Shackling Water

“Certain stuff you were supposed to do in private—fast, pray, woodshed—because to have cats know about it might sully the ritual’s purity, shade your motivations with self-consciousness.  All of a moment you might find yourself looking left then right before helping a blind man across the street, not to check for traffic but in hopes of being seen.” (15)

I read this line in Adam Mansbach’s Shackling Water and thought, “Damn.  In two sentences he nailed a sin we’re all guilty of sometimes, pinpointed the way we all know we’re guilty and try to avoid it, and underscored just how our own awareness of it is in itself self-conscious.  “Woodshedding,” in case you don’t know, is holing up with your instrument and playing, working it with the pure motivation of chasing the music down.  It has to be done in private, with absolute dedication, and it marks a true musician.  The minute it marks the musician, however, it becomes the property of observers.  I’m muddying this all up trying to explain the quote, which does such a crystalline job of explaining the phenomenon.

Reading Adam Mansbach as a writer is humbling.  His work is full of jump and energy.  Every word works, every sentence packs a punch.  He writes the way his main character, Latif, wants to play.

Do you remember that movie when Jack Nicholson tells Helen Hunt, “You make me want to be a better man”?  That’s what this book did to me as a writer.  It kicked me in the ass.  I’ve fallen into a rut, taking an easy formula that works for me.  My words and my sentences are lazy.  Shackling Water makes me want to be a better writer.  It’s moving and intense, to be sure, but Mansbach never takes the easy route to his readers’ emotions.  Latif is working hard, Mansbach is working hard, and it makes the reader want to work hard, too.

Perhaps the best part is the end, because it’s not definitive.  I’m so tired of endings that are neatly tied up.  Such a cop-out wouldn’t be worthy of this book.  I won’t say any more, because everything I say about the book will lessen the intensity of reading it for the first time.  I’ll stop now so you can go get the book.

The Importance of Being Kennedy

I think one of the biggest problems with being rich and famous would be all the servants who know far, far too much about the family.  See, here at Casa Rosenbaum, we have all sorts of funny little secrets, which I would tell you but then they wouldn’t be secrets anymore.  If we had lots of servants, we’d be screwed, because then they could start blogs spilling all the beans.

Fortunately, we don’t have eight kids and a dog, because if we did, we’d need nursery staff.  And nursery staff is privy to the deepest, darkest secrets about a family – relationships.

So, what would happen if the most famous family in American politics had a nanny who, at the end of her life, left behind a memoir?  That’s the premise behind Laurie Graham’s The Importance of Being Kennedy.  Nora is nanny to all eight little Kennedys, including Jack, the understudy for his favored older brother; Rose, whose mental problems only got unmanageable when she was subjected to a lobotomy; and Kick, the loyal daughter who up and marries a Protestant.

Nora doesn’t intend for her memoir to become public, as she considers herself a part of the family and subject to all taboos that constrain the rest of the clan.  So, the story isn’t bitter and angry – just matter-of-fact in its bare critique of the family and its ways.  The book is very funny and well-written, but it is also pointed.  The takeaway may be that loving our own egos more than our children is a recipe for disaster.  Or it may be that even the rich feel left out of cliques of other rich people.  Or it may be about appreciating what we have, as humble Nora is a hell of a lot happier than her wealthy employers.

Or, maybe the takeaway message is that, should you have eight children and a dog, thereby requiring nursery staff, you probably want to make them sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Omnivore’s Dilemma

Remember the Friends List of Five?  That’s the list of famous people you are allowed to boink  without reprisal from your partner, should any of them come a’knockin at your door.  The two permanent seats on my list are of course Harrison Ford and Will Smith, with regular guest appearance by Jason Bateman, O He of the Very Fine Posterior.  The other two slots are up for grabs.

Michael Pollan is so totally on that list right now.  Seriously, if this dude showed up at my front door, it would be mighty hard to turn him away.

I love his articles in the New York Times.   This man talks about food in such an ethical, respectful way.  Although I am a bit more extreme in my approach to Real Food than I was before I got on the Pollan Bus, I have always thought that food is better when it is simply food and not a clever mixture of artificial flavors.  (As an aside, I cannot fathom why people put sauce on asparagus.  That stuff tastes so damned good simply steamed – why the hell would anyone want to fuck with it?)

