New Century Reading

The Testaments

Not surprisingly, there was a big stir when it was announced that Margaret Atwood was going to publish a sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, titled The Testaments. I admit to feeling a little skeptical when I heard the news; I'm an ardent fan of Atwood's work up until the Oryx and Crake trilogy, and was afraid this new book would be in that vein.

The good news is that it's not. But the bad news is that I didn't find Testaments to be nearly as good as Handmaid. This book is told from three points of view: Aunt Lydia, a young woman growing up in Gilead, and a young woman growing up in Canada. I figured out pretty early on how these stories would merge, so the big reveal wasn't breathtaking the way it was supposed to be. In fact, part of what made me unenthused about this book is that the plot felt so labored to me. It felt like Atwood had mapped it all out, then forced it to fit the map, rather than developing organically. Especially the ending--I really felt as if the book was forced into the ending Atwood wanted to give it.

That said, I found Aunt Lydia's backstory interesting, but ended up wishing the book had focused mostly on her. 

Ah well. Can't win them all. Sure didn't think this deserved a Booker Prize, though.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

It may be that I went into this book with too-high expectations. Ocean Vuong is a gifted poet, of Vietnamese ancestry with parents and grandparents who experienced the Vietnam War firsthand, and he's gay, so certainly it seemed like he had a rich amount of source material at his disposal for his fiction debut. And in fact, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous does seem to be highly autobiographical. It's about a young man, Little Dog, growing up with his mother and grandmother who escaped Vietnam and tried to find a better life in the U.S. It's about being an outsider and not understanding either the language or the culture of one's adopted country. It's about watching his mother and grandmother battle mental illness no doubt provoked by the war. It's about realizing he's gay and exploring that aspect of his life. It's about going to college, learning to read, learning to write, even while his mother cannot read nor write and mostly only speaks Vietnamese.

The book is told through a series of letters he writes to his mother, even though she can't read, analyzing their lives together and what has happened to them. He's a fearless writer, not shying away from the abuse his mother rained on him at her worst moments, or the abuse she herself received at the hands of his father. He writes movingly about his early sexual experiences, the good, bad, and ugly. He writes about being taunted at school, or in his neighborhood because his mother bought him a pink bike because it was the cheapest, and she didn't understand what that meant for a boy in America. And he writes about his mother working for years in a nail salon, ruining her own hands, and the time he watches her helping an amputee get a pedicure.

So there was much that was breathtaking. But my hesitation with the book comes directly from its poetic nature; for every sentence or scene that I sighed with admiration over, for its beautiful use of language and imagery, there was at least one scene in which poetry took over entirely and the novel lost momentum. There are long sections of stream of consciousness which, while lovely to read, don't contribute to the book. At points he plays with form, as a poet will do, but it doesn't necessarily add anything to the novel.

Which I suppose raises a question of poets and novelists. Not that writers only have to choose one or the other; luminaries including Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, and the queen of stream-of-consciousness herself, Virginia Woolf, all wrote prose and poetry. I think--for me, at least, and take this with a grain of salt because Vuong's novel is getting stellar reviews and ratings--the poet overtook the novelist too many times and lost sight of the novel. 

The Golden State

This debut novel is an odd, but finally compelling story of motherhood, international marriage, mental health issues, and the relationships we forge at the most unlikely times, with the most unlikely people.

Daphne is the mother of toddler Honey and married to Engin, a Turkish man who has been caught in the immigration nightmare taking place in the U.S. today (although, spoiler alert, he's not been stuck in a camp somewhere with his child taken away and given to other people to adopt, but he is stranded in Turkey while his US-born wife and daughter are stuck in California). This difficult situation has gone on for eight months, with Daphne managing a full-time job at a university while struggling to raise Honey as, essentially, a single mother.

One day, Daphne just snaps and leaves work, gets Honey, and drives north to a rural town where she owns an old mobile home. It had been her grandmother's, then her mother's, and with those family members dead and gone, it's now hers. She's trying to sell it, but the market for old mobile homes in a rural, remote part of the state isn't great. 

Once she gets there, she doesn't quite know what to do with herself, or Honey. The endless hours of the day, and the monotony involved in caring for a toddler, quickly begin to take a toll. She makes tentative overtures to neighbor Cindy, whose xenophobic ideas don't exactly work well with Daphne's marital state, and Cindy is also part of a movement to create a 51st state from this slice of northern California that strikes Daphne as not particularly valuable. Still, Cindy's an adult with whom Daphne can share some grown-up talk and the occasional cigarette.

