Archive for January 26th, 2012|Daily archive page

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner

author: Khaled Hosseini
name: Paul
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1385
rating: 3
read at: 2011/12/04
date added: 2012/01/23
shelves: novel
review:
You know those commercials for the SPCA that have Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” playing and a slide show of abused and pitiful looking dogs and cats? Everyone I know hates those commercials, and with good reason. They’re manipulative, playing your emotions without any real motive aside from gain. It isn’t that they aren’t effective, it’s that they’re so transparent in their subtlety-deprived excavation of our knee-jerk emotional response that you hate them for being so good at what they’re clearly trying to do, in part because they don’t earn it. We have this sense that we should not be moved to tears by a thirty second commercial, so when we are because of some laser-targeted heartstring yanks, we don’t admire the efficiency of the effort, we just feel resentful and call it cheap.

I bring it up because I felt that way a lot when reading Khaled Hosseini‘s The Kite Runner, like I was being played somehow. Like those loathed commercials, it wasn’t that the book was ineffective, it was that it felt like it hadn’t really earned its response from me. Admittedly, this is an awkward criticism to level at a novel. What counts as effective and well-deserved emotional investment? It’s as subjective as opinions on the quality of writing itself. Ahem.

But I think it starts with realistically crafted characters who are more than puppets, who inspire affection and sympathy from readers in the same way real people do, by having faults and overcoming obstacles and being relatable. Too many of the characters in The Kite Runner seem to exist in such a compartmentalized way as to serve only a single possible purpose. The biggest example of this is the unbelievably saintly Hassan, our narrator’s sort of half servant, half friend. In order for the protagonist to have a crisis, he must sacrifice Hassan and his innocence (a symbolism effort that is precisely as restrained as those bloodied puppies from the SPCA spots) and while the sequence is, truly, harrowing and effective, it feels sleazy and conniving as well. I’m not even sure what to contrast this to, because it seems like so few other authors would dare to stoop to the level of brutalizing a saccharine character in this way just to introduce some conflict. Those aren’t puppet strings Hosseini grasps, they’re puppet bridge cables.

The story is of Amir, the narrator/protagonist, a boy growing up in Afghanistan just before the Russian invasion in the late 1970s who emigrates to the United States as a teenager to escape the conflict. The first third or so of the book deals with his relationship to Hassan, the turbulent quest for approval from his father, Baba, and the encounter that drives a wedge into all of their lives. The second part of the book is the by-the-numbers coming of age bit, set in California. In fact, it is set in my hometown.

Let me pause here for a second and talk about this setting and the way Hosseini deals with it. Admittedly, part of the reason I even picked this book up was because of its Fremont, CA secondary setting. I know this is extraordinarily nit-picky but it annoyed me an awful lot that some of the details which are thrown in about the town are exceptionally strange ones. Not so much that they are completely incorrect or indicative of heavy license being taken with the place—I actually wouldn’t mind so much if the Fremont depicted here was sort of a fanciful version of the town I once knew more intimately than any other on Earth. The problem is that he includes really random tidbits that just feel as if they were constructed without any real research or any true local’s appreciation for what the place is actually like. For example, at one point he talks about the Indian movie theater and, contextually, I assume he’s referring to the Naz cinema which was, at one time, located in Fremont’s Centerville district. But the time setting here is the early 1980s and I happen to know that the Naz took over a building that used to be called ABC Theater which showed second run movies, double features and Rocky Horror on Saturday nights up until 1988 when it sadly went out of business. It wasn’t until the early 90s that it became the Naz, which from what I can tell was the first Indian theater in the area. You can see how someone who came to Fremont after the Naz was in place would assume it had been around for a long time (it’s a very old fashioned looking theater) and had always shown Indian movies. A bit of research could have cleared it up. Other nagging details annoyed as well: At one point he describes mapping out a route to hit up the best garage sales on a Saturday and listing the East Bay towns but in a totally nonsensical order: “Fremont, Union City, Newark, Hayward.” Any East Bay resident will tell you that with Newark being southwest of Fremont and Union City being northeast with Hayward beyond that, you would never hit up Newark in the middle of a trip to UC/Hayward. Never. It’s backtracking twice. It’s stupid. He goes on: “San Jose, Milpitas, Sunnyvale, and Campbell if time permitted.” No. You have to drive through Milpitas to get to any of those other three South Bay towns and if you hit Campbell last, you are at the furthest southern point from home. And yeah, I know he doesn’t necessarily say that was the order they visited the towns in, but I don’t know anyone who would list a number of cities they visited in a random order that way. It’s like saying, “I went to Las Vegas, Detroit, Phoenix, and then Chicago by train.” It sounds awkward if you know anything about geography.

