Book 323: Amsterdam

 

“As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”

Dates read: June 25-27, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Lists: Booker Prize, The New York Times best-seller

Few things are more satisfying than boiling hot self-righteousness. If there's a drug that gives you that feeling of someone else being not just incorrect, but morally wrong, and being about to shove it in their face that you're a better person than they are, please no one tell me. I will become an addict. Of course, we all know that it is almost inevitably followed by realizing that you are not quite in fact as heroic as you felt, nor is the other person the literal spawn of Satan. But it's a heady rush while it lasts.

Even long-standing friendships aren't immune from misunderstanding and resentments. In Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, two old friends meet at the funeral of a woman they each had loved once. But it isn't the free-spirited Molly, now gone after a brief but terrible bout of dementia, that drives apart Vernon, the editor of a struggling London newspaper, and Clive, a respected composer. They've long since come to terms with that part of their lives. Neither of them can much understand what she ever saw in another one of her former lovers, who also attends the funeral: Julian, a conservative politician whose policy stances would seem to be anathema to Molly's guiding principles of love and acceptance. Nor can they understand why she married George, who seemed bent on controlling her and molding her into conventional respectability. Like many friends, Vernon and Clive have gone through cycles of being more or less close over the years, and the funeral pushes them back into each other's orbit. Spooked by the circumstances of Molly's death, each promises that if the other were to be in a similar state of decline, they would help the end come quicker.

Not long afterwards, both men find themselves in a position to have to make a moral choice. Vernon is given photographs that Molly took of Julian during their relationship...photos that his support base would find shocking. These photos would solidify Vernon's position at the paper by boosting circulation and catapult him into the spotlight after a lifetime of toiling away in relative obscurity. Clive has received a prestigious government commission to compose a piece to celebrate the millennium, and struggles for inspiration until, when taking a hike while out of town, he sees a man attack a woman on the trail. Finding himself suddenly able to see where he wants his symphony to go, he ignores the situation and doesn't report what he saw to the police. Clive is aghast that Vernon would even consider publishing the photos of someone else's private, intimate moments. Vernon is insistent that Clive report what he saw and face responsibility for his failure to intervene on behalf of the woman and keeping what he witnessed from law enforcement. The two are bitterly estranged.

This book is so short as to practically be a novella. That doesn't limit the impact of McEwan's satire, though. If you have ever known a pompous middle-aged man, Vernon and Clive are pitch-perfect. Both ruminate on the clarity of the situation facing the other, while running themselves ragged in the mental gymnastics required to justify their own choices. Each can only see the ways in which they themselves have been good, devoted friends, while the other has taken advantage of their generosity. But that's kind of one of the issues: character. While obviously something this brief and with this perspective isn't out for a deep character study, Vernon and Clive are basically the same person. And George, who shows up to create havoc throughout, seems more like a plot device than a human. I never found anyone compelling enough to really care about how it would end up.

How it ends up is a little too tidy and convenient, for that matter. And the pacing is odd...it drags and feels bloated (despite its brevity) in places, but the conclusion feels rushed. It's not without its clever moments and witty turns of phrase, but it really feels like an excellent short story concept that got padded into a decent-but-unspectacular short novel. It's worth a try (the upside of having such a low page count is that even if it doesn't work, it shouldn't take long to finish), but there are sharper, funnier satires out there. 

One year ago, I was reading: The Eyre Affair

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Reading Dangerously

Three years ago, I was reading: Daisy Jones & The Six

Four years ago, I was reading: My Name is Venus Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Six years ago, I was reading: The Namesake

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Book 323: Amsterdam

Book 257: Oryx and Crake

 

"How could I have been so stupid? No, not stupid. He can’t describe himself, the way he’d been. Not unmarked — events had marked him, he’d had his own scars, his dark emotions. Ignorant, perhaps. Unformed, inchoate. There had been something willed about it though, his ignorance. Or not willed, exactly: structured. He’d grown up in walled spaces, and then he had become one. He had shut things out."

Dates read: August 25-29, 2018

Rating: 8/10

Becoming more aware of the world kind of sucks a little. Not being able to just laugh at the joke. Not being able to just let it go. The eye rolls and sarcasm. But once you really start thinking about it, the way the polar ice is melting at levels unseen before in the modern world, the way the waters are warming, the wildfires in the West, the way coastal cities are left vulnerable to ever-more calamitous weather and flooding, it's hard to just put out of your mind. And that's just global climate change, to say nothing of the countless other significant issues facing our world.

One day, something is going to be the end of the world as we know it. Superbacteria and/or a global plague. Nuclear war. Heck, maybe the zombie apocalypse. But why not climate change? In Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, it's climate that creates the void into which increasingly powerful corporations pour themselves. Soon, the divide between the haves and the have-nots becomes even more literal, with the highly-educated few retreating into city-esque complexes created and owned by business interests, while the masses are walled off into their own zones. Jimmy is born into privilege, to a mother and father who are good worker bees, and it is in the compound school that he meets Glenn, who becomes his best friend...and who ends up changing the world beyond what anyone could have imagined.

As an adult, Jimmy has renamed himself Snowman (after The Abominable), and as far as he knows, he's the last "real" human left alive. There's a group of genetically engineered people, the Children of Crake, but they're not the same. He's left alone, in a devastated world, with only his memories and his guilt over the role he played in it all. These memories make up the bulk of the book, with very little actually happening in an actual plot sense. Jimmy does venture back to the last place he lived in search of food and sunscreen and medicine, which forces him to confront what happened with Glenn, who became Crake, and the beautiful, reserved Oryx, who was involved with them both. How they died, and how the virus that wreaked havoc on the rest of the world was released.

