My monthly bookpost, with quotes and commentary on everything I've read lately. In this edition, the truly wonderful Handmaid's Tale, Chuck Norris's truly terrible Black Belt Patriotism, and many things in between, with much food for thought found in good and bad alike. Plus, a contribution from Kos's own contributor James Alexander Protzman...
Little House in Jesusland: Vein of Iron, by Ellen Glasgow :
Ever since she was too little to lace her own shoes, Ada had wondered what it meant to be poor. She remembered, too, the very moment when her wondering began. It was when she was five years old, and Grandmother had taken her frock of yellow sprigged calico to give to the poor McAllisters, who lived up the road. She had loved her yellow sprigged frock, and she had hated to give it away. When she had cried, Grandmother, who was rummaging in her closets to find clothes to put in a basket, had reproved her and said she ought to be glad to divide with God's poor. "Are we poor, Grandmother?", she had asked. "Not so poor," Grandmother had replied, "as the poor McAllisters." "What does it mean," the child had persisted, "to be poor?" "It means," Grandmother had answered, "not to have enough to eat. It means not to have enough clothes to cover you." "Oh then, we are not poor, Grandmother," Ada had cried joyfully. "We have two bags of cornmeal in the storeroom, and two sides of bacon in the smokehouse, and a patch full of sweet potatoes in the garden. And all of us," she had added in triumph, "have our new red flannel petticoats for next winter." Then mother had dropped on her knees, crying, while she folded her in her arms. "You're right, darling," she had said, "we aren't really poor, and we have much to be thankful for."
Glasgow's book is an American masterpiece that brought out waves of heartfelt rage, pathos and gratitude in me, sometimes all three in quick succession. It tells the story of the Fincastle clan of the Virginia Valley, Ada and her father, John in particular, from 1910 until 1935. They are kin to my Scots-Irish ancestors, and I feel their wildness, stubbornness and traditionalism as though Glasgow's words leap from the pages straight into my blood.
My sister in law is re-reading the Laura Ingalls "Little House" series right about now, and I couldn't help comparing Vein of Iron to those books, especially in the beginning, when Ada is young and indulging in the same rural farmhouse chores of the time. Ada's world, however, is not in Ingalls's midwest, but in the mountains, surrounded by a savage Calvinism that infests the town and family with viciousness where the religion of Ingalls inspires only sweetness. The story opens with a group of children taunting the village idiot boy and putting dung in his cap; Ada has the first of many epiphanies as something in her abruptly realizes the cruelty of their behavior; she gives her hat to the boy to replace his dirty one...and is scolded by the preacher for it. John Fincastle used to be the preacher, but he gave up the church before the story began, having sided with common sense and reason over superstition, and so he is now barely tolerated by the community as some sort of crazy radical. In a scene that almost defies belief, the marital and career potential of Ada's true love are enthusiastically destroyed, with his own parents as willing participants, and Grandma tells Ada to shut up and welcome the loss as a test of faith. Meanwhile, the area happily sends the best of its youth to get butchered in WWI, for they approved of a righteous war, and what war could be more righteous than the war to defend little Belgium? And yet, just when I was ready to throw the book down screaming, an act of kindness or charity, even the thoughts of resistance to injustice left unspoken by Ada and John, would bring calmness and balance to the narrative. And however bad it gets, it is not quite the worst it could be.
The chapters about the Great Depression are positively heartening in comparison to what comes before. A Fincastle might say, "A depression is simply when everyone else has to live the way we do." The vein of iron in the title is the strength that runs through the spirits of the Fincastles, from the righteous, Jesus-crazed Grandmother to the insolent, headstrong son Ranny, but most especially in Ada and John. They alone are the ones who are completely themselves, and who do not bow down to prejudice. There are times when I envy such extreme strength, just a little, in those who have it; Vein of Iron reminds me that such strength is only developed though endurance of severe, severe hardship, and that a little softness is a luxury to be savored. I loved this book, and hated it, in that order.
I Go Like the Maven: The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips :
Despite the mutual disclosures, the illusion of second-date intimacy, even his role as a muse for a song that was winning plaudits, he couldn’t meet her because he wasn’t her equal. Though he dreamt of her, she had no shortage of equally awe-crippled fans. And as a spinning fan, his appeal was near zero: a middle aged fan is not a prize, any more than a three year old fan. The Rolling Stones—senior citizens—could hardly enthuse that a nation of toddlers now complained that they couldn’t get no satisfaction. She would get none herself from meeting him, at least not yet.
