Boy, are my arms tired! Card Catalog. A Decade of Book Reviews.

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Desert Queen

The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
By Janet Wallach
Anchor Books

To get to the meat of the story in Desert Queen, one must first put aside most expectations of quality writing and swallow hard whenever author Janet Wallach lets loose with a deluge of purple prose. Still, it’s worth wading through the quagmire of bedazzled, shopworn phrases to get to the substance of Gertrude Bell’s singular life. Because, this Victorian woman defied the expectations of her era and, just possibly, set the wheels in motion that eventually led to our various modern gulf wars in Iraq.

Bell, the wealthy, only daughter of an English ironworks baron, was the first woman to graduate with a degree in history from Oxford University. She should have retired from thinking after that unprecedented foray into bookishness and found a husband among her peers. Yet, after three seasons of hubby-hunting, Bell, verging on old-maidenhood, could not find a mate. So, she did the next best thing. She took a life-altering trip to visit her uncle, the British envoy, in Tehran. And once she’d seen Iran, there would be no keeping Bell down on the farm. In fact, she would spend the bulk of the next five decades exploring and reshaping the Middle East.

Starting in 1900 Bell began traversing the Arabian desert, dressed like a Bedouin, mapping archeological sites and the territories of the local tribes. During her travels she met, and became fast friends with the, then unknown, T.E. Lawrence as well as various tribal leaders. Her facility for learning languages, including Arabic, French, German, Italian, Persian and Turkish, and her daring in exploring areas even men had avoided, allowed her to collect information like few others.

This information would prove invaluable as the world turned to conflict during World War I. Like an old school Condoleeza Rice, she was recruited by British intelligence and became the only female officer in the British military. As Liaison Officer, Correspondent to Cairo she was instrumental in obtaining alliances with Arab tribes for the English in their fight against the Turks. After the war she continued her work with the government and, in 1918, was the first to sit down with a map and draw the borders of what would become modern Iraq — with a Shiite majority in the south, and Sunni and Kurdish minorities in the center and north respectively. Despite her general desire for a sovereign Iraq, Bell, like many who would come after her, had an affinity for Imperialism that clouded her common sense. She wanted Iraq to be independent, but not so independent that the British could not use the country as a giant oil well to fuel their industrial might.

Bell’s professional achievements were many, including the writing and publishing of several books on the Middle East. She also began the first antiquities museum in Baghdad, to preserve the archeological finds she’d studied over the decades. Her personal life was less fulfilling. Her father forbade her to marry her first love. Her second was already married and subsequently killed. Her third, ultimately, rejected her. Whatever passion she possessed was funneled into her work and her love for Iraq and the King, Faisal, who she helped place on its throne.

Interestingly, despite Bell’s freewheeling independence at a time when that was unheard of for women, she was an avowed anti-suffragist. Mostly she was a lone goose among many ganders, and had little compassion for women. In fact, it took her decades of visiting harems to develop an interest in the virtual-slavery that was the norm for most Muslim women. Still, Bell was a singular woman whose intelligence and vision did much to alter the face of the world, for good and otherwise. She deserves a less-obscure place in the historical record — and a better-written biography than Desert Queen.

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GAY L.A.

A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics
and Lipstick Lesbians
Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons
Basic Books

As a gay person, whose right to marry or to put one’s life on the line in the armed forces is debated daily by seething pundits, it is sometimes difficult to remember how far civil rights for sexual minorities have progressed in a relatively short period of time. One hundred years ago, a blink in geological time and only a hop-skip-and-jump in social terms, gays and lesbians could barely meet in public. According to Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, authors of Gay L.A., the social gains made during the last century by homosexuals are largely due to the brave activists who ran to the edge of the continent — fleeing oppression and convention the East— and settled in for the good fight in Los Angeles.

Who would have thought that Los Angeles, a town thought to be apolitical in the extreme, would have been the place that made the L-Word safe to utter across the nation? Yet, according to historical archives and the hundreds of interviews with elder gays conducted by historians Faderman and Timmons, it was there that homosexuals began forming political action groups, fighting police brutality, publishing homo-centric magazines and setting the tone for the twenty-first century’s out gay lifestyles.

But the fun, gay-trendy era only began about thirty years ago. Before the Stonewall Riots and the backlash against Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative, there were decades (centuries maybe) of homosexual persecution in Southland. The authors shed a little light on the more ancient forms of persecution by briefly examining historical accounts of the unpretty punishments doled out to gay Native Americans at the hands of the sixteenth century Franciscan friars. (Cardinal Mahoney take note: if they could sue you they would.) However, most of the book examines gay life on the West Coast during the last century.

One of the reasons L.A. became such a Mecca for gays and lesbians was certainly because, since the 1920s, it has been the capitol of the film industry. Normal (read Puritan heterosexual) rules did not apply to the denizens of the movie world back then any more than they do now. In fact, some of America’s best-loved stars were homosexual, and this book reminds readers that Carey Grant and even Katherine Hepburn were surely queer. While the sexual orientation of numerous celebrities was a secret to their legions of fans, it was relatively common-knowledge within the confines of Los Angeles. Still, what one did under George Cukor’s roof or at the gay clubs that flourished on the Sunset Strip was still something to keep mum about if one wanted to stay out of the tabloids and keep a career moving forward.

Though gay celebrities had a measure of freedom and acceptance in their milieu, homosexuals in other walks of life in sunny L.A. did not. And Gay L.A. examines their stories in some detail. Survivors of the early part of the last century reveal the class stratifications within the gay community. While middle-class homos remained closeted and used beards of the opposite sex in public, working-class homosexuals frequented the dangerous gay bar scene. White-collar gays had much to lose by getting caught in the regular raids on these establishments, which is why they formed elaborate home-based gay social groups. Working-class gays, on the other hand, met at public establishments or city parks and were subject to the vicissitudes of the police. In fact, up until homosexuality was taken off the books as a crime in the late 20th century, L.A. gays were routinely hauled to jail just for hanging out together.

Gay L.A. also examines the rise of and the infighting within the city’s Gay and Lesbian Center, which was one of the first organizations to offer psychological counseling to gay residents. It also follows the activities of various, men’s, women’s and AIDS organizations, many of which set the tone for the acting-up that would happen across the nation in the wake of the HIV epidemic. Out of this health crisis would emerge the leaders and media movements that would lead to a city that today boasts openly gay legislators, lipstick lesbians and an incorporated borough, West Hollywood, which is the largest gay and lesbian enclave in the nation.

While this book is a fascinating read for anyone interested in gay history, there is much in this account that is given short shrift. For instance, Timmons and Faderman refer to the proliferation of working-class gay bars within the city during the 1970s and 1980s, but don’t bother to interview anyone who went to them to find out what the lives of those who were not involved in the political movements of the era were like. Their modern accounts come mainly from the people who currently hold positions of power or influence in the community. It is just one oversight in a book that was clearly written by people who are not Los Angeles natives and who tried to cover too much ground with too few resources. The writing itself is workmanlike, though the subject matter is lively enough to keep one’s interest. Hopefully this book will spur some real gay Angelenos to write about the gay L.A. they know, because this one book can not do justice to the subject.

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The Omnivore's Dilemma

A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
The Penguin Press

“What should we have for dinner?” asks Michael Pollan in the opening paragraph of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He then proceeds, with wit, intelligence and rare thoughtfulness, to answer that complex question by tracing four meals back to their origins.

The first is a McDonald’s meal that, U.C. Berkeley professor, Pollan and his family consume while driving in a car. This meal, he finds, originates in a cornfield in Iowa. Corn, it turns out, is at the base of close to half of all foods found in the supermarket, and certainly most fast foods.

With an eye for the germane and a gift for beautiful prose, he takes the reader on a labrinythine trip through the maize maze. In the hands of a less-adept writer this exhaustive journey would have been excruciating, but with Pollan at the helm, it becomes a magical, mystery tour. He explains that corn feeds most of the animals — pigs, cows, chickens and even fish — that Americans eat. Corn syrup sweetens everything from sodas to french fries. And corn and its derivatives are hidden in thousands of processed foods under names like ascorbic acid, lecithin, maltose, MSG and caramel color, to name just a few.

What’s more, corn, particularly the industrial corn at the heart of Mc Donald’s’ food, is not agriculturally sustainable, is genetically modified, destroys the land, impoverishes the farmers, makes the cows sick (so that they need to be pumped full of antibiotics to stay alive until they’re fat enough to slaughter) and is fully subsidized by the government and its tax-payers. That Big Mac might seem cheap, but in reality, by the time you push your two bucks over the counter, you’ve paid for it twice.

