Some thoughts on memoirs

The problem with the memoir as an art form is that the reader can have trouble tolerating the echo-chamber of the narrator’s head.  The convention of the unreliable narrator in fiction serves to open up space between what is said and what the reader can trust or believe.  But with a memoir we are often subject to an unrelenting barrage of the writer’s self-justifications and an insistence that the version told must be accepted as the Truth.  There is no space there for reflection or interpretation.  Books like The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr or Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs may fascinate and horrify with their sad and bizarre childhood memories, but after awhile one wonders what the point is.  It may be a form of therapy for the author, but it doesn’t make it Art and it doesn’t mean I have to read it.   My reaction to these books is:  get a therapist or start a blog, and I wonder what the publishers and editors (if there are any out there) are thinking.  That said, I recently read Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the memoir of a Somalian woman who escaped an arranged marriage to rise to political power in Holland.  While the story is more compelling than most due to the charged religious and political subject matter,  it still barely clears the shoals of petty self-regard that inflict these types of books, and in the end dwindles into a repetitive polemic against Islam.  Perhaps it would have been better to have ended the book when she got on the train to Amsterdam, seeking asylum as a refugee, and taking the first brave step toward a new life. For she is brave and intelligent, qualities that do come through in her writing. It’s just that the story of her life speaks for itself, it does not need to be enclosed in her new ideas about freedom and religion, crudely spelled out and hammered home; it does not need the added layer of her struggles in Holland, where she seems to go through homes, jobs, friendships and countries at a rapid rate - that would have made a fine postscript and the rest could have been a magazine article. I guess it seemed logical to frame the narrative with the murder of Theo Van Gogh, but, again, the time in Holland dilutes what came before, the more passionately written and deeply-felt story of her coming of age and her growth as an individual.   I do wish Hirsi Ali the best in her new life, and better editors and advisors to help her with her next work.

I tend to avoid biographies since they often share more detail about a person that I might care to know; they are often huge and exhausting.  The only memoirs that I typically enjoy are travel narratives, because the purpose is clearly stated, there is always something happening, and the writer is revealed through their actions not statements–often, this does not show the best side of a person, but that is the danger of the memoir – and the blog, I suppose – one stands to be fully revealed. I do enjoy Paul Theroux’ travel writing, for instance, but sometimes he comes across as cruel to the people he meets who do not know that they will be skewered in his next book, and the reader can feel a bit bad about enjoying such scenes. On the other hand, Darwin, in The Voyage of the Beagle, comes across as a good-natured, kind and thoughtful person, and an excellent travelling companion.

Lethem’s latest

While on a trip to NYC, I was reading Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn.  His sense of place, whether Brooklyn, Manhattan or even, incongruously, during a car chase up through Connecticut, Massachusetts and on into Maine, is flawless. I love how he describes Hartford’s “endearing little rush hour” or the laconic lobsterman he meets on the Maine coast.  It was an additional pleasure to be staying in Midtown east and reading about a stakeout further uptown on Park Ave. For this is a detective novel, but, in the tradition of the best of the genre, it is much more than that – it fairly brims with catchy characters, insights into human behavior, a dash of pathos, rich details and at the center, a hapless fellow named Lionel who happens to be suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.  In the tradition of the flawed detective hero, Lionel ups the ante:  an orphan taken under the wing of a petty gangster, his syndrome effectively conceals his intelligence giving him the advantage of being always somewhat undercover. When his mentor is killed, Lionel sets out for vengence. While the plot gets a bit clunky at the end, and Julia is never fully believable, Lionel’s humanity and decency carry the day. I give it three cheers!

Ants, Grasshoppers

I recently picked up Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett. The only other work of hers that I have read is Bel Canto, but I might try some of her other novels. This is her only work of nonfiction, a memoir of her friendship with fellow writer and poet Lucy Greely. It is also the story of Patchett’s writing life, beginning as it does when she and Lucy are accepted into the graduate program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  Patchett writes beautifully and shows us Lucy and herself as a foil to Lucy throughout the years of their joint struggles to be writers.  Lucy is the star, always was the star, and Ann the quiet friend, the helper, the plodder who piles up pages methodically while Lucy manically parties, puts off writing, frets about love, doesn’t pay her bills, falls and has to be picked up again and again.  Ann lovingly depicts Lucy with all her flaws, using an analogy that I love, that of the ant and the grasshopper.  Ann, of course, is the ant and Lucy the lovable grasshopper, playing music for all to hear, rushing here and there, and not storing up food for the cold winter months.  As Ann puts it:

We were a pairing out of an Aesop’s Fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare.  And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music, and their interesting side trips. What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard…..Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises.  They need us to survive, but we need them as well.  They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

Sometimes we expect and want perfection in our heroes.  But as Jane Austen said, “Pictures of perfection make me feel sick and wicked.”  I am also reminded of Knightley’s remark about Emma, from Jane Austen’s Emma:

We love her not in spite of her faults, but because of them…

Because Ann portrays Lucy so truthfully, we can love her as she does, as we love Emma.  Ann’s tribute to Lucy is a work of truth and beauty. It is fitting to end with Keats:

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

 

A movie tie-in

Recently wrote about The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and then came across a BBC series called Island at War which is about a fictional channel island during the German occupation (the islands actually were taken over by the Germans as a first step to invading England).  This intense drama begins in the wake of Dunkirk and follows certain island families as the British decamp and the Germans take over.  Many of the events in the book are also portrayed here, such as the evacuation of the children and the clever sharing of dead pigs (the Germans kept track of how many pigs each farmer had) so that the island folk can sneak a pork dinner.  There are also those who collaborate with the enemy, spies in hiding, a Jewish girl being pursued by a creepy Nazi and many other subplots.  The German characters are fully realized as well, especially the Commandant who strives for a “model occupation,” but also needs an execution to keep the islanders in check.  It is chilling to see the Nazi flags and goose-stepping soldiers in the village streets, but equally chilling is how “civilized” the enemy is.  These are not aliens, not really that foreign.  Many of them have English relatives, most speak English, they’ve probably all read the same books, including the Bible.  It makes one realize that the enemy is our own natures, the capacity of each of us to do the wrong thing, to choose evil or expediency, or just follow orders. I’ve sited this passage before, from the  5/22/06 New Yorker.  Anthony Lane was profiling an Englishman named Patrick Leigh Fermor (“An Englishman Abroad”) and relayed the following anecdote:

Fermor recounts a time in 1944, when he and his men are in flight from German patrols towing a German general. As they are climbing Mt. Ida (in Crete?) the General watches the dawn break and murmers from Horace, “Vides ut alte stet nive candidum.” Leigh Fermor also knew Horace and continued the quotation, “nec jam sustineant onus, Silvae laborantes, gulque, Flumina constiterint acuto”, and so on to the end. Fermor adds, “for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Anthony Lane adds that “it feels like the end of something: the last, companionable gasp of a civilization– grounded in the knowledge of earlier civilizations, Roman and Greek– that had not just held sway in Europe for over a thousand years but had done more than any political truce or chicanery to bind Europe together. Both Leigh Fermor and the general had been raised to recognize Horace odes 1.9, to get it by heart, and to realize that the poem itself is a crystallization of our common feelings.” (p. 64).

The ending is inconclusive, leaving one wondering if there are more episodes to come, but no. It ends in medias res, with the fates of many of the characters left up in the air. Yes, we know the eventual outcome, we know that Germany loses, but what about Zelda, hiding in the attic, and the fate of those sent to prison camps in France? On the other hand, I don’t know that I could take the suspense if they continued the series through the long years of occupation; things were obviously going to get much worse before getting better.   But the uncertainty of the ending is part of the lesson:  that’s war and war is hell, for both the occupier and the occupied – and the viewer.

On the outside looking in …Rachel Cusk

I just read Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold, but I’m not really sure what I think of it.  It seems to be another of those quirky introspective books about the break-up of a marriage from the man’s point of view (reminiscent of both Netherland and Enduring Love).  This book has much less action than the other two, but also has some memorable scenes and intelligent insights into human behavior, as in the scene when the narrator, Michael, is standing outside under an overhanging balcony:

…shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark..

Shortly thereafter, the balcony falls off the house, a symbol perhaps of the crumbling relationship between Michael and Rebecca.  When the surveyor, a normal-seeming man of about the same age as Michael, comes to assess the damage, Michael has an epiphany about his own life:

When I saw him standing on the doorstep amid the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become.  Crystal fruit bowls (thrown at him by Rebecca) did not come flying trhough the air at Ed Reynolds.  Balconies did not fall on him from above. 

 The Hansburys are entertaining, and so, also are Rebecca’s parents, Rick and Ali.  Somehow, the previous generation seem more vibrant and alive than their pallid, whining offspring.  In the end, for both families, the reality created by the parents is more compelling than that of the children who return to the fold (also a clever reference to sheep, who make up a part of the story), abandoning their fragile, tentative pathways, their lives to which they had never fully committed.  Michael alone has not that luxury and is left on the outside looking in.  This is a smart and entertaining book, but it all seems rather muffled.  It’s hard to feel connected to the characters, perhaps because Michael himself is so disconnected.  I do like her writing, I’m just not that excited about it.

