Amy Bloom's "Away"

I love street books.

People in Brooklyn frequently abandon--actually, I should say liberate their used books on street corners and stoops. There are so many books available for free to any random pedestrian that it took me almost two years of living in New York before I even used my library card. To anyone who knew me at the Hawaii State Library, this is a shocking statistic. I used to go there at least twice a week, schlepping home six books at a time, not because I was going to read them all, but because I'm a book junkie. I love the sensation, the smell, the sight of all those little black marks swarming across the page. The Brooklyn street book phenomenon--they're like finding bottles of wine or bags of weed just sitting there for anyone to take.

Anyway, this review is about a street book called "Away," by Amy Bloom. Fine adventure reading, about a Jewish woman, Lillian, fleeing persecution in early Soviet Russia. She comes to New York City's Lower East Side in the 1920s after her family is murdered in a pogrom and falls in with the thriving Yiddish theater crowd. But her city life is cut short when she learns that her little daughter may still be alive and living with cousins in Siberia. Lacking the funds for an ocean voyage back to Russia, she takes off overland across America, intending to walk the Yukon Trail and sail the Bering Strait to get her daughter back.

One of the things that sets this book apart from the other things I've been reading is how the author deals with secondary and tertiary characters. Lillian's story unfolds in real time, but the people she encounters--her lovers and friends--we get to see their entire life stories, and their eventual deaths, laid out in a few pages just after Lillian leaves them to continue her journey. It's kind of like the series finale of "Six Feet Under" (SPOILERS) when the show flashes forward into the future to show the deaths of every main character. And it's deeply moving, because it reminds the reader about mortality and the fragility of life and all of that good stuff that is the REAL reason we read books: to experience life and death in the miniature, in the hopes that it will better prepare us for our own.

Monique Truong's "Bitter in the Mouth"

Plot twists are hard to pull off.

Quick clarification: by "plot twists," I don't mean the part of a Law & Order episode where they figure out who the murderer is. The surprises that happen in mysteries, detective stories, and a lot of stuff that ends in "noir" aren't really plot twists because the reader expects them. A mystery, by definition, is going to have a big reveal or two at the end, so that reveal isn't a plot twist. It's just part of the plot.

No, a plot twist happens in all the OTHER kinds of stories, where the reader has been bopping merrily along the path laid out by the author, following the plot under a given set of facts, and then, BAM! Something gets revealed that changes all of the previous facts and assumptions the reader's been following this whole time. A good plot twist has to be completely unexpected, but also completely logical, requiring little further explanation.

"Luke. I am your father."

The plot twist in "The Empire Strikes Back" is a perfect example. The viewer knows that Darth Vader has a hard-on for this Skywalker kid, seeing as he blew up the Death Star. And Luke has vowed to kill Vader and defeat the Empire because Vader killed his father and the evil Empire is evil (I think. Aside from blowing up planets that are strongholds for violent insurgents, do we ever get a good explanation for why the Empire is evil? I haven't seen the movies for a while, so if you know, put it in the comments, I'm happy to be schooled in Star Wars lore.) The baddies and the goodies have all the motivation they need to hate each other as soon as the movie begins. Since that isn't a mystery that needs solving, the audience isn't expecting the plot twist. And the twist itself immediately makes perfect sense in the context of the story. "Luke, I am your father." "No, that's impossible." "Search your heart, you know it to be true." Three lines of dialogue, and everything the audience knows about Vader, Luke, and the whole Star Wars saga up to this point changes. The twist is simple, elegant, and adds depth and pathos to the story.

Now, consider "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" (and my incredible geekiness). All of the Harry Potter books are guilty of the clunky, awkward and gratuitous plot twist, but "Prisoner" is my favorite book in the series, so it's going under my knife. The big reveal at the end is that Sirius Black didn't betray Harry's parents to Voldemort and then kill Peter Pettigrew; Peter Pettigrew betrayed Harry's parents, faked his own death, framed Sirius for everything, and has been living in disguise as Ron's pet rat for 13 years. It takes an ENTIRE CHAPTER AND A HALF to deliver this information, all of it crammed down the reader's throat in one enormous chunk of exposition worthy of a James Bond villain. Furthermore, the big reveal doesn't fundamentally change the way that we view the characters or the story up to this point. It doesn't shift our perception of the events of the book or give them any depth or pathos they didn't already have.

