Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann

Whether it is a happy life or a sad one the Skinz live is of course unknowable to anyone watching them stride by, turning their bulging skulls greedily upon their bulging necks, trying to pitiless, exclusive; not listening much to one another; but we can consider the question. The lone ones lean up against the restaurant windows, hunching their heads in like turtles at the same time they swivel their gaze in what might be anxiety or might be automatic street wisdom. They spend too much time waiting, but on the whole they are arguably happy, having their fights to look forward to. What more, after all, could anyone yearn for in his guts than the chance to hurt somebody else, jawkicking a soul to screaming subhumanness in order to reiterate that I live?

William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories are organized in the order of the visible spectrum, from "White Knights" to "Violet Hair," passing through every color in between. The symbolism there is immediately apparent: I am going to tell you about the full spectrum of human experience, of all the different kinds of people in the world, and though they may seem to one another quiet alien, they are all parts of the same phenomenon. And then, right from the beginning, he challenges you with this easy observation by giving you a story about Nazi Skinheads living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. In fact, this story (chapter? essay? section?) is classic Vollmann, a dispatch from a margin of the world that most people would prefer to pretend doesn't exist, or if it does, to think of it somehow as below noticing or writing about. Vollmann's depiction of the Skinz is both sympathetic and unsparing; they are racist and violent but also, in some way, childlike. The next story, "Ladies and Red Lights," builds on the depiction of Tenderloin prostitutes that appears in Vollmann's Whores for Gloria, but it was "White Knights" that struck me most as that book's successor and heir.

The other section I really liked was "Yellow Rose," about the Vollmann character's brief and doomed relationship with a young Korean woman named Jenny. Jenny's family will never accept a white boyfriend, something the narrator knows but cannot accept, and his insistence on presenting Jenny with an engagement ring is one of the book's saddest and most powerful moments. But the whole thing is really driven by the power of Jenny's voice, twinged with not-quite-Englishisms and a bubbliness that conceals a deeper desperation. ("Mom would stab me with knives... Mom would fry me alive if she know. I'm become steel faced, as my mother said these days.") I was delighted when these two stories, "White Knights" and "Yellow Rose," came together in the story "Blue Wallet," wherein the Vollmann character invites both Jenny and her friends and his skinhead friends to the same party, with predictably tense results. (The title refers to a wallet that Jenny loses, assuming it was stolen by said skinheads.)

There are other stories here that explore the margins of Bay Area society, notably "The Blue Yonder," a fantastical imagining of the motivations that drive a real-life killer of the homeless who was never identified or caught, and "Indigo Engineers," about a group of scrap metal engineers who attract huge crowds for a kind of proto-Battle Bots exhibition of machines that stab and slice each other. But other stories seemed to me, if not failed experiments exactly, big swings that never quite come together. I didn't really connect with "The Green Dress," about a man who falls in love with his neighbor's green dress--not his neighbor--stealing it and treating it as a lover. And I thought that a pair of mytho-historical stories, one about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace called "Scintillant Orange" and one about the Thugs of ancient India called "The Yellow Sugar," never quite rose to the convincing level that Vollmann perfected in his novels about the colonization of North America. Like The Atlas, this is really an odds-and-sods collection with organizational pretenses. Well, they're all odd, and a couple are sods, but when he's at his best, there's really nothing like him, is there?

Whores for Gloria by William T. Vollmann

Whenever Jimmy needed the smell of a woman or the soft weight of a woman's embrace, why, he had the whores being themselves for Gloria who partook of them all and lived on them all like some sky-goddess feasting upon the smoke from sacrifices. As for the rest of what he needed, the airy loveliness and happiness, he had that always with him; it floated at his arm like a helium balloon; no one could see it or ask about it or take it from him. So, having the hair, he really only needed the memories. Jimmy sat alone in his room, drinking tequila until his lips went numb. That's right honey babe (he said to Gloria) I have you I'm not lying I never lied to you I haven't told the truth for so long now that I've given up lying.

Jimmy is a Vietnam vet living in San Francisco's Tenderloin District. He lives entirely on the social security checks he gets from the government; these go to rent, to the bar, and to the prostitutes who make the Tenderloin their home. Sometimes he has sex with them (though when he does, he ends up obsessing over whether or not he has contracted a venereal disease), but mostly he only wants to hear their memories, which he appropriates for the woman of his dreams: Gloria. Gloria is Jimmy's one true love, his wife, whom he has known since childhood, and who represents everything good and beautiful--glory--about the world. But she's not real.

