Hilary's Book Blog

Word around here is that this is based on a true story. It’s the kind of book people ask for without knowing the author or the title, and as librarians we can only find it through word of mouth, because there is no concrete distinguishing characteristic that would tell anyone there’s a local connection. So after finding it once, forgetting it, then needing to find it again two years later, I figured I should read it myself & see what all the fuss is about.

As a novel, it’s not great but not terrible either—routine psychological suspense, where there’s a sordid family secret that’s revealed bit by bit. As the narrator struggles to remember/reconstruct what happened, you’re driven to keep reading to find out what exactly it was–but to me that feels like fake suspense, because you know it’s going to be something horrible even if you’re not sure exactly what the details will be (the genre is not my cup of tea, personally). The reconstruction comes in chunks as Richard, the narrator, interacts with his sister who’s killed her husband (because in a breakdown she thought he was her dad), the sister’s lawyer, other siblings, and a love interest. It’s well-paced and decently-written, although the dialogue is a little stilted and the procedural parts don’t ring particularly true (the lawyer is a heck of a lot more like a psychologist).

Knowing that it’s supposedly based on real events makes it worse in two ways. First, of course, it’s tragic and upsetting (whether or not the event actually happened—it feels like “recovered memory”). Secondly, I have mixed feelings about the roman-a-clef aspect (which of course is what prompted me to read the book in the first place).

If you know a fictional book has a real-life basis, naturally you’re constantly looking for the details that match up to real places/people/things. Summers’ veneer of disguise is ridiculous: “Pallstead” for Hallstead, “Cranklin Hill” for Franklin Hill. Other match-ups are a little looser: the childhood farm is supposedly in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Maryland, whereas we’re in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania (but the location of the real farm is in the Blue Ridge school district); “Blueberry,” the county seat, must be Montrose (Susquehanna County seat) because of the library’s Blueberry Festival (since I often wear the Newberry the Blueberry costume and am in charge of publicity for the Festival, that gave me a particular thrill!); Waterton is presumably Binghamton. There’s a real Steam Hollow Road, so maybe she didn’t even bother to disguise that. And she refers to the farm’s tiger lilies—they could be clever stand-ins for the daylilies that grow everywhere, but are more likely just wrongly identified.

It’s enjoyable to look for what can be identified, but ultimately I think it distracts from the narrative. Of course, since most people who read this book have no connection to the area, this isn’t a relevant criticism for most potential readers!

I’ve read one of Sparks’ novels—ehhhh—and listened to part of another on CD while fixing the library copy—strongly disliked it, but that was partly my reaction to Tom Bodett’s reading. (Bodett adopts a slightly higher, simpering voice for the female characters. Do a voice characterization or don’t, fella!) But this is nonfiction and sounded interesting. It is, although with a touch of the blandness I found in his fiction.

Nicholas convinced his brother to come on a package tour which breezed by most of the famous exotic destinations in the world: Mayan and Incan ruins, Easter Island, Ayers Rock, Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, the rock cathedrals in Lalibela, Ethiopia (which I hadn’t heard of before—they do sound fascinating), the Hypogeum, and the Northern Lights. As they travel, he intersperses autobiography. (It’s not clear why Micah gets co-author credit, since everything is in Nicholas’ voice; presumably it’s just a nice gift of the royalties). And a very sad story it is—by their mid-thirties, they had already lost both parents and their only sister.

It’s not a particularly remarkable family—difficult father, loveable mother, yada yada—although the young Sparkses often say to each other “our parents are weird,” “our parents are crazy.” But what adolescent doesn’t think that? They were very poor and became very self-reliant (their mother in particular didn’t coddle, and pooh-poohed injuries), and that must somehow be related to the extreme determination of both brothers, but Sparks doesn’t really show us how or why. He tells us that he basically decided to become the best runner in his high school, and then in the state, and he did; then he told Micah how cool it was, and Micah also became a state-ranked runner. (Obviously they must be genetically gifted, but that’s not the only requirement). More strikingly, they both decided to be millionaires before they turned 30. Micah made it with time to spare, and Nicholas got a million-dollar offer for The Notebook two months before his 30th birthday.