For my birthday, my in-laws sent several books, the most exciting of which is The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  In this book, Pollan follows four meals from their origins straight to his dinner plate: a McDonald’s concoction, an industrial organic meal, a locally produced, sustainable meal, and a meal that Pollan gathered completely for himself.  He does a phenomenal job weaving in science, history, economics and politics to explain why our food is produced the way it is and why that method of production is a health and environmental risk.  For example, did you realize that grass-fed beef is much less likely to have e-coli because something about feeding cows corn weakens their intestinal linings making it more probable that it will rip in slaughter?  The book is funny, fascinating, and always readable.

One of the most amusing moments is when he sits down to a big steak while reading a text on vegetarianism.  “Animal Liberation,” writes Pollan, “is one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it.  Because singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change” (307).  The same could be said of Pollan’s book itself.  It makes you want to run out and buy some eggs from hens who ate cow poop.

The book’s major flaw is that his meals are not pure.  Sure, it is easy to get a meal completely from McDonald’s and another completely from Whole Foods.  He fails, however, to eat a completely local meal when he decides to make a chocolate soufflé in Virginia, citing some crap about chocolate being an exception because they don’t make it in Virginia.  Isn’t that kind of the point?  If it isn’t locally made, find something else to eat.  Not that I think anyone can live on completely local food unless her last name is Kingsolver, but if you are writing a book about it, you ought to be able to do it for just one meal.

He fails on his final meal, too.  It is supposed to be all foods he hunted, foraged, or grew himself.  He makes quite a to-do about gathering his own yeast from the air for the bread, yet he never tells us how he managed to grow and mill his own flour, leaving me wondering if maybe he picked that up at the Stop & Shop.  He also mentions, during the cooking of his precious foraged mushrooms, dumping in an entire stick of butter.  Presumably he did not milk that cow, churn that butter, and then form it into a stick neatly wrapped in wax paper.  Again, it’s not that I think he ought to eat all food he produced himself, but is it too much to ask that he stick to the rules of his own game?

Nonetheless, this book is fantastic.  It is a compelling argument for doing one’s best to eat locally produced food that has been sustainably raised.  I am unabashedly a Michael Pollan groupie, and I am more than happy to admit that he had me at “Hello.”

The Invisible Wall

Harry Bernstein was ninety-six years old when he published his first book, The Invisible Wall, so a little rambling is to be expected.  The reader tends to forgive a nonagenarian if he loses his thread or if the writing goes a little flaccid at times.  Old men are likely to veer off into side streets now and again.

Not this old man.  His tale of growing up poor in England at the start of World War I is tightly woven, with nary an unnecessary word.  He takes his time with the story, but every detail comes to fruition at some point as he chronicles his childhood on a street with an unseen border right down the middle: the families of poor Christian mill workers on one side and the families of poor Jewish tailors on the other.

Young Harry is not really all that interested in such social and religious politics, distracted as he is with other important matters – namely, clogs.  The poor kid really wants clogs like the kids on the Christian side, because clogs are just plain cool.   His mother declares such footwear low-class and insists she will buy him real shoes and send him to a much more posh school than the one attended by her older children.  She arranges for him to attend, free of charge, and then sets to work turning an empty room in their house into a shop, where she sells old fruit so she can earn money to buy her son shoes for school.  It is with jubilation that the reader sets out with Harry and his mother that first day of school, knowing how hard-won are his spot in that school and his new suit of clothing, not to mention the clogs sparking on the pavement.

It is moment built of the stuff of all bootstrap memoirs: the poverty-stricken family, the hard work against all odds, the determination to better oneself, even the shoes that are so far out of the family’s reach.  That his mother fails to get the good shoes because her shop yields only enough cash for clogs?  Well, even that is standard fare, demonstrating the family’s desperate circumstances.

What is unexpected is the moment Harry and his mother walk into the school, clogs striking the shiny, waxed floors so loudly that heads come popping out of classroom doors.  The headmaster strides forward, confronts Harry’s mother, and orders them out of the school.  No clogs on his perfect floors.

All that hard work, all that determination – they are supposed to pay off in these kinds of books.  Harry is not supposed to be sent to the same crappy school as his siblings.  That’s not the way these types of memoirs work, people.

And that’s what makes the book so real.  Everything doesn’t work out, although some things do.  The pathos isn’t in service of smarmy victory – it’s just the way life works out sometimes.  People go to war and come back without legs.  Unwed mothers stay unwed.  People die.

Of course, there are moments of victory, and the final bridging of the two sides of the street is predictable, although certainly earned.  There has to be a happy ending, after all, or Americans wouldn’t read it.  (The ending isn’t all happy, because only an asteroid coming out of nowhere and flattening Harry’s horrid father would be a satisfying conclusion to this tale.)

