men who later made it famous, and was an incredibly gifted thinker and writer. Her legacy to aAmerica, among other things, is kindergarten. Mary, the middle sister, was a teacher and writer who helped Elizabeth with her work and later, helped her husband, Horace Mann, with his. The youngest, Sophia, was an artist and also married Nathaniel Hawthorne. Marshall brings them and the people they knew to life, illuminating the social, cultural, and religious environment that shaped them and the day to day lives they led. I thoroughly enjoyed The Peabody Sisters and would like to wander around Boston and Salem visiting the places where these fascinating women lived and worked. I’d also like to read biographies of some of the rest of their circle, starting with Horace Mann.

When I was just about finished with The Peabody Sisters we visited Elements, a used bookstore, coffee house and bar in Biddeford (much like Book & Bar in Portsmouth. I was fairly restrained in my purchasing, but I did buy Gramercy Park: an American Bloomsbury by Carole Klein. It seemed to be similar in spirit to Marshall’s book; rather than covering one family’s impact on a period, it covers one neighborhood’s impact on several periods. Klein begins with Samuel Ruggles, who wished to preserve some open space as Manhattan expanded north, and began planning to create the neighborhood with its exclusive park in the center in 1831. By the 1840’s homes were being built around the park. Straight through the 1930s, when Klein’s book ends, a parade of interesting New Yorkers lived in Ruggles’ lovely neighborhood, and many more visited. I enjoyed reading about the many writers and artists but also about people I knew less about, like architect Stanford White and inventor and Cooper Union founder Peter Cooper, critic, novelist, artist Carl Van Vechten (who was a close friend of Gertrude Stein, James Weldon, Langston Hughes, Bessie Smith, and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Again the book made me want to walk the neighborhood — I’ve been to the Strand several times and never realized how close I was to Gramercy Park. Klein wrote several other books that I am interested in tracking down.

My final vacation read was a collection of William Trevor’s short stories, After Rain, that I found on the free cart at work (librarian benefits: we see donations before anyone else does). I’d never read the much acclaimed Trevor but as longtime bookconscious readers know, I enjoy short fiction. This book was a little sadder than I am in the mood for lately — world, local and family events offer enough difficult emotions for the time being. But I persevered because Trevor really is a master at this form. “The Piano Tuner’s Wives” and the title story were my two favorites. The former opens simply: “Violet married the piano tuner when he was a young man. Belle married him when he was old.” The story goes on to tell of the two marriages, “He had given himself to two women; he hadn’t withdrawn himself from the first, he didn’t from the second.” It’s a lovely story.

“After Rain” is set in in a little “pensione” in a small town in Italy where a woman named Harriet visited for years with her parents, and has fled when a relationship ended. In a rain storm, Harriet takes shelter in the “Church of Santa Fabiola” and looks at an Annunciation, “by an unknown artist, perhaps of the school of Filippo Lippi, no one is certain.” When Harriet walks back to her hotel, she is still thinking of the painting: “While she stands alone among the dripping vines she cannot make a connection that she knows is there. There is a blankness in her thoughts, a density that feels like muddle also, until she realizes: the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape, glimpsed through arches, has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time.” Beautiful. And true — I’ve felt that way, where the connection I was trying to make was just beyond me.

The painting Trevor refers to is this one:

Annunciation
1497
Panel, 176 x 170 cm
Duomo, Volterra, by Fra Bartolomeo and Mariotto Albertinelli

I wrote not that long ago about attending a talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum about another annunciation painting and buying a book abut the exhibit. On Sunday, just before we moved the former Teen the Elder (now nearly 24) out of his house in Boston, we stopped at the Museum of Fine Arts to see the Botticelli exhibit, which included some works by Fillipo Lippi. I’ve always loved when my reading and life intersect.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Nest, Public Library, and The Hidden Life of Trees

We had two snow days and a late start this week, plus as I mentioned in my last post, I’m really getting into my book bingo card. So I read three books!

I had three squares I wanted to fill. The first was “A book from the Books & Brew book lists.” I chose The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. It’s a debut novel that got a lot of buzz last summer, and I really enjoyed it. It’s the story of four grown siblings in New York, the Plumbs, who’ve all been counting on “the Nest” — an inheritance fund their father, who made his fortune in absorbent materials found in feminine hygiene products, diapers, and meat tray liners, set up to distribute to each of them on the youngest sibling’s 40th birthday. Leo, the eldest, is the family ne’er do well, who made a bundle selling a gossip website and has been in trouble ever since. When the book opens he gets into a drug-addled crash, injuring a nineteen year old catering waitress. His mother taps into the Nest to settle his affairs, and the rest of the book is about how the other siblings await Leo’s reparations — Bea, a writer who has been stuck on a dead-end book for years; Jack, an antique store owner who didn’t tell his husband he took out a second mortgage on their summer place; and Melody, who can’t afford the perfect suburban life she is trying to give her teenaged twins.

