Every so often as you read your way through the year, one book just reaches out, grabs you, and doesn't let go until the last heart wrenching page has been turned. For me, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett was one of those books.
From Booklist (via amazon.com) Marina Singh gave up a career as a doctor after botching an emergency delivery as an intern, opting instead for the more orderly world of research for a pharmaceutical company. When office colleague Anders Eckman, sent to the Amazon to check on the work of a field team, is reported dead, Marina is asked by her company's CEO to complete Anders' task and to locate his body. What Marina finds in the sweltering, insect-infested jungles of the Amazon shakes her to her core. For the team is headed by esteemed scientist Annick Swenson, the woman who oversaw Marina's residency and who is now intent on keeping the team's progress on a miracle drug completely under wraps. Marina's jungle odyssey includes exotic encounters with cannibals and snakes, a knotty ethical dilemma about the basic tenets of scientific research, and joyous interactions with the exuberant people of the Lakashi tribe, who live on the compound. In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggle and sacrifice of dedicated scientists.
Passages
Marina - her relationship with her father Marina did not forget her father in his absence, nor did she learn to accept the situation over time. She longed for him. Her mother often said that Marina was smart in just the way her father was smart, and that explained why he was so pround that she excelled in the very things that interested her the most: earth sciences and math when she was a little girl, calculus, statistics, inorganic chemistry when she was older. Her skin was all cream and light in comparison to her father's and very dark when she held her wrist against her mother's. She had her father's round, black eyes and heavy lashes, his black hair and angular frame. Seeing her father gave her the ability to see herself, the comfort of physical recognition after a life spent among her mother's people, all those translucent cousins who looked at her like she was a llama who had wantered into their holiday dinner.
Marina - her relationship with Dr. Swenson Marina waited for a moment, hoping for more than a one word affirmation. She was on an unnamed river in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night feeling very much the same way she always felt with Dr. Swenson, like Oliver Twist holding up his empty bowl.
Marina - her responsibility Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chief's hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marina's cheekbone, and together they did the slow skip forward while the men beat their drums and the tourists took their pictures and the children followed with their dances, their snake and their sloth. In this group Marina danced with the people who were not white while the white people watched them. It would never have been her preference to be part of a tourist attraction. One of the children handed her the sloth and she took it. She hung it around her neck and continued her dance, feeling the soft, warm hair against her skin. Had anyone given her a choice, she would have chosen instead to be back on the porch behind the storage shed beneath her mosquito netting reading Little Dorrit. Still, she knew it was somehow less humiliating, less disrespectful, to dance with the natives than it was to simply stand there watching them.
Then there were those exquisitely written passages that just made me sit back and sigh.
Pickles [a Golden Retriever] leaned up against marina now and he batted her hand with his head until she reached down to rub the limp chamois of his ears.
From the grand exterior she entered a lobby of palm plants and tired brown sofas that slumped together as if they had come as far as they could and then given up.
Marina had been a very good student, but she only raised her hand when she was certain of the answer. She excelled not through bright bursts of inspiration but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.
There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was not getting used to it.
As hard as some of this story was to read, there was no denying the joy of spending reading time with Drs. Singh and Swenson along with Milton, Easter, and the Bovenders. Each small event, nuance, or description drew me in like the constant churring of one of the unnamed, unseen insects of the Amazon.
There have been two books this year that took my reading breath away. The first was Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland, and I will post separately about this. The second, and most recent, was The Paris Wife by Paula McClain.
From Booklist (via Amazon) History is sadly neglectful of the supporting players in the lives of great artists. Fortunately, fiction provides ample opportunity to bring these often fascinating personalities out into the limelight. Gaynor Arnold successfully resurrected the much-maligned Mrs. Charles Dickens in Girl in a Blue Dress (2009), now Paula McLain brings Hadley Richardson Hemingway out from the formidable shadow cast by her famous husband. Though doomed, the Hemingway marriage had its giddy high points, including a whirlwind courtship and a few fast and furious years of the expatriate lifestyle in 1920s Paris. Hadley and Ernest traveled in heady company during this gin-soaked and jazz-infused time, and readers are treated to intimate glimpses of many of the literary giants of the era, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the real star of the story is Hadley, as this time around, Ernest is firmly relegated to the background as he almost never was during their years together. Though eventually a woman scorned, Hadley is able to acknowledge without rancor or bitterness that "Hem" had "helped me to see what I really was and what I could do." Much more than a "woman-behind-the-man" homage, this beautifully crafted tale is an unsentimental tribute to a woman who acted with grace and strength as her marriage crumbled.
Passages Hadley viewing narcissus The Rhone Valley was in top form just then, with narcissus blooming in every bare patch of meadow and in the jagged crevices of rock. The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.
On laughter Everyone laughed, and it was one of those domino moments. That laugh would eventually set off an entire series of events, but not yet. It just stood there in the room, tipping and tipping, but not falling. Not falling yet. Not quite.
Hadley on Ernest’s The Torrents of Spring It wasn't until that moment that I fully understood how hurt he'd been when everyone, including me, had disparaged the book and shut it down. He loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved, and even adored.
On Ernest’s hubris I knew Ernest's bravado was almost entirely invented, but I hated to think of all the good friends we'd lost because of his pride and volatile temper, starting in Chicago with Kenley. Lewis Galantiere, our first friend in Paris, had stopped speaking to Ernest when he'd called Lewis's fiancee a despicable shrew. Bob McAlmon had finally had enough of Ernest's bragging and rudeness and now crossed the street to avoid us in Paris. Harold Loeb had never recovered from Pamplona, and Sherwood and Gertrude, two of Ernest's biggest champions, now topped the long and painful list.
Bicycles as metaphor On the crushed rock path along the windward side of the hotel, three bicycles stood on their stands. If you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars--one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.
