New Century Reading

Flannery

Flannery O'Connor has always seemed something of a mystery. A deeply religious Catholic, living out her short life while suffering from lupus, out on a farm in Georgia with her mother, she nevertheless developed her own style of Southern grotesque writing. Her stories are filled with what today might be called "freaks and geeks." Yet the stories also had an intensely spiritual subcontext, directed by O'Connor's own strongly held beliefs. But who was this quiet woman, and how did she come to write these masterpieces?

Brad Gooch does his best with not much source material in Flannery, A Life of Flannery O'Connor. He has meticulously combed through the existing body of Flannery's correspondence, as well as family records and reminiscences of people who knew her. The portrait he paints is of a precocious, introverted child more interested in her stories and writing than in making friends--a situation exacerbated by her mother's insistence that Flannery only hang out with the "right" people. Situations that occurred in her youth eventually were mirrored in her stories, bearing out Flannery's assertion that you gather up experience in childhood and transfer it to other situations when you write.

Gooch's writing style is amiable and approachable. It does on occasion seem like he never met a fact or tidbit he didn't like well enough to add to the book--there are perhaps too many sentences devoted to this or that obscure relative that have little bearing on Flannery's development as a writer. Still, when he quotes friends who had the privilege of hearing Flannery read her work out loud in her deep Southern drawl, you can't help but wish you could have been there too.

There's no doubt that lupus played a defining role in Flannery's life. She had already attained success in her writing career and was building a life away from her mother and Georgia when she was diagnosed. The debilitating nature of the disease forced her back to her mother's farm in Milledgeville (also known as "a bird sanctuary," to Flannery's wry amusement). Though it seems clear through anecdotal reports that Flannery's mother was not necessarily a fan of her work (Gooch records a scene where Mrs. O'Connor, in front of Flannery, asks Robert Giroux to help her daughter write about nice people), nor overly supportive of her writing time, nevertheless Flannery continued working up until her far-too-early death in 1964. She maintained friendships with such luminaries as Katharine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell, Robert and Sally Fitzpatrick, and Robert Giroux through extensive correspondence, and those letters serve as a jumping-off point for Gooch to look at the interior life of this gifted writer.

Even though her life was outwardly a quiet one, not filled with the angst of other writers of the time who turned to alcohol, drugs, and dealt with mental illness, Gooch's portrayal of Flannery still manages to make her interesting--and perhaps most important, brings the reader back to the work itself, a worthy accomplishment.

The Turtle Catcher

Nicole Helget's debut novel raised some excitement, coming on the heels of her controversial memoir, The Summer of Ordinary Ways. The anticipation for the novel was even higher when it was known that the opening chapter was a winner of Minnesota Monthly's Tamarack Award, a $10,000 short fiction contest.

So when The Turtle Catcher arrived, I was eager to explore this new fictional voice, especially since the author is a Minnesotan too. The first chapters didn't disappoint--the book opens with the premeditated, frightening killing of a not-quite-normal boy by three brothers, who are avenging the exploitation of their sister. In fact, the opening paragraph is nearly perfect:

"In the time just after the big war, when banks weren't to be trusted and when snapper turtle stew, a cheap meal for the big families common in those days, bubbled on stovetops in farm kitchens, the three Richter brothers led Lester Sutter to the edge of Spider Lake to watch him drown through the sights of their rifles."

I was hooked--until I kept reading beyond the opening, award-winning section. The writing and the story both decline in quality, with the writing at times crossing over well into overwritten. At other times, the author goes out of her way to explain things that the average reader could figure out on their own, which is not only distracting, but insulting, such as when she describes a small-town baseball game during World War I that pits German immigrants against Scandinavians, and the reader is told in great detail how this game mirrored the actual war. We can figure that out on our own.

Another problem is the occasional use of overly contemporary language for a book set 90 years ago. At one point, a character responds to his child asking about the situation of a troubled family by saying "It's complicated." At another point, one of the characters considers talking through an issue with another person: "Maybe she'd feel better. Maybe they'd both feel better. No. To name these fears and troubles would give them power."

That is distinctly 21st-century language, and it's a jarring break from the narrative.

