Wednesday, July 22, 2009

quarter in a mud puddle

After reading the first of the 13 stories in Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge," I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. How can you like a novel if you can't like, or at least relate to, its protagonist? I was barely into the second story when I started grumbling to myself that this book was too depressing. Olive was just a mean old lady who knew a lot of people who died. Maybe I didn't want to like this book because of the prominent Oprah quote on the cover, or because it's one of those books "everybody" likes. But I kept reading, and at the end of the second story, I knew this book was unlike anything I've ever read. Olive isn't just a mean old lady. She's something completely different to every person she encounters. She's an angel, a fuddy-duddy, a wife who doesn't appreciate her husband, a stern mother. Or is she? Each of these stories reveals a new side of Olive through the eyes of her fellow townspeople.

Pharmacy
The book's opening story gives us some background on Olive's marriage. The focus is on Henry, a pharmacist who watches his way of life mold to uncontrollable circumstances in the progression of modernity. The story alternates between the "good old days" and the "we're getting old" days, and we find that Henry is a gentle, naive soul who just wants everyone to be happy. His reliable old assistant is replaced by a newly married young girl, and Olive teases him that he has a new girlfriend. Denise is sweet and Henry admits only to himself that he is intrigued by her. She ends up leaning on him quite a bit when her husband is killed in a hunting accident, but she later remarries and moves away. Henry's pharmacy is replaced by a brightly lit chain drugstore. "People are never as helpless as you think they are," Olive tells her husband. Denise sends Henry greeting cards for years to come.

Incoming Tide
Wondering why I should care about this woman, Olive, and why she hasn't yet appeared in the second story, I begin to make notes in my book to mark things I don't like. I feel the book is too depressing, and unnecessarily descriptive passages are putting me to sleep: "He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety."

But I want to find out: Does Kevin commit suicide at the end? His mother did as much when he was younger, and he left town. Now he has returned to follow in her footsteps. He parks by the water and is approached by Olive Kitteridge, his former teacher who knows of his past and wants to empathize. I get annoyed when the author spells out what should be implied: "It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning." But I appreciate observations on New York: "...he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn't know it." And I give in to the blatant explanations: "He missed his mother. ... But this turbulence in him was torture." He's turbulent like the waves, see?

He is saved from his rising surf when he literally jumps out of the car and into the water to save a woman from drowning. She clutches him more tightly than he thought possible, and he is inspired: "...oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on." I don't want to like this, but I love it.

The Piano Player
Angie has played piano in the cocktail lounge for years. She is highly cognizant of her stage fright and relies on vodka to get her through it, to get her to that place where she is alive only inside the music. "...when she played, it was like being a sculptress, she thought, pulling at the lovely thick clay." I can hear the jazzy lounge piano in my head while the author reveals Angie's secrets, and we see Olive and Henry enter. Olive is grouchy, Henry is a breath of fresh air. But our focus remains with Angie, who spies in the crowd a former lover. Simon comes to talk to her, to make himself feel a little better about the life he doesn't love. He's married with children, and Angie hasn't changed. He stabs her with a dull knife of knowledge: Angie's prostitute mother had once sought him out in desperation. That night, Angie decides to stop seeing Malcolm, her married lover, and tells him so. He's angry, but he doesn't hurt her. She has friends. "A face like an angel. A drunk." She thinks of her mother, paralyzed and thin and cared for by attendants who are rough and leave bruises on her frail arms. Tomorrow Angie will mention this to someone kind.

A Little Burst
In the most humorous of the first five stories, we get a glimpse of Olive as a mother. Her son, Christopher is marrying at 38. He's known his wife only a short time, and the reception is being held at the home he and his parents built for him. The author describes Olive "[w]edging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table," and I realize that all the little details that had been putting me to sleep are there to help me out. Each story is in a vastly different setting with new characters, so being able to visualize seemingly unimportant details serves to ease the reader's transition into and grasp on the current moment.

