New Century Reading

The Memory Police

I had high hopes for The Memory Police, because I'm a big fan of Yoko Ogawa's short story collection, Revenge. The novel didn't live up to the short stories, but I'm not sorry I read the book, and do find her an interesting writer.

In The Memory Police, we have mostly unnamed characters, including a first-person narrator, in an unnamed island nation somewhere in a wintry climate, in an unspecified period of time. Strange things are happening; specifically, things disappear, like fruit and perfume, and shortly after the things disappear, the island's population forgets about them too. Except for a few people who retain their memories and are, apparently, deemed to be a risk to the state. Hence, the Memory Police, who come to collect those people and take them--who knows where? They never come back. 

One such person is the unnamed narrator's mother, who has left behind a few sculptures and a house. The narrator herself is a novelist, and part of the book is an unsettling novel that she's writing as she chronicles life amidst the disappearances. Her editor (the closest we have to a character name: R) is someone she enjoys working with, and when he confesses that he's someone who has not forgotten anything and asks for her help in hiding him, she takes on the momentous and dangerous task. She's helped by an old family friend, the Old Man, who seems to be someone she can trust and rely on.

That is the bulk of the book, up until the last 50 or so pages. Honestly, not a lot happens. But here's the thing with Ogawa: She creates such an icy feeling of underlying tension and dread, that even when nothing's happening, you can't help but worry that something is about to happen. 

The other striking and unsettling thing about the book was the parallels to Anne Frank and her family. Not just the details of someone being hidden away and living in fear of police who will take them away and likely do horrible things to them. Ogawa also includes throwaway details, like in the novel that's being written, the main character mentions working on an instruction manual for a company that manufactures jam. The Franks hid in a building that was headquarters for a pectin company, pectin being used to thicken jams. Later the narrator tries to find tasks to keep R busy in his dark hiding place, something the helpers did for the Franks. There are references to food shortages and days after days of eating the same bad vegetables--clearly found in Frank's diary. And, of course, the neverending fear of that knock on the door.

This could all be coincidence, but it read clearly to me.

Whether or not you should read this book depends on how much you want a solid plot more than atmosphere, or if you are OK with a story that's both close and intimate, and held at arm's length. In the scheme of things, I prefer her short stories and think her talents are better applied there, but this was an interesting read. 

The Dutch House

Oh, Ann Patchett. You made me angry with State of Wonder, which you opened with a highly inaccurate version of the suburb I live in. But you mostly redeemed yourself with your next novel, Commonwealth. And now, with The Dutch House? I am 110% back to total fandom. 

The Dutch House is about, literally, a house, but of course it's about the family that lives in the house. Cyril Conroy buys the opulent-home-fallen-on-hard-times at the end of WWII as a surprise for his wife. That sets in motion events that reverberate for generations, especially to Cyril's children Danny and Maeve. The children end up with a stepmother who cares more about the house than the children, and things get worse from there. Danny and Maeve end up tightly bonded by all that's happened to them, and to the Dutch House, which remains a touchstone to them all their lives.

I'm generally not a huge fan of generational sagas. But Patchett takes a wise, if risky, approach with this one, and is hugely successful. The story is told from the first-person POV of Danny, Cyril's youngest. Danny tells the story of what happened to the house, and to him and his sister, as an older adult looking back over many years. It's a point of view that runs the risk of wallowing in foreshadowing, but Patchett uses a very light hand and still makes it believable. Danny views his past with a loving, but firmly realistic view of the things that happened, and relates them with both pain and the softening that age can bring:

"There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself."

I'm guessing some readers will have issues with the ending, but I didn't. I felt that Patchett earned it, and I closed the book with a huge sigh of: "What a great reading experience this was!" It may take me a day or two to pick up another book, so immersed in this one am I still. Oh--and that cover? Is perfect for the book. But you have to read it to know why.

Little Fires Everywhere

I found this to be a terribly frustrating read. At its best, author Ng raises some valuable and necessary discussions of what makes a mother, what makes a family, multiculturalism, and parent-child relationships. There are parts that are beautifully and compellingly written. 

