March Books

Normally, I try to go by that edict, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” I’m a southern girl and if we’re taught nothing else we’re taught to Be Nice.

But I don’t think the author of this book was Being Nice so I’ll just flat out say that I did not like The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian.

SPOILER ALERT

Readers must willingly suspend their disbelief and how. A number of the characters in The Double Bind are characters from The Great Gatsby. Sounds interesting, no? That’s what I thought although each time one of those characters did something, it always took me smooth out of the story because I’d think, "Hey, that’s Daisy Buchanan’s daughter telling this story."

The main character, from whose point of view the majority of the story is told, was brutally attacked while in college and narrowly escaped with her life. She works for a homeless shelter and when one of their former client dies, she is given his possessions, including some incredible photographs he apparently took back in the day of Life and Look magazines, that give her clues to who he is – Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s son. So how did he come to be at a homeless shelter?

Intriguing, right?

It is, right up until the end where ha ha: “Trick’s on you, you gullible reader! Made the whole thing up! Laurel, the social worker, is bonkers! The attack was way, way more violent (and I could have done without that scene at the end, thank you very much) and she is the schizophrenic patient suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome after the attack. Of course, Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s child isn’t a character – they’re fictional characters, you dufus! Ha ha I’m the clever author and DUDE you’ve been punked.”

Irritated the crap out of me.

You could tell how clever the author thought he was being, how supremely pleased with himself he was.

I don’t think that’s right. There is an implied bill of rights between author and reader and when the reader picks up a book, she ought to be assured that the author isn’t going to trick her. Am I taking this a wee bit personally? Maybe so but there are some many good books out there and I don’t have time for this kind of tomfoolerly. Jerk.



The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler is a quiet little book that I liked although I don’t really know why. It’s sort of in the tradition of a drawing room type book – I never felt like I really knew the characters and didn’t care much for the ending, yet the story was oddly compelling.

“Having sacked her handyman, newly-widowed Mrs Emerson finds a replacement in Elizabeth, a lanky, awkward girl. The Emersons have a reputation for craziness, there are seven adult children, and Elizabeth finds herself drawn into their disorderly lives against her will. But in the end it is hard to tell whether she is a victim of the needy Emersons, or the de facto ruler of the family.”

I like Anne Tyler’s novels; this is one of her early ones.



I swooned over the cover of The Wedding Machine by Beth Webb Hart – look at those oak trees – they took me back to Charleston. The second thing I noticed was the little “Women of Faith” logo. I’ll be honest – it made me think twice because the admittedly little “Christian” fiction I’ve read had the feel of an ABC After School Special. Lessons are learned. Like the author is more concerned with teaching the reading right from wrong, young lady, rather than telling a story. It feels like a Sunday school lesson rather than a novel. There is nothing wrong with Sunday school; I go every week (okay, most weeks) and I love it. Books can have church-going characters with upstanding morals and values and be rip-roaring good reads; case in point, the Mitford series.

I digress. The Wedding Machine is a fun read, without being impressed with itself for being virtuous and teaching its readers a lesson. It’s southern down to its bones. Some of it is a bit clichéd but you know, there are things that happen in the south and you think, “Oh, I know that did not just happen,” because it’s so stereotypical, yet it did, so there you are.

From the book jacket:
"Welcome to Jasper, South Carolina. A place where Southern hospitality thrives. Where social occasions are done right. And where, for generations, the four most upstanding ladies of this community ensure that the daughters of Jasper are married in the proper manner.

Friends from school days, "the gals" have long pooled their silver, china, and know-how to pull off beautiful events. They're a force of nature, a well-oiled machine. But the wedding machine's gears start to stick during the summer their own daughters line up to tie the knot. In the lowcountry heat and humidity, tempers flare, old secrets leak out . . . and both love and gardenias bloom in unlikely places."


After The Wedding Machine I picked up another book I’d bought that same day. I plowed through two chapters before I threw it across the room. It was cheese. It was Cheez Whiz. No, wait, it was a generic brand can of day-glo orange squirt cheese.

The book had a nice cover, though. Maybe I’ll cut the cover off and display it in my office. It really is nice-looking.