That's why plot twists are difficult to pull off properly, because they aren't really about plot at all. They're about perception. A plot twist doesn't change the story so much as it changes the way the reader views the story. The characters experiencing the twist can be moved by it as well--Harry and Luke are both surprised as hell when the truth comes out--but if the twist doesn't change anything about the reader's relationship to the story, then the twist has failed as a literary device.

All of this just for me to say that I didn't much like Monique Truong's novel "Bitter in the Mouth."

Seven years passed between Truong's first novel, "The Book of Salt," and her second, "Bitter in the Mouth," and I had such high hopes. "The Book of Salt" is easily one of my favorite novels of all time, at least in the top 5, if not the top 3. Basically, it's about the gay Vietnamese cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas when they were living in Paris in the 1930s. It's an amazingly rich and dense book about food, language, colonialism, travel, love, family, betrayal, and identity. I'll review it the next time I read it, which will be soon, because I love that book like a fat guy loves cake.

But Truong fell into a sophomore slump with this one. "Bitter in the Mouth" is about a young woman, Linda, from the South who grew up with undiagnosed synesthesia, which causes her to taste words. I think Truong was trying to write one of those Faulkner-esque Southern family dramas, and to a certain extent, she succeeds. The best parts of the book are the descriptions of Linda's relationships with her family: distant mother, doting father, heinous grandmother, beloved great-uncle. But any bits of the book dealing with her synesthesia, which is about half the book, just drag the whole story to a screeching halt. Much is made of Linda keeping her sound-taste sense secret from the rest of her family, and while there is inherent drama in the distance created between family members by any kind of secret-keeping, synesthesia isn't a strong enough vehicle to carry such emotional weight. As far as secret mental disorders go, it's actually kind of lame, especially compared to the other family secrets revealed in the book: rape, adultery, closet homosexuality, cross-dressing, cancer, none of these events get as much attention in the book as Linda's synesthesia. I feel that Truong placed undeserved importance on this one aspect of her narrator's life story, and that's not even my biggest complaint with the book.

The reason I opened this post with a discussion of plot twists is because "Bitter in the Mouth" has two of the worst plot twists I've ever encountered. The first occurs exactly halfway through the book, and while it did alter my perception of Linda and her family, it also required about 50 pages of exposition immediately following the big reveal. That's basically as long as all of the big plot twists revealed at the end of all 7 of the Harry Potter books. The second plot twist comes about ten pages before the end of the book, and those last ten pages are used to, again, explain the plot twist. I say that these are the two worst plot twists I've encountered because (1) plot twists that require extensive exposition/explanation are just bad writing, (2) both of the big reveals could have been revealed at the beginning of the book for much bigger narrative impact, and (3) the second plot twist is treated as a cathartic moment between Linda and her mother, but doesn't actually address the main reason they are estranged from each other. Linda was raped when she was 11, and her mother maybe knew about it, or covered it up, or was in love with the rapist--something of that nature, it's never really revealed. Truong spends a lot of time at the beginning of the book setting up the rape as an example of how awful Linda's mother really is and how the rape was proof that Linda's mother never loved her. Then at the end of the book, Linda and her mother lay all their secrets out on the table so they can love and trust each other again, and neither one even mentions the rape. What. The. Hell.

Of course, I did read this whole novel, so it wasn't actually that bad. It's just that whenever I find myself walking down the street and talking to myself about the books I read, I spend a lot more time bitching about "Bitter in the Mouth"'s faults than I spend praising its virtues. Those plot twists really ruined an otherwise solid novel for me. As I said, a good plot twist is difficult to pull off. And after walking to Brooklyn Heights and back yesterday, mumbling to myself about Star Wars and Shakespeare and Fight Club and Harry Potter and Edith Wharton, I've determined that a plot twist, even a really good one, is evidence of good-but-not-great story. I think about great novels like "The Age of Innocence," or plays like "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet," and the thing that they all have in common is a dreadful sense of inevitability. We learn the endings of "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet" at the beginning of the plays: Macbeth will be king, but not for long; Romeo and Juliet fall in love and commit suicide. Edith Wharton is the queen of inevitability. Her characters never make brave or grand choices; they make realistic choices, practical choices, and obvious choices, always following the paths set for them by society and their own human limitations. There are no plot twists in the truly genius tragedies of the ages, because the most poignant tragedy is the one that's spotted from miles away, and the audience can only sit and watch as it rushes toward us, inevitable, immutable, and unchangeable.

