book by Daniel Handler

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I was in a workshop in grad school and the workshop leader asked, “Why do you write?” She was asking for a grander summation of what we write for and the answer came more easily for me than I thought. I’m interested in and writing at love in all of its horrible and wonderful variations. I wrote romantic comedies for years, trying to get into the nitty gritty of that first blush, when things don’t work out, trying to get to the center of the horrible overwhelming awkwardness of dating and falling in love. My first novel is a romantic tragedy about trying to make love work when one of you is dead. My next about how making life choices despite love can screw things up—for generations.

So Why We Broke Up is totally up my alley. I’m not sure how Daniel Handler manages to fully capture the voice of a teenage girl—being a dude and all–but Min’s voice is genuine, immediate, awkward, terrified, clever, funny and fully herself. The book is in second person—only not. Second person irritates me for long patches, but Handler uses it as a launching point for our story. Ed, the object of Min’s love and the reason for her broken heart is the “you” in this story as Min recounts the relationship—ostensibly in a letter. But while Min addresses Ed directly, Handler is careful to reserve second person for dramatic effect and to flow back into Min’s first person account of things.

Min is delivering a box of memories collected from her relationship with Ed, the high school basketball co-captain. Each chapter begins with a picture of said object, illustrated beautifully, in vibrant color by Maira Kalman. Movie tickets, beer caps, rose petals are the detritus of a relationship clearly gone awry. I had a bit of burning covet over this device, as I’m enamored of the way physical objects can become milestones in emotional territory and I touched on it in a piece of flash fiction. But there’s covet and there’s “wow you really wrote the shit out of that.” Handler really wrote the shit out of that and with the bright and painted images given extra weight through the stories behind them, my hat is off.

Another device I totally covet, is Min’s world of old movie references. This was an affliction of my teenage years—okay, and my twenties—and maybe a little bit now. In the novel I’m revising, a woman in her twenties is plagued by the same tendency as Min—to transpose movie life onto real life, her affection for movie actors onto real people. But Handler took it one step further and creates a fictional world of old movies complete with titles, plots, stars and real-life tales. There is such singularity to each of Min’s movie references, sometimes deliberate, sometimes off-hand, that they have a truly authentic ring: “Lottie Carson sleeps in the igloo alone and Will Ringer, frost on the beard he’ll shave off for her, because she asks him to, because he loves her—he sleeps with the dogs.” (p.29.) In that one line, Handler creates not only a vivid old film, but Min’s mooning, breathless, girlish and romantic lens through which to view it. Handler could have taken real older movies and thinly disguised them, but that would have taken the reader off the page. Instead, he creates these hilarious and delightful fictional movies that broaden the fabulousness of his main character.

But the book goes beyond devices and is a terrific reminder that while we can litter our prose with clever asides, funny moments and vivid objects, the characters at the book’s center and the various ways in which they do and don’t get what they want are where the heart of a story lies.  This book has a strong beating heart and it is Min’s. She carries us from first infatuation, through awkward love, to social pressure and inevitable breakup in terrifying, exhilarating, mortifying and genuine moments. Every secondary character in her life, from her best friend and gourmet cook Al, to Ed’s wry and clever sister or his worldly slightly trashy ex-girlfriend is vivid and genuine. While these are high school characters we recognize enough for them to resonate, they are their own people on the page.

And while Min has these “quirky” (I hate that word, usually applied in a condescending way by people who find quirky “cute” or who say “interesting” when they really mean “weird”—but would doubtless be applied by one of Ed’s friends, and therefore fits) qualities, it is her raw, close emotion that makes her so real. Like any rapidly growing exposed-nerve teen she can become consumed by her own self-loathing doubt, “I’m not a romantic, I’m a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I’m smart. I’m not something anyone should know. I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned and pretended I didn’t recognize.” (337)

Handler creates such a balance of clever and real, hilarity and heartbreak that coveting can only get us so far. Time to get back to work.

annotation by Diane Sherlock

Facebook brought me to THE FAMILY FANG. I’ve been fortunate to experience the acquaintance and generosity of some well-known authors, including Nick Hornby. He posted that THE FAMILY FANG was his favorite book of 2011. Since my mentor, Rob Roberge, recommended I read Hornby as I was writing my own comic novel, WRESTLING ALLIGATORS, I was curious to read Hornby’s recommendation. I was not disappointed. THE FAMILY FANG is a lot of fun. It also illustrates one of Roberge’s maxims: funny and sad go together in order to make funny work. 

A short digression… in college, I attended a theater conference in Los Angeles and within it some performance art pieces (and I use that term loosely). I sat next to David Antin as he apologetically passed me a pile of rabbit droppings on a silver platter. That was one “performance” without a point and even the lack of point wasn’t the point – it was just bad. Anyway, I attended my share of odd performance art and avant-garde plays in New York and L.A. and met people like Caleb and Camille Fang, the performance artist parents of the novel. Wilson nails it.

Camille and Caleb use their children, Annie (Child A) and Buster (Child B), in their pieces. Examples: Annie on guitar, singing with Buster as they sit on the street beside a guitar case with the sign, “Our dog needs an operation. Please help us save him.” As the “piece” develops, a man heckles her, ending in shouts and a smashed guitar. That man is of course her father, unknown to the “audience.” There are also pieces featuring Buster in drag to win a beauty contest and one with the children complicit in a fake shoplifting. Some pieces are innocent, some are exploitive, and some are cruel.

For the parents, “art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.”  Everything is in service to Art. The parents are oblivious to the effect of their lifestyle on their children, but mirroring them are two children who are oblivious to the gifts (awe, wonder) their parents have provided them in the midst of the pain. It is no surprise that though Annie and Buster try to create lives for themselves, they fail and return home. This delights their parents. “We’re a family again,” their dad cries. “This is what the Fangs do. We make strange and memorable things.” Their mother adds, “We distort the world; we make it vibrate.”  

The cycle of art begins again, but then the parents vanish at a roadside stop, apparently the victims of foul play. Or are they? Is it art or did something actually happen to them? This mystery propels the reader forward as Wilson explores the limits of familial relationships. The questions surrounding their disappearance that he sets up so well – well enough that the reader can imagine the book going either way – is something I want to explore in my own writing. I haven’t used the reader’s participation and curiosity to the degree that Wilson has here. He not only keeps ratcheting up the stakes, but creates tension in his use of our revulsion over the performance pieces even as we are sucked into fascination over what will happen, with the parents’ elation, and the children’s emotions over the outcome, good or bad. He makes great use of the small telling details that enhance a good story, “Annie felt her fingers snap into fists…then she felt Buster’s own hand slowly uncurl her fingers until they were straight and steady.”

Fine details, vivid characters, an outrageous yet realistic premise that builds over the course of the narrative with increasing stakes add up to an entertaining book that resonates more deeply – and ends with more impact - than one might expect from a comedic novel. Funny and sad indeed.

annotation by Talya Jankovits

I am not proud to admit this, but sometimes I get writer’s envy. When I got word of Téa Obreht, I almost fell over with jealousy. Born the same year I was and she was already published in places such as The New Yorker, Harper’s and The New York Times, as well as voted in for The New Yorker’s “20 under 40″ and The National Books Foundation’s “5 under 35″. Her novel, The Tiger’s Wife, is a New York Times bestseller, a 2011 National Book Award Finalist and the winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. So you better believe that I, with a handful of modest online publications (thank you Annotation Nation!) and a novel still four years in the making, watched my hands grow green when I picked up her novel. I tried to put petty jealousy aside when I began her book and instead set out to learn from a peer and figure out what she did that I need to do. Surprisingly, I also figured out what she did that I don’t want to do.

Without sounding condescending, (and really, how could I, she’s the one with a national bestseller, I’m the one still pulling out repetitive clichéed imagery from my novel) Obreht’s writing felt beyond her years. I was enthralled with her imagery, her description, moments of writing that made me keep glancing again at her very young looking photo in the back of the book, trying to convince myself that yes, this young woman really wrote these sentences. She captured the young, the old, the foreign, the magical and she delivered lovely word by word fresh imagery, rich metaphors and breathtaking descriptions. While recently revising my own novel, I cringed with shame when a generous reader pointed out that I had used “thin lips” about a half dozen times in a dozen pages. Language is vast and supple with variety and Obreht utilizes all of it in her novel. It was a good kick in the writer’s gut to remind me that language is endless and profoundly important, you don’t want to just write a story, you want to write a story well, and write well Obreht did. But that isn’t enough to earn you the kind of acclaim that The Tiger’s Wife earned Obreht, and I’m sorry to say but the buck stopped there for me.

Obreht is a storyteller, that’s for sure. She can tell a story in a post war-torn Balkan country, she can paint you a tiger’s wife and a deathless man and she can lead you to a small village with big superstitions and she can capture the persona of the young and the old, but despite her ability to captivate me in various chapters, I was constantly left with questions, holes and confusion. Where Obreht soared in writing, she slumped in plot. Chapter chunks seemed like short stories strung along with barely a thread connecting them. The main character, Nadia, is on a quest to understand her grandfather and his death but all Obreht did was lead me down a wild goose chase of story clumps that dizzied me and left me wondering exactly what the novel was about.

As a reader and a writer, the importance of plot to me is incomparable. My own novel stretches across time, jumps point of view and countries. Something I am very aware of is being sure that everything comes together, that I am writing a story in which I am posing questions that get answers, that everything is serving a driving purpose towards the ending, in other words,  that a novel is taking form. And no matter the novel, no matter the plot, be it linear or non-linear, but it in various POVs or one, there should always be a beginning, middle and end. There should always be continuity, regardless of structure. Even if plot plays second fiddle to language, it still needs to be addressed cohesively. Obreht had too many pages of opportunity to fix her plot blunders and it made me wonder about the value of editing, revision and clarity of mind. Putting writer’s envy aside, I was disappointed with what, at the outset, felt like a promising read.

Whether or not I’ll ever make the New York Times National Bestseller list, I do hope to achieve smaller and more doable accomplishments, such as completing a novel where I can attain the same level of language as Obreht, yet remember the importance of something as basic as the purpose of plot. In writing, it all matters.

annotation by Kate Maruyama

In Blueprints for Building Better Girls, Elissa Schappell’s  characters all have something more going on than they are telling us. The stories are revealed in intimate detail, but in careful increments. Schappell is brilliant at ensconcing the reader in place, a teenage bedroom with Jacques Cousteau playing in the background, a drunken college campus, a quiet well-to do home, a starving artists’ view of New York City–then she starts peeling back the layers. By the end of each story, we are left as changed as the characters, with more to think about.

