Fitzhugh, Newman, Troost, Barbery, Tyler, Auster

Books read:

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

Robert Newman, The Case of the Murdered Players
J. Maarten Troost, The Sex Lives of Cannibals
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo

Sort of an odd list this month; I think Amazon might have a hard time making recommendations (other than Nick) for me as a customer based on that, and admittedly all but the Paul Auster and Muriel Barbery were re-reads, but there is no point in blogging about what I'm reading if I'm not prepared to be truthful about the peculiarities of my reading habits, so here goes.

Harriet the Spy was part of last month's late night children's book nostalgia spree; the only part of it I had actually remembered was the bit where the kids run the purple socks up the flagpole and where Harriet gets caught in the dumbwaiter of the house of the rich lady she has decided to spy on. It's a really odd book to have become a classic in many ways: Harriet is not at all an appealing kid, and I think most kids reading that book would recognize her as kind of an unpleasant brat, and the book also violates one of the fundamental tenets of school-age kid books in that she has an intact reasonably intact family life (i.e. unlike the Lemony Snicket books, Harry Potter, pretty much all of Roald Dahl, etc. etc. she hasn't taken the basic precaution of getting rid of one or both parents in order to better be able to embark on dangerous and exciting adventures). The thing that most struck me (re)reading it was that, as in the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, having live-in maids is written about as being completely normal, which makes me want to do some research into how many American families actually had live-in maids in the fifties and sixties. (Harriet's family has a cook and a nanny; Harriet's an only child and as far as I can tell her mother doesn't have a job.) I mean, if you read Emily Post (as a theoretical example. not that I have a 1956 edition next to the loo that I occasionally dip into to find out what you would serve at an afternoon bridge party as opposed to an ordinary ladies' tea 'at home') she definitely discusses which member of your staff should perform which function at a formal dinner (butler announces, oversees drinks, footman/valet takes coats, parlour maid parlours, chamber maid chambers, cook cooks, undercook undercooks, etc. etc.) which all seems just ferociously high society victorian and unrealistic, but these kids' books written in the 60's all seem to take it as a matter of course, and the kids seem pretty normal in other ways (taking the schoolbus to their public schools, saving their allowance, liking macaroni cheese, etc.). Perhaps it was assumed that only upperclass kids _read_ these books? or maybe way more people really did have live-in maid service. Add to the to-be-looked-up list.

More Robert Newman, as well (the Sherlock Holmes spin-off, to borrow a useful TV word): this time what struck me was all the stuff that is left out that adults would want to know about. There's a bit at the beginning of the Case of the Murdered Players, for instance, when Andrew (age 14) comes home from his posh boarding school and greets Sarah (age 13, best friend, fellow mystery-solver, Cockney street-rat-turned-accomplished-young-lady since being rescued from the gutter by Andrew's famous actress mother) after not having seen her for several months while he's been away at school, and Robert Newman tells you that Andrew shakes hands with his stepfather (appropriate), gives his mother a hug (appropriate), and "greets" Sarah. Maybe not everyone is as prurient as me, but given all the sexual tension inherent in the 14 y/o boy & 13 y/o girl best friend dynamic (an unlikely enough scenario as it is), don't you TOTALLY WANT TO KNOW??? like do they hug? what? okay, I am being prurient. I'll let it drop. There's also a delightful scene in which Andrew's mother successfully identifies a kidnapping suspect out of a possible three gajillion women in England with two questions: "Did she smell familiar to you, Andrew?" ("Yes, funnily enough, mother, her smell reminded me of you, but I couldn't place why!") "I bet it was theatre greasepaint. She's an actress!" ("Yes! that's it!") "Tell me, was she wearing any jewelry?" ("Um, yes, an orange necklace and earrings") "Her name is Coral Lumley - she always wears that set; it was given to her by an admirer!" Fastest criminal ID in police history.

