Weston Cutter's Blog, page 6

Gender is Over

 “The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan” by Jenny Nordberg

The Underground Girls of Kabul traces the journey of Swedish journalist Jenny Nordberg to find, as she so simply puts it in the subtitle, “a hidden resistance in Afghanistan” among the women. I worried at first this would be another privileged look onto the lives of Afghan women we immediately judge as oppressed based on the burkas and hijabs, but oh, this book is so much more than that. Nordberg is not tracing a movement of women turning against their religion by abandoning headscarves or anything like that; she traces a movement of mothers who make a conscious decision to dress their daughters in neither hijabs or headscarves or skirts or feminine wear altogether and instead, to raise these daughters as sons.

It’s terribly, terribly fascinating. Why would a woman choose to ignore the anatomical gender their child is born with? In Afghanistan, it seems it’s a much for the child’s sake as the mother’s herself. The little girl gets to grow up as “the first sex,” (in comparison to female, the famous “second sex”), gets to experience the joys and freedoms of boyhood, the favoritism of teachers, fathers, neighbors, etc., even if it lasts only for several years before their physical development rats them out.

Mothers in Afghanistan are supposed to have a son. It’s nothing like China were it is one kid, tops, get a boy or chances are up; women can have as many kids as they want. The societal pressure, though, encourages women to have sons. A woman who can only give birth to girls is often ashamed, often pitied, looked down upon and judged by other women.

If this is sounding very Henry the VIII, Nordberg explains. Sex is so not talked about. The literacy rate is low outside of the major cities in Afghanistan. There’s no way to learn things we no consider common knowledge, like for instance, it’s entirely up to the man’s sperm what gender the baby will be. Instead, superstitions circle, like keeping the womb warm will make a boy and so on.

And so, Nordberg visits the families’ of these bacha posh (translated, “dressed up like a boy”) children to learn their stories firsthand. Many of the girls come from families with many sisters, many have mothers who can no longer take the pressure to have another child in hopes that it is a boy; many have fathers who are seeking an heir, a right-hand family member and would rather have one that looks like a boy. And of course, thanks to the advantages from family and society, many of these girls are eager to take advantage of their handpicked boyhood.

Obviously, this arrangement brings up many questions. Nordberg faces them head on. The first and most obvious: “what happens when she hits puberty, when she begins to develop as a girl and everyone can tell her apart from the other little boys?” One mother answered very matter of factly: “then we will change her back.”

This is the real real fascinating kicker of the whole book: As strict as we see Afghanistan being, as harsh a society for women as we interpret from the outside and even, as far behind in sexual education as Nordberg found, it’s a place where genders are accepted as more fluid. People, for the most part, accept that your son was actually a daughter all along.

Nordberg visits and learns from a wide range of these bacha posh – a woman her family has nicknamed “Uncle,” unmarried and still living happily as a man well into her later years; the youngest of four sisters, a girl who pouts and fights any little boys that call her a girl; another teenager who grew up as a boy, identifies only as a boy and is now fighting her family who wishes her to change back to being a girl and marry an eligible man.

The Underground Girls of Kabul is thoughtful, never judgmental. Insightful, but never exploitive. It’s an Afghanistan I never would have imagined, one I think many Americans can’t entirely understand. Jeez though – if you have daughters, or an interest in gender studies, or an interest on nature vs. nurture fight of things – read this book.

Necessary Fiction: Blake Butler+Lindsay Hunter

300,000,000 by Blake Butler

I’ve written before of how much I enjoy and admire Blake Butler‘s writing, and like I’d suppose many I was more than mildly excited to get 300,000,000 this fall. I knew enough: that he’d been working on it for a long while, that it was somehow something that’d been somewhat initiated by a conversation with Bolaño’s 2666. This is to say I knew basically nothing.

If you’ve read Blake’s stuff, you know there’s a sort of heat and power created through what feels like verbal viscera: there’s lots of bodies, flesh is everywhere, often there’s burning. It’s hard to get at (unless you’ve read him, in which case you already know), but the body is the vector of Blake’s fervency, its limits, weaknesses, bits. There’s a pressure in his work brought about by sentences like “I felt the rising hammer in my pudge where what I’d eaten all those years there sat upon me waiting to be fed what it had asked for every inch and hour in the theaters and the poll booths and the gas stations and the groceries and the houses of the other people who had let me down and those who had not meant to let us down, the same.” That’s from early on in the first section of 300,000,000, and if you’ve been reading the mostly great things (not just *positive*, but stuff that’s really engaging with a tough-ish text) that’ve been written about the book (my favorite ones), you maybe already know that’s Gravey-slash-Darrel, and if you haven’t read anything, you can at least quickly apprehend the sense of almost like torrent in his stuff. That power—that feel—as been there from the start, in Scorch Atlas and Ever, but it feels cresting now in 300,000,000, feels like it’s found its ultimate purpose.

