I mentioned earlier this month that I haven’t really been able to stick with Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I do enjoy the books while I'm reading them—they’re warm, charming, and pleasant, with a unique premise—but ultimately I grew tired of how numerous and forgettable they are. I used to enjoy this episodic interchangeability from time to time; Law & Order has the same quality. But lately I’ve been thinking, What’s the point of watching a show if I can’t even tell whether I’ve seen it or not until I’m 30 minutes into it? Why spend time reading a book I won’t even be able to describe two weeks later? There are so many other things clamoring for my attention, things that might make more of an impression. So I’ve quit watching L&O unless I’m honestly sitting around channel-surfing with nothing better to do, and I’ve skipped the last few N1LDA books, though I still felt conflicted enough about this to keep them sitting on my to-be-read list.
Finally, though, with the lamentable layoff of my carpool partner forcing me into solo commuting, I’ve hit upon the perfect solution: audiobooks. I’ve never really bought into audiobooks, even though I know a lot of people who like them. I’m just such a stubborn old-fashioned book reader that I can’t help but think that (at least for me) listening to a book is Not Quite the Same Thing as REALLY reading a book. But on my long, desperate commutes, when even NPR occasionally fails to entertain, I started thinking that although I would never use audiobooks to replace actual reading (i.e., I wouldn’t listen to a book I really wanted to read), it might be a perfect way to get through all those books I only sort of want to read. Those books tend to be light and diverting, a good way to pass the time, and if I space out and miss a few plot points or artistic turns of phase, oh well.
So I tried it, checking the CDs for The Miracle at Speedy Motors out of the library, and it was pretty good—very well narrated, by a South African actress who handles all the accents and pronunciations masterfully. I did find myself getting frustrated from time to time; the books move along in a placid, leisurely manner, and I tend to be a fast reader, prone to bouts of slight skimming when feeling impatient, but while listening I was forced to give every word equal time and weight, which occasionally made me want to shake Precious Ramotswe for being so slow on the uptake. But at other times I was excited to get back in the car and find out what happens next, and overall I was suitably distracted from the horrors of traffic. I’ve already got the next N1LDA audiobook on hold, and I’m trying to think about which other books I might like to listen to (although my library doesn’t appear to have a large selection).
Side note: I’ve been watching the N1LDA HBO show on DVD and it’s really great. It’s impossible for the show to capture McCall Smith’s sly, gentle narrative voice, which is half the fun of the books (for instance, certain phrases, like “tiny white van” and “traditionally built woman” are repeated throughout the books until they almost become in-jokes in themselves), but the characters are spot-on and the cintematography is gorgeous.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
NEVER LEARN ANYTHING FROM HISTORY
I have already professed my love for the online comics of Kate Beaton in detail. It pretty thoroughly sums up why, when I saw that Beaton had published a collection of her history comics in this book, I immediately had to buy a copy—and another for a friend. Sadly, I brought my own shiny copy with me to the doctor's waiting room during A’s hernia surgery, and there was an unfortunate accident in my purse with a water-filled snack baggie of carrots, and now the book looks like I’ve been reading it in the shower. Luckily, even if it will never close completely again, the pages remain perfectly legible, so I’m still able to enjoy the contents. Now I just need Beaton to publish a second book containing her more recent gems, like the Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell one here. Or better yet, can’t a major publisher sign her up and give her a ton of money and produce a huge, gorgeous compendium? Get on that, major publishers!
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
THE FOOD OF A YOUNGER LAND
The subtitle of this book is A Portrait of American Food—Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation’s Food Was Seasonal—rather clunky, but it does sum it up. During the 1930s, the WPA launched a project to document American regional food traditions, but Pearl Harbor put an end to its funding and the piles of unedited manuscripts were never transformed into the planned book, America Eats. Mark Kurlansky dug the materials out of the Library of Congress and has assembled them more or less in their raw state, with commentary. I loved the idea of exploring these quirky lost foods (fried beaver tail, anyone?), as well as the background from Kurlansky describing the WPA project, but found the actual reading a little dry. Because it was meant to be assimilated and polished into a series of longer essays, and perhaps also because the writers were not always very accomplished, the writing is uninspired, often no more than lists of ingredients or sketches of recipes, so it can be exhausting to read from cover to cover. It was fun to page through (I was happy to see both booyah and lutefisk representing Minnesota), but I ended up skimming most of it and feeling unsatisfied afterward. This is an interesting historical document, but not an especially compelling read.
Just now, in double-checking the correct spelling of Kurlansky’s name on Amazon, I came across a link to another book, America Eats! On the Road With the WPA, by Pat Willard, that sounds like what I wish I’d read: Willard details the WPA project and includes excerpts, but also takes her own roadtrip across the U.S. to investigate how many of these foods still exist today. Darn it, why didn’t I find that book first? I’ve put it on my to-be-read list, but will need a break before I tackle it, as The Food of a Younger Land may have burned me out on the subject for right now.
Just now, in double-checking the correct spelling of Kurlansky’s name on Amazon, I came across a link to another book, America Eats! On the Road With the WPA, by Pat Willard, that sounds like what I wish I’d read: Willard details the WPA project and includes excerpts, but also takes her own roadtrip across the U.S. to investigate how many of these foods still exist today. Darn it, why didn’t I find that book first? I’ve put it on my to-be-read list, but will need a break before I tackle it, as The Food of a Younger Land may have burned me out on the subject for right now.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
VERA
Although full of the trademark wit and perceptiveness Elizabeth von Arnim demonstrates in the lovable Christopher and Columbus and The Enchanted April, Vera is much darker—a tragedy, rather than a comedy, of manners. The setup is similar to Rebecca (although Vera was written first; did du Maurier read von Arnim?), with an innocent young wife marrying a wealthy, secretive husband and moving into the home haunted by the spirit of his dead first wife. But in Rebecca, nothing is as it first appears to be (i.e., the husband is good and the dead wife a bitch); in Vera, it’s just what you feared: a nightmarishly realistic portrait of an emotionally abusive relationship.
I can’t say I loved this book, but only because it angered me so much, because it was so masterful in its portrayal of banal selfishness and cruelty. von Arnim alternates points of view throughout the novel, so for better or worse, you’re right there in the characters’ heads. This means that the husband, Wemyss, isn’t some mustache-twirling caricature of unspeakable evil, but a monstrously childish, needy, narcissistic control freak whose actions seem perfectly reasonable according to his own twisted logic. He’s the kind of character that makes you wish you could jump into the novel and punch him in the face, but you know that even if you did, he would never understand why you were being so horrible to him—in other words, he’s exactly frustrating enough to have driven his first wife, Vera, to suicide. (The hints we get of Vera’s constrained married life are chilling; for instance, Wemyss claims that she never left the house because she had no interest in traveling, yet her bookshelves are pathetically full of Baedecker guidebooks. It makes you wonder how she lasted as long as she did.) And the new young wife, Lucy, seems maddeningly naive to a modern reader, yet von Arnim gains your sympathy for her early in the book (after the death of her father, Lucy poignantly reflects, “Life—how terrible it was, and how unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting.”) and keeps you with her every step of the way, through her struggles and rationalizations, as she gradually realizes Wemyss’ true nature yet still, pathetically, keeps trying to find ways to make the relationship work.
In a way, this is a 1920s version of a Lifetime movie, with the Charming (a Little Too Charming) Meet-Cute, the Escalating Warning Signs everyone but the ingenue can see, and the Protective Motherly Figure—in this case, Lucy’s spinster aunt, Miss Entwhistle—whose instincts keep telling her This Man is No Good, who is ultimately proven right, and who must finally save the ingenue when the Evil Abuser reveals his Evil Ways. Yet von Arnim boldly explored these tropes before they were tropes, and (spoiler!) in her version there’s no climactic rescue, no spunky heroine finding her inner strength, no punishment for the villain, no happy ending—just everyone soldiering on along the same disastrous course. In my view, this is a classic feminist horror story on par with The Handmaid’s Tale (less extreme, sure, but far more likely to actually happen to you or someone you know). I’m not sure I’d want to read it again, but it demonstrates that von Arnim’s talent ranged far beyond the light, sparkling stories I love her for.
I can’t say I loved this book, but only because it angered me so much, because it was so masterful in its portrayal of banal selfishness and cruelty. von Arnim alternates points of view throughout the novel, so for better or worse, you’re right there in the characters’ heads. This means that the husband, Wemyss, isn’t some mustache-twirling caricature of unspeakable evil, but a monstrously childish, needy, narcissistic control freak whose actions seem perfectly reasonable according to his own twisted logic. He’s the kind of character that makes you wish you could jump into the novel and punch him in the face, but you know that even if you did, he would never understand why you were being so horrible to him—in other words, he’s exactly frustrating enough to have driven his first wife, Vera, to suicide. (The hints we get of Vera’s constrained married life are chilling; for instance, Wemyss claims that she never left the house because she had no interest in traveling, yet her bookshelves are pathetically full of Baedecker guidebooks. It makes you wonder how she lasted as long as she did.) And the new young wife, Lucy, seems maddeningly naive to a modern reader, yet von Arnim gains your sympathy for her early in the book (after the death of her father, Lucy poignantly reflects, “Life—how terrible it was, and how unsuspected. One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting.”) and keeps you with her every step of the way, through her struggles and rationalizations, as she gradually realizes Wemyss’ true nature yet still, pathetically, keeps trying to find ways to make the relationship work.
In a way, this is a 1920s version of a Lifetime movie, with the Charming (a Little Too Charming) Meet-Cute, the Escalating Warning Signs everyone but the ingenue can see, and the Protective Motherly Figure—in this case, Lucy’s spinster aunt, Miss Entwhistle—whose instincts keep telling her This Man is No Good, who is ultimately proven right, and who must finally save the ingenue when the Evil Abuser reveals his Evil Ways. Yet von Arnim boldly explored these tropes before they were tropes, and (spoiler!) in her version there’s no climactic rescue, no spunky heroine finding her inner strength, no punishment for the villain, no happy ending—just everyone soldiering on along the same disastrous course. In my view, this is a classic feminist horror story on par with The Handmaid’s Tale (less extreme, sure, but far more likely to actually happen to you or someone you know). I’m not sure I’d want to read it again, but it demonstrates that von Arnim’s talent ranged far beyond the light, sparkling stories I love her for.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
BETSY AND JOE
(By Maud Hart Lovelace; see here, here, and here for previous installments in the series.) Against the usual backdrop of wholesome high-school fun (picnics, auto rides, football games, dances, movies at the Majestic, ice cream at Heinz’s, singing around the piano), abundant food porn (“cold ham and chicken, potato salad, green corn on the cob, baking powder biscuits, and plum cake,” a midnight snack of “milk, cold sausages, and part of a chocolate cake,” Christmas dinner with “four kinds of dessert—caramel ice cream, mince pie, fruit cake, and plum pudding,” a party spread of “ice cream and cake and cookies and jelly roll and soda pop and rye bread and egg salad and sausage and cheese,” a breakfast—breakfast!—of “coffee cake and a plateful of cookies, thickly sliced homemade bread, and a bowl of milk”), and baffling old-timey fashions (“serge bathing suits, trimmed with white braid around collars, sleeves, and skirts, long black stockings, laced bathing shoes, bandanas on their heads,” “a tweed suit with a brown velvet collar and a brown tricorn Gage hat,” “the pink chambray dress which was made in princesse style, long and close-fitting, with white rickrack braid,” a coveted opera cape of “pale blue broadcloth lined with white satin, trimmed with silk braid and gold and blue buttons,” “coquettish little mobcaps, trimmed with lace, flowers, or bows of ribbon,” “a pale blue picture hat with the sweeping pale blue plume”—and what the heck is a “cravenette”? I’m not even going to get into the mystifying hairstyles), change and adulthood loom large during Betsy’s senior year (Class of 1910, woot!). I think that’s why I never liked this book as much as the previous three when I was younger; I wanted to read about kids, not grown-ups, and wanted everything to stay the same, even though of course that wouldn’t make for much of a plot. Among the major developments: Betsy’s older sister, Julia, is studying opera in Europe; several members of the Crowd go off to college; Betsy finally wins that darn essay contest; and shy, uninterested-in-boys Tacy is wooed by 27-year-old salesman Mr. Kerr (a bit creepy when you remember she’s only 17, but things were different back then, and Kerr is a good guy; the plotline seems much sweeter to me now than it did when I was a preteen and 27 seemed incredibly old).
