Recent hits

John Hart's The Last Child, a gritty modern mystery with a compelling young boy as the central character, searching for his kidnapped sister. Excellent read.

Nine, the Rob Marshall musical with Daniel Day-Lewis and every Oscar-winning woman ever, was indeed quite bad. Marshall failed to motivate the musical numbers as Guido's imagination the way he managed to make Chicago all happen in Roxie's head; besides that, he apparently forgot that not every musical number has to have bells, whistles, a cast of thousands, and mostly-naked women.

Michelle Moran's chick-littish series set in ancient Egypt is quite good because of the use of historical events and detail, though the interpersonal plots are on the level of girl likes boy, girl puts on makeup, boy notices girl.

Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune reminded me how great an adventure story can be when someone is writing it well and creatively. It also contains the seeds of her fascination with the Zorro legend, which she reworked so well in her recent novel (shockingly entitled Zorro). I may have to go back and try her famous House of the Spirits again. I didn't like it when I first read it, but I was very young, and maybe there's even an alternative translation now.

Leonard Bernstein's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has some musical gems in it, and even some hilarious lyrics. But among other reasons the show isn't put up often, some of the interpolated scenes of African American characters are less than politically correct. "The Money-Lovin' Minstrel Show," ye gods.

Road to Damascus

Well, I finally read Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It took me a very long time to get around to it, which I mostly attribute to the fact that he was so lionized by the time I heard of him that I got a bit turned off. I also didn't see how a memoir about his parents' tragic death and his consequent raising of his young brother could be different from, as he puts it in the intro wryly, all the other cultural products about tragic and tragically hip orphans, like Party of Five. (God, there's a dated reference.) Funnily enough, I've heard a lot about him over the years, because I was originally involved with the group that set up what turned out to be the Chicago chapter of 826, Eggers' writing/tutoring center that started in SF as 826 Valencia (here it's called 826CHI, I believe). But I never went back to the well.

I did, and it is good. If I had to pick a David Foster Wallace disciple, he might be the one I'd pick... but I see more of a straight line to Joyce, funnily enough, in the way that he plots and uses language. He's so dry and hilarious in describing his pathetic, ragtag parenting that it isn't in the least self-aggrandizing, and Toph, his brother, is perhaps the best character of all. The parenting sections hold up a lot better than his accounts of Might Magazine, which he was trying to start up at the same time, though those have their own kind of starving-artist humor. I really enjoyed the book all the way until the end, which I found kind of disastrous, but I guess when you're writing a Joycean memoir/novel and the final word "Yes" has already been taken, you end up miserably plumping for a tableau and the word "finally."

Check me in ten

Years, that is. I started reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, this year's Booker Prize-winner about Thomas Cromwell, and it certainly is good. But I am Tudored out by all my historical mystery and fiction reading on the cardio machines over the last few years. I think I need to take a break and go back to it later. It's extremely rare that I do such a thing with a book that I actually do like, but this time I think it's a necessity.

Teen pregnancy, and divorce, and teen pregnancy, and...

Today I had a weirdly adoption-heavy day. When you're sick, it's a perfect excuse to read fun books and watch movies, and I loaded up today, because who knows when I might get better? So I read Lorrie Moore's new book A Gate at the Stairs, and then I watched Juno at long last, being the one person in the western world who had not rushed to see this miraculous witty work in the theater. Then I realized that somehow I had ended up processing two wildly different works about adoption, both painfully unrealistic in their own ways.

*SPOILERS ALERT*

Moore's book is told from the p.o.v. of Tassie, an aimless young college student who takes a nannying job with an overachieving older couple who adopt a biracial child... and overachieve in dealing with race as they do with everything else. Meanwhile, she has her own racial blindnesses, as a secret jihadist actually convinces her that he's Brazilian and whams, bams, and thank you ma'ams her on his way out. Well, no, it's a more in-depth relationship than that... entangled with her fragmented family, her brother enlisting, her wary attitude toward domesticity... And shockingly, considering this promising landscape, it all ends in massive disaster!

