Month: September 2012

A Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes

The dialogue among childhood friends—British, bookish boys in the 60’s—provides a full sense of their worldview and the dynamics of any teenaged group. Barnes is wonderful at portraying them at the micro level  and then pulling back twenty years into the future to provide the macro lens and the inevitable distortion of time.

Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson

This is an amazing first novel full of visceral energy (in particular what it is like to be a teenager, the child of hippies, in the drug-fueled 80s;) the raw, unadorned doom of adolescence; and the fate of biology.  I gobbled it up.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

I feel like Harbach is a clairvoyant and a ventriloquist. Oh, and he’s experienced past lives and knows, for example what it is like to be a sixty-something college president who’s in love with a student. He knows what it is like to be his daughter, Pella, a young woman struggling to find herself, to be an uber-gifted athlete and a person like Schwartz who’s ambition and wisdom and drive outstrip his own talent. These creations are unforgettable and true.

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Dana Spiotta like De Lillo, is a modernist; she gives us the story in the most elliptical, spare, deliberate, gorgeous fashion she can while insisting that the way it’s told is of equal value with what is told. The story itself is a one of the modern obsession with image, fame and identity: Spiotta tracks the sister of a would-be rock star through their interactions and through his own homemade scrapbook of invented concerts and self-generated rave reviews.  We come to question the difference between a life of true fame versus imagined, and, at the same time, feel the tragedy of a life and a talent that remains unrealized.

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman does a rare thing: she satirizes her characters (they are upwardly mobile, private -school New Yorkers) with such a light touch that we are also able to see the distinctions among them—some host parties for six-year-olds at the Plaza and some, like our protagonist, Liz, merely attend them—and to feel the pain of their imploding marriages, and lost dreams.  The beautiful life is falling away in the midst of a sex scandal and the Internet and the beautiful children and adults within the story, who love one another with ferocity, are revealed.  I’ve always loved her prose style, a lyricism and precision that are rarely concomitant.  With each careful sentence, the pieces are stacked. And then they fall beautifully.

The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger

In Amina, a Bangladeshi woman, new to this country, Nell Freudenberger has created a character with a tangible inner life. This may be the essential job of the novelist yet often we are not lucky to see it. Instead we may find signifiers for who a person is—their clothing, the material world around them—external markers. Freudenberger reveals Amina  first in these material ways, the ways that perhaps Amina sees herself, aspiring as she does to obtain all the outward signs of American success, and then later, internally.  She’s a character who doesn’t know her thoughts, suffers from self-deception, perfectionism, her own outgrown ambitions and her buried desires.

As its title suggests it’s a book about marriage. The relationship depicted is at first deceptively simple. It thickens incrementally as Freudenberger reveals its origins. In the end I came to see the institution in a new way: it’s a formal bond that may start from an authentic connection or from nothing more than a contractual exchange of needs (Amina needs to become an American with George’s help, George needs to create a family with her help.) Yet within that dry, almost mercenary start, a true connection blooms.

Her method is never flashy; slow, incremental, precise and clear, she guides us into her characters and their position in the world. The feat is huge: Amina convinces you that Freudenberger has been possessed by a Bangladeshi woman when she is truly an American from LA. (Amina’s perception of Bangladesh when she returns is searingly vivid and palpable.) In the author’s full identification with this character, we gain full access to what feels like a real life.

The Marriage Plot by Jeff Eugenides

Leonard is insane. He’s also the most compelling character in this book about three Brown students in the late eighties.  The hollow grayness of boredom, the fear of growing up, the high of being in love, a sense of failure and then grandiosity, are all depicted as—not just the heart of his illness– but the heart of human nature. The pages in which Leonard decreases his medication in order to feel himself (whatever that inimitable thing a self, actually is) are pages of genius; he is not just compelling, he is sympathetic. As we read, he is no longer a freak but a tragic figure.

A friend commented that Eugenides must have suffered manic depressive illness himself or have known someone who had.  That’s irrelevant. It’s his imagination (whether connected to an ill or “normal” mind) and his use of language that has enabled him to create this indelible, painfully accurate portrait.

Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman

Can your baby wait for a marshmallow? The answer may determine their future success. Druckerman describes a study in which toddlers are asked to delay gratification; such an ability, she writes is endemic to French children in contrast to their American counterparts. Living in Paris and raising three children, Druckerman writes beautifully about the cultural differences among French and American parents. Her tone is humorous, relying at times on good doses of generalization.  I found her lament familiar and hilarious while my mother and her peer didn’t seem to connect to it. My guess is that the divide about parenting is perhaps not only national but generational. Our parents knew to make us wait for gratification, but somehow our generation can’t make our children do the same. My American friend living in Europe put it this way, “French parents say “non” more than any other word.”