Book Reviews

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.

Be Careful What You Wish For – Ravens by George Dawes Green

November 5, 2013 by rachelreadsfiction Leave a Comment

The Boatwright family is in trouble. Creditor’s send bills to their workplaces, they’re in danger of losing their house to foreclosure, the mom, Patsy, has a drinking problem, the dad, Mitch, is religious, passive and ineffectual and their youngest son, Jase, is just a kid — clueless and mostly tuned into video games. There may be some hope for their eldest daughter, Tara (yeah, like the plantation) she’s going to night school and taking organic chemistry with the dream of finding a way out of Brunswick, Georgia. And then the worst possible thing happens – they win the Georgia mega-millions lottery. That’s three hundred and eighteen million dollars.

Turns out Patsy Boatwright has been buying lottery tickets for years, parking herself on the sofa on Wednesday nights to watch the drawing with a steady flow of gin & tonic’s. Chapter one ends with Patsy holding the winning ticket, yelling “GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD!” while rocking back and forth in front of the television. Enter Shaw and Romeo, young tech support workers from Dayton, Ohio, driving through Brunswick on their way to Florida. On their way, that is, until they stop at a convenience store, the very store which has sold Mitch Boatwright the winning lottery ticket. When a pretty young clerk rebuffs Shaw’s advances, and lies to him about knowing who won the jackpot, “a shaft of anger” opens up inside him, into which the seed of a plan begins to germinate. It’s a plan to terrorize the Boatwrights into giving him and his buddy Romeo half of the jackpot.

The plan seems far-fetched at first – Shaw overhears the convenience store

clerk talking about who bought the winning ticket, then he does a little online sleuthing to find out who the family might be. Of course, it’s frighteningly easy for anyone with a little bit of knowledge to find out a whole lot about anyone over the internet – that’s the point here. Shaw is quickly on the scent of the Boatwrights. He scares up the most information from Tara’s MySpace page. Shaw’s character is well drawn – multi-faceted and increasingly frightening. He’s strange at first and angry and says some weird things: “Here’s this universe filled with power, right? These energies, all around us, in every molecule. And you and me, we’re smart, we’re capable, we’re clever. . . . But we might as well be ghosts. We can’t seem to get hold of a fucking thing. . . Everything goes to someone else.” So Shaw decides it’s time he gets hold of the Boatwright’s windfall.

After cleverly inveigling his way into their home by pretending to be from the Lottery Commission, Shaw sets forth his scheme: he will take half the winnings and leave them alone once he has it. In the meantime he will live with them, they will concoct a believable story about how he came to know them and bought the winning ticket with Mitch but if anyone tries to stop him or tip off the police, he will kill their loved ones one by one. For emphasis he has them turn out the lights and look out the window at his partner, Romeo, skulking under the chestnut tree in the front yard, lit by a streetlight. He’s the partner and designated killer should anything go wrong. And right then, just after threatening them, Shaw tells the Boatwrights about his dream, “all this love; I want to bring kindness and truth and virtue to the world. But I’ve never had the tools before, and here a tool is set down before me—.“ The tool, of course, being the Boatwrights’ windfall.

The cover story is that Shaw met Mitch Boatwright when Mitch was in Greenville, SC at a training course for work. Mitch volunteered at a crisis center through his church, Faith Renewal, and Shaw was a desperate suicidal man. Mitch had saved his life. They convince everyone that Mitch and Shaw were buddies, that Shaw came to Brunswick to visit Mitch and they bought the lottery tickets together. And here’s where things get all Southern Gothic. The Boatwrights are, of course, good church going Christians. At the press conference announcing the winners, Shaw tells the bogus story about their meeting, how Mitch saved his life and then Shaw stuns the crowd by saying he plans to give most of his share of the money away.

The rest of the novel plays out with Romeo stalking the Boatwright’s loved ones while an old cop, Burris Jones, nicknamed Deppity Dog, who has been in love with Tara’s Grandma, Nell, since they were in high school together, continues to sniff around and investigate, like a dog on a bone. And Deppity Dog smells a rat. The family becomes more and more terrified and yet strangely drawn to the charismatic and clearly crazy Shaw as he achieves rock star status in their little town and especially in the Faith Renewal church community. He begins to have followers, pilgrims, so many want to hear Shaw speak about the miracle of winning the mega-millions lottery and his dream to use the money to make the world a better place that they have to set up camp out at the local fairgrounds. Then Diane Sawyer interviews Shaw, asks him about all these disciples he’s attracted — does he think the Lord is calling him? Is his winning the jackpot some kind of divine intervention? Shaw knows that the pilgrims love him, that he has “woven this whole world out of pure faith. It’s a kind of magical tapestry of faith and love and power and it’s come alive now.”

