Pulitzer Project: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel

I had a mixed reaction to this particular novel. My initial reaction was, wow, finally found a Pulitzer winner that might hit the high end of my rating scale.  Michael Chabon can write, every sentence is beautifully crafted, the various bits of trivia that the novel is salted with are intriguing, but, holy wah, Chabon could have used a better copy editor.

Remember me saying that a fat Pulitzer winner is never a good sign? That's definitely true for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It would be a much better book if it was considerably shorter, like maybe 200 or so pages shorter. The copy I had was a trade paperback and did not look like it was potential doorstop material, but it turned out to be 640+ pages filled with a font small enough that it came close to me reaching for the magnifying glass I use when doing counted cross stitch. Admittedly the first two-thirds of the book flowed sufficiently well that the tiny font didn't bother me much, but then I hit Antarctica. 

Why Chabon decided to stick one of his protagonists at a remote station in Antarctica during World War II is baffling. The Antarctica section was admittedly a slog. A reader should not be thinking "What is the fucking point?!" Maybe Chabon decided that he really needed to detail every second of Josef Kavalier's experience but it honestly did not seem to add anything to the book overall, at least not for me.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay follows the lives of two cousins, Josef Kavalier and Samuel Clayman. Both are in their late teens when Joe arrives in the United States as a refugee from Prague. The Kavalier and Clayman families are Jewish, it's the 1930s, Nazis are now in control in Czechoslovakia, and life is getting scarier for anyone Jewish. The Kavaliers decide Josef should go to America to stay with relatives there. 

After Joe arrives in New York, it turns out he and his cousin share a love of comic books. It's a time when comics are just taking off, the whole phenomenon of Superman has every would-be commercial artist excited and trying to figure out how to get in on the action. Joe is an extremely talented artist, Sam not quite as good at drawing but great at plot lines. Together they push the idea of a new superhero, the Escapist, persuade a publisher to develop the concept, and do quite well for a couple years. Joe has been stashing money in the bank to eventually pay for his family back in Prague to get out of Europe. Then the world changes. On the same day Joe learns that his younger brother died enroute to the U.S. the Japanese government bombs Pearl Harbor. Joe's response to hearing that his brother drowned when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship carrying refugees is to immediately enlist in the Navy. He is determined to kill Germans. His burning desire for revenge is thwarted, though, by the Navy's decision to train him as a radio operator and ship him to a tiny station in Antarctica. 

Back in New York Sam is slowly coming to terms with being homosexual. He does what many (most) gay men did in the U.S. in the 1940s: he works hard at staying thoroughly closeted. He marries his cousin Joe's pregnant girlfriend Rosa and presents as the stereotypical suburban dad. He has occasional discrete meetings with other young closeted men while being quietly conflicted and miserable. He had been given the opportunity to go to Hollywood with his first lover, an actor, in December 1941 but had panicked at the last minute. He stayed in New York and then steps up to marry Rosa when Joe enlists without knowing fatherhood is imminent. Time moves on, twelve years pass, and Joe returns. And that's when Chabon decides to wrap things up quickly. After almost 600 pages of meandering, chatty, and, to be totally honest, engaging text Joe, Sam, and Rosa manage to tie up all the loose ends in remarkably few pages. 

So, general conclusions about this book? Definitely a mixed reaction. On the one hand, Chabon is really good with words. Reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was not work. The book flows. I came really close to telling myself I'd finally hit a 10 on my rating scale. And then I hit the Antarctica section. Okay. As that narrative bit advanced it got weirder and weirder. Reacting to a book by muttering "What the fuck. . .?" a lot is never a good sign. 

So would I recommend it to other readers? Maybe. Chabon can write. If a person has read anything else by him (The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Wonder Boys, Telegraph Avenue) that reader is going to expect Chabon's discursive style. If the prospective reader has never read anything by Chabon The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay might be a bit much. Still, even with the odd Antarctica section the book is way more readable than most of the previous Pulitzer fiction winners. Does it qualify as a beach book? I'd say yes. The discursive style can make it hard to put the book down, which means it's perfect for long hours on a chaise lounge or beach towel while slathered in Coppertone. Just remember to hydrate. 

Next up if I keep moving up the list chronologically is Empire Falls by Richard Russo, another book and author I know nothing about. Unless, of course, American Pastoral falls from the skies (or from Thrift books) and I get to do a step backwards. 

Pulitzer Project: Interpreter of Maladies

After I finished The Hours the Younger Daughter decided to read it, too, before returning it to the library. After all, the book was pretty light weight, both in size and content. I breezed through it quickly. So did she. And then she asked the usual question: What makes a work of fiction good enough to merit a Pulitzer? By then I had started reading Interpreter of Maladies so I had two recent examples to think about. So what does make a work of fiction Pulitzer worthy? I have no clue. Some past winners have been total dreck, literally unreadable, and others were amazing: beautifully written, a joy to read.

As for the most recent, it falls somewhere into the middle of the pack. Not bad, not great, just quietly announcing, yes, these are typical New Yorker short stories. Not great literature, not bad, just sort of there. The author is Indian American, sort of. According to Wikipedia, Lahiri was born in England and came to the United States at the age of 3 when her father was hired to work at a university library in Rhode Island. 

Her parents were Bengali and placed a lot of emphasis on remembering Bengali culture. The family made frequent trips to India and no doubt provided much of the material Lahiri drew on for her fiction. Her work is described as "autobiographical" but it's a bit of a stretch to call fiction autobiographical when the work is set years, even decades, before Lahiri was born. She may be channeling her parents' and other relatives' stories, but she didn't live any of it herself. 

The book is a collection of short stories, some longer than others. "Interpreter of Maladies" might be the longest. It's an odd narrative about a man who has two jobs: he works as an interpreter for a medical doctor translating patients' descriptions of symptoms and relaying the doctor's advice to the patients. India is a land of many languages and dialects, and the doctor has a sizable number of patients who speak a language the doctor doesn't know. The man's other job is as a tour guide, and it is through his conversations with American tourists that we learn about him being an interpreter of maladies. This is the story that won a prize from The New Yorker and again I'm not sure why. Maybe for being the penultimate New Yorker type of story? Exotic setting, intriguing cultural references, a faint hint of erotica in the tour guide's extremely G-rated thoughts about the female American tourist. Totally typical New Yorker, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary for that magazine other than the story being set in India instead of on a Caribbean island. 

The other stories in the book vary in setting and protagonists. Some are set in India, some in the U.S. One of the oddest stories for me involved a young married couple who moved into a new (to them) house and kept finding Christian tchotchkes: a snow globe with a Nativity scene, a garish poster, and even a large concrete Our Lady of Perpetual Cleanliness hiding in a clump of bushes in the yard -- why Mary wasn't in the usual old bathtub is a mystery. The house is apparently salted with tacky religious memorabilia. They keep finding stuff in odd places: tucked behind a radiator, for example. The wife is fascinated and wants to keep it all; her husband keeps reminding her that they're Hindu. I found myself thinking several kind of related thoughts: the tchotchkes collection is a guaranteed way to get nailed for the sin of cultural appropriation (something that no one was thinking much about back in the 1990s), non-Christians do get a little weird about religious memorabilia and holidays (lots of people celebrate Christmas or Easter with zero thought about the religious meaning of the holidays), and is it wrong of me to want a large statue of Ganesha for my garden? I have an old bathtub I could put him in. 

So how is the book in general? Well, it's competently written, i.e., it's definitely readable. Lahiri can write, which is good considering that her academic career seems to have consisted of teaching other people how to write. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes. I mean, it doesn't suck. Or, to damn with truly faint praise, I've read worse. It's another middle of the pack book. Not great, not bad, just sort of there. 

Next up on the list? Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The Garland County Public Library on-line catalog says they have a copy on the shelves so I may get it read in the next week or so. Assuming, of course, that the library does have it. Here's hoping they do because this is one book I'm actually looking forward to reading. I liked Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel. I also know he was the head writer for Star Trek: Picard, but I'm not sure if that's a positive or not. In any case, after ignoring the Pulitzers for two years, I may cross three off the list in one month. 

Pulitzer Project: The Hours

It's been awhile since I thought about the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Back in 2023 I read the 1997 winner, Martin Dressler, and was so thoroughly unimpressed by it that I lost interest in moving on up the list. When I decided to get back to it I wasted about a year in trying to track down a copy of the 1998 winner, American Pastoral. Despite it being a Philip Roth novel and, if I recall correctly, a best seller, the local library did not have it. Nor did any of the other libraries in the library's interlibrary loan network. So then I did the looking for a used copy. Turned out used copies for sale were scarce, too, and the ones I found were priced higher than I felt like spending. I finally decided to step back from the obsessive need to do the list in the order the prize was awarded and moved on to 1999, Michael Cunningham's The Hours.

