In The Blood by Lisa Unger

I never doubted my belief in the veracity of this story. 

This was a spell-binding psychodrama thriller: murder, mayhem, and more.

Psychopaths on the rampage (if you can spot them), battling psychiatrists!  Who’s on top of the I.Q. ladder, i.e., who’s manipulating who?

Plots and sub-plots unfold – who can you trust?

A 24-hour read: 340 riveting pages.

The author’s got a half a dozen other books out:

  Heartbroken

      Darkness, My Old Friend

         Fragile

              Die For You

                  Black Out

                     Sliver of Truth

                         Beautiful Lies

So you can see a “shrinky” bent here.

Whether you’ve only taken one course [Child Psych 101 or Abnormal Psych 200] or even if you’ve got your PhD in Psychotic Drugs or Sociology of Abnormal Psychosis, this will hold your attention to the end, and you won’t know who to trust:

not the cops,

not the shrinks,

not the teachers,

not the kids,

not your family,

and least of all, not yourself.

 

Everyone’s wacko, and everyone has an agenda.

 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simoson

Back to back coming of age tales -- or is it three in a row before this month? All teens: Cat’s Table, Brooklyn Tree, Flower Language.!  This time the protagonist is not 16, but 60, and transitioning through male menopause.

Ms. Simonson opens with the portrait of a stodgy old fuddy-duddy, an iconic English “Major”; then the author proceeds to awaken his feminine side, transforming the Major into an emotional, feeling, caring, amorous, and waltzing multi-cultural hero after the application of several doses of estrogen.

This story was pleasant to read because it had a nice balance of plot, narrative, and description.  We, as a group, have complained recently that this sort of balance was missing from our library selections.  For me, having lived the better part of a decade in England, there were many reminders of small town English life.

There were a great number of quotable bon mots, mostly voiced by the Major, and most of which I will leave to others to cite, but two that tickled my English-trained funny bone were: [p.175] in response to “where would we be if we were honest”, the Major retorts, “On a dry spit of land known as the moral high ground”; and [p.203] in response to “I’m in love with an unsuitable woman!” the Major retorts, “Is there really any other kind?”.  Simonson has provided us with a read that is a level up from our recent undertakings: more balanced, more urbane, much more broadly-based in scope.

If there is any fault with this otherwise good book, it lies in gender characterization.  And while yes, I feel the gender portrayals are “spot on” for women; they are a bit off the mark for men.  In “American” argot, she doesn’t get men.  It’s a book written by a middle-aged woman, for other middle-aged women.  The Major’s transformation: philosophically, physically, metaphysically, and culturally takes amazingly little time.

The men are all single-layer stereotypes.  This starts with the Major, who “hates women drivers.”  He is a rock-solid, confirmed bachelor at the onset of this story: golf once a week with his friend Alec (a name only, never developed); periodic telephone updates from his son, Roger [who is the epitome of a self-centered child who think that elders aren’t capable any longer of self-care]; and passing relationships with the local Vicar and other golf club buddies.

Additional men are added as the plot develops: the fundamentalist kid, Abdul Wahid; the Major’s freshly deceased brother Bertie; Mrs. Ali’s deceased husband (Ahmed: a nice guy we are assured); Colonel Peterson (not quite yet dead); Mrs. Ali’s deceased husband’s brother Dawid (a fundamentalist sympathizer at least when it comes to misogynist views on women).

Now with the women, we’ve got a large, yellow, sweet 2-pound onion to be carefully peeled, layer by layer, throughout the story.  Mrs. Ali is real; so is Grace, so is Sandy.  We empathize with dancing Amina; despise the old crone, Mummi.  We don’t really like Bertie’s wife Marjorie, nor Sadie Khan but we do root for Alice B Toklas, along with the women’s club ladies: Alma and Daisy, the Vicar’s wife.

There is no moral – other than, the rich get richer

                              and the poor get to have love and babies

February Reader's Theater

Here are the video links for the Feb 2014 one-act plays put on by the River Friends of the Library
Time Sandwich (about aging)
a

a

Wanda's Visit (Marriage Comedy)
b

b

James Agee's Depression Era Study
c

c

Crab Cakes (male aging)
d

d

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje

 

Sailing, oh sailing,

           a sea without women, oh

                      we men crave the sea.

 

This book was spell-bindingly written.  I finished it in two back to back readings.  It did drag a bit towards the end.  But this author is a master at 2 to 3 page character outlines.  He was like a script-writer penning a memorable back-story for an actor to use to properly get into character.

He neatly, Dickens-like, drew the characters together with a plot web at the end with some surprising twists.

The author titled this book a novel; but he also commented at the back that it could be called a fictional memoir.  As a novel, I found it bland, and when he went into older, reflective sections at the end, it was actually boring.  However, as fictional memoir, it was brilliant.  Ondaatje has an imaginative knack for inventing characters.

But then, I listened to Michael Krasny interview the “Train” guy about his book on Trains[1] (see below).  Ship travel, like train travel, pushes people’s nostalgia button.

So, I’m finishing up with my nostalgia.

Since stories have been told around traveler’s campfires, the most exciting and heroic are those about sea voyages.  It’s not too big a jump, for me, to think of space travel as sea voyages.  I’m not alone, the USS Enterprise of Captain Kirk and Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon to name a few.  I’m a junkie for sea stories; good or bad, I’ll still read them all.  My top four are: (1) The Odyssey, (2) Two Years Before the Mast, (3) The Old man and the Sea, and (4) Shackleton and the Endurance.  I’ve reread each of these at least once; a rarity reserved by Peter for the likes of Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet, or Frederik Pohl’s “The Heechee Saga”.