However, that kind of storytelling is even more difficult to pull off then a good plot twist. You have to be damned talented to keep an audience enthralled when they already know the ending of the story. And you have to be willing to go bleak--really, really bleak. Not everyone wants to write bleak tragedies; not everyone wants to read them. A story with plot twists is more likely to be a comedy, or an adventure story, or a comic book (comic book plots are constructed almost exclusively out of well-done plot twists, which is why I enjoy them so much). I like to read those, too. My reading diet is mainly composed of comedies and plot twists, with great tragedies thrown in like the rare shot of whiskey in my afternoon tea.

That actually sounds pretty good right about now. I'm going to have tea with whiskey and read another book. What a twist!

Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

Three weekends ago I was at Comic Con; two weekends ago I was in Georgia (only slightly less surreal than Comic Con); and last weekend I had me mum staying with me. So this weekend I stayed in my apartment and read Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones." I don't know what else I can say about this book that hasn't already been said by the mainstream media. It was a ridiculously successful book when it came out and it was made into a rather disappointing movie by Peter Jackson, who I otherwise adore. His portrayal of young woman-angst in "Heavenly Creatures" was transcendent, and I can quote about as much of his "Lord of the Rings" movies as you would expect from someone who attends comic and anime conventions. It's too bad his Lovely Bones was so wildly off base.

But anyway, back to the book. I read it in two days and wept at the end, as I expected. It's a book narrated by a girl who dies in the second sentence of the novel. The dead girl, Susie Salmon, keeps watch over her family, friends, and murderer for years, mostly observing them as they try to cope with her absence. It's a story about grieving, healing, learning when to let go and when to hold on tight. In the hands of a less skilled writer, "The Lovely Bones" might slip into sentimentality, but rest assured that it doesn't. I wouldn't stand for it if it did. I can't stand anything maudlin. If the word "tearjerker" is used to describe anything, I run the other way. "The Lovely Bones" works because the narrator, Susie, isn't herself maudlin. Being dead seems to give her enough of a perspective on life that she doesn't pine excessively for what she might have been or done; she is moved by her family's grief, but not so much that she can't see their flaws and faults and describe them to the readers. I feel that sentimentality is often used to hide the truth about people, to shield the reader/viewer from the true selfishness and petty cruelties that humans inflict on each other. The great strength of "The Lovely Bones" is that it doesn't shy away from these harsh realities, but embraces them, painting a dense and sweetly sad picture of an American murder.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

Has this ever happened to you? You don't know the name of a book or it's author. You don't even really know the plot. But you know just enough about it to know that you want to read it. Hopefully you recognize it when you actually find it.

Here's what I had: it's Shakespeare's "King Lear," but set on a farm in the American Midwest.

I've carried around that bit of information in my brain for years like a dusty piece of candy in a coat pocket. (Mmmmm, pocket candy.) I don't know how it came to be lodged in my memory-hole, but there it was, taunting me, a book that I knew I would like but had no idea how to get.

No, I wasn't going to look on the Internet. That strategy is for out-of-print comic books and scone recipes. Don't interrupt.

The King Lear-on-a-farm book, I now know, is Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-winning novel, "A Thousand Acres." My eyes skimmed over it when I was sifting through the $2 bin in front of Book Court because it had trashy romance novel font, and I've trained my eyes to avoid that font as assiduously as I avoid roadkill and people handing out fliers in Times Square. Me mum snatched it up and said, "You have to read this, this is a great book."

"Is it the one that's King Lear on a farm?" I asked. Honestly, this was a stab in the dark. I hadn't even read the description on the back cover yet. The book just set my biblio-sense a'tingling.

She looked at me blankly. "I don't know what that means."

I opened the book and read the first review blurb. "No, that's the one. I totally want to read it."

And you, too, should totally read "A Thousand Acres." Do we all know the plot of King Lear? Old king decides to split up his kingdom between his three daughters, but the youngest daughter refuses to flatter him, so he banishes her and splits his kingdom between the oldest two daughters, who treat him badly once they have all the power. Family drama ensues, as does some mad wandering on the moor, and there may be a war in there that I'm forgetting.

So "A Thousand Acres" is about a farmer who owns a thousand acres of prime farmland in Iowa, and he decides to incorporate his farm and split the shares equally among his three daughters and their husbands. The youngest daughter expresses misgivings about the plan, so the father immediately cuts her out of the plan and won't even let her come into his house. Family drama ensues when the father decides he wants the land back. Some man wandering on the plains, a blinding and a couple of affairs later, and everything falls apart. It's all very exciting.