As usual, I knew nothing about the book before starting to read it. The cover made it clear it had been made into a movie -- even I recognized Meryl Streep -- but I didn't recall ever seeing the film. I'm pretty oblivious when it comes to cinema and had no recollection of a movie that it turns out was both a critical and financial success. According to The Google, it made tons of money and resulted in an Oscar for Nicole Kidman. 

Small digression. I find it intriguing that beautiful actresses, no matter how skilled they are, seem to get tapped for awards when they take on roles that erase their physical attractiveness. Kidman suffered through long sessions in the make-up trailer thanks to the prosthetic nose and other enhancements designed to make her physically resemble the author Virginia Woolf. (The Younger Daughter had seen the film and said she didn't realize it was Nicole Kidman until she saw the credits.) The following year Charlize Theron won an Oscar for her portrayal of Aileen Wuornos in Monster, a role for which Theron gained 30 pounds and shaved off her eyebrows. Of course, male actors do it, too, like Matthew McConaughey for The Dallas Buyers Club. He lost over 50 pounds so he could realistically portray someone suffering from AIDS.

Back to the book.. . . As is true for most of the Pulitzer winners I read, my knowledge of either the book or the author was basically nonexistent when I picked it up. My initial reaction was relief that it was a modestly sized trade paperback and not something with the physical heft of War and Peace or Kristin Lavransdatter. Both of which I enjoyed reading, but they weren't Pulitzer winners. The hefty Pulitzer winners have not been nearly as readable as anything by Tolstoy. If a Pulitzer winner looks like it would make a nice solid doorstop, I don't see that as a good sign.  

The Hours offers vignettes from three different women's lives: the author Virginia Woolf, a fairly young stay-at-home wife in late 1950s Los Angeles, and a middle-aged lesbian in New York City in the early 1990s. The three women are tied together by Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf is in the early stages of writing the book, she's working out plot points in her head. The L.A. trad wife is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and the New Yorker was nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway when she was in college. Her first name is Clarissa, the same as Mrs. Dalloway, so the nickname made sense at the time. Now, 30+ years later, she's not as sanguine about it as she was in her 20s. 

I have never read Mrs. Dalloway so I have no idea how the descriptions of the three women match up with themes in the book. I do know about Virginia Woolf's life (and death) but I have never read anything by her. I'm not sure why. Woolf is a feminist icon so maybe I should feel a little guilty about not knowing anything about her actual work. Then again, if she'd been published in one of the genres I have an addiction to (mysteries and science fiction and fantasy) I might have read her but then she wouldn't be the iconic author she is remembered as. 

So, having approached the book with my usual level of blissful ignorance and feeling cautiously optimistic ("How bad can it be? It got optioned for a movie."), how was the actual book? Brief summary: Definitely readable but thin. As noted, the novel offers slices of life, basically one day each, for the three women. The first chapter kind of threw me for a loop -- it's a description of Woolf's suicide in 1941 -- but then the frame shifts. In Woolf's case the narrative jumps back to a summer day in 1923. She's thinking about her next book (Mrs. Dalloway), preparing for a visit from her sister Vanessa, trying to persuade her husband to move back into London proper instead of being stuck in a dull suburb, and worrying about her own mental health. She apparently suffered from headaches so severe they triggered hallucinations. 

The book then jumps forward in time to a day in the life of "Mrs. D," the middle-aged New Yorker. She's running errands, shopping for fresh flowers, fussing about the health of the friend who gave her the Mrs. Dalloway nickname, and remembering incidents from back when she and the friend were young. He's now a well respected poet who's just been awarded a prestigious prize so Mrs. D is planning to host a party celebrating his accomplishments. She's worrying about the guest list (did she inadvertently invite someone Richard wouldn't want to see?), worrying about her 19-year-old daughter's friendship with a feminist activist, worrying about life in general. One odd little bit of business is while she's at the florist she notices a film company is set up down the block. There are a couple trailers for the actors, one of whom is reportedly a major female actress. She wonders if it could be Meryl Streep. Given that Meryl Street plays Mrs. D in the film, that struck me as an interesting coincidence. 

As for the party Mrs. D is stressing about, in the end other events cause its cancellation. 

The Woolf and Mrs. D chapters are reasonably interesting; the trad wife in L.A. was more of a slog. Not surprisingly, it's the thinnest sections. She's young, has been married for a few years, has one child (a boy) and is pregnant again. She is a passionate reader, has always had a reputation as a book worm, and given any sort of a choice she'd rather read than do anything else. She's also suffering from massive insecurity. She worries that she's doing a bad job as a parent, she throws out a cake because the frosting isn't perfect, she worries that she's lost herself. She feels sufficiently unmoored that she brings her 3 year old son to a neighbor to be watched while she drives into the city and gets a hotel room for a few hours so she can have a quiet place to read with no other obligations. Is this nod to A Room of Her Own? (One of the multiple Virginia Woolf novels I've heard of but never read.)

I'm sure book clubs had discussions centering on questions like "What is the theme of this book?" I have no idea. Maybe it's that we all live in our own heads too much and worry about stuff it's not worth worrying about?  Bottom line was The Hours is readable. Michael Cunningham can write. Can he write at an Edna Ferber or Upton Sinclair level? No, but good if not great beats quite a few other Pulitzer winners. On the usual1 to 10 scale, it's a respectable 6 or 7. Better than average and not work to read.

Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes, with the minor caveat of warning them not to be put off by the description of Virginia putting rocks in her pockets and walking into the Ouse in the first chapter. Cunningham must have realized a drowned woman wouldn't have much to say or think about. Virginia breathing in 1923 is a lot more engaging than a very damp Virginia drifting in a river 

Next up on the list, assuming a copy of American Pastoral doesn't drop from the sky, a collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. 

Pulitzer Project: The Stone Diaries

It's been awhile since I bothered reading any Pulitzer Prize fiction winners. Back in 2021 I hit a couple that were such duds that I lost interest in bothering with Interlibrary Loan to work my way up the list. But after we got to Hot Springs, a city large enough to have a public library that hasn't overdosed on Danielle Steele, I checked the online catalog and then asked the Younger Daughter to check the 1995 winner, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, out for me.

The book turned out to be surprisingly good. Not great, but definitely readable. Shields could write. The book is  structured as a faux biography (or possibly memoir) of/by Daisy Goodwill Flett, a woman born in a small town in Manitoba in 1905 who manages to make it into her 80s before a bad fall triggers a decline in her health. 

By the time The Stone Diaries was published, Shields was an established author with a good reputation in Canada. She was in the comfortable position of feeling free to play around with formatting, perspective, style. . . she even inserts a section of vintage photos to mimic the type of old family photos a reader would expect to see in a real biography or memoir. That particular literary trick didn't go over very well with me. I'm not sure if Shields meant for there to be a disconnect between the way a reader finds herself visualizing the characters and the supposed photos of them (a character described as "morbidly obese" appears to be not especially fat, for example) or if the incongruities were simply an accident, but the end result was that to me that section just felt weird. 

Some sections are told in the first person, some in the third, but all are more or less the story of Daisy's life. Some of the narrative is from Daisy's perspective, some is how things may have looked to the people around her. For example, at one point a college friend of Daisy's visits for a few days, and the author gives us two radically different interpretations of how that visit went. One version describes a happy home, well behaved children, and a Daisy who seems to have her life pretty much together. The other version has Daisy as a fraud, her kids rude, and depicts a household the visitor would be happy to never visit again. 

So who is Daisy Goodwill Flett? In most ways, a rather ordinary woman. She's smart, but not brilliant; attractive but not necessarily stunning; hardworking but not ambitious. She's like most of us: she goes through life behaving appropriately but not making many waves. Her life has had some tragic blips -- her mother dies in childbirth, when she's eleven years old her foster mother is killed in a bicycle accident, her first husband manages to kill himself by falling out of a second floor window on their honeymoon -- but other than hearing the splat when Husband Number One hits the pavement she's not a witness to the events. She was present when her mother died, but witnessing a death when she'd only been breathing for a few minutes herself probably didn't make much of an impression. She is, in fact, remarkably untouched by events happening around her. 

And maybe that's the point. Maybe Daisy represents all of us. We all go through life experiencing various blips but most of the time we all just muddle on. 

So was the book worth reading? More than most of the ones on the list, although still not one of the truly good ones. On the usual scale of 1 being the worst, 10 being the best, it's a solid 7. Decent writing, not a whole lot of work to get through, but in the end not that special. The Younger Daughter asked me what makes a book merit a Pulitzer. Sometimes it's because it's an amazing work of literature and sometimes it's the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Even though the announcement may say the award is for The Most Recent Work the reality is the prize is actually acknowledging the half a dozen or more better works the author cranked out decades earlier. Not being familiar with Shields' previous work I don't know if The Stone Diaries qualifies as a lifetime achievement award candidate, but it feels like it could. 

