New Century Reading

Vestments

Vestments, the first novel by John Reimringer, is in part a love letter to the city of St. Paul. I live in the Twin Cities metro area and did live in St. Paul for a while and visit it as often as I can, and it was a joy to read the detailed descriptions of the city. I would hope that for someone not from here, it would be equally enjoyable, although I wonder if sometimes it would read like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, with too many street names, too much "then he went to this street and turned on that street, then turned again on this street".

Vestments is the story of Jimmy Dressler, born to a dysfunctional Irish-Catholic St. Paul family who eventually grows up to become a priest himself in the 1990s. The plot is both a coming-of-age story as well as a look at faith, specifically the Catholic faith, and what life is like for late-20th-century priests in small, rural parishes.

This is a book I read for book club, and I must say that if it wasn't for book club, I wouldn't have finished it, but I'm glad I did. Structurally I have some issues with the book. More than half of the book is told in flashback, which to me is too much. If that much past needs to be explored, it would be better to just start in the past and move forward, at least for this book. I found myself impatient and sighing a lot when it was clear that once again, we were not in the current timeframe. When the backstory finally caught up to the present story, I enjoyed the book much more.

There's also a bit of the cliche about the dysfunctional family, yet Reimringer delineates his characters so thoroughly that, even if they're not likable, the reader still cares about them and what happens to them.

Finally, I'm not sure why this book is set (when not in flashback) in the 1990s. The only reason I know the time period is due to a few references to Bill Clinton being in office. Other than that, I'm puzzled. If there's supposed to be some noticeable difference in the pre-9/11 age, it's not clear. If something has changed in the priesthood since then (not being Catholic or knowing any priests, I have no idea); there are several references to child abuse scandals, so that's not a new topic.

Overall, glad I did read to the end, loved the characters, thought much of the writing was good, and will definitely read the next book Reimringer writes.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Boy, did this book make me feel like a curmudgeon. It's getting raved about all over the place; bloggers and print reviewers alike have been raving about it. The Washington Post's Ron Charles said, "If your friends don’t like it, you may have to stop returning their calls for a little while until you can bring yourself to forgive them."

Ouch.

I guess it's not that I didn't like it, but I didn't love it. The story is simple enough; one morning retired Harold Fry gets a short letter from a long-ago acquaintance, saying that she's dying of cancer and thought he'd want to know. He lives in the south of England, she's in hospice in the north. He writes a short note in return and takes it out to post it, but as he walks to the postbox, he thinks of different things he should say. Eventually he's passed several postboxes and is out of his home village, and he realizes that he'd rather walk the 600 miles to where she is and talk with her than post a letter. So, without proper clothing or even a cell phone, he walks, to the consternation of his wife.

It's not that it's not a sweet story, or that it's too sweet a story. Every time the scale started to tip towards treacle, author Rachel Joyce tipped it back again, especially in scenes where Harold has gotten some publicity and begins to pick up some hangers-on, who vastly overrate the significance of the so-called pilgrimage. Or when he meets a gasbag who says his wife loves Jane Austen: "She's seen all the films"

My problems were these: first, the episodic nature of the chapters, easily signified by the chapters' titles: Harold and the Letter, Harold and the Hotel Guests, Harold and the Doctor. It's kind of like all those Friends episodes, which had titles beginning "The One With" or "The One Where".

Second, at times Joyce simply stated the obvious. When he chats with a man he would previously have cast judgment on, his own journey makes him feel more kindly. We see that in the interaction between the two men, but Joyce feels it necessary to comment: "He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others."

My third biggest peeve comes in that quote. He's walking to atone for the mistakes he had made. But two of the biggest factors in Harold Fry's history aren't revealed until nearly the end. I won't give spoilers, but when I got there, I felt gypped. I understand that the author was creating some mystery and tension in not telling us some very key information from Harold's earlier life, but since Harold and Maureen certainly knew about them, and they certainly had an impact on Harold's pilgrimage, I wish I'd known from the beginning. I felt like I'd been tricked, and the ending, instead of feeling catharctic, left me shrugging.

I'm disappointed. I'd heard so many good things about this, and there were parts I liked. I just wish the big secret had been disclosed up front, so we could really study how it affected Harold and his journey.

Gods Without Men

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru knocked my socks off. To try and describe what it's about is daunting. The title comes from a Balzac quote: In the desert, you see, there is everything and nothing . . . It is God without men.

The desert plays a pivotal role, and is almost a character itself. The center story is of Jaz and Lisa Matharu, a young couple from NYC who find their marriage collapsing as they struggle to deal with their son Raj, who is severely autistic. In an attempt to create a "normal" family, they take a trip west and end up on the edge of a desert in California, where (this is sort of a spoiler, but it's right on the book flap, so it's hard to avoid it) Raj disappears, and Lisa and Jaz find themselves under intense--and incredibly nasty--public scrutiny.

But the book isn't just about the Matharu family in the present day (well, 2008-2009). It's about a missionary exploring the same region in the late 1700s; an early linguist and his young wife, coming to the desert to learn Native American languages and stories in the 1920s; a young mother and UFO believer taking refuge there in the 1950s; the rise of the UFO community and its coming apart during the 1960s; a young rock star from Britain; and a young Iraqi girl being trained to simulate the Iraqi people in a Marine base in the U.S.