My first Atlantic crossing by sea was on a troop ship, whose name was probably 0026894023.  It was a great adventure.  I got my “sea legs” after less than a day.  Me, who got seasick as a Boy Scout fishing off Santa Cruz Bay. [It was probably the early morning bus ride from San Jose to Santa Cruz; and I wasn’t the first – the deck was slippery from the first 6 or 7 eleven-year-old boys.] 

The crossing to Europe was in bad weather, rainstorms all the time; 30-45 foot swells that made you wonder why the ocean didn’t just swallow us up; “How will we ever get back on top of the swells?”  Looking forward along the port bow at a three-story building of turbulent water that you are heading for is scary. 

I volunteered to work in the bakery, getting special privileges, but mainly roamed the ship from sunup to sundown, just like these Sri-Lankan kids.  No swimming pools on a troop ship.  Most GIs stayed below decks and spent their time being sick, not eating and vomiting when they did.  The sea air gave me an enormous appetite, and I could eat even as food was sliding from one end of the table to the other.  We were prohibited from going on deck during bad weather, but the crew wasn’t about to patrol the place: “If some idiot GI wants to get washed overboard, who cares.” 

So, I spent most of my free time exploring the ship and watching the sea.

I could watch the sea for hours.

---

[1] Recently on NPR’s Forum:

http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201402181000#disqus_thread

On Feb 18^th  Michael Krasny’s Forum was a call-in book discussion about “Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World”, written by Tom Zoellner.  In NPR’s promo for this program, they said that “… .. Tom Zoellner is back from a rousing trip around the world… .. Zoellner charts the history of the locomotive along the world's most important railways, from the birthplace of the steam engine in Cornwall, England, to the frigid stretches of the Trans-Siberian railroad. We'll talk about his journey and discuss the future of high speed rail.”

Most of the program was devoted to telephone callers, remembering with fond nostalgia, their experiences with trains.  They didn’t ever get to any of the planned talking points.  The link above will take you to the more than a dozen comments that came in on-line with similar nostalgia.

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Betty Smith – certainly no pretension there, in her name. 

Why does a book like this, or any book, achieve “classic” status – read and recommended by millions – timelessly, decade after decade. 

There’s no, for all books, one single answer.  Every classic will have its own genesis.  For the Brooklyn book, I am a proponent of the following reasons. 

There is the classic memoir style of personal exploits, romances, tragedies, and successes.  This starts with Odysseus by Homer millennia ago and continues to this day as the most popular form of relating stories.  With the semi-lyrical form of crafting her stories as though told around the kitchen table, Betty Smith captures the metrical, the choral, and the familial moral essence of all story-telling.

This memoir style works best in modern {written} times, when the primary subject is the major upheaval of the majority segment of society.  Classical subjects have been: class change: serf to urban worker; urban to intellectual worker {yet to come}; political upheaval – governing ideas; wars; technology; and the inclusion of women, racial differences, and sexual preferences {in process}.  A sub-stylistic aspect is the incorporation of local argot, which she does very well – no bias.  The writing is at a generic, common-man level:   gender,  race,  religion --- all are included at the table.

Well, these criteria still allow for tens of thousands of texts.  How do I keep filtering?  It is very hard, but oh, so important, to be able to age with your protagonist as a story begins to span years.  Betty Smith has used the writing devices available to her.  The pre-teen girl recounts her adventures in perfect memoir style: recounting all the well-researched specifics that will please her middle-aged audience.  Her romantic “PaPa” is her icon of this period.

Betty’s writing about her teen years tended to drift into the play scripting of O’Neill and Wilder, with revelations sort of like Dreiser’s.  Her stories became more dramatic and less factual.  Practical “MaMa” became her icon for these years.  There is no dis-associating the author from her personal history.  This is still memoir.

And finally, when she writes, for her older audience, about America going off to WW-I, the ethos is far more about WW-II.  She’s grown up as an author and really can’t capture those thoughts of 25 years before.  But why should she? 

Do all women have the Lee vs Ben conflict?  Francie has moved on, well beyond “on” by the end of this book.  I have been reminded, from this reading, that all women have this Lee-Ben quandary.  I get no vote: I’m neither Ben nor Lee.

But this is another thing about being a great classic, the story must pose questions, and Betty’s does,  dangled throughout, that are never answered:  Ben or Lee; Michigan or Brooklyn; marriage or not; children or not; writing or working; career or children.

"Her" a Film with Joaquin Phoenix

An unusual set of random circumstances: completely drained me of energy on Saturday; then was re-energized by the SF 49ers on Sunday morning’s win, and then with an early game end, I took an early nap, leaving me with an unfilled 7-9pm timeslot, which was when “Her” was playing at the Airport Stadium 12.

What a fascinating movie.  I was interested in what was going to be happening soon in the computer relationships world.  Joaquin Phoenix is the main character, and he is almost Chaplinesque in playing the meek, downtrodden soul that finds no successes in his life, especially with women.  Amy Adams is his ex-wife [a successful author], Rooney Mara is his best friend [a computer games authoress], Olivia Wilde is a hot-babe his friends try to set him up with, and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of Samantha, his computer friend.

This is not a Sci-Fi theme, no more so than “You’ve Got Mail” with Meg Ryan was 15 years ago.  It’s a girl meets boy tale [loses; then finds], but I won’t give away who.  He has imperfect relationships with all four co-lead women.  He comes to understand each relationship as the 2-hour movie unfolds.  There is no “film time” to develop other male characters.  The two they couldn’t write out of the script were clearly MCPs.

I enjoy the author William Gibson’s take on futuristic ideas, usually ten years out.  This film is just a clean and neat short story that could be this year or next, but it also could be a Gibson short story.