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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.

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

 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.)

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

 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.

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

 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:

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

 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:

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

  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck
Penguin Classics

In 1940, acclaimed American novelist, John Steinbeck undertook an ocean voyage from Monterey, California down the coast of Baja and into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California) in order to collect samples of, mostly invertebrate, sea life. On this scientific journey aboard the Western Flyer, he was accompanied by his good friend, biologist Edward F. Ricketts, as well as a colorful crew of hired hands.

The Log from the Sea of Cortez, his account of that trip, is a mostly-interesting mixture of scientific observations about the life forms discovered, the islands and tide pools where they were found, and the human travelers’ reactions to their prolonged withdrawal from civilization. While the descriptions of the natural world are evocative, the endless cataloging of species becomes monotonous. “On the reef, we took a number of barnacles, many Pahtaria and Linckia, sponges and turnicates.” Passages like these are numerous, and in the absence of an urgent biological curiosity, begin to feel tedious.

His reflections on human foibles, however, enliven the narrative and sound more like the inspired novelist-philosopher than the stilted documentarian. “There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue… The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves… It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witchdoctor does with this tilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols… We have no know a single great scientist who could not discourse feely and interestingly with a child… A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.”

There are many chapters and passages that stand alone as essays. One, an amusing story about an anthromorphized outboard motor, named the Sea Cow, is particularly memorable. Another is a reflection on a daylong discussion of teleological vs. non-teleological thinking. “This little trip of ours was becoming a thing and a dual thing, with collecting and eating and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating activity.”

The book concludes with an appendix, a biography of sorts of Ed Ricketts — of whom we learn almost nothing from the Log itself. (Steinbeck’s wife, who was also on the voyage and from whom he would separate shortly after the trip’s conclusion, is not mentioned in the narrative at all.) In this homage to his friend who died eight years after the conclusion of the trip, Steinbeck returns to his superior storyteller mode, and weaves together a picture of a smart, funny, eccentric and beloved friend. Ricketts was also Steinbeck’s primary intellectual collaborator. “Very many conclusions Ed and I worked out together through endless discussion and reading and observation and experiment. We worked together, and so closely that I do not know in some cases who stated which line of speculation since the end thought was the product of both minds. I do not know whose thought it was.”

Originally written separately, the heartfelt, About Ed Ricketts is the single-most cohesive and enjoyable portion of the book. While The Log from the Sea of Cortez may stand as a useful scientific catalog of Baja California’s exoskeletal inhabitants, it is more fun to hurry past the unappetizing tide pool references and get a good crack at the delectable philosophical meat.

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

 Sontag & Kael  Opposites Attract Me

Craig Seligman
Counterpoint Press

What do you get when you take two of the most celebrated cultural critics of the latter 20th century, add one fawning lesser critic to lend his emotionally-charged perspective to their works and, as a final insult, stir in his little-needed insights to complete the witches brew? This is a rhetorical question. However, since I posed it, I’ll answer that, by adding my voice to the afore-mentioned trilogy of terror I am probably only creating a four-square mess.

This is not to say that reading New Yorker film reviewer, Craig Seligman’s, Sontag & Kael, Opposites Attract Me, is an utterly useless dissipation of heartbeat time. Seligman is trying to do something worthwhile by comparing and contrasting the ideas of the much revered and despised novelist and critic, Susan Sontag with those of the equally controversial film reviewer, Pauline Kael. That he fails, at least partially, is not because the two are too dissimilar — they both held elitist views about pop culture (and I mean that in a nice way). It’s not because they are too similar — even the author refers to Sontag as a villain and Kael as a hero. No, he fails because while he noodles around interminably, examining the ideas these women published, the ways those ideas were received, what each woman thought of the other’s ideas, and even his reactions to those ideas — and what he was doing during the moments he first heard them, in a manner that almost likens arts criticism to the shots fired from the grassy knoll — he fails to successfully unite the two in time and place.

This failing is partially due to the construction of the book. In the main, each chapter is about a single woman, creating a feeing that one is reading two different essays, spliced together. Secondly, Seligman loves the emotional Kael, while icy Sontag intimidates him. This admitted bias futhers the feeling of separation between the two subjects. Lastly, the chronology of the book is flawed. Though there is a rough approximation of following their careers and the evolution of their thoughts over the course of their careers, there is far too much back and forth in the narrative timeline to give one a clear sense of what each professed during a given period or in relation to one another.

What the reader is left with is a sort of split-screen story, in which half the picture is devoted to one woman ferociously scribbling her erudite thoughts, while the other half shows another woman sitting in a darkened movie theater with a self-satisfied look on her face. The audience knows they exist somehow within the same film, story, city or maybe even the same building, yet they appear so emotionally disconnected that they may as well be in separate galaxies.

Clearly they are connected in the heart and mind of author, Seligman. Much of the book is an accounting of the author’s own relationship to these writer-artists and their works. While personal perspectives often lie at the very heart of good writing, in this case one can hear the passion, but can’t feel any of the heat.

But don't believe me, because The Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Review of Books, Village Voice and Variety all loved it.

Rating:

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

 Blood is Dirt & A Darkening Stain

Robert Wilson
Harcourt Press

While I have enjoyed the brusque economy of a Raymond Chandler story now and again, I have never been much of a fan of hard-boiled fictional detectives. Maybe it was because I spent my impressionable years hunched over Nancy Drew books that I came to believe that all dangerous mysteries should be concluded swiftly in order for a sleuth to have time to enjoy the comforts of a cup of piping hot cocoa and a delicious casserole at the end of the day. I suppose that means I prefer my dicks to be dickless.

Detective Bruce Medway, the protagonist of Robert Wilson’s detective novels, embodies the opposite of this happily-ever-after-the-murder, middle-class fantasy. He is never polite, he never has the right frock for the dance, he never misses an opportunity for a quickie with his German girlfriend and he ends his days of detecting by sucking on a bottle of Black Label whiskey. In other words, he is a Dick of the first order. While Nancy’s housekeeper, Hanna Gruen, would never approve of drinks that don’t have maraschino cherries or umbrellas in them to signify their inherently festive qualities, Medway prefers a less frivolous mode of consumption — neat from the bottle — one that signals his ongoing dissolution.

But who wouldn’t be dissolute in his circumstances? He’s a middle aged, private detective without a steady flow of work and what little there is of it is literally murderous. He lives in the wildly corrupt, West African country of Benin — a place where the cost of living is expensive but life is cheap. He’s a tough guy with a heart of gold, but not so golden he lets sentiment cloud his instinct for survival. He does let a drop or two of emotion escape, like spittle oozing from a napping mouth, when he contemplates his live-in gal pal, Heike. But, given that his work puts his fraülein in mortal danger on a regular basis, these droplets of caring are the least he could muster.

No, Medway is neither a really nice guy nor a complex character, but Robert Wilson’s gift for description lends a compelling sophistication to his detective’s personality. Rigid of yolk, he might be, but simplistic in his view of his clients he is not. Wilson’s voice superimposed onto his leading man’s never ceases to delight, as in this portrayal of a potential patron:

“He sucked on a Camel, pulling an inch of it into his lungs without even glazing over. His yellow cigarette fingers were shaking and his thumb flickered against the filter. He was tall and thin. The sort who could eat like a pig and never get themselves over 150 pounds, the sort who kickstarted the day with four espressos and five Camels, the sort who could live off whatever their latest stomach ulcer was secreting.”