In “Aren’t You Dead Yet?” Our heroine Beth, later B, later Lizzie, is in a mutually destructive self-aggrandizing artistic relationship with Ray, a painter. In his discovery of Beth’s “earlier self,” Ray creates her as playwright, as artist, as someone important, but can’t cope with her growth. He leaves her, but haunts her in later years and when Beth, now Lizzie runs into him again, she tries writing their story into a play. The problem is that in her version of the story, Ray dies. He’s a likely candidate, as he is now a junkie waiting for a heart donor. But when Ray doesn’t die, our narrator is left choosing the story over the reality. Within this one short story, Schappel creates a many-layered nostalgia littered with objects and random bits of art. Nothing is placed in this story accidentally. A stolen tube of cadmium red, and a Navajo blanket—one of the only things Ray takes with him when he leaves Lizzie–turns up at the end. Schappel also portrays the layers of love as seen through different ages and varying degrees of nostalgia. Lizzie’s view of Ray goes from starstruck and smitten, to re-smitten and nostalgic, to barely tolerant. Lizzie grows up, but Ray stays the same.

I am constantly investigating the various stages of love in my stories and novels, and Schappel is deft with managing love in its stages, fickleness and wistfulness. She has inspired me to peel back at least one more layer in what’s going on in my stories, to try to have things happening on different levels. So often I am stuck in the moment in front of me; pulling wires to get each moment to resonate through the others will take some work.

In “Are You Comfortable?” Schappel gives us Charlotte, home from college, knee deep in her WASP life. When her mother tells us that she has mono, we are pretty sure something more is going on with this girl. Charlotte is instructed to take her once intimidating and intelligent grandfather out for lunch—only now he suffers from dementia. He is the only one to whom she can come clean; she tells him of her date rape and how it’s destroyed her. Schappell is so careful in setting up this story, that we are lost with Charlotte in her day and her inability to get motivated to do much of anything. Schappell recreates the malaise of depression and jams it up against an old folks’ home and a pip of an old man who used to be intimidating. Things slide sideways as a simple trip to the diner becomes a mess and by the time we are delivered to the reveal, it is devastating.

Schappel has a way with final lines. So much has been written about opening lines, but the final line of a short story, once it has dragged you through the wringer, is every bit as crucial, if not more so.  We are left with Charlotte’s grandfather’s non-reaction to her enormous reveal. Her grandfather: “Peering out at the woods, hands pressed against the glass, he watched as the sun, red and round as a rubber ball, dropped behind the trees.” It was an enormous thing for Charlotte to tell her grandfather—but did it do any good? We are left to mull things over.

Another story’s last line:

“I wonder, when we’re done, what will be left of us.”

And:

“They stayed like that, not moving at all, until the streetlights began to come on.”

It is what our readers are left with, in short stories, that creates that final note. And that is seriously something I need to work on. Schappel had me going through my short stories and seeing those last lines as a missed opportunity. She has a facility with that last moment or image. That fade to black.

The characters in her stories overlap each other’s lives in a lighter way than in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, but in a way that’s quite enjoyable and useful in each story where it happens. I didn’t recognize the repeats in character until halfway through, but they bump up against each other’s lives, each living on the periphery of another’s story. In “Out of the Blue and Into the Black,” Belinda is a friend of Charlotte’s and worried about her after her rape, but doesn’t quite get around to helping her–directly. The story itself creates the deep-feeling, yet reckless college life; Charlotte’s being in that story shows the careless hold our well-intentioned selves have on the big things that happen at that age. And Charlotte’s predicament and Belinda’s concern over it forces Belinda’s paramour, Andy, onto a path he may not have otherwise taken.

I am always so eager to get onto new characters and new situations, I hadn’t thought of connecting them or repeating them other than to take characters in my novels out for a walk, hoping to jar something I couldn’t in the novel I was working on. But with Blueprints and Goon Squad, it is tempting to go back and ask some questions of these characters from other periods in their lives.

There are few short story collections I can read all in a row. So often I need to take a breather, a step away. The short story is a tricky medium and collections are trickier. But Blueprints for Building Better Girls was not only completely enjoyable, it was an absorbing page-turner that I finished within the week.

annotation by Marianne Woods Cirone

What would happen if you took a classroom full of talented, witty MFA students (okay, very talented students) and told them each to write a short story about three characters named  Gerard, Benna and Eleanor; a Renoir painting, a lounge at the Ramada Inn and a diner named ‘Hanks’?

The results would be likely to look like Anagrams by Lorrie Moore.  This book, which has been loosely called a novel, is closer to some of the permutations, or anagrams, if you will, that you would get from the writing assignment above.  This book is made up of various short stories about these same three characters:  Gerard, Benna and Eleanor, as well as Benna’s “imaginary” daughter, Georgie, which are told in different POVs and in different voices.   From first to third person point of view, from Gerard to Benna’s voice, Moore interweaves the various combinations available to tell the potential stories of these characters, offering a glimpse into the options that we have as writers when we approach a project with a given set of parameters.

In each of the stories, the relationships change, the character’s backgrounds and life choices change, yet there is enough consistency in the thread between the stories that they truly illustrate the vast array of possibilities which a writer has available when choosing to create her fictive world, even with a set of given parameters.  To the reader, the various situations and outcomes the book presents mimic  the world of life possibilities which we all at times ruminate over:  what would my life looked like if I had married him; if I hadn’t married him; what if he died; what if we had a child; if we didn’t?  Moore’s various stories play out varying scenarios across the lives of these three characters with different details, twists and relationships.

The thread of consistency which Moore offers is her sharp wit, her keen eye for detail and her borderline anguish over the constant small (and large) disappointments which life offers.  She ably interweaves a topic of grave seriousness, (e.g., a lump found in Benna’s breast) with laugh out loud humor:

“These are the words they used:  aspirate, mammogram, surgery, blockage, wait.  They first just wanted to wait and see if it was a temporary blockage of the milk ducts.

‘Milk duds?’ exclaimed Gerard.

‘Ducks,’ I shouted.  ‘Milk ducks!’

Moore’s rhythmic sentence structure contains the necessary cadence and use of metaphor that are necessary for good writing and excellent comic timing.  In one story, Benna’s best friend, Eleanor, just admits that she has slept with the man Benna is involved with:

“”Don’t you see, sisterhood has to be redefined,’ she [Eleanor] was saying.  ‘There are too few men in the world.  It’s a heterosexual depression out there.’

What I finally managed to say, looking at the Heimlich Maneuver poster, was, ‘So, this is sociobiology?’  She [Eleanor] smiled weakly, hopefully, and I started to laugh, and then we were both laughing; teary-eyed, our faces falling into our arms on the table, and that’s when I took the ketchup bottle and cracked it over her head.  And then I got up and wobbled out, my soul numb as a crossed leg, and Hank yelled something at me in Greek and rushed out from behind the counter over to Eleanor who was sobbing loudly and would probably need stitches.”

During this scene, Benna happens to be pregnant with Gerard’s baby (which she later aborts), and is also waiting to see the progression of a suspicious breast lump.  After the confrontation and the abortion, and the benign resolution of the breast lump drama, Benna offers a glimpse into the wisdom which will pull her through these experiences:

“But I believed in starting over.  There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of miracles.

If I could not be anchored and profound, I would try, at least, to be kind.”

Anagrams was written in 1986, when Moore was about 28 years old, and I so I wondered how her work and her voice had changed since that time.  Then, I remembered reading the short story, “People Like That are the Only People Here,” Moore’s semi-autobiographical short story about a young child’s bout with cancer, during my recent writing classes at the local community college (coincidentally, this type of educational institution was another topic which Moore addresses with great angst).

Moore has honed her skills of dealing with life’s seemingly random cruelties with sardonic wit as she addresses one of the most dreaded scenarios to face a human being:  a child experiencing a life-threatening illness and the apparent meaninglessness of it.    Upon review of this short story, I noted that Moore uses a distant third person, naming her characters by their roles rather than names:  the Mother, the Baby, the pediatrician, the nurse, the Radiologist, the Surgeon, the Husband (using capitalization as noted herein).  As the piece progresses, so do first names:  given to a couple nurses, then some of the other pediatric patients, their parents.   I see Moore’s distancing as both a means to emotionally disconnect from the rawness of the subject matter as well as a way of expanding the universality of the experience.

Both of these pieces by Moore show her incredible facility with language, her rare sense of timing, and her ability to explore the commonalities of human vulnerability.  While Moore seems to be wrestling with a deep underlying sense of disappointment with the events of  life that can never be understood, she demonstrates that these experiences can, at least, be profoundly be revealed—and processed– through the process of artistic expression which illustrates the human events that connect us all.

annotation by Stephanie Quinn Westphal

In his 2001 novel, Erasure, Percival Everett makes brilliant and sophisticated use of satire to examine questions of race, family and the vagaries of the publishing business in contemporary U.S. society. The author creates a compelling and conflicted protagonist, Thelonious Ellison (“Monk”), who functions as both the vehicle and the purveyor of the satire. The author uses his protagonist and his predicaments, the novel’s structure, and the parody Monk writes to convey different aspects of Everett’s incisive rage at the crippling nature of prejudice on individuals and society.

Everett embeds satire in the character of the protagonist himself. The novel is ostensibly the private journal of Monk, a highly intellectual professor and writer of fiction. Everett gives Monk a trenchant, mocking wit. When the professor presents his predicaments, the author simultaneously uses them to illustrate larger social problems he wants to mock in order to change. Monk does not match many of our society’s stereotypes. He lists his “failings” as follows: he’s relatively athletic, but not good at basketball; he listens to “Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder”; he’s good at math, but he can’t dance. As Monk puts it:

“Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I’m not black enough. Some people whom the society calls white tell me the same thing.”

In particular, Monk is told he’s not black enough by editors, who have rejected his novels, and by reviewers, whom he has perplexed with his work. One reviewer compliments the excellence of one of Monk’s novels, but ends by saying,

“…but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience.”

It’s both funny and pathetically off point that this brilliant man is questioned because what he wants to write about isn’t considered “appropriate,” and Everett extracts every satirical gem from Monk’s perpetual “wrong in every context experience.” The professor’s quandary also illustrates an underlying irony of prejudice.

