Book (P)Review: Life After Life by Jill McCorkle

How I feel about Jill McCorkle and her book

I do not understand why Jill McCorkle doesn't have more of a national readership.  She's admired and read widely in the South but most of my Yankee friends, co-workers, and customers have never read her. Personally, I think she is a national treasure AND her latest novel makes me want to hug her.  I love it.

I think it's swell when my feelings towards a book are so simple and uncomplicated that I can use that simple declarative: I love it. I also love Algonquin, McCorkle's long-time publisher, for their cozy packaging and brilliant marketing campaigns.  I can't think of another publisher, large or small, deeper pockets or not, that does a better job supporting their authors.

NB: Basically this post will be one big lovefest. So consider yourself forewarned and forearmed and whatnot. (Aside: "forearmed" is a strange word, no? Wouldn't anybody who possesses a full, and thus lower, arm be "forearmed?")

Life After Life is set in the small town of Fulton, North Carolina, and more particularly within the microcosm of Pine Haven Estates, a retirement community where most of the characters live, work, or visit. Which means that Jill McCorkle has written the first book I've read this year that features the final frontier of reading -- older people. I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: it's easier to find a good piece of fiction written about a bi-racial, gay, born-again Zoroastrian fundamentalist (or insert problem set of your choice) than it is to find good fiction written about the over-70 set. While I'm pleased that large sections of the populace once deemed as "other" by the average reader are now well represented in contemporary fiction, I'm puzzled why we don't have more portrayals of septua- or octogenarians when, if luck and health are on our side, we will all cross over that nebulous boundary into senior citizenship.

But I digress.  What I love about novels set in small towns is the ridiculous diversity they can provide. I don't say this very often, but I entirely side with Mrs. Bennet over Mr. Darcy on that point. In Life After Life, the reader meets: Abby, the heartbreaking little girl who, caught between her own unpopularity at school and her parents' fighting at home, chooses to spend her time amongst the gentler souls at Pine Haven; Stanley, the desperate man who pretends to dementia after his wife dies in order to release his younger son from the responsibility of taking care of him; Sadie, the former teacher and now Pine Haven resident who believes that the secret to unlocking your own happiness lies in communicating with your inner third-grader; Rachel, the Yankee who moves south after her husband dies so she can be amidst the surroundings of her one great love, only to discover that her lover was not the man she had built him up to be; CJ, the young mother trying to make ends meet as the cosmetologist to the seniors; and Joanna, who makes amends for her early life's bad decisions by dedicating the second half of her life to hospice care, ensuring that nobody in town need die alone.

McCorkle offers a hodge-podge of styles to carry the story forward. Many of them are third person narratives that flit about from one character to another, but she also employs excerpts from the notebooks Joanna keeps about each of the people she has sat with at the end of their lives, interspersed with a few first person narratives that reflect the state of mind of those dying individuals. It's true that because of these narrative jumps the novel felt a little disjointed to me at first, but once I became adjusted to their rhythm I reluctantly had to admit they served the story quite well.

One of McCorkle's greatest strengths is her ability to simultaneously show that while there really is nothing new under the sun, people (even those whom you think you know well) have an endless capacity to surprise. She gives warmth and sparkle, wit and dignity to her characters and embraces them wholly, despite, or perhaps even because of, their flaws. In short, she plumbs the depths of the human heart with compassion and precision.

Here are some random passages that I marked as I read; I include them to give you a flavor of her writing.

p. 124: "Marge is negative about everything, her doughy face permanently etched in a frown, every suggestion and thought negated unless it involved her relationship with Jesus, who to hear her tell it, thinks she walks on water."

p. 104:  Regarding some people's notion on the segregation of heaven (not racially, but according to levels of worthiness): "'Well," Mrs Silverman said, "I think that if there is a heaven, then it has to be a socialist society; otherwise it wouldn't be heaven but just more of the kind of unjust hell you're always describing.' No on, not even Mr. Stone, said anything after that and Abby decided she would try to use everything she learned from watching Mrs. Silverman -- hands on hips, one eyebrow raisesd, little words like if made to sound big and powerful."

pp. 57-58: "Some have many hands reaching from the bedside and others have none, and yet in that final moment, the air heavy and laden as molecules regroup and reshape in preparation for the exit, it is all the same. It is like the moment when a snake enters the yard and the birds go silent. The silence begs your attention; it's time to go. The journey is over."

