Nom de Plume

“What are you going to do while I’m gone?” I asked. Steve and I were walking around Seward Park this evening. “Are you going surfing?”

“Well,” he said, “the waves are crap, so probably not. Besides, it won’t be as much fun, you know, alone.”

“Are you saying you’ll miss me?”

A pained look crossed his face. “Uh, yeah. Oh God, I feel ill now.”

I should interject and say this is perfectly normal for Steve; normal declarations of affection make him deeply uneasy. It’s a good thing I’m not very sensitive and that I don’t expect romance and roses because, God knows, I would never get them. His idea of a compliment? When we were going to the opening night of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, I was wearing a vintage sparkly shell. It was one of those 60s sleeveless knit numbers with the beads sewn all over. I came out of the bathroom with makeup and high heels (which happens, oh, once a year), black velvet and this glittery top, expecting him to say something really nice. He looked at me fondly and said, “Ohhhh, you look just like fishing tackle.”

In any case, back to the conversation at hand.

“So you’ll miss me?”

“Uh-huh,” in a monotone.

“Horribly?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Rip out the kitchen cupboards.”

I said nothing. What could I say? That the bathroom’s not finished, the floors aren’t finished, or that all the trim’s a mess? No, I couldn’t possibly say that. So what I did say, after a long moment of silence in which I was contemplating who I could go live with, was, “Uh, so how long will we be kitchenless?”

“At least a month.”

And call me crazy, but there was more than just a hint of glee in his voice.

Or rather reading too much. We such readers take the written word far too seriously. We hunch over our novels and analyze every word, every shift in tone. We scrutinize motivations and examine characters like they’re organisms under a microscope. If you read too much do you become desensitized to the simple pleasure of a book? Or maybe it’s the opposite. Do you become too sensitive and therefore more critical? I don’t know — but what I do know is that Steve is reading Until I Find You and laughing his head off.

I took a couple hours off yesterday and picked up Katie Berry, who was in town. We stopped at Maruta, a Japanese grocery in Georgetown, for sushi and then walked in Kubota Gardens. It was a lovely gray Seattle day, and we gabbed the entire time in the way of women who haven’t seen each other for months. Then back to work.

Well, I go. On Saturday. My mother embarked on rebuilding the ranch house about two years ago, and it’s finally finished. Which means she can start unloading the container that’s been sitting there ever since she retired and got stuff out of storage.

Yes, that’s right. My mother is the only person I know who actually owns a container.

I’m looking forward to it. Not only are all my books there — every single one that I made her save from my childhood — but I’m hoping to find my journals.

I’ve been keeping a journal in one form or another ever since I was twelve. Thee journals from about 18 on are in a box in the garage, but those teen years have gone missing. And I hope they’re in storage.

My early journals were more like scrapbooks, in which I cut and pasted articles from riveting publications like Young Miss and Seventeen in between magic marker entries of which boys I liked. Later, I graduated to antique fountain pens; this was from the same obnoxious phase in which I looked up obsolete words in the OED to put in my English essays. I’m sure these journals, if I find them, will embarrass me to death. All I can hope is that my mother doesn’t find them first.

I can’t help it, before a summary, before anything, I’m blurting out my opinion so here goes:

I was so disappointed.

It dragged more slowly than the donation process and left me colder than a clone who’s completed and is lying on a slab of metal in the morgue. And if you don’t understand that and want to read the book with fresh, unspoiled eyes, read no further.

Actually, it wasn’t that active a disappointment; it was slower and more seeping. Kathy went to school at Hailsham, a private school in the country, where all the students were made to feel special, as though they had a purpose. There are two students with whom she has a special relationship, Ruth and Tommy, who eventually become a couple. Years later, Kathy acts as carer to both. You see, they are all raised for organ donation; they are clones of real people and their sole purpose is to to provide the healthy bits to unhealthy real people.

The idea is fabulous. The problem was the tone; I would characterize Ishiguro as being a master of quiet dissonance, which works so well in Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled. To me, it didn’t work as well here; the characters — with the exception of the manipulative Ruth — the characters seemed flat. Perhaps the slow exposition of the spoiler was to blame; I already knew what it was.

It’s not that I thought it was bad — Ishiguro writes so well. But for a better literary science fiction novel, read Atwood’s Oryx and Crake instead.

For a long time, especially in college, John Irving was one of my favorite writers. A Prayer for Owen Meany remains my favorite, followed by Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire and then of course, Garp. But starting with Son of the Circus, his sprawling familial novels with his trademark warped viewpoint descended into just being bizarre and not very readable. Now, for readers looking for those early Irving novels, there’s Until I Find You, which echoes earlier work.

