A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

I confess, I started reading A Series of Unfortunate Events last year because I was extremely busy and my book count was extremely low. My only exposure to the series previously had been the decent but not particularly good movie adaptation--which actually combines the first three books—and being impressed by the very nicely designed little volumes I saw in the store. I also read a couple interviews with Daniel Handler, the man behind Lemony Snicket, and was intrigued by his description of the series.

Reading the first few Snicket books, I was struck by the willful similarity between them—the plots were identical. The Baudelaire orphans, Violent, Klaus, and Sunny, whose parents died in a fire, are taken by their caretaker, Mr. Poe, to a new guardian, who eventually turns out to be evil, incompetent, or both. At the end of each book, their living situation has fallen apart, the guardian is frequently dead or MIA, and they’re on the way to the next event in the unfortunate series. The guardian in the first book is Count Olaf, the series’ primary villain, who hatches a plot to steal their family fortune. In each subsequent book, up until The Carnivorous Carnival, #9, Olaf disguises himself—as a detective, scientist, receptionist, auctioneer, et al, and the adults around the Baudelaires have no idea anything out of the ordinary is going on. It’s a little like a series of horror films, where the teenagers being hunted down have no recourse but themselves. At the end of The Vile Village, #7, the Baudelaires finally break from Mr. Poe and strike out on their own, seeking the mysterious organization V.F.D., which may hold information about their parents’ death. The rest of the books, from #8, The Hostile Hospital onward, mix things up structurally, as the orphans try to find old friends, solve the V.F.D. mystery, and find someplace they belong.

The real constant in the books, however, is Lemony Snicket, who is retracing the orphans’ steps and writing their history. He’s an engaging narrator, opening every book by warning the reader that the story to follow is quite miserable, and that they might be better off to read something else. As the series goes on, a meta-story begins to develop, one that is connected to the Baudelaire’s own. It involves Count Olaf, a woman named Beatrice, Lemony himself, and lots of daring escapades. Although this story is extremely interesting, and is revealed very well in snatches throughout the series, the full narrative is never given. Blank spots abound, plot points are missing, ambiguity is everywhere. While Snicket is an engaging narrator, he’s not a very direct one. The meta-story really pulled me through the slow spots in the series, and while it’s not entirely satisfying, it is thematically appropriate, which leads naturally into the next section of this review.

There’s really no way to discuss the series without discussing the end—which, conveniently, happens in #13, The End, so spoilers follow.

In The End, the Baudelaires seem to have found a safe place, a desert island inhabited by a group of people—many of whom are given names from Shakespeare’s The Tempest—and Ishmael, their benevolent-or-is-he leader. The villagers see right through Olaf’s disguise, the first people in the entire series to do so, and banish him. This leads to several weeks of peaceful living for the Baudelaires, but, unsurprisingly, the island is not as utopian as it first appears. Ishmael exercises, through force of peer pressure, an iron control over the populace, “suggesting” to them that any item that washes up on the shore would be better stored in the “arboretum” to prevent rocking the boat. The Baudelaires, however, are unsatisfied with this arrangement and sneak into the arboretum, only find a huge book called, of course, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s here that the series shows its hand. It doesn’t explain, or even attempt to explain all the mysteries that have cropped up throughout the narrative. Although it is implied that many answers reside in the book—which is not the same as the Unfortunate Event books themselves—the reader is only able to read one short excerpt. Instead, the book serves as reminder that stories never really begin or end, that every story starts and stops arbitrarily and all life—and fiction—really happens in media res.

One of Ishmael’s favorite sayings is, “It depends on how you look at it”, and that turns out to be the watchword for the entire series—of course we don’t get all the answers, because we’ve seen everything through the Baudelaires’ eyes. Snicket makes the point that simply by shifting perspective, another 13 book series could be written on Olaf, or Ishmael, or any of the guardians, or, as in the case of the Snicket meta-story, someone not directly connected to the Baudelaire orphans at all. I’ve never seen a young adult series—or many adult ones, for that matter—so comfortable with ambiguity. It’s to Handler’s credit that the ending doesn’t feel like a cop-out. There’s a very real sense that he knows exactly what’s going on, and could pull back the curtain if he wished, but that’s not the story he’s chosen to tell. The exact relationship between the Snickets and the Baudelaires is never made explicit; the possible wrongdoings of the Baudelaire parents are never enumerated; things are left up in the air in many ways, but that only makes sense—we’ve only followed one series of unfortunate events, and the world is made up of nothing else.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in the fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.  Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattainted goodness trembled off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

Middlemarch is a book about a pair of bad marriages.  The first is that of Dorothea Brooke, the "Saint Theresa" of the above passage, who is ardently devoted to religion and to charity, and hopes to marry a man whose wisdom and devotion will help to elevate her spirit.  She thinks that the aging, ugly Reverend Edward Causubon is that man:

"He thinks with me, said Dorothea to herself, "or rather, he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror.  And his feelings, too, his whole experience--what a lake compared with my little pool!"

