The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

Mer A. recommended this book to me, after I mentioned Didion as an author on my reading list. Wow. Fabulous. Mer's recommendation mentioned some oddities with Didion's style, which I'll address below.

The book takes place in a fictional Latin American country, and is narrated by the matriarch of a family who controls much of the business and politics in the country. The narrator was born in the United States, but moves to this country as a young adult. She claims early on in the book that the story is not about her, it's about a woman named Charlotte who flees to this country as an adult when her life in the U.S. starts to fall apart. However, it is clear to the reader (well, at least to this reader) that her telling of the story is as much about her as about Charlotte.

Early in the book she characterizes Charlotte as a norteamericano, a classification in her world that determines how Charlotte is treated and how she integrates with the local community. The following passage well illustrates the mirror the narrator looks into in her telling of the story:

"As the child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents, attentive godparents, one brother named Dickie, ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver, as well as with a small wooden angel, carved in Austria, to sit on her bed table and listen to her prayers. In these prayers, the child Charlotte routinely asked that "it" turn out all right, "it" being unspecified and all-inclusive, that she had been an adult for some years before the possibility occurred to her that "it" might not. She had put this doubt from her mind. As a child of the western United States, she had been provided as well with faith in the value of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of cleared and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of progress and education, and the general upward spiral of history. She was a norteamericano."

Didion has a very rhythmic writing style, which I enjoyed. That passage above is of a style common in this book: sentences that would be considered "run-on" anywhere else, coupled with a strong ability to capture a particular theme quickly. In some cases, Didion was more likely to break her rhythm onto separate lines, connecting them by using the same words in a different way. This style definitely brought me into the book and into the narrator's head:

"Anyway." Charlotte folded the pages of her unfinished Letter with a neat vertical crease as children fold their weekly themes. "It's not just a new sentence. It's a new paragraph."

It occurred to me that I had never before had so graphic an illustration of how the consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.

Or the unconsciousness of the human organism.

If the organism under scrutiny is Charlotte.

Thematically, the book was largely about Charlotte's relationship with her daughter, who disappeared as part of a radical political organization. I think there were ways in which I would have connected with the book even more if I had children. That said, I may have appreciated themes in the book I would have otherwise missed had I been more focused on the mother-daughter narrative.

For example, avoidance. Charlotte's move to Latin America is the most extreme example of her propensity to avoid the things in her life she doesn't like. She refuses to acknowledge her daughter's defection initially:

"Marin...was at that moment, even as the two FBI men occupied Leonard's Barcelona chairs, even as te fat FBI man toyed with one of Leonard's porcelain roses and even as the thin FBI man gazed over Charlotte's head at the 10' by 16' silk screen of Mao Tse-tung given to Leonard by one of the Alameda Three, skiing at Squaw Valley. Or so Charlotte tried to tell the FBI man."

Finally, ideas around separation were common in this book. Charlotte is norteamericano, thus treated differently. She also expects to live by different rules as her counterparts. The dialectic of how she acts and how she is treated through her life reinforces this. The narrator's comment on this is extreme:

"Charlotte had no idea that anyone else had ever been afflicted by what she called the "separateness."

And because she did not she fought it, she denied it, she tried to forget it, and, during those first several weeks after Marin disappeared and obliterated all the numbers, spent many days without getting out of bed. I think I have never known anyone who led quite so unexamined a life."

This book takes more patience than most books. It nudged me through the story rather than ushering me. I enjoyed that about it, but not everyone will.

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Mer A. recommended this book to me as she handed me a nearly hip-high pile of her castoffs. I was not a huge fan, despite Mer's verbal recommendation and Ann Patchett's quotation on the cover.

This story follows a family through four generations of dysfunction and secrets. The book kept my attention, but the writing was nothing special and the story was implausible. This is the first book I've read all year that I did not dog-ear any pages for the purposes of remembering a special line or quotation. I would have forgiven the uninspired writing (or at least questioned if it were just subtle and not uninspired) had the plot been more plausible. However, the story involved so many unlikely romantic trysts, and so many moments where the characters could have saved themselves forty or fifty pages of heartache, that I could not get past that.

The praise on the front and back cover suggest that this book masterfully captures a family through several decades of life. However, by the end of the book I was disgusted by the sexual pairings, bored waiting for the members of each generation to grow up, and tired of the third person omniscient narrator's omniscience.

Given all the praise for this book, coupled with a soft spot I have for first-time novelists, I'd be open to reading the sequel, but it's not high up on my list.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

Over the past few years, I had seen sullen-looking college students all over Boston reading this book. Finally, after noticing it in the memoir section of Trident, I finally picked it up myself. It ended up being a great choice, full of wonderful writing and well-developed themes; also great because it has short chapters which are perfect for reading during a busy week.

