The least Orthodox shiva you will ever sit

Book: This Is Where I Leave You

Author: Jonathan Tropper

Published: 2010 (Plume)

Pages: 339

Dysfunctional family lit fic could use less stylistic frills. I didn’t know that until I read this book. It’s about a guy who catches his wife cheating on him with his boss and then has to go sit shiva with his non-Jewish family because his dad died and wanted them to (except it turns out it's his sexpot therapist mom who says he wanted that so she could bring the family together).

There’s nothing unusual here except how real all the discord feels without going into depressingly sharp focus a la Jonathan Franzen or fuzzing everything over with sentimentality. Without getting metaphoric or Hallmark-card obvious, Tropper makes good arguments several times a chapter about why family should have to earn its bonds and how it’s both easier and way harder for them to do that with each other than with the outside world.

He also details how it feels to jam a birthday cake with lit candles up his cuckold’s ass and how shiva chairs are lowered to get the mourners closer to the ground while giving the absolute worst views of their visitors sitting in normal chairs, so, you know, he got his fun in there too.

But it’s not all about perspective, and thank fuck for that, because real people feel real things and get hurt and deal with it in weird ways and Tropper’s right there to show how they normalize it into a straightforward but deep account of dealing with about seven different kinds of loss all anchored to this big one.

Bookshelf! 

Marine life in the desert

Book: Jarhead

Author: Anthony Swofford

Published: 2003 (Scribner)

Pages: 363

We had to read part of this in freshman English, the part where all the marines are showing off for a visiting reporter by playing touch football and eventually pretend gang-raping in their full desert protection suits. That’s a good place to start, because it shows the aggression and fear and hysteria and bravado and sand and grit and hostility that all these marines carried with them through basic training to Desert Storm.

Swofford’s a good writer. He’s eloquent, good at distinguishing everyday events that have underlying psychological terrors versus ones that are just a pain in the ass. He stands a little bit apart from the rest of the troop, not any more educated really but more inclined to introspection, but he understands and shares their compulsions. He goes a little crazy, too.

I liked going along with him as he tried to figure out what all this meant to him. He never really wanted it but it was all he had, and that gets his cynicism going wonky when he could really stand to just shut it up until he got this goddamn war over with.

He was probably the best normal guy to chronicle this sort of thing exactly because he wasn’t truly a “normal” guy in the marines but he wanted to be so badly until the absurdity (and all those cheating girlfriends, a whole wall of them from the squad) wore him down.

Bookshelf. I need to start separating my memoirs from my essay collections from my factual non-fiction. It’s getting messy.

"This episode of Downton Abbey was 37 hours long."

Book: Something Dangerous

Author: Penny Vincenzi

Published: 2001 (Overlook)

Pages: 710

This is Downton Abbey in book form, minus the vast majority of the servants’ part and set a World War later in a family that still has ties to what made it rich (publishing). It starts out you know it’s like a soap opera but with way better production values and characters that are archetypes rather than flat-out stereotypes and that tells us a little at least about the general human condition, right? Sure. Plus she’s totally sleeping with the dude who’s terrible for her! 

But that’s not an endorsement. It’s a warning about how utterly dull wartime declarations can get when everyone’s intentions are noble and all tension is eased within a couple pages of bringing it up in the first place. And all the ladies take back their men after declaring them scoundrels and getting pregnant like every other day seriously they even talk about birth control and how they should use it and apparently that doesn’t happen because every other major plot point is “[Female character. Any of them. Seriously.] is pregnant!” Because it’s ALWAYS A SURPRISE and there’s 700 PAGES of that.

Plus there’s a sheen of historical irony that just gets more and more annoying as the characters worry about and hope for events that everyone damn well knows the outcome to by now. And the matriarch, who in my head was totally Maggie Smith even though she was actually the mom in the book, starts out admiring Hitler and his revolution but you know what changes her mind? The same arguments against fascism that she’s been hearing since he started out. The arguments just suddenly work somehow around the time he breaks the glass of every Jewish shopkeeper he can find.

It’s that kind of weak convenience that drives all the character changes, and I just couldn’t like it nearly as much as I thought I was going to in the first hundred pages. Donate.

Good books get better!

Book: Kingyo Used Books Volume 2

Author/illustrator: Seimu Yoshizaki

Published: 2004 (Viz Signature)

Pages: …I can’t tell.

I got to actually, literally, in real-manga-time see how reading a story affects people in the rest of their lives in this volume, so I now officially love this series.

Best examples: a schoolboy finds Tezuka’s Adolf in his desk and reading it and sending notes to the student with the same name who keeps leaving the volumes makes the boy take hold of his own destiny by defending himself and manga at the same time! And a boy who recently lost his father gets inspired to take a journey when he finds his dad’s favorite series and follows its lead.

The one weak spot is the story about the manly man secretly liking girly manga but being ashamed of it. Literally all that happens is him standing around muttering in a bookstore until a couple other guys unashamedly buy the girly stuff and the manly man is all, “Oh…so, I guess that’s okay then.” And that's where it ends.