The Invisible Wall offers hope that different sides, different faiths, can come together, perhaps not loving one another but learning to coexist.  You can read it because it is a relevant theme in today’s world of bitterness and religious acrimony.  Or, you can just read it because Harry Bernstein really knows how to tell a story.

LOVE Park

I have always felt that there is something endearing about American literature of the 1950s and 60s, written by angst-filled men – or at least about angst-filled men – seeking meaning or a definition of masculinity or just some tail.  Think Dean Moriarty, forever on the road.  You can smell a book of that era from a distance, and I find it somehow reassuring to read about these men who are so earnestly convinced of the importance both of their search for identity and of their penises.

People aren’t allowed to write like that anymore, of course.  It is simply not sophisticated enough for contemporary readers; we now respond to slick post-modernism or soul-searching therapy (God, are people still reading Eat, Pray, Love?).  Writing needs to be more ethnic now to hold our interest (because we’re all sort of done with white men, right?).

The fact is, there are rules for writing in every period, which is why sometimes late at night Henry James and Edith Wharton start to resemble one other.  Today’s books, diverse in their topic, voice, and quality, nonetheless are identifiable as “current,” although I am hard-pressed to define why that is.

So, it takes a shitload of courage for an author to publish as his first novel a Greek-American version of Updike’s Rabbit Run set in suburban Philadelphia.  In first-person, no less.  Who the hell writes in first-person, nowadays?

Jim Zervanos does.

LOVE Park, though well-written, is not the most arresting prose I have read in the last year.  It doesn’t startle me with its intensity like most books I have picked up lately, and, frankly, I had a rough start getting into it because I found the protagonist less than appealing.  In fact, the damned book made me work to engage with Peter Pappas, a twenty-six-year-old who just can’t get his shit together.  I wanted to smack him upside his head time and again and tell him to stop dreaming about how to dislodge himself from inertia and just get on with life.

The book never outwardly solicits the reader’s sympathy.  Far from it – Zervanos seems to know that his readers will have little patience for a college-educated man who lives in his parents’ cellar while painting empty apartments white and waiting for something to happen to him – perhaps a career track, or losing his virginity at the very least.

But then, about halfway through the book, one of his little fantasies falls through – because in a book inspired by Rabbit Run, all movement towards change must necessarily end in naught – and I realized I was crestfallen for the poor dude.  I felt his wriggling humiliation.  Somewhere along the line, Zervanos had gotten me to give a shit about this guy.  Not just about Peter, but his father, too, who is as flawed a priest as one can hope to find in literature.

The characters are well-developed, especially Peter’s siblings, Sophia and Andrew.  One of the things Zervanos does well is to make the reader think she has gotten a handle on the stereotype that should apply to a particular character and then to undermine that stereotype with a fully-realized person instead.  I found this particularly surprising in the character of Daisy, who I did not realize I had accepted as the two-dimensional piece of ass that Peter sees.  Then, she confronts him with “You think I don’t have feelings?” and I felt the same sense of shame Peter ought to be experiencing.

There are small track-backs, revelations of little details that don’t amount to much but that act as keys to turn the reader’s understanding of the characters.  I really don’t want to reveal any of these, because one of the pleasures of this text is the moment when the entire character revolves and then clicks into a very new place.  But, since this is a book review and I have to give some details, there is a moment when one character, hitherto mostly an unbearable pain in the ass, in passing mentions his financial troubles.  Suddenly, it is jarringly clear we’ve been viewing him through Peter’s own insecurities, and that he is actually quite human.  This happens with each character at some point or another, and each is an opportunity for Peter to grow up.

Which of course he does not do.

Instead, we are also provided small details about Peter that subtly undermine the stereotype he could be.   The reader is never in love with him, but we feel his angst.  What separates him from Updike’s Rabbit is that we feel a deeper sympathy for Peter, or at least I do.  Now, this may be because he is my contemporary…

LOVE Park is well-researched and firmly rooted in its physical environment, which anchors the text nicely.  It made me homesick for Philly.  There is a sharp but not overbearing sense of humor that pokes up from time to time, but make no mistake that this is a serious book.  And it avoids the pitfall so many books seem to tumble into these days: although there is movement to the text, everything is not neatly tied up in the end.

I taught with Jim Zervanos for a year back when we were both a lot younger.  He was working on a novel then, and I’ll admit I didn’t take his aspirations too seriously, even though he was a great teacher and a nice person.  He was just far too handsome and the teenaged girls were far too in love with him for him to be legit.  I am happy to admit that I stand corrected.