As the novel unfolds, readers learn about the sibings’ lives and their families, but Sweeney also works in details about contemporary American life – 9/11, the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession, SAT tutoring, gay marriage, the gentrification of Brooklyn . . . . Yes, it’s a book about New York, and that’s both a pleasure and an annoyance, in that it’s fun to vicariously enjoy the city, and it’s aggravating to read about privileged people feeling badly that they can’t keep their summer home or they can’t get away with not filling out financial aid forms or they can’t quite become an “it” novelist while living pretty much free in a dead lover’s apartment and having a job where they’re allowed to work on said novel. A few times I wanted to yell, “Hey, there are real problems in the world.” Still, it seemed possible that was part of the point, and also, it wasn’t enough of a detraction to keep from enjoying the story, which is Austen-like in it’s social commentary and it’s contemporary “novel of manners” sensibility.

Will Leo make good? Will Melody ever figure out what her daughters really want? Will Jack push his patient husband too far? Will Bea notice that her long suffering boss not only admires, but loves her? Just as there’s fun in reading about Jane Austen’s well-to-do characters, I didn’t ever completely lose patience with the Plumbs. My brief quibbles: a few minor characters play relatively important roles but we hardly get to know them. And the final pages skip ahead a year, and at one point even tell us what’s going to happen further in the future, a device I’ve never enjoyed.

The next square I wanted to vanquish was “A book of short stories.” I’d had my eye on Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith for some time, ever since reading that in the time it took her to write and edit the book, 1,000 British libraries closed. Smith wrote the book in part to draw attention to the importance of libraries, and she alternates short stories, all of which deal in some way with words or books, and brief commentaries on libraries by Smith and many of her writer friends. Public Library, Smith says, “. . .  celebrates the ways our lives have been at least enhanced,  and at most enabled and transformed by access to public libraries.” I read it in one sitting, and enjoyed both the fiction and the tributes. It’s one of those books that caused me to look things up and wonder things (How many libraries have closed in the UK? (depends where you look and how you define closed) Why haven’t I ever read anything by Katherine Mansfield? Why haven’t I heard of Olive Fraser?) This was the perfect read on a day when the snow was falling hard and I could sit and muse on the meaning of libraries in my own life. If you like short fiction, the stories are a delight.

Finally, I needed to fill the square “A book about weather or the environment,” so I read The Hidden Life of Trees by forester and conservationist Peter Wohlleben. This is one of those books that compels the reader to lift her head, exclaim, “Wow, listen to this,” and read fascinating tidbits to her family members, whether they want to hear them or not, and whether the only family members in the room at the time are feline or not. (Examples “There is a fungus in Oregon that is 2,400 years old and weighs 660 tons!” and  “There is a spruce in Sweden that is 9,550 years old!!” “There’s a quaking aspen in Utah that has more than 40,000 trunks and is thousands of years old!” “Trees scream!”) I couldn’t get over what I was reading and I will, as many other reviewers have stated, never look at trees the same way. Wohlleben explains the life of trees and their incredible abilities to deter pests and adapt to changes in climate, cooperate with each other and with beneficial partner species, raise their young, communicate, and learn from their environment. As the author says of trees, “I will never stop learning from them, but even what I have learned so far under their leafy canopy exceeds anything I could ever have dreamed of.” I learned so much from this book, not only about trees, but also about the human capacity to understand the world, and hopefully, to preserve it.

And now, on to the square “A book whose title begins with ‘W.'”

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On not finishing books

I’ve written here before about not finishing books and how hard I find that. This summer I’ve not only let go and left books unfinished, I’ve allowed myself free-range grazing in books — starting and setting them aside and returning to them. Why the change? I think this reading style fits the chaos of my life life right now.

One adult child is about to be a senior in college (yes, longtime readers, that’s the former Teen the Elder) and is working from home doing an unpaid internship, which as you can imagine isn’t very gratifying — there are a lot of requirements and stipulations from an organization that not only isn’t paying him, but also isn’t always doing what they said they would. He’s sticking it out but isn’t thrilled, and mostly hopes it will look good on his resume to have completed the internship. His younger sister (Teen the Younger) is going to be a senior in high school, another tumultuous time in life, and she doesn’t feel any more satisfied with her summer. I’m still reviewing for The Mindful Reader column and occasionally for Kirkus but both of those have not gone as planned this summer either — par for the course in journalism, but still an additional dash of unpredictability.