This gets weird, and I’m not sure how to say this. In the interviews he’s done, Blake’s mentioned that this book feels like the end of something for him, and you feel that, immensely, in reading it, if you know his other stuff. It’s not just that, though: his stuff’s had squeam-inducers before but all that before stuff hasn’t coalesced as does 300,000,000. That’s not to say the old stuff’s been unsuccessful; that’s simply to say that it feels very much that this book is what Blake’s been writing toward and for; that the skills he’s had and been working with and on for a good while now have found their ultimate Purpose here (in ways I at least can’t help feeling for instance like Wallace’s skills found their ultimate Purpose or Form in Jest [this would be an interesting game, to try to track in what work a writer’s Skills were brought most to best use and bearing; such a game’d be wildly subjective, of course, but would still be fun—not as an implication that the earlier work’s somehow lesser, but in the sense that the earlier work didn’t take full ravishing advantage or make complete use of the powers available (for instance: Hass’s Field Guide is great, but I’d argue Praise is where he really hits it; Charles Wright’s talked about his real style catching after several books; Patchett’s Bel Canto has a style strikingly similar to Taft and Magician’s Assistant but it’s the book that really caught [and then think of the authors we're still waiting to see if they've already hit their mark, or if there's more coming: has Jim Shepard nailed it? Laura van den Berg? Caitlin Horrocks? Mark Danielewski?])]). Anyway, enough blather: read this incendiary thing. It’s a seethe of fear and fall, a dark what-if done through a language so transfixing in its gnawing.

Ugly Girls by Lindsay Hunter

I’ve hollered Hunter’s greatness, and will continue to holler it till she hits some unlikely shitwall, though at present her record’s 3-0: Daddy’s, her debut, is phenomenal, and Don’t Kiss Me, her follow-up, is (I think) even better, twisted and sweet and sincere while being creepy and trying for your wallet (not, like, to solicit, but to steal). Creepy and twisted and all that by the way in a way totally different from Blake’s stuff, or, really, from anyone else’s: Hunter’s characters and stories are lonesome people and crap odds and unappreciative children trying to scam another day of service from their parents, alone people trying to scam or score or land, in some measure, the comforts of together without being skeeved by the ancilaries that come from such togetherhood. Her stories are loogies of awesome. I don’t know how to say it. You want to find new words when dealing with LHunter’s stuff because of how fresh she goes with her own work. It feels stilted and silly to write something as true and real as her debut novel is a strong series of jangly snapshot-ish takes of Baby Girl and Perry, trailer girls on the hunt for the next realer and stronger thing. It’s an unfair task, actually, to attempt to talk much about Ugly Girls: one of the Big Charges of Hunter’s work has been its creepy singlularity—the way the stories, brief and jangly as switchblades, land and then land again, moving on and on—and it’s a whole different sort of value and power and feel to read such effort sustained across plot and momentum.

Unfair because one of the things we’re given in novels (often, sometimes, I don’t know: I’m here writing about two of them, both of which don’t offer this) is this sort of immersive cohesion, the Satisfying Comforts of a Long Narrative threaded, worked over, (re)solved. Hunter’s stuff’s not really, I don’t think, best in that capacity (it’s fine in that capacity, but honoring that aspect is like praising Coltrane’s stuff for the fidelity of the recording rather than the transformative runs he’d dare): what she does best, and the thing the reader’s left with, is sharp coil and attempts at ease. The thing’s not supposed to give the sort of soothing-development you might look for elsewhere. Ugly Girls is not one big spike, or even a series of small, singular spikes: it’s a layering of jagged and on top of the jagged Baby Girl and Perry, ugly and pretty and human meaning howling often totally silently, try to find cream, something easing. That there’s not really anything to find to ease things isn’t any like lesson, obviously: the search is the thing, even if—maybe especially if—the search turns up what you feared and hoped from the start, a sense that nothing, really, works to soothe all the way down to the elemental levels. If you’ve been paying attention to Hunter, you’ve been (or: should’ve been) hoping for a novel, and I’m thrilled as fuck as a reader to say: this is as good as anyone could’ve hoped or expected.

Weird Gross Baltimore

THE BALTIMORE ATROCITIES by John Dermot Woods  

I’ve never been to Baltimore but I’d love to see this seedy little place in person. I wonder if the city is really like John Waters’ depictions, a place where the seedy underbelly grows so fat it spills over, covering the whole town. I thought maybe it’s just Waters’ style and the reaction of his twisted groupies, but then comes John Dermot Woods’ The Baltimore Atrocities, another look into the cruel, creepy and cringe-worthy actions of despicable people, once again set in Baltimore.

Woods’ story starts off with our narrator filling you in on the grotesque Baltimore school system of his childhood. A little boy, he and his lab partner are sent to the principal’s office for dissecting a frog and then swirling the guts inside the dish to make a beautiful arrangement. Gross, sure, but the kid doesn’t understand why making something so beautiful out of something so morbid gets them into trouble.

From there, we get more of the narrator’s story spliced through the pages. As he grows, he loses his sister somewhere near the park. It’s strange for most, but in Baltimore, it happens to so many. Families lose their eldest. Siblings go missing. Authorities seem lacking in care or maybe, just really bad at tracking the kids down.

And so, our narrator and another young man, one who had lost his brother in almost the same area team up to start an investigation of their own. Just like the kid did with that frog, the young man cut up the gross insides of the town, spread them out for all to see, and ultimately, create something morbidly beautiful and fascinating from the filth.

While a frame, the narrator and his companion’s story are just a small part of Wood’s masterpiece. I’d say at least 75% of the emotional stuff, the horror, the filth and the humor is found in the short 2-page caricatures of the city’s freaks, one page dedicated to the tales of these despicable people, the other to a Woods’ drawn profile of the creeps (think a Daniel Clowes’ down to under-earth style honesty to the drawings, which, YUM).