Ravens is suspenseful and well-written — a page turner. Occasionally I had trouble suspending disbelief — how long could these guys really hold this family hostage with all the media attention they were getting? But Shaw’s deeply flawed, twisted character, his apparent belief in divine intervention, the unhinged scenarios that play through his mind as the action plays out on the page kept me reading and wondering how the Boatwright’s could possibly get out of this mess. And the religious aspect kept me fascinated. It’s absurd that Shaw can so easily exploit the Boatwright’s and the larger community’s belief in a personal God, right? These salt of the earth, church-going Southern folk know that God controls the lives of ordinary humans and are thrilled to experience the miracle of the mega-millions jackpot personally, right here and right now in the twenty-first century, in their own town. God has sent his prophet Shaw to Brunswick, Georgia to walk among them, to heal the sick and feed the poor. The author explores this theme throughout the novel as the community and most everyone in the family begins to believe. Mitch Boatwright goes from believing that his family has been blessed by God with all this money, to blaming their own greed for what is happening. Finally Mitch concludes that Shaw and Romeo have been sent from God to test their strength and that they have been found wanting. Except for Tara. Tara’s the one who’s going to college, who has read books other than the bible. Keep your eye on Tara as you read this book, and on Deppity Dog. Love and education are more powerful than blind faith and ignorance, even in South Georgia.

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

October 24, 2013 by rachelreadsfiction 1 Comment

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Conner is a strange book. In the Author’s Note to the Second Edition, she describes it as a comic novel dealing with matters of life and death, wherein protagonist, Hazel Motes, struggles with his faith in Jesus “like a monkey swinging back and forth in his brain.” I found little comic in the novel.

At the outset, Hazel is on a train going to “the city” later identified as Eastrod, Tennessee. He’s wearing a brand-new suit which is a “glaring” blue and still has the $11.95 price tag stapled to the sleeve. His hat, noticed by everyone he meets, looks like a “preacher’s hat.” Haze has nowhere to go after serving in the army for four years and losing his family one by one. He is preoccupied by the deaths of his younger brothers and his mother, especially wondering where they go as their coffins are closed over them. He says he wanted to put his elbow into his mother’s coffin to keep it from closing her into the darkness. Everyone he meets seems to be attracted to his eyes, trying to see into their impenetrable depths. Like his name, which reflects the protagonist’s state of mind, there’s a lot of imagery around “seeing” in this novel. And, while everyone takes Hazel for a preacher, he insists that he is not now, and never will be, a preacher. Methinks he doth protest too much.

When Hazel reaches his destination, he decides to prove that he’s a sinner by visiting a prostitute and then proclaiming himself a preacher for The Church Without Christ. Much of the action of the novel takes place between Hazel and a simple young man, Enoch Emery who follows him around and tries to befriend him “because there’s nothing worse than having no friend in the world.” I think that many scenes involving Enoch and his wanderings around the zoo and his fascination with a mummy encased in glass in a museum there are meant to be comic. But for me, the portrayal of this simple, uneducated man is less funny and more pitiful. When Enoch hears someone preach about “a new Jesus” he decides that the mummy is this new Jesus so he steals the mummy and gives it to Hazel.

Try as he might to avoid the role of preacher, Hazel cannot stop himself from preaching or from thinking about Jesus. This is not surprising since the bible is the only book he’s ever read, and “when he did he wore his mother’s glasses” which tired his eyes. Nor can Haze avoid the scammers who try to hook up with him to make a buck — a charlatan who shows up while Hazel is preaching and makes fifteen dollars and some change for his trouble; another preacher who pretends to be blind and his bizarre daughter who decides she wants to marry Hazel. But Haze becomes more and more tormented and deeply withdrawn. In desperation, he blinds himself with a bucket of lye, then wears barbed wire under his shirt to add to his suffering and stays mostly in his room. When his landlady, who has been caring for him, suggests that they get married, Hazel runs out into the icy rain with his cane wearing his now threadbare suit, preacher’s hat and shoes lined with broken glass and rocks. The next day he’s found unconscious in a ditch by two policemen who take him back to his landlady to pay his rent even though Hazel tells them, “I want to go on where I’m going.” Hazel dies in the back of the squad car but no one realizes he’s dead. His landlady remarks that she “has never seen his face more composed.” The more she looks into it, the more she sees him “moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.” Whew. I close the book and am glad it’s over.