On believing People belong to each other only as long as they both believe. He's stopped believing.
Hadley & Ernest
A summing up In the end, Ernest didn't have the luck I did in love. He had two more sons, both with Pauline, and then left her for another. And left that one for another, too. He had four wives altogether and many lovers as well. It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was probably vanity, wanting to stand out in a long line of women. In truth it didn't matter what others saw. We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.
There was always this picture of Ernest Hemingway in my mind—the older, bearded literary giant. Here in The Paris Wife, the picture sharpened with the details of the younger, insecure struggling author. This fictional rendering expanded and enhanced my mind picture of Hemingway and urged the taking up of The Moveable Feast as well as revisiting The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Perhaps there are clues there that will add nuance to the picture of Papa Hemingway.
Did you ever wonder what would happen if a birthday wish really came true? That is the question answered in 29: A Novel by Adena Halpern.
From Publishers Weekly (via amazon.com) The proverbial search for youth's fountain manifests itself in Ellie Jerome, a 75-year-old woman who has employed every available artifice to remain young. Identifying more with her stylish young granddaughter, Lucy, than with her abrasive middle-aged daughter, Barbara, Ellie's 75th birthday wish is to be 29 again, for just one day. When her wish comes true, hilarious problems arise, as the young Ellie must create a new persona in order to enter and leave her apartment in a neighborhood where everyone knows the old Ellie. Choosing to let Lucy in on her secret, Ellie persuades her to be her guide on a youthful adventure in pursuit of stylish looks and a trendy life. While the dynamic duo romp through Ellie's magical day, Ellie's daughter and her dearest friend, Frida, a 75-year-old worry wart, having decided that Ellie was kidnapped, embark upon their own misguided adventure before the old (now wiser) Ellie returns at the end of her big day. With this rollicking, if familiar, offering, Halpern...sets out to prove that you're only young twice.
Passages On Gershwin Whenever I hear Gershwin in my head it means I'm having a good time. (By the way, if you're too young to be familiar with Gershwin, plese get yourself some CDs. You'll thank me later.)
On that "moment" A moment comes in everyone's life when they realize they're old. I'm not talking about the day you see your first gray hair or the day you see the hint of a crow's foot. What I'm talking about is the day when you realize you've grown out of being able to adapt to something new.
On lipstick (Hello, Lancome? Why did you discontinue Risque?) I almost had a heart attack when Lancome stopped making my favorite lipstick. I was on the phone with Lancome for three hours, with four different operators, trying to get to the bottom of why they discontinued my color, when the last person finally said, "No one wears that color anymore, ma'am." "I do!" I said.
On using your "stuff" I walk into the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. I put some water in the kettle, turn on the stove, and grab some tea bags. I go into the cabinet and take out a cup and saucer. I use my good bone china every day. You should, too, if you don't have small children. It's a lesson I've learned: enjoy the things you have.
In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Ms. Halpern thanks, first and foremost, "...the amazing seventy-something women I interviewed for this book. Your generosity, honesty, and frankness were more than I could ever have asked for. I hope I've done you proud in creating a character that captures the best of who you are." I think the author accompished this. The dialog between Ellie and Frida as well as incidents in the story are all spot on.
Most of the wisdom passed on by Ellie Jerome was obvious, but it never hurts to be reminded again and again about the value of family and friends.
20th Century Fox has obtained the movie rights to 29, so let's play the "Who Would You Cast in the Movie" game. Here are my choices:
Ellie Jerome - Florence Henderson
Young Ellie Jerome - Cameron Diaz
Lucy Jerome (Ellie's granddaughter) - Anne Hathaway
Barbara Sustamorn (Ellie's daughter) - Susan Sarandon
Frida Freedberg (Ellie's best friend) - Olympia Dukakis
Zachary - Chris O'Donnell
If you read 29, please come back and let me know your dream cast!
Rating: 3.5/5 (Fiction Scale) Dedication: This book is lovingly dedicated to my mother, Arlene Rudney Halpern First Line: I'm jealous of my granddaughter.
Book Extras Visit the author's website here. Visit the publisher's page here. Read a review at Musings of a Bookish Kitty here and another at Book Addiction here.
Several years ago I tried to read In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner. Perhaps being the mother of a single, out-on-her-own daughter colored my reaction, but I just couldn't bring myself to read past the opening sequence of events. So, I stayed away from Jennifer Weiner until I read the description of Fly Away Home. Granted, the pulled from the headlines plotline of the disgraced politician may have made this another pass; however, I put it on my library reserve list and did find the story good enough to keep me reading on a Saturday afternoon despite the less than enthusiastic editorial review from Publishers Weekly.
From Publishers Weekly (via bn.com) Weiner weaves a forgettable family drama with three weakly connected storylines: mother Sylvie Woodruff long ago sacrificed herself to become the perfect politician's wife, but the revelation of her husband's infidelity sends her off to reconnect with her old self. Her daughters aren't faring any better: recovering addict Lizzie is pursuing an interest in photography, but a childhood incident continues to trouble her; and dutiful older daughter Diana, an ER doctor, is escaping her blandly offensive husband via her own affair. The three women's crises function in parallel, and Weiner is unable to keep the narrative tension going when she hops from one character to another, largely because their issues are so tidily resolved and the women are never in real emotional danger--Sylvie's husband's affair is a "one-day story," Lizzie's narcotic slip is to take a couple of Advil PM (and an apology resolves the unresolved past), and the breakdown of Diana's marriage is dispatched as easily as Diana making a resolution to change her life. The lack of conflict and strong characters, and the heavy dose of brand names and ripped-from-the-headlines references, make this disappointingly disposable.
When all was said and read, it was wrapped a little too nicely. I'm much more intrigued with watching the tensions in The Good Wife. How will Alicia Florrick handle things this year?