Helget is, at times, a talented writer, and she's not afraid of difficult plot points and unlikable characters. If an editor would take her by the hand and work on her writing style, and some of the more histrionic plot points, she could be an outstanding writer. But as this book stands, only the award-winning opening is worth reading. 

Southern Reading Challenge

I don't have a good track record with reading challenges--nothing says "don't read me" like committing to read specific books--but I keep trying, mostly because I find challenges that speak to interests I have. Like southern books. Hence, I'm giving the Southern Reading Challenge a try. The three books I'll read are: The Habit of Being, letters of Flannery O'Connor; The Help, by Kathryn Stockett; and To Kill a Mockingbird (it's just been too long).

Songs for the Missing

Stewart O'Nan is one of the gems of contemporary American literature. Don't believe me? Check out the slim but powerful Last Night at the Lobster. Or read his latest novel: Songs for the Missing.

Kim Larsen is your average American teenager, just out of high school, killing time in her small town over the summer, waiting for college. But one afternoon, after hanging out with her friends and new boyfriend, Kim disappears.

It would be a cliche to say that the lives of everyone around Kim--her parents, sister, and friends--are changed forever. But that's exactly what happens in a situation like this, yet O'Nan manages to steer clear of trite territory and mine deeply into what happens, especially with her family, as they struggle to come to grips with her disappearance as it drags on for days and weeks. The terror of the phone ringing, the omnipresent press, the less-than-competent police, the distancing from teenage friends who, perhaps, did not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what happened that day.

Besides avoiding cliches, O'Nan carefully hones in on who these people are, the people left behind. They're not perfect, by any means, and they can be frustrating and clueless--just like real people in rea life. At the same time, the pressure exerted over them, keeping them watchful and fearful, can't help but take its toll, and O'Nan doesn't balk at showing that. Statistics show that couples that have lost a child are more likely to divorce, and O'Nan explores that theory carefully, making neither side at fault for the difficulties they face. Yet the parents' preoccupation with the lost daughter also takes a toll on the one who remains--again, an understandable but painful reality.

Perhaps the hardest torment is the constant gnawing of the situation. At dinner, the mother is simultaneously happy and devastated:

"This was the silly Ed she loved, and the quiet life she wanted for her family, down to the soft light of evening and the mellow buzz from her second glass, and because she could see how perfect the moment was, she did what she promised herself she wouldn't do. There was no quicker way to ruin the mood. She could feel the tears building like a sneeze, hot and ticklish, and pressed her napkin to her face, jumping up and groping blindly for the sliding door, already sobbing." 

Tears building like a sneeze--one of the many little, nearly throwaway lines that demonstrate so clearly how the scene feels, but with little fanfare or grandstanding from the author. He understands that the story itself has plenty of pain and trauma; he just has to tell it.

Our Kind

Every year I read the National Book Award finalists and winner, and just about every year I wonder how the winner is chosen. Not that 2004’s winner, The News From Paraguay by Lily Tuck, isn’t a good book, well-written, interesting characters, all of the good qualities an award finalist should have. But compared to Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, Tuck’s book should have been a runner-up.

 

Our Kind is the story of a group of women, all part of the 1950’s country club set, who have aged past their supposed glory years. Their husbands have died or left them for younger trophy wives; their children have grown, moved away, forgotten them or come to view them as irrelevant. But these women—Judy, Barbara, Canoe, Esther, Louise and Suzie—are finding ways to reinvent themselves and their lives to make them meaningful to themselves and each other, if not to the family members who have abandoned them. Among their sometimes aimless activities: an intervention for a handsome local realtor who has come to represent the men in (or out of) their lives; rescuing geese; conducting a book club at a local hospice, while reflecting on activities they once thought were important: baby photos, hat parties, education.

 

If it doesn’t sound like much happens, well, that may be true. But Walbert conquers two difficult writing hurdles with her novel. The first is the “novel in stories” structure. More often than not this type of structure becomes a series of stories in which a few are good while the rest are merely filler; rarely can an author pull this off in a worthwhile manner (the last one I can remember succeeding is Jean Harfenist’s A Brief History of the Flood). But Walbert succeeds with this form, with each story a gem, highly successful on its own merits, yet together the novel is more than a sum of its parts.

