Book Reviews

Peyton Place

September 6, 2016 by admin 2 Comments

Peyton Place surprised me. What is now called an iconic novel of the mid-fifties, for me Peyton Place represented the first book I thought of as “dirty.” Like Valley of the Dolls, Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, was one of those books that the moms in my neighborhood whispered about but seemed to all be reading. This must have been in the mid-sixties when Peyton Place, the TV series began its five year run. This notoriety reminds me of a current novel that seems to be in that same category: Fifty Shades of Grey, which I have not read but have heard so much about. After reading Peyton Place, however, I realized that I’d gotten it all wrong. This is not a smutty novel. It is simply a novel that shocked its early audience with its honesty. The subject of Peyton Place is not sex, though sex is underneath most of the main characters’ personal dilemmas, the themes here include hypocrisy and secrecy, coming of age and a new way of looking at female sexuality.

The setting is a small town in New Hampshire where everything is tidy and all the residents keep up appearances. The plot follows the story of three female characters: a middle-aged woman, Constance MacKenzie, who worries that her secret, her daughter’s illegitimacy, will be discovered and ruin her life; the woman’s daughter, Allison, who believes her father is dead and aspires to be a writer who searches for truth, and another adolescent girl, Selena Cross, who suffers ongoing sexual abuse from her stepfather. The forward to the Fiftieth Anniversary edition explains that Metalious’ publisher insisted that the abuser in the novel be changed from father to stepfather. Incest was a topic that simply could not be written about in the mid-nineteen fifties. The author was angered by this change and said that it turned her book from “tragedy to trash.”

Peyton Place is also about class privilege. The abuse of Selena Cross is easily overlooked because she belongs to a family living in a shack, literally on the wrong side of the tracks. The town women are interested in Selena because she is beautiful and polite and has a good work ethic. Despite their class differences, Selena is a classmate and friend of Allison MacKenzie. Selena’s mother, Nellie, is the MacKenzie’s housekeeper. Eventually Selena works in Constance MacKenzie’s high-end dress shop.

The male characters in the book are mostly members of the good-ole boy network of movers and shakers who live on Chestnut Street: Leslie Harrington, the owner of Cumberland Mills, a board member of the local bank, chairman of the Peyton Place school board and a very rich man; Seth Buswell, owner of the local newspaper The Peyton Place Times and Doc Swain, the town doctor who becomes important for intervening in Selena Cross’ life at two crucial turning points. The other group of male characters literally live on the wrong side of the tracks in shacks without running water and work in the lumber industry either cutting trees or, like Selena’s stepfather, Lucas Cross, working as carpenters. This lower class of men are stereotypically drunks and wife beaters. But the town, including the social workers, mostly turn a blind eye to what happens in their households because they possess the most highly-valued New England characteristic: they pay their bills.

As the plot unfolds, we wonder whether Seth Buswell and Doc Swain will succeed in instituting zoning laws which will help bring running water to the shacks, whether Allison MacKenzie will realize her dream of a writing career and whether Selena will escape from her abusive stepfather. We also wonder whether Constance MacKenzie will lighten up enough to engage in an open relationship with the stranger who comes to town, Tomas Makris, the “Greek feller from New York” who arrives in the Fall as the school’s new headmaster. Though Constance has had an illegitimate child she tells herself that “she had never been highly sexed. . . ” that her affair with Allison MacKenzie for whom she names their daughter,” was a thing born of loneliness. . . .Men were not necessary for they were unreliable at best and nothing but the creators of trouble.” As an outsider, Makris sees Peyton Place for what it is, a small town in which lived two kinds of people: “Those who manufactured and maintained tedious, expensive shells, and those who did not. Those who did, lived in constant terror lest the shells of their own making crack open to display the weakness that was underneath, and those who did not were either crushed or toughened.” He is immediately attracted to Constance MacKenzie and some of the steamy scenes in the novel are between Tom and Constance.