A while back I heard an interview with Steve Martin after his memoir, Born Standing Up, came out. What a nice, unassuming guy. He told the interviewer that when he was starting out, he wasn’t any better, any funnier, any more talented than the next guy trying to make it. The difference was that he kept coming back and he kept performing and he kept trying. That made an impression and on that alone, I bought the book.

Like I do most nonfiction, I picked this up and put it down. I’d read a chapter or two and set it aside for a week. I find it to be a little slow going. The last one-third or so was particularly interesting and it felt like he was just hitting his stride when it was time to wrap the book up. It’s a fascinating look behind the scenes at a career I’d never thought much about. There are great stories about his early days at Knott’s Berry Farm and ones later when he first gets on the Johnny Carson show, what meeting Dan Arkoyd was like, the camaraderie on the set of a Carl Reiner movie. It also made me like him even more and I’ve always liked Steve Martin. Now I feel like I kind of know him and it’s impressive, how much he struggled and how he kept on keeping on. It made me feel warmly toward him.



Diary is by Chuck Palahniuk, the guy who wrote Fight Club, which may tell you all you need to know about this book. It's twisted, in other words. It's a trip, in a good way, but still a trip.

From Publishers Weekly:

"With a first page that captures the reader hook, line and sinker, Palahniuk (Choke; Lullaby) plunges into the odd predicament of Waytansea Island resident and ex-art student Misty Marie Kleinman, whose husband, Peter, lies comatose in a hospital bed after a suicide attempt. Rooms in summer houses on the mainland that Peter has remodeled start to mysteriously disappear-"The man calling from Long Beach, he says his bathroom is missing"-and Misty, with the help of graphologist Angel Delaporte, discovers that crude and prophetic messages are scrawled across the walls and furniture of the blocked-off chambers.

In her new world, where every day is "another longest day of the year," Misty suffers from mysterious physical ailments, which only go away while she is drawing or painting. Her doctor, 12-year-old daughter and mother-in-law, instead of worrying about her health, press her to paint more and more, hinting that her art will save exclusive Waytansea Island from being overrun by tourists. In the meantime, Misty is finding secret messages written under tables and in library books from past island artists issuing bold but vague warnings.

With new and changing versions of reality at every turn, the theme of the "tortured artist" is taken to a new level and "everything is important. Every detail. We just don't know why, yet." The novel is something of a departure for Palahniuk, who eschews his blighted urban settings for a sinister resort island, but his catchy, jarring prose, cryptic pronouncements and baroque flights of imagination are instantly recognizable, and his sharp, bizarre meditations on the artistic process make this twisted tale one of his most memorable works to date."

It's a strange book and in reading about it, Stephen King's name was mentioned. I don't know they'd I'd call Diary horror but I would call it unsettling.



Veronica by Mary Gaitskill was a National Book Award finalist, which I find baffling. Judging by the Amazon.com reviews, which you can take for whatever they’re work, I’m not alone. Set mostly in the 1980s, the book tells the story of Veronica, who is a friend of Alison, who is the narrator. Veronica is older (40! Gasp!) and wise cracking. She also suffers from AIDS, which she contracted from her bisexual boyfriend. Alison did some modeling and there are many pages of the decadence and degredation and overkill of the 80s. Got it.

What bothered me as the “poetic prose,” a dumb turn of a phrase if I’ve ever heard one. It goes one for paragraphs and pages. It made me feel apart and separate from the story.

She talks about women in a salon sitting under hairdryers, “dreaming angrily.” I ask you, how can one dream angrily? I don’t think it’s possible. One can be angry and plot elaborate schemes of revenge and one can fall asleep and have a dream that makes her angry, but to dream angrily? What does that even mean?

Another: “radio played sequined songs..” I’m guessing this is a metaphor. For something. Sequined songs.

I found the writing overwrought.