In these two enjoyable novels, Blood is Dirt and A Darkening Stain, (now in paperback) filled with rapid-fire prose and move-it-right-along story lines, Medway, gets into numerous scrapes involving illegal toxic waste dumps, corrupt politicians, child sex slavery, corrupt police captains, commodities smuggling, corrupt government officials and some deviant sex types thrown in for good measure. Wilson’s mastery of the language and his setting come together to create a vivid environment for Medway’s drunken, though surprisingly-successful detecting.

“Now it should have settled down into the dry season before the April rains, but eh weather, like the currency markets, the world economy and my left foot was a mess this year. Cotonou, and other cities along this stretch of coast, had been thumped about by short, savage night-time storms which had left it flat on its back, with no power and secreting fluids from orifices which should have been free and dry. The town got up groggy in the mornings, he people pasty-mouthed and irritable. The building shed their conference paint jobs and looked bruised and broken, with mud splattered up the sides from the rain’s kickback. The mud roads were steaming lakes and the first post-conference potholes opened up in the new tarmac like a teenager’s nightmare acne."

Unlike other mystery adventure stories written by authors with great skill at plot and pacing but no feeling for language — like Dan Brown with his Da Vinci Code — Wilson’s books don’t leave one with the dumbed-down feeling of having just consumed something largely insubstantial.

At the end of these two crime-ridden jaunts, though Medway seems to be on track to finally finding his own comfort by making an honest woman of the long suffering (and I mean suffering) Heike, he will probably find a way to put it off until he almost gets her killed again. And the emotional security that he might have found with her (or even in a bowl of hot, homemade soup and some of Hanna Gruen’s sandwiches) will elude him again as he finds himself embroiled in another, crazily complicated mystery. With writing this good and entertainment value this high, one certainly hopes so. Comfort be damned.

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

 Slammerkin

Emma Donoghue
Harcourt Press

Mary Saunders is 14, pregnant from her first sexual encounter — an alleyway rape — and alone on the grimy, cobbled streets of 1762 London. What’s a girl with no family or friends to do to keep body and soul together? Doll Higgins, the young Miss who pulls Mary out of a ditch, advises that she should, “use what you’ve got. Sell it while you’re young and the market’s high.” So begins Mary’s life selling cunny on the corner.

Mary’s initial months away from the confines of her parents’ grinding poverty convince her that their lifestyle is not one to which she will every willingly return. Under Doll’s tutelage she has her first tastes of rum, gin and liberty. Doll also introduces her to something that will become a more powerful intoxicant than alcohol could ever be. Mary who feels only numb contempt for the men she services is overcome with lust for fancy gowns, bright fabrics and beautiful clothes of all kinds. 

It is within the realm of clothes that she imagines she will make her fortune. Not as a seamstress, sewing her fingers to the bone as her mother had. No, she fancies that just by acquiring the right outfits she will be able transform herself into the wealthy, respected woman she longs to be.

But the winter of 1762 is shaping up to be the coldest Londoners have felt in many years, and Mary, ill with a hacking cough, is forced to abandon Doll to enter the Magdalene Hospital, a home for girls who are no longer pure. Here, amid the first cleanliness and order in her life, she discovers that she has an innate talent for the very thing she eschews: sewing. Not only is she good at it, but, to her surprise, she actually enjoys the work.

However, the hospital, with its strictures and confinements does not suit her need for freedom. So she takes back to the streets, and then out of the city entirely, to the outskirts of Wales. By now, Mary, an often-unlikable protagonist, has been hardened almost beyond redemption. She’s been a whore, had an abortion, gotten the clap, watched friends die and is only just fifteen. Still, in Monmouth she plans to start a new life at the home of her mother’s best friend, Jane Jones. But, despite her best intentions, and her many near misses with respectability, it is at the Jones’ house that she gets into the trouble from which she will never redeem herself.

In “Slammerkin,” Donoghue combines an obviously vast knowledge of historical details and some actual bygone events with page-turning, literally-bodice-ripping storytelling. This is a fine, entertaining novel that will leave you feeling grateful that you were not born during the eighteenth century.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2004© Suzanne Rush 2005

 The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

Yann Martel
Harcourt

“The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” is the title of the novella that opens this collection of old stories from Yann Martel, author of the acclaimed novel. “Life of Pi.” What is striking about this, and the other early works contained in this reissued anthology, first printed in Canada in1993, is Martel’s remarkable display of raw creativity. His stories never fall along completely familiar lines, but take subjects others might handle prosaically and imbue them with cold magic.

The eponymous novella that opens the book is the story of two straight, male, college friends, one of whom, Paul, is dying of AIDS. Like many stories of hard, drawn-out deaths, this one explores the shopworn ideas of loss and tragedy. However, unlike other tales of undeserved woe, this one diverges from the kind of self-pitying drivel that characterizes stories of bereavement, by introducing a novel concept. The unnamed narrator, Paul’s friend, decides to pass the time with his dying pal by having them write a story together. It is a biography of the fictional Roccamatio family from Helsinki, and, it is his idea that the family's saga will follow and incorporate the events of the twentieth century. Paul’s friend can, in this way engage Paul in life, history, drama, and keep him involved with the living as long as possible – if only with these historical or imagined lives.

Interspersed between growingly horrific descriptions of Paul’s disease and its wasting effects on his body, the story of the last century is told — beginning with the death of Queen Victoria and ending with the imagined death of Queen Elizabeth. The device works wonderfully as an interesting point of friendship as well as a useful narrative device. What’s more, it introduces an intellectual hopefulness into the bleak reality of the inevitable death awaiting Paul and the reader.

In another story, a different unnamed narrator discovers a decrepit Washington D. C. theater, slated for demolition, in which a symphony is to be debuted. He attends the concert, and is inspired by a composition, written by a drunkard and performed in a hall that resembles a WWII battlement. Martel’s descriptions of the music and atmosphere bring the concert to life in its entire moldering, bittersweet, transformative splendor.

The last tale, called “The Vita Aeterna Mirror Company, Mirrors to Last till Kingdom Come,” is particularly imaginative in both subject and presentation. It begins as the story of a young man visiting his grandmother. He is bored by her recollections, which the reader discerns by the running commentary of his inner voice, printed in a column adjacent to the his grandmother’s ennui-producing recitation of people and places he niether knows nor cares about.

It is only when he finds a gothic, and imaginary, antique mirror-making machine in her overstuffed attic, that he begins to become interested in the secrets the old lady may hold. To make a mirror with the machine, she explains, one must mix the ingredients and then combine them with memories. While he watches her speak into the ancient, ivory horn that feeds into the machine, he is struck by the splendor of the contraption and its mystical implications, but never so much that the tale become a cloying cliché of “now I realize how much I love my Grandma and whatever she says is worthwhile and I’ll be sorry when she’s dead.”

No, there is something about Martel’s voice that is always a bit removed from the situations he describes. Though all these stories are of different types of transformation and spiritual redemption, Martel retains a tone something less than heartwarming. While this may turn off readers who want to spend their feel-good Tuesdays with Morrie, it will work like a refreshing tonic on those who wish to see their beauty mixed with the honest despair that is often its companion.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2004© Suzanne Rush 2005

 The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty

Kitty Kelly
Doubleday

Kitty Kelly, queen of the best-selling exposés of the rich and famous has produced another look at how wealth and power can corrupt. This time her subject is the Bush dynasty – a word they disdain for its elitist connotations. However, if she it to be believed — and why shouldn’t she be when she had many lawyers scrutinize the information in this book prior to publication and has never successfully been sued by any party about whom she has written – the Bush family has spent the last three generations developing a political lineage of dynastic proportions.

The story of this family reads like a Taylor Caldwell, or even a Harold Robbins, novel. One young man makes a mint during the same industrial era that created the Rockefeller fortune, and that money is passed down to and grown by each subsequent generation, which uses it as a power platform to gain every greater amounts of influence. In this case, that young moneymaker was George Herbert Walker, whose daughter married Prescott Bush and began the family Americans have come to love or loathe.