But, as she will learn, Casaubon is not that man--his life's work, a Robert Graves-like "Key to All Mythologies," remains unrealized, an abortive intellectual project that would be useless and meaningless even if he could ever get around to writing the first page of it.  Casaubon feels keenly that he is a failure, and Dorothea's devotion to him ultimately only spurs his anger and resentment.  Because this kind of plot requires there to be a right man for Dorothea, Casaubon's insecurity is amplified by his fear that Dorothea is in love with his young cousin Will Ladislaw.

The second marriage is that of the young doctor Tertius Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy.  Lydgate is an ambitious man, eager to contribute to the world of medicine and with the talent to do so, but he falls for the vain Rosamond, who drives him into debt and derails his hopes.  These two marriages act as pillars for the novel, which also contains a handful of side plots concerning the inhabitants of the titular town, but Eliot puts the Dorothea story clearly at the center of the novel.  Ironically, Dorothea's poor marriage does elevate her spirit and grow her in wisdom, as she shows when she finally meets Rosamond in the book's final pages:

"Marriage is so unlike everything else.  There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.  Even if we loved some one else better than--than those we were married to, it would be no use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.  I know it may be very dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us like a murder--and everything else is gone.  And then our husband--if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life..."

"The marriage stays with us like a murder"--that is wonderfully evocative, and a great example of Eliot's formidable prose and strong characters.  Dorothea is intricately realized, but so are the "fringe" characters that populate Middlemarch, like Dorothea's scatterbrained father Mr. Brooke, the lazy but warm-hearted Fred Vincy, and ten or fifteen others.  I mentioned in my year-end review that Tolstoy was a big fan of Eliot's, and Middlemarch has that kind of immense Tolstoyan scope but also the kind of fine attention to the peculiarities of character that I associate with somebody like Austen or even Shakespeare.

Eliot sets her story at the historical moment of political argument over the Reform Bill of 1832.  The minor figures of Middlemarch talk about it constantly; Will Ladislaw champions it as the editor of a local paper with the patronage of Mr. Brooke, who mulls a candidacy for Parliament.  I admit I didn't understand most of the details, but I did glean that the reform in question was the expansion of suffrage, and Middlemarch reflects that in the expansiveness of its depiction of the town.  By focusing on such a large cast of characters, Eliot expresses a kind of universal suffrage, as she is interested in capturing the voices of as many people as possible.  Reform, too, seems to me to be a central idea: how people seek to reform themselves by seeking wisdom, prudence, and responsibility.

The story of Dorothea knits those two aspects up nicely: she is constantly seeking to be a better person, though she is certainly the best person in the book already.  Furthermore, Eliot is deeply interested in the idea that there are unrecognized saints, like Dorothea, whose goodness never gets recognized because it toils in anonymity.  Eliot ultimately can't bear to deny Dorothea the happiness she deserves, and though perhaps it would have been bolder to let her remain in selfless abegnation, it's rewarding to see goodness rewarded.

Christopher's Top Ten of 2012

So you're telling me we've been doing this for six years?  That, my friend, is madness.  In those six years I've read 313 books, which is probably five or six times the number of books I'd read in my life up to that point.  At the end of the year, it's nice to look back and recognize at least one unqualified success, I think.

Here are the ten best books I read in 2012.  I still have some left to review, like Middlemarch, but I'll get around to it.  I'm not including books I re-read, or any of the Shakespeare plays because, well, that's just not very interesting.  He's been on enough lists.

10.) Baudolino by Umberto Eco - Brent commented on my review of Baudolino by saying, "So this is basically Life of Pi."  He was being snarky, but there's a lot of truth to that.  Both Baudolino and Life of Pi are about finding value in religion and myth while divesting them of the necessity to be exact truth, but while Life of Pi does it with a dishonest bit of sleight-of-hand, Baudolino puts the games it plays with truth front and center.  Baudolino, a courtier of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, creates elaborate lies about the mythical Eastern king Prester John as a way of legitimizing Barbarossa's power.  Then, preposterously, he sets out on a journey to find the king he's invented.  A lesser author would have Baudolino discover that the people and places he's imagined have come to life, but Eco provides stranger, more ambiguous discoveries. 

9.) The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon - What I liked best about The Crying of Lot 49 is that it was fun.  Though it shares the postmodern anxiety about the gulf between language and what it represents, it is neither bewildering nor unpleasant because it recognizes that that gulf opens language up to play.  The sheer ridiculousness of the novel's central conspiracy--that there exists a massive, ancient, and secret rebel postal service--suggests that if we really can't make sense of the world, we may as well have a laugh at its expense.