From The New Yorker:
"Gaitskill's second novel is narrated over the course of a single day by an ailing former fashion model named Alison, now cleaning offices for a living, who ruminates on her glamorous youth and on her friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. Her recollections range through the bohemian San Francisco of the late nineteen-seventies, the fashion worlds of Paris and New York in the eighties, and her family's claustrophobic but comforting home in suburban New Jersey. Gaitskill's distinctive prose often traverses decades and continents in a single paragraph, in a way that is more montage than narrative. When this ambitious approach succeeds, it yields startling revelations; when it doesn't quite come off, the result is a pleasant muddle. Recalling San Francisco prostitutes, Alison says, "Most of them weren't beautiful girls, but they had a special luster." An analogous allure pervades this book."



Last year The Rock Orchard by Paula Wall was one of my favorite books of the year. It was funny, set in the south, and kind of trashy;. A good, fun read.

The Rock Orchard was a bestseller and the author followed it up with The Wilde Women. It has the hallmarks that defined Wall’s first novel – the main characters are strong women with lusty appetites. They’re eccentric at a time when that just wasn’t done, and especially not in the small town south. They were rebels with a cause.

I got this book last Saturday afternoon, began reading it Saturday night at bedtime, picked it up again Sunday afternoon and pretty much didn’t put it down until I finished it that night. I tried to read slower after I hit the midway point to stretch it out some. I thoroughly enjoyed it and didn’t want the book to end.

Which was almost exactly what I said about The Rock Orchard when I first read it (I’ve re-read it at least once since) in October of 2007: “It’s one of the first books I’ve read in a while that I was sorry when it was over. I really liked it and will be looking for more – everything – by this author.”

From Publishers Weekly:
"Wall's second novel (after The Rock Orchard) follows two beautiful, smart, sexually provocative, self-assured sisters whose dalliances captivate their small Southern hometown. Five Points, Tenn., has been brought low by the depression, but the residents retain their interest in the Wilde sisters' feud, which began when Pearl caught her younger sister Kat inappropriately entertaining Bourne Cavanagh, Pearl's fiancé and the heir to a whiskey distillery empire. Pearl disappears and travels the world, sending Kat a tersely worded postcard every month. Sassy and brash Kat stays behind and toys with the town's menfolk, including Mason Hughes, whose wealthy family owns the shirt factory where Kat works. Pearl sashays home after a few years and opens a high-class bordello that caters to the rich and powerful, while Kat continues to entice and evade Mason..."



The Reserve by Russell Banks. The book jacket says, "Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Bank's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous quesetions about class, politics, art, love, and madness..."

FAIL.

Uh, no it doesn't. There is no murder, there is no mystery.

Next.



The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister has some really pretty passages of food writing. The other ingredients (pun intended) are there - setting and characters and plot but I wanted a bit more depth from all, which was what Bekka, who kindly passed this book to me, thought of it.

Amazon said:
"The School of Essential Ingredients follows the lives of eight students who gather in Lillian’s Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen. Students include Claire, a young mother struggling with the demands of her family; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer learning to adapt to life in America; and Tom, a widower mourning the loss of his wife to breast cancer. Chef Lillian, a woman whose connection with food is both soulful and exacting, helps them to create dishes whose flavor and techniques expand beyond the restaurant and into the secret corners of her students’ lives. One by one the students are transformed by the aromas, flavors, and textures of Lillian’s food, including a white-on-white cake that prompts wistful reflections on the sweet fragility of love and a peppery heirloom tomato sauce that seems to spark one romance but end another. Brought together by the power of food and companionship, the lives of the characters mingle and intertwine, united by the revealing nature of what can be created in the kitchen."



I first read Garden Spells in January and loved it. I read it again and enjoyed it even more so.

Because it has characters like Evanelle Franklin, who is a distant - "second or third or fourteenth cousin" to the Waverlys. The Waverlys are strange and are known for being so. Evanelle is strange in a different way; she brings people things before they need them:

"When Claire was young, Evanelle would stop by to give her a Band-Aid hours before she scraped her knee, quarters for her and Sydney long before the ice cream truck arrived, and a flashlight to put under her pillow a full two weeks before lightning struck a tree down the street and the entire neighborhood was without power all night."

Wouldn't it be neat to have an Evanelle Franklin in your life?


Favorite Book of the Month: The Wilde Women by Paula Wall

Character Who I'd Most Like to Have a Drink With: Pearle Wilde