What is of particular interest in this tale, is that though it is clear that every generation of Bushes has benefited from their family’s money and connections to groups like Skull and Bones at Yale University – and later to the CIA and the oval office – each and everyone of the sons of the house of Bush insists that they are self-made men. Kelly exhaustively and convincingly documents how each of the Bushes has been handed the silver spoons that they have used to feed themselves ever-bigger portions of the American pie, while remaining self-deluded about their actual paltry contributions to their own successes.

What emerges is a portrait of publicly personable, glad-handing people who are simultaneously private liars and back stabbers. They are much like the guy in your office who plays golf with the higher ups and manages to get promoted while taking credit for all your work while destroying you, your credibility and your prospects on the way up.

She also exposes a few closely guarded family secrets along the way. For instance, in her book, Sharon — the former wife of Neil Bush, brother of the current president and son of the former president — claims that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David while his father was in office. This contradicts G. W.’s time frame of recovery from substance abuse and has him using drugs during the time he claims to have been “born again.” Kelly recounts numerous anecdotes about the vitriolic outpourings of former First Lady, Barbara Bush. Known publicly as a nice, old grandma, she was in reality, a vicious old bitch. Kelly is not the first to mention the deficits in Barbara Bush’s personality, but she is the first to mention that Barbara’s husband had a long-term affair with his secretary. No wonder Babs was on the rag.

Though a good deal of the information in this book comes from unnamed sources, much of it seems highly credible. Certainly the information about George H. W. Bush’s affair appears to have been widely known by Washington insiders for many years prior to Kelly’s revelations. The accusations that Laura Bush sold dime bags of pot during college, and that George W. and Governor Jeb Bush had affairs while married is not so well substantiated. But nothing the author claims seems out of place with this family once she has set up the foundation of their story. In fact, each revelation of imperfection makes sense as part of her psychological profile.

Kelly’s prose is straightforward and very readable. She invokes the era of the founders of the Bush family with flair and she, mostly, avoids editorializing. That Kelly is not in love with the Bushes is clear, and yet she describes their personal heartaches and trials with the kind of compassion Barbara only showed to her dog, Millie.

If one desires a look at the kind of life most will never lead, because power and wealth have created an uneven playing field, then The Family will be as illuminating, as it is bile-producing.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" October 2004© Suzanne Rush 2005

 Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America

Arianna Huffington
Miramax Books

At the risk of seeming one note — like one of the kids in the Sound of Music who learns to sing by endlessly braying out a single ti or do, while bounding across the Austrian countryside wearing a floral-printed smock made from discarded curtains, until she gets it right — I am here to report on yet, another election year, anti-George Bush tome. And this time I am going to get it right. Really.

Has any sitting president in recent memory inspired such an outpouring of published pique? (Okay, maybe Bill Clinton.) Even in an era when most people, allegedly, don’t read much, many of these hate-the Republican-sin and hate-the-Republican-sinner books are bestsellers holding onto slots on the New York Times’ list for months at a time.

For myself, I’ve just about had it with the bad news. These days, I’d rather read fiction or stories about animals. I had to cancel my e-mail membership to Move-On.org because I couldn’t take their daily fear mongering anymore. If I didn’t admire Arianna Huffington’s way with words, or hadn’t (absentee) voted for her for Governor of California, or hadn’t gotten her book for free and autographed to me, I may have skipped Fanatics and Fools and picked up Seabiscuit, instead. Sorry Laura Hidebrand, I still haven’t read your book, but if it makes you feel any better I did see the movie. I’m sure it’s the same thing, right?

In any case, if one to were to read a single book about why George Bush and his cronies must go away, and do so as rapidly as possible, then Fanatics and Fools would be an excellent choice. Arianna is a better writer — and funnier — than Al Franken. She hasn’t worn out her welcome quite as much as has Michael Moore. Plus, she needs the revenue to prove that she does, indeed, pay income taxes. More importantly, rather than being just another enumeration of the sitting president’s flaws, Arianna’s book serves up a little vision with the vitriol.

I’m going out on a stylistic limb here by calling her by her first name only. After all, there is only one Arianna (like there is only one Madonna or Cher). Plus, I believe the kind of folksy but smart warmth she tries to convey— not to mention her tireless self-promotion — compels me to call her by her given name. Now that I recheck, I see that the inscription in my book is signed with the single name, so I feel a bit better about my choice to go with the familiar terminology.

Anyhoo, what Arianna does in this book is lay out a litany of the lies and manipulations of the Bush administration. She presents the case for viewing the neo-conservatives as a group who are making a disaster of America's domestic and foreign policies. First she tackles the, by now thoroughly invalidated, reasons put forth by the Bush Administration’s “fanatics” to go to war in Iraq and the disastrous aftermath of said war. Then she rips the facade from “compassionate conservatism” by exposing the hypocrisy inherent in aspects of the Republican agenda like Bush’s Orwellian-monikered programs. “No Child Left Behind, “ is one optimistically misnamed program that upon closer inspection leaves many children behind in the public school system. Another, the “Blue Skies Initiative,” pulls the plug on environmental regulations and sullies the air at a faster rate than J-Lo goes through husbands.

Arianna also describes her abortive run for governor of California. A sarcastic and biting critic throughout, she reserves an especially sharpened dagger to plunge into former and future opponent, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heart. He deserves it when, after running on the “compassionate conservative” platform, “he didn’t even wait a few weeks before targeting programs [for financial cuts] benefiting the poor and disadvantaged.” These programs included all public schools from K-12 institutions to state colleges and universities, Medi-Cal from which she slashed nearly $900 million, capping enrollment in the Healthy Families program, cutting money from AIDS treatment and prevention, cutting $375 million from support services that help the elderly, and more. Much more. Yes, he deserves her relentless scrutiny, particularly now that he has his own stake in the company that owns the nation’s major tabloids (The Star, the Enquirer, the Weekly World News, plus the Weider Publications). It will take independents, like Arianna, to scrutinize him because some of the most reliably, no-holds-barred, expose writers in this country are decisively out of the running.

Enough about fanatics. How about the fools? In this section, Arianna explains why the Democrats are just about as bad —meaning corrupt and untrustworthy— as the Republicans. She says they benefit from the same corporate slush funds, they are toothless when it comes to pushing a remotely left of center agenda and they have become so spineless as to be almost unelectable. Though she has billed herself as an Independent for several years now – since her conversion from Newt Gingrich style, Republican hate mongering – she concedes that during this election it is important for people to forget what asses the Donkeys are in favor of remembering how dangerous the Pachyderms have been. She even pleads with Green party members, whom she seems to like and identify with, that they have to forego their deepest beliefs and do whatever it takes to oust George Bush. In other words, the Democrats are dead; long live the Democrats (at least in November of 2004).

In the last short section of the book Arianna gets to her “game plan.” Here Arianna lays out a list of ideas that she believes need to be implemented to change the nature of politics and leadership in America. After calling for the people of this country to change their innermost attitudes to long-held ideas like thinking that the most macho man should be president (Felix Unger for President instead!) and that family values are some kind of throwback to the dead-and-gone ideals of the ‘50s she lays out “The New Contract for a Better America.” In it she lists eight imperatives including, “Achieve Energy Independence,” Prescribe a Cure for the Healthcare Epidemic,” “Treat Lost Jobs as a Social Calamity, Not a Lagging Economic Indicator, and “Be a Leader, Not a Bully.”