Sadie, musing on her final days, p. 306: "She always wanted some days of the week underwear, but that seemed so extravagant, especially for someone who was married and taught school. But then she got Lynnette some and Lynnette never wore the right day at the right time, but that was okay. Lynnette was a child who hears that different drummer and Sadie is proud of the fact that she never tried to change what the child was hearing but instead encouraged her to do her best and be happy. IN the middle of a dark night she liked to plant her open palm on Horace's back and draw in the heat and the she would move her hand in slow steady circles. He will call soon. He always calls and she is always right ready to answer."

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided by the publisher, Algonquin.  They will published Life After Life on March 26, 2013. I may also post again about this book after the Winter Institute dinner, where McCorkle will be one of the stars.

Book Review: The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon

Warning: This review of Nell Leyshon's The Colour of Milk will be chock full o' spoilery goodness.  If you'd prefer not to know about finer plot points and what happens in the last 50 pages, don't read much further beyond this sentence, in which I tell you that the author has created an original and compelling voice that is the perfect counterpoint to the better-known drawing room narratives of (or set in) the Regency era.

Each section of the book begins, "this is my book and i [sic] am writing it by my own hand," and thus the reader comes to know our protagonist, Mary, who tells us more than once in her first person narrative that her hair is the colour of milk.  She is a teenager of indeterminate age when the novel opens in 1830, born with a bum leg, possessed of a backtalking mouth and something like an inability  to speak without giving offence. Her mother, three older sisters, and most especially her father have no use for her at all beyond the hard work they can get out of her, and as a farmer's daughter, there seems to be no end to such work--even to the point where she is forbidden to sit down during the day unless she is milking the cows.

The one source of kindness she knows in life is from her grandfather, a once-robust man whose legs have been crushed and who has been reduced to being a permanent invalid. Mary's father is a man of violent tempers who thinks no more of beating his wife and daughters than he would have thought of whipping his oxen if they weren't plowing properly. Mary herself is clearly possessed of a native intelligence that comes from close observation of her natural world and reflection thereof, though utterly uneducated and illiterate. Thus, she knows exactly what is happening one night when she wanders through the barnyard and sees one of her sisters copulating with the vicar's son, but she has no real idea of what social consequences could arise.

It comes with much displeasure but not much surprise when her father tells her one night that he has essentially sold her into slavery at the vicarage: Mary will leave home to work for the vicar, the vicar will pay her father.  Because, y'know, that's fair. Life turns out to be not quite as awful at the vicarage; Mary actually is treated mostly with kindness, thanks to the vicar's wife who values her very much. But the fact that it is not her choice to be there rankles her and her resulting impertinence gets her in trouble more than once.

Okay, here is the second spoiler alert.  If you keep reading on from this point, don't say I didn't warn you.

The thing about being a woman in the first half of the 19th century is that you are at the mercy of the men in your life.  It's bad enough if you're like Elizabeth Bennet, who at least is assured of her value within the family sphere; if the western world's favorite heroine had been assaulted during the course of Pride & Prejudice, we know that her family and the neighborhood, and most importantly, the law would have taken up her cause.

Not the case if you're born the fourth daughter to an impoverished and illiterate farmer in the west of England. In this way, the author aligns herself with the long literary tradition of heroines who are not only at the mercy of the men in their lives, but the victims of the men's perversity.  The very figures who should have been most protective of Mary, namely her father and the vicar, and the ones who abuse their position over and over.

When the vicar's wife succumbs to her weak heart, it's not long after that the vicar dismisses the second household servant and invites Mary into his study to drink tea with him on a nightly basis.  There he  takes the first steps in teaching her to read using The Holy Bible, and once the indecipherable black code resolve itself into recognizable letters, Mary is hooked on learning more.  Unfortunately, the vicar is hooked on Mary and utterly unhampered by any scruples that would prevent his preying on a young woman in his care. He starts touching her and sneaking into her room at night, claiming loneliness as his right to rape her, in exchange for teaching her reading and writing.

Mary decides to accept the exchange and never puts up any resistance to his unwanted fumblings until the day she decides she has learned enough from him and no longer needs to participate in his sordid quid pro quo. The vicar seems truly bewildered at her decision. One can practically hear his inner monologue: "You mean it wasn't good for you, too?" But no matter, he forces her anyway, and this time with true violence in his hands and vengeance in his heart: how dare she make this difficult for him?  Doesn't she know who he is?  He's the goddamned vicar, for crying out loud, and he deserves her respect, nay her obedience, no matter how depraved his demands.