She was—as he had once intended to become—a machine: fuel in, art out. She required regular infusions of something rare: feelings she could process in whatever artistic blender she carried within her, to extrude as art. And, he thought with mounting excitement, if longing and anticipation were materials from which she could forge her music, then he could provide her with something of value. He could feed her fire; she could sing about fire; he would understand his own fires in turn; she would see in him a man of alluring fire; a chain reaction might ignite, maybe not extinguishing for years, if he didn’t present her with a mere man too soon.
The too-bold eyes in the burka
I’m the one in the mask
The fencer, the cop behind one-way glass
Looking at you, looking at you.
This book contains some of the richest language I’ve seen in any book this decade.
The plot is a nonentity; nonsense in which two people who are made for each other spend the duration of the book NOT reaching out, NOT meeting, NOT doing much of anything through a combination of wussy-ass cold feet and improbable coincidences. Normally, I hate such plots. Never mind. In this case, it’s incidental. Having an actual plot to The Song is You would be like sticking flying buttresses on the Great Pyramids, or acting talent onto Jessica Simpson. It would distract from the actual treasure.
What The Song is You is really about is language and characters. There are descriptions to send chills down one’s spine, from the locked boxes in assorted hearts to album cover art ranging from the cliched to the brilliantly original, from the behavior of dogs, to the most beautiful, disturbing interior decoration in any fictional apartment. The characters run the gamut from the Irish, redhaired rocker Cait O’Dwyer, far and away the sexiest female I’ve encountered in any 21st century novel, to the autistic brother whose life was ruined by a disastrous championship run on Jeopardy, to throwaway, one-paragraph barflies and grocery store customers.
The various forms of communication between people who barely meet face to face, from internet messages to telathon phone calls to messages in song lyrics mass marketed for one person’s ears, make for innovative storytelling and character development. I can barely find it in me to describe the joy, the uplift, the dizziness, the heartbreak, the philosophy evoked by a simple boy/girl story in which almost nothing happens. Highest reccomendations to a literary gourmet feast that guides the reader down the oldest of old paths and takes her where she’s never been before.
Monte Pyschel’s Flying Tourists: The Seasick Whale, by Ephriam Kishon:
The Valley of a Million butterflies!
Wonderful green pastures...flowers...oak trees...everything...
Except for one thing.
"Where", we shrieked, "where are the million butterflies?"
With a hoarse shout the guide turned around and tried to run back dodging our people, but the rearguard caught him in a flying tackle and pinned him to the ground.
"They’re busy right now," the man panted, "asleep..."
He put a trembling hand into his shirt pocket and gently pulled out a dead butterfly:
"That’s what they look like," he stuttered. "If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all..."
We inspected the specimen. It was a well-developed male, brown with yellow wing tips. Left wing damaged. The participants crowded round the butterfly and looked at it, deeply moved. I asked the guide how many tourists a year were coming to the island? He estimated them at a million in the butterfly season. I stepped aside and with my pocket knife carved the following message into a gnarled old oak tree:
"Tourist, if you come to Sparta, tell them the last butterfly died fighting the Byzantines."
When the guide saw that we had no intention of lynching him, he recovered his poise and washed his hands of the whole business. No one knows, he stammered, why they gave that name to the Valley. As a matter of fact, no butterfly ever comes here, they all drop out exhausted on the way. We asked him what they had done to keep the place so scrupulously butterfly-free? What was the secret? DDT? Spraying from the air? What?
"I don’t know," the poor guy mumbled. "Maybe once in a blue moon a butterfly strays this way, but he quickly gets bored and flies away."
For purely humanitarian reasons we gave him a tip. He burst into tears. It was the first time this had happened in all his years in the Valley of a Million Butterflies.
On the way back we tried to locate at least a few flies or mosquitoes, but there were none. Trudging down the mountain we remembered those scoundrels who, with their overflowing enthusiasm, had goaded us on our way to the Valley of a Million Butterflies.
Then we met a large group of tourists panting uphill.
"Well," they asked, "See any butterflies?"
"It’s fantastic!" we answered, "Billions of butterflies in all colours! Take some sticks along, they might attack you..."
For all my gushing over The Song is You, which I was urged to read aloud by the person who recommended it to me, it was The Seasick Whale that I actually chose to read to my family. I couldn’t help it. It was my designated graze-of-the-month book, the short work divided into bite-sized vignettes that I intended to take to work and read in short bursts while on line or waiting for something, and I got stares from laughing out loud, and just had to share one bit after another.
Kishon is an Israeli in the 60s, on a tour of Europe and America with his wife, reacting to the usual culture shocks and official indignities of vacation travel with stoicism and subtle/absurd Jewish humor. You never quite tell where reality leaves off and Kishon’s laugh-so-you-don’t-cry imagination takes over. He invokes the muse to describe the ordeal of crowded trains in Homeric epic prose. We meet the Italian grocer’s widow who erects an enormous bronze equestrian statue of her husband, his former customers, immortalized in white marble, raising their arms towards their hero; the Swiss policeman who makes Kishon take his trash back out of the litter basket ("Kindly take back that thing! This is a brand new bin. Let’s keep it clean!"); and the Englishmen whose good manners escalate the "no, no, I insist—after you" doorway ritual into murderous violence.