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Sure, why not. It's decently written, moderately interesting, and inoffensive. This book, in fact, proved to be such a relief to read compared to some of the others I suffered through as part of this Pulitzer Project that I've already moved on to the next one on the list, Richard Ford's Independence Day*, the 1996 winner. At this point, I'm within 25 books of the most recent winner and have already read three of the 25 out of order, it looks like I could actually live long enough to read them all. . . especially if there's a year or two between now and whenever I get to the end that no prize for fiction is awarded. 

*Also surprisingly readable. I'm already about a third done with it. 

Science fiction or fantasy?

My most recent reading material is Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary. Weir has a fair amount of expertise in science and engineering and it shows in his work. His first book, The Martian, got all the technical stuff right. Everything that happened in the novel matched up neatly with reality; there wasn't anything that wasn't conceivably possible just by extending current technology out a bit further: sending a manned mission to Mars, having various devices working, and sufficient dramatic elements to keep a reader interested in seeing The Hero manage to survive on a diet of potatoes far longer than one would think possible. The book was readable. I enjoyed it, but had zero interest in watching the movie. 

Project Hail Mary is similar in that all the technology and science seems plausible. No violations of known laws of physics (e.g., no sudden discoveries of a faster-than-light drive or wormhole technology), for example. It does include the discovery of a life form that seems to be impossible given the conditions where it was found, but it's not totally implausible. Scientists have found marine life at depths where the water pressure should flatten them and thriving in thermal tubes where they should be getting cooked instead of breeding. So I'm willing to accept Weir's invention of 'astrophage.' 

In short, the book should be easily classifiable as hard core, old-fashioned science fiction. There's only one small problem. The plot centers around the need to Save the Planet, a classic trope in speculative fiction. An imminent threat is discovered, more or less by accident, that has the ability to turn Earth into an ice-covered lifeless rock. And it's a threat with a short timeline. If a solution isn't found within a few years it'll be too late. This is where the book steps away from being science fiction and turns into fantasy.

Humanity's response (or at least politicians' responses) is pure wishful thinking. Elves and orcs are more grounded in reality than Weir's vision. The governments of the world throw themselves into cooperating with the effort. The Chinese, Russians, Swedes, you name it, are all united in supporting Project Hail Mary. I can slide easily into a willful suspension of disbelief when it comes to accepting a lot of things authors do -- time travel, multiple universes, you name it and I probably won't quibble -- but a united Earth? That's the proverbial bridge too far. I'd be cruising along in the book, enjoying the various things The Hero has to cope with, and then there'd be a dip into governments worldwide giving the project's administrator a blank check. No, no, no. We humans would rather die a miserable, post-apocalyptic death while shivering over a dumpster fire and cooking rats than we could ever manage to get two countries, let alone the whole world, to agree on something that everyone needs. Don't agree? Just take a look at the stellar job we're all doing on agreeing on actions to slow climate change. 

Despite the fantasy element, the book is a good read. The management of the project pops up occasionally and has me muttering, but fortunately most of the novel just focuses on The Hero and the problems he personally is trying to solve. I'm actually not quite done with it -- I read another section that had the project manager bulldozing her way through bureaucracies and enjoyable though it was to see someone ream desk monkeys it got me thinking about how thoroughly unrealistic that plot element appears to be. Which is a shame, because it really would be nice to have a Project Manager for the whole planet.   

Book Review: Educated, A Memoir

I am not a huge fan of memoirs, especially memoirs that detail someone's sad experiences with a religious cult or particularly harrowing circumstances, but for some reason Tara Westover's Educated caught my eye. Maybe pickings were slim on the New Books shelf. 

I have a minor addiction to advice columns and to the 'Am I the Asshole' threads on Reddit. I tell the S.O. that one nice thing about reading them is our own family starts looking pretty damn sane. Well, Educated had kind of the same effect, except in mega doses. Some holy-shit-I-survived memoirs feature a person's escape from a religious cult, some highlight abusive parents, some feature mental illness, and some involve abuse by other family members. Westover's book checks all the boxes. It was like, holy wah, this woman needs to stop thinking about someday reconnecting with her incredibly toxic family. Don't fantasize about building a bridge back home; dynamite that sucker in your mind and never look back. 

I could see missing your family if you've become estranged because you no longer buy into your father's lunatic right wing conspiracy theories, but not when your parents ignored the fact you were being terribly physically abused by an older sibling and resorted to major gaslighting when you asked why they never intervened. Then when you toss in being treated like slave labor -- what type of deranged adult pressures a 12-year old into operating an industrial metal shear in the family salvage yard? -- and having real, physical life-threatening injuries treated with homeopathic remedies. . . Westover's book is a really nice illustration of how if a totally toxic environment is the only thing you've ever known no sane, safe place is ever going to feel normal.  

It probably didn't help Westover psychologically when it wasn't so much that she deliberately cut off ties with her family as it was that they disowned her. She achieved something where most parents would be doing the happy dance and bragging to the whole world about their genius daughter, but not Westover's. To her specific set of demented parents she became a sinner, possessed by a demon, and for sure a slut and a whore when she decided to go to graduate school in England after graduating from Brigham Young University. Her parents had tolerated her attending BYU as long as they believed she just wanted to study music so she could come home, get married, have kids, and give piano lessons on the side. But winning a competitive scholarship, the equivalent of a Rhodes, and then getting more education than any woman needed? Not something they could condone.

Westover's life story is definitely a strange one. She was the youngest of seven children born to a Mormon couple in Idaho. Her family apparently started off as a typical lower middle class household. Her parents met while her mother was still in high school and then got married after her father completed his two-year Mormon missionary obligation. He worked as a contractor, built up his business, and built a house on his parents' farm. They were observant but not fanatics. The oldest three kids started off attending public school. In short, nothing at all odd about the family that would make them much different than any of their neighbors. At some point, though, Westover's father slid into weirdness. 

Mormons have always promoted clean living (no stimulants like caffeine), being prepared for disasters, and emphasizing modesty in women, but most aren't fanatics about it. They may not drink Diet Coke themselves but they usually don't freak out and assume you're heading straight to Hell for sipping soft drinks. Similarly, they may have a pantry stocked with a year's supply of food, but they're not obsessed to the point of being doomsday preppers. It's just something they do, kind of like Lutherans internalizing making bland jello salads for church suppers or Catholics looking forward to Friday fish fries during Lent. Westover's parents, on the other hand. . . the family may have continued attending regular church services in town and visited a bit with various relatives, but by the time she was born her father had turned their household into a one-family cult.

Westover speculates that her father suffered from being bipolar, a condition she learned about while in college. It's possible, I suppose, but what's a bit odd is that Westover's mother totally bought into enabling the man's delusions. Maybe it made life easier for her, but end result was the parents' behavior put the kids through hell. 

Her father became convinced only he knew the true will of God and that his interpretation of the Bible and the Book of Mormon was infallible. At the same time, he started believing the U.S. government was out to get him. The younger kids were all home birthed by a midwife (a highly illegal arrangement at the time; Idaho did not license midwives or condone home births) and their births never registered. It wasn't until one of the older kids needed a birth certificate in order to get a driver's license that the family applied for delayed birth certificates. By then Westover was nine years old. Her mother couldn't remember her birthday and wasn't even sure about what month Westover was born.

No birth certificates meant, of course, no public school. The younger kids were all home schooled, more or less. No real curriculum, no actual lesson plans, and not a whole lot of reading material in the house. At some point Westover realizes her life is probably going to be like her mother's: get married, have kids, take over her mother's roles as a midwife and herbalist. She also realizes she really doesn't want to do that. One of her brother's had managed to escape the family by getting admitted to BYU -- he had learned that the university had a policy of admitting homeschooled students if they scored at least a 28 on the ACT -- and he encouraged her to do the same to study music. Her one clear talent at that time was vocal music.

When she does get to BYU, she describes herself as being totally socially inept as well as totally ignorant about anything outside her very narrow range of experiences. She says, for example, that the first time she ever saw or heard the word "holocaust" was in an art history class during her first week of college classes. Similarly, once she gets to Cambridge, she's still doing the totally socially inept doofus persona.

This is where I actually do have problems with Westover's memoir. It's loaded with contradictions. She claims to have been totally naive about the world in general, but at the same time she took dance classes as a tween (although that stopped once her father realized that the girls danced in typical ballet and/or tap dance class attire (leotards and tutus). The immodesty freaked him out. As a teenager, she got involved with local amateur theater and sang the lead role in "Annie." To escape working in the family salvage yard, she sought out odd jobs in town and worked at a local supermarket. I find it totally believable that her home life was pretty damn weird (not to mention abusive) but it's not like she was being kept locked in a basement. The family had a computer and internet access. They even had cable television -- her father had a particular love for reruns of "The Honeymooners." In short, she had first hand exposure to how average people lived and how they dressed. 

