Nom de Plume

My last encounter with Jincy Willett led to this deep and insightful review. Fortunately, The Writing Class fared a little better; I enjoyed it. Amy Gallup, once a celebrated author, hasn’t written in years–that is, if you don’t count scribbling on the margins of really bad student writing from the workshop she teaches at the local community college or her lists of strange words that she posts to her blog late at night. Business is as usual: there’s a new crop of workshop attendees with varying degrees of talent, the woman who has taken her class five times already is back; and Amy settles into the comfort of teaching. Only all of a sudden, one person in the class is doing malevolent things to the others in a sneaky, underhand sort of way. And then there is a murder. It’s one of them. Who is it? Who is next to be murdered? And how does Amy and her students handle it?

Okay, I confess; I figured out who is was pretty early on; there was only one person it could be. Still, it didn’t detract from the story at all, which was mystery, writing advice, and the story of Amy who slowly lets herself be drawn into a community and writing again after a long, dark and very depressing existence.

Sammy Brady lives a quiet life in a small Illinois town. Sequestered from the rest of the world for reasons both of his making (a hinted-at tragedy in his past) and not of his making (his homosexuality), his basset hound Stump is really the only living thing he has–until his recently widowed neighbor barges into his loneliness with a loneliness of his own. Together, they build a dog house modeled after a ship, at which point Sammy is interviewed by a local newspaper writer–the great nephew of the young man he loved as a teenager, the person who died, the person whose death he hugs to him as his fault. His neighbor’s granddaughter appears, his long-lost brother with a mysterious connection to a militant organization resurfaces, and Sammy is drawn into a slow, inexorable descent into his past as his world widens enough to include other people.

This was a gorgeous, gorgeous book. It is lovingly written; we are drawn into characters that if real, we wouldn’t look at twice. I loved this. Highly recommend.

I’ve been meaning to read this for ages and ages, but just finally got around to putting it on hold at the library after a jaunt to Elliot Bay a couple weeks ago, where it was still being touted as as a staff pick. For those living under a rock the basic story is this: Woman teetering on the brink of 30 and stuck in a dead-end job decides to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year and blog about it. Woman gets huge blog following. Woman discover self while losing her mind trying to hit the deadline. Woman MAKES the deadline–and gets a book deal.

So you can see that of COURSE I wanted to read it, even though I don’t have a huge blog following and am never going to get a book deal out of the random, rambling mess that is Nom de Plume. I particularly wanted to read it because I am working my way through a Madhur Jaffray Indian food cookbook. (Slowly, that is.) Actually, I’ve been cooking a lot lately, and I’m getting to be a decent one. But anyway.

Julie and Julia was fun. It was a good book to read last night as Xanax wended its way through my system. (I won’t bore you with my anxiety issues, only to say that I was so relieved to learn that I am not about to have a heart attack and that pharmacology is a wonderful thing.) Her descriptions of food and cooking are wonderful; I particularly remember one passage musing about liver and how it’s something you have to give yourself over to. But her descriptions of her lack of a sex life, her wacky friends, her dead-end job, and so forth weren’t nearly as riveting. And this was the problem for me: The book was too much like a blog. Or rather, it was too much like a blog that was padded with personal details to make it into a book. The only thread of continuity was the food. Everything else seemed kind of random.

Part of me feels churlish for not just adoring this book–as she puts it, Julia Child saved her life and it’s wonderful beyond measure that she was able to quit her temping jobs and write full time (and there’s no question the girl can write; she’s funny and articulate). Still, when all is said and done, and the book covers closed, and I have moved on to make two batches of soap (may chang and laurel for one; vetiver, ylang ylang, violet leaf absolute and clary sage for the other), my reaction is, “Eh.”

There’s something about the holidays that makes me want to reread old childhood favorites. The feeling was especially strong this year, probably because for the first time in YEARS, we actually had a real Christmas tree. A proper one, not like the pathetic little Charlie Brown Christmas tree that we had a few years ago (and that Mr. Demo subsequently planted in the Japanese garden and proceeded to bonsai). Anyway, this year it was Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. I loved those as a child. LOVED them. So I reread them all, and lo and behold, the library had the final four books in the series (Betsy was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Betsy and the Great World, and Betsy’s Wedding), which I had never read and enjoyed thoroughly.

The library also had Emily of Deep Valley, which I had never heard of. So I read that one as well. And I have to say that much as I loved the other books as a child, Emily felt a lot more real than the ever-popular Betsy Ray. She is a bit of an outsider, lives in the “old-fashioned” house with her grandfather. Unlike the other kids, she can’t go off to college. Still, she comes into her own, finding her place in the world–and it’s a charming story.

I don’t know any little girls to give these books to, but if you do, a boxed set would be a great gift. That’s how I got mine.

After writing histories of other emotions–anger, jealousy–the topic of happiness should be a snap for author Sally Farber. But of course, thinking about happiness (and whether you’re happy or not) is the surest way to succumbing to the deep, looming realization that of course you’re not. So she does what any self-respecting writer would do; that is, she procrastinates, rewrites, procrastinates some more, and has a wild affair with a self-absorbed artist. I liked this novel. Recommend.

Relaxing social strictures and therapy are doing wonders for us as a society–but I sometimes wonder if they’re ruining the contemporary novel. I mean, what is there to fight about these days? What provides the tension? Nothing. Instead, the focus turns inward; the protagonist fights against himself (or discovers something, or whatever). And if it’s not really well done, then all the reader (well, this reader anyway) can think is, “God, this person needs a shrink.”