I knew there was a reason I'd always wanted to read this book. I tore through it like a wildfire. It's all so deliciously tragic, like watching a train wreck in slow-motion. The oldest daughter can't get pregnant; the middle daughter has breast cancer; the youngest daughter is city-fied and thinks her sisters conned their crazy old father out of his land. But the more you learn about the father himself, the more you realize what an absolute bastard he is, just a cruel, manipulating, vile excuse for a human being. He's poisoned every aspect of his family's lives, and the further away from him they seem to get, the more he ruins their lives. Depression--espionage--suicide! G-d, I loved this book.

I have to confess to having a secret love of Midwest literature. Although I talk a lot about being from Hawaii and living in New York, I also have a connection to all that middle country, the "flyover states," as us city liberals like to say. One of my father's aunts married into a wheat farming family out in Montana, and for my tenth birthday he took me out to their house to go dear hunting in the fields. There's something hypnotic and humbling about being on the plain underneath all that sky, and hearing the wind moaning in the eaves of the house after everyone has gone to bed. A good deal of the American identity--of my own identity--is out there with the wheat and corn. I loved "A Thousand Acres" like I loved "O, Pioneers!" and the Little House on the Prairie books, because they're all about American farmers, and the sadness and cruelty and loneliness of that kind of life.

I also recommend reading "King Lear," if you're into Shakespeare. The language trips a lot of people up, but it's amazing how he managed to predict a lot of modern anxieties about inheritance and care-giving. Plus, this speech:

"Howl, howl, howl, howl! O! you are men of stones:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so
That heaven's vaults should crack."


William Effing Shakespeare, gang.

Neil Gaiman Week: American Gods

Neil Gaiman doesn't photograph well. I don't mean that he's unattractive or that you can't find professional photos of him that look pretty good, but trying to photograph him in person was impossible. Every picture I took came out blurry. The picture to the left was the best one I managed to get last Sunday. This has happened to me before: once in Roslyn Church in Scotland where no matter how close I got, I couldn't photograph one of the Green Men sculptures on the wall of the church; and another time in Nebraska, when the BF and I couldn't photograph this interesting-looking log on our tree adventure. I like to think that the spirits inside these objects resist photography, that they have all this energy swirling around them that prevents the machine from working properly. And I now think that Neil Gaiman has this as well. The man radiates charisma, and it screwed with my camera!

As crazy as this theory sounds, it's right at home in the world of Gaiman's books. The manipulation of energy that comes from things like prayer, worship, obsession, and desire is one of the major themes of Gaiman's book "American Gods." To summarize, "American Gods" is about a man, Shadow, who finds himself in the company of several shabby gods and mythical creatures who emigrated to America in the minds of their worshipers, only to find that "this is a bad place for gods." Without worship and prayer, the gods are forced into lives of crime and prostitution while new American gods--gods of technology and media--arise to challenge them for the souls of the American people.

Gaiman wrote "American Gods"--one of his few adult novels, I think there's only two or three others--after moving to the United States and discovering that it was nothing at all like what he had pictured from movies, music and literature. "It's a weird place," he said at the New Yorker Festival. "Winter can kill you. And no one the Midwest seemed to have a problem with that. Do you people not know this is odd?" He wanted to write a book that would capture the "wonderful, glorious oddness" of America, and he wrote a great deal of it while driving across the country on various Gaiman-adventures (I assume he has many adventures, he seems like that kind of guy). "You can't drive in England for long distances, you run out of country," but in America, he drove for hours and days, always on back roads and secondary highways, discovering ghost towns and eerie roadside attractions that formed the backdrop of his novel.

"American Gods" is very much an American road trip book. It's also pretty obviously written by someone who isn't an American, and I mean that as a compliment. Gaiman writes America from a perspective free of American cultural baggage. His scenes set in the modern American South or on American Indian reservations are devoid of any but the most superficial talk of race relations; scenes set in San Francisco or New York absent themselves from the politics and struggles we associate with these bastions of liberalism; the Midwest is spooky and weird in a way you'd never expect. And because "American Gods" is about immigrants and foreigners struggling to understand their new home, this perspective works. Gaiman's American still feels like a true and honest portrayal of America (at least to this American), but the fact that it's being presented by an immigrant who finds everything so gloriously odd makes me see my country with fresh eyes. Yes, we are weird! This is a weird place, the whole great mass of it, from Pacific to Atlantic, from Great Lakes to Rio Grande.