It's a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that's really Atwood's strength anyways. She loves to dig into the ways our little flaws can set in motion events that spiral out of control, to take the tensions underlying society and drag them up into the open. I find it really interesting that this book was written in 2003, the year I graduated high school, because so much of it seems to apply to the kinds of debates that continue to be relevant even now: just because we have the technology or knowledge to do something, does that mean we should? How do we weigh morality? Whose morality gets weighed? The writing date of the book does mean there are some things that come off anachronistic (she posits a world focused on disc-based storage, in which email is a primary communication method), a lot of it is startlingly prescient.

Clearly I liked it, but it was not without failings. The biggest, for me, was its lack of developed female characters. Jimmy's mother is intriguing, but we see relatively little of her and through mostly his eyes, reflecting on the way her choices impacted him. Oryx remains to the reader just as mystifying as she largely is to Jimmy, and while I could see Atwood intending this as a statement of how men tend to project their own stories only the women they claim to love (Jimmy is convinced he knows parts of Oryx's past, which she herself denies), I wish we'd gotten more of her perspective. And as much as I enjoy character-driven novels, I wish it had been structured differently, so that it was taking place in the present rather than largely in the past. These are relatively minor issues, though. On the whole, this book is fascinating and thought-provoking and one I'd recommend widely (though maybe not younger/less sophisticated teenagers).

One year ago, I was reading: Patron Saints of Nothing

Two years ago, I was reading: Seduction

Three years ago, I was reading: The Book Thief

Four years ago, I was reading: The Confessions of St. Augustine

Five years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

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Book 257: Oryx and Crake

Book 186: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

"The joy made him feel like a drunken man. To teach and exhort and explain to his people—and to have them understand. That was the best of all. To speak the truth and be attended."

Dates read: October 30- November 2, 2017

Rating: 7/10

Lists/awards: Time's All-Time 100 Novels

A lot of people, including myself, talk about how hard it is to make friends as adults. And it is, for lots of understandable reasons, mostly centered around only meeting new people in relatively small numbers after a certain point. But we also tend to be less open and vulnerable as we get older, and that makes it harder to make a real connection. Our old friends, we feel like we can tell them anything, and that's such an important thing to have in our lives. Everyone wants to feel understood.

Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter takes place in small-town Georgia, but it could take place in a small town anywhere. Our main character is John Singer, a Deaf man who works as a silversmith (he's continually referred to as "deaf-mute", or "mute", because this book was written in 1940 and they weren't great about sensitivity training back then). At the very beginning, he's living with a fellow Deaf man, Antonopolous, as his roommate, and they speak to each other in sign language. While Singer is otherwise typical apart from his deafness, Anton clearly has more profound issues...he seems to have some sort of intellectual disability as well as health problems. After a medical episode, his brother (the local grocer) takes him to an institution to be cared for, leaving Singer in need of a new place to go.

He ends up in the boarding house run by the Kelly family, and it's here that he attracts one of what turns out to be a small but devoted group of...well, followers is the best way to describe it. Mick Kelly, the musically-inclined daughter of the not-well-off family, comes often to Singer's room to talk to him (he can read lips and will occasionally respond in writing) and listen to the radio. At the local cafe, Singer attracts the lonely owner, Biff, who has a bad marriage even before he's widowed, and Jake, a traveling labor organizer trying to inspire the locals to band together. And then he also manages to meet and attract the attention of Dr. Benedict Copeland, the only black doctor in town, whose children (including the maid for the Kelly family) have refused to follow in his footsteps. While he moves through all of these people's lives at the center of their obsession, though, he maintains his own obsession with his friend and former roommate, regularly visiting him and bringing him expensive gifts.

I'll be honest...when I first started reading this, I was concerned that it was going to be a "sad lonely people being sad and lonely" story. Unless they're particularly well-written, those types of stories don't tend to appeal to me. But what I actually found here was a beautifully realized tale of the desperate human need to connect and feel like someone understands you. Each of the people drawn to John is estranged from most social connections: Mick, because her sensitivity and love for music makes her an oddball among her family and most of her peers, Biff, because he and his wife, who he was estranged from, never had the family he craved, Jake, because he's an actual outsider to the community whose efforts to organize them only alienate them instead, and Dr. Copeland because his education and pride separate him from his children as well as his community. In John, who can only listen and doesn't talk and is kind-hearted, they find the acceptance they covet. For John, though, the only person in his life who can understand him and he can communicate with in sign is Antonopolous, and it therefore it is this bond that John prizes above all others.

It's such an insightful look into the human condition that it's hard to believe Carson McCullers was only 23 when she wrote it. We're a social species, humans. We want to be members of the group. Feeling outside of it, especially when we're teenagers like Mick, is difficult to bear. For the most part, the characters McCullers creates feel real and sympathetic...John himself is really the least plausible character, to so patiently bear the demands on his time and emotional energy that his acolytes demand from him. I found myself wondering why he didn't literally shut the door on them once in a while to get some time to recharge. This novel would be best for fans of character-driven rather than plot-driven stories, because quite little actually "happens" besides the emotional journeys of the people involved. But if you're down for a slower, quieter book, this is really very lovely.

One year ago, I was reading: The Completionist

Two years ago, I was reading: Spoiled

Three years ago, I was reading: The Song of Achilles

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Book 186: The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter

Book 164: Notes On A Scandal

"People like Sheba think that they know what it's like to be lonely. They cast their minds back to the time they broke up with a boyfriend in 1975 and endured a whole month before meeting someone new. Or the week they spent in a Bavarian steel town when they were fifteen years old, visiting their greasy-haired German pen pal and discovering that her handwriting was the best thing about her. But about the drip, drip of long-haul, no-end-in-sight solitude, they know nothing. They don't know what it is to construct an entire weekend around a visit to the launderette. Or sit in a darkened flat on Halloween night, because you can't bear to expose your bleak evening to a crowd of jeering trick-or-treaters."

