Tag: USA

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

A bizarre tale of income inequality and spontaneous human combustion, NOTHING TO SEE HERE is so good it kind of depressed me.

 It tells the story of a young girl, Lillian, from a poor background who works very hard to get a scholarship to a fancy boarding school:

I didn’t know the school was just some ribbon rich girls obtained on their way to a destined future. . . . . I wasn’t destined for greatness, I knew this.  But I was figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.

This is in the first few pages.  Already at this stage I had a sinking feeling in my stomach about how magically good this one was going to be. 

At this school, she really, really likes her roommate. Here is part of one of their early conversations:

“. . I want to be so important that if I fuck up, I’ll never get punished.”  She looked psychotic as she said this; I wanted to make out with her.

. . .“I think we’ll be friends,” she said. “I hope so, at least.”

“God,” I said, trying to keep my whole body from convulsing.  “I hope so, too.”

Years later, when Lillian has lost her way and spends most of her time smoking pot in her mother’s attic, this friend asks her to nanny two children who have behaviour issues.  The behaviour issues are they burst into flames when they are upset.  The friend is married to a Senator, Jasper Roberts, and is fabulously wealthy.  Here he is on TV:

Jasper was on C-SPAN, smiling, listening thoughtfully, nodding, so much nodding, like he understood every fucking thing that had ever happened in the entire world.  They would cut to different senators who were on the committee and it was like a practical joke because they all looked exactly the same. 

Part of the weird power of this book is the dreadful acceptance of how the world is; that is, that the rich are rich and will always be rich, and the poor are staying poor.  Eventually Lillian comes to love the children, and there is a degree of redemption in this.  Here is her fantasy of reunion with her mother that never happened:

. . .  And she would hug me and it wouldn’t be weird. It would be like the way somebody hugs another person. And the entirety of my life, everything that had come before, would disappear. And things would be so much better.

In the end though it’s really a sort of bleak novel.  Lillian find some sort of hopefulness, but it’s a narrow, conditional thing, in the middle of world that is totally unfair and will stay that way

CARRIE by Steven King

I picked up CARRIE because I read Steven King’s autobiography, and was curious to see what the book that changed his life was like.

It was his first novel,and he almost fainted when the publisher offered him $400K for it, because he was barely paying his bills at the time.  He’d actually thrown the first draft in the bin, and it only made it to the publisher at all because his wife fished it out and insisted he go on with it.  To read his autobiography, you’d think by this stage he was on the verge of past it, about to sink into a life of low income jobs, nearly missing his potential.  In reading the back cover I discover he was actually only TWENTY-SIX.  For god’s sake, Steven, I don’t think it’s even possible to waste your life already when you’re just in your twenties. It’s only in your forties you start looking down that particular barrel.  Unless of course you commit a murder and get caught.  I was listening to a podcast recently about a man who killed someone at 15, and is getting out now, 40 years later.  First thing he is going to do is have an omelette, he said.  Second thing is go to his parents graves to apologize for throwing his life away. 

It’s possible this post is going off course.  Back to CARRIE.  What I found surprising was how straightforward it was, how little plot it had, and how little real ‘horror’ was involved.  It’s essentially a “worm turns” story, though in this case the worm devours its hometown after turning.  For those who don’t know SPOILER ALERT the book is about a girl who is badly bullied at school and ends up blowing up her prom with her telekentic powers.

Apparently when this was written, horror was very much about shadowy alleys and old parchments, so it was revolutionary in its ordinary setting and conventional protagonists.  It no longer feels revolutionary, but is still a solid, engaging read, and captures very well what it was to be a teenage girl (not that surprising because Steven King you were SO YOUNG WHEN YOU WROTE IT I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW YOU FELT YOU WERE WASTING YOUR LIFE.)

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

Here is a book about what happens when there are not enough social workers.  Augusten Burroughs parents are getting a divorce:

My father grew hostile and remote .  . . And my mother began to go crazy.  Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen red! sort of way.  But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way.  Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax. 

She eventually give over her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr Finch, who believes children over the age of thirteen should be completely free.  He also believes that he direction of his poop in the toilet bowl contains messages from god, as does choosing Bible verses at random.  His oldest daughter preserves his poops on an outdoor table, and checks the Bible for him for all sorts of questions.  The other children, some biological, some not, are left quite free, to knock sunroofs into the ceiling (by just making a hole), to eat dog food, and to get raped by adults.  Apparently when children are completely unsupervised it does not take long for predatory types to recognize this as an opportunity. 

At 14 he has a relationship with a 33 year old man that he believes is loving.  So too does the 33 year old, who makes such red-flag covered statements as the below:

I mean my feelings for your are so huge, I don’t think I can contain them.  Sometimes I want to hold you so tight it scares me.  Like I want to hold you until the life is gone, so you can’t ever vanish.

The book is comic, and he is close to some of his step-siblings, so it is not as bleak as the statutory rape would have you believe.  But I see from Google that the Finch family sued, arguing that much of what was in the book was fiction, and now the book  is marketed as a ‘novel’ rather than a ‘memoir’.  They are apparently amazed that someone they looked after at such a time should tell such lies about them.  So I guess it is sad either way: either it’s a sad childhood, or a sad set of lies about a childhood.  Anyway, I enjoyed it. 

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

This memoir got a lot of good reviews, and it seemed like I would like it.  It tells about the author’s family, and in particular her father, who is a very eccentric Catholic priest..  Some of it was very funny.  Try this: 

(My father) seems overjoyed to see me.  Has he forgotten what I’m like?

And

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish cream liquer out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken

And

My father despises cats.  He believes them to be Democrats.  He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur

Though I must comment: surely everyone knows cats are Republicans. Also, why the pretentious failure to capitalize Hillary Clinton’s name?

The book was sometimes beautiful.  Here is a night time drive in the American South: 

Through our rolled down windows we could hear the round rattle of the palms, crickets applauding, bullfrogs belching out their personal ads

But overall I found I couldn’t really connect with it.  This is partly a matter of style – it is so intensely poetic, my query would be, why not just write a poem?  Example:

Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax.  They will return again next year.

I know some love this sort of thing, but for me, I am like: M’KAY.

But a more profound problem for me was what seemed to me a lack of heart.  Truly her family were strange and her path odd.  Her father chose to buy a guitar rather than pay for her college.  She ran away to marry a man she met on the internet back when the internet was just message boards.  And yet somehow I don’t feel I understand how she felt about any of it.  Everything is filtered through a distant ‘amusement’ which is no doubt where many people eventually get to with their families.  But for me, for a book so ‘revealing’ I didn’t think it revealed much of anything.