It's about belief systems, what happens when people within those systems change their beliefs, and what constitutes a family, especially families of different belief systems. It's about ways of life that build up and then die out (or are killed). It's about Native American beliefs, UFO chasers, Judaism, Sikhism (on a separate note, my heart goes out to the victims of the recent tragedy in Wisconsin), us vs. them mentalities.

It's also about good writing, emotional, precise, such as when Jaz and Lisa are being interviewed on TV about Raj's disappearance:

"That was why they were there, after all. For the apportionment, the magical assignment of blame. Bad things do not happen without a reason. It is preferable, when thinking about bad things, to make them happen to bad people. We think of bad things all the time. Our thoughts have to go somewhere. If the bad people do not seem properly Bad, we must make them so, unless we can make them Good, but for that we apply the most exacting standards."

Lots to think about, lots to talk about, and definitely worth a re-read.

Shelf Discovery Part Final

OK, I missed the last two weeks, but Girl Detective said it was the kind of read-along project where you could join in as much or as little as you want, so that's awesome. And--she might do it again next summer! Which would be even better, as there were books I wanted to read but didn't get to.

I did, however, get to this one:

And if you want to see what I thought about it--and I had a lot to say--you can see my guest post on Girl Detective's blog here.

Carry the One

Carol Anshaw's novel has an intriguing premise: on the night of Carmen's wedding, her siblings and assorted friends end up driving under the influence on a dark country road and hit and kill a young girl. How do these lives move forward over 25 years with that tragedy on their hands? Or, as one of the characters says, how they account for themselves over the years when they always have to "carry the one" along with them?

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that question is answered for most of the players. There are two characters whose lives appear to be altered forever: Carmen's brother Nick, who falls deeper and deeper into drug addiction, and his girlfriend Olivia, who takes the fall for the tragedy and spends time in prison, coming out an altered person.

But the others? Carmen herself, pregnant at the time of the wedding, and her sister Alice, their parents? Hard to tell.

It made for a frustrating read. The book opens in 1983 at the wedding and concludes in 2008. A great deal happens in those 25 years: the characters fall in and out of love, marry, divorce, raise kids, develop careers, travel, the things people do in a lifetime. Much of the book focuses on Alice and her on-again/off-again years-long affair with Maude, but honestly, I couldn't see how the child's death had any effect on this affair. Alice is a painter who paints many pictures of the child, but eventually she stops, and, well, so much for that.

Carmen becomes a heavy-duty do-gooder, but we don't know anything about her before the wedding. Maybe that was just her personality.

I think part of the problem was the minimalistic narrative. This is a story that crying out for some soul searching, heart-wrenching thoughts and discussions, and they just never happened.

Even more troubling, as the book progresses across the years, it skips and jumps across time, and there's no noticeable change in most of the characters that can be tied back to their processing or not processing the child's death.

It did raise an interesting question to me. One chapter is devoted to 9/11. Absolutely nothing happens in terms of the characters. They just sit and watch it unfold. I thought, what a waste of a chapter. It felt gratuitous and forced. Then I thought, but how do you write a story that covers the last twenty years of the 20th century in America and not include 9/11? Finally, though, for me it came down to this: if you're going to use 9/11, and she could hardly have avoided it given the narrative structure, it needed to be a catalyst for someone in the book. In Carry the One, it's not.

In the end, not much of interest happened. I'm surprised I kept reading, but I was hoping somehow something would surprise me and move me. Not only did that not happen, but the final page even managed to tick me off by having an eye-rolling development.

Virginia Woolf

For some time (cough *years* cough) I've been meaning to read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. But it's a bit intimidating. For one thing, it clocks in at nearly 1000 pages. That's a lot of biographical detail. Which is not to say I'm not that interested--I am--but that's a big commitment.

When I read that there was a shorter, perhaps more introductory bio of Mrs. Woolf by Alexandra Harris, I thought, hey, that might be just the thing to start.

And it was. Just 170 pages long, it obviously can't go into the level of analysis that the Lee bio can, but it's a good overview of Woolf's life, literary and otherwise. Sometimes the shortness of it means that little commentary is given to things like the abuse Woolf experienced as a child, or her attachment to Vita Sackville-West. Yet it still gave me a clearer picture than I had of Woolf as a person. Best of all, it increased my interest in reading the Lee bio. As soon as I read the novels I haven't yet read. Which now are leaping to the top of my TBR stack. For a short book, it sure did its duty.

The Poetry Project

Before I get into the August topic, I wanted to give kudos to the city of Minneapolis for commemorating the collapse of the I-35W bridge five years ago with poetry.

Welcome to the August Poetry Project. This month's theme is Pulitzer Prize winners. There are some mighty fine poets on that lengthy list. But of course, I have to turn to one of my faves. Sylvia Plath is the only poet to win the Pulitzer posthumously, in 1982 for The Collected Poems. As I mentioned in my introductory post for this project, I especially love the poems she wrote to and about her children. Some are heartrendingly sad, particularly the ones written during her separation from her husband. Others are more awestruck at the enormity of having a child, such as this one:

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And nowyou try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.