Which is what was running through my head as I read the soap opera-like Free Food for Millionaires, the story of Korean-American Casey (along with her friends), who graduates from Princeton, fights with her family, goes 24k in debt on mainly clothes, takes a secretarial job because she only applied to one investment banking house, goes back to school, takes out massive student loans to go back to business school, gets an internship, works her ass off, and then ends the novel giving up on business school because she “just can’t.” I guess it was supposed to be that hopeful note at the end of the novel speaking of personal redemption through self-discovery. But I found it tragic because it just all seemed so stupid.

And this is the thing. I am down with the tragic heroine. Madame Bovary? I’d have an aperitif with her any day. Lily Bart? She is my PEEP, man. But while Madame B and Lily B do stupid things, we still understand, our hearts rip apart as we read, hoping that this time–finally–things will turn out better. With Casey? I just want to shake her. So is it 1. the writing (I confess, this was a riveting read with Casey and all her friends)?; 2. the fact that I never really LIKE Casey; or 3. that we have completely different expectations from the modern novel? I suspect there’s a little of 2 in there, but perhaps a whole lot of 3. And maybe it’s why I’ve really been into mysteries lately. (Just worked my way through all of Donna Leon and Martha Grimes.)

I read this while we were in Rockford over Thanksgiving, and to be honest, I can’t remember that much about it except for the fact that the protagonist’s aunt used laurel soap, which sounded lovely and refreshing, and reminds me that I want to order some laurel essential oil to make the soap for myself.

Now that I’ve refreshed my memory, I do remember this. It was your typical coming-of-age story, only it centers around a Syrian girl growing up in 1970s Indianapolis. She starts out as a strict Muslim, finds she needs to go outside her community and religion to find herself, and ends up striking a happy medium. Blah blah. Sections of the book were howlingly funny–I remember chuckling on the plane–but Kahf lost me on long passages of political and religious commentary. It was one of those books in which you ask yourself, “Okay, now that she’s written about herself, where does she go from here?”

Which is all to say that this was okay, but nothing spectacular.

Arthur Blume is a mediocre creative writing professor–and an accomplished serial murderer. The novel takes the form of his “true record” after he has been caught and is in prison; Blume is outraged that he is depicted as a monster even though he calmy states that he has killed 17 people and attempts to set the record straight. Alternating between his childhood with a psychotic mother and the story that precipitates his being arrested, it’s well-paced and thoroughly creepy. Blume is a cold, punctilious man, yet we still have sympathy for him. Ironically, it is Kinder’s success in depicting him that brings her into dangerous territory; it invites comparisons to that ultimate in sympathetic villainy, Humbert Humbert. And of course, one loses. His voice sometimes falters too, particularly when it comes to talking about women, and I couldn’t help but imagine the author sitting at a desk at a loss for words. Indeed, the footnote explaining the typical behaviors of serial killers shed a better light than his own explanation. But credit where credit is due: It must be hard to get into character, and 90 percent of the time, this is convincing.

I think this might be the year that I get back into blogging regularly. I kind of lost patience last year, for a variety of reasons. But now I have a new three-column template that I’m finally happy about (except for the fact that it has fixed columns)–and I’ve decided that I’m going to start posting book reviews again. And of course, I have this huge backlog that looms larger every week. So first, I need to play some catch up.

Last year, there was a plethora of books about England, starting with Edward Rutherford. He writes these long, sprawling tomes that span centuries. They’re a little like Valerie Anand’s Bridges of Time series , only in a single volume. I started with The Forest, continued with Sarum, plodded through London, and then lost all patience with The Princes of Ireland: The Dublin Saga (which I include here despite the fact that it’s not England). Reading these is fun and like a little history refresher–but they’re also disjointed because they consist of a story in this time period, then a story in the next, and so on. Some of the sections are really short, and I often felt that just as I was getting into them, they were over.

Anyway, I then read my way through a whole bunch more books set somewhere in the long span of English history. Philippa Gregory, Diane Norman, and so on and so forth. They were fun and entertaining, but not really much more than that.

Two stand out.

First, Tom Bedlam: A Novel (George Hagen), which tells the improbable, but no less compelling for it, story of a Victorian boy who starts out as the son of a factory worker who is plucked from obscurity by his grandfather, educated, sent to medical school, and eventually ends up in South Africa. I enjoyed this Dickensian story mainly because I really grew to like the characters. It didn’t even bother me that Tom’s later years aren’t nearly as informed by his early ones as they should have been.

Second, Mistress of the Art of Death (Ariana Franklin), which managed to be both a thriller and historical novel–as well as surprisingly literate for either genre because it starts off with a twist on the Canterbury Tales. When children are brutally murdered, people start accusing the Jews–auguring ill for the crown’s coffers. Henry II sends off the Salerno for the best coroner in order to determine who the murderer really is. And instead of a man, they get a woman. The 25-year old Adelia sets of for England under some duress, and she finds the place to be brutal. England is not sure what to make of her either. Of course, she solves the mystery, finds some love along the way, and pretty much every other plot point required–but this was very fun and truly a joy to read.

A few years ago, Steve’s mother Pam pulled out this book that Steve wrote when he was in the second grade. It cracked me up, and she gave it to us. I’ve been meaning to post it to the blog for eons. I was looking for stamps the other day and found it. It’s really very sweet, though still very funny. (“I like your baby anyone”??) Also, it’s clear that Steve used up his lifetime store of compliments very early on. Apparently, he had a crush on his teacher. And finally, he won an award for it. So with no further ado …