You've never seen an America like the one in "American Gods." And if you never read any of Gaiman's other work, you should read still read this one. He's created a rare and wonderful analysis of America's soul, and even though he's English, I never felt more of an American than I did after reading this book.

Neil Gaiman Week: Coraline

Last Sunday, I saw Neil Gaiman speak live at the New Yorker Festival--read about it on Big Island Rachel--and to honor my most favorite of the writer-types, I'm going to take some time out of our regularly scheduled comics lineup to review some of his work. Since I was fortunate enough to hear Gaiman talk about his more famous projects, such as "Coraline," "Stardust," "American Gods," and the "Sandman" series, these reviews are going to be a bit more behind-the-scenes than usual ('usual' being Big Island Rachel is just lying making educated guesses about what authors may have been thinking).

Gaiman described his book "Coraline" as "a horror story for five-year-olds." It concerns a little girl named Coraline who discovers that a doorway in her new house leads to another house, much like her own, except the other house is everything a little girl could hope for: magical moving toys, beautiful clothes, great food, and a mother who wants to love her forever and give her everything her heart desires. All Coraline has to do in order to stay in the other house with the other mother forever is let the other mother replace her eyes with shiny black buttons. Coraline refuses, and goes back home to her real house, only to discover that the other mother has stolen away her real mother and father, and it's up to her to get them back.

The origins of this story go back to Gaiman's daughter Holly, who, at five years old, would sit on his lap and dictate a series of stories about a little girl named Holly who comes home to find that her mother has been replaced by an evil witch. The witch always ends up throwing Holly in the cellar where Holly encounters what Gaiman describes as "not-ghost children. I never understood if they were ghosts or not, but Holly, at 5, seemed to know quite well what they were." Holly and the not-ghost children would then go to America to find out Holly's real mother.

"Holly's Story," as Gaiman titled the collaboration, was initially published as a comic book at the Taboo imprint, but the idea stayed with him. "I wanted to write a book that the Hollys of the world would like--a horror story for five-year-olds." Not surprisingly, the book, now called "Coraline," languished at the publisher's for years, his editors being reluctant to publish a children's book where evil witches want to sew buttons into little girls' eyes. Eventually, Gaiman urged his editor to read the book to her two little girls, ages 5 and 7 at the time. He told her, "If they're scared and traumatized, you can forget about it." The editor read the story to her children and they weren't scared or traumatized, so "Coraline" was published.

Several years later, Gaiman ran into the editor and her now-twelve year old daughter, and he thanked the girl for not being scared of "Coraline," else the book would have languished forever in publishing limbo.

The girl said, "No, I was terrified of that book! But I knew that if I told anyone, they would stop reading it to me, and I had to know how it ended."

There's no doubt, "Coraline" is a creepy little story. In subject matter, I'd compare it to H.P. Lovecraft, especially in the way that none of the REALLY creepy stuff is ever explained: why the door in Coraline's house leads to another world; what that other world is; what the other mother is (and if there are more of her kind hanging around)(ooo, I just got chickenskin). Gaiman hints at mysteries and horrors beyond the borders of the story we're told. There is already a lot to disgust and scare us, nasty little details like the button-eyes and the talking rats in the attic. But the genius of this book is it's ability to leave the reader with big gaps in our knowledge of this other world, gaps that we can't help but fill in after we close the book, and everyone knows that the things we imagine are always worse than the things that are. We're haunted as much by the empty spaces in "Coraline" as we are by the monsters that leap out of the shadows.

In a way, it's almost more frightening to read this book as an adult. While children are used to feeling out of their depth in a weird and confusing world, I find that the older I get and the more furniture I acquire, the more secure I feel in my version of reality. "Coraline" takes this security away. She simply walks into the other mother's house and has to take what she sees at face value. In adult books this would be called a minimalist approach, but really it's how all children experience the world, as a stream of information without context. As adults, we tend to forget just how terrifying a lack of context can be. "Coraline" still scares me to this day because it's a story that's stripped of the comfort of context. I'm a little girl, too, groping in the dark for something familiar to catch hold of, and finding only more questions.

I'm going to crawl into bed and squeeze my teddy bear very, very tightly now.