New Century Reading

Woman No. 17

I wasn't wild about Edan Lepucki's debut novel, California, but then, I'm a hard sell on dystopia. I did like her writing, and when I saw her second novel was not dystopic in the least, I thought I'd give it a try. 

I have to report mixed results. This novel is told from two POVs: Lady Daniels (Lady is a childhood nickname that stuck), whose marriage is falling apart, who has sons from two different relationships, the older of which is mute, but not deaf. The other POV is that of the nanny Lady hires to care for her younger son while Lady writes a memoir about her older son. Esther, or S, as she asks to be called, takes the job for motivations unknown to Lady. But that's fair, because there's a lot going on with Lady that S doesn't know. And although they don't know it right away, they both have significant Mommy issues with their own mothers.

So there's conflicted parenthood, conflicted women, conflicted daughters, and around all of this, the art scene. It should be right up my alley, kind of a good pairing with Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, which I loved. There's also some excellent writing, zippy imagery, darkly funny lines, and some wildly honest writing about being a mother.

But. Here's the funny thing. I figured I'd be most interested in Lady's story, since I'm closer in age and life stage to her, but by the end, she annoyed me. She's somewhat unlikable, usually a plus to me--love a good unlikable character--but she just feels shallow and whiny. In contrast, S is a young 20-something who has plenty of issues, but somehow she was far more interesting to me. Even though chapters alternated between the two, it's pretty much Lady's book. I ended wanting more of S, a lot more, and S's ending felt just dropped into place rather than fully fleshed out.

Yet Lepucki's writing is strong enough that I will definitely read her next book. And kudos to her for not just recycling her work in California, but striking out into new territory.

Lucky Boy

In Lucky Boy, Solimar Valdez is a young woman from a going-nowhere village in Mexico. She wants to get into the U.S. and find a better future. After taking a dangerous and horrific route, she manages to cross the border and meet up with a cousin in San Francisco. The cousin helps her by putting her to work as a house cleaner, and gives Soli stern warnings about not getting caught by police. But it's not long before Soli realizes that she's pregnant, the result of a brief tryst on the journey from Mexico. She thinks about getting an abortion, but can't bring herself to do it, and soon looks forward to having her own child.

Kavya Reddy is married and wants nothing more than to become a mother. But to her distress, getting pregnant turns out not to be a simple thing for her. After giving artificial insemination a try, she and her husband, Rishi, decide to try the adoption route, going through the foster care system.

Can you see where this is headed?

Sure enough, Soli's undocumented status catches up with her, and her baby boy Ignacio (Nacho for short) is taken away from her when she's sent to detention. After all, the baby is an American citizen, while she is not. Kavya and Rishi are given Nacho for foster care, with warnings that it may not be a permanent placement, depending on the outcome of Soli's legal woes.

It sounds a bit like Jodi Picoult's territory, but thankfully author Shanthi Sekaran is miles above Picoult in writing. Here she gives us two mothers who both desperately love and want this little boy. One mother has the means to give him pretty much the American dream; the other doesn't, but loves him so fiercely that it does make a reader (this reader, anyway) reflect on whether strong maternal love is enough to make up for lack of amenities and options. 

Then there are other issues; should a baby be separated from his biological mother, even if they have different passports? Is that fair or right? Is it fair or right that because Kavya and Rishi are more privileged, they should be able to take this baby from its biological mother? But if they also provide a deeply loving, nurturing environment, does that make them better qualified?

These are all unsettling questions, and obviously very timely. It's a tough, gut-wrenching situation, made worse by the fact that neither side is easily the favorite or the completely best choice. 

I did have a few qualms. The book is longer than it needed to be, and included unnecessary detail about fostering a toddler (I'm glad the author did her research, but she didn't really need to show it all to us). At times, it teeters into melodrama territory, and some of the action (including how Soli ended up in detention) just didn't really work. But those are minor quibbles. This is a book well worth the read.

The Book of Joan

There is a whooooooooooole lot of stuff going on in The Book of Joan. The book takes place in an unspecified time in the future, where wars and environmental devastation have made Earth virtually uninhabitable. Survivors are on board a spaceship circling the planet, continuing to drain it of whatever resources it can still find. The people on board have become hairless and sexless, essentially creepy sentient blobs. We're introduced to Christine, who tells us in a barely suppressed fury, of the things that have brought humanity to this point. She also tells us about Joan.

Joan is, of course, a futuristic Joan of Arc. It's believed by most that she was burned to death by the forces of Jean de Men, the now-evil leader of the spaceship. However, as it turns out, she's not dead; she's still on Earth. Christine hears that Joan is still alive and begins plotting to get her on board to bring Jean de Men down.

So, dystopia mixed with a saint. Joan here is no saint, but she is unearthly in ways that terrified her family as a child, and in ways she herself doesn't understand until much later.

Great premise. And author Yuknavitch is an excellent writer. But oh, my, there is just so much going on, and the sheer rage from the characters never abates long enough for the reader to catch a breath. There are some weirdnesses; sometimes the book is told from Christine's third-person POV, then from her first-person POV; other times,it's told from Joan's third-person POV, then first person. Not sure why that was necessary. It's distracting.

The meaning of nature and the environment gets a lot of coverage here, sometimes to the point that it slows down the narrative. Then, in the last third, some seriously weird shit begins to happen that left me feeling entirely meh. Your mileage may vary. Lots of people love this book, and I am somewhat tired of dystopia (hell, we're on the verge of living it right now).

I hadn't read anything by Luknavitch before, and while I thought there were many amazing passages of sheerly wonderful writing, overall, the book just left me shaking my head. And wanting to read this about Joan of Arc instead.