As the title suggests, the main event here is that Betsy is finally dating Joe Willard, who after three years of holding himself aloof from a normal social life has become class president, a star reporter for the town paper, and a fixture at the Ray house. At the same time, however, Tony Markham, Betsy’s freshman-year crush before they settled into a sibling-like friendship, has suddenly developed romantic feelings, and because Tony is always just on the verge of getting into wild and dangerous pursuits (he’s now hopping freight trains up to Minneapolis and threatening to drop out of school), Betsy leads him on to some extent, for fear of alienating him. Juggling two beaus is fun for a while, but then it leads to hurt feelings all around (Joe briefly dates the Crowd’s most alluring girl, Irma; Tony runs away to sing on Broadway; and Betsy is generally miserable) before Betsy and Joe eventually reconcile and end the book making plans for the future.
I continue to like Joe much more than I did as a kid, when fun Tony seemed like the more dashing option. Having mostly shed his Mr. Darcyesque pride from the earlier books, which was sexy while it lasted but would make for a frustrating boyfriend, Joe comes off as smart, funny, noble, and respectful of Betsy’s intellect, if a tad overidealized (it’s a mutual lovefest between Joe and Mr. Ray, for instance). Naturally, I’m going to be sympathetic to any relationship built on a love of books, so for me the moment where Betsy and Joe accidentally give each other the same Christmas present, a copy of As You Like It (apparently, back then, “It was proper for a boy to give a girl only books, flowers, or candy”), was perhaps the most romantic moment, even above the scene where Joe declares that he likes Betsy’s hair in its naturally straight style (significant because Betsy has spent the last four years obsessing over curling it every night; Betsy thinks, “If he had looked through all the poetry books in the world he couldn’t have found a better compliment to pay her”). Of course, it was also hard to suppress an “Awwwww” after reading this:
This was the first of the books that I’d read in the awesome new editions, which include biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace specific to each book. The most interesting thing that I learned about Betsy and Joe was that “Almost every character in the high school books, even the most minor, can be matched to an actual person living in Mankato in the early years of the twentieth century”—with one notable exception: Joe. Although Joe is based on Maud’s husband, Delos Lovelace, (a) Delos was two years younger than Maud, and (b) the couple didn’t meet until after high school, so everything about their academic rivalry and halting courtship is fictionalized (in reality, Maud’s opponents in the essay contents were other girls). However, Joe’s life and character are still based entirely on Delos’ background, so you can read the books as a romanticized if-only-we’d-met-earlier version of their relationship.
As the title suggests, the main event here is that Betsy is finally dating Joe Willard, who after three years of holding himself aloof from a normal social life has become class president, a star reporter for the town paper, and a fixture at the Ray house. At the same time, however, Tony Markham, Betsy’s freshman-year crush before they settled into a sibling-like friendship, has suddenly developed romantic feelings, and because Tony is always just on the verge of getting into wild and dangerous pursuits (he’s now hopping freight trains up to Minneapolis and threatening to drop out of school), Betsy leads him on to some extent, for fear of alienating him. Juggling two beaus is fun for a while, but then it leads to hurt feelings all around (Joe briefly dates the Crowd’s most alluring girl, Irma; Tony runs away to sing on Broadway; and Betsy is generally miserable) before Betsy and Joe eventually reconcile and end the book making plans for the future.
I continue to like Joe much more than I did as a kid, when fun Tony seemed like the more dashing option. Having mostly shed his Mr. Darcyesque pride from the earlier books, which was sexy while it lasted but would make for a frustrating boyfriend, Joe comes off as smart, funny, noble, and respectful of Betsy’s intellect, if a tad overidealized (it’s a mutual lovefest between Joe and Mr. Ray, for instance). Naturally, I’m going to be sympathetic to any relationship built on a love of books, so for me the moment where Betsy and Joe accidentally give each other the same Christmas present, a copy of As You Like It (apparently, back then, “It was proper for a boy to give a girl only books, flowers, or candy”), was perhaps the most romantic moment, even above the scene where Joe declares that he likes Betsy’s hair in its naturally straight style (significant because Betsy has spent the last four years obsessing over curling it every night; Betsy thinks, “If he had looked through all the poetry books in the world he couldn’t have found a better compliment to pay her”). Of course, it was also hard to suppress an “Awwwww” after reading this:
Then he kissed her. Betsy didn’t believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn’t mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.
This was the first of the books that I’d read in the awesome new editions, which include biographical information about Maud Hart Lovelace specific to each book. The most interesting thing that I learned about Betsy and Joe was that “Almost every character in the high school books, even the most minor, can be matched to an actual person living in Mankato in the early years of the twentieth century”—with one notable exception: Joe. Although Joe is based on Maud’s husband, Delos Lovelace, (a) Delos was two years younger than Maud, and (b) the couple didn’t meet until after high school, so everything about their academic rivalry and halting courtship is fictionalized (in reality, Maud’s opponents in the essay contents were other girls). However, Joe’s life and character are still based entirely on Delos’ background, so you can read the books as a romanticized if-only-we’d-met-earlier version of their relationship.
Monday, November 9, 2009
THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE
If there’s anything I love more than cozy postwar British country-house mysteries, it’s books about brave and precocious young girls, so as soon as I heard about this book by Alan Bradley (via a glowing review in Entertainment Weekly), I put it on hold at the library. Maybe I let my expectations get a leeetle too overblown—although how could I not, when Publishers Weekly compared it to Harriet the Spy?—but once I finally got my hands on the book, it took me a while to warm up to it. I like my literary kids preternaturally mature, eccentric, and brilliant, but even I found it hard to buy Flavia de Luce, budding chemist and detective, as an actual 11-year old; her disconcerting lack of affect made the book feel flat to me. (Perhaps having read Ellen Klages set my bar too high—see The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace for fully realized, spunky postwar young girls who have rich intellectual lives but still believably age-appropriate emotions.) But eventually, perhaps because I let go of expectations of realism, I came around. It may not have rocked my world (and Flavia can’t hold a candle to Harriet, so let’s just nip that comparison in the bud right here), but ultimately this was a fun, absorbing read and I’m looking forward to the sequels. Bradley has already been contracted for five more Flavia books, and although in the past I’ve demonstrated a tendency to fall away from contemporary series that showed promise but ended up generating too many similar books too fast (Thursday Next and the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I’m looking at you), I think this is one I can stick with.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
JULIA CHILD
After enjoying the blog, the book, and finally the movie of Julie & Julia, seeing her kitchen at the Smithsonian, catching a French Chef marathon on PBS and checking the DVDs out of the library, and then happening to learn that she grew up just a few blocks away from my apartment (without knowing it, I’d biked past both her childhood homes and the Montessori school she attended—which remains a Montessori school today—at least once a week for the past five years), I was thoroughly in love with Julia Child and ready to learn a little more about her. The definitive biography is Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch, but it weighs in at 569 pages and I didn’t know if my Julia crush was just a momentary fancy or an abiding devotion, so I decided to start with this slender Penguin Lives volume (by Laura Shapiro, the author of Perfection Salad, which I read a few years ago). It turned out to be a great biography, zipping right along with just the right balance of facts and analysis. It gave a good overview of all the major elements of Child’s life, so it will satisfy anyone who has a casual curiosity about her. But it also added so many intriguing details and quotes (the description of how The French Chef was filmed was full of awesome tidbits, including the fact that Paul was backstage washing dishes the entire time) and raised so many interesting issues (not shying away from her flaws, including an evenhanded look at whether she was homophobic) that it made me decide I still want to read the Fitch biography someday, just because I want more Julia. Highly recommended.
(P.S.: This was the second volume of the Penguin Lives series I’d read, after Jane Smiley’s bio of Dickens a couple of years ago, and I was impressed with both. It kind of makes me want to read the whole series, because I like the way authors are matched up with subjects in surprising yet sensible ways—Carol Shields on Jane Austen, Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis—and I feel like the books give me just the right amount of information; they’re not as slight as Biography episodes, but they don’t start off, as so many massive tomes do, by detailing the subject’s ancestors for generations back.)
(P.S.: This was the second volume of the Penguin Lives series I’d read, after Jane Smiley’s bio of Dickens a couple of years ago, and I was impressed with both. It kind of makes me want to read the whole series, because I like the way authors are matched up with subjects in surprising yet sensible ways—Carol Shields on Jane Austen, Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis—and I feel like the books give me just the right amount of information; they’re not as slight as Biography episodes, but they don’t start off, as so many massive tomes do, by detailing the subject’s ancestors for generations back.)
Saturday, November 7, 2009
THE MAGICIANS
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman: This isn’t quite a lovable book, but I really liked it, had a hard time putting it down, was still thinking about it days after finishing it, and look forward to reading it again, which for me is a ringing endorsement.
While the critical reaction to The Magicians was mainly positive, a few reviews I read accused it of being derivative. This is inaccurate and, I think, unfair. The book is knowingly referential and satirical, using the classic tropes of fantasy stories in a highly original way to explore what it might be like to actually experience them (verdict: less fun and scarier than you might expect). In a way, it’s like Northanger Abbey, with Narnia instead of Gothic novels. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessed with a series of World War II-era British children's books about a set of young brothers and sisters who find their way into a magical land called Fillory and have adventures there. Quentin’s fascination with Fillory continually motivates his actions throughout the book, for better or worse.
But it’s not just Narnia being referenced here. The Magicians gained a lot of buzz when it was published because of its familiar setup: An ordinary boy suddenly learns that he’s a magician and is whisked away to attend magic school. The similarity ends there, however; Brakebills is a college, not a secondary school, and Quentin is no world-saving hero but rather a somewhat self-centered, morally ambivalent, high-achieving student who, when offered admission to Brakebills, cynically (and delightfully realistically) wonders if it’s his best option:
There are nice little jokes about quidditch and hobbits throughout, but this is definitely a book for world-weary adults, not young Harry Potter fans. An early review I read compared it to The Secret History (thus sealing my decision to read it, because The Secret History was one of my favorite books at a formative age), and that’s what I was most strongly reminded of. (Runner-up: It also reminded me slightly of Pamela Dean’s (coincidentally similarly titled) The Secret Country trilogy, in which a group of children discover that the imaginary land they created really exists, but is more real and dangerous than they ever intended.) At Brakebills, Quentin falls in with a clique of brilliant, charismatic, debauched students who ultimately discover that Fillory is a real world, gain the power to travel there, and must then deal with the horrifying consequences of their actions. While the characters aren’t as fully realized as in The Secret History (one of my favorite thing about that book is how deftly Donna Tartt makes you feel first fascination, then affection, then revulsion, all for the same set of people), the tone is similar. Both are books that probably work better on an intellectual level than an emotional one. For instance, Quentin isn’t always likable (in fact, I occasionally wanted to punch him), but he doesn’t really need to be, since the story follows the shattering of his illusions and the ramifications of his own flawed decisions.
There aren’t a lot of warm fuzzies in The Magicians, but it’s not all darkness by any means; wry humor abounds. And Grossman’s world-building doesn’t rely entirely on others’ work; there are plenty of genuinely cool magical touches. As a bookworm, I loved his description of the Brakebills library:
I can see why a few reviewers might complain that The Magicians left them cold, but for me, the book was so smart and intriguing, and such a clever commentary on the fantasy genre (I’m always a sucker for that intertextuality) that it was a slam dunk. I’ve added Grossman’s previous book, Codex (which sounds like a wacky version of Possession, involving scholars studying a newly discovered manuscript, but also somehow involving online role-playing games) to my to-be-read list, so we’ll see how that stacks up.
While the critical reaction to The Magicians was mainly positive, a few reviews I read accused it of being derivative. This is inaccurate and, I think, unfair. The book is knowingly referential and satirical, using the classic tropes of fantasy stories in a highly original way to explore what it might be like to actually experience them (verdict: less fun and scarier than you might expect). In a way, it’s like Northanger Abbey, with Narnia instead of Gothic novels. The main character, Quentin Coldwater, is obsessed with a series of World War II-era British children's books about a set of young brothers and sisters who find their way into a magical land called Fillory and have adventures there. Quentin’s fascination with Fillory continually motivates his actions throughout the book, for better or worse.
