Tag: USA

CROSSROADS by Jonathan Franzen

Okay: I am about ready to give it up for Jonathan Franzen, and concede he may indeed be America’s greatest living novelist.  Because this thing is LIT.

It tells the story of a nuclear family, over a period of about a year, from each of their perspectives (mom, dad, son, daughter, other son).  From pg1, I was in. We open in

. . . the nursing home in Hinsdale, where the mingling smells of holiday pine wreaths and geriatric feces reminded him of the Arizona high country latrines. .

MWAHAHAHA.  The father is a deputy minister at a Protestant church.  He feels a sad kinship with the “dusty creche steer,” and is conducting an awkward flirtation with a parishioner.  He is generally terrible at it, though he does get her to accept some vinyl records from him.

 “He was not so bad at being bad as to not know what sharing music signified.”

Later he finally manages to get it together with his parishioner.

With a sigh, she closed her eyes and put her hand between his legs.  Her shoulders relaxed as if feeling his penis made her sleep.  “Here we are.”

It might have been the most extraordinary moment of his life. 

The book is so incredibly well observed (‘that type of disinfectant unique to dentist’s office’ I mean god does he carry a notebook EVERYWHERE), so impressive in its creation of different points of view, so successful in concluding everyone’s arcs, I am just like DAMN

According to my blog, when I read a previous novel of his, FREEDOM, I was so overcome that I stopped on p38 to write a blog post about how much I already loved it.  This was back in 2011, and it’s probably a good thing  it was a while ago, because that book, like this, is a novel of a single nuclear family.  I’d probably be able to see more of the authors tricks and obssessions and so be less impressed. As it is, let me just say again, DAMN.

STAY SEXY AND DON’T GET MURDERED by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

Here is a book by Karen and Georgia. I’ve never met either of them, but I feel like I know them. This is because I listen to their podcast MY FAVORITE MURDER every week.  It’s a true crime comedy podcast (don’t ask).  This is their spin-off book about their private lives.  Karen and Georgia moaned a lot in the podcast about how hard it was to write a book, and that does kind of show a bit.  They’ve added lists of stuff, a sure sign you are struggling to fill those pages. I was only surprised there were not recipes.  (In fact Georgia did try to add her dad’s bbq chicken , but then he revealed it was just whatever generic bbq sauce happened to be on sale)

Reading this book did make me realize how much MY FAVORITE MURDER’s magic sits not in either host, but in the relationship between the two.  There is some kind of special sparkle that makes those two add up to three or even four. I find it interesting when that happens, like it did for Simon & Garfunkel.  Of course leaving aside their special chemistry, it’s also true that we live in a lonely age, and are hungry for friendship, even if it is the friendship of other people. I suspect that’s a big part of why the podcast got to be so big.

The authors mention how when they met they had both coincidentally been reading DARING GREATLY by Brene Brown.  This is a book about the power of vulnerability.  They both say reading that book made them more open to new people (and thus each other), and to new projects (and thus MY FAVORITE MURDER, the project that took them from struggling to millionaires).    I also see how it translates into their show, which is often surprisingly open about all sorts of topics (mental health, pets, fat).  I had thought this was just ‘how they were,’ and its interesting to find how much it is actually a choice. 

SH*T MY DAY SAYS by Justin Halpern

In this book I supported someone in monetizing his Twitter feed. I didn’t object. I’m always in favour of people other than Twitter making money off Twitter.

The author of this book got unexpectedly dumped, and so did what you get to do if you are not an immigrant: move back in with his parents. He was inspired to start a small Twitter account for his friends where he posted various things his dad said, and it went viral. Publishing deals followed. Meanwhile, in London, the Amazon algorithm noticed I had been buying lightly comic books, and here we are.

The book was funny, and I often laughed reading it. Most appealing, however, was the obvious love between father and son. The dad’s advice is blunt but caring.

“Sometimes life leaves a hundred-dollar bill on your dresser, and you don’t realize until later it’s because it fucked you.”

And:

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and just ain’t spitting it out.”