Remember how early I just mentioned how the school system was messed up for punishing kids for dissecting kids the wrong way? Investigation into the Baltimore Atrocities uncovers way more filth than that. For instance, a teacher finds a note signed by 18 children in the class making fun of him, then gets his revenge by cutting off the pinkie fingers of all offending children. A child gets sent to school with home baked treats from her father, which, we learn, he has laced with poison, killing almost the entire class. Kids in this town are lost everyday.

It seems everyone in the city has a dark disgusting secret or a missing relative or child. There are over a hundred murders in here. Limbs are more expendable than in the “Saw” franchise (although the blood does not get as big of a close up, so don’t set this book aside because of puke-factor). So why didn’t I just set this book aside and read something uplifting? The thing is, like a bad limerick, Woods’ caricatures are extreme and vial, but ultimately, more relatable to the type of people who believe everyone’s got a dark side, whether you see it on the surface or have to wait for it to be uncovered by the police reports.

Why Is This The First Book I’ve Read from Feminist Press?

INTO THE GO-SLOW by Bridgett M. Davis

I’ve always hated not having a sister and it’s books like Into the Go-Slow that always reconfirm to me just how much I’m missing out. The story of younger sister Angie’s idolization and parallel horrification at her older sister’s behavior provide such a complex sister dynamic, you’re definitely be rolling your eyes the next time someone tells you “Frozen” is such a deep look at sister relationship.

The novel takes off in 1986, and Angie’s older sister Ella has been dead for a few years. Still, there are pieces of Ella that haunt Angie, control the way she lives her life still. For instance, she refuses to leave Detroit, the place her sister spent most of her life, even as her mother and her other older sister opt for a new life in the south. By the time we meet Angie, she’s taking on her older sister’s obsession with Africa, Fela Kuti, even becoming involved with the same men and women Angie spent her time with.

It’s tragic, though, despite Angie’s following in Ella’s footsteps, Ella’s old friends can’t see it. While Ella was the outspoken life of the party, fuel to any environment, Angie is more likely to stand back and soak it all in. And there are the physical differences as well – while Ella was full-bodied, Angie’s thin frame keeps people from making the connection that the two could have been sisters.

It’s around this time that Angie decides she must follow in another one of Ella’s footsteps. She decides she must visit Nigeria, the place were Ella was killed years earlier, hit by a car while crossing the road. Angie is desperate to meet the people who knew Ella closely, who were with her in the moments before her death.

There’s so much at play at this point. Not only is Angie going to find out about Ella, she’s leaving to find out about herself. An obsession with Africa, their forefathers homeland, a passion for the women of Nigeria and a job as a reporter for an independent Nigerian newspaper were what worked to pull Ella out of a downward spiral; Angie hopes diving into the same, tracing the same trails will lead her to discover more about herself. As her mother heartbreakingly tells Angie: “I think there are a lot of ways to be black in this world, and I think you just need to find yours.”

At this point, there’s already so much I have heard about yet know I’ll never understand. Sure, I have an older brother and know what it’s like to follow in another’s footsteps (literally, every time I had the same math/science teacher following my brother, having to explain that I’m better at writing/art as they gave me that look of shock handing back the first assignment), but from all accounts I’ve heard, this is nothing like following a same-sex sibling. People expect you to look the same, to talk the same, to be the same girl. I can’t imagine having my way carved out before me like that.

What makes it even more complex for Angie is that, despite Ella’s success and joy as a writer during the last few years of her life, so much of her life was spent addicted to drugs, battling the demons of addiction. For so long, Ella was no one to look up to, and even a young Angie realized this. Despite the horrible things her sister would do while high, though, Angie would never distance herself. Of course she saw the flaws and harm Ella’s actions had on the rest of the women in the family, yet, it seems Angie would rather bury that Ella, keep the memory of the thriving, wise Ella in Africa alive only.

And then, there’s the tension of being black in America. That line the mother said really stuck with me: “There’s a lot of ways to be black in this world.” As a white person, I don’t think I’ve ever actually taken a minute to think about what kind of white person I should be. As with most whites, I have a vague pride in my national heritage, but have never truly felt defined or discriminated against because of it.

And then my curiosity is peaked – what are the ways to be black in this world? It seems, coming from this novel, there’s to take on your skin color, to delve into the history and current circumstances of your people, to really connect with your African roots; or to try to move past the racialization of everything, to try your damnedest to live in a colorblind world despite it all, as Angie’s mother and middle sister do. Are these the choices? I’ll never know. Privileged as I am with my white skin, I will never truly have to understand what it means to be black in America, in the world, in life.

Basically this: Into the Go-Slow will teach you something, give you a meaty story about how a person should be no matter their skin color, origins, or past.

Graywolf Is the Best Press in the Country at Present (maybe ever)

Surely you’ve seen what’s been happening with Graywolf Press. You must have. If you’re paying attention you’ve noticed what’s been happening with them this year. It’s not just that Leslie Jamison’s amazing The Empathy Exams was a NYTimes bestseller, though that was a big, big deal (and the book remains among the year’s deepest glories, as good a book of essays as you’re likely to even know how to hope for, and one that casts and interesting light on your [mine, anyway] older favorite books of essays [hard not to read Didion or Sontag or Hitchens or hell even Wallace differently on reading Jamison]).