At any rate, the third section of the book is devoted to Amir’s return to Afghanistan, drawn back by an opportunity for redemption offered by one of Baba’s close friends who stayed behind. And if the first section of the book feels manipulative and undeservedly touching, Hosseini wastes no opportunity to exploit emotional triggers or thrust new pictures of abused innocence in readers’ faces. In a lot of ways the book feels like every Hollywood tearjerker cliché packed into one unbroken string of groan-inducing pile-on. The tortured artist hero; the journey-quest for redemption; the family secret unveiled; the surprise return of the villain; the one-last-mistake climax; the bleak ending with the slight nod toward hope; it’s all here.

In the end, I resent The Kite Runner. I resent it because Hosseini is not ineffective with his crude use of these simple tools and I resent it because the book is written in a way that makes it easy to swallow if difficult to digest. I resent it most for being so blatant and unsophisticated while having the audacity to be somewhat effective. The novel hits a lot of my downgrade triggers—apart from this cheap, Oprah-book sensibility—too: A writer protagonist (when oh when will writers look past their own self-important noses for pity’s sake?), an in-prose discussion of the prose itself (the section about endings toward the end is like one big “don’t blame me if you’re disappointed in a few pages” caveat), book-club-ready dream sequence symbolism and excessive bookending (the “oh, look what I dregged up from the first twenty pages in the last twenty pages” syndrome).

But what I resent most about The Kite Runner is that I couldn’t bring myself for whatever stupid and sentimental reason to outright hate it. As much as the book annoyed me—incessantly, endlessly—throughout reading it, I found the experience to be a sickening seesaw between my brain and my heart. All the while my cynicism and critical thought processes were deriding the book and its crass, obvious machinations, my manipulated emotion centers were loving the characters of Baba and Soraya and Hassan and Sohrab, desperate to find out what happens to them all. I flipped back and forth between wanting to toss the book aside in snooty disdain and finding myself unable to stop reading it until I reached the end. I hate that I could see so easily through Hosseini’s book and yet I fell for it completely.

Like a person who has to donate to the animal shelters because Sarah McLachlan and the sad-eyed kittens gave them no choice, I may not feel good for being so regrettably lacking in control for my own response and actions, but I can’t deny what they were. The result is a book I will never recommend to anyone but which I must begrudgingly admit I devoured.

from Paul's bookshelf: readJanuary 23, 2012 at 11:08AM

Great Stories by Chekhov

Great Stories by Chekhov

author: Anton Chekhov
name: Paul
average rating: 2.00
book published: 1966
rating: 2
read at: 2011/11/29
date added: 2011/11/29
shelves: short-stories, classic
review:
Classic literature, especially classic Russian literature, vexes me. I know roughly nothing about the Russian language so I sometimes console myself as I struggle with Dostoevsky or Tolstoy (which I’ve occasionally attempted but never fully conquered) with the notion that written Russian is particularly difficult to translate into smooth reading English. But then again, I get this way about classic English lit sometimes as well, where I see words on the page and just can’t seem to get through them into that fugue state where I’m not really reading as a mechanical word-eye-brain-context-thought-idea process, but as a sort of direct input from the author’s imagination, utterly unaware of the printing or the sentence construction; it’s like drawing ideas from the page via some kind of mind vacuum.

I guess there is a reason why I’m not an English major (or any kind of major for that matter). Chalk me up as just another filthy soul populating the unwashed masses.

But I like stories. I love books and written words and I have enjoyed some classics, even some stuffy and difficult works, both modern and time-honored. So I don’t always know what it is that may cause me to go cross-eyed with frustrated agitation that a story just won’t seem to let me in.

So consider my first foray into Anton Chekhov. On one hand, there are moments in the fairly limited collection of Chekhov’s work included in this old paperback printing I found for a song at a used bookstore which reveal clearly why he is considered a master of the short form. “The Kiss,” for example, an early inclusion about a lonely young soldier who happens upon a stolen moment of intimacy, intended for someone else entirely, and uses that off-handed experience to construct for himself an entirely new persona, a boosted ego of imagination and possibility which has, in spite of the joy it brings him, a tragic collision with the reality of, well, reality. Another pair of tales, “A Father” and “A Problem,” highlight a certain astonishing insight into human nature, simply revealing complex elements to relationships in a relatable way.

But then you get to some of the longer works included here, such as “Ward No. 6,” and I start to hang back on the dry exposition, the deliberate pace to a character study that, too, has something interesting to say but says it in such a dull fashion that I struggled to get through the 30-some page short over the course of about four days. Again I found myself looking back on my own Russian lit crutch and saying, “Well, maybe it’s just the translation?” But maybe it isn’t. At least in the case of Chekhov, or perhaps in the case of this particular collection, the longer the story gets the harder it was for me to muddle through. I like the way I can see his mind working: his philosophy and his understanding of what makes a character interesting combined with a detailed sense of realistic arc make for living souls in the stories but at some point it’s like reading 500 pages about a grandmother spending an evening watching TV: no matter how good the writing is, the subject is bound to wear out its welcome if you linger too long.