The Sex Lives of Cannibals (a misnomer, btw; there's no sex and no cannibalism) is fun if a little self serving: J. Maarten (first initials always make me wonder much more than middle initials, like, wow, if they choose to go by their middle name even in the book publishing world, their first name must be something REALLY AWFUL) is funny, but he knows he's funny, so it takes a little bit of the joy out of his funniness. The book is sort of a loose travelogue of the year or so he spent living on a shit-infested island in Kiribati in the South Pacific while his girlfriend worked for some sort of noble NGO garden-planting sanitation public-healthy type organization. My favourite thing in the book are the chapter headings: he does them like an 19th century serialized novel, as in "Chapter 17: In Which the Author Meets the Poet Laureate of Kiribati, Who Has Never Written Any Poetry As Such, And Also An Account of the Great Beer Crisis," (this is a made up example. Not an actual quote, as I don't have the actual book to actual hand. but you get the gist). 'sfunny.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog (lent to me by my mother) was disquieting; it and the Paul Auster book are the only things with pretentions to Quality Books, I think, this month, but overall I found that there was a misanthropic streak through the hedgehog book that was hard to forgive. The main character (the concierge in a Paris apartment building) makes a point of constructing an elaborate and detailed (figurative) mask of herself to present to the world, and then despises the world for not being able to see who she truly is, and you think, hunh?? but then... that whole business with the mask...? hunh? which would make sense if the author was making a point about how foolish that is or something, but instead she seems to be on the narrator's side in despising all the people who are unable to appreciate the narrator for her true self. There were moments of intellectual name droppiness as well, which felt a little bit like Adrian Mole desperately trying to sound Intellectual and Educated - like a bit where she's "almost" caught quoting Marx or Hegel or someone under her breath as she takes out the garbage - how do you quote Marx or Hegel in front of someone else without a large part of you intending to be heard rather than "accidentally" overheard? - which feels very, very contrived. I am also less and less a believer in the canon of Great Books (having been completely unable to get through many Great Books in my time) and the importance of having read all of them: I would rather talk to someone who feels really excited about ten books that they've read that I haven't than someone who feels snooty about having read five Great Books only four of which I've read, even if we might have more of a common basis for discussion in the latter scenario. Luckily the narrator does meet someone at the end who a) meets her criteria for intellectual superiority b) recognizes her as an equal and c) also keeps himself somewhat aloof from the riffraff so she gets something approaching a happy ending. Although not quite. No spoiling here.
The Paul Auster I think was my favourite book of the month: I read it because it seemed to be following me; my old roommate left a copy when she moved out, and then I noticed it on my sister's bookshelf, so I decided if two people had read it whose taste I trusted, I probably should as well, and I really really liked it. It's a little plotless and random and there are a lot of things that go unexplained (it seems if there's copy on the dustjacket describing your book as "in the classic picaresque tradition" you can get away with an awful lot when it comes to plotlessness) but he writes so nicely and you really want the main character guy to succeed in his efforts to fly (premise of story: young guttersnipe boy abandoned by biological family picked up by mysterious guru-type person who puts him through horrendous trials to teach him to fly and then takes him on the road to show off his abilities, which become ever more wondrous but fraught with difficulty) and I was quite devastated at several points in the book when scary/bad things happened and quite gleeful when really cool things happened. I am going to read some more Paul Auster soon.
Eek - have to go catch a bus. Anne Tyler maybe next time.

Russo - Orringer - Newman - Austen - Parks - Konisberg - Bianchini

Books read:
Richard Russo, Empire Falls
Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Underwater
Robert Newman, The Case of the Threatened King and The Case of the Somerville Secret
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Tim Parks, Juggle the Stars
E.L. Konigsberg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Bianchini et al, The Paper Architect

Still on the list:
Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy
Anne Fadiman, Rereading