But it’s not just Narnia being referenced here. The Magicians gained a lot of buzz when it was published because of its familiar setup: An ordinary boy suddenly learns that he’s a magician and is whisked away to attend magic school. The similarity ends there, however; Brakebills is a college, not a secondary school, and Quentin is no world-saving hero but rather a somewhat self-centered, morally ambivalent, high-achieving student who, when offered admission to Brakebills, cynically (and delightfully realistically) wonders if it’s his best option:
Maybe he should ask to see a brochure….how much did he know about this place? Suppose it really was a school for magic. Was it any good? What if he’d stumbled into some third-tier magic college by accident? He had to think practically. He didn’t want to be committing himself to some community college of sorcery when he could have Magic Harvard or whatever.
There are nice little jokes about quidditch and hobbits throughout, but this is definitely a book for world-weary adults, not young Harry Potter fans. An early review I read compared it to The Secret History (thus sealing my decision to read it, because The Secret History was one of my favorite books at a formative age), and that’s what I was most strongly reminded of. (Runner-up: It also reminded me slightly of Pamela Dean’s (coincidentally similarly titled) The Secret Country trilogy, in which a group of children discover that the imaginary land they created really exists, but is more real and dangerous than they ever intended.) At Brakebills, Quentin falls in with a clique of brilliant, charismatic, debauched students who ultimately discover that Fillory is a real world, gain the power to travel there, and must then deal with the horrifying consequences of their actions. While the characters aren’t as fully realized as in The Secret History (one of my favorite thing about that book is how deftly Donna Tartt makes you feel first fascination, then affection, then revulsion, all for the same set of people), the tone is similar. Both are books that probably work better on an intellectual level than an emotional one. For instance, Quentin isn’t always likable (in fact, I occasionally wanted to punch him), but he doesn’t really need to be, since the story follows the shattering of his illusions and the ramifications of his own flawed decisions.
There aren’t a lot of warm fuzzies in The Magicians, but it’s not all darkness by any means; wry humor abounds. And Grossman’s world-building doesn’t rely entirely on others’ work; there are plenty of genuinely cool magical touches. As a bookworm, I loved his description of the Brakebills library:
Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility.
To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which the books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own power in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was said to have been quite dramatic. A painting of the scene survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear on the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call numbers, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly deposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300–1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub-sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribable papery susurrus.
I can see why a few reviewers might complain that The Magicians left them cold, but for me, the book was so smart and intriguing, and such a clever commentary on the fantasy genre (I’m always a sucker for that intertextuality) that it was a slam dunk. I’ve added Grossman’s previous book, Codex (which sounds like a wacky version of Possession, involving scholars studying a newly discovered manuscript, but also somehow involving online role-playing games) to my to-be-read list, so we’ll see how that stacks up.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
FINN
A follow-up to my rereading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn last year, this novel by Jon Clinch is a dark, masterful take on the story from Huck’s father’s point of view. As in Twain, Finn is first-nameless, an outsider, a racist, and a terrifyingly brutal drunk, which makes being inside his head, as you are for much of the novel, a disturbing experience. The big twist here is that in Clinch’s version, *SPOILER BUT OTHERWISE I REALLY CAN’T EXPLAIN WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO INTERESTING* Huck’s mother is black, a runaway slave whom Finn basically kidnaps, abuses, and then eventually murders after she tries to seek a better life for their light-skinned son by surrendering him to the Widow Douglas and passing him off as a white orphan. Finn clearly cares for her and their son (at least to some extent, in his own manner, as much as he’s capable of it) but repeatedly torments, fails, and betrays them, in the end robbing them both of their very identities. The book makes you simultaneously sympathize with him and hate yourself for doing so, rendering his violent end (in that house floating down the river that Twain so eerily evokes, where Huck and Jim will stumble across his body) both tragic and victorious. Although—as Clinch himself acknowledges—there’s no evidence Twain ever intended Huck to be anything other than white, reimagining Huck as mixed-race does fit well into the world of the novel, helping to explain Huck’s thorough knowledge of folk wisdom and his marginalization (in Twain, all the mothers in town warn their sons to stay away from him). This wasn’t an easy read, and I’m not sure I would want to read it again, but it was a powerful and memorable exploration of some of the darker themes and undertones of Huckleberry Finn.
One quibble: Apparently Clinch irrationally hates em dashes, because they don’t appear anywhere in the book, even when they’re desperately needed—for example, to convey an interrupted sentence in dialogue, such as:
“I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But—”
Instead, in Finn, we get periods:
“I thought you said.”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But.”
This is both disconcertingly choppy and incredibly confusing, and it left me just plain annoyed. I understand disliking certain punctuation marks because you feel they’re ugly or overused; I tend to be peeved by lazy use of ellipses. But they exist for a reason. In the case of ellipses, no other punctuation mark can really convey that sense of a sentence gradually trailing off, and in the case of em dashes, no other punctuation mark can convey sudden interruption—and certainly not a period, which conveys an intentional ending. IT’S JUST WRONG. It gets in the way. It doesn’t express what you want to express. Who are you to think you know better than the accumulated tradition of grammatical rules and commonly accepted usage? This is why I’m not a fiction editor, because there are certain “artistic” authorial whims I refuse to put up with when they go against good sense.
One quibble: Apparently Clinch irrationally hates em dashes, because they don’t appear anywhere in the book, even when they’re desperately needed—for example, to convey an interrupted sentence in dialogue, such as:
“I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But—”
Instead, in Finn, we get periods:
“I thought you said.”
“Never mind what I said.”
“But.”
This is both disconcertingly choppy and incredibly confusing, and it left me just plain annoyed. I understand disliking certain punctuation marks because you feel they’re ugly or overused; I tend to be peeved by lazy use of ellipses. But they exist for a reason. In the case of ellipses, no other punctuation mark can really convey that sense of a sentence gradually trailing off, and in the case of em dashes, no other punctuation mark can convey sudden interruption—and certainly not a period, which conveys an intentional ending. IT’S JUST WRONG. It gets in the way. It doesn’t express what you want to express. Who are you to think you know better than the accumulated tradition of grammatical rules and commonly accepted usage? This is why I’m not a fiction editor, because there are certain “artistic” authorial whims I refuse to put up with when they go against good sense.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
SHELF DISCOVERY
Shelf Discovery: Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading—A Reading Memoir, by Lizzie Skurnick: I adored the now sadly defunct (I think?) Fine Lines series at Jezebel, which revisited beloved YA novels of my generation (Island of the Blue Dolphins! Jacob Have I Loved!). I was happy to see that someone else had read the All-of-a-Kind Family books, one of my favorite childhood series: “You should also go to Coney Island circa 1903, the better to plunge into the Atlantic wearing 8 petticoats, holding hands with your sisters, stopping only to get lost and be taken in by an Irish policeman ( ‘Air ye now! Well, ye come along with me...’) who buys you a peanut-candy bar and a lollipop and an ice-cream and it is magically not creepy at all.” And the writeup of Summer of Fear cracked me up especially; check it out for the Lois Duncan tropes alone (“The Malevolent Double,” “Perky heroine, just getting breasts, hotter boyfriend than she deserves”) if you read any of those books when you were a kid. (My college friend M and I rediscovered Summer of Fear in a used bookstore circa 1998, bought it, and passed it back and forth between us for weeks, each marking it up with mocking commentary, MST3K-style. Good times.)
So I was thrilled when I learned there would be a book based on the feature. The book is pretty much like the blog (which is to say, brilliant—both entertaining and insightful), and the only time I was disappointed in it was when I wanted it to be more like the blog (some of the pieces were excluded or shortened, and some new pieces were added). Needless to say, I now have a list as long as my arm of young-adult books I want to read or reread.
I’m deficient in Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and some of the other YA classics because I didn’t really go for hard-hitting realism as a kid—I mostly devoured books about animals (The Incredible Journey, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, Paddington); the intersection of real and fantasy worlds (Oz, Narnia, Roald Dahl, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L’Engle, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Freaky Friday), Olden Times, preferably involving hardship (Little House, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, All-of-a-Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Betsy-Tacy, Island of the Blue Dolphins); and ordinary, mostly wholesome, adventurous, precocious girls (Ramona Quimby, Anastasia Krupnik, Harriet the Spy, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Pippi Longstocking). I was an advanced reader, but not an emotionally mature one, so I had little interest in reading about dating, drugs, alcohol, or other grown-up things, and by the time I was finally interested I was mainly reading adult books. I may have skipped the Sweet Valley High stage entirely (although I ardently loved the Babysitters Club for a few years), and I know I never had a V.C. Andrews phase. So about half the essays in Shelf Discovery had me nodding in agreement and recognition, while the others had me frowning in puzzlement (Did I read that one? Does it sound vaguely familiar?) or thinking, “Wow, this sounds awesome! How did I miss it?” (except for the V.C. Andrews ones, which had me thinking, “Ew! I would have hated this then and I would hate it now”).
My friend A was just telling me that she and her coworkers have started a book club where they read only YA books (perfect for book clubs, because they’re short, nostalgic, fun, and generally packed with issues) , which had me seething with jealousy. I want a YA book club! Anyone want to start one with me? At least maybe I’ll make reading or revisiting classic YA books a regular blog feature next year...er, along with the 200 or so other books I really want to read. Sometimes the amount there is to be read excites me, but often it just thoroughly oppresses me.
I suppose one solution is just to stop reading books about books, which are always guaranteed to make me want to read more books.
So I was thrilled when I learned there would be a book based on the feature. The book is pretty much like the blog (which is to say, brilliant—both entertaining and insightful), and the only time I was disappointed in it was when I wanted it to be more like the blog (some of the pieces were excluded or shortened, and some new pieces were added). Needless to say, I now have a list as long as my arm of young-adult books I want to read or reread.
I’m deficient in Judy Blume, Cynthia Voigt, and some of the other YA classics because I didn’t really go for hard-hitting realism as a kid—I mostly devoured books about animals (The Incredible Journey, Misty of Chincoteague, Black Beauty, Paddington); the intersection of real and fantasy worlds (Oz, Narnia, Roald Dahl, Susan Cooper, Madeleine L’Engle, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Freaky Friday), Olden Times, preferably involving hardship (Little House, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess, All-of-a-Kind Family, Anne of Green Gables, Betsy-Tacy, Island of the Blue Dolphins); and ordinary, mostly wholesome, adventurous, precocious girls (Ramona Quimby, Anastasia Krupnik, Harriet the Spy, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Pippi Longstocking). I was an advanced reader, but not an emotionally mature one, so I had little interest in reading about dating, drugs, alcohol, or other grown-up things, and by the time I was finally interested I was mainly reading adult books. I may have skipped the Sweet Valley High stage entirely (although I ardently loved the Babysitters Club for a few years), and I know I never had a V.C. Andrews phase. So about half the essays in Shelf Discovery had me nodding in agreement and recognition, while the others had me frowning in puzzlement (Did I read that one? Does it sound vaguely familiar?) or thinking, “Wow, this sounds awesome! How did I miss it?” (except for the V.C. Andrews ones, which had me thinking, “Ew! I would have hated this then and I would hate it now”).
My friend A was just telling me that she and her coworkers have started a book club where they read only YA books (perfect for book clubs, because they’re short, nostalgic, fun, and generally packed with issues) , which had me seething with jealousy. I want a YA book club! Anyone want to start one with me? At least maybe I’ll make reading or revisiting classic YA books a regular blog feature next year...er, along with the 200 or so other books I really want to read. Sometimes the amount there is to be read excites me, but often it just thoroughly oppresses me.
I suppose one solution is just to stop reading books about books, which are always guaranteed to make me want to read more books.
Monday, November 2, 2009
BEYOND HEAVING BOSOMS
Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. Aside from a few late-night group giggling sessions over the dirty parts of someone’s mom’s old collection of bodice-rippers when I was a teenager, I’ve never read anything shelved in the Romance section. Furthermore, I’ll admit I’ve tended to look down on the genre. But Wendell and Tan go a long way toward earning it my tolerance, if not my grudging respect. Even if you’re not a romance fan, their awesomely named website, Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, is worth checking out for its mixture of humor (I recommend the Cover Snark category, as well as many of the book reviews with D and F grades, in particular the review of The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable Girl) and thoughtful writing on plagiarism (Wendell and Tan were the ones who broke the Cassie Edwards story, which you may have read about) and the joys and frustrations of being a reader (for instance, this piece). Similarly, their book is a hilarious celebration of romance-novel tropes (for instance, The Heroic Wang of Mighty Lovin’ and the Magic Hoo Hoo) as well as a levelheaded defense of the genre and a critical examination of its development, trends, challenges, and shortcomings (including the themes of rape, racism, and homosexuality). Even if, as I was, you’re reading mostly for the humor, it’s their affection for the genre that places this several cuts above all the “Let’s make fun of X” (where X may be Lifetime movies, Babysitters Club books, ugly cakes, or one’s own childhood writings) phenomena spawned by the Internet. In other words, they snark because they love. As Wendell and Tan put it:
Romance novels, we thought, deserved the harsh eye simply because we loved them as much as we loved the literary canon at which we were encouraged to level the power of our sexy, sexy literary analysis abilities…And when a genre is as crapped upon and denigrated as much as romance is, the only people we think are qualified to criticize it are those who read it and love it. So we brought in the noise, the funk, the snark, and the “Oh, hell, no.”I didn’t feel inspired to check out any romance novels after reading this, but I was consistently amused by the writers’ sharp wit, and at least I’ll stop rolling my eyes at readers of romance novels from now on.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES
Background: Published in 1963
This is the one where: Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett break up, for reals!