This is a memoir written by a poet who grows up without knowing his father, only to meet him as an young adult while working at one of Boston's Pine Street Inn homeless shelter. His father suffers from mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia, and ends up homeless in Boston. Flynn charts both his own trajectory into young adulthood with no direction as well as his father's life story, at least as much as he can piece together.

I definitely enjoyed this book more than I otherwise would have because of its being set in Boston. The Pine Street Inn is near the edge of my neighborhood and I recognized many of the locations he mentioned. I've also read several books touching on the Irish in Boston and this fit that genre well. In Flynn's case, his association with his Irish roots and friends from childhood was sadly plagued with alcoholism. He writes of one of his friends,

"When he got off the school bus he could see his father sprawled out. His mother said, I give up, handed my friend the address and the keys. My friend wasn't old enough to drive, but he learned. He tells the story now as if he were speaking of raking the leaves."

Aside from the descriptions of Boston, I also liked this book for its description of his troubled relationship with his father. When he meets his father for the first time, he is 27 and struggling with his own ability to grow into adulthood. Flynn writes,

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."

This book does a great job of "showing not telling" (as a great writing teacher once taught me) the complexities of this relationship. Flynn wrestles with inevitability and fate and responsibility, using an effective combination of vignettes, conversations, and letters.

And last, but by no means least, Flynn is a poet. Thus, his writing is superb and unique. He has a style that transcends standard literary devices such as metaphor or hyperbole. In describing a homeless man that he knows, Flynn writes,

"Brian wears three army blankets over his head like layered ponchos, a hole cut in the middle of each, making his slow way up, stopping at a barrel to poke for half a sandwich, half a beer, stopping at each payphone, checking the change slot, knowing that the phones release dimes secretly."

This would have been a good book had it described a difficult relationship between father and son, or a young man's first few years working at a homeless shelter, or covered any topic with equal skill. Lucky for us readers, it does all three.

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

I saw this book at the Trident Bookseller Cafe waiting for Mer W., requested it from the library, picked it up and read it on the train going home for Passover, all in four days. It was a great read, the kind of book I found myself daydreaming about reading when I was doing other things.

The book follows parallel stories, one in the present and one in the past. In the present, a family is convening in a beach town for a wedding; in the past, the matriarch of the family is a young woman in Leningrad during WWII who works in the art museum. It was a very carefully written book, scarcely wasting a single word. Like A Fine Balance, it was a book that I could watch happening in my head, as if it were a movie. One of the strangest things about the book for me was that it was about a non-Jewish family during WWII. It is interesting to have read Suite Francaise within a few months of this to see how far-reaching WWII was across Europe.

In some ways, the story occurring in the past was a standard war love story. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy goes off to war, girl is sad, boy and girl reunite. But the main character's life while her husband is at war is fascinating, as she and her family survive in a shelter and she continues to work in the art museum as all the art is crated and shipped off.

The writing about love in the book is sublime, "She has been in his life for so long," the author writes, "that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twinning so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her."

It is no mystery why I found myself cradling the book at times as I was reading.

The modern-day story has some interesting themes, too. The most striking was the questions surrounding care for elder relatives. Also prominent were the dichotomies between someone's life story and how they are perceived as a senior, best captured in this passage:

"...a battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents' dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen's actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not the one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet's. She didn't think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her."

Perhaps most interesting is that this is a short book to cover all this ground. Just 250 pages or so, with big margins.

The Guy Not Taken by Jennifer Weiner

I have enjoyed Weiner's novels for several years. However, this book of short stories was uneven and disappointing. The first three stories shared the same characters, which made me think that the book was going to be a set of vignettes about this family. However, the rest of the stories were about all different groups of people, including (indulgently) some characters from her other books.

Many stories shared a theme around swimming, or characters who swam, but other than that, I found no ideas or themes that were shared through the book. I admit that I am not always a fan of short stories, but I'll pick up a Hemingway or Munro book now and then and don't feel this way about those.

One story is about a woman who transforms her job helping kids write college essays into helping someone write a personal ad. That she misjudges one of the applicants (who ends up having a disabled brother) and falls in love with her "ad" client is reasonably predictable. The highlight of that story is her client's description of himself, "Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?"

In another story, she seems to struggle with ideas around teenage pregnancy and parenthood, and child abuse. It too is predictable. Like in the story described above, though, the writing is as good as the theme is boring:

"How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a Master's degree and a mortgage and a husband, who'd insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable, brat?"

The title story was about a woman whose interference with her ex-boyfriend's wedding registry actually changes history in a sci-fi Back-to-the-Future way. Kind of a cool idea, except in the afterward, she mentions that it is being developed into a movie script. How those thirteen pages can turn into an hour and a half worth $10.75 I'll look forward to seeing.

The one highlight of the book for me was the afterword, where she describes how each story came to her, and under what circumstances she wrote it. Like Suite Francaise, it was a neat opportunity to understand how writers think. She mentions in the afterword that the stories were told in the order of the characters' ages, which I did not notice but thought was cool.