Surprised by Sin by Stanley Fish

I've been taking a class on Milton (who is great--I never knew!) and, of course, that involves reading Paradise Lost, one of English's longest and most persnickety poems.  The story, if you're a godless heathen, is Genesis: Adam and Eve enjoy some good times in the Garden of Eden, before a very bitter fallen angel named Satan infiltrates it and convinces them to eat the fruit from the only tree God's told them not to touch.  Things after that pretty much suck.

>One of the aspects of Paradise Lost people have been trying for centuries to figure out is this: Why is Satan the most compelling character?  He's the one that gets all the poetry, the fancy rhetoric, the courage and the devil-may-care attitude.  Here he is, talking to Beezlebub in Hell:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

Badass! God, by contrast, comes off as a self-righteous, authoritarian prude.  Why would Milton make Satan look so awesome and God look so bad?  William Blake famously said that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it."  Could it be that the righteous Puritan Milton really was more emotionally invested in his artistic depiction of the devil?

Fish replies to these claims with a breathless piece of Reader-Response criticism.  He argues that Satan's seductiveness is part of the design of the poem; we are supposed to be attracted by Satan because that's his M.O.  We respond to his lies, his rhetoric, his sublimity on an internal level, and then must face the cognitive dissonance of our intense attraction to Satan.  That, Fish argues, is the way we learn to cast our gaze inward on our own fallen nature.  If we are dissatisfied with God's language, well, as Milton reminds us in On Reformation: "The very essence of truth is plainness and brightness; the darkness and crookedness is our own."

I find this a very compelling way of reading the poem, and perfectly in accord with the kind of poetry Milton writes elsewhere (though I admit I am not quite yet an expert).  Some critics have derided this image of God as a disciplinary schoolmarm, but I think those critics--and to some extent Fish--discount the way in which the poet himself is entangled in this process, having to endure the same education that we are.  Paradise Lost is not very interesting if you regard Milton as an uptight jackass (like Robert Graves did) who is constantly bringing the ruler down on the reader's fingers; but as the introspection of a blind, defeated, and utterly broken man, it's something different all together.  

I'm going to post a longer review, of course, on Paradise Lost, which is a great poem, though perhaps not what the Kindle Generation wants or feels they need.  When I do, I'll share more thoughts about the best way to read the poem, but to be sure, they will be closely modeled after Fish's reading.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire. 

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave. 


Other Fifty Bookers Reviews of The Road
*Where Chris says it will never be made into a movie, lolz (2007)
*Where Brook says she will need a McCarthy break (2009)
*Where Carlton doesn't see what all the fuss is about (2010)
*Where Brent compares it to No Country for Old Men (2013)



I'm pretty late to the party, but for a reason - I saw the movie not realizing that it was a book; once I found out I decided to wait a few years so the more dramatic and terrible scenes were out of my head. The cruelty of humanity scenes definitely stayed in my mind, but the ending was actually fuzzy. There's not too much to say about the book: there's a man, there's a boy, there's an apocalypse. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie. It is grey, grey, grey. 

The Road is an incredibly difficult book for a few reasons. 

First, I think if I were a parent, I wouldn't be able to read this novel. As a non-parent I am tormented by the choices that are being made, by the care that's being provided, by the questions that are being asked. I can't imagine picking up this up as a parent and finishing it. 

Second, there aren't any answers. The story details the daily life of a father and son in some kind of post-apocalyptical world, and this world is never explained. Cormac McCarthy counters that it doesn't matter, but if you are a reader who needs answers and explanations...you will not get them. I like knowing the motivation of why the world is the way it is, but I suppose McCarthy is right to the extent that it doesn't matter. So what if it's global warming or volcano or nuclear disaster? In any of those cases the reaction can only be "ok...so what do we do now?"

Third, like everything else in this text, the point of view is maddeningly elusive. It begins with SUCH an objective third person(1) that when it occasionally switches to second (2) or first (3) it's startling and unsettling. It happens only a handful of times in the novel, but each time stands out SO much that I'm ready to start scouring the academic parts of the internet.  

(1) When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him...His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
(2) Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.
(3) He lay listening to the water drip in the woods...If only my heart were stone.

It is not an overstatement to say that it is one of the most depressing books of all time. Even the most depressing books (The Bluest Eye, for example) has some kind of redemption - even if it's not the character we want getting what is owed to them, someone survives, someone makes it, someone gets SOMETHING out of the shit that is handed to them. I don't think it's a spoiler alert to say that a Pulitzer Prize novel doesn't end with unicorns eating rainbow burritos. 

I went to a brilliant conference on teaching Holocaust literature, and one session was about how to handle the idiot kids who say things like, "Why didn't the Jews do x, y, or z? I would have." We were told real stories to share with students at the beginning to show kids: this was not a time of making better choices, this was a time of making IMPOSSIBLE choices that needed to be made anyway. This book, featuring a holocaust of humanity, is that impossible choice. What is the point of surviving? How do you kill yourself when you were 'lucky' enough to survive? What is the point of your child surviving in this ugly world that is left? How do you kill your child to spare them?

