When We Were the Kennedys

This lovely book quickly became one of my all-time favorite memoirs. Monica Wood's ability to describe childhood experiences rivals Harper Lee's in To Kill a Mockingbird. Although her subject is very sad--the sudden death of her beloved father when she was ten--it is also filled with characters full of love, kindness, and resilience, as well as grief and confusion. It also paints a vivid picture of a mid-century industrial town where working in the factory brought pride, unity, and security to families like Wood's.

And the writing is gorgeous--one gracefully crafted sentence after another. From the introduction: Her family's story was "powerful and engulfing, erasing all that came before, just like the mill that had made this story possible. In each beholden family, old languages were receding into a multicultural twilight as the new, sun-flooded story took hold: the story of us, American children of well-paid laborers, beneficiaries of a dream. Every day our mothers packed our fathers’ lunch pails as we put on our school uniforms, every day a fresh chance on the dream path our parents had laid down for us. Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad. Then he died."

Breaking Up With God: A Love Story

Breaking Up With God: A Love Story by Sarah Sentilles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sentilles describes the evolution on her faith in God as if they had been lifelong friends and lovers.
The strong, comforting faith of her childhood led her to study religion at Harvard, work as a youth minister, and decide to become an Episcopalian priest. As she learned more about both religion and human experience, she came to realize that her relationship with God wasn't working. In her struggle to decide whether to stay on the path to priesthood, her mother told her, "Part of life is discerning when you need to stay and when it's time to go. Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference." Her journey was long and painful, but ultimately Sentilles did "break up with God." Here's how she describes it:

"I didn't lose my faith. I left it....God is gone....Too many terrible things done in his name. Too much suffering in the world. Too much violence. Too many disasters. I let go of a personal God. I let go of all of it."

The metaphor of God as boyfriend may seem sacreligious to people of faith, or trite and facile to skeptics. For me the metaphor worked perfectly, maybe because my own experience has been similar. If you struggle with belief or have outgrown your faith, you'll like this book.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Until I read her memoir, Patti Smith was only a vague TV image. I was turned off by the scary darkness of her looks, and her music made me change the station as fast as I could. Robert Mapplethorpe made a stronger impression, also negative, when he achieved notoriety for his homoerotic photographs of male nudes. But when I read Just Kids I found two very different people: rebels, yes, but also passionate creators yearning to produce great art and fulfill great love, willing, even eager, to sacrifice comfort and security. Before she was a musical performer, Patti was an artist and a poet, living with Mapplethorpe in New York--first on the streets, then in a warehouse loft without a bathroom, and finally in the Chelsea Hotel, a famous hangout for artists ranging from Dylan Thomas to Bob Dylan. In their early years as a couple, they gave themselves only to each other and to their art. "'Nobody sees as we do, Patti,'" Robert would say. "Whenever he said things like that, for a magical space of time, it was if we were the only two people in the world."

Robert's drug use (Patti claims to have never used drugs) and his anguish about his emerging bisexuality eventually led to their split, but they remained close. She set her poetry to music and became a successful performer, married a musician, had children. He achieved the notoriety of the cultural rebel as well as respect as a photographic artist. He died of AIDS in 1989.

I'm glad I read this. It humanized two people I'd known only as caricatures, gave me insight into the process of creating art, and provided an interesting tour of the New York art world of the 70s and 80s.  



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The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While not as good as his second novel, Angelmaker, this one is just as inventive and entertaining. Here the catalyst for doomsday is a weapon that will simply make the enemy go away. Seems very efficient until it goes awry, of course, and the gone-away victims return in grotesque, threatening forms. Only a mysterious substance called Fox, carried in a pipe around the world, keeps the remnants of civilization safe, and now it's threatened by a fire on the pipeline. Our Heroes, a crazy but lovable bunch of veteran trouble-shooters, must respond, led by the able Gonzo Lubitsch (think the Channing Tatum character in Magic Mike) and his best buddy, who's the narrator. What follows never fails to surprise as it leads us down labyrinthine paths punctuated by digressions that are probably the best part of the book except that there are so many of them and they get in the way of finding out what happens next. Ultimately I lost patience with them, but only because the central story, a moving quest for identity embedded in a pow-bang-boom action story, demanded resolution. Harkaway's mind seems to be hyperactive in the best sense, popping out more weird and wonderful inventions than can fit in one story. I can't wait for his next book.


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Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I had more fun reading Angelmaker than I've had with a book since I was twelve. It's a comic book wrapped in a literary novel, an incredibly inventive and beautifully written story of an ordinary guy who comes to realize that it's up to him to save the world. Throw in a bit of political commentary, a little philosophy (does knowing the truth bring salvation or doom?), a wealth of characters both real and larger-than-life, and you have an unforgettable novel. If you like Michael Chabon (especially "Gentlemen of the Road") and Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy, you'll love this. Check out the cool promo on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxJn0W....

A few favorite passages:

A few decades of calm, she reasoned at the time, and the world would set itself straight. But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged.

Picture a man, the tale [of the Recorded Man] went, in a bed of silk sheets. And picture all around him wires and cameras and men taking notes. Everything about him is written down. They are making a record of him: his breaths, his words, his pulse, his diet, his scent, his chemistry—even the fluctuations of electricity in his skin. As he grows weaker—for he is very old now, and injured, and sick—they press filaments of metal through holes in his skull and into the fabric of the brain itself, and record the chasing flashes of thoughts running from fold to fold of the grey stuff inside his head. And through all this, he is conscious, and aware. Is he a prisoner? A millionaire? Does he feel pain or horror at his own predicament? Does he have any idea why this is happening? It’s so bizarre. And yet somewhere, somewhere, it is real, and he is lying there. Perhaps, when he is gone, they will need someone else. Perhaps they will need you.

Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one who deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which use humans to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own weird little ecosystems.

So he cheated back. He abandoned Daniel’s world in order to preserve it, and from that lesson drew his entire life. He broke laws, cracked safes, smashed windows and shattered the public peace, and from destruction he drew consolation. The biggest lie was that the world worked the way it was supposed to, and having seen through it, Mathew Spork was free.



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An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read both this memoir and its sequel, "Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness," via audiobooks with terrific narrators, but Fuller's writing is just as beautiful and evocative in print. The daughter of white British settlers in central Africa in the mid-twentieth century, she grew up during the revolutionary years when colonials were losing their power, their land, and sometimes their lives to native peoples reclaiming their country. Fuller's childhood stories are both harrowing and hilarious, as are her descriptions of her amazing parents--gutsy, passionate people surviving tragedy and betrayal through sheer stubbornness and large amounts of alcohol. Like so many stories of Africa, Fuller's tales reveal through the chaotic lives of unforgettable individuals a wider perspective about a place and a culture so different from my own. I can't ask much more from a book than that.


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The Fault in our Stars

I wish John Green's publishers would get smart and market his books for adults as well as "young adults" (YA).  He's a terrific writer for readers of any age who love coming-of-age stories, even tragic ones. Green's teens are frighteningly smart, serious, intellectual, witty, and good. They take risks not for the sake of mindless entertainment, but for moral reasons.They suffer, and they face their suffering head-on, defining themselves by the struggle.


The suffering in this case is caused by illness. Sixteen-year-old Hazel, her oxygen tank practically a body part, knows that her cancer will kill her; she just doesn't know when. Her social life consists mostly of support group meetings; one of her friends there has just lost his second eye, and he's one of the lucky ones. When a good-looking new guy limps into the group--he lost a leg to osteosarcoma-- Hazel resists the immediate attraction; she's determined not to cause him the kind of pain she sees her parents face as they wait for her to die. (Unlike most YA parents, the ones Green gives his kids are always loving and supportive--even appreciated by their kids most of the time.)


Of course Hazel and Gus fall in love. Green takes adolescent love very seriously, another thing I appreciate about him. How they help each other through the mine fields of their lives is a touching story told with both gut-punching realism and gallows humor. If I hadn't known so many kids like Hazel and Gus, kids overflowing with intellectual curiosity, passionate dreams, and heroic moral courage, not to mention brilliant, caustic repartee, I might think the characters and dialogue are overdone. But Hazel and Gus and their parents are as real to me as my own family, except that we haven't had to face anything like this. If and when we do, I'll return to this story to remind myself that it's possible to live fully even when you're dying.


In one of my favorite scenes, Hazel and her parents are picnicking in a park. "I was just trying to notice everything," Hazel says, "the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him. Who am I to say that these things might not be forever?...All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children."


The passage took me back to Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, when Emily gets to re-visit her life after she has died. She watches the quotidian life of her family and asks, "Do any human beings ever appreciate life while they live it--every, every minute?" It's the point of many great works of literature, one that bears countless repetitions, and Green's moving story is a worthy reiteration.

THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s memoir of his nomadic, fatherless childhood searching for an identity and a future is hypnotically engaging.  In search of wealth and the right man, his divorced mother moved Toby, who renamed himself Jack, from Florida to Utah to Washington State, where she married Dwight, definitely the wrong man, especially for Jack. "I was bound to accept as my home a place I did not feel at home in,” he writes, “and to take as my father a man who was offended by my existence and would never stop questioning my right to it.”

Jack descends with no remorse into a delinquency that includes drinking, lying, stealing, destruction of property, and ultimately, submitting falsified documents to get into a private school. Without sparing the details of his misdeeds, the adult Wolff keeps us on the boy Jack’s side. I was halfway through the book before I realized that the pathetic bully Dwight wasn’t the only Bad Guy—just one old enough to know better, unlike his stepson. I thought of all the rebellious, unreachable boys I’d butted heads with as a teacher and understood Dwight’s frustration with this unlovable kid who was the price of getting the woman he wanted. Even a kinder, gentler stepfather might have failed to tame such a boy.

But Wolff makes us understand that at the heart of a bad kid is the legitimate, if misguided, search for some kind of personal power. Watching World War II movies, Jack knew that “the point of the show was to celebrate the victory of goodness over evil….[But] the real point was to celebrate snappy uniforms and racy Mercedes staff cars and great marching, thousands of boots slamming down together,… to watch Stukas peel off and dive toward burning cities, tanks blowing holes in buildings, men with Lugers and dogs ordering people around. These shows instructed us further in the faith we were already beginning to hold: that victims are contemptible, no matter how much people pretend otherwise; that it is more fun to be inside than outside, to be arrogant than to be kind, to be with a crowd than to be alone.” That’s the trouble with being a victim, Wolff reminds us—it can make you want to be a bully.

Jack ultimately escapes to the private school he lied his way into, but can’t succeed there either and is eventually thrown out. He “wore himself out with raging” and then joined the army. Wolff ends the chronology there, Jack still unredeemed. But in the final passage he relives a nighttime ride with his friend Chuck. Believing they have broken free of their wrong-filled pasts and are on the lip of a limitless future, they break into song. “It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.”

Jack/Toby grew up to be one of America’s most respected writers and teachers. I wish he would write a sequel; I want to know the details of the continued transformation from a powerless boy to a man who, having found himself, empowers others.