But then there’s been this fall, and it’s been—well, you’ve seen. You must have seen. There’s been Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra, which I didn’t even get or read but you can still find it making splashes across all sorts of places. No, the thing that’s happened this fall in terms of books has been that Graywolf has released Matthea Harvey’s If The Tabloids Are True What Are You?, and they’ve released Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and they’ve released the might Eula Biss’ On Immunity: An Innoculation, and I at least can’t think of the last time three books have, together, so aptly and sadly and with difficult beauty have perimetered a time (This must happen to everyone, right? How the art you’re into helps demarcate months or seasons sometimes? How last fall, September 2013, because Breaking Bad was finishing, there was this weird charge, at least for me, how the show meddled around my days as well? Maybe it’s just me but I doubt it: I still remember 4/30/96 as the day on which a new Dave Matthews Band, new Bob Mould?, and new Paul Westerberg CD were all released, and Steve and I were there, midnight at Cheapo or wherever, and I know he remembers too).

Anyway: Graywolf. These books. You need these books. Everyone needs these books

            There’s all sorts of reasons you need these books though ultimately all the reasons reduce to because they’re amazing+will make your life better. First—finally—we get some more Matthea Harvey, whose Modern Life and Sad Little Breathing Machine and Pity the Bathtub…are all so great but too far in the rearview: I at least have needed her stuff more now, have needed that for awhile, and If The Tabloids Are True What Are You? is so good I feel like I’ll be sated for a good while. Maybe you saw Handler’s take on it, or you saw it pop up in some other place—chances seem good this was one of those books of poetry that actually got something of a toe-hold. Regardless: you should check this book. Yes, certainly: there’s full-color art, from cut-outs of mermaids with oddly shaped tails (best one: scissors) at book’s start, and there are pictures of tiny things frozen in ice, men and chairs and the like, and that section immediately follows “The Glass Factory” which features things heated to 1000 degrees and the pairing of the sections will just simply make you feel more than you’ve likely felt for awhile while reading poetry, and there’s the enrapturing “Telettrofono” section at the end in which there’s textile art accompanying the poems. There are, also, just poems, with titles, often with accompanying visual art (book’s best poem: “There’s a String Attached to Everything” which starts “The puppet snob is born by being dropped from above.” Other fantastic starts include “My Octopus Orphan” with “thinks his suction cups are radios” and “The Tired Mermaid” which goes: “The Tired Mermaid wishes for once her horoscope would just read: hungover today, stay in bed.”). The thing however about all these things is that they are not, at all, filigree, not streamer-ish add-ons aimed merely at decorating. What Harvey does that no poet’s doing that I know of is starting wherever. It sounds so dumb to even say it. She just begins. When’s the last time you read a poem that starts “They were lonely. I was alone. / Out of those two sentences, // I made myself a home.” That’s the start of “Woman Lives in House Made if People,” and, sure, the Dickinsony echo’s nice, but just look at the confidence of her builds: she just makes poems, she starts them and pushes them into existence. This sounds so silly to try to articulate, but it’s so magnificent, what she’s doing: there’s little that it feels Harvey’s trying to do or make or lead the reader to; the poems just feel there, present, unfussy in their strange splendor. Here’s what I mean: “Game For Anything” starts on p. 100, and it’s brief (“A plane-shaped silence flies / overhead.” it begins), 19 lines, and on p.101 there’s a picture of a miniature TV with a screen of clouds, and then, on 103, there’s a poem that doesn’t have a title—there’s a picture at page’s top, something that looks like a bird moving, and the poem beneath it starts “The sun was dim then done, but after months of treatments, the animals did begin to glow.” So: is that poem part of “Game For Anything”? Is it its own poem with a visual title? Biggest: does it matter?

The great gift Harvey’s offering—aside from, as ever, tremendous poetry obsessed with reaching out, with deep strangeness, with trying to understand the mechanics of our inner and outer enmeshings—is that she dethrones poetry from the weird realm of things meaning and symbolizing to poems just being. I’m not sure how to wave my arms big enough to make clear how monumental this ability, this accomplishment, actually is. It’s a beguiling, beautiful book that speaks not to your head or your heart but to your personhood, your actual walking-around-on-a-gray-monday self. It’s just a stunner.