8.) Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth - I think that Roth, too, is having a lot of fun in the sublimely filthy Sabbath's Theater, though it's a fun that is punctured by the demands of grief and the promise of death.  It is a novel about the limits of fun, about what the joys of sexual hedonism can and cannot do.  The aging pervert and puppeteer Mickey Sabbath finds himself unable to deal with the death of his longtime lover, which forces him to reflect on the life he's lived.  Honestly, that description sounds boring as hell, but Sabbath's Theater succeeds because it tempers its poignancy with sexual farce, like a novel-length expansion of that time Rabbit Angstrom asked some woman to pee on him.  More importantly, it deftly navigates sexual morality, neither forgiving Sabbath for the cruelty his libido sometimes produces nor slipping into prudishness.

7.) VALIS by Philip K. Dick - I was originally going to have Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on this list, but I think it got just barely shoved off by VALIS, my final book of 2012.  It may be a record of Dick's growing mental instability, but it is honest about that instability, and I'm not sure I've ever read a book as forthcoming or as raw.

6.) The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark - I think that The Mandelbaum Gate is Spark working intentionally outside of her comfort range: the pace is slower, the characters more sympathetic, the violence toned down.  In my review I suggested that one reason for that might be that Spark viewed the book as being semi-autobiographical, in so far as it is about a Catholic convert with Jewish ancestry.  But even if that's not the case, it's a remarkably powerful book, fashioning the image of a divided city into a metaphor for divided histories and divided selves.  Throw in a light-hearted spy caper, and it might be the best Graham Greene book Greene never wrote.

5.) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers - Writers who are really sensitive to the nature of human existence have an ear for the way people talk past each other, too wrapped up in their own plans and needs to recognize the plans and needs of others.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of the greatest novels I have ever read in that regard.  It is the story of a handful of small town Southerners who strike up a friendship with a deaf-mute, each seeing in his inability to respond an imaginary sympathy to their own worries.  No book I've ever read captures just how it is that a world that is so full of people can be so damned lonely.

3.) (tie) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I wanted to read Anna Karenina in anticipation of the Joe Wright film that was recently released.  And while that film (which I enjoyed) is so needless of its source material I might not have bothered, I'm glad I did, because it was really great to be immersed in Anna Karenina.  The story of Anna and her doomed love affair with Count Vronsky is an elegant tragedy, but there is something cold and insular about it that does not permit the reader to share in it.  It might have been a very off-putting book if not for the B-plot of the landowner Levin and his beloved Kitty, whose romance is something like the negative image of Anna's, and for the collection of vivid, fascinating characters that collect at the edges: Anna's stoic, suffering husband Karenin; the lecherous, sanguine Stepan Oblonsky; etc.

3.) (tie) Middlemarch by George Eliot - Something about placing these two novels in a tie just seemed right.  Tolstoy reportedly had an admiration for Eliot, and it's easy to see why: Middlemarch is a big brick of a book about an entire community of provincial Britishers, held up by two columnar romance narratives.  Give everyone Russian names and it might as well be Anna Karenina.  Or, rather, if you made a Venn diagram of Tolstoy and Jane Austen Middlemarch would be the vesica piscis in the middle.  When I can, I'm going to give it a proper review, but I want to do it justice.

2.) Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping is, along with The Blue Flower, one of the two books I've read this year I would call revelatory; that is, they exceeded my expectations and showed me something I hadn't seen before.  In Housekeeping, it is the ornate but immaculate prose, which gives voice to sentiments I've often had but had not had the words to describe.  It is the story of a young girl being cared for by her aunt in the Western town of Fingerbone, but more than that it is about the inherent sadness in the separation of things.  I find myself returning to one line of Robinson's again and again: "What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?"  I don't know what that might look like, the knitting up of the fragments of the world, but I know that it is something I have yearned for without knowing that I yearned for it.

1.) The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald - I don't know what to say about this novel.  I think it may be perfect.  Its conciseness, its humor, its baffling lightness--it captivated me in a way no other novel has this year.  It is the story of the German poet Novalis, who fell in love with a not very pretty and not very smart girl but loved her with immense passion and sensitivity.  Each moment, each character, is so carefully and distinctly wrought with only a handful of words.

For lack of anything else constructive to say about it, I'll note this: One of the trends of 2012 for me was an amplified interest in female writers: McCullers, Eliot, Robinson, Fitzgerald, and of course Spark, whom I've always loved.  I read a recent interview with V. S. Naipaul in which he said he's never read a female author who he thought was as good as he is.  Mr. Naipaul, if you're reading this, I'd like to say: 1.) You're kind of a crusty old misogynist fart, and 2.) You clearly haven't read this book, and you should.  (I also read Fitzgerald's Offshore, which might have made it on this list if there weren't a self-imposed one author rule.)


