Category: books

The End of Alice by A.M. Homes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first encountered AM Homes’ writing through her brilliant collection, The Safety of Objects. I was not aware of the controversy she faced with her novel The End Of Alice in the 1990s, but just by hearing the summary, you’d know the story submerged the author in hot water. How could it not? The novel features Chappy, a pedophile, corresponding via prison letters with an unnamed 19-year-old girl who is trying to seduce a 12-year-old boy. It’s a story with an unreliable narrator narrating another unreliable narrator’s narration. Homes is so incredible a writer, so confident of her technique and language, that my attention never wavered. I finished the book fairly quickly. How much of the story is true? We don’t know. Chappy paints himself as a victim, the unnamed girl paints herself as a seductress, but should we believe either of them?

It’s a beautifully written story. It also made me sick. AM Homes once said that she hates it when people say they love reading her books. “Her goal is to unnerve, dig under the skin, maybe piss you off with her fearless honesty, think, and at the same time make you laugh. Quite a feat.”

Quite a feat, indeed, but mission accomplished.

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I am so so happy to get some reading done over the weekend.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have long been a fan of Shirley Jackson. I regularly re-read her short story “The Lottery” and her celebrated novel The Haunting of Hill House. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which deals with persecution, Other-ing, alienation, and mental illness, contains whispers of these two pieces. The language is heightened in such a way that made me think the Blackwood residence hides something supernatural. The novel begins: “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

There are no werewolves here; just humans, and the horrible things they can do.

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Big Brother by Lionel Shriver

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Pandora Halfdanarson loves food. Before she had her own business, she catered, whipping up vast amounts of pasta and cake. Her husband, Fletcher, is a health nut, eating bland food and cycling miles and miles every day. Their children would rather have Pandora’s cupcakes than Fletcher’s bran cereal. They usually skip having dinner at home with their parents.

No one has a healthy relationship with food, Pandora believes. She believes it more when she goes to the airport to pick up her big brother, Edison, who now weighs close to 400 pounds.

I knew when I first started reading that Big Brother should have come with a trigger warning. My boyfriend is nowhere near 400 pounds, but he is a big guy; my weight is close to what Pandora weighs, in that moment in the story when she looks at the scale and staggers back, horrified. Yes. Okay. My boyfriend and I deal regularly with fat discrimination (the odd look as we walk down the street, the overly familiar comments, the name-calling), and now fat discrimination screams at me from this novel. Edison says at one point, “It’s not a description, it’s a verdict. Like I’m an abomination, the source of all evil and corruption in the universe. I eat too much, but I ain’t murdered anybody. I ain’t no paedophile.” Hear, hear, Edison.

And yet I kept reading. I want to know what happens. Where is Shriver going with this? I wondered what ending would be satisfying for me. If Edison ends up losing weight and being loved, then that means the love of family is conditional – we’ll only love you if you’re exactly this size. (I feel this, always, and this is a touchy subject for me.) If Edison ends up dead due to his weight gain, then it’s a condemnation of all fat people in the world – if you don’t lose weight, you will die, and it will all be your fault because you eat too damn much.

However, Edison is not only fat – he is also a slob. He eats constantly and doesn’t clean up after himself. He is depressed and lethargic, and an annoying name-dropping full-of-himself person. He is also poor, so he gets money from his sister. That will get anyone thrown out of a house.

He has to be all this, instead of merely fat. What if Edison is fat and happy? What if he exercises every day, holds down a job, is neat, jolly, smart, and happy? Would Pandora still be moved to make him lose weight? Would Fletcher still be moved to say the meanest, blackest things to him?

Edison has to be more than fat, so his fatness can be rolled into the other sad parts of his life, so Pandora and Fletcher can come across not as judgmental pieces of shit, but as victims of a gold-digging, jive-talking fat guy.

I can see the solution from a mile away. Pandora should have explored the root of the problem: her brother’s diminished sense of self-worth, his loss of dignity and the will to live. Not the weight gain alone.

I loved this book. It talks about family and the truth about sibling dynamics, and how society views the individual based merely on what the surface shows. Lionel Shriver’s big brother died an obese man, so I know where she is coming from. She is coming from a place of guilt and mourning. But her prejudice about the overweight shines through. The book goes back and forth, from fat-hating to fat-loving, but the weight discrimination is still there. Just read this article of hers. (Add to this the fact that by her own admission, she eats only once a day, and equates food with guilt.)