I couldn’t help contrast this selection with the Raymond Carver volume, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that I read earlier in the year. Carver’s direct-to-the-point simplicity doesn’t need fantastical things to happen to be compelling. The slice of life examinations are reminiscent to Chekhov’s, in spite of being separated by nearly one hundred years and half a planet. But Carver (or his editor) never let those tales overstay their welcome, stripping them down to their barest necessities leaving only that which absolutely must be revealed. They both traffic in sadness and irony and the bitter pill that is life, but where I could not put down What We Talk About, I couldn’t wait to set down Great Stories. I can attribute this fact to the editors, to the translators, to the authors or to myself but in any case, what I cannot escape is that I didn’t much care for enough of this book to recommend it or even like it. At best I can say it was okay and I’m intrigued to know more about the author’s work, but when I dive in again, I’ll be sure to be more selective about which volume I choose and not let a bargain make my decision for me.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 29, 2011 at 02:51PM

One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, #1)

One for the Money (Stephanie Plum, #1)

author: Janet Evanovich
name: Paul
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/17
date added: 2011/11/24
shelves: mystery, novel
review:
Stephanie Plum is, at first blush, kind of a cookie-cutter feisty heroine, the kind who appear in mystery novels and television shows often as the kind of safe pushback against the damsel-in-distress archetype. But the thing Janet Evanovich does that I like is she starts her series with Plum green and soft, just getting into the boys club that other authors would have their protagonists waltzing through as old hands. It is this trial-by-fire atmosphere where readers share in Stephanie’s alternately terrifying and hilarious mishaps as well as her triumphs, both minor and major, that make her an interesting character.

One For The Money follows the down-and-out Stephanie Plum as she finds herself six months out of a job, selling off her last few possessions to pay her bills and running out of options. In a moment of desperation she goes to her cousin, Vinnie the bail bondsman, looking for work. All he has to offer her is a longshot job as a bounty hunter, dragging in bail jumpers. She accepts, at first not sure at all what she’s getting into, and then she realizes her first target is a cop by the name of Joe Morelli, a heartbreaker from her neighborhood she has a short if rather checkered past with. Before she knows it, Stephanie is neck deep in the murder case against Morelli where it appears he killed an unarmed man. Mixed up in the whole deal is a sinister prize fighter who locks his eyes on Plum, another bondsman who goes by the name of Ranger, and a couple of plus-sized hookers.

Evanovich grants Plum’s first-person account of her inaugural stint as a bounty hunter a solid dose of humor, sass, humility, honesty and thrills to make for a race of a read. Plum feels authentic, going from adrenalized self-satisfaction to terrified near-victim regularly and offering plenty of plausible explanations as to why she doesn’t give up, revealing herself to be tenacious and endearing without being moronic. Moreover, the assorted cast of characters are perhaps not as well-realized but just as relatable and the interactions between the principals all feels genuine.

As a mystery, One For The Money is pretty good, although it isn’t difficult to tell which tidbits of information are important to the end sequence well in advance, at least the specifics of the plot aren’t readily obvious. Evanovich strikes the right balance between levity and gravity, ratcheting up the tension and the stakes through the course of the briskly moving novel until it gets pretty real by the end, but fortunately only in that sort of surface-level, Hollywood type of heft. What this does is make the book feel very escapist which is a positive thing, but it also makes it feel kind of lightweight and frivolous as well, which is perhaps not so good, depending on your disposition. This is a tough line to walk for mysteries: Too dark and you end up with Thomas Harris or John Sandford; too light and you end up with Nancy Drew. For the most part this beach-read vibe works in Evanovich’s favor, but I wonder if this kind of disposable sensibility can persist through a whole series?

All said, I enjoyed One For The Money quite a bit, and a lot more than I expected to. I’d pick up the next book in the series without hesitation and while it certainly isn’t going to be on any must-read list or be something I press on all my friends to read, the sort of lovable disaster that is Stephanie Plum is a character I’d be happy to revisit when I’m looking for another fun read.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 24, 2011 at 08:38AM

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

author: Stephen King
name: Paul
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2011/11/19
date added: 2011/11/20
shelves: memoir, non-fiction, writing
review:
The appeal of Stephen King, I think, has always been that he has a kind of everyman style which allows his work to be relatable, so he starts describing you or people you know and then his warped imagination kicks in and the effects are visceral and emotional. Often King uses this to punch you in the gut with cold fear, where other popular-but-critically-disdained authors might go for a well-timed weep (Nicholas Sparks) or maybe a coordinated sigh of relief (John Grisham).

One gets the sense from On Writing that King is a little bitter the literary community has crammed him into a box labeled “popular but trashy.” Its hard to feel too sorry for a guy who can presumably console himself by swimming Scrooge McDuck-style in his swimming pool filled with money, but in reading On Writing you start to understand that the reason King never made it into that snobby group of anti-taste, pro-pretense folk is because he doesn’t really care much about anything as high-falutin’ as art or pushing the boundaries of the novel format or challenging preconceptions of what a novel can be. He’s a storyteller. Someone, somewhere seems to have decided that the literary equivalent of telling ghost stories around the campfire is lowbrow and while you can tell it rubs him the wrong way, King finally seems to decide the problem is with the critics, not with him or his legions of fans.

