Spoiled Only Child

Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon

I don't know why I grew to hate this book, even though it was fabulously written and told a very entertaining story. I started out loving it and gradually grew to resent every page. But by that point I was close enough that I had to finish. It's a book about a professor/novelist--Wait! I just figured it out!. It's because the whole nutty, misbehaving professor who can't deal with life thing has been so overused. And I hate it every time. I think that's it.

Anyway, so this professor has been trying to write the followup to his successful novel for seven years, and he has written 1,200 pages and is nowhere near finished and the thing sucks. And his whole life is falling apart. He's a pot-smoking, emotionally dysfunctional loser whose wife is leaving him and whose girlfriend has just told him--surprise!--that she's pregnant. Oh, and the girlfriend is also the chancellor of the university where he works, and she's married to another guy who's also his boss. So he goes on a bender with a suicidal nutcase of a student, and they steal a jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe and shoot the girlfriend's dog and go to Passover dinner with his wife's crazy family and run over the family's pet snake and drive around for days--weeks?--with the dead dog in the trunk. And there is a transvestite somewhere along the way, and a crazy drug-addicted agent whose career depends on the guy's failed novel, and a stolen tuba that figures prominently. And at various points this guy is bitten by a dog, beaten to a pulp, hit in the temple with a baseball bat. And I don't think he ever sleeps during the entire course of the novel. And then he loses the only copy of his novel while being attacked by crazy people. And then at the end he marries the girlfriend and becomes a father and lives happily ever after.

OK, it's becoming obvious why I hated this book. It was ridiculous. I guess some people would find it funny, but to me it just didn't ring true in any sense of the word. That's it for me and Michael Chabon.

A Happy Marriage, by Rafael Yglesias

What a wonderful and true meditation on marriage. This is the story of a man whose wife is dying of cancer after 30 years of marriage. It tells the tale of her illness and death intermingled with the story of their courtship and their struggles as a couple. They went through the stages that many couples experience, that first infatuation, the stressed and sexless years of having young children, the more settled time of middle age. Just after they had their first child, he had a passionate affair and came very close to leaving his wife and his child. But he decided to stay, less out of love than out of obligation, and in the end he decided the reward of married life and fatherhood far outweighed the passion of that love affair. 

No, they never recaptured their first passion and his wife was always a bit of a mystery to him. He spent too much of their marriage obsessed and pouting about his failed career as a novelist. They both missed a million chances to be more generous, more open, more forgiving with one another. And it was only when she was diagnosed with cancer, he admits, that he could finally be sure that he still loved her. Before that, he didn't know anymore whether what he felt was just familiarity and routine, or whether it was genuine love. 

But despite all of it, they had a happy marriage. They made each other better people. They had a deep and enduring respect for one another. They were partners, family, in the truest sense of the word. They raised children, conferred over every decision, made one intertwined life together. They had a union far deeper than any love affair, and it endured until the moment of her very unromantic death. Though we all like to think of marriage as a long romance, I think this is the truer picture of how a marriage endures the ages. 

Paula, by Isabel Allende

"I get into my car and drive away from the town toward the hills; almost blindly, I reach the forest where I go to walk, the haven where I so often come to be alone and think. I plunge into the woods along paths made rough with winter's debris. I run, tripping over branches and rocks, pushing through the saturated greenery of this vast bosky space, so like the forests of my childhood, the ones I crossed through on muleback, following behind my grandfather. My feet are heavy with mud and my clothes are dripping and my soul is bleeding, and as it grows dark, and when finally I can go no farther after walking and stumbling and slipping and getting up to flounder on, I drop to my knees, tear my blouse, ripping off buttons, and with my arms opened into a cross and my breast naked,
I scream your name, Paula."
—Isabel Allende

My terrible reading drought is so, so over. This book was incredible. Isabel Allende wrote it when her daughter fell into a coma at 29. It is a memoir of her own life, written at her daughter's bedside through a year of horrible struggle for life. Her story is simply fascinating. Allende grew up in Chile, the child of an eccentric and well-known, but not very happy, family. She fled her country when it was overthrown by a violent dictator in 1973, becoming first an exile in Venezuela and then an immigrant in California. In this book, she tells the story of her life, which includes an amazing career that took her from secretarial work, to fluff television reporting, to being a school administrator to becoming, wholly unexpectedly, a novelist. It also includes tales of sexual abuse, abandonment by her father, stormy love affairs, a difficult divorce and a period during which she abandoned her children.