But. As in her first novel, Everything I Never Told You, Ng starts the book with a whammy in which we learn that young adult Izzy Richardson has burned down her family's home (this isn't a spoiler--it's on the first page), and then goes into massive amounts of backstory. I find that a tough approach to swallow. It's almost like bait-and-switch. Worse, as the book goes on, one of the main characters feels the need to reflect on her history with just about every person she mentions, even if that person never appears again. It's good for the author to know this. The reader doesn't need it, and it slows the book down.

Then there are so many characters who are explored through their own points of view. Too many. We really didn't need this many. And the end result is that some of the characters don't end up fully fleshed out, especially some of characters who are key to the overall story. Also? Too many plot lines. Way too many, and some of them feel very forced. There are also groaners of foreshadowing, with some plot points being clearly set up to be clever, but I could see the outcome a mile away--and I didn't buy some of them.

So why did I finish this book, when I'm generally a hard-and-fast 50-page-rule follower? I did care enough to want to see how it ended, although that disappointed too. This book has been getting raves, and I do think it's better than Ng's first book, but boy, I wish some editor would sit down with her and show her how to streamline and make a tighter book that would be more riveting.

 

Mitz

Well, this is quite the charmer. It belongs on the bookshelf right next to Flush. Mitz is a fictionalized account of Mitz, a marmoset adopted by Leonard and Virginia Woolf (that part is true--they did adopt a marmoset), to the amazement of many of their contemporaries and outright horror of others. While Flush is Virginia Woolf's own fictionalized pet story, telling of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog from the dog's perspective, Mitz varies from being almost a nonfiction account to one looking through Mitz's eyes. 

But unlike Flush, which mostly was a happy book, Mitz doesn't hesitate to touch on some of the harder things in the Woolfs' lives, including her mental health issues and the horror of realizing that WWII is coming (remember, the Woolfs had lived through WWI in Britain and had never forgotten the horror). Mitz is along for the ride (in a fact-based scene) when Leonard and Virginia take a motoring trip to Europe in the late 1930s and inadvertently get caught up in an anti-Semite demonstration (Leonard was Jewish). 

I suspect this book is more enjoyable if you know a bit about Virginia Woolf. I'm no expert, but have read some biographies and most of her diaries, so many of the people mentioned are familiar to me. Sigrid Nunez also did a stellar job writing about animals in The Friend. Here, she brings Mitz to life while realistically noting that none of us can possibly have known what she was like. Nunez also sheds some light on some of the other animals in the Woolfs' lives, including the much-heralded Pinka the dog.

Nunez' tone throughout is just right. It's a silly thing to do, writing a book about a marmoset, and yet it works to show us the Woolfs from a different point of view. She can be playful too:

"When Virginia joked about how much she and Mitz had in common, she was right. Two nervous, delicate, wary females, one as relentlessly curious as the other. Both in love with Leonard--for both, he was their rock, their 'inviolable centre.' They both were mischievous. They both had claws."

Which is to say, I really enjoyed this book. If you're a Woolf fan and want a different take on her life, check this one out.

Less

I think if I had not been in the right frame of mind, I might not have liked this book. I've seen some mixed reviews of it, many of them focused on "Do we really need another book about a white man's midlife crisis, even if he's a gay white man?" I get that. But so does the author, who addresses that more than once in the book itself, very cheekily. 

Less is the story of Arthur Less, who's about to turn 50 at the same time that the love of his life, the much-younger Freddy, is getting married to someone else. He's a novelist of some, but not enough, renown; he's the former lover of a highly acclaimed poet; and he's been invited to Freddy's wedding, salt in the wound. He knows that not going to the wedding would make him look petty, so he digs around his desk and cobbles together an around-the-world literary tour, where he'll speak, read, teach, and interview a better-known author. It's more than he should do on his income, but parts of it are paid, and so he goes.

It's a slyly funny book, but also with much warmth and heart, which I was in the mood for. Arthur suffers humiliation after humiliation, and yet plods his way around the world, never losing sight of the fact that he's about to turn 50 (something he pauses to consider in light of the fact that he's from the generation that lost so many to AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and what does turning 50 mean for them?) and his lover is marrying someone else.

