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The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

Jun9

I tried to become absorbed in this rather self-centered and pretentious novel because the cast of characters who inhabit the novel are my age mates. The six friends who make up the group who call themselves “the Interestings” are teenagers in the mid-seventies, college students in the late seventies and early eighties, get married (or at least co-habit) in the eighties, really marry and have children in the nineties, and find themselves midddle-aged and evaluating the consequences of their life decisions in the twenty first century. That’s me, except for the co-habitation part, and except for the fact that these are artsy people. Or artsy wannabes. And rich, mostly. And New Yorkers, insufferably proud and parochial New Yorkers. If it weren’t for all those differences, I could have been any one of the characters in this novel.

So, other than age, I don’t really have much in common with Jules and Ethan and Ash and Goodman and Jonah and Cathy. Honestly, I’m glad not to have much affinity with these characters because they are not very likable people, except for Ethan who is a teddy bear. Jules, the main viewpoint character, is the outsider who meets the other teens at Spirit-in-the-Woods summer camp for “talented” teens and becomes a part of their oh-so-interesting in-group. But Jules always feels a little outside and a little envious because she’s from suburbia and middle class and not really all that interesting. Ash and Goodman, brother and sister, are rich, not terribly talented or interesting on their own, but backed by lots of money and influence, they can appear to be both. Cathy is a dancer with the wrong kind of body for professional success in dancing. Jonah is a musician, but emotionally damaged, the son of a sixties folk music star. And Ethan is an artist and animator, the real talent in the the group.

In 468 pages, Ms. Wolitzer tells the story of these six people, their friendships, their professional lives, their coupling and uncoupling, their families, and their sexual misadventures. The book could have been about 200 pages shorter and lot better had Ms. Wolitzer left out the long and tedious descriptions of the various characters’ sexual encounters, both within and outside marriage. I get it. Sex is really important to these people. Jules rejects Ethan because she’s not sexually attracted to him, even though he is her best friend. She buys sex toys on a shopping trip with her best girlfriend, Ash. She fantasizes sex with Goodman. She has lots of sex with her live-in boyfriend, then husband, Dennis.

Jonah Bay is gay, so we must have lots of descriptions of homosex, including answers to the questions we all have about how to have sex when one partner is HIV-positive. Then, there’s attempted rape, sex with a clinically depressed person (not much there), sex in marriage, sex in the college dorm, sex while high, unfulfilled sexual attraction, sex with vibrator, no sex, maybe sex, wild sex. Every few pages the author throws in a sex scene, some of which attempt to be titillating but only succeed at being boring. I skimmed a lot.

And, although I read the whole thing, skimming aside, I would say that’s an apt description for the entire book: it tries but fails to be interesting. The characters try but fail to grow to be interesting. Jules tries to be wry and sardonic but only manages to be jealous and lazy, trapped in some ideal past when she “came alive” at camp. Jonah tries to overcome his past as an abused kid, but he never connects with anyone much. Ethan tries to be a good rich and powerful man, but he has to have a major failure, so the author sticks one in, even though it doesn’t seem to be in character. Ash tries to be a feminist and an artist but turns into a a rich housewife like her mom. Goodman doesn’t try ever, and he reaps what he sows. Cathy sort of drops out of the story after providing a convenient plot device. I kept hoping for character development, but all I got was more sex scenes and detailed physical descriptions of how ugly or pretty each character was at any given point in his or her life. These descriptions (and the sex scenes) may have been supposed to stand in for character development.

I don’t know to whom to recommend this book. If you are self-absorbed enough to identify with these characters, then you are self-absorbed and won’t find them to be very interesting. Maybe New Yorkers who are not self centered and pretentious could see by reading The Interestings why the rest of us tend to think that they are. Books like this one don’t help to dispel the stereotype.

The Nargun and the Stars by Patricia Wrightson

Feb1

This Australian classic won the Children’s Book Council of Australia Award for Book of the Year in 1974, and its author, Patricia Wrightson, is the only Australian author to have been awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award for lasting contributions to children’s literature. I found a copy of The Nargun and the Stars in the multitude of books that were donated to my library from a local private school’s discard pile, and I read it to see if it would be a good addition to my own library.

It’s a dark and perhaps humanistic, or even pagan, book, but I would say that it’s pagan in the sense of drawing on pre-Christian era mythology, in this case the mythology of the Australian aboriginal peoples. Just as C.S. Lewis drew on both Greek and Norse mythology for his depiction of Narnia and as Tolkien drew from Norse, Saxon, and Celtic myths to create the creatures and world of Middle Earth, Ms. Wrightson used the Australian aboriginal myths and legends to tell a story that speaks into our own time.

The novel begins and ends with the Nargun, a stone and earth creature, full of hunger and anger and “slow, monstrous coldness”. Over centuries, or millennia, the Nargun slowly moved across the Australian landscape and settles into Wongadilla, a place in the mountains of southern Australia.

