Summer Reading that's Not

Three very different books have helped me get through a month so hot that staying inside and not moving very much is the only way to survive. (Of course, for those of us who spend our lives reading, that's not exactly a punishment.)

Lionel Shriver's So Much for That is the kind of sobering fiction that a) makes your life look idyllic by comparison, and b) reminds you that it probably won't stay that way for long. The particular hell in this novel is illness ("aided" by the American health system) and the many kinds of havoc it can wreak as even the healthy become victims. Fifty-year-old self-made millionaire Shep Knacker is about to realize his lifelong dream of retiring to an edenic beach in a remote country where a dollar a day will buy perfect happiness when his wife finds she has a cancer that will probably be terminal. The dream of paradise recedes further and further into impossibility as Shep's resources, both personal and financial, are drained to care for Glynis, an unproductive artist who is so cold she sometimes seems to deserve her awful fate. If this isn't depressing enough, there's a side story of Shep's friend Jackson caught in his own horrific tailspin. I'll spare you the details of that one.

Why did I keep turning the pages? In brief: a compelling main character and some amazing writing, including extended conversations that bring characters to life so fully that they seem to be in the room with you as they fight, bravely or stupidly, the particular brand of slings and arrows  life has tossed at them. We're privy to lots of details about chemotherapy and its side effects and lots of decreasing dollar figures showing how quickly illness can not only kill you but rob you of everything you have--don't we all need to know about these things so we can be ready to deal with them ourselves? After all that, if you haven't passed out from the drinks you'll need to get to it, there's a surprisingly satisfying ending. So Much for That is no beach read, but after a hiatus, I do want to read more of Shriver's work. She's that good a writer.

So what did I pick up next? A TRUE story of horrific tragedy--Tracy Kidder's Strength in What Remains, the story of Deogratias, a Burundian refugee who escaped the sudden genocide that swept through his country in the early 90s, when he was in medical school. Kidder manages to let us see enough of the horror Deo somehow lived through to break our hearts without totally turning our stomachs. After six months of  flight and refugee camps, Deo managed to get to America, where his life was in many ways worse, if less violent. While he learns English Deo endures months of poverty and exploitation, working twelve-hour days for five dollars, sleeping in squalid abandoned tenements before settling in Central Park, living off his wits and his desperation. Deo himself is inspiring, but so are the Americas who grab hold of him and won't let go: an ex-nun determined to find him a home; the retired couple who take him in and put him through Columbia; Paul Farmer, the founder of the international health and social justice organization Partners In Health, who gives Deo a way to fight against poverty and disease in his own country. (Farmer is the subject Kidder's earlier book Mountains Beyond Mountains.) This one's well worth reading. Just take a deep breath first.

So I needed something light, right? A full-page ad in The New York Times raved about Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. Sounded intriguing and easy. I mean, how sad could lemon cake be? The premise is original and thought-provoking: nine-year-old Rose suddenly realizes that she can taste the feelings of the people who made the food she eats--especially her mother, who does not know that her secret emotions burden her daughter. Eventually Rose confides in her brother, a strange, aloof nerd with, it turns out, some secret skills of his own. It's a loving but weird family:  "My father was a fairly focused man, a smart one with a core of simplicity who had ended up with three highly complicated people sharing the household with him: a wife who seemed raw with loneliness, a son whose gaze was so unsettling people had to shove cereal boxes at him to get a break, and a daughter who couldn't even eat a regular school lunch without having to take a fifteen-minute walk to recover. Who were these people?"

Rose struggles to live with her power and the knowledge it brings her while navigating the always-turbulent waters of adolescence. Lemon Cake feels part normal-teen-girl-finds-herself, part mythical tale sprinkled with magic realism, and part science fiction that strains credulity. The parts don't always feel right together, but Rose is a memorable character and Bender is a lovely writer who has captured the complexity and fragility of family. I can't give this book an A, but I'll read her next one.

Sex in the 60s—the Age, not the Decade

Warning: If the thought of your parents having sex makes you shudder, you are too young for this book.


“Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.”

Jane Juska paid $136.50 to place her carefully thought-out personal ad in The New York Review of Books, where “very smart people write very thoughtful, very long essays on everything from Freud to Jon-Benet Ramsey.” What would move a retired high school English teacher to go man-hunting in this way, and what happened when she did? The story is told in her feisty 2003 memoir A Round-Heeled Woman (slang for a woman who spends a lot of time with her feet in the air), one of my favorite books this year.

“I did not begin this adventure seeking a husband, a long-term relationship…, a partner,” Jane writes. “I liked where I lived [in California] and, for the most part, the life I lived there. It just didn’t have any touching in it…. I had felt a little dying happening to me for too long. I suppose placing the ad was my way of raging against that. I sure as hell wasn’t going to go gentle into that good night. Fuck, fuck against the dying of the light.”

Waiting for War

Sarah Blake's novel The Postmistress explores the same questions as The Sparrow (see below) and one of my other favorite philosophical novels, Albert Camus' The Plague: in the face of crimes against humanity—even when they haven’t yet touched us—what are our responsibilities? What do we believe in? Where do we find comfort? In a gripping story of war and its inexorable effects, Blake’s cast offers a variety of answers.

It is 1940, and Americans are watching anxiously as the German war machine marches across Europe and brutally bombs England. Across the ocean, on the tip of Cape Cod, postmistress Iris James, strait-laced, middle-aged, and certified virginal, takes her work very seriously. " If there was a place on earth in which God walked,” Iris believes, “it was the workroom of any post office in the United States of America. Here was the thick chaos of humanity rendered into order." Blind to the dangers of what is happening in Europe (she sees no reason to cut down the flagpole that a friend worries might lure attackers), Iris insists that goodness and order will triumph, just as the world’s mail will always reach its destination. The war across the sea will test Iris’s faith in an overarching plan and the role she plays in it.

Near Iris lives Emma Fitch, the new wife of Will, the town’s young doctor. Love has given Emma a sense of identity she never had, but Will, following a professional failure, doubts his competence and questions his destiny. Radio broadcasts from London detailing the horrors of the Blitz entice him to leave his home and wife to work in a London hospital. After he leaves, Emma discovers she is pregnant, and all she can do is write letters begging Will to return. Passive and one-dimensional, Emma is not a very interesting character on her own, but she represents “those who stand and wait,” while her husband strikes out in the only way he can against the evil of innocent suffering.

Admissions of all Kinds

Anyone who's ever shepherded a child through the college admission process or has survived it herself will appreciate Jean Hanff Korelitz's novel Admission. Princeton admissions officer Portia Nathan devotes herself fiercely to the young people represented by the thick piles of paper on her desk. "Not that she remembered them as individuals—no one could ever do that—but she couldn’t excise them, either. Instead, she sometimes felt as if she were throwing them behind her, into a great sack that grew heavier and heavier every year, and then she dragged them forward with her, all those lives." I was reminded of what was best about my career teaching English to high school seniors: the privilege of witnessing passionate young lives at the peak of their potential. Though we meet very few of them, the real life force of this story emanates from the hundreds of students whose admission files occupy Portia's desk, home, and soul.

Jesuits in Space

I'm wary of revisiting books from my past. What if I return to a story I loved passionately ten years or a lifetime ago and find the magic gone? What will that mean about how I've changed?

A book blog by another Richmond woman--apparently we are legion--spurred me to ignore the risks and reread The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. "Jesuits in space" is how one review described it, and I was hooked before I even opened the book. The Jesuit teachers and students at my university were an amazing group of guys; we girls used to joke that the admission requirements for the Society of Jesus included looks of at least 8.5 out of 10 and an IQ over 200. Listening to their discussions in philosophy and theology classes blew my just-freed-from-the-nuns mind wide open, and I've never been the same since. The Sparrow had a similar effect when I first read it fifteen years ago. I'm happy to say that last week it again moved my heart and challenged my thinking.

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.