Category: Books

When life is busy, tiring, frustrating, hectic, or just too much, I turn to fiction.  August was like that.  August was fiction month.

With the exception of one volume of short stories, I read novels in August.  The stories were by Caitlin Macy, whose novel, Mrs. I read in July.  Macy is an astute observer of a certain subset of the culture, of the striving, competitive, intellectual aspirational class, at least in its east-coast variation.  She captures the striving, the uncertainty, that combination of need, drive, and guilt, the petty jealousy of it as well.  Some of the stories resonated deeply with me, others not so much, but I could see how they lead to the novel, a novel which in a way was a series of linked short stories.

When I was at my mom's I read the first three volumes of the Leafy Hollow Mysteries by Rickie Blair.  One of my tasks was to connect mom's nook to her new wireless network so she could read again, and the first novel in the series, From Garden to Grave, was the first book she downloaded.  As she read and laughed she mentioned that I should read it, and so I did.  It was a free offering on my kindle as well, and there was something nice about reading together.  But I read much faster, and although the novel was well enough written, it was not deep or difficult, and the characters are a bit simple and over the top.  I read the first two novels that afternoon, and enjoyed them, the way one enjoys a piece of cake, as a lovely wonderful, too sweet, but still enjoyable treat.  The next afternoon we were in the emergency room, and after I browsed through my stack of shelter magazines I downloaded the third volume, A Branch Too Far. It was interesting, light, silly and entertaining, just what I needed to rest my nerves and wandering thoughts.

I had another book with me that afternoon in the ER, but didn't feel able to settle into it.  I might have wished I had Andrew Sean Greer's Less, which was a light, charming book, sweet and humorous but packing a fair amount of wisdom in its soft and gentle exploration of the mishaps in the adventures of one Arthur Less.  It is the kind of book I could read again when I needed a bit of cheering. I could read it again because I am simply the kind of reader who picks up books again and again, but also because it is the kind of book I love, a meandering exploration of character.  Obviously not for those who are looking for a fast-paced, plot driven novel.

Instead I had Phil Rickman's second novel in the Merrily Watkins series with me.  I had read the first one, The Wine of Angels, early in the month and loved it.  This is not high fiction, and a fair portion of the characters and settings are not deeply explored, but I loved the self-doubting main character, Merrily Watkins, a fairly newly minted Episcopal priest, posted as the new vicar in a small town in Herefordshire, in the west of England, and soon to become a deliverance minister (not yet, not in the first book).  It is an interesting mix of things, a gentle study of the currents and whims of Episcopalians and the church, about the way we struggle with the pressures of modernity and tradition on many levels, and in many ways,  and a murder mystery with a hint of the occult, but mostly here it is an exploration of intuition and the unexplained, those borderlands between what we can touch and what we don't understand, and the ways we try to explain them. I like the way the book explores the thin spaces of spirituality, as well as Merrily's struggle with these places and her own intuition, the battle between intellect and spirituality, between science, superstition, and faith. I think the series looks promising; I'd like to grow with these characters, but again, this is not a novel for those who want action,  or those who want their answers served in black and white.

Which leaves me with the two "big" novels.  I'll start with The Tin Drum, which I had never read, but which I had also assumed I would read since childhood.  My father had a copy and he encouraged me to read it more than once.  Having read it now, I think I am happy that I didn't read it in my teens as there is so much I would not have understood.  I am not convinced that I understand it now, but it is not a difficult novel to read. It is often laugh-out loud funny, but it is also deeply sarcastic and often very uncomfortable.  I completely believe that it might be considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, in any language, and I am glad to have finally read it.  I have a harder time telling you what I think about it because nothing I can say captures the complexity and power of the book and its wonderfully allegorical story.  What does keep popping into my mind, and I admit that this comparison may be a bit on the shallow side, is a line from Caitlin Macy's Mrs.:

The truth was, people didn't want to go back in time to stop Hitler, they wanted to scoop up Manhattan real estate on the crazy cheap, see Dylan in a café, maybe.