Dates read: July 29- August 2, 2017

Rating: 8/10

Arbitrary age guidelines are...well, arbitrary. A person isn't suddenly mature and responsible enough to drive a car the day of their sixteenth birthday if they weren't the day before. They don't suddenly understand all the implications of a contract they sign the day they turn eighteen if they didn't previously. There's no magic power to being able to handle your liquor at 21. But since it's enormously impractical to examine these kinds of milestones on a case-by-case basis, we develop a shorthand. Most 16 year olds are in a better headspace to drive than those younger than them. By the time someone hits 18, they're more mature and responsible than they were even a few years ago, more able to make adult decisions. And your brain is more developed by the time you get to 21, better able to absorb the impact of alcohol.

One of the more controversial age guidelines (and one that tends to vary depending on place and circumstance) is the age of consent. In the US, it tends to vary between 16-18. Europe skews slightly younger, with most between 14-16. Again, there's no hard and fast way to assess if someone is "ready" to give knowledgeable consent, so you just have to set a standard and go with it. What is always inappropriate and often illegal is exploiting a relationship of power. So when Sheba Hart, an art teacher at an English school in Zoe Heller's Notes On A Scandal, begins a relationship with 15 year-old student Steven, she's clearly in the wrong. Sheba's story is told through the voice of fellow teacher Barbara Covett, as a manuscript that Barbara is writing in the wake of Sheba's deeds becoming public. At the beginning of the events that the book recounts, she's a bitter, lonely older woman who has had no real bonds with anyone besides her cat. When Sheba, lovely and ditzy, makes her teaching debut at St. George's, Barbara sets out to befriend the soon-overwhelmed younger woman.

Well, befriend isn't really the right word. She wants to become a necessary part of her life, the way she'd been closely enmeshed with a different younger woman years earlier who got married and will no longer speak to her. There's an implication that Barbara's interest is more than platonic, but I think making too much of a "repressed lesbian" angle is overstating the case. As I read it, Barbara's not trying to get into Sheba's pants, she's trying to get into her head and exert control over her. And the way Heller writes it (through Barbara's not-exactly-unbiased narrative voice), Sheba isn't exactly in control of her affair with Steven, either. The deeper Sheba gets in, the more he pulls away until he eventually ends it. And then it all comes tumbling down, leaving Sheba cast off from her family with no one to stand by her side. No one, that is, besides Barbara.

Heller has written a book with a lot of moral complexity. Barbara is certainly manipulative, but she's also desperately lonely, and is understandably very hurt when Sheba throws her over after she's had to put her cat down to go cavort with Steven. Fundamentally, she wants to be important to another person, which is something most of us want (although most of us aren't as manipulative as Barbara). Sheba is the one crossing the boundary with Steven, but she met her much-older husband when he was her professor in college, when she was only a few years older than her teenage lover, and Steven proves to be the party less emotionally invested in their relationship. Both women are predators, but neither is purely evil.

It's a book that may prove difficult for some people to read as it deals heavily with a adult-teenager, teacher-student relationship. Barbara, for all that Heller has given her some sympathetic qualities, is a negative character and given that the book is told from her perspective, I'd classify it as "dark" in tone. But it's undeniably compelling. Even though I watched the movie (years ago, when it came out) and remembered the "twist", as it were, I still found it interesting and enjoyable, in its own way, to read. I'd recommend it for people prepared for the subject matter.

One year ago, I was reading: An Untamed State

Two years ago, I was reading: The Wars of the Roses

Three years ago, I was reading: The Woman Who Would Be King

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Book 164: Notes On A Scandal

Book 157: My Antonia

"Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."

Dates read: July 1-4, 2017

Rating: 5/10

There's something very powerful about childhood friendships. My best friends are still two girls that I've been friends with since elementary school, even though I live on the other side of the country from them...there's a special-ness to having history that's shared from the time you were really young, the way you got to know each other's parents at sleepovers, the field trips and dances and first relationships you were there for each other for. I feel like I know them, and they know me, in a way that would be almost impossible to replicate for people we've met later in our lives. We've been there with each other as we became adult people, through the fits and starts and steps backward and forward and sideways. It's a strong bond.

In Willa Cather's novel My Antonia, Jim Burden recounts his memories of Antonia Schimerda, the dearest friend of his youth. They arrive in rural Nebraska on the same train: orphaned ten year-old Jim going to live with his grandparents, fourteen year-old Antonia as part of her immigrant Bohemian (Czech) family. They tread similar but not identical tracks...while Jim's family is prosperous and steady, the Schimerdas quickly find themselves mired in poverty and struggle to make ends meet. But they live close to each other (by pioneer standards, anyways) and the two become close. Even when the Burdens move into town, Antonia's there before long, as a "hired girl" to do housekeeping. When Jim goes off to college, Antonia stays, and even so they easily pick up where they left off when they reconnect almost a decade later.

There's not much of a traditional story structure here. It's presented as an adult Jim's recollections of his friend, so it takes a loose and kind of winding way of presenting its narrative. I didn't take much issue with that, since the book is pretty short, honestly, and not super textually rich so it's not like it gets bogged down for the lack of standard-issue "rising action". Where I found myself losing interest was in the last third or so of the book, in which the lively Antonia largely vanishes and we're left mostly with Jim, who is pretty boring and whose straightforward path doesn't have any real tension. We see the world of the novel through Jim's eyes, but it's Antonia who gives it its animating force. I'd argue that Cather's strength isn't so much her prose, which didn't do much for me, but her characterizations. She imbues even relatively minor characters, like Otto the hired farmhand, or Antonia's mother, or fellow young immigrant woman Lena with a verve that makes them memorable. Too bad she couldn't do the same for her ostensible main character.

I will say that I'm glad this book was something I read as an adult instead of in high school. Teenage me would have HATED it because it's kind of boring, and while adult me would agree on the boring part, I was able to bring more life experience to bear that improved the reading of it, for me. I'm able to appreciate the way a significant friendship can loom large in your nostalgic reflections of childhood, and the hesitancy you can feel about reaching out even when you really want to reconnect. And one thing I did really enjoy and think still is criminally underrepresented in literature is the depiction of a genuine mixed gender friendship. As someone who's had strong, completely nonromantic friendships with men that I've really cherished, I feel like so often you only see those depicted as part of a family relationship or one of the two parties is gay, like there has to be some obstacle to "explain" why a man and a woman who enjoy spending time with each other would not want to sleep together. To see an actual friendship between a boy and a girl depicted as just that, in a novel published literally a century ago, is refreshing.