Fever Dream

Fever Dream is a short, read-it-in-a-day volume, and that's appropriate. Like a real fever dream, it's intense, and not something you'd want to drag out any longer than necessary.

Which is not to say it's not worth reading. I could hardly put it down. The premise is deceptively simple. A woman is sick in bed, dying, and she's talking to a young boy. He is not her son. How they're connected, how she became sick, why she's dying, and what happens along the way, that makes up their conversation (the book is entirely in dialogue, but it works). And what, exactly, did happen? Something mysterious. Something related to an environmental disaster.

Or is it? Or is she hallucinating? Is any of this real?

There are clues and repeated motifs. The woman thinks repeatedly about "rescue distance": the distance required to rescue her young daughter at any given time. Ropes tightening. A green house. Horses. Ducks. All in a style that's both hallucinatory and hyper-realistic at the same time.

This is a book that continually forces the reader to question what's happening, what's real, what's not, in a good way. Even after finishing it, I'm not entirely sure what I think happened--but it did make me think.

Anything is Possible

I so loved Elizabeth Strout's My Name is Lucy Barton, and I couldn't wait to read this one after hearing that many of the people mentioned in Barton would appear here, including Lucy herself. I even reread Barton in preparation (and loved it even more the second time around, if that's possible). So maybe my hopes were just too high.

Like Lucy Barton, this collection of interwoven stories is a quiet one, often with what's not being said as important as what's being said. But when we learned about the characters in the new book in Barton, we saw them through Barton's eyes, through her memories, and through her difficult, shifting memories involving her family. Now we see the characters through their own eyes, and yes, we gain insight on some of the things the earlier book touched on.

But it felt a little too disparate to me. There were some stories I liked very much. There's a very creepy one about an affluent couple who are keeping some disturbing secrets, and another where Lucy comes home to visit after a 17-year absence, and her brother and sister have quite different feelings about her visit. The dynamics are tense and frustrating and perfect.

But then there's a meandering story that takes place in a bed-and-breakfast, and a story about the kind janitor who used to let Lucy stay after school instead of going home right away because he suspected something wasn't right at home. The story strains to get to its conclusion. And the less said about the closeted gay farmer story, the better.

Ah well. Strout is still one of my favorite authors, thanks to Barton and Olive Kitteredge. I'll keep the faith and await her next book.

Best American Short Stories 2016

I pick up this annual offering every year, and although uneven, it's always interesting. It sometimes seems like the guest editors I like the least offer the stories I like the best and vice versa. But it's always instructive to see what writers themselves choose for best stories.

I have to say, Junot Diaz raised the bar. In this batch of 20 stories, there was only one I didn't finish, and only one other that left me meh. That means there were 18 stories that I fell hard for. That's a pretty impressive accomplishment.

But that's not the only impressive thing about this year's collection. This has to be by far the most diverse edition ever published under the BASS title. More than half of the stories are by women. There are authors from Nigeria, Ghana, Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The writers include people of Asian, Guatemalan, Native American, and African American descent. And their stories represent that wide diversity, whether they're set in places far from America or show people from those places struggling to live and adapt in America.

So, not surprisingly, these stories range widely from funny to sad to horrific, from realistic to magical realism to experimental. If you want diversity in your reading, of every type, this is a good place to start.

In the Great Green Room

In the Great Green Room is, of course, the first line of the iconic children's picture book, Goodnight Moon. Our oldest son loved Goodnight Moon so much as a toddler that my husband and I both knew it by heart for a long time. I can still quote several pages from memory. It's a lovely, quiet story of saying goodnight, charming without being cloying, comforting and ritualistic in a good way. No wonder it's still a bestseller decades after being published.

When I saw there was a biography out about its author, of whom I knew nothing, I decided to give it a try. Author Amy Gary had been working on getting some of Brown's works back into print and asked Brown's sister if there were any unpublished works. Turns out there were--including a huge stash of diaries and letters.

That's a cool find. Gary used them as the basis for this bio, and it turns out that Brown had a really interesting life. She was a groundbreaker in ways I hadn't realized. When she started writing children's books, the prevailing attitude was that children only liked fantasy and fairy tales. Brown disagreed. She felt that children looked at their own lives and the real world with a sense of wonder, and that books for them should explore that. Clearly she was onto something.

She also earned a living (mostly--although it didn't hurt that she came from a wealthy family and her father kept her on an allowance) as a single woman in the 1930s and 40s, something that was rare, and she had an extended relationship with a woman. She owned unique and interesting properties and was almost frighteningly prolific, yet hard on herself; she longed to write adult works, but her attempts in that direction failed. She was a shrewd businesswoman and tough negotiator. She once sent a publisher a set of dueling pistols while they were haggling a contract.

So, interesting woman, interesting life. But the bio itself had some serious flaws. Most of it reads as if the author simply paraphrased things from the journals and diaries. In the end, she notes considerable research, but most of that doesn't seem to appear in the actual text. Not enough time is spent looking at the effects of the lesbian relationship she had, in which her partner was emotionally abusive, to put it mildly. It would have been nice to know if the author had uncovered any source materials from the partner that might give some alternative views on the relationship, or on the relationship she had with a man who was more than a bit of a cad. Towards the end of her life, Brown finally had a romantic relationship that seemed to be working, but it was cut short by her sudden death. The author treats that last relationship as the romance for all times. But we don't know that for sure, do we? Brown had a terrible track record in terms of her love life. We have no idea if this relationship would have lasted. 

It would also have been nice to have more time spent on the iconic books like Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny. Other than noting that the librarians at New York Public Library didn't consider Goodnight Moon to be a good book and, in fact, didn't stock it in the library until decades after it was first published, the importance of those books is barely noted.