So there you have it--another year in the books.  If you read this blog and have enjoyed it, thanks.  If you want to join us in 2013--and we'd love for you to join us--send me an e-mail at misterchilton-at-gmail.com.  I'd like to welcome back Randy, who's rejoining us after a year's hiatus and assures me that he is going to review only books about Satan worship.  See you next year, folks!

VALIS by Philip K. Dick

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than the razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer.  It is more elusive than the merest phantom.  Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.

VALIS is simultaneously the most bizarre and the least fantastical book of Philip K. Dick's I've ever read.  It is bizarre because it is about a man, Horselover Fat, who has prophetic visions implanted in him by a benign force through a pink beam of light.  It is not fantastical because it is, almost to the letter, completely autobiographical.

Dick makes no effort to conceal the fact that Fat is himself; he announces it in the first couple of pages.  "Horselover" is a translation of the Greek word Philippos, and dick is the German word for "fat."  And yet in his capacity as narrator, Dick speaks to the man he lovingly calls "Horse," interacts with him, tries to guide him through a long series of griefs that include the suicide and cancer deaths of friends, divorce and alienation.  When Dick says, "I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity," we are in the uncomfortable space between the canny tricks of an accomplished writer and the neurosis of a madman.

But that's one of the most interesting questions VALIS tackles: what separates sanity from insanity?  If Dick admits that he, as Fat, has become unhinged, does that somehow make him less unhinged?  The pink beam that hits Fat reveals to him, piecemeal, a religious cosmogony that he records as a massive exegesis, like Dick did in his own life.  It is a semi-Christian, explicitly Gnostic theology that says that the years between 103 and 1974 AD were imaginary and that the times of the Roman Empire still continue behind the illusory 20th century.  But it also says that the world is inherently irrational, created by an irrational God (this is a quintessential Gnostic tenet) and that the pink light, beamed in by what Dick calls "God," "Zebra," and "VALIS" in turn, is a rational source breaking in through the irrationality.  This source is not divine but human, transmitted by a group of our beneficent kin who never let themselves slip into the mad, unreal world in which we live.

I do not think, as Dick did, that he received information from three-eyed humans residing near the star Fomalhaut.  But there are ideas in here that are compelling, that cannot be dismissed as one man's quackery, and that seem to me to be genuine and heartfelt responses to deep suffering.  I have immense sympathy for anyone who has come to believe that the universe is essentially irrational.  What is most remarkable to me is Dick's ambivalence about whether his/Horselover Fat's cosmogony is sense or sheer senselessness, and the nakedness with which he seems to confess that the fictionalization of his experiences, and perhaps his entire  career as a science fiction writer, represent a desperate attempt to corral the world into sense:

You can understand why Fat no longer knew the difference between fantasy and divine revelation--assuming there is a difference, which has never been established.  He imagiend that Zebra came from a planet in the star-system Sirius, had overthrown the Nixon tyranny in August 1974, and would eventually set up a just and peaceful kingdom on Earth where there would be no sickness, no pain, no loneliness, and the animals would dance with joy.

It is the highest praise I can give the novel that, while I was reading it--and perhaps even now--I couldn't differentiate between fantasy and divine revelation.  The second highest praise I can give it is that, though it serves mostly as a frame for the presentation of Dick's cosmogony, it remains a highly entertaining and deeply moving novel.  The mixture of grief and humor Dick applies to Fat's life is some of his best satire.  Here's Fat's suicide attempt:

What had saved his life initially emanated from a defect in the choke of his car; the choke hadn't opened properly as the engine warmed, and finally the engine had stalled.  Fat had made his way unsteadily back to the house and lain down on his bed to die.  The next morning he woke up, still alive, and begun to vomit up the digitalis.  That was the second thing which saved him.  The third thing came in teh form of all the paramedics in the world removing the glass and aluminum sliding door at the rear of Fat's house.  Fat had phoned his pharmacy somewhere along the line to get a refill on his Librium prescription; he had taken thirty Librium just before taking the digitalis.  The pharmacist had contact the paramedics.  A lot can be said for the infinite mercies of God, but the smarts of a good pharmacist, when you get down to it, is worth more.

I particularly liked the cynicism of Fat's skeptical friend Kevin, and the incredibly dark humor of Sherri, the awful, parasitic cancer patient that repays Fat's kindness with utter cruelty.  The book's second half, which becomes more clearly fictional (and includes plot elements lifted from Dick's first attempt to fictionalize his exegesis, Radio Free Albemuth), is unpredictable and absorbing: Fat and his friends make contact with a two-year old girl, Sophia, who seems to be the earthly avatar of VALIS who commissions them as her emissaries on Earth.