There’s a medical issue in the family, plus all the usual daily life stresses of work, errands, remembering to mail things, carrying on with keeping up the house and the laundry and all that jazz. We also decided to have some long-hoped for work done to the house, mostly outside, but disruptive nonetheless for around a month now. And Teen the Younger decided to completely redo her room (inspired in part by The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up), which has been great, but has resulted in much of her old room moving into the garage and needing to be dealt with. Yes, the Computer Scientist helps, but he’s as caught up as I am in the maelstrom of generally unsettled and unsettling emotions and decisions and stuff out of place because of the work, and a million little things to be taken care of.

So, I’ve started and stopped reading. Repeatedly. I’ve returned more library books unread than I care to recall. At the moment I have two books going, both of which I’ve been reading for weeks: Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends With Yourself through Meditation and Everyday Awareness by Chogyam Trungpa and The Stories of Jane Gardam. Both are excellent. Both can withstand the chaos. Mindfulness in Action was compiled and edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian and is one of over two dozen posthumous works by Chogyam Trungpa. It goes beyond describing how to practice mindfulness meditation and gets into the nitty gritty of what mindfulness is and does. It’s wise and kind and gentle, and very insightful.

If you’ve read bookconscious regularly you know that I love Jane Gardam. I’d read her grocery lists. And I’ve reviewed many short story collections before as well — a good short story, like a good essay or poem, makes me happy. There’s something about compact forms, well crafted, that I find really satisfying. I’m around halfway through this collection and I haven’t read a story yet that I didn’t like. Gardam’s subject, as always, is humanity in all its messy, marvelous glory. Maybe the messiness is what is especially appealing to me, given the way things are around here these days.

Oh, and we have a kitten. Gwen, short for Guinevere. She’s compact and perfectly lovely too, but trying to introduce a kitten to our cat is also not conducive to finishing a book.

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Vacation reading

Last week the bookconscious household visited Isle la Motte, Vermont. We rented a cozy cottage on the west side of the island, with copious views of Lake Champlain and its gorgeous sunsets. We walked, biked, ate large breakfasts of fresh local eggs accompanied by many pork products, picked raspberries, visited farm stands, grilled most of our dinners, made s’mores (a first for the Computer Scientist) over a camp fire, kayaked, canoed, looked at the lovely blue moon, sampled local maple creemees, apples, cider donuts, ice ciders, and beers, and relaxed. It was a really perfect end of summer week, and a memorable family vacation.

I took along four books and ended up reading all of those plus three and a half more on my iPad. It was heavenly. Spending long stretches of time lost in a book brought back my childhood summers and the joyful sense of freedom I felt, reading as long and as much as I wanted.

Most of what I brought had been in the “to-read” pile for some time: Dave Eggers‘ novel A Hologram for the King (funny and touching but felt to me like an overgrown short story), Margaret Drabble‘s novel based somewhat on her family history, The Peppered Moth (Wow! An amazing multigenerational story that’s also a kind of social history of women; I want to read everything Drabble has ever written!), Elinor Lipman‘s essay collection I Can’t Complain (sealed my previous view that Lipman is not only someone I’d like to know but also someone I’d like to be), and Paul Harding‘s forthcoming novel Enon (both devastatingly brilliant, as I expected it would be, and just plain devastating).

The three e-books were: Aimee Bender‘s The Color Master (short stories, which I checked out of the NH Downloadable Books website while giving a demo to a patron at the library a few hours before we left for Vermont because I remembered that Ann Kingman recommended it on Books on the Nightstand; I liked some pieces, including the title story, but didn’t like others), Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway (I had somehow managed not to read this yet, and I loved it), and Katharine Britton’s Little Island (which I’ll review in September’s Mindful Reader column).

The book I started on vacation and finished yesterday, also an e-book from the library, is Anthony Marra‘s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Longtime bookconscious fans know I am generally suspicious of “It” books that the literary industrial complex promotes heavily. I tend to be a contrarian about books I’m told I will love. Besides, with works like Mrs. Dalloway still to read, I’m not interested in every hotshot emerging writer that comes along. But in this case, the hype is justified. Marra is so young; like Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife, it’s hard to imagine how with relatively little life experience he managed to tap the emotional range required to conjure his characters, people of various ages living in war torn Chechnya. Which he didn’t even visit until the book was nearly finished. And like Obreht he blew my mind.