            But that’s not even everything, because of course after the Harvey there came Eula Biss’ On Immunity, a book just as gloriously written as her first (also Graywolf) collection Notes From No Man’s Land, but a book which felt pressing and urgent even months ago but now, as Ebola spreads and we recognize the fragility of structural, population-level health, feels even more crucial. The book’s central consideration is Biss’ experience becoming a mother and confronting all the questions and concerns about vaccinating her son, and of course the book’s not just the obvious and continually necessary get your vaccinations and ignore the largely proven-incorrect anti-vaccination folks; no, beautifully, Biss actually engages with the idea of vaccination, which idea is (duh) monumentally fraught: how do we help protect our kids, ourselves? How do we adjudicate the varieties of risk? And the writing, good lord: Biss is so patient and probing and holy-hell smart you feel like the thing’s shining on you, giving you something like an intellectual burn as you read. Further, too: she makes and draws connections that will astonish you. Here’s what I mean—this from page 157: “The more vulnerable we feel, sadly, the more small-minded we become. In the fall of 2009, at the height of the H1N1 flu pandemic, a group of researchers began testing their hypothesis that people who feel protected from disease might also be protected from feeling prejudice. The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the fly and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.” I mean, come on: what are you reading that offers you such startling insight with such grace? What On Immunity is doing is waging an incredibly smart, incredibly calm, incredibly humane (that passage on 157 is on that section’s penultimate page, and here’s how Biss closes the section on 158: “I have doubts that we can vaccinate away our prejudices, or wash our hands of them…But I still believe there are reasons to vaccinate that transcend medicine.” Regardless of your stance on vaccination, certainly you can at least admit that that’s among the most level-headedly honest statements made in the whole history of the battle) campaign not just rah-rahing vaccinations, but rah-rahing thought, deep consideration. Which, of course, is among the real glories of her book: the excitement’s from the thinking as much as the writing or the subject matter.

            And then there’s Rankine’s devastating, almost infinitely sad(-dening) Citizen: An American Lyric. Look at that cover and keep your throat from catching. I don’t know how to write about this book. I’m a white man and by the accident of my birth I’ve lucked away from a life of hatred and pain and anger I literally can’t fathom (I can imagine it, as can any of us who’ve been paying any attention at all over the last two years as Mike Brown was murdered, as Trayvon Martin was murdered, as John Crawford was fucking killed for holding a toy gun at his side in a Wal-Mart in Ohio, as hundreds of other black bodies have been destroyed). Rankine in Citizen is dauntingly effective in addressing, in this her latest “American Lyric,” how this is about black bodies. She writes “And you are not the guy and still you fit / the description because there is only one guy / who is always the guy fitting the description,” (from “Stop-and-Frisk”). She writes “And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I didn’t know black women could get cancer, all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here.” That nowhere: that’s everywhere in Citizen, that’s (seemingly) everywhere in American life—the nowhere of any location to which we might head, black and white Americans, to try to stop fearing and hating each other. It seems an awfully tall order, to even think of ways we might address or build a bridge toward fixing this toxicity, and while Rankine’s not overtly making some claim for *how* this is to be done, she is, with Citizen, offering a devastating meditation on where we are, and while the book is somehow beautifully gutting (one hesitates to mention beauty at all given the subject matter), it’s impossible not to feel a shock of sorrow that we’re still in such a place, as a country, that Rankine and others need to keep writing, keep addressing it.

Again: all three of those are Graywolf titles, and notice there’s no mention of D. A. Powell’s Repast, which gathers his first three (glorious) books of poetry into one, and it doesn’t mention the great Jeffrey Renard Allen, or Kevin Barry, or the Art Of series which is just mind-blowingly good, or any of the other whalloping titles Graywolf crams into each calendar year. What I’m trying to say is that there’s no one better than Graywolf right now, but, dig: they’ve been doing this for years. If you’re not devouring the bulk of their offerings, you’re missing out on not just some of the best books published, but books that, to my mind, track and articulate and consider the human experience better than any other press’s catalog. They are doing the almost-impossible, in any industry: they’re batting almost a thousand, connecting every time. Pay attention. Look at them go. Long live Graywolf.

Finally, a Review of that new Murakami novel

Haruki Murakami’s COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE

Finally, finally back after a no-good-reason break from reviewing, and be glad, because I am here to fill you in on that new Murakami novel everyone has been talking about!

Murakami has, to me at least, begun to fall into the category of artists who make wonderful wonderful creations, yet, many of this creations are unstartingly similar. Murakami’s fiction, the more I delve into the backlogs of it, reads much like a Wes Anderson film – sharp, clean, filled with the same characters from one book to the next, the same set designers decorated the pages.

Recurring themes and characters of Murakami pieces present in this work: A blank-slated protagonist surprised that women find him attractive; a witchy, distant woman; some bit character talking vividly about a dream

Recurring themes and character of Murakami pieces missing from this work: Cats; unexplained life forms; talking creatures; the moon; a fetish-like obsession with women and their clothing

It’s fine enough to say you’ve read Norwegian Wood or 1Q84 and that is all you need from the man. BUT, for those of you who loved those books and wanted them to run on for pages, chapters, decades (myself included), Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is well worth it. Just because you know what a candy will taste like does not mean you shouldn’t eat it.

This story starts off with young Tsukuru Tazaki, colorless in relation to the names of the other best friends in their closely connected clique, Aka (red), Ao (blue), Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). Throughout high school the friends are a perfectly balanced, perfectly inseparable unit, pledging to do as much as possible together, to never date (at least within the group) to avoid imbalance, even to stick together after graduation, going to community college rather than venturing off to separate distant cities. Despite his love for his friends, Tsukuru decides to pursue an education in Tokyo, learning about how to effectively make and maintain train stations, the only avenue that really intrigued him.

Coming home on school break, Tsukuru is shocked to discover his friends no longer want anything to do with him. They refuse to see him, to talk to him, even ask that he not contact them again. Tortured by the rejection and haunted with questions about why it had happened, Tsukuru thus begins his years of pilgrimage.

