Dara Horn

Many cities do a One City One Book event where they try to get as many people as possible to read a selected book, plan lots of events, and bring the author in for readings. Philadelphia, where I live, does it, but we also have a Jewish One Book program. The books featured in this program have included two memoirs, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lugnado and My Father’s Paradise by Ariel Sabar, and this past year a novel by Dara Horn called All Other Nights.

All Other Nights is a story that takes place during the Civil War and explores some of the Jewish war experience. I had heard good things about Horn but never read her, so I looked forward to reading this book. Before I had a chance to read the book, I went to hear the author talk. She has a very impressive resume. Here’s just a bit from her bio:

Dara Horn received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006, studying Hebrew and Yiddish. In 2007 Dara Horn was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her first novel, In the Image, published by W.W. Norton when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. (this is from her website, www.darahorn.com)

The talk she gave was terrific. It was a very thoughtful, complex presentation – you could tell she had spent a lot of time preparing her remarks, and I appreciated that. I see a lot of author presentations and readings. Recently I went to a writers conference where the keynote speaker just kind of played it by ear. She had a few notes of things she wanted to touch on, but she just kind of casually chatted about her writing life in a way that sounded to me like she’d discussed the same thing over and over at other workshops. I didn’t feel like she had done any special presentation for this particular conference. I really appreciated that Dara Horn seemed to think we were an important audience, an audience worth working for!

One of the things she discussed that stayed with me most had to do with why she chose to set her novel during the Civil War. She said that when an author writes an historical book, they’re not necessarily writing about that period in history, but instead using that historical period to comment on contemporary life. She felt the Civil War was very fitting to discuss America today (red states, blue states, lots of partisanship…). I thought it was really interesting to look at historical fiction this way.

I finally got around to reading the book recently. The history is interesting, and I learned more about the Civil War and something about Jewish life at that time, but as a whole the story was a bit of a romance, with a bit of the overwrought language of the genre. (Many writers have certain word or sentence quirks, I find. I read a book recently where characters were always wincing. Someone or other winced on practically every page! I started to notice this because it’s a strangely-spelled word and doesn't look like it would be pronounced the way it's spelled, and then before I knew it I was just looking for the winces and not the actual plot. This book had its heroine “brushing another loose curl back behind her ear.” It drove me crazy. I thought: if that chick brushes a curl behind her ear one more time I’m going to recommend getting her a haircut! And then sure enough, she’d do it again!)

I decided not to give up on the author, however, and now I’m reading the book everyone says is her best one, The World to Come. So far, so good. Much better than All Other Nights. This is writing you can admire, interesting sentences, unexpected plot turns. None of the above in All Other Nights (sorry, Dara).

Reading The World to Come, by the way, I feel a course shaping up here – if I did a course on contemporary American Jewish writers, a great combo would be The World to Come, Away by Amy Bloom, and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. They feel like they all fit together really well. Then maybe throw in some Shalom Aleichem or Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ready to enroll, anyone?

Jonathan Carroll

One of the benefits of working in the publishing business is attendance at Book Expo, the annual book convention for the industry. I learn a lot at Book Expo about forthcoming books, and I am lucky to be able to pick up galleys (advance copies) of some of them. I recently discovered on my shelf a galley I picked up two years ago because the story sounded appealing, and finally decided to read it. The book is The Ghost in Love by Jonathan Carroll. I don’t know anything about him except what it says on the galley – he’s American, he’s written lots of books, and he lives in Vienna (where if he’s smart, he eats a lot of pastry!).

In The Ghost in Love, Ben, our protagonist, has an accident—he slips in the snow and falls and hits his head, hard, on the concrete. Ben is supposed to die, and a ghost is quickly dispatched to earth to check in with Ben and commence any necessary post-death follow-up haunting. Ben, however, for unexplained reasons, does not die, and thus commences a jolly romp through an alternate reality that would do Harry Potter proud. I’m not at all saying it’s the same kind of book, it’s merely similar in that the author has imagined an alternate reality that is smart, well-thought-out, interesting, entertaining, and later in the book when it gets more psycho-babblish, thought-provoking. There is one Harry Potter similarity when Ben begins to see life through someone else’s eyes, where I am reminded of Harry seeing through Voldemort’s eyes, but the book is truly original and charming. Oh and there’s also a whole animal theme so dog-lovers will love this book.

If I had to guess, I’d guess that Jonathan Carroll is very well-read himself and also that he has been in therapy. The ideas that bounce around in this book strike me as ideas that come from someone who has thought a lot about Meaning-of-Life type questions, and has his own complex system of understanding these challenging questions, which he tries to present through this lively and quirky story—ideas having to do with alternate versions of ourselves at different ages and what we can learn from our experiences, questions of memory and what we retain and what we lose and, in losing memories, what is lost in life. Questions of self-worth and value, and how badly we often treat ourselves. And questions of love and relationships and what we can expect from them and how we can make them work. All of this is woven into this book, some lightly and, in the denouement, a bit more heavily. You can follow this thread of self-evaluation through the book, or you can just appreciate it on a lighter level as a fun story. I did a bit of both.

I may look into some of Carroll’s earlier work. . .