Juno you probably know, and I wouldn't advise any couple adopting to watch it... first of all because if they are dreaming of getting a perfectly healthy white baby with a perfectly healthy, intelligent, law-abiding mother, it's best to shoot those dreams down now, and second of all, because the demise of Jennifer Garner's perfect marriage might cause them to take too hard a look at their own. Yeeeow. At the same time, I feel like people got caught up in the overwritten coolness and cutesiness of the teen lingo and the admittedly wonderful cast, art direction and set dressing of the movie and ignored that fact that it's basically a charming romp through well-enough-to-do white suburban teen pregnancy, from which the teen can escape totally unscathed and in fact better than ever.

Moore's work is maybe less emotionally unrealistic, but it's not realist in the sense that it is a weird confluence of awfulness. It is, however, authentic in pulling together all the most troubling strands of our society and distilling them through the experience of Tassie.

I feel the need to go watch Cinderella to swab some idealism back into my brain. Oh god, I feel like Juno, who just wants to know that two people can be together forever. Yuck.

Recalled to life

Finally slowing down a little on work; you can tell because I'm a little way into Colson's The Intuitionist, and today I bought Queen's album The Miracle, which I happily anticipate listening to tomorrow. Good times

Cliff notes

Twilight summed up:

Hi. I'm a teenage girl and I'm new in town. I'm extremely pretty and boys fall for me right and left, but I'm also really casual and klutzy and un-catty, so you can't hate me for it. I don't seem to have any real hobbies or interests -- well, I read a bit. My mother's flakey and lives at the other end of the country, and my dad's kind of clueless, so I have tons of freedom to have all kinds of ridiculous adventures.

My boyfriend is so awesome. Who needs hobbies when you have him? He's totally gorgeous and sexy and athletic, and so cool. He's also insanely wealthy. None of that is why I love him, of course; I love him for who he really is, 'cause he's also sensitive and vulnerable -- and he has some other interests, though we don't talk about them much. He absolutely dotes on me, but he's so respectful and protective that he won't have sex with me -- which is great, because then I don't have to think about whether I'm ready for it or not or talk about something like condoms, which would break the spell of my fantasy. He's never looked at another girl in school before me, which makes me feel really special.

This is crap, people. Run-of-the-mill teenybopper romance crap. The only thing that saves it is that the guy is a vampire. To get through, you really either need to want to read a Harlequin romance, or shut your eyes to that and focus on the universe. If you try it out of curiosity, just read New Moon, which is at least a little more interesting as Bella gets all crazy after her vampire leaves her, and spares you the exposition of the first novel. And for god's sake, spare yourself the last one, in which she has a half-vampire baby that nearly kills her and who her werewolf Native American best friend then forms a soulmate bond with... How they're going to film all that, I will never know, because I have no interest in seeing the movies. But yes, Robert Pattinson is pretty.

Sad and squalid

I liked The Reluctant Fundamentalist so much that I followed it up with Mohsin Hamid's first novel, Moth Smoke. This one's set completely in Pakistan, though with flickers of the U.S., and has the same concerns about screwed-up relationships, the effect of the world economy on individual drones, and the pace of urban life killing us all. Singularly depressing, with a more experimental style. I didn't love it, but it was an interesting read.

A long and storied life

In the category of "finally got around to it," I read the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines, which tells the story of a young slave freed by the end of the Civil War, who lives through all the turmoil of the next several decades. Reconstruction, racism, rights, death, marriage, humor -- it's all in here, and extremely well wrought. The only fault I have to find with the book is its episodic quality, which I'm not terribly fond of. I think it could have been given a little more of an arc, but at the same time, I can understand that life doesn't always fall out that way, and it follows in a great tradition of rather episodic African American literature, like Souls of Black Folk.

Reinvention

I've started Toni Morrison's new novel/la, A Mercy, set in earlier slavery days than any of her previous works (I think). It's a new departure for her stylistically as well as topically, but I was not wowed by the start. I'll post again when I make my way through.