While it seems important to constantly point out to those who don’t yet get it, that their government is corrupt and their leaders are lying to them, it is still a downer. No matter how wittily Arianna explains the facts of what’s the matter, my weariness of the topic suggests to me that it is time to stop the mudslinging and present a new vision. Though she does both in Fanatics and Fools, one hopes that her next book will concentrate on the “vision thing,” — something she eloquently and emotionally claims Robert Kennedy did in spades during his short political career — rather than the vitriol thing. If the country is to change its attitudes, someone, hopefully many someones, must be willing to keep shining a light on the progressive ideas that will move America forward to create a thriving, truly compassionate society. Arianna is half way there, and despite all that is shallow and self-serving about her and her work, that still puts her 50% closer to the goal than most of her rivals. Maybe if she can keep illuminating the ideal she will be Governor of California yet — if there’s anything left to govern when Arnold is done.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" October 2004© Suzanne Rush 2005

 Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs
Picador

It is comforting to read about a childhood that is, very likely, worse than one’s own. Augusten Burroughs survived an upbringing far more dysfunctional than most one will encounter, unless of course, one works as a psychiatric nurse in a prison for the criminally insane. Come to think of it, after his crazy, Anne-Sexton-wannabe mother foisted him off on her highly unorthodox psychiatrist, to live in his fun house of distorting mental illness at the twee age of thirteen, Burroughs would have made a decent loony bin nurse himself. Instead, he chose writing as his profession, so we all get to revel in the do-do smeared madness.

Running With Scissors is the autobiographical tale of Burroughs’ adolescence in said nut house, in this case a moldering, cockroach-ridden, Victorian house in Northampton, Massachusetts. The house was filled with the biological and adopted offspring of Dr. Finch, who was his mother, Deirdre’s, shrink. Told in the style of a witty, gay teen with too much time on his hands, an overdeveloped fascination for bad '70s television and no formal education past grammar school, this book reads like a conservative’s dream litany of what went awry with the parenting skills of the me-generation.

Burroughs’ mother, a sometime poet and most-of-the-time psychotic who loved to indulge in the regular destruction of her heirloom china collection when in the midst of a break, is depicted as a textbook narcissist. Burroughs' adopted father, Dr. Finch, who keeps a “masturbatorium” for himself in a back room of his office, is shown to be a quack of immense proportions both physically and professionally. And the inhabitants of the house, a group of neurotic, unsupervised kids with the occasional patient — like a gay pedophile — in their midst, are clearly lucky to be alive. Both the lack-of-supervision and the advice and pharmacological comforts given to these kids by their parents can only be described as abuse.

For instance, when Burroughs told his mother he no longer wanted to attend school during Jr. High, she and Finch concocted a fake suicide attempt for him. A bottle of Valium plus a bottle of Jack Daniels delivered by the good Doctor landed the pre-teen in lockdown for two weeks — but did get him out of school. When Burroughs was sexually attacked by Neil Bookman, the afore-mentioned gay molester who was twenty years his senior, he was encouraged to have an affair with him. Similarly, his “sister” at the Victorian kook farm, Natalie, was persuaded, also at the age of 13, to live with a rich neighbor, also twenty years her senior, who regularly beat her when not indulging in his penchant for underage sexual hijinks.

In the end, it is the friendship Burroughs and Natalie form that saves them both from sinking into believing that Dr. Finch’s fondness for imagining he is receiving messages from God, codified in the sizes and shapes of his own excrement, is normal.

Though Burroughs’ voice is light throughout the mostly harrowing tale, the grit seeps through. Rather than feeling amused at the conculsion of Running With Scissors, as one does after reading David Sedaris’ family tales, one is left with the feeling that they could use a good, hot shower to get the roach droppings out of their hair.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" September 2004© Suzanne Rush 2004

Why Lincoln Matters
Now More Than Ever

Mario M. Cuomo
Harcourt

Thank heaven that guys like Michael Moore and Al Franken have finally brought liberal punditry down to Rush Limbaugh’s level. Now my team can finally remove that collective stick that’s been crammed up our asses for the past decade and serve up some of the same partisan-flavored shit that the Republican Party has been shoveling since they took over talk radio. It is wearying to always have to take the high road, or at least appear to. But, when you’re number two, you try harder. And when the number one news network on television is run by a cadaverous, right-wing, power-mongering zealot, then, not only do we liberals have to try harder, we have to defend every position we take, afraid we will be accused of left-wing bias.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’d would forgo watching “The O.C.” next season — well, at least any episodes that feature Marissa too heavily — to meet a Democrat who was actually left wing. Okay, maybe Dennis Kuchinich is a lefty, but that’s why he never had a chance. No the Right-wingers, Conservatives or Republicans — whatever one wants to call them — have been framing the political arguments in this country for so long that anyone who is even contemplating crazy notions like national healthcare is branded “Liberal,” with a capital L, which evidently stands for loser or Communist, or both.

Nevertheless, after watching the mildly populist speechifying by the leading Democrats at their convention in Boston this summer, it is clear that there is a movement afoot to reclaim the word “Liberal.” If it worked with “Queer,” for gays, this is certain to be a snap. Still, old Dems like Mario Cuomo are still laboring under the constrictions of the past, and feel that they have to couch all their arguments against right wing policies with something seemingly legitimate.

What, I ask, could be more legitimate than Abraham Lincoln? He freed the slaves, saved the nation and then died a martyr. (It’s notable that America’s two most well spoken leaders were assassinated. But, as Jesus showed, such is the fate of those who think too deeply.) Former New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, though no John Kennedy, is no rhetorical slouch either, if his book, Why Lincoln Matters Today More Than Ever, is any indication.

In it he uses the writings of President Lincoln to contrast the contemporary ideals of the Democrats and the Republicans, with the GOP coming out the loser in the comparison. Lincoln, who is claimed by both sides whenever it is expedient, is used here to great effect to illustrate that the policies of the Bush White House are miles, as well as decades, removed from the lofty ideals of the father of Bush’s party.

Cuomo asks and answers questions like, would Lincoln have championed stem cell research? Would Lincoln have started a preemptive war? Should the nation’s tax burden be placed on the middle class and not the wealthy? Unsurprisingly, Cuomo finds that the great emancipator would have answered, yes, no and no, respectively to these queries.

If one is looking for a robust historical look at America’s (arguably) greatest leader in this book, they will be sorely disappointed. If one is looking for a less snarky screed against the policies of the Bush administration than they would find in a Stupid White Men, then Cuomo’s slim volume will fit the bill nicely.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" July 2004© Suzanne Rush 2004

Atonement

By Ian McEwan
Anchor Books

Overflowing with breathtaking prose, skillful narrative and keen insight into human nature, Ian McEwan's Booker Prize-nominated Atonement, is a superior literary achievement. In Part One, a section that spans nearly half the book and takes place during one 24-hour period, he languidly introduces his cast, most of whom are living in and around an opulent, English country manor. In the hands of a lesser writer, this much time spent describing a single, slow-moving day could have seemed interminable. But, McEwan turns it into poetry.

This is the home of, among others, 13-year-old Briony Tallis, erstwhile protagonist, budding writer and pubescent intellectual. On this stifling afternoon in 1935, she has abandoned rehearsals of her first play. Instead she sits at the parlor window, awash in frustration, yet mesmerized by a series of powerful revelations. Some are discoveries about her own nature. Some are insights into the characters of those around her. In this passage, typical of McEwan's ability to inhabit the minds of his characters, she wonders:

“Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? … Did her sister also have a real self, concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody… If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance,” she concludes.

Despite the incontrovertible clarity that this and other newfound visions seem to have from the perspective of Briony’s inner eye, all are colored by the first blush of that righteousness particular to adolescence. It is a righteousness she will come to regret.