I’m trying to recall the last time I laughed so hard over a travel journal, and nothing else comes to mind. The Seasick Whale is a work unlike any other. Highly recommended.
What a Difference a Year Makes: Singularity, by William Sleator :
He was standing on the metal chair, brushing cobwebs out of the back corner of the ceiling—the walls were still thickly draped with them. I had cleared about one square yard of floor; the rest was black with insect bodies.
"Where’re the keys?" I said.
"Right there on the table."
I took the keys and let myself out. Shading my eyes, I looked around for Fred. Then I bent over to get the bags, and the door slammed shut behind me.
"Darn thing!" I said, and unlocked it again.
I stepped back inside. "We’ve got to do something about this door, it’s a real—"
My voice died. Barry wasn’t standing on the chair. He lay on the cot in his underwear, asleep, his mouth half open, his eyes closed. His clothes were piled on the floor beside the dresser. There were no cobwebs anywhere, and the stone floor was clear of bugs, except for a mountain of them near where I stood at the door.
Barry had heard me start my sentence. His eyes fluttered open and came to rest on me.
There was pale stubble on the lower half of his face.
An instant later Barry was out of bed and had me pinned against the wall. "Where the hell were you? How could you leave me locked up in here all night?"
The Redhead, who had read and reread this old favorite many times, recommended it to me. At first, it seems like a standard YA fantasy, about twin boys exploring the house of their recently departed eccentric uncle, finding otherworldly skeletons and rooms in which time does strange things. Midway in, however, the book takes a surprising turn that I won’t describe in depth due to spoiler concerns, but it turns out not to be so much a kid’s sci fi story as a tale about inner space, the realms and hidden boxes within the mind, and the theme becomes much more mature than what the first few chapters would lead you to expect. It is a new twist on the process of growing up. Recommended.
Spinning chaff into more chaff: The Writing Class, by Jincy Willett :
Who was garroting the orphans of Glandmoor? Could it be...
RODNEY PLANK, glowing young barrister, whose family tree has more than one rotting branch? Or...
HERMIONE FLANGE, spoilt socialite, with an insatiable appetite for heedless thrills? Or...
TIFFANY ZUNIGA, lovely, headstrong suffgagette, whose ideological convictions perhaps masked...a more sinister orthodoxy?
The more Amy thought about it, the more she came to believe that only a writer, or an aspiring writer, would behave in such a literary way. And look at the attention given to style and substance. No two forays alike. You had the oral assault, the whispered phone message. You had the visual, the dreadful cartoon. The crude, high school bully boy attack on Marvy, and the cutting malice of the poem. If the entire performance were just that, a work in progress, Amy would have to give it high marks.
On the back of the jacket, it seemed like a great mystery puzzle. The protagonist teaches a writing class full of misfits of varying degrees of competence, and one among them is a psycho who plays pranks and then kills...and the clues to the killer can be found in the writing samples discussed in the class.
Except that they can’t. I wasted way too much time reading the suspects’ attempts at writing, and there are no clues, not even in the real culprit’s offering. Further, the characters are two dimensional cutouts: the asshole doctor and lawyer, the class clown, the young hopeful who might have real talent, the emo, the pathetic lady who really just wants to make friends. They have little in common, and it’s hard to see how they of all people would end up forming bonds with one another that would last longer than the class.
A lot of the book is filler...Willet fills it with jokes that "Amy" puts on her blog between classes. Lists of "novel hybrids" like 20,000 bottles of Beer Under the Sea and Gone with the Windows for Dummies, which are cute but have little to do with the story. Finally, although it is possible to narrow the suspects down to three or four by process of elimination, there is no hidden clue that really identifies the culprit, which is a real letdown because this is one of those mysteries where the puzzle is the whole thing and everything else is just details.
Mostly Subdued on the Southern Front: A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway :
We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be the most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Sometimes on a slow news day the book journals trot out the old column with snips of bad reviews that the critics of the day gave to the most enduring classics ever: "Ha, ha! That loser called Moby Dick a boring fish story with more trivia about whales than anyone would want to read! Can you believe it? Guess Melville showed HIM up, eh?" And so, I, who am not even in the same leagues with the professional critics who get lampooned there, would have to be nervy beyond belief to dare to pan Hemingway, right? Yeah, so what. I’m a special snowflake, marching to the beat of a different kazoo, and just because I hated something doesn’t disentitle you who might find it wonderful. In fact, I’d appreciate it if any Hemingway fans out there took a moment to explain to me what makes the rest of the literary world applaud while I scratch my head and wonder what all the fuss is about. ‘Tis charity to show.
