Nom de Plume

There are certain women writers that I lump together in my mind because of a certain sensibility they share: Margaret Atwood. Carol Shields. Anne Tyler. To this list, I add Alison Lurie, a writer who in my opinion doesn’t get enough credit. Many of her real killers are dated, often set in the sixties and seventies, with old-fashioned “hip” dialogue and some social constructs that the modern woman may not have a lot of patience with, or even sympathy for. Nonetheless, her stories still whiz along, and she brings a deep sympathy to her characters.

The Nowhere City was another of my Barnes and Noble freebies–remaindered reprints of a book originally published in 1965. Paul and Katherine Cattleman move to Los Angeles from the academic world of New England. He has failed to get a teaching position, and takes a year-long job as a historian for a large corporation. Katherine is unhappy about moving to LA, reacting against the city’s fakeness with acute sinusitis.

Paul is not a faithful husband; he never has been and feels no guilt about it. And the things Katherine hates about LA–the sense of not having a history, not being real–are the very things he loves. He enters into a deep affair with a “beatnik” who lives in the slum of Venice (in itself interesting to me, because the landmarks described are familiar to me, but it’s a different world from the gentrified Venice Beach of today).

Yet Katherine embarks on her own journey, complete with an affair with a psychiatrist who is estranged from his starlet wife. Lurie captures the arc of the Cattlemans’ marriage through Katherine and Paul’s affairs with others—and the person who is ultimately changed by the California experience is Katherine; she who hates LA comes to embrace it wholeheartedly, while he who loves it–at least at first–is the one who remains static. I loved that the unhappy wife is the person for whom vistas open.

Lurie also captures the essence of LA as I remember it: artificial, lacking in history, a place where normal arbiters of taste and morals are somehow placed in abeyance. I can’t remember everything I’ve read by Lurie, except for The War of the Tates. This was a much better book. And I’ve got another of hers to read, so stay tuned.

One of my free Barnes & Noble books from the $25 dollar gift certificate. Martha has a miserable job as a fact checker for a women’s magazine, a series of hypercritical boyfriends, and a crippling self-esteem problem. While staying with her best friend’s parents on Fire Island, she stumbles into a group of goddess worshippers communing on the beach—and gets sucked into the community when she saves the leader from drowning. Throughout the book, Martha is involved with the rituals–Talking sticks, sweat lodges, man-bashing gatherings–but keeps a watchful eye on her own involvement. She wants the peace she thinks these women have, but knows deep down that they are just as petty and jealous as anyone else.

There were parts of this novel that had me laughing out loud: Prose wickedly satirizes the rituals, the goddess worship speak, the ubiquitous man-bashing. But there’s something liberating in Martha’s journey into and out of this feminist-on-steroids group. Good insight into the relationships women have with each other, the reader really gets a keen sense of Martha’s self-hatred in the beginning. Recommend.

Fast forward a few decades to a world in which autism has been completely eradicated by treatments given in the womb. Lou Arrendale belongs in a select group who was born too early to be completely cured. Nonetheless, he is doing very well as a high-functioning autistic: He has an apartment, a car, a fencing class, a crush on a “normal” and a good job at a pharmaceutical company where he and others are valued for pattern recognition skills.

Then he gets a new boss who resents what he calls preferential treatment for the autistic employees, and makes a threat; they will be fired if they don’t participate in a trial program reversing the effects of autism and making the same person, only normal. But what is normal? Why is normal better? And how could Lou be the same person if he weren’t autistic?

The Speed of Dark is a thoughtful, intelligent book that I would highly recommend in addition to–and even instead of–A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Moon has created strong, sympathetic characters, and provided the reader with rich insight into the workings of Lou’s brain. In turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this is one of the better, more thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while.