As an alternative, Pollan takes a look at organic farming, both on an industrial and a human scale. On the industrial side, he seeks out the former ‘60 hippies who went back to the land and began small, organic farms, that they later turned into huge, organic machines. These “Big Organic” growers, like Cascadian Farms, use most of the same methods as other agribusinesses — cheap labor, eye-averting animal husbandry and massive fuel consumption — to get their produce into national chains like Whole Foods Stores and recently, Wal-Mart. In fact, the main difference, but possibly a key one, between organic industrial and traditional agribusiness, is that they don’t use pesticides on the produce or antibiotics in their meats. There is still suffering in every, delicious bite, just not as much for the eventual consumer.

The alternative to industrial farms is the local, small farmer. Pollan finds the embodiment of this type in Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farm in Virginia. At the heart of Polyface and the meal that ensues from it, is grass (not corn). Grass is what cows eat when left to their own devices.(In fact, a cow's four, delicate stomachs, which we all learned about in the second grade, can’t even digest corn. At Polyface, once the cows shear the grass in a given field, they are rotated to another pasture and chickens take up the work of turning the soil, plucking out the juicy bugs and fertilizing the ground to produce more grass — plus eggs and poultry. Salatin has perfected a work-intensive system that replenishes the earth, gives the animals close-to natural lives and refutes the notion that dangerous chemicals are needed to produce what we eat.

What Salatin can’t do is produce food on a large enough scale to satisfy chain food stores. This brings Pollan to a discussion about the importance of eating locally-grown and seasonal foods. Most of the foods that grace the aisles of American supermarkets originate hundreds or thousands of miles away. During the last decade, markets have increasingly offered out-of-season foods of all kinds that are flown, shipped and trucked from far-flung parts of the globe. Add that fuel consumption to the petroleum used to fertilize fields and to run huge farm machinery and you get food with unseen petroleum saturating every morsel.

In the final portion of the book, Pollan decides to forage for a meal so that he can feel and taste, firsthand, the karmic repercussions in every mouthful. He learns to hunt, and kills a wild boar. He learns to tell the good morels from the poisonous, and makes several treks to the woods to collect mushrooms. He picks urban fruit for dessert and grows lettuce in his back yard for salad. He even makes his own yeast to bake bread and dives for abalone off the treacherous California coast. This final eating odyssey is a particularly contemplative one, in which Pollan confirms that while foraging for one’s food is almost impossible to do for the average person, “a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true cost of things we take for granted.”

To read The Omnivore’s Dilemma is to be forced to view food differently — to really look at it and ask ourselves what the heck we’ve been absentmindedly shoveling down our gullets all these years. If this book was mandatory reading material in our country’s high schools, the alarming obesity rates in the US would drop in short order; adults would have the insight to stop being swayed by fad diets that don’t work; less nonrenewable oil would be consumed; and possibly, the animals we rely upon for food would be able to have lives that didn’t resemble those of extradited detainees in Syrian prisons. Pollan makes a comprehensive case for changing much of our world merely by changing what we choose to have for dinner. And you thought you were powerless.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" September 2006 © Suzanne Rush

GAY L.A.

A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics
and Lipstick Lesbians
Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons
Basic Books

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" December 2006 © Suzanne Rush

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters
Riverhead Books

Sarah Waters, best-known for her Victorian-era lesbian relationship novels (Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, Fingersmith) covers fresh historical territory in her latest novel. The Night Watch, which takes place during the WWII-era London and beyond follows the lives of four unadorned British citizens who are trying to pursue the simple human quest for love and stability in a nightmarish, wartime landscape that is anything but loving or secure.

One is Kay Langrish, a romantically-inclined, lesbian ambulance driver who works each night, pulling bodies from the gaping maws of recently-bombed buildings. Another is Vivien, a war ministry secretary who is having an affair with a married solider. Her brother Duncan is a conscientious objector who spends the war moldering away in a dank, London prison. And finally, there is Helen, the newly-minted lesbian who begins cheating on Kay during the midst of a Nazi air raid.

Waters tells these stories using a reverse chronology — beginning in 1947 and ending in 1944 — which is hinted at by Kay in the opening chapter who arrives at a movie theater midway through the film because, as she says, "People's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures."

Like her other books, The Night Watch is a dark novel that examines the harsh realities of both the era and the human condition. People may have noble intentions, but displays of moral relativism are always more likely than non-stop heroics where her characters are involved. One’s loving boyfriend may turn out to be a spineless cad. A conscientious objector may truly be a coward. And, when tested, a seemingly-loving girlfriend may never have loved enough to remain loyal.

Unlike her other novels, The Night Watch offers no happy endings, except, perhaps, the end of the war. While this will disappoint some who have come to look forward to a kiss and a nod to those glorious, imaginary futures, others will find that her writing and story-telling abilities are as sound as ever.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" August 2006 © Suzanne Rush

Political Fictions

Joan Didion
Vintage

In this collection of essays, most of which were previously published in the New York Review of Books, essayist Joan Didion again showcases her ability to slice through the extraneous details and carefully-crafted analyses that constitute much of news reporting today, to get to the fundamentals of the events shaping this country. In this case she focuses her attention on American’s bumbling two-party political system.

Since the 24-hour-a-day news cycle began in earnest over a decade ago, Americans have been subject to the needs of reporters to make their lives relevant and to serve the corporate bottom line both by reporting and analyzing current events — germane or otherwise — and by rehashing the few events that seem the most salacious for maximum ratings. This has created a world in which Americans know everything about what a given politician eats, wears and does on holiday, but almost nothing about the substance of his actual beliefs or what his policies might be. The media’s emphasis on this minutia can almost entirely obscure the fundamentals of any situation.

Yet, in these essays, Didion takes these same litanies of the extraneous and places them in intelligent perspective. For instance, in the chapter entitled, “Newt Gingrich, Superstar,” she examines what Dick Williams, the author of Newt!, called, “the intellectual base that [former Speaker of the House, Gingrich] has been developing since he was in high school,” and exposes it for the shoddy thinking that brought about such disastrous ideas as the Contract With America. Included on the list of Gingrich’s intellectual stimulants are The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Girl Scout Handbook, works by Tom Clancy and the motion picture Jeremiah Johnson. Didion exposes the fantasy of Gingrich’s intellect by showing it is nothing but an amalgam of pop psychology clichés, historical distortions and contradictory bullet points.

Many of the essays in this book deal, at length, with President Bill Clinton. In a piece called, “Eyes on the Prize,” she reminds liberals and conservatives alike that Governor Bill Clinton was not above negative politics, race-baiting and various and sundry lies to get to the White House. In “Clinton Agonistes,” she tells the story of how the Monica Lewinsky affair led the nation’s press and pundits to dominate the national conversation with declarations that Clinton had to go, and debates about the same — while most of the nation thought no such thing.

In one of the most satisfying essays in the book, “Political Pornography,” she pulls the rug out from under the rickety throne on which enshrined journalist Bob Woodward sits. Woodward’s fame is based on his reporting about the Watergate hotel break-in, which eventually led to the resignation of President Nixon. Since then, as Didion illustrates, Woodward has become a Washington insider and hack, with little further enlightenment to offer to the news-reading public. His reliance on whistle-blowers to crawl out of the woodwork and provide the facts for his numerous books is something she finds particularly problematic.

“As any prosecutor and surely Mr. Woodward knows, the person on the inside who calls and says ‘I want to talk’ is an informant, or snitch, and is generally looking to bargain a deal, to improve his or her own situation, to place the blame on someone else in turn for being allowed to plead down or out certain charges.” Yet, “the informant who leaks to Mr. Woodward… knows that his or her testimony will be not only respected but burnished into the inside story…” In this way, and others, Woodward, as Didion illustrates, has been turning shit into a golden reputation for decades.

Political Fictions reminds the reader that the actual issues behind the obfuscations, characters and gamesmanship that pass for the news are far more interesting, substantive and real than the extaneous ones examined to death by the media’s pundits. The story is the story.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" September 2006 © Suzanne Rush

Eat the Document

Dana Spiotta
Scribner

In her second novel, Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta explores the lives of two generations of political misfits and the alienation that permeates their lives as a result of their choices and the times in which they live.

Mary, the central character, is a ‘70s radical in the mold of the SLA’s Emily Harris. We meet her as she begins a life on the run following a violent political action that has gone awry, ending in inadvertent murder. After a couple of decades of cross-country relocations and name changes, she is now Caroline — a wine-spritzer-addled mother who is eking out the semblance of a life in the Pacific Northwest.

