Put a bird on it

Book: Birds of a Lesser Paradise

Author: Megan Mayhew Bergman

Published: 2012 (Scribner)

Pages: 221

I found a way to check out this book because it’s short stories with an owl on the cover. It knows how to get my attention.

And I enjoyed these stories, albeit in a very quiet way. They are prime examples of lit fic, with one potentially interesting stab at half-hearted (pun intended because the old dude wears an artificial heart) sci fi about an old survivalist living with his daughter and her partner who accidentally steals the old man’s Alzheimer’s patient girlfriend while they’re all trying to live in a rapidly drying up world.

That’s also the only story that doesn’t have animals figure into themes of family, love, and protection that, though hard-won, are almost never strong enough to last. People leave and animals die and everybody wonders what they’re doing here.

I appreciate how the author doesn’t try to add substance by going needlessly artsy on the prose. She presents slices of not-quite-ordinary lives as they are; the thematic metaphors are there for readers who want them. That is either a good command of subtlety or boring, depending on how much you like cows.

I felt really cheated that there wasn’t at least one story about an owl, though. At this point, owls are shorthand for quirky on par with handlebar mustaches, so I never really know whether the picture means anything or not.  

Healing story no. 1 billion and seven

Book: Left Neglected

Author: Lisa Genova

Published: 2011(Gallery Books)

Pages: 322

There’s a certain kind of matte-finished book jacket painted with still life that’s supposed to be vaguely symbolic of the story within but mostly reminds you of when your mother dragged you to a bunch of interior design stores because she was redecorating her living room and wanted your input. It’s generic trying to disguise itself as profound. In my experiences, these book jackets do their advertising jobs well; the stories tend toward premises that look cool but are slathered with all the intellectual complexity and emotional subtly of a Hallmark Channel movie.

That is how a book about a workaholic recovering from a rare brain disorder becomes boring.

Left neglect is where a person ignores the left side of their world because a part of their right brain is damaged. Fascinating, right? And rare, and rich with weird physical and psychological challenges, right? Not according to this account of an overworked mom who prattles on about her busy by reciting from a big business trope list without bothering to add her personal details. When she gets into a car accident that literally slows her down to about a quarter of her normal speed, the author lapses into healing family clichés about staying slowed down for good.

I just…y’all, these books wear me out. They make me feel guilty for wanting a sick person to be much more interesting, then they make me question my guilt issues because I’m feeling guilty about a fictional character, then they make me reassert my true hatred for said character because everything works out in the end because she willed it to be so through family rifts and financial crises that in any other universe would require more than her wanting to fully heal. It’s not that this isn’t realistic (although it isn’t). It’s that the dramatic obstacles melt like cotton candy, without any effort, and leave just as saccharine an aftertaste. I HATE cotton candy.

Points for the subtle title pun, though. 

Love triangle number infinity

Book: The Marriage Plot

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

Published: 2011 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Pages: 406

Internet rumblings + my university ID card still checking out books for me after I’ve made the leap from student to employee + Eugenides speaking here this coming spring + Middlesex = me finding and reading this book as fast as I could.

And the only reason I was disappointed was how can ordinary people in a college courtship postgrad marriage love triangle compete with hermaphrodites and a family of suicidal virgin sisters? Eugenides is brave for tackling such an ordinary subject in his unadorned prose, which brings weird things into the real world but keeps its real-world subjects small.

But he made me care about these people and wonder about the plausibility of happily ever after, and while he didn’t break the ground I think he meant to with the parallels of the Victorian novel marriage plot and its application to the late ‘80s/early ‘90s changing American dream, I wanted to know what happened to his fictional slice of it. And the ending was bittersweetly satisfying.

To the rumors!

“It’s Mary Sue-tastic!” I didn’t really get that. The female protagonist is a little empty, yeah, and mostly but not always described as pretty, but she’s in her early twenties and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. That totally happens all the time. And she has interests (Victorian novels!) and flaws (spoiled and indecisive and clingy!). I had more problems believing that her parents paid for her to wander, and get her apartment, and treat her boyfriend/husband’s mental illness, especially since they didn’t seem to like any of the choices she DOES make.

“It’s about David Foster Wallace’s bandanna and depression!” I mean maybe, in the troubled genius of the male antagonist. But I recognized the other guy in the love triangle a lot stronger. He was a lot like Walter from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—a guy who works hard to make himself good and feels like he deserves something (the girl) for being able to repress his base urges so well.This guy makes better choices, though, which makes for a less brutal reading.

“It’s great!” “It’s terrible!” It’s good.

Brilliant minatures

Book: And Yet They Were Happy

Author: Helen Phillips

Published: 2011 (Leapfrog Literature)

Pages: 305

The Reactions

Reaction #1

I don’t know what to make of this book. It’s a collection of two-page vignettes (which, if you’ve never tried it, is an awesome word to taste while you say it) that are, I think, loosely connected to make a bigger picture of one couple’s life. Only they don’t feel cohesive enough to be about just one couple.

They slide too much between points of view and verb tenses to construct an overarching narrative. My brain likes overarching narratives.

Reaction #2

But my brain, like with the Mike Sacks book, couldn’t put Phillips’s down either, for similar reasons. They’re really compelling, and with these, there was an added curiosity of how they were meant to tie together.

Reaction #3

I kept reading to find the hidden meaning that I was sure I was missing and would come to suddenly understand (bing!) if only I read enough of her words. Once I got beyond the flood series, which is the first chunk of the book and not the most reader-friendly part to dive into (pun intended), I started feeling connected to these weird flashes of everyday life as imagined past their ordinary boundaries. The fight series especially hit home because she managed to write exactly how it feels without exaggerating into melodrama but keeping every ounce of miserable meaning and expressing them in weird ways that shed new light on it.

And that is my favorite kind of writing.  

Old Kentucky home

Book: Girl Trouble

Author: Holly Goddard Jones

Publication: 2009 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 322

You shouldn’t look to literary fiction to cheer you up about the human condition; it’s not going to work. Jones’s stories, all set in the fictional Kentucky town of Roma, pile common yet life-shattering pains onto regular people and make them work things out for themselves. Just like in the real world.

A high school coach has to deal with getting one of his players pregnant, a divorced woman has to deal with her husband rebuilding on the land they use to live (where she got raped in their cheap starter house), a young college-bound man has to deal with loving his buddy’s girl and not his own girlfriend, a young girl has to deal with her budding sexuality around a couple who lost their own child. There’s a trend of violence and sexuality playing off each other, on purpose but mostly accidentally, and a trend of the town elders being just as clueless, only in different ways, as their children.  

I like how ordinary her characters are. It makes them feel like real people and gives the circumstances universality they wouldn’t have if she wrote about what she calls the two Kentucky stereotypes: rich mint-julep-sipping horse breeders or feral hillbillies. I have no empathy for either of those, but I can identify really well with young people who are trying to get out of town without screwing up enough to keep them home all their lives. They fail, and it breaks my heart a little. Their parents help the best they can or know how to, and most of the time it’s not enough.

Taken individually, each story feels slightly generic in its treatment of conflict that’s been dealt with so much before in fiction. Taken together, it all gets a little heavy in a This Could Happen to You and You Would Have No Idea How to Handle It Any Better way.

These are depressing stories told well.