Tell me, blog friends...do you believe that men and women can be just friends?

One year ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Two years ago, I was reading: Freakonomics

Three years ago, I was reading: All The King's Men

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Book 157: My Antonia

Book 146: If We Were Villains

"Ten years of trying to explain Dellecher, in all its misguided magnificence, to men in beige jumpsuits who never went to college or never even finished high school has made me realize what I as a student was willfully blind to: that Dellecher was less an academic institution than a cult. When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses."

Dates read: May 15-20, 2017

Rating: 7/10

For someone who's been dead for over 500 years, William Shakespeare's still pretty damn popular. It seems like there's at least one major screen adaptation every year. And everyone reads at least one of his plays at some point in high school, right? They're probably the only plays which most people have actually read all the way through in their lives (I include myself in this number, I don't particularly care for reading plays). While some people hate his stuff and most feel more-or-less indifferent, there are also some people who REALLY love it. I'm not one of those people, but I do have a favorite of his works (Much Ado About Nothing) and still regret that I didn't get a chance to take a course focused on Shakespeare in college from a legendary professor.

It's a group of people who are super duper into Shakespeare that is the focus of M. L. Rio's If We Were Villains. The book mostly follows seven Shakespearean acting students in their senior year at an exclusive arts college. We know something big and bad happened, because the book opens with one of the seven (Oliver, our protagonist) being released from prison after a decade. He agrees to return to his alma mater and speak to the detective who put him behind bars to finally reveal the true story of what happened all those years ago.

Based on the length of sentence alone, it shouldn't be surprising that what happened was that someone died. The who and the how I'll leave for the reading of it, because the bigger issue is what happened after that person died. The way the remaining members of the group deal with the death, and how it changes their relationships with each other, both on and off the stage. They'd each developed a little niche over their years together (the king, the femme fatale, the good guy, the ingenue, the villain, etc), and the removal of one of the spokes of the wheel renders the structure unstable.

If you've read The Secret History, a lot of that will sound pretty familiar to you. Indeed, it's pretty obvious that Donna Tartt's debut novel was a significant source of inspiration for Rio for her own. And that's fine, Tartt doesn't own the concept of a tight-knit group of students studying an obscure subject at an exclusive private college dealing with the fallout from the death of one of their own. But here's the thing: if you're going to write a book with strong parallels to a novel that's been consistently popular since it was published 25 years ago, you have do it at least as well or better. And although I want to make it clear that I did enjoy reading If We Were Villains (I did love The Secret History, after all), Rio didn't quite hit that mark.

The characters fall a little too neatly into the roles they fill onstage: Richard, the king-type, really is a raging egomaniac; Meredith the femme fatale really is a sexpot; Wren the ingenue really is demure and sweet, etc etc. Where this fails most problematically is that the "background player" types are kind of underdeveloped, and that's Oliver and Filippa. Oliver, you'll remember, is the main character and while it's not unusual for a reader-insert-character protagonist to be kind of bland, Oliver never really captured or held interest for me. Filippa is the only other member of the group that doesn't come from privilege and the small peeks we get at who she is make her easily the most potentially interesting character, and it's frustrating that she's given the short shrift. The plot developments, too, weren't handled especially deftly. I'm generally not good at anticipating plot twists, but I called nearly all of the major ones easily. Rio's prose is solid, though, and I'd definitely be open to reading more from her in the future. I'd recommend this to people who loved The Secret History and want to read something similar, but if you haven't read that book yet, it's better than this one.

Tell me, blog friends...are there "if you liked that, you'll love this" books that you feel pulled off being better than the inspiration?

One year ago, I was reading: Valley of the Dolls

Two years ago, I was reading: Smoke

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Book 146: If We Were Villains

Book 122: Marlena

"I've never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don't touch anything doesn't mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you're irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena's case, the person you'll never have the chance to be. The world doesn't care that you're just a girl."

Dates read: January 30- February 2, 2017

Rating: 6/10

When you think about it, we usually meet our friends for the most stupidly mundane reasons. A girl who was a friend of mine in high school was someone I'd made friends with in first grade because we were always at the end of the tallest-to-shortest line together. My friend Kailey and I became friends because I just happened to be one of the first people she met when she moved to my school district in fifth grade. One of my closest friends in college was someone who'd become close to my then-boyfriend through the Greek system and we just all started hanging out together. It's strange to think that people who have been huge parts of my life are people I very well would never have known if not for mere accidents of geography and chance.

In Julie Buntin's Marlena, fifteen year-old Catherine encounters the friend who will change her world forever, the titular Marlena, because she happens to move next door to Marlena's family. A year earlier she'd been known as Cathy, a motivated student at a private high school outside of Detroit, but then her parents divorced and her mother, short on resources, moves her and her brother Jimmy to the northern Lower Peninsula to start over. Catherine decides to become Cat, and her seventeen year-old neighbor becomes her best friend. Marlena is what could be delicately described as a troubled young woman: her mother has long since vanished and her father cooks meth in the woods, she's the closest thing her decade-younger brother has to a parent, she's hooked on opiates and has a squicky relationship with the older man who provides her pills to her. The intense friendship that springs up between the girls draws Cat into a new world: drugs and booze and sex and cutting class. But after a year, Cat tells us, Marlena will be dead, found drowned in a shallow stream in the woods.