Jason, her son, is a thoughtful, but disaffected adolescent who channels much of his flaccid energy into an obsession with music. He’s the kind of guy who can listen to 30 variations of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album and talk about all of them with philosophical acumen. Yet, he can’t be bothered to exercise, make friends or go on a date.

Simultaneously, we meet Nash, the former Bobby DeSoto. He is Mary’s ex-boyfriend and partner in radicalism. He, too, has survived three decades in hiding and is living off the grid in the Seattle area, running the leftist bookstore, Prairie Fire. The store is a hotbed of twenty-first century, twenty-something activism. Here Nash, in his reluctant way, fosters a new generation of latte-drinking radicals.

Nash becomes involved with Miranda, a deep, young woman who frequents the bookstore and believes she sees in him a reflection of her own optimism and hunger for change — something she doesn’t perceive in contemporaries like her computer-hacking, materialistic boyfriend. She thinks, wrongly, that Nash “must know some secret way of being in opposition to the culture at large that didn’t frustrate him.”

Spiotta moves back and forth in time from the free-expression of ‘70s California to the fresh espresso of ‘90s Seattle, to illustrate the gradual dilution of idealism that has occurred in Caroline, Nash and the American radical movement itself. She captures each era with an eye trained on the ever-changing details of cultural trends without lapsing into cheap, branding short cuts. Her writing, like her characters, is reflective, full of hidden meaning and laced with weary humor.

If there is such a thing as a chick-flick — and I’m talking about the classy Merchant-Ivory variety, not the arrested-development stories that star Matthew McConaghey — then this book is a chick novel. This is not to say that Spiotta has nothing to say about activism, relationships or the human condition that will resonate with men. Nor should this characterization diminish Spiotta’s writing skills or viewpoints. It’s just that she thinks like a woman, sees the world as a woman does and is comfortable bringing her distinctly female insights to the fore. Her female characters make classically “smart woman, stupid choices” mistakes, but are depicted with compassion and insight. Her male characters are often indistinct or portrayed as stereotypes. Jane Austen had a clearer eye for women too, and rendered their foibles with a kindliness that is part of what allows her work to endure.

Each generation of malcontents has its own issues and unique context. Yet, Eat the Document makes it clear that the search for meaning is ever-present. It’s only the costumes that change.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" July 2006 © Suzanne Rush

The Economics of Innocent Fraud

Truth for Our Time
John Kenneth Galbraith
Houghton Mifflin

Economist and long-time presidential adviser, John Kenneth Galbraith published The Economics of Innocent Fraud in the last year of his life, at the age of 95. In this extended essay he examines, with an academic’s dour glee, the lies inherent in modern economic reporting and policies. "A marked enjoyment can be found in identifying self-serving belief and contrived nonsense," he claims in the opening chapter. That the fraud he discussed is clearly not at all innocent is part of the stilted hilarity that ensues from his observations.

For instance, he writes at length about the substitution of the moderate phrase “market economy” for the loaded-with-visions-of-monopoly term, capitalism. “Reference to the market system as a benign alternative to capitalism is a bland, meaningless disguise of the deeper corporate reality — of producers power extending to influence over, even control of, consumer demand.” (Insert grave chuckle here.)

Galbraith explains in some detail how corporations are in the control of their managers and not, as is purported, of their owners and stockholders. Further, he illustrates that corporations, or the private sector, are largely in control of what is called the public sector — notably in the defense of this country. (Funny stuff, that.)

In one chapter he discusses the fact that those who have the most interesting, fun jobs get paid the most money, while those who toil the hardest at the most grueling and undignified tasks earn the least. “The word ‘work’ embraces equally those for whom it is exhausting, boring, disagreeable and those for whom it is a clear pleasure with no sense of the obligatory. That the most generous pay should be for those most enjoying their work has been fully accepted.” (But, you already knew that movie stars and big time corporate chiefs not only get paid too much, they also get everything from their mansions to their toothpaste for free. Har, har, har.)

One of the funniest sections of the book is the one in which Galbraith explains that the machinations of the Federal Reserve, famously headed by Allan Greenspan during the recent past, does not control or even much influence the economy. He illustrates, using historical facts, that raising and lowering interest rates has produced very different results during different eras. “The action is reputable and well regulated; there is general agreement by the participants and approval from the financial world; it is just that nothing perceptible occurs.”

This idea dovetails nicely with his assertion that those who predict the future of the economy know about as much as a roadside psychic peering into a Lucite crystal ball. “Financial advice and guidance, however worthless, can be for a time financially rewarding. The comes the overriding truth.” (And you took out that home equity loan based on the Fed’s predictions. How funny is that?)

The Economics of Innocent Fraud is a short but illustrative read. Oh, and it’s amusing too, if you have the stomach for that kind of thing.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" May 2006 © Suzanne Rush

Imperial America

Reflections on the United States of Amnesia
Gore Vidal
Avalon

When Gore Vidal was asked about the state of new fiction in America at a recent question and answer session at the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Van Nuys, he replied that, while fiction continues to be published, his editor assures him that what Americans are really reading is nonfiction books. In other words, when we can collectively leave The Da Vinci Code on the toilet tank — where it belongs — we’re picking up books like his Imperial America.

Imperial America is a collection of essays, published in 2004 that showcases Vidal’s witty, yet bleak reflections on the state of the US. These topical, political essays, written during a two-decade period that spans 1980 through 2001, cover subjects ranging from the loss of Congressional powers beginning with the Nixon presidency to the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004.

To say that Vidal, an accomplished United States historian, is horrified by the current State of the Union, would be an understatement. Because, to him, the America of the last fifty years—its shoddy government, frightened workers and over-extended armies —is little more than a tool of corporate bankers and the nation’s elite.

“We can date from January 1950 the strict governmental control of our economy and the gradual erosion of our liberties, all in order to benefit the economic interest of what is never, to put it tactfully, a very large group…”

In a nutshell, Vidal explains how, ever since America’s corporations discovered that the surest way to riches was through waging war — and on the taxpayers dime — they, with the help of their bought-and-paid-for government officials, have been systematically looting the country to build munitions. They have hijacked the presidency, congress and the Supreme Court — the court that empowered them to begin with. They have bought and control the media in order to assure that only images of glorious materialism prevail in the psyches of average Americans — who get poorer with each purchase. They have rigged elections using electronic voting devices. They stand ready to promote sending young people to die in any battle that ensures the free-flow of the last of the globe’s oil to grease their moneymaking machinery. And nothing short of another Congressional Congress — a new revolution — will unseat them from power.

At the JCC lecture, a high school student rose to ask Vidal why he only talked about the negative aspects of America. Vidal answered that most of what he saw was negative. If even half of what he says is true, the outlook for America is dark indeed.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" May 2006 © Suzanne Rush

1 Dead in Attic

Post Katrina stories by Times Picayune columnist
Chris Rose
Chris Rose Books

“Before August 29 of last year,” Chris Rose writes in the introduction to his book, 1 Dead in Attic, “I spent most of my work day stalking celebrities and reveling in the frivolity of the entertainment industry.” In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, this journalist who worked for the Times Picayune in New Orleans, fell off his shoddy celebrity high, hit the sodden earth, and began stalking stories that carried far more gravitas than say, which loathsome scumbag Brittany Spears was choosing to father her brats that week.

That Rose’s former focus on the inconsequential hadn’t predisposed him to report on destruction, devastation and death, didn’t diminish his devotion to those crucial topics. With his family safely out of harm’s way in Maryland, he took to the streets — some of them underwater, others blocked by fallen trees and rusting cars, still others filled with roving bands of abandoned people and feral pets — and wrote about what he saw.

What he saw was utter desolation. Rose writes about the physical desolation of the now infamous Ninth Ward neighborhoods, which he describes in his title article, “1 Dead in Attic,” attempting to put a face to the words that had been spray-painted on a muddy ruin. “I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.”

He writes about the emotional desolation of the survivors, who, after the storm, “talk about prescription medications [for depression] now like they’re the soft shell crabs at Clancy’s.”

He recounts his personal desolation and the feelings of melancholy, heart sickness and desperation he underwent while living in isolation in his uptown home; while visiting with the weary band of surviving neighbors on the moldering stoop in front of his house; while traveling alone through America’s anonymous airports just to spend a few hours with his family; and mostly, while trying to imagine when things might ever get back to normal.

It is in this recitation of his own feelings, fears and tears that his workmanlike prose, otherwise leaded with clichés, finally shimmers with insight.”

“I have cowered in fear this year from the real and the imagined. The fear of injury, the fear of disease, the fear of death, the fear of abandonment, isolation and insanity.