Little does he know that Mary, good farm-raised girl that she is, has a wiry strength and an emotional detachment when it comes to the dispatching of animals. Little is he aware that in the pocket of the apron she was wearing when he raped her for the last time, there was a wire for cutting hard cheese.  Little does he suspect she would ever use it to garrote him when he passes out from post-coital rapal exhaustion.

Of course, he can go to the grave resting in the easy assurance that no court of law would ever find in Mary's favor for his murder, and that is what makes this book the utter counterpoint to the Regency novels we know and love. Every time I sit down to revel once more in the exploits of Eliza Bennet or the Dashwood sisters (and I do love them), my readings will forever be altered, because for every Miss Bennet or Miss Dashwood, I fear there were hundreds more of girls like Mary.

NB: I read an ARC of this book, which is already available in the UK and will be published in January 2013 in the US by Harper Collins. I would also like to thank my coworker, Caitlin Caulfield, for planting the seed that Mary's story was the darker side of the same literary coin as Austen's novels.

We're Gonna Rock Down To Telegraph Avenue: Part the Last, or Brokeland

So this week is the final installment in the Michael Chabon readalong, and I have to say that I am feeling a little bereft, both at the thought of the dissolving of the fellowship (that sounds vaguely Tolkien-like) and at the closing of the book. I am grateful to HarperCollins, Mr. Chabon himself, and his editor, for approving this unprecedented ARC readalong and providing the ARCs to all of us.

Part V, Brokeland, seemed a little more disjointed to me that the other sections of the book, with the possible exception of part I, where I was still having trouble keeping characters straight.  It starts out in media res, and while I think that works for the most part in the rest of the book, I wanted something more directly picking up where part IV left off.  I think it's a testament to how much I've come to feel for Chabon's characters that I don't want to miss out on the important things in their lives, so it's a little frustrating to learn that so many of the conversations I wanted to be privy to have occurred offstage.

I wasn't expecting a happy ending from Chabon, but what I got was an ending that was both realistic and satisfying in equal measure, and that says something, I suppose.  I won't go too much into the particulars of the plot, other than to acknowledge how good I thought the hospital scene and the final scene, up in the second floor room, were.

I didn't have particular expectations about Telegraph Avenue before I started it, other than I thought it would be fun to do a readalong with a not-yet-published novel, but I'm so glad that that is how I came to the book.  Without a group to discuss it each week,  to pick apart the good, the bad, & the extraordinary, I might have given up on it.  I don't usually like to work that hard on my fiction, but Chabon made me reach and stretch to accommodate his book and I think I'm a better reader for it. Now that I'm on the other side of it, I find my mind going back to those characters and wanting to live in their world a little longer.

It's impossible to really summarize a book like this one, where the plot points meander or even happen offstage and where the characters are so varied and rich, or where the location becomes a character in and of itself--or maybe even a metaphor for what Chabon is doing.  So I'll just share with you the short blurb I wrote for something we call a "shelf tag" in my bookstore, where it will become part of my shelf in the Staff Favorites section:

The best fiction reflects not only how the world is, but what its reality could be. Chabon's latest (and greatest) novel, while ostensibly about race in the 21st century, is really a cross-section of America itself and a peek into the real American Dream. Chock full of pop cultural references that will keep the curious reader Googling, and imbued with the creole rhythms of music from the world over, it shows that our differences don't always have to divide us and that the "apartheid of consciousness" that pervades our nation can, in fact, be overcome.

I'll conclude, as usual with some of my favorite passages, but first a question: was anybody really surprised to learn the name of the new tenant next to the King of Bling? I smiled rather broadly when I read that.

"There was nothing a man couldn't do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy bras."

"Valletta rocked back. Wavering in her resolve. Knowing she should make good on her threat and go, but trained by the Pavlovian bell of love to confuse contempt with affection and indifference with reserve."  God, so true of so many women I know.

The whole metaphor of whites & blacks and the pedestal of the world = backs of elephants and a turtle (which is either Mayan or from Terry Pratchett, or possibly both).  It's too long to excerpt here, but the concluding sentence is both defeatist and humorous: "It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world."

"Nat might have felt ashamed of the self-pity in which he currently wallowed, if self-pity knew any shame."

"'Pissing on a zeppelin,' Nat said, regretting bitterly the loss of this opportunity. 'Why didn't I think of that?'"

