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Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Feb1

This adult novel is about mothers and their children and their bond to their children. It’s quite compelling and the issues that are raised are thought-provoking and worthy of examination. However, I have a couple of issues myself with the novel and its believability and the lack of believable motivation and awareness on the part of some of the characters. To talk about these problems, I will have to give some spoilers for the plot of the novel, so here is your warning. Here there be spoilers.

Mia Warren is an artist (photographer) and a single mom. She and her teen daughter, Pearl, rent an apartment in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Midwestern suburb that is, we are told repeatedly, the epitome of upper middle class respectability, predictability, and dullness. (Under the surface, however, there’s a lot of not respectable, unpredictable, and crazy stuff going on in good old Shaker Heights.) Mia’s and Pearl’s landlords are the Richardsons, particularly Elena Richardson, who lives in a luxurious two-story home in Shaker Heights with her four teenage children and her colorless and barely described husband. (You can forget the husband. He doesn’t really do much of anything in the story.) An old friend of Elena Richardson, Linda McCullough, attempts to adopt an abandoned baby. The baby, abandoned at a firehouse, is ethnically Chinese. In the meantime, Pearl develops a close friendship with the younger of the two Richardson sons, Moody, while Moody proceeds to fall hard for Pearl. Pearl, however, has a crush on the older Richardson, Trip, and eventually they get together. The oldest Richardson child, Lexie, eighteen, has a boyfriend who is black, and the two of them manage to get Linda pregnant. Mia, the avant-garde photographer, not only has a secret in her past that involves Pearl’s conception and birth, but she also befriends the Chinese baby’s real mother and tells her where her baby is, in the home of Elena Richardson’s friend, about to be adopted.

Despite all of these intertwining relationships and problematic characters, the title and the narrative indicate that the book is really not about any of these people as much as it is about the Richardsons’ fourth child, Izzy. Izzy is fifteen years old, and she has a fraught relationship with her mother because of her traumatic birth and the way her mother has treated her ever since—and Izzy’s reaction to that ill treatment. Izzy is a social justice warrior, and she just doesn’t fit into the staid, racially indifferent world of Shaker Heights. She especially doesn’t live up to her mother’s rule-following expectations. She gets along with Mia Warren much better than she does with her own family and her parents. So far, so good. We have a lot of interesting characters and situations to explore.

The first false note sounds when Lexie finds out that she is pregnant. She begins to dream of keeping the baby, of her and her boyfriend, Brian, going off to Princeton or Yale together and living in family bliss while raising their own child. However, she soon realizes that this dream is not likely to become a reality. Brian recoils at the mere suggestion of a possible unexpected pregnancy. Lexie can’t think of anyone she can tell about the baby, and so she schedules an abortion. Meanwhile, Lexie is feeling her own maternal instincts which display as an inordinate interest in the little Chinese baby, Mirabelle/May Ling, and a sympathy for the adoptive parents who are fighting to keep Mirabelle as the birth mother tries to regain custody of the baby she abandoned. Never once does Lexie even begin to think of her own baby and its own right to grow up in a loving home even as she is almost obsessed with the child that is at the center of the custody battle and that girl’s right to grow up in a loving home. Not once does Lexie say to herself, “Wait, maybe someone would like to adopt my child. Maybe my child has a right to life and a home and parents who love her and can care for her.” It’s a huge blind spot, and no one in the novel even brings up the obvious and painful parallel.

Then, there’s the ending of the novel. Basically, Izzy burns the Richardsons’ house down—on purpose. We’ve been told over and over throughout the novel that Izzy isn’t crazy, just misunderstood. Then, she takes Mia’s words about “how sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground and start over” literally, and she sets a bunch of little fires in all the beds in the house and burns it to the ground. Izzy then runs away from home to try to join Mia and Pearl who have left town for their own reasons, and Izzy’s mother vows to “spend months, years, the rest of her life looking for her daughter.” So, if Mother Richardson ever does find her wayward daughter, Izzy obviously needs some serious psychiatric help. People who are simply artistic and misunderstood don’t burn the house down for no reason other than a need to start over. Maybe the last paragraph of the novel is meant to tell us that Linda, too, is in need of some psychiatric help and lives in a fantasy world. She tells herself that Izzy, when they find her, will “be able to make amends.” I wanted to shake Linda Richardson and tell her that Izzy is delusional. Izzy won’t make amends because Izzy doesn’t even see that she’s done anything to make amends for. I can’t make a definitive diagnosis, but Izzy is ill and needs help. And maybe Linda does, too.