I did not, at any point, entertain the idea of what I would do if I were in The Man's place or The Boy's place. How do you turn to cannibalism? How do you let yourself and your child starve to death? It's pointless to play Let's Pretend because no one knows deep inside what their actions would be. So we watch theirs, from a distance, like the narrator, and I think it's set up in such a way that it's almost impossible to pass judgement. 

If you're in the mood to kind of hate everyone forever, this is the book for you. It's not a good time, it's not satisfying, it's not beautiful. It is GOOD in the way that good medicine is GOOD for you even if you hate every moment. I finished the novel in two days, not because it was so compelling, but because I knew I couldn't leave it unfinished and I wanted it over as quickly as possible. 

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Jarvius Cotton cannot vote.  Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy . . . Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave.  His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote.  His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation.  His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests.  Today, Jarvius Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

So starts Michelle Alexanders condemning book about how our criminal justice system inherits the racism started with slavery, continuing through Jim Crow, persisting through desegregation, and rebirthed as the War on Drugs.

Alexander's narrative runs like this: following the success of the civil rights movement and desegregation, public intellectuals committed to a discourse of colorblindness.  This effectively killed overt racism.  Racism, however, did not end; it became covert.  Thus, for example, Kevin Phillips, Republican strategist, noted the following lessons from Nixon's successful presidential bid:

Nixon's successful presidential election campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to campaign primarily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack rhetoric.  He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party's support for civil rights reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained.

Enter the War on Drugs.  Reagan took advantage of pre-existing fears of black, urban, drug-crazed youths by promising a crackdown (pun intended) on crime.  The Republicans, thus, were able to take advantage of hidden racial tensions.  To keep this racial tension alive, the federal government poured funds into the War on Drugs, and its ugly brother, Mass Incarceration. Unsurprisingly, this disproportionately affects African-Americans.  See also Crack-Cocaine Disparity.

Alexander also explains how civil rights activists were complicit in this shift.  As Republicans embraced a colorblind, anti-crime rhetoric, liberals focused on social policies like affirmative action and equal employment opportunities.  Activists were not willing (or able, arguably) to fight for "criminals" while they were focusing on more deserving individuals (e.g., hard-working and upward socially mobile minority members).

Think the War on Drugs is not racist?  Non-minority Americans use drugs as often as black Americans, Alexander counters.  Yet, she continues, law enforcement targets neighborhoods full of minorities.  Stop-and-frisk does not occur on college campuses (despite that they are warrens of illegal alcohol and drug consumption).  (Try the experiment I tried with myself: ask yourself how many of your non-minority friends have broken the law; now ask yourself how many of them have been stop-and-frisked.)

Nor is the problem of mass incarceration limited to minorities actually in prison.  The collateral consequences of a felony conviction has created a caste system.  For example: there are 2.3 million people in prison in the U.S; another 5.1 million are under some form of "community supervision" (i.e., parole or probation).  And felons cannot vote.  This a community of people who, by law, have fewer rights than everyone else.  One might reply, "But they did something to deserve this."  Perhaps. I find such rationalization difficult to accept in light of radical, disparate impact the criminal justice system has on minorities.

But this book is not merely a history.  In fact, it is a two-pronged call to action:  (1) we need to acknowledge the racial origins of today's prison industrial complex and (2) we need to reform the system.

There are quite a few barriers to reform.  Of course, the population involved is itself a barrier--voters do not love convicted felons.  They love recidivist felons even less.  Another barrier is the vested economic interests: "Rich and powerful people, including former vice president Dick Cheney, have invested millions in private prisons.  They are deeply interested in expanding the market--increasing the supply of prisoners--not eliminating the pool of people who can be held captive for a profit."

I'm only starting to dip my toes into the universe of criminal justice reading (see, e.g., Don't Shoot), but this book strikes me as essential reading.  Even if you want to disagree with Alexander's points, the book synthesizes a great deal of the academic literature and presents important challenges to how we currently operate our criminal justice system.  So: essential reading for anyone interested in criminology; good reading for anyone generally interested in crime, racism, or history of slavery/civil rights movement.

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

The preview for A Winter's Tale movie which is what started my stupid adventure.

The first thing you need to know about my boyfriend is that his book taste does not skew towards 'romance.' The books he's read over the time we've been dating include the following words in their titles:

Capital Punishment
Sociopath
Metaphysical
Murder
Jim Crow
Violence
Federal Courts
Satanic
Ritual Abuse
Democracy
Fatal
Guantanamo

You might argue: But what about The Time Traveler's Wife and The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Everything Is Illuminated and The Great Gatsby? Well, besides his weird thing for Fitzgerald, he read those books because a cute girl told him to. And even still, none of them are traditional romances with a love arc and a happy ending - they just happen to have SOME romance in them.