If you're following this readalong and are intrigued by our discussion, please consider pre-ordering your book here.

Please note that if the Linky List closes before you've had a chance to post, you should just add a link to your post to the comments section.

P. S. The guest post I promised last week from Melody went up this week--it's the post that is one newer than this one, or just click here. 

Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Characters

I'm jumping back on the Top Ten Tuesday bandwagon this morning to participate in this week's question, asked by the good folks over at The Broke and the Bookish: What are your top ten all-time favorite characters?

Well, I rather despite the construction "all-time favorite" since it implies that from here on out, I will form no more opinions about my favorite things, or that nothing I encounter later in life will equal what I've encountered so far.  So I'm modifying it to mean my top ten characters I've encountered in literature so far. Some are the protagonists and some play a supporting role, but all of them are wonderful in their own way. In no particular order:

1. Thursday Next from the Jasper Fforde series.

2. Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables.

3-4. Samwise Gamgee and Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings.

5. Meg Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time.

6-8. Luna Lovegood, Minerva McGonagall and Severus Snape from the Harry Potter series.

9. Katniss Everdeen  from the Hunger Games trilogy

10. The Murray Twins, Poppet & Widget, from The Night Circus. (I'm counting them as one since they're twins and, you know, inseparable)

Oddly enough, there are no Austen characters on my list this week.  Usually Austen appears on all of my TTT lists, but I figure she's getting enough airtime from the rest of y'all this week that I can give Elizabeth, Darcy, and Colonel Brandon a skip for now without feeling too guilty.  :)

Who's on your list this week?

Book Review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

From the little I knew about Lolita before I picked it up, it was not really a book I ever wanted to read.  But while I'm not above judging a book by its cover, I decided that I shouldn't judge Lolita without at least dipping into it first.  Many people I know love this book.  Writer friends and acquaintances frequently include it on their Top Ten lists.  Plus I've been saying to myself that I need to start reading a little Russian literature.  How can one be well-read without reading any of the Russians?  One day while changing the sheets in our guest bedroom I noticed the Vintage paperback edition of Lolita on the shelf and said to myself, What the hell? It helped that this one was only 300 pages long--compared to looking down the barrel of War & Peace, that's pretty short. I started the book that night and had to force myself several times throughout to finish it. My husband kept teasing me about it: "you must really love that book, the way you're tearing through it."  But he couldn't be more wrong.  I was appalled, almost from start to finish.  What I found inside these pages was actually far worse than what I had imagined.

If, as many people claim, the intention of literature is to disturb, then by golly, this book is literature. But that's a load of codswallop, in my opinion.  I think great literature can be disturbing, but for me, the point of reading is to create empathy. And it's not that I turn away from disturbing fiction.  I have long admired works by Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye and Beloved), Cormac McCarthy (all of 'em) and D. M Thomas (The White Hotel), and they're nothing if not disturbing.  But they're also full of humanity, depth, spirit, and redemption. 

Lolita started off well enough for me, dubious confession from the narrator aside. Humbert Humbert falls in love with a girl at the seaside and has his first sexual encounter with her.  Fine.  Annabel is "a few months my junior," as Humbert recounts.  Annabel's premature death results in what can only be called arrested development, because thereafter Humbert is only sexually attracted to young girls.  So far, it's about what I expected.

But then Humbert receives a peculiar inheritance that stipulates he must live in America to benefit, and shortly thereafter the bile rose in my throat on a regular basis.  He only boards with a certain Mrs. Haze after seeing her daughter sunbathing in the backyard.  From there he keeps a diary of his lustful thoughts about Dolores, whom he calls Lolita.   She, in turn, has a crush on handsome Humbert. One day when they're alone he pulls her onto his lap and masturbates against her.  But it's when he fantasizes about a sleeping pill strong enough that he could rape Lolita without waking either her or her mother that I grew most disgusted.  He goes so far as to experiment with different strengths of pills and is disappointed that they don't seem to work.

Ugh--fast forward through Humbert's marriage to Mrs. Haze and her subsequent death. He is now Lolita's sole guardian, and after that point he molests the girl on a daily basis and threatens her with dark tales of deprivation and group foster care to hold her silence.  And yet Humbert persistently sees himself as the victim in their scenario: "There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child." Yeah, poor guy.