“I have feared the phantom notions of sharks swimming on our streets and band of armed men coming for me in the night to steal my generator and water and then maybe rape me of cut my throat just for the hell of it.

“I have wept for hours on end, days on end.”

In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the ensuing failure of the levee systems that once shored up the town, New Orleans will never be the same. Neither will the people who live and lived there. Certainly Chris Rose has not remained the same. And though he might not have chosen to divert his focus from the trivial if not for this disaster, the change is beginning to suit him.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" April 2006 © Suzanne Rush

Veronica

Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon

Mary Gaitskill displays a rare gift in modern fiction writing: mainly that of being able to create a narrative that is as dense with thought as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Her work is the antithesis of trifles like The Da Vinci Code, where action is everything but the characters remain two-dimensional. In Gaitskill’s stories, while the plots are uniquely compelling, it is the subtext — the ideas of the narrator and characters — that overwhelms the whole. One must stop at frequent intervals while reading her biting meditations to review, chuckle or just inhale deeply.

Veronica, her second novel, recounts the story of Alison, a former teenage model who walked the runways of Paris and New York during the coke-fueled disco era. She is now a fifty-something woman battling the physical decrepitude of middle age and advanced hepatitis while cleaning bathrooms for a living in San Rafael, California. Alison’s story, and that of her doomed friend Veronica, is told in flashback during the course of one rainy afternoon she spends hiking on Mt. Tamalpias.

In typical Gaitskill fashion, this is more than a tale of two women who forge a friendship despite differences in age and outlook. It is a long contemplation on the excesses of the late 1970’s and the 1980s, its popular culture and the personal devastation that came in the wake of that new age, new wave party. Drugs, AIDS, twisted sexuality and the shallow posturing of those grasping at the straws of youth and popularity in order to find their place, are shown for the hollow, but heartbreakingly human pursuits that they are.

“There is always a style suit,” Gaitskill writes. “When I was young I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically — people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras — I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. It’s understandable that I thought that; TV and newsmagazines acted like the world had changed, too. I was happy with it, but the five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, ‘Now we’re this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!’ Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one.”

Neither Gaitskill nor her characters are particularly runny or liquid. In fact this author’s work always feels pointy and jagged, like a sharp elbow thrust into one’s ribs unexpectedly. Still, Gaitskill’s women are compelled to change with the tides, even if they’re not gracious about going with the flow.

Much of Veronica is also an attempt to explain the power and emotional influence of popular music. Song lyrics are sprinkled throughout the book like a soundtrack, illuminating inner and outer dramas. Yet, unlike the tacky pop tunes regularly used in modern films to bludgeon the audience into understanding some banal, Natalie Portmanesque character arc, Gaitskill’s songs run along the interior walls and temporal recesses of her characters’ psyches. The reader is privy to them in the same way they might be privy to their own, barely acknowledged interior monologues.

In just one of many musical reflections, Gaitskill writes:

“When John took those naked pictures, the most popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.”

With Veronica, Mary Gaitskill has captured a particular version of the longings of her generation of late baby boomers who thought the world was going to be handed to them on a silver platter, only to discover that the platter was made of lead. Still, Gaitskill seems to say, anything that shines can be beautiful, and, like Veronica and Alison, we all die sooner or later. So, pass the leaden goblet. We’re only human, after all.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" December 2005 © Suzanne Rush

Under the Banner of Heaven

A Story of Violent Faith
Jon Krakauer
Anchor Books

Americans live in an era when magical thinking, or the belief in that which cannot be proved, has reached a new apex of influence in just about every aspect of contemporary life. I refer here, primarily, to the ascendancy of supernatural ideologies that begin with the overtly religious proclamations of the country’s leaders and filter down to acts like the exorcism of evolutionary science from the textbooks of school children. In this climate where “Godly” jihadists commit mass murders in the name of Allah, and Christian fundamentalists kill doctors who perform legal abortions — or call for the assassination of Venezuela’s president because he is a communist (and won’t let the US control his oil reserves) — it is important to turn a critical eye to both the roots of contemporary religions and the fundamental tenets at the core of these belief systems.

Jon Krakauer does just this in his book, Under the Banner of Heaven, where he examines the roots of one belief system: the Mormon religion, it’s history of violence and the fundamental fringe groups who practice this American faith at it’s most extreme. As a dramatic fulcrum, Krakauer recounts the horrific story of brothers Dan and Ron Laffery, who bloodily murdered their sister-in-law and 15-month-old niece in Utah in1984 in the name of an alleged revelation from God. From this murder he leads the reader into the shadowy world of fundamentalist Mormons, who live in remote desert enclaves and practice polygamy in addition to well-documented child sexual abuse. The tenet of taking “plural wives” as handed down by the religion’s founder, Joseph Smith — though no longer sanctioned by the church leaders and illegal in all 50 states— still thrives in these communities that exist far from prying eyes and legal oversight. (Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped from her bedroom in June 2002, and missing for months, was the victim of a fundamentalist who took her as a plural wife.)

Krakauer traces the roots of the fundamentalist Mormons’ beliefs to the founding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, recounting in detail the life of it’s 19th century founders, notably Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Smith was, by many accounts, something of a charlatan, who first tried his hand at various supernatural scrying techniques to find “treasure,” until he was, by his own account, sent a vision that led him to uncover a “latter-day” bible. Inscribed on solid gold pages, and buried on a hillside in upstate New York, this book, known as The Book of Mormon, became the basis of the newly minted LDS faith. Notably, this original document said nothing about polygamy. It was only, years later, when Smith had been married for some time, that he received further revelations that informed him that the path to world peace could be paved if only men were not forced into the tedium of having sex with only one woman, that plural wife-taking was added to LDS teachings.

But peace, as Krakauer recounts, was elusive to the Mormons, whose clannishness and unique practices infuriated every community in which they settled. They were driven violently from New York and Missouri, and finally settled in Utah, where they hoped to be left alone in the barren wastes of that vast desert state. This was not to be. The Mormon settlers of Utah were to engage in many more bloody battles in their new homeland, including the notorious Mountain Meadows Massacre, until they found the relative tranquility and autonomy they sought. In the end, all of this violent history goes into the making of the murderous Laffery brothers, who claimed to have heard revelatory voices telling them to embrace fundamentalist Mormonism and eventually kill their brother’s wife.

Krakauer is a masterful writer who is able to weave past and present into a rich and compelling narrative of the Mormons’ “one true church,” that is as impossible to stop staring at — and as ugly — as an automobile accident. Despite the heat he has taken from LDS church leaders for allegedly portraying a negative, one-sided view of their history and doctrines, his book, with its copious footnotes and well-documented research, seems as credible as the information it presents seems incredible.

As Krakauer states in his author’s remarks at the end of the paperback edition of the book:

“There are some ten thousand extant religious sects – each with its own cosmology, each with its own answer for the meaning of life and death. Most assert that the other 9,999 not only have it completely wrong but are instruments of evil, besides.”

Certainly, religions in general — whatever their roots — have been the basis of as much human suffering as enlightenment. The revelations of child sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic priests are but one example of this. And while those ten thousands groups are battling it out to see whose imagined vision of universal power triumphs, there will be more suffering.

The world could do with many more Krakauers, looking into the roots of supernatural doctrines and lending a modicum of reason to the beliefs that make some lead lives of virtue, but lead others into murder. As the NRA might say, God doesn’t kill, people do. But people have also done other things, like mapping the solar system, observing the evolution of the animal kingdom, inventing carbon-dating, curing numerous diseases and sending men to the moon— and they did all of these things without relying on any magical texts to guide them. I wish someone would get on their bike and ride to my door to tell me about some of those incredible achievements rather than just coming to spread their myths retold as fact. The Mormons are not the only people to do this, but after reading this book you may finally lose patience with the politically correct attitudes that allow them, and others, to spread their bullshit on your doorstep — or all over your country.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" December 2005 © Suzanne Rush

Dark Genius of Wall Street

The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons
Edward J. Renean, Jr.
Basic Books

In his biography of Jay Gould, Dark Genius of Wall Street: The Misunderstood Life of Jay Gould, King of the Robber Barons, Edward J. Renehan, Jr. has set out to change the world’s perceptions of the notoriously rapacious businessman who, he claims, has been treated unfairly by the press — both during Gould’s lifetime and beyond. But Renehan’s attempt at the rehabilitation of Gould’s sinister image is similar to persuading the public to excuse Tony Soprano’s resume of murder and extortion by emphasizing that he had a rotten childhood and always loved his kids.