Everett also uses the novel’s structure to heighten the satire and ensnare the reader in the experience of prejudice itself. Everett employs the frame story structure in an audacious way. In the outer frame, Monk grapples with the issues of race and stereotyping which make it difficult for him to publish the sort of academic work and fiction he writes. Simultaneously, he is caring for his mother with Alzheimer’s, who is being “erased” by the disease, just as Monk’s individual self is being erased by society.

Enraged by the three million dollar sale of a novel called We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, Monk writes a parody. My Pafology, later renamed Fuck, is a hilarious, but deeply disturbing send up of what Monk calls “the shit that’s published” as authentic black writing and the public that gobbles it up. The inner frame is that story.

Everett takes the familiar device of the frame story structure, and uses it in an audaciously humorous way to expose and criticize the mostly unconscious prejudice and stereotyping most of us fall into despite our best efforts. Monk won’t sign his own name to Fuck and instead credits it to “Stagg R. Leigh.” When his agent asks if he’s serious about sending it out and it if should have an explanation, Monk replies,

“Send it straight,” I said. “If they can’t see it’s a parody, fuck them.”

Ironically, Fuck becomes a huge success, and Monk is embroiled in an ever more complicated scam in which he pretends to be the elusive, barely literate author, Stagg R. Leigh. The reading public can’t tell it’s a parody and gives the fictional Stagg R. Leigh the kind of fame and respect that continue to elude Monk. Readers of Erasure are put in the very uncomfortable, but edifying position of reading the inner story, Fuck. Everett holds this uncomfortable mirror up to us until we are forced to confront our own limitations and biases. We come to care for the inner story’s central character, Van Go, no matter how exaggerated a character he is. Everett employs this ancient story form, the frame story structure, to take his readers, laughing uneasily all the way, to a more profound and disturbing understanding of the pervasive and destructive nature of unconscious prejudice – and their own unwitting participation in its perpetuation.

It’s brilliant and effective satire, channeling Everett’s considerable rage into a biting and effective call for change. By employing his incisive anger as subtext, as the emotional through-line that underpins the story’s plot (and the novel within the novel), the author transmutes into a far more powerful and effective tool than if the rage had been simply stated.

The novel also stands out for the inventive, subversive way the author uses language in this story. Everett confidently claims a wide range of linguistic territory – from formal, academic diction to informal, colloquial speech. He moves in and out of these linguistic counties with elegance and savoir-faire. His approach in this novel also clearly illustrates the difference between the limited power of a polemic versus the far greater persuasive power of an experiential novel.

In fiction it is often hard to communicate raw, yet nuanced ideas about race, injustice, or persecution without offending or alienating the very audience the author wants to persuade. Erasure succeeds brilliantly because Everett embeds his sophisticated satire in a form that both amuses and challenges, enticing us to do what none of us really want to do: confront our own ignorance and unconscious prejudices. He never lets us off the hook, but he takes us on a wild, bracing ride before he catches us and kills our old, more primitive selves so that we can be reborn in a new state of greater awareness and enlightenment.

After reading Erasure, I am inspired to play with the frame story structure to see what can be achieved within that particular narrative form. Like Everett, I’d like to experiment with embedding one narrative inside another, especially if they’re told in distinctly––if not jarringly—different voices, points of view, and tones. What effects can be achieved through such juxtaposition? How would the strictures of this particular narrative form limit and torque the story? I’d like to figure out how to use this nesting structure to make my novel more potent and emotionally resonant for my readers. Finally, I’d like to steal Everett’s tactics for transmuting rage, through wit and raw intelligence, into biting satire with the capacity to take readers beyond understanding to actual change. How do you make your writing crack open someone else’s brain and heart so that they finish your novel bigger, better and more humble than they were before? Now that’s art.

annotation by Nancy Conyers

Disquiet, like Kate Jennings’ Snake, is a short novella that illustrates that what the author leaves out is as important as what she chooses to leave in.  Disquiet is only 121 pages and Leigh has chosen to tell her story through spare, yet vivid, details which allude to a plot and to a back story.  It forces the reader to pay as close attention to what is off the page as to what is on the page, and to do more work than in reading a conventional, longer novel where the writer does the work for the reader by filling in the plot.

Disquiet is the story of an Australian woman, Olivia, referred to as ‘the woman,’ and her two children, ‘boy’ and ‘girl,’ who flee Olivia’s abusive husband for her childhood home, a chateau somewhere in France.  When they arrive at the rambling chateau (which, itself, becomes a kind of character in Leigh’s book), Olivia’s mother is waiting for Olivia’s brother Marcus, and his wife Sophie, who are coming home from the hospital after Sophie has given birth to a stillborn baby(referred to as ‘the bundle.’)

In a few paragraphs, Leigh slips in small, razor sharp details that tell the larger story the reader is meant to figure out.  Olivia, speaking to Marcus about her marriage, “declared, simply, ‘I am murdered’” to describe her years of abuse (20).  Marcus, talking about Sophie trying to have a child, lets slip, in the middle of the conversation, “There was…another woman.  There is…another woman,” then goes right on speaking about the fertility treatments Sophie is going through (20).  Sophie will not give up the bundle and Leigh shows us Sophie’s mental state with this spare detail: “Sophie dipping her little finger into the soup and bringing it to the bundle, trying to feed it.” (23)

There is so much that is unspoken in Disquiet, but we, as readers, feel intensity from the way Leigh has chosen to portray her characters.  We feel their profound despair and unhappiness and the traumatic, horrid events of their lives in a disturbing, disquieting way.  This is a book that gnaws at us.  The gorgeousness of Leigh’s prose, coupled with the controlled sparseness of her details, stay with you long after you put the book down.

Leigh took nine years to write Disquiet after her first book, The Hunter, was published.  She began this book when she won a mentorship with Toni Morrison in 2002 from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.  When asked why she took so long to write the book, Leigh often paraphrases the poet Elizabeth Bishop who said that scientists and artist are alike in that they are prepared to waste effort.  Leigh told me at the Shanghai Literary Festival that, to her, wasted effort is an exploration and that when she sets out to write something, it is an exploration and she can’t be guaranteed of a result.

Disquiet is the perfect example of why we should explore as writers and allow ourselves the beauty of wasted effort that leads to discovery.

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I have been a Capote fan since my early twenties, when reading In Cold Blood inspired  me to read  his entire oeuvre from Other Voices Other Rooms straight through to the drug-addled Answered Prayers and, more recently, his rediscovered manuscript, the ostensible precursor to Breakfast at Tiffany’s: Summer Crossing.  Capote was a hard working  writer who cared a lot about sentences and craft and was a painstaking revisionist–something we all can remember as we gasp over good writing: it usually took a lot of drafts to get there. He had a way of maintaining his own sharp observational lens throughout an enormously long career, constantly re-evaluating his work and always attempting to become a better writer. His entire introduction to Music For Chameleons which was published after his most acclaimed book, In Cold Blood, is a disclaimer that he had been wrong all along, he had only just now, figured out how to write. His non-fiction character portraits in that book and in magazines became the model for the way to do it. I doubt any celebrity piece in Vanity Fair doesn’t owe a nod  to Capote’s ability with character observation: read the book’s “A Beautiful Child” or his piece on Elizabeth Taylor. He had a keen eye for the nuances of humanity and used them in his fiction and non-fiction until, sadly, drugs and alcohol clouded his ability.

I haven’t re-approached Breakfast at Tiffany’s for several years, not since re-examining In Cold Blood in graduate school or since reading Summer’s Crossing. But as the book’s fifty year anniversary is upon us, and, as I am struggling with a heroine in my novel-in-progress, I decided it was high time for a re-read.

I was surprised that descriptions of Manhattan, one of the few things that evidenced glimmers of brilliance in the troubled Summers Crossing (there was a reason the book was found in a box of trash left out on the curb), were spare in Tiffany’s. Instead of merely providing a tableau,  Capote brings up descriptions of New York to provide us with the heightened awareness a person feels when something extraordinary happens. We are so often told to describe our surroundings in fiction, we tend toward the standard long-shot here-we-are-and-here’s-what-it-looks-like introduction. But Capote opens his novel thus,

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”(1)  He goes on to describe the apartment itself.

It is not until, in the glow of getting his first story published, the narrator goes out on the town with Holly that we were given the scope of the island, “That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird.” (45) and our narrator leads us on a grand montage from drinking Manhattans in a bar, down Fifth Avenue,  through a beautifully described Central Park finally landing in Woolworths.

Setting can create mood, foreboding and romance, but it is used so subtly here to give us a character’s sense of ebullience, that moment in life where, out of simple elation, we pay more attention to our surroundings.

Holly herself, made an icon by Audrey Hepburn’s captivating and breathless performance in the movie, is a great deal more complicated in the book. Lulamae Barnes was orphaned as a child and sexually molested in foster care; this is casually mentioned, “I’ve only had eleven lovers–not couning anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count. Eleven. Does that make me a whore?” (65) She is lured into marriage at fourteen in Texas to a widower with four children and manages to escape to New York to recreate herself as a fast-talking devil-may care socialite, Holly Golightly.

Capote has the eyes of his narrator to observe Holly’s goings on, but it is in her dialogue that we get to the heartbreaking poetry of a damaged person whose outrageous parties, most torrid love affairs or found fortunes won’t ever truly heal. In a toast to her long lost husband whom she sent back to Texas on a bus, she says, “Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc—it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.” (60)

When her brother Fred dies in the war, Holly has a vision that “the Fat Woman” has him, the Fat Woman being her version of Death. Holly loses a pregnancy with a Brazilian she was meant to marry, suffers a scandal, losing the promise of marriage along with the baby and our narrator tries to talk her out of fleeing to Brazil. She says, “And if you lived off my particular talents, Cookie, you’d understand the type of bankruptcy I’m describing. Uh, uh, I don’t just fancy a fade-out that finds me belly-bumping around Roseland with a pack of West Side Hillbillies. While the excellent Madame Trawler sashayes(sic) her twat in and out of Tiffany’s. I couldn’t take it. Give me the fat woman any day.” (80) Holly, despite her bravado, navigates life just this side of shattered.

The movie, needing to sell tickets, created a romance between our narrator and Holly, to round out a lovely ending. But in the book, this narrator’s love is not romantic, and describes something a great deal more particular and human : “For I was in love with her. Just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too.” (61) Capote so deftly describes a completely non-romantic infatuation that all of us have had flutter through our chests at least once.