But the book is about so much more than her life. It illuminates the beauty and culture of South America, and how much was lost when so many of its countries fell to dictatorships and violence, scattering its people to the wind. It is an artfully written manifesto on love, between man and woman and, of course, between mother and child. It seemed the ultimate reassurance that, no matter how flawed a relationship between a mother and child, no matter how many years and other relationships have separated the two, that primal love that a mother feels for her child is never lost. It is a love for the ages, that enriches our world and our lives just by existing, even though it opens us to terrible hurt.

Perhaps most importantly to me, it was a book about finding a path in life. Allende is a very famous and talented novelist. But she did not get there through striving and pushing herself; she didn't put herself on the 10-year-plan to become a novelist, crossing off items on her to-do list along the way. She describes herself as a sort of mystic, stumbling through life with few plans, letting the voices of the spirits speak through her. She wrote her first novel when she was past 40. It started as a letter to her dying grandfather, and the way she describes it, she was simply taken over by the story and its characters. She says she wrote one short story while stopped in traffic; it just blew through her like a gust of wind and she wrote it down. She never knew, and probably still doesn't, where she is going. She simply opened herself and let the power of the universe take over. This is reassuring to me, because I have come to feel that, if I'm ever going to move forward in my life, it's going to be this way. Maybe there are some people who can develop a formula for succcess and, through discipline and hard work, realize their dreams. But for me, every attempt to push myself forward leads to a brick wall. So now I'm just trying to make myself light and bouyant, ready to be carried by the next gust of wind.

Timbuktu, by Paul Auster

Finally, after several disappointing and not-worth-finishing books in a row, I found a good, fun, quick read. I was starting to think I would never find a good book again. This is a novel told from the perspective of a dog, Mr. Bones. Only the most skilled of writers could pull something like this off, but Paul Auster can. Mr. Bones gets a taste of both extremes of American life, first as the dog of a drunken homeless man and then as the pampered pooch of a well-off suburban family, which renames him Sparky.

In the end, I guess, he prefers the former life of wandering the streets, roaming free. There is a sort of authenticity in that life that he cannot find in suburban America. He finally decides that the comforts of the good life come at too high a cost. But for a while, he is seduced by the ease and luxury. This brilliant passage, I think, is the heart of the book: "It might not have been perfect in this place, but it had a lot to recommend it, and once you got used to the mechanics of the system, it no longer seemed so important that you were tethered to a wire all day. By the time you had been there for two and a half months, you even stopped caring that your name was Sparky."

The Women, by T.C. Boyle

If only there were more novels like this one. So, so, so wonderful. I was sad to finish it. I think it will be like The Corrections for me; I'll spend years looking for one even close to this great. The book is a historical novel, based closely on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright. So you not only get to read a great story, but you learn about this fascinating historical figure and his work. I learned that Wright was into organic architecture, which was integrated into nature, and despised the "gingerbread" architecture of San Francisco. Can you imagine, hating San Francisco? And yet, I can also see that he is at least partly right. 

But this is not a book about architecture. It is about Frank Lloyd Wright, and the women who loved--and were destroyed by--him. It paints him as a true genius, a magnetic and enthralling personality who left an indelible and beautiful mark on the world, but also as a true narcissist, proud and vain and self-centered. He built a homestead in rural Wisconsin, Taliesin, a sort of mini-universe that he filled with people who worshiped and served him. He was always straddling the edge of bankruptcy, and became a sort of low-level crook who constantly ran up tabs that were never settled and finagled loans that he never repaid.