Luckily, it is not only through her goggles that we watch events unfolding on this dramatic day. McEwan slips soundlessly into the heads of one character after another — Briony’s sister, her mother and the charwoman’s son — to create a world where every incident is experienced from at least three emotional points of view, and sometimes more. In real life people act terribly and one can only guess the reasons. In this novel people act terribly and one knows why.

Presented this way, Atonement’s realistic explorations of both the basest and the most evolved aspects of the human condition, lead unavoidably to compassion for McEwan's frail creatures. There is no one to hate, there is no one to love, and there is no joyous finish to create a hackneyed literary balance to the tragedies that occur. In the end, there are just people, as flawed and magnificent as any that have ever been wrought from a combination of vowels and consonants — and probably more so.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" July 2004 © Suzanne Rush 2004

Home Town

By Tracy Kidder
Random House

In 1982, Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Soul of a New Machine. That’s why it’s so baffling to encounter Kidder’s Home Town, a book that is so excruciatingly mediocre it is almost unreadable. What a shame, because the premise of this nonfiction exploration is so initially appealing. Had it been presented by a scribe with more feeling for creating three-dimensional characters, or more feeling for the town in which the story takes place, or maybe just more feeling period, this could have been an entertaining piece of writing.

Home Town is a biography, of sorts, of Northampton — a picture book berg in Eastern Massachusetts best known as the address of Smith College. Kidder attempts to reveal the singular qualities of this quirky hamlet by intercutting the stories of contemporary townies with historical anecdotes. One imagines that he intended these tales to be woven together into a vivid, intimate tapestry depicting the place and its people. It is the very thing that Robert Altman accomplished as a filmmaker with his eponymous paean to Nashville. Kidder, however, doesn’t quite pull it off.

Home Town centers primarily upon three Northampton residents. One is a good-natured, native, 33-year-old, police sergeant. The second is a lawyer suffering from a crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder. The third is a single mother and Ada Comstock scholar struggling through Smith. Other secondary characters are introduced to flesh out the intertwining biographies as needed. These three subjects seem like worthwhile characters to follow over the course of the narrative. Yet, the lack of compelling prose and the plodding pacing of the book, leave the truly dramatic events recounted from their lives feeling monotonous and insignificant. The book always seems to be building to a climax that never arrives.

If one somehow manages to force themselves through page after page of this lifeless text, they will gain a cocktail-party’s-worth of knowledge about the history of this New England town, the founding of which dates back to the 17th century. On the other hand, when reading for pleasure begins to feel like cleaning the toilet with a toothbrush, one would do well to consider a different focus of study for trivia contests. Home Town, is a truly second-rate book, right down to the graphic design used on the book jacket. Kidder has evidently produced better work, so skip this one and get thee to that Pulitzer Prize-winner instead.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" July 2004 © Suzanne Rush 2004

The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters

Little, Brown
By Elisabeth Robinson

Elisabeth Robinson, a Hollywood film producer whose credits include the blockbuster, Braveheart, has written her first novel, The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters. It is the story of a film producer, Olivia, who faces hard times when she loses her job, tries to mount her own production of Don Quixote, and has to face the terminal illness of her younger sister, Maddie.

The action is takes place primarily in two locales. One is California, where Olivia is living in an office building because she is virtually homeless after losing her big time studio job. The other is Ohio, land of her childhood, where her "ordinary" parents and sister still live. In the former location Olivia displays her formidable grit by trying to woo stars like Robin Williams to sign on to her Cervantes remake, while in the latter she must marshal her forces to fight the medical establishment to ensure that her sister, recently diagnosed with leukemia, gets the top-notch care she requires.

This is one of those stories where the main character, who is living a pretty shallow existence, is forced to confront her values in the face of a life and death situation. Inevitably she discovers that love and family are more important than fame. But this character is never really forced to make a decision between the two. She produces her film and tries to save her sister simultaneously. That she must lose something along the way, her lover, for one, is less important ultimately, than that she live her personal dream and make her movie.

The book is chock-full of Hollywood clichés like slimy producers, egotistical writers, director and actors. It is even more loaded with celebrity name-dropping and glamorous locations, all to prove the author's significance as a "player." And let's not forget her inclusion of a slew of dysfunctional family clichés like the alcoholic father with a heart of gold, that Robinson wrings dry for the sake of an appearance of emotional depth. The writing in this epistolary novel is lively enough to keep the reader's interest, though not particularly insightful, unless one regards the kinds of hackneyed truisms that emanate from "very special episodes" of sit-coms as insightful.

Were Elisabeth Robinson not so well connected in the entertainment world, her book, workmanlike though it is, would probably not have gotten past the first agent's reader. However, as The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters illustrates at every juncture, it's not what you know, it's who you know that leads to success.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" February 2004 © Suzanne Rush 2004

Wicked
The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Reagan Books/Harper Collins
By Gregory Maguire

Some of the most compelling and memorable writing is the kind that emerges from one person's obsessions. In the case of Wicked, it is Gregory Maguire's passion for the Wizard of Oz that becomes the springboard for a more reflectively complex tale than one might expect from material derived from that ubiquitous children's classic. On the other hand, L. Frank Baum the author of the Wizard of Oz, always meant his story to be a parable of the times in which he lived, not merely a fairy story. This is certainly how Maguire has interpreted the material.

In Wicked, Maguire has written an absorbing tale, which draws the reader into the whimsical and grotesque Land of Oz, and renders it somehow believable. This is where his obsession with the material really pays off. He has evidently familiarized himself with all the Oz books, because he inhabits this fantasy world as readily as if it were his own. Real are the landscapes, the fantastic life forms and importantly, the characters.

In Elphaba, the girl who is to become the Wicked Witch of the West, Maguire has created a complex personality. Poor Elphie, if it isn't easy for Kermit to be green, imagine what it must have been like for her. Even in a world like Oz, full of all manner of talking animals, Wizards from the beyond, tiny Munchkins and tattooed Winkies, she still sticks out like a sore thumb. Being born with an allergy to water and a full set of sharp teeth doesn't endear her much to her self-involved parents either. No, she does not have a happy time of it in her early years.

However, she learns two important things during her childhood that shape the course of her life. The first is the lesson that comes from being born "different." She learns that to be other means to be forever cast out. The second she learns from her father, a religious man who lives life consumed by the quest to behave in a morally upright fashion. He suffers much for this, and she will not forget that being just is not the easiest path, nor is definitive righteousness easy to discern.

As a young adult, armed with her difference and her moral imperative, she enters the university in Shiz. (A map is provided to show that Shiz is just North of the Emerald City.) As luck would have it she is immediately paired with Galinda from Gillikin. This is not a roommate situation the shallow, social-climbing Galinda (later, a more mature Glinda the Good) finds ideal. Elphaba, with her defensive, pointed speech, and harsh manner is not easy to love. However, the odd couple does forge a college friendship, based partially on their mutual dislike of the headmistress, which lasts well into the era of their adult infamy.

This early portion of the novel, which concerns the budding relationships between the future witches and their coterie of friends, is the most pleasing section of the book. Perhaps because it is the only part that provides a glimmer of hope that the future we know is in store for Elphaba will not come to pass and that somehow she will choose the love of friends over other pursuits.

But love is never Elphaba's objective. Her main concern throughout the novel is how to wrest power from the Wizard of Oz, who is depicted as a tyrannical, despot who rules the land by force and intimidation. Like many a liberal college student before her, she embarks on a series of subversive activities, which lead her to a life as an outcast and terrorist. She is accustomed to seeing herself as the first, and her basic moral relativity can justify the second.