Seeing what the fuss is all about

I only read Neil Gaiman after seeing the movie Stardust, and then, hearing all the praise for what an imaginative prophet of modern life he is, I thought I should read some of his more serious work. (Stardust, while fun, is decidedly a light novel.) Having now read Anansi Boys and most of American Gods, I think I can pronounce that he is good, if not quite as earth-shaking as I'd been led to believe. Anansi Boys in particular manages to balance myth with a lot of real-world themes like failed parenting, individualism, finding a truly suitable partner in your life, and so forth, while being a good fun adventure chasing crooks around the world. Anansi's son, Charlie, leads a very boring life in London, which is turned upside down when his more godlike brother shows up... and turns out to be, quite literally, his better half -- or at least more fun, more daring, and more problematic than anyone could imagine, forcing Charlie to become pretty godlike himself. It's fun.

An ode to NYC

Ah, New York, you muse of novelists and filmmakers... you've done it again, in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake. I'm a little late to the party on this one, I admit, especially since I've taught her short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies. But I have to say that reviews bear some responsibility. I can only see the words "coming of age" so many times before I start thinking I can put off reading this oh-so-important novel. However, Namesake is worth it, and the great thing about modern coming-of-age novels is that they can portray important times of life like high school and college without being treated as un-serious. The hero, Gogol Ganguli, struggles with his name and all it represents: his family's complex history and immigration, relationship to art, adjustment to life in America. It handles the issues of a second-generation child and his interracial dating without ever becoming too symbolic or cliched, which in itself is a true feat. And, since Lahiri is nothing if not a fun descriptive writer, there's also lots of loving portrayal of NYC's urban desert and yummy Indian desserts.

I'm looking forward to renting the movie that was made by Mira Nair starring Kal Penn, late of House and soon of the White House.

The Great ... Novel

I have occasionally thought in the last few years that The Great American Novel, as an elusive concept, has been replaced by The Great Post-9/11 Novel. Certainly, a frontrunner for that one is Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a justly lauded novel about a Dutch-born banker and his British wife, whose marriage crumbles during? because of? the stress of life in Manhattan post-9/11.

I'm guessing that many adored it for its loving depiction of the energy and wackiness of Manhattan, as well as the sorrow and sordidness of its illicit underbelly and the weariness of its corporate giants (we might feel less sorry for the protagonist today, thinking of AIG!). It has all of that in spades. To me, however, the characterization was ultimately unsatisfying, though done in that clever way so that you could say it was the wonderful art and subtlety of the author in realistically depicting the limits of ever knowing another human being, etc. etc. Come to think of it, it reminded me a great deal of Kazuo Ishiguro's self-deluded protagonists, but without Ishiguro's ability to expose the painful, almost crippling emotional wounds of his characters, wounds that are often the effect of the British establishment and imperial leftovers. Hans and his wife represent a more modern malaise, the loneliness, self-loathing, and pain that afflict people who have no obvious source of complaint and every seeming source of satisfaction -- or rather, 9/11 is put in as the source, when it plainly isn't the source so much as a catalyst for self-examination. I dunno. I really did not love it, but I'm almost afraid that it might be because I'm too much imbedded in the same framework to judge.

And we think we have problems

Another Irish-themed post: a historical mystery series I've enjoyed lately is the Sister Fidelma series by Peter Tremayne, set in 6th-century Ireland. Sister Fidelma is the red-haired nun, dalaigh (roughly a cross between a judge and a detective in their court system), and sister of the king of Cashel. As she navigates these social circles, she's naturally in a position to take charge of some intriguing cases with the help of her sturdy Saxon friend, Brother Eadulf, decidedly the Watson to her Holmes. As a matter of fact, he gets a little too Watson-like in the comic film tradition; sometimes when he wants to sit and eat, I'm pretty much with him and against the annoying perfect Fidelma, but things balance out later in the series.