He truly rode the roller coaster of life, leaving his wife for a mistress--a huge and very public scandal at the time--building Taliesin as a sort of love nest, and then having a servant at the house go crazy and murder the woman, her two children and four other people at the house while he was out of town. He was a charmer and a romantic, who had many women and even more children. But the only person he truly loved was himself. He exacted a heavy toll on those close to him. They paid for the gifts he gave to the world. I so want to go see Taliesin and Falling Water now, but trips to rural Wisconsin and Pennsylvania don't seem to be in the plans.

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

If you haven't already seen the movie, go get this book. It's about a husband and wife who think they are better than suburbia, with all its conventions and nosy neighbors, and yet have ended up there anyway. And they find themselves sucked into the mundane life they never wanted, the office job, the home improvement projects, the child rearing and the neighborhood social scene. At one point, miserable and their marriage in trouble, they make a plan to extricate themselves, sell the house, leave everything and move to Europe just for the adventure of it. But the pull of regular life is just too strong and it doesn't happen.

This book was about the very issue that I've struggled so much with lately — whether we can be true to ourselves, live the lives we really want, from within conventional society. Can we have our nice houses and lawns and office jobs, and still be our authentic selves? Or do we give too much away in the service of maintaining it all? It is so easy to get sucked into the routines of normal life that we close ourselves off to all the adventures of the world. It's as if this couple is standing before a plate glass window, looking at all that the world has to offer, but can't touch it. At one point, they almost break through, but an invisible hand pulls them back from such a radical move.

It all ends disastrously for them. The wife just cannot accept her mundane existence. I'm hoping my own struggles will have a happier conclusion.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken

This book was about a dead baby, so it seems wrong to say that it was a pleasure — and that I gobbled it down in two sittings like a decadent chocolate bar. It was an intensely personal account of the way McCracken, a novelist, dealt with the stillbirth of her first baby, who didn't live long enough to get a real name and is called by his gestational nickname, Pudding. It was beautifully written and I just loved reading it. It is incredibly sad, but at the same time funny and somehow hopeful. She does get another (live) baby in the end.

It was fascinating because McCracken was so much like me (except for being a novelist who spent her life flitting around the globe). But she was middle class and had health insurance and prenatal care and every chance in the world of having a healthy baby — and she just got unlucky. I'm sure some people will go through the book looking for reasons why she deserved it (she used a midwife, switched doctors several times, didn't run to the hospital at the first sign of decreased movement), in an effort to prove to themselves that this couldn't happen to them. But the fact is, we are all at the mercy of fate. Bad things can happen at any time.

The most stunning revelation was that in her case, as in many stillbirths, she found out the baby was dead before delivery. And then she had to go through labor and delivery — knowing the baby was dead. The horror is unimaginable. Possibly the most moving part of the book were transcripts of e-mails sent by one of her close friends after the baby's death. They inspire me to be a better friend, to be the kind of friend who could save someone with compassion. The biggest lesson, for me, was this: When something bad happens to someone you know, letting them know that you care and you're sorry is worth doing. It means something. Don't remain silent because you don't know what to say.

If you are a voyeur like me, who likes nothing better than to get a window into the most private experiences and feelings of others, then read this book.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

I think this book is a major reason for all my wishing to be free of the office and spend my life doing tasks that women 50 years ago considered drudgery. Barbara Kingsolver spent a year eating local. Her family moved to a farm in Virginia and grew most of their own vegetables, raised and slaughtered their own meat, made their own bread and cheese and preserved all their own food for the winter. Anything they couldn't grow or make themselves, they bought from as local a source as possible. To keep this pledge, Kingsolver turned herself into a full-time farmer and homemaker. She was chopping the heads off turkeys, hoeing and pulling endless weeds, canning tomatoes, making jam, everything but churning her own butter. And, it would seem from her book, every second of it was just fucking wonderful. Her kids loved it. She loved it. Life was so much more meaningful for all of them; they all became better people. Eating became a religious act, a covenant with the earth.