The action takes place at: Totleigh Towers
Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett yet again, “one of those soppy girls, riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds the view that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case”
But she’s really in love with:
Other characters include:
Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: “blue alpine hat with the pink feather in it…tilted just that merest shade over the left eyebrow which makes all the difference”
First paragraph: “I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don’t suppose I have ever come much closer to saying ‘Tra-la-la’ as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning. God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)”
Bertie fashion moment: “One was either soaring like an eagle on to the tops of chests or whizzing down behind sofas like a diving duck, and apart from the hustle and bustle of it all that sort of thing wounds the spirit and does no good to the trouser crease.”
Slang I’d like to start using: “I had become as hungry as dammit.”
Bertie gets no respect:
Bertie: “You remember that day I lunched at the Ritz?”
Jeeves: “Yes, sir. You were wearing an Alpine hat.”
Bertie: “There is no need to dwell on the Alpine hat, Jeeves.”
Jeeves: “No, sir.”
Bertie: “If you really want to know, several fellows at the Drones asked me where I had got it.”
Jeeves: “No doubt with a view to avoiding your hatter, sir.”
Best bit of description: “My eyebrows rose till they nearly disarranged my front hair.”
Best bit of dialogue: “‘I hate you, I hate you!’ cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.”
My review: Five stars. It’s a straight-up sequel to my very favorite book in the series, The Code of the Woosters, featuring the same location and most of the same characters (some of the best in the Bertieverse). This allows Wodehouse to build the humor on already-established concepts (Bertie’s aversion to Madeline, Bassett and Spode’s aversion to Bertie, Stiffy’s troublemaking, the dog Bartholomew’s viciousness), but the story doesn’t feel like a retread, maybe because the characters actually do change in the end (Gussie finally gets a backbone and dumps Madeline, Spode declares his longtime love for Madeline).
Had I read it before? Yes; my parents own it, and my father read it aloud to me when I was a kid. I haven’t read it as many times as The Code of the Woosters, but I remembered the alpine hat and the black amber statuette. I think I appreciate the story more now that I’ve read the series in order; after following Gussie and Madeline’s on-again, off-again relationship through three previous books, it’s a genuine surprise when they actually do end it for good.
Next up: Jeeves and the Tie That Binds
This is the one where: Gussie Fink-Nottle and Madeline Bassett break up, for reals!
The action takes place at: Totleigh Towers
Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Madeline Bassett yet again, “one of those soppy girls, riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds the view that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case”
But she’s really in love with:
- Originally, newt-lover Gussie Fink-Nottle (“he was looking so like a halibut that if he hadn’t been wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, a thing halibuts seldom do, I might have supposed myself to be gazing at something AWOL from a fishmonger’s slab”)
- But ultimately, Roderick Spode, Lord Sidcup, former leader of the Black Shorts and sometime seller of women’s undergarments (“He’s about eight feet high and has the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces”)
Other characters include:
- Sir Watkyn “Pop” Bassett, Madeline’s father (“He was a small man…you got the impression, seeing him, that when they were making magistrates there wasn’t enough material left over when they came to him”)
- Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng, Madeline’s cousin, “a cross between a ticking bomb and a poltergeist…in short, about as loony a young shrimp as ever wore a windswept hairdo”
- The Rev. H.P. “Stinker” Pinker, Stiffy’s fiancé, the rugby-playing curate (“Even as a boy, I imagine, he must have burst seams and broken try-your-weight machines”)
- The dog Bartholomew, Stiffy’s pet (“Aberdeen terriers, possibly owing to their heavy eyebrows, always seem to look at you as if they were in the pulpit of the church of some particularly strict Scottish sect and you were a parishioner of dubious reputation sitting in the front row of the stalls”)
- Emerald Stoker (younger sister of Pauline Stoker from Thank You, Jeeves), an art student who loses her allowance gambling, works as the cook at Totleigh Towers, and ultimately elopes with Gussie, “just ordinary, no different from a million other girls, except perhaps for a touch of the Pekingese about the nose and eyes and more freckles than you usually see”
- Major Plank, an explorer who sold Bassett the amber statuette and ends up giving Pinker the vicarage of Hockley-cum-Meston because the village rugby team needs a new prop forward (“an elderly gentleman with a square face, much tanned, as if he had been sitting in the sun quite a lot without his parasol…He was looking at me with a cold, glassy stare, as no doubt he had looked at the late lions, leopards, and gnus whose remains were to be viewed on the walls of the outer hall”)
- Aunt Dahlia, who sadly appears in the story only by telephone (“The aged relative has a strong personality and finds no difficulty, when displeased, in reducing the object of her displeasure to a spot of grease in a matter of minutes. I am told that sportsmen whom in her hunting days she had occasion to rebuke for riding over hounds were never the same again and for months would go about in a sort of stupor, starting at sudden noises”)
Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: “blue alpine hat with the pink feather in it…tilted just that merest shade over the left eyebrow which makes all the difference”
First paragraph: “I marmaladed a slice of toast with something of a flourish, and I don’t suppose I have ever come much closer to saying ‘Tra-la-la’ as I did the lathering, for I was feeling in mid-season form this morning. God, as I once heard Jeeves put it, was in His heaven and all right with the world. (He added, I remember, some guff about larks and snails, but that is a side issue and need not detain us.)”
Bertie fashion moment: “One was either soaring like an eagle on to the tops of chests or whizzing down behind sofas like a diving duck, and apart from the hustle and bustle of it all that sort of thing wounds the spirit and does no good to the trouser crease.”
Slang I’d like to start using: “I had become as hungry as dammit.”
Bertie gets no respect:
- “My aunt Agatha, the one who eats broken bottles and turns into a werewolf at the time of the full moon, generally refers to Jeeves as my keeper.”
- “Myself, I’ve never found a host and hostess who could stick my presence for more than about a week. Indeed, long before that as a general rule the conversation at the dinner table is apt to turn on the subject of how good the train service to London is, those present obviously hoping wistfully that Bertram will avail himself of it. Not to mention the timetable left in your room with a large cross against the two thirty-five and the legend, ‘Excellent train. Highly recommended.’”
- “I don’t suppose he has ever loved anything in his life except a dry martini.”—Spode
Bertie: “You remember that day I lunched at the Ritz?”
Jeeves: “Yes, sir. You were wearing an Alpine hat.”
Bertie: “There is no need to dwell on the Alpine hat, Jeeves.”
Jeeves: “No, sir.”
Bertie: “If you really want to know, several fellows at the Drones asked me where I had got it.”
Jeeves: “No doubt with a view to avoiding your hatter, sir.”
Best bit of description: “My eyebrows rose till they nearly disarranged my front hair.”
Best bit of dialogue: “‘I hate you, I hate you!’ cried Madeline, a thing I didn’t know anyone ever said except in the second act of a musical comedy.”
My review: Five stars. It’s a straight-up sequel to my very favorite book in the series, The Code of the Woosters, featuring the same location and most of the same characters (some of the best in the Bertieverse). This allows Wodehouse to build the humor on already-established concepts (Bertie’s aversion to Madeline, Bassett and Spode’s aversion to Bertie, Stiffy’s troublemaking, the dog Bartholomew’s viciousness), but the story doesn’t feel like a retread, maybe because the characters actually do change in the end (Gussie finally gets a backbone and dumps Madeline, Spode declares his longtime love for Madeline).
Had I read it before? Yes; my parents own it, and my father read it aloud to me when I was a kid. I haven’t read it as many times as The Code of the Woosters, but I remembered the alpine hat and the black amber statuette. I think I appreciate the story more now that I’ve read the series in order; after following Gussie and Madeline’s on-again, off-again relationship through three previous books, it’s a genuine surprise when they actually do end it for good.
Next up: Jeeves and the Tie That Binds
Friday, September 11, 2009
THE WINDS OF MARBLE ARCH AND OTHER STORIES
Dear god, I adore Connie Willis, who writes brilliant sci-fi, alternately charming and chilling, full of literary and historical references. Just the introduction to this huge compilation, in which she discusses some of her influences, was full of things I love (P.G. Wodehouse! Three Men in a Boat!) and gave me a whole slew of additions to my reading list (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Mapp and Lucia series). As for the stories themselves, I had read some of them before, including “Fire Watch” (set in the same awesome time-travel world as Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, and to which it appears her new book will return[!!]), the screwball comedy “Blued Moon,” the poignant “Samaritan” (if you want to get me crying, just kill a fictional animal), and the eminently creepy “All My Darling Daughters” (which I flat-out refused to reread and actually paper-clipped the pages together so that I wouldn’t accidentally glance at any of the pages, it’s really that terrifying). But the majority were new to me, my favorites of which included the title story and “Jack,” both of which continue Willis’s obvious obsession with the London Blitz (also seen in “Fire Watch” and her new book, apparently).
Sadly, the book was so poorly copyedited it was rife with typos, and it now appears to be out of print, now only available used for exorbitant prices—two strikes against its publisher, Subterranean Press—so I guess I’ll have to hunt down the stories in other volumes if I want to own them. Anyway, reading these just made me want to sit down and reread Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Passage straight through. If you haven’t read any Connie Willis, I can’t recommend her highly enough. I’ll be eagerly awaiting her next novel, Blackout, due out in February, and will pass the meantime trying to hunt down all the older novels and novellas (Remake, All Seated on the Ground, Uncharted Territory) I may have missed.
Sadly, the book was so poorly copyedited it was rife with typos, and it now appears to be out of print, now only available used for exorbitant prices—two strikes against its publisher, Subterranean Press—so I guess I’ll have to hunt down the stories in other volumes if I want to own them. Anyway, reading these just made me want to sit down and reread Lincoln’s Dreams, Bellwether, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Passage straight through. If you haven’t read any Connie Willis, I can’t recommend her highly enough. I’ll be eagerly awaiting her next novel, Blackout, due out in February, and will pass the meantime trying to hunt down all the older novels and novellas (Remake, All Seated on the Ground, Uncharted Territory) I may have missed.
BETSY WAS A JUNIOR
Maud Hart Lovelace’s sequel to Heaven to Betsy and Betsy in Spite of Herself. Childhood pal Tib moves back from Milwaukee and joins the Crowd, Betsy sets her sights on Joe Willard but he goes steady with Phyllis Brandish instead (twin sister of Betsy’s ex-beau Phil, of the red automobile), Betsy dates “strong silent type” Dave Hunt, and Betsy’s older sister, Julia, starts college at the U of M and brings home exciting tales of sorority rushes, prompting Betsy and seven of her girlfriends to form their own Greek-letter club, the Okto Deltas (the boys then form a matching fraternity, the Omega Deltas). As usual, plenty of madcap fun ensues, but also as usual, Betsy doesn’t accomplish many of the goals she sets for the school year. She neglects her lonely younger sister, Margaret, as well as her studies (there’s a great chapter where Betsy, Tacy, and Tib pull a frantic all-nighter collecting flowers for their Biology herbariums), and the rest of the school is alienated by the cliquey Okto Deltas. Tony nobly refuses to join the Omega Deltas (“They leave too many people out”) and drifts away from the Crowd toward a “fast clique of older boys,” skipping classes, hanging around “a pool hall which had a bad reputation,” and getting suspended for coming to school drunk(!). None of the Okto Deltas are given leadership of the committees organizing the Junior-Senior Banquet, and worst of all, Betsy isn’t chosen to compete against Joe in the Essay Contest, even though the topic, “The History of the Deep Valley Region,” is right up her alley. As in the other books, when Betsy realizes the error of her ways and how far she’s strayed from her ideals, it’s handled realistically, without the smack of “Very Special Episode”:
Again, Joe remains in the background of this book, but the glimmers of him that appear are tantalizingly Mr. Darcyish. What bookish girl wouldn’t sigh over this passage?