Rating: 3/5 (Fiction Scale) Dedication: For Joanna Pulcini and Greer Hendricks First Line: Breakfast in five-star hotels was always the same.
Book Extras Visit the author's website here. Visit the publisher's page here.
Les at Lesley's Book Nook has written a review of Fly Away Home which pretty much echoes my experience. Please click here to read her review. While you're there, be sure to check out Les's new wheels!
Plantation by Dorothea Benton Frank has been on the "gotta get to this book" list for some time. Now that a follow-up book, Lowcountry Summer, has just come out, I figured it was time to get to Plantation which I had downloaded to my Kindle last year.
From Publishers Weekly (via amazon) ...this colorful contemporary romance effortlessly evokes the lush beauty of the South Carolina Lowcountry while exploring the complexities of family relationships. When Caroline Wimbley Levine learns that her mother, Miss Lavinia, has supposedly gone mad, she leaves the big city bustle of Manhattan and returns to Tall Pines Plantation. Caroline originally left Tall Pines to escape her feisty, eccentric mother and her drunken brother, Trip, but when Miss Lavinia dies, Caroline is forced to come to terms with her family's troubled history as well her failing relationship with her husband. As Caroline reminisces about her past rebelliousness and her childhood, she realizes that her father's sudden and tragic death many years before served as a catalyst for the family's disintegration. Caroline and Trip also learn that their seemingly selfish and self-assured mother was not so uncaring after all. While most of the story is told from Caroline's point of view, journal entries written by Miss Lavinia open several of the chapters, providing the narrative with additional texture and warmth. Although the novel is short on plot, readers will enjoy immersing themselves in the lives of these deftly drawn, heartfelt characters.
Passages On bookshelves Turning out lights, I looked around at what Richard and I had built in the last thirteen years. We had six rooms of travel memorabilia from our wanderings. Our bookshelves were crammed with learned opinions on every area of psychology and psychiatrics in and out of print. Those were Richard's. They were his library and his weapons. My books were on textiles from around the world, Japanese gardens, obscure religions such as the cargo cultures of West Africa. Sometimes it seemed that he focused on the mind of man whereas I studied the spirit and what man held sacred. Our bookshelves were as good a starting place as any to see the differences between us.
On a doctor's office His walls were covered with diplomas and citations and photographs of what appeared to be open-air-market people in Istanbul and Greece. He apparently liked to travel and to read. In addition to bookshelves of reference materials on various skin diseases, he had a small collection of leather-bound old books--classics--probably first editions. He treasured books. He couldn't be all bad.
On appreciation and simplicity But when the red ball of the sun slipped under the Edisto River that evening, I was pretty sure that life didn't get much better than being in the place you loved most, surrounded by the people closest to your heart.
Plantation was a story of a family finding its true self again after years of misinterpretations and misunderstandings. I enjoyed seeing Caroline Wimbley Levine find her heart and home, although it seemed at times that she certainly was taking a lot of needless side trips along the way. I have put Lowcountry Summer on my library reserve list; however, I see from many reviews that this follow-up to Plantation is getting some of the same bad reviews as did Return to Sullivan's Island. Sometimes, unless it is clear that the author set out to write a series, characters may be best served by our remembering them as we last knew them in print or as we, the readers, chose to imagine what happened next.
Rating: 3.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Dedication: For Peter
First Sentence (from Prologue): This story I have to tell you has to be true because even I couldn't make up this whopper.
Personal note: Lavinia Boswell Wimbley took a fancy to the poetry of Rod McKuen.
Heart of the Matter, the latest from Emily Giffin--what can I say? I had a coupon and the cover is purple, and so went my pledge to library more/purchase less.
From Booklist (via amazon) Tessa Russo is celebrating her wedding anniversary with her handsome husband, Nick, a pediatric plastic surgeon, when his pager goes off. At the hospital, he meets his new patient, six-year-old Charlie, who has been badly burned while roasting s’mores. Charlie’s mother, Valerie, a high-powered lawyer who has raised Charlie on her own, is wracked with guilt. As Charlie goes through various grafts and surgeries to repair the damage done to his face and hand, Nick and Valerie become close. Tessa, a stay-at-home mom who has misgivings about leaving her professorship, recognizes the distance growing between her and Nick but isn’t sure what to attribute it to or what to do about it. The premise is a familiar one, but Giffin injects freshness by getting inside both Tessa’s and Valerie’s heads and by making both sympathetic, fleshed-out characters. Giffin’s talent lies in making her characters believable and relatable, and readers will be enthralled by this layered, absorbing novel.
Passages On becoming your mother On Sunday afternoon, Nick, Ruby, Frank, and I are shopping for Halloween costumes at Target--our idea of quality family time--when I realize that I've officially become my mother. It's certainly not the first time I have sheepishly caught myself in a "Barb-ism" as my brother calls such moments. For example, I know I sound like her whenever I warn Ruby that she's "skating on thin ice" or that "only boring people get bored." And I see myself in her when I buy something I truly don't want--whether a dress or a six-pack of ramen noodles--simply because it is on sale. And when I judge someone for forgetting to write a thank-you note, or driving a car with a vanity license plate, or, God forbid, chewing gum too enthusiastically in public.
On what women do (My comment: They do?) ...all women compare lives. We are aware of whose husband works more, who helps more around the house, who makes more money, who is having more sex. We compare our children, taking note of who is sleeping through the night, eating their vegetables, miding their manners, getting into the right schools. We know who keeps the best house, throws the best parties, cooks the best meals, has the best tennis game. We know who among us is the smartest, has the fewest lines around her eyes, has the best figure--whether naturally or artifically. We are aware of who works full-time, who stays at home with the kids, who manages to do it all and make it look easy, who shops and lunches while the nanny does it all. We digest it all and then discuss with our friends. Comparing and then confiding it is what women do.