The story is told on two tracks: mostly the story of the year in which Marlena was a part of Cat's life, but also Cat all grown up, working at a library in New York City, long past that time in her life. Or is she? The unhealthy relationship she developed as a teenager with alcohol is still with her, threatening to unwind her relationship and career. This is not as successful a framing mechanism as it could be: the portions in Michigan are dominant and the underdevelopment of the portions in New York render them almost superfluous. I think with some editing to balance out the narratives better, the book would have been more powerful. As it is, it's good: the friendship between the girls rings true, and Buntin draws them and the supporting characters in ways that make them complex and interesting.

Although I am in no way trying to imply any kind of impropriety, there's no denying that this book has distinct similarities to Emma Cline's The Girls and it's interesting that both came out around the same time. Both are books about young, relatively sheltered teenage girls who find themselves drawn into an intense bond with an older girl. The older girl in question in both stories draws the younger into "dark" situations: drinking, drugs, sex. Both books intersperse the story of the one-time friendship with flash-forwards to the girl all grown up, looking back on that time of her life. And since the comparison is obvious, it has to be said that for me, Cline's is better. Buntin's makes me excited to see how she follows up this debut, but it falls short of greatness and lacks the raw power of The Girls. I'd still recommend it, though, especially for those that enjoy stories about strong female friendships and coming-of-age stories. 

Tell me, blog friends...did you ever have a super close friendship as a teenager?

One year ago, I was reading: The Love Song of Jonny Valentine 

Two years ago, I was reading: Yes Please

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Book 122: Marlena

Book 113: The Guineveres

"I gave up writing in my notebook a long time ago- life got in the way, and I grew out of the habit. Besides, after everything that happened that year, there were some things I didn't wish to remember, some questions I couldn't bring myself to ask. Back then, I hadn't realized that time had a way of providing the answers. Back then, I believed The Guineveres were all I had."

Dates read: December 25-30, 2016

Rating: 9/10

A feeling of belonging is so important. It's why students do extracurriculars, it's why adults look for clubs to join on meetup.com. Without a group, we feel isolated. So even if it's not the group we might have hoped for, we join them. It's the most pressing, of course, as teenagers. We say and do and wear the most ridiculous things as teenagers in order to fit in, to belong.

The group at the heart of Sarah Domet's debut novel, The Guineveres, is formed on just about the most prosaic foundation possible: they all share a name. Four young women come to the convent of The Sisters of Supreme Adoration, all for different reasons and out of different situations, but all named Guinevere, and so they become friends. We first meet Ginny, Gwen, Win, and Vere (our narrator) as they're trying to escape the convent at the annual Easter parade. They've got big dreams: they're going to get an apartment together in the city and become secretaries. They can't wait until they're 18 and they're released. They need to get out now.

Their attempt is foiled, of course. They're caught and assigned to duty in the sick ward as punishment. And that's when their lives really do change: five anonymous young men come in, soldiers in the War (it's never quite identified, but maybe Korea or more likely WWII), all comatose. When one of them regains consciousness, an older girl (close to but not quite 18) is sent home with his family to be his nurse. Which gives rise to the next escape plan: when the remaining boys awaken, the Guineveres will get to go away with them, too.

The action moves forward from there, but backwards too. We learn, gradually, about how each of the girls came to the convent and why, and what becomes of them. Domet takes her time, giving her story room to breathe. Her sense of pacing is top notch: she neither engages in gratuitous info dumping, nor gratuitous info withholding. She lets the tale unfold as it will, with lovely, insightful prose as it works along. It's become trendy for promising debuts, especially female-centered ones, to be compared to Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, which happens to be one of my favorite books of all time. That's a pretty high bar to clear, for me, and this might be the first one that I've seen compared to it that I really think measures up. Domet's quality of writing and crafting of story make me so, so excited to both re-read and see what she does next! Definitely highly recommend this read!

One year ago, I was reading: Helter Skelter

Two years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

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Book 113: The Guineveres

Book 107: The Girls

"I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves."

Dates read: November 24-26, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Teenage girls are kind of sociopaths. I know that I was. You're just figuring out who you are and who you might want to be, trying on identities like clothes. Everything seems so black and white: you're a good girl or a bad girl, a nerd or a popular, a prude or a slut. Male attention is both terrifying and intoxicating, often at the same time. You want desperately to feel like an adult and demonstrate that you're not a child anymore without really knowing what the consequences of your actions could be. It's a wonder any of us get out of it with even somewhat-functional mental health.

Emma Cline's The Girls has been widely billed as a novel about the Manson cult, but that's not entirely accurate. It does feature a significant portion of plot about a Manson-esque group, but what it's really about, more than anything else, is the heady experience of being a 14 year-old girl. We first meet Evie Boyd as an older woman, staying briefly in a friend's beach house when she finds herself between gigs as a live-in nurse. Her friend's college-age son stops by with his teenage girlfriend, and watching them and her brings back Evie's memories of that fateful summer when she found herself around the edges of the lives of Russell (our Manson stand-in) and his pack of girls.

Evie's in an especially vulnerable spot that summer; her father has recently left her mother for a young colleague, and Evie and her longtime best friend are starting to drift apart. She's fascinated by the group of teenage hippies she sees around town, drawn to their exotic-seeming poverty so different from her own comfortable trust-funded existence (she's the granddaughter of a never-named wealthy former child star clearly modeled on Shirley Temple). Evie's particularly hypnotized by their ringleader, Suzanne, and the intensity of her infatuation finds her constantly lying and making excuses to go out to the ranch where the group lives, doing whatever she can (sex, drugs, helping the girls break into homes in her own neighborhood) to fit in and attract Suzanne's attention and praise. But eventually, as in real life, there's a grisly murder and the hazy fever dream of that summer ends, leaving Evie back in her old world.

Cline has a real gift for atmospheric, lush prose. She creates a powerful sense of mood, a feeling that every moment is weighed with portent...which goes right along with what I remember from being that age. Everything is so close to the surface, and Cline really captures those feelings of uncertainty and being right on the edge of something meaningful that characterize being that age. She also draws a picture-perfect portrait of the kind of all-consumingness of female friendships in the teenage years. It's a tricky thing to depict without devolving into cliche, but Cline really gets at the heart of that desperation to please the object of your obsession. The plot moves along fairly slowly, but the careful attention paid to creating the ambiance of teenage girlness and the rich, vivid writing more than make up for it. I don't know that this is a book that would be as successful if you've never actually been a young teenage girl and can't identify with it, but I personally really enjoyed it and would recommend it highly.