Daphne also meets Alice, an elderly woman returning to the place she fell in love with her husband decades earlier, and as Alice has traveled in Turkey and knows some of the language, the two women bond over that.

By the end of the book, these fragile alliances with Cindy and Alice converge in a fairly terrifying way. And that's all I'll say about that, except that I found it all too believable and sad. There was also an aspect of the ending that I saw coming, although I couldn't for sure say that the author didn't intend me to know; Daphne's first-person narration is somewhat unreliable, and thoroughly distracted by the endless tasks involving Honey.

That is perhaps the part of the book that really resonated with me: the constant needs of a toddler. It's rarely seen in fiction, how demanding this life can be, and how draining, and how much time a young mother can spend doubting herself and second-guessing everything she does. Yes, it makes for repetitive reading at times, almost monotonous, but it's also hugely representational of how that life is.

The one quirk of the book that annoyed me was a very light hand with punctuation, particularly commas. I get that the author wanted to show how fleetingly the mind works under these conditions, but frequently it pulled me out of the story as I tried to separate the phrases and clauses into their proper portions. That said, I was never tempted to stop reading, and read faster and faster as I approached the end. It's a very strong debut, and I can't wait to see what she does next.

 

My Sister, the Serial Killer

Hoo boy, this book. Korede has a sister, Ayoola, who has the unfortunate habit of doing away with boyfriends that annoy her or she tires of. Korede, a nurse who is all too aware that her sister got all the looks and charm in the family, is the one who keeps Ayoola from being discovered, a task both embittering and binding. But is blood--the blood of vanquished beaus--really stronger than water? 

This is a quick read, darkly funny, with some salient points about family and what we do to protect them. There were also unfortunately some plot twists that I saw coming a mile away. That brought my enjoyment down a tad, but not enough to keep me from finishing the book, or being happy that I did. But I wouldn't feel like rereading it to see what I missed in the story's layering, because I didn't miss anything. That said, the ending itself was a stunner, and in a good way. So: Quick, darkly funny, somewhat predictable, yet still a fun read. 

There There

This is a debut novel that's explosive, fierce, funny, and heartbreaking, and honestly, I think it's fair to say that Tommy Orange is poised to join the ranks of such Native American literary luminaries as Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie. He's got a voice all of his own, stories to tell, and a masterful way with narrative and drawing characters.

There There is the story of so-called urban Indians, in particular Natives of Oakland, CA. The title comes from the famous saying of Gertrude Stein regarding Oakland: "There is no there there." The saying has become a cliche that people use to describe things or people that don't have particular meaning or value. But if you dig deeper into Stein's context, that isn't really what she meant.

Author Tommy Orange uses that deeper meaning to great effect, looking at how Natives who were displaced from their righteous homes and ended up in places like Oakland can become part of that latter landscape, making it their home even when it's not their home; they can feel nostalgia for it as white hipsters start encroaching.

The book focuses on several characters, each given several of their own chapters. At first they appear disparate, but gradually Orange draws them together as Oakland prepares for its first big Powwow. Along the way we learn about people's histories, how they've become who they are now. It would have been easy for Orange to resort to "types," but he doesn't; these people are all human and breathing. And they have wide varieties of reasons for wanting to attend this Powwow, some of them dark.

My one quibble is that there are so many people that a few get short shrift, and by the end, it's somewhat hard to keep track of them all. I was fully invested in the story and ripped through the dramatic ending, and yet I think a deeper focus on fewer characters would have been even more involving. That said, this was a hell of a debut, and I can't wait to read Orange's next book.

I'm thankful too, as a pretty clueless white woman, that there are people like Orange writing these books that help me learn and understand things I don't know about the Native community. It's humbling.

 

The Overstory

I hardly know how to describe this book. It's a novel about trees. Or a novel about people and how their lives are affected by trees, from the young woman who becomes a scientist passionately devoted to learning about trees and writes a book similar to this one, to a young man in Vietnam whose life is saved when he lands in a tree after abandoning his burning airplane, or another young man whose family has been photographing a rare American chestnut for generations, or a young college student on the verge of flunking out of college who dies in a freak accident but comes back to life desperately needing to save trees. 

It's also by necessity a book about the dire consequences of destroying trees and the havoc man is wreaking upon the planet by doing so. Powers is clearly on the side of saving the trees, and maybe it's because I'm on the same side that I didn't find him preachy at all. Instead, I marveled at the large cast of characters, all fully fleshed out, and how the stories gradually intertwine even while covering decades. He's a cerebral writer and also deeply interested in science, and he's clearly done an intense amount of research. But his writing doesn't come across as didactic, just literary and thoughtful, and so engrossing.