The setting in small town New Hampshire is beautifully drawn. Nature surrounds the town and is a refuge for the

innocent Allison MacKenzie. She likes to walk out of town and hike up the hill where “the delights of childhood were all around her, and here on the hill she did not feel that she was peculiar and different from her contemporaries.” From on top of the hill at Road’s End, Allison liked to look down at the town spread out below her. “She could see the belfry of the grade school, the church spires and the winding, blue road of the Connecticut River with the red brick mills, like growths, attached to one of its sides.” Allison is happiest in the woods, “one of the few remaining stands of lumber in northern New England which had never been cut, for the town ended below Memorial Park and the terrain above had always been considered too rocky and uneven for development.” . . . She felt a deep sense of ownership toward the woods. She loved them and she had learned them well through every season of the year. She knew where the first arbutus trailed in the spring, when there were still large patches of snow on the ground, and she knew the quiet, shady places where the violets made purple clusters after the snows had disappeared.” Allison is truly comfortable here. “She could move quietly through the woods with a gracefulness that she never possessed away from them . . . ” In the woods with Allison is where Peyton Place begins and where it ends. And while, as a young girl, Allison echoes the sentiment of her mother, certain she wants little to do with men, in the end a man comes looking for her.

Peyton Place surprised me not only because it isn’t a prurient novel packed with sex scenes, but also because it is quite nuanced and well-written. Early on, it’s clear that Metalious’ novel may have been shocking to its mid-fifties readers not only because it included some sensuality, but because from the very first sentence, it’s clear that women in this novel are sexual beings, just like men. In this way, Peyton Place was ahead of its time and might now be considered feminist in its views. The very first sentences titillate the reader with the idea of female sensuality: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.” Constance MacKenzie definitely has sexual passions but they have been repressed for so long that it takes Tomas Makris a long time to release them. Constance’s daughter Allison, however, knows early on that she longs for a career and that she won’t let men or sex get in the way of that. When her high school friend asks her if she plans to get married when she’s old, she replies, “No. I’m going to have affairs instead.” After she gets a job writing in New York, however, she publishes a story in a major magazine about a young woman who, like her, aspires to be the boss in a publishing company but settles for marrying the boss instead. It is the mid-fifties after all.

I’m glad I read Peyton Place and I recommend it as a well-written novel with a solid plot. And, as a reflection of a particular time and place, Peyton Place is brilliant.

The Land of Mango Sunsets

January 23, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

I had the pleasure of reading The Land of Mango Sunsets, by Dorothea Benton Frank on the beach in Hawaii – a perfect backdrop for it. The novel begins with a Prologue explaining why the narrator calls the low country of South Carolina “the land of mango sunsets.” It’s a lovely romantic story involving a honeymoon in the South Pacific and a plate of sliced mangoes, “dripping with fleshy sweetness” delivered each morning along with a simple breakfast tray. It’s a charming image of young honeymooners eating mangoes behind mosquito netting in their bed. And it’s an image that stays with the reader, as it has with the narrator, who says, “mangoes were equated with love, tenderness, and hopeful beginnings, and we spent our lives looking everywhere for other examples of them.” We expect then that this will be a story of hopeful beginnings with maybe a little love and tenderness thrown in.

We also discover in the prologue that this place of mango sunsets is the place where the narrator’s family “had kept the same cottage for over one hundred years” and where, as a young girl, she remembered pausing to watch the sunset: “. . . [T]here was a sliver of time late in the day when the sun hung in the western sky, after it stopped burning white and before it dropped into the horizon. For just a few minutes it would transform itself into a red orange orb.” And her father called it “the mango sunset.” Lovely.

http://www.city-data.com/picfilesc/picc30348.php

Dorothea Benton Frank, like Pat Conroy, has deep feelings about this part of the South Carolina low country, Sullivan’s Island, where “a chorus of bird whistles and song” began and ended each day, where “the pungent smells of salt and wet earth haunt me . . . I could smell rain coming, sense a storm, and knew enough to be afraid of fast water that would spin you away from life in an instant.” The difference though is that for Conroy the land itself is tied up with twisted memories of family dysfunction while for Frank, the low country is a place where family thrived, “there were the leathered but loving hands and peppermint breath of old people, always there to help.” In The Prince of Tides, Conroy has written a lament while Frank has written a love song.