 

The second hurdle Walbert manages to overcome is the point of view: first person plural. The book is narrated by the women as a whole, a “we” narration that at first is jarring and leads the reader to suspect a tricky, self-conscious writing. But soon the narration begins to make perfect sense. This book is about a group of women who together represent a generation, a time and place, and their story is a group story. Even as individual pieces are being told, they’re all reflective of the group and the generation, such as this description of their devotion to Dr. Spock:

 

“They’re in their birthday suits, the babies, and having none of it, their tiny tomato faces flush with rage. It is all we can do to sit on our hands; if we were breast-feeding, our breasts would leak, but we’ve dried them out on the advice of Dr. Spock; a little crying, he tells us, builds character.

 

“We want character: character and brains and looks and lives led a la Amelia Earhart…In other countries, Dr. Spock writes, mothers leave babies out in the snow and those girls grow to be warriors.

 

“We want warriors, we’d tell them. Warriors with character. Brilliant, gorgeous warriors with character. And pilot licenses.”

 

By the end of this unusual but compelling novel in stories, Walbert has shed light on a nearly forgotten and often-denigrated generation of women. For that, and for her courage in tackling difficult writing and succeeding, she should have won.

Things That Fall From the Sky

A male nanny with subconscious Nabokovian feelings for his eighteen-month old charge. A family splintering apart while the sky literally – and slowly – falls down around them. A society actively working to earn the second coming of Christ. A husband and son struggling to come to terms with the loss of their wife and mother during a power outage. These are the fantastical and heartbreakingly realistic stories that make up Kevin Brockmeier's debut collection, Things That Fall From the Sky.

 

Brockmeier's collection almost defies description, but these stories could almost be described as fairy tales, or in some cases, morality tales. Magical realism exists alongside mental illness and grief, raising interesting questions of the true state of the American psyche. The characters that populate these stories are driven by love, or something akin to it, and their lives are shaped by forces outside their control, as described by the narrator of "Apples:"

 

"The fall of my thirteenth year was a time when all the important events in my life seemed to cluster together like bees. On the same sun-bright afternoon that I won the school spelling bee, my parents sat across from me in the living room and told me that they no longer loved each other, and a great gray ocean of wishlessness filled our house. Days like this would surface around me every few weeks: I was chased to my front door by a stray dog on the same day that I had my braces removed. I answered the phone to an obscene caller on the same night that my mom went to live with a stranger. And on the same November day that I received my first kiss from Allison Downey, I watched my Bible teacher, Coach Schramm, get killed by a bucket."

 

The writing in these stories is sometimes dreamy, sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes deeply realistic and other times rooted in fantasy, but never is there a sense of a writer losing control. Brockmeier's language and characters join forces to create stories that are sometimes creepy, as in "These Hands" with its overly devoted male nanny; other times, such as "Space," with its father and son facing grief, Brockmeier is muted and heartbreaking. And occasionally he's laugh-out-loud funny, as in "A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin," which brings the fairy tale character – or half of him, as is the case – into the present time to face to trials and tribulations of modern life. Yet even when laughing at Half of Rumpelstiltskin's exploits, there is a glimpse of tremendous pain that gives the whole, absurd premise life and poignance.

 

Brockmeier is a highly imaginative, deeply involving writer with a world of tales to tell, a world larger than the everyday one we all cope with. His worlds, even when based on fantasy, aren't escapist; they're created to illuminate the effort and pain involved in living in our own, smaller world.

Savage Beauty

Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, is as riveting to read as a novel. Its central character is Vincent herself, a fiery, unstable and formidably gifted poet who spent her life trying to manipulate others while ultimately being controlled by those she wanted to dominate. A groundbreaker sexually and politically, Vincent represented a generation of women who wanted more from life than household drudgery, and her poetry titillated and outraged the country. Her sad later years, declining into drug and alcohol addiction, read as the tragedy they are, although Milford delicately steps away from assigning too much blame to any party. Would Vincent have become the poet she did if she had not had the help of so many people, and what would she have accomplished if her husband had not, as we call it today, co-dependently fed her addictions? Milford doesn't attempt to answer these questions, but this highly readable and fascinating literary biography shows how Vincent's life is far from obsolete.