The series is well written and will interest Ireland buffs with its inclusion of mythology and real history. What lends it that dash of contemporary reference is the bitter strife between the more flexible Irish Christianity and the Roman Christianity attempting to take over. The Irish want to keep their law system, which rarely invokes any kind of death penalty, let the clergy marry, etc. The incoming Romans or Roman-trained clerics want to establish the Penitential system and enforce celibacy. Fidelma naturally provokes their wrath on an almost daily (and certainly bookly) basis. Although Ireland is portrayed as a little too utopian, particularly in contrast to Eadulf's rough Saxon ways (less washing, less law), the clash between fundamentalism and tolerance is an open commentary on our current dialogue, complete with divergent attitudes towards homosexuality.

The joys of rereading

I took Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence with me on my recent brief trip, figuring it would last a couple of flights at least. I haven't touched it since my extremely fast initial read right when it came out, when I was dazzled by the prose and scope. Though I am also enjoying it very much this time through (am almost done), this seems to be one of those rare instances in which I can't recapture that magical first read. There will be other pleasures, like enjoying turns of phrase more now that I'm not as swept up in the plot -- which incidentally feels much less complicated this time around, either because I have some recollection of what's going on or my head is just screwed on tighter these days (not likely). I'd certainly still recommend it to all.

When bad producers happen to good films

As always... I finally got around to something, namely the film version of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, one of my favorite American novels. This isn't as much of a "finally" as usual, because it was only released on DVD very recently, and till then I had been hoping to catch it on someone's Tivo. The novel is mostly famous for its incisive portrayal of Europe's post-WWI ennui and barely concealed rage, as viewed through bitter American expat eyes.

I was always curious about this film not just because of the novel it's quite faithfully adapted from, but also because I, loving swordfighting films, always loved Errol Flynn's Robin Hood as a child, and this was sort of his mature character actor comeback in his turbulent middle age, right before his death. Unfortunately, I never really put that together too well with the novel to ask the logical question why someone so old and battered-looking was cast in the first place. It's one of the major flaws of the film -- the cast is mostly so old that it looks like the Lost Generation has survived the second world war and is lost again. There's not much effort to make it look like the twenties, either (I admit I am not a costuming expert, so maybe I'm wrong), and it just looks like a melodrama of middle-aged drunken drifters. With the exception of a horribly wooden young actor as the supposedly charismatic bullfighter who Brett runs off with.

The production values are reasonably lavish, though people in the production complained bitterly about filming in Mexico instead of Pamplona. As a matter of fact, they're too lavish for the film's own good. It just doesn't look right when Jake, the drunken newspaper writer hero who's probably the best and smartest of the lot, sleeps in freshly ironed striped pajamas and pulls on a lavish robe when Brett awakens him in the middle of the night. There's altogether too much pageantry around the bullfighting, some of which works to mirror the tangled emotions of the characters, but plenty of which is just show.

Adaptation's quite faithful, as I said, with three major flaws. Robert Cohn's Jewishness is entirely gone, which is something that it's possible to get away with only if you then emphasize his status as someone who didn't fight in the war. Without either, he's just damn annoying. The compression of time makes Brett look like a big whore, frankly, rather than a lost and desperate woman (even if she is commonly regarded as a nymphomaniac). And finally, and most awfully, the film doesn't have the courage to end with the bleak exchange, "Oh, Jake, we could have had such a good time together." "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Jake says it rather angrily in the last scene, rather than bleakly, but the film ends on the weak invented dialogue, "There must be an answer for us somewhere." "I'm sure there is." It's just as empty of any solution as the original, without the stoicism-cum-cynicism. Maybe Jake is supposed to be pacifying Brett, knowing full well that there is no answer, but in that case, why diverge from the great original lines?

For all these flaws, I blame Darryl F. Zanuck, who may have produced a few good films, but made a hell of a lot of bad ones to fill his Twentieth-Century Fox pipeline. Of course, solid but slightly stodgy director Henry King isn't exactly free of blame, either.