So, it’s an interesting novel with compelling characters, but none of the characters were people I could sympathize with or understand very well. Sex-driven teens whose parents preferred not to know what they were doing. Rule-keeping parents who can’t think outside their own little boxes. A rule-breaking parent who suggests vandalism to impressionable teens and then disclaims responsibility. A parent who discards her baby and then wants her back. Another parent who is too dumb to see her own blind spots in regard to societal expectations. And crazy arsonist Izzy. I just couldn’t find anyone very likable, but if these were real people, I would feel sorry for them. And this is me, being smug and patronizing, probably.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens, again

Jan22

I finished reading Bleak House this afternoon, and although David Copperfield is still my favorite among the works of Mr. Dickens that I have read, I must say that Bleak House is quite a story. It’s a fog-infused novel, fog throughout being the sign and symbol of the people in the story and their lives as they are caught up in the fog of a very complicated and never-ending lawsuit, Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

“The lawyers have twisted it into such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have long disappeared from the face of the earth. It’s about a will and the trusts under a will — or it was once. It’s about nothing but costs now. We are always appearing, and disappearing, and swearing, and interrogating, and filing, and cross-filing, and arguing, and sealing, and motioning, and referring, and reporting, and revolving about the Lord Chancellor and all his satellites, and equitably waltzing ourselves off to dusty death, about costs. That’s the great question. All the rest, by some extraordinary means, has melted away.”

It’s Shakespeare who wrote, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” as a halfway joking solution to the country’s problems. But Dickens must have had the idea in mind when he wrote such an indictment of the damage that being caught up in the system of law and courts and chancery can do to a man’s or woman’s soul, mind, finances, and health. Several characters fall victim to the vicissitudes of the courts and of lawsuits, while others manage to hold themselves above and at least somewhat untouched by the fog and snare of placing their hopes in a successful settlement of Jarndyce and Jarndyce or any other interminable lawsuit.

“In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.”

This double narrative echoes the many double or contrasting characters in the novel as well as the divided pairs that appear throughout the story. As I’ve already noted, the irresponsible, uncaring Skimpole is a contrast to the extremely passionate Mr. Boythorn, a butterfly versus a bull. Timid, balding, and generous, Mr. Snagsby is the opposite of the grasping, greedy opportunist, Mr. Smallweed. Mrs. Jellyby neglects her home, her husband, and her children while she spends all of her time and energy trying to care for the natives far-off Borrioboola; Her daughter Caddy Jellyby acquires a father-in-law who neglects his responsibilities by focusing on himself and his own comfort and “deportment”. Mr Jarndyce, Ester Summerson’s guardian, refuses to pay any attention the lawsuit that carries his name, but Richard, another party in the suit, becomes so obsessed with Jarndyce and Jarndyce that he loses his money and his health worrying over it. Sir Leicester Dedlock has a “family of antiquity and importance” and is said to “always contemplate his own greatness” while the poor, illiterate orphan boy Jo habitually answers any inquiry made to him with the words, “I don’t know nothink.”
Lady Dedlock is rich, bored and unhappy while Esther Summerson is relatively poor, busy, productive, and generally content. I could go on, but if you read the book you will have fun finding more contrasts between the various characters.

And what are these contrasting and complementing characters supposed to teach us? Maybe we can learn that we all run the risk of going to extremes, of our best qualities turning us into caricatures and even exaggerated hypocrites or immoderate fools. Passion is good, but too much passion about everything looks foolish (Mr. Boythorn). Charity begins at home. Good deportment or manners is less important than a good heart. Taking care of business is good, but immersing oneself in the ever-changing circumstances of a business over which one has no control (like the stock market) is a recipe for anxiety and depression. None of us really can say that we know everything or that we know “nothink”.