The novel is filled with longing, melancholy, pain, and isolation, nothing new to the Murakami palate. What’s may make this the saddest of his novels is this: While most of the characters voluntarily isolate themselves, Tsukuru is the first to be brutually rejected, to be forcefully left out of a unit closer to him than his own family.

It hits the boy hard, so much so that for almost a year, all he can think about is death. He shrinks in size, not eating enough. He grows hollows under his eyes that still haunt him years later. He barely gets over it.

Following Tsukuru’s investigation and reconnection with his friends years later, we find out the painful reasons why they did what they did – although, to us, it never fully makes sense – and why they believed it was the only solution.

It can be a hard read at times, living through the mind of a boy being cast out from the only people he really cares about, but ultimately, this may be the most philosophical, the strongest (and, not a slight factor of encouragement) and the fastest-reading Murakami novel to date. Highly, highly recommended.

Gatsby On and On

Maureen Corrigan’s SO WE READ ON: HOW THE GREAT GATSBY CAME TO BE AND WHY IT ENDURES

So We Read On finds NPR critic and college professor Maureen Corrigan looking a each page, allusion and word of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby with the same hyper-focused, zeroed-in lenses that most scholars reserve for biblical studies or another analysis of a Shakespearean play. The difference here? Corrigan’s writing is hardly as stuffy, much more personal than the usual sterically academic read, thanks in no small part to Corrigan’s sheer, unabashed love for the novel.

Corrigan starts the book talking about the reason why most normal, still-intelligent adults don’t love Gatsby: they got forced into it in high school. Even worse, she says, they may have been introduced in junior high, at far to young an age to understand the satires and complexities of the novel. She admits to not loving it the first time as well, not getting just “why” this was a classic, and completely sympathizes with anyone who felt the same way, which is great for a reader like me who spent too much of my high school first- reading of the trying to remember every characters names (names are the worst things for me to remember, even now) and the colors of all the major objects in the novel, because that’s what a lot of the quizzes focused on back then. Next, Corrigan explains why, if you are one of those readers who fall into that very large boat, you must give the book a second go.

It’s funny – I’m not 100% sure who the target audience may be for this book. Fanatics or skepticals? Just more readers like me who love the lore the book holds and really, have read the book less times than they have read explorations of the history and context of the story? It’s a little hard to think that people already averse to the tale of Gatsby would willingly pick up a 300 page book delving further into that same story, but…. Maybe the best possible audience would be the folks that read it once, didn’t get it, don’t get the reason why this story has been remade into so many movies, taught in so many high school classes and just need to understand why this particular story is so resonating.

Of course, as a professor who has been teaching the story semester after semester to a group of college students (a much better age at which to be introduced to this great novel, she believes), she has plenty of insights into the novel thanks to the maybe hundred times she’s re-read the book. Among her theories and the things she wants you to notice about the book: the important roles water plays in the characters’ lives (especially Gatsby’s); how funny Fitzgerald meant this novel to be; and how, contrary to popular belief, it’s likely Daisy was based less on Zelda Fitzgerald and more on Scott’s first love.

Then, separating her from the strictly library-bound critic academics, Corrigan goes out into the field and really really digs for some new insights. She goes to a 7 hour reading of the entire novel, straight through. She delves into Scottie Fitzgerald (Scott and Zelda’s daughter) and the fight she undertook to keep her father’s papers and documents as an intact collection. She goes to the home of an old and somewhat eccentric collector of Fitzgerald documents and early manuscripts to dig through his personal archives, ultimately leaving with an internal debate over a single word that’s become illegible. She goes to a high school, watching students turn their own interpretations from the novel she loves so much.

Seriously though – if you have any interest in Fitzgerald – or even (and this is the guy I thought I loved more) his, as Corrigan reveals, frenemy Hemingway – be that an adoration for his work, a passing urge to revisit that high school read, or the desire for a little more background info on that Baz Luhrman film you just watched, by all means, check this out. It’s far more fun than the average academic companion.

All Hail Betty Halbreich! All Hail Joan Rivers!

I’LL DRINK TO THAT: A LIFE IN STYLE, WITH A TWIST by Betty Halbreich

Three cheers for the tough old broads.

I’ll Drink to That, the new memoir from Betty Halbreich, the 86-year-old woman who’s become famous during her 40 years working as a personal shopper at NYC’s Bergdorf Goodman (shopping’s mecca for the uninitiated) is an utterly thrilling read, written crisply and cleanly by a woman on whom it appears decades of reading Vogue have shaped into a completely gorgeous writer.

I have a strong desire to throw the word ‘legend’ in here, but Halbreich specifically said in the book she hates that word (in relation to herself, at least). Fact is: for so many, Halbreich is Bergdorf Goodman. She’s the star of that 2013 documentary Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf Goodman, a look into the cult of BG, how its fans are more loyal to the store than to most are to their alma maters. (She’s also going to be the inspiration for Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, which ARE YOU EFFING KIDDING ME I cannot wait to see).

From girlhood it seems, Halbreich had a preternatural instinct for dressing herself and dressing herself well. Living a plush life in a rich Jewish community in South Chicago, Halbreich learned early on the importance of well made, lasting clothing. Yet, something her upbringing couldn’t teach her, the girl always knew how to stick out from the crowd. As her mother would say (and I quote loosely), “If the other girl’s were wearing scarfs around their heads, Betty put hers around her waist.”