It's also surprising how much I liked this book in that much of it is told in backstory, usually a pet peeve of mine, but here it's done so well that it carried me right along. Each stop on his trip brings up memories from his past with both Freddy and the famous poet, which is entirely logical, given the elegiac state of mind he's in setting off on this trip. 

And there's a weird narrative bit where, though Arthur's story is told in the third person, it's told by a first-person narrator. We don't learn who the narrator is until the end, although I sussed it out fairly early on. Figuring out who the "I" was also told me the end of the story. But you know what? I was fine with that too. I enjoyed seeing how the author got us to the inevitable ending.

I don't know, folks. This shouldn't have worked for me, but it did. I'm typing this in a warm glow of rare sentimentality. I could see reading this again someday.

Disappearing Earth

I've seen Disappearing Earth compared to Anthony Marra's The Tsar of Love and Techno, and I can kind of see it: This book is set in Russia, is a novel in stories, with characters that pop up and reappear in various stories. But I think the comparison ends there. Marra's book is much more ambitious, and successful in its ambitions, than Disappearing Earth is. Which is to say that although I liked Earth enough to finish it, I didn't love it, not nearly the way I loved the Marra book.

While Tsar was wide-ranging in terms of geography and time, Earth is much more compressed, taking place in a single 12-month period. The book opens (not a spoiler, this is on the jacket too) with two little girls being abducted. Each chapter is set in each month after the abduction, with every story from someone else's point of view (but many characters pop up as supporting characters in other stories). The book itself is set on the Kamchatka Peninsula, an area of Russia that I know little about. To be fair, I did learn a lot from reading this book, so that's a positive. Not least of which how isolated the peninsula is from the rest of Russia, how much resentment the residents have because of how Russia forced them to open up to outsiders when the USSR came apart, and there's considerable racism against the peninsula's indigenous population. 

Those were all interesting things. But I didn't connect with several of the characters, and too many of the stories played out the same way, with people making predictably bad choices, which became repetitive. In the end, the most interesting stories were the ones directly related to the missing girls. The girls were mentioned in all the stories; that's the linking thread. But it wasn't really enough, not the way Marra used Soviet propaganda art throughout his book. 

Lots of people on Goodreads love this one, but I'd recommend Tsar over it.

The Lager Queen of Minnesota

I read Stradal's first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which I liked but thought had some flaws. So I was happy to dive into this one and find it smoother going. It's an engaging story of two sisters, Helen and Edith, and the rift in their relationship due to Helen's manipulation of their parents' estate to get the money she needs to run a brewery, her life's passion. The two sisters spend decades not speaking, while Edith struggles financially, especially after being widowed, but Helen is mostly comfortable and even wealthy until the craft brewery movement comes into Minnesota. Then there's Diana, Edith's granddaughter, who finds brewing beer a passion of hers as well, but who doesn't seem to have the financial prospects to make it work.

So, interesting characters and situations. Stradal seems to have done his homework on the Minnesota beer scene over the past half century, including the rise of craft breweries bringing their hoppy IPAs to town and disrupting the previous love for lagers. He definitely nails small-town Minnesota, and does mostly a (surprisingly) good job of exploring these women's psyches. His acknowledgements at the end include a whole lot of women, so I take it he took time to make sure he was presenting women fairly. And if the question comes up as to why he's writing about women in small towns and not men, I'd say it's because women have often had an unsung role in keeping these towns going.

Thus I was reading away, quite enjoying the book, which wasn't perfect, but its good points easily overcame its bad points. Until I got to about the halfway point.

Spoiler alert (slight spoiler, not a major plot point).

At the halfway point, Diana has just graduated from high school and gets a job at a local brewery where she's allowed to start brewing her own beer, and then is sent out on sales calls to bars to sell it.

Diana is 18-19 during this section, starting in 2008. The drinking age in Minnesota has been 21 since long before 2008. Out of curiosity, I began googling brewery employment laws and regs, and while I couldn't find the specific state statute, I did notice that all of the local breweries that have help wanted ads for brewers very clearly specify 21 as the minimum age. If I'm correct, there's probably a law or state licensing requirement around that, and to risk losing that license by hiring underage brewers would have been terribly risky in 2008, as the craft brewery scene was just taking off here. 