Holly scrambles through life with more passion and lack of thinking than your average person and her nonstop clever dialogue and slapdash chic lifestyle makes her deeply appealing, but Capote maintains the difficulties our narrator has with Holly’s tremendous appeal and her myopic self-involvement. She is a complicated friend to have and more than once, he gives her up for lost.

Capote is not content with story clichés, nor character clichés.  This is no romantic love story, there is no simple solution. Holly is not your average tragedy waiting to happen. Holly is not the Heroine-Who-Cannot-Escape-Her-Past, nor is she the Live-Fast-Die-Young-Reckless femme fatale. She is not the girl, who, with a bit more polish, could have made a go of it in society, or in the movies. She is the corners and subtleties of fragile human existence and the simple scramble to get a toehold in this life.

Nor does she come to an untimely tragic end, or happy end. She is one of those larger personalities we encounter in life, one of those complicated, fragile friendships that never quite leave us. Our narrator eventually finds Cat, the feline Holly heartlessly threw out of a cab as she headed for the airport. Cat is well taken care of in a new home and the narrator tells us, “I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he’d arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.” (85) No further explanation, no solid answers. The novella ends.

As we struggle on with our individual characters, it’s important to remember that it is the original ones who last–the ones who don’t fulfill a role we’ve seen before, but go forward in whatever manner is consistent with their characters. Holly in all of her carefully wrought humanity and singular observations, in her brash decisions and cracking façade is an original. As I go back into a character with more depth, I need to remember that human stories don’t always have a predestined arc, that characters can grow, but stifle, too and that a simple human observation of an average day can overpower a character who follows a predictable more dramatic route.

book by Garth Stein

annotation by Lee Stoops

“To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live…When I am a person, that is how I will live my life.”

~ Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain (160)

Enzo is a dog; a dog, like any other – without a dexterous tongue or opposable thumbs. But he witnesses his life with the mind and intentions of a person. He knows that dogs are the last incarnation of souls before they become human, and he is ready – eager, even – to move into his next incarnation. But, his soul, as a dog, has a purpose and a lot left to learn, as is evidenced by one of the most touching, charming contemporary stories. Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants, wrote of The Art of Racing in the Rain, “[This story] has everything: love, tragedy, redemption, danger, and – most especially – the canine narrator Enzo. This old soul of a dog has much to teach us about being human. I loved this book” (from “Praise for The Art of Racing in the Rain” preceding the text). Gruen’s list of included elements in the book is dead on, though it’s her noting of what Enzo’s soul has to teach us that really hits the nail on the head: much.

The story opens in Enzo’s voice letting us know that, while he can’t speak, he can communicate. And, by the end of the first chapter, his personality and perception of humanity is clear and engaging, and already offering some foresight into the story and its tone.

“I close my eyes and listen vaguely in a half sleep as he does the things he does before he sleeps each night. Brushing and squirting and splashing. So many things. People and their rituals. They cling to things so hard sometimes” (8).

Stein’s created a terrifically reliable narrator in Enzo. He is clear on what he knows, thinks, doesn’t know, or confuses him. The typical unreliable nature of a first-person (or, dog) account goes out the window as Enzo honestly shares his witness and role in the Swift family’s life. And he sets up his story by evaluating himself and his species. “I like to think I came from a determined gene pool” (11).  Stein’s given Enzo charge of the Swift family from just before its inception throughout an unimaginable tragedy. Denny, Enzo’s master, is a semi-professional racecar driver. Stein uses Denny’s character, his and Enzo’s bond,

“I laid my head on his leg and looked up at him.

“Sometimes I think you actually understand me,” he said. “It’s like there’s a person inside there. Like you know everything.”

I do, I said to myself. I do” (61).

and Enzo’s love of racing as a way to deliver metaphor after metaphor for life and the human (or dog) experience. “But I am a racer at heart, and a racer will never let something that has already happened affect what is happening now” (75).

Stein’s success in the story lies in the true voice of Enzo and his ability to honestly and emotionally recant his experience and understanding of his place and his (and the Swift family’s) life. Language (and lack of) is the means, not the barrier, for a soul that can’t talk. “The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague” (288). Throughout the narrative, Enzo’s character and voice drive the story; at breakneck speeds and recovery paces, the dog works the reader through some of the most poignant examples of what it is to live, and how to prepare for what comes next.

Perhaps Stein’s greatest achievement in The Art of Racing in the Rain is Enzo’s reconciling of life as a racecar driver at heart, especially life when it comes in unexpected and derailing ways:

“A driver must have faith. In his talent, judgment, the judgment of those around him…himself…

As the gravel trap rushes at him, the driver must make decisions that will impact his race, his future…What is to be done?

The driver must accept his fate. He must accept the fact that mistakes have been made. Misjudgments. Poor decisions. A confluence of circumstances has landed him in this position. A driver must accept it all and be willing to pay the price for it. He must go off-track.

…At this moment, a driver feels tremendous crisis. He must get back on the gas. He must get back on the track.

…A winner, a champion, will accept his fate. He will continue with his wheels in the dirt. He will do his best to maintain his line and gradually get himself back on the track when it is safe to do so. Yes, he loses a few places in the race. Yes, he is at a disadvantage. But he is still racing. He is still alive.

The race is long. It is better to drive within oneself and finish the race behind others that it is to drive to hard and crash” (290-291).

With an impassioned narrator, wit, and sensitivity, Stein manages a story arc that is both smooth and satisfying, heart-warming and heart-wrenching. And by the end of the story, the reader is left asking the same question Enzo is left asking: “Have I squandered my dogness? Have I forsaken my nature for my desires? Have I made a mistake by anticipating my future and shunning my present” (315)? The answer for Enzo is as elusive as it is for anyone. But it’s also not what matters most. What matters most is understanding and living the truth: “The car goes where they eyes go” (321).

Of course, writers must the same dogged pursuit of answering those questions, and Stein’s success for other writers is the example of giving the story direction that’s worth following. Stylistically and structural, the story is sound. But it’s in the creation of the story’s narrator, the voice of Enzo that Stein accomplished something to which all writer’s aspire – an authentic and original voice, a sympathetic heart, a truly created and wholly pure, wholly winning protagonist. For entertainment’s sake, it would be foolish for any reader to pass The Art of Racing in the Rain. For writers hoping to one day write that one, true, open-hearted character, there are few examples out there that demonstrate it as well, as uncontrived, and as warmly.

annotation by Talya Jankovits

From the first sentence, I knew I was in for a writing treat. Franzen is so detailed that you can hardly go more than a few sentences without being greeted by a beautiful image, a clever metaphor or a breathtaking string of adjectives and nouns. Just after reading a few pages I wanted to run to my own novel and find ways to make it “prettier” to enhance my  images and descriptions, to pay attention to the sound of a screeching tire or the color of a mole on an elbow. I was so driven to write after reading that I did. I’m pretty sure that’s enough in it of itself to assert a bit of an infatuation. But infatuation is usually fickle.

My Contempt:
If I had to read one page more of this novel I would have thrown this book in the dishwasher, cleaned it up and made Franzen wash his mouth out with soap. About a quarter of the way through this book, I began to feel like I was out on a date with a gorgeous guy who was smart and funny, but by the time the appetizer arrives I realize he is dominating the conversation to hear himself talk about and assert his own cultured, well rounded intellect and opinion on just about anything. Franzen is a great writer, but at times I felt that entire scenes were inserted totally unnecessarily; I began to feel taken advantage of, as if Franzen created strikingly different characters only in order to assert himself in all things. The character of Chip seemed to be invented purely for Franzen’s philosophical appetite. I felt drained reading hypothetical conversations between Chip and his grad students that went on for pages discussing the ethical responsibilities in mass media commercialism. Greg was an opportunity to explore stocks and business (where I had to read through an entire conference on an imaginary drug with irrelevant characters participating in banter with the drug reps,) Denise was a field day for sexual appetite and food connoisseurship and Aurthur became less of a character and more of an excuse to explore scatological images. Reading this novel was like having my eyes held open and being force fed information. Now, either this actually happened – characters were created to feed Franzen’s frantic appetite for self assertion – or something went terribly wrong during editing.

I am currently in the revision stage of my novel and have gone through multiple drafts and something that comes up frequently is finding irrelevant scenes or lengthy narratives that don’t contribute to the characters, the plot or my readers need to relate to the characters and the plot. What frustrated me in Franzen’s novel is that I felt I was reading lengthy narrative that didn’t at all enhance the reading experience for me and left me feeling drained, so drained that all the beautiful writing I was so excited about at first began to fade before me and leave only the constant barrage of information. My lesson – don’t overload, everything in moderation. Even the luscious writing began to become too much.

My Compromise:
I thought annotating the novel would help me gain clarity on my perspective and writerly gains or losses, but I’m still as torn as before. There will be a second date – I will read Franzen again, to feed my need for glitzy, detailed writing but I will also remind myself during my revision process of the importance of staying honest to my characters and stories, small or great, and staying committed to making sure every page of my novel matters. Because at the end of a novel, its not how much you’ve written or how much you know, but how well you know what you write.

annotation by Kate Maruyama

My study of multiple character POV stories and pure impulsive curiosity led me to Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints and I’m very glad it did. It’s the story of a handful of teenagers wandering through a shaky time in their lives, careening off their various tracks and into each other. This makes it sound like a story that would meander in its telling, one of those coming of age tomes that becomes too enamored of its self-reflection to stay on track. But it’s not.

Henderson brings order to the structure and gives us life, up close, and characters we can grab a hold of. She manages to maintain tension throughout the book with action, ticking clocks and the subtle pattern she creates in the movement through the various voices telling their stories. When each new voice comes in, it is so close, nailed down with internal thoughts and observations, that the larger story becomes seamless. Henderson also has the deft ability to make her characters’ voices change as they grow and become more aware of life around them.

We open with Jude, lost in his small town moderately drug-abusing Vermont lifestyle with his best friend Teddy. When Eliza, Jude’s father’s girlfriend’s daughter (the obscurity of the relationship only emphasizes the delicate web of chance and relationships that drives these characters’ lives) comes to town, it results in Teddy’s accidental death which drives all of the players into a downward spiral and something else which ends up throwing Eliza and Jude together with Teddy’s brother, Johnny in a fully realized New York City of the 1980s.

Nothing is an accident and Henderson navigates a very human landscape of the ever changing definition of family, chance meetings, and that slippery world of growing up which can lead a boy from drug abuse to the hare krishnas to near marriage and out the other end into the beginning of life. She touches on history without proselytizing, bringing us the Tompkins Square riot of 1988 and the spectre of AIDS casting its shadow on New York.