Olive isn't fond of her son's bride, or that bride's mother, for that matter. "Don't I hate a grown woman who says 'the little girls' room.' Is she drunk?" Olive is tired of the company and ready to go home and take a nap. She siestas in the master bedroom while Henry says his long goodbyes, and she overhears tidbits of the bride's conversation with a friend. She hears enough to know her dress is insulted and her husband adored. She also hears Suzanne refer to Chris as having had a "hard time," with no explanation. Depression runs in the family, but Olive has taken care of her son. She has loved him. Olive is enraged by the know-it-all bride, and she decides to steal a shoe and a bra from the room, and to draw a magic-marker line down the sleeve of a sweater she knows won't be worn for months. Just to show "Dr. Sue" that she doesn't know everything. "Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they're finished with loneliness, too."

Olive knows her body is wearing out, and she believes that her soul is, too. She progresses day to day on the lookout for "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are obvious, but little bursts can be just as fun. Like stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law to "keep the self-doubt alive." She figures it's a better solution to life's potential emptiness than her husband's method: "He is an innocent. It's how he has learned to get through life." He prefers his bursts slow and gradual, and not a bit bursting. And just like that, I was fond of Olive.

Starving
Harmon is the owner of the hardware store. His wife, Bonnie, is increasingly distant, so he begins having Sunday rendezvous with Daisy Foster, a widow. "His brief Sunday moments with Daisy were not untender, but it was more a shared interest, like bird watching." He doesn't understand what's happening till he hears a local young couple use the phrase "fuck buddies." Appalled, he halts his sexual activity with Daisy, but continues to bring her a doughnut each week, and they start talking.

The young couple Harmon has been observing starts to have problems. They're busted for smoking pot and kicked out of their apartment. The boy leaves town, and the girl, Nina, loses her cinnamon (doughnut) complexion while giving in deeply to her anorexia. In need of a bed, she ends up staying briefly at Daisy's. When Harmon comes over, he stays longer than usual, talking with the girl. Olive arrives on her Red Cross collection rounds, and a mini-intervention takes place. Olive tries to reach out, telling Nina that we're all "starving" for something, but the girl sarcastically rejects the comment, bringing Olive to tears. "I don't know who you are, but young lady, you're breaking my heart." The conversation continues, and Harmon senses a strange energy, "something astonishing and unworldly," in the room. Nina goes home to her family, who keep Daisy updated on her illness.

Harmon feels his marriage unraveling as he is drawn nearer to Daisy. News arrives that Nina has died of a heart attack, and Harmon realizes he wants more from life than a quarter in mud puddle. He professes his love to Daisy, and rents out the room Nina had shared with her boyfriend.

----

The morals of the book are unfolding beautifully, and I can see the merit a book like this will have in classrooms and book clubs. I could probably devote an exorbitant number of blog posts to answering the questions in the reader's guide. Every person has to find his or her own way to "get through life." Death is imminent, but the way you live is so important because it's all we have. Olive's "little bursts" are the silver linings of her life, and they're no different from Harmon's quarter in the mud puddle. It's no hundred-dollar bill, but it sure might come in handy.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

hey, i think i like this whole "true story" thing


My foray into the nonfiction world has begun, and as a result, I want more nature books and a job with the Central Park Conservancy (they're not hiring). Reading "Central Park in the Dark" was like pulling on my old hiking boots, grabbing a bag of gorp and embarking on an adventure through NYC's elegant treetops -- but without the sunscreen, because all of these wildlife dramas unfold after sunset.

I'll never again enter Central Park without turning on my long-lost wilderness senses. I might not know what kind of bird is on that branch, but I'll take a minute to observe it, or to say hello. Marie Winn has inspired me to think back fondly on my days in field-studies class, and to wonder why I didn't get my degree in forestry. Alas, I can school myself indirectly by memorizing everything I learned reading this book and will learn when I become obsessed with its many related blogs. I wanted to whine that there were no maps or photos included in the book, but I'd rather buy my own map of the park to hang on the wall, and I like the optional interactive aspect of going online to see what slug sex looks like beyond my imagination's eye.