The contrast between Esther and Lady Dedlock says something different; it’s not about moderation as much as it is about the difference between a “good woman” and a bad one. Is there really much difference between Esther and Lady Dedlock? Is one perfect while the other is a classic fallen woman? Or are they both just women who are trying to make the best of their own circumstances, women who have been molded by the past and their own upbringing, and who make the best choices that they can make in a Victorian society/sinful world?

I’m definitely curious now to watch the miniseries, Bleak House. Since I know the basic plot of the story, I can watch for more contrasts in the TV version as well as looking to see how the actors, writers and TV producers characterize the various people in the novel. The Perfect Esther and the Ever-Generous Mr. Jarndyce as well as the Evil Mr. Tulkinghorn and the Sponging Skimpole may have more nuance and subtleties to their character in a televised production.

Well done, Mr. Dickens.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Jan15

I’m reading Bleak House by Dickens, finally. Partially inspired by the BBC TV show Dickensian, I am about two-thirds of the way through the book, and I thought I’d capture some thoughts here before they escape into the ether.

Bleak House is an odd book. One of the oddities occurs in almost the exact middle of the 740 page novel, when one of the ensemble of characters dies in a particularly weird and spectacular way: he spontaneously combusts. Spontaneous human combustion, or SHC, is a rare and controversial phenomenon in which a person catches fire and burns to death without an “apparent external source of ignition.” I thought maybe it was a Victorian superstition, but when I looked on Wikipedia there were recent reported cases cited of SHC from 2010 and 2017.I guess it’s a thing, although the explanations for the phenomenon vary.

Then, there are the characters who don’t catch on fire and turn into a pile of fat and ashes. They are odd, too. Dickens tends to use his characters to show the extremes of human personality. I’m also reading Karen Swallow Prior’s new book, On Reading Well, and she points out in her first chapter on prudence that “prudence, like all virtues is the moderation between the excess and deficiency of that virtue.” So, in Bleak House, Dickens has one character, Skimpole, who cares too little about his life, his livelihood, and his responsibilities. SKimpole is depicted as a childlike, carefree (or care-less) man who languishes about, happy and imperturbable, sponging off his friends, while sometimes being upbraided or even jailed by creditors. None of this bothers Skimpole who is content to live without any visible means of support and without caring from where the invisible means of his support, his friends, derives.

Enter Mr. Boythorn, another friend of the family at Bleak House, who has the opposite problem from Skimpole: Boythorn cares too much. He makes bombastic, exaggerated speeches throughout the book about how he would like to deal with anyone who inconveniences him. He “would have the necks of every one of them wrung, and their skulls arranged in Surgeons’ Hall for the contemplation of the whole profession.” Or he breathes “such ferocious vows as were never breathed on paper before” as to his intentions in this or that. Both men, Skimpole and Boythorn, are afflicted with a vice, an excess or deficiency of passion, but neither is very effectual in the world at taking care of his own affairs. Skimpole does nothing to take care of himself or anyone else, and Boythorn makes fantastic, exaggerated claims, threats, and promises that can’t possibly be carried out in real life while calmly feeding his bird and again, doing nothing effectual.

Neither man has the prudence that Ms. Prior defines in her book: “Prudence is the love that chooses with sagacity between that which hinders it and that which helps,” or “the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality.” Mr. Skimpole lives in a fantasy world where money, and possessions, and responsibilities are inconsequential and beneath his notice, while Mr. Boythorn cares deeply about anything and everything but lives in another kind of fantasy where words and threats make reality change and get better, the louder and more violent the threat the better. I have certainly been guilty, and seen others enjoy, both kinds of fantasy, to our joint detriment, although I think the passionate speechmaker is something closer to real prudence than the sponging dilettante. At least Mr. Boythorn has a house and pays his own bills.

More on Bleak House tomorrow.

Henry James, b. April 15, 1843

Apr15

“In Heaven there’ll be no algebra,
No learning dates or names,
But only playing golden harps
And reading Henry James.”
~Displayed at James’s home, Lambs House in Rye and said to have been written by Henry James’s nephew in the guest book there.