I did have a couple of quibbles along the way, including how he delays relaying a specific piece of information to the reader, but it's fairly clear what that info is early on. There was no need to hold it back. On the other hand, he lightly weaves in what might be magical realism--or is it? Maybe it's just the mental health of the characters involved. Or maybe it's both.

But in the end, while I've always been a fan of trees and a person who's growing more and more concerned about environmental issues, this book made me hyper aware of trees and their role in the world. I read the last third of the book while on a trip in the northernmost part of Minnesota, along Lake of the Woods, where trees are plenteous:

But there's also a paper mill up there that's a big source of jobs, so driving down the long highway, it wasn't uncommon to come across areas where trees are being logged. It would have made me a little sad before, but while reading this book? Heartbroken. And feeling like I need to learn a lot more about trees.

Highly recommended, but allow some time--it's not a quick read.

Idaho

I had the hardest time figuring out how to rate this book on Goodreads. It has characters that are interesting and flawed, it has an act of violence that sends shock waves out to the survivors and bystanders that last years--decades--and it shows keen insight in spots, especially in the depictions of young girls, ages 6 and 9.

But for every moment like that that made me happy, there were problems. Overwriting. A copious amount of backstory in the first 60+ pages, much of which wasn't necessary, or at least wasn't necessary right up front. Scenes that felt like darlings that needed to be killed. In fact, there was an entire chapter like that; expanded and set aside as a stand-alone short story, it would have worked much better, but in the middle of the novel, it dropped two people we've never seen before into the story, and never see them again. Oh--and as long as I'm trotting out literary cliches, let's talk about guns on the wall: There are a couple of very self-conscious references to the white supremacist, anti-government factions that live in the wilderness in Idaho, so I kept waiting for those factions to have a role in the plot. But no. Apparently the author just felt that she should acknowledge those factions exist in Idaho, even if they had no bearing on her story.

As to that story, there was much I liked. It opens with Ann, who has married Wade. Ann is his second wife. His first is in prison. He used to have two daughters, but no more. Eventually you find out why they're gone and why his first wife is in prison. In the meantime, Wade is slowly sliding into dementia. Ann is trying to cope with him while also understanding the losses he's faced.

The author understands dementia and portrays it accurately; she gets childhood trains of thought--there's a wrenching scene in which the younger sister tries to understand why her older sister no longer wants to play dolls with her, and it's heartbreaking. 

But by the end, which made no sense to me, it felt like the author had lost her footing, sort of like the TV series Lost. This is one of those books that made me sigh with longing for the days when editors had time to work with young authors. Clearly she's talented and thoughtful, but she needed reining in. Much more reining in.

Finally, I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads, figuring that half of the book was a 5 and half a 1, so let's just average it out. Still, I did finish it, and I will look for her next book.

Goodbye, Vitamin

I didn't have a lot of expectations going into Goodbye, Vitamin; I think I saw it listed on some "books soon to be published that YOU SIMPLY MUST READ" and thought, well, fine, guess I will, then. I was maybe even a little leery of it, being a debut novel by a young, attractive female. Lauren Groff blurbed it, which is a big positive for me, but there was another blurb by an author named Justin Taylor in which he referred to it as a "slacker comedy" and a "campus novel", and I thought, oh dear, this may not be for me.

Turns out the Groff blurb is the one that worked for me. This is a short read, the story of 30-year-old Ruth, whose fiance breaks off their engagement just as her father is starting his descent into dementia. Her mother asks her to come home for a year to help. So Ruth takes a leave from her job and heads home.

Some of this is predictable--will Ruth recover from the breakup? Will she meet someone new? Well, duh. But that's fairly secondary to the story of Ruth and her parents, and, to a lesser degree, her brother Linus. Like any family, this one has some less-than-perfect history. Like most families, loyalties can be divided, and memories can be fraught (and not just because of dementia). Ruth adores her father, but is forced to face certain realities of her parents' marriage that don't put him in the best light. And overall, what happens when someone is losing their memory, bit by agonizing bit.

Which is not to say this book is depressing. Sure, it's sad at points, but the author has a deft hand with humor, which keeps it from sinking into a pit of despair. 