Great literature is emotionally evocative and universally relatable — it takes you so richly into the characters’ experience that it doesn’t matter whether it’s set in a place and time and culture you are unfamiliar with. I’m probably never going to live in a war zone, God willing. I knew only a little bit about Chechnya before I read this novel. But I ached to the core for these people, and Marra’s stunningly beautiful writing had me both turning pages and savoring, even the sections full of violence and horror that in lesser hands would have made me skip. It was especially moving to read in light of the conflict in Syria, as I followed the news and tried to imagine what it’s like for ordinary people caught in a civil war.

I’m really fortunate that I get to read so many good books. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is beyond good.

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Tenth of December by George Saunders

I enjoyed George Saunders‘ book of essays, The Braindead Megaphone and his earlier story collection, In Persuasion Nation.  The New York Times Magazine has already anointed Tenth of December as the best book of the year. In the article making that bold proclamation, Saunders is also interviewed. It’s a very interesting read that gives you the sense of him as human being as well as insight into his writing process. He sounds like a humble and hardworking guy as well as a genius. Even daunted by a) feeling I can’t add much to what’s been said about Saunders or this book and b) being embarrassed to gush about a writer I admire so much, here goes.

The stories in this collection are mostly set in places that seem very much like ours except something is just different enough to give you a slightly off-balance feeling as you read, while you get your bearings in the strange land of Saunders’ imagination. In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” poor immigrants come to America to be “SG’s” — they are strung by a microline through their heads and hang on racks as yard decorations. Other than that, the setting is completely familiar. In “Escape from Spiderhead,” young criminals are sent to a center for pharmceutical experiments in lieu of jail. The experiments test emotion-setting drugs that can temper the amount of love people feel.

In “Home,” which is mostly about a returned war veteran whose family is completely changed (mother has a live in boyfriend and is being evicted, sister married a jerk and has a baby, wife left him and remarried), there is one detail that makes us feel as strange as the veteran does: a store selling plastic tags reading “MiiVOXmax and MiiVOXmin.” Neither the reader nor the characters really learn what they’re for. In “Victory Lap” the boy whose parents are very controlling must place a geode in the yard before they come home. We never learn why.

The stories aren’t really about these weird details. “Victory Lap” is about calling upon your true nature in a crisis — even this boy, whose parents have molded his life so firmly, can find a reservoir of strength in an emergency even though it violates many of his parents’ rules. “Home” is about the futility of war, its impact on the ones who go, and the disjointedness that results when those at home are completely disconnected from their emotional wounds. “Escape from Spiderhead” is a commentary on the our culture’s dependence on and trust in pharmaceutical solutions. In the way other normal human emotions and variances in personality have been made into “conditions” to be treated, Saunders writes of love as a treatable disease.

Other stories are set in places not discernibly different than our own. These are just as moving, tragic even. “Puppy,” which juxtaposes two mothers each trying to do their best for their families, might be the most heartbreaking story I’ve ever read. “Sticks,” in just two pages, tells the story of a man desperate to tell his kids there’s more to him than the emotional absence he’s offered, as he decorates a pole in the yard, his “one concession to glee.” The narrator says, “We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us. Dad began dressing the pole with more complexity and less discernible logic.”

Both “Exhortation,” a story in a memo which captures the strange futility of a contemporary workplace filled with rules, rubrics, and benchmarks, and “My Chivalric Disaster,” about a man working at a medieval re-enactment whose dose of KnightLyfe (a drug that makes him speak in Renaissance style) causes him to act chivalrous to disastrous result, address the ways low skill, low pay work, when combined with unthinking or overbearing management, creates a system in which people live in either (or both) physical or psychological poverty, unable to express themselves and sapped of a sense of self.

The title story is beautiful, strange, and sad, a tribute to the imaginative powers of childhood and the redemptive resources of old age, to the pain of being rendered helpless by illness and infirmity and the reckless hope of youth that drives us to overcome helplessness, to believe in our own big hearts. I can’t imagine a story that better balances those experiences.

I love a book that makes me think and also entertains and Saunders’ writing consistently does that. The issues he ranges over are big and current — he is holding a mirror up to contemporary American culture. But he’s doing it in a fun house, showing us how silly we look with just a slight distortion of the smooth glass we normally gaze into. It’s not a hopeless book though, and there are glimpses of humor even in the most tragic stories. The questions Saunders raises would be fun to discuss in a book group.

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