I doubt this little jingle is an accurate description of heaven, but if it were, then it would follow that even though such a heaven would be bereft of higher mathematics, it would involve a great deal of thinking. One can’t read Henry James without thinking, carefully. For instance, I found this excerpt of criticism by James, concerning William Morris’s poem The Life and Death of Jason, to be quite amusing after I thought about it and figured out what James was actually saying. (Maybe I liked it partly because I’m also not a fan of Mr. Swinburne.):

“Mr. Morris’s poem is ushered into the world with a very florid birthday speech from the pen of the author of the too famous Poems and Ballads,—a circumstance, we apprehend, in no small degree prejudicial to its success. But we hasten to assure all persons whom the knowledge of Mr. Swinburne’s enthusiasm may have led to mistrust the character of the work, that it has to our perception nothing in common with this gentleman’s own productions, and that his article proves very little more than that his sympathies are wiser than his performance. If Mr. Morris’s poem may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is simply of that of Chaucer; and to resemble Chaucer is a great safeguard against resembling Swinburne.”

I want to steal (borrow?) James’s template sometime and use it in my own reviews, for example: “XYZ fantasy novel reminds me of Tolkien and Lewis, and so even though its writing has been compared in reviews to that of contemporary and less talented fantasy authors, to resemble Tolkien and Lewis is a great safeguard against modernity.”

So happy birthday to Henry James, who resembles no other author, really, and has been called by readers and critics, the Master. His books and other works do require effort and some thought to be appreciated, but that’s certainly not a bad thing. It depends on the reader as to whether you think James is worth the effort.

Links and thinks for Henry James:

William Faulkner on Henry James: “One of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”

Ernest Hemingway on Henry James and his novels: “Knowing nothing about James, it seems to me to be the s–t.” Also, “he wrote nice but he lived pretty dull I think. Too dull maybe and wrote too nice about too dull.”

Oscar Wilde: “Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”

Christopher Beha, James and the Great YA Debate: “So few other writers offer the particular pleasures that James does.”

From Portrait of a Lady:

“It has made me better loving you. . . it has made me wiser, and easier, and brighter. I used to want a great many things before, and to be angry that I did not have them. Theoretically, I was satisfied. I flattered myself that I had limited my wants. But I was subject to irritation; I used to have morbid sterile hateful fits of hunger, of desire. Now I really am satisfied, because I can’t think of anything better. It’s just as when one has been trying to spell out a book in the twilight, and suddenly the lamp comes in. I had been putting out my eyes over the book of life, and finding nothing to reward me for my pains; but now that I can read it properly I see that it’s a delightful story.”

Top 10 Henry James novels by Michael Gorra, Publisher’s Weekly.

Henry James on life: “To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live.”

And, finally, a quotation that seems to epitomize James’s approach to writing and to the United States. (He moved to England and lived most of his adult life there.): “I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favour of doing it.”

If Mr. James’s novels may be said to remind us of the manner of any other writer, it is not an American author. And to resemble no other American author is a great safeguard against resembling Hemingway.

The Children Act by Ian McEwan

Jan26

McEwan’s book is about a judge who must decide a case concerning a minor whose Jehovah’s Witness parents don’t want him to have a blood transfusion that could save his life. It’s a book that garnered a lot of notice and a fair amount of praise back in 2014 when it first came out. I’ve been planning to read it for a while, but when I found a copy at Goodwill the other day, I decided to go ahead and do it. It’s only little over 200 pages long, so it’s not that much of a commitment.

The point of view protagonist is Fiona May, a British High Court Judge, almost sixty years old (my age!), and specializing in family law, custody disputes and decisions involving the “best interest or welfare of the child.” Unfortunately, at the same time that she is deciding a controversial case about a seventeen year old, Adam Henry, who is refusing, along with his parents’ approval and consent, a life-saving blood transfusion, Fiona May is also dealing with her husband who asks her permission to have an affair because their marriage has grown stale and sexless.