Certainly Dick felt that way--did he, or did he believe, that he had met someone like Sophia?  Or is the book's latter half merely a madman's rationalization his mad philosophy?  The book ends in an unsettlingly ambiguous place, and that its ambiguity speaks for Dick's rationality and reflectiveness makes it no less difficult to evaluate.  As we rev up for "a national discussion on mental illness," I value VALIS, as I do One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for its urgent reminder that mental illness and mental health are not clear opposites, and that prophets and geniuses are not always easily indistinguishable from madmen.

Brent also reviewed this book in 2010.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

I’ve struggled a little with how to review Flight Behavior because my feelings about it are conflicted. I was extremely excited to receive an advance copy for review, and, at first, it met my expectations. The prose was good, the main character, Dellarobia, was well-drawn, and the plot was intriguing: Dellarobia climbs the mountain behind her house, planning to cheat on her husband, only to have her mind changed when the side of the mountain appears to be on fire. Upon closer inspection, it turns out the “fire” is actually a massive migration of butterflies whose migratory patterns have been messed up by climate change.

There are other characters, the primary one being Ovid Byron, a scientist--entomologist, probably--who arrives on Dellarobia’s farm to study the butterflies. He’s the most developed character outside of Dellarobia herself, and when the two of them share a scene, things work pretty well. Kingsolver’s prose is excellent--her language is evocative and warm without being overblown, and it’s well-suited for describing the ethereal beauty of the butterflies.

However, after getting about midway through the book, I began to have misgivings. First, it was the speechifying. Look, I’m not a climate change denialist, and I largely sympathize with Ovid’s (and Kingsolvers) concerns about the environment. That said, there are numerous multi-page conversations that do little to advance the plot, but instead serve as a way to soapbox global warming. Kingsolver is a good writer--surely there must have been a better way to embed the information than exposition dumps disguised as dialog. Some of it is interesting, but no one likes to feel like their novel is preaching to them.

The other issue I had with the book involves its treatment of the non-Dellarobia characters in her hometown. They are, at the beginning, presented in the broadest way possible. Her husband, nicknamed Cub, is a redneck, as his father, nicknamed Bear. His mother, Hester, is overbearing and controlling, and mostly unkind. They’re all deeply religious, and believe that the butterflies are a sign for God. They’re also vehement climate change denialists, at least at the beginning, although their views do change minimally throughout the novel. Overall, though, the book gives them the short shrift. We are told repeatedly what a good man Cub is, even if he isn’t quite the good man for Dellarobia, but we’re never really shown, so my ultimate impression of him was that he was a man-child who never even tried to be an adult. Bear gets even less characterization. Hester is a legitimately complex character, but she disappears for long stretches of the book, and a revelation about her near the end never really resolves. I felt no love in Flight Behavior for any of the tertiary characters, save maybe Dellarobia’s rambunctious friend Dovey, and though the book seems to be presenting some sort of faith-vs-reason dichotomy, it lands so firmly on the side of reason that it sometimes feels more like a satire than a realistic novel.

Finally, there’s the issue of the ending, which I will be partially spoiling below. If you haven’t read the book and don’t want to know the ending, stop reading now.

ENDING SPOILERS

The novel ends with Dellarobia deciding that, yes, she has married the wrong man, so she decides to get a divorce, move out of town, and go back to school. She breaks this to her son by a) telling him she has some exciting news b) sharing said news i.e. that she’s moving away and going back to school but he’ll still be able to see her c) justifying her decision by comparing it to crapping the bed, and d) withholding what is essentially her going away gift, an iPhone, until her young son admits that things will never be the same. Lest this sounds like an exaggeration, here’s the passage:

“What if I want everything to stay how it is?” he asked.
“Oh, man, that’s the bite. Grown-ups want that too. Honestly! That’s what makes them crap the bed and stay in it, I’m not even kidding.”
His eyes scooted away from hers, avoiding the verdict.
“It won’t ever go back to the way it was, Preston. You have to say that right now, okay? Just say it and I’ll give you the pod-thing.”
He glanced over at her, making sure, and said it. “It won’t ever go back to how it was.”
“Okay” She handed it over. “You’re the man.”

The high-school language ("Oh, man", "I'm not even kidding") seems wildly inappropriate for breaking world-shattering news to your child. This section so impacted my view of Dellarobia that it retroactively tainted the rest of the book. The story begins with her about to make a selfish mistake, and ends with her selfishly upending everyone’s lives and forcing them to accept it whether they like it or not. The very end comes out of nowhere, and feels like a cosmic attempt to validate Dellarobia’s choice, but her treatment of her child and husband had already wrecked her character for me by then. Maybe this is just a personal bias, I don’t know. All I can say is that, while it has its strong points, I ultimately didn’t enjoy Flight Behavior that much, even though I really wanted to.