The Dogs of Babel

Paul Iverson’s world changes forever one day when his volatile wife, Lexy, dies after falling from a tree in the backyard. The only witness is their dog Lorelei, and in his grief, Paul wonders what Lorelei witnessed. Strange clues in their home lead him to believe Lexy’s death was not an accident, but was it suicide or homicide? Believing only Lorelei knows the truth, Paul, a linguist, sets out to teach Lorelei to talk.

This is the initial premise of Carolyn Parkhurst’s debut novel, The Dogs of Babel. The book is told both in the present, as Paul tries to come to terms with his intense grief and his frustration in not knowing the circumstances of Lexy’s death, and in flashback, as he remembers meeting and falling in love with Lexy, their courtship and marriage. As he works with Lorelei, he comes into contact with a group of underground researchers who use less than respectable means to introduce speech to dogs, and he also discovers the late night world of TV psychics, a fascination he finds his late wife also shared.

Parkhurst is, at times, a lovely writer, and she is most effective when detailing Paul’s grief. His love for Lexy is heartfelt, and her loss is devastatingly described for the reader:

“I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on.”

 While Paul’s grief feels very real, the character of Lexy is poorly drawn, leading readers to wonder why he grieves so much for such a shallow, immature woman. Parkhurst’s intention was clearly to make Lexy a volatile free spirit, someone suffering from unspeakable rage but someone whose whimsy would make that rage bearable. Consequently, Paul and Lexy’s first date consists of driving from Virginia to Disney World, eating only appetizers along the way because dinner marks the end of the first date. Unfortunately, this becomes precious rather than endearing. Lexy’s rages, in contrast, seem rather minor and not nearly threatening enough, so when Paul remarks at one point that he was thinking of leaving Lexy because of them, he appears fussy rather than savaged by his wife’s anger.

Not that all of Lexy’s characterization is poorly drawn; she is a mask-maker by trade, and her fascination with death masks is poignant and well developed. But wandering side plots involving a TV psychic Paul tries to find and a group of pseudo scientists who abuse dogs to try to teach them to talk distract from the main story and reduce the overall credibility. Yet Parkhurst is a skilled writer when she stays focused on the primary story and the narrator’s voice; I for one will look for her next book to see how she’s developed.

        

A Brief History of the Flood

In A Brief History of the Flood, Jean Harfenist tells a coming-of-age story in a series of connected short stories, two literary conventions that have proved the downfall of many a writer. But Harfenist's book is a strong example of what such conventions can do if they are handled correctly; she stays away from the tired clichés of both genres and instead delivers a compelling story with taut writing and all-too-human characters.

Lillian Anderson, from Acorn Lake, MN, is a young girl in a large household headed by an alcoholic father and a manic-depressive mother. The flood faced by the Anderson family is literal and metaphoric: their run-down house and slipshod lifestyle threatens to engulf them at every turn. In a series of stories that follows a linear timeframe, Lillian loses her virginity, watches her parents seek deeper into their respective crises, and learns the ways of boys and girls, men and women, while struggling to find her place in the world.

What could be a depressing tale is redeemed by Lillian's smart narrative, sometimes arch and sometimes heartbreaking but always real. Harfenist has a way with words but doesn't use them in a superficial, "showing off" kind of way. Instead her gift with language is used to enhance Lillian's character and sharpen her observations of life in Acorn Lake, such as when Lillian arrives home to find her mother with another man:

"A thin-lipped, guilty-looking man is sitting at the table, shirt open to show off a mat of brown chest hair that stops suddenly at the base of his naked neck. Happy's resting her black muzzle on his thigh. Labs will go whoring for a pat on the head.

"Mom tightens the belt on Dad's bathrobe. 'Lillian, I'd like you to meet Biff Brookes, a dear old friend of ours from Minnewashka Valley. He dropped by hoping to catch your father at home. Biff, this is my daughter Lillian and this is her friend Irene.'