It’s a perfect mix of chuckles and heart. Well done Amazon algorithm, well done.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS by Alison Lurie

Here is a Pulitzer winner, pitched as a novel about the love lives of plain women. I was ready to love it. It even had a very excellent opening sentence.

On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten A.M flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.

But things go down hill from there. It tells the story of two American professors on sabbatical in London. One is a handsome man, the other a plain woman. The man has some romantic problems, but basically everything works out great.

The woman finally meets someone to fall in love with but is so hung up on past rejections that she doesn’t even notice. I don’t know. I just found it super bleak. I guess I don’t really believe there is any such thing as ‘plainness,’ outside of edge cases (e.g., extreme obesity). Some people are pretty, that’s for sure, but even the not-that-pretty can make themselves appear at least reasonably decent enough for some other reasonably decent person to want them. The competition’s just not that steep. Even if you don’t look that good, it’s not as if most of the others do either. I guess I just found the whole idea of some unchangeable quality of ugliness kind of distasteful and ridiculous.

WOW, NO THANK YOU by Samantha Irby

For some reason I had the idea I wouldn’t like this lady’s work, and had put off reading anything by her for months. Big mistake. Turns out I LOVE HER.

WOW, NO THANK YOU is a series of comic essays about her daily life, covering such topics as ageing, irritable bowel, social awkwardness, and her love for her phone. One essay begins:

I once starred in a horror movie called I Was Caught Waiting, Alone, in a Public Place, without my Fucking Cellular Phone

She is enthused by it’s “cracked screen and lightly buttered handfeel.” Lightly buttered exactly describes my phone too.

She is hyper conscious of others’ feelings about her. Here’s an example, where she is being wheeled down the hospital corrider by a nurse on the way to a serious surgery:

And because my brain is a nightmare, I kept thinking, “Is this bed too heavy for her to push? Is this the heaviest bed she’s ever pushed? Is she going to need help to take that sharp right corner? Maybe I should just get up and push her in the bed instead,” and thank goodness I signed that DNR because what is the point of living like this? Anyway, we made it to surgery

What I found most interesting about this book though is the author’s casual attitude to achievement. She had a rough start in life, and struggles with depression, and generally she aspires just to get through the day. I found this kind of an inspirational approach. I wonder if when one has an easier start in life, one sets a higher bar on achievement to be ‘happy,’ and maybe that’s a trap.

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I listened to this book, which is about a long journey by wagon from Wisconsin to South Dakota, while making a make shorter journey by car from Wisconsin and South Dakota. ALL HAIL THE COMBUSTION ENGINE! I thought ten hours was a lot, but that was as nothing to the multiple weeks it took, Pa, Ma, Mary, Laura and Baby Carrie Ingalls.

Not much has improved in terms of entertainment. I googled ‘things to do off the I-90’ and the most helpful suggestion was from a trucker who said people do like to laugh at the ‘Kum and Go’ gas station (this I had already done), and maybe eat some pancake-wrapped sausages there, but there is not much else to do unless ‘you like the smell of pig sh*t.’

This semi-autobiographical story is a pretty interesting account of the settler experience. It is quite amazing to see how they managed to create a homestead out of an axe, a gun, and the prairie. It was also interesting to see that they clearly understood that they were taking land from the Native Americans. I would have expected some kind of soft-soaping, but it is exceedingly clear that they are in conflict with people already using the land, and understood themselves to be in conflict with them. They are essentially waiting for the government to hand the land over to them. I learn from Wikipedia that Ingalls daughter, who owned the rights to this story, was a raging libertarian, so I find this hilarious.

What I will probably most remember about this book is it’s success in capturing a small child’s view of the world. Many books try this, and very few succeed. It was really elegantly done here. I expected a much less sophisticated book, for some reason. I now understand why it’s a classic.

WINTER IN THE BLOOD by James Welch

For some reason I had the impression that colonialism in North America was less bloody than in Africa, involving more diseased blankets and deceptive treaties and less outright murder. I learnt how wrong I was at the Akta Lakota Museum in South Dakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is as stomach-churning a use of guns on unarmed people as anything Kitchner did in Sudan. I bought this book there, as the back cover told me Welch is a relatively important Native American writer.