 But Macy writes a much softer version, more attuned to our naive America sensibilities, where we don't really want to believe that humans are basically crass self-interested beings, or at least we want to pretend like we don't believe that.  The truth is that most people, most of us, are more concerned with our own immediate needs and wants than the grand issues of the world; most of us in crisis think only of what we need to protect for ourselves.  We grow outraged from the safety of our own security, we will fight if the fight doesn't inconvenience us, or endanger us too much.  The truth is that at some level we all want to be Oskar Matzerath, eternally 3 years old, eternally getting what we want and making the world pay for not giving it to us.  But eventually we learn that 3 year-olds are not taken seriously and we adapt, eventually we are forced to grow up, as Oskar decides to grow up, even though it almost kills him.  The process of growing up does that, it destroys some part of our essential self, and we too have humps, scars, burdens, deep buried secrets that deform us.  If we survive we might also find art, find beauty, but no matter what course we take, the blind cook, death, awaits us all.  This is a powerful, even beautiful novel, it is also simultaneously a fun and a brutal read.  I will read it again.

It strikes me that the books I will save and read again can be either light and silly, or profound and enlightening, difficult even.  I make no apologies for that, we are each of us a complex blending of the self we were born to be and the experiences and cultures that have shaped us.   Perhaps that is why people's collections can be so interesting, but often it is the why that makes them interesting more than the what.

One book I will not read again is The Water Cure.  I emoted about it extensively here.  It is beautifully written, and as a first novel, it is absolutely stunning.  I will look for Sophie Mackintosh's next novel.  But as powerful as the novel was, I felt let down by it in the end.  I felt deceived and used, subjected to a promise, an emotional wrenching even, without closure, or any further understanding or empathetic growth.  I went in to it expecting to love it and instead the novel left me with overwhelming sadness and no recompense.

This was not because the book was sad, or even that there were no happy answers.   I have just finished reading Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room, which I got from the local library.  I expected to dislike this book.  I had not intended to read it until it appeared on the Booker list.  And yet, although it is unquestioningly bleak, I did not find it depressing. I loved it.  I loved the voices of the characters, I don't particularly want to meet them, become besties, but Kushner's writing was successful in building empathy, in bringing outrage and understanding and some insight into lives that are totally different from the lives of most of the readers of this book, different from the lives most of us can even imagine.  I was touched, outraged, sad.  Yes probably manipulated as well, but mostly I felt like I was beginning to see something differently than I had been able to see it before.  Yes Romy Hall's life is bleak.  The terrible truth was that it was always bleak, the lives of most of the characters in this novel were bleak and imprisoned before they even committed a crime, and this is what I think Kushner portrays so successfully.   But I would also be naive to think that some of my perceptions of this book were not partially shaped by my having just finished reading both Mackintosh and Grass,  

What I don't understand, and perhaps there is no need, is why some books make me feel inspired, touched, enlightened even, while those same books might bore a friend to tears, or make another feel manipulated, as I felt manipulated by The Water Cure.  There are books among my all-time favorites that are abhorred by friends, and vice-versa.   I am intrigued by this, by the complex multi-faceted ways we experience and are shaped by the world, and by the ways the world speaks to us.  Increasingly it is the discussions about the ways things affect us, or do not, that I find interesting.  I am reminded that CS Lewis said something along the lines of "there are no good or bad books, only good and bad readers".  I don't have the book with me in the apartment, so I am not certain of the quote, but I generally agree, at least to a point.  I admire anyone who can write a book and get it published.    I'm not even sure I see being a bad reader as a particular criticism.  We are all bad readers at times.  We all bring biases and expectations into everything we do.  Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, we may not be the right reader for a book, but that doesn't mean that there aren't people who love that book, whose lives are changed.  Reading is a relationship.  Writing, be it a letter, a blog, or a book, is also about relationship.  Would that we could all learn to share our opinions, explore our differences, and find even new respect in the world.  Books can help us open doors.  Let's keep them open.

 I read more books in June than I have read in the two months since, not that this is a contest or anything.  But I promised an accounting, and so it seems I should get to it, if for no other reason than I will be annoyed with myself if I don't.  

Actually, the first three books were finished in June, but none of them were completely read that month.  I'd been working my way through
Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Introducing the New Testament since October, as they were primary texts for members of the EFM group I was mentoring and My Neighbor's Faith, was the last text for the the fourth year portion of the group. This was my second reading for each of the books.

Working down from the top left corner of the collage, the next layer consists of non-fiction.  I found Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education and Deborah Davis' Strapless fascinating. I don't have to agree with the author to enjoy a book, or to find it edifying, although both authors engaged in some interesting and enlightening analysis.  Crow Country was charming and I would have found it engaging had I not leaned that I really have little to no interest in corvids.  In fact, Crow Country and Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone were my least favorite books of the month; the former because, well, crows, and the latter simply because I found it too predictable for my peripatetic brain.