The actual story takes place in the 1970’s, when the book was written and published. Simon, an orphan, comes to live with his second cousins, brother and sister Charlie and Edie, on a sheep run in Wongadilla. Simon begins to explore the strange place where he has landed, so to speak, and he finds and gets to know odd and mythical creatures in the swamps and forests and caves of Wongadilla. However, it is the Nargun that is a threat to the sheep ranch, to the humans who live there, and even to the Potkoorak of the swamp and the Turongs of the forest. Charlie and Edie and Simon become a family and a team as they work together to understand and to defeat the impersonal but powerful malevolence of the Nargun.

I can see why this book won the acclaim that it did. The writing is quite beautiful and evocative, and I am sure that the atmosphere of this book will become a part of my mental concept of Australia and all things Australian. The Nargun and the Stars won’t be a book for everyone. It might give some children (or adults) nightmares, and some parents could object to the idea that the evil Nargun is only confined by the end of the book and only by means of completely human ingenuity, but not finally defeated or destroyed. However, that ending reminds me of the book of Revelation (which I doubt was the author’s intent) when Satan himself is chained for 1000 years (Revelation 20). Perhaps the Nargun, from Australian aboriginal mythology, is really a demon, or at least that’s way I thought of it as I read.

According to Gunai/Kurnai tribal legends, the Nargun is a fierce half-human half-stone creature that lived in the Den of Nargun, a cave under a rock overhang behind a small waterfall in the Mitchell River National Park, Victoria, Australia. Aboriginal legend describes the Nargun as a beast that was all stone except for its hands, arms and breast. The fierce creature would drag unwary travellers into its den, and any weapon directed against it would be turned back on its owner.

As Shakespeare so aptly said via Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Stories like The Nargun and the Stars serve to remind us in our materialistic and naturalistic philosophical world that we don’t have it all figured out and that there are all sorts of “dragons” and enemies that have yet to be finally defeated and destroyed.

This novel also reminded me of G.K. Chesterton and his observation to the effect that “fairy tales do not tell children the dragons (Nargun) exist. Children already know that dragons (Nargun) exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons (Nargun) can be killed (or at least chained).”

One more impression: there is a definite affinity between The Nargun and the Stars and N.D. Wilson’s The Boys of Blur. If you liked Wilson’s take-off on Beowulf, I’d recommend Ms. Wrightson’s fantasy/horror story of Australian monsters and heroes.

1974: Events and Inventions

Mar6

'Alexander Solzhenitsyn' photo (c) 2007, openDemocracy - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/February, 1974. Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the Soviet Union after publication of his epic novel The Gulag Archipelago, a book critical of the communist government in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970.

March 8, 1974. Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris, France.

April 25, 1974. Carnation Revolution: A coup in Portugal restores democracy. Despite repeated appeals from the revolutionaries on the radio asking the population to stay home, thousands of Portuguese descend on the streets, mixing with the military insurgents. The name Carnation Revolution comes from the fact that no shots are fired, and the celebrating Portuguese citizens put carnation flowers on the soldiers’ guns and on their uniforms.

'The children and the red carnation' photo (c) 2009, Pedro Ribeiro Simões - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/May 17, 1974. Dublin and Monaghan bombings: The Protestant terrorist group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), explode numerous bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, in the Republic Of Ireland. The attacks kill 33 civilians and wound almost 300.

May 18, 1974. India successfully detonates its first nuclear weapon, becoming the 6th nation to do so.

August 8, 1974. President Richard Nixon, facing impeachment by Congress over the Watergate scandal and cover-up, becomes the first U.S. president to reign from office. Vice-President Gerald Ford will become the new president.

September 12, 1974. Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia is deposed by the Derg, a military committee which soon embraces communism and will rule in Ethiopia for the next thirteen years.

November 21, 1974. In Birmingham, England, IRA (Irish Republican Army) terrorists bomb 2 pubs, killing 21 people.

Rubik’s Cube, a 3-D mechanical puzzle, is invented sometime in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture ErnÅ‘ Rubik. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes have been sold worldwide, making Rubik’s Cube the world’s top-selling puzzle game.

'Solving the Rubik's Cube' photo (c) 2008, Steve Rhodes - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/

The Eye of the Elephant: An Epic Adventure in the African Wilderness by Delia and Mark Owens

Jan24

Epic is right. Mark and Delia Owens first went to Africa in 1974 to study lion behavior in the Kalahari Desert. They lived in the desert for seven years and wrote a book about their experiences, Cry of the Kalahari. The couple then returned to the U.S. to complete their graduate work and then attempted to return to their work in Botswana. However, when the government of Botswana declared them persona non grata, they were forced to look for another place to carry on their vocation in wildlife management and conservation. North Luangwa National Park in Zambia and the preservation of the endangered elephant population there became their mission.