Henderson slides smoothly in and out of POVs and miraculously avoids the pitfalls of multi-POV stories, keeping us engaged with each new page.  Even a brief departure into Jude’s mother’s POV is so carefully drawn and close that there is no worry in leaving the other characters: Henderson makes each page the place where you, as a reader, want to dwell.

It’s a challenge, while telling several different stories at once (as I am doing in my current novel) to maintain tension without using artificial means. I can only think that Henderson worked incredibly hard in the editing process, reshuffling and ordering the story until it felt right. She has the help of the ticking clock of a pregnancy and various smaller situations exploding in various characters’ lives, but we do jump around in time here or there, taking steps back into a prior day, or week,  or jumps forward.  It’s as if she approached the book musically. While it makes narrative sense, those little jumps in time and consciousness would be disorienting without a larger attention to rhythm and pace.  There is not a moment wasted in this tight, close novel.

As I go into a thorough rewrite of a rough draft of my novel, I hope to take out everything that is inessential, and perhaps to shuffle the deck a little, see if different parts of the story might go together for reasons greater than timing or chronology.  And most of all, I need to make sure that each characters’ voice is close and fully present in his or her section—to remember to pay attention to the world of the page.

annotation by Diane Sherlock

Foer deals with loss through a number of characters in the aftermath of 9/11, primarily through the eyes of the nine year old protagonist, Oskar, whose father died in the attack on the World Trade Center. There was something that rang a faint bell beginning with the spelling of Oskar and about 100 pages in, the book reminded me strongly of Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, another polarizing book. Count me in the ‘admire the writing, didn’t care for the book’ group on both counts. I had a far more negative reaction to The Tin Drum, but it didn’t help my reaction to this book - precocious child wandering through a landscape of loss, tambourine instead of the drum, aftermath of devastating act of man’s inhumanity to man. After this realization, my opinion of the book was colored because it seemed not so much homage (except in the tip of the hat to Vonnegut’s Dresden) as derivative. Most of the writing is very good, the organization of material less so, with the bedtime story about the Sixth Borough seeming more like a stand alone short story than part of this narrative. Foer’s use of repetition was for the most part irritating – “I gave myself a bruise,” “heavy boots,” and “Jose” were not unbelievable for a bright nine year old, just wearisome for me as reader.

Foer has many missed opportunities with the book and it reads like what it is, a book by a young writer with more reading experience than life experience. One missed opportunity was portraying the height of the Twin Towers. He writes about burning jet fuel and the choice to burn or jump (something I spent probably an unhealthy amount of time contemplating as I watched it unfold on TV and since). Years ago, I went to the top of the Towers and it seems like Oskar would have at some point either with his parents or school. It was stunning to step off that elevator and see that view. Some people couldn’t get off the elevator – it was too much like stepping out into space –  and I missed the sense of that in the novel. Other missed opportunities included the grandmother, who could have been the emotional heart of the book, but ended up feeling disconnected. With regard to the grandparents, it would have been nice if Foer had mimicked the areas of Something and Nothing in his narrative in those sections involving the grandparents’ story. Also, there was no satisfactory pay off for hiding the answering machine. It felt like it fizzled away when his mother said she talked to Oskar’s father on her cell. The other glaring missed opportunity was the lack of response by others to Oskar’s relaying of his father’s death. It’s as if 9/11 only happened to Oskar. Even though he’s an unreliable narrator and taking into account the limited perspective of a child, it seems likely that at least one of the people he told his story to would have replied with their own 9/11 story.

I liked most of the pictures, especially in reference to the picture book Oskar collected along the way. He’s on a scavenger hunt he thinks was set up by his father. The rest of the pictures didn’t bother me, but I found them unnecessary, thanks to Foer’s vivid descriptions. By the time I reached the flip book at the end, I was not engaged with the story and it had no real impact on me. This might also be because I had just read Amis’ Time’s Arrow and reread Slaughterhouse Five so rewinding was familiar.

As with All Families Are Psychotic, Foer did not convince me with the character of the mother. She was two dimensional and her reactions seemed off, especially after losing her husband and a child with obvious marks all over him wandering around New York City day and night. The cursory reference to hospitalization and therapy was just that, cursory. The scene when he hides the answering machine from her was poignant, but later when he truly hurts her, while painful, did not have that same kind of emotional resonance and by that point, I was hoping for it, for more to pull me in. Even if the mother didn’t keep track of him (and the explanation that she kept a closer eye than he was aware of seemed like window dressing toward the end), one of the other adults along the way should have behaved, well, more like an adult.

All in all, the book had its moments, but overall was a cautionary tale warning against gimmicks under the sheen of good writing. The ‘look at me’ quality of the writing could have reinforced the character of Oskar. Instead, much of the writing felt forced. It will be interesting to see how Foer develops as a writer after the white hot attention he’s received as a literary wunderkind and the fact he’s already used the two seminal events in living history for his first two books.

book by Jonathan Safran Foer

annotation by Telaina Eriksen

Michigan State University and East Lansing choose a book each year to read as a community. The 7,000-8,000 freshmen are given this book at their summer orientation and community members are encouraged to read the selection as well. In early fall, a month of activities surround the chosen book in the hope that students, faculty and community members intermingle at these events, giving students and East Lansing citizens something proactive to talk about… rather than fighting over parking places and witnessing public intoxication which often leads to public urination. The chosen author speaks at least twice (once to the community and once to the students and faculty of the university), there are writing workshops, related films are shown, and other sanctioned events dot the community calendar.

And while literary critic/Yale professor Harold Bloom doesn’t “like these mass reading bees…it is rather like the idea that we are all going to pop out and eat Chicken McNuggets or something else horrid at once” (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/nyregion/want-a-fight-pick-one-book-for-all-new-yorkers.html), I believe literary-centered activities help communities talk about important things… discrimination, stereotypes, wars, and other personal and societal tragedies. Just as all politics are local, so are all good books (with my insincere apologies to Harold Bloom).  The book chosen this year, in part because the committee wanted to promote discussion and commemoration of the 10th anniversary of 9-11, was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the story of Oskar Schell, whose father died in the collapse of the Twin Towers.

Having lived in this community for 25 years, my friends and acquaintances know of my book worm habits and often discuss books with me. Never have I received such a spate of negative and/or confused opinions about a book as this 2011 selection of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’ve received this response to the book while I am at the gym. Standing in parking lots. Workshopping in classrooms. Men and women alike approach me with utter bafflement and apprehension. Many book lovers had trouble with this book. As I began reading Foer’s lyrical, mythical tale, I understood their reactions.

This is not a linear narrative, though it is full of story. You don’t always know exactly what is happening and no, it is not always believable that a nine-year-old savant is being allowed to wander all over New York City with no supervision. It is not always believable that Oskar’s grandfather cannot speak, so he has had “yes” and “no” tattooed on opposite palms. It is not always believable that a nine-year-old can know about women’s “VJs” and their periods, but not know what the word intimidating means (p. 293). And perhaps it is unbelievable that a caring mother might not notice or comment on over 40 bruises on her son’s torso.

Foer does not break lines between different characters speaking and dialogue attributions are at a bare minimum. Visuals are scattered throughout the book, many a selection from Oskar’s scrapbook “Things That Have Happened to Me.”  Michigan State University Professor Stephen Arch commented in a video he did for the One Book community on Facebook, that readers should take the visuals in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as one would take the pictures in a graphic novel, as an integral, not supplemental, part of this story.

So why have my fellow readers struggled with this book and what does this tell me as a reader and a writer? It tells me that we are at a strange time in the creation of and enjoyment of novels. I think we are always at a strange time, but I think we can all agree that the Internet is changing at light speed how books are distributed, marketed, sold, and read. I don’t think writers or readers have been able to keep up with this frenetic evolution and evidence is piling up that our time on Google and Facebook, etc., actually rewires our brains.  While Foer’s work is probably accessible to the incoming freshmen at Michigan State who grew up with a cell phone in one hand and an iPod in the other, other readers, who remember the days of whole sets of encyclopedias at the library, might struggle with what Foer’s creation IS and may not like this integration of visual elements, this stream of consciousness experience of loss and mourning, this fantastical fable of a bright American boy losing his whole world on a single dark day.

Foer does many things well in this unique narrative and one of the things I truly admired was his juxtaposition of the WWII bombing of Dresden versus the events of 9-11. Not only does this show the unrelenting onslaught of war, of human experience, how we are trapped in the same place over and over again only with different heroes and enemies, that the innocent are so often mere threads in the tapestries of insanity, egos, human greed, and self-righteousness, but the contrast of these two events also shows how our losses both tie people (and characters) together and tear them apart.  I know from my son’s love of WWII history, that the necessity of the Dresden bombing remains historically questioned. Was it really necessary to drop bombs that destroyed EVERYTHING for 15 square miles? The parallels between the innocent deaths in Dresden and the innocent deaths of 9-11 were not lost on this reader.

In the final pages of the book, Oskar receives a letter from Stephen Hawking, after repeatedly writing to Hawking in the days following 9-11.  Hawking finally responds personally and tells Oskar “I wish I were a poet…I’ve been able to explore the origins of time and space with some of the great living thinkers.  But I wish I were a poet.” We writers sometimes bemoan our vocations. We wring our hands and complain about our rejections, the disrespect of our art and the written word. Most writers are dreadfully underpaid and we have to have an elastic sense of self that encompasses both occasional success and more frequent abject failure—sometimes these ups and downs occurring in less than a 24-hour period. But indeed what a joy it is to be a poet…even in this high-energy uncertain death-of-print world.  Who else gets to create mythical hybrids like Foer’s? Myths that try to guide people (baffled by form or no) to the heart of death and acceptance of loss? Astrophysics must adhere to its laws. Astrophysics pauses in stuttering awe at the mystery of dark matter.  Writers reach right into the dark, laws be damned, and take their readers with them.

annotation by Stephanie Quinn Westphal originally posted 7/10/09

When I first began to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I didn’t care for his writing. I found some of his stylistic tics annoying, especially the way he repeats phrases, ideas and images, overstates the nine-year-old protagonist’s brilliance, and gives too many examples of a particular idea. But once I became captivated by Oskar Schell as a character, I became engaged in his story. As the novel progresses, Foer seems to settle down into the world he creates and uses his ambition and talent to great and moving effect.

