Conroy Goes South

The first time I read a Pat Conroy book was a conversion experience as stunning as being knocked off a horse. It was on a plane, at the end of another exhausting school year teaching English, and I would have been happy to be reading sheer drivel as long as I didn't have to either grade it or make up a test on it. But the gods of reading must have decided that I deserved a reward, and they guided my hand to The Prince of Tides in the airport bookstore. I devoured it, named it the best book ever written, and went on to Conroy's earlier novels, The Lords of Discipline, The Great Santini, and The Water Is Wide. All were dramatic stories (some would say melodramatic; I'll say Southern) about passionate, wounded people spewing dialogue that could move me to tears or make me laugh out loud, often in the same scene. The settings were brought to life with some of the most gorgeous language I'd ever read. Conroy became my religion. I taught his books, I followed his trail to bookstores and lecture halls, I wrote him fan letters. I sat at the kitchen table with my daughter weeping over passages of tragic beauty. I insisted all my friends read him, and I insisted they love him as much as I did.

After those first four books there was a lull during which we Conroy acolytes held our collective breath in anticipation of his next book, which turned out to be Beach Music. It was a long exhale, ending in silence. A good book, but one that tried too hard and told too many stories, losing its momentum along the way. I can recite whole passages of those first four books, but Beach Music is a blur.

Yet Another Katrina Injustice

This blog is turning into a Dave Eggers Fan Club (see below). I just finished his latest book, a nonfiction story called Zeitoun about a man whose particular Katrina story makes you wonder how many different ways people can suffer from one cause. Well, no, from at least two causes: natural disaster and human failure. The first, the hurricane itself, was bigger, but it's the second that breaks your heart.

When Katrina hit, Syrian-American Abdulrahmen Zeitoun was running a successful contracting business and raising a family in New Orleans. As the storm approached he sent his wife and kids out of the city but stayed to protect his home and other properties he owned. After the levees broke he paddled around the city in a small canoe rescuing people, feeding abandoned dogs, and trying to keep his buildings from complete ruin. His wife, who eventually landed with a friend in Phoenix, kept urging him to leave the city, but he refused, feeling safe and useful. They talked daily, until the day she abruptly stopped hearing from him.

Where The Wild Things Are: A Retelling

Yesterday I introduced grandson Brendan, age 3, to Maurice Sendak's famous picture book Where the Wild Things Are. He requested four repeats, so it was fresh on my mind when I picked up The New Yorker a few hours later and found a story by Dave Eggers called "Max at Sea." It didn't take long to realize that Eggers was retelling, with much embellishment, Sendak's story of Max, the boy in the wolf costume who acts up, gets sent to bed without supper, and sails to a fantasy island of strange monsters. In the new version, Max joins the monsters in destroying their own nests, a crime I thought bizarre (as did Max) until I thought of how easily a child can wreck his own home. Max wins the monster's approval and is made their king. "Let the wild rumpus begin!" he proclaims, as in the original--and the story is over.

The best part of Sendak's story for me is Max's return to his bedroom, where he finds that dinner has been left for him, and it's still warm. I guess for Eggers it's all about the rumpus. I'm not sure that readers unfamiliar with the story will get much from "Max at Sea," but if you love the original, you will probably enjoy Eggers' riff on it.

Later...turns out Eggers wrote the screenplay for the upcoming movie. And that the story in The New Yorker is part of a larger novel. Go here for an interview with Eggers about all these wild things. A link to the story is at the start of the interview.

Hold on to your Slippers

Cutting for Stone
a novel by Abraham Verghese

In a 1950s Ethiopian mission hospital prophetically called Missing, conjoined twin boys survive a traumatic surprise birth. Their mother, a beautiful Indian nun who never revealed her pregnancy, dies, and Thomas Stone, the attending surgeon assumed to be the father, flees. The babies are separated but retain a bond so strong that narrator Marion often refers to them as one person: ShivaMarion.

Adopted by doctors Ghosh and Hema, who find their own love through the boys and return it generously, the twins grow up steeped in medical knowledge and practice, often to humorous effect: "Hema’s departures in the night [to deliver babies]came with cryptic phrases...: `eclampsia' or `postpartum hemorrhage' or, that most chilling term of all, the `Delayed Afterbird.' That one wasn’t even in the medical dictionary. And you never heard of the Afterbird except when it was Delayed. It was feared, and yet its arrival was necessary. Shiva and I looked for that Delayed Afterbird on the trees of Missing, or high up in the sky." Shades of Garp's Undertoad.

Two Sweet Movies

I usually limit myself to book talk here, but the last two movies I've seen were so wonderful that I have to gush about them. "Away We Go" was written by fave author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Vendela Vida, who I believe is his wife. John Krasinski, the lovable bear of The Office, and Maya Rudolph of SNL play a young couple facing the need to define themselves as they await their first child. Giddily devoted to each other, they leave their trailer home to sample life in other locales where friends live. In Phoenix Allison Janney gives a hilarious lesson in how not to parent, a performance later topped by Maggie Gyllenhaal's anti-stroller ("Why would I want to push my children AWAY from me?") uber-mama in Madison, Wisconsin. In Montreal they witness the sadness of friends who adopt children to try to make up for their lost pregnancies. Burt and Varona leave each city with more questions and no answers, but they never lose faith in themselves or their future. Underlying the movie is Eggers' trademark zest for life while death hovers just offstage. Ray and I both gave it an A+.