Joyce Carol Oates

In one of the book classes I teach, I read a book called The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan. This is a class called “A Sneak Peek at Next Year’s Bestsellers” where we read books in galley form. Galleys are pre-publication editions of books (also called ARCs – advance reader's copies – or AREs – advance reader's editions), generally intended for book reviewers and booksellers. This particular book was a love story set in Niagara Falls in the World War I era. The book, while it wound up getting nice reviews, did not move me, nor any of my students, but I was interested to see that the author cited a book called The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates as a book she admired. I was interested in learning more about Niagara Falls, and I thought perhaps I’d seek this book out so I could read something well-written on the topic. I ordered the book from my local library and it soon arrived, weighing in at 481 pages. (To my surprise, a few days later I saw a copy of the book on my library’s book sale shelf so I bought my own copy for $2.)

The Falls begins in 1950, when a bride and groom arrive at the Falls for a honeymoon. This honeymoon goes awry, however, when the groom throws himself into the falls. The bride, now a widow, refuses to leave until her husband’s body is found, and for 7 days she haunts the area, following police and basically creeping everybody out. With her thin frame and her red hair, the bride, whose name is Ariah, earns the name “the widow bride of the falls.” She also meets Dick Burnaby, a local lawyer and bon vivant, who is strangely drawn to her.

The husband’s body is finally found, Ariah returns home to Troy NY to continue the spinsterish life she was living prior to her ill-fated marriage, but Burnaby tracks her down and proposes to her. She marries him and returns to Niagara, where they live a happy, passionate, well-to-do life, have hot sex, and bring three children into the world (the first one born suspiciously early – a remnant from her brief marriage? We are led to wonder but never told.).

And so it goes, and the time passes, until Dick, at nearly 200 pages into the book, becomes involved in a new legal case called Love Canal. And suddenly I know, or think I know, what the book is about.

It’s very interesting to me to learn about Love Canal this way, reading what I assume is pretty accurate information as Dick’s eyes are opened to the horror of what is happening. But at this point, I put the book aside. Suddenly I am deluged by books I must read for classes I must teach, and my pleasure reading must be put on hold.

I do not pick the book up again for almost eight months. When I do, I skim the first 200 pages again to refresh myself on the details. And then I continue. We see what happens as a result of Dick’s Love Canal case, both in the courtroom and in his marriage. And when that episode ends, we are suddenly plunged about sixteen years forward in time, where we are now seeing the story from the point of view of the Burnaby children. We learn some of what happens to them, and we are thrust about among varying points of view. This section comprises the final third of the book, and I’m still not sure it was needed, even though the author pulls it all together in the very end. To me it made the story sprawl so far afield that it began to feel diffuse. It also made me see Ariah differently. In my eyes, she went from being quirky and temperamental to abusive, so losing my affection for the central character had an impact on my overall feelings about the book. However, no question that the writing is very good so if you need a Niagara Falls book, I can recommend this one. Or if you know any other good ones, let me know!

Also, if you’re an Oates fan, tell me which of her many books you recommend most highly. Thanks!

Ann Patchett

I finally read Bel Canto. It’s been on my “been meaning to read” list since, well, when was it published? 2001. For a while. In the meantime, I read a few other Ann Patchett books. My introduction to Patchett started when I was teaching a class about memoirs. I teach adult education book discussion classes, a program I call “Open Book.” We meet in my home and have lovely, passionate discussions. For this memoirs class, I was trying to introduce my students (mostly women, ranging in age from 20s to 60s) to the late 90s wave of wonderful memoirs that kind of got this whole current memoir craze going. I assigned Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, and then I assigned a pair of books, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face and Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty. What a great opportunity to get two different perspectives on the same topic. And when, despite my misgivings about Ann going public with her version of Lucy’s story after Lucy’s death and whether her motivations were pure, when I found myself liking Ann’s version of Lucy’s story better than Lucy’s own version, I decided to read more of this writer’s work.

I next wound up reading her book What Now? which started as a graduation speech and evolved into one of those cute little small trim-size hardcovers publishers are always putting out as graduation gifts, and I really liked what she had to say (especially since “what now?” is what my mother said to me at my graduate school graduation, before the ink was even dry on the diploma, as it were, or the champagne was even downed). Then I read Patchett’s novel Run, or rather listened to it on audiotape, and enjoyed it, and figured, three down, I might as well try to read all her books. That would be a nice accomplishment, to have mastered one author’s complete oeuvre.

And so, Bel Canto. Good story, very compelling. I really enjoyed being in the midst of it, and was drawn into it right away. Interesting setting, great concept, great characters and well-developed. Patchett knows how to structure a story, and she has a beautiful way with a sentence. When she describes music, it almost has physicality, and you can feel the impact the opera diva’s singing has on her listeners. You become enmeshed in the setting: the house packed full with people and sound, the garden lushly overgrown and going wild, the heavy fog that blocks the view from the windows, the cacophony of languages being spoken by the occupants of the house who hail from all over the world. I think this is a very good book (if not profound), although I was totally thrown by the epilogue which felt tacked-on and very unexpected (which, perhaps, was the point).

More Ann Patchett to come!