"Songs for the Missing," by Stewart O'Nan

I have so much enjoyed and admired Stewart O’Nan’s novels, once I discovered them these past two years (see my posts of 5/7/11 and 1/26/12), that I was pleased to come across one of his earlier books, “Songs for the Missing” (Penguin, 2008/2009), at my local library sale. I have to say I hesitated when I saw it was about the disappearance of a teenaged girl; I normally do not want to read about such a topic, even in fiction. (Strangely, I can read murder mysteries with enjoyment, but not literary fiction about similar topics; perhaps the mysteries are so stylized, so formulaic, that they seem more like puzzles than stories of real lives and deaths.) But because of the sensitivity and insights displayed in his other novels, I trusted O’Nan, and read this one. The focus is on the parents and sister of the missing girl, and although I don’t know if the portrayals are realistic, they certainly feel that way. Such a mixture of grief, desperation, pain, numbness and the need to do something, to keep going, to be strong. O’Nan, it seems to me, shows a deep understanding of human beings and their reactions to tragedy, as well as their reluctant resilience. Although the journey through the novel was painful, it was also compelling, and I stayed up late reading it when I should have been working on projects with deadlines.

Author Drawn to Words as a Child

Although I don’t know the relevant science (and the nature vs. nurture debate continues robustly), it does seem that some future writers (and readers!) very early on reveal an irresistible attraction to the written word. In “On Saramago” (Threepenny Review, Spring 2013), Margaret Jull Costa quotes the Nobel Prize winning Portuguese writer Jose Saramago on his childhood love of reading. Although he came from an extremely poor family, his father did bring home a newspaper, Diario de Noticias, every day. Saramago writes (in his memoir “Small Memories”) that “I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn’t necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diario by Diario, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print.” I can imagine the little boy, earnestly and passionately focused on extracting meaning out of the little black symbols, intuitively knowing they were the key to something important and magical that would be his life’s blood, his destiny.

My Night at the San Francisco Ballet

Although this topic is not directly related to books and reading, and although I fully realize the feelings I express in this post are far from original, I can’t resist writing about the magnificent San Francisco Ballet (SFB) performance I attended a few nights ago, and the feelings it evoked in me about the larger world of art. My wonderful daughter took me to this performance as a gift, and we both felt it was one of the best ballet performances we had ever attended (and we both have gone often over the years to see various dance companies perform). Program Four at the SFB consisted of three pieces (both my daughter and I prefer these shorter pieces to the full-length “story” ballets, although of course those are often wonderful as well.) The first was “Scotch Symphony,” choreographed by George Balanchine; the third was “From Foreign Lands,” by Alexei Ratmansky (a world premier); both were excellent, beautiful, and beautifully danced. But the most riveting, the most sublime piece was the middle one: “Within the Golden Hour,” by Christopher Wheeldon. It was gorgeous, inventive, cohesive, fantastic; the movement was amazingly creative and intensely compelling; every minute of watching every interwoven permutation of dancers and dance was pure joy. So here are my unoriginal but heartfelt feelings and thoughts evoked by the performance: I left the Opera House feeling almost “high,” thinking about the transcendence that art -- whether it is literature, dance, music, theater, painting, or something else -- provides in our lives. It allows us to see and feel the best that the human mind and heart can offer; it allows us to transcend the everyday, the quotidian. Even when the art addresses and embodies the difficult parts of life, it takes us to another place, another perspective, and we feel how sharing the experience allows a note of hope, no matter what. And when it focuses on the pure joy of movement, music, and more, there is nothing better. I think of all the art I have been fortunate enough to experience over the years -- in books, in museums, in performance spaces, and elsewhere -- and I am deeply grateful to the writers, choreographers, dancers, composers, musicians, visual artists, actors, and all those who contribute to the art that opens up and gives us access to larger spaces, thoughts and feelings in us all.

Magical Thinking about Self-Help Books

I have a habit of occasionally buying advice or self-help books, usually about personal finance, health, or getting organized. The problem is that once I buy them, I tend not to actually read them. Why don’t I read them? Well, my intentions are good, but the books are generally not very scintillating reading. And the areas I think I need to work on are the exact areas I don’t necessarily really want to think about, as they are associated with anxiety and with forcing myself to do things I don’t feel like doing. So I procrastinate actually reading the books, and they often just sit on my bookshelves for weeks, months, or years. Strangely, though, I somehow manage to feel that just by having bought them, and having them sitting on my shelves, I have made concrete steps toward moving forward in the areas I mentioned. Magical thinking!