Long story short: they take a year-long road trip, staying in a different motel each night so that nobody will suspect Humbert of raping his step daughter. And so that Lolita will not know anybody well enough to confide what is happening to her.  Eventually they settle down and she goes to an all-girls boarding school.  When she wants to go out with her girlfriends, Humbert requires extra sexual favors from her and he gets upset when she performs desultorily. Huh. Go figure. Then she's in a play at school and then he abducts her and they go on another long road trip.  One night Lolita gets so sick she must be hospitalized and Humbert, in his usual martyred voice says, "giving up all hope of intercourse, I wrapped her in a laprobe." Helluva guy, that Humbert.

When Lolita is abducted/rescued from the hospital by a man claiming to be her uncle, Humbert  spends the rest of his inheritance criss-crossing the US trying to find them. He doesn't.  But one day he gets a note from Lolita asking for money--she's pregnant and she needs money to move to Alaska.  Humbert shows up, with murderous thoughts, and only gives up the money in exchange for the name of the person who liberated her, whom he tracks down and kills. The end.

So, what I want to know is how this book has become such a milestone of American letters, so canonized, so revered? The cover of the book proclaims that Lolita is "the only convincing love story of our century (Vanity Fair)." Um, did they read the same book I did? This is a novel dedicated to the abomination of love.  I wonder if the same reviewer would call Mein Kampf "the only convincing political tract of our century."

Nabokov is frequently regarded as "one of the twentieth century's master prose stylists" (from the back cover), and there were times when I thought the writing was quite good.  And of course the fact that he is so facile with a language beyond his native tongue is a remarkable feat and praiseworthy all on its own. But there are also long passages where the text meanders so much that it's hard to tell up from down.  Here's one such example, where Humbert is describing nymphets, the word he coins to describe those girls on the cusp of reaching sexual maturity, to whom he exclusively attracted:

"Neither are good looks a criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes."

For this reader, at least, the prose does not elevate the subject to the point of literature, and I confess it bothers me still, three weeks after completing this novel, that the sexual abuse and coercion of children is somehow legitimized by this book's canon status.  It's exactly not that I'm upset that books like this are published--I believe in the free market and publishing works uncensored.  It's the fact that important writers, even feminist writers, elevate the pedestal this book stands on that bothers me.  If it were instead a cult classic, maybe something along the lines of Bret Easton Elli's American Psycho, another book that I know would disturb me and thus will never read, I could rest more easily. 

I know that many of my blog's followers must have read this book.  I'd love you to engage me a dialogue about Lolita with your thoughts on the subject, as I feel fairly sure I hold a minority view on this novel.

The Wife of Bath Kicks Ath!

I am a bit of a failed medievalist.  I never read Chaucer until I got to grad school, so I was off to a late start,at least from a scholarly point of view.  But I promptly fell in love with his stories, his word play, and the timelessness of his themes, Middle English be damned!  It also helped that the lady in The Knight's Tale shared my name, albeit with a different spelling.  And did you know that Chaucer used the word "piss-ant" back in the 15th century?  While I can't say that he was a feminist, or even a proto-feminist, it's clear that women's issues interested Chaucer a great deal.  If you never got past "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote..." in high school or if you have scary flashbacks from trying to read rhymed couplets in translation, I'd recommend that you give Chaucer another try.  Find a good modern translation (the prose version from Ackroyd is pretty good, actually) and sit back for some good times.  Because in a time where the book as an object may soon become obsolete, isn't it nice to be reminded that language and stories can survive through the centuries with their power undiminished?

Anyway, all of this is to say I ran across something very interesting in today's Shelf Awareness: the personal playlist for Chaucer's Wife of Bath.  I've copied and pasted it for you to read below, but you can read it in its original format at Flavorwire. 