Ask anyone to list the top ten American authors ever, and the odds are good Hemingway will be on it, right up there with Hawthorne and Melville and Twain and Cather and Richard Wright. After two attempts, I have failed to see the point. The Sun Also Rises (April 2009 bookpost) meant absolutely nothing to me, while A Farewell to Arms is a reasonably good war story, but nowhere close to the best I’ve read.
Hemingway is said to have invented the clipped, concise prose which has been copied by so many other authors that it is no longer distinctive. Having read pretty much all of Robert B. Parker, I have to keep reminding myself that Hemingway did it first.
The most jarring thing is that the narration is so calm and deadpan that to me at least it saps the excitement and action out of the war story. There are attacks, explosions and war wounds, horse’s ass officers and brutal, stupid privates, cold blooded, senseless killings, an escape down a turbulent river clutching a log, a tragic star-crossed love story with sex and death...and it’s all described with about the same intensity as telling the time. The death of an important character, which should be devastating, is punctuated with the observation that it is raining outside, which might be meant to underscore the tragic pointlessness of the death, or the numbness of the bereaved; to me, it just underscored how little depth there was in the main characters to begin with. By the end of the book, I felt I hadn’t really gotten to know them at all.
A Barbecue Eastern: A Bell for Adano, by John Hersey:
Tomasino was alarmed by the shots. "You have come to shoot me," he shouted, springing to his feet. "I knew there was a trick. You want to kill me."
But Major Joppolo calmed him. "That was just to get rid of the crowd. I don't want anything except to send you out fishing, Tomasino."
Tomasino said, "There is a trick," but he sat down again.
The Major said, "Tomasino, we will need about half a dozen boats. Can you help arrange this?"
"To whom will the tribute be paid? How much will it be?"
"You won't have to pay any tribute to the Americans, Tomasino."
"No protection. No tribute. I do not believe it. And how much tax must we pay on the gross weight of our catch?"
"There will not be any tax on your catch, Tomasino. You will only have to pay the regular taxes. It is true that your profit will be limited to fifteen percent of what you take in. The rest you must spend in wages to your fishermen and upkeep on your boats."
"No protection, no tribute, no special tax. You are making fun of me, American."
"Why should I make fun of you, fisherman? It is my job to run this town. I consider it my job to keep the people of this town alive. They haven't enough to eat. I want fish for them. I want you to go fishing. Why in the name of God should I make fun of you?"
Tomasino stood up. "American," he said, "I begin to think you are different from the others."
The contrast between Hemingway's WWI Italy and Hersey's WWII Italy could not be greater. A Bell for Adano is every bit the masterpiece that A Farewell to Arms is supposed to be.
It is the flip side of one of those old Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns in which the new sheriff is given the impossible task of cleaning up the remanants of the most corrupt town on the frontier, and who not only succeeds but wins the love of the girl and the admiration of all the decent townsfolk. Here we have the American Major Joppolo, put in charge of a provincial town in newly occupied post-fascist Italy, with the same effect. Fascists have conscripted the young men of the town, placed a corrupt Mayor over them, and melted down the bell of their 700 year old clocktower to make bullets (imagine the effect on an ignored, remote American community if some Edward Arnold type bought up the land that housed the one little tourist attraction that put their town, barely, on the map, and destroyed it to put up a Wankermart mall, and you'll have a sense of the demoralisation Joppolo is dealing with when he inherits the mess). The central drama of the tale concerns Major Joppolo's efforts to obtain a replacement bell with a good sound and sufficient history to take the place of the original.
Joppolo is the kind of soldier who makes an American proud of America. He combines the wisdom of Solomon with the kindness of Mr. Rogers and the quiet determination of John Wayne, and so of course he has to spend as much effort getting around his superiors to get what the town needs as he does winning the trust of an occupied peasantry. The scenes in which he dispenses justice are the best.
The Italians with their wild gestures, heavy-lidded simplicity and easily roused emotions occasionally are reduced to potentially offensive stereotypes. Not having seen a village of this kind myself, it's hard for me to judge. It is, after all, a culture shock book. In the author's own words, it is meant to illustrate what America is able to accomplish abroad, and what it cannot accomplish. I went away wishing very much that President Bush's advisers had read A Bell for Adano before deciding to overthrow fascist Iraq and "win the hearts and minds" of the people there. Failing that, I wish the folks on the ground had read it during the occupation. They would not only learn a lot, but have a wonderfully comic, poignant and suspenseful time at it. Very topical, and enthusiastically recommended.
