Parkhurst ongoing

Am reading more Parkhurst and learning more—am thinking her books seem to have to do with murder – hence it’s that kind of book (what is that? mystery? literary mystery? what category/genre? must I pigeonhole it?) Also learning about her writing style – perhaps it is the voice she has given this character – very calm, analytical, professorial -- I suppose that is what she is going for – explains in details – a bit dull…
Got to the part where he talks about how his first wife bugged him because she always needed to talk everything out – uh oh, sounds like someone I know!
(posted 9/29 – written 6/22)

Moving on to Carolyn Parkhurst

Carolyn Parkhurst has a new book out, called The Nobodies Album. I read a review in the New York Times. I was interested in it because the main character is a writer working on getting her next novel published and I really enjoy novels about writing and publishing (for example, Olivia Goldsmith’s The Bestseller—and please recommend others to me if you know of them!). I requested the book from my local library (more on how much I love my local library at another time) but they don’t have it yet, so I decided I’d request her two earlier novels (as long as I’m attacking the canon of Ann Patchett and Jonathan Carroll I might as well try Parkhurst too!).

Today I started reading The Dogs of Babel. I know absolutely nothing about it— except the author’s name! – and I didn’t try to learn anything, just opened to page one and started to read.

I’m not a fan of back cover copy or flap copy – and I’ve certainly written my share of both in my career! The goal of back cover and flap copy is to catch the interest of someone who might happen to pick the book up knowing nothing about it – to capture their interest in the few fleeting moments they turn their attention to this book when they come across it in a store. As such, this copy, like a movie preview, needs to be sparky and compelling, needs to provide some quick info that will make the browser want more. As such, again like the movie trailer, it tends to give away too much. So I don’t read it. I sometimes read it after I’ve finished the book! Of course this sometimes causes challenges for me – like the novel I read not too long ago, in which I spent the whole time I was reading it looking for clues to figure out what city it took place in, and what decade it was, because both were unnamed in the book. I eventually did figure it out, and was proud of this – then I finished the book and glanced at the back cover where it quite plainly said “in Brooklyn in the 1970s.” Ah, well.

So I’m reading The Dogs of Babel with no clue what to expect. In the very first paragraph, the narrator’s wife dies by falling out of an apple tree. The police come and rule it a suicide. But then, a page later, the narrator mentions that in the days after her funeral he starts to find things that make he him think the day his wife died was not an ordinary day. Am I about to read a murder mystery? The book’s cover has a picture of a mask on it – could be a mystery. Well, I’ll find out (but not by reading the flap copy!)

One other thing before I delve further into the book. I’d like to present to you here a few parts of sentences from said the paragraph of the book:

“. . . it was a weekday afternoon, and none of our neighbors were at home. . . None of them were working in their yards…”

Ok, am I the only one who notices? Does anyone care anymore? None were? How about none was, as in “not one of them was”? Why can’t anyone be grammatically correct anymore and why doesn’t anyone care? Lynne Truss, where are you when I need you (see Eats, Shoots & Leaves if you don’t know what I’m talking about)?!
(posted 9/29 - actually written 6/21)

Ann Patchett's THE MAGICIAN'S ASSISTANT Continued

I finished The Magician’s Assistant – another notch on my Ann Patchett belt. I finished reading and writing about it long ago, in fact – as you can see, there’s a gap in my postings. Somehow summer did not turn out to be a time when I had much time to myself, alas! Boys home from school, needing Camp Mommy to keep them busy. I still stayed up late and didn’t sleep enough so I could get my reading in, but fell behind on posting. I try to rectify that and catch up with the books I read over the summer.

I enjoyed The Magician’s Assistant very much. Her books just flow by and I love her storytelling abilities. That, said, here are some details:

Things I like about Ann Patchett and The Magician’s Assistant:

The skillful way she goes off on seamless tangents and then weaves right back into the narrative.

The way she understands and describes the emotional lives of her characters.

When she describes to a “T” the way I feel about something or something from my own experience (see examples below).