Jimmy spends his days "searching" for Gloria. Sometimes this seems to take on a literal aspect, as in searching for a woman who has hidden just behind the next corner, then the next. But mostly it means memorizing the stories told to him by the real prostitutes, sanitizing them and replaying them in his mind as a memory belonging to he and Gloria together, or just to Gloria. It's a difficult process, because the prostitute's stories are often grim ones. It's easy enough to assign to Gloria a lovely childhood memory of going on a road trip or sitting in a dark movie theater, but what can Gloria do with the memory of being nearly killed by a serial killer who targets prostitutes? Or the many stories of torture and rape that feature in these women's lives? Jimmy's quest makes him sort of an odd duck among the johns, and when his methods escalate--because when you chase what cannot be caught, your methods must escalate as a matter of course--it alienates him more and more from the life of the Tenderloin, already characterized by its alienation from the larger world. He begins to ask not just for stories but locks of hair, talismans to make Gloria real, and then it's an easy step from locks to entire wigs.

It seems likely that the stories that make up Gloria's imaginary life are ones told to Vollmann by the prostitutes of the Tenderloin, or fictionalized versions of them. A brief appendix, "A Profile of the Tenderloin Prostitute," is almost certainly taken verbatim from such conversations. No writer throws himself into his subject like Vollmann; after being embedded with the mujahideen, the Tenderloin was probably an easy assignment. Vollmann's engagement with the Tenderloin surpasses what one might call research or journalism; he (later?) famously developed a female alter ego to live among the women described here. (What Vollmann calls, in the language of the time and place, "Transvestites" or "Transformers," are as central to the construction of Gloria's identity as AFAB women.) For this reason, Vollmann's books always have an honesty and authenticity that few other books, especially novels, can match. Whores for Gloria crackles with the real life of the Tenderloin.

Ultimately, Whores for Gloria is a story about the nature of our desires. Jimmy both does and does not believe in Gloria; he consciously and intentionally cobbles an identity and memory for her from those of the Tenderloin women, but after he does so he must forget that he has done this, and in a sense persuade himself that the image he has made is a representation of the world. Of course, this is what all our desires are: images that we have made to persuade ourselves that they are real. In Jimmy I recognize the power of the fantasy life that dwells within, as well as the fear that descending too far into the fantasy can leave one alienated and unfit for the world. Such desires are principally about sex and romance; you might even say that all sexual desire is structured the same way as Gloria. But Vollmann captures the way that even our yearnings for other people are rooted in a deeper yearning for abstractions like beauty and goodness that need images to cling to, but which can only be failed by them.

Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick

He struggled up, disconnected himself from the straps, saw through the port the world below.  Clouds, and the ocean, the globe itself.  Here and there on it matches were lit; he saw the puffs, the flares.  Fright overcame him, as he sailed silently through space, looking down at the pinches of burning scattered about; he knew what they were.

It's death, he though.  Death lighting up spots, burning up the world's life, second by second.

He continued to watch.

The people of the world, and San Francisco Bay specifically, thought the first bomb would be the last.  Not consciously, of course, and there's always the fear, but they organized their lives and minds around it, speaking of it as an inflection point in time, but it wasn't the last bomb, and worse was to come: a series of nuclear explosions that left the world, all of it, in a state of near-ruin.  In the Bay, communities are starting again; people are driving around in horse-driven cars and trying to reinvent combinations of spices that taste like tobacco.  Dogs have learned to talk, but not very well.  In West Marin, a strong and resilient community forms, distinct from faraway neighbors in Oakland and Bolinas, places that before the bomb dropped were only minutes away, not days.  Dick casts this world with an unusually large cast of people, many of whom are worth enumerating, because this is a real ensemble affair:

Hoppy Harrington is a phocomelus, born with tiny flipper-like hands and legs, not because of the first bomb or the later ones, but because of the very not-fictional effects of thalidomide.  Before the bombs go off, he's an outcast, having to beg for a menial job as a TV repairman, but with special powers: a system of electrical extensors makes him quite "handy," and he can see the future.  In a trancelike state, he sees the aftermath of the bombs--a gray wasteland his onlookers take not as a wordly future but a vision of the afterlife--an afterlife in which he wields a kinglike power.  And in truth, in the wrecked world of Marin after the bombs, he becomes nearly all-powerful; he alone possesses the know-how to build and operate a radio tower, and enlarges his physical power by tweaking the electric field of his extensors.