This is one of those memoirs that gets touted as being inspiring, proof of the resiliency of the human spirit, because Westover managed to shape a career as a historian despite the handicap of being raised by wolves. I think she discounts the role sheer dumb luck played. At BYU a roommate could tell Westover was struggling psychologically and persuaded her to talk with her bishop. Mormon bishops have tremendous influence over their congregants. They're also as prone to being abusive patriarchal  assholes as any other religion. Westover's, however, did not push her into accepting a good, submissive, go home and get barefoot and pregnant future. She got lucky. He encouraged her to apply for scholarships and to dream big. 

 Similarly, after she was in England at Cambridge and studying for a master's in philosophy, she had another psychological crisis. She sank into major depression and totally neglected her studies. She failed classes. In most realities, she'd have been toast, booted from the program, and generally told to go back to salvaging scrap iron. Instead, her professors told her she had potential and gave her a second chance. People fail out of graduate programs all the time and no one cares. In Westover's case, someone did care and tossed her a lifeline. 

Time to wrap this up. Was the book worth reading? It's a toss-up. It was interesting but depressing as hell. I know rural communities are good at turning a blind eye to domestic and child abuse, but I am nonetheless baffled as to why in the 1990s anyone would think it was fine for a girl in her early teens to be working odd jobs instead of being in school. It's pretty clear that everyone in town knew her family so where the hell was CPS? Just how lax are Idaho's laws when it comes to home schooling? Most states at least want to see some documentation that the parents doing the teaching aren't total dolts. 

And then there's the issue of the psychotic older brother. The dude bullied all of his siblings, almost killed his much younger sister several times, and the parents just ignored it all or blamed the behavior on the smaller, weaker kids. He had a local reputation for being a prick who picked fights for no reason. The dude pretty obviously belonged in a cell somewhere, but the parents were oblivious. 

Back to is it worth reading. . . if you want to read a life story that reads as though no one would buy this as a movie plot line, go for it. Westover can write. I zipped through it pretty quickly. On the other hand, it is one of those books where I'm happy it came from the library and not a bookstore. Spending actual money on it would have felt a bit dirty, like I was subsidizing misery porn.

Pulitzer Project: The Shipping News

The 1994 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, has to be one of the stranger books I've read since I began this project about 12 years ago. I'd be tempted to say time flies when you're having fun except some of the books were not fun. Some of the winners were definitely a slog, the type of reading material that should make any aspiring author think, "yes, I can do this! If this piece of crap is a prize winner, I can write a best seller, too." I wouldn't say The Shipping News qualifies as bad, but I'm also not sure if it qualifies as good. It does remind me that the fact the books are getting newer as I work my way up the list does not necessarily mean they're getting better. 

This is one novel where I'm reasonably sure the film version outshone the book -- and by a lot. The movie, after all, had Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey. Spacey may have been revealed to be a total prick, but he can act.

For that matter, it's obvious Proulx can write when she wants to, but she decided to craft a decidedly odd book when she wrote this novel. This was another one of those books where the reviews for it left me wondering if the reviewers and I had read the same novel. Professional reviewers did a lot of blathering about comic elements while referring to aspects of the book that struck me as profoundly sad. The main character Quoyle is a poor schmuck of a lifetime loser, a fellow who was raised in what was obviously a totally dysfunctional family, isn't particularly good looking, has trouble finding and keeping a job, and ends up married to a sociopath. He kind of blunders through life with only one friend to speak of. And we're supposed to be amused by him? I must have missed something. 

It gets really dark and strange before anything remotely upbeat happens. His sociopath of a wife leaves him, taking their two young daughters with her and her current boyfriend. The wife and boyfriend die in a traffic accident, but not before the wife sells the two little kids to a pervert who plans to use them in kiddie porn. Not a whole lot of comic elements in that particular section of the book unless, of course, one finds the notion of two small naked children covered with dish soap sliding around on a kitchen floor while the pedophile tries to figure out how to work his new camera amusing. 

Quoyle gets his kids back, his aunt whom he'd never met before shows up because his parents died (suicide pact), and the aunt persuades him to pack up and move to Newfoundland, the land of his ancestors. The first couple chapters describing Newfoundland made it sound as though anyone who lives there is either truly desperate or too dumb to leave. It is not an inviting province. The family home (which apparently they have a legal claim to, despite no one having lived there for several decades)(I found myself wondering just who was paying the property taxes for all the years it sat there abandoned) is not fit to live in so they end up stuck in a motel that is overpriced and filthy. Then the aunt's dog dies. Can it get worse, one wonders? Short answer: yes. 

Our Hero, such as he is, is hired as a reporter by a local newspaper. His standard assignments are to cover the shipping news (report on what freighters have arrived in port, where they're from, and when they're leaving) and traffic accidents. The paper's publisher wants suitably gory accident scene photos for the front page. Descriptions of Quoyle's new work milieu are, to say the least, bizarre.  

I usually don't look at reviews much after I've read a book. This one was an exception. As noted above, the professional reviewers, the ones who get paid for their prose and often have academic training in "literature," thought it was great. They loved it, thought it was a masterpiece. 

People commenting from the perspective of book club members or just ordinary readers were less sanguine than the literati. They found Proulx's writing style confusing and choppy, an assessment I agree with. There are flashes, a sentence or a paragraph here and there that light up a page, but overall? It is not a good sign when my reaction to a novel is "this chick needs a good editor." You know, every time I read a book that seems awkwardly constructed I find myself remembering a story about James Joyce. Supposedly when Joyce was complimented on creative elements (odd spellings, strange sentence constructions) in his work he confessed that they weren't intentional. He was just a terrible typist and never had been good at spelling. I always wonder just how much of what's on a page is what the author actually intended and how much is the result of a copy editor being afraid of stepping on the author's voice by cleaning up gross errors in grammar. Editing, after all, is an art, a balancing act, and some authors handle being edited better than others. 

So, overall assessment of The Shipping News? Not an easy read, and a remarkably depressing one for most of the book. I'll give it a 5. It's not horrible, but for sure I didn't enjoy reading it.  

Next up: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shield. Another work and author I've never heard of. It is also, of course, one that requires an Interlibrary Loan request. 

Pulitzer Project: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was a pleasant change from the last few Pulitzer winners I've read. Butler can write, among other things, and he doesn't leave you wondering just how much more misery a writer can pack into one book.  

The book is a collection of short stories that share a common theme: Vietnam. Or, more accurately, Vietnamese people. Butler is a Vietnam War veteran who trained and worked as a translator. He spent longer than the normal tour of duty in the country. Duty stationed in Saigon, he discovered he genuinely liked the people. He spent his free time exploring the city and talking with ordinary people. 

The stories vary in length, setting, and tone, from only a couple pages to almost novella size, from Vietnam while the war is still in progress to 20 years later in Louisiana, and from melancholy to upbeat. Protagonists vary widely, too. 

For example, an elderly man living in exile in Louisiana is visited by an old friend, Ho Chi Minh, that he had shared a room with many years before in Paris. The fact Ho has been dead for over a decade is irrelevant. They reminisce about the days they spent working in the kitchen of a London restaurant while Ho tries to remember what he did wrong when caramelizing sugar for Auguste Escoffier. Ho chides his old friend for becoming a Buddhist instead of becoming as involved as politics as Ho did, although he does note that at least he picked Hoa Hao, a reformist Buddhist movement.

The notion that the future president of North Vietnam once worked as a chef's helper in a London kitchen managed by one of the most famous names in culinary history struck me as sufficiently bizarre that I had to Google it. Sure enough, Ho worked in multiple kitchens when he was a young man and still trying to figure out just where he fit in the world. Whether or not he worked for Escoffier is debatable, but for sure he was in a kitchen in London at the right time for it to have happened. What is known is he changed jobs frequently. 

In any case, the elderly man decides visiting with Ho could be a sign he's going to die soon so he asks his children to arrange for a Vietnamese tradition, having family members come to visit him to say goodbye before he's actually on his deathbed. When they do visit, he decides it's easier to just pretend to doze in his chair than it is to talk with them. He saves his conversations for the visits with his dead friend.  

The overall tone of the stories varies. Some end on a vaguely sad note, others are more upbeat. Good things happen to people who weren't expecting a happy ending, although not always. One fellow learns the hard way that it pays to be careful what you wish for, another realizes you can't turn back time. As a whole the book was a good read. 

In one of those weird coincidences that happen all the time, I was still thinking about the book when Pat Sajak made a joke on "Wheel of Fortune" about the beaches on Antigua being full of Wheel of Fortune winners because the show seemed to give away a lot of prize packages with that particular Caribbean destination. One of the longer stories in A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain features a couple who are on a Mexican vacation because the wife won the trip on "Let's Make a Deal" by dressing as a duck. As she's looking around at the hotel she realizes that all the other guests also look like game show winners -- and sure enough, "The Price is Right," "Jeopardy," and others are all represented. It gives an otherwise serious story a light touch. 