These life choices bring her no happiness. In fact, after her one lover is killed through his association with her, she is forced underground, hiding where many women before her have found refuge, in a nunnery. It is only after six years there that she emerges to travel to the Vinkus, land of the Winkies, to find the family of her dead lover, ostensibly to apologize to his wife for her part in his death. But his widow will not hear her apologies. Elphaba is frustrated by her inability to voice her sins, believing that the forgiveness she desperately seeks will result only from this confession.

While she waits for her day of absolution, Elphaba begins to develop powers in sorcery, an art she has formerly disdained. She learns to ride a broom, charm bees and monkeys, and develops a loving menagerie of animals for which she has a greater fondness than she does for humans.

Dorothy's arrival on the scene complicates Elphaba's life. She cares little that her sister, The Wicked Witch of the East, is dead. She cares only that the magical shoes the witch had worn, subsequently given to Dorothy by Glinda, do not fall into the hands of the Wizard. To this end she pursues Dorothy and her companions. It is this quest to do the right thing that leads her to make the many foolish choices fans of the Wizard of Oz will find familiar. However, from Maguire's perspective, Elphaba seems less wicked than desperate. When the fatal water bucket arrives in Dorothy's guileless hands, it seems like an injustice.

Elphaba is a complex heroine for a complex age, both the fantasy one she lived in, and the literary era into which she has emerged. L. Frank Baum's social commentary was missed by most of the audience who read his books during the early years of the last century. In Wicked, however, there is no question that the author is attempting to comment on the political and social life of the nation. He succeeds with some obviousness, but the charm of the fantasy is never lost to the harsh realities of the themes.

After almost a decade in print, Wicked has been adapted into a new, Emmy Award® winning, Broadway musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" February 2004 © Suzanne Rush 2004

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

By Al Franken
Dutton

It's a sad day when Americans have to rely on second-rate, former Saturday Night Live comedians to clarify what's wrong with the current state of the union. But funny men like, Al Franken from SNL, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show and Bill Maher are the only figures on national television — the place most people get their news — who are exposing the hypocrisy and lies of the current administration and their handmaidens in the right-wing press. It's not that no one else is mentioning that pundits like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity are full of shit. It's just that most of them, like Eric Alterman in "What Liberal Media," or the venerable lefties at "The Nation," are doing it in newspaper columns or dense tomes that require a commitment of time to read and digest. Regrettably, if most of the public is going to get the message that something is stinky in the White House, they will have to hear it on television in the form of a 30 second sound byte. (Or maybe in a book written by a TV personality, who will be interviewed on TV by other TV personalities about that book which is largely about still other TV personalities.)

Despite the fact that Franken can be a self-serving wanker, much like that semi-worthwhile blowhard Michael Moore, at least he had the wherewithal to utter what the national press corps in general, have been unable or unwilling to say: that our current President, Vice President, press secretary and various members of the cabinet and Congress are liars. Not only are they liars, but so are many of the current batch of über-conservative political pundits who have top-rated TV and radio shows. Those are pretty strong words, and Al Franken, who also wrote the book, "Rush Limbaugh is a Big, Fat Idiot," knows that if one is going to assert those types of opinions they had better have some evidence to keep them miles away from a libel trial.

To substantiate his examples in "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" Franken assembled a team of Harvard University students to research the hell out of every allegation he makes. This group effort, or some equal form of authentication, has been the modus operandi of all current, liberal whistle-blowers, because while those on the right seem to be able to say anything that pops into their relentlessly-spinning heads, taking them on requires actual research.

Franken first takes on "Ann Coulter: Nutcase," the ubiquitous, leggy lawyer-turned-political authority who has written two popular books: "Slander" and "Treason." Both pithily-titled works are, it seems, filled with slanderous and unsubstantiated opinions about liberals. Franken, is able to refute many of her assertions using some simple fact-checking, something she either didn't bother to do, or which she faked in order to skew the facts. He exposes her manipulative use of endnotes in "Slander" to hide any truths that would not further her shoddy ideas in the main text. And further shows how she was able to make outrageous assertions by cleverly wording phrases to ensure that they were misconstrued to mean whatever she wanted them to mean, rather than what they actually meant.

Next, he takes on Bill O'Reilly, host of Fox News Network's No Spin Zone. O'Reilly is famed for his ability to win arguments with guests on his show by pummeling them with a double-whammy of invective and intimidation to either keep them quiet or at least, humiliate them. But according to Franken, O'Reilly who regularly cuts people off when they begin to dissemble (in his opinion) is happy to spin his own stories, particularly stories about himself. Franken points out that O'Reilly's oft-repeated claim that he came from a hardscrabble childhood is refuted by his own mother who is happy to point out that the family lived in a nice neighborhood and sent little Bill to private schools. In one, now infamous encounter between O'Reilly and Franken at a book-sellers convention, Franken asked O'Reilly why he claimed his former show, Inside Edition, had won two Peabody awards, when it had not. O'Reilly vociferously denied that it hadn't. Later, when told that the show had won only a Polk award (and a single one at that) O'Reilly went ballistic and accused Franken of engaging in "attack journalism" — in effect, of lying about him. The reality is, Inside Edition did only win one Polk, and only during the year after O'Reilly left the show. His lies about himself are laughable, but his lies about other people, his use of fabricated statistics and his assaults on anyone who disagrees with him are less so.

Sean Hannity, another Fox News hack, gets the Franken treatment in much the same manner that was used to dispatch O'Reilly. For old time's sake, Al even takes a few stabs at pointing out the bushel of lies he heard listening to only twenty minutes of a broadcast by recovering drug addict and radio personality, Rush Limbaugh. Finally, just for fun, he takes a swipe at Bernard Goldberg, best selling author of "Bias," who is probably the most inept liar in the bunch. Conservatives would be smart to revoke Goldberg's membership in their club since he is not much more than a constant embarrassment. Admittedly, it's easy to take a poke at celebrities. After all, despite what most of these fatuous opinion-makers think, they are not intellectuals. Taking potshots at them is easy sport.

However, whom he goes after next are people who it is a little harder to spoof without taking on a little personal risk. These are the very people in power who enable those previously mentioned to exist. In fact, they almost require them to exist so that each can serve the other in a M.C. Escher-like, head to tail, symbiosis of lying. The people I'm talking about are President George W. Bush and members of his administration.

What are some of the lies he exposes about them? A few are the common ones most Americans already question, like claiming that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to justify going to war, when there were none, or claiming that Bush's huge tax cuts would help the poor, when indeed, they only help the already wealthy. (Read this book, or others for details and charts.) He states that Bush lied about his drunk driving arrest, as well as his cocaine use, and backs up those allegations with interview dates and times in which Bush prevaricated. He shows how George Bush's environmental policies are despoiling air, land and water nationwide, while his administration claims the opposite. He proves that Bill Clinton's plan to combat terrorism was ignored by the White House, and possibly led to the attacks of 9/11. He even goes so far as to say that George Bush, affable as he seems on the surface, or as compassionate as he claims to be, is really "mean," — as mean as his mother Barbara, who he exposes as a "Queen BitchÓ in an amusing anecdote.

Franken also discusses the "myth of the liberal media," where he points out, once again, that Vice President Al Gore got an unfair whipping during the 2000 election cycle from the allegedly liberal press corps. As he says, with numerous examples to prove the point, "Any normal American who watched the news or read the papers that year would have noticed that the media just hated Al Gore."

