On a broken holiday together

Book: The Red House


Author: Mark Haddon


Published: 2012 (Doubleday)


Pages: 264


A British extended family full of secrets and people who don't especially like each other go on holiday together and oh boy, do things get out.

Like one of the dads is having an affair, one of the teenage girls is gay, the other teenage girl bullied a friend into attempting suicide, one of the mothers is haunted by her stillborn child on that kid's eighteenth birthday, the other dad had a marginal influence in accidentally paralyzing one of his patients, the teenage boy fancies his teenage girl cousin and then her mom. Typical stuff in a family drama.


But it's the little details, like how the dad's affair isn't any better than his regular life and how he's slowly realizing that, and how the teenage girl grows to realize she's gay and how she's been pushing that part of her down because she joined a church and was scared her new friends wouldn't approve, and how the teenage boy's lust jumps so easily from his step-cousin to his step-aunt when the first sharply rejects him, that ties this story together. 


It's sort of the opposite of How It All Began; here, everyone hurtles together from the edges of each other's lives into a holiday labeled "restful" which they all figure is just code for "we have to be bored around each other" and set up defenses accordingly. 


The defenses, of course, don't last the whole week. They're knocked down by each other through impulsive acts and immediately regretted revelations, and while there's not a giant happy hug and singalong at the end (thank fuck for that), whether they want to or not they all understand each other better as people by the time they part. 


Multiple perspectives stay in third-person, which is a relief because especially at the beginning they're a little hard to juggle, and descriptions (of landscapes especially) are staccato. Keeps the emphasis on what's happening in everybody's heads, which is always the most interesting bit.

German angst on art and beauty

Book: Death in Venice and Other Stories


Author: Thomas Mann


Published: 1988 (Bantam, this collection); 1897-1912 (original story publication dates)


Pages: 263


Hoo, boy, does Thomas Mann ever have conflicting issues with his chosen profession.

He's this great chatty German with a keen sense of existential dread and how beauty (and lust disguised as high-minded appreciation of it) can wreck an artist especially easily. His character-to-character dialogue has that real-life rhythmic panic of "Oh fuck how much of what I actually feel should I say?", which is not something I expect to come across so clearly from a pre-modern writer. Snaps for him.


Or maybe his 1988 translator. That's a problem I have with translation; how much of the text is lost when it jumps languages? Witness Kafka's "bug" vs. "cockroach" vs. "vermin" opening. Maybe I should just learn German? 


But then I'd be the shitty translator and have no one to complain about but myself, and as Mann proves in his giant blocks of monologue on the nature of Art and the Writer's Role in it all, that is some boring-ass prose. It stops his narratives dead until the hunchback re-meets the lady who makes him feel the pang of being an outcast, or until the shopkeeper yells at the religious dude to stop waving that knife around because that won't make him take the obscene picture out of his shop window, or until the tubercular wife of a count stops playing the piano for a smitten writer. 


See? He's got some good stuff. You just have to get past his angst. I bet he was FUN when his writing was going badly.      

Lonely vs. alone

Book: The Late Bloomer’s Revolution

Author: Amy Cohen

Published: 2007 (Hyperion)

Pages: 288

Lonely and alone aren’t the same thing. I think people confuse them too much, especially in artistic depictions of normal life. People are social animals, right? So we’re all miserable when we have no one else around us, so for happy endings everyone has to be paired up with his or her sex of choice. Yes?

No, not really. Amy Cohen finally realizes that, and she made me cry while going through her process.

Really, it’s your standard woman-discovers-herself-through-dating-way-past-when-she-thought-she-would-be-settled-down arc, thrown together with learning how to ride a bike at age 35 and being okay when her fiancé left her because he didn’t want kids.

That was the ending. Her fiancé went to live on the opposite coast without her after she gave him an ultimatum: go and live without her or stay in New York with her. And it didn’t destroy her, and I wanted to shout this ending in Hollywood’s direction so maybe they’d get a good idea or two. Woman discovers hard but necessary decision actually makes her grow! Yes!

Her book made me cry because it made me think about what being lonely really means. It’s not something that can just magically go away with the addition of another warm body; she was loneliest when she was trying to make connections work with the wrong people. And that is just an awful feeling, this giant black hole that opens up in time and swallows everything until you’re exhausted and bored and have no idea what to do next so you don’t do anything, which makes it worse.

Cohen’s a writer good at setting up empathy by simply telling her story. She’s also wearing a tank top, jeans, and Converse in her author photo, so I feel like we’d get along. That means she’s done her job right.