Obesity and weight gain is a very complex issue. At least the book can be a jumping-off point for further discussion.

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Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I stay away from self-help books, advice columns, or any collection of articles that purport to bring you enlightenment. It’s not just the subject matter (enraging judgment-filled pieces that tell you to stay away from the gays and find Jesus to make your depression go away); it’s that most of these books are unfortunately not well written.

Enter Cheryl Strayed, who introduced herself as advice columnist Sugar on The Rumpus in 2010. It’s easy to write her off as one of those eager old ladies who calls everyone “sweet pea”, but her beautifully written reply to this letter shows that she won’t be saccharine when she needs to be blunt:

WTF? WTF? WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.

Her reply begins:

Dear WTF,

My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel the same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.

The best advice we get in life comes from experience – our own and other people’s. Tiny Beautiful Things is filled with compassionate guidance, but it is also filled with stories from Cheryl Strayed’s life. This is a collection of advice columns, but it is also a memoir of a woman who has experienced death, loss, guilt, bitterness, and later light and love, in her life.

Like most of us.

I don’t know if all of her anecdotes are true. She seems to always have a ready story that just happens to be a perfect match for a letter writer’s problem. But you know what? Who gives a shit. I’m not here to double-check a stranger’s life. I’m here to listen, and she tells the best stories.

This is my favorite, because this is Sugar’s advice to herself:

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

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Extra reading: I also love this advice from Stephen Fry: “It will be sunny one day.”

Three things:

• The election results are nauseating.
• If you ordered a copy of Unseen Moon, you should have received an email by now. :) Please reply to me so I can make sure you are a person and not a figment of my imagination.
• Books will always be there for you.

Here are some books I’ve recently finished.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? by Mindy Kaling

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Read this in one sitting. I am a fan of The Office (first season was funny, second season was brilliant, third to fourth season was that kind friend you come home to after a long day, then I gave up), but not really of Mindy Kaling, as she plays Kelly, a “tertiary character” that tends “to have one or two great lines per episode. Wait, what’s the thing that comes after tertiary? That’s Kelly.” I know she now has The Mindy Project, but I haven’t seen that, so all I know about Kaling is that she plays Kelly Kapoor. I’m so glad I read this book. The text is not laugh-out-loud funny, but I find her humor and her stories and her attention to strange detail endearing. It’s a light read you should bring with you to cheer you up. Hell, it cheered me up. (“This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink.”)

Also, and I just found out about this through this book, Kaling and a friend wrote a one-act play called Matt & Ben, where she played Ben Affleck. The play got her a meeting with The Office creator, Greg Daniels. That is awesome. Where can I get a recording?

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Andrew Solomon once again writes with infinite grace, understanding, and generosity. If you want to learn more about depression, or if you’re suffering from it, this is the book for you. Actually, I would recommend this to everyone, because even in this day and age, I still hear people talk about depression as if it were ordinary sadness that you can just walk off, or cure with a drinking session with a couple of friends. I used to say that, when I was younger, not knowing that there are people who cannot literally get out of bed in the morning due to this paralyzing ailment. Solomon writes about his own depression, and discusses suicide (his own mother committed suicide when she realized that she won’t be cured of her illness), depression among the poor (an often overlooked demographic), and the politics of institutionalization and medication.

A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I can’t quite articulate how much I loved these stories, how much I admired the level of craft on display here. Characterizations are sharp, and descriptions are precise and concise. It is amazing. Consider this excerpt:

The summer Jessie Spencer turned five, she played Capture the Flag every day with the big boys, the almost-six-year-olds who’d gone to kindergarten a year late. Jane never worried, even in passing, about Jesse’s IQ or her eye-hand coordination or her social skills. Jesse and Jane were a mutual admiration society of two smart, strong, blue-eyed women, one five and one thirty-five, both good skaters and good singers and good storytellers. Jane didn’t mention all this to the other mothers at play group, who would have said it was the same between them and their daughters when Jane could see it was not, and she didn’t mention it to her own sweet, anxious mother, who would have taken it, understandably, as a reproach. Jane didn’t even mention this closeness to the pediatrician, keeper of every mother’s secret fears and wishes, but it sang her to sleep at night. Jane’s reputation as the play group’s good listener was undeserved; the mothers talked about their knock-kneed girls and backward boys and Jane smiled and her eyes followed Jesse. She watched her and thought, That smile! Those lashes! How brave! How determined!

That single paragraph (the second paragraph in the first story) made me sit up and take notice.

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