I am, of course, now wondering if I ever do get to Aruba or Antigua or Cancun if it will turn out that most guests won their trips and I'll be the only sucker who actually paid to go.

Back to the book. This is one I do recommend. The writing is good, the stories are interesting, and you may even pick up some trivia about Vietnam without having to think about it much. I do have to say that learning that most Vietnamese restaurants in this country with seemingly exotic names are actually just advertising their specialty wasn't much of a revelation. That's a tradition in most countries, including this one (e.g., Colton's Steak House, Red Lobster, International House of Pancakes). 

On the usual 1 to 10 scale, I'll give it an 8. It's better than average but not quite a solid 9. 

Up next: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. The L'Anse library amazed me. They actually have it in their collection. In fact, I already have it on the nightstand to be read as soon as I finish reading Battleship, an odd book that claims to be about a racehorse (a steeple chaser) but is more accurately a biography of Randolph Scott's first wife, Marion duPont. Fascinating but completely irrelevant piece of trivia: Battleship is buried at Montpelier, the home of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison. 

Not exactly a phone book, but close

I have occasionally opined that some best-selling authors have slid so far into everything and anything that has their name on the cover is sellable territory that their publishers could run off copies of the New York City phone book and make a killing. So far as I know, no one has tried that (yet), although I'm reasonably sure writers like Stephen King or John Grisham could pull it off. 

Well, George R. R. Martin hasn't exactly decided to print out a phone book, but he's come close. I made the mistake of paying actual money for Fire and Blood, a work set about 300 years prior to the events described in the Fire and Ice series (A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows, etc.). Martin fans have been waiting for what feels like forever for Martin to finish the series, although we did get a look at what it might include when the HBO series wrapped up by killing off the person way too many viewers had decided was the heroine. I wasn't one of those people -- I'd seen enough foreshadowing in the way Martin shaped Daenerys Targaryen's character and story arc to know she wasn't going to do a living happily ever after in the arms of her nephew despite the Targaryen tradition of marrying relatives. Besides, Martin is notorious for never giving anyone a happy ending.

So what's the deal with Fire and Blood? Martin has pulled off an interesting publishing coup. One of the things every author of fiction has to deal with is the back story for the characters. What happened to get that person to where they are now? Where are they from? What's the social/cultural/political context? How much of that background do you have to create in order for you as the author to get into your characters' heads and figure where they're coming from and why? How complex does that back story have to get? Can you get by with a few notes on index cards ("father went nuts and had to be killed by his own body guard") or do you end up filling notebook after notebook with complicated genealogy charts, maps of imaginary continents, speculations about how you'd tell the sex of a dragon (wait to see if it ever lays eggs?), and so on. 

Martin apparently opted for the latter approach. Mountains of notes, databases crammed with spreadsheets, long lists of vaguely Celtic sounding names to slap on the characters blessed with violet eyes. And then at some point he looked at the Everest-sized pile of paper, the mammoth backstory he'd created to help keep him straight with the Starks and the Lannisters and the Tullys and especially the Targaryens, and said, "you know, the fans keep complaining about the series not being finished. I wonder if being handed this mess would shut them up for awhile?"

I'm guessing the answer to that question is Probably Not. Or, more emphatically, No. It did not shut us up. It just gave us more material to complain about. I doubt that I'm the only person to read this book and mutter just what was the frelling point? Hundreds of pages of Targaryen trivia. 

I can see how keeping all this stuff in the background while writing the actual novels would be useful -- it's pretty clear why several centuries later why Daenerys is likely to go off the rails. It's a family tradition. For every Targaryen who turns out sane and is a competent ruler, there's another one who's a self-centered amoral psychopath. When you have a family tradition that promotes full sibling marriage, odds are multiple generations of in-breeding are going to produce some weirdness. Actually, not just some -- a lot. Lots and lots of weirdness. Infants dying young, infants born with major congenital defects, children who have rage issues or turn super promiscuous really young, children with definite sadistic tendencies. But does it occur to anyone in the Targaryen line that just like inbreeding isn't good for horses or dogs it might not work real well for people? Nope. They keep right on marrying each other. 

In short, Martin does a solid job of providing a background that explains why even a Targaryen like Daenerys who starts off looking like a hero can end up being a cold-blooded tyrant assassinated by the one person she may have loved. He's also apparently provided a lot of material for the showrunners for the HBO prequel to Game of Thrones to work with. Lots of battles, palace intrigue, dragons fighting dragons, lascivious and raunchy happenings in whorehouses and palaces. The prequel should be fun to watch.

Fire and Blood, however, is more odd than fun. There are long sections that are close to Biblical with the lists of names -- lots of begats and not much else. It's more like a summary of a novel (or novels) than it is an actual novel. I felt like I was reading an extremely long book report, an excessively wordy description of a book and not the book itself. 

On the other hand, the illustrations are nice. 

Pulitzer Project: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

 

I’m a little late in posting this. I read The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love not long after we got to Arizona last February. It was another one of the many Pulitzer Prize winning books the L’Anse library did not have in its collection, but, thanks to the wonders of online catalogs, I knew the Safford library had it on the shelves. Not long after we got parked at the Graham County Fairgrounds the Younger Daughter checked the book out for me.

It was an odd book, one of those where it’s a bit tricky trying to do a review. The writing is good, the storyline and characters interesting, but what is it with male authors and their penis fetish? As far as I could tell there was no reason to obsess about the generosity of the main character’s male endowment, the gargantuan size of his trouser snake, the impressive length and girth of the dude’s dick. Nonetheless, every time the man did a mental flashback, whether it was to his carefree days as a young man in Cuba or more recent memories of romantic encounters, the appendage in question crept into the reminiscing. It was distracting. (Note: it also makes it tricky trying to write about it without sliding into using bad puns or snickering about things popping up.)

The plot line of The Mambo Kings follows one man’s life, which as the book begins is apparently ending. Cesar Castillo is in a hotel room, comfortably ensconced with a record player, a stack of vinyl, and a generous supply of booze. It’s not clear at first that he’s come there planning to die as the flashbacks to his past are intercut with his thoughts about the present, but as his story unfolds you can tell he’s not planning to walk out of the hotel again. He’s an old man in poor health, he almost died recently while hospitalized, and he’s been told by his doctor that if he doesn’t stop drinking he will die soon. The booze supply in the hotel room makes it pretty clear he’s decided he’d rather go out pickled than live life as a frail geezer. (Note: He’s not actually terribly old by contemporary standards – early 60s maybe – but a lifetime of partying like a rock star has caught up with him.)

The records he’s brought to play while drinking himself to death are all ones from his glory days as one of the Mambo Kings, the band he and his younger brother, Nestor, formed after arriving in New York from Cuba in the mid-1950’s. They specialized in Cuban music, the songs they had grown up with and ones they composed themselves. The ‘50s were good to them. There were numerous dance clubs featuring live music so musicians could make a decent living. They recorded several albums that sold well, and, at the height of their popularity, they made a guest appearance on I Love Lucy. They played characters who were Cuban friends of Ricky Ricardo (Dezi Arnaz) and performed one of their original songs. Everything was going good for them, but of course it couldn’t last.

There were family tragedies, musical tastes changed so there were fewer and fewer paying gigs, and the Mambo Kings faded into obscurity. A man who once took center stage as a musician finds himself making a living as an apartment building maintenance superintendent. That doesn’t stop him from continuing to party hard and ignore his health – and then it catches up with him.

I have a vague memory of this book helping to revive an interest in Cuban music in the early ‘90s. Or maybe it was the movie. On a personal level, it didn’t inspire me to go searching for mambo music, but then my interest in things Cuban tends to be limited to the sandwich.

So, how would I rate this book and would I recommend it to other readers? I’ll give it an 7 – it’s on the good side of average. I might have been a little more impressed if the author hadn’t kept circling back to the size of Cesar’s cock. The author Oscar Hijuelos is Cuban himself – was he unconsciously trying to assert that Cuban men are especially virile? It was weird.

Despite that weirdness, though, I would recommend the book to other readers. The wordsmithing is good, the story overall is interesting, and, who knows, it may even inspire one to start listening to Tito Puente recordings.

Up next on the list (and I’m not looking forward to it) John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest. I found Updike’s Rabbit is Rich sufficiently repellent that I couldn’t finish it. I am not optimistic about the next installment in the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom. But with the library open again it appears Interlibrary Loan is unavoidable.  

A recommendation

Looking for a fairly new book to read? Margaret Atwood's The Testaments came out in September. It's the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale. 