 But there are still books that are palpably changing lives, and no, you can never argue with that because you won’t win. Going back to the library; I will eventually dine on the third volume.

Books on books on books

Book: Kingyo Used Books

Author/illustrator: Seimu Yoshizaki

Published: 2005 (Shogakukan)

I told my boyfriend not to lend me this first volume of this series because I’d want to read all four (which are the only ones out of eleven to be translated to English) at once because it’s about a used bookstore and OF COURSE I liked this book. Do you even know who I am, dear Reader?

But, it turns out, although I liked this book and did read it in one setting and am looking forward to the next adventures that selling used manga can bring, I find myself being able to wait.

I think that’s mostly because I wanted a little more from each little episode that’s presented here. Most of them would be so much stronger if they had just a bit more of an ending than someone hugging a book and smiling about how that book helped/changed them for the better. And this is coming from someone who does that ALL THE TIME in real life.

It’s still really heartwarming in a non-cheesy way to see how books spark inspiration, and relief, and nostalgia, and how they affect each customer in a different way that still ends up binding them together as a group with mutual appreciation. My favorite story was the one about a young American who gets obsessed with an old detective manga and lives it out in his real life and comes to Japan to meet the author because that one acted out the ending of how the book affected not just the boy but everyone around him, but the one I identified most with was the art student who reluctantly read a manga about a great artist and discovered that she wasn’t competing with all the artists in the world or even herself, but that she just wanted to contribute and be a part of that world.

I’m phrasing it badly, but that’s how I always want my writing to feel like. So brownie points to that story.

And it really does feel like visiting a bookstore, because I can go in and out when I want/can and can browse all the books at my leisure because they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, and all those stories are sitting there up to the ceiling waiting patiently for me to get back to them.

And the library. OF COURSE I LIKE THIS AND WANT TO READ MORE. 

"Do you have any more of that mango?"

Book: Man or Mango? A Lament

Author: Lucy Ellmann

Published: 1998 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Beekeeping, poetry, perverts who grow giant vegetables, and staged murder weekends at boring Irish hotels all have something in common: deeply discontented people depend on them for one sort of bracing or another.

A lady who is slipping mostly willingly into hermitude uses an Irish weekend to get away from getting away.  An expat American poet uses the same hotel to try and finish his epic poem about ice hockey on his new patroness’s dime. These two were in love awhile ago, turns out, and they broke each other’s hearts, and, well, after years of obsessive lists and weird habits that burst out in stream-of-consciousness tandem chapters that sometimes are told first person, sometimes third and observations about everyday life that they desperately try to turn into art, they find each other again.

Perverts who grow giant vegetables just want to show off the giant vegetables, it turns out, or keep bees and harass the pretty hotel staff.

And then a lot of them drown in a stormy tidal wave that ended the hotel’s staged murder weekend early.

This was a hard reading experience to describe because just when I was starting to clap in the rhythm of a chapter, it would be over and a new one would start with a whole different tempo, and sometimes by the time I had caught up with that one it ended and changed again. But even while it was mildly frustrating, it also felt like a true record of how messy and absurd human emotion can go if it locks onto something against its will and tries hard to pull away or at least distract itself. It’s lyrical rather than clear.

It seems like it would reward more with repeated readings, but alas, this one is also a library baby. I have to give those all back.  

A very, very brief tour of what you already know from Psych 101

Book: A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

Author: V.S. Ramachandran

Published: 2004 (Pi Press)

Pages: 112

You read that page count right, dear Reader. 112 of actual content – PLUS 65 pages of endnotes. The doctor says at one point, “Like a colleague says, the real story is in the endnotes!” which – dude, NO IT’S NOT. If it’s not important enough to put on the first page about it, then why the hell is it there in the first place?

And before you point out the big fat David Foster Wallace-fanning hypocrite in the blog, guess what. Footnotes start on the same page so at least you get the starting illusion that they have something to add to the subject instead of something that’s only worth squirreling away.

This book was so brief and spazzy that I didn’t learn a damn thing about the human consciousness that I hadn’t already gotten an “A” in for Psych 101. (Except that ragging on Texas culture is an even weaker grasp at humor when it’s abruptly inserted into a serious sentence.) It didn’t stay on topic long enough to discuss any of the experiments that supported its hypothesis about brain damage and how various points of said damage can show us how the brain works. He had some interesting ideas that, if you ignored the endnotes section (I did), were not supported at all, and even if you dipped into the notes (…fine, I only mostly ignored them) were only offered anecdotal evidence.

Plus he did that really annoying writing thing where he went, “And here is where I will tell you about x.” He really didn’t fucking need that tick, especially in such a small book. JUST SAY IT ALREADY.

I’ll be taking this one back to the library too. Fortunately, I just got in the hold queue for a Pulitzer-prize winning nonfiction, because I have not been batting well in this genre lately.