My favorite novel was Warlight.  I wrote about it, along with Little Fires Everywhere and The Immortalists, here,  I thoroughly enjoyed The President is Missing, even though I am not usually James Patterson's target audience and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry surprised me with its depth. I wish I had written something about it.  This was the first time I had read anything by James Lee Burke, whose prose built a powerful sense of place,  but although I felt the characters had potential, I was not convinced I was interested in continuing to build a rapport beyond that first weekend's read. 

So a good month, with books for every mood in which this reader happened to find herself. 

Two more Booker-listed novels have arrived on my pile: one I ordered and the other is from the library so that one will have to jump to the top of my list forthwith.  In the meantime, I have read only one of that first trio of books, Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure and honestly I'm not quite sure what I think.  I hoping some clarity will be revealed as I write but I also realize that is a somewhat tenuous platform on which to begin a book post.

I had read about the book before the Booker longest came out, so it was there floating somewhere on the horizons of my mind and I recognized those early reviews when I started reading the book.  The phrase feminist dystopia, and comparisons to Margaret Atwood are bandied about;  and I had read that the novel tells the story of three girls whose parents have fled society after some terrible disease or plague and are raising their girls separately, to protect them.  But in the end I felt all these vague reassurances are more about selling the book than the book itself.  Yes it is the story of three women, and yes their parents have raised them in isolation, but everything else is in question. In that sense the novel is a psychologically suspenseful mystery, but also one that, unfortunately, can come to no good end.  I suppose I see shades of dystopia in the book, since the book is about a community that is slowly revealed to be truly frightening, but this community is a family, perhaps was once a cult, but that aspect seems to be in the past, and I certainly see nothing I want to call feminist in this novel; in fact I am not sure feminism is the author's intention at all. 

This is a novel that lured this reader in with gorgeous, often lyrical, and sometimes hypnotic prose.  As it is told from the perspective of the three women, the voices vary, and the perspectives are sometimes confusing.  It is a story that both draws you in and leaves you oddly disquieted, simultaneously entrancing and disturbing.  

As I mentioned earlier, the novel is told from the perspective of the three sisters:  Grace, Lia, and Skye, mostly from the perspective of Lia, and very little is heard from Skye until near the end. I suppose in a sense the girls represent the three elements:  Grace, earth, solid but also unyielding.  She is angry, bitter, withdrawn, and at times rock hard, and almost flat in her affect, she has built a steely resolve around herself, a resolve that does not want to be broached.  She is also pregnant. She of all the women in this book frightens me the most, and yet in the end, when she reveals herself far more fully, when her reserve is finally fractured and she explodes, like a volcano rising from what appeared to be an otherwise placid plain, my heart broke.

Lia, water, is the most emotional, and her emotional life is often out of control.  She has endured years of abuse, all the girls have, to rid her of her emotions, but it has not taken, and yet she has therefore also never learned to control them, never learned what love is or isn't never really learned how to relate to people as people.  Of course not.  Who has she ever related to but her parents and her sisters?  In some ways Lia makes me incredibly sad, her words are full of longing and one senses that she wants nothing but love, to be held and cuddled.  She is desperate for love, and she would do anything for it.  But love has always been something that is doled out piecemeal to those who obey and submit.  Lia obeys and submits, but she is not broken in the obvious way that Grace is broken, her willingness to submit is a form of defiance, and she never quite finds the love she seeks.  She will go further, do anything, if she thinks it will mean she will get love in return, but she doesn't really know what that means.  Because she is constantly denied the affection she craves, she becomes more daring, more desperate, and therefore far more dangerous. Like water she can be calm and placid, but she can also be a raging storm or a tidal wave. She struggles with why she cannot control her emotions, yet she doesn't understand  anything about them, she is simply an uncontrollable emotional force.  Skye is the youngest, the most ethereal, and yes, you guessed it, the air.  She is referred to the most obliquely, until the end, when much is revealed and things fall in place.