The novel begins in earnest in New York, another parallel to The Prince of Tides but Frank’s protagonist is not just visiting, Miriam Elizabeth Swanson lives in the city and appears to be just as snobbish and cold as her name suggests. It’s the story of Miriam making her life in New York in her fabulous apartment which she has had to subdivide and rent out after her husband divorced her to marry a much younger woman with whom he has children. Miriam is bitter and carries that bitterness with her in most of her personal interactions. She is not particularly likeable. She barely speaks to her two grown sons, having alienated them during her divorce by forcing them to choose between her and their father. She does have one lovely friend and tenant, Kevin Dolan, with whom she shares frequent cocktail hours and dinners and I can’t help wondering, early on, why this man cares for her at all.

Miriam’s problem is that she is striving hard to maintain her place in the Manhattan social scene which her husband’s wealth had insured. But now that he’s gone, so is her social standing. She is snubbed by the league of women who spend their time volunteering for the appropriate charities, in this case, the art museum. Miriam’s other problem is that her other tenant has died suddenly and she needs to rent his space as soon as possible because she needs the income. The new tenant she settles on, Liz Harper, is young and beautiful and, in the way of all strangers who come to town in fiction, is about to stir things up. She will become the catalyst for Miriam’s transformation from bitter peri-menopausal woman to loving mother, grandmother and daughter, and a woman for whom the chance of a grown-up loving relationship with a man is once again possible. But it’s not just the stranger coming to town that saves Miriam, she must also reconnect with her roots in South Carolina and face her mother’s mortality.

I thoroughly enjoyed Miriam’s journey from phony wannabe socialite to loving and loveable woman. I loved it when her nemesis in the volunteer world gets her comeuppance and also watching Miriam take baby steps toward kindness to her fellow human beings and her own family. The writing is solid — lovely in parts — and the characters are well drawn. It’s a story that made me feel good. I can’t help it if I like happy endings. And, too, I love the fact that my copy of The Land of Mango Sunsets has that slightly warped look that happens when most of the reading takes place on the beach with the book resting against a wet swimsuit and perilously close to the surf.

Fiction Addiction in South Carolina

December 29, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

I’m delighted to take my literary road trip back down south right now — smack dab in the middle of the darkest, coldest and wettest season in the Pacific Northwest. I could use a sun break. I’ll admit that it didn’t take too much online research to find the South Carolina bookstore that sounds just right to me. With a name like Fiction Addiction, how could I miss? I’ll admit to suffering from that same problem myself and having no need for rehab. While I occasionally pick up a nonfiction title, fiction is definitely my addiction. This bookstore seems a natural match.

I read on their website that the owner of Fiction Addiction is from South Carolina originally and that she spent five years in New York working as an editor at St. Martin’s Press — excellent credentials! Also, I’m drawn to the events and other bookish offerings I find listed. First, I notice the “For Local Authors” link: If you are a local author with a publishing contract with a New York publisher, we would love to get an advance reading copy of your forthcoming book so that we can help start some early buzz for you. This bookstore apparently goes out of its way to support local writers and I think that’s awesome. And they don’t only support the big time New York published authors, but also offer creative ways to stock books by local writers and published by indie presses. I like that too. Additional resources for writers include links to the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop and a list of local writing groups with contact information — lovely.

Possibly my favorite offering from this bookstore is called “Book Your Lunch.” This is a program to connect readers with writers by bringing them together over lunch. What a fabulous idea! The bookstore invites authors to a local restaurant to read from or talk about their latest book and follow that with lunch and a book signing. Now that sounds like something we Seattleites could really get into. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the Elliott Bay Book Company or Third Place Books adds this to their agenda.

And so it is with completely positive feelings that I make the call to Fiction Addiction. The woman who picks up the phone is pleasant and seemsinterested in my project. When I explain that I’m looking for recommendations for a book or two of fiction that is particularly evocative of South Carolina, her initial response is, “Oh my!” She takes some time to consider my request, and I can’t help filling the silence by talking about The Prince of Tides as an example of the kind of book I’m interested in reading. Though I read this novel years ago, I still remember how it dropped me right into the low country, filled with shrimp boats and salt marshes, and how I could practically smell the humid southern air while reading it. The bookseller (I’m sorry I didn’t as her name) admits that she has not read Prince of Tides and I try not to judge that. Instead, I enthusiastically suggest that she add it to her to-read list and reiterate the kind of novel I’m looking for. We talk a little bit about what Greenville is like, she suggests I look up Falls Park in downtown Greenville and so I find this beautiful photo:

After some thought, the woman recommends Dorothea Benton Frank, an author I’m not familiar with, and I suggest she send along whichever of Frank’s titles she likes the best. “She’s very popular around here.” She tells me. “But her books are not exactly literary — more of a beach read.” I tell her that’s fine with me, since I’m on my way to Hawaii soon. As I’m giving her my billing information, I can’t help myself, so I ask her to send along a copy of Prince of Tides, too. It has been so many years since I’ve read that novel. It’s a classic. And it must certainly be one of the best novels set in South Carolina ever. I can’t wait to re-read it.

Existential Humor? John Barth’s The Floating Opera

November 5, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

I know John Barth is a well-regarded American writer. Somehow I’d missed reading Barth as an English major back in college. To be fair, I’d focused on nineteenth century English literature so there were many American writers that I missed during those brief four years. So I was excited to be reading Barth for the first time as part of my journey into Maryland. Sadly, The Floating Opera, Barth’s first novel, disappointed me. Interestingly, Barth sets me up for this dissatisfaction in his “Preparatory Note to the Revised Edition.” He tells me that this novel was written in only three months and its companion piece in the following three months. He explains that this was his first novel which he wrote at age twenty-four after “writing fiction industriously for five years.” He also says that he had “deservedly—no success whatever with the publishers” until one finally agreed to publish The Floating Opera, but only after he made major changes in its construction, “notably about the stern.” He’s pleased to note that, in this edition, he has changed the novel back to its “original and correct ending,” but wants the reader to recognize it as “the very first novel of a very young man.” Not exactly a resounding recommendation, right? I feel adequately forewarned.

The story of this novel takes place on a particular day (about June 21, 1937) in the life of a then thirty seven year old lawyer, Todd Andrews, when Andrews changes his mind about ending his own life. The novel is written in a first person stream of consciousness style. At first I’m drawn in. I like the invitation the author has given me: “. . . come along with me reader, and don’t fear for your weak heart; I’ve one myself, and know the value of inserting first a toe, then a foot, next a leg, very slowly your hips and stomach, and finally your whole self into my story.” Todd Andrews is an eccentric fellow, though he says he isn’t. He works in the law firm established by his father, lives in a single room in the Dorset Hotel, just a stone’s throw from his office on lawyer’s row and the courthouse. He describes himself as “interested in any number of things, enthusiastic about nothing.” Alas, I find myself not very enthusiastic about him.

The title of the novel is from a showboat that traveled around the Virginia and Maryland tidewaters during that time, and is a metaphor for life: “our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we either renew our friendship—catch up to date—or find that they and we don’t comprehend each other anymore.” And so, this novel is structured the same way, floating “willy-nilly on the tide of my vagrant prose” where the plot “sails in and out of view.”

Let’s see if I can summarize the plot. Todd Andrews wakes up on the day in question and, as is his habit, takes a big swig of Sherbrook rye whiskey, a routine he began in college to shake a hangover. As he is splashing water on his face, he has an inspiration—today is the day he will destroy himself by suicide. He feels like he has been made no progress in life over the last eighteen years, that he’s back to where he started then, a single man who’s in love with his best friend’s wife and mistress. His friend knows about the affair, he has encouraged it actually. It is to his mistress that Andrews leaves a farewell note.

Then Andrews gives us a brief summary of his life, his first sexual experience, college, military service, law school, law practice. We learn that his father has also committed suicide and he has been trying to figure out why it happened by writing a long letter to his father over the years. He also tells us a lot about his sexual prowess, despite his chronic prostate problem he is apparently a great lover. Of course.

Okay, now I’m bored with this review. Let me just say that The Floating Opera is meant to be humorous and I did find some snippets sort of funny. It’s also, I think, meant to be sort of existential. Mostly, Barth’s adolescent romp through life in this short novella, his cynical searching for meaning, and his conclusions fell flat on the page and left me cold. Here’s what he concludes in a funny, off-hand kind of way:

Nothing has intrinsic value.
The reasons for which people attribute value to things are always ultimately irrational.
There is, therefore, no ultimate “reason” for valuing anything.
Living is action. There’s no final reason for action.
There’s no final reason for living (or for suicide).