Thirty Days With My Father by Christal Presley

"[S]ometimes I felt sorry for my father, and sometimes I wished he would die. And all the while I loved him and wondered if the war really had made him like he was or if it was just him."

At a writing workshop, a speaker posed a question: "What if you wrote about the thing you fear the most?" This prompt resonated with Christal Presley, and she knew what she feared the most: her father and "the war he brought home with him from Vietnam." This question lead her to decided to talk with her dad either on the phone or in person (they didn't not live all that close to each other) every day for 30 days.

Presley had haunting childhood memories of her father, of him "snapping" and chasing her around the house because she had dropped some plates, or him locking himself in his room for hours, of him announcing that he was going down to the river to shoot himself and then walking out of the house with his rifle. Presley had a relationship with her dad, but it was a relationship of fear and confusion. He was never physically violent toward her or her mother, but she says that there were time when she thought it could escalate to that.

Presley began her writing project tentatively. The phone call on day one of the project couldn't have lasted for more than a minute, consisting of her father telling her that he didn't want to talk about the war, and her quickly hanging up the phone. But she was persistent, sticking with her stated goal. With each passing day, her father opened up more about his experiences in the war. It wasn't long before Presley and her father were discussing things that happened in their home during her childhood, at once apologizing, consoling and analyzing. By the end of the thirty days, Presley's relationship with her father has changed drastically. She looks forward to talking and seeing him, and he with her. And perhaps most importantly, being able to move on from some of darker spots in her past has enabled the brighter spots to shine through. As she put it, "It's interesting how the good memories come back when you stop being angry."

Thirty Days is structured like you would expecting a writing project like this to be structured. It is comprised of 60 sections: an entry for each day and a journal entry that accompanies each daily entry. I found it interesting to see how both Presley and her father changed in how they dealt with each other. Her conservative Christian upbringing resonated with me, having grown up the same way. I think this made me connect with her in a way that I wasn't expecting.

I don't think this book is for everyone. It follows a fairly predictable trajectory, with few twists or turns, and the writing is fairly spartan. However, if you are interested in learning more about PTSD and its affect on families, this book will be a valuable resource.

Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

MEPHISTOPHELES: Be done with nursing your despair,
Which, like a vulture, feeds upon your mind;
The very meanest company bids fair
To let you feel a man among mankind.
It's not that we propose
To toss you in among the rabble.
I am no ranking devil;
But let us say you chose
To fall in step with me for life's adventure,
I'd gladly, forthwith, go into indenture,
Be yours, as well as I know how.
I'm your companion now,
And if this meets with your desire,
Will be your servitor, your squire!

FAUST: And for my part--what is it you require?

MEPHISTOPHELES: Never you mind, it's much too soon to worry.


How does one review Faust?  It took Goethe's entirely life to complete it, and seemingly contains every thought, every idea, every feeling that he felt was important to human existence.  It's so immense, so bizarre, so full of things to talk about that it defies description.

The story, at least at the beginning, is very familiar: The scholar Faust sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in exchange for endless knowledge and power.  In most versions of this story, this will predictably come back to bite Faust in the ass, but Faust isn't that kind of book.  By the end of the book, the deal that Faust makes with Mephistopheles seems quaint, and pretty much forgotten.

There are two parts: The first is a tragedy, in which Faust uses his powers to seduce a young woman named Margarete.  She has his child, but kills it, and dies for it, although it seems that at the very end she is redeemed.  This story is heart-rending, and Faust's tearful visit to the mad Margarete in her cell just before her execution is pretty hard to take:

MARGARETE: Day!  Yes, day is here, it dawns so gray;
This was to be my wedding-day!
Tell no one that Gretchen was yours already,
My poor wreath's shredding!
What's done is done!
We shall be one,
But not at a wedding.
The crowd is thronging, no word, no laugh;
The square is milling,
The streets o'erfilling.
There tolls the bell, they break the staff.
How they pounce on me, bind me!
Already I am on the scaffold laid,
All necks shrink back from the winking blade
That will glint and find me.
Mute lies the world like the grave!

Now, this part of Faust is strange.  The whole thing is written like a play, but the stage directions are so ornate and the number of parts so monstrous that it could never possibly be performed.  There are lines attributed to figures like "This World's Child" and "Prontophantasmiac" and a talking soap bubble.  There are some talking marmosets.  But at least the overall story of what Faust inflicts on Margarete is recognizable as a genre tragedy.