Yes, Jay Gould was a self-made man who began life in hardscrabble circumstances. He was hard-working, extremely intelligent and self-sufficient. He loved his wife, his siblings and his large brood of offspring and was unfailingly generous to them.

But he was also a single-minded, Machiavellian, moneymaking machine, who used bribery of elected officials, demonstrably false news stories, violent union-busting techniques and boldly, unethical, financial stings to squeeze every dime out of companies to turn a profit. He was aided in his consummate exploitation of the stock market by a lack of government regulation that would make Enron's corporate pirates salivate with envy.

Renehan’s book exhaustively recounts Gould’s manipulations of Erie Railroad stock — a series of complicated financial moves with which he looted a middling company and drove it and thousands of investors into the ground — and which earned him an incredible personal profit and the moniker "the Mephistopheles of Wall Street." Yet, somehow, the reader is to believe that his later able handing of the Union Pacific railroad, his take-over of the Western Union telegraph company and his rip-off of New York’s public transportation system — companies which he did not devastate — lets him off the hook for the corporations he looted and the lives he destroyed.

While Renehan’s book is a well-written history of a fascinating man and the Darwinian era in which he lived, the facts of Gould’s life render the book unconvincing in its primary aim. Gould remains what he was, a multi-faceted and riveting monster of fiscal selfishness. Or, in the common parlance, a consummate success.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" April 2006 © Suzanne Rush

Lillian Hellman

A Life with Foxes and Scoudrels
Deborah Martinson
Counterpoint

Deborah Martinson’s biography of American playwright, Lillian Hellman (1905–1984), does much to rehabilitate the spotty reputation of its subject. Hellman, who wrote the acclaimed plays, The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour, among others, lived a remarkably colorful life filled with dualities.

Her first taste of a double life came during childhood. She was the poor relation of a rich family, who wore fine clothes but lived in a boarding house. She spent half her youth as a too-Jewish Southerner in New Orleans, and the other half as a not-Jewish-enough New Yorker in Manhattan.

As an adult she worked as a writer on Broadway and a filmmaker in Hollywood. She seldom had less than two romantic relationships going at one time — one, famously, with author, Dashiell Hammett And she became a privileged, wealthy woman who cloaked herself in the queenly trappings of her fame while championing the working stiff in her creative and political works. Finally, when her career as a dramatist came to an end, she reinvented herself, to much applause and controversy, as a memoirist.

In numerous, earlier works about the author, the details of Hellman’s life have been used to portray her as two, very different women. The first is the version the playwright herself invented in various autobiographical books like Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman. Here she is the noble, truth-teller who stood up to Joseph McCarthy, Hollywood and the Nazis when others folded. The second, from outside sources, is of a woman reviled by contemporaries, like Mary McCarthy who claimed that "every word [Hellman uttered] was a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

In this biography, written for the first time with the consent of Hellman’s executors, Martinson, an associate professor of English and writing at Occidental College, gives far more credence to the former version of Lillian than the latter. Here she is the witty, worldly firebrand. Martinson depicts her with both a cigarette and a knowing remark ever-burning at her lips. She is the heroine of Broadway, leftist politics and numerous romantic entanglements.

But Martinson’s portrait feels like an homage rather than an unadulterated rendering of this complex woman. It is as if Martinson has digitally removed Hellman’s shadows and rough edges to present a more-beautiful-than-life facsimile of the author. Martinson says that she was “plagued by what I chose to include of the millions of details a life comprises as well as what I left out.”

Details like: “the silly, arrogant bell she used to ring her staff.” Or the possibility of sexually transmitted diseases that caused vaginal polyps.” Even, details from later in Hellman’s life like, “the diminished flow of oxygen to her brain.” These things, she felt would “overwhelm her character and her writing and her politics would begin to fade.”

Yet, it is precisely these kinds of details that illuminate a life. To decide that it is better to show a woman who championed workers, but not show that she loved to keep them in their places with an annoying bell used to summon them at will, is to remove the kind of complexities that render a human complete. Hellman was extraordinary in countless ways. She was a tough, smart, successful woman who made an enduring mark on her world. But she was also a self-serving, pain-in-the-ass.

Despite her years of research, and the singular access she was given to Hellman’s cronies and records, Martinson’s book is more love letter to the playwright than a definitive biography. Perhaps she felt she needed to choose between the two Hellmans and champion the one she preferred, rather than presenting the complicated, two-mints-in-one amalgamation that would have shown the playwright in all her glory and foolishness. For those who want to remember Hellman as she would like to be remembered, this is a lovely, entertaining book. For those who want to examine a life depicted with (vaginal) warts-and-all, you may need to wait for a more complex work.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2005 © Suzanne Rush

Jesus Land

A Memoir
Julia Scheeres
Counterpoint

In her often harrowing, yet slyly droll memoir, Jesus Land, Julia Scheeres smashes a fist-sized hole through the brittle, smiling façade of the Christian family fantasy. Yes, on the surface, Julia’s family, with pious, Midwestern Doctor and Nurse parents, four blonde kids and two adopted black sons, was the picture of brotherly love. But, things were, as they say, not all they seemed to be in the good Doctor’s house.

For one thing, Mrs. Scheeres clearly hated her children, which she expressed by alternately ignoring them or telling them she couldn’t wait for them to grow up and move out. All of this while she was continually praying, going to church and acting the part of the loving messenger of God. Dr. Scheeres was mostly absent, except for the interludes during which he came home to dole out punishment — most of it branded with a belt onto the backs of his two adopted sons. And Julia, well, when she wasn’t being emotionally abused by her parents, she was being sexually abused by Jerome, the oldest of the adopted boys.

Jesus Land tells the story of a two-year period during the 1970s when 16-year-old Julia and her beloved youngest brother, David came of age in a crucible of violence. First there was the violence David endured as the only black kid in their backwater hamlet. Scheeres' depiction of high school life for David, who is humiliated and threatened by rednecks, rejected by girls and beaten by his father, is gut wrenching. Her own horror at the behavior of others towards him is further exacerbated by her adolescent guilt about not wanting to suffer under the negative attentions his proximity brought her.

Then there was the sexual violence against Julia which happened with the regularity of bible study. Because, when her brother Jerome wasn’t banned from the house by their parents for some behavioral transgression, he was breaking into her room at night for regular rounds of rape. And if Jerome wasn't doing the violating, it was the local jocks trying to gang bang her. Ultimately with the aid of some Southern Comfort and a recognizable brand of skewed teenaged logic, she submits to one of them, who becomes an ersatz boyfriend with whom she hopes to “feel something,” and to blot out the memory of less willing acts committed upon her in the past.

The family’s veneer of working dysfunction is finally ripped away for good when Jerome throws a party while his parents are out of town. They return to find broken bric-a-brac and booze bottles and throw Jerome out for the last time. With the three older kids already gone to college, this leaves Julia and David to take the brunt of the Doctor’s anger, which he aims at David — first leaving him with a broken arm, and then sending him to Escuela Caribe, a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic. Julia is next. When her mother finds evidence of her sexual activity Julia runs away to avoid the beating she knows can’t be deflected any longer. Ultimately she joins David.

Indiana was no Disneyland, but Escuela Caribe was surely the unhappiest place on earth. Under the guise of Christian values, the sadistic counselors and house parents at this camp “vomit evil” and generally demoralized the teens sent there. The kids are not allowed to stand, eat or move without asking permission. They are given daily, harsh physical punishments and endless chores. They are encouraged to turn on each other to “build character.” And all of this is done, like the witch trials, the massacres of the Crusades and the sexual abuse of children by priests, invoking the name of Jesus.

Scheeres writes about this ongoing nightmare with a wry detachment that makes it almost palatable. Her depictions of the fumbling hubris inherent in teenage sex are startling in their authenticity. Her attention to the comic details of life on the fringes of the action adds life to her often-grim narrative. Overall, there is a steely resolve and unlikely hopefulness about her voice that allows the reader to believe that she will survive a world in which she trusts no one except the brother who was her best friend. Had her tone been more vulnerable, or her eye been solely fixed upon ugliness, this modern, Dickensian tale would be unbearable to read. Instead, it is hard to put this book down.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" October 2005 © Suzanne Rush

Bait and Switch

The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich
Metropolitan Books

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote Nickel and Dimed to expose the fallacy that a working adult could survive in America earning only the minimum wage. To do so, she took a variety of low-paying jobs, including that of a Merry Maid, a Wal-Mart Associate and a waitress, and forced herself to live solely from the income she could make in those occupations. She was not surprised to discover that what she had suspected was true: it was nearly impossible to pay for even the barest of necessities when earning $5.15 per hour. What did startle her was the way blue-collar jobs, and the lifestyle they proscribed, undermined one’s physical health and store of personal dignity.