White Belt Ideology: Black Belt Patriotism, by Carlos "Chuck" Norris :
A high school teacher named Jim came home too tired to talk to his wife. His wife, Susan, then told Jim a story about a man, who went to breakfast with his buddies. The man ate his favorite omelette, then afterward gathered up some crumbs in a bag. For lunch he ate a turkey-tenderloin pie and a huge salad, from which he gathered up a few crumbs after and put in another leftover bag. When he came home that night, he handed his wife and two boys the little bags of leftovers. Susan said, "That's the way we feel when you come home with nothing left to give. All we get is leftovers. I'm waiting to enjoy a meal with you. Hoping for time to talk, laugh and get to know you, longing to communicate with you the way you do every day with the guys, but all we get are doggy bags. Honey, don't you see? We don't need leftovers. We need you."
Contrary to popular belief, I am not opposed to clasically conservative ideas. I want the government to be accountable for the tax money they spend, and to spend it in a way that gives the American people value for their money. I think the Bill of Rights is not multiple choice, and that the Second Amendment deserves as much respect as the others. I love classical culture and values--just look at all the Dead White Guy authors I read and discuss. And a lot of "old fashioned values" such as courage, respect, thrift, putting one's own children first...is anyone really, consciously AGAINST those things? My problem with today's right wing is that they no more embrace the best of conservatism than modern liberals embrace John Locke. They spend money to make LBJ blush, the only difference being that they don't even have the guts to raise taxes to pay for what they want and take the heat for their choices...they'll make the NEXT guy pay for it. They aggressively war against science and learning, denouncing intelligent people as "eggheads", "elitists", "pointy headed intellectuals". They only TALK about "family values", urging their idea of virtue on other people while they themselves indulge in activities involving same sex prostitutes, controlled substances and diapers.
So when Carlos Norris (who changed his stage name to Chuck because a Spanish-sounding name was evidently not American enough for him) aligned himself with the crackpot right and started talking about giving out roundhouse kicks to liberals, I started making jokes about why Barack Obama is more badass than Chuck Norris:
Chuck Norris's hands are registered deadly weapons. Barack Obama's hands have the nuclear code!
Chuck Norris can carry his weight in ammo. Barack Obama can carry 28 American States plus DC!
Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer; too bad he never cries....Barack Obama has cured cancer, because his election made Chuck Norris finally cry!
Chuck Norris can kill a mall full of zombies...but Barack Obama can talk them down!
I impulse-grabbed Black Belt Patriotism from the library in large part because of my brother in law, who enjoys Chuck Norris badass jokes. In fact, it was my brother in law who made the single best insight we got from the book: Chuck Norris isn't so bad; he probably only wrote half the book.
It looks like more of the same old right wing crap, especially on the book jacket. The courts are controlled by liberal activist judges. The ACLU is trying to close your church. Tort lawyers are ruining America. Gays are stealing your marriage. Here's how to take your country back blah blah blah...on the inside, there's more heart than that. Norris lists eight things that he says are wrong with America, and devotes one chapter to each. Not listed as one of the eight, but mentioned in snide asides throughout the book is the old rightist chestnut that we're all too dependent on the government for everything and we should be more self reliant. Of the eight things he lists, fully six of them are things that any American with a family could do, if she agreed with Chuck and wanted to do them, without the government being involved in the slightest. Things like studying American history, being good to your family, being religious, not having an abortion, getting in shape, tuning your moral compass. But here's the thing: Norris advocates getting the government involved in those things, the very things government is least needed for! If you squint one way, it looks like Norris is more concerned about OTHER people's values than his own and the reader's. Squint another way, and (most of the time) he's directly urging the reader to do set her own house in order, and it's when you squint that way that the book succeeds.
Is Chuck Norris schizophrenic? No, I agree with my brother in law's assessment. He had some conservative publishing house (Regnery Publishing, Inc) publish his book, and they had a ghostwriter salt Norris's original work with the same verbatim right wing talking points you see everywhere the fringe right is talking.
As evidence that people should write what they know, Norris's chapter on physical fitness is excellent. At least up to the point where that other voice interjects with We don't need to pay billions of dollars through new taxes to provide universal medical coverage. If anything, I believe the government needs to discover more ways to motivate personal responsibility and disease prevention, encourage the states' role as stages for new market-based ideas, and challenge private sectors to seek creative ways to bring down medical costs. Most of all, if we took better care of ourselves, we could reduce our personal and national medical costs and live longer and happier at the same time. That ain't Walker Texas Ranger saying that. That's some insurance lobbyist in a suit.
When Chuck Norris visited troops in Iraq, they cheered. At one point they held up a sign that read, "Chuck Norris is here, we can go home now". When Barack Obama visits Iraq, the troops will applaud dutifully, and they will actually go home.