I plucked it off the New Books shelf at the library last week. I was prepared to be depressed or to have trouble reading it. I know from experience Atwood's books can be a tad unsettling. My mild apprehension was not helped by the fact the other book I checked out, Ruins of War, featured a psychopathic serial killer terrorizing post-war Munich right after World War II ended.

I decided to tackle Ruins of War first. I'd deal with a nightmarish past before delving into a dystopian future. Last night the serial killer met with a satisfying demise, it was still early in the evening, and so I reached for The Testaments. One-hundred-seventy pages later I dimly realized the Packer game had ended and the S.O. had retired for the night. I had a hard time putting the book down, but common sense prevailed.

Holy wah. Atwood can write. I could have easily done a marathon cover-to-cover night, read it in one sitting even if it meant being awake until dawn. Only the knowledge the result would be a totally wasted day today as I stumbled around in a sleep deprived brain dead fog turned off the "just one more page" impulse.

At this point, I'm at slightly less than the halfway point. Atwood is following three women: a girl raised as the daughter of an elite Gilead family, a girl raised in Canada, and an older woman who is the most powerful Aunt in Gilead. I have no idea where Atwood is going with these narrative threads, but the impression I get is that sooner or later these three people are going to meet. Maybe. With Atwood nothing is ever really predictable.

Pulitzer Project: Breathing Lessons

As I was reading Anne Tyler's Breathing Lessons I kept having this nagging feeling. It felt familiar, like I'd read it before. Then it hit me.

Breathing Lessons is like an episode of All in the Family, the sit-com that aired in the 1970's. The novel describes one day in the life of a middle-aged married couple, Ira and Maggie. They live in Baltimore, but have to spend the day driving to a small town in Pennsylvania to attend the funeral of a high school classmate. The deceased was married to Maggie's best friend, a woman she's known since elementary school. Ira isn't happy about going because it means he has to close his business for the day, but he recognizes Maggie needs to be there.

Ira's kind of a grump, a man of few words, while Maggie is a lovable ditz who can't stop talking. He's a pessimist, she's an optimistic. She sees the best or the potential for the best in everyone; Ira is a skeptic and a realist. They're opposites, one of those couples where you find yourself thinking "No way is that relationship going to last!" But there they are: still together 20, 30, 40 years after all the seemingly better matched couples have split up or divorced.

All in the Family had a similar couple at the heart of it: Edith, the goodhearted but a bit scatterbrained wife, and Archie, the grumpy husband. Edith liked everyone; Archie minced no words in expressing his disdain or his bigotry. A marriage of opposites, a pessimist and an optimist co-existing while viewers got to wonder what on earth Edith saw in Archie. Over the course of the show, it became clear there was more to Archie than was obvious at first, but it took awhile to get there.

At first I had a similar reaction to Ira and Maggie. The novel is told from two perspectives, first Maggie's and then Ira's, and as I was reading I kept thinking "Why on earth are these two people still married?" The perspective might be Maggie's as she's remembering how she first became friends with Serena, how she met Ira, and so on, but along the way she does enough scatterbrained stuff that you start having a Dan Savage type reaction and think Ira should just DTMFA*.

And then they have a moment at Serena's house after the church service and it hits you: it may seem like Maggie and Ira bicker about almost everything, but underneath the verbal jousting and disagreements they really care for each other. Not only do they care, despite the surface appearance of not having a clue about what the other is thinking they do actually know each other pretty well.

The second half of the novel is told in Ira's voice. The narrative continues as they're heading home, but where we spent the first half of the book seeing Maggie moving back and forth in time and memories, now it's Ira's turn. We learn about his disappointments, the family obligations that prevented him from following his dreams, and how he feels about a variety of people and events.

In contrast with the last Pulitzer winner I read, Beloved, Tyler's Breathing Lessons is grounded in reality. No magical realism here, no wondering if someone is real or imagined, an actual person or a lost spirit. The only fantasy consists of Maggie's overly optimistic dreams of her son and his ex-wife getting back together or of  her being able to spend more time with her granddaughter. The novel looks at one day in the life of a pretty ordinary married couple: a small business owner and his wife. There are no dramatic epiphanies, just occasional flashes of humor and a glimpse into the lives of ordinary people coping with the fact they've hit middle age. No one's life turned out quite the way they thought it would back in high school, but that realization has a lot less sting when you look at your classmates and see that they're not what they thought they'd be either.

Overall impression of the book is it's readable. Tyler can write. I wasn't blown away by it, but I didn't suffer. I'd put over on the better side of the scale, maybe a 7 out of a theoretical 10. It's good, but it's not great. Would I recommend it to other readers? Yes, with the usual caveats. If you like Jodi Picoult you might like it, although with the qualification that it's not nearly as depressing or heartbreaking as the typical Picoult novel. Maybe it would be more accurate to lump it in with Joanna Trollope -- ordinary people, no major drama, just life with a few mildly disconcerting bumps along the way.  [Usual small digression: why doesn't the local library have any of Trollope's books? She's really good, but I haven't seen anything by her since leaving Atlanta and the amazing DeKalb County library system.] [I keep thinking that all those shelves for Danielle Steele could surely be put to better use than housing that many cubic feet of what is basically the same book over and over with slightly different titles.]

In 1994 Breathing Lessons was made into a movie for television starring James Garner and Joanne Woodward. It was good enough that Woodward won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a tv drama; Garner was nominated as Best Actor. I think the casting was probably spot on, and the supporting cast looks decent, too. Garner physically fits the way Maggie describes Ira. Knowing that, will I go looking for it online somewhere? No. I already have a Watchlist on Prime that's going to take me several lifetimes to finish.

Next up on the Pulitzer list? The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos. I have heard good things about this book. I hope I'm not disappointed.

*Dump the motherfucker already.

Pulitzer Project: A Summons to Memphis

The Pulitzer Project continues to lurch from one extreme to the other, from work that is so horrible to read you wonder about the sanity of the judges to prose that sings, from books fat enough to double as doorsteps or ballast in a freighter to books so thin they barely qualify as books and not pamphlets. 1986 had Lonesome Dove, a tome so thick and heavy it was physically hard to read in bed. 1987 has A Summons To Memphis, a piece of lightweight fluff that feels so thin you kind of expect it to just float away.

A Summons to Memphis seems to fall into a familiar category among the Pulitzers, the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award. Author Peter Taylor was an acclaimed author with numerous short stories to his credit. According to the cover blurb, however, A Summons to Memphis was his first novel in 35 years.

I must say the book is readable. Taylor could write. The prose flows. You keep reading despite the fact the narrative feels a lot like a Seinfeld episode -- a story about nothing -- and then you realize it's actually a subtle paean to the joys of being passive aggressive. This could be one reason it earned a Pulitzer. On a surface level, reading it from a purely superficial perspective, it feels almost whimsical. The narrator, a middle-aged man who has been collecting old and rare books since his college days, works as an editor for a publishing house in New York. The story is told entirely from his perspective: his recollections of his family's trials and tribulations, his observations of spinster sisters' odd behavior, his reluctance to spend much time around his parents and sisters since he left Memphis decades earlier. The book starts off light, returns sporadically to being very light, but an undertone of bitterness slowly creeps in.

The summons to Memphis he receives when the book begins is from his sisters. Their father, a retired wealthy attorney and relatively recent widower, has moved on to a fairly predictable stage. An octogenarian, their father had first allowed himself to be cossetted by the numerous widows in his age group. After a few months of going for tea, the old fellow moved on to frequenting nightclubs and apparently flirting with much, much younger women. He's now progressed to socializing with just one woman, a middle-aged matron he has actually proposed to. She's a respectable person not dramatically younger than him but still youthful enough for the sisters to recognize that the old man is a lot more likely to take a dirt nap before his intended bride than the bride is to predecease him. The assumption is that if he dies first, the widow gets everything. No surprise. The sisters want to prevent the wedding. The narrator recalls the classic Memphis fate of elderly widowers hoping to remarry: shuffled off to an old folks' home or moved to a family property so far out in the boonies they might as well be on a different planet. He wonders just what his sisters' plan for their father is.

And this is where the passive-aggressive behavior creeps in. The narrator's family turns out to be  good at saying they're doing something nice while actually making people's lives miserable. No one ever engages in direct communications, with the possible exception of the father. His personality is forceful enough that none of the children ever directly contradict or defy him, but it turns out they're really good at payback when they've got 30+ years of resentment built up.

Nothing dramatic happens, there is no grand denouement that ties everything up in a neat bundle. The book ends as quietly as it began with the narrator back in his New York apartment. Will he ever go to Memphis again? Probably not.

How would I rate this book on the usual 1 to 10 scale? It's in the middle of the pack. The writing is good, but the style was a little odd. I'd give it a 7. Maybe. Maybe only a 6. It's one of those damn with faint praise tomes. You know, "I've read worse." Would I recommend it to other readers? Only if they're as OCD as I am about reading (or at least attempting to read) all the Pulitzer Price fiction winners.