Stuart McConchie is a black TV repairman who works briefly with Hoppy, and who is deeply suspicious of him when others find him weird but harmless.  Hoppy has a vision of him in the afterlife gnawing on a dead rat--which, lo, comes to pass.  Food is scarce, after all, after the bombs.  Stuart's role in the plot is pretty inconsequential, I think, but he brings in themes of race in a way that is unusual for PKD; will the new world be any different for black people in America?  Hoppy Harrington uses society's upheaval to move from the margins of the world into the center, but for Stuart, depressingly, such a move seems not possible; when he arrives in Marin from Oakland, some community members make it clear they don't want black people--coded, again, as "urban"--in their town.

Bruno Bluthgeld is the "Dr. Bloodmoney" of the title.  He is a researcher of some kind who is considered directly responsible for the initial bomb, and is perhaps connected to the later bombs also.  He certainly thinks he is: he both believes that everyone in the world would like to murder him if they could, and that he can manifest nuclear bombs out of thin air with his mind any time he wants.  Both of those things, it turns out, might be true.  He's hiding out in Marin under an assumed name, living as a toothless shepherd, but his kind of power, if it exists, may not be the way of the world anymore, and puts him at odds with the ambitious and megalomaniacal Hoppy.

Walt Dangerfield is an astronaut who, along with his wife, is going to be the first human to live on Mars.  His ship is launched shortly before the bombs go off, and so he finds himself stranded in orbit without anyway to return.  His wife has died.  Over the years, he acts as a kind of world radio, beaming music and conversation, down to those with working radio towers.  He's a pretty obvious stand-in for God.  Hoppy's plan is to use his radio tower to kill Dangerfield--with a kind of sonic beam or something?--and then to replace him with a practiced imitation, to become God.

Finally, there's Edie and Bill Keller.  Edie is a normal seven-year old girl, and Bill, of course, is the shrunken homunculus of her twin brother who lives inside of her body.  Everyone thinks Bill is imaginary, but he's not; he's "a terribly old, wizened thing," "hard and small, floating... [l]ips overgrown with downy hair that hung trailing, streamers of it, wispy and dry."  He can swap bodies with other creatures if Edie presses her side to them, and obviously, he can talk to the dead.

One of my favorite parts of Dr. Bloodmoney is so silly I can barely believe it's in there: Bill Keller, correctly identified by Hoppy as a threat, is torn out of his sister by Hoppy's electrical powers and launched into the sky, where he is devoured by an owl.  He flies around as an owl for a little while, and then vomited out like a pellet.  It seems impossible, but Dr. Bloodmoney might be the most unshakably weird book of Dick's that I've ever read.  Dick never could write a book about one weirdo in a normal universe; there always have to be two or three at least, and this novel really takes that dictum to its maximum.  It's made of such disparate parts all stitched together that it seems like it should be a horrible mess, but it all holds together.

And what keeps it together is the frank terror of the idea of a post-nuclear world.  As Dick writes in his afterword (how awesome to have a window into the thinking behind gonzo books like these), it's actually an "extremely hopeful novel."  Society is not murdered by nuclear war; it remains in the form of small communities, banded together.  Industry and technology are not obliterated but merely retarded; this is not The Road, where the best people can do is stack rocks and make fire.  There is even the impartial suggestion that worldwide crisis can help spur society to reorganize itself.  While Hoppy is clearly a monster, we're told that other phocomeli are also prized as "handymen" by their communities.  Dick points to Bluthgeld as the real villain of the story: the kind of person who believes they have the right to provoke catastrophe in the world of others merely because they have the ability.  Bluthgeld's ability to create bombs out of nowhere seems to me like a representation of the egos of Cold War leaders, who had the audacity to believe that they were capable of administering nuclear arsenals.  Human decency is better represented in the figure of Stuart McConchie, who opens the book by humbly sweeping the stoop of the TV repair shop.

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

I don't plan on living a long life.  Or a short life, necessarily.  I have no plans at all.  The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don't exist, and then your plans are meaningless.

Romy Hall is serving a lifetime sentence for killing a disabled man--her stalker.  She killed him because she was afraid for her son, Jackson, and in the blackest of ironies, it's this act that means she'll be separated from her son forever.  Not just physically, but legally, spiritually; her parental rights are terminated, meaning she doesn't have a right even to know where he is or if he's all right.  This is perhaps the greatest indignity of her prison sentence, but it's not the only one.  How about the time when, upon arriving at prison for the first time, she helps deliver a baby despite the explicit orders of prison guards, and ends up in "ad seg," solitary confinement?  You'd be hard pressed to find a more explicit symbol of the way that the carceral state robs the dignity of women in particular.