My plot summary? Take a single mother with a badly injured child and mix with a somewhat happily married renowned pediatric surgeon. Toss in a the surgeon's wife who's wondering "is that all there is," and you have the Heart of the Matter.
While Giffin explored in depth the single attorney mother and the former college professor housewife and made each of these characters evoke sympathy from me, I felt some annoyance that the story never really got inside the doctor's head to understand what he was thinking and feeling.
Next time, I'll be strong and remember my pledge...or I'll just honestly admit that I may have aged out of this kind of story regardless of the come hither purple cover.
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Dedication: For Sarah, my sister and lifelong friend
First line: Whenever I hear of someone else's tragedy, I do not dwell on the accident or diagnosis, or even the initial shock waves or aftermath of grief.
Playlist Lullaby of the Leaves, Vince Guaraldi Unchained Melody, Righteous Brothers Jupiter Symphony, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, Johann Sebastian Bach Night Swimming, REM Sarah Smile, Hall & Oates Beck CD (unspecified) Georgia on My Mind, Willie Nelson version
From Booklist (via amazon) When popular crooner Richie Rossiter dies, his longtime partner, Chrissie, is left bereft and angered that she never got Richie to divorce his first wife and marry her, providing security for her and their three daughters. In addition, money becomes a serious issue since she was his manager. Then she learns that Richie amended his will to leave a treasured piano and the rights to songs he wrote early in his career to his first wife, Margaret, and their son, Scott. Chrissie, who refused to ever fully acknowledge Richie’s first family, is left to wonder whether he actually loved her, while Margaret finds herself enormously relieved to discover that she was remembered. The prolific Trollope skillfully engineers a heartwarming story of renewal and hope as she brings the two families closer together. Scott reaches out to Chrissie’s youngest child, providing her with both comfort and a link to her dad’s childhood in Newcastle. Hurt feelings and issues of abandonment vie with the impulse to forge ahead and to heal in this intelligent and moving novel of modern family life.
Passages On a tea caddy Tamsin was taking tea bags out of a caddy their father had brought down from Newcastle, a battered tin caddy with a crude portrait of Earl Grey stamped on all four sides. The caddy had always been an object of mild family derision, being so cozy, so evidently much used, so sturdily unsleek. Richie had loved it. He said it was like one he had grown up with, in the terraced house of his childhood in North Shields. He said it was honest, and he liked it filled with Yorkshire tea bags. Earl Grey tea--no disrespect to His Lordship--was for toffs and for women.
On Dawson, the cat Today, he had ignored his breakfast. It was untouched and he had removed himself to his favorite daytime place, stretched along the back of the sofa in the bay window of the sitting room, to catch any eastern sun there might be, and also any passing incident. He would not, Margeret knew, involve himself in anything that required exertion, but equally, he liked to know what was going on.
On ablutions A bath, an application of this and that to her face, a prolonged session with the immense variety of toothbrushes the fierce young hygienist at her dentist now insisted on, a vigorous hairbrush, a well-laundered white cotton nightdress with picot edging--they all added up to something that, some days, Margaret looked forward to almost from the moment she woke in the morning.
My first experience with Joanna Trollope was in 1999 when she was writer-in-residence for Victoria magazine and her novella Daughter Number Three was serialized in that publication. Since then, I have been entertained by several of her domestic dramas, but alas, not so with The Other Family. The story dragged on and meandered, and I found some of the characters annoying. This was a story of a family's grief and their journey to reconciliation; unfortunately, I did not care enough about the characters to take comfort in the resolution of their story.
Rating: 2.5/5 (Fiction Scale) Source: Library Dedication: To Jason First Line: Looking back, it astonished her that none of them had broken down in the hospital.
Ann Hood has suffered the loss of a child and felt the happiness of adopting a child. Those personal experiences combine in her novel, The Red Thread.
From Booklist (via amazon) Hood’s latest engaging novel is a timely exploration of the adoption process, specifically the adoption of Chinese girls by five couples in Providence, Rhode Island, brought together by Maya and her Red Thread Adoption Agency. One by one, Hood introduces each couple: there’s a compulsive investment banker and her consultant husband; a social do-gooder and her immature husband who still pines for an ex-girlfriend; Maya’s friend Emily, who longs for her own daughter, tired of vying with her stepdaughter for her husband’s affection; an ex-baseball player who fears losing his wife’s love and attention to the new adoptee; and a mismatched couple with their own mentally challenged daughter whom the wife struggles to love. Maya is an upbeat ringleader who believes every child is connected by a red thread to those fated to play a part in his or her destiny. Hood intersperses the stories of these diverse couples with the sad stories of five Chinese babies slated for adoption, resulting in part soap opera, part enlightening look at contemporary adoptions, and an altogether entertaining read.
Passages On the red thread There exists a silken red thread of destiny. It is said that this magical cord may tangle or stretch but never break. When a child is born, that invisible red thread connects the child's soul to all the people--past, present, and future--who will play a part in that child's life. Over time, that thread shortens and tightens, bringing closer and closer those people who are fated to be together.
On learning to knit Susannah's grandmother had taught her to knit when she was ten years old. Susannah had sat on her lap, facing out, and her grandmother had placed the needles in her hands, wrapped her arms around her, and knit. Their hands, making the motion together, were like being on a sailboat, rhythmically rocking.
I wanted to love this book, but instead, I just liked it. While each family situation was unique, I never really got them straight in my mind and had to keep turning back to refresh myself on which family was which. When I was on page 235 of 302, I started thinking how will the details of these families come together, and then they did--bing, bam, boom, done, the end.
In her Acknowledgments, Ms. Hood references the adoption of her daughter through China Adoption with Love in Brookline, MA. Click here to read more about this organization.