One startling and ultimately profound thing Foer does in this novel is break the edges of the frame. He uses photos and other visual devices embedded in the text in inventive ways, including to visually recreate the stepped process of coming to an epiphany, and as a cinematic device that mimics movement (via a backwards flip book). On the simple, rather straightforward level, Foer inserts a photo of the façade of an urban apartment, which makes the reader feel as if she’s standing next to Oskar when he looks out his window to see his grandmother’s apartment across the street. The author also employs other visual methods for directing the reader to previous portions of the novel, not just in a mental reassessment of what’s been read, but also in actual thumbing through of the pages. He uses blank pages, pages with only one sentence in the middle of the sheet, and pages with names written in different handwriting and colors to make us stop and step away from the text for a moment, and then to reenter it with new awareness. He halts the fictive dream, makes us think about it, and then calls us back into that dream, albeit with a slightly altered perspective. By incorporating such visual elements in his text, Foer expands on some of the ways in which fiction traditionally works, giving us a richer reading experience.

Through his inventive and deliberate juxtaposition of photographic images with the written text, Foer also makes them work in tandem on a more symbolic level. The author inserts a close up shot of an old person’s turned up hands, with “No” written in the palm of the left hand and “Yes” on the right hand (but inverting them so that the photo of the right hand is on the left page and vice versa). The person’s thumbs are gnarled and his fingers show the wear and tear of a long life. By including the photograph of a real elderly man’s hands deformed by arthritis and speckled in age spots, Foer makes that detail more powerful to the readers. I found it interesting that Foer didn’t place that photo early on in the book when the narrator first describes the grandfather’s hands. Seeing the image later added retroactively to the description’s impact.

Directing the reader’s attention, and specifically, her conscious awareness of the path her eye follows, seems to be a central objective of Foer’s style and structure. The author’s deliberate orchestration of our eye movement and thought processes creates a meta-text, a text that occurs above and between the physical pages of the book and that is more than simply an adjunct to the printed text appearing on the pages.

One of the central threads in the novel is the series of phone messages that Oskar’s father leaves from the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11. He listens to his father’s messages in a state of near paralysis, fueled alternately by hope and dread. When the buildings collapse and it seems likely that his father didn’t make it out alive, Oskar conceals the evidence of the phone messages from his mother. He buys a matching phone, redoes the outgoing message, and then hides the original phone, with the messages on it still intact, up in his closet.

Not only does Foer space out the revelation of the individual calls over the course of the novel, but he also echoes this slow unveiling of clues in his placement of photographs and images in the novel. The first photo in the book is of an extreme close up of an old-fashioned door with a glass doorknob and the lock below it (a visual pun, perhaps, of the title?). The perspective is so close that I didn’t really recognize what the image was or register it consciously until later in the text when Oskar finds an old key his father had tucked away in an envelope. Foer seems to be saying that some patterns only “make sense” with repeated viewings and over time. Surely the initially inconceivable and incomprehensible bombing of the Twin Towers qualifies as such an event.

Shortly after we learn of the mysterious key, we watch Oskar start on his quest to find out what the key opens, to uncover symbolically the secret of who his father was and the meaning of his death. Foer then intersperses several shots of the door and the lock in the text; it’s the same door, but it’s either from further away, the keyhole is empty, or the key is turned in the lock. Foer may be playing not only with long shots versus close ups, but also with images of the front of the door in contrast to the back of the door (a theme he plays with in the photos of the backs of people’s heads, something that Oskar talks about). Moving back and forth across the text adds intrigue and the satisfaction of discovery to the reading experience. It also illustrates how dependent meaning or learning is on context. Without knowing about the strange key, much of the import of the photos of the door and keyhole is lost. We can’t grasp it. Foer spaces out the photos the way he spaces out the phone calls from the father, delaying both our gratification and our epiphanies.

Foer also uses body orientation (facing forward, facing backward, looking down at your hands, etc.) to echo the dislocation and sense of fragmentation that Oskar battles against as he tries to reconstruct a coherent worldview after the violent death of his father and the rending of his sense of safety. The author thus recreates in the readers both the sense of being shattered and the compulsive need to reassemble a world of recognizable patterns, even if the patterns must shift a bit to include the new knowledge.

The very back of the novel is what amounts to a backwards flip book that shows a person who has leaped off a building (which we learn is indeed a picture of someone plummeting to his death off one of the Twin Towers because Oskar finds such images on a Portuguese news show and keeps a print out of that horror and others in a folder under his bed). As I flipped through the final photos, I watched the fuzzy body of a man as he miraculously moved up through the air, back towards the moment before that figure – emblematic of Oskar’s father– leaped to his death. Back up to the safety of the tower. Back to a world that was still held together in its old order. This is Oskar’s impossible, but understandable wish. This is the wish of all humans in the face of loss and the inevitable death of those we love and ourselves. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer has created a brilliant, multi-faceted portrayal of this universal human dilemma.

As the novel neared its end, I had a better understanding of the meaning of the title, referring as it probably does to the closeness of Oskar’s apartment to the Twin Towers, the emotional and metaphorical “loudness” of his father’s death as well as the “incredibly close” nature of Oskar’s connection to his father both before and after his death. I found it a flawed, but deeply moving novel, almost triumphant in its tangible recreation of the fact that fiction and stories are at their very best still only approximations of reality, just as photographs are translations of light. It’s the best we can do as humans to empathetically step into and convey another person’s experience, and it is enough.

Annotation by Kate Maruyama, originally posted 5/27/09

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE kinda blew my mind about four years ago, when I read it for the first time. While I am very well read in certain areas of literature, I have huge gaps in others.

I hadn’t read much about 9/11; it still hurt too much. Growing up in Connecticut, New York was my city. In my heart, it held my ideal future life in my childhood and teenage dreams. I tried to get through Art Spiegelman’s IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS, but it was too personal and too well drawn. He took me right down that tunnel of despair I’d been avoiding for two years thus far.

When I got to Oskar Schell’s story, I was ready. The kid had that approach to the subject that I needed to have: glimpses, trying to sort out the emotions involved, that lost feeling and inarticulateness that goes with it. It was still too awful to either dive into or put away. Oskar’s immature mind and the mature way he approached it proved very cathartic for me. I also enjoyed the two stories’ separation and how they wove together. I was willing to go wherever Foer took me. The big question came up often: how did he do this? How did he think of all of this?

But when I finally read SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, the idea of the backwards thing at the end of Foer’s novel gave me a “huh.” I read AS I LAY DYING and the epiphany came, “Wow, people have been messing with time and character space for longer than I realized.” TRISTRAM SHANDY did in 1759, with its blackened page thing what I thought was revolutionary in 2005.

This second reading held echoes of everything I had read since the first: heavy echoes of Vonnegut, Faulkner, Sterne, and of Foer’s first novel Everything is Illuminated. It did not strike with the same original resonance it had given me on its first read. Sigh. This is the price of studying writing, losing that wonder and becoming jaded.

I still love Oskar’s voice, his “heavy boots” and his natural acceptance of every new personality that comes along. His travels and his approaches to people are fascinating, and, as my boy approaches nine, some of his observations really slayed me. The scene where Oskar is onstage as Yorick (a nod to Tristram Shandy? ) basically melting down inside while playing an inanimate skull is beautifully done.

This reading brought up an irritation with Oskar’s mother that I hadn’t felt before. Sure, it’s revealed that she was aware of his travels the whole time, but I don’t think I’d let my nine year old traverse Glendale on his own, let alone the five boroughs of New York City, unless I knew he had a companion; even with a call ahead to the person meeting him.

Mr. Black from upstairs is still a lively character, as is his life, delivery and filing system; but when he abandoned Oskar atop the Empire State building, it became once again apparent that while Foer’s characters are rich in this book, not all of their motivations are clearly defined.

The story of the grandparents was problematic for me this time. There was something lacking in their motivation and questions kept arising. Thomas Sr. never really tells us how he felt about losing Anna and her baby and why it makes him behave so awfully to his wife. It is a clever device to have him stop speaking, but scene after scene, his thoughts and feelings are stunted. While there is reason for this, it leaves us in the dark as to his thought processes. The “not space” he and Grandmother created in the apartment felt more like a writer enthralled with the rhythm he has found in his own language than an insight into his character’s lives. The vagueness of motivation in Thomas Sr. only brought into relief the problems of the grandmother character. I wanted so much more of her, from her point of view. Her voice is distant and folkloric and it feels like there was an opportunity here for so much more to happen.

I never could have written something so vast and in many ways beautiful and certainly not in my early twenties. It is a good reminder not to get too caught up in one’s poetry (which I could totally see doing at that age) and never to forget that writing should really be about the characters and what they are experiencing: that rendering their thoughts, feelings and conflict are really what make a novel work. That those lyric moments need to be earned and can’t just be everywhere.

Maybe Oskar is a lesson in following the characters who are really telling the story, or listening harder to those yelling in the background.

book by Sara Gruen

Annotation by Lee Stoops

Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants begins with an epigraph from Dr. Suess’s Horton Hatches the Egg about the unfailing faithfulness of elephants. What follows is a fast, colloquially-written prologue that ends in violent murder as remembered by an old man. Needless to say, after three pages, I was hooked.

Of course, the prologue is a flash of something to which the reader will eventually return. Chapter one establishes the pace and mystery of the book. Jacob Jankowski, an elderly man living in an assisted care facility. He’s not sure of his age (he’s either ninety or ninety-three), he has a difficult time remembering the names of those caring for him, and he spends more time reliving his youth in his mind than cogitating in the present. His memories are not flash-backs or recollections. When he’s narrating as twenty-three year-old Jacob, he’s truthfully telling the story as it happens.

““It was something alright. I remember it like yesterday. Hell, I remember it better than yesterday”” (324).

Gruen succeeded in the telling of this story in three ways: 1) the perspective of her narrator (the story is told in first person by Jacob, both at twenty-three and ninety (or ninety-three)) is believable both in the presentation of the prose and the reality of his voice and person; 2) the ease with which dialogue is delivered offers the reader true voices and personalities; 3) the story is engaging, mysterious, and well-paced throughout.