I'm not sure why Taylor thought Ruth was a slacker; she did quit college to follow her fiance across the country, but she ended up in a decent job, not the most exciting job, but a good one. She went to her parents for Christmas for the first time in years as the book opens, because she certainly couldn't go to her ex-future-in-laws, but would she have stayed if her mother hadn't asked her to? I don't think so. So calling this a slacker novel seems inappropriate. As for the campus novel label, Ruth's father had been a professor, and there is a subplot involving his fading career at a local academic institution, but it's just a subplot. 

Overall, a strong debut, and I'll look for author Rachel Khong's next book.

Lucky Boy

In Lucky Boy, Solimar Valdez is a young woman from a going-nowhere village in Mexico. She wants to get into the U.S. and find a better future. After taking a dangerous and horrific route, she manages to cross the border and meet up with a cousin in San Francisco. The cousin helps her by putting her to work as a house cleaner, and gives Soli stern warnings about not getting caught by police. But it's not long before Soli realizes that she's pregnant, the result of a brief tryst on the journey from Mexico. She thinks about getting an abortion, but can't bring herself to do it, and soon looks forward to having her own child.

Kavya Reddy is married and wants nothing more than to become a mother. But to her distress, getting pregnant turns out not to be a simple thing for her. After giving artificial insemination a try, she and her husband, Rishi, decide to try the adoption route, going through the foster care system.

Can you see where this is headed?

Sure enough, Soli's undocumented status catches up with her, and her baby boy Ignacio (Nacho for short) is taken away from her when she's sent to detention. After all, the baby is an American citizen, while she is not. Kavya and Rishi are given Nacho for foster care, with warnings that it may not be a permanent placement, depending on the outcome of Soli's legal woes.

It sounds a bit like Jodi Picoult's territory, but thankfully author Shanthi Sekaran is miles above Picoult in writing. Here she gives us two mothers who both desperately love and want this little boy. One mother has the means to give him pretty much the American dream; the other doesn't, but loves him so fiercely that it does make a reader (this reader, anyway) reflect on whether strong maternal love is enough to make up for lack of amenities and options. 

Then there are other issues; should a baby be separated from his biological mother, even if they have different passports? Is that fair or right? Is it fair or right that because Kavya and Rishi are more privileged, they should be able to take this baby from its biological mother? But if they also provide a deeply loving, nurturing environment, does that make them better qualified?

These are all unsettling questions, and obviously very timely. It's a tough, gut-wrenching situation, made worse by the fact that neither side is easily the favorite or the completely best choice. 

I did have a few qualms. The book is longer than it needed to be, and included unnecessary detail about fostering a toddler (I'm glad the author did her research, but she didn't really need to show it all to us). At times, it teeters into melodrama territory, and some of the action (including how Soli ended up in detention) just didn't really work. But those are minor quibbles. This is a book well worth the read.

The Book of Joan

There is a whooooooooooole lot of stuff going on in The Book of Joan. The book takes place in an unspecified time in the future, where wars and environmental devastation have made Earth virtually uninhabitable. Survivors are on board a spaceship circling the planet, continuing to drain it of whatever resources it can still find. The people on board have become hairless and sexless, essentially creepy sentient blobs. We're introduced to Christine, who tells us in a barely suppressed fury, of the things that have brought humanity to this point. She also tells us about Joan.

Joan is, of course, a futuristic Joan of Arc. It's believed by most that she was burned to death by the forces of Jean de Men, the now-evil leader of the spaceship. However, as it turns out, she's not dead; she's still on Earth. Christine hears that Joan is still alive and begins plotting to get her on board to bring Jean de Men down.

So, dystopia mixed with a saint. Joan here is no saint, but she is unearthly in ways that terrified her family as a child, and in ways she herself doesn't understand until much later.

Great premise. And author Yuknavitch is an excellent writer. But oh, my, there is just so much going on, and the sheer rage from the characters never abates long enough for the reader to catch a breath. There are some weirdnesses; sometimes the book is told from Christine's third-person POV, then from her first-person POV; other times,it's told from Joan's third-person POV, then first person. Not sure why that was necessary. It's distracting.

The meaning of nature and the environment gets a lot of coverage here, sometimes to the point that it slows down the narrative. Then, in the last third, some seriously weird shit begins to happen that left me feeling entirely meh. Your mileage may vary. Lots of people love this book, and I am somewhat tired of dystopia (hell, we're on the verge of living it right now).

I hadn't read anything by Luknavitch before, and while I thought there were many amazing passages of sheerly wonderful writing, overall, the book just left me shaking my head. And wanting to read this about Joan of Arc instead.