Every year, the Concord Museum decorates and displays Christmas trees with bookish themes throughout the museum. Several years ago, I Love You Like Babycakes was one of the featured books. It is a wonderfully told and illustrated book about finding the child of your heart.
Rating: 3/5 (Fiction Scale) Dedication: For Annabelle First line: In her sleep, Maya dreamed of falling.
Passages On the turning point He turns slightly more toward me in the seat and I turn slightly more toward him. I tell him it seems strange that a person who can climb mountains is afraid to fly, and he shakes his head. It's a matter of control, he says, and he tells me about the scariest thing that's ever happened to him on a climb. Years ago, when he'd just begun the sport, he'd found himself linked to a guy who didn't fix the clips right and something broke loose and both of them slid. There's nothing worse, he says, than to be halfway up the face of the mountain, past the turnback point, and all of a sudden to realize you can't count on the other person. I ask him what the turnback point is and he says there's a place you get to in every climb where it's as dangerous to retreat as it is to advance. I nod. It seems I should have known this.
On Yankee and Southern women I think of the Yankee woman in the barbecue scene in Gone With the Wind and how she referred to the southerners as "puzzleling, stiff-necked strangers." I suspect that is now Nancy sees us, as puzzling and stiff-necked, as people who splash around a kind of surface friendliness but who are easily offended when she breaks rules she didn't know existed. Perhaps she views her time in North Carolina as some sort of extended anthropological study. She does look a bit like Margaret Mead, peering out from her oversized hats and gauzy scarves, taking mental notes about the incomprehensible rituals of the aboriginal people. Because there are a lot of rules and even though Kelly and I may not always follow them it's a bit shocking to come up against someone who doesn't even seem to know what they are. You don't put dark meat in your chicken salad. You write a thank-you note and send it through the U.S. Postal Service instead of relying on an Ecard. You don't correct anyone's pronunciation of anything. You call anyone over seventy "ma'am" and you call your friends "ma'am" if you're mad at them. You don't brag about how cheap you got something, or, even worse, how much you paid for it. Especially not real estate. Now, on the flip side, it's perfectly okay to drink like a fish, or curse, or flirt with someone else's husband. In fact it's a little insulting if you don't. To refuse to flirt with her husband implies your friend chose badly, and if you and she both damn well know she chose badly, you need to flirt a little bit more just to help her cover up the fact.
On a book club discussion "You can't expect everything to be some old-fashioned romance," says Kelly, picking up the plate of brownies and walking into the den. "It's supposed to be a realistic treatment of an affair." "What do you mean?" Belinda asks, following her. "That things have to be sad to be realistic?" "What she means," Nancy says, as patient as a saint, "is that in novels women run off with their lovers. In real life, women stay."
On the making of a happy night There are men everywhere here, all over the city, looking down from office windows or even higher, suspended in mid air, circling in planes, heading to the beds of women like me. Women who take off their wedding rings, women with bright red mouths who wait alone in darkening rooms, drinking Tanqueray. I lie down and pull the nubby gray comforter over me. I am drunk and alone in a rented bed. Nobody here knows me and nobody at home knows exactly where I am, and I think, somewhat illogically, that this is the happiest night of my life.
On the beginning Our actual affair began sometime back. Yesterday morning when I boarded the plane, or perhaps last Tuesday, when he e-mailed me the ticket information, or maybe it was even earlier, when I agreed to come to New York, when we set a date to meet. Or maybe the turnback point was the very first day he called me, when I was watching Tory on the ball field, or when I kissed him, in the chapel in Dallas. The idea that you can change your fate is illusory and I do not indulge it for long. This decision was made years ago. Before I ever met Gerry Kincaid.
On self discovery ...I'm smeared with potting soil so I go into the house to take a bath. At the last minute I squirt a dollop of bath gel into the water. This bottle of Vitabath has been in the bathroom cabinet for years but I can't remember who gave it to me or what I was saving it for. It falls from the bottle with a big gelatinous thud and makes the bottom of the tub so slick that when I step in I slide straight down and make a splash. The sound of my laughter surprises me and I look up, thinking maybe somebody else has come into the room.
On thoughts and potato chips Belinda says that maybe she should get a job, but she barely got through two years of college and the only job she'd be able to get would be a crap job. Nancy has started tutoring high school kids in math, and maybe Belinda could do something like that. Not math, of course, because Beinda stinks in math, but something like that, part-time. She doesn't want to end up like her mother. You know, bitter. Kelly says maybe we can list all the things Belinda is good at while we walk, but I suspect this will be no help at all. Women like Belinda never get jobs that have anything to do with what they're good at. Belinda is very close to that most dangerous of questions--"But what about me?"--and I dread this for her. It's the potato chip of thoughts. You're better off not opening the bag.
On the anonimity of terminals ...for airports are the great equalizers, aren't they? The beautiful and the strong, the discheveled and the frightened, they are all sitting with magazines and bottled water, waiting. You turn to the story of the rock star's daughter who drunkenly rode her motocycle onto the patio of a Santa Monica restaurant. She hit a women who later claimed to be her father's greatest fan, and finally, yes, it's starting at last, that sweet numbness that slips over you in airports, that sense of being neither here nor there. You need these pockets of time and you feel for Nicole and the woman who was hit in Santa Monica and even for the model who sources say got pregnant just to avoid doing jail time. She assaulted a photographer who snapped her in an airport. They say she kicked him, flew at him in a rage. She screamed profanities and the contents of her purse went flying. But you know how she felt. There are times when a women doesn't want to be seen.
Reading Love in Mid Air was like watching a car accident. You know you should look away, but you are compelled to stare, trying to absorb the details. Elyse and her friends border on giving us too many intimate details and you want to say, "Enough!" Then you realize that the details are necessary to knowing the whole story of these loves and lives in free fall. Publishers Weekly says the details are filled with "wit and insight." I'll give them insight, but not sure about wit.