I do not think that this was the best book Zervanos could write, although it is quite strong.  But it is a brave book, and it is well worth reading.  I suspect it is a harbinger of even better stuff to come, and it sure is a more intelligent text than most of what is being published these days.

For the record, my nine-month-old could not stop looking at his picture on the cover and cooing, so I guess the ladies still adore him.

The Bitch in the House

When I was eleven years old, I landed in the home of my maternal aunt and her husband.  My aunt was in her mid-thirties with six-year-old and one-year-old sons.  Suddenly, she was raising my teenaged sister and me.  She made quite a muddle of it, I must say.  Intellectually, I knew that it must have been hard figuring out teenagers she hadn’t raised from early childhood.  Emotionally, I was pretty sure she just didn’t like me very much.

The biggest issue was that my aunt was a bitch of the first order.  She was petty and self-absorbed.  “That’s what happens when a smart woman stops working to stay home with the kids, even though she has a housekeeper and puts the kids into daycare,” I would say rather smugly to friends.  “She just has nothing else to keep her occupied.”

You know what?  I am now more or less the age my aunt was when I moved in, and baby, I get it.  I might have known the reasons when I was younger, but now?  Now I get how The Bitch so easily becomes default mode.

I just finished The Bitch in the House, a collection of essays edited by Cathi Hanauer.  What surprised me about this text was how much I recognized myself in so many women’s voices.  So many of these women started out sassy and fun, only to degenerate into shrews.  Kids or no, fat or thin, married or single, they all have felt the rising of what one woman describes as the inner bitch.

Femaleness is a complicated state of being in our present society.  Expectations are high, both internally and from those around us.  This book layers voices examining how, in response to those demands, we so often awaken our Bitch.  It is a must-read for any woman who often finds herself wondering when she became such an unpleasant person.

Because so many of the contributors are writers, the prose is strong, although I think the primary weakness of the text is a lack of professional diversity.  I found myself wondering whether bitchiness was rampant only among writers or if perhaps we could have heard from chefs and investment bankers, too.

The Bitch, formerly known as The Shrew, has been around for a long time, as long as men have had nasty words for women who spoke their frustration about their situations.  The time has come for women to own her, and The Bitch in the House makes The Bitch ours to define.

Life of Pi

I rarely stop reading a book in the middle.  Once I have made the commitment to start, I feel like I am somehow breaking faith with the text if I stop midway.  This has probably resulted in untold damage to my brain cells from forcing myself to finish thousands upon thousands of crappy pages, but so be it.

I almost stopped reading Life of Pi right in the middle.  It just wasn’t doing it for me.  Yeah, yeah, I get it.  There’s a kid, there’s a tiger, there’s a boat and an ocean.  I pretty much gathered that from the picture on the cover.  I felt we were just sitting there together on the lifeboat, which is all well and good for the kid with no options, but for those of us with dishwashers to unload… well, I really wanted to leap out into the water and swim the hell away from Pi and Richard Parker.

And then, right when I was ready to bail, the narrator mentioned the number of days he was at sea, and suddenly everything got interesting again.  I decided to stick around and see where it all went.

Damned glad I did.

Maybe it’s because I am tired or maybe it’s because I am out of practice, but I just didn’t see the end coming.  I don’t mean the part about finding land – I sort of figured that was how a “lost at sea” book usually winds up, unless it concludes with a guy nailing a bird to the mast of a sinking ship, in which case there is still one guy in a life boat who makes it to shore.

What I didn’t see coming was the part with the Japanese dudes who come down to interview Pi.  I don’t want to say a lot more for those of you who haven’t read this (have I mentioned that I abhor spoilers?), but just when I thought we were talking about one thing, it turned out the whole had been about quite another theme altogether.

If you HAVE read the book or don’t care if I reveal something, then read on.

My son, Zachary, is almost five years old.  These days, he draws pictures to process the reality that is not quite what he would like it to be.  It is his way of controlling the story and of shielding himself from the pain of a world that doesn’t operate how he prefers it to.

Reading Life of Pi, I realized how much we all do that.  Children are, of course, especially adept at weaving yarns, but adults need it just as much.  Fiction allows us to process the complicated odor of reality.  And, yes, television serves this purpose, as do movies.  Books, in my humble opinion, do it better because they require more work on the audience’s part, but that is definitely my bias.  But we do it all the time.  We fantasize about losing weight or having time to cook or having sex with Christopher Walken.  OK, maybe not the last one…  We also choose which story to tell, so that sometimes we show our darkest selves and other times we get to be the hero.

