"Blue Plate Special," by Kate Christensen

Who could resist a book titled “Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of my Appetites” (Doubleday, 2013)? Certainly not I! This memoir by novelist Kate Christensen is aptly described on the front book flap as follows: “In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, “Blue Plate Special” is a narrative in which food – eating it, cooking it, reflecting on it – becomes the vehicle for unpacking a life.” I have read and enjoyed the three authors listed, with a special fondness for the late Laurie Colwin. So I dived headfirst into this book, and devoured it in a couple of days. It is candid, sometimes very sad, sometimes celebratory, and absolutely mesmerizing. It is a memoir of family, friends, a series of loves, and a series of homes scattered across the U.S.; it tells of struggling to be a writer and struggling to overcome the legacy of a very difficult childhood. And woven throughout are the author’s connections with food: learning about different types of food, learning to cook, being comforted by food, being fascinated by food, maturing in her tastes…and always, throughout, cooking and eating. She describes the food in her life in vivid detail. The food is important, even central, but finally, the biggest strength of this book is Christensen’s honest depiction of her life and evolution. I have known of but not been drawn to her novels, but perhaps now I will look for them.

"Fin and Lady," by Cathleen Schine

Cathleen Schine, whose “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” I posted about on 4/11/10, has a new novel out: “Fin and Lady” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), and it is just as lively and engrossing as the earlier novel. (She has also written several other novels.) Both are full of life, full of interactions, meditations, surprises. In “Fin and Lady,” an eleven-year-old boy is orphaned and goes to live with his glamorous, fun but restless and moody, older half-sister in Greenwich Village in New York in 1964 (but it somehow seems like a slightly earlier era, perhaps because the expectations for women were still so restricted...). It is a huge change for young Fin, who has not only lost his parents but also his roots on a dairy farm in rural Connecticut. Lady is warm and welcoming to Fin, admirably seeming not to hesitate for one moment to take on the sudden responsibility of being guardian of a young boy she has only met a couple of times, but they make an odd pairing, and they know so little about each other’s very different lives. Lady isn’t sure how to be a guardian/big sister/substitute mother, and Fin has to learn how to adapt to the new situation. He is in fact remarkably adaptable (the one thing I find not entirely believable is the swiftness with which he does adapt, although perhaps it is because he has no choice, and because Lady is genuinely loving if an atypical “parent”), and comes to love Lady profoundly. He also finds that she is unsure about what is important in her life, and her constant need to do new things, go to new places, be with new people is a sign of this. She wants to marry, she says, but she seems at the same time to resist this kind of commitment, and she keeps several suitors dangling. These suitors develop the habit of all visiting Lady and Fin, sometimes at the same time, each hoping she will make up her mind in his favor. I don’t want to reveal more of the story than this, but there are many plot developments, and they definitely kept me glued to the book. There is a bittersweet ending, but one that readers can accept and even celebrate some aspects of. These two unusual characters, Fin and Lady, and their touching if unusual relationship, are the central draw of this engaging novel.

Jane Austen on England's ten-pound note!

I opened my newspaper a couple of days ago to see my beloved Jane Austen's face on a sketch of a future British ten-pound note -- hurray! The new bank note will appear in 2016 or 2017. Apparently there had been many complaints about the lack of women on English money; fortunately, "The Bank of England chose the chronicler of 18th century English country life as the new face of the note, bowing to critics who complained that the venerable institution was ignoring women on their currency" (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/25/13, p. A6). It seems to me that the issue of equal treatment of women, although a very important one that readers of this blog know I am passionately positive about, is not the main one here; the main point is that next to Shakespeare, Austen is the greatest English writer ever, and should be honored as such. In any case, I am thrilled to learn this news.

"Where She Went," by Kate Walbert

More Kate Walbert! As I wrote on 7/24/13, I so admire Walbert’s fiction. Because I enjoyed the three books I have already written about, I looked for and read her earlier book, “Where She Went: Stories” (Sarabande, 1998). This collection of stories is really, like Walbert’s “Our Kind,” a “novel in stories,” although not labeled as such. The first half of the book tells the stories of a mother, Marion, and the second half tells the stories of Marion’s daughter, Rebecca. But in fact both halves include both women’s stories. The stories start in the 1950s, and move back and forth through the years up to 1992. Marion escaped her own background in “the middle of the country, near a Great Lake few could remember the name of” (great line! Even though I lived in Michigan for many years, I still can't remember the names of all the Great Lakes....), moved to New York, and married a man she had only known for a short time. After all, at that period in our history, most women’s main goal was to find a husband. Marion’s husband Robert is a good man, but they are very different. His job took them to many cities over the years – Rochester, Norfolk, Baltimore, Tokyo, and many more. Every time, Marion tried to establish herself, decorate the new house, and build a new life. Her daughter Rebecca, who came of age in the 1970s, was determined to lead a more independent life, as were so many young women at that time. Intriguingly, she too lived in many different places, but in her case it was because of her restlessness and her longing to find out what kind of life she really wanted. Marion and her mother have a loving but somewhat wary relationship. Marion encourages Rebecca to do the traveling and have the freedom that she, Marion, wishes she had had. So Rebecca is sometimes torn between feeling she is doing what she is doing for herself, and wondering how much of her behavior is based on trying to fulfill her mother’s dreams. Like “Our Kind,” this book – without being preachy – clearly focuses on the dilemmas faced by (American) women in the second half of the twentieth century (and of course some of these dilemmas continue now). My only small reservation about this book is that occasionally it tends to get sidetracked with rather dreamlike, poorly integrated descriptions of the various locations and scenes. Because -- captured by the author's more recent books and wanting more -- I am reading “backward” in Walbert’s career (this is the earliest-published of the books I have read), naturally the writing here is slightly less accomplished than in the later books. Even so, the writing is generally beautiful and insightful, and this book, like the others by Walbert that I have written about, is well worth reading.