This doesn’t make it any less satisfying when Joe finally chooses Betsy over Phyllis; in fact, for the first time I wished for a film adaptation of these books just so I could enjoy seeing the climactic, Austen-like scene at the Junior-Senior Banquet played out: Joe asks Betsy to dance—but he’s too late and her dance card is full! She gives him a dance anyway (booting Lloyd, who “only took two because Tib was mad at him”), the next-to-last dance of the evening—but then Phyllis wants to leave early! Betsy watches from across the room as Phyllis and Joe argue and then leave together—but then, just as the music starts for the second-to-last dance, Joe comes running back! And they dance! But wisely, Betsy knows it’s not that simple:
After winning the Essay Cup yet again and participating in a daring school prank, Joe romantically whisks himself off to work in the threshing fields again for the summer, sending Betsy a coy postcard from Texas: “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a good dancer?” And since the next book is called Betsy and Joe, you can probably guess where this is headed.
She wondered whether life consisted of making resolutions and breaking them, of climbing up and slipping down. “I believe that’s it,” she thought. “And the bright side of it is that you never slip down quite to the point you started climbing from. You always gain a little… Gosh!” she thought. “I must be growing up.”
Again, Joe remains in the background of this book, but the glimmers of him that appear are tantalizingly Mr. Darcyish. What bookish girl wouldn’t sigh over this passage?
She always looked forward to English class, both because she liked the subject and because she enjoyed the competition of Joe Willard. They never saw each other outside of school but in English class there was a bond between them. They talked for each other’s benefit sometimes; they sought each other’s eyes when a good point was made; they smiled across the room when something funny happened.When Joe finds out Betsy hasn’t been picked for the Essay Contest, he lobbies in vain on her behalf. He now works for the town paper as a part-time reporter. And although he’s dating the snobbish Phyllis when he obviously belongs with (and is attracted to) Betsy, Phyllis is never portrayed as an enemy, and Joe’s interest in her isn’t shown to be a character flaw on his part, but an understandable match:
In a curious way Joe and Phyllis were alike. Neither one “belonged.” They were different, Phyllis because rich and Joe because circumstances had always set him apart. He was accustomed to being different and had come to like it…Joe had not been influenced in his choice by the Brandish money or prestige. The fact that Phyllis was so cosmopolitan, that she had traveled abroad and had lived in New York—those things would fascinate him. But most of all, Betsy felt, their “differentness” drew them together.
This doesn’t make it any less satisfying when Joe finally chooses Betsy over Phyllis; in fact, for the first time I wished for a film adaptation of these books just so I could enjoy seeing the climactic, Austen-like scene at the Junior-Senior Banquet played out: Joe asks Betsy to dance—but he’s too late and her dance card is full! She gives him a dance anyway (booting Lloyd, who “only took two because Tib was mad at him”), the next-to-last dance of the evening—but then Phyllis wants to leave early! Betsy watches from across the room as Phyllis and Joe argue and then leave together—but then, just as the music starts for the second-to-last dance, Joe comes running back! And they dance! But wisely, Betsy knows it’s not that simple:
Joe would not, she felt sure, desert Phyllis now, even though they had had a disagreement. He was a fundamentally loyal person. He had been unwilling to humiliate Betsy by leaving her without a partner, and he would certainly not humiliate Phyllis, with whom he had had such a good time all year, by deserting her at the beginning of a gay Commencement week—when she was a senior, too. He would see her through. But maybe, just the same, he didn’t care about her any more. Maybe he never had.
After winning the Essay Cup yet again and participating in a daring school prank, Joe romantically whisks himself off to work in the threshing fields again for the summer, sending Betsy a coy postcard from Texas: “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re a good dancer?” And since the next book is called Betsy and Joe, you can probably guess where this is headed.
READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi: This was a follow-up to my reading Lolita for the first time last summer, and I wish I’d checked it out immediately instead of a year later, because Nafisi’s take on Nabokov was my favorite part of the book. Overall, this was a moving, powerful, and revelatory memoir, but I’ll cop to feeling that it was also slightly scattered and draggy in spots. I won’t be rereading it, but I’m glad I read it once.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
JEEVES IN THE OFFING
Background: Published in 1960 (U.S. title: How Right You Are, Jeeves)
This is the one where: Bertie and Sir Roderick Glossop become pals!
The action takes place at: Brinkley Court
Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Roberta “Bobbie” Wickham (“Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle. But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espièglerie and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb. In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.”)
But she’s really in love with: Reginald “Kipper” Herring (“The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in for a lot of boxing from his earliest years, he had [a] cauliflower ear … and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King King and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.”)
The task at hand: Keep Aubrey Upjohn from suing for libel over Kipper’s negative review of Upjohn’s memoir, keep Wilbert Cream from proposing to Phyllis Mills, keep Glossop’s identity secret while he’s undercover as a butler to observe Wilbert Cream for signs of insanity, and find Uncle Tom’s missing silver cow creamer—which Bertie and Glossop assume Wilbert Cream hse stolen—without arousing the suspicions of Mrs. Cream
Other characters include:
Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: Nothing, except maybe his short-lived plan to knock Upjohn into the lake and have Kipper save him from drowning (seriously, how many books does Wodehouse use this plot in?), thus earning his gratitude and ending the libel lawsuit, which of course goes awry
First paragraph: “Jeeves placed the sizzling eggs and b. on the breakfast table, and Reginald (‘Kipper’) Herring and I, licking the lips, squared our elbows and got down to it. A lifelong buddy of mine, this Herring, linked to me by what are called imperishable memories. Years ago, when striplings, he and I had done a stretch together at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the preparatory school conducted by that prince of stinkers, Aubrey Upjohn M.A., and had frequently stood side by side in the Upjohn study awaiting the receipt of six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said. So we were, you might say, rather like a couple of old sweats who had fought shoulder to shoulder on Crispin’s day, if I’ve got the name right.”
Bertie fashion moment: None, again. Maybe I need to get rid of this category?
Slang I’d like to start using: “Beasel,” Bertie’s preferred term for Bobbie Wickham: “I could make nothing of this. It seemed to me that the beasel spoke in riddles.” Internet results suggest “beasel” either means “flapper,” “fiend,” or just “girl,” but the way Bertie uses it seems like a slightly nicer way of saying “bitch.”
Bertie gets no respect: “‘I see you have not changed since you were with me at Malvern House,’ [Upjohn] said in an extremely nasty voice… ‘Bungling Wooster we used to call him…He could not perform the simplest action such as holding a cup without spreading ruin and disaster on all sides. It was an axiom at Malvern House that if there was a chair in any room in which he happened to be, Wooster would trip over it. The child…is the father of the man.’”
Best Jeeves moment:
Jeeves: “I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them. As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.”
Bertie: “Scotch, isn’t it, that word?”
Jeeves: “Yes, sir.”
Bertie: “I thought as much. The ‘gang’ told the story. Why do Scotsmen say gang?”
Jeeves: “I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.”
Best bit of description: “The effect the apparition had on me was to make me start violently, and we all know what happens when you start violently while holding a full cup of tea. The contents of mine flew through the air and came to rest on the trousers of Aubrey Upjohn, M.A., moistening them to no little extent. Indeed, it would scarcely be distorting the facts to say that he was now not so much wearing trousers as wearing tea.”
Best bit of dialogue: Bertie’s explanation to Aunt Dahlia of why he doesn’t want to marry Bobbie Wickham, despite having proposed to her and been rejected in the past: “The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce…I’m one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and Roberta Wickham wouldn’t recognize the quiet life if you brought it to her on a plate with watercress round it.”
My review: Four stars. Bobbie Wickham is delightfully madcap, plus we have Aunt Dahlia, the return of the cow creamer, Glossop bonding with Bertie (and revealing himself to have been at least slightly Bertie-like in his youth), and finally meeting Aubrey Upjohn, a nemesis Bertie has mentioned in many previous stories. About the only downside is that the book could have used a bit more Jeeves (he’s once again on vacation, “off to Herne Bay for the shrimping,” in the first half). Also, I do have to note that despite throwing tea and cucumber sandwiches at people when startled, overall Bertie seems to have become a lot smarter than in the early books—he still gets into scrapes, but his role is more the jaded, sarcastic onlooker and less the bumbling, blithering idiot. I’m not sure whether I approve of this or not.
Had I read it before? No! I would definitely remember Bertie getting buddy-buddy with Glossop.
Next up: Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
This is the one where: Bertie and Sir Roderick Glossop become pals!
The action takes place at: Brinkley Court
Bertie accidentally gets engaged to: Roberta “Bobbie” Wickham (“Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly. Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle. But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espièglerie and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb. In her society you always had the uneasy feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop. You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.”)
But she’s really in love with: Reginald “Kipper” Herring (“The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in for a lot of boxing from his earliest years, he had [a] cauliflower ear … and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King King and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.”)
The task at hand: Keep Aubrey Upjohn from suing for libel over Kipper’s negative review of Upjohn’s memoir, keep Wilbert Cream from proposing to Phyllis Mills, keep Glossop’s identity secret while he’s undercover as a butler to observe Wilbert Cream for signs of insanity, and find Uncle Tom’s missing silver cow creamer—which Bertie and Glossop assume Wilbert Cream hse stolen—without arousing the suspicions of Mrs. Cream
Other characters include:
- Aunt Dahlia Travers (“She greeted me with one of those piercing view-halloos which she had picked up on the hunting field in the days when she had been an energetic chivvier of the British fox. It sounded like a gas explosion and went through me from stem to stern. I’ve never hunted myself, but I understand that half the battle is being able to make noises like some jungle animal with dyspepsia, and I believe that Aunt Dahlia in her prime could lift fellow-members of the Quorn and Pytchley out of their saddles with a single yip, though separated from them by two ploughed fields and a spinney.”)
- Sir Roderick Glossop (“The eminent brain specialist…was a man I would have not cared to lunch with myself, our relations having been on the stiff side since the night at Lady Wickham’s place in Herfordshire when, acting on the advice of my hostess’s daughter Roberta, I had punctured his hot-water bottle with a darning needle in the small hours of the morning. Quite unintentional, of course. I had planned to puncture the h-w-b of his nephew Tuppy Glossop, with whom I had a feud on, and unknown to me they had changed rooms. Just one of those unfortunate misunderstandings.”)
- Aubrey Upjohn, Bertie and Kipper’s former headmaster (“I was immediately struck by the change that had taken place in his appearance since those get-togethers at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, when with a sinking heart I had watched him reach for the whangee and start limbering up the shoulder muscles with a few trial swings. At that period of our acquaintance he had been an upstanding old gentlemen about eight feet six in height with burning eyes, foam-flecked lips and flame coming out of both nostrils. He had now shrunk to a modest five foot seven or thereabouts, and I could have felled him with a single blow.”)
- Phyllis Mills, Upjohn’s stepdaughter (“Nice but goofy, Kipper had said, and a glance told me that he was right. One learns, as one goes through life, to spot goofiness in the other sex with an unerring eye, and this exhibit had a sort of mild, Soul’s Awakening kind of expression which made it abundantly clear that, while not a super-goof like some of the female goofs I’d met, she was quite goofy enough to be going on with. Her whole aspect was that of a girl who at the drop of a hat would start talking baby talk.”)
- Mrs. Adela Cream, writer of mystery stories (“tall and thin with a hawk-like face that reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. She had an ink spot on her nose, the result of working on her novel of suspense. It is virtually impossible to write a novel of suspense without getting a certain amount of ink of the beezer. Ask Agatha Christie or anyone.”)
- Wilbert Cream, Adela’s son, “a willowy bird about the tonnage and general aspect of David Niven with ginger hair and a small moustache,” who Bertie and Dahlia mistake for his brother Wilfred, a notorious playboy and kleptomaniac
Jeeves disapproves of Bertie’s: Nothing, except maybe his short-lived plan to knock Upjohn into the lake and have Kipper save him from drowning (seriously, how many books does Wodehouse use this plot in?), thus earning his gratitude and ending the libel lawsuit, which of course goes awry
First paragraph: “Jeeves placed the sizzling eggs and b. on the breakfast table, and Reginald (‘Kipper’) Herring and I, licking the lips, squared our elbows and got down to it. A lifelong buddy of mine, this Herring, linked to me by what are called imperishable memories. Years ago, when striplings, he and I had done a stretch together at Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea, the preparatory school conducted by that prince of stinkers, Aubrey Upjohn M.A., and had frequently stood side by side in the Upjohn study awaiting the receipt of six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said. So we were, you might say, rather like a couple of old sweats who had fought shoulder to shoulder on Crispin’s day, if I’ve got the name right.”