While the book is lively and chock-full of fun facts, it is also problematic in the way that Franken's previous books have been problematic. Namely, Franken thinks too highly of himself, thinks he is funnier than he actually is, and because of these traits, presents himself as an obnoxious jerk on a regular basis. Maybe that's just his schtick, but he needs to know, it's not that amusing. However, these annoying personality quirks are no reason not to enjoy the parts of the book that are truly humorous (like when he refers to Coulter's latest book as the "Treason Diet") nor are they a reason not to take seriously all of the solid research that went into making his theories ring true. It would be nice, preferable even, if a more respected writer or popular figure could take on the lies of the political right and make it onto the best-seller's list for as long as Franken has with this book. But, for now, he's better than nothing, and still far better than most.

Rating: (for content and accessibility, not style)

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" December 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2004

Where I Was From

By Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf

After a lifetime of defining the California experience, celebrated essayist Joan Didion is reconsidering. In "Where I Was From," her newest and most personal book of essays, Didion reexamines the ideas about California she believed were immutable. As she puts it, "this book represents an exploration of my own confusions about the place and the way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day confront them only obliquely."

Didion is a California native, who grew up in Sacramento, went to school at Berkeley, wrote the seminal essays about her state that were included in "The White Album," and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," wrote a standard-bearing novel about Los Angeles, "Play it as it Lays," and made a pile of money in backbone local industries like real estate and the film business. She is, in many ways, the quintessential Californian. As she tells it, much of what imbued her thinking about this place has been colored by the myths of the California pioneers who's values she was taught to believe were the true ethos of the state.

This set of ideas was passed to her from her parents down from their parents and so forth, all the way back to the relative that had made the overland crossing with the Donner-Reed party. A relative who had split away from the doomed caravan only at the final cut-off that ensured survival for Didion's clan, and infamy and horror for the others. A central theme that emerges from her exhaustive examination of her family's records and the writings of other pioneer families is the one expressed best by Virginia Reed, "Don't take no cut-offs and hurry along as fast as you can."

As Didion now sees it, her family took plenty of short cuts, as did many who built the Golden State. However like all immigrants, they chose to define the place by what it had been when they arrived, and anything that came after was an aberration. If her clan had not arrived during the initial era of westward expansion, had instead come during the dustbowl migration, or during the post-WWII boom, perhaps they would not have seen the development of the state's vast Spanish land grants into housing tracts as anathema. But they did see new homes, new industries and, most importantly, new people as a blight on their values, moreover, on those values they believed were intrinsic to the place — values that included personal fortitude, love of the land and individuality.

Didion takes a look at these values with a newly jaundiced eye to discover that defining the state by its inhabitants individuality, ability to survive hardship and reverence for nature is as fantastic a notion as that behind any Disneyland theme park ride. The state, she discovers, has always been a place full of carpetbaggers looking for the next strike of gold, the next get-rich-quick scheme, be it hacked from the foothills of the Sierra, grown in the San Joaquin Valley or in built in the aerospace plants of Lakewood.

California, in essence, she now tells us, is a place full of emigrants who left what they had in search of something better, lured by the promise that that better thing would be easily come by. It would not require hardship beyond the initial journey. It is a place where the idea of self-sufficiency rests on the unexamined reality that almost all innovations emanating from the state have been financed by the federal government. In other words, there would have been no agricultural miracle in the once-arid central valley without the government providing the water systems that fed it. There would have been no distribution of the food grown there without the government financing the railroads that carried the goods to market. There would have been no booming aerospace industry if the government had not built the aqueducts that carried drinking water to Southern California, and then financed the cold-war plants that employed so many. The whole state, in this view, is a get-rich quick scheme guaranteed by federal handouts.

Though full of fascinating ideas and information, the book itself is often tedious reading. Didion's recounting of quotes from pioneers on the overland trek goes on for too long. Her final chapters, in which she reexamines her own novel, "Run River," are also slow-moving. In both those sections she is prone to using her signature technique of repetition to drive home her points. This time, however, she exhausts the device. It is only in the central portion of the book where she reverts to her familiar style of reportage, about the aerospace industry in the California Southland, that the book zips along. But, despite the difficulty of wading through some of the less entertaining parts of the book, it is in those sections that Didion straightforwardly reveals the most intimate details about herself, her past and her own attitudes.

What she never gets at are the "confusions as much about America as about California" that she hints at in the beginning of the book. Had she so chosen, Didion could have drawn many parallels to the ideas we Americans have about ourselves Ñ our individuality, grit and personal fortitude — to remind us that much of what we rely upon is not ourselves but plain and simple government assistance. And, in the same way that backing from the federal government made California a powerhouse economy, so too do the entitlements like AFDC, social security, Medicare, the transportation infrastructure, the national park system, corporate welfare and others, allow most Americans to live in a golden state of fearlessness. The danger is that by not admitting that the aid and comfort of the government is vital to the pursuit of our individuality, happiness and economic success, we Americans will allow the support systems we don't acknowledge to disappear. These ideas must be confronted, and not obliquely, otherwise we will soon have to see just how much grit we really possess.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2004

The Great Unraveling:
Losing Our Way in the New Century

By Paul Krugman
W. W. Norton & Company

"New York Times" op-ed Page Economist, Paul Krugman, does his math. He's been busy re-doing a lot of other people's math as well, namely, the "fuzzy" variety emanating from the Bush White House. Using the same starting numbers that the administration used to promote policies like privatization of Social Security, tax cuts or changes to Medicare, he's come up with vastly different conclusions than the ones they have built their arguments upon. In his book, "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century," a collection of his NYT essays from the past four years, Krugman reminds readers of each and every disastrous economic policy that the current administration has hammered through, and the erroneous positions they used to sell them. Excuse me, erroneous is too bland a euphemism. Krugman flatly calls Bush and his administrators, liars.

Krugman didn't start out to be a Bush basher, he claims. When he began at NYT he had intended to write straightforward economic analyses. But, "as a trained economist I wasn't even for a minute tempted to fall into the he-said-she-said style of reporting, under which opposing claims by politicians are given equal credence regardless of the facts. I did my own arithmetic [regarding various Republican fiscal schemes] ... and quickly realized that we were dealing with world-class mendacity, right here in the U.S.A." Krugman perceived that Bush's economic policies were no only being misrepresented by the administration, but were seriously undermining the financial health of the nation. In the end, he felt obligated to begin pointing out the crooked politics and bad numbers behind the rhetoric. So his columns became as much a commentary on fiscal matters as a critique on Bush & Co.

The essays he has chosen to include in this book are, for the most part, those in which he turned out to be remarkably prescient. His series on the corporate scandals predicted early that Enron was not an isolated case and would only be the first of many. His look at the California energy crisis foretold the fact that energy generators and traders, motivated solely by profit, concocted the whole, avoidable debacle. His take on Bush's tax cuts made it clear beforehand, that they would mainly benefit the wealthy, would not stimulate the economy, and would plunge the U.S. into tremendous debt for the foreseeable future. How has he substantiated these claims? He did the math, and it's hard to argue with the logical conclusions that come from simple addition and subtraction. Anyone could have checked the numbers with a pocket calculator, but it seems that few others did.

More startling than the revelations contained in the columns — mainly, that the government's economic stimulus proposals mainly enrich the already rich and bankrupt everyone else — is the content in the opening section of the book. In his lengthy introduction, Krugman makes an eloquent case for a vast right-wing conspiracy "that now effectively controls the White House, Congress, much of the judiciary and a good slice of the media." Because the right holds such a dominant position, he says, "old rules about politics and policy no longer apply." This bears repeating: a well known, well respected, "New York Times" columnist claims that the country in the grip of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

He lays out the evidence behind this claim quite thoroughly in the opener, and then goes on to call the current politically mighty "A Revolutionary Power," from a theory he borrowed from Henry Kissenger. There is, he claims method and strategy behind all the madness fueling bad economics, the destruction of the environment and preemptive war.