Next up on the list: Beloved by Toni Morrison. The L'Anse library actually has a copy on the shelves. Granted, it is the large print edition but at least it's there. No Interlibrary Loan for a change. And, given that this is another novel that gets described as "seminal," I'm hoping it turns out to be readable. Usually seminal is another way of saying "No one has read this book."

I should have known better

On my most recent trip to the library, I made the mistake of checking out To America, a collection of essays by Stephen Ambrose.  I should have known better. I have written before about being disappointed by Ambrose. This book annoyed me even more.

To America is as I expected a collection of essays in which Ambrose muses on his life in general, how he decided to major in history at the University of Wisconsin back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (the 1950's), and how he stumbled into military history and succumbed to being a proponent of the Great Man Theory. Well, he doesn't actually come right out and say he deliberately decided to become an acolyte at the altar of the Great Man Theory, the if it wasn't for heroes like Eisenhower/Lincoln/whoever we'd all be screwed explanation for everything, but in essence that's what happened. He's also a huge believer in Destiny and the inevitably of progress.

This in itself would not be a terrible thing. Lots of people think that because things turned out a certain way, that's the only way things could have gone. You know, certain things were meant to be, there was no alternative. These people have not read enough Harry Turtledove books. Or, for that matter, any other alternative history. Nothing is inevitable. History is full of "what ifs?" There's a reason people talk about "turning points" in history -- those are the obvious times and events when things could have gone in a different direction. That doesn't mean they had to go in the direction they did; we just think it was inevitable because it's the result we've been living with.

Small digression: one minor example of an event that would have easily changed history as we know it. By coincidence, I am currently reading a biography of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was the second son, not even really eyed as a spare by his father. What if his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy jr, hadn't died in action during World War II? Would JFK have bothered with politics?

No, what makes the belief in inevitability a Terrible Thing is Ambrose uses this sense of predestination, of it was meant to be, of (dare we say it?) Manifest Destiny to do a lot of jingoistic we are the best, the brightest, the greatest country on the planet because we inadvertently killed off the indigenous population, defeated evil doers like Hitler, and did our best to contain the Communist menace in Vietnam. After all, when Europeans came to the Americas, the natives weren't really civilized; they needed to be colonized and/or eliminated so the United States could be the great shining beacon of hope the rest of the world reveres today. He even manages to claim that the Europeans never practiced genocide, that all the indigenous deaths were the tragic but inevitable result of accidental exposure to disease.

And then there are the bloopers, like describing Tet as a "religious holiday." What the fuck, dude, it's the lunar New Year in Vietnam. How much research would it have taken for this supposedly great historian to have found out it's the first word in the Vietnamese phrase "tet nguyen dan," or feast of the first morning on the first day of the new year. It's celebrated by everyone -- Catholics, Buddhists, animists, whatever -- in Vietnam. It is not a specifically religious holiday any more than New Year's Day is any place else on the planet. I've been hearing Tet described as the lunar new year since Americans first got to hear the word back in 1968. Surely somewhere there's video of American newscasters talking about the Vietnamese launching surprise attacks during the New Year holiday?

His view on Vietnam, incidentally, is that if we'd just turned the generals loose and let them do their jobs the U.S. would have won that war. Right. More likely it would be like Afghanistan is now -- stuck there forever and reading more and more like a bad copy of a Joe Haldeman novel.

Bottom line: I'm avoiding Stephen Ambrose books in the future. Part of me has been thinking for years that I should read Undaunted Courage, but given that I already know quite a bit about the Lewis & Clark expedition I'm thinking now that wouldn't be a good idea. If I'm catching weirdness in the Ambrose books on topics where my knowledge is relatively superficial, I shudder to think what I'd find in a book where I'm already fairly well-read.

Pulitzer Project: Foreign Affairs

Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1985. It doesn't quite live up to some of the cover hype -- it is not wildly comedic -- but it is gently amusing. One biography of Lurie described her writing as "social satire," which is probably accurate. It's also probably the reason I wouldn't describe the book as comedic. Comedic novels are laugh out loud funny. Foreign Affairs elicit some smiles, but you don't have to worry about spraying coffee across the room.

The novel as a whole is satirical with its jabs at English upper class society, academic culture, and tourism, but it doesn't feel quite right on the level of individual characters. Satire involves making fun of people, laughing at them, and Lurie's characters are too sympathetic. It's hard to laugh at people you like. If anything, you find yourself wincing in sympathy as young Fred Turner misreads English social cues in his romantic pursuit of an actress, and you hope nothing horrible happens to Vinnie Miner when she's doing research in a questionable neighborhood.

The plot of Foreign Affairs follows two American university professors who are both in London for six months for research purposes. Virginia ("Vinnie") Miner is tenured faculty, a full professor in the English Department at a New England university. Her area of expertise is children's literature; her personal focus is traditional rhymes and their origins in historic events. A petite, quiet person, she's in her 50's and fits the classic image of a spinster English professor. Fred Turner, in contrast, is young. His academic career is just beginning; he's still at the stage of having to worry about tenure and the need to publish or perish. He's in London to work on a book about John Gay, the 18th century author of "The Beggar's Opera."

Turner and Miner teach at the same school but scarcely know each other other. Miner's opinion of Turner is probably higher than his is of her. Miner knows that Turner is regarded favorably in the department, but of course will never tell him that. Young assistant professors are supposed to stress about tenure. Turner, on the other hand, tends to be a bit dismissive of Miner. She's part of the old guard, the dinosaurs in the department. Neither had anticipated seeing the other in England, but as it turns out, their paths do cross occasionally. They're both using resources at the British Museum, and they also see each other at parties hosted by mutual friends.

As a divorcee whose marriage ended in bitter disappointment, Miner has no illusions about romance. She is resigned to being alone. She is not looking for a lover when she arrives in London, although she admits to enjoying sex so would not object to a brief liaison with a fellow scholar. She does find love, but in a most unexpected place.

Turner is married but quarreled nastily with his wife just before leaving on his sabbatical. He is sure he will be divorced soon, the marriage is irreparably damaged. He spends his first few weeks in London sulking, sunk into a morose mood, and neglecting his research. Then he meets an English actress, a classic English beauty who is also a member of the aristocracy, and he's instantly smitten. He pursues the actress and succeeds, although he never does realize that the two of them are speaking different languages.

Both affairs end, Miner's through a cruel twist of fate and Turner's when he tells the actress he has to go back to the States because he's obligated to teach summer classes. Her ensuing melt-down makes Turner recognize that he never really knew her. When was she acting and when was the relationship real? He doesn't know. He'll never know, but suddenly his estranged wife is looking really sane and remarkably attractive.

As usual, after I finished the book I did some Googling. I kept thinking it read a lot like a Hugh Grant film. I can see where as a film there could be some obvious humor, even slapstick, that the book lacks. It was a made-for-television movie in 1993 starring Joanne Woodward and Brian Dennehy as (I assume) Vinnie Miner and her improbable love interest. I probably won't go looking for it. I liked the book but not so much that I want to see a film treatment, too.

Would I recommend this book to other readers? Yes. Lurie can write. It's was also nice to read a book that was essentially fluff. No serious issues, no inside glimpses of the life of a down--and-out alcoholic (Ironweed) or the mental weirdness of a skeezy middle-aged car salesmen's dick (Rabbit is Rich). On my usual scale with 10 being the best, I'd stick Foreign Affairs over on the high side. It's not quite a 10, maybe not even a 9, but for sure an 8+.

Next up: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I was surprised I had to do this as an Interlibrary Loan request. It was so popular when it came out I was sure the L'Anse library would have it. Nope. The librarian was surprised too. We speculated that one of two things happened: The copy they had wore out and wasn't replaced or, more likely, someone checked it out and kept it. (We have Lonesome Dove on VHS, but I guess it would be cheating to go see if the tv with the built-in tape player still works.)

If you're going to write a book, do some research

I managed to depress myself recently by reading This Is The Way the World Ends, a thoroughly researched and remarkably frightening book about the rapid pace of climate change and just how thoroughly screwed we are. I decided I needed some mind candy, a piece of fiction that wouldn't require much thinking at all. You know, a break from reality. I'd check out a mystery, but nothing too dark, something from the Janet Evanovich school of writing instead of James Lee Burke or John Sandford.

For the uninitiated, Evanovich mixes romance and/or sex with the crime and corpses. Her lead characters are young women who manage to stay alluring while eating whatever they want (usually donuts and cupcakes), bumble their way through crime solving, and end up being saved by some dude who is the requisite tall, dark, and handsome (white horse to ride in on is optional). You know, classic female fantasy material. Evanovich also manages to be funny -- if Bob the Dog is involved, odds are there's going to some laugh out loud shenanigans happening -- so definitely mind candy. The mental equivalent of dining on gum drops and Snickers.