Bertie fashion moment: None, again. Maybe I need to get rid of this category?
Slang I’d like to start using: “Beasel,” Bertie’s preferred term for Bobbie Wickham: “I could make nothing of this. It seemed to me that the beasel spoke in riddles.” Internet results suggest “beasel” either means “flapper,” “fiend,” or just “girl,” but the way Bertie uses it seems like a slightly nicer way of saying “bitch.”
Bertie gets no respect: “‘I see you have not changed since you were with me at Malvern House,’ [Upjohn] said in an extremely nasty voice… ‘Bungling Wooster we used to call him…He could not perform the simplest action such as holding a cup without spreading ruin and disaster on all sides. It was an axiom at Malvern House that if there was a chair in any room in which he happened to be, Wooster would trip over it. The child…is the father of the man.’”
Best Jeeves moment:
Jeeves: “I mistrust these elaborate schemes. One cannot depend on them. As the poet Burns says, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.”
Bertie: “Scotch, isn’t it, that word?”
Jeeves: “Yes, sir.”
Bertie: “I thought as much. The ‘gang’ told the story. Why do Scotsmen say gang?”
Jeeves: “I have no information, sir. They have not confided in me.”
Best bit of description: “The effect the apparition had on me was to make me start violently, and we all know what happens when you start violently while holding a full cup of tea. The contents of mine flew through the air and came to rest on the trousers of Aubrey Upjohn, M.A., moistening them to no little extent. Indeed, it would scarcely be distorting the facts to say that he was now not so much wearing trousers as wearing tea.”
Best bit of dialogue: Bertie’s explanation to Aunt Dahlia of why he doesn’t want to marry Bobbie Wickham, despite having proposed to her and been rejected in the past: “The male sex is divided into rabbits and non-rabbits and the female sex into dashers and dormice, and the trouble is that the male rabbit has a way of getting attracted by the female dasher (who would be fine for the male non-rabbit) and realizing too late that he ought to have been concentrating on some mild, gentle dormouse with whom he could settle down peacefully and nibble lettuce…I’m one of the rabbits and always have been while she is about as pronounced a dasher as ever dashed. What I like is the quiet life, and Roberta Wickham wouldn’t recognize the quiet life if you brought it to her on a plate with watercress round it.”
My review: Four stars. Bobbie Wickham is delightfully madcap, plus we have Aunt Dahlia, the return of the cow creamer, Glossop bonding with Bertie (and revealing himself to have been at least slightly Bertie-like in his youth), and finally meeting Aubrey Upjohn, a nemesis Bertie has mentioned in many previous stories. About the only downside is that the book could have used a bit more Jeeves (he’s once again on vacation, “off to Herne Bay for the shrimping,” in the first half). Also, I do have to note that despite throwing tea and cucumber sandwiches at people when startled, overall Bertie seems to have become a lot smarter than in the early books—he still gets into scrapes, but his role is more the jaded, sarcastic onlooker and less the bumbling, blithering idiot. I’m not sure whether I approve of this or not.
Had I read it before? No! I would definitely remember Bertie getting buddy-buddy with Glossop.
Next up: Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
FATHER OF FRANKENSTEIN
After reading Frankenstein: A Cultural History, I rewatched Gods and Monsters and then decided to read the Christopher Bram novel it’s based on. It’s a good book, but mostly what struck me when I read it was how great an adaptation the movie is—like, pretty much spot-on, to the point where I’m not sure you need to read the book if you’ve seen the film. One thing I did like better about the book is that Whale’s housekeeper is Hispanic, which is so natural for the L.A. setting, whereas in the movie she’s played as rather quirkily (almost distractingly) Germanic by Lynn Redgrave; I would have rather seen the part cast with a Hispanic actress, and think that in seizing the opportunity to get a big name like Redgrave (even though she is brilliant), the filmmakers undermined the character a little—I found her more likeable in the book). Also, it’s much clearer in the book that the final climactic scene between Whale and Boone is something Whale’s been planning for a while, rather than something that spontaneously happens in the heat of the moment. But I do have to admit that Gods and Monsters is a much better title than Father of Frankenstein, and in fact I see that the current edition of the book is being sold with that title. The weirdest thing about this book is that it takes place at 788 Amalfi Drive in Pacific Palisades, and when I was in the middle of reading it, I attended a party at 1310 Amalfi Drive! Unfortunately I didn’t notice the coincidence until I got home from the party; otherwise, I certainly would have seized the chance to drive by James Whale’s house, the site of his tragic end (he drowned himself in the pool).
BETSY IN SPITE OF HERSELF
Sequel to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Heaven to Betsy. Betsy is now a high-school sophomore, and like any self-respecting teenager, she wants nothing more than to change everything about herself. She sets her sights on Phil Brandish, a rich newcomer to town who drives a bright red automobile (cars are still an exotic rarity in Deep Valley in 1907, and Lovelace adorably describes the red auto “passing with almost meteorlike swiftness, fifteen or twenty miles an hour”). Seizing the opportunity of a Christmas trip to visit her friend Tib in exotic Milwaukee (seriously: Lovelace makes much of Milwaukee being, as Betsy’s father says, “so German that it’s like a foreign city”), Betsy resolves to return “Dramatic and Mysterious,” which involves spelling her name “Betsye,” laughing and smiling less, wearing green all the time, sprinkling her speech with “foreign phrases,” and dousing herself in Jockey Club perfume. She does succeed in attracting Phil, but at the expense of fun times with the Crowd, of course. Her true friends don’t like her new personality (“Cab said she put on airs, acted la de da”), and Phil turns out to be a stick-in-the-mud who’s jealous of Betsy spending time with anyone else and talks about nothing but his car (and attempts to get “spoony” with Betsy by holding her hand, apparently an inappropriate liberty that prompts her to declare, “You might as well know, I don’t hold hands”). Betsy knows she doesn’t truly love Phil, “But Phil was big and handsome; he was rich and he was a junior. He was very exciting.” On the one hand, Betsy’s behavior is exasperating, especially when Phil dumps her for being her true, “silly” self and she’s so upset she once again loses the Essay Contest to Joe Willard, but on the other hand, I sort of appreciate that Lovelace doesn’t punish her too badly for it. Betsy learns she should be true to herself, but there’s something admirably assertive and healthy in her experimentation, as her sister Julia points out: “You wanted Phil, and you went out and got him. It took determination. It was all right. And you couldn’t have done it without a little of what Cab calls ‘la de da.’” “But I didn’t keep him,” Betsy responds. “Silly!” says Julia. “You didn’t want to.”
What I found most interesting about the book was the portrayal of Joe, Betsy’s future husband, who I never found that appealing as a teen (because he wasn’t overtly fun or funny, like the other boys in the Crowd) but is now starting to seem like a hot Mr. Darcy type to me. Before she starts going with Phil, Betsy decides Joe should become part of the Crowd, but when she invites him to drop by her house sometime, he rudely rebuffs her, saying it would “bore” him. Later, Miss Sparrow, the librarian, gives Betsy valuable insight into Joe’s character, revealing that he supports himself entirely on his own, working at the Creamery after school and on threshing crews in the summer to pay for his room and board and save money for college. Though Joe’s hard luck story verges on making him sound saintly, there’s endearing vulnerability about it too:
What I found most interesting about the book was the portrayal of Joe, Betsy’s future husband, who I never found that appealing as a teen (because he wasn’t overtly fun or funny, like the other boys in the Crowd) but is now starting to seem like a hot Mr. Darcy type to me. Before she starts going with Phil, Betsy decides Joe should become part of the Crowd, but when she invites him to drop by her house sometime, he rudely rebuffs her, saying it would “bore” him. Later, Miss Sparrow, the librarian, gives Betsy valuable insight into Joe’s character, revealing that he supports himself entirely on his own, working at the Creamery after school and on threshing crews in the summer to pay for his room and board and save money for college. Though Joe’s hard luck story verges on making him sound saintly, there’s endearing vulnerability about it too:
“He has no father or mother. He has to work for a living. And being barred from the usual things high school students do, he takes refuge in books…He isn’t a boy who pities himself. Not at all. He has to work, but he makes that an adventure. He would really like to play football or baseball after school, but he can’t. He has to go to the Creamery. So he just makes plans about playing them in college…His routine is quite satisfactory to him but only because he puts out of his mind the things he cannot have… If he let you draw him into your Crowd, he would constantly be embarrassed. He would be forced to admit that he isn’t, perhaps, quite as lucky as he thinks he is. Don’t you see, Betsy? Living as he does now, he doesn’t mind shabby clothes. But he is a proud boy. He wouldn’t like coming to call on you in shabby clothes. When you urge him to come he gets desperate. He just has to be rude.”Awww. And how cute is it that, just like Elizabeth Bennet falling in love with Darcy after seeing his house, Betsy’s heart warms toward Joe when she learns that he “just about lives at the library”: “She loved the library too…the quiet, the smell of books.” Hooray for sexy, sexy libraries!
TRAFFIC
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us, by Tom Vanderbilt: As someone who’s always had a long driving commute (although ironically, I read most of this book while riding the Metro to work) and now lives in one of the world’s most infamous traffic cities, I found this collection of factoids about the psychology of driving fascinating. While not much hard information stuck with me (except, randomly, for the fact that about 75 traffic signals in L.A. run on “Sabbath timing,” where it’s not necessary to press the button to get a pedestrian walk sign from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, because Sabbath-observant Jews are not supposed to operate machinery on the Sabbath—and the city offered to install sensors that activated the walk signal automatically when a pedestrian was present, but was rebuffed because even passively triggering a device would be considered breaking the Sabbath), I do think the book made me a more thoughtful and careful driver. After being barraged with statistics and studies about how the human brain isn’t evolutionarily equipped to operate at the high speeds we drive, and how everyone thinks they’re a much better driver than they really are, and hundreds more odd quirks of biology and sociology that underscore how illogical people’s behavior behind the wheel can be, driving doesn’t seem the simple, casual undertaking it did before. (Not that I’m paranoid now—in fact, it seems miraculous that traffic functions as well as it does!) A worthy read for anyone who drives (or bikes or walks).
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
BUFFY SEASON 8: TIME OF YOUR LIFE
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 4: Time of Your Life, by Joss Whedon, Karl Moline, and Jeff Loeb: Not the strongest part of this series (it doesn’t really further the overarching plot, nor did it have me as enthralled as the awesome return of Dracula in Volume 3), but even if the plot machinations that get Buffy to the future are iffy, I enjoyed the chance to see Fray again—and Karl Moline, the Fray artist, returns to draw that part of the book, making me extra happy. I still wish Season 8 was a TV show, even though I know the whole point of the comic is to do things that would never work on TV. Maybe it’s just that I’m still a comic-book newbie, but I find reading it in comic form awkward; I like the writing, but I’d prefer to see the actors acting it out. Oh god, is that how non-readers feel whenever they’re forced to read a book? Now I’m ashamed.
FRAY
Fray, by Joss Whedon, Karl Moline, and Andy Owens: Damn you, Joss Whedon, for everything you touch is brilliant and leaves me wanting more. Your shows get canceled too soon, or teeter on the brink of cancellation. Dr. Horrible is only 45 minutes long. You make me start reading comic books just so I can get Buffy Season 8. Then I hear that Volume 4 features a crossover with one of your earlier comics, Fray, so now I have to go get that out of the library because apparently I have become a feverish fangirl, in thrall to your every whim. And of course I end up loving Fray by the time I finish it, only to discover THERE IS NO MORE FRAY. What kind of sick game are you playing, Joss Whedon? Anyway, if you can stand the frustration and are a Buffy fan, you should read Fray, which takes place hundreds of years in the future, when slayers and demons have been forgotten; there are still vampires, but people assume they’re just homicidal mutants, which apparently is nothing to get too worried about in the future (Whedon’s vision of the future: the rich are richer, the poor are poorer, and there are flying cars). It’s the typical reluctant-hero scenario: Malaka Fray is a thief who discovers she’s a slayer and has to learn to become one without the help of a watcher or the usual prophetic dreams and visions (there’s a very good plot twist about why she doesn’t have those). I really liked the art, more so than in the Buffy Season 8 comics—especially the fact that Mel has a more realistic body (a deliberate request on Whedon’s part, as he discusses in his foreword), whereas the Season 8 people look like comic-book versions of the actors from the show (in other words, uniformly boobtastic).