The most remarkable feat Sparks describes is his determination to help his son, Ryan, who was diagnosed with autism. He basically worked with Ryan all day every day and trained him willy-nilly to learn language and interact with other people, and it actually worked. But through these amazing stories, there is something I can’t quite put my finger on—a lack of affect, a lack of insight—that prevents me from fully understanding or identifying with Sparks. There are photos interspersed throughout and I found myself staring at the faces of the young Sparkses, who are all impossibly good-looking (Nicholas in particular has adorable dimples, and their smiles all glisten with movie-star teeth), wondering what makes them tick. It’s like looking at a family of Barbie and Ken dolls.

There seems to me to be a lack of affect even on the trip. Sparks talks about how amazing the sights are, yet the two are avowedly bored by guides and museums, and often seem to annoy the tour operators with a lack of respect. An immature attitude comes across, reinforced by this account of one of the daredevil stunts they pulled as teenagers (in a neighborhood lavish with Christmas decorations):

Over the next two hours–thinking we were soooooo funny–we unscrewed every lightbulb and hauled them off. We’d filled six plastic garbage bags with lights, and the houses looked as if they’d been visited by the Grinch. I really and truly can’t explain why we did such things. It’s juvenile and embarassing, but I can’t help but think that if we had a chance to go back in time, we’d end up doing those things again.

Doesn’t that sound like he still thinks it was pretty funny?

Before the trip begins, Nicholas is a workaholic who’s getting depressed and losing touch with his family, and Micah has lost his religious faith (their background is very observant Catholic). Getting away together and reflecting on their family history helps, and when they return, both have found some peace of mind.

People often ask my brother and me how we continued to function–even flourish, by most standards–in the face of so much tragedy in our lives. I can’t answer that question, except to say that neither Micah nor I ever considered the alternative. We’d been raised to survive, to meet challenges, and to chase our dreams.
…

My parents may have been crazy, but whatever they did, it worked.

So it’s a nice ending, and the trip does sound spectacular—I just felt as though, instead of seeing someone else’s life clearly, as one does in the best memoirs, I was seeing a picture of that life through cloudy glass. And as I recall, that was my impression of the Sparks novel I read too—that it was a good imitation of a novel, but that it didn’t make me feel like the real thing. Maybe it’s just me…

Christopher Moore (whom I’ve never read–I just stumbled across his website) has a list of “funny books” he recommends, and I liked enough of the ones I knew to try ones I didn’t, like this one. A real bear and a failed novelist exchange lives accidentally. The bear finds the writer’s manuscript, gives himself the name “Hal Jam,” and heads to New York, where he’s an overnight success. We meet agent Chum Boykins, publisher Elliot Gadson, publicist Zou Zou Sharr, etc…all broad caricatures, literary phonies who see in Hal not a wild animal but a rough-hewn genius like Hemingway, their ticket to success. Meanwhile the writer is meeting weird country types like Vinal Pinette in the Maine Woods. There are flashes of laugh-out loud humor, especially the bear’s attempts at conversation (he learns a few words, which combined with emperor’s-new-clothes syndrome gets him as far), but basically it’s the meat of a mildly funny short story dragged out into a contrived novel.

[Paperback title is Family on Beartown Road, which confuses the heck out of people who think one is a sequel to the other…]

Cohen lives in Binghamton, our closest city, and writes a column for the paper. The column’s never struck me as anything special, so I wasn’t expecting much from this book. I read it both for local interest, and because the topic of Alzheimer’s fascinates me (I spent several years as a home health aide working with Alzheimer’s victims). House on Beartown Road surprised me–it’s got some flaws, but on balance it’s a terrific memoir.