So when the movie preview for this book came out, and my boyfriend got all excited because he loves this book, and we clarified that he was not talking about a Shakespeare play, and he used the word 'romantic' to describe it...well, I ordered the book on Amazon very quickly to get some insight into his Fatal Guantanamo Ritual Abuse Satanic Federal Court brain. Thus my 748-page-long journey started.

The first thing you need to know is that the part of the book that is shown in the preview is indeed romantic as fuck - but that part is only up to page 215 and isn't picked up again until page 710 - and even then it's only sort of  revisited. You might ask yourself if the last 38 pages of a book is really the time to start wrapping up the original plot and the answer is no, absolutely not, and the ending is truly ambiguous. It's one of those 'you get to decide how you think it ends' except, very annoyingly, the narrator ACTUALLY says "You must answer within your own heart." If I wanted to answer within my own heart I would write fanfiction.

Now onto the actual book, and I will try very hard to limit my cursing: the novel is a bit of magical realism and follows multiple plot lines over a long period of time with shifting perspectives that eventually interact. I love magical realism (Marquez, Murakami, and Bender are all favorites) and the structure is one I really enjoy (Everything Is Illuminated and A Visit From the Goon Squad are also favorites). I was really ready to love this book.

The first chunk of the book is about Peter Lake, a burglar and general criminal who is incredibly charming and handsome and the Penn family. Poppa Penn is wise, realistic, and hilarious; his daughter Beverly Penn is beautiful and ill, and the family is the kind that you wish you were raised in.  This is the romantic chunk.

The second chunk of the book is a few generations into the future and centers around the newspapers published by the Penn family and gives the background of various employees in their journey to work there. Virginia Gamely, from the magical Lake of the Coheeries, travels to New York City and starts working there.  Hardesty Marratta whose incredibly wealthy father's will says "All my worldly possessions, ownerships, receivables, shares, interests, rights, and royalties, shall go to one of my sons. The Maratta salver, which is on the long table in my study, will go to the other. Hardesty will decide." Hardesty - mountaineer dirt bagger - takes the salver which cryptically says "For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone" and heads off to New York City and eventually works for the newspaper as well. There is a lot of talk about what this "perfectly just city" is or should be. The gorgeous Christiana who goes from being a wealthy man's armpiece to...working for the Penn family who owns the newspaper. This goes on for hundreds of pages. Also sprinkled in their little stories are the story of a gang chasing a man, the story of a man who doesn't know who he is, the story of a Mayor being overthrown, and the story of a giant ship that is impossibly large and has mysterious plans.

All of the book is overly descriptive:
"Peter Lake's eyes were the only vital part of his face as they took in the quickening images that hurtled past, and they moved with machinelike, supernatural speed, fastening precisely upon every detail, catching a glimpse of more of each of the billions that he was assigned to see. The velocity and rhythm of these many lives combined into a pure and otherworldly whistle, like that of a loon in the deep forests on a still, clear night. They lay in all positions. Some were merely dust, others the ivory bones that children fear, spookishly luminescent. In unending scenes and drolleries, they clutched amulets, tools, and coins." (this description continues for a whole page). 

Some of the book is romantic:
"He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was not good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn, and he loved her."

Some of the book has observations that I agree with:
"Well, actually," he said, "I seldom watch television myself - only the good programs. You know, the culture stuff."
"What's the difference what you watch?...No matter what it is, if you don't move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death...And besides, you just watch all those dramatizations of literature because you've forgotten how to read...Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land."
(I felt very self-congratulatory reading this because I was camping and reading it next to a fire - that I later dropped the book into - and I feel very self-congratulatory re-reading this now because as I write Serious Book Reviews, my boyfriend is buying a television).

Some of the book is philosophical (okay, a  lot of the book is this [ok, like, most of it]):
"The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is."

Some of the book has that Ayn Rand feel where the author is trying to brainwash you within the story. I can't find the exact quote, but the newspaper that everyone works for that is this amazing place to work for pays everyone in shares and the longer you work there or the more education you receive or the more whatever you receive, you get more shares, and thus you have incentive to work harder and make the newspaper make more money that way your salary goes up, but everyone's goes up together or down together depending on profit...something like that.

The thing that really drove me crazy, besides the way-too-many plots, the overly descriptive writing, the ambiguous ending, the uninteresting political crap that wasn't political because their debates were just about how winter is awesome and the above TV quote, the fantastical elements that seemed to have no purpose, was the description of women. Mark Helprin does not believe that average looking women deserve to be in novels. Every. Woman. Is. Utterly. Perfect. Perfection. Perfect. What follows are descriptions of women - some are main characters, and some we only see in the scene quoted - from the novel. To clarify, each bullet point is a different woman.