These two crises are supposed to be related somehow, I think, but really I could only see that they were related because they both were happening at the same time in relation to Fiona. The judge uses the complexities of the Jehovah’s Witness case to escape from her tumultuous thoughts about her broken marriage. And maybe she becomes personally involved in Adam’s life, visiting him in the hospital before making her ruling on the merits of the case, as some kind of demonstration to herself to prove that she is not as cold and passionless as her husband accuses her of being.(?) Otherwise the two plot strands are really separate events, and Fiona is curiously passive in both her relationship with her husband and her relationship with the boy, Adam. And yet, at the same time, as a judge, she plays God and berates herself for not being all-knowing and all-wise enough in her chosen role.

I thought the novel brought up many interesting themes and questions. How is a secular court to decide what is the “best interest” of a child whose parents can’t agree? Especially when religious doctrines and secular philosophies clash, both the religion and “philosophy” are deeply held beliefs, and the court cannot favor one over the other. But, of course, it inevitably does favor one religion over the other (secular) religion because the court, or the people who administer justice, have their own religion, usually secular, and their own values, usually valuing peace and safety and enjoyment in this life over any eternal values that some religions may claim to hold as more important. Thus, Adam’s fidelity to his convictions as a Jehovah’s Witness, a faithfulness which he believes will usher him into eternal life and right standing with God, is not as important as his earthly physical life which is in danger unless he has the blood transfusion.

The book doesn’t really solve the dilemma of competing worldviews and values, but it does give the reader something to think about. The secondary plot having to do with Fiona May’s marriage is less interesting and not so thought provoking.

Mandala by Pearl S. Buck

Jan23

Oh, my. I have read and enjoyed several novels by Pearl S. Buck, but this 1970 novel set in in India wasn’t one of them. I did read about 4/5 of the story before I skipped to the ending and put myself out of my own misery.

The book presented such a cliched view of India, of Americans, of British, of priests, of men and women, of sex and sexuality. The entire book was hard to read, not because it was philosophically difficult, but because it wasn’t—but tried to be. Prince Jagat, the male protagonist, is a man of the “new India”, full of ideas about how he will fit his life into the changes that have come about since the ending of the British Raj. And yet he expects his wife and his daughter to passively respond to his every whim and demand. And for the most part, they do.

Other cliches and stereotypes include the bluff, good-hearted American Bert Osgood; the mysterious and beautiful American lady Brooke Westley (really, Westley because she’s a Westerner, get it?); the rebellious daughter Veera who eventually gives in with a pout; the ghostlike Moti, Jagat’s wife, who glides about in her traditional sari, drinking tea and mumbling wise proverbs; Father Francis, the priest who has sublimated his sexuality in doing good works among the poor; and of course, beautiful, mysterious, esoteric India itself. Common Indians are “poor but happy”, uneducated, stuck in the past, unwilling to give up customs and religious practices that are damaging to their own well-being, but at the same time essential to their Indian heritage. They are stuck between the past and modernity, and no Westerner can truly fathom the depths of the history and heritage that have made the Indian culture what it is. Ah, it is a mystery.

300+ pages of Eastern mysticism combined with agnosticism, adultery and religious speculation is just too much. The end: “Believing and unbelieving, he gave a great sigh. ‘I do not know,’ he said, and believing and unbelieving, he went his way.”

10 Best Adult Fiction Books I Read in 2017

Jan22

News of the World by Paulette Jiles. It’s a surprise, even to himself, when in Wichita Falls Captain Jefferson Kidd agrees to deliver ten year old Johanna Leonberger to her relatives near Fredericksburg. Johanna has been a captive of the Kiowa for four years, and now the girl has been recovered. But, unfortunately for her, Johanna still believes she is Kiowa, but the Indians don’t want her back and the only choice Johanna has is whether or not to go quietly to her unremembered relatives’ home in German country.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. A lovely novel about enduring suffering and finding one’s place in the world.

Safely Home by Randy Alcorn. American businessman Ben Fielding discovers the truth about the persecuted church in China when he goes to visit his former college roommate, Li Quan.