Tell me, blog friends...do you regret some of the things you did when you were 14?

One year ago, I was reading: The Wonder

Two years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

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Book 107: The Girls

Book 77: The Lords of Discipline

 
"To walk in the spire-proud shade of Church Street is to experience the chronicle of a mythology that is particular to this city and this city alone, a trinitarian mythology with equal parts of the sublime, the mysterious, and the grotesque. But there is nothing to warn you of Charleston's refined cruelty. That knowledge must be earned. No gargoyles hang from the sides of St. Philip's or St. Michael's. No messages are in the iron scrollwork of its gates to warn visitors like Poe, Osceola, me, and you."

Read: August 7-12, 2016

Rating: 10/10

When I'm grabbing my next book to read, I'm not reaching into a bookshelf and snagging whatever catches my eye. I have a spreadsheet. I have SO many unread books that it's really the only way to keep it together. I try to alternate hard copies and Kindle titles, and try to read about three ARCs for every five backlist titles. Since I've bought a lot of books over the years, it's the only way I'll be able to make sure I actually read all of them...without making myself do it, a lot of the older stuff would just pile up as shiny new things stole my attention away. Sometimes this means I read books I'm not actually super interested in anymore. That's okay, because it also means there are some total gems, like Pat Conroy's The Lords of Discipline, that I snagged on Kindle sale years ago and forgot. I honestly don't even know what drew me to buy the book in the first place, military school coming-of-age doesn't really speak to me, but I'm really glad that I did buy it because I loved it.

Will McLean is about to start his senior year at the Institute, a military academy in Charleston (based on the Citadel, Conroy's own alma mater). He didn't really want to go, but promised his father he would before his father died and gets a basketball scholarship anyways. He's not distinguished himself as a military man during his time there and doesn't plan to enlist and ship out to Vietnam as so many of his classmates intend, but he's almost made it through and is closely bonded with his three roommates, especially native blue-blooded Charlestonian Tradd St. Croix. Will is a quasi-outsider...while he's Southern and from an Institute family, he's also Catholic and an athlete, and probably the closest thing to a liberal on campus. Which is why he's assigned to look after incoming student Tom Pearce, the first black student to ever enroll, and protect him from the threat of a mysterious group called The Ten, who are deadset against integration. As Will's final year unfolds, he relives his own traumatic freshman year and we see how he's been shaped (sometimes against his own will) by the experiences he's had at the Institute as he tries to look out for Pearce, investigates The Ten, and falls in love with a troubled young socialite.

First of all, Conroy is an incredible writer. His plotting and pacing are masterful. He covers a lot of territory (freshman hazing, two suicides, a love affair, an investigation into a shadowy group, the experience of participating in organized athletics), but it never drags, nor does it feel overcrowded. Drama drives not from the mystery plot (which really only picks up in the last 20% or so of the book), but from experiences and relationships. The prose is strong and sure, lyrical without verging into purple territory, poignant and resonant. I have to imagine that Conroy loves Charleston as much as his protagonist does, because much of his most sweeping and sentimental prose is dedicated to the city and made me want to take a visit there myself.

The characters Conroy creates feel real...we obviously spend the most time with and are asked to identify the most with Will, but he's not perfect or beyond reproach. Even the person who's ultimately revealed as the "bad guy" has motivations that make sense. He places those characters in high-stakes situations without turning it into the lurid melodrama it could spill over into with less control. It's just a fantastic novel and I'm adding everything Conroy wrote to my TBR and I recommend this book highly to anyone, even if you don't think you'd like it.

Tell me, blog friends...has an author ever painted such a lovely picture of a place you feel inspired to visit there?

One year ago, I was reading: We Need To Talk About Kevin

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Book 77: The Lords of Discipline

Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick

 
"There was so much dirt in life, so many eraser crumbs and stray coffee grounds and dead wasps trapped inside the storm windows, that it seemed all of a person's time- all of a woman's time, at any rate- was spent in reallocation, taking things from one place to another, dirt being as her mother had said simply matter in the wrong place."

Dates read: May 8-11, 2016

Rating: 3/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

Sometimes I feel like a fake "serious reader". Which is the most ridiculous first world problem, I know. But there are so many of the classics, so many high-profile novelists, that I haven't read: Murakami, The Count of Monte Cristo, Faulkner, Catch-22. And until now, John Updike. But a secondhand copy of The Witches of Eastwick, which I'd seen the very cheesy 80s movie version of quite some time ago and enjoyed watching, came into my path and I decided it was time to cross that one off my list.

And this is one of those instances where (at least for my money), the movie was better than the book. They both have a similar setup: three socially outcast women living in a small town in Rhode Island become involved with a mysterious stranger, Daryl Van Horn, who comes to town and chaos ensues. In the movie, the women become witches under Daryl's satanic influence, and band together to turn against him when he causes harm. But that's not where the book goes. The book is much darker, and it suffers for it. When you're dealing with heavy stuff like magic and death and the devil, you need a little levity to keep it from dragging.

When Updike opens his novel, the three women (Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie) are already witches. A widow and two divorcees in a small town in the early 1960s, they are outside the conservative social order and each others' only real friends. They aren't especially nice people: they frequently behave spitefully, none of them are at all involved in their children's lives, and are all sleeping with married men. When Daryl Van Horn, the devil hisownself, arrives in town, he doesn't imbue them with power as much as heighten their ambition (and start having orgies with them, of course, because that's apparently what the devil does). While all of the women have romantic designs on Daryl on some level, they share him relatively peacefully until a younger woman, Jenny, joins their group and eventually succeeds in becoming Mrs. Van Horn. The witches are jealous and band together to use their magic to kill her. Van Horn then skips town with Jenny's younger brother and the women each, eventually, conjure up a good man and themselves depart Eastwick.