I like King’s approach to writing. His advice makes sense to me, although he seems to be in favor of flying by the seat of your pants, finding that sketchy-to-describe place where the characters seem to take on their own lives and end up acting of their own accord. King comes as close as anyone I’ve seen to describing how this takes place, but even then, he can’t quite get over the big cloud-like shape on the blackboard labeled with “HERE BE DRAGONS.” It’s just too much like magic to try and describe how something that a person logically ought to control (it’s coming from your own mind for pity’s sake) in fact seems to be coming from somewhere else.

He advocates that the key to being a writer is to read a lot and write a lot. Makes sense to me. He has a few pieces of practical advice, too, although he doesn’t dive very deep into specific mechanics other than to recommend actually reading Strunk & White, avoiding adverbs and making rewrites 10% shorter than the first drafts. A lot of the rest of his advice is about process and this advice is the kind that I don’t know I’ve seen in other places. You can find plenty of other people who tell you to avoid adverbs and be merciless with rewrites but I haven’t encountered anyone who suggests keeping the first draft to yourself and getting help only once the whole story is written (King uses the metaphor excavated). I’m not sure anyone else would bother explaining why you should scoot your writing desk off into the corner of a room (though make sure the room has a door) instead of creating a monument to writing with some huge behemoth as a writing-room centerpiece. The best part, to me, of On Writing is the way King describes the Ideal Reader better than I ever could (and I have tried).

I can’t be sure if On Writing would appeal to anyone who didn’t have aspirations of writing. I think if you aren’t a writer and have no real desire to be, but you live with or know a writer, it might be interesting to get some insight on the kinds of things they might find fascinating and useful, but the only other people I can see really caring about this book are people really interested in Stephen King as a person. An awful lot of On Writing is the story of Stephen King, truth be told. It’s not, perhaps, a “proper” memoir, but because King is mostly known just for writing, it’s maybe as close as one might come. The first third of the book is a series of anecdotes and memory snapshots (entertainingly) told in King’s casual and readable style most of which serve to kind of explain how King got to be a writer and what circumstances lead to his stock and trade being a storyteller. Most of the rest of the book is the section about the actual act of writing and then the last maybe 15% is an odd sidenote about the accident he suffered in the late 90s, getting struck by a van. It does kind of come full circle as a sort of writing parable, but it feels like an odd inclusion here, in a way.

I really liked On Writing. I don’t even say that with a shuffle of my feet and a half-apology in my voice, either. I actually kind of expected to like it and I very much did. I think its practical information may not be applicable to every writer, but it felt applicable to me, and I hope it will make my writing better. The pseudo-autobiographical parts at the beginning were fun to read and interesting, also they were inspiring and able to show how tenacity is possibly the writer’s primary tool for success. And it’s a blisteringly fast read, too. I’m no speed-reader but I tore through this book in under five hours. I can’t be sure about the broad audience appeal, but I can say that if you have any inclination toward writing at all, at least give it a shot. You could even probably skip the third part where he talks about getting run over. Spoiler alert: he starts writing again. But even with this strange postscript, there’s enough here to make it well worth the quick read.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 20, 2011 at 08:54AM

Sick Girl

Sick Girl

author: Amy Silverstein
name: Paul
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2011/11/14
date added: 2011/11/14
shelves: non-fiction, memoir
review:
Sick Girl is a very frustrating book to read. Amy Silverstein should be applauded for being frank and brutally honest about her feelings regarding her nearly twenty year fight to stay alive with a transplanted heart given to her when she was only twenty-five. But the takeaway from most of that forthrightness is that she’s kind of a whiny pain in the neck.

The usual recipe I’ve seen in memoirs is that they start out at some random pivotal moment, suck you in, then back way up to the beginning and slowly explain why you should admire/appreciate/identify with the author. Sick Girl works in reverse in that the opening chapter kind of caught my attention as Silverstein contemplates suicide and I found myself thinking, in that context-deprived way, “Yeah, I can see how she’d get there.” Then the author spent the rest of the book convincing me that she was an unappreciative, immature, sad sack of a bore who I found very few redeeming characteristics emanating from.

Let me frame it this way: This is a rich girl with a loving father and stepmom, a practically saintly husband, a wonderful adopted son, apparently many close friends—including some very sympathetic and caring ones, who lived far past her expected ten year projection post-transplant, was able to graduate law school, work a job, exercise regularly, and basically live her whole life in spite of a congenital heart defect that could have killed her long before she found out she had heart issues and needed the life-saving operation. For heaven’s sake she ran with the bulls of Pamplona—a feat many people leave unchecked on their bucket lists—and somehow through all of this she manages to find nothing to fill three hundred pages other than the occasional nod to these abundant blessings and a whole lot of grousing about how terrible it is to be a heart transplant recipient.