In her latest expose, Bait and Switch, The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream, Ehrenreich again goes undercover as an American worker — this time as a white-collar employee. The premise of this journalistic exercise was to pose as an unemployed corporate wannabe. Ehrenreich would spend five months looking for work — that being the average amount of time the government claimed it took to find a job in 2004 — then land a position and see what ensued. With so many Americans getting downsized from their corporate jobs within the last decade, this arena presented a prime hunting ground for her investigation.

To pursue employment, she did what most educated Americans do today, she got on the Internet. There she discovered the world of Monster, HotJobs and the innumerable corporate websites that let one post resumes, peruse openings and apply for positions electronically. But Ehrenreich wasn’t content to sit around and hope someone would see her postings. She approached her task, in corporate lingo, more proactively.

She hired career coaches, resume writing counselors and joined networking groups. In each of these realms she discovered worlds of subtle and overt oppression that may have made her long for the grueling days she’d spent scrubbing floors while researching her last book.

Career coaches, she finds, are self-styled entrepreneurs with no credentials and a love of crackpot personality tests. Under the tutelage of one she is asked to take the discredited Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales test and to decide which Wizard of Oz character most typifies her inner drives. While debating upon whether the Scarecrow or Tin man best represent her, this coach offers the only bit of job searching help she’ll get after paying his fee: the name of someone else to help retool her resume.

She moves on to a new career coach and a resume writing professional with similar results. The coach wants her to take another personality test, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Corporations, she discovers, are strangely enamored of these tests that have been proven to be less accurate than reading the future in tea leaves. Her resume coach strings her along for months with revisions regarding the bolding of type and clarification of mission statements.

Next she ventures into the world of networking. She joins a variety of paid and unpaid job-seeking groups with the hope that they will provide, at the best, actual contact information that will lead to work, and, at the least, camaraderie with others who are unemployed. She finds neither. The leaders of the networking groups seem to be following their own agendas, usually trying to sell the increasingly desperate out-of-work employees more personal coaching, EST-like self-help information or, in one case, a severe dose of Jesus.

As far as forming bonds with other white-collar workers on the skids, the rigid format of the meetings she attends, keeps this kind of bonding at bay. There is no room for commiseration in this world where each non-working, increasingly depressed striver is told that their failures are a result of their own negative attitudes. Perhaps the idea is that talking to others in one’s own situation will only foster the very negativity that keeps them down.

In the end, after thousands of dollar spent on coaching, makeovers and travel to job interviews — and more than five months later — Ehrenreich is offered a position. It is as a salesperson for the medical insurance company Aflac. This was not the type of work for which she’d been looking, nor was it work for which she was qualified. But, since it was a job as an independent contractor, on a commission-only basis, her erstwhile employer didn’t seem to care. When she asked about medical benefits, a natural question when going to work for an insurance company, she was told that her position didn’t include any.

Ehrenreich’s odyssey through the transition industry is told with her usual brand of wit, intelligence and sense of outrage. The situations in which she finds herself are, indeed, absurd. But, what the book lacks is the sense of desperation that job hunters actually feel. Ehrenreich was not worried that she would never work again in her chosen profession. She was not worried she would not be able to pay bills and end up sick or homeless. Without that urgency — one that more people feel with each passing corporate take-over — the book, while amusing, feels a little hollow. Still, every job-seeker should have a pal like Ehrenreich with whom to pass the tea and sympathy when grinding out another form letter for a job they don’t really want anyway.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" October 2005 © Suzanne Rush

Reading, Writing and Leaving Home

Life on the Page
Lynn Freed
Harcourt

In her beautifully composed book of essays about the writing life, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home, author Lynn Freed explores three main themes. The first is, home, and how it informs and haunts the writer. In Freed’s case, home, narrowly seen, is South Africa. Yet home is more than one’s country of origin. Here, it includes the slightly-droopy-at-the-edges mansion in which her theatrical parents held court, and significantly, her parents themselves.

Though Freed has spent her entire adult life living in the US, her fictional characters always return “home” to South Africa. It is through revealing the landscape of her childhood that she has seen her greatest success as a novelist. Yet finding the right voice with which to expose her familiar world was initially elusive.

“For the young expat South African writer of the seventies and eighties, the perceived audience for her writing fell loosely between what I call the Out-of-Africa crowd on the one hand… and the Keepers of the Moral High Ground on the other,” Freed writes. “And so, for a number of years, I occupied myself writing predictably horrified short stories placed in South Africa. They were full of fake daring, fake feeling, fake everything. And they were, of course, predictably rejected.”

Not until a writing teacher encouraged her to “write about her family,” did she discover the authenticity that had eluded her. Yet, with that realism came the prospect of truth-telling — her second major theme in the book.

In more than one essay, Freed explains why fidelity to subject and character in writing is more important than kindness. “The page will reveal the fake even when the writer is moving herself to tears,” she states. To this end she describes the necessity of the writer becoming a virtual serial killer.

“Before they can even begin writing [writers] must kill off parents, siblings, lovers, mentors, friends — anyone, in short, whose opinion might matter. If these people are left alive and allowed to take up residence in the front row of the audience, the writer will never be able to get the fiction right. More than this, she will never want to get it right.”

Telling the truth is not only expressed in revealing others for the flawed human animals they are, but in exposing herself. To this end, the third major theme of the book deals with writing itself — and her own arduous process. Freed is seemingly as free discussing her Mother’s melodramas or the talentless, prima donna, students to whom she caters as a MFA creative writing teacher, as she is examining her own missteps and dark nights of the soul.

In “False Starts and Creative Failure,” she writes of her near-inability to produce the “second” novel for which her publishers were clamoring. She shares one stillborn opening paragraph after another; one meaningless title after another; as if getting either of those right would begin the effortless flow that produces a book.

“Of course, it was hopeless,” she admits. “Still, I chased on. I thought that if only I had the idea for the story, I’d have the novel itself. I forgot everything I knew about ideas and fiction. But desperation and vanity does this to a writer; it makes her stupid.”

Not only does Freed’s writing come in egocentric fits and starts, but her life outside of this realm, is also variously marred and enlivened by ups and downs. She hates teaching for taking her away from writing. She worries that her constant travels have kept her from stability. And she probably isn’t an ideal mother as she reveals in this short passage about her relationship to her daughter:

“Once, I tore her passport in half. Once, I drove the car pool in a devil mask and bridal veil. Once, I threw her clothes out of the window. Once, I locked her out of a hotel room and she had to bring in the Mexican police to break down the door.”

Within the pages of this book, Freed presents herself as relentlessly ambitious, emotionally aerobic and unflinchingly astute. These are likely essential traits for a writer who can never stay in one place, yet can never go home.

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Human Oddities

Noria Jablonski
Shoemaker & Hoard

Human Oddities, Noria Jablonski’s short story debut, is teeming with the kind of people your mother warned you about. It’s even got some mothers of whom your own mother might not approve. In fact, Part One of the book contains three tales focusing on just such a matriarch. Seen from the viewpoint of the narrator, the Mommy who emerges from Jablonski’s pages is narcissistic and neurotic in ways that could shame Joan Crawford. Moreover, her vanity is married to a severe brand of body dysmorphic disorder that pushes her from drugs to cosmetic surgery in ever more desperate bids to alleviate a smidgen of her self-loathing.

While this exposé of common, household dysfunctions is enough to justify the book’s title, the more obvious Human Oddities occur in Part II. Here we enter a sea littered with homid flotsam. “One of Us” features Siamese twins — the second set we meet in the book. “Monkey’s Paw” climbs inside the world of an infuriating relationship on the skids and the unrequited devotion that allows it to survive. “Big Guy” examines the kind of faceless, working class stiffs, who consider sex with, well… stiffs. “The End of Everything,” the last and most accomplished story in the collection introduces transvestites and murderers.

In this final tale, Jablonski flexes her writer’s muscles to add complexity to a life that outsiders might carelessly dismiss with a single epithet. Interestingly, it is here that the mother figure, who has haunted so many of the previous tales in the form of a monstrous and carelessly selfish antagonist, takes shape as the alter ego of the main character himself.

All the stories in the collection exude a quiet desperation examined unflinchingly and with an eye toward everyday details that forces the reader to see a reflection of themselves in those from whom they would most like to avert their gaze. Human Oddities is already number three on the bestseller list at Atomic Books in Baltimore, between Playboy Brunettes and 101 Diseases You Don't Want to Get — two more books full of people your mother doesn’t want you to meet.