Mission, obsession, calling—all these words are somewhat inadequate to describe the dedication with which Mark Owens in particular approaches the task of protecting the elephants from poachers who are slaughtering the elephants for the meat and for the ivory trade. Mr. Owens literally endangers his own life while trying every trick, weapon, and argument in the book to stop the poachers. He flies daily (and nightly) “missions” to find the poachers. He begs and encourages and bribes the native Zambian game guards to do their jobs and arrest the poachers, without much success. He sends letters of appeal and sends radio messages to anyone he thinks might help. And all the while, the elephants are being killed at the rate of several thousand per year.

Finally, in October 1989, seventy-six nations vote to list the African elephant as an endangered species and to forbid trade in ivory and all other elephant parts. This action along with the Owens’ work in confronting poachers and educating Zambian villagers about the value of wildlife in attracting tourism dollars is instrumental in slowing to a near-halt the poaching of elephants on a large-scale basis.

Of course, after reading an entire book about the anti-poaching efferts of Delia and Mark Owens, I had to see what the couple is doing now and what the status of the elephants in North Luangwa is now. The Owens have returned to the U.S., but their conservation and education project in North Luangwa continues under the auspices of Zambian Hammer Simwinga and the Owens Foundation for Wildlife Conservation. The Owens have most recently been working on grizzly bear conservation in North Idaho. The elephant population in North Luangwa is said to be slowly increasing.

I’m not really an animal person. While I think it is a worthwhile goal to save endangered species, such as the African elephant, it’s not a cause I feel called to give my life to. Still, I am interested in Africa, and particularly in Zambia this year, so I found the adventures of Mark and Delia Owens fascinating.

Before There Were Blogs

Sep30

Nowadays for snippets of information, household tips, news analysis, and humorous and autobiographical stories, I go to the internet, usually to blogs. Ten or more years ago I had a subscription to Reader’s Digest. It served much the same purpose, “an article a day of enduring significance.”

Dewitt and Lila Wallace founded the Reader’s Digest Association in 1922.
Their vision for the company was based on a simple notion that people did
not have enough time to read all that was being published, and that people
needed a reading service that selected editorial material to inform, enrich,
entertain and inspire.

The result of the Wallaces’ vision was a pocket-sized magazine, sold at an
annual subscription that would provide an article a day of lasting
interest – and of enduring significance – in condensed form. Today the
magazine offers a mix of engaging original and republished content to appeal
to contemporary tastes. It is the largest-selling magazine in the world,
published in 48 editions and 19 languages, and sold in more than 60
countries.

So how much “enduring significance” did those Reader’s Digest articles contain? Well, it just so happens that I have a lot of those old magazines collecting dust on a top shelf in my bedroom. I thought it would be fun to look at one every now and then and see how significant and enduring it was.

Reader’s Digest, September, 1974.

Current events: a compilation of articles and opinions on the possible eminent impeachment of Richard Nixon (didn’t happen), another on the “rise and fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army” (whatever happened to Patty Hearst?), and still others on busing, Teamsters and the underworld, and the real cost of foreign aid. All of these pieces, while maybe of some historical interest, are dated, not enduring.

“The Colonies Must Be Punished!” by O.K. Armstrong is one of a series of articles, called Great Moments in American History: Bicentennial Feature; this particular article deals with the reaction in Britain and the colonies to the Boston Tea Party. I remember the Bicentennial celebration in 1976. On the Fourth of July, 1976, I was on my way to a youth evangelism conference in Dallas/Fort Worth. For a long time after that, through college, I had the T-shirt with bicentennial colors to prove it. Date yourself; where were you in July 1976?

Back to Reader’s Digest, September, 1974, there are some useful tips on how to make your houseplants behave, how not to get gyped by your auto-repairman, and how to reduce college costs. There’s the obligatory diet article, called “Beware the Diet Saboteur.” “Thousands of people are unable to reduce, obesity specialists find, because their kinfolk knowingly or unknowingly undercut their efforts.” The “psycho-analyze yourself” article is called “What Are You Afraid Of?” and gives us eight suggestions for coping with fear.

Merle Haggard and Sheik Ahmed Zaki al-Yamani get biographical profiles, not in the same articles.

The “special feature” at the end of the magazine is “Solzhenitsyn: Conscience of a Nation.” Enduring significance, yes.

He does not want his country remade in the image of the modern, free-enterprise West. In fact, to some of his admirers, this fierce clinging to everything Russian, including the old concepts of the Russian earth, Russian people, the spiritual values inherent in backward Russia, is one of his limitations as a man and a writer. But it is also one of his greatest sources of strength.

Finally, there’s a kidlit note:

Statement on the copyright page of Toolchest by Jan Adkins: “We have gone to considerable difficulty and expense to assemble a staff of necromancers, sorcerers, shamans, conjurers and lawyers to visit nettlesome and mystifying discomfort on any ninny who endeavors to reproduce or transmit this book in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission from the publisher. Watch yourself!”

By the way, Toolchest is a beautiful, old children’s book. It’s out of print, but available used from Amazon.