Not a particularly literary last couple of weeks, I confess, but I have been reading A LOT. Quantity over, hm, if not quality, then at least quantity over density.
To start with: the Richard Russo (Empire Falls). Totally not at all not at all what I was expecting. I didn't read the dust-jacket blurb before I started it, as a good faith gesture, so I was going entirely on the picture on the cover and the author's name, so my expectations were a little woolly, but I was definitely anticipating a hyperliterate thriller-type book (Richard being sort of a professorial hyperliterate name, combined with the fact that once a long time ago I saw the thriller heistykidnappy film in which Renee Russo's son gets abducted by creepy Gary Sinise and a girl with a tattoo on her neck. Superlative logic, hmm.) But instead it turned out to be a very peaceful book about a small town in Maine and a gentle nice peaceful man who lives in the small town and his small unhappinesses (depressed unfulfilled mother, unmanageable drunk father, bolshy soon-to-be-ex-wife, sensitive teenage daughter, miserable job) which he overcomes with small happinesses and ultimately everything works out OK. The most unexpected thing about this book was how profoundly alienated and un-American I wound up feeling while reading it: the characters (who for the most part are reasonable, relatively smart, articulate people) do things like attend football games and believe in God and say "Golly, I'm plumb tuckered out" as if those are all completely normal things to do (they're not, sorry) and I found myself doubting that Richard Russo and I would get along, although I have no doubt that he too is a really nice man. I think also I still slightly resent Maine, as a place; when I was small my friend Bug would disappear for the entire summer there with her family, and every year I would spend the month of August getting excited every time I saw an orange VW camper bus, thinking it was them, back from Maine, and then disappointed every time they weren't.
Julie Orringer's book, How To Breathe Underwater, was a holdover from my Polysyllabic Spree Amazon ordering binge that I hadn't gotten to right away - her stories are all unmistakeably about American characters, too, and you would think they would get monotonous because they're almost all about adolescent suffering in one way or another, but in fact they are quite a) different from one another and b) very interesting, and her prose is totally unaffected and translucent. I read it really fast in one sitting, so I might have to go back and read it again at some point.
The excellent Robert Newman series (not recommended for general adult consumption, unless you are like me and have an unexplainable fetish for re-reading (and re-re-reading) British preteen books) was given to me when I was eight or nine by my fairy bookmother, a sixty-ish literary-magazine editor with a hairy chin, an ability to talk uninterrupted for hours about the London theatre scene, and a fetish for British pre-teen literature that matched (possibly exceeded) mine. She had no kids of her own, and lavished (the only adequate word) literally hundreds of books on my sister and me over the course of about a decade before she died of ovarian cancer in the mid-1990's. The Robert Newman books started with a book called The Baker Street Irregulars, in which a motley gang of scruffy neighbourhood kids helps Sherlock Holmes solve a mystery (all set in dank, dirty, Dickensian London). Holmes doesn't turn up for the subequent books, but the kids are pretty much set by then, having made friends with one of the Scotland Yard inspectors and acquired a famous actress as long-lost parent in the first book, and they go on to solve lots more mysteries. I got them because I had a dream about them the other night and couldn't go back to sleep until I had gone online and ordered them (tragically, tragically, they are all out of print! how can this be?!) but luckily several grotty used library copies were still floating around out there looking for a good home and one by one they are arriving on my doorstep from all over the country. I heart the internet. What did we do before it? Don't know and don't care.
I feel a little silly listing the Jane Austen - how many gajillions of words have been written about her novels and life already? does anyone really need to know what I think? - but my two burning unanswered Jane Austen questions are:
#1. How can her characters be so black and white (the women are all either weak/silly/vain/ foolish or sensible/undervalued/quiet/witty/perceptive, and the men all either funloving blackguards or upright honourable stuffed shirts) and yet still be so appealing? and convince you that the most engaging of her love stories (Elizabeth & Darcy, Anne & Frederick) are between fully rounded adults?
#2. How does she manage to present a picture of a society in which women's scope of interest is so limited (and she is so obviously aware of the limits) and yet she doesn't get stroppy about it?
I don't think I'm ever going to get satisfactory answers to these, but enlightment is always welcome.
The Tim Parks book was recommended by my sister, whose taste in books is so fearsomely dense (she reads physics textbooks for fun. I am not making that up) that I was a bit nervous about it. She doesn't believe in fiction on principle (why read things that aren't real when you could be reading about quantum theory, after all?) so I was very surprised when she recommended a work of fiction. Once again, I didn't read the dust jacket blurb before I started it (this time out of fear that it might say something like "This fictionalized description of the work of some of the most obscure and difficult-to-understand quantum physics theorists of our time really brings home how dense and difficult this material really is...") and thus was extra bowled over to discover that not only was it proper fiction, it was arguably proper trashy fiction, covering the necessary basics of kidnapping and crime and sexy Italian people and dastardly deeds happening in beautiful exotic settings and a creepy narrator and everything. It was great.
The Mixed-Up Files is like the Jane Austen: why bother trying to come up with something new to say about it, as everyone's read it, everyone loves it, blah blah blah I love it too. It was another self-indulgent pre-teen late-night Amazon purchase that I couldn't resist. It's hard to believe that book is over 35 years old, yikes, older than me. The Paper Architect isn't really a reading book but OH BOY IS IT COOL OR WHAT. It caught my eye in, of all places, the most recent issue of Entertainment Weekly (which I started receiving mysteriously a year ago; someone out there clearly felt I needed more pop culture in my life), and I had to have it! had to. It's a book of do-it-yourself pop-up cutouts of famous buildings; last Christmas I was obsessed with Paul Jackson's The Pop-Up Book, which goes over basic techniques for different sorts of pop-ups, and had copied from his book a pop-up version of the Venetian Bridge of Sighs which was pretty much the coolest thing I did all year. The Paper Architect doesn't require you to do any figuring out yourself, as they have drawn out the patterns for you - I think the first one I am going to do is the Taj Mahal (see photo. beautiful, no?) and then perhaps I will get back to reading...