The second part, however, infinitely ramps up the weirdness.  Faust now finds himself in the court of an Emperor, to whom he and Mephistopheles offer their services by, among other things, introducing paper currency.  Then Faust, in his role as the Master of Revels for the Emperor, has Mephistopheles conjure up the image of Helen of Troy, falls in love with her, and spends a huge chunk of Part II searching for her to be his lover.  Then he returns to the Emperor's court and spends the rest of his life on an urban development project using the power of the sea to build a great city.  There are really great moments--like when Mephistopheles murders an innocent old couple at Faust's behest because their home is in the way of the development--but it's impossible to confine all of those moments into one major narrative.  (Or so it seems to me; I'm sure others have tried.)

I don't mean that it doesn't hang together, but rather that the work as a whole is so ambitious and so bizarre that the issue of "hanging together" seems irrelevant.  Goethe called it an "incommensurable" work--it can't be measured--and I think I agree.  If I've spent this entire review just telling you what happens in it, it's because I have no idea how to approach it or evaluate it, and if I wanted to, it would probably take me a lifetime.

Because You Have To: A Writing Life by Joan Frank

I wish I’d read Because You Have To with a highlighter in hand.

Where most books on writing seem to be written by fairly well-known authors or teachers, Joan Frank’s new collection of essays on the writing life comes from a different place, the pen of a writer who has learned, in her own words, “there may not be any breakthrough.” This is a woman who has published five works of fiction, been reviewed in the New York Times, but has come to accept that she may never be a household name, never able to answer the question, which she addresses in an essay, “Have you written anything I’ve heard of?” in the affirmative.

And yet, she continues to write, and write well, because, well, because she has to. Reading her essays felt more relatable to me, a wannabe writer who has published one story and a couple poems, than, say, Stephen King’s On Writing--although it’s good too. There is a compulsion in everyone who calls themselves a writer to create, to put the words down on paper and make them real, and Frank expresses that feeling more eloquently than most. She understands, and communicates, that writing is not about fame, or money, or notoriety. It’s about desire, about an insatiable need to get what’s inside outside. Every writer, famous or not, can relate to that.

Because You Have To isn’t a book on craft, for the most part. It’s more similar to Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird or Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing. It’s full of advice--or sometimes just empathy--about the mundane things in a writer’s life: rejection letters, finding--or making--a place to write, and feeling as though you must “steal” time from the real world in order to get it down on paper.

Ultimately, what a reader gets from this sort of collection probably depends on what they brought into it. If they don’t write, have no desire to write, they won’t come away with a real understanding of the madness; but anyone who’s felt like they would burst if they didn’t tell their story, well, this one’s for you.

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare

MISTRESS FORD: I shall think the worse of fat men as long as I have an eye to make difference of men's liking.  And yet he would not swear, praised women's modesty, and gave such orderly and well-behaved reproof to all uncomeliness that I would have sworn his disposition would have gone to the truth of his words.  But they do no more than adhere and keep place together than the hundred and fifty psalms to the tune of 'Greensleeves.'  What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?  How shall I be revenged on him?  I think the best way were to entertain him with hope, till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease.

Merry Wives of Windsor occupies an uncomfortable place in Shakespeare's works.  It doesn't seem "Shakespearean," whatever that means, even though one of its principal characters is Falstaff.  It should be set in the time of Henry IV and Henry V, about 200 years before Shakespeare lived, but its atmosphere is decidedly Elizabethan, and instead of focusing on the lives of great men and women, it's about a pair of contemporary middle class families.

Bloom calls the Falstaff of Merry Wives an "impostor," and while I don't necessarily want to support that turn of phrase, I think he's right: Falstaff here is hardly the same guy as in Henry IV and Henry V.  His cleverness, his endless humor, are replaced with broad venality and gullibility.  Seeking money, he writes identical letters to the Mistresses Ford and Page declaring his love for them, but they discover his duplicity and punish him by leading him on only to engineer a series of mild humiliations.

Unfortunately, they're not very funny.  In the first, Mistress Ford convinces Falstaff to hide in a laundry basket from her husband, which she then has a servant dump in a laundry basket.  In the second, she convinces him to hide by dressing up as her aunt, whom her husband hates, so he gets the crap beaten out of him.  Finally they get a bunch of children to dress as fairies and pinch him in the forest.  I suspect that on stage each of those moments might play extremely well, but on the page they fell, for me, very flat.  Much of the other humor is derived from the humorous accents of some of the minor characters.  I did, however, enjoy the Latin lesson given by the Welsh parson and teacher Evans to his student William, which the ignorant Mistress Quickly keeps interrupting:

EVANS: What is your genitive case plural, William?

WILLIAM: Genitive case?

EVANS: Ay.

WILLIAM: Genitivo: 'horum, harum, horum.'

QUICKLY: Vengeance of Jenny's case!  Fie on her!  Never name her child, if she be a whore.

EVANS: For shame, 'oman!

But I suspect even that plays a lot better to an audience who has had a rigorous classical education.