I can never bring myself to underline things in a new book, but this one includes a handy index for referencing everything from the history of cars in Central Park to moth bait, pinking time and the Perseids. That means I can verify the Snapple "Real Facts" I started throwing at my friends: "Did you know the scariest-looking wasp is one that doesn't come after people? It's the cicada killer!" I'm not sure my pseudo-knowledge of shooting stars and roosting birds will help me convince anyone to go to the park with me at night, but perhaps at twilight you'll find me pointing out how you can tell the difference between male and female lightning bugs by where they're flying when they flash. Marie Winn does her best to comfort the reader by noting that in a decade of night visits, she's only had two scary experiences, one involving men who want to be cops, the other involving men who actually were cops. But the park has such a bad reputation, I'm not holding my breath till I'll convince anyone to go on a night walk there.

I did not want this book to end, and lucky for me the nature knowledge can continue by following Marie Winn online, and I can monitor the book for a whole month when I make it my staff rec in August. It just came out in paperback, though I was reading the hardcover version I received for free at NYU last year. And if I ever get money, I'll pick up a copy of Winn's other popular tome, "Red-Tails in Love," the story of some red-tail hawks who built a nest on a building on Fifth Avenue and had babies there for something like 10 years.

So I've got a whole heap of nonfiction stacked upon my television set, but I'm compelled to take a tiny hiatus from nonfiction. I happened to have won a free copy of the Pulitzer-winning short-story collection "Olive Kitteridge" from Goodreads.com, and since the point of a contest there is to read and review the book, I'll be starting on that today. It marks the second time I've read an honest-to-goodness bestseller ... the first being "Eat, Pray, Love." I'm not selling out, I'm expanding!

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

memoirs of a vampire in the dark

I have, of course, a few things going on in my reading world. When I finished "Jamaica Inn," I had a hard time picking what I would read next. There are just too many books on my "to read" list. Just check out my Goodreads account. I grazed the stack and grabbed a Doris Lessing book I found at The Strand recently: "The Memoirs of a Survivor." My radar pinpointed Lessing because we've had "The Golden Notebook" on our Fiction Favorites table a few times at the old Barnes & Noble. I scanned the cover, and decided this might be one of those hidden classics. Turns out it is. There are a lot of people who seem to like this book. It claims to be slightly autobiographical, so I figured I'd give it a go. At 189 pages, it should be a breeze, right? Well if there's anything I learned from Virginia Woolf (and actually, there was a lot) it's that a short book can sometimes take much longer to read than a long book. It's all about cognition. Lessing starts what seems to be a beautifully abstract story, but she philosophizes with the best of 'em, and halfway through this work, I got bored. Obviously, not all philosophical writers are boring, and I think when the mood strikes me I'll return to this book. But it's not quick train reading.

Lessing's genderless narrator tells the reader of the current times, in which Britian is becoming a wasteland. People try to cling to their homes, but government services and consumerism have fallen to the wayside. Bands of young people rove the country, and this narrator is seemingly randomly assigned to become the caretaker of a 13-year-old girl, Emily, and her odd cat-dog. The narrator lives in an apartment building, and begins seeing visions of another person's home on the other side of the living-room wall. This is not a neighbor's home we're peeping into, for on the other side of the wall is actually a hallway. The narrator can step into the other world and roam the rooms, and even spends time cleaning them and otherwise interacting with the space, which we later find to be scenes from Emily's childhood. Emily is no trouble to the narrator, but begins hanging out with some of the gangs that pass through, and the narrator fears she will leave. She does not, though, partially because her cat-dog (Hugo) would be in danger of being eaten.

I attempted to scan the book for a good example of Lessing philosophy, but I got bored. I'd much rather my mind migrate to the next book I picked up, "Let the Right One In." I borrowed this book from a coworker after having seen the Swedish film. This book was quite the opposite of its half-finished predecessor. There's not a lick of philosophizing among the hundreds of pages of vampire-story goodness -- Lindqvist leaves that to the reader. Because I already knew the story, it was easy to visualize the events, if not a tiny bit distracting. I prefer to read a book before I see its movie version, but had I not seen the film, I don't know that I would've picked up the book. I suppose it sounds redundant to say the book was like an expanded version of the film, but it's true. There was an additional subplot and more explanation of what in the movie were mysterious details.

