Tag: USA

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

“the world is a wonder, but the portions are small” (Rebecca Hazelton SLASH FICTION)

This is a well-written novel with two parallel stories. One covers the AIDS crisis among gay men in the 1980s and the other is set thirty years later, with some tangential characters from that first story now dealing with different issues. I enjoyed each of the stories in themselves, a lot, because Makkai is clearly a gifted writer, but I kept waiting for the two stories to join up, or resolve somehow, even if only thematically. They never did. It was bizarre. It was like two traditional novels smooshed together for no apparent reason.

Also, and this has nothing to do with this novel, but it’s remarkably sad how many novels there are about AIDS deaths in the eighties for Americans and how few about Africans

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

For some reason, I always thought this was an epic poem, and avoided it accordingly.  In fact, it is an account of the author’s childhood, which was packed with incident and heroism.  Incident and heroism is good for epic poems, but not what you typically want in a childhood.

She spent much of her early life in a small town in Arkansas, in the 1930s.  I do not need to say much more for you to get the general idea re: racism.  But still, the specifics are surprising.  Apparently, for example, the fact that her grandmother was sometimes referred to as ‘Mrs’ was regarded as a rare mark of great respect, accorded to her because she ran the general store. 

Later Angelou and her brother go to live with her mother, and there she is, as an eight year old, raped by her mother’s boyfriend (that usual suspect). It is a stomach-churningly terrible scene.  She is so hurt she has to go to hospital, but she won’t tell what happened because he threatens to kill her brother if she does.  Her brother reassures here that he can take ‘anyone,’ and so much does she admire him (despite the fact he is just eleven himself) that she believes him and so tells the name of her attacker.  He is sentenced to a whole year in jail. Not to worry, as her family has him murdered the day he gets out.

She moves in with her father for a while, but after being stabbed by her father’s girlfriend (after a very strange trip to Mexico) she runs away, and lives for a month with a group of homeless kids in a junk yard.

After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself.  The unquestioning acceptance by my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity.  Odd that the homeless children. . . could initiate me into the brotherhood of man.  After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Oklahoma, I was never again to see myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. 

This bizarre translation of her time at the dump into a lesson in brotherhood is emblematic of the book as a whole. The summary here might make it sound like her life, and thus the book, was bleak and tough, but that is not at all how her it feels: it is fun, and loving, and hopeful, like there’s always a way out.  

In her late teens she becomes worried she is a haemaphrodite (don’t ask).  She approaches a popular boy, and asks the immortal words: 

Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?   

Apparently he would like that, and poor Angelous gets pregnant that day.  This is where the book ends, but given what I know about her, I have no doubt that she will transform getting pregnant in high school into something wonderful.  This lady is a boss.  It’s a high bar, in life and in literature. 

Side point, interesting overview of how she wrote:

She would get up at five in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She wrote on yellow legal pads while lying on the bed, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget’s Thesaurus, and the Bible, and left by the early afternoon. She averaged 10–12 pages of material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening.

Wikipeda

Sherry! Like I said, she’s a boss. She was encouraged to write the book by James Baldwin (who reverse-psychologied her by saying no autobiography could be art) and the first person she showed a draft to was Jessica Mitford, sister of the famous Nazis. This is some six degrees of separation

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

Well here are some pretty serious #daddyissues.  This book tells the story of a couple who get married, have two children, and move restlessly across the Midwest looking to strike it big.  At least the father is looking to strike it big.  The mother is just hanging on.

It’s a broad sweep of middle America across decades, involving possum-hunting and gold-panning and bootlegging and the Spanish Flu.   (This was remarkably like todays’ COVID.  They went on lockdown, they wear masks, it made me wonder if really medical science has not come on that far after all)

The book is so jam packed with incident, some of it so random, that I started to suspect it must be based on  real life.  I also wondered this because it was so completely judgemental towards the father character.   This dad came from poverty, and pulled himself up into wealth.  He couldn’t stand the idea that he was going to be trapped in a $100/month job because of his lack of education and was always looking for the next big break. I found this kind of inspirational, like he was a class warrior.   His youngest son doesn’t take it that way, and is horrified by his bootlegging (but not so horrified that he doesn’t take that sweet moonshine money to pay for his law degree). 

I learn from the Introduction that indeed this is the story of Stegner’s own family.  Sadly his mother, brother and father all died within three years of each other, and it was then he decided to write about them.  This casts the book in a different light for me.  I see what it is, his effort to record and remember them, to create a monument to their messy lives.   I can’t imagine what it must be like to be the only one who remembers your childhood, though I guess that if I am lucky enough to live to a great old age I will find that out.    I wonder if I’ll want to write about it, when its only me left. 

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

There was a period in 2011, not coincidentally not a great time in my personal life, when I read a lot of David Sedaris.  And by a lot, I mean it all, and mostly in the early hours of the morning. 

Recently  I googled for authors ‘like Sedaris,’ and was surprised  by how few options there were.. I gave the options a go (Crossley, Burroughs, Rakhoff) and can report that the options are even fewer than Google suggested, in fact essentially nil.  No one is writing the comic personal essay like Sedaris.  And by no one, I mean no one.  Really, I find this remarkable.  Everyone has a personal life.  Most people have a sense of humour.  It’s incredible that Sedaris has, at least in my opnion, not one truly viable competitor.

I started a re-read of him, to try and figure out what he is doing.  My blog tells me this is the third time for FLAMES.  And three times round, I still can’t tell exactly what it is he is doing so well.  Here he is on glasses:

Today these frames sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish.  Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment.  What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

And on smoking:

As with pot, it was astonishing how quickly I took to cigarettes. It was as if my life was a play, and the prop mistress had finally shown up.  Suddenly there were packs to unwrap, matches to strike, ashtrays to fill, and then empty. 

I tried to map out a couple of the essays, and my theory is the success is the apparent ease: conversational and yet so artful.  In later years he has got a bit sappy, one has to hear about his feelings, and in particular his feelings about his father, but at his best: he’s quite alone in his medium. 

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.