THE BLACK HOUSE
More scariness from Patricia Highsmith. You know she’s good because she has a story called “The Terrors of Basket Weaving”—this lady can make anything foreboding. Still, I didn’t like this collection quite as much as Slowly, Slowly in the Wind…or maybe there’s such a thing as too much Highsmith?
THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN: BLACK DOSSIER
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill: Meh. Alan Moore really, really loves to mimic different literary styles, eras, genres, and media. His imitations are spot-on, and they can be brilliant when woven into a story, but when he layers disembodied supplementary material into his books, it’s often just TOO MUCH for me—from the pirate comic and birdwatching article in Watchmen to Allan Quatermain’s crazy drugged-up vision at the end of the first League volume to…well, most of this book. I appreciate the idea of it, but it loses me in practice. I mean, there’s no question Moore is a genius and I don’t want him to dumb himself down, but for me there’s a point at which being ambitious and challenging just crosses a line into being exhausting and boring. I’m pretty damn detail-oriented and a freakin’ English major to boot, but I also like a good story, and when I have to wade through page after page of densely written, eye-numbingly typeset, and—in my opinion—frequently tedious pastiches, it smacks of authorly self-indulgence. It’s just telling, not showing. I’m happy for the diehard fans who will love delving into all the minute clues and references, but this casual reader did a lot of skimming and eye-rolling. The book (really just a little appendix to the series, meant to lead up to Volume 3) fills us in on Mina and Allan’s doings in the twentieth century (they’ve become immortal), allowing Moore to move forward from Victorian literature (sigh; I liked the Victoriana) to 1984, Jack Kerouac, and Orlando, as well as glancing backward to Shakespeare and Fanny Hill. The framing device, in which Mina and Allan steal the dossier documenting their adventures back from the government, is pretty amusing, especially the highly unflattering portrait of James Bond as a brutal, corrupt misogynist. The dossier itself is what tested my patience, though of course I loved the P.G. Wodehouse parody, “What Ho, Gods of the Abyss,” in which Bertie Wooster narrates how the League narrowly rescued his Aunt Dahlia and her friends from a monster out of H.P. Lovecraft. The book ends with a rather loony but visually awesome 3D sequence, and I was pleased to discover that the 3D glasses were still carefully tucked away in my library copy of the book. I now await Volume 3, Century, with mingled anticipation and trepidation.
OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS
At my last job, I spent five years editing young-adult biographies of scientists, politicians, business leaders, inventors, explorers, and other high achievers, and I couldn’t help but notice an eerie similarity among their life stories: they all seemed to have enjoyed extraordinary strokes of chance, coincidence, and good luck (those little frissions of “It almost didn’t happen!” were always one of my favorite things about reading history). Studying so many remarkable lives made me realize that the old saw is really true: a lot of success comes from just showing up and being in the right place at the right time (of course, when the time comes, it helps if you’re smart and talented). (This was illustrated for me in another way by working with the authors who wrote for that publisher—they weren’t always the most talented writers, but they were the ones who were out there hustling, working hard, doing their research, sending us their ideas, and cranking out manuscripts; for a first job out of college, that was a good lesson to learn.) This fascinating book (Malcolm Gladwell’s books are always like catnip to me; I’m all, “Yes, please, tell me more about the results of that sociological experiment! Ooh, and this neurological research!”) bore out my casual observation with study after study suggesting that the factors that create success may be more complex than most people realize—for instance, it really is possible to be born at the right time, whether you’re a Canadian youth hockey player or a nineteenth-century industrialist; and practice (10,000 hours of it) really does make perfect, whether you’re Bill Gates or a Beatle. I realize there are flaws in Gladwell’s logic (he tends to be anecdotal and oversimplifies things at times, so I understand why some people think he’s overrated), but maybe because it tapped into my previous musings on biography, I found this book pretty thrilling.
SLOWLY, SLOWLY IN THE WIND
I didn’t get around to reading any of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories during last year’s Month of Highsmith, but I had heard good things about them. I don’t usually read short stories, but I have enjoyed Shirley Jackson’s, and these were right up that (dark, scary, twisted) alley. Even the title is disturbing. Recommended for fans of psychological horror.
THE CHILDREN OF MEN
Reading this, I realized that the movie version (which I really liked when I saw it in the theater) drew little from the P.D. James book beyond the names of the characters, the situation (in the distant future, humanity can no longer reproduce), and the basic plot (reluctant hero must help a mysteriously pregnant woman while evading the authorities). The book’s protagonist, Theo, is a history professor (in the movie, he is a government worker/ex-activist); the book’s pregnant lady is a dissident named Julian (in the movie, she is Kee, an African refugee; confusingly, Julian still exists in the movie as the non-pregnant character played by Julianne Moore, but she is also Theo’s ex-wife, which she is not in the book); in the book the baby is a boy, while in the movie it’s a girl (interesting corollary: in the book Theo’s dead child is a girl, killed when he accidentally backs over her with a car, while in the movie it’s a boy, killed in a flu epidemic—what does all this gender switching signify?). The movie is grim and action-packed, with undertones of the Holocaust and the war on terror. The book is quieter and more subtle, less a plot-driven narrative than an exploration of what a world without children would really be like on a day-to-day level. The answer: outwardly more pleasant than in the movie, but still basically hopeless, with disturbing delusions (women push baby carriages with dolls in them down the street and have kittens baptized) and an underlying foreboding that the race will die out (a deer breaks into a church, presaging that nature will soon reclaim the empty cities, while the government encourages elderly people to commit suicide because there aren’t enough younger people left to care for them). As in the movie, Theo must shake off his cynicism and complacency and learn to hope for the future, but in the book the emphasis is much more on his relationship with his cousin, who has risen to become the totalitarian ruler of England, and his spiritual awakening through his love for Julian (James called the book a “Christian fable”). I thought the book was more thought-provoking and, in an odd way, spookier than the movie, even if less dramatic (the end is a little unsatisfying). But I was relieved to find that rewatching the movie after finishing the book didn’t give me a V for Vendetta reaction: I still liked the film version as much as I had before (of course, the presence of the gorgeous Clive Owen certainly didn’t hurt). The book and the movie stand as good examples of how you can create two different types of dystopias from the same premise.
FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY
I thought Frankenstein was boring when I read it in high school, but I developed an appreciation for it in a world-rocking class on “The Condition of England Novel” during my semester abroad at the University of East Anglia, where the professor interpreted it—in the light of the history of anatomy, dissection, and grave robbing in the nineteenth century—as an extended class metaphor with the monster representing the lower classes rising up against the aristocracy. Even though I still don’t love the novel, it’s clearly rich source material that’s generated an enduring myth, so I was interested in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s light but informative survey of the many ways in which Frankenstein has been reinterpreted throughout history. I knew that the popular image of Frankenstein bore little resemblance to the original book, but I was surprised to learn that this wasn’t the sole fault of the Boris Karloff movie—in fact, thanks to lax-to-nonexistent copyright laws, Shelley’s novel was already being bastardized in other books and plays during her lifetime. This wasn’t an essential read, but I liked its blend of biography, literary theory, film history, and pop culture, and it did inspire me to rewatch the 1931 film as well as the excellent Gods and Monsters—which then led me to start reading the novel on which it was based, Father of Frankenstein.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
HEAVEN TO BETSY
A couple of weeks ago I was at the library, looking for a book by Madeline L’Engle in the always-disorderly Juvenile section. It wasn’t on the shelf, even though the library catalog said it was (See? Always disorderly), but while I was searching through the “L”s, my eye fell upon an old Perma-Bound copy of Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace, the same vintage (1960s) as the library copies I read when I was a kid. It looked lonely and I suddenly felt nostalgic (the musty smell of a library does that to me), so I checked it out.
I’ve read this book at least six times. The series is right up there with the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books in my “beloved childhood reading” pantheon. My mother read them when she was a little girl, I have read and reread them throughout my life, and most of my grade-school friends read them, but when I grew up, and especially when I moved to California, I realized that Lovelace never quite hit it big outside the Midwest the way Laura Ingalls Wilder did, and most people I know who aren’t from Minnesota haven’t heard of her. Which is sad, because these books (originally published in the 1940s and early 1950s) are delightful. The first four are sweet kids’ books, but it’s the later six books, which follow Betsy Ray through high school and beyond, that I especially love. Written in a more complex style, they’re equally as enjoyable for adults as for kids and teens, so if you haven’t read them yet, it’s not too late to start.
Like the Little House and Anne books, the Betsy-Tacy books lovingly and loosely autobiographically document the life of a smart, stubborn, spirited girl in a particular time and place—in this case, the early 1900s in Deep Valley, Minnesota (a fictionalized version of Mankato, where my aunt and uncle live). As in the Little House books, there is an emphasis on family coziness, but unlike Laura, Betsy faces little in the way of material hardship (no blindess, locusts, or nearly wandering out to die on the prairie in the middle of a blizzard here). As in the Anne series, Betsy is has a “bosom friend” (devoted redhead Tacy), aspires to be a writer, and competes academically with her future husband (the blond, poor-but-proud Joe Willard), but unlike Anne, Betsy isn’t enough of a drama queen to get into serious trouble with her temper or imagination. Mostly, she just has fun. I loved all three series equally, but this was the one I wanted to live in.
Betsy wrestles with some issues in Heaven to Betsy, which covers her freshman year of high school in 1906. Like Laura wishing for blond hair and blue eyes or Anne wishing for violet eyes and an alabaster complexion, Betsy wishes she were prettier, despairing over her freckles and her straight hair (which she curls every night on Magic Waver rollers). She gets homesick while visiting the country, is sad when her family moves out of her childhood home, wants to convert from Baptist to Episcopalian, has an unrequited crush (or, as they called it in 1906, a “case”) on bad-boy-lite Tony Markham, says goodbye to a few friends who move away to distant cities, and gets so caught up in her social life that she neglects her writing and loses the school essay contest (topic: “The Philippines: Their Present and Future Value”) to Joe Willard. But her problems rarely get in the way of wholesome, old-fashioned good times with her cheerful family and madcap crowd of friends: eating banana splits at Heinz’s soda fountain, making fudge, singing the latest songs around the piano, having sleepovers, joining school societies (the Philomathians and the Zetamathians, which compete throughout the school year in a Hogwarts-reminiscent rivalry), making up catchphrases in Latin (“O di immortales!”), taking surrey rides, going to football games, eating the onion sandwiches Mr. Ray makes for Sunday night lunch, going to Presbyterian youth group, popping popcorn, drinking cocoa endlessly, playing with Ouija boards, going ice skating, having winter picnics, building bonfires, and throwing innumerable parties. The Crowd is coed, but there is no dating (only one girl, Carney, gets to have a lone real date, attending a play “with Larry…in the evening…alone,” and it’s a special concession from their parents because his family is about to move away to California). Boy-girl relations are refreshingly easygoing, cheerful, and innocent: The boys tease and banter with Betsy, walk her to and from parties and other events, kiss her on the cheek under the mistletoe, and drop by the Ray house to eat the delicious food cooked by Anna, the “hired girl” (who, judging by the illustrations, is at least in her 40s). Like the Little House books, in retrospect this turns out to be a slightly food-porny series; the food isn’t described in any great detail—except perhaps those remarkably tasty-sounding raw onion sandwiches sprinkled with salt and pepper—but it is omnipresent, and always delicious. No wonder I grew up to have a food blog if this is what I was lovingly rereading as a kid.