• She looked no more than fourteen or fifteen, had astonishing green eyes, and red hair that was piled up in beautiful waves and falling tresses. She was freckled...she had a most attractive bosom...the girl, in fact, was twenty-seven years old.
• She was a red-haired beauty, an Amazon...she was perfect and insatiable. Each breast was a marvel. Her forest of red pubic hair was soft, fragrant, and deep. She was as white as ivory...
• Her golden hair was lit so brilliantly in a crosslight that it appeared to be burning like the sun...she was beautiful...perfectly formed, rich, and young...lovely blushing girl...she was beautiful...her limbs, smoother and more perfect than ivory, beautiful in themselves as examples of form, beautiful in their motion...she was beautiful, half naked, glowing...
• Anarinda was very beautiful...Oh, Anarinda, breasts as round as clams, Thighs as smooth as flounder's soul, Hair as gold as hay. In you my bell shall toll...
• Her broad face was so perfectly beautiful above a high gray collar...that she seemed like a goddess...
• One was small and had red hair..The other was much larger and far more sensual...and she had flying blond hair, red cheeks...Little Liza Jane was sixteen, and fully developed. Dolly was still pubescent, but what she lacked in volume she made up for in freshness..her dancing bosom...he opened his eyes to feast upon the many breasts and legs in the bed. But they were all tangled up in one another already, and the two girls were breathing in slow lascivious hisses...They were not interested in him, although they let him enter and satisfy himself several times...
• she was still painfully beautiful...not to mention, her beauty...
• And Jessica Penn, standing, was an unmistakable fusion of womanly beauty and ripening sex
• I knew that you would be the most beautiful woman in the world. And goddammit, you are.

There are more examples, because again, it's basically every woman in the novel. I wish I could better articulate why it's so bothersome to have fully featured men who are short or tall or skinny or fat or old or snub nosed or ANYTHING and then only have these perfectly beautiful women. Every time a woman was introduced I had to roll my eyes through the description.

In 750-pages you can read super detailed imagery, philosophical rants, magical realism/fantasy that doesn't really WORK, a few chase scenes, a few fight scenes, a few scenes that make no sense and are not explained in any manner, and a lot of beautiful women who exist to be fallen in love with and/or fucked by men in weird ways - I just don't know why you would want to. I really didn't and finished four books between starting and ending this novel.

The boyfriend says he's going to reread the book, and I'm very curious to see if his memory of the book matches up to what he reads.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things begin to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into two halves: Before and After.

"Keep talking about monsters and they're gonna put you away. Then you really will be Special Ed."
"Don't call me that."
He flicked away his cigarette and spat a huge glistening wad over the railing.
"Were you just smoking and chewing tobacco at the same tie?"
"What are you, my mom?"
"Do I look like I blow truckers for food stamps?"



The first compelling aspect of this novel is the cover. I don't think anyone can walk by it and not be interested. The only thing that stopped me from actually picking up the novel for so long is the word 'children' and knowing that all my freshmen had read it in middle school - I thought it would be a little 'young' for me in spite of my hardcore love for young adult literature. And then I got to the part where the protagonist makes a very offensive yo' mamma joke and I was stoked to go on. The combination of the fantastic and beautiful with the cynical and real is one of the things I really enjoyed about this book - the contrast makes the fantastic more lovely and the cynical more hilarious. 

As mentioned in my Divergent review, "Young adult novels seem to come in two genres lately: the Normal Kid Who Discovers a Secret World That They're Suddenly a Part Of and the World Run By Suspicious Government That Teenage Hero Must Fight" - this book falls into the former category. 

Jacob, a teenage boy, grows up on his Granpa Portman's stories about his childhood. He was a kid in WWII and survives by being sent off to a boarding school. He tells Jacob fantastic stories about this place where little girls float and little boys have bees living in their bellies - and of course has photos to prove their existence. As Jacob grows older, he realizes that these stories are impossible, and cynically disbelieves them and becomes too 'cool' to listen to them (like all good young adult protagonists, he is an outcast and not cool at all). After his grandfather's death he becomes fixated on the idea of finding the school and the woman who saved Granpa Portman from the war and finangles his way to the island off of Wales where the school was. 

(Total side note: A recent Holocaust event in my city involved three Holocaust survivors and one woman whose parents were survivors. We have had so many novels and non-fiction written from the perspective of survivors, and I find it really interesting that we are now looking to the second and third generation to tell their stories - either fiction or non. This book is similar to Everything Is Illuminated in that a younger generation is trying to reach back to the older generation who has been lost to discover what their lives and experiences were like.)

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he does find the home and the children certainly are peculiar, but there are more surprises than that happening here. It is a mystery story, a family drama, and of course there is a romantic interest. Battles must be fought and choices must be made and it belongs firmly in the fantasy and young adult genres. 

But the coolest part of the book is by far the photographs:

The book ends with an acknowledgements page that says: "All the pictures in this book are authentic, vintage found photographs, and with the exception of a few that have undergone minimal postprocessing, they are unaltered." 

My book also comes with an interview with the author and he describes his process by saying: "I started collecting vintage snapshots...I noticed that among the photos I found, the strangest and most intriguing ones were always of children. I began to wonder who some of these strange-looking children had been - what their stories were...so I thought: If I can't know their real stories, I'll make them up."