That Guernsey, potato pie society book…

Finally got back to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It was okay. All the characters were just a little too quaint and exotic – like some of those Southern novels that just try too hard to show you how eccentric everyone is.  What was interesting to me was the underlying, rather grim story of Guernsey during the war.  England apparently just pulled out, not wanting to waste resources on defending the Channel Islands.  The hardship of the occupation – lack of food, curfews, the children being sent away before the Germans came – is alluded to throughout the book, but the tone is light and anecdotal.  That’s okay; it makes an enjoyable story, just not a great one. The literary part, where each person in the Society talks about a book that they read and liked, is interesting – I am intrigued to read more Charles Lamb and Seneca. I was annoyed by the character who read and disliked Marcus Aurelius, that was not well-done or well thought out. I felt it was just thrown in to add a colorful episode and did a diservice to a great philosopher. Such opinions were not earned. I also liked the mention of Anne Bronte (more on this topic to follow).  The story of Elizabeth was barely told, but that was the most gripping part of the book, the part that ‘got me by the throat’, so to speak.  Learning more about the islands was interesting – prior to this, I had heard of Jersey because of Lily Langtree (the “Jersey Lily”) and I knew that Victor Hugo had lived in self-imposed exile on one of the Channel Islands, but that was pretty much it. So, my opinion is mixed – I think the book is fairly charming and likeable, but leaves one with that sickly feeling of having overindulged in something sweet.

Chemistry? Yeah, Chemistry

I happened to pick up The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (another bad book title involving pie; how weird is that?) on a 1 week loan from the library and easily finished it in a day and a half.  This debut novel by Alan Bradley has garnered attention by winning a crime writing award, and, I think, for the winning character of his 11-year old sleuth, Flavia de Luce.  The plain green binding of the book, without a glossy plastic cover, adds to a certain timeless feel of the writing and helps bring you back to the setting of 1950’s Britain. It felt to me like a library book from my childhood (in the fifties as it happens), and I was surprised to find that this is not a reissue of a forgotten classic, but has a 2009 copyright. I was also surprised to find that Bradley is not British at all, but Canadian.  He certainly infuses his book with a striking sense of time and place – a small village in postwar Britain – and describes childhood as it used to be in the days of benign neglect, before the over involved, slightly-crazed parents of our generation (self included).  Flavia’s dysfunctional family is half the fun of the book: the distant father; the disparaging older sisters; the missing, apparently deceased, mother.  It reminds one a bit of Dodie Smith’s 1948 classic (also an entertaining film), I Capture the Castle. I was also reminded me not a little of Oliver Sach’s memoir of his childhood, Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood.  In this engaging story, Sach’s shows us his own childhood, mostly during the war years, interwoven with the history of science and imbued throughout with his love of science, metals and chemistry.  He, like Flavia, had his own lab and experimented freely, sometimes causing explosions which, I seem to recall, caused very little disruption in the family routine (both of his parents were doctors).  They both make heroes of eminent chemists from the past; when in a tight spot, Flavia often asks herself what Madame Lavoisier would do in her place.  In short, Bradley captures that passion that was so moving in Sach’s memoir (I always loathed chemistry in school – the smells, the dry lectures, the incomprehensible symbols and stupid experiments – but Sach’s chapter on the Periodic Table is sheer poetry).  Flavia is always figuring out what chemical compounds lie behind smells, foods, causes of death – poison is, after all, her speciality. Speciality fascinates the generalist—those who dabble, who wander wide but shallow, envy the ones who dig deep – Glory be …to all trades, their gear, tackle and trim.  There is the genius of this book, not in the plot, which is clunky at best; even the characters are a little too, too; even the setting too quaint, but the love of chemistry elevates it all to a different level.  I certainly wouldn’t say as the book blurb declares, that “it is an enthralling mystery, a piercing depiction of class and society.”  No, not that, but something better, in its way, something true.  And, there is alos just an old fashioned enjoyment of telling a story replete with details of rooms, weather, towns, faces, all the stuff of a story that must be there.  I could wish for Bradley an editor to help with the plot – little things niggle such as Mary’s odd about-face in leading Flavia up to the room at the inn where she finds important clues, why did it take Flavia so long to remember the steps when at the bottom of the pit, etc. – however, the father, Flavia, the Inspector, Dogger are all wonderful characters, and I will be following Flavia’s further adventures with gusto.