My expectations when reading fluff are not especially high. As long as the writing is reasonably smooth and the author doesn't commit too many howlers, I don't feel like it's been a total waste of my time. I'll flinch when I stumble across something that's a blooper, like referencing a cultural icon like a killer car and then saying that Christine was a Ford Pinto when she was actually a Plymouth Fury, but it doesn't matter what you're reading; with most fiction there's going to be blemish or two.

When that blemish turns into a severe case of creeping green crud, a fungus that permeates the entire work, however, I tend to get a tad annoyed. The latest annoyance? Holly Quinn's A Crafter Knits a Clue. I should have known, given the excessive cuteness of the title, but I really didn't expect it to turn into an incoherent hot mess. The first few pages weren't bad.

Then Quinn decided to turn high school basketball into a major plot point. First, she gets the season wrong. She has the sport being played much too late in the school year. Winter is over, daffodils are blooming, people are running around without winter jackets, but it's not even tournament season yet.. In Wisconsin. Let that sink in for a moment. The daffodils are a possibility, especially in the southern part of the state, but it's definitely not the end of Winter yet when basketball wraps up for the year. The Wisconsin state tournament is in mid-March. Maybe she'd never heard the term "March madness"? I can remember March Madness in Madison; there were still snowbanks. Disgusting, melting slushy snowbanks, to be sure, but still definitely not let's run around in just a tee-shirt weather.

Then she makes her teenage character a senior. It's getting towards the end of the school year, he's supposedly hoping to go to U-W on a basketball scholarship, but he hasn't been recruited yet. I used to be a college basketball coach's secretary. I know how this shit works. If a player is worth offering a scholarship to, the college coaches want to see them in action a lot earlier than the end of the season their senior year. They scout kids when they're juniors, sometimes earlier if their names keep popping up in sports reporting, check them out at summer basketball camps, and by the time it gets to be Christmas, they're angling for verbal commitments -- and when it gets to be National Signing Day (February 6 this year) they want the prospective players' signatures on paper. If there are college coaches or their minions at late season basketball games, they're not looking at the seniors. They're eyeballing the younger players and making notes on who to track as a possibility for a year or two down the road. 

There are multiple additional inconsistencies and bloopers in the book. Quinn really could have used a good editor. In one chapter her heroine is described as having a hard time juggling her purse, a bratwurst, and a soft drink but in the next paragraph she does a both thumbs up salutation to a friend -- and then is immediately back to dealing with both the brat and the drink simultaneously. Does she have four arms? The heroine gives out a slew of $50 gift cards for her shop but then thinks that it's a good thing sales were brisk that day because maybe she'll finally be out of the red. The handing out the gift cards made no sense in terms of plot development anyway. It seemed to be tossed in just to emphasize a little more what an extremely nice person Our Heroine is. End result? It feels sloppy. 

I suppose it could have been worse. One thing that grated a bit even if it didn't qualify as a blooper is the heroine refers to her full-grown golden retriever as her "puppy." Over and over. He's a puppy, not a dog, and although I think it's fine to baby talk to your dog regardless of his or her age in the real world it just reads as childish on the page. Not sure why that was irritating, especially when it could have been worse. Our Heroine could have been thinking of the beast as her fur baby.

Quinn apparently has fantasies of this being the first novel in a series. She may succeed in that ambition. Most readers won't pick up on the stuff that bothered me. Her attempts at humor fall pretty flat (she does definitely channel Evanovich, right down to having a good looking police detective as a romantic foil for the heroine), but they aren't offensive, just ineffective. The writing may be sloppy, but it's not hard to read. Readers who less fussy than I am might actually like the book. Stranger things have happened.

Pulitzer Project: A Twofer, Rabbit is Rich and The Color Purple

I figured I might as well lump these two together because I couldn't make it through either one.

Technically John Updike's Rabbit is Rich is more readable than Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Updike could string words together in a way that didn't insult the reader. It's too bad the actual storyline was so repellent.

Rabbit is Rich is part of a series of novels Updike penned about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. In this novel, Harry has hit the dangerous mid-life crisis years -- he's described as having been born in 1933, and it's the Carter administration in the novel so he's got to be somewhere not far past 45 or 46. And he is so skeezy it makes a reader's head spin, the classic misogynistic sexist pig in a polyester suit. A young couple comes in to the Toyota dealership Angstrom owns and Angstrom is more focused on plotting how to get close to the girl (who's probably close to 30 years younger than he is) than he is on actually selling them a car. His college age son brings a young woman friend home and Angstrom is immediately thinking he'd keep her happier in bed than his kid can. He and his wife go to the country club for an afternoon and Angstrom is ogling every woman in the pool and visualizing what they might be like in the sack. Everyone knows that men tend to think about sex a lot more than women usually do, but most writers don't manage to make that obsession seem quite so sleazy and off-putting. Is there a word to describe the opposite of erotica? Smut that turns you off instead of on? If not, there should be.

Maybe if Updike had stuck to Angstrom's fantasies it wouldn't have been so bad, but it did not help at all that Updike managed to write an explicit sex scene -- Angstrom and spouse in bed -- that on the "ewww really gross scale" probably scored an 11. A younger reader could read that sex scene and think, "omigod, if that's what sex is like when you're pushing 50 celibacy is looking good."

It was actually a little bizarre just how badly dated this book is. Were the late 1970s really that horrible? The only thing missing (at least in the section I got through) was members of the Rotary swapping motel room keys. Didn't Updike see "Oh Calcutta"? Anyway, between the racist language and the protagonist's fixation on assessing all the women he sees (except possibly his elderly mother-in-law) in terms of their fuckability a reader finds herself hoping the book really isn't too heavily biographical. I'd hate to think that Updike himself was as much of a pig as his protagonist/ I do know that Updike modeled his mythical town in his novels on his home town in Pennsylvania so maybe he was, but it is a tad depressing to be reminded of just how disgusting middle class middle-aged men can be.

In any case, I gave up about a third of the way into the book. When you start hoping that the "hero" is going to drop dead of a cardiac event on the next page and you've barely hit page 100 in a 400+ page book you know it's time to cut your losses and move on.

Unfortunately, the move on was to The Color Purple. This is ticks all the boxes on my list of things I hate: epistolary writing, overuse of dialect, murky character development. Once again I found myself wondering just why on earth the prize committee felt the need to award the prize to this particular book. It also really had me wondering just why Oprah Winfrey thought the book was so great.

Granted, Oprah was sexually abused by a trusted family when she was young, and The Color Purple starts off with the narrator telling us she's been raped repeatedly by her father, but. . .  the book sucks. It really, truly sucks. The plotline might have made a good screen play (and I'm assuming it did, although I've never seen the movie) but the book reads like something an undergraduate would churn out in a creative writing course. It's clunky, it's riddled with contradictions (the narrator is supposedly the smart kid in the family but she doesn't know how to spell? And she writes her letters in dialect? I might have a Yooper accent, but when I write a letter I'm going to say "them," not "dem" and when I describe going someplace it'll be "We went to Green Bay" not "We go Green Bay."), and it makes it seem like the protagonist exists in a vacuum. There is zero context. Nada. Zip.

Still, I think I got as far as page 50. Then I decided life is too short to waste on bad books.

As for the hype around it, there are two ways to sell books. One is to have a book that is just really, really good, something that grabs the reader and sales take off based on word of mouth. The other is through publicity about how wonderful the book is, how it's this masterpiece by (dramatic pause) an African American woman, and people start thinking they have to buy it. And then if you say, wow, this really sucks, it's like you're wrong, it can't suck, all the critics love it, eventually you just stop saying this book is awful, quietly set it aside, and let it gather dust on the bookcase. I have a strong hunch The Color Purple has slid into the same category as books like Ulysses and Their Eyes Were Watching God. People will claim they've read it, loved it, and will never admit they gave up on The Color Purple right about the time the protagonist's father gives her to a local widower, a dude who's willing to take her as a replacement wife/housekeeper as long as her father tosses in a cow with her to seal the deal.

I totally fail to see why this book got hailed as this amazing piece of African American fiction because it spends most of the book perpetuating every racist stereotype every cracker has ever held about blacks: the men are brutish animals who abuse their women and children, their women aren't particularly smart (after all, they put up with the brutish men), and they're all okay with living in squalor.

For what it's worth, I am perfectly willing to read some remarkably grim material if it's reasonably well written. After all, I read The Road cover to cover, roasted baby on a spit and all.

Recommendations? Skip both of these turkeys. On the usual sliding scale, they're both in the basement.

Up next:  Ironweed by William Kennedy. I know nothing about the book, nothing about the author, so maybe this is a good sign. Maybe I'll actually be able to read it.