The book is partly an attempt to convince readers that they, too, should be trying this. She keeps talking about how pleasing it all is, and how cheap — because processed and prepared foods cost a lot more than making it yourself. But she seems to forget that she has a couple advantages that we, the masses, don't. One, they had inherited a family farm. Two, she is a famous novelist who can afford not to work for a year. She presents it as: I chose to  grow my own food rather than work for money so I could buy food. But she seems to forget that even growing food costs some money, and that most of us have other costs, like our housing and medical care and clothing and recreation and gasoline, that we also need paychecks to cover. We no longer live in a pre-industrialized, agrarian society, and for most of us, it's not so simple as deciding, "I'm going to stay home for a year to bake bread and grow zucchini — except for when I take a two-week vacation to Italy."

Now, I am all in favor of eating local, of making ethical decisions about our food. I am a member of a CSA, and I get a delivery of local vegetables every week. And I try my darndest to make as many meals as I can from scratch, rather than relying on processed food. That said, I'm angry with Kingsolver. Her book left me with a vague sense that my life could be so much more meaningful, more responsible and kind to the earth, but with no earthly idea how I would achieve such a thing. It feels like snobbery for her to say, "Look how much better I'm doing it," while failing to acknowledge the advantages that allow her to do it that way.

She also failed to acknowledge any of the drawbacks of eating this way. She was, essentially, a prisoner of her farm and her kitchen, but she made it seem as if it were all romance and roses. C'mon Barbara, weren't there some good reasons why women embraced all the conveniences of the 21st century? Does being home on the farm, canning pound after pound of tomatoes, really fulfill all your deepest needs? Wasn't there at least one day, Barbara, when you wanted to say, "Here's a damned frozen pizza. I'm out of here."

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is an incredible writer. I am blown away every time I read her. Her first collection of short stories won the Pullitzer. I loved her novel, The Namesake, about the experience of being an immigrant and the gulf between generations. But I think this collection of short stories is her best work yet. They are all stories about Bengali immigrants struggling to assimilate and to remain connected to their roots in a foreign culture. It's mostly about dysfunctional relationships, parents and children or spouses unable to bridge a distance that opens up between them. The characters come to life almost immediately and are absolutely believable. I just couldn't stop reading. My only complaint about Lahiri is that all of her characters are sad, and most of them are hopelessly repressed. There is very little joy in her world.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean-Dominique Bauby

I made the mistake of taking this as my only reading material on a four-day backpacking trip. So I was trapped in the woods with the haunting vision of this guy, trapped in a ruined and useless body with his sparkling mind intact. Creepy cannot begin to describe it. Paralyzed head to toe from a stroke, able only to blink his left eye, he wrote this book letter by letter, blinking his eye at the correct letter of the alphabet. No wonder it is short.

The book is sold as a sort of uplifting testament to the power of the human spirit. "It will make you fall in love with life all over again," one review says. And I guess that's partly true. Bauby has the strange vantage point of being able to look over his life after it has essentially ended. He sees all the missed chances, the times he should have savored it more. Certainly, the reader has the chance to fix all the mistakes that he cannot. But I don't know that I left it feeling inspired. My overriding feeling was one of fear. Life holds worse possibilities than I ever imagined. Who knew such a horrifying thing could happen to a person. His essay about a day with his children — his grief over the inability to tousle their hair, touch their bodies, reassure them when they are afraid, tell them he loves them — is heartbreaking. No person is meant to live this way.

The book was an amazing window into the mind of a man in incredible circumstances. He records his memories and his fantasies, and he is truly a talented writer. But part of me regrets reading it. I am haunted by it still and fear I will be forever.