Cohen moved to Binghamton & bought a big country farmhouse with her husband. They had a daughter and shortly thereafter her father, whose Alzheimer’s was rapidly worsening, moved in with them. Nine weeks later, the husband left. As the book opens, winter is coming on and Cohen is responsible for a one-year old, an elderly man who needs almost as much care, dogs, cats, and a drafty farmhouse. Pretty scary. The present-tense, straightforward narration gave me the claustrophic impression of being trapped, stuck, overwhelmed right along with Cohen. Many of the short chapters have clearly been reworked from newspaper columns, and there’s some repetion of the background, but that actually adds to the immediacy, the way the brain runs over and over an awful situation. Sometimes the journalistic style reveals sloppiness (reliance on cliches, egregious mistakes like “enormity” for “enormousness”), but there’s also plenty of compelling writing, and the brisk pacing works.

The situation is as hard as you would imagine (harder if you’ve never experienced a winter in this area!), but there’s humor and happiness too. Cohen herself isn’t that appealing as a character, primarily because through most of the book she’s in thrall to a deep depression. But her daughter and her dad are both captivating. Little Ava adopts everything.

I have to fight her over the stub ends of celery and carrots. She wants to take them back to her room, where she lines them up in rows on the wood floor and talks to them in baby gibberish. Then she tucks them in bed and bids them goodnight. They have names. They get sleepy and hungry. I find her trying to feed a piece of an old cookie to a chewed ear of corn she’s pilfered from the dinner table.

Sanford’s “word salad” (constructions people with Alzheimer’s come up with to work around words they’ve forgotten) are often poetic or funny. His love for Ava, even though he doesn’t really understand who she is and calls her “this little guy,” is heartwarming. Cohen understands the way the world seems to him and her intelligent sympathy (even when the practical and emotional problems drive her to the edge) help us feel how her dad is still a whole person. And despite all the difficulties, it’s wonderful how well the combination of a tiny child and someone with dementia works. Ava and Sanford understand and accept each other.

The brain of my father and the brain of my daughter have crossed. On their ways to opposite sides of life, they have made an X. They look upon each other with fond familiarity. And they see each other heading to the place they have just come from. On his way out of this life, Daddy has passed her the keys.

Instead of thinking about him losing the abilities to speak, to walk, and to negotiate the world, I like to think he has given them to her.

It’s hard to keep quality and momentum through eighteen books, let alone 26. Grafton is holding her own, by moving away from the standard whodunit into psychological explorations of character. So although the later books in the alphabet aren’t as twisty as the early ones, if you ever liked Kinsey Milhone, you’ll want to know what she’s up to. Despite the slow start, R has a gripping finale.

Kinsey’s got a guy, a good one for a change! Her 87-year-old cutie landlord, William (my favorite recurring character), is trying to date–and being clobbered by his older brothers. Those are the subplots–the focus is Reba Lafferty, an impulsive ex-con who’s a daughter of privilege. Her dad has hired Kinsey to shepherd her from prison back to a regular life. Reba is entertaining but not completely in focus–I don’t really get why Kinsey likes her so much. Naturally, Reba has not entirely left her criminal past behind her, and soon she’s dragged Kinsey into the middle of a money-laundering scheme being investigated by the FBI.

The weird thing about this series is that since time is passing much more slowly in Kinsey’s world than in ours, she’s falling further and further into the past. R supposedly takes place in 1987 (which means William is most likely dead by now–aww…), which is easy to forget because mysteries generally take place in an unspecified present. Yet whenever I’m reminded of the year, I can’t help but watch out for anachronisms, and second-guess “would a shopping mall really have been anchored by a bookstore that early?”

Binchy is one of the few novelists whose newest books I always make a point to read. She’s classic comfort food–not great literature, but decently-written, heartwarming stories that don’t leave a sticky or soggy aftertaste. One of the best things about her books is that the central characters always change for the better in a believable way. They may be in sad situations, but over the course of the novel they somehow find the courage to grow and overcome their personal flaws a little bit. Love, kindness, and hope are always central. I can make these generalizations because Binchy’s books are not wildly different from each other. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s why they are comfort food–you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

Nights is middle-grade Binchy. She’s left the precincts of her native Ireland again, which can be nice for a change (although it’s unintentionally hilarious when she puts Irish idioms in the mouths of supposed Americans, eg having one of them say to another, “Will we do X?” where an American would really say, “Let’s do X.”) There’s a motley assortment of characters whose fates intertwine: four tourists stuck in the small Greek village of Aghia Anna, after a terrible boat accident paralyzes traffic in and out. We have a young woman in love with a jerk, a young man who’s escaping from his smothering family, a woman running away from her lover, and a recently-divorced dad who’s agonizing over relations with his son. They join Andreas, the elderly proprietor of the tavern where they meet, who is alienated from his son, and Vonni, an Irish ex-pat who sees the fix for everyone’s problems but her own.