Like I said earlier, it's a lot of pretty heavy material without much to lighten it up. The women have some small moments of sympathy, but are largely negative people that aren't very enjoyable to read about. You would think that the literal devil would be a compelling character, at least. He's supposed to be interesting, right? Not as Updike writes him. Daryl is never written as even particularly physically attractive, much less the charismatic wily schemer you would expect the Prince of Darkness to be. There was no one to care about, much less identify with or root for. Updike's writing is good (if you're into the flowery-language-and-run-on-sentences kind of writing, which I tend to be), but the story falls completely flat.

Because I didn't like the book, I spent much less time thinking about it and its plot as a story and more time wondering if I thought this was, as it is usually considered, a feminist work. On the one hand, you have women who are close friends, who have discovered and own their power, who have the sex lives they want to have, who are not defined by their motherhood, and who are unapologetic for any of this. While we're often presented with narratives about men who behave in an antisocial manner and asked to consider them the heroes of the story, The Witches of Eastwick is a rare example of this phenomenon for female characters. On the other hand, they aren't given many redeeming features, either: they aren't funny or really all that interesting, they're petty, and they're driven to a murderous jealous rage over...a man. Their "happy endings" only come when they've each found themselves...a man. I think on the balance, it's more feminist than not, but I will qualify that by saying that Updike writes terribly about the experience of being a woman. When he writes about sex or menses, it's cringeworthy. And even if it's mostly feminist, that doesn't mean I have to like it. I didn't, and I wouldn't recommend it. It's just not fun to read.

Tell me, blog friends...what major works or authors haven't you read yet?

One year ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

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Book 51: The Witches of Eastwick

Book 48: Enchanted Islands

"But I found his dedication to the craft a sign that he was an enlightened being, like those monks who spend years crafting sand paintings only to sweep them away once they've finished. Now I see he was keeping himself busy, keeping the demons at bay. But demons are not dissuaded by oceans or preferences; they stow away like sea lice, unwanted visitors from another place, coming ashore with you wherever you go."

Dates read: May 2-5, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I turned 31 earlier this month. I still don't feel like a grown up. I don't pick up after myself with any sort of regularity. I eat frozen dinners at least a couple times per week. I laugh at fart jokes. I love T-Rexes and have a model skeleton of one in my office (courtesy of our incredible office manager, who not only got it for me but built it for me as a gift). I can take down a whole tube of Pringles in one sitting if I'm not paying attention. I've only recently started flossing regularly, and insist on using the little picks or I won't do it. My life only vaguely resembles the one I thought I'd have when I was younger: I was going to stay in Michigan and be a prosecutor. But here I am, a lobbyist in Nevada. I don't think of myself as an adult, even now that I'm married. When are we finally done growing up?

The answer, as gleaned from Allison Amend's Enchanted Islands, is much later than we think. Frances Frankowski is a shy, bookish girl growing up in a poor family in Duluth when she meets fellow youngster Rosalie at the library and the two become instant best friends. They grow up together, but when Frances learns that Rosalie is being exploited when the two are teenagers, they run away to Chicago. After some time there, Rosalie betrays Frances' trust, and Frances flees...first to Nebraska, then to San Francisco, where after a stint as a teacher, she eventually winds up as a secretary for naval intelligence when she's in her late 40s. She runs back into Rosalie and they are reconnecting after decades apart when Frances is offered the chance for marriage to a handsome younger man as part of a secret mission in the Galapagos, and when she accepts it, she alters the course of the rest of her life.

The book is split into four parts comprising two real halves: Frances' life before she meets her husband Ainslie and goes to the Galapagos, and after. The first half takes us through Frances' family life and the beginnings of her deep friendship with Rosalie. The book actually starts with Frances and Rosalie together in a nursing home, having both outlived their husbands, so we knows theirs is a relationship that stands the test of time going in. But the seeds of their break are planted early, and when it comes, we're as saddened as Frances herself is but not really surprised. What is surprising is that they manage to find their way back together early in the second half: a chance encounter in a movie theater in San Francisco, thousands of miles from where they once were girls together. By then, Frances is already contemplating the offer of a sham marriage and an adventure overseas, and it's as much a vain desire to announce to her friend that she IS married, thank you, that convinces her to go for it as anything else. The relationship she and Ainslie create, which sustains long after their mission has ended, is just as lovely but never more important than Frances' relationship with her real soulmate...her best and dearest and oldest friend. I've always had a soft spot for stories about female friendship, because my relationships with my girl friends have occupied such a central place in my own life.

This was a good book, and I've actually gone back and added one of Amend's previous novels to my to-be-read list, because I really enjoyed her writing, which is sure and strong. It actually struck me as I was reading it that this seems like the book that Sena Naslund thought she was writing when she wrote Ahab's Wife...minor personage (in this case, Frances Conway was a real person, who wrote two books about her time in the Galapagos, but she's not notable enough to have her own Wikipedia entry because all the secret spy mission stuff is completely made up), fiercely independent, facing obstacles, adventures, and hardships with strong will and determination. But Amend's work is far superior: she allows Frances to be flawed: prickly, occasionally small-minded, and petty. In doing so, she creates a beautifully realized character who is sympathetic and compelling. All three of the main characters are, really. Amend is a gifted writer and I would recommend this book wholeheartedly.

Tell me, blog friends...when did you start feeling like a grown-up? Or do you at all?

**I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review**

One year ago, I was reading: The Nazi Officer's Wife

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Book 48: Enchanted Islands

Book 38: The Group

 

"Helena, who was as immune to social snobbery as she was to the 'fond passion', had not felt the charm of the South Tower group to the same extent as Kay, but she raised no objections to the alliance, even though her teachers and her parents had worried a little, thinking, like Norine, that an 'exclusive elite' was a dangerous set to play in, for a girl who had real stuff in her." 