Literary Mixtape: The Wife of Bath

3:30 pm Monday Aug 8, 2011 by Emily Temple

If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more! Here, we sneak a look at the hypothetical iPods of some of literature’s most interesting characters. What would be on the personal playlists of Holden Caulfield or Elizabeth Bennett, Huck Finn or Harry Potter, Tintin or Humbert Humbert? Something revealing, we bet. Or at least something danceable. Read on for a cozy reading soundtrack, character study, or yet another way to emulate your favorite literary hero. This week: Chaucer’s bawdy grand dame, the Wife of Bath. The Wife of Bath is one of the most developed characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which is somewhat unusual, since she is — gasp! — a woman. Also going by Alyson, the character is a strong proponent of female independence, and even dominance over men. She’s bawdy, lusty and rambunctious, insatiable and in control in the bedroom, and confident in her God-given right to have as much fun as she wants. Independently wealthy and confident, she has managed five marriages despite the Church’s disapproval, because somehow she just keeps on landing those gentlemen. The Wife of Bath can get down with the best of them, so she’d definitely be into some deliciously crude fare, as well as some of your typical feminist empowerment rock. And of course, she’d only listen to lady singers. Who else? Here’s what we think the Wife of Bath would gossip, spin her tale, and lay down the law to, but be warned: there is some parsing of Middle English ahead. Stream the full mixtape here. “Let’s Talk About Sex” — Salt-N-Pepa After all, even the Bible tells us it’s good to procreate! Why not talk about it so everyone can do it better? Or as the Wife of Bath says, “But wel I woot expres, withoute lye, God bad us for to wexe and multiplye: That gentil text can I wel understonde.” “Independent Woman” — Destiny’s Child All we can say is, the Wife of Bath would totally be throwing her hands up during the chorus of this song. Plus, let’s not lie: Beyoncé’s “Try to control me boy, you get dismissed” is basically the modern equivalent of Alyson’s ”We love no man that taketh kepe or charge.” “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” — Billie Holiday The Wife of Bath may be somewhat unconventional in her proto-feminist views, but we don’t think she really minds the criticism. Plus we think she’d really dig a strong woman like Billie in her headphones. “Konichiwa Bitches” — Robyn Alyson would be all over Robyn — an unconventional young woman who doesn’t take any guff and pretty much turns it out on all counts. After all, girl knows exactly what she’s doing: “You wanna rumble in my jungle/ I’ll take you on/ Stampede your rumpa/ And send you home/ You wanna rumble in space/ I put my laser on stun/ And on the north pole I’ll ice you son” “Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy Me” — Tata Young Even the Wife of Bath needs a song to jam to when she hangs out with her equally bawdy, irreverent friends. Leave your husbands at home, ladies! “Like a Virgin” — Madonna Though it’s true that Alyson “nil envye no virginitee,” and by most counts a rich widow was more desirable than a virgin, sometimes it’s still fun to pretend. Especially when you get to that fourth husband. “Dirrty” — Christina Aguilera The anthem of all sexually unrepressed party girls everywhere. We think the Wife of Bath is probably also too dirty to clean her act up, and proud of it. “Money” — The Flying Lizards Because let’s face it: the Wife of Bath knows what’s really important in life. And she’s got a lot of it. “How Many Licks” — Lil’ Kim feat. Sisqo “I wol persevere, I nam nat precious. In wyfhode I wol use myn instrument/ As frely as my Makere hath it sent. If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe! Myn housbond shal it have bothe eve and morwe.” In other words, you better know what to do with it, and so should your man. “I Want You” — Joan Jett Badass rocker Joan Jett would definitely be on heavy rotation on the Wife of Bath’s playlists. No nonsense and gruff, she never dolled herself up for shows like the pop stars, but wore what she wanted and kept pace with (or, often, bested) the big dogs. “Gentlemen Aren’t Nice” — Emilie Autumn Doesn’t Alyson know it. Good thing she’s about ten steps ahead of them. “Not a Pretty Girl” — Ani DiFranco Ah, but of course we had to put on a song from the queen of the hippie-feminist crooners herself. The song might be a little soft and breathy for Alyson’s taste, but we’re pretty sure the message would hit home.

(NB: I tried to reformat this so that they wouldn't all run together but I couldn't get it to work.  Not sure why.  But if it's hard to read here, just click through the above link to read it on Flavorwire.)

Literary Blog Hop: Is Literature a Sentimental Journey?

This week's Literary Blog Hop, sponsored by The Blue Bookcase, asks us to discuss our thoughts on sentimentality in literature.  When is emotion in literature effective and when is it superfluous?  Use examples.  

Good question.  And by good question, I mostly mean hard to answer. Ingrid's answer on The Blue Bookcase was really more of an essay, comparing (perhaps unfairly) Lady Chatterly's Lover and Twilight.  In my book, one of those is a work of literature and one is a piece of pulp fiction, and thus I have very different sets of expectations for them.  