The Glorious Cause by Jeff Shaara. A fictionalized history of the American revolution as seen through the eyes of George Washington, Nathaniel Green, Benedict Arnold, the Marquis de Lafayette, British Generals William Howe and Henry Clinton and Charles Cornwallis.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett. Dr. Annick Swenson is working, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, on a fertility drug that will revolutionize the world, if it can be brought to market. The trouble is that Dr. Swenson can’t be bothered to communicate with the pharmaceutical company that is sponsoring her work and that hopes to make a fortune by selling her discovery. The company has already sent one person down to Brazil to find out what’s going on, Anders Eckman. But he’s disappeared, reported dead. Now, they want Dr. Marina Singh, a researcher who worked with Eckman, to go to Brazil, find out exactly what happened to her friend and colleague Anders Eckman, and bring back a firm timetable for the completion of research on the fertility drug.

Frederica by Georgette Heyer. Solid Regency romance with strong characters and witty and slangy repartee. I liked the romantic leads quite a bit, and I even felt sympathy for the ingenue parts, played by Frederica’s sister Charis and her crush.

The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman. World War I veteran Tom Sherburne, returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a small, isolated island off the coast of western Australia. He marries a local girl, Isabel, and although the marriage is happy, the isolation of the lighthouse leads Isabel to make a fateful decision.

Kindred by Octavia Butler. Dana, a twentieth century black woman, is transported back in time to the early nineteenth century in a slave state where she is forced to decide again and again whether she should do something to save the life of a young white slaveowner, Rufus.

Demelza by Winston Graham. This second book in the Poldark series ends with death, destruction, and loss. From its hope filled beginning with the birth of a child for Ross and Demelza Poldark to the end when all is dark with only a hint of light in the last line of the novel, the story is an engaging look at late 18th century Cornwall and its politics, characters and social customs.

Jeremy Poldark by Winston Graham. The third book in the Poldark saga.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Jun17

As I was reading this book, I remember thinking, “This story reminds me of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Then, I went to Goodreads to log the book as having been read, and there I discovered that several other people noticed the similarities to Conrad’s classic story. Perhaps Ms. Patchett intended to follow after Conrad, in a feminist, post-colonial setting along the Amazon rather than the Congo. At any rate, she did have a harder time taking her characters into the unknown. With our twenty-first century technology, we at least think we know everyone and everything and can communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

“I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of cellphones. I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters. So I have to stand on my head to contrive a plot in which the characters lose their cellphone and are separated from technology.” Ann Patchett interviewed in The Washington Post, June 17, 2011.

So, Ms. Patchett’s protagonist, Dr. Marina Singh, turns out to be particularly absent-minded and tech-averse, unable to hang onto her cell phone or make it work for any length of time. Accept that plot/character device and go on.

Dr. Annick Swenson is working, in the heart of the Amazon jungle, on a fertility drug that will revolutionize the world, if it can be brought to market. The trouble is that Dr. Swenson can’t be bothered to communicate with the pharmaceutical company that is sponsoring her work and that hopes to make a fortune by selling her discovery. The company has already sent one person down to Brazil to find out what’s going on, Anders Eckman. But he’s disappeared, reported dead. Now, they want Dr. Marina Singh, a researcher who worked with Eckman, to go to Brazil, find out exactly what happened to her friend and colleague Anders Eckman, and bring back a firm timetable for the completion of research on the fertility drug.

Dr. Singh, of course, finds that getting in touch with her old professor, Dr. Swenson, is not as easy or uncomplicated as it looked to be from far away in good old Minnesota. And once she does arrive at Dr. Swenson’s camp among the Lakashi people, Marina Singh is embroiled in a web of competing interests and secrets and lies that threatens to keep her in the Amazon jungle for the rest of her life or perhaps end her life prematurely, as happened to her colleague, Dr. Eckman.

Some of the episodes and plot developments in the book certainly stretched my credulity and my ability to suspend disbelief, but to list these rather unbelievable coincidences and character actions would be to spoil some of the “wonder” of the story. As a reader either you decide to go with it, or you put it down. I read to the end, and although I didn’t like certain aspects of the ending very much, I still found that the book gave me much to think about:

Would it be a good thing to have a drug that enabled women to continue to have children into their fifties and sixties and beyond? Why is it that women lose their fertility in their mid-forties? Would women’s lives be improved by such a drug? Would the children who resulted from such an innovation be better off or worse of than children who are conceived and raised while the parents, especially the mother, are relatively young?