"No one moves. Mom looks shell-shocked, and this Biff doesn't have the guts to stand up and say hello, but my pal Irene Marlene Patschky is grinning like she just discovered birth control pills.

"There is no coffee.

"Biff can't help himself a minute longer. He looks at Irene's ankles, then up, over every curve, up five feet, eleven inches until his neck is cricked and his jaw is slacked.

"Irene arches her back to bring her sizable chest closer to his face, and squinting her already slitty eyes at him, she says, 'We don't want to interrupt anything. Lillian and I will go outside and lie down in the sun.' She can sweep a room clean of guilt, doesn't matter who owns it or whether they earned it. Usually that's what you want in a friend."

Each story stands on its own, yet together they create a larger work that meshes seamlessly with no weak links. The concept of a novel in stories is a tough one to pull off; it seems there are always a handful of stories that become filler material, but Harfenist has overcome that pitfall by writing stories that all matter and contribute to the larger story. A Brief History of the Flood is an impressive achievement, but what's more important, it's a wonderful book to read.

Two Views of Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo is an almost legendary figure, a startling artist and a flamboyant, tragic person whose life has become almost mythical. It’s no surprise, then, that she should be attractive to novelists who look for characters out of the ordinary. To write Frida Kahlo as a completely fictional character would be difficult, unbelievable; as usual, the old line about truth being stranger than fiction proves to be accurate.

 

In recent years, two authors have tackled Kahlo’s lives on fictional terms, with markedly different results. Barbara Mujica’s Frida is told from the point of view of Frida’s sister Cristina. Given that Cristina betrayed Frida by having an affair with Frida’s husband Diego Garcia, this approach has the benefit of exploring another side to the story. It’s a great idea—but the execution is poor. The narration is in first person, told to a psychologist. This type of narrative technique is annoying, and the slow reveal of the therapist is pointless. The setup has no bearing on the story. More unfortunate is that both Cristina and Frida come across as whiny, self-absorbed, immature brats. Cristina spends a great deal of time desecrating Frida’s character, only to conclude, “But of course I loved her.” That self-professed love is not at all apparent, and it’s not clear if this is self-delusion or is supposed to show the duality of their relationship.

 

Kate Braverman’s The Incantation of Frida K shows what Frida’s life looks like in the hands of an authorial master. Braverman’s book brilliantly brings to life, in drug-hazed, hallucinogenic prose, the wild memories and insights of Frida as she is dying at the age of 46. Her life is presented as brutally and with as much color and bravado as Frida’s paintings. Far from being an immature brat, Braverman’s Frida is a ferocious, talented woman whose strange and often damaging relationship with Diego Rivera shapes but does not totally destroy her. Cristina is a minor player in this book, yet her brief appearances with Frida tell a more complex and painful story than Mujica’s entire book.

 

Braverman’s approach succeeds on so many levels; the book is told first person from Frida’s point of view, a courageous voice that could, in lesser hands, have become an embarrassing mess. But Braverman’s skill in writing elevates the story beyond pathology and gossipy biography, instead presenting a woman of breathtaking intelligence and pain, a survivor, someone who is lost within her own fantasy world of lost children and increased doses of morphine. The opening of the book sets the tone: “I was born in rain and I will die in rain. Know me as a river, as harbor. They will say I was a slut with a brazen sailor’s mouth. They will not remember my elegance and restraint.” Later, describing her marriage to Rivera, Frida says: “So it would continue. The days and nights redolent with junctures, like the abscesses on my back. Then Diego would return, offer an entertainment and I would agree, dress, apply face paints, elaborate layers of ribbon and flowers in my hair. I didn’t have clothing. I had costumes. I didn’t have a marriage. I had a form of traveling theater. I let circumstance define me.”

 

In the best of all worlds, all fictionalized accounts of larger-than-life people would read as well, as beautifully and painfully, as Braverman’s book does. Unfortunately, the endeavor to recreate famous people often ends, as Mujica’s does, in failure. Let’s hope there are more writers like Braverman out there, willing to tackle complex subjects with courage and creativity.