The Story of a Good Bad Girl: The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson :
"This will be your third home in less than three years." Miss Ellis swept her golden head left to right and then began to turn the wheel in a cautious maneuver to the left. "I would be the last person to say that it was all your fault. The Dixons' move to Florida, for example. Just one of those unfortunate things. And Mrs. Richmond having to go into the hospital"--it seemed to Gilly that there was a long, thoughtful pause before the caseworker went on..."for her nerves."
I’m perplexed. This is another book that was urged on me by The Redhead, whose childhood it enriched. The effect on me was much different.
It is the story of four misfits who find themselves clinging to one another for comfort. Galadriol "Gilly" Hopkins is the overintelligent, underwise, impulsive child who goes from one foster home to another, leaving a wake of destruction to rival the Mongol hordes. As the story begins, she is placed in a new home with an obese, excessively religious new foster mother, another foster child who appears to be special needs, and the old blind man from next door. There isn’t much money between them, but they have each other.
As with Singularity, the plot soon goes 90 degrees away from where I thought it was headed. I expected a story along the lines of "First she had to conquer herself; after that, the universe was easy". Not even close. As is often the case with my books, I’m not the target demographic, and no doubt kids find something remarkably entertaining and enlightening in the way it all turns out (or doesn’t, really). I found the ending completely unsatisfactory, and had to go looking to see if there was a sequel (apparently not, but there’s a movie version said to be coming soon). And...so it goes.
Blessed are the Geeks: Jesus Swept, by James Alexander Protzman:
Somebody ducks behind a dumpster, the hint of a halo trailing in the night. Luke turns again and finds Jesus himself, his five foot frame shivering cold beneath a flimsy purple poncho.
"You s-scared the dickens outta me," says Luke.
"I didn’t mean to."
"Did s-so."
"Did not." Jesus wrestles with his plastic wrap. "Help me out of this thing?"
He smiles, raises his cool gray eyes to heaven, mumbling something that might be a prayer. Luke feels quiet pressure.
"Thank you", whispers Jesus. "You’re always there."
"I wouldn’t count on always." At six-three and two hundred pounds, Luke towers over the little savior like a dark mountain. "Where’s the pizza you promised?"
"I have food to eat that you know nothing about," says Jesus.
"Do not."
That’s when Mark pulls up in the jeep with a large pepperoni pizza.
"Do so," says Jesus.
The book jacket describes Protzman as "the George Carlin of the literary world". That doesn't do Protzman justice, at least not for me, who found 20 of Carlin's jokes offensively unfunny for every jewel there was. Protzman is more in the genre of Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore, if not yet of their near-perfect caliber. To the extent he's Carlin, he's the Carlin who mentored Bill and Ted, not the pottymouthed stand up comic.
The story itself doesn't matter; it's the various characters and the descriptions of how they get to where they're going: the self-sufficient young woman who self-mutilates as a defense against sexual attention; the middle-aged couple with the quirky circle of friends and the pillow talk that goes from mundane to pornographic in seconds; the Geek Chorus of street-sweeping dudes who evangelize in their spare time and fight over whose turn it is to be Jesus; and a silver bracelet that might or might not have magical powers...all set against a coastal North Carolina backdrop of frothy-mouthed preachers, enraged marine sergeants, hot Pagan disc jockeys and University trusts
.
In some ways, Jesus Sewpt parallels the George Burns movie Oh God, with a lot more ambiguity, in that characters with no special claim to holiness believe they've been given a brand new message from God, and the completely uncontroversial message itself (in this case, "Do good. Be nice. Have fun") is lost in the argument over where the message really came from and how presumptuous the would-be new Apostle is to claim to know God's truth. I liked it.
Come to think of it, Tom Robbins' first book had to do with ordinary people and a Jesus relic, too.
Bombs in Gilead: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood :
It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion. She told the same story last week. She seemed almost proud of it, while she was telling. It may not even be true. At Testifying, it's safer to make things up than to say you have nothing to reveal. But since it's Janine, it's probably more or less true.
But WHOSE fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger.
HER fault, HER fault, HER fault, we chant in unison.
WHO led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us.
SHE did, SHE did, SHE did.
Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen?
Teach her a LESSON, teach her a LESSON, teach her a LESSON.
Last week, Janine burst into tears. Aunt Helena made her kneel at the front of the classroom, hands behind her back, where we could all see her, her red face and dripping nose. Her hair dull blond, her eyelashes so light they seemed not there, the lost eyelashes of someone who's been in a fire. Burned eyes. She looked disgusting: weak, squirmy, blotchy, pink, like a newborn mouse. None of us wanted to look like that, ever. For a moment, even though we knew what was being done to her, we despised her.