Okay, I know Flannery O’Conner is considered one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. And I’ve read some terrific short stories she’s written, but Wise Blood leaves me cold. There, I wrote it out loud! It’s always hard for me to admit that I don’t like a novel which is considered by literary critics to be genius — it makes me feel ignorant. That said, I now understand why O’Connor only wrote two novels. The long form is not her strength. Or, more likely, it’s just me. I’m not interested in reading about the quest for religious belief. But that’s not entirely true. I’m simply not interested in reading about that quest when it involves an absurd and twisted set of characters, self-mutilation and martyrdom.

Andalusia Farm - Main House — Flannery O’Connor’s Andalusia Farm – Georgia southernliterarytrail.org

What have I learned about Georgia as a place through reading Wise Blood? Sadly, not much. I imagine that in the Bible Belt during O’Connor’s time there were plenty of circuit riding preachers – fake ones as well as true believers, and maybe some individuals who, like Hazel Motes, had been taught to read and write “but that it was wiser not to.” And I know that O’Connor was interested in faith — Catholicism v. Fundamentalism particularly, and, while this story sets forth one side of that equation, it feels mean-spirited to me. Flannery O’Connor once said: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” (Mystery & Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor.) I know the characters in Wise Blood are not meant to be realistic — they just might be too grotesque to speak to this Yankee.

Jernigan, by David Gates

October 10, 2013 by rachelreadsfiction Leave a Comment

The protagonist in David Gates’ novel, Peter Jernigan, is a mess. As the novel opens, he’s been up all night driving through the New Jersey snow. The sun is up and blinding now as he makes his way to Uncle Fred’s camp. He longs to get the car off the road, feed lots of wood into the stove to warm up the cabin then drink what’s left of the gin in the bottle on the seat next to him, washing down four Pamprins with it and sleep the sleep of the just. We know he gets into the cabin and anticipates cutting some wood and getting warm. Chapter Two opens with Jernigan reflecting that he has Uncle Fred to thank for getting him into this place. And for calling the state police, who carried me out of the trailer and rushed me to the hospital. But he doesn’t remember any of that and, horribly, he says, They got there too late for my thumb and forefinger — the surgeon almost had to do (meaning cut off) the whole hand — but the essential man, was, and is, still intact. Which is the big thing, right, the essential man? Jernigan. And, of course, we wonder, who is this guy? How did he end up here? Who’s Uncle Fred? Turns out Uncle Fred is not anyone’s uncle, just a friend of Jernigan’s from college who got the nickname Uncle Fred because he looked like some kid’s uncle.

The book is written in a casual, tossed-off kind of way which I found particularly jarring when Jernigan’s story gets pretty serious, and then seriously dire. Turns out Jernigan is the master of the off-hand comment, a clever literary device that keeps me wondering and guessing throughout the novel. And Jernigan is written in a self-consciousness style. Often, in Dickensian fashion, he talks directly to the reader. Like when he veers off the main story and into a vignette about Judith and we’re wondering who’s Judith? though we understand that Jernigan’s had a relationship with her and that she didn’t understand him as well as Uncle Fred always has. After the vignette, he says, But we’re jumping all around here and losing track. Not that I mind losing track, far from it. But. Okay, I easily fall into the style. And at the end of Chapter Two, when Jernigan says, End of reminiscence, I’m ready for the real story. Except not. Because the real story is how Jernigan got into this mess — injured and off by himself in a musty-smelling shithole of a trailer. He tosses off a kind of a prayer, asking forgiveness from his son for being a drunk and for knowing he’s probably not capable of doing better, since he has failed at least once before at getting sober. [Read more…] about Jernigan, by David Gates

American Pastoral

October 1, 2013 by rachelreadsfiction Leave a Comment

American Pastoral begins with a vignette from the narrator, Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman’s, youth. It’s a story about another kid in their Jewish neighborhood in Newark, Seymour Levov, nicknamed “The Swede.” The point is that Swede was no ordinary Jew, he was blonde and blue-eyed, beautiful and athletic, the All-American Adonis who transcended the Jewish experience. He was kind and unassuming, seemingly perfect and loved by everyone, adults and his peers alike. Flash forward and the narrator is at his high school reunion, remembering the past through the filter of nostalgia. The story jumps back and forth in time — from the reunion in the 1990’s, to the pre-World War II Newark — a center for manufacturing in the Northeast, filled with second generation Jewish immigrants working hard to succeed — to the period of post-war enthusiasm and prosperity, through the devastation of the Vietnam war. The history is told through the lens of Skip Zuckerman, but it is the life of Swede Levov, the Golden Boy. And what a life he’s had. He enlists in the Marines but spends most of his military career as a recreational specialist in South Carolina since the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima just after he finished basic training. He leaves the military, goes to college and takes a job in his father’s glove factory. Later he marries “a shiksa,” Miss New Jersey of 1949, no less. From all outward appearances, The Swede continues to lead a charmed life.