Finding out his process made the book that much more interesting and of course I had to go back through and pour over all the photos to see how the original photographer created these haunting images...he doesn't photoshop them to make them more 'realistic' and in some it's obvious that they were double processed or simply cut and pasted, but that makes the whole book more charming.

I look forward to reading the sequel, but this one did not end with such a cliffhanger as to require buying it in hardcover (the Divergent ones, on the other hand, had me going to MULTIPLE Targets to find the sequels, and I happily paid hardcover prices for them). 

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

Thus did he see first, he the hill-bound, the sky-girt, of whom the mountains were his masters, the fabulous South.  The picture of flashing field, of wood, and hill, stayed in his heart forever: lost in the dark land, he lay the night-long through within his berth, watching the shadowy and phantom South flash by, sleeping at length, and waking suddenly, to see cool lakes in Florida at dawn, standing quietly as if they had waited from eternity for this meeting; or hearing, as the train in the dark hours of morning slid into Savannah, the strange quiet voices of the men upon the station, or seeing, in pale dawn, the phantom woods, a rutted lane, a cow, a boy, a drab, dull-eyed against a cottage door, glimpsed ,at this moment of rushing time, for which all life had been aplot, to flash upon the window and be gone.

When I began Look Homeward, Angel, I was thrilled.  Wolfe's ebullient prose, knotty and tinted with a kind of Lawrence-esque mysticism, seemed like something novel and exciting.  It seemed made for some Scottish moor, but it was about my own homeland of North Carolina, and I was looking forward to seeing it afresh in passages like the one above, seeing the "fabulous" in it--as in (as I think Wolfe means) it, the stuff of fable.

But I couldn't imagine what it would be like to read prose like that for five hundred endless pages.  Whatever skills Wolfe had, they did not extend to variation of style, and he seems not ever to have realized that florid prose works best in small, impactful doses.  At first I appreciated what I thought was a sense of ironic humor interjected into the novel, as here, when the hero, Eugene Gant (a not-so-thinly-veiled Wolfe) is born:

The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets, hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance, harmony of parts, and unity of effect in this most energetic, driving, and competitive world.  He was the most complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age, and, what's more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with the blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.

As a mock-heroic, that's damn near peerless.  But the trouble is, as I came to suspect over the course of the novel, it's not mock anything.  Wolfe wasn't ashamed of proclaiming his own genius, and extends that privilege to his stand-in here.  The novel traces young Eugene's childhood, from his birth to the time when he enrolls in the University of North Carolina at Pulpit Hill (Chapel Hill, obvi) and then goes on to Harvard.  During that time he broods, carries on abortive love affairs, broods, ponders the mysteries of the universe, and broods some more.  His relationship with his family is destructive, except for a few siblings who ultimately die
 
But Eugene never grows in any significant way, perhaps because Wolfe didn't think he needed to--though that may be uncharitable.  It is peculiar in its repetitiveness.  The epigraph sets the keywords of the novel:

Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  Where?  When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

That's sort of beautiful, is it not?  But these phrases are plucked apart, reorganized, and repeated maybe twenty times in the novel until you begin to wonder what they really mean--a question for which there is no answer.  Other lines are repeated purposelessly, and odd pet words, like phthisic, perhaps to save the reader of shuffling off to the dictionary more than a couple of times.  What Lawrence used to great effect, Wolfe uses like a child wielding a new toy, without discretion or pause.

This review seems overly harsh.  The book left a bad taste in my mouth, though I did like parts of it--especially Eugene's father, W.O., an interminable drunk with a penchant for quoting Shakespeare and turning domestic squabbles into high drama.  It seems no accident that he and Eugene's mother, a cold woman with a penchant for owning real estate (clear depictions of Wolfe's parents--his mother's boarding house still stands in Asheville, NC today) are the most clearly drawn of the mishmash of characters. 

According to legend, when the novel was published, the people of Asheville--here called "Altamont"--ran Wolfe out of town for turning them into unflattering novel-stuff.  I doubt any of them actually read the whole thing.  If they had, they probably would have murdered him.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

British Railways delivered the copies of Lolita from Flintmarket station, twenty-five miles away.  When the carrier van arrived it drew, as usual, a ragged cheer from the bystanders.  Something new was coming to Hardborough.  Outside every public house there were parcels waiting to go out, and Raven, to save petrol, wanted a lift to the upper marshes.

Christine was aghast at the large numbers ordered.  They hadn't sold so many of one thing, not even Build Your Own Racing Dinghy.

Brent's recent post shamed me enough to get started on my own backlog of books to review.  Part of this shame is that I've been failing you, the blog-reading public--but mostly it's a shame for failing a great book like The Bookshop, which really deserves better than my warmed-over comments six weeks after I've finished.