It bothers me all the more because I love the film for its ability to offer the one thing that you can't get from the novel: a look at Jake from the outside. He's the narrator of the novel, the most damaged ex-soldier psychologically and physically. The film takes care to spell this out by throwing in an awful flashback in which the doctor announces to him that he's going to be impotent, a word nowhere to be found in Hemingway. Regardless, watching Jake suffer is even more wrenching than reading his adjectiveless account of his suffering. Some of Tyrone Power's line readings were illuminating to me. Ava Gardner, as Brett, is lovely, Eddie Albert is a solid and sympathetic Bill Gorton, and even Mel Ferrer isn't bad as Cohn, but all in all, the cast could have benefited from much better direction and less stuff going on around them. A similar movie that springs to mind, filled with aging stars playing drifters, is Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable's last movie, The Misfits. It had a kind of spareness that this film unfortunately lacked.

The Ghost of Jennifer Aniston

I read The Senator's Wife by Sue Miller -- lest you think I've only been watching movies lately. Unfortunately, I had heard rumors that it was going to be made into a film with Jennifer Aniston (very old rumors; I think they might have been also rumors about Brad Pitt costarring as her husband, so you can guess how old they were). So I couldn't get the visual out of my head the whole time.

Interesting meditation on marriage: love, sex, fidelity, expectation, the daily grind, set in an academic town in the nineties. A young couple move in next to a senator's wife (where's the senator?) and the two marriages go through some rough times in tandem for a couple of years. I hate giving away plot, so it's hard to critique that openly for you, but it's a reasonably good read. Personally, I'd have liked more about the political side, but there are reasons that it's not a big part of the wife's life.

Lovely descriptive writing, and fairly good entry into the head of the younger woman (the Aniston character); a lot of almost stream of consciousness interiority that is specific enough to be interesting, but not so overwritten as to be totally unbelievable (you know the type that follows a clear trajectory that nobody's musings take). Certainly a good, slightly lighter read, though nothing earth-shattering.

Secure in the homeland

Back in Chicago, after MLA San Francisco (it was lovely, thank you, though I wish I'd gotten to see more of SF) and a stint in NJ, aquarium-less this time.

A few cultural thoughts:

1) I dreamed about Frost/Nixon last night. Specifically, going to a screening of it with the cast and crew. I think my subconscious is trying to get my butt to the movie theater. Hint taken.

2) I really, really want to read Netherland.

3) Brace yourselves for a disquisition on how Disney mismanaged the Narnia franchise and how bitter I am about the whole thing. And I wasn't even really into the movies, but I miss my big Yearly Movie Event that Lord of the Rings got me used to for three years. New Line's lesson to the world: jump off a cliff and sometimes you hit a really big trampoline.

Unhappily ever after

Earlier this week, the famous writer David Mura came to speak at Northwestern. He's probably best known for his memoirs about Japanese American identity and masculinity, especially the aptly named Turning Japanese. He has just published his first novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, a really fantastically written novel about a very underwritten problem; after the Japanese American internment, what happened to the next generation? And what happened in the long term to the no-no boys, those people who refused to bear arms for or take a 'loyalty oath' to the government that was imprisoning them without benefit of trial? Ben Ohara, adjunct historian, was decidedly not a model minority child; his parents' social ostracism erupts in his juvenile obesity and delinquency, and in his brilliantly weird brother Tommy's drug abuse and disappearance.

What makes the novel so engaging is not only an articulate, self-deprecating central character (also the key to Mura's memoirs) but its placement amid the swirls of very large social movements: post-internment resettlement, of course, but also rainbow coalition, city gentrification (though Mura professed his ignorance of what's happened lately to Chicago's Uptown), white flight retirement to Arizona, and even the always slightly pathetic currents of academia and its trend towards part-timers. Its success in gesturing lightly towards these issues is somewhat reminiscent of Junot Díaz, who Mura thanks for his reading, though with only one major footnote as opposed to Díaz's Foster-Wallace-like revelry in them.