I could almost understand if her pre-transplant illness had been protracted, but her hospitalization seems to have been under a year in total. I might be able to see the blackness she describes if her principal complaints—chronic infections from a suppressed immune system, regular (if temporary) misery from the immunosuppression drugs she has to take, lots of crummy doctors and a nebulous loneliness—weren’t, as near as I can tell, either just parts of the human condition or small prices to pay for, you know, life. But try as I may, I was never able to see just what Ms. Silverstein had so very rough.

And maybe that was where I thought the book was the most frustrating, because I really wanted to see the “other side” of the story. The world is awash in heartstring-tugging tales of inspirational courage from cases like hers that defied the odds, with the patients just steadfastly refusing to give in to despair or depression and choosing instead a sunny outlook or a faith they hold dear to carry them through. But Sick Girl fails on a fundamental level to express just how someone with the gifts the author has could possibly continue to choose to be thankless and pessimistic. There are so many points at which her effort to be understood falls flat as her whining and inability to see anything positive makes one wonder if she is in any way deserving of the fortune she so carelessly squanders on self-pity and blame-casting. And tactless tricks like focusing endless, numbing pages on rehashing in so many ways the turmoil she feels about casting a veil over her illness and how miserable it makes her to put on a brave face while skimping on life highlights such as the adoption of her son do little to camouflage her tale, either.

It feels icky to judge a person this way, but in writing this book Silverstein invites it and while I admire her courage in at least trying to explain why she feels the way she does, I closed the book wishing she’d invested half the time she did trying to convince herself she was justified in her sour attitude and outlook trying to find a new way of looking at things instead. Especially when, laid out as it is, it seems so painfully obvious to even the most outside observer.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 14, 2011 at 09:56PM

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything

author: Bill Bryson
name: Paul
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2011/11/10
date added: 2011/11/11
shelves: history, non-fiction, science
review:
I love science the way I love history: When presented by a storyteller, it assumes the inherent magic that I suppose those who find it fascinating just at its surface level always appreciate. Unfortunately, science and history both are often told with a dullness, a dry lack of drama which the facts themselves do not really lack. Too often I get the impression that people tasked with relating the wonderful truths about science and history feel like if they elevate the palatability of the delivery they may inject too much license, which would undermine the fundamental essence of truth that must accompany work which is often difficult or laborious. The point missed by these people (too many of whom attempted to instruct me about these subjects during my school days) is that even a fascinating truth can be told in such a way as to make it utterly uninteresting.

Enter Bill Bryson, working through his own struggles with science (using a fair bit of history, it turns out), he writes A Short History of Nearly Everything which is the storytelling historian’s book about science, knowledge, progress and, well, pretty much everything that flows from that, which is pretty much everything. Bryson guides the reader with an impressive clarity through the lives and works of the scientists, amateurs, thinkers and tinkerers who unlock the secrets of our world, the universe and everything in between. Rather than just stating cold facts or even narrating the facts, he choses to dissect the people behind the theories and formulas which make up the basis of what we think we know. There isn’t a point at which Bryson shies away from the heavy subjects, assuming the intelligence of his audience is sufficiently like his own: Capable of grasping even advanced concepts provided they are presented in a knowable way. But when Bryson himself finds that in his exhaustive research there is no one to provide him a hook he can use for his own understanding much less one that can be transferred to his willing students, he doesn’t dismiss the reader as too dim to grasp it thus implying he does, he shrugs his own shoulders and says, “it gets deep from here, so deep even the scientists themselves don’t always get what they’re talking about.”

Bryson has a gossipy way of describing in good-natured humor the quirks and personalities of the names we all have heard but perhaps know little about other than the laws or theories attached to their monikers. In not pulling punches for the titans of modern thought, the author humanizes them and makes them relatable, understandable and even all the more admirable. If the guys unlocking the secrets of gravity and thermodynamics and atoms and geophysics and astronomy can struggle with reclusiveness, boorish behavior, petty squabbling, professional misconduct and close-mindedness, perhaps they aren’t these mythic figures after all. But then that means they’re just people, and if they’re just people doing great things then perhaps some day so might I. The crossing of streams, as it were, that Bryson employs where he hops from biographical history to geology to astronomy to world history to astrophysics to politics to oceanography makes one almost wonder why course curriculums in school are divided at all. There was never this sense of interconnectedness conveyed to me in my studies and there was certainly never this much riveting attention paid to what was being explained. If I could have Bill Bryson as my one and only high school instructor, I’d gladly do it all again and I’d probably even study for the tests and hand in all my homework on time.

This book is inspiring, the way all good nonfiction books are. It gets your mind working, it sparks imagination. There are also times when it is terrifying (check out the section on asteroids and their potential to impact the Earth and then see how well you sleep that night), hilarious, shocking, and fun but it is also relentlessly, unapologetically educational from first page to last. I love this book, I would and will recommend it to any and everyone. I listened to it on audiobook borrowed from the library and I now I must buy a physical copy. In fact, it is pretty amazing that for all the educational value of A Short History of Nearly Everything, it never relies on complicated diagrams or wild charts to convey its information. Bryson gets the job done—better than almost anyone—with just the power of his words. Someone please convince this man to write textbooks.