The Bookshop is the book that gained Fitzgerald her first measure of public acclaim.  The trademarks of her later novels are here: the focus on a somewhat hermetic or fringe community, like the houseboaters of Offshore or the war-torn BBC of Human Voices; the proud and idiosyncratic hero/ine; a cast of quickly but deftly sketched characters.  The heroine here is Florence Green, who decides to open up a bookshop in Hardborough, an isolated island community.  Florence's ambitions are troubled by the seaside damp, and a poltergeist, but mostly by Hardborough's drably menacing social queen, Violet Gamart, who wants the property Florence buys for a local Arts Center.  The novel is one of modest ambitions beset by petty challenges, but Florence's steadfastness garners our admiration. 

My favorite of the minor characters population Hardborough is Christine, the ten-year old girl who Florence employs in the shop, and who approaches her job with blue-collar stolidity and a jealous possessiveness:

Christine liked to do the locking up.  At the age of ten and a half she knew, for perhaps the last time in her life, exactly how everything should be done.

The novel dwells on a long episode in which Florence mulls whether to order copies of the recently published Lolita; when she eventually does, it becomes a huge sensation in town.  I was particularly fond of this inlaid set of letters between Florence and her solicitor, responding to Violet Gamart's charges that the street activity around the Lolita display has become a public nuisance:

December 8 1959

Dear Mrs Green,
In reply to your letter of 6 December, I think we ought to abate the obstruction, by which I mean stopping the general public from assembling in the narrowest part of the High Street, before any question of an indictment arises, and I also think we should cease to offer for sale the complained-of and unduly sensational novel by Nabokov.  We cannot cite Herring v. Metropolitan Board of Works 1863 in this instance as the crowd has not assembled as the result of famine or of a shortage of necessary commodities.

Yours faithfully,
Thomas Thornton
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 9 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,
A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Yours sincerely,
Florence Green.

December 10 1959

To: Mrs Florence Green

Dear Madam,
I can only repeat my former advice, and I may add that in my opinion, though this is a personal matter and therefore outside my terms of reference, you would do well to make a formal apology to Mrs Gamart.

Yours faithfully,

Thomas Thornton,
Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths.

December 11 1959

Dear Mr Thornton,
Coward!

Yours sincerely,

Florence Green.

Besides being pretty funny, Fitzgerald does such a good job here of capturing these characters' voices with economy: the pedantic cowardice of the lawyer, the defiant pride of the shopowner.

To its credit, The Bookshop stops short of being inspiring; despite their enthusiasm for Lolita, the denizens of Hardborough never really rally in support of the bookshop against Violet Gamart's selfish domineering,  They patronize the shop when they want something from it, and ignore it when they don't, as they do with Florence herself.  These are people with lives of their own, with needs and ambitions equal to Florence's, and there is a bittersweet truth to the recognition that no one cares, or could ever care, about the bookshop as much as she does.  Her cold warn with Violet Gamart is, in the end, waged for relatively minor stakes.  But Fitzgerald suggests that steadfastness in your own ambitions, as private as they may be, is no small valor.

Incendiary Girls by Kodi Scheer

So, Incendiary Girls, the second of the two short story collections I read last month, was not at all what I expected. The cover, a white horse, got me thinking I was about to read some dreamy, fluffy stuff, so imagine my surprise when Incendiary Girls turned out to be full of ruminations on the fragility of the human body, meditations on the mysteries of the afterlife, and large helping of surreal, Cronenbergian body horror.

There are two ways to look at most of the stories in Incendiary Girls. The first is as a character study of their protagonist(s) and their responses to traumatic events in their lives. The second is as horror stories where the greatest fear of all--death, of course--is writ large. But these aren’t navel-gazing internal monologues. Scheer’s characters cut open their own bodies and the bodies of others (dead and alive alike), find body parts in their bathtubs and under their beds, watch as bodies burn--in the world of Incendiary Girls, your body provides protection in the same way that the Alamo did--it keeps you safe until it doesn’t, and then you get massacred.

Although the first couple stories are good, particularly the second, about a woman who converts to Islam as part of a bargain with God to cure her cancer, the real turning point in the book is Miss Universe, which I’d like to talk a little more about.

SPOILERS FOR MISS UNIVERSE IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH

The story begins backstage at the Miss Universe pageant, as the girls are getting ready. What seems like the setup for some psychological torment quickly gets much darker, as Miss Afghanistan says the wrong thing to her fellow contestants, inadvertently convincing them that the scar on her leg is fake. To prove it, the girls hold her down and cut it off, only to decide that the skin underneath is fake, as are her toes, her fingers, her face--you see where this is going. The story ends with Miss Afghanistan turned literally inside out in a, uh, pile on the floor, as the other contestants walk out onstage.

Obviously there’s some political commentary here, which is worth unpacking, but I’d like to focus on the way that this story encapsulates a lot of the book’s M.O. Except for one story in the middle, a foray into light comedy(!), these tales are uniformly dark and mostly don’t have happy endings. They emphasize the trauma in the lives of their characters by literally tearing them apart, or, in a couple instances, turning them into something completely different, as in Primal Son, where a comic-sounding concept--human couple gives birth to a monkey--is played so straight that it becomes disturbing.