"Our Kind," by Kate Walbert

I am increasingly convinced that Kate Walbert is an exceptional writer of fiction. I wrote admiringly about two of her novels: “A Short History of Women” on 6/13/12 and “The Gardens of Kyoto” just a few days ago on 7/13/13. “Our Kind: A Novel in Stories” (Scribner, 2004) is also astoundingly well written. The interrelated stories are about a group of women living in a small town that could be anywhere in the U.S.A., over a period of time roughly the second half of the twentieth century. The specific times are vague, but these are women born about 1930, by my calculations. The book seems to embody some of the assertions of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), the early feminist book about how the majority of women were staying at home as they were “supposed to” and quietly going a little crazy, wondering why raising children and running a home just wasn’t fulfilling enough. The women in “Our Kind” don’t explicitly talk about such feelings, except in a late chapter when Viv remembers how as a scholarship girl at a Seven Sisters college, she was encouraged by an admired professor to go on for graduate school, but gave it all up to get married. The women in general have been happy at times, but their husbands often leave or die, and their children move on, and then they wonder what to do next. Their greatest comfort seems to be each other’s company. This book is both somewhat hazy about exact dates and plots, and very concrete and thus evocative of the lives of these women. Happiness and sadness are interwoven, as the women get older, lose family, lose their health, drink too much, in some cases see their children struggle and even die, yet the women keep on, always keep on. To me this is a very sad novel about the waste of so much talent and energy, but also a positive novel about the power of female friendship and support of each other. Walbert is so insightful about women’s lives, yet without being didactic. A lovely, wistful book that thoroughly captivated me. Do put Kate Walbert's fiction on your "must-read" list.

"Shakespeare's Kitchen," by Lore Segal

The name of the author Lore Segal is familiar to me, yet I cannot remember what I have read by her. Perhaps, a long time ago, her early novel, “Her First American”? She also writes children’s books, so perhaps I read some to my daughter when she was young? In any case, I have now just read her “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” (The New Press, 2007), a collection of short stories that reads very much like a novel, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The book has nothing to do with “the” Shakespeare; one of the three main characters is named Leslie Shakespeare. The others are his wife Eliza and his mistress Ilka. They, along with most of the other characters, work for or are connected to a think tank in Connecticut, the Concordance Institute. The novel is about the small and big events in the lives of this group of colleagues and friends. Even more, as the author points out in an “Author’s Note,” she was “thinking about our need not only for family and sexual love and friendship but for a ‘set’ to belong to: the circle made of friends, acquaintances, and the people one knows.” I think this is a wonderful, fascinating theme; as Segal says, most of us have, or want to have, such a network of people to be part of. In this book, she shows us the daily interactions, gatherings, connections of this particular group of friends; many of these interactions take place in the “Shakespeare’s kitchen” of the title. Most of the action takes place over a period of perhaps 20 years, with a bit of looking back at the end of the book. There is love, sex, work, conflict, kindness, conversation, illness, deception, reconciliation, gossip, intrusions from the outside world, and much more. There is, too, a bit of humor, even gentle satire, about the think tank and its members. This is a very human and completely engrossing book; I highly recommend it.

"Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules," edited by David Sedaris

David Sedaris is a funny, original, insightful writer. The CD I recently listened to, “Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules” (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2005) (Sedaris’ titles are usually quirky) shows his philanthropic side; the five stories in this collection were not written by Sedaris but rather selected, edited, and introduced by him. The stories on this audiobook are taken from a larger collection in a book of the same name that Sedaris also edited. He reads one story himself, and the others are read by writers and actors, including one by the wonderful actor Mary-Louise Parker. Sedaris published this audiobook “to support 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring center in Brooklyn, New York, designed to help students ages six to eighteen develop their writing skills through free writing workshops…and one-on-one help with homework.” This organization, I happen to know, is an offshoot of writer Dave Eggers’ “826 Valencia,” here in San Francisco; the original San Francisco site for this wonderful and worthy project has inspired several others. The stories – one each by Patricia Highsmith, Tobias Wolff, Charles Baxter, Amy Hempel, and Akhil Sharma (what a marvelous selection of writers!) – are excellent, with a slight tilt to the eccentric and gloomy, and the readings do them justice. The only thing that seems a bit strange to me is that the label on the copy I borrowed from my local library says “Fiction, Children”; while this audiobook benefits children, the stories themselves are definitely adult-oriented (not as in "adults only," meaning sex and violence, but as in -- see above -- at times rather dark and gloomy). For readers who listen to audiobooks in their cars, as I do, or elsewhere, this is a short, well-chosen collection. That it benefits a good cause is a bonus.