Or better yet, someone just get this book into the hands of students, before it’s too late for them, as it (almost) was for me.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 11, 2011 at 07:56AM

The Help

The Help

author: Kathryn Stockett
name: Paul
average rating: 4.46
book published: 2009
rating: 3
read at: 2011/11/03
date added: 2011/11/03
shelves: novel
review:
It’s hard to know what to think about a book like The Help. It does an awful lot of the things that books sometimes do to make me dislike them: It ignores reasonable consequence (and therefore drama) in favor of feel-good schmaltz; it broadcasts its plot and developments with screaming neon and signal flares; it features a plucky heroine, who also happens to be a writer that manages to save the day… by writing; it reads like a screenplay that was adapted into a novel rather than the other way around. But then again, despite (or perhaps because of) these factors, The Help is ridiculously, compulsively readable. A huge portion of that is owed to Kathryn Stockett‘s ability to characterize her principals and make them feel alive, so while The Help, on the surface, seems to struggle against what I want in a novel, I can’t deny that it is entertaining.

The Help is the story of Aibileen and Minny, two black maids working in Jackson, Mississippi in 1962 for sub-minimum wage cleaning rich white women’s houses, cooking their food, and caring for their children. Both of them suffer indignity and abuse at the hands of their employers but they do what they do because it affords them the money to live and there are parts of the job—mostly involving the white children they practically raise—that do have appeal. Enter Skeeter Phelan, recent college grad with aspirations of being a writer who hits on the idea of telling the story of what it’s like to be a black maid working in the South. She convinces Aibileen and Minny to tell their stories and the three of them risk it all so that voices may be heard and, perhaps, change may come.

Here’s my biggest problem with The Help: As engaging as Ms. Stockett’s writing is, as charming as the novel can be, the story here isn’t the one that ought to have been told. The real story would have been for Stockett to write the story that her characters write, to ignore the fictionalization and focus on real black maids working in the South during the civil rights movement. Even the hinted-at story that Aibileen’s deceased son began of black men working for white employers in the early 1960s would have been a more effective tale, at least in terms of social relevance, than this. It disturbs me quite a lot that there is a blurb on the cover from NPR about this book being the next To Kill a Mockingbird. If this is what we have accomplished since Harper Lee‘s novel, we have fallen far indeed. Because to me writing now, in the early 21st century, about racial conditions in the mid-20th century, feels incredibly easy. Lee’s novel addressed racial issues that were still prevalent—heavily prevalent—in 1960 when it was published. I’d be a fool if I suggested that racism wasn’t a problem now, but overt institutional racism as depicted in The Help is no longer the societal norm that it was fifty years ago, much less the sort of problem that a subtler variety infecting modern prejudices can really be compared to. This results in a book that, on the surface at least, is socially relevant but upon closer inspection is repeating lessons learned so long ago they have been absorbed into the foundational levels of decorum already rendering the book, at best, trite.

At which point I might almost say, “Well, so what?” It could just be a light, entertaining read, after all. But then I have to point out the fact that Stockett writes the point-of-view chapters for Aibileen and Minny in a pseudo-dialectical fashion that is so off-putting as to coat two-thirds of the book in a sour film of embarrassment. It’s not even that Stockett tried to write the way black people in the south might or might have talked back then but that she does so in an awful, half-committed style that reads as painfully as it would be to listen to a white public speaker inflect a black dialect. It is in that grating black-through-white-voice fashion that much of the book is told and while eventually as a reader I was able to adjust (around a third of the way in) and just use the ham-fisted stylistic mechanism to affect a character voice in my head, it never once stopped feeling gross to have to do so. Not to mention the fact that while Stockett takes some measure to ensure that Skeeter is presented as somewhat flawed in her own racial attitudes herself, she still comes across as kind of a white savior to the poor black folk who need a champion.

I have to wonder how much of the discomfort I had with either tactic comes from my knowledge that Ms. Stockett herself is white and that clearly Skeeter is a self-insertion mouthpiece. Would the dialect writing bother me if they had been written by a black author? After all, it’s not offensive to me that Irvine Welsh dumps a heavy, phonetic Scottish brogue into his novels, perhaps because he himself is Scottish. I can’t know though, because I do know Stockett is white and, again, her black dialect sounds white-doing-black. Would Skeeter’s character sit as ill if I didn’t know Stockett practically is Skeeter? I don’t know if the inclusion of the Acknowledgments or the Too Little, Too Late segments as postscripts after the novel text helped or hurt my opinion of the book. It frustrated me to hear how little concern she had with historical accuracy (in a historical novel!) and to learn that her life mirrored Skeeter’s so closely. Yet it was good to hear that she worried about affecting the voice of people who deserve to have their stories told, with very good reason.