Is it really important to protect “native” cultures from the influence of modern Western culture? How important? Should we withhold what we consider to be life-enhancing technology and medicine from those native peoples in the interest of protecting their way of life? Does this novel perpetuate the myth of the “noble savage” living in a sort of paradise and the intrusive white colonialists coming to despoil and exploit those indigenous peoples? Or is it a myth?

What does this book have to say about our current Western cultural habit of putting off child-bearing to farther and farther into a woman’s life span? Is this a good idea, and should we change our biology, our biological clock so to speak, to accommodate the choice to delay child-bearing, if we can? When we abort our babies and use contraception to avoid conceiving them and delay marriage, are we doing anything different from the people in the book who work to extend women’s fertility and child-bearing years into old age?

I didn’t really like the ambiguity of the ending in this novel, but I suppose it was necessary to make it a “literary” novel. I’m low-brow enough to like all of my loose ends tied and questions answered at the end of a book, but I know that’s not necessarily in vogue in literary circles.

Fans of Patchett’s other novels, of The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will probably find State of Wonder to be to their taste as well.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Mar2

I read and reviewed this slim novel back in 2012, and since it’s supposed to be coming out as a movie in March, I thought I’d repost, FYI. I’m wondering how well the movie will be able to capture the “unreliable narrator” point of view.

***********

I do believe SFP at pages turned nailed this one. (You’ll only want to read her thoughts after you’ve read the book.) It’s a short book, a novelette really, but the ending isn’t . . . exactly. Hence the title.

The book is only 176 pages long, but it tells the story of Tony Webster’s life from his perspective, which it turns out is somewhat skewed. Maybe. Tony doesn’t “get it.” The book raises the possibility that we’re all like Tony, that our memories are unreliable and we really don’t understand each other or the events of our lives very well.

The Sense Of An Ending won the 2011 Man Booker prize for literature. I think it well worth the the time invested to read it and think about it.

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.”

“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient— it’s not useful— to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

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The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

Feb8

Movies and books don’t usually make me cry. Even as I’ve become more emotional and easily moved in my old age, I still rarely cry in response to a fictional narrative. After all, it’s fiction, didn’t really happen.

Well, trigger warning, The Light Between Oceans made me bawl. In my bed at 1:00 in the morning as I read the ending to this beautiful, supremely sad, and emotional story, I cried, silently so that I wouldn’t wake up my sleeping husband. The themes of brokenness and loss and self-sacrifice and again brokenness were so poignant and so very, very sad.

Set just after World War I came to a close, the story is about a veteran of that war, Tom Sherburne, who returns to Australia and takes a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a small, isolated island off the coast of western Australia. While Tom is on “shore leave” form his lighthouse duties, he meets a local girl, Isabel, and the two of them marry and go to live at the lighthouse where they will stay, just the two of them, without company or leave for years at a time. The real story begins when Isabel is down by the shore and hears a baby’s cry.

I have always identified with these quotations from Gone With the Wind:

“Perhaps I want the old days back again and they’ll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.”

Rhett Butler to Scarlett: “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken – and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.”

Or this horribly frightening and prescient quote from Cry, the Beloved Country:

–I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it.
He was grave and silent, and then he said sombrely, I have only one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

Brokenness.

We do live in a broken world. And sometimes things are so broken that there is no way to pick up the fragments and glue them back together. In The Light Between the Oceans, that kind of brokenness and tragedy comes to one couple, brought on by their own choices, wrong choices, but also very human and understandable choices. I don’t really want to tell anyone too much about this story, except that it is very sad, very real, and very good—-all at the same time. Thank you to whoever recommended it to me.

Thank God that my Jesus makes all things new. We live in a broken world, and sometimes that world is falling down about my ears. And many, many times it is broken through my own fault, my own bad decisions, my own sin. But my God promises, through Christ, to make all things new.