"The Use of Fame," by Cornelia Nixon

I like novels about academe. I like novels about writers. I like novels about marriage. So Cornelia Nixon’s “The Use of Fame” (Counterpoint, 2017), which features all three of these characteristics, caught my interest. The two main characters, Abby and Ray, are both poets and have been married for twenty-five years, when their loving and mainly successful marriage is challenged by their taking teaching positions at universities on opposite coasts. Ray is at Brown and Abby is at Berkeley. They try to make this arrangement work, but it is difficult, and puts an increasing strain on their marriage. Infidelity, health issues, alcohol, pills, and class differences all become factors. It is hard not to sympathize with both characters, especially since it is clear that their relationship is deep and meaningful (although one of them is, at least on the surface, more at fault than the other one regarding their difficulties). But the novel reminds us that sometimes love and history together are just not enough. This is a beautifully written, absorbing, and sad exploration of love and marriage.

And the Winner Is....Kazuo Ishiguro!

Just announced as the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature is Kazuo Ishiguro, the British writer of such novels as "The Remains of the Day" (which was made into a critically acclaimed movie starring Anthony Hopkins) and "Never Let Me Go," as well as five other novels. The Swedish Academy describes his novels as "uncover[ing] the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." One official of the Academy, Sara Danius, says that Ishiguro is "a writer of great integrity," and intriguingly describes him as a mixture of Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. The New York Times lists his themes as "the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time." Adjectives commonly used about his work include "restrained," "reserved," and "fastidious." The choice of Ishiguro was a bit of a surprise (other writers who had been considered more likely to win included Margaret Atwood, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie) but a welcome one by most commentators. Some are particularly glad to see a return to a more traditionally literary author, after last year's contentious choice of Bob Dylan. Interestingly, Ishiguro, a sometime songwriter, has been quoted as saying his hero is Bob Dylan!

"Do Not Become Alarmed," by Maile Meloy

Last time I posted about a rather predictable and only mildly amusing “travel” novel, “The Last Laugh.” The “travel” novel I write about today is much less predictable, much more gripping and suspenseful. “Do Not Become Alarmed” (Riverhead, 2017), by the well-regarded Maile Meloy, tells of two families who take a cruise together from the U.S. into Central America. The families, two couples with two children each, are related, and the trip is planned as a change of pace and healing distraction for one of the women, whose mother has died recently. At first everyone is excited about the luxuries and variety of activities on the ship, and the sense of adventure they feel. But one day soon, they take a day trip into an unnamed country, and suddenly everything goes horribly awry. The children, along with two adolescents they have met on the ship, disappear. (This has been mentioned in every review of the book that I have read, and happens early on, so this is not a spoiler.) The rest of the book consists of how the children deal with being lost and falling into the wrong hands, and how the parents panic and do everything they can to find the children, but feel horribly helpless and overwhelmed with fear and grief. The stories are told alternately. To tell the truth, when I initially read the reviews that revealed this plot, I thought I would not be able to bear to read the book, but somehow I changed my mind and read it after all, and am glad I did. It is in fact painful to read in some parts, but the story is so vivid, so well told, with such interesting characters and plot developments, that it completely captured my attention. Clearly it has done the same for many other readers, as it has been on some bestseller lists. Meloy is a gifted writer.

"The Last Laugh," by Lynn Freed

Lynn Freed’s novel “The Last Laugh” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) is a sort of slightly dispiriting, rather self-conscious making-fun-of-the-genre romp. Three women friends in their late sixties with backgrounds in South Africa, Europe, and the United States decide to live on a Greek island together for a year. They (or at least two of them) decide they have outlived passion and men, and are also tired of the complications of their grown children’s lives; they just want to take a break from all that and enjoy the pleasures of Greece with good friends, good food, sunshine, and the other cliches about this kind of adventure. Of course real life intervenes in the form of badly-timed family visits, love affairs, a bit of jealousy, and more. I kept thinking of the most famous older (early 20th century) example of this genre, “Enchanted April” (about which I posted on 12/20/14), and how lovely it was, although (because?) it was set in an earlier time. At one point, one of the characters in Freed’s novel alludes to “Enchanted April” as unrealistic. Perhaps “The Last Laugh” is more realistic, but it is also clumsier and more self-consciously whimsical. It is a quick, fun read but rather forgettable.