Flash-forward to adulthood. Halbreich quickly marries an even richer, even-more on-the-scene man with roots in New York City. The fashion is amplified. No longer can she wear the same thing to two different social events. Now it seems, there must be a new dress for each party. The marriage though, isn’t a happy one, leaving Halbreich attempting suicide as it unravels and spending time in a mental institution to sort things out.

Days – literally, days- after leaving that institution, she starts her job at Bergdorf Goodman. Plucky enough to stand up to it’s snottiest customers and honest enough to let a woman leave without spending hundreds on a piece that wouldn’t suit her, Halbreich’s talent is quickly recognized, even though she’s not actually been fulfilling all the duties she should as a salesgirl, seeing as she nearly refuses to use the register. Thus, the creation of her own department, “Solutions,” as they call it. Women come in with a problem, in need of a specific look or piece; Halbreich provides the solution.

You know how there is probably one thing that every person is really actually born to do? It’s so enormously satisfying to read the story of a person who is actually doing, and has been for decades. Halbreich didn’t simply create/found the Solutions department at Bergdorf; she essential is the solution to many a woman’s dressing woes.

From the introduction to the end, Halbreich walks us through the typical days in her shoes (which, I could not help but appreciate, never show toes. FINALLY someone else who understands my deep-seated aversion to flip-flops!!). Woman come in, seek Halbreich’s assistance, leave with wisdom and hints as to dressing, and – but only if they truly find something they look stunning in – leave with the perfect piece. One completely admirable thing about Halbreich: she can tell a woman simply in need of “retail therapy,” not in need of new clothes, from a mile away. She often offers that therapy and keeps the clothes on the rack.

And when there is a woman who truly needs something, Halbreich delivers. I imagine her mind working a bit like a computer system – she seems to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the store, walking through it each day and noting items/designers and pieces that have been moved around. Sort of like a dewy decimal system on clothing, if you need to find something, refer to her. Furthermore, though, she can tell what will suit each woman. Basically, she’s a living breathing Match.com for women and their clothing.

Who are these women, anyway? Everyone from costume designers (she’s help curate looks you’ve seen in Woody Allen’s movies as well as on Sarah Jessica Parker circa Sex & The City) to celebrities to everyday New York City women, sometimes even a bride or two.

Note here, and this is terribly sad yet touching: Halbreich was a great fan (and friend) of Joan Rivers, another one of her loyal customers, and writes freely about her adoration for Joan. It was so strange reading this book in the days after Rivers’ death – unlike the magazines picking up her story as it was hot, Halbreich included this ode to her friend months before she could have known. Timely, yet unintentional, I think this may be the best tribute (even if it wasn’t meant to be) to Rivers I have read so far. And – as a further testament to the women’s mutual respect for each other, Rivers’ blurb on the back of the book is perfect: “”I would trust this woman with my life—closet!”

Anyway, this isn’t a book about fashion, or why Bergdorf Goodman is holy or why you must buy designer (Halbreich herself often relates the desire to cut the tags out of clothes to curb her client’s label obsessions); this is simply a book about a woman who is doing what she was put on this earth to do, who has changed women’s lives and shaped the film and fashion industries by doing it.

One Door Shuts…

EPILOGUE: A MEMOIR by Will Boast

It starts with the death of his father, his last immediate family member. From there, Will Boast’s memoir goes on a powerful journey through his family’s past and his path to finding the other family he never knew he had. It’s deep, tragic, painfully honestly reflective and so, so good.

Boast’s mother was the first guardian lost, early on in his high-school days. Discovering cancer, she went through chemo and the works, but the shitty thing doctors don’t tell people or their families point blank when the cancer begins to spread is that chemo doesn’t cure everybody. One in five survivors, one in four depending on the type. Boast’s mother was not the one. That left Will, his younger brother Rory and his dad.

Obviously, it’s hard for a father, any father, to suddenly be left with the responsibilities of both parents. Especially so if the guy’s not been so involved with the kids lives before. Even more if the guy finds his main source of comfort from the bottle.

It’s the three men in the house for a bit, but soon, Boast must go to college, leaving just his dad and Rory in the house. They fight. It’s tense. Father sees son throwing his life away, drinking too young and too much, doing drugs, skipping classes and never caring for homework, hanging out with the wrong crowd. Son sees dad (often drunk) and rolls eyes to the remarks, goes out and lives as he wants.

Then, Rory gets in a car accident with those boys his father warned him about. Will’s crushed by his brother’s death, losing this kid that meant so much to him, that charmed everyone he met.

Now, his father is all alone in the home, practically drinking himself to death. Will visits and calls as often as he can, but finds it hard to balance spending so much time with his last remaining family member with his desire to leave the Midwest, to move even further from his Wisconsin hometown, his discomfort seeing his father so deep in his alcoholism, often saying odd, things, slurring and hiccupping as they talk.

His dad shows up to work one day with a pain in his gut. Still, this is the man with perfect attendance. He powers through. On the drive home, he collapses, dying at the steering wheel of his car.

This is where Epilogue, time-line wise, begins, as 24-year-old Boast realizes the family he knew is gone.