It's hard to read The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner's new novel, without thinking about Orange is the New Black.  I imagine that for most people, including me, the Netflix show is the first and only artistic depiction of women's prison they've known.  Like Piper Chapman, Romy is more literate than her cellmates (look at her chat with the prison tutor about Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son!), a fact that's meant to build a stronger sympathy with the reader, who is, after all, a reader, and to provide context for Romy's highly attenuated eye.  Here, for example, is what she sees in a mattress lying against a tree:

We were at a stoplight past the off-ramp.  Outside the window, a mattress leaned against a pepper tree.  Even those two things, I told myself, must go together.  No pepper trees, lacy branches and pink peppercorns, without dirty old mattresses leaned up against their puzzle-bark trunks.  All good bound to bad, and made mad.  All bad.

But unlike Piper, Romy really does come from poverty.  She's raised in a down-at-heels part of San Francisco, peopled by junkies and pimps, feeling miles away from the technocrats and the hippies of popular vision.  Though the novel begins with Romy's transfer to the Stanville prison, about half of it is filling in this back story.  She's exposed to violence at a young age, and learns early on what men will do to women they have power over, even twelve-year olds.  She's a stripper at the title club, but not a stripper with a heart of gold, or a cartoon.  Like her coworkers, she's someone who's learned to exploit the broken operation of the male gaze to her own benefit, even as it seeks to victimize her in ways large and small.

Does Romy deserve to be in prison?  Certainly the account of her crime, which appears at the end, casts into doubt the urgency of her claim to self-defense.  But Kushner is interested in other, more complicated questions: for example, how does the carceral state use the narrative of absolute responsibility to minimize the context that makes up the lives of those it punishes?  We can't understand Romy's crime without the context of her stalker's stalking, which only makes sense in the context of the broader ways in which men punish women in America, a dynamic that the prison only exacerbates.  Kushner explores these questions subtly and thoughtfully, but tips her hand a little in the thoughts of Gordon Hauser, the prison tutor, who thinks:

The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things.  There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death.  And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools.  There were large-scale acts of it, the death of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.

Button Sanchez committed an awful crime, beating an Asian student to death.  Hauser is convinced she didn't see him as a person, which hardly exonerates her.  But the prison only doubles down on what Hauser sees as the root cause of violence, denying Button's personhood.  It's a little on the nose--on the button, maybe--to compare the Stanville prison to the Iraq War, but the point is a solid one.  Button's act of violence pales in comparison to the systemic violence that is incarceration, and in America we fail to reckon with that measurement on a daily basis.  "It added new harm to old," Hauser writes of the prison system, "and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about."  The brightly-colored sisterhood tropes of Orange is the New Black, even though it often makes sharp criticisms, lack the essential tonal darkness that our prisons deserve, and The Mars Room delivers.

Kushner's writing is full of excellent, powerful detail.  Here's just one little bit that I liked about a totally minor character:

He only left the house himself one evening a week, Sundays, when he worked as a volunteer security guard at the Red Cross.  He made a big deal about it.  Always took a briefcase with him, and said it held important documents that he needed to study for his next Daytona run.  It wasn't really a briefcase.  It was the emptied container for a backgammon set.  Once, Sammy opened it.  It was filled with candy bars.

It's funny, it's real, it's specific.  What a terrific image is: the backgammon set full of candy bars.  She does that throughout, sketching each individual life with a careful and empathetic eye, and a sense of how absurd life can be.  During the long bus ride to the prison, one prisoner waxes poetic about how they're going to miss the Bloomin' Onion at Outback.

But as a whole, the narrative sags.  It takes a hundred pages just to get Romy off the bus and into the prison.  The novel is peppered with accounts from other characters, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third: her cellmate, Sammy, the crooked cop, Doc, in a men's prison somewhere, and especially Gordon, the tutor.  Kushner also splices in some sections from Ted Kaczynski's journals.  And while I think I get why--Gordon lives isolated in the mountains, like Kaczynski; Romy imagines those same mountains are a kind of Eden just out of reach; neither Gordon nor Kaczynski can understand isolation in the way Romy can because their isolation is her Eden, etc., etc.--it seems like a lot of pages to make what seems like a convoluted observational loop.  The Gordon sections are especially frustrating, because as interesting as he is as a character, his presence ends up a narrative dead end for Romy.  As a result, the time spent in the actual prison with Romy is relatively short. 