Echoes being the operative word.

The actor Jack Burns is the son of a tattoo artist mother and an organist father. His father is not part of his life, and until he is an adult, he thinks it’s because his father deserted him. This, along with a somewhat unhealthy relationship with his mother, causes him to develop his “older woman thing.” There is a lot of “penis-holding,” dysfunctional sex, therapy, Hollywood lifestyles and ambiguous relationships … But rather than summarizing its 820 pages, which would be tiresome for both of us, I’ll just let you read the blurb yourself. (Note that Random House says there’s too much stuff to summarize too, and that’s their job.)

Other reviewers have called his novel “self-indulgent” and they’re right ( there is, for example, an untoward focus on Jack’s nether regions and this is the least of it); however, this is not what bothered me. So what did? Rather than standing on its own as a story, I was reminded of earlier, better Irving novels. It was as though he said, “Okay, those other books didn’t work so now I need to return to the formula.”

John Irving’s success has always been in capturing both the mundane and the unspeakable, churning them through his oddly-configured kaleidoscope and then writing what he sees so we see it too. His characters are strange, the situations they find themselves in even more so. And herein lies the problem: Jack Burns didn’t feel like a character; he felt like Irving himself. Indeed, there are sections that are straight out of the author’s own life. It went far beyond using real life as artistic fodder and felt, at times, like an odd sort of capitulation to market forces. And that’s what feels strange; this was a capitulation to readers just like me.

Still original, still a unique voice, I enjoyed the novel. But if you’re reading him for the first time, don’t read this.

1) If my toner cartridge is “at the end of its life,” then why is it still printing perfectly?

2) Why does the kid across the street with a car worth even less than mine have an alarm system so sensitive that it goes off when you pass within two feet of it?

Last night, I was listening to a podcast that talked about Lolita. The content was pretty facile, but can you imagine the furor if Lolita were a new book today? Not only would this administration try to ban it, but Nabakov’s computer would be seized by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security would try to get records of library patrons who had checked it out, and some conservative home-schooling crank would put together a google map of every bookstore that carried it.

So celebrate Banned Book Week; censorship is closer at hand than you think.

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A few months ago, I bought a mid-century couch from the Fremont Market. It’s been sitting pushed up against a wall and virtually unused … until Sunday. This past Saturday, we went back up to the market (where we ran into a couple I vaguely knew from Boise), and I got another mid-century piece — a teak coffee table. This led to getting rid of one cheapo couch for another.

Steve was worried that it wouldn’t go with the house and then realized that we have such a hodge-podge that it doesn’t really matter. What really matters to me right now is getting the floors redone.

In any case, I’m pleased with the two purchases. They go well together. I’m not convinced about that particular rug and the pillows, but those are small things to switch around. No modern monochrome for us!

On another note, we finally bought a new sink and Steve installed it. The rest of the bathroom is still a mess, especially considering that I’ve taken down all the towel racks and need to mud, Kilz, and paint. It just seems so daunting. Nonetheless, Steve wanted to rip out the kitchen cabinets on Saturday.

I have enjoyed other Hilary Mantel novels enormously. I didn’t enjoy this one. In fact, I hated reading it, but am not immune to its strength. And that raises an interesting question about books that are flawlessly constructed, well-written, and even powerful–but that you just don’t like. (Ultimately, it’s the same question of art: should a painting mean something or should it be aesthetically pleasing?) And perhaps this is a testament to Mantel’s skill: she takes you someplace you really don’t want to go, but you go anway.

At its heart, this is the story of two women who are paired together in an improbable way. Alison is a fat, sloppy psychic who has been visited by spirits ever since her childhood, which, by the way, was truly horrific. Colette is a thin, brisk woman who does everything by the book; she went to school, got a good job and married a man who would do. She is unhappy. After her divorce, she ends up on the psychic circuit looking for meaning. Feeling an instant bond with her, Alison offers Colette a job as her assistant.

Although Alison and Colette are absolute opposites — Alison is fat, forgiving, understanding, malleable; Colette is thin, unforgiving, and rigid — they have in common a lack of control in their respective worlds. Alison is tormented by the spirits of cruel men from her childhood, which means she can never move on. Colette is at odds with the modern world that surrounds her. When the two pair up, they give each other a glimpse into another world; perhaps this is what draws them together. The novel charts the time they spend together.

Colette goes to live with Alison, and eventually they move to an industrial wasteland in the middle of the countryside, a move that was calculated to lose the spirits. It works for a while, but ultimately the pasts of each catch up with them. It is only when they embrace their respective ghosts, for lack of a better word, that they achieve an uneasy compromise with the lives they must lead.