Zuckerman runs into the Swede a couple of times over the years, but as an adult the Swede appears to have “ended up bland .” What could have happened to turn the Swede into “a human platitude?” Of course, once he discovers the real story of the Swede’s life, Zuckerman says, it has been a little bit like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible. The narrator is obsessed with the Swede’s life, wondering whether anything “had ever threatened to destabilize the Swede’s trajectory? What brooding, grief, confusion and loss had come his way in life?”

This is the setup for the real story, the story of Swede Levov’s life, which the narrator has imagined — from golden boy to broken man. The Swede’s daughter, Merry, it turns out,

New York Times Photo Archives - Patrick A. Burns — New York Times Photo Archives – Patrick A. Burns

was a Vietnam war activist who bombed the post office in their small New Jersey town, killing the local doctor and sending her into hiding. With this act of violence, Merry destroys the Levov family’s unbearably idyllic life. A major theme that interests Roth in this novel is parent-child relationships. Parents must do everything they can to help their children succeed. It is impossible for a parent to give up on a child, to believe the unthinkable about a child, to confront the evil which is “ineradicable from human dealings.” Even though Swede Levov had a second chance, a second wife, three normal, healthy children, he had experienced “the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.” He can never really be happy again. Merry’s violent act “transport[ed] him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence and the desperation of the counter-pastoral — into the indigenous American berserk.”

American Pastoral is pretty grim, though there are bits of Roth’s sharp humor throughout. And the setting of Newark is equally grim — a place changed from a manufacturing hub to “the worst city in the world,” abandoned now that everyone has moved to the suburbs. While Newark used to have “a factory where somebody was making something in every side street. Now there’s a liquor store in every street — a liquor store, a pizza stand, and a seedy storefront church. Everything else in ruins or boarded up. ” Even Swede Levov had to move his glove factory to Puerto Rico, after holding out as long as possible through the riots of the sixties. His loyalty alone — to his employees and to the neighborhood –cannot hold back the tide of urban decay.

I’d say I got a good sense of a narrow slice of the New Jersey Jewish experience from the 1940’s through the 1990’s by reading American Pastoral. Through the story of Swede Levov, Roth handily demolishes the myth of the American dream. The notion of creating some kind of perfect life in the bucolic suburbs where one can hide from the reality of life and the desperation of poverty and war is absurd. Especially for Jews. It is Roth’s tour de force about “the ritual post-immigrant struggle for success turning pathological.”

Is American Pastoral the quintessential New Jersey novel? It definitely has that element described by Rutgers Professor Michael Aaron Rockland — characters trying to find a center, looking for meaning in their lives while living in a “never never land” of rural New Jersey and pretending to be living on a farm. Levov’s wife actually buys cows and runs a successful dairy farm for a time. Yes, this book has given me a fairly Dickensian feel for Newark at the end of the twentieth century. And I’m glad to be moving on to Jernigan, wondering about the kind of New Jersey David Gates has presented there.

Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell

September 9, 2013 by rachelreadsfiction Leave a Comment

Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell is the story of a twenty- year-old young man, Harley Altmyer, who, on page one, is questioned by the local sheriff for the brutal murder of a woman. From the looks of it, Harley is plenty guilty. His hands are full of dried blood, the color of a dead rose and, while he claims innocence, he can’t stop talking about how the mining office where he and the dead woman were found is a favorite hideout of his, where he liked to come with his friend Skip, now off at college. Harley rambles on about how he and Skip used to try to kill Skip’s little brother, but not seriously. The only time they actually came close to hurting Donny by luring him to sit directly underneath the automatic garage door while they press the button to lower it, Harley pulled him to safety at the last minute. Harley somehow naively believes that these stories he can’t seem to shut up about may help convince the sheriffs questioning him that he is not a murderer.

And Harley is no stranger to trouble. He knows the sheriff because he’s the same man who investigated his father’s murder, when his father was shot in the back by his mother two years before the novel opens. Wow, this is some dysfunctional family. Since his mother has been in prison, Harley has been working two jobs, delivering appliances by day and working at the local grocery store at night to support his three sisters, ranging in age from eight to sixteen. And he’s not happy about it. Harley is consumed with rage over his situation. He can barely keep his anger in check while going through the motions of caring for his sisters. While he sometimes keeps his regular appointment with the court-appointed psychologist, he’s very careful about what he tells her about his feelings. He can tell when she has tricked him into saying something important because she gives him a look, like I was suddenly naked and surprisingly well-hung. Yes, Harley is angry and in trouble, but funny too. I am completely on his side from page one. [Read more…] about Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell

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