(500) Days of Summer is another sweet love story with terrific actors and a whimsical, creative visual style. Serious, angsty Tom (Joseph Levitt-Gordon) and enchanting vagabond Summer (Zooey Deschanel) fall in love, and we get to go along for the ride. We know from the start that the affair won't last, but it's still a pleasure to jump on and off their ride (revealed in unchronological order), from Tom's first giddy fall to Summer's ultimate revelation and a nice little coda that will enable you to walk out smiling. I'll see this one again.

I've GOT to Get Rid of Some Books!

I have a faux rule that for every book I buy I have to get rid of one already in the house. It's SO faux that I've never once followed it, and now there is absolutely no place to put the new books I continue to bring home. Reading on my Kindle has slowed the rate of space-hogging acquisitions, but I MUST own IN HARDBACK the new novels of Russo and Conroy, which will simply not fit on the tottering read-next stack of 3-for-2 paperbacks or in the special family bookcase of books-that-changed-our-lives or on the shelves of I-really-will-get-around-to-these-one-day virgins. Buried somewhere among the possible losers is the next story that will transport me to that reading nirvana where I actually can't go to sleep and will also move me to greater insight about another culture or the entire human race. Every book unread carries this potential, and every book already read and loved is like a snapshot of a moment in the past I can't part with.

So how am I going to downsize my library? Do I get rid of The Oxford Guide to the English Language that I haven't looked at since I retired from the classroom? How about the seven-volume set of The Williamsburg Novels, which I loved in adolescence but found I had outgrown when I tried them again last year? The coffee-table size books about Pittsburgh, our home town? The many volumes about birds, though we haven't gone birding or looked at the books in several years? The many books about how to write and how to get published? (There are so many--how can my novels still be in the closet?!) The poetry books, which are quite dusty, I'm ashamed to say? The novels I taught (and therefore read enough times to have memorized whole chapters), marred by annotations and highlighted passages I didn't want my skimming students to miss? The promo copies of children's books my grandson hasn't grown into yet?

They're all too precious. I'll just have to get rid of some furniture and build another bookshelf.

Is there such a thing as biblio-manic-depression?

A few months ago I couldn't find a thing I wanted to read. I picked up mysteries, memoirs, essays, old favorites; read via print, audio, and kindle. Nothing captured me. I'd endured book malaise before, but never with such persistence. Had I lost my great passion? or had my mind merely yielded to the prevailing culture, where reading too often means skimming a few lines on screen, clicking on a link, racing through emails--all of it barely breaking the surface of my brain. Would I ever finish a book again? More importantly, would I ever be totally immersed again in a book I never wanted to end, a book like The Prince of Tides or The Shadow of the Wind or the Mary Stewart romances I read in seventh grade?

A month earlier son Michael had insisted that the first book I should download onto my new kindle was The World to Come by Dara Horn. I finally dug into it as I took off for a week in Sedona. Maybe it was the magic of beginning a vacation, but I dove into the book and didn't want to surface until the end. It's a beautifully written story about a lost young man in New York City who steals a Chagall painting that he believes once belonged to his family. The story floats through time like Chagall's night flyers, transporting us back to the lives of Benjamin's ancestors, Russian Jews who fled to America. I loved every page of it, even the somewhat bizarre last chapter that seems to belong in a slightly different book but is well worth reading in its own right.

Did I mention that Dara Horn has a PhD in comparative literature and three novels under her belt, though she's barely past thirty? Jealousy aside, I'm grateful to her for ending my book blahs.

Hooked on the Kindle

After wondering whether it would be a betrayal of all I hold dear to become a Kindle reader (see Jan 08 entry below), I was given one for my birthday. At first I felt like I'd gone over to the Dark Side, but it didn't take long to develop the zeal of the convert. Maybe it was the first time I Kindle-read a newspaper over breakfast and I could "turn the page" without putting down my cereal spoon. Or maybe it was being able to turn up the font size so that I could read without glasses while lying on my side in bed.

I used to carry several novels and magazines when I traveled so I could indulge whatever reading whim grabbed me. Now I just take my Kindle. I can download a book from anywhere in thirty seconds. Even better are free first chapters and sample periodicals.

Learning to use the Kindle is easy, since its functions are focused and limited. And the actual reading experience is just what amazon's Jeff Bezos said he wanted Kindle to provide, one that makes the vehicle invisible so that you can just READ.

Do I miss "real" books? No, since I still buy and read them, and my home will always be full of them. I do occasionally miss book covers and blurbs, as hokey as they are. I love the thrill of anticipation I get when a book begins with pages of rave reviews, which I haven't seen in a Kindle edition. But I can easily find those elsewhere if I want.

The Kindle isn't perfect. It sometimes fails to list the source on passages I've clipped, and some of the New Yorker cartoons are illegible. But it's a great option for avid readers--or will be once the price comes down.