"The Burning Girl," by Claire Messud

Fiction about young girls and their friendships is important, and I am happy to find such novels when they take those girls and those friendships seriously. Claire Messud, an undeniably serious writer (see, for example, “The Emperor’s Children” and “The Woman Upstairs,” the latter of which I posted about here on 5/29/13), has written about such a friendship in “The Burning Girl” (W.W. Norton, 2017). The narrator, Julia, looks back on her long, intense childhood friendship with Cassie, a friendship that ended four years earlier in late middle school when the two drifted away from each other and then experienced a dreadful event that brought them together in a way that their friendship could not survive. The two girls had always been extremely close, despite somewhat different family backgrounds. They felt they could almost read each other's minds. Julia’s family is more traditional; her loving parents are still married and middle-class. Cassie’s single mother is also loving, and a little less middle-class; Cassie's father died when she was very young. Some of the events the two girls go through are the usual ones of early adolescence, but nothing is “usual” about Messud’s dead-on description. The friendship starts to go awry when Cassie first endures the entrance into her life of her mother’s new and controlling boyfriend, and is further derailed as she imagines that her father might still be alive, which belief preoccupies her and leads to trouble. There is also a sort of complicated competition for a boy, Peter. Messud’s achievement in this novel is not so much about the specifics of the plot (although it is a compelling one) as it is about its portrayal of girls’ lives and relationships at that critical and delicate time period when they are emerging from childhood. Adults often do not take the intensity of girls’ (or perhaps of boys’ either) feelings and experiences as seriously as they should. Those adults vaguely remember some of this, but experiences and feelings fade, and we perhaps downplay their importance and their longterm influences on us. We may remember very well that those years were intense, but we can’t really recapture the depths and textures of that intensity, and life moves on. It is both pleasurable and painful to be reminded by this very evocative portrayal of what those years can be like.

RIP Kate Millett

RIP Kate Millett, leading second wave feminist, brilliant scholar, writer, activist, and artist. Millett died Sept. 6, 2017, in Paris, where she and her wife had gone to celebrate Millett’s upcoming 83rd birthday. Her “Sexual Politics” (1970) was a groundbreaking book on feminism that made a huge impact. It was based on her dissertation at Oxford, and blended literary analysis, history, politics, and philosophy. Millett wrote ten books, on topics such as her bisexuality, her mental illness, and the lives of various other women. She also created much visual art. Her life was not easy, but she never gave up on trying to make a difference for women and others. Gloria Steinem (as quoted in the New York Times) remembers her as follows: “She wrote about the politics of male dominance, of owning women’s bodies as the means of reproduction, and made readers see this as basic to hierarchies of race and class.” It is hard to say strongly enough how influential Millett’s work was, especially “Sexual Politics,” and how it was a critical part of the heady days of second wave feminism. Steinem also notes that Andrew Dworkin said that Millett "woke us up." I remember those days well, and I still have on my bookshelf a somewhat worn copy of “Sexual Politics,” which indeed, along with other feminist classic books, woke this lifelong feminist up. I also read several of her other books. Here I want to offer my heartfelt tribute to Kate Millett and to thank her for her powerful and original writing and her fearless activism.

"The Customer is Always Wrong," by Mimi Pond

I hadn’t read a graphic novel for a while, but have just read Mimi Pond’s “The Customer is Always Wrong” (Drawn & Quarterly, 2017). This was enjoyable to read, although (because?) very similar to her 2014 graphic novel, “Over Easy” (about which I posted here on 5/11/14). Both books are semi-fictionalized versions of the author/artist’s time working in a restaurant in Oakland, California, back in the late seventies and early eighties, and the characters and story lines are quite similar, although this seems to be a sequel to the earlier novel. It could easily be titled something like “More Stories of My Crazy Days in the Restaurant” or some such. The main character, Madge, is a little older and a little less naive than she was at the beginning of “Over Easy,” and since she has had some comics published, she has her ambitions to move to New York and make a career as a comics/graphics writer; she is saving money toward that, but that stash of money keeps getting diverted. Meanwhile she continues to be a server at the restaurant, and tells the stories of the various fellow workers there as well as of some of the “regulars.” There are still a lot of drugs, and there is still a lot of sex. And lots of drama, in this case even including some rather scary criminals (although this storyline ends up softened, eventually…). And some sadness. The manager of the restaurant, Lazlo, is probably the most interesting character: a poet, a confidant to Madge and others, tough but kind. The drawings are still in green ink. The facial expressions of the characters are, again, a highlight.