I don’t know what my final conclusion is on Incendiary Girls. I found it challenging and difficult to read at times, and I don’t know that I’d want to read it again. It was moving and off-putting at the same time. But, as bleak as it gets, Scheer ends the book with a moment of triumph. Maybe we can’t stop the world from doing what it will to our bodies, but we don’t all have to end up like Miss Afghanistan.

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith

The shadow of the Vietnam war hangs heavy over The Frangipani Hotel, although the war itself is rarely mentioned. However, the exodus of the Vietnamese “boat people” opens the book, as the narrator asks her grandmother to tell the story of the day she left. The story begins as you’d expect, with the grandmother on a boat, but ends with the first supernatural occurrence in the book--although, Life of Pi style, we’re not really sure, as readers to what extent this is literally what happened.

SOME SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH

This is not the case throughout; As alluded to above, all but one or two of the stories in The Frangipani Hotel have explicit supernatural elements. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they carry the story, but they’re always there, and after the first couple stories, I found myself waiting, during the seemingly mundane moments, for the other shoe to drop. There’s the creepiest hitchhiker ever, who lives off the life and memories of others, the girl who visits Vietnam and just might have accidentally eaten her grandmother, the old men who sit in a room every night and wait for a memory from the past to knock on their door, and so it goes. There are two stories with no obviously supernatural elements, but even there, the supernal and the mundane feel as though they are separated by a thread.

I’m not at all familiar with Vietnamese folklore, but most of the stories in the collection feel like updated versions of campfire stories, universal fears made current by transposition into modern times. If the creatures and stories Kupersmith shares aren’t myths, they feel like they are. Aside from the supernatural through-line, there are other common threads pulling the collection together--remembrance of the past, acceptance of mistakes, questions of identity, the Vietnam war, of course--so these stories, in spite of their eldritch trappings, maintain their humanity.

Highly recommended.

This book was sent to me by TLC book tours, who thought that I might enjoy it. They were right, but I never would have guessed, looking at the cover. It’s a nice image, but the bright pink lettering and fluorescent pink spine seemed to indicate a much different, much more romantic type of book. I can’t help but wonder if a book that is mostly made up of supernaturally-tinged tales building on Vietnamese folklore would have been given the same cover if it were written by a man--but I digress.

Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth

In case you have been under a rock that does not have any teenagers anywhere near by, here's what you need to know about the trilogy:
"Working together, these five factions have lived in peace for many years, each contributing to a different sector of society. Abnegation has fulfilled our need for selfless leaders in government; Candor has provided us with trustworthy and sound leaders in law; Erudite has supplied us with intelligent teachers and researchers; Amity has given us understanding counselors and caretakers; and Dauntless provides us with protection from threats both within and without. But the reach of each faction is not limited to these areas. We give one another far more than can be adequately summarized. In our factions, we find meaning, we find purpose, we find life." I think of the motto I read in my Faction History textbook: Faction before blood. More than family, our factions are where we belong. Can that possibly be right?

Young adult novels seem to come in two genres lately: the Normal Kid Who Discovers a Secret World That They're Suddenly a Part Of (a la Harry Potter, Twilight, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) and the World Run By Suspicious Government That Teenage Hero Must Fight (a la Uglies, Hunger Games, Maze Runner) - this trilogy falls into the latter category. 

Beatrice (later changed to Tris) begins the novel as a member of the Abnegation faction. Abnegation wears grey. Abnegation takes the stairs so that other factions can take the elevator. Abnegation lives in cinder block homes without decoration. Abnegation does the service work that no one else wants to do. Abnegation is completely selfless. Abnegation members are the only people who can be trusted to have power because they are the only ones who don't want it. 

"To some the sight [of my plain neighborhood] might be gloomy, but to me [its] simplicity is comforting. The reason for the simplicity isn't disdain for uniqueness, as other factions have sometimes interpreted it. Everything - our houses, our clothes, our hairstyles - is meant to help us forget ourselves and to protect us from vanity, greed, and envy, which are just forms of selfishness. If we have little, and want for little, and we are all equal, we envy no one. I try to love it."

Couples are made within a faction and kids are raised in their faction until their 16th birthday when they take a virtual-reality-type test to determine which faction they are best suited for. The results are known only by the test giver (a stranger volunteer) and the teenager. A few days later the entire community comes together to watch teenagers pick their new factions: will they stay with their family and the faction who raised them or will they leave everything behind - including almost all contact with their parents and siblings - to join a different faction?

Beatrice's results are inconclusive - she COULD be Abnegation, Dauntless, or Erudite, but she doesn't REALLY belong in any of them. She's labelled Divergent, her tester falsifies her results, and warns her that she cannot tell anyone - ANYONE - about being Divergent which also means she can't find out what it means and why it's dangerous. She immediately eliminates Erudite as a possibility and is stuck between Dauntless and Abnegation. Of course, no one is going to read 1500 pages about providing food for the factionless (homeless) and not having strong emotions and not asking questions because they indicate curiosity which is a selfish desire and not touching or kissing while flirting, so I don't think it's a spoiler to say she decides to join the badass, tatted up, pierced, punky Dauntless. 