And that’s the lever that moves all the action: each of the characters can see how silly or blind the others are being, and gently help them react to their own situations differently. The power of friendship is another nice Binchy emphasis. Inevitably, as these random people become friends, they care about each other and we care about them. The satisfactory happy endings come as each person finds the strength to deal with his or her problems, and the reader is left with a feeling of optimism about ordinary human beings. Now that’s my kind of fiction!

The resilience of kids is a byword, but at the age of eight Kevin Sweeney came up with a novel way of dealing with the loss of his father. He decided to choose three men to be his surrogate dads–without telling them, he’d observe and emulate them. A terrific premise, but alas this book doesn’t deliver quite as much as it promises. It’s still an occasionally touching look at a hardscrabble San Francisco Irish childhood.

Sweeney explains in the introduction that the book grew out of an essay he wrote for Salon in 2001. (The original essay says he was 7 when he came up with his plan; presumably he subsequently found the correct age in the journal he kept.) The deaths of many young fathers on 9/11 prompted him to think about his coping strategy, and he wanted both to reassure families left fatherless and to encourage other men to be role models. I just read that essay, and it’s wonderful. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t very succesfully flesh out the essay, and what’s been added to pad it out to full length is just not as compelling as the original.

Memoirs are as thick as dandelions these days. If the author’s not a household name, doesn’t have a truly compelling and unusual story to tell, or doesn’t write like an angel, it’s tough for yet another autobiography to stand out. The Sweeneys are averagely interesting people with an averagely interesting story; what’s compelling is Kevin’s idea, but we don’t learn much about what prompted him to come up with it. He describes being eight years old, lying in bed and worrying that he won’t know how to be a good father, a good man, because he doesn’t have “the classic reference point–my old man.” Isn’t that in itself a rather remarkable train of thought for an eight-year-old? But as an adult, Sweeney has difficulty reconnecting enough with his child self to explain it to us. “My scheme had a formality and simplicity that makes me wonder now about why I felt this need so clearly,” he says. The idea was his first journal entry, but reading one’s old journals can sometimes be like reading that of a stranger’s–it isn’t always possible to reconstruct the self who wrote them.

After describing his family–how his father died when Sweeney was three, leaving six children, how his mother worked tirelessly and his oldest brother became the male head of the household–Sweeney goes on to introduce the three men he chose to be his subsitute fathers, but that only takes a few pages for each. The rest of the book is taken up with Sweeney’s youth: inheriting his brother’s paper route, playing baseball, pranks and mischief (he and his friends used to collect gunpowder from used casings at the Navy base and use it to blow things up), learning to drink in high school, and so forth. We hear a little bit about his interactions with his chosen fathers, notably the one “man to man” talk which got him off the path towards excessive drinking. But until the conclusion, which briefly analyses what he learned from each of the three, it’s not really much about them. There’s some insight into the damage repression of grief does; the family doesn’t talk about their dad and his death until the kids are grown.

As a side note, Father Figures has an arrestingly hideous cover–extreme closeup of a boy sitting and holding an enormous orange balloon(?) in front of him, cropped so that all you see is one dirty scabbed knee, ugly shorts, a bit of T-shirt and arm, and one quarter of an orange circle taking up most of the cover. It’s unsettling in a way the book absolutely isn’t, and I think it might make people who might enjoy the book hesitate to pick it up, while suggesting some dark tale of child abuse to others who would then be disappointed.