Jacob is twenty-three years old for eighty-five percent of the narrative. The story begins with his parents’ tragic death, his losing everything because of their debt, his failing out of an ivy league veterinary school (days before graduation), and his jumping a traveling circus train. It all happens in depression-era America. Chronicling the traveling circus’s tour, its people, and the violence and darkness that exists within the community, Gruen masterfully dictates it all through Jacob’s eyes. The descriptions of scenes were powerful, but it was the interior exposition of Jacob that was so authentic. His emotional development, his naïve struggle with the ethics, morals, and relationships of the other characters, and his inability to put intention to finding himself and his way brought gritty realism to the pages. An example (Jacob, speaking about August who is the “equestrian director and superintendent of animals:” his boss):

“I hate him. I hate him for being so brutal. I hate that I’m beholden to him. I hate that I’m in love with his wife and something damned close to that with the elephant. And most of all, I hate that I’ve let them both down. I don’t know if the elephant is smart enough to connect me to her punishment and wonder why I didn’t do anything to stop it, but I am and I do” (171).

Of course, the story is really about the elephant, Rosie, and August’s wife, Marlena, and what they mean to Jacob. I see it as a great feat that Gruen was able to, for lack of a better word, nail Jacob’s character.

Dialogue drives stories in a very specific, very powerful way. In a dialogue-heavy story, such as Water for Elephants, the story-teller can’t afford to leave any skill at home. Gruen’s dialogue in the story is present exactly as it needs to be. It’s charming in places, it’s colloquial in most (the language of the 1930’s traveling circus is one-of-a-kind), and it’s natural and flowing. There were places an aspiring writer may have been tempted to keep trying to make the characters speak. Gruen rejected that temptation, leaving just enough said. The story continues to weave seamlessly in and through the passages of conversation.

““Damn,” I say.

“What is it?” says Marlena.

I straighten up and reach for Silver Star’s foot. He leaves it firmly on the ground.

“Come on, boy,” I say, pulling on his hoof.

Eventually, he lifts it. The sole is bulging and dark, with a red line running around the edge. I set it down immediately.

“This horse is foundering,” I say.

“Oh dear God!” says Marlena, clapping a hand to her mouth.

“What?” says August. “He’s what?”

“Foundering,” I say. “It’s when the connective tissues between the hoof and the coffin bone are compromised and the coffin bone rotates toward the sole of the hoof.”

“In English, please. Is it bad?”

I glance at Marlena, who is still covering her mouth. “Yes,” I say.

“Can you fix it?”

“We can bed him up real thick, and try to keep him off his feet. Grass hay only and no grain. And no work.”

“But can you fix it?”

I hesitate, glancing quickly at Marlena. “Probably not.”

August stares at Silver Star and exhales through puffed cheeks” (171).

Not long after this exchange, the horse is put down, and then, because of lack of food or funds to buy any, and to the disgust of many, the dead horse is fed to the big cats. Gruen’s use of tags, vocal control, and character consistency in voicing gives the dialogue throughout the novel strength of form and progression of story. As a writer that loves and relies on dialogue, finding stories that use it so effectively is exciting.

Gruen’s story consists of darkness, mystery, and grittily precise use of sex, violence, and cruelty. But, these elements are only supplements to the overall story. The story is one of love; love in all its forms. It’s truth that Gruen brings to her fiction that drives Water for Elephants.

book by Janet Fitch

annotation by Kate Maruyama

I have always been interested in reading LA writers to get a handle on the literary scene around here, but have been appalingly late to the read on Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. The book is not only a great read and a fascinating study of a narcissistic character (more on that later), it contains  the most beautiful physical descriptions of Los Angeles I’ve ever read. In other books, there have been descriptions of west side life, the life of screenwriters, rife with bougainvillea and jasmine and In n’ Out franchises, or dark noir cityscapes, but Fitch manages to capture the city as a living, breathing organism, with seasons, neighborhoods and moods. LA is so strange to transplants, so familiar to locals, that it frequently gets short shrift as a literary landscape.

Fitch puts us there from the first line, “The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw.”

Fitch gives us pre-teen and teenage Astrid as she moves from foster home to foster home, across neighborhoods, demographic lines and environments of Los Angeles. The so often called “urban sprawl” becomes areas of specific neighborhoods and people, from the racist Myrtle (“The air in Van Nuys was thicker than in Sunland-Tujunga. It was a kingdom of strip malls and boulevards a quarter mile across, neighborhoods of ground-hugging tracts dwarfed by full-growth peppers and sweet gums fifty feet high.” 101), to the west side actress Claire(“an old neighborhood of stucco bungalows and full-growth sycamores with chalky white trunks and leaves like hands” 169), to the Tujunga desert-dwelling Starr and Ray (“In November, when the air held blue in the afternoons and the sunlight washed the boulders in gold, I turned fourteen.” 71), to the scrapping Rena and her gang of junk salesgirls (“This is why Rena liked it down here among contractors and bakeries and sheet metal shops…”264). And everywhere Astrid is, she experiences the torrential rains and moody skies of winter and the fires and the hot blowing Santa-Ana winds of summer and autumn. The Santa Anas always blow when Astrid is in a desperate, trapped place, but when she moves foster homes, she is frequently greeted with blue skies and clarity.

I’m working on a novel set in 1930s Hollywood and my knowledge as a 20 year resident of LA has helped in descriptions and weather, but Fitch has inspired me to take it to another level with mood and theme, if nothing else because I owe it to the city where I make my home. New York is a cityscape we know and are given over and over in all of its textures and seasons. LA deserves a fair shake.

Fitch’s language is so carefully wrought, her sentences specific, often lyrical, but never to the extent that they distract from the story itself. Astrid, in her uncertainty and questioning, makes an excellent glass-bottom boat for the city. She has grown up in a bizarre circumstance, the afterthought of a narcissistic mother, a stranger to holidays and school–regular kids stuff. She has the ability to observe each new take on life, from an evangelical church, to a high-class hooker’s home, to a nervous wreck of a marriage and her prism is so skewed that everything is new. Fitch gets us into Astrid’s present life immediately and with such strength and surroundings, that by the time her mother, Ingrid, kills Barry Kolker and changes her child’s life, I wondered where Astrid could possibly go for the remaining 300 pages of the novel.  Being unfamiliar with the overall movement of the story, I was put in the enviable position of being surprised by every twist and turn of Astrid’s wayward childhood and stunned again and again that Fitch could keep the tension going through so many different environments. And each time she moved to a new foster home, I cringed with Astrid, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We know this is not a girl bound for an Orphan Annie ending where she finds her true home at last.

The character of Astrid’s mother, the narcissistic. Notoriety-seeking poet, Ingrid was truly fascinating, as I consider myself a longtime student of the narcissist. I have several people I love in my life who were affected negatively by narcissistic mothers and have toyed with narcissistic characters in the past. Ingrid is a portrait of pure destructive narcissism. Her self-absorption is obvious immediately, and yet Fitch keeps us wondering what she will try next. She is paralyzing for her daughter, but it is only when she becomes incarcerated for murdering her boyfriend that she becomes truly dangerous for Astrid. Astrid just begins to get a handle on life when her mother, having nothing else to do in prison (although one wonders at her life with her inmates) sends her ruinous letters, attempting to manipulate her, hurt her, and possess her; at the same time she has given her daughter up in the most selfish way possible by giving in to murder, knowing full well the possible consequences. With the title, the method of killing the boyfriend (poison) and the poison in the letters, Fitch creates a fascinating and unredeemable villain. And she works just fine. When Astrid finally gets a toehold on life and seems to move on, but we can feel her mother’s poison working again… Ingrid haunts beyond the finish of the book. The villain in my ghost story is narcissistic, destructive and self-absorbed, but feels two dimensional next to Ingrid. I long to take another whack at the pain such a character can inflict on a sensitive protagonist’s life. I’m not certain what form he or she will take, but said villain will definitely owe a nod to Ms. Fitch.

Fitch is a good reminder to keep each new aspect of a story as environmentally alive and vivid as the last. So many authors give us vivid descriptions in some portions of a novel and just sketches of another. The only way Astrid’s constantly changing adventures keep hold of us is through Fitch’s attention to details, objects, colors, and to LA’s weather, apartments and neighborhoods. We feel, smell, touch, hear and taste with Astrid—the food changes with every new home. She lives on Chalet Gourmet appetizers with Claire, on nourishing food she cooks with Starr and Ray, on processed foods with Mavis. Because of these details, as well as Astrid’s constant longing for family, we are moved from one world to another without taking a breath. I, too, fall victim to some thorough description followed by sketching and this book reminds me to pay equal attention to each world I’m putting forth. This is crucial in my present novel, which goes across time and place, frequently bouncing between.

But the most important lesson here is: Angelenos, San Franciscans, Clevelandites, Minneapolans, Milwaukeans Middletonians, exploit the world around you, it is rich in details and you owe it to your city to portray it fully.

annotation by Diane Sherlock

The Conservationist is a South African novel of the early 1970’s before the end of apartheid that lays out in vivid landscape the contradictions and difficulties of that country and its tensions. It is both dense and lyrical as it follows the life of a wealthy white South African protagonist, Mehring. Mehring has a failed marriage, an estranged son, a dead body on the property he bought on a whim as a weekend getaway, and a mistress who must flee the country due to political messes. Gordimer explores the monotony of both farm life, a hobby for Mehring, as well as the monotony of the business world along with themes of death and rebirth.

For the most part, Gordimer does an admirable job of exploring her themes and painting a vivid picture of life on the veld, but it remains one of the coldest books I have ever read. Certainly the protagonist is one reason. Gordimer provides a fine tension between the way Mehring sees himself and the way he appears to others. He believes he has gained his position in the world entirely due to his own hard work, giving no quarter to luck, circumstance and privilege. By the end of the book, it’s clear he is small minded, both bigot and sexual predator. It is not an easy or quick read, requiring concentration and attention to the small details Gordimer includes. The physical descriptions are lyrical: “…it lashed around them, a furry tongue of fiery soft dust spitting stinging chips of stone.”

The main flaws in the book are a smattering of clunky transitions and occasional awkward turns, such as using coincidence to ill effect when Mehring reads about his friend’s death of a friend right after a chance meeting with the man’s daughter. Mehring’s moral equivalence sticks out: “But the children ignore him as he ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can we go on getting away scot-free? When the aristocrats were caught up in the Terror, did they recognize: it’s come to us. Did the Jews of Germany think: it’s our turn.” While it illustrates his mindset that the Jews controlled money the way the French upper class did, it didn’t feel seamless within the narrative. In fact, the fractured narrative is at times an annoyance.