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Gullboy

The Inconceivable Life of Franco Parjarito Zanpa
Wade Rubenstein
Counterpoint

Wade Rubenstein’s first novel shows off his sense of the zany and the influence of repeated readings of A Confederacy of Dunces. This is, in many ways, a good thing, because Gullboy, like Confederacy, is an entertaining romp through the world of the bizarre.

In the barest sense, it is the story of Ernesto Zanpa, a lazy loser who lives on Coney Island in a moldering house he inherited from his parents. God knows, as a marginally employed, uneducated near-bum, with a prostitute wife, he never would have managed to find a home otherwise. Even within the relative safety of his bungalow, he imagines the cardboard box he will one day inhabit under a cement overpass.

But destiny comes knocking — or wailing, in this case — at his door in the form of a half-human, half-seagull he finds in a nest in his back yard. He adopts the baby and becomes father to the boy, who he names Franco, after his own father. Parenthood transforms Zanpa into a man with a purpose who works daily and cares for his little gull-babe.

It is the other characters who inhabit his world that provide most of the crazy comic fodder. His wife, disgusted with her hubby and his bird boy, becomes an inadvertent online porn star when she has a gastronomical incident in full view of a webcam toilet. His lawyer, a kooky bastard with a successful ambulance-chasing practice, ends up shooting himself in his own penis while running from the Russian Mafia. And, his son, the Gullboy, Franco, is a marvel of unlikely avian growth spurts married to superior human sensitivity, who longs, like the Little Mermaid, to be fully human despite the price he might have to pay.

The supporting cast in the story is too long to list, but most contribute to the comedy in a useful manner. Still, one wonders if the number of freaks spread through the story, like icing on an already sweet cake, could have been pared down a bit to focus the action.

Not to be a spoiler, but the ending misses the mark emotionally and feels as if the author lost his aim somewhere while contriving the whirlwind of action that comprises the last third of the book. Still, all-in-all, Gullboy is an amusing and elaborately designed trifle, certainly worth an afternoon or so of one’s attention.

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Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy

Mabel Maney
Harper Entertainment

Why, oh, why, has no one published Mabel Maney in hardback? I think about those volumes of classic Nancy Drew books arranged on neat shelves in her apartment — with only paperbacks sporting her name on the spine to place beside Carolyn Keene’s — and I weep. One can only hope that some good friend or semi-devoted lover has had the sense to have a set of her works hand bound in leather to present as a gift.

Maney, who wrote several Nancy Drew satires in the 1990s, is a singular, dry wit and spot-on parodist. By introducing lesbian content into the already homoerotic girl detective genre, she created a world of her own in which to explore a variety of contemporary themes like incest and relationships woes — while still providing her characters with the requisite, hearty tuna casserole after a hard day of sleuthing.

In her later spoofs, which I am just getting around to reading, she takes on the James Bond myth by introducing James’ twin sister, Jane. Once again, Maney's protagonist, Jane, is a randy lesbo with a string of relationship wins and losses to haunt her. When she is drawn into impersonating her brother, who is incarcerated in an insane asylum, in order to save the Queen of England, Jane becomes a drag king extraordinaire in addition to a swashbuckling ladies lady.

The go-go, ‘60s England evoked in Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy is likely more akin to Austin Power’s Britain than it is to Ian Flemings’. Still, this tale of hipster lady spies with cosmetic bags full of deadly gadgets is more than a stylized look at the past. In her own witty way, Maney introduces imposing themes like the death of the Empire and its gentry, women’s liberation and class struggles. These themes do not intrude upon the frothy plot, but add a layer of sophistication to what might otherwise be a mindless romp.

Yes, Maney is too clever to forever languish in paperback.

Rating:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury

The year is 1808. While Napoleon is whipping the English armed forces on every front and King George is effectually insane, one magician decides to revive practical magic in Britain. Mr. Norrell, a pedantic, fussy scholar is hardly the type of man to seize the imagination of London society with his convoluted spells to defeat the French Emperor, or bring erstwhile heiresses back from the dead to marry penniless suitors — yet he is precisely the man who does.

In Susanna Clarke’s historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the egotistical Norrell aspires to be the only practicing magician in England — in the world, if truth be known. To insure his precarious perch of power, he uses his magical abilities to extinguish the gentlemanly, theoretical magic societies that have abounded for decades. That accomplished, he discovers that it’s lonely at the top. Mr. Norrell longs for a peer. Loneliness compels the best of men to make decisions that result in their undoing, and Norrell’s decision to take on the outgoing, rakish Jonathan Strange as his apprentice is no exception.

Strange is everything Norrell is not. He is sociable when Norrell is withdrawn, he is creative where Norrell is bookish, moreover, Strange is not one to be tamed into subservience. There is much that Norrell will not share with the curious Strange, mainly his extensive library of magical texts. They are the only books of their kind in existence, and Norrell has methodically hoarded them for decades and hidden them for his sole use. The hidden texts are bothersome by themselves. Yet to Strange their absence is maddening, for in them he is sure lie the answers to his own questions: like why Norrell eschews the help of Faeries or, why Norrell denies the importance of England’s greatest magician, The Raven King.

After he is sent to help Lord Wellington defeat Napoleon, Strange returns hungry for answers and unwilling to dance in attendance to his taciturn tutor. He breaks off his relationship with Norrell to hustle off and create magic of his own. What follows is a dark journey that alters the lives of many and changes the course of English magic forever.

Clarke’s novel, though full of very human (and inhuman) characters and delightful passages of superior prose (much of it in the form of pseudo-historical footnotes), has a cold aspect to it. The subplots, involving the plight of women and servants, are chilling and seemingly irresolvable. This iciness pervades fully half of the book, which is a long time in an 800-page novel. And while happy endings are not part of Clarke’s obligation, the hopelessness that blankets the lives of so many characters becomes stultifying.

This is no Harry Potter tale, where the heroism of the protagonist casts a shining light on even the bleakest situations. Strange and Norrell are deeply flawed, even unlikable, individuals. However, the scope of the book is breathtaking and the fog of dry humor that lies like a thin shroud over the tale makes it worth finishing the book to discover whether or not anyone in England will ever be happy again.

Rating: (I'd give it 4 cats for skill and style.)

The Wisdom of Menopause

Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change

Christiane Northrup, M.D.
Bantam Books

Women of a certain age and socio-economic group love Dr. Christiane Northrup. She is, among other things, a founding mother of the groundbreaking Women to Woman Clinic in Yarmouth, Maine; author of several books about women’s health; and a ubiquitous-yet-benignly-smiling face on PBS stations during fund drives.

In her book, The Wisdom of Menopause, she explorers the vicissitudes of that life phase women have dreaded for centuries, known as "the change." In medical terms this is the time during a woman’s late 40s and early 50s in whch she enters perimenopause or menopause, stops ovulating and eventually stops getting her period. This phase is full of discomforts and surprises, all of which Dr. Northrup lays out with a clinician’s precision. The symptoms include hormonal imbalances, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, depression, bone density loss and a general withering on the vine.

Northrup also examines the change in a more new-agey way, discussing how the changes in a women’s body also signal changes in attitudes about life. From her perspective, menopause is as vital and difficult a period as adolescence, since it is accompanied by just as many hormonal alterations as the earlier phase. Similarly, menopause signals a time when women need to reevaluate their place in the world, their role in relationships and their ultimate goals. That women often use this time to discard those things that never worked for them is part of what she calls “the wisdom” of the change.

Northrup’s book is chock-full of great medical information about hormone replacement therapies and which tests women should request from their doctors. It is also plump with anecdotes, both from women whom she has treated over the years and from her personal, historical storehouse.

Feminism once taught women that the personal is political, and Northrup takes this philosophy and runs with it by using her own divorce and professional growth in later life to illustrate, what she sees as, emotional changes omnipresent for all women. While much of what she purports has the ring of truth to it, some merely sounds like a bid to lend greater meaning to the upheavals in her own life. Fans who watch and like her for two hours on television, may feel less friendly after spending 500 pages with her, reading the exhaustive details of the dissolution of her 25-year marriage — an event that clearly left her reeling.

This book works best as a reference for those on the verge of becoming crones. The facts about hormone replacement and heart disease are indispensable, as are the lists of supplements and dietary suggestions for enhancing health during middle age. It is easy enough to skip past the seemingly, endless "personal stories" and get to the medical meat. It’s not that these tales have no value. But, if you’ve read three, you’ve read them all.