"Interventions," by Richard Russo

I am a big fan of Richard Russo’s fiction. His novels, such as “Empire Falls,” “Bridge of Sighs,” and “That Old Cape Magic,” are to me examples of the best that fiction has to offer: they are deeply engaged with humanity, families, the big questions of life; they are engaging; they are funny (especially "Straight Man," a hilarious academic novel); they make readers feel connected to the larger world; they are well written. I have always felt (perhaps irrationally) that Russo himself must be a good person, and his memoir “Elsewhere” (which I posted about here on 11/10/12) seemed to confirm that impression. I have just read a slightly odd assortment of Russo’s fiction and memoir, published in four little booklets gathered in one boxed set titled “Interventions: A Novella & Three Stories” (Down East Maine, 2012). I say “odd” because one of the four is a novella, two are short stories, and the fourth is a mini-memoir. One of the stories has been published before; the others have not. Each booklet’s cover is by the author’s daughter, the artist Kate Russo. The covers are beautiful and the whole boxed set is, as the back cover states, “handsome.” The stories themselves are, unsurprisingly to me, compelling and definitely worth reading.

"The Priory," by Dorothy Whipple

The fiction of Dorothy Whipple was one of my big “discoveries” of the past couple of years. I have posted about several of her novels already, when I went on a sort of Whipple binge (1/24/12, 1/30/12, 2/10/12, 7/24/12, 8/14/12), and now have just finished reading “The Priory” (Persephone, 2003; originally published 1939). As with the other novels, this one focuses on life in England circa the 1930s amidst the upper class, or aspiring-to-the-upper class, but often struggling characters and families. Also, even more than in some of the other novels, this one focuses on, and sometimes explicitly discusses, the dilemma of women’s being completely dependent on men for their living. Poor Aunt Victoria still lives with her widowed brother, “the Major,” and his family, and is resented for the money it takes to keep her, especially by the Major’s new wife Anthea, who wants to be sure of support for herself and her twin babies. One of the Major’s young daughters from his first marriage, Christine, marries Nick, a man from a well-off family who is completely dependent on his wealthy father; the father, although he is generous, uses his money as a way of controlling Nick. Matters become worse for Christine when she feels the need to separate from him, and refuses to be dependent on his father or on her own family; she soon finds out how very hard it is for an upper-class but poorly educated woman to find a job and support herself and her baby. Whipple conveys well the desperation women felt when they saw no way to be independent, all because of the way society raised and treated women at the time. This theme is a powerful one in “The Priory,” but I don’t want to give the impression that it is a didactic novel. The main attractions of this novel, as with Whipple’s other novels, are her insightful portrayal of her characters and their relationships with each other, and her accomplished writing. Oh, and there are those gorgeous Persephone endpapers…

Sisterhood is....Melodramatic?

I am fortunate to have three wonderful brothers whom I love dearly, but I have sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a sister. Since my women friends are so important to me, I have imagined that a sister would be like a very very good friend, but even closer because of growing up together and because of the family bond. So I have been a little bit envious of my friends who have sisters. Some of them are very close to those sisters, sharing experiences and supporting each other through the years. Others are not so close, with various rivalries and differences dividing them. In any case, I find the topic of sisterhood a very appealing one in novels, so I thought I would enjoy Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “The Pretty One” (Little, Brown, 2013). It is in fact a fairly enjoyable novel, as light entertainment, but its problem is that it is too much ABOUT sisterhood, with capital letters. Its tagline, written almost as a subtitle on the cover, is “A Novel about Sisters,” and the novel itself is too explanatory of that relationship, in a schematic, predictable way. Three sisters are at the same time close and competitive, and each has her own label, given to her by their mother early on, and perpetuated into the sisters’ thirties, their current age in the book. Perri is the organized, traditionally successful one with the good job, husband and three children, and beautiful home in the suburbs. Pia is “the pretty one” of the title, but has trouble in both her work life and her love life, never being able to settle down to one job or one man. The youngest, Gus, is a successful family rights lawyer and activist, and a lesbian whose partner has left her. In a short period of time, the three sisters and their parents go through various dramatic (actually melodramatic, in a sort of breathless, OMG style) crises and problems that test and even threaten the sisters’ relationships to each other. Or at least that is the ostensible import of these events, but at no point is it even a little believable that the sisters will become estranged, or that any of the problems that arise will be serious enough to permanently harm any of them. A couple of flirtations, a couple of job problems, some halfhearted speculation about the father of Pia’s young daughter, Gus’ short lived fling with a man … none of these comes to much after all. Even when there is a revelation toward the end of the novel about a suddenly appearing new family member, there is very little of the shock and angst one might expect; the person is unrealistically easily absorbed into the family. Perhaps the novel does make some points about sisterhood, family bonds, family problems, and the truism that family trumps everything else, but these points are made too explicitly, too predictably, and worst of all, in a sort of lukewarm style that makes the reader feel that even the author’s heart wasn’t completely in this story.