Though the novel sags slightly at the end, probably the unfortunate effect of suddenly needing to speak in voices other than Ben's to answer some of the questions he's asking, it ends with an open but not annoyingly vague conclusion. I really enjoyed this very much, and I think its mixture of hapless child and hapless grownups will appeal in a self-identificatory fashion to a number of readers (though I have a feeling it's not exactly going to be in the YA section).

Mura, who was delightful to speak with about his work and the arts scene/historical work of the Asian American community, gave a great performance of some of his poetry and short stories, including a new short story about a Chinese-Filipino skateboarder in Minneapolis (he had me the second he mentioned Lupe Fiasco, of course) who falls for a Somali girl he sees being harassed by two black American girls on the train one day. Mura's so well known for his memoir work that it was important to see his ability to address other experiences so incisively. I say this with some guilt, because I must say (and I think that this is fair) that as a younger child, not even a teenager yet, when I first started reading AA fiction with an eye towards forming some kind of identity for myself, Mura's memoirs did nothing for me. As memoirs are wont to do, if they are not about a suitably apposite subject. A young sansei dating a white woman and going to Japan? What in god's name could I possibly get out of that?

At that age, not much. As a scholar, I now see just how important his work was; he addressed a lot of issues and anxieties that people really didn't want to hear about. As a reader, I certainly look forward to more of his fiction. As an audience member, well, I'm nowhere near him, but if you're in Minneapolis, try to catch him sometime at Theater Mu, one of the major Asian American theater companies.

Mortally afraid

Somewhere in this harried weekend, I managed to devour a fantasy novel (first in a while) by famed writer Tanith Lee called Mortal Suns, set in a vaguely ancient Greek kind of world ruled by polygamous kings. It's unbelievably eerie and has some gorgeous descriptive writing; you can understand both these attributes when I say that the main character is an otherwise beautiful princess who is born without feet and is sent away by her mother to the Temple of Death; said mother then almost dies of supernatural feet kicking about in her womb.

Creepy as it is (and that's the tip of the iceberg), the writing does at least carry it along for the first half of the novel, but after that, when the romance gets going, phrasing takes over for any kind of characterization and the whole thing falls apart, character, plot, even imagery, and all. It's a pity, really.

It's great to be alive!

This post is to reassure you, faithful readers, that I still am. However, Esther in The Bell Jar didn't think it was so great.

Yes, took some time to read this weekend after checking in with myself and realizing that the lack of new reading was why I was not feeling quite human. So I read Roots and The Bell Jar on Saturday (raiding that pile of books I own but still have not read, not a huge one). Sylvia Plath is such an icon that I don't know how I didn't read The Bell Jar, but I think that, like Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22, it was one of those books that a certain group of très cool, world-weary teenagers would carry around and rave about. 'Nuff said.

I was astonished at how extremely pertinent Esther's neurosis and mental breakdown still is, though; ambitious but purposeless girl in big city, returns to small town, sexual hangups, academic confusion, mental institution. Except for the shock treatments, it's dreadfully realistic and depressing. As a matter of fact, so much so that I couldn't quite appreciate the beautiful Plathian descriptive writing and very tightly told story. Nobody talks much about the craftsmanship of the novel, and I can see why, as you spend a lot of time thinking, "Oh dear lord, this sad girl." But it is very well told. At the same time, there were some episodes out of the story arc, particularly Esther's first major sexual experience, that were clearly meant to reflect her mental state and that I didn't feel were entirely successful -- didn't manage to be quite unclear enough to be dreamlike or extra frightening, didn't fill any function in telling us more about Esther. They might as well have been told in a straightforward narrative fashion.

I was very glad to read it at last, and found it well worth reading. Two pop culture notes: confounding author's biography (in this case near hagiography) with novel, I was under the strong impression that the narrator dies at the end. Not so. Also, a couple of years back, Julia Stiles was announced to star in a new film version of the novel. Haven't heard anything on it since.