Kindling

I already decided that I don’t want a Kindle (you know that electronic book-reading thing that you get from Amazon); however, I thought I would try it out while on vacation with a kindle-owner.  I read part of a New Yorker, but found that it wasn’t quite the organic experience that I’m used to – the cover wasn’t in color and was essentially meaningless, the cartoons were separate from the articles, plus the little sidebars didn’t show up, although they’re probably in there somewhere.  I like to read the magazine back-to-front sometime, or skip an article and go back to it, which wasn’t as easy as with the actual magazine.  Of course, I probably wasn’t utilizing all of the tools that are available, like search and bookmark.  One cool feature is the built in dictionary.  I also read part of a book, which was enjoyable (The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society –this has to be the worst title ever).  It’s weird not to know what page you’re on, but you always know what % of the book you’ve read.  I am always searching back through a book to find a memorable phrase or passage and Kindle lets you bookmark, which would save a lot of time.  Of course, the big plus is taking it on vacation – I lugged 2 hardcovers and 3 magazines in my backpack, whilst they had a world of books at their fingertips.  (Of course, you don’t want to take it to the beach!) The power is intoxicating, just one click and you can be reading a new book instantly (your credit card information is saved for ease of ordering).  For me, that power is also a negative.  I feel like my reading budget would instantly become a problem, especially since I tend to rely on the library for my reading and listening.  From a totally self-serving point of view, it is too bad that the Kindle reader can no longer lend one a book; if you borrow someone’s Kindle, they usually must be otherwise occupied, and it also creates a gift-buying problem for your friends or family members with Kindle; I could always fall back on a book as a gift, but now I guess a gift certificate to Amazon will have to suffice.  Thusfar, I only know two Kindle-owners and haven’t see anyone else sporting one in public places, but with the competition increasing, perhaps the price will come down and Kindles and other devices will become more prevalent.  This leads me to a final, admittedly minor, quibble:  if everyone on the plane or train is reading a Kindle, you really have no way of discreetly peeking at what they’re reading, which for me is one of the joys of travel.

The Help

I finally read The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  It was a compelling read, with much suspense and a real sense of the danger that Aibileen, Minny and the other maids were courting through their covert writing project.  The beating and blinding of one maid’s son for using a white bathroom provides a serious counterpoint to the ridiculous notion of the Junior League President that all households should have separate bathrooms for the help, ‘for sanitary reasons.’ One felt that even Skeeter, the young white woman who persuades the maids to tell their storis, might be in serious trouble, but there is also a sense of change trickling down, even to the provincial backwater that Jackson seemed to be. One of the strengths of the book is an undercurrent of national and even local events – of social upheaval on many fronts – hearing a Bob Dylan song, learning of Martin Luther King’s march on Washington. This premonition of the future is most poignantly expressed when Aibileen says goodbye to ‘her last white baby’, Mae Mobley, and has a visionof the modern world that Mae will inhabit. (In the fictional book, “Help”, that is being written by Skeeter and the maids, the editor declares that the best section is by Sarah, Aibileen’s pseudonym, and her voice is the one that I remember most from the book.)  The ending was a bit patched together, with Skeeter heading off to New York, her Mother apparently not dying, and the maids piecing their lives back together somehow.  While not entirely believable, the interwoven stories from different viewpoints works pretty well; however, it is disconcerting to have one chapter, the Junior League benefit where so many of the plotlines come together, suddenly in the third person, with an omniscient narrator telling us what different people were doing and thinking.  I also wonder if it would have been a better book with just two viewpoints -  Aibileen’s and Skeeter’s; it would have been harder to write but I think it would have been a stronger. All in all, though, the writing was good, with many insights into actions and motivations and a lot of humor. Elizabeth not recognizing herself in the book was perfect!  So, between, the topic, the times – early sixties in the South–and the characters, it adds up to a good, even an important book, well worth reading.

Sad

Khaled Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is better than the first in that it takes place entirely in Afghanistan.  His first, The Kite Runner had an initial riveting section set in Afghanistan, but the second part, set in the United States was not as compelling.  A Thousand Splendid Suns compels utterly with overlapping narratives of women’s lives that are inseparable from the recent history of this beleagured country. While reading of the sorrows and tribulations of wives who are abused; daughters denied schooling and given away as child brides; and mothers whose sons are lost in senseless wars, one has a horrible feeling that this story is still being told, that women will remain, in many cases, mere objects, abused, despised and wasted, valued only for breeding and kept subservient by physical abuse and unjust social structures.  There are many sympathetic male figures in the book, and some of the worst men show glimmers of humanity, even the bully, Rasheed, and the weak father, Jalil; however, for the most part society encourages the worst impulses so that these glimmers are eventually lost.  A poignant moment in the book is after the Soviet occupation of Kabul, when Laila’s father tells her that it is actually a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan, because she is allowed to go to school and to be independent.  This while his two sons are fighting in the Jihad against the Russians, the Jihad that is mostly a reaction to the freedom allowed women under Soviet rule.  The breakdown of rebel forces into factions that tear the country apart after the Soviets leave is an illustration of the senselessness of war.  More people killed, homes destroyed, children orphaned, and women’s rights even further-circumscribed – Hosseini ends on a hopeful note, but his book, dedicated in part to the women of Afghanistan, was written two years ago.  Since then, the Taliban have increased their presence and no doubt stories such as those of Laila and especially Mariam will continue to be played out in obscurity.  We have to at least thank Hosseini who shines a light on these lives and tells his tale with love and compassion.