I would like to simply add one more point to Barth’s conclusion:

6. There’s no final reason to read this novel.

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler

July 29, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

How does Anne Tyler do it? How does she create these wonderfully quirky characters who say and do cringe-worthy things in their daily lives yet share qualities that strike uncomfortably resonant chords in her readers? In Breathing Lessons, we meet Maggie and Ira Moran, a long-married couple who, as the novel opens, are on their way to the funeral of Maggie’s best friend’s husband. The action of the novel takes place in one day and much of it on their road trip from Baltimore to Deer Lick, Pennsylvania. Of course, I had to Google “Deer Lick” to see if it really exists. It does. It’s just southwest of Pittsburg and more than a three-hour drive from Baltimore, an interminably long time to be stuck in the car with these two characters. Maggie is a busy-body. But she is also good-natured – the kind of person who strikes up conversations with strangers and then divulges the most personal information. While stopped at a convenience store along the road, Maggie tells the clerk her family troubles: her son can’t keep a steady job, has once been arrested, pretends to be a rock star and is divorced with a young daughter. In fact, Maggie is certain she has heard her ex-daughter-in-law, Fiona, on a talk show this very morning as she was driving their car out of the auto shop. She’s so surprised to her Fiona’s voice that she slams straight into a truck. Here is another of Maggie’s characteristics: She’s accident prone. And Maggie takes the notion of “wishful thinking” to a whole new level. While she doesn’t exactly lie to her friends and loved ones, she habitually tells what Mark Twain would call “stretchers.” She frequently creates elaborate scenarios in her head in which she can change things, to make them better, with little regard for the real impact on other people’s lives. The most audacious example of Maggie’s “meddling” here is her plan to stop in on her ex-daughter-in-law and granddaughter and convince them to drive back to Baltimore with her and Ira — a thinly-veiled attempt to get Fiona and Leroy back together with the Morans’ immature and irresponsible son. We also learn, through Maggie’s conversation with the stranger at the diner, that their daughter, Daisy is leaving for college the next morning with a full scholarship to an Ivy League school. The girl has become “unrecognizable” to Maggie who, with tears in her eyes, tells the clerk that Daisy recently asked her this chilling question: “Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?” Ouch. Later Ira suggests that Maggie’s hare-brained idea to stop bring Fiona and Leroy home with them is her way of replacing Daisy with Leroy. Maggie wants an opportunity to start anew with her granddaughter, to do things right this time. This, it seems to me is what Anne Tyler is examining in this novel – the wish we all have to turn back the clock, to get one more chance to dosomething better the next time around. That said, there are some lovely moments between Maggie and Ira, moments which only happen between long-married couples who have known and loved each other for many years. And while Maggie has, no doubt, settled for being “ordinary,” Anne Tyler reminds us that, in the final analysis, it’s what we all have in common.

Breathing Lessons is a beautifully written novel which highlights poignant moments in a couple’s ordinary life. Though sometimes painful and close to home, there were also times when Maggie’s reflections had me laughing out loud. And for me, looking for a sense of the State of Maryland in this novel, I got a great feel for the countryside on the road between Maryland and Pennsylvania. I particularly liked this description of driving out of Baltimore: The scenery grew choppy. Stretches of playgrounds and cemeteries were broken suddenly by clumps of small business – liquor stores pizza parlors, dark little bars and taverns dwarfed by the giant dish antennas on their roofs. Then another playground would open out. And once they cross into Pennsylvania: They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the same old scabby, stippled surface. The views were long and curved and green – a small child’s drawing of farm country. Distinct black cows grazed on the hillsides. And when they return to Maryland after their adventure: They were in Maryland now, and Maggie imagined that the country here looked different —more luxurious. The hillsides emptied of livestock, had turned a deep, perfect green, and in the faded light the long white fences gave off a moony glimmer. Yes, I have a sense of Maggie Moran’s world now, both the physical landscape and the emotional turmoil inherent in any ordinary, long-lived life, beginning with youthful hope, taking the bumps and disappointments as they come but never losing sight of the possibility for positive change, and maybe a little well-intended meddling.