The end gives a flash of narrative drive, but it doesn't quite ring true, in a novel that spends so much time milling about in the fine details.  Forget it.  Life sentences don't have narrative drive.  As Kushner writes, "[L]ife does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes."

Beyond the Possible by Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani

Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani are the type of church people I would never have heard about growing up. If I had heard of them, it would not have been in a positive light. The people in the pews of the churches my family attended would have found Williams and Mirikitani lacking; some would have thought them reprehensible. Williams and Mirikitani are the founders of Glide Memorial Methodist Church is San Francisco, a church that reached--and reaches--out to the downtrodden, the outcasts, the addicts. A church that loves unconditionally. A church.

Beyond the Possible tells the story of how Glide came to be, starting with the childhood and formative years of Williams and Mirikitani. The early lives of these two are worthy of print on their own. Williams grew up in a segregated Texas town in the 1930s. He was a good student and athlete, and worked hard to get into college. After he graduated from college, he was one of five young men who helped desegregate the all-white Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University. The students at Perkins had made a formal request to desegregate their school. This was the first voluntary desegregation of a major educational institution in the South.

During World War II, when Mirikitani was about two years old, her family was interred at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas. Her family never expected her to do much else other than marry and provide a good home life for a husband, but she pushed herself to do much more.

The personal journeys of Williams and Mirikitani, combined with the the revival of a dying church in the middle of San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, make for an extremely compelling narrative. Much like the story of Glide, the story of Williams and Mirikitani is winding and intricate. I feel at a loss when I try to sum up either, not sure of what to leave out. It all seems so integral.

I am quite cynical when it come to religion--particularly religious institutions. And while I still hesitate to call myself an atheist, deep down, I know that label probably fits better than any other. In spite of this, or perhaps it is because of this, I found the story of Glide extremely compelling. A church that is a group of people advocating for social justice and loving others unconditionally is a church that I could see myself attending... occasionally.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

“Why do you want to be on The Real World?”
“Because I want everyone to witness my youth.”
“Why?”
“Isn't it gorgeous?”

“We are the bright new stars born of a screaming black hole, the nascent suns burst from the darkness, from the grasping void of space that folds and swallows--a darkness that would devour anyone not as strong as we. We are oddities, sideshows, talk show subjects. We capture everyone's imagination.”

“I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it's hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so - this has always been my dream - so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make shoes while the children sleep.”

When I went to find a passage to copy to entice you readers to read this book (most of you probably already have; it was quite the darling of the literary world a few years back and I am terribly behind when it comes to the darlings of the literary world) I couldn’t narrow it down to just one. So I included three. The first one was a bit of pithy dialogue between the author/memoirist and a casting agent for The Real World. The second and third are examples of what I liked so much about this book – the thick, lustrous description sliding down the page like a model’s hair sliding down her back in a shampoo commercial. (In related news, think I could place in that “worst abuse of a simile” contest?) A downside of so much description is that this book progressed sloooooowly. It is engaging but definitely not a quick read, for me at least.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG) begins and also ends with the death of the author’s mother, after a protracted battle with cancer. The four Eggers kids have recently lost their father to the disease as well. Hard times for any family, but the three older Eggers children, of which Dave is the youngest at 22 must also contend with guardianship of their littlest brother, Topher. Dave eventually takes on Topher, and moves from suburban Illinois to San Francisco where they live for several years. This book is the account of the boys’ SF years. David is a struggling writer, working with friends to produce a magazine that sounds so hipster-pretentious I would have hated it if I was reading pretentious magazines in 1995. I was not; I was 10, the same age as Topher.

Dave has lots of adventures despite the fact that he is effectively a single parent in his twenties. The boys rent a series of apartments together, and Topher attends school. They play a lot of Frisbee on the beach. In the book, Eggers tends to project his feelings into his recounted conversations with Topher, injecting the dialogue with a sophistication and level of detail that would only come from a writer and not from a fifth-grade. This is okay because at the beginning of the book Eggers writes that the dialogue is not a precise rendering of actual conversation. While the events in the book did happen, Eggers cautions that the book must be considered only somewhat non-fiction because of certain liberties taken with dialogue and with the names of those involved.

I was really glad to read this book for several reasons, one being that it has been on my book shelf forever. My bookshelf is small and I have a lot of books so they are double stacked. The entire front section of books on each shelf are ones I own but have never read. I bought a lot of paperbacks at the Bulls Head in Chapel Hill with my One Card…sorry Mom, that’s why I kept running out of meal money in college. Now I refuse to buy any more books until I read some of the ones on my shelf (library books are still okay).