I suppose in the end I can’t criticize The Help too much for failing to be what it could have been. I guess that’s like saying The Bell Jar is flawed because it doesn’t include the psychological background of chronic depression or 1984 is lacking because it doesn’t include a counterpoint identifying the positive aspects of oligarchy. Still, I wanted better from The Help than I got.

from Paul's bookshelf: readNovember 03, 2011 at 08:57AM

The Graveyard Book

The Graveyard Book

author: Neil Gaiman
name: Paul
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2011/10/30
date added: 2011/10/30
shelves: childrens, fantasy, novel, horror
review:
Nobody Owens lives in a graveyard. When he was very young, the man Jack killed his family and he narrowly escaped his fate by falling under the protection of the kindly ghosts of the graveyard on top of the hill who have taken on the task of raising Nobody in spite of their limitations—namely, incorporeality and death. The Graveyard Book chronicles the youth and adventures of Nobody as he makes unlikely friends, gets into trouble, gets rescued, attends school, and tries to learn the truth of where he came from and who he is.

Neil Gaiman is incredibly imaginative and fills this book with the often dark, quirky twists that are kind of his signature. As a children’s book it can be fairly grim, though I suppose for this day and age no more so than, say, The Wizard of Oz was at the time of its release. The book flies by quickly and Bod (as he is known) rapidly becomes a lovable protagonist, head-strong, adventurous, resourceful and prone to dreaming. The book is structured kind of like a handful of smaller stories tied together somewhat loosely—one could see this being almost a comic book mini-series (perhaps unsurprisingly given Gaiman’s background) though Bod ages naturally throughout.

It does seem as though there were perhaps more adventures at earlier ages that could have been included, perhaps to keep the book at a manageable length some side plots and sub-stories were cut out or intentionally left unexplored; the final chapters however do draw the tale to a satisfying conclusion. I wonder if an imaginary sequel would go back and fill in the gaps of Bod’s upbringing or focus on events that happen chronologically following The Graveyard Book’s end.

My favorite part of the book is the section/chapter titled “Danse Macabre” which is kind of a small, almost throwaway tale of a unique sort of irregular holiday that is described in a particular way as to be mysterious and yet so full of joy and humanity (the significance of which is only relatable once you understand what it is), it left me with an uncontrolled grin. I’ve read several of Gaiman’s adult novels (American Gods, Anasazi Boys, Neverwhere) and often Gaiman’s biggest failing is that his wild imagination outpaces his descriptive abilities which occasionally—sometimes in regrettably pivotal scenes—don’t quite convey a ready vision of what he sees in his head. In The Graveyard Book this is never the case and especially in the closing paragraphs of Danse Macabre, it felt as though I were right there with Bod and all the others.

That descriptive image transfer actually leads to my chief complaint about the book other than that it feels like it could have contained more, which is Dave McKean’s illustrations. I like McKean’s art, quite a bit, but I’m not sure his style suits this book. There is an abstractness, a kind of hazy dark quality in McKean’s work and I felt like it lent too much of an ominous maturity to the feel of the book which didn’t match the unexpectedly breezy tone of Gaiman’s writing. Don’t get me wrong, the tone of the prose is spot-on, clear and crisp as one would expect for a book meant to be read by middle-schoolers, dark in just the right amounts but also full of vibrancy. But McKean’s art plays a big part in setting that tone and it draws it to a much more melancholy place than might otherwise be found in an unillustrated edition.

Overall, this is a delightful book and one which I hope to share with my daughter, seven or eight years from now, an example of modern classic children’s literature that is just perfect for reading around Halloween.

from Paul's bookshelf: readOctober 30, 2011 at 09:34AM

Road To Nowhere

Road To Nowhere

author: Christopher Pike
name: Paul
average rating: 3.44
book published: 1993
rating: 2
read at: 2011/10/26
date added: 2011/10/26
shelves: horror, novel, young-adult
review:
It’s a little difficult for me to judge Christopher Pike‘s young adult suspense novels. I read them occasionally because my wife grew up with them, loved them, continually re-reads them for comfort and I like to have a frame of reference for an important part of her formative years. Some of them have been decent to good, but a few that I’ve started and never finished have read a bit too much like low-budget after-school specials crossed with The Outer Limits.

Road to Nowhere is the story of Teresa, recently betrayed by a boyfriend she thought she would love forever, fleeing from her problems and her old life. As she drives north on California’s coastal highway she picks up two curious hitchhikers and to pass the time the three of them begin to tell stories; Teresa tells of her heartbreak at the hands of her boyfriend and best friend, while the strangers, Poppy Corn and Freedom Jack, weave a conflicted tale of star-crossed lovers.