I read this a few weeks back, for class.  I'm sure I would have had something better to say about had I blogged about it immediately, but clearly I found this one of Shakespeare's most forgettable plays.

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Ovid was keeping track as the temperatures crept to freezing, miserably watching the downward march.  After decades of chasing monarchs and their beautiful mysteries, he would now be with them at the end, for reasons he had never in his whole life foreseen.  She wished he could explain this to the kids who'd been in her yard.  Some deep and terrible trouble had sent the monarchs to the wrong address, like the protesters themselves.  The butterflies had no choice but to trust in their world of signs, the sun's angle set against a turn of the seasons, and something inside all that had betrayed them.

One day Dellarobia Turnbow climbs the side of her mountain on her family's property in eastern Tennessee, intending on an illicit rendezvous with a man who is not her husband, but something stops her first: the mountain is on fire.  Or, at least, that's the way it seems.  Later she discovers that what she's seen is not fire but an enormous cluster of monarch butterflies who have settled on the mountain, diverted somehow from their traditional wintering home in Mexico.

The monarchs intrude upon Dellarobia's life: They contemplate her family's plan to cut down the mountain's trees for money.  Tourists come, and she becomes a minor celebrity.  Scientists come, living on the Turnbow property to study this unusual event.  Some changes are good and some are bad; most lie somewhere in between.  And even though Kingsolver is careful to keep her representatives of science cautious in their claims, her metaphors make it clear--such upheavals can only be the result of global warming.  What Dellarobia undergoes is, quite literally, a sea change.

Kingsolver seems to have two goals here: One, to illustrate the way climate change can affect an individual human life, to rescue it from abstraction.   Two, to bridge the gap between the academic and the regular Joe, and illustrate the possibility of common ground between them.  I'm not sure she succeeds in this second goal; while Kingsolver clearly writes out of great affection for the salt-of-the-earth types that make up Dellarobia's community, she doesn't wholly avoid the temptation to skewer them as rubes.  For instance, Dellarobia convinces her husband and father-in-law (Cub and Bear, respectively) to take one last look at the land before signing the logging contract, without telling them about the butterflies, which leads to an absurd plot point in which Cub announces at church that Dellarobia foresaw them in a vision.  This ensues:

Dellarobia felt the doubtful stares.  She'd been sitting it out every week in the cafe, drinking coffee and making her grocery list, in no way deserving of a miracle.  And yet a small shatter of applause broke out, like a handful of gravel on a tin shed.  Someone very close to them shouted: "Heaven be praised, Sister Turnbow has seen the wonders!"  It was the man who'd come in late, with the sporty sunglasses on his head.

The sunglasses, the out-of-place folksiness of "Sister Turnbow" and "seen the wonders," which are somehow incongruent with the casualness of the church and its cafe, and the sheer stupidity everyone in this scene seems to share--they add up to something that isn't the friendly ribbing that I think Kingsolver is aiming at.  Contrast the character of the scientist, Ovid Byron, who is described as "Tall, dark, and handsome, but extra tall, extra dark.  Okay, extra all three."

Is it a surprise when Dellarobia falls in love?  Kingsolver chooses to make Byron an immigrant from the US Virgin Islands, who Dellarobia thinks sounds like a "reggae singer."  In other words, she amplifies his otherness, emphasizing his status as an outsider--while fetishizing his exoticness, something which Kingsolver seems to share with Dellarobia.  There are good narrative reasons to do this, as there are good reasons to satirize casual fundamentalists in sporty sunglasses, but when you do them both the novel is thrown off balance.  In other words, I don't think Flight Behavior represents both sides as equally as it thinks it does.

But I do like the point that Dellarobia makes about the impossible divide between these two camps when she theorizes to Byron that the problem is essentially social, that the reason her community does not believe in global warming has less to do with stupidity or cowardice than the human tendency to divide itself in two.  "The environment," as she says, "got assigned to the other team."  She goes on:

"These positions get assigned to people," she said.  "If you've been called the bad girl all your life, you figure you're already paying the price, you should go on and use the tickets.  If I'm the redneck in the pickup, fine, let me just go burn up the some gas."

The enmity between the believers and the skeptics, that is, precedes even the belief itself.  Yet, is Kingsolver aware of the ways in which the novel unconsciously preserves that divide, instead of breaking it down?

Flight Behavior is strongest, I think, when it focuses on the first goal: creating a vivid depiction of an individual life who comes to see the upheaval of her life as part of a larger, global phenomenon.  The butterflies are a powerful metaphor that dominates the work.  Like Dellarobia, they are lost, confused, struggling to survive against impersonal forces that are much stronger.  We want the butterflies to make it because of their beauty and mystery, and because if they do perhaps that implies that Dellarobia too can make it, that she too can "[fly] out to a new earth."