While that's not a big spoiler overall, I was shocked that the author didn't do anything to clarify this. He clearly researched the daylights out Minnesota's brewing history, but never addresses the age restrictions. I find it hard to believe a brewery would have hired someone underage for a role that seems to not be legal, not to mention then sending her out to sell in bars, where technically she's too young to visit. 

So. If you can get past that stumbling block, you might enjoy the book. I mostly did, but these details really pulled me out of the book and disengaged me. Your mileage may vary. 

The Shakespeare Requirement

Way back when, I read and loved Julie Schumacher's novel, Dear Committee Members. It was an epistolary novel about politics at the university level, and it was wildly funny and astute. But I was concerned to see there was a sequel, a more conventional novel that's not in the form of letters from the testy Prof. Jay Fitger. Still, worth a try.

Sadly, it's not as good as its predecessor. There are a couple of reasons for that, the primary one being just an overwhelming number of characters, all of whom get their point of view explored to varying degrees. The epistolary approach of the previous book kept the story firmly in Fitger's voice and point of view, which worked so well. But in this book, the number of points of view is overwhelming and mean some characters get short shrift and end up more caricatures than characters.

There are also a dizzying number of plot points, many of which seem designed to move the novel in a madcap way. Sure, there's still a lot of humor here; I laughed out loud more than once. But I also winced at some of the more pointed jokes or plot points that were really strained.

So. Read Dear Committee Members, and maybe consider this one with the caveat that it's not as good.

Binstead's Safari

Binstead's Safari is such a hard book to describe, and not just because I want to avoid spoilers. It's also hard to summarize. For example: Millie and Stan Binstead are a long-married American couple, childless, he a professor writing about weird anthropological topics in Africa. He gets a grant to pursue the topics, and to his surprise--and dismay--Millie insists on going too. He wants nothing to do with her, his mousy, depressive little wife. But she insists. 

Surely just from that, you can immediately dream up where this book might be going. Especially when, at the beginning, they stay in London on the way and Stan wants nothing to do with Millie while he's there. But she picks herself up and entertains herself in ways she would never have expected to: "She bought two pairs of shoes and began to enjoy herself." Again, a scene like that leads to certain expectations.

Then they get to Africa. This consumes most of the book, as it should. There's a long section that, while interesting, is fairly slow and static, and yet I never felt like giving up. And the buildup to the end, with increasing tension and dread, is fantastic. It's hard to see how Ingalls could have accomplished that without the slower section, setting the scene and building the characters. But, of course, for me to explain how the book busted right through my predictions and came up with something else would involve significant spoilers. So I'll just say: Give it a try. It's only 218 pages. But stay with it until the end.

In the Night of Memory

I think In the Night of Memory is the third part of a trilogy that I'm reading kind of out of order. First I read what I think is the second back, The Road Back to Sweetgrass, and I'm waiting for the first book to arrive from the library. But it appears the books are stand-alones, so the order won't matter. 

This book is again the story of Native Americans from a fictional northern Minnesota reservation. Some of the characters from Sweetgrass appear here too, but the story centers on two sisters, Azure and Rain, and their mother, Loretta. As the book opens, the drunk Loretta delivers her 3- and 4-year-old daughters to the county, which has terminated her parental rights. Loretta leaves, and the girls have no idea if they'll ever see her again.

We see their childhoods, a series of foster homes of varying quality and care, until finally someone who knows Loretta tracks them down and brings them to a Native family in Duluth. Here the girls finally have a real home, with a family that cares about them. But not a family that knows where Loretta is, for Loretta is one of many missing Native women, gone without a trace.

So it's a topical book, although the focus is more on the daughters than the missing mother, which makes for a better story, I think--the left-behind girls, always wondering where their mother is, the girls forced to undergo things no child should ever have to experience, yet who have each other and that, sometimes, is all that's left, but it's enough.

My one quibble with the book is that there are so many characters that it's hard to keep track of them all, and at times the overall momentum of the story seemed slowed by the introduction of new people and stories, or quick recaps of stories I remembered from the previous book. I would have liked this book to focus simply on Azure and Rain, because they're compelling and interesting, and I cared very much what happened to them.