Dates read: March 30-April 2, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/awards: NY Times Bestseller

My husband was my third serious boyfriend. We've been together for almost four years now and I think he's just the greatest thing since sliced bread. But as wonderful as he is and as much as I love him, I know that the deepest and most emotionally rich relationships I have right now are the ones I have with my close friends, Kailey and Crystal, that I've known since elementary school. They have known me and seen me and been there for me through my experiences growing up, through family conflict, through ugly breakups. They know me better than just about anybody and probably better than I know my own self. I believe that I'll be friends with Kailey and Crystal for the rest of my life.

So stories about female friendships and how they grow and change over time and through life experiences are catnip to me. Mary McCarthy's The Group follows eight young women who graduate from Vassar in 1933 and the course their lives take over the next seven years. The novel kicks off with the rather impulsive wedding of one of their number, Kay, to her long-distance and mysterious boyfriend Harald almost immediately after graduation. Kay's marriage (and its deterioration) make up the most coherent through-line of the story, which follows the members of the group one at a time as they make their way in the world (the world being 1930's New York for the most part) and continue to be involved in each other's lives. McCarthy's writing is sharp and insightful, and the characters she writes feel very real...all of them are self-deluding to some extent and McCarthy lets you "watch" them do it through her narration of their lives.

What struck me as I read this book, which was apparently enormously popular when it was published in the 60s, was how even though it was written 50 years ago and takes place another 30 years before that, it was so modern in many ways. Sure, some of the references are pretty dated, but the challenges these women face are largely similar to the ones we're continuing to face today: the difference between sex and love (and wanting the former to mean the latter even when you know it doesn't), dead-end relationships, sexism in the workplace, sexuality, marriage, raising kids. There's a character, Priss, who has a child and is struggling with the decision of whether to breast feed or bottle feed and the way she feels like she's doing it wrong depending on who's she's talking to. The Mommy Wars feel very current and endemic to the current social media-laden climate, but this book makes it obvious that it goes back waaay further than that. It's easy to feel like the stuff your generation is facing is new and different than the things that previous generations struggled with, but it's really much more similar than you might think. Plus ca change and all that.

Tell me, blog friends...do you still keep with high school and college friends?

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Book 38: The Group

Book 33: Private Citizens

 

"She felt mute and illiterate in the language of power, which was money. She knew that corporate oligarchs used it to subvert democracy. But she was hazy on macro and micro; how US trade agreements affected sweatshop conditions in Indonesia; what the Fed did, exactly. Her efforts to research the housing market crisis ended in page-crumpling fury- credit default swaps? Mortgage-backed securities? Collateralized debt obligations? How could people be moral when morality obliged you to know everything? It was her fault for not studying econ in college, but she'd had so much contempt for the future ibankers that it had seemed principled not to."

Dates read: March 19-22, 2016

Rating: 8/10

I may have graduated from college almost ten years ago (eep!) but I went straight to law school after that, so I really only started to have that post-graduation trying-to-figure-it-out experience about 6 years ago. It took me a couple years....I spent nine months trying to find a job as a lawyer, doing a couple stints of book rush at the college bookstore to score some pocket money, then once I got into litigation practice I washed out (I have no problem admitting I couldn't handle the pressure) after about a year and a half. From there, I was lucky enough to have a friend with a connection to the Obama campaign in Nevada, and figured I could spend a few months doing field organizing, making enough money to cover expenses while I contemplated next steps. But I met my now-husband while campaigning, and so I stayed in Nevada. Needing a job, I happened to find out about an internship with a lobbying firm during legislative session. I took it, and they liked me so much they kept me! Things in my life have been pretty stable since, but those 2-3 years right after graduation were fumbling and awkward and kind of scary sometimes.

Which is all to say that the just-graduated-and-I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing, trying to discern out who you really are and what you really want to do era isn't all that far behind me, considering that I'm 30. That time in their lives is what the characters in Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens are facing, so I had an immediate connection with the story. Confused social activist Cory, insecure tech worker Will, unstable grad student Henrik and self-destructive wannabe writer Linda all knew each other at Stanford and live in and around tech-boom San Francisco, and the story follows each of them in turn as they try to figure out the obstacles in front of them: Cory's inheritance of a flailing nonprofit, Will's inability to cope with his hyperambitious, emotionally withholding girlfriend Vanya, Henrick's loss of funding for his research and recurrence of bipolar disorder, and Linda's drug issues and infatuation with her own perceived genius. They're not friends anymore, per se, more like people whose lives intertwined in college as roommates or in ill-fated relationships, and never came completely apart. And as their lives get more complicated and harder, they find themselves coming back together.

Both Tulathimutte's characterizations and grasp on the thorny knot it can be to be a millennial are strong and ring true. Cory and Will and Henrik and Linda all feel like real, if highly magnified, people. None of them are especially likable, but all of them can be sympathetic. They're all experiencing the fuzzy mess of trying to check your privilege, of trying to find the right boundaries between your online life and your real one, figuring out your own niche in a crowded world, living up to the praise and expectations you've been inundated with for your whole life. It's trendy to dismiss millennial malaise as a bunch of whining from spoiled brats, but Tulathimutte understands that it isn't that simple. We were raised to believe that you earn a medal just for showing up, that you can be anything you want to be...and when it turns out that your life isn't particularly special, you can't shake the feeling that it's your fault, somehow, that you've failed yourself and wasted your potential. The writing is maybe a little heavy on esoteric word choices, but it's sharp and incisive and compelling. I'm not sure how I felt about the end, though...it felt like a bit of a departure from the rest of the book, at least in part. But maybe when I read it again (and I plan to), knowing how it winds up, it'll fit more cohesively.

Tell me, blog friends...how long did it take you to get yourself together after college?

**I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, William Morris, through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and honest review**

Note: Review cross-posted at Cannonball Read

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Book 33: Private Citizens