None of this is news, of course, but I think Life of Pi sheds a hell of a positive light on the way fictions function in our lives.  As to how that ship sunk, well, all I can say is someone was down there with a key letting out all those wild animals.

Mama Ph.D.

            I went to graduate school when I was twenty-six.  I wanted to become an English professor, perhaps for all the glory and prestige attached to the job.  I loved the reading and the digging and the thinking.  What I did not like was living in a different state from my significant other.

            We lived apart through our whole engagement and the first year of our marriage.  I finished my coursework a year early due to a sanity-breaking schedule of extra-classes, teaching, masters’ thesis-writing, exams, wedding-planning, and back-roads-of-Virginia-driving, and so I decided to move up to Philadelphia to be with my husband.  I arranged with the department to take my next set of exams from afar, with a great deal of support from the (female, young, mother) chair of the graduate program and my (female, young, mother) dissertation director.  I would write my dissertation from afar, and I would adjunct at Villanova, in my new neighborhood, due to help from a (male, older, father) member of my committee.

            Out one evening with a small group of graduate students and one male professor, I discussed my plans for finishing the program from a distance.  The professor, who heretofore had been very supportive of me, even though I had chosen someone else to be my dissertation director (at his suggestion), dismissed me. 

           “You’ll never finish the program,” he told me.  Damn.  Them’s fightin’ words.

            I kept those words in my head through the following three years as I struggled to pass exams, far away from the support of my peers and their study groups.  Those words echoed as I sought out a dissertation writing group from the English department at Penn.  Those words pounded in my head as I bolted down to North Carolina for a quick meeting with my dissertation director before I shot back up to Philadelphia for an appointment with my reproductive endocrinologist.  I heard his words quite clearly as I took a French translation class at Bryn Mawr to fulfill my second foreign-language requirement, seven-months pregnant and feeling Zachary kick when the teacher played Jacques Briel. 

            I flew down to defend my dissertation when I was nursing a six-month old, who got his first taste of academic life that day.  I nursed him at my graduation, handing him off to daddy before I went up to get my hood.

            I never did get the breast milk out of my academic robe.

            I managed all of this because of a supportive director, only a few years older than I am, who herself had borne her children while dissertating.  But, I never would have finished if I hadn’t wanted to send a giant “fuck you” to the man who told me I’d never do it.

            In his eyes (and many others), I am a huge disappointment.  I was doing well in graduate school.  I had publications – good ones.  I had a promising dissertation.  I was a strong teacher.  I had a damned good chance of actually finding a Job, which, in the vocabulary of the academy, means a tenure-track job at a four-year school.

            Except that I decided I did not want to be an academic.  All that time apart from the peer group removed the lemming-like need to jump into a life in which we would move to North Dakota to live on a crappy salary for 60+ work-hours a week during which I would produce articles on obscure topics published in obscure journals that eight other people might bother to read.  And all that prestige?  Um, somehow I had missed the memo informing me that professors are now treated like servants to entitled students, who cannot understand why anyone would give them a B.

            I realized I just didn’t want it.  But I finished the degree because I finish things.  And I was going to show that asshole professor that I could.

            So, I did.  And then I didn’t.  After graduating, I jumped off the track into the wild abyss of who-the-hell-knows-what-I-am-doing-now.

            It makes me feel tired and alone, this strange background of mine.  Except, it turns out it is not so strange.  There are a whole lot of us, as I recently read in a book called Mama Ph.D.  Some stayed, some left, but we all struggled to find our place in an academic world designed for men with wives at home. 

            The book was revelatory for me.  It made me realize that my choice was not just personal.  It was a response to a system that is not set up for women (or men) who want a work-life balance. 

            Reading the first part of Mama Ph.D., though I loved the writing and related to the women in the book, I did not see my own situation.  These were women who had found their way – some within the academy and some by opting out – despite overwhelming odds against them.  They decided not to struggle with the demands of the job, or perhaps they found a way to prioritize motherhood.  In one painful and beautiful essay by Jennifer Cognard-Black, she admits that putting career ahead of her daughter is detrimental to that relationship, “and I’ve slowly disconnected from my spouse—after fourteen years of marriage, we have almost entirely separate lives now” (134). 

            Ouch.

            And, then I found the essay, the one about me.  The one where Lisