Nom de Plume

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 …

I was feeling rather vindicated when I googled “underrated novels” and ended up on this article that cited both Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai and Calvin Baker’s Dominion right off the bat. And while I ended up getting a whole bunch of other books that I haven’t read off that list, I have one to add: Christopher Wilson’s The Ballad of Lee Cotton.

I picked this up in Powell’s having run out of everything else on our camping trip. It looked interesting. Hoo boy. You don’t know the half of it. I was riveted until three in the morning, huddled in my sleeping bag with the Petzl on my head. Why, oh WHY isn’t this better known? Why aren’t all the reviewers singing its praise? Seriously this is up there with The Last Samurai and Transmission and all those other wonderful, unforgettable novels that make whatever is on the New York Times Reviling of Books pale in comparison.

So. Lee Cotton is born to a black mother and an Icelandic father. He looks white. I mean, really white. Which is a problem in the South, pre-Civil Rights. But that’s not all of it because he can hear what people are thinking without them saying a word. He hears voices, a gift he gets from his obeah grandmother who lives in New Orleans. But he manages to get by–until he starts rolling around in the hay with a white girl whose father just happens to be the most rabid Klan member around. Who finds him out. Who beats him up and throws what he thinks is a dead body into a railroad car, which takes him to a hospital in a large city.
Where of course he passes as white, and thus starts a new chapter in his life. And this is just the beginning of Lee Cotton’s story, and of his many transformations into Lee McCoy (as in “the real McCoy”).

Part Zelig, part John Irving at his most wonderfully weird, and really, probably the best novel I’ve read this year, this is a rollicking story that is seriously clever. I loved it.

There are some books that become inextricably linked with a time or a place, and even looking at the spare cover (with the Today’s Book Club logo on it that almost dissuaded me from reading it entirely) makes me think of our Oregon trip and camping next to a peaceful lake in the pine trees. Ahh, those halcyon days. Wait a minute–oh, yes, that was the site where we had the generator on one side and three full generations of alcoholics on the other who only shut up after they lost and rediscovered their car keys twice and the camp host came over thrice.

But anyway.

The Schwartzes live in Bellwether, Connecticut, a place that is exactly as it sounds: staunchly middle class, white, relatively affluent. But underneath all this perfection, of course, lurks something else (insert Jaws music). Bernard, the father is ineffectual and clinically depressed–if affable–after his wife leaves him and moves to California. Chris and Cathy, the two children, muddle along until Bernard combines pills and ends up in a coma. No one knows how to deal with it. And so they don’t–even when Bernard awakens with the mind and motor skills of a child.

This was an odd novel. I liked it. It certainly wasn’t one of those blend-into-the-rest-of-them sorts of books. I could say that it represents the breakup of the American nuclear family, or turns the Holden Caulfiend coming-of-age on its head, or even that it’s about the never-ending ability of Americans to remake themselves. And while none of these are false, what really makes this book is the fact that Sharpe manages to convey all the heartbreak of the Schwartz family without ever losing his sense of humor or irony.

As the queen of procrastination, I naturally picked up this jaunty orange-colored book thinking it would be a witty romp through the hours of the day. And it’s certainly a romp through the hours, but, well, there’s no way to say this nicely, so I’ll just say it: It’s just not that witty. Or funny. Or even that interesting, to be brutally honest. Sure, Hodgkinson makes some interesting points and observations (among them some admittedly pithy observations about daytime vampires), and backs everything up with quotes from other, more famous loafers. But ultimately, I abandoned this. After all, if I need lessons in idleness (which let’s face it, I don’t), I have a much better role model.

Well hello …

This summer, I’ve wended my way through a long series of completely forgettable books–aside from Harry Potter, of course– and so haven’t felt compelled to post reviews of anything. But my luck has turned! A few weeks ago, Steve and I went downtown and hit Elliott Bay. Lo and behold, I hit the kiddie lit mother lode. Actually, I only bought two (the rest are on hold at the library), and one of them was a complete dud (Adam Gopnik’s “The King in the Window”). But Jeanette Winterson’s “Tanglewreck”–well!

The time tornadoes are raging when Abel Darwater pulls up to the old house Tanglewreck, where Silver lives with her horrible guardian aunt. He’s looking for the Timekeeper, a mysterious clock that will allow him to control time forever. He whisks Silver and her aunt off to London, still trying to wheedle information out of Silver–who escapes into the underground world of the Throwbacks. Along with her Throwback friend Gabriel, Silver goes on a quest to find the Timekeeper, where she runs into clever plays on words, imaginative representations of particle physics, a commentary on commercialization, and a whole host of other adventures that are surprisingly sophisticated yet still palatable to a younger audience

I don’t really know how to describe Tanglewreck, except to say that it’s a little “His Dark Materials,” a touch “A Wrinkle in Time,” and a smidge “The Phantom Tollbooth.” But we all know that comparisons are odious, and this is wholly its own imaginative work. Highly recommend.

Which I reread last night, curled up in bed with my Petzel headlamp because Steve was asleep. It was instant childhood revisited. I always pictured Harriet’s bedroom and tiny bathroom as my bedroom and tiny bathroom in our house in Bucharest. It was at the top of a large three story house, and I was the only one up there in a rabbity warren maze of narrow halls and small rooms.

As a kid, it always outraged me that Harriet got blamed for other people reading her notebook. My feeling was always that yeah, they’re curious, but if they ignored the PRIVATE signs emblazoned on it, they deserved what they got. Pure and simple. On rereading it, I still felt that way–Ole Golly was the only adult who makes any sense on what she has to say about it–but more than that, I was struck by how absent Harriet’s parents are. Actually, all the parents are pretty absent, from Sport’s checked out father to Janie’s ineffectual mother. It’s kind of like Charlie Brown adults and their mwah mwah conversations; the parents are there, but they’re not present.

Which all leads to the question: Is Fitzhugh showing the separate world that children inhabit, or is she making a statement on all these parents? I can’t tell. Can you?

One has certain expections from the author of Le Divorce, L’Affaire, and all those other les nouvelles — or should I be correct and say les autre nouvelles? You know, a wry skewering sense of humor, deft characterization … It’s far from flufff, but all les nouvelles have a certain lightness of touch. Lying Low, on the other hand, is completely different.

Written in 1978, Lying Low seems to be written by another person entirely. It’s really very interesting. There’s no question the novel is dated; it was rather like reading Alison Lurie. Still, it has a power all its own, and though I’m not going to say I liked reading it (it was really quite painful), it was also discovering the origins of a voice: more pensive, more concerned with the “life and death” matters.

The novel is about four people who share a house in a dusty California college town. Theo and her photographer brother Anton. Ouida, a South American woman dodging immigration, and Lynn (an assumed name) who has been roaming the country anonymously ever since she blew up a lab and killed a scientist.

Lynn is, of course, the lynchpin of the story: we follow as her separate identities start merging together and she realizes that the limbo she lives in is unsustainable. at the same time, however, she’s not the only person in hiding; instead, she is in some way emblematic of them all. The end is truly shocking, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.

One final musing: I wonder if Dana Spiotta read this before writing Eat the Document

What I’ve read this week:

Joanna Martin plows through the records, letters, and other documents of her ancestors, the Fox Strangways, to deliver a portrait of women and children of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Then we plow through 356 very long pages of Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House.

The book is divided into two main categories. The first describes the 4 women of the 4 generations of women her book covers. The second category is broken into different sections, such as education, household management, servants (so difficult to find in those days), and so on. The most interesting section, to me at least, was on health (though it STILL didn’t answer that burning question of what Georgian women did without Monistat). It’s pretty amazing that she had all these resources on hand to go through for firsthand accounts of what life was like.

But herein lies the problem, at least for me: There were fascinating characters and riveting snippets of information, but the scholarly tone laid a dull finish over everything. The bulk of the book was taken over by excruciatingly long lists of who earned what, the furniture in the inventory in each room, the exact cost of coal for umpteen houses during the winter of 1797 … I am sure there are far more scholarly people than I who delight in these details, but I wish they had been footnoted instead.
Also, I got the decided impression that the title was tacked on by the publisher to make this more appealing from a feminist perspective. And while it did favor women, the link between the title and the content often felt tenuous.