Lerner is among the best of the self-help authors–she’s pragmatic, insightful, funny, literate, and avoids one-size-fits-all/magic pill claims. (Of course, the downside of realism is missing the excitement of “this will solve ALL my problems!”–which is what drives bestsellerdom.) Lerner gives a brief overview of the book’s layout in the first chapter, which ends:

…the brief epilogue reveals the six secret, simple, specific steps you can take to banish unwanted anxiety, fear, and shame from your life forever. Just kidding, but yes, that would be nice.

This book is a good exploration of emotions that fuel unhappiness, with some practical exercises, though it’s not as structured as the most detailed self-help books. Lerner’s primary technique is to weave anecdotes and reflections together into a narrative. It’s a more philosophical approach than most, and more enjoyable to read and think about.

Lerner draws interesting distinctions between behaviors in the face of stress, like underfunctioning and overfunctioning (I can see that I do both in different circumstances). She does describe a sort of “magic” solution which is pretty cool. A man was terrified of asking a co-worker out on a date. Lerner asked him to go to a shopping mall in a city he was visiting and collect 75 rejections in a row by asking women out to coffee. The process helped him realize that it would be easier to just ask out his co-worker than to finish!

The chapter on public speaking, and how its principles can apply to difficult private situations, is especially good. I also found the section on dealing with anxiety in organizations particularly novel and useful.

But my favorite aspect of Fear and Other Uninvited Guests is Lerner’s bracing and refreshing realism. When she shows people talking to their parents about sensitive topics, for example, there’s no “Honey, you’re right–thank you for pointing that out!” conclusion. Instead, the parents storm out and the adult child is left shaking with nerves. But the focus is on having the courage to speak up respectfully and constructively, and the participants end up feeling better even if there’s no huge breakthrough. The epilogue is titled “Everyone Freaks Out,” which encapsulates the whole approach. Anxiety, fear, and shame won’t go away, but facing them with courage and calm can help.

An assortment of essays, mostly quite good, about commitment & relationships. It’s sort of a sequel to The Bitch in the House, which I haven’t read, and similarly marketed as “representatives of the opposite sex reveal the TRUTH about how they feel.” As I say, these are good essays, some even brilliant, but if they strike you as containing any earth-shattering revelations, you haven’t been paying enough attention to the aforesaid opposite sex as people, instead of stereotypes.

Which leads to the most striking passage (to me), in the foreward, where Cathi Hanauer (editor of Bitch in the House) describes the reactions people had to the concept for this book:

I was told, “It’ll never work.” “Men don’t think.” “Men have no interest in self-exploration or revelation.” “Men don’t feel things.” “Men won’t say anything negative about their wives.” “Men have no interior lives.” “Men just want to watch TV and read the paper.” I didn’t believe it. Okay, I believed some of it. But not all of it, not really.

Now take those sentences & replace “men” with “women,” “blacks,” “Asians,” “gays,” or any other group, and add whatever negative stereotypes you think of. (Although it’s kind of tough to imagine something more sweepingly insulting than “don’t think” and “don’t feel things!”) Can you see the new paragraph appearing as-is in a book issued by a major publisher, with no more emphatic commentary than the last bit?

I can’t say I’m surprised by this, unfortunately, but it bothers me a lot. It’s a symptom of why on the whole I prefer to identify myself as an egalitarian (all humans deserve the same rights and access to opportunities) rather than a feminist (since that focuses specifically on women’s rights, although I don’t discount the importance of the feminist movement in the 20th century). Would the world be a better place if it were run by women? I doubt it; I think it would be bad in different ways (just like when any previously-oppressed group comes to power). We’re all human beings, after all, basically monkeys with language and culture, and we struggle with similar problems and tensions.

Nevertheless, certainly in American culture there are some generalizations that can be made about the roles of men and women (keeping in mind that no generalization should be used to predict an individual’s behavior or attitudes). Over the past 40 or 50 years, there’s been an enormous change in the expectations–both women’s and men’s–of how a man could and should act. The essays in Bastard on the Couch don’t shed any blinding light on this topic, but they do offer some interesting, poignant, and thought-provoking flashlight beams on a few areas.