Aside: The book being discussed at the book club is never named, and the man Elyse meets on the plane is named Gerry Kincaid. Those of you who have read that other book about a woman who stayed will recognize the reference.
From Kirkus Reviews An oddly passive middle-aged academic switches colleges and comes alive to friends, feelings and a future, in this debut novel from Meier, wife of author Frank Delaney. Partnerless and all but friendless, 48-year-old Dr. Joy Harkness seems to have sleep-walked through much of her life, including a four-year marriage and another 12 teaching literature at Columbia University. But all that's about to change after she accepts a prestigious new post at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Meier's debut breezily mixes the influence of French aestheticism on Henry James with lighter humor and romance as she drops her not-quite-credible heroine into an irresistibly sociable new community in which Joy discovers a perfect if run-down house, falls foul of several campus Lotharios (known as the Coyotes), gets sucked into a spousal-abuse drama and finds herself acting as temporary den mother to four active little girls. Slowly she realizes she is enjoying what she had previously avoided: "the mess of including other people in my life," even stumbling on an unlikely partner in Teddy Hennessy, a gifted, self-taught house-fixer-upper burdened with a cartoonishly possessive mother. Leisurely in pace, intelligent and amiable in tone, the novel glides over its implausibilities, including Joy's paradoxes-simultaneously attractive and insightful while also isolated and unaware. Dodging predictability in the final quarter, Meier takes leave of her heroine in a happy place. An up-market, engaging, feel-good fantasy.
Passages On Post-its For days on end I had gone through these books in a whirlwind of desperation and excitement, marking pages with yellow Post-its. They stuck out like messy tongues from every book, at every angle. On the joy of books/bookshelves There wre my books! My precious thesauri, my Elements of Style and my rhyming dictionary; the Columbia Guide to Standard American English and Menckien's American Language; two great Arthur Quiller-Couches, On the Art of Writing and On the Art of Reading; Edward Sapir's Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, Fowler's King's English (of course) and Bartlett (obviously) and Simpson's Contemporary Quotations. There is T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, and Carl Van Doren, The American Novel. Bulfinch and Brewer and Joseph Campbell, and--can you imagine?--Teddy found space for all eighteen volumes of my Cambridge History of English and American Literature.... Upstairs in my bedroom, still stacked on the floor and waiting for just the right bookcase and a moment of inspiration from Teddy, lay the books closest to my heart. Every book by Henry James, every book by John O'Hara, every book by Edith Wharton, Nabokov and Updike. Novels, short stories and plays by Faulkner, O'Brien, O'Neill, O'Casey and Fitzgerald. Books full of the collected essays of Gore Vidal, most all of Truman Capote, all of Willa Cather, some of Flaubert, most of Zola, all of Tolstoy, All of Chekhov, all of Proust and Joyce and Meredith, all the plays of Arthur Miller, most of the plays of Philip Barry and J. M. Barrie, William Inge, Tennessee Williams, nearly all I could get my hands on of Stoppard and Caryl Churchill. There were, of course, my Shakespeares.... There were biographies, auto- and otherwise, in the dozens, from Boswell on Johnson to a ghastly but fascinating Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel I could never make myself throw out. I loved the way biographies on the shelf made your mind bounce around like a pinball, based on their proximity to one another: Mary McCarthy to Whitaker Chambers to Anthony Burgess, Matisse to Moss Hart, Leonard Bernstein to Beethoven (or is it the other way around?), Isak Dinesen to Dawn Powell; and most were still in boxes, as were all of the poets. On style Did I have any style at all? I was thinking of Donna in her tiny warm-up suits and Catsup in his heathery tweeds, Bernadette in her soft watercolors and vintage prints and Dan and Josie in their jewel-colored cashmere sweaters and their Hermes and Missoni scarves. They all had clothes that represented them, clothes that looked like them. I had clothes that were comfortable and didn't show stains. Maybe these were the clothes that fit my personality, I thought glumly. On Thanksgiving dinner aftermath People return to the table to help themselves to more food, patting their stomachs and saying that they've already had two helpings of the stuffing or three of the squash, onion and apple puree. Even covered with smears of cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, green beans, bits of meat, stuffing, gravy and puree, my grandmother's china looks beautiful. It fills the room, as people have left their plates sattered about like leaves in autumn. The pale robin's-egg blue border on the tiny pleats of Wedgwood porcelain feel as though they've always lived in this house. I particularly enojed the way Ms. Meier used cultural, movie and TV references to set a scene.
Mamie Eisenhower bangs.
Teddy had rewired the bell, and it sounded Andy Hardy old-fashioned in its deep electronic voice.
The house was a large split-level ranch at the edge of a development I would have positioned somewhere between Leave It To Beaver and Bewitched.
He had a kind of William Holden-in-Sabrina quality; sure of himself, but boyish. Or Paul Newman in The Long Hot Summer.
It's Aunt Elizabeth's house...Aunt Elizabeth's house from Bringing Up Baby.
And my favorite, I decided that Philip Barry's line from The Philadelphia Story was the one to hold on to: "The time to make your mind up about people is never."
I am glad that I was guided by Lesa's review of The Season of Second Chances and not the editorial reviews (Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, etc.) on bn.com and amazon.com because I would have missed a very delicious reading experience. This book has one of my favorite things--detailed descriptions of interiors and dishes. I loved picturing in my mind the transformation of Joy's house from an uninhabitable wreck to a fully restored Victorian--the colors chosen for each room, the furniture, and the dishes. It took Joy Harkness some time and a lot of emotion to find her comfort zone. Her brother's long ago adivce held true in the end: Long, long ago, when I was disappointed at some school friend's slight, my brother reminded me of an idea I've just remembered. "Don't you get it?" Timmy said. "No one is using the same yardstick. Their idea of a full measure is rarely yours--or anyone else's." Rating: 4/5 (Fiction Scale)
5/9/10 Update:Click here to view an excellent post on Breaking the Spine where the author comments on the changes that take place in The Season of Second Chances.
6/10/10 Update: Kristen at BookNAround has just reviewed The Season of Second Chances. You can read her excellent review here.
8/12/10 Update: Diane Meier has a post on Head Butler regarding The Season of Second Chances and Chick Lit? Women's Lit?. Click here to read her comments. Dedication: For Sara-Owen and Frank
From Library Journal After the death of her mother, Dulcie, Emily moves in with her grandfather in Mullaby, NC, and learns of her mother's part in the Coffey family tragedy. Fortunately, not everyone holds Dulcie's past against Emily—Julia welcomes Emily with a cake and offers a shoulder to lean on, but Julia has troubles, too. She's working off the debt on her father's restaurant so she can sell it and open a bakery far from the town that dismissed her so easily as a teen. Things may change if the romantic Sawyer can persuade Julia to trust him with her heart or if Win Coffey can help Emily expose the truth of her mother's deepest secret. Wallpaper that changes with mood, a sweet scent to call one home, and boys who glow in the moonlight will make readers jealous they can't live in a magical world like Allen's. VERDICT That it is never too late to change the future and that high school sins can be forgiven—these are wonderful messages, but Allen's warm characters and quirky setting are what will completely open readers' hearts to this story. Nothing in it disappoints.
Passages Nothing flagged.
I appreciated that there was just enough darkness in this story to keep it from slipping into syrupy sweetness. I also thought again about high school reunions, contrasting the more typical reunion depicted in Elizabeth Berg's The Last Time I Saw You with the reunion of sorts playing out in The Girl Who Chased the Moon.
Rating: 3.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Dedication: To the memory of famous gentle giant Robert Pershing Wadlow (1918-1940). At the time of his death at age twenty-two, he was eight feet eleven inches tall--a world record that has never been broken.
The first half of Every Last One by Anna Quindlen is best described with the adjective quotidian. Mary Beth Latham and her family (husband, Glen; daughter, Ruby; twin sons, Alex and Max) go through the daily routine so familiar to anyone who has had kids in middle school and high school and who remembers (fondly or not) the soccer games and practices, the having to be at opposite ends of the town at the exact same time, the crises of young love, etc. And so, the first half of Every Last One lulled me into this family's life, enjoying the conversations between Mary Beth and Glen as they handled the ups and downs. Then, suddently, I am post-quotidian and launched into the unfamiliar needs of healing and rebuilding hope and love.
Here is where I normally post an editorial review by either Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, or Booklist. After reading the reviews of Every Last One, I have decided they give away too much information. Every Last One is a book that every reader needs to experience as it happens. I do hope, however, that you will check out the wonderfully thoughtful review Les posted at Lesley's Book Nook and the video files posted here.
Passages On prom attire Kiernan found a sky-blue tuxedo at the thrift store at which Ruby struck out on a dress. It came with a ruffled shirt, a cummerbund, and an enormous bow tie. Ruby said the bow tie looks like a butterfly. I know exactly what Kiernan will look like. He will look like James McGhee, the boy who took me to my prom. He wore that self-same tuxedo. I remember finding an old photograph of the two of us posed in front of two freestanding Styrofoam Corinthian pillars that had been set up in the hotel hallway, and thinking what a good thing it was that the classic black tux had come back into style, and that the sort of Empire-waist dress I was wearing had gone out of fashion. Now Kiernan is wearing the blue tux, and Ruby and all her friends wear dresses with Empire waists. I am trying to learn to take nothing for granted.
On family changes My brother, Richard, and I were two people related by blood, with little in common. When he left for college, it was as though the pond of our family had rippled slightly, then closed around the disturbance and become smooth again.
On lovers' ghosts Kiernan will finish his senior year in high school, and he will go away to college, and he will become something fine and true: a beloved teacher, perhaps, or the sort of lawyer who represents the indigent. He will have a life in which this one seems merely like the sort of dream that is vivid at the moment of waking and has vanished by the time you've had your coffee. But this day my daughter has cast him out of the closest thing to paradise he has known, our kitchen. To us it seems so ordinary, so little to have, but I have seen in his eyes...the glitter of yearning, and felt sad that the best we could offer was a kind of borrowing. Kiernan had believed he could turn the borrowing into ownership. And from time to time as he grows older, he will remember Ruby Latham, and how he loved her, and how he lost her. Every other girl will have a Ruby ghost hovering over her without her knowing it.
On a window on the world There were four panes of bright light aslant on our ceiling from a white June moon. The light through this window, the smell of the air, the witchy line of a tree branch that has insinuated itself into the sight line of my side of the bed: this is how I track the seasons. I can't say why, but when I see those squares of light on the ceiling I feel as though all will be well.
On the butterfly effect Once Ruby and I were sitting in the yard, watching the monarchs swarm the bee balm. It must have been early September, one of those slow late-summer days when school had just begun yet everything felt tentative--the textbook unopened, the sweaters still packed into their plastic beneath the bed. Ruby loved to tell me things I didn't know, and that afternoon, as we sipped lemonade and scuffed our bare feet through the shaggy grass, she had told me about the butterfly effect, how the beating of their wings in Mexico could cause a breeze in our backyard. "That's kind of terrifying," I replied. But even as I spoke I realized that that was what we had all believed from the moment we had children. The breast-fed baby became the confident adult. The toddler who listened to a bedtime story went on to a doctorate. We flapped our wings in our kitchens, and a wind blew through their futures.
This was a one-day read for me. I was completely drawn in to the Latham family and sat rivited, tissues in hand, while seeing how everything came out on the other side.
Rating: 4.5/5 (Fiction Scale) Note: My copy of Every Last One is on its way to my friend Suzanne. I have a very personal question to ask her after she finishes, and her answer could mean a change in my rating.
High school reunion--a phrase greeted with great anticipation or great trepidation every five years--is the focus of The Last Time I Saw You by Elizabeth Berg.
From Booklist For everyone who has received an invitation to their high-school reunion and broken out in a cold, clammy sweat, Berg nails the experience: the dread that morphs into downright fear; the bouts of self-doubt that coalesce into prolonged periods of self-loathing; the internal inventory that comes up short in the bragging-rights column. Of course, there’s just as much potential for life-affirming and life-altering revelations. Glory days can be relived, damaged reputations repaired, lapsed friendships restored, lost loves rekindled. As Dorothy, Pete, Mary Alice, Candy, and Lester consider returning to Clear Springs for their fortieth high-school reunion, each contemplates the chance for redemption and revenge, renewal and retribution. Ultimately, they are then surprised to discover how much they have yet to learn about human nature and their own capacity for joy and forgiveness. Luckily, the zestfully wise Berg is the perfect teacher for such tender lessons of the heart, and her sublimely authentic and winsome characters are apt students. Book groups are clamoring for upbeat yet significant works that are entertaining as well as enlightening; Berg’s latest novel satisfies and succeeds on both counts.
Passages On pre-reunion thoughts But he did finally agree to go to the reunion. It might be interesting to see all those people again, even though he'd never really been close to any of them. He'd pretty much kept to himself, for many reasons. He wonders if any of his classmates look anything like they used to, or if at the reunion they'll all walk around squinting at name tags, then looking up with ill-disguised disbelief into a person's face. He feels he still somewhat resembles the boy he used to be, but then he guesses that everyone does that, sees in the mirror a mercifully edited version of themselves different from what everyone else sees.
On marriage ...some people have very happy marriages. I think the biggest problem is people's expectations are so high. And so wrong! People think marriage is going to be so romantic and fulfilling. They think the other person is going to complete them. But that's not what happens. In a good marriage, you complete yourself while sharing a bathroom. ...You need to give what you want. And don't expect so much. That only sets up up for disappointment. If you expect anything, expect that marriage will be hard, that it will be work. And expect that the pleasures will be erratic and often small, but they'll turn out to mean more than you know.
On a memory of youth The last thing she thinks of before she falls asleep is a time she was a little girl outside playing on a summer night. She was the first to be called in, and she resented it: the sky was violet and the clouds were pink; the fireflies were just coming out; the taste of sweat at the bend in her elbow was delectable; and the earth had given up its heat to the coolness of evening, making the grass so pleasant to lie in. She compalined bitterly to her group of friends about having to go in, and Mary Nix said, "We'll all have to go in in a few minutes, anyway. You're just the first." That made it better. Then, when she got inside, there were clean sheets, and the light on at her bedside, and the covers turned down, and the little statue of the Virgin to whom she prayed every night and who she believed knew her best. Knew everything, in fact, and just kept quiet about it.
On the current state of manners (as in my aversion to "Hi, guys" when greeting table of women diners!) Mary Alice leans back in her chair to let the server remove her dinner plate. "Still working on this?" he'd asked, and Mary Alice had, as usual, despaired of hearing that particular turn of phrase. Whatever happened to "Still enjoying this?" or "Have you finished?" or "May I remove this?" "Still working on this always reminds her of pigs at a trough. Oh, but why fuss about such things? She supposes she's getting old and cranky.
On surveying the room of reunion classmates She stares at the floor and holds back some strong feeling that could be laughter or could be tears, either one. Or both. It comes to her that all of the people in this room are dear to her. As if they all just survived a plane crash together or something. All the drunks and the show-offs and the nice kids and the mean ones. All the people she used to know and all the ones she never knew at all. And herself, too. She includes herself and her stingy little soul. And oh, what a feeling.
In her newsletter sent out with the release of every new book, Ms. Berg says of The Last Time I Saw You I think high school is something we never quite escape, and I've always wondered why that is. This book let me explore that notion, and also taught me that there's always hope of a lot of things to come to you later in life, including love, either for yourself or for another, or both.
My initial reaction to this book was, "I liked it, I think." Now days later when these characters have had a chance to roam around my mind and I've had a chance to really think about how subtly Ms. Berg wrote the human vulnerabilities of this select group of reunion attendees, I believe this book is much deeper than it first appears. After attending my 35th reunion (40th and 45th have come and gone without me), I concluded that not much had changed. The popular kids were still popular. Those of us who weren't popular...well, you can guess. Having read The Last Time I Saw You, I might just check the "yes" box on the invitation to the 50th.
Random questions and thoughts - Having read several in the M.C. Beaton Agatha Raisin series, I couldn't help but think of dear Agatha as Dorothy Shauman Ledbetter Shauman planned her outfit, hair and makeup for the reunion.
- Just why was this 40th reunion referred to in many places as the "last reunion"?
- My friend Suzanne and I are going to see Elizabeth Berg at the Brookline Booksmith on Monday, April 26. Maybe I'll come back and post some more thoughts about this book after the event.
Rating: 3.5/5 (Fiction Scale)
Epigraphs High school, those are your prime suffering years. You don't get better suffering than that. -Uncle Frank (Steve Carell), Little Miss Sunshine
Every parting gives a foretaste of death as every reunion a hint of the resurrection. - Arthur Schopenhauer
Maybe one day I can have a reunion with myself. - Sebastian Bach
P.S. If you haven't done so, please click on the link above to Ms. Berg's website, then take some time to read her blog. It's fantastic!