On the plus side, Gordimer uses Zulu creation myths in her narrative, leaves conclusions to the reader, and her protagonist and the people around him are full of contradictions: he’s not a male chauvinist, yet he will risk his societal position in a high-risk clandestine fondling of a teen girl on a plane; his leftist mistress travels the world on his money and so on.

Mehring’s philosophy is summarized in a conversation/debate he has with his lover about the farm: “A farm is not beautiful unless it is productive. Reasonable productivity prevailed; he had to keep half an eye (all he could spare) on everything, all the time, to achieve even that much, and of course he had made it his business to pick up a working knowledge of husbandry, animal and crop, so that he couldn’t easily be hoodwinked by his people there and could plan farming operations with some authority.”

There were some problems with this particular edition from Penguin. The paperback cost fifteen dollars, seriously overpriced for such a cheap product. The type was difficult to read and there were only a couple of footnotes explaining that Witbooi = white boy, and Swart Gevaar = black danger. Those were the easiest to figure out. There should have been a dozen more footnotes for American readers, including the information that corn is referred to as ‘mealies’ in South Africa and vlei (pronounced ‘flay’) means wetlands. More problematic is that dialogue is set off with dashes and descriptions use the same device. It would have been less confusing if standard quotation marks had been used.

Gordimer’s facility with language and description alone show why she is held in esteem, as co-winner of the Booker Prize for this work and Nobel Prize recipient in 1991. Her lyricism was the most valuable element for my own writing. The Conservationist is also an excellent study for those exploring unsympathetic protagonists, particularly one as isolated as his country was before the end of apartheid.

book by Alice Walker

annotation by Marianne Woods Cirone

The Color Purple is heartbreaking, funny, enlightening, tragic, ultimately uplifting—and I really wish I had read it before I read The Temple of My Familiar.  Alice Walker published The Color Purple in 1982; she received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for it in 1983.  The Temple of My Familiar was published in 1989, seven years after The Color Purple, and includes several characters that were continued from the first book, including Miss Celie and Miss Shug, two of my favorites.

In an ironic twist, the characters of Miss Celie and Miss Shug are brought together initially through an affair between Miss Shug and “Mister” (Albert), who is Miss Celie’s domineering, merciless husband who brings the sexy songstress Miss Shug into their home to have the submissive Miss Celie nurse her to health—only to see the two of them end up falling into a sexual relationship and moving out together.  Miss Celie eventually finds her own independence and self-respect, is reunited with her long lost sister and the children that she “gave up” at birth, and finds peace with a god who resides in nature and not churches.  In TCP, Walker shows the same beautiful skill in developing characters and scenarios which show and extreme fluidity of relationships and lifestyles, constantly redefining the meaning of the words “family” and “spirituality” in a more modern contest.

After reading two on Walker’s book, I can see her exceptional talent in expressing herself poetically and in telling, in particular, the important stories of many voiceless women who have been oppressed over centuries.  Walker shows the transformation of characters such as Miss Celie, who initially started as a little dormouse and developed into her own strong person, as well as those like Sophia, who started out with a will of steel and were nearly broken by the never ending sequence of events involving men determined to break her spirit—and who nearly succeeded.  Walker shows the weaknesses and strengths of people of many different races, and expresses, perhaps on behalf of the untold many, the deserved anger and touches our hearts through the stories behind this legacy of mistreatment and exploitation that started this cycle of fear and loathing.

I found The Color Purple to be much more emotionally engaging that those in The Temple of My Familiar—I was literally in the skin of the characters in TCP, while I found I was held at arm’s length by the stylistic techniques and the complexly intertwining stories in TTOMF.  Every time I picked up TTOMF it felt like starting anew, while TCP (which I listened to on audio book in the wonderful voice of Alice Walker reading her own work) sucked me into their world from the start.

In doing some research on Alice Walker, I found that she attended Spelman College and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence, worked as a civil rights activist and married a white, Jewish civil rights lawyer at a time when interracial marriages were still illegal in some states; they had a daughter together, Rebecca, who was born in 1969, and later divorced.  Rebecca claims to have felt disenfranchised from the black, the white and the Jewish communities; she later wrote a book called Black White and Jewish and said that she felt as though she was “more of a political symbol than a cherished daughter.”   Later in life, Rebecca took “Walker” as her surname although Alice and Rebecca later became estranged, with Rebecca’s citing her mother’s “extremely feminist views that children enslave women” and the absence of Alice as a mother figure in her life as a major distress and void in her life.

Rebecca wrote in a 2008 U.K publication:

Ironically, my mother regards herself as a hugely maternal woman. Believing that women are suppressed, she has campaigned for their rights around the world and set up organisations to aid women abandoned in Africa  -  offering herself up as a mother figure.

But, while she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel…My mother … never came to a single school event, she didn’t buy me any clothes, she didn’t even help me buy my first bra - a friend was paid to go shopping with me. If I needed help with homework I asked my boyfriend’s mother.

…When I wrote my memoir, Black, White and Jewish, my mother insisted on publishing her version. She finds it impossible to step out of the limelight, which is extremely ironic in light of her view that all women are sisters and should support one another.

Astrologically, the conflict between Alice and Rebecca seems explicable —Alice’s Aquarius which is the ultimate freedom-demanding, humanitarian, visionary sign with a potential dark side of aloofness, almost versus Rebecca’s Scorpio:  passionate, emotional and deep, with the potential dark side of extreme possessiveness and grudge-holding.

As the mother of two (almost) adult daughters, and a person who has personally struggled with my relationships with them, my roles as a woman, wife, and writer; and how to balance the needs of each, I wonder where the truth in this story lies… and how Alice Walker’s writing and fictional creations fit in with the actual translation into today’s society.  Is Walker’s dream for the world just a dream— do we still live in a world where we must choose work or family?   Is Alice and Rebecca’s relationship, if in fact is as described, a societal failing or a personal one?

I wonder what we can each learn from Walker’s writing or her personal challenges that can help to transform our world into a place of greater love—“tolerance” seems a milquetoast expectation indeed, in the larger picture of what the world needs for everyone to feel connected to each other in a loving, positive way, to transform our real world into the ideal created in the fictional world.

Annotation by Lee Stoops

“The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity – it’s envy.”

~ Yann Martel, Life of Pi (6)

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is, as writing for life goes, brilliant. Early on, the story evokes a sense of wonder that encompasses all parts of life: physical, emotional, spiritual, rational, survival. Martel’s control of language is gripping both in its power and lyricism. At times, the story progresses in a fairy-tale manner of wonder, while at others it’s a philosophic and/or religious text, and still at others it’s a journal of tragedy and adventure. The story as a whole is an expressive, brutal, and tender account that inspires the imagination and answers unanswerable questions – all through the eyes of a teenage Indian boy adrift on a small lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with an adolescent Bengal tiger.

Within the first 10 pages, I knew I was in for a ride. The book’s first section, “Toronto and Pondicherry,” richly details the early life and development of the book’s main character and narrator, Piscine Patel. “Pi” is a self-inflicted nickname; a response to teasing and mispronunciation. Martel’s first person narrative of Pi is very smart, very direct, and often poetic. Pi is an emotionally evolved (“He had no idea how deeply those words wounded me. They were like nails being driven into my flesh” (7).), spiritually charged (“To me, religion is about our dignity, not our depravity” (71).), life-aware (“First wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fit in the impression made by the first” (50).) young boy. He struggles with people, but understands humanity on the scale of animal survival and evolution. He comes to questions of wonder on his own, in response to his unique world view. “All things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive” (41).

Reading the story through my worldview lens, I found myself rapt, as a reader/writer/human, throughout each page. In one scene while growing up in India, Pi approaches his father and makes some religious requests. His father, a busy zoo-owner/keeper and loving but at times absent figure, argues and eventually presses Pi to talk to Mother. The following is the end of their dialogue:

““But Piscene!” she said… “Father and I find your religious zeal a bit of a mystery.”

“It is a Mystery.”

“Hmmm. I don’t’ mean it that way. Listen, my darling, if you’re going to be religious, you must be either a Hindu, a Christian or a Muslim. You heard what they said on the esplanade.”

“I don’t see why I can’t be all three. Mamaji has two passports. He’s Indian and French. Why can’t I be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim?”

“That’s different. France and India are nations on earth.”

She thought for a second. “One. That’s the point. One nation, one passport.”

“One nation in the sky?”

“Yes. Or none. There’s that option too, you know. These are terribly old-fashioned things you’ve taken to.”

“If there’s only one nation in the sky, shouldn’t all passports be valid for it?”

A cloud of uncertainty came over her face” (73-74).

This exchange is indicative of Martel’s character/topic control. He uses both dialog and inner monolog to offer the reader arguments and answers. In terms of writing, it’s powerful because it’s borderline rhetoric. Something written that can at once entertain, enlighten and raise questions (or, even answer them) is something I want to be able to do with my writing. There’s more here than just the story: there’s life.

His family, because of politics and for other reasons, is forced to consider a major life change and relocation/emigration. The sell what animals they can, lose the lease on the zoo, and pack everything (lives and what animals are left) onto a Japanese cargo ship bound for Canada. It sinks (it’s never really clear how/why, but that doesn’t matter) and Pi is left alone on a small life boat with a wounded zebra, an orangutan, a hyena, and an adolescent Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Of course, by the end of the first week, Pi and the tiger are the only two alive. This is where the fiction really kicks in and the story, while it crawled beautifully along in section one, starts to walk and then run. Everything Pi knows is challenged. And, fortified. Living in the head of someone living on a raft with a tiger for seven months for 189 pages that feel like a single page is remarkable story-telling. Martel’s gift throughout “The Pacific Ocean” part of the book exists within a perfectly balanced mix of humor, sorrow, adventure, wonder, invention, and contemplation. “And so, in a moment of insanity brought on by hunger – because I was more set on eating than I was on staying alive – without any means of defense, naked in every sense of the term, I looked Richard Parker dead in the eyes. Suddenly his brute strength meant only moral weakness. It was nothing compared to the strength in my mind” (222). It’s no wonder to me that this story commanded the coveted Man Booker Prize.

Martel’s story as a writer is wrought with short-comings, floundering, and attention lost. His success came from perseverance through what most would label failure. Part of what makes this story so powerful is that it comes from the imagination of someone that really believes in the power of fiction to grow and change lives. A hopeless optimistic telling the story of a hopeless optimistic – as a reader I was inspired, but as a writer I am affirmed. The story wins in the end: not because it actually wins, but because it’s told as truth. Beautiful.