It’s about a young man who goes on a bender while looking for the girlfriend who has left him. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but it’s profoundly not my kind of book. First of all, it’s clearly a boys’ book. I can’t defend this definition, other than to say I know them when I see them. Second, it has one of those motive-less protagonists so beloved of midcentury fiction. If even the protagonist doesn’t care what they are doing, I find it hard to do so myself.

Let me give you a taste:

First Raise got us each a cup of coffee and watched us drink. It was beginning to get light. He loved us. He watched us drink the bitter coffee down. In the living room beside the oil stove, my grandmother snored. Beneath the closed door leading off the kitchen, Theresa slept or didn’t sleep.

Perhaps there are some people who don’t find this annoying. If so, I am not one of them.

LEAVING CHEYENNE by Larry McMurtry

A story of a love triangle in small town Texas. And when I say small, I mean small. When there are only about two women in the whole place, and one of them is ugly, you can see where the triangle gets more likely.

It’s told in three sections, one for each person in the triangle. Wikipedia tells me McMurtry was married twice, both times to women, which surprises me because on the evidence of this book I would say he had never met a woman. The girl’s section of the book was just bizarre. It is clear throughout which man she ought to have married, and she chooses the other, and so I thought her section would be a ‘reveal.’ What it revealed is that McMurtry thinks women are basically irrational, don’t know what’s good for them, and can’t explain their own thought process.

That said, I still liked the book. The charm is in the setting, as with other books of his that I’ve read ( LONESOME DOVE, THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (minus the cow-rape of course)). Try this, on a hailstorm:

I guess the worst was Old Man Hurshel Monroe getting his skull cracked outside the door of the bank. They say Beulah Monroe found the hailstone that conked him and kept it home in the icebox for nearly ten years, till one of her grandkids ate it for an all-day sucker.

Or this, the very opening of the book:

When I woke up Dad was standing by the bed shaking my foot. I opened my eyes, but he never stopped shaking it. He shook it like it was a fence post and he was testing it to see if it was in the ground solid enough. All my life that’s the way he’d wake me up—I hated it like poison. Once I offered to set a glass of water by the bed, so he could pour that over me in the mornings and wake me up, but Dad wouldn’t do it. I set the water out for him six or seven times, and he just let it sit and shook my foot anyway. Sometimes though, if he was thirsty, he’d drink the water first.

I googled the author and found him to be a rather charming man. I love his transactional approach to writing. Try this:

If I could not write another word of fiction and make a living, I would. But I can’t. I live off of fiction, mostly. I have a novel coming out this year, Loop Group, and I have one more novel that I owe Simon and Schuster, about an aging gunfighter. I’m getting close to thirty novels in all, I think. That’s a lot of novels. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t even offer them to my friends anymore. They all stopped reading at fifteen or twenty. When a new one comes out, I think, “Do I really want to mail this one around?”

CROSSING SAFELY by Wallace Stegner

An unusual novel about compromise and friendship. It’s about a pair of married couples who become friends in their twenties, and follows their relationships across their lives

It’s about the fact that some people live their best lives, and some people don’t. It’s also about the subtler point that it is hard to know which category you fall in.

The husband in one couple becomes an author. The husband in the other couple would like to, but ends up a university lecturer. This is in part because his wife, who has far more energy and ambition than he does, is convinced he should do this ‘first’ before he tries the uncertain life of a poet. Seems reasonable. However he failures to get tenure, which sends his wife into a breakdown. I mean on the one hand one has to agree with the character who tells her to ‘renounce this dramatization of failure,’ but my other suggestion would be HOW ABOUT SOCIETY JUST LETS HER GET HER OWN JOB. Honestly, can you imagine how messed up things were in the early twentieth century when half the population had to try and live out the suppressed dreams of the other half?

This whole question of ‘failure’ is an interesting one. Here is the author husband:

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.

This is my third novel of Stegner’s, and I am inspired to keep going. He is a lovely writer. Enjoy this description of a hillside:

The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other side of hills.

I wonder how long it took him to come up with that.