There’s not much mystery to the plot twists, each of which are broadcast practically via bullhorn from very near the outset. That alone wouldn’t make the story awkward but the fact that the events that make up the bulk of the narrative (that is, the parts that aren’t story-within-story) are essentially meaningless sucks much of the heft from the final chapters. Everything is pat and neat at the end, there seems to be no consequence to any action and as a result there is a pervasive sense of futility to finishing the book. The clumsy morality that serves as the late-breaking central theme is grossly ineffective here and even the lame stab at sentimentality is almost funny rather than touching.

That all said, one aspect that salvages Road to Nowhere from the trashbin is the inner tale of John and Candy as related by Poppy and Free, told with campfire-esque salaciousness in a banter-y style over the course of the first 2/3rds of the book. It is this telling that really propels the book—and far more than the drab tale of Teresa and Bill—enough so that by the end I wished Pike had ditched the structure and re-written Candy and Jack’s tale, leaving out the encompassing parts that don’t work.

from Paul's bookshelf: readOctober 26, 2011 at 10:42PM

The Night Circus

The Night Circus

author: Erin Morgenstern
name: Paul
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2011/10/26
date added: 2011/10/26
shelves: fantasy, novel
review:
There are some books that are good because they are so gripping you cannot wait to finish them to see how it all ties together, to find where the conclusion leaves the characters or what impact the events will have on the place. There are some books that are good because the world they create is so alive, so wonderful, that you want to just live there forever. Books like this you want never to end. The Night Circus is such a book.

Before I dispense with the gushing, let me just say that The Night Circus has a pretty fatal weakness: There isn’t really a whole ton of tension and drama inherent in the story. In fact, the fulcrum on which the scale rests is whether or not the reader can be enchanted by the idea of Le Cirque des Rêves to the point that threats to the circus itself will provide sufficient drama to propel one through the pages. For me, this absolutely worked. The turn of the twentieth century setting, the dazzling descriptions of marvelous, wonderful exhibitions, even the aura of mystery that surrounds the central cast and the circus itself was so charming that I had no problem just letting Erin Morgenstern carry me away through her dreamlike creation. When the antagonism finally reveals itself (as dimly as it does), it was enough for me. However, I can see where those who are not taken in by Morgenstern’s construct, viewing it more as mere curiosity, would find the book to be plodding, possibly even dull.

Because here is the principal trap of the book that beckons you to just immerse yourself in its environment: Something has to happen there. The book does in fact have to end and usually the characters you’re loving and the places you’re delighted by must change or there is no story at all. This has undone many a promising novel either because the author her- or himself cannot bear to do what must be done and either the book stretches into an infinite number of sequels and re-visitations which dilute the initial appeal or they go nowhere. Occasionally a live-in book will go too far, over-explaining the marvels that elicited the initial attraction until they no longer have any draw.

Fortunately Morgenstern sidesteps this issue because while The Night Circus is ostensibly a book about magic, it is really a book about the magic of stories, the magic of dreaming and creating. Ms. Morgenstern understands stories and therefore she knows she can’t just fabricate the world of Le Cirque des Rêves and then leave it sitting there on the table like some heavy for-show-only centerpiece that serves no function. Cleverly, she uses this knowledge to build the setting and then makes its existence the function, threatening it with destruction while exploring the nature of disagreement, of determination, of consequences both intended and unintended.

The tale woven around the circus itself (which is the main character, make no mistake) is of two young magicians—real magicians, not illusionists of the Harry Houdini variety—pitted against each other in a contest. This is a contest without clear rules, lacking discernible parameters and with an uncertain goal. But it is a contest the magicians are compelled to engage in and one which uses the circus as its playing field. Celia Bowen is one contestant, daughter of the once-famous and now semi-deceased Hector Bowen and her opponent is Marco Alisdair, protege of an enigmatic man known only as Alexander H., if he is known by anything at all. The characters are really just faces and voices for the circus. A minor but easy critique to make of The Night Circus is that Morgenstern doesn’t realize her characters particularly well; everything has an aura of mystery which is somewhat necessary to maintain the mystique of the circus itself, but other than a few minor characters, we never feel like we know the principals any better by the end of the story than we do at the beginning.

It’s okay, though, because they each represent a particular facet of the circus and through the majesty of Morgenstern’s descriptions of the wonderful (and nonviolent) feints and parries Marco and Celia cast at one another we know enough to make the tale work. And it’s not like the characters are so sketchy as to be unlikable or apart from sympathy and/or scorn. Rather, they are as tied to the circus itself as the whole of the novel.

In many ways, The Night Circus reminded me of an adult’s version of the best children’s books. It’s not that The Night Circus is particularly lewd: There is very, very little objectionable material within, but that’s not why it feels child-like. Instead it is the imaginative heat that radiates from the pages, the way Le Cirque des Rêves reminds one of wish-they-were-real locales like Hogwarts or Narnia or the way E. L. Konigsburg depicted the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. The best praise I can think to offer The Night Circus is that, in a book about magic that comes from dreams, magic that comes from tales and legends and love and mystery, Ms. Morgenstern demonstrates that this magic is, in fact, very real.

from Paul's bookshelf: readOctober 26, 2011 at 09:34AM