In the days after his father’s death, Boast begins to clean the house, airing papers, documents and secrets his father had hidden for many years. There’s a folder marked “Marriage/Divorce.” Was his father planning on leaving Boast’s mom before they found the cancer? There’s a massive sum of money, more than poor bohemian Boast ever imagined he would earn thanks to his aspirations as a writer and jazz-musician, that is the product of the payouts from Rory’s death.

And, as his aunts reveal to Boast, there’s the fact his father was married before, while he was still living in England. He loved an older woman, got her pregnant and raised two young boys with her until about 10 years later, he left and never came back. Never even kept photos of his British boys. Boast’s father had another family, but, as Will realizes, he, his mom and his brother were the other family, the ones his father chose.

It’s aching, and rough and may even be hopeless, but Will knows he must find his half-brothers, the only people it seems he has left.

Epilogue is intense, exposing the wounds of a family, the ways its members try to heal them or at least hide the scars. It’s unfair, for Will, to have lost so much so soon. It’s unfair, for his half-brothers, to have lost their father years before his death.

As the story unfolds though, there is hope. It’s an Epilogue to his first family, the ordinary mother-father-two-kids set-up, a beautiful obituary to the good times and the bad. Yet, the story is just the beginning of Will’s new life, the story of how he came to find his other family and how the pain both sets of boys helped sew them together.

Two New-ish Novels

Bluff City Pawn by Stephen Schottenfeld

 

I’m surprised this didn’t get more press; maybe it did and my head’s buried. Regartdless: it’s a fine, tough novel (if you’re deep on Bloomsbury it may remind you of Hart’s Then Came The Evening, in lots of ways [Hart's new one's called The Bully of Order; thing hit 9/2]) about three brothers in Memphis, the middle of whom, Huddy, runs Bluff City Pawn, purchased with help from his older brother Joe, a construction guy (so lamely vague and general: he owns a construction company, was developing the sort of McMansion boomtown exurb places whose value was mercilessly deflated as of ’08 and is written as exactly the sort of guy one’d spend energy trying to avoid [because arrogance, because blind consumption of upper-middle-class BS, etc] but also exactly the sort of guy who’d never know he’s cause for avoidance). Their younger brother, Harlan, has been in trouble, is un- or underemployed variously, is someone who’d’ve maybe been called a bit of a drifter in some black-and-white era, and he comes back to town from reaches south just in time to help these two guys with a Big Deal: an old gun collector has died, and his collection’s been offered to Huddy, who needs Joe’s help financially to close the deal and Harlan’s help hands-wise to actually make the deal physically transpire.

So simple, that premise. And yet: there’s the turbulence of blood, the way family can trap us and make us continue to be the same people, the way we try to—with new prospects and chances—clear old trouble, gain new vistas, and the book’s hard as hell for the way the river of it courses so happy one page/section/movement until the reader, deep in, feels and realizes that nothing comes without some price, and the payments Schottenfeld exacts from his supremely well-drawn characters are never obsence, never gratuitous, but holy hell do you feel them. That, more than anything: this was the book this summer that had me feeling most, that sort of read you’ve got to buck yourself up to read, knowing it’ll drag you through stuff you have the chance to, with other novels, avoid. This is gobledygook. Read the thing. You’ll see. If I had some place to put such a bet, I’d gamble this’ll be quick on the list of Books I Didn’t Think I’d Return To But Then Did, Very Quickly.

 

California by Edan Lepucki

 

Splashy as hell, this thing was, the Colbert Bump and all, and I’d be lying to claim it anything other than a seductive read: each time I laid the thing pages-side down and heaved from the couch for more water or snack or whatever I was itching to get back soon as I’d moved from it. Soon as. Every time.

Yet the book ultimately felt thinner than the thing I was left holding in my hand: engaging, eminently readable fiction, certainly, but a story that felt…wary, maybe unsure. It’s weird. The set-up’s great: Something’s Happened, and in the Post-Happened world, a couple—Cal and Frida—are out California somewhere, fending for themselves in a small home they moved into after the former occupants didn’t need it any longer. Hand-washing clothes, growing your own food, the whole post-apocolyptic thing—and, in this scenario, Frida’s with-child, which fact Lepucki weaves through the book as sort of a moral Magic-8 ball: should she bring a child into such a world? What does it say about those who’d argue either side of that? PS it’s not *everyone* that’s been cast-out: there are wealthy communities in which folks are still protected, in which there’s still electricity and food and goods, in which there’s still available the ease of modernity. Also there’s a group called the Movement, activists who, as the Falling Apart (it’s never named or specificed, the Happening that cleaves time from Before to After, but it’s not, like, a meteor or plague: it’s just the logical further moves of the current unsustainable path we’re on at present, with wealth accruing more of it and the poor accruing less and the middle class getting hollowed as an empty can) was transpiring, did stuff to try to shake people into awareness, to fight for equality, etc. Among those in the Movement was Frida’s brother, whose final act was to blow himself up at a mall.

Further detailing later plot moves robs certain likely-seeable-from-miles developments, but still, I’ll abstain. Despite, however the interesting set-up and cool moves, as of page 137 the book, to this reader, deflated, and the plodding on from there’s much, much less interesting and fulfilling than it’d been at the start. Who knows. Maybe I’m being dickish and unfair. It’s not a bad book, certainly, but it sure as hell could’ve (and maybe should’ve) been quite a bit more.