I generally prefer books that make me feel and think, as opposed to just one or the other, and I do not think that a book has to be written for an adult audience to do both.  I also have to become emotionally engaged with at least one character to come away loving a book as opposed to just respecting it. And anytime an author is able to call upon my empathy and make me emotionally engage with a character who shares nothing in common with me, it's a good thing.  Part of the importance of literature is to be able to live somebody else's experience.  But when the emotions are out there on the surface, all the time, and make me feel like I am a teenager again--when every feeling, whether it is love or betrayal or jealousy or joy, is heightened to the  point of making me exhausted just reading it, it loses its effect.  Same thing when an author resorts to emotional manipulation of a reader. 

So what examples shall I use?  How about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, which is one of my favorite books of the last five years, Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee, which I recently reviewed here, and Catfish Alley by Lynne Bryant, which I recently reviewed here.  The Verghese book is a masterpiece, spanning decades and continents, world events and the particulars of one family, in a way that was heartbreaking, energizing, and inspiring by turn.  The main characters were of different cultural, political, educational, and religious backgrounds but not once did I consider myself as other, separate from them. With the Mukherjee book, however, with nearly identical differences (how's that for oxymoron?) separating me from the main character, there were few moments when I felt moved at all.  And yet with Bryant's book, with whose main character I share a similarity of class, gender, race, and even place, I didn't so much over-identify with the woman as feel like the story was emotionally manipulating me to get a response. 

I can see now why Ingrid felt moved to write an essay on this subject rather than just a quick blog post!  There's no way that I am going to take the time to finish a more complete defense of my position--not when I could be outside reading in the hammock--so I will just have to let it rest here.  

Top 10 Tuesday : Fictional Friends -- Who Would You Choose?

This is the first time I've participated in a Top 10 Tuesday list, hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, so here goes. Today's topic is Top Ten Characters I'd Like to be Best Friends With:

1) Elizabeth Bennet from Pride & Prejudice
2) Hermione Granger from fanction (not necessarily canon Harry Potter books), particularly Anna's trilogy that starts off with Roman Holiday
3) Huckleberry Finn from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
4) Meg Murray from A Wrinkle in Time
5) Emily Byrd Starr from Emily of New Moon et al
6) Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables et al
7) Owen Meany from A Prayer for Owen Meany
8) Thursday Next from The Eyre Affair et al
9) Caddie Woodlawn from Caddie Woodlawn
10)  Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (I guess this is kinda cheating, but I'm okay with that)

Love in the time of Victoria...Queen Victoria, that is.

I have been meaning to post about this book for the last few months, as it was a book I mentioned on the radio for the Round Table book discussion on WAMC back in January, but I'm afraid real life derailed the blog for a while. But noticing the display of Lewis Carroll books at the Odyssey today prompted me to dig this up to post.

ALICE I HAVE BEEN by Melanie Benjamin is a new(ish) hardcover novel that is the ingenious imagining of the inner life of Alice Liddell, the real life little girl who was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Now I have to confess that I’m a huge fan of the Alice classics--I read the books so often in my childhood that I took to reading them backwards AND upside-down just to keep things interesting. The poem "Jabberwocky" was the first poem I ever memorized (quite possibly the only poem I ever memorized) and I can recite it to this day, but this novel is so vividly imagined and compellingly told that you wouldn’t have to be obsessed with Lewis Carroll to reap lots of enjoyment from the novel. It opens in 1932 when Alice is an old woman, reflecting on her life and how the public identification as Alice in Wonderland has affected her. The author deftly interweaves known facts into the fantasy of her conjectured story, and my curiosity was roused to the point that I actually did a few Google searches to sift through the narrative for fact vs. fancy (Alice did meet Queen Victoria's youngest son whilst he was attending Oxford, but there's no evidence that he courted her, for one example).

I found Alice Liddell’s childhood the most compelling section, where we see her interactions with Charles Dodgson, the Oxford mathematician who would go on to write the Alice books under the psyeudonym of Lewis Carroll. The author does an amazing job of maintaining a very delicate balance between a sweet, avuncular relationship and a predatory relationship between the two, and it’s clear that however ambiguous their friendship is to the outside world, the two of them find mutual comfort and understanding with each other.

It’s the section where Alice is a young woman that is so heartbreaking to me, which picks up several years after the rift between Dodgson and the Liddell family. Tired of overanalyzing the relationship that shocked the entire Oxford community, Alice retreats into the comfort of hazy memories and finding order in the strict ideas of Victorian fashion and decorum, preferring not to dwell on that universal great mystery of just how narrow the chasm is that separates childhood from adulthood. Ultimately this spellbinding novel is a meditation on the sorrows and losses on both sides of that chasm, which makes it such a satisfying read.