But here is the thing that I struggle with.  We are told that the family has fled a great illness, that people waste away, and they have created a healing space where people come to be cured.  But it is slowly revealed that the "cures" are really tortures, and the precautions the girls are taught have nothing to do with reality, with really preventing disease.  They are rituals yes, often brutal rituals.  But wrapping oneself in muslin, scattering salt, forced near drowning and suffocation, slicing the air with a knife, these things will not protect you from actual disease.  Slowly it is revealed that the family is a cult.   Yes they have fled a terrible reality, but one wonders if it is a reality that far removed from our own, or if instead people have internalized fear and anger and rage to a greater idea than we like to admit. The women who are shrinking and dying have not caught some contagious disease, but it is their fear that is eating them alive.  It is as if the author has glommed onto the underbelly of our discontent of the fear and anger in society and wondered what would happen if our fear manifest itself physically as disease and death?  There are hints throughout the book that the outside world is not so much devastated, no so different from our own.

Slowly it is revealed that these three girls have been removed from society to grow up in their own patriarchal cult.  The father, called King, is obviously the head, although it seems to be the mother who is the most sadistic, who does most of the dirty work of forcing the girls through rituals that come dangerously close to torture.  The girls, who think they are growing up to be strong, are strangely broken, and really incapable of living with other people.  They are also weak, malnourished, with rotting teeth, the opposite of resilient, completely dependent on an artificial structure, and, unfortunately, on continued self negation and torture.  

They are women, not girls. Skye, we learn, is 18, although she seems to behave as one much younger..  One wonders if there would have been hope for her, but the others, Lia and Grace, at  28 and 30, are probably too old to escape their pasts.  In the end, a brutal end, they escape with Skye.  There probably is no real hope for them other than escape; if their parents fled the world in horror to "protect" them, they must now avoid the world, because in the eyes of the world they have become horror themselves even though they had no control in their making, or unmaking. Like much of the book, there have been hints all along, hints the world is not what they think, hints that this place is not what they think, the these girls are not who we think.  Grace remembers coming to the island, which is not an island after all, when she was 2 and Lia a baby.  Grace tells us that Sky is 14 years younger than herself.  We might think Skye, playing childishly is still quite young, but Lia tells us early on that it has been years since Skye has grown.  The hints are there, like a hidden reality, floating beneath the surface.  Secrets waiting to be unmasked.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that there is no  resolution here.  The men come; but they are shadow men.  This is not surprising because the story is told from the perspective of the sisters, and they have no concept of men except as a shadow-thing. The ending is really not surprising if one has been paying attention, but it is profoundly sad.  I did not find it disturbing because it is sad; I found it disturbing because its sadness is so open-ended, as if there is no hope from dependence and destruction. It is disturbing because it reminds us how much we are shaped by our environments, the women who come to the cult hotel to be healed, believe they are damaged by their weakness and fear, and so they are.  The girls who grow up in the cult are damaged even though they may believe themselves to be strong, when their weakness is revealed they have no place to escape. The women who come to be healed are damaged because they internalize their fear, believe themselves to be weak.  Everyone in this novel is shaped by what they believe their world expects them to be.  There is no self-actualization here, And in this world, where one believes because one is told what to believe, without question, without the ability to trust one's own perspectives and experience, without the knowledge that one can be strong in and of oneself, there is nothing but sadness and despair. 

I suppose I haven't written a review that would encourage anyone to read this book.  Yet I do not regret reading it.  I do recommend it, but only if one is aware of what one is getting into.  Sophie Macintosh seems to be trying to say something important here, and I applaud the Booker committee for recognizing this.  She doesn't quite pull it off.  But the novel definitely made me think,   I'm not sure we can ever stop crazy people from running off and torturing their children, would that we could, but we we do really need to think about the harm we do to others in our various stereotypes and expectations.  Although in a way the idea of stress causing disease and wasting seems far-fetched, I am not sure it is as far-fetched is it sounds.  Perhaps I am giving Macintosh credit for being more dystopian than I originally realized, and perhaps even being feminist through an anti-feminist sort of metaphor, reminding us of the dangers of blind neglect, of acceptance of the status quo, of complacency.  Perhaps I am thinking that we are really a long way from accepting each other for who and what we are, as individuals and as fellow humans on a shared path.  Perhaps it is time to think about all of that.

Time for a book update. I had been thinking that all I wrote about was books, but it isn't quite true. I had been thinking that all I thought about was books, which may have been slightly more correct, but mostly I thought about books I want to read (Booker longlist) and moving books.  When it came to actual reading, July was very light.

Three books.  Three very different books, but I enjoyed every one of them. 