Things I don’t like about Ann Patchett and The Magician’s Assistant:

Well, I’m just not so sure about the ending. I seem to have had the same problem with Bel Canto. In my opinion, Patchett tells these stories that are so good they could just go on and on forever. Maybe she just doesn’t know how to wrap up? Maybe she sees that she’s gone on long enough and the end must come and she starts looking around for ends to tie up? No, I highly doubt that. It’s just in these two books (Magician and Bel Canto) she seems to make last minute romantic connections between two characters and in both books I personally don’t feel that those connections would naturally have been made by the characters as I have come to know and understand them. In this instance, the connection even involves a change of sexual orientation. Not to say it couldn’t happen, and maybe that was her goal all along, but to me it’s the one part of the story that doesn’t feel smooth.

Things Ann Patchett clearly likes that are recurring themes:

Opera

Beautiful homes (In Jungian psychology, the house is a symbol of the self, so I think the literary houses Patchett builds are important.)
(posted 9/29 - written 6/19)

Back to Ann Patchett

I’m having a little trouble with the Dara Horn book The World to Come. It may be a little too dense/intense even for me. I’ve just gotten to a part where a character is about to have a Vietnam War experience, and since I know that later in life this character is missing part of his leg and he is currently intact in his pre-war incarnation, I suspect that something unpleasant and probably gruesome lies dead-ahead. And so I put the book aside for a bit and looked for something else. I’ve already finished White Apples and I enjoyed it. Some thematic & stylistic overlap with The Ghost in Love but enough good new stuff to keep me happy and interested through to the happy ending.

Then the copy of The Magician’s Assistant I had requested from the library arrived so I figured this was as good a time as any to take the next step in my Ann Patchett read-‘em-all project. Her books also are easy-entry – you’re pulled right in and along, at least I am – and enjoyable reading. First of all, she’s a very good storyteller. I know I say plot is overrated, but good storytelling is important and a valuable skill that I greatly respect (and don’t yet know if I have) and not to be underestimated in my snobby search for what I deem to be “literary.”

I do think Patchett also writes beautifully, uses words beautifully. Her books have long passages that are woven in between the story elements where she explores a particular idea and I never resent these forays, never feel like they’re taking me away from the story like I do with some books. These pieces always feel seamlessly integrated and interesting and beautifully-expressed and I’m always right there with her for as long as she goes on any particular journey or tangent. There’s one in this book while the main character, Sabine (the magician’s assistant) is driving from one place to another and Patchett does this page-plus riff on why Sabine loves living in Los Angeles, and it’s just a beautiful tribute to the city and so well-expressed. (There are more but now I can’t find them. I usually mark up my books but I’m reading a library copy and I didn’t want to make too much of a mess of it. Should have kept some Post-its nearby!)

There’s another quote in the book I love where one character, a woman in her 40s who is the mother of two sons (like me), is discussing how her mother worries about her. It’s a comment that rings very true for me!

“She worries about me too much, though. I don’t like that. I have to worry about the boys and worry about myself, and then I have to worry about the fact that I make my mother worry. Wears me out.”

And another line from the book that perfectly describes how my mind works (and why I’m so stressed!):

“Sabine made lists, things to buy, things to make, things to practice. All day long the list propelled her forward. When she went to bed at night her mind would reel through all she had forgotten, all the things there hadn’t been time for.”

More to come once I’ve finished The Magician’s Assistant!

More Jonathan Carroll

I requested a few more Jonathan Carroll books from the library – the ones that the cover copy mentioned as those that had gotten the most acclaim: The Wooden Sea and White Apples. Once I looked at a few more of his books I realized that the themes I discovered in The Ghost in Love were typical Jonathan Carroll themes, and that his books are full of people who come back from the dead, unusual otherworldly characters, and other fantastic elements, all of which I like very much because they’re very creative (although I wonder if I would get tired of them after a few books). I immediately started reading White Apples. His works are very easy to get into – a few sentences and you’re hooked because they grab you with clever dialogue and interesting scenarios and just fly along. So now I’m reading White Apples and Dara Horn’s The World to Come simultaneously, which is a very odd combination. And yet strangely enough, I keep finding parallels. The Horn book has a lot of connections to Jewish folklore and it frequently refers to babies in the womb and what happens to them just before they are born, how an angel comes and shows them the whole life they are about to live and then slaps them so they forget it (and that is why babies are born crying) – this fits right in with Carroll’s characters who seem to go back and forth between life and death. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever before read two books at once in quite this way, going back and forth between them within a short period of time, and it’s odd how they mix together – makes for much interesting creative foment!

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. . .