Crybaby, Crybaby, Crybaby.
We meant it, which was the bad part.
I used to think well of myself. I didn't then.
That was last week. This week Janine doesn't wait for us to jeer at her. It was my fault, she says. It was my own fault. I led them on. I deserved the pain.
Very good, Janine, says Aunt Lydia. You are an example.
There are so many acknowledged "great novels" from the first half of the 20th Century, and only a handful that have been published in my lifetime and deemed great literature almost as soon as they came out. The Color Purple. The Satanic Verses. The Corrections. And The Handmaid's Tale. It becomes more relevant every year the Falwell/Pat Robertson/Sarah Palin wing of Christianity remains politically aggressive, intolerant and insane.
I read this one to keep a promise to someone on a political blog who thought Rabelais was sexist. I had been told it was yet another preachy book about only the oppression of women by men. I was told wrong; it is about the oppression of most of humanity by a handful of clerical Patriarchs. In the Christian America called Gilead, people of color are resettled in those lands not fit for Indian reservations. Atheists have to embrace Jesus or die. Jews who don’t convert are put on boats "to be resettled in Israel" and then thrown into the ocean to save money. Unmarried couples and second marriages are forcibly broken up. Men are forbidden to masturbate and must work low wage jobs to serve the patriarchs. Everybody is required to buy "soul scrolls", prayers dispensed by vending machines. And of course, once they’ve gotten rid of all the non-Christians, they further determine which churches are the real Christian Church (if you’re a Christian reading my book post, it probably ain’t the one you go to) and create new second-to-eighth class citizens. Even the "Commanders", the Patriarchs who rule, and who don’t bother to obey the sexual taboos they impose on other people, live in fear that competitor Patriarchs will uncover their illegal fetish behavior and strip them of office and jail them. Nobody is happy.
But especially, this is the story of the women. Privileged women, like the vapid lady who used to sing solo in the televangelist’s choir (back when women were allowed to have jobs) get to marry the Patriarchs and live in gilded cages. Fertile, attractive women get the privilege of being sex slaves to the Patriarchs and having their babies taken from them to be raised by the wives. Strong middle aged women are "Aunts" who get to guard, abuse and "educate" other women. And infertile or ugly women are just sent to the sites of nuclear accidents to clean up toxic waste until they keel over. The narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the sex slaves (her name is Offred; I’m not sure whether her name is pronounced "offered", "of Fred" or "afraid"; either would be appropriate to her situation); her observations and memories are told with the detachment of one trying to escape from a world of infinite pain.
And yet, there’s a touch of humor to be found as well. Atwood is Canadian, and she seizes the chance to tweak the nonfictional foibles of Canada’s noisy neighbor to the south. She makes fun of the excesses of extreme feminism through Offred’s memories of her radical gynocentric mother. Best of all, she pokes at her own critics in a wonderful epilogue in which academics of the far future discuss Offred’s recently unearthed diary. The Christian Nation of Gilead, thankfully, has long since gone the way of Ozymandias the Great and Powerful. May the same happen to Evangelical fundamentalism in America, the sooner the better, and not just for the women but for all of us.
Sexual Perversity in Paradise: Night and Day, by Robert B. Parker :
They walked into the school lobby, where a thick mill of parents was being held at bay by two Paradise cops. Most of the parents were mothers, with a scatter of fathers looking oddly out of place. When Jesse came in they all swarmed toward him, many of them speaking to him loudly.
"You’re the chief of police, are you gonna do something?"
"I want that woman arrested!"
"She’s a goddamned child molester!"
"What are you going to do about this?"
"Do you know what she did?"
"Did they tell you what happened here?"
Jesse ignored them.
He said to Molly, "Keep them here."
Then he pointed at Suit and jerked his head down the hallway.
"What’s up," Jesse said when they were alone.
"This is weird", Suit said.
Jesse waited.
"Mrs. Ingersoll," Suit said, "the principal. Christ, she was principal when I was here."
Jesse waited.
"There was some kind of after school dance yesterday," Suit said, his voice speeding up a little. "Eighth grade dance. And before the dance, Mrs. Ingersoll took all the girls into the girls’ locker room and picked up their dresses to see what kind of underwear they had on."
Jesse stared at Suit for a time without speaking.
Then Jesse said, "Huh?"
I’m glad that, unlike Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker is still cranking out books. I find his series about Jesse Stone, police chief of an upscale Massachusetts town where the rich and self-important are at least as much trouble as the street gangs and the trashy Wal-Mart people, far better than the Spenser books. I still love Spenser’s snappy dialogue, but the stock characters have Mary-Sue’d over time to the point where they’re too perfect to be consistently interesting. Spenser out-muscles, out-guns and out-thinks any army without breaking a sweat, he has connections in both law enforcement and the underworld, and his perfectly smart and beautiful girlfriend and his perfectly formidable sidekick spend entire chapters just being perfect, ruining life for all mortals around them.