I've discovered something else as well.  Remember how, in the last post, I stated I would surely discover something that should have been brought to the apartment but got stored instead?  Well I stored all my journals, including my reading journal, up to the most current (new) one, and most of my notes, the passages I copied out, are in storage.  I shall have to rely on memory.

Mohsin Hamid:  How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.. I loved Exit West, and thought it would be good to read some of Hamid's earlier work.  When I saw this at McKay's books, I snapped it up.  Obviously the same author, writing about one thing, while pretending to write about another.  The book is very witty, at times sarcastic, and very wise, and I can see how it could be off-putting to some.  It is written under the pretext of being a self-help book, but it never quite achieves that goal, nor is it meant to, it is a parody of a self-help book.  There are no proper nouns in the book, and two parallel narratives. The protagonist, "you" is both the narrator, who rises from poverty to great wealth, and the reader.  The other main character, the "Pretty Girl" runs a parallel but different course. The book appears to be about how to achieve great success, but it is actually about the way achieving success and the path to that achievement corrupts us, and what is lost in the end.  Although the books take place in Asia, in a world that appears quite corrupt, and we in more developed western countries may think it does not apply to us, Hamid's lessons are universal in that the pursuit of power corrupts, and money is also power, but what the heart really wants is to love and be loved. In the end it is a love story, a love story in a time of seismic social change, and this reader found herself in tears.  

Deborah Levy: Hot Milk.   Deborah Levy's Hot Milk was short-listed for the Booker a couple of years ago but I just now got to it.  I enjoyed the novel, but I think there is a lot I didn't get, a lot going on beneath the surface.  I can see how it is the kind of novel that people who dislike literary novels would despise.   Half-Greek British girl goes to Spain with her disabled, controlling, hypochondriac confabulist of a mother.  The prose is vivid, and sometimes hallucinatory.  It does not tell the story directly.  But it is still a great novel, about coming of age, about what we gain, but also what we lose, when we unloose chains.  Through beautiful and often intensely metaphoric prose riddled with parallels to Greek Tragedy the author throws in Brexit,  economic disaster, a warm Spanish paradise that is a horror of toxic waste, sexual freedom, dependence and independence.  A lot is made of the themes of those who serve only themselves, vs those who serve others, male and female, and the dangers and traps in both extremes.  I found the novel to be at times cryptically elusive and yet easy reading and entertaining, often even quite funny. I could read it again. Perhaps I should read it again.  But I probably won't.

Caitlin Macy: Mrs.  If I picked up this novel in a bookstore I would probably think of it as one of those quick reads about the imperious and overly arrogant one-percenters who are due for a fall, and I am certain there are readers who chose this book for that reason.  They would be disappointed, because there is very little action and no really shocking upset.  I read it slowly and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I think the writing rewards attention, as the author is deft at subtle detail, the kind of thing you would miss if you were skimming through quickly. The beauty of the book would be lost. Yes it is about the one-percenters, parents of children in an exclusive pre-school in Manhattan, and yes there is some cultural upheaval.  But the book is more than that.  It is a satire, but a satire with an undercurrent of humanity.  The story is almost an illusion.  What is important here is the characters, and the stories they tell themselves, both the primary characters, and those in the backdrop, deployed here as a kind of chorus.  Actually, although the story occurs in a specific socio-economic setting, the characters, and aspects of their mores and their behaviors, their assumptions about each other, can be found in any place, in any group.  Perhaps I have a soft spot for the  book because I have known too many women like these women, but I suspect we all have, if we allow ourselves to look beyond the superficialities.  The settings may be different, the level of privilege, but we are not so different.  Macy is a deft observer of humanity, and she tells the story through the voices of her characters, interleaving their stories and their perspectives.  Each character is portrayed tenderly, with understanding, and yet also witheringly.  Each character, in telling the story, reveals themselves inadvertently, showing that weakness or darkness that is meant to remain hidden, often even from themselves, with a subtle turn of phrase.  I found this to be great satire because it slips in so quietly, catches one by surprise, if one is paying attention, and therefore hits directly like a needle to the heart.  It was an enjoyable read, with some really great lines and a few truths.  

I don't know what August will bring, reading-wise.  I don't have any of the Booker novels yet, so I can't make predictions about what I will or will not read.  I will however, look back, and come up with a list of the books I read in June.  Leave no rock unturned, after all.