Rating:

Lighthousekeeping

Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt

The Fixity of Beaver

As Jeanette Winterson gets older her novels become more clearly personal. It would certainly be easy to read Lighthousekeeping, her latest, as an extended letter to a particular lover (or lovers). At its best the book explores universal emotional themes, but at its worst it verges on the embarrassingly private.

With Lighthousekeeping, as she has done in the past, Winterson weaves two love stories into one. The first is the contemporary — and autobiographical in feeling, if not fact — story of Silver. She is a girl, born of an errant seaman (get it, semen?) who is soon orphaned. Which is how Silver comes to live with Pew, keeper of the lighthouse at Cape Wrath in the seaside town of Salts. Pew is a blind man, whose family members, one following another, have been keeping the lamp in the tower burning since its construction. He is both the custodian of the light and “an old man with a bag of stories under his arm” — many of which he imparts to Silver, and one of which is the basis of the second major story.

This second, is a tale about the clan that built the lighthouse: the Dark family. (The names in this novel tend to hammer the cranium with their obvious metaphors.) The Darks’ tale centers upon Babel, a 19th century man who lives a double life, much like the Jekyll-Hyde character he fears himself to be. Babel Dark is a wealthy pastor living in Salts, with a wife he does not love — who he, in fact, beats regularly — and a child who he hardly notices. Simulatneously, Dark is also the gentle, loving husband of Molly O’Rourke and the attentive father to their children.

Winterson has a gift for evoking the past and it is not surprising that Dark’s story is the more compelling one of the two in this book. By intertwining alluring glimpses of historical figures like Charles Darwin, Robert Louis Stevenson and their fictions and theories, with Dark’s double life and obsessive longing for integrity, the author creates the magical, but, er… dark, world in which her character struggles. “How can a man become his own death, choose it, take it, have no one to blame but himself.” Dark wonders about his own inability to move wholly toward the, er… light. In passages such as that one, the author plumbs the psyche of her character without losing sight of his, and all of mankind’s, um… evolution.

Silver’s story, on the other hand, is less enthralling, far more disjointed, and eventually collapses into a difficult-to-comprehend, romantic quagmire. Her biography begins straightforwardly enough and the passages from her early life add to the overall tapestry. But, once Winterson makes the jump to Silver as an adult, she loses her perspective of the overall design and the potentially majestic weave of the book’s elements begins to look like one of those garish, velvet paintings of a provocative Latina hanging on the wall of a Mexican restaurant. Here the theme of longing, which this author has pretty much exhausted in her previous books, and which could best (better) be summed up as: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” becomes tiresome.

Once Silver finally finds a love object the reader is subjected to a semi-detailed, wince-inducing scene of sex with said lover. All of this takes place on the isle of Capri or in Greece or, hey, it doesn’t really matter at this point. By now the reader has been to so many locales, during so many time periods that Silver may as well be on the moon making whoopee with a Venusian.

One of the most off-puttng aspects of the description of this love relationship is that, after all these years, Winterson still insists on giving her protagonists ambiguous sexal identities. One reads about the lovemaking in this confusingly, codified portion of the book, yet still has no concrete idea about the gender of Silver’s lover. It’s 2005. It’s okay to be gay, already. Really.

We may never know whom Winterson loved and lost (unless it’s the woman to whom the book is dedicated). Still, Silver’s story, about keeping the light of her love burning, seems painfully autobiographical, and oddly embarrassing. It makes one wish Winterson would stick to the historical and the metaphorical — where she generally shines – and leave the contemporary and obviously personal alone. Winterson is a lyrical writer with quite a few appealing literary tricks up her sleeve. However, despite what is good about Lighthousekeeping, by the end, its brilliant potential has been, all but, extinguished.

Rating:

Prep

Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House

It’s difficult to truly like Lee Fiora, the protagonist in Curtis Sittenfeld’s debut novel, Prep. It’s not that there is nothing one might like about a South Bend, Indiana, teenager who has the smarts and gumption to make it into Ault, the prestigious, Eastern, prep school in the story. She isn’t evil, or ugly or a particular stand-out in any negative way. Similarly, and here’s the problem, she’s not a stand-out in any positive way either. Lee is so average — so “Mid-Western,” so typically-teenage, so mousy, so passive-aggressive, of such middling intelligence and of such run-of-the-mill interests, or as she characterizes herself, "one of the mild, boring, peripheral girls" — it is hard to care what happens in her life.

However, maybe Lee’s lackluster normality is precisely what points to the thesis of Prep: What happens when you put and ordinary teenager into an extraordinary school? Will she crumble under the socio-economic pressures of having to pay for her boarding school education using a scholarship when most of the other students think of money and exclusive institutions as their birthright? Will she succumb to peer pressures, align herself with the cool kids and develop an aversion for those somehow beneath her? Will she excel academically and form lasting bonds with the born leaders of society?

The answer is that Lee does is what most teenagers do: she rails feebly at the awkwardness of being a misfit among her peers and makes a passel of mistakes — including having a sexual relationship with a popular boy who has little regard for her — that she will regret for a lifetime. Yet, it is in these descriptions of Lee’s commonplace, youthful foibles that Sittenfeld’s work finally rises above the ho hum.

For instance, Sittenfed’s characters speak the authentic language of the young, where the silliest exclamations are taken for profound. They think the thoughts of the young, in which a preoccupation with being liked, or who’s in and who’s out, are uppermost in the mind. They are influenced by the most banal aspects of popular culture, as in one instance where Lee is performing fellatio on her erstwhile boyfriend for the first time, and suddenly recalls the exact instructions, from a Cosmopolitan-like magazine she has read, on how to regard the penis as an ice cream cone during this act.

While Prep follows along the in the mold of other coming-of-age stories, in which a teenager must pass a variety of tests on the way to becoming a whole, integrated adult, this novel does not show the protagonist coming out on the other side of her trial much changed. This storytelling technique lacks the distinct character arc one has come to expect from fiction and movies. Yet, in presenting a little-changed Lee at the end of four years at Ault, Prep mimics real life more closely than do most such tales. The novel may lack some of the false vivacity or uplifting hopefulness found in traditionally-constructed dramas, but it seems to paint a realistic picture of what most of us really become after negotiating the stumbling blocks of high school: just a bunch of older teenagers.

Rating:

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BLESSEDLY BRIEF

Ryan Boudinot’s The Littlest Hitler is an amusing collection of stories that relies heavily on absurd situations to entertain. The title tale, about a child who dresses as Adolph Hitler for a school Halloween pageant, only to find that a classmate has dressed as Anne Frank, sets the tone for these stories that only get more peculiar as the book progresses. And the more outlandish the topics and characters, the more the stories in this book succeed.

“Civilization,” in which a son is compelled by the government to kill his parents to receive a free college education, “The Sales Team,” in which three salesmen violently assault their potential customers to make a successful pitch and “Drugs and Toys.” which stars an inverted drug store owner who likes to strip and pretend to shop at night in the nude, are some of this collection’s standouts. In the other stories, where some of the absurdity of the situations is subtle, or where there is too heavy a reliance on setting a contemporary scene by using brand names and recounting high-tech office politics, the writing is less compelling.

Perhaps it is merely a generational bias that makes me less interested in the doings at dot-com-era firms and the twenty-somethings who inhabit that world, than I am in the stories that break out of that mold. Still, there is a sameness to the tone Boudinot uses to narrate all these stories, and it works best when he pushes his characters out of the world he actually inhabits, and frequently revisits, to place them in a context that is less mundane. The further he strays from reality, the more entertaining the story.

This Is Not the Life I Ordered: 50 Ways to Keep Your Head above Water When

Desert Queen

GAY L.A.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

GAY L.A.

The Night Watch

Political Fictions

Eat the Document

The Economics of Innocent Fraud

Imperial America

1 Dead in Attic

Veronica

Under the Banner of Heaven

Dark Genius of Wall Street

Lillian Hellman

Jesus Land

Bait and Switch

Reading, Writing and Leaving Home

Human Oddities

Noria Jablonski Shoemaker & Hoard

Gullboy

Kiss the Girls and Make Them Spy

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Susanna Clarke Bloomsbury

The Wisdom of Menopause

Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change Christiane Northrup, M.D. Bantam Books

Lighthousekeeping

Jeanette Winterson Harcourt

Prep

Curtis Sittenfeld Random House

BLESSEDLY BRIEF

Noria Jablonski
Shoemaker & Hoard

Susanna Clarke
Bloomsbury

Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing During the Change

Christiane Northrup, M.D.
Bantam Books

Jeanette Winterson
Harcourt

Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House