The Ice Storm

April 9, 2014 by rachelreadsfiction Leave a Comment

Right away in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, I get a sense of what the author thinks of New Canaan, Connecticut — the novel’s setting: It is “the most congenial and superficially calm of suburbs. In the wealthiest state in the Northeast. In the most affluent country on earth.” And he places us in time: “Three years shy of that commercial madness, the bicentennial.” Okay — 1973. And the next paragraph is a long list of things that don’t yet exist in that time: “No answering machines. And no call waiting. No Caller ID. No compact disc recorders or laser disks or holography or cable television or MTV.” The list goes on and on, but you get the picture — a very dramatic picture. I remember 1973 quite well but this novel plunks me back in that time so vividly that I almost have to remind myself that over forty years have passed since then. Moody does this in many ways throughout the book, but perhaps most effectively through his references to the music of the time — and not just the top ten pop songs but some of those songs that make me smile and think, wow, I forgot all about that one. Helen Ready singing Delta Dawn, Cat Stevens singing anything. Watch and listen to Delta Dawn here:

Turns out I’m close in age to the teenage protagonist, Paul Hood, who narrates this story of a disastrous ice storm which is the backdrop for his family’s implosion. Of course his parents’ marriage has been rocky for some time — his father, Benjamin Hood is having an affair with a neighbor and his mother, Elena, cannot get enough self-help books to find her way out of a deep depression. In the Midwest, in 1973, I didn’t know of anybody’s parents having “key parties” — where the men drop their car keys into a bowl as they walk in the door and at the end of the night, the women choose a set of keys randomly from that bowl. Here is the man she will go home with, have sex with, no strings attached. It might have happened. In New Canaan, in 1973, we learn, key parties happen all the time. And all this sexual promiscuity trickles down to the children — even the pre-teens are experimenting with alcohol and sex when they’re not playing with dolls, eating junk food and watching endless television. Now that seemed very familiar to me.

Okay, the book is depressing. No doubt about it. But, too, it’s darkly funny. It begins like this: “So let me dish you this comedy about a family I knew when I was growing up.” So, you’re expecting humor but right away Moody hits you with other emotions: nostalgia, embarrassment, fear of aging, desperation. Anyone who has been through adolescence can relate to Paul Hood’s all-consuming crush on the most popular girl in school. And in the early seventies, in the middle of the sexual revolution, we were all still trying to figure out how to deal with “free love” and wanting all relationships to be “relevant.” It wasn’t the beginning of married couples having affairs, but it sure became a whole lot easier, after birth control became readily available and cheaper than it had been before. The collective consciousness was open and searching. Or so it seemed at the time.

The Hood family members are all searching too, trying to make sense of their comfortable suburban upper class lives. They’re all pretty selfish, kind of hard to like — except for the voice of the teenage boy, Paul, Rick Moody’s voice, which catches everyone with their pants down. Their individual self-absorption and petty concerns are magnified by the enormity of the ice storm, wreaking havoc and ultimately real disaster in their cushy neighborhood. As Mother Nature is powerful enough to destroy life through major events, ice storms and hurricanes and mudslides, so too is our flawed human nature capable of destroying lives and relationships and families. But, like the cleaning up and moving on that inevitably happens after natural disasters, human beings are resilient and can do the same.

In the Afterword to my edition of The Ice Storm is an essay by Rick Moody entitled: The Creature Lurches from the Lagoon: More Notes on Adaptation, I discovered that this novel was made into a movie. Of course, I couldn’t wait to see it and really enjoyed reading the authors thoughts about that process. The thing that most interested me was that the film, by Ang Lee, has an original score. What? I wasn’t going to hear all those old seventies tunes? But I trust the author when he says that the score, though it sounds kind of Eastern (lots of gamelan in it), it is mournful and for him brings up “waves of regret about the past.”

So I watched it. I recommend it. But read the book first, especially if 1973 is stored in some of your own memory synapses. But, be warned. You may just be tempted to dust off some of your old vinyl.

Book Reviews

Footer

Connect with me on Social Media

Twitter