The twenty-seven essays are divided into four sections: “Hunting and Gathering” (sex/monogamy/adultery), “Can’t Be Trusted With Simple Tasks” (household responsibilities in marriage), “Bicycles for Fish,” (a grab-bag, but mostly about role reversals), and “All I Need,”(sad endings). They’re all interesting the way any honest self-revelations are (except Anthony “Jarhead” Swofford’s essay, which feels narcissistic and fake).

Daniel Jones says in “Chivalry on Ice:”

The gestures of chivalry may have been inherently patronizing and obsolete, but my liberation from having to perform them had the side effect of dulling my caretaking instincts, of turning me into someone who would cheer my wife on in one breath (“You can do it yourself!”) only to brush her off in the next (“You can do it yourself’).

This touches on a problem many of these essays dance around: in the absense of traditional gender roles, it’s easy to flail around instead of doing the work of figuring out how to be kind and helpful and supportive to each other based on what each individual needs and wants.

Funny but fundamentally very sad (how do relationships evolve into this awful dynamic?) is Christopher Russell’s “My List of Chores,” where he shares his wife’s daily harangues and general distrust of his competence, which he passively resists, causing her to go even more over the top.

In “Ward and June R Us,” Rob Spillman describes how he and his wife put an end to constant bickering over chores by switching traditional roles each week, so that they take turns being “June” (in charge of all parenting and domestic duties) and “Ward” (come home, relax, and play with the kids guilt-free).

Robert Skates shows the fallout from divorces around him (his own marriage long over) in “The Hole in the Window: A View of Divorce.” At the end, he generously allows his son and his son’s ex-stepfather to hang out together, commiserating over the shock of that second divorce which has split them apart.

Other standouts are Steve Friedman’s “A Bachelor’s Fears,” funny and finally touching; Rob Jackson’s heartwarming “My Life as a Housewife;” and Trey Ellis, “Father of the Year,” funny and poignant.

The fourth in the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series, and great in yet a different way. The book opens with Aubrey at home in Hampshire, now married to Sophie and finding that domestic living is not all that he had hoped.

This cottage, though picturesque among its ash trees and even romantic, ideally suited for two in the early days of his marriage, was neither large nor comfortable; it had always been low-ceilinged, pokey and inconvenient, but now that it also contained two babies, a niece, a ruined mother-in-law, some large pieces of furniture … and a couple of servants, it was something like the Black Hole of Calcutta, except that whereas the Hole was hot, dry and airless, Ashgrove Cottage let in draughts from all sides, while the damp rising from the floor joined the leaks in the roof to form pools in many of the rooms.

It’s a comic beginning; O’Brian describes the infant twin girls thus: “They had pale, globular faces, and in the middle of each face a surprisingly long and pointed nose called the turnip to an impartial observer’s mind.” But very soon Maturin has arranged what both Jack and Sophie want most, Aubrey’s return to a sailing ship.

Aubrey is appointed temporary Commodore in charge of retaking the island of Mauritius from the French. One of the things I’ve liked about this series from the start is the insights into work relationships. Aubrey is now supervising not just a crew, at which he’s an expert, but other captains, and that’s a whole new set of problems and sensitivities. The showy, competitive Lord Clonfert, who measures himself against Aubrey and resents his success, is a particularly well-drawn tragic character. O’Brian is masterful at allusions (often subtle) which capture the truth of the situation. Here’s Maturin reflecting on what ultimately happens to Clonfert’s rivalry with Aubrey:

Stephen … looked at Jack with his pale, expressionless eyes, looking objectively at his friend, tall, sanguine, almost beefy, full of health, rich, and under his kindly though moderate concern happy and even triumphant. He thought, ‘You cannot blame the bull because the frog burst: the bull has no comprehension of the affair…’

The complex political games and jockeying for position in the Navy and the government at large are also highlighted in this volume. Maturin’s role as a valuable spy for the British gives him the power to turn the wheels to Aubrey’s advantage, another plot thread neatly worked out. Since there are 16 volumes yet to come, and Aubrey is already into middle age and rising fast in the ranks, I wonder what’s in store for him. There are hints that Maturin is seriously depressed; in the first volume I found O’Brian’s opaqueness frustrating, but now it’s part of the charm that leads one on to the next book.