In some ways, his theory is so horrific as to be unbelievable. But is it any more preposterous than what many liberals claim justifies all the incompetence emanating from the White House: that Bush is just incredibly stupid? Then again, as Krugman says, "People who have been accustomed to stability can't bring themselves to believe what is happening when faced with a revolutionary power, and are therefore ineffective in opposing it."

To better understand how this "power" works, he next sets out a kind of guide that he calls "Rules for Reporting".

1. "Don't assume that policy proposals make sense in terms of their stated goals." In other words, when the President says the country must go to war because we want to wipe out the weapons of mass destruction hidden by a dictator, none will actually be found. Remember newspeak? It's not just for fiction anymore.

2. "Do some homework to discover the real goals." Krugman says the true goals of the administration are usually already part of the public domain. "When you learn that the official now in charge of forest policy is a former lumber industry lobbyist, you can surmise that the 'healthy forests' initiative, under which logging companies will be allowed to cut down more trees, isn't about preventing forest fires."

3. "Don't assume that the usual rules of politics apply." This means that under normal circumstances, when a former Enron executive is appointed to secretary of the Army and then his division of Enron is revealed to have been a source of phantom profits, that secretary would be summarily ousted. But this did happen, and he wasn't. Why? Because, a revolutionary power is immune to criticism, as we shall see in the next rule.

4. "Expect a revolutionary power to respond to criticism by attacking." By way of explanation: "The Bush administration has become notorious for its intolerance for dissent, even from those who are mostly on its side. According to the 'Washington Post,' 'GOP lawmakers and lobbyists say the tactics of the Bush administration used on friends and allies have been uniquely fierce and vindictive.'"

5. "Don't think there's a limit to the revolutionary power's objectives." Given that the right is not playing by any accepted rules, Krugman suggests that they could do almost anything, like making the poor pay higher taxes than the wealthy, or invading countries that are already stable democracies. As hard as this might be to believe, Krugman reminds that, "Pundits who predict moderation on the part of the Bush administration, on any issue, have been consistently wrong."

Wow! This is the kind of stuff you usually hear from easily dismissed, kooks on Internet sites (similar to mine), not from respected journalists. However, just to dispel the idea that he is a conspiracy nut, Krugman reminds us again of Kissenger's own words about a revolutionary force: "'Those who warn against the danger are considered alarmist; those who counsel adaptation to circumstances are considered balanced and sane.' But so far the alarmists have been right, every time."

After setting up this almost inconceivable and very frightening scenario of corruption at the highest levels, Krugman tries to cheer up the reader by saying that he still hopes there will be a "great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country."

Conspiracy? It seems so. Nut? I think not. Because, most of what he says makes sense. Certainly what the Bush administration says vs. what they actually do makes none. Besides, if you discount Donald Luskin (who heads up the Krugman Truth Squad at National Review Online), no one has threatened to sue Krugman for libel based on any information or opinions he has published. Still, it will take more than this one book to change the minds of those who believe George Bush is a sound and caring leader — just as it takes more than listening to Rush Limbaugh to convert a liberal into a "Dittohead." Still I hope, as Krugman does, that the "great revulsion" happens sooner rather than later. If only a portion of his contentions are true, the alternative is simply too bleak to contemplate.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" December 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2004

Garbo Laughs

By Elizabeth Hay
Counterpoint Press

Elizabeth Hay is better at writing about a certain kind of discontent than just about anyone. Her discontent is the deeply rooted type that strangles happiness at every turn. The glass is perennially half-empty viewed from her perspective. But more specifically and far more importantly for her and her characters, no relationship is ever the "right" one. The venomous two-headed snake in her soul always poisons the unconditional love of a husband or friend. It is a relentless creature that won't let her forget that the partner is not without flaw and, at the same time, that there is something wrong with her for seeking fault to begin with. Consequently she lashes out at others, but saves the most vicious attacks for herself. It can't be easy living inside her head.

Certainly Harriet, the protagonist in her novel, "Garbo Laughs," is tormented by her internal dichotomies. Harriet lives in Ottawa, with her compassionate husband Lew, and their two children. However, she lives here in body only. Where she really comes alive is inside the illusionary world that she has constructed from repeatedly watching movies on videotape. Continually and systematically, Harriet views old musicals and other classic films to fill the void she feels in her own life. She has recruited her children to this singular endeavor, and consequently has two pre-teens who are more well-versed in the lore of old Hollywood than in contemporary pop culture.

Harriet is a writer, plagued by insomnia, who has given up the composition of anything but daily letters to movie critic Pauline Kael. She does not know Kael and these are letters she will never send — has no intention of sending. Yet, only in them, first by using the metaphors of film criticism and then more directly using the missives as a kind of diary, is she able to address her dissatisfactions.

"Dear Pauline, Here is my favorite fantasy. Guests have come for dinner. We are talking in the kitchen, or on the verandah ... and one of the guests insults me. Then evenly, without rudeness, I say, 'There's a very nice restaurant down the street. Why don't you try it out?'

"The insulter laughs. Coarsely. Like a horse.

"'I mean it.' And I am very calm. "I don't make food for people who insult me.'"

What the reader begins to understand through these oblique disclosures of Harriet's passive-aggressive behaviors and descriptions of her almost-agoraphobic lifestyle, is that underneath the simplified unhappiness she is truly paralyzed by fear. Life to her, is flawed and scary; movies are ideal and safe.

Lew knows he competes for her affection with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, but understands that his wife's emotional dalliances with long dead movie stars can't truly disrupt the life he offers. It is only when a friendship with a neighbor, Dinah, and the return of an old flame begin to insinuate themselves into the couple's life and marriage that the unmistakable signs of unraveling begin. Temptations are offered. Yet, for Harriet, no temptation of new romance will ever live up to the unrealistic expectations she has imbibed thorough her film addiction. For Lew, who is more intrinsically honorable and tethered to reality, the choices pose a deeper dilemma.

Besides writing about lady malcontents like she was born to it, Elizabeth Hay has a gift for creating striking descriptions of flora and fauna that make one wish she was a nature writer. It is almost exclusively in the passages of the novel where Harriet is contemplating the outside world, that the reader senses a temporary and uncommon respite from her inner turmoil.

Hay resolves "Garbo Speaks" by allowing Harriet to regain a taste for life only to lose her appetite for movies. All just in time, as it turns out, to hold on to her husband and the remainder of a life she finally saw wasn't so bad after all.

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Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2004

The Road from Coorain

By Jill Ker Conway
Vintage Departures

A palpable love of the land and a deft facility for storytelling distinguish Jill Ker Conway's, "The Road from Coorain," from lesser autobiographies. Conway, who would later go on to become the first female president of Smith College, tells the story of her childhood in the Australian bush and her youth in Sydney, in this artfully written memoir.

Coorain, the New South Wales homestead and sheep ranch, on which she spent her first eleven years, was built by Conway's resourceful, pioneering parents. From a government grant of thousands of acres of arid grassland, acquired at the end of WWI, the Kers built a thriving wool farm, raised three children and came to know, respect and sometimes fear, the land on which they, for a time, thrived. Conway's spirit was molded in this environment, by the hard manual labor a working ranch requires and the love of land that comes from daily contact with the vastness of nature. Indeed, her descriptions of the flora and fauna of the regions of her youth are so vivid, one can almost feel the heat of the relentless sun on one's skin or hear a lizard scuttle through the sage.

Conway's childhood took a turn when a many-year drought, that left most of her family's sheep dead and their grazing land dust, struck Coorain. On the heels of this came the death of her father, an event which devastated her mother and left the family with only one rational choice: to move to the city.

Sydney, relatively verdant and nestl