Nom de Plume

Gave him a bath this morning–he acted abused but is now free of dog slime from two daycare days at Elizabeth’s frolicking with Koya and Aslan. Or rather, being frolicked given the size disparity.

Joan Castleman decides to leave her novelist husband Joe as they are flying to Finland. where he is to receive a literary prize. The novel flashes back over the course of their marriage and his career. There were parts I found a little tiresome, especially in the beginning as Joan narrates her tale a little too glibly–but it all leads to a shocking end that we are teased with at the beginning, but decide, no that can’t be.

Well, if that’s not cryptic and garbled enough.

Suffice it to say that this was a sly, subversive book. Joan appears glib at times, but this is part of Wolizter’s deft characterization. Joan and Joe come alive. The Wife also has a lot to say about women vs. that whole slightly misogynistic era of male writers who have deeper love affairs with their egos than with their women. You know, the Roths and Updikes that formed such a large part of the American literary scene for too long. For that alone, I enjoyed this immensely. All in all, a recommend.

It’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep. So pissed off about work that I finally just got up.

One of the reasons I wanted to do book reviews on this blog was because I often forget what I’ve read. I find myself at the library, checking books out–only to come home, crack open the spine to the first page and then think, “This looks familiar ….”

It’s one of the hazards of not having a TV and reading really fast.

When you read as much as I do, it all kind of blends together. Every now and then, there’s a popper–something that one actively recommends to friends, instead of saying, “Yeah, it was good,” and the. moving right along.

Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox is a popper.

Set in the fictitious Southern town of Madagascar, The Celestial Jukebox weaves together the stories of an aging Chinese grocer and his slow fall into love with a Honduran migrant worker, a 15-year old Mauritian boy obsessed with American music, a neglected wife and mother of two in an upper middle-class suburb, two farmers, one white and one black, and their intertwined lives, a girl who comes back to visit her roots …

Beautifully written. Hauntingly written. Go read it.

The Mount Holyoke Quarterly article on blogging!

And here are the alum blogs:

Donna J. Albino
The Heretic’s Corner
Mary Pugh Clark’s Photo Blog
Marya Morevna’s Battleground
Nice Person
new, interesting ways to procrastinate
The Sound of Crystal Chimes When Struck
Treading Water
Word Ridden
The World According to Blerg
You think you know, but you have no idea…

I like a regency romance (and anything within a hundred years) as much as the next person, but I’ve noticed an oddity: the best trashy novelists are usually confined to paperbacks, while the crappier novelists get the hardback deals.

Unfair, I say. Especially for this hardback. Unreadable.

It was probably my state of mind at the time, but I finally conceded defeat and returned The Golem’s Eye to the library–only three days late. Somehow it just seemed like too much trouble to bother. I didn’t get past the first chapter.

Minnesota, 1923–The Real Minerva is about fifteen-year old Penny Niebeck, her hardened mother Barbara, and Cora, “the Maagdenbergh woman,” who just moved to her grandfather’s farm and who perplexes the town with a shadowy past, a prediliction for wearing men’s clothing even though pregnant, and an amazing sense of self-reliance.

Barbara is a housekeeper to the town’s richest family, with an impersonal sexual relationship with patriarch Laurence Hamilton. When Penny confronts her mother, they argue. Penny runs off to Cora’s farm, hearing that she needs a hired girl. She arrives in time to call a doctor for Cora, who has just given birth to a baby girl–and she stays. Barbara’s pride keeps her from visiting her daughter; she and Laurence turn to each other for comfort. Penny and Cora develop a deep, complicated relationship with each other and the baby. Then Cora’s abusive ex-husband appears.

By far, the real strength of this book lies in its depiction of the relationships between mothers and daughters: Penny and Barbara; Cora and her daughter; Cora as a mother figure to Penny. Although at some times overwrought, this was the first book in a long time that I actually got teary over.

The story would have been more satisfying without the neat little bookends of the prologue and the epilogue. Also, I sometimes found the character of Cora a little forced.

How can you not like a heroine you first meet as she wanders upstairs to an attic bathroom wearing her grandmother’s wedding nightgown to slather mayonnaise on her face and strew rose petals in her bath?

Cutter lives in a crumbling Florida mansion with her sister Ginnie. Her grandmother has just died, and Ginnie and their brother are trying to sell the house–and Cutter is waging war against the realtor: she dribbles honey for ants, leaves scads of hair she is braiding Victorian style in tangled masses on the coffee table. Meanwhile, she waittresses and writes obits in the vain hope of buying her siblings out.

Her sister is having an affair with her married English professor, whose wife Elizabeth suffers severe agoraphobia and stress. When Elizabeth shows up at the house after an anonymous phone call tips her off about the affair, Cutter and Elizabeth forge an odd relationship–eventually culminating in a way for Cutter to keep the house and Elizabeth to assert her own independence.

Sly and offbeat, fun for a rainy sort of day.

Now you see it.

Now you don’t.

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