There were a few points in "Let the Right One In" (originally titled "Let Me In") where I could tell the translator had trouble making a sentence flow without repeating itself, but I appreciated the straightforward style the novel uses to lay out the events. That doesn't really mean this was a light read -- the subject matter made sure of that -- but it was quick. The main character is Oskar, a young boy who is bullied at school, which causes him to fantasize about killing more than most, I would think. So it makes perfect sense that he would enter into a passionate friendship with a child vampire who recruits men to do her killing for her. Eli took notice of Oskar because of his violent tendencies, so she intended to exploit him. But like the boy who is dared to date the loser and then falls for her (see "10 Things I Hate About You") Eli finds that her relationship with Oskar is unique. In a moment of potential weakness, she cannot kill him even though she is starving for blood. Her prior blood-seeking sugar daddy, Hakan, was exploited by Eli because of his perversion. He was able to love Eli because of her still-childlike body, and his desire to be with her competed viciously with the conscience that plagued his murderer self. Hakan lost Eli because he could no longer kill, and it's ironic that he wanted so badly to die but instead became a vampire and needed to kill to simply survive. Hakan's eventual demise is outlined in the major subplot that didn't make it into the movie. That scene is more gruesomely played out than Eli's killing of the school bullies, which thus became the peak of gruesomeness in the film.

I'd like to see a sequel to this book, and there may very well be one. I know the author has other vampire books, so I'll have to do some research, because they just may not be translated yet. But I'd like to see how the story plays out. Oskar told Eli he wanted to kill people who deserved it, so the randomness of vampire killing may not suit him, unless he becomes a Robin Hood-esque vigilante vampire. And there's another question: Would he let Eli turn him? Eli offered and Oskar declined, but who says he couldn't change his mind? Eli's cycle of leaching off human killers won't end until she partners with another vamp for eternity, and a child-vampire duo is tragically romantic. In this respect I had hoped for a little more from the book's ending, because just like in the film, the last scene is Oskar taking Eli in a trunk on a train with no known destination. The book did highlight what is only implied in the film -- that Eli was actually born a male. This touch is intriguing but sad because of the mutilation he endured. Oskar is confused but accepting of this knowledge, and in the end I like to think it only makes him love Eli more.

During (though not because of) this reading, something struck me. I knew that next I wanted to read something real. I've ignored nonfiction for a long time, but there are so many great books that I want to add to my "read" list, and I don't mean that book I read about how to find a job ... although I guess that counts. And now, for a list of nonfiction books I've read.

David Sedaris "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris "Holidays on Ice"
Chuck Klosterman "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs"
Cynthia Shapiro "What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here?"
Tori Amos "Piece By Piece"
Donald Miller "Blue Like Jazz"
Amanda Hesser "Cooking for Mr. Latte"
Virginia Woolf "A Room of One's Own"
Rick Warren "The Purpose-Driven Life"
Greg Behrendt "He's Just Not That Into You"
Lynne Truss "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"
James Frey "A Million Little Pieces" (yes, I'm counting it)

There may be a few more but that's the gist from the shelves I have here in NYC. That list is too short. A few essays, a few biographies, and a few life lessons. So, I went through those shelves and pulled out the nonfiction that I haven't read, and I stacked the books up on my TV to pick something new. Some highlights I hope to devour soon:

Truman Capote "In Cold Blood"
Mary Roach "Stiff"
Stephen King "On Writing"
David Grann "The Lost City of Z"
Elie Wiesel "Night"
Anne Frank "The Diary of a Young Girl"
Bob Dylan "Chronicles"
Adam L. Gollner "The Fruit Hunters"
David Sedaris "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim"

You may remember me starting something called "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." Yeah, I wanna finish that, too. But for now, I'm reading a few things at once. "The Autobiographer's Handbook" is for inspiration in writing. Wade Rouse's "At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream" is for entertainment. And Marie Winn's "Central Park in the Dark" is for substance and train riding. Naturally, I could write all day about the book's first 60 pages, but I'll save it for a day when I'm in less danger of being late to work. Let it suffice to say I'm loving every page because it reminds me of field studies in high school, and it's a way of exploring the park I can't experience while just passing through. Which reminds me, I'm also making my way through the poetic essays of Colson Whitehead's "The Colossus of New York." Go, nonfiction!