So in a fit of bookmooching, I got two Patricia Wrede novels (very entertaining froth and by the way, I loved The Enchanted Forest Chronicles). I found the first one, Caught in Crystal, tiresome. But The Raven Ring was a very nice way to pass an evening. Basically, a woman of the Cilhar, a very fierce tribe, goes to collect her mother’s belongings after she is killed under mysterious circumstances. Amongst the things is a ring that has been passed down in the family for seven generations. And everyone seems to want it. Our heroine Elerat teams up with a callow magician and an honorable thief to solve the mystery. Of course she does, and of course she finds love during the process.

Apparently, this is the sixth in the Seneca Falls mystery series, featuring a librarian sleuth in the 1860s.

And I am hooked.

Glynis has the town constable at her beck and call, and a dashing loner named Jacques Sundown in her bed (that is, when he’s around). And she’s the best sleuth in town. So when an upstanding citizen is murdered, the constable whisks her into the middle of the investigation, where she investigates and solvest he case.

This was such a great read less because of the mystery itself (though that was good too), and more because Monfredo does such a great job if infusing history into the novel. At no point is she didactic, but she makes the events of the day–the Civil War and the burgeoning women’s movement–and integral part of the story. I suspect I will be reading all of these.

I miss Steve when he’s gone — but at the same time, I relish the thought of climbing into a freshly made bed and reading til the wee hours of the morning. Remembering how much I loved Jacob Have I Loved as a child, and feeling the need for some comfort reading, I clambered into bed last night with a paperback and a snuggly little pug. It was strange; I had read this so often that the words echoed in my memory, but I was taken anew by its power. I cried. Honestly, I did. There were two main parts that got me. The first was at her grandmother’s malevolent whisper, “”Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated” and she realizes it was God who was speaking. The second was when she bursts out at her mother when they’re washing windows, and her mother tells her that she’ll miss her more than she misses Caroline.

From Masha Hamilton via The Elegant Variation:

The Camel Bookmobile made its first run almost a decade ago. Three dromedaries trudged through dusty, arid northeastern Kenya near the border with Somalia to bring a library to settlements so tiny and far-flung they’d become nearly invisible; places lacking roads and schools, where most people had never held a book between their hands and where they lived daily with drought, hunger and disease…

The Camel Bookmobile books are primarily in English. The children are taught the language in outdoor “classroomsâ€? under acacia trees for the younger students, indoor classrooms for the older students. They particularly like children’s storybooks, though all fiction is also sought-after, as well as books about math and astronomy, biology and other sciences. …

… The Camel Bookmobile librarians told me their patrons also really appreciate the sense of connection they get when a book is signed from a particular place and person. It widens their understanding of the world. So send a favorite book or two, sign your donations with your name and city, and add a note if you wish.

So come on all you bleeding heart liberals, send a book:

Garissa Provincial Library
For Camel Library
Librarian in Charge, Rashid M. Farah
P.O. Box 245
Garissa, Kenya

And know that you’re in good company.

Nonfiction Readers Anonymous weighs in on the wonders of Susan Cooper, and reminds me to reread the set for myself this season. We did, however, buy the boxed Dark is Rising set for Steve’s nephew last Saturday. It was a hard decision for Steve. You see, he’s always been the ultra cool uncle–especially after he gave Ben the very expensive skateboard he was riding when he busted his Achilles heel tendon. It’s hard to top that gift.

“He doesn’t like to read,” Steve protested. We were standing in Elliott Bay Books.

“Yeah,” I said, “that’s a problem.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t get him books then.”

“No, we should. I meant that not liking to read is a problem. We need to fix that.”

Which may sound snotty, but really, I do believe in foisting books on kids. At the worst, the books sit unread on shelves. At the best, they read them and discover wonderful new worlds.

I’m not above bribery either. We slipped in a note that said, “Don’t let your mom catch you reading the dirty parts.”