Stone is for real. He has limitations. He has flaws in his character and as a public servant is obliged to be mindful of public relations issues when he annoys influential people, as he does in abundance in Night and Day. He frequently encounters situations where issues of legality and ethics conflict, and his stories usually involve several interlocking cases, not just one. In Night and Day, he confronts not only the panty-obsessed principal, who may or may not have committed an actual crime, but a group of spouse-trading swingers who may or may not have committed an actual crime, and a peeping tom whose escalating home invasions are certainly illegal, and increasingly creepy. Parker’s books explore topical events about as thoroughly as the average Law and Order episode (this one was written while the Supreme Court was considering the civil rights implications of an actual case where a schoolgirl was strip-searched on campus), but Stone’s consistent core of concern for children always drives home the importance of the events more than TV and newspapers ever did for me.
I’m still trying to decide whether my clear preference for Parker’s concise prose over that of Hemingway makes me some kind of literary philistine. Honestly, the best of the taciturn-detective genre seems to me to have improved on the Hemingway style, in large part because the subject matter is more gripping.
Babbit is Rich: The Late George Apley, by John P. Marquand :
My father once made a remark which I will now repeat to you because it illustrates this attitude. One evening not very long before his death, when I was seated with him on the Hillcrest piazza watching the gold of the setting sun on the leaves of our great elms, I happened to make some casual remark about the servants, when my father stopped me by beating impatiently on the floor with his walking stick. "I do not like the word servants", he said, "when it is employed to differentiate a certain class of persons from ourselves. In a sense we are all servants, placed here on earth to serve. Some of us, by the will and omniscience of the Divinity, have been given a greater task than others. I count myself, somewhat to my sorrow, as a member of that group. It is a very grave thought to me to think that I may soon have to render an account of my stewardship to my Maker. I have held control of some large industries in this country and through them I have controlled the lives of many people. This is a solemn thought and some day it will be a solemn thought for you. There are certain definite obligations for one in my position and one in yours...and one of them is to try to make your life worth while with the advantages God has given you. When one is the steward of a large fortune one should not dissipate it by useless spending. That is why I have always lived on a small fraction of my income, have reinvested another fraction against possible contingencies, and have given the rest to charity." This sentiment of my father’s, I am afraid, is a little archaic today, but I am glad to see that it is still followed by many. There would be less trouble if everyone with property followed it.
This may well have been the most important book of the month for me, even though it's completely dated. I chose it for a couple of frivolous reasons: it was on the Pulitzer list, and I was once in a production of Zoo Story, in which my character teased another character by guessing that one of his favorite authors would be J.P. Marquand, a name I'd never heard of before or since, until now.
If the book jacket had not explained to me that his was a satire, I wouldn't have been looking for it. Even looking for it, the actual satire didn't come through for me until around midway through the story, which was published in the 1930s about turn of the 20th century old money, the "Boston Brahmins" who valued their family name and social position over love, money or common sense. I was prepared for a satire that did to Boston old money what Babbit did to the Midwestern middle class boosters. Instead of a lampoon of Thurston Howell III, however, I found a character study that, at first, seemed deadpan serious, about a family with many admirable qualities and several that were downright sad, and not much that looked ridiculous.
The sad was the sacrifice of things that would have made George Apley happy. His love interest. His relationship with his children. Entertainments that he forgoes in order to be serious. His narrow minded approach to a changing world. The admirable was his love of culture and civilization, his sense of duty to the community, his efforts to set an example for others. Although his values are dated, it seemed to me that America lost something when this aristocracy went the way of the horse drawn carriage, or at least that right now we could use a healthy dose of culture-loving communitarian leadership, instead of the ever-greedier rich coarsely ripping off everybody else.
The ridiculous became apparent to me only as the book widened from the family to the greater world changing around the Apleys. George is pompous as his son grows up, and gives old fashioned advice to the young that inspires eyerolls rather than respect. He fusses about the family name oblivious to the fact that not everybody takes the Apley name as serious as the Apleys do, and that many Americans have in fact never heard of them. Then again, it may have been that way from the beginning of the book, and I just didn't know what to look for. What did I know about Boston Brahmins, anyhow? I remember thinking that they might as well have been satirizing European feudalism, that the tale was about a foreign culture with little relevance in today's world, that Boston was nowhere near the center of the Universe it was painted as in the book, and that nobody cares about "family dynasties" or recognizes anybody as having high social/cultural "rank" any more. Nobody.
Then I learned that Ted Kennedy had died, and the bottom dropped out of my world.