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March 2012
Arcadia
You know what I'm afraid of? I'm afraid of both overselling and underselling this book. I loved, loved, loved it--LOVED it--and I'm not sure that's saying enough. But I'd hate to get anyone's expectations too high and then approach it more critically than I did. I went into it with some curiosity, having read only a few of Lauren Groff's short stories and liking them, but not at all sure I'd like the subject matter.
Arcadia is the name of a commune of sorts, in upstate New York in the 1970s. The story is told from Bit's point of view. Bit was born in the early days of the commune to Handy and Hannah. His parents are early members and, as time goes on, pivotal members; Handy is (as his name implies) a hands-on guy who's critical to the building and maintaining of the complex. Hannah struggles with depression, especially in winter, but when she's able to cope, she contributes heavily too.
For Bit, it's a wonderful childhood, with lots of freedom from rules and restrictions, and with an education that's eclectic and not always practical. He's aware there are problems; bickering amongst the adults, lack of food, and eventually power struggles and a rising population of people who don't contribute in any way. But for a child, it's home, and it's family.
It's not much of a spoiler to say the commune doesn't survive. From the get-go, the reader can see that it can't possibly make it, for the same reasons most communes (if not all) of the '70s died off. But how can a child of that time and that place survive the world outside? That's the real story of Arcadia--both how he grew up in Arcadia, and how he learned to cope outside of it.
The Washington Post's Ron Charles makes a good case for this being the story of Paradise Lost. He also notes feeling the way I did while reading: fear that Groff was going to screw this up. Time after time, I found myself almost holding my breath, thinking: oh, she's not going to do *that* or go *there*, is she? And she did do that and go there, and she made it work. And the whole time she was confidently doing what she needed to do, she did it with beautiful writing, poetic but very organic (no pun intended). There's been some discussion over at the Tournament of Books about so-called "MFA writing" and how hard it is to define. This book is the anti-MFA-writing book. It's wonderfully written and crafted, but never feels like it was workshopped in any way.
In fact, this is a very rare book for me in two ways: one, it actually gave me a lump in my throat more than once. I don't tend to react that way to books, no matter how sad or tragic. I need more visual cues than that (say, the opening montage of the movie Up) for tears. But Groff drew them out of me. There's a layer of sadness running through this book, entirely earned. I cared so much about Bit and his family, no matter how flawed or eccentric they seemed to be, and when things didn't go well, it hurt.
The other thing? And this is borderline miraculous for me--Gross doesn't use quotation marks in the dialogue, and I didn't mind. Lack of quotation marks is usually one of my major peeves, but it worked for me. I was slightly annoyed at first when I realized she was not going to use them, but eventually, it came to feel right--like it added a slight remove for the reader, as if I was not part of the action, but at the next booth, listening in. And that was perfect for the story. Any closer in, I would have been seriously depressed at various points.
Which is not to say it's a depressing book. Not overall. Just some sad points.
And oh, the writing:
"Sharon smoothes down Grete's fine white hair, and Bit sees with a pang that he'd forgotten again to brush it this morning. Grete is a dandelion gone to spore."
"For a few breaths he forgets himself in the swim of nature around him. Its rhythm is so different from Bit's human own, both more nervous and more patient. He sees a bug that is smaller than a period on a page. He sees the sky, bigger than all that's in his head. An overwhelm from two directions, vast and tiny, together."
All kinds of stars and thumbs up for this one. Now I've finally got to get that copy of Monsters of Templeton that's been languishing on my shelves for too long and finally read it.
My thanks to Hyperion Books for sending me a review copy.
Lightning Rods
Quite a while ago I heard about this book coming out. The author previously published one other novel, The Last Samurai, which I remember liking quite a lot, so I requested an ARC from the publisher. It came. I picked it up, started it, it didn't "wow" me, I set it down; tried again later, same result. Set it aside for a donation. Then the Tournament of Books listed it as a challenger, and I decided to give it one last try. Third time's the charm, I guess, or at least somewhat, because I did finish it.