The first act of her initiation is to jump off a speeding train onto a rooftop - one kid refuses and chooses to become factionless, and one kid dies. The very next step is to jump several stories into a dark pit without knowing what's at the bottom. Dauntless initiation involves self defense, combat, and mental stamina (more virtual reality - except instead of having to make choices you're stuck in scenarios with your worst fears - the more scared you get, the worse it is for you) with real violence occurring. No character is safe in Veronica Roth's world - she isn't afraid to hurt, maim, or kill. If any of this is intriguing, you should absolutely read them, particularly as the pages fly by (I finished all three in less than a week). The trilogy follows Tris's discovery of what exactly it means to be Divergent and where Divergent fit into the government as a whole. A heck of a lot happens that is not worth spoiling.

Outside of the interesting premise, what makes the trilogy awesome (without saying too much about the plot) are a few things which are outstanding in their own right but also outstanding in comparison to the more recent popular young adult novels:

• the protagonist is a real - not accidental - badass 

Bella never kills a human, not even as a baby vampire, and one of the so-called redeeming traits of Katniss is that in the first Hunger Games she doesn't *really* kill anyone in a hand-to-hand person-to-person way - she's always a step removed from the action. These are cruel government regimes; our heroes are not going to escape without getting dirty and it's selling the audience short to not give them an honest view of what are essentially war stories. Tris is trained as a combatant and acts like one which is what ANY person in her situation would have to do to survive. 

• the protagonist isn't pretty 

I am tired of the protagonist girl who is soooo pretty, except she doesn't know it, except the really Impossibly Hot Guy does know it, and thus she gets the really Impossibly Hot Guy without being conceited or having any of the other pretty girl personality traits that no one likes in real life. Tris tells her Love Interest, "I'm not trying to be self-deprecating. I just don't get it...I'm not pretty...I'm not ugly, but I am certainly not pretty," and he responds, "Fine. You're not pretty. So? I like how you look. You're deadly smart. You're brave. And even though you found out about [that horrible thing from my past]...you aren't giving me that look." Teenagers - and screw it, all people - need to understand that we are not all supermodels AND WE WILL ALL STILL FIND PEOPLE TO LOVE US. I love that she accepts her face and is honest, and he accepts her face and is honest. 

• the romantic relationships are healthy

There is no Bella/Edward/Jacob or Katniss/Peeta/Gale love triangle filled with unhealthy obsessions, lies, and deceptions. You know how in Twilight and the Hunger Games characters are always lying to each other for each other's benefits? And then fighting about it but accepting that the lies were okay because they stay together and keep lying? Yeah, that doesn't happen here. 

"I'm reliable. You can trust me. And you can let me be the judge of what I can handle."
"Okay. But no more lies. Not ever."
"Okay."
I feel stiff and squeezed, like my body was just forced into something too small for it. But hat's not how I want the conversation to end, so I reach for his hand.
"I'm sorry I lied to you," I say. "I really am."
"Well," he says. "I didn't mean to make you feel like I didn't respect you." 

A mature conversation about their legitimate not-over-dramatized feelings that ends with an honest apology - THIS is the kind of relationship problem solving that I want to see in my own relationship, in my students' relationships, and in my books. More of this please. But wait! Twilight is based on a toxic relationship that creates horrible depression and co-dependence, surely this book has that because it's such a popular formula, right? Wrong-o my Twihard friends. 

"If we stay together, I'll have to forgive you over and over again, and if you're still in this, you'll have to forgive me over and over again too, so forgiveness isn't the point. What I really should have been trying to figure out is whether we were still good for each other or not."

I love that these teenagers who have gone through incredibly traumatic experiences together (we're in book three at this point) have actually matured because of those experiences and are able to have an adult idea in their head of what a relationship is made up of and what the purpose of one is. Forgiveness is maybe an overstatement, but a part of a working relationship is definitely the ability to choose to let some things go. Not every incident needs to be a dramatic fight, and the more important question is always whether the relationship is still positive and healthy and productive.


I applaud Roth for creating an incredibly compelling series that breaks many of the formulas set up by the previous generation of young adult books. The fact that this series is verrrry  popular warms my heart. She gives the audience their full credit and assumes that if we're reading a book about an oppressive government regime then we are probably capable of handling the details of all the effects of that system. She also gives the characters their full credit. These teenagers have to grow up fast in this world and they do; they're not so overly mature as to be unbelievable, but she doesn't treat them like they're little kids or dumb teenagers either. They make hard decisions, they do what they think is right, sometimes they make mistakes - like we all do - and have to deal with those consequences.

This series will, however, wreck your soul. I finished the third one sobbing. I'm a crier anyway (the LEGO movie made me cry), but I haven't cried like that since the epilogue of Harry Potter.