Overall, this book kind of dragged for me. The writing was obviously excellent, but the plot was meandering. Sometimes I wanted to be Eggers’ best friend and sometimes I couldn’t stand him, especially when he talked about his magazine or his sexual encounters (awk. ward.) I’m kind of late to the Dave Eggers game (I also own What is the What, but haven’t read it yet either) so maybe I’ll read one of his other books and see how that compares. Not gonna lie, Wild Things (out in October, the book cover is covered in fur, it’s a redo of Sendak’s classic but for young adults) looks interesting too.

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

Here then is the error, my moment of greatest failure. If everyone has a decision she would give anything to retract, this is mine: a shape in the sand caught my eye.

In the moment that Abby Mason looks away from her fiancee's six-year-old daughter to photograph a seal pup the child disappears. Frantic, Abby and her fiancee Jake spend the next several months looking desperately for Emma and slowly growing apart. Abby cannot let go of her own guilt and sadness at losing the child that would have been her daughter. Jake struggles to forgive Abby and himself for leaving Emma to go on a trip.

The book's title comes comes both from the San Francisco setting and also Abby's struggle to remember specific details about the day Emma went missing so that she might be able to find a clue to her whereabouts. Abby dives into books about memory and tries hypnosis in between ceaselessly searching the San Francisco landmarks where a little girl might be taken and relentlessly working to help the investigation.

It isn't until a tiny shoe is found on the beach months later that Jake decides to halt the search. Convinced his daughter wandered into the ocean and drowned under the eye of a distracted Abby, Jake holds a funeral and grieves by burying a tiny empty casket. Abby, refusing to give up the search, is given an ultimatum: make a new life with Jake by putting Emma in the past or give him up for her fruitless continued searching. In the end, Abby follows a clue trail to Costa Rica, where after three exhausting months, she finds Emma living with her kidnappers at a popular beach resort. Exuberant that she, Jake and Emma can now live happily ever after, she is struck when Jake lets her know there is no place for her in their lives now.

The ending of this book was hopeful of course because Emma was found safe, but sad too in the dissolution of Jake and Abby's relationship. The themes: memory, a step-mother's growing but powerful love for her new daughter, a relationship strained beyond repair, and letting go. My mom recommended this one to me, and its definitely very reminiscent of some Lifetime-type chick lit. However, this book's writing is actually quite nuanced, and I enjoyed the imagery of the San Francisco coastline through out the seasons as Emma stays missing for an entire year.

All in all a good book. I would not recommend it to any of the guys though.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Here it is, in the twilight of the year, and not only am I getting destroyed by Carlton, I am getting passed by Brent, and it looks as if fifty is a near impossibility. Even the books I read I pretty much read for work--case in point, this novel, The Joy Luck Club, which I am about to read with my tenth graders (and so had to quickly read myself).

I had gotten the impression somewhere that Amy Tan was a lightweight, and that The Joy Luck Club was a pretty Hallmarkish simp-fest about mothers and daughters rediscovering their relationship. I am please to report that while it does fall firmly in the stylistic arena of most pop-fiction, Tan's dissection of how families interact across cultural boundaries is pretty compelling.

The Joy Luck Club is split into 16 stories, many originally considered as separate stories not meant to tell a single narrative. There are four mothers who escaped China during the Sino-Japanese War of the 1940's and their four daughters who grew up in San Francisco's Chinatown. The one is exception is Jing-Mei Woo, who, just as she has replaced her mother in the womens' mah jongg circle--the titular club--tells four stories, assuming her mother's pair.

In Chinese, "joy luck" is one word, and its English equivalent not quite up to the task of translating it completely. In the same way, Tan explores the way that certain Chinese concepts fail to make the translation in the lives of their daughters, and the frustration of both sides who essentially live in separate cultures. To one of the daughters, it may seem that feng shui is an outmoded concept with no practical meaning, but she fails to see that the way her hastily constructed table falls apart is indicative of the weakness and fragility of her household and her marriage.

I am having trouble remembering specific episodes; for the most part, these characters are interchangeable. They are all, you get the impression, Amy Tan an Amy Tan's mother, and so there is very little cross-pollination between the stories. For the most part, each story tells about one pair of mothers and daughters, and the other characters appear only incidentally. As a result, The Joy Luck Club cannot cohere an struggles as a narrative. But the stories themselves are carefully contained and affective; I hope that this makes it easier to read for my kids.