Lightning Rods is the story of Joe, a salesman who can't seem to find the right product to sell until his spare time engaged with pornography leads him to a concept that he thinks will revolutionize corporate America and wipe out sexual harassment issues in the workplace: creating private anonymous spaces where men (the primary abusers) can have sex with a woman whose face they can't see, several times a day if they like, to tone them down. The women in turn will make buckets of money and remain anonymous within the office.
Not surprisingly, it's a tough sell at first to find women willing to take on this task, but eventually he does, and the next impossible task is to find a company willing to take on such an outrageous idea. But he does, and it's a success, and then...
And then corporate America does what corporate America does best, and finds all kinds of complaints and problems and Joe needs to keep addressing them. Nothing is ever perfect, and again not surprisingly, eventually the government takes notice.
I can't quite bring myself to say I liked this book. There are parts of it that are laugh-out-loud funny; DeWitt's vision of corporate America is spot-on and fully recognizable to anyone who's spent any time in a large office. She skewers the way companies are run right down to the lingo and business practices they use, and her aim is unfailingly perfect.
But. Generally I love dark humor; I love a good send-up; I love acidic commentary. However, this book fairly drips acid to the point where, at times, I had to set it down and walk away for a while. According to Mark Binelli, the judge who picked it to win in its first round at the ToB, DeWitt was quoted in an interview as saying she wrote the book because she "felt like she was getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall” by the publishing industry. I read his decision after finishing the book, and that stuck with me; I think that's my problem with the book. While at times humorous, there's an undertone of vengeful bitterness that creeps in and diminishes the overall humor, at least for me, and gave me a feeling of "oh dear, this person needs to just let this go".
Still, I wouldn't say don't read it. It's an interesting book, and certainly creative. It's just not high on my list of books to read again someday.
The Stranger's Child
So, this is my first Alan Hollinghurst, and I had high hopes, maybe too high. Hollinghurst previously won the Man Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. I love the cover, and it very much fits the story. I love that it's about poetry and poets. I love that it travels through various periods of the last century in Britain. What I don't love is the book itself.
The book starts just before WWI, with the dashing Cecil Valance visiting his friend George Sawle's modest country home, Two Acres. George and Cecil have a hard time keeping their hands off each other, but do so long enough for George's younger sister, Daphne, to have an encounter with Cecil. She asks him to sign her autograph book. Going above and beyond, he writes a poem that leaves both George and Daphne thinking is a love poem just for them.
From there, the story moves ahead in spurts of time. Cecil is killed in WWI, and his slim body of poems leaves a lasting, if second-tier, legacy. Still, the poem called Two Acres becomes a classic that English schoolchildren all have to learn. Daphne goes on to marry Cecil's brother Dudley, who has some issues of his own, while George also marries in what appears to be a most practical arrangement. As the years and decades go by, lingering interest in Cecil's work leads to a stubborn young biographer sensing something other than heterosexual love in Cecil's most famous poem.
I loved the premise, but not the execution. At 435 pages, this could easily be cut by at least 20%. There are long descriptive scenes which, while beautifully written, begin to stall the story. As the plot moves towards the end of the 20th century, it becomes more and more difficult to care about people's interest in and involvement with Cecil and his life and legacy. In fact, the final section is devoted to a book dealer in 2008 who stumbles on a handwritten letter book with some transcribed letters that somewhat fill in the picture of Cecil even more.
But here's the thing. Just as the story of Cecil is never fully discovered (even his stubborn biographer is later painted as unreliable and having problems of his own, thus calling into question some of his writing), this book never fully enlightens us as to the whole truth, once we get past Cecil and George at Two Acres. The book dealer's discovery might have been interesting if it had led to something major, but it doesn't. And that too would be OK if the reader were more invested in the book dealer's character, but we're not. Or at least I wasn't.
I think Hollinghurst was trying to use the novel to illustrate how family history and its secrets and lies, once exposed to even a small level of notoriety, becomes like that old children's game, telephone, with each succeeding generation blurring the truth more and more, rather than making it clearer. Again, I like that premise, but while not making the past clear, he also didn't involve me enough in the characters in each time period to make me care.
The title comes from a poem by Tennyson:
"Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger's child--
"As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills--'
A worthy theme, but the book doesn't quite live up to it.