As an adult, I also can’t help exclaiming over all the period details. The Rays’ new house has all the modern conveniences: a bathroom (“no more baths in a tub in the kitchen”), a bedroom for all three girls (no more sleeping “in the same room, in the very same bed”), a gas stove (“no more horrid wood fires to build”), gas fixtures (“no more lamps to clean”), and a furnace (“no coal stove in the parlor”). Betsy wears sailor suits and shirtwaists, wears her hair in a grown-up pompadour for the first time, affects an “Ethel Barrymore droop,” and pins starched ruffles across her chest “to give her figure an Anna Held curve.” All-girl parties are called “hen parties,” and for Halloween there is a “sheet-and-pillowcase party” (everyone dresses as ghosts). The Crowd plays intriguing-sounding games like Consequences and Fortunes; Ruth and Jacob; Going to Jerusalem; Bird, Beast, or Fish; Jenkins Says Thumbs Up; Pass the Ring; and Prisoners’ Base. On Halloween, the girls drop apple peelings, snap apple stems, and walk backwards down the stairs with a mirror to try to foretell their future husbands. But gender roles never seem too oppressive, even if Betsy comes off as rather coquettish and boy-crazy in this book (a late bloomer myself, I always sympathized with the shy, more sensible Tacy, who doesn’t really see what all the fuss over boys is about). Still, Betsy’s dreams for the future always revolve around her career:
For some reason, I never owned these books when I was a kid, instead just checking out the same dogeared copies from the library over and over again. Little did I know at the time that I was missing my chance. In my adult life, they’ve fallen in and out of print in dismaying cycles, and even when they’re in print the new covers have been loudly flowery, modernized, and…let’s face it, pretty lame-looking, without the charming Lois Lenski illustrations of the earlier four books or the classy Vera Neville drawings of the later six (which that made them seem so sophisticated to me as a child and shaped my mental images of all the characters). Used copies of the older, more attractive editions are hard to come by in used bookstores outside of Minnesota (I’ve only managed to find Betsy in Spite of Herself so far), and even on the Internet they often sell for as much as $80. As soon as I started rereading Heaven to Betsy this month and remembered just how much I loved it, I became determined to acquire the entire series at any price and promptly started Googling. Imagine my delight when I discovered that HarperCollins is not only finally putting the later six books back into print this fall, but it’s giving them the deluxe treatment, in beautiful grown-up editions featuring the original cover art, with forewords from writers who are fans of the series (Laura Lippman, Anna Quindlen, and Meg Cabot)! You can be sure I’ll be snapping them up this time around.
Despite having spent my childhood visiting the Little House sites within easy driving distance (Pepin, Walnut Grove) and yearning to go to Prince Edward Island, I’ve never visited any of the Betsy-Tacy sites in Mankato, but I’d like to try to the next time I’m in town. The Betsy-Tacy Society has purchased and restored the “Betsy House” (Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthplace and childhood home) and the “Tacy House” (the home of Frances “Bick” Kenney, on whom the character was based), and placed a bench at the spot where the real-life Betsy and Tacy would sit and eat their dinners on “The Big Hill.” You can also see Tib’s house and many of the other sites mentioned in the books, as well as visiting Lovelace’s grave. Later this month, there’s actually going to be a Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, with a keynote speech by Meg Cabot, walking tours, picnics, an essay contest, and a re-creation of Heinz’s ice cream parlor (and on the same weekend, a tour of the Betsy’s Wedding-related sites in Minneapolis and dedication of a Maud Hart Lovelace memorial in Mueller Park)! If I still lived in Minnesota, that’s totally the kind of dorky thing I would want to go to. But I’ll have to content myself with rereading the familiar old library copies and preordering the new editions.
I’ve read this book at least six times. The series is right up there with the Little House and Anne of Green Gables books in my “beloved childhood reading” pantheon. My mother read them when she was a little girl, I have read and reread them throughout my life, and most of my grade-school friends read them, but when I grew up, and especially when I moved to California, I realized that Lovelace never quite hit it big outside the Midwest the way Laura Ingalls Wilder did, and most people I know who aren’t from Minnesota haven’t heard of her. Which is sad, because these books (originally published in the 1940s and early 1950s) are delightful. The first four are sweet kids’ books, but it’s the later six books, which follow Betsy Ray through high school and beyond, that I especially love. Written in a more complex style, they’re equally as enjoyable for adults as for kids and teens, so if you haven’t read them yet, it’s not too late to start.
Like the Little House and Anne books, the Betsy-Tacy books lovingly and loosely autobiographically document the life of a smart, stubborn, spirited girl in a particular time and place—in this case, the early 1900s in Deep Valley, Minnesota (a fictionalized version of Mankato, where my aunt and uncle live). As in the Little House books, there is an emphasis on family coziness, but unlike Laura, Betsy faces little in the way of material hardship (no blindess, locusts, or nearly wandering out to die on the prairie in the middle of a blizzard here). As in the Anne series, Betsy is has a “bosom friend” (devoted redhead Tacy), aspires to be a writer, and competes academically with her future husband (the blond, poor-but-proud Joe Willard), but unlike Anne, Betsy isn’t enough of a drama queen to get into serious trouble with her temper or imagination. Mostly, she just has fun. I loved all three series equally, but this was the one I wanted to live in.
Betsy wrestles with some issues in Heaven to Betsy, which covers her freshman year of high school in 1906. Like Laura wishing for blond hair and blue eyes or Anne wishing for violet eyes and an alabaster complexion, Betsy wishes she were prettier, despairing over her freckles and her straight hair (which she curls every night on Magic Waver rollers). She gets homesick while visiting the country, is sad when her family moves out of her childhood home, wants to convert from Baptist to Episcopalian, has an unrequited crush (or, as they called it in 1906, a “case”) on bad-boy-lite Tony Markham, says goodbye to a few friends who move away to distant cities, and gets so caught up in her social life that she neglects her writing and loses the school essay contest (topic: “The Philippines: Their Present and Future Value”) to Joe Willard. But her problems rarely get in the way of wholesome, old-fashioned good times with her cheerful family and madcap crowd of friends: eating banana splits at Heinz’s soda fountain, making fudge, singing the latest songs around the piano, having sleepovers, joining school societies (the Philomathians and the Zetamathians, which compete throughout the school year in a Hogwarts-reminiscent rivalry), making up catchphrases in Latin (“O di immortales!”), taking surrey rides, going to football games, eating the onion sandwiches Mr. Ray makes for Sunday night lunch, going to Presbyterian youth group, popping popcorn, drinking cocoa endlessly, playing with Ouija boards, going ice skating, having winter picnics, building bonfires, and throwing innumerable parties. The Crowd is coed, but there is no dating (only one girl, Carney, gets to have a lone real date, attending a play “with Larry…in the evening…alone,” and it’s a special concession from their parents because his family is about to move away to California). Boy-girl relations are refreshingly easygoing, cheerful, and innocent: The boys tease and banter with Betsy, walk her to and from parties and other events, kiss her on the cheek under the mistletoe, and drop by the Ray house to eat the delicious food cooked by Anna, the “hired girl” (who, judging by the illustrations, is at least in her 40s). Like the Little House books, in retrospect this turns out to be a slightly food-porny series; the food isn’t described in any great detail—except perhaps those remarkably tasty-sounding raw onion sandwiches sprinkled with salt and pepper—but it is omnipresent, and always delicious. No wonder I grew up to have a food blog if this is what I was lovingly rereading as a kid.
As an adult, I also can’t help exclaiming over all the period details. The Rays’ new house has all the modern conveniences: a bathroom (“no more baths in a tub in the kitchen”), a bedroom for all three girls (no more sleeping “in the same room, in the very same bed”), a gas stove (“no more horrid wood fires to build”), gas fixtures (“no more lamps to clean”), and a furnace (“no coal stove in the parlor”). Betsy wears sailor suits and shirtwaists, wears her hair in a grown-up pompadour for the first time, affects an “Ethel Barrymore droop,” and pins starched ruffles across her chest “to give her figure an Anna Held curve.” All-girl parties are called “hen parties,” and for Halloween there is a “sheet-and-pillowcase party” (everyone dresses as ghosts). The Crowd plays intriguing-sounding games like Consequences and Fortunes; Ruth and Jacob; Going to Jerusalem; Bird, Beast, or Fish; Jenkins Says Thumbs Up; Pass the Ring; and Prisoners’ Base. On Halloween, the girls drop apple peelings, snap apple stems, and walk backwards down the stairs with a mirror to try to foretell their future husbands. But gender roles never seem too oppressive, even if Betsy comes off as rather coquettish and boy-crazy in this book (a late bloomer myself, I always sympathized with the shy, more sensible Tacy, who doesn’t really see what all the fuss over boys is about). Still, Betsy’s dreams for the future always revolve around her career:
Not that she was anxious to get married. Far from it! She had been almost appalled, when she started going around with Carney and Bonnie, to discover how fixed and definite their ideas of marriage were. They both had cedar hope chests and took pleasure in embroidering their initials on towels to lay away. Each one had picked out a silver pattern and they were planning to give each other spoons in these patterns for Christmases and birthdays. When Betsy and Tacy and Tib talked about their future they planned to be writers, dancers, circus acrobats.See? Fun people.
For some reason, I never owned these books when I was a kid, instead just checking out the same dogeared copies from the library over and over again. Little did I know at the time that I was missing my chance. In my adult life, they’ve fallen in and out of print in dismaying cycles, and even when they’re in print the new covers have been loudly flowery, modernized, and…let’s face it, pretty lame-looking, without the charming Lois Lenski illustrations of the earlier four books or the classy Vera Neville drawings of the later six (which that made them seem so sophisticated to me as a child and shaped my mental images of all the characters). Used copies of the older, more attractive editions are hard to come by in used bookstores outside of Minnesota (I’ve only managed to find Betsy in Spite of Herself so far), and even on the Internet they often sell for as much as $80. As soon as I started rereading Heaven to Betsy this month and remembered just how much I loved it, I became determined to acquire the entire series at any price and promptly started Googling. Imagine my delight when I discovered that HarperCollins is not only finally putting the later six books back into print this fall, but it’s giving them the deluxe treatment, in beautiful grown-up editions featuring the original cover art, with forewords from writers who are fans of the series (Laura Lippman, Anna Quindlen, and Meg Cabot)! You can be sure I’ll be snapping them up this time around.
Despite having spent my childhood visiting the Little House sites within easy driving distance (Pepin, Walnut Grove) and yearning to go to Prince Edward Island, I’ve never visited any of the Betsy-Tacy sites in Mankato, but I’d like to try to the next time I’m in town. The Betsy-Tacy Society has purchased and restored the “Betsy House” (Maud Hart Lovelace’s birthplace and childhood home) and the “Tacy House” (the home of Frances “Bick” Kenney, on whom the character was based), and placed a bench at the spot where the real-life Betsy and Tacy would sit and eat their dinners on “The Big Hill.” You can also see Tib’s house and many of the other sites mentioned in the books, as well as visiting Lovelace’s grave. Later this month, there’s actually going to be a Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato, with a keynote speech by Meg Cabot, walking tours, picnics, an essay contest, and a re-creation of Heinz’s ice cream parlor (and on the same weekend, a tour of the Betsy’s Wedding-related sites in Minneapolis and dedication of a Maud Hart Lovelace memorial in Mueller Park)! If I still lived in Minnesota, that’s totally the kind of dorky thing I would want to go to. But I’ll have to content myself with rereading the familiar old library copies and preordering the new editions.
Friday, June 12, 2009
V FOR VENDETTA
V for Vendetta, by Alan Moore and David Lloyd: Yet another step in my descent toward possible comic-book nerddom. Especially the fact that after enjoying the book, I rewatched the movie, a movie I had previously liked, and couldn’t stand how different it was from the book. Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, and Stephen Fry were great, and the segment where Evie is in prison was quite faithful to the book, but everything else—I get that you might have to simplify the plot, maybe remove a few characters and take out the LSD sequence, but so many huge, unnecessary changes! Like, oh, the entire political context? And the ending? And…wait, Evie and V are in love? Ack. Thanks for ruining my multimedia experiences with your superior writing, Alan Moore. (Luckily, I will not under any circumstances be watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie, since the consensus is that it’s dreck anyway. I mean, Mina is a vampire and Tom Sawyer is part of the League? Puh-leeze.)
FIRE AND HEMLOCK
Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones: This is my other favorite novel (I can’t believe I have two—pure chance) retelling the Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer legends, so of course I felt compelled to reread it after rereading Tam Lin. I don’t love it as deeply as I love Tam Lin, but it made a huge impression on me as a kid, not only because I like the story but also because it was so dark, complex, and sophisticated that I could never understand why it was shelved in the Juvenile section. I read other Wynne Jones books, but this one seemed like it was in another league. It took on an almost magical quality in my mind. I never knew anyone else who had read it and it went out of print for about 10 years, so I couldn’t even obtain my own copy. I would have started to think I had dreamed the whole thing (this in itself echoes the plot of the book, in which Polly comes to realize she has two sets of memories, one false and one true) if the Dakota County Library hadn’t hung on to the old copy I used to read. Finally, the book was reissued a few years ago and I was able to buy it for myself. It still holds up just as well (even better, in some places) upon adult reading (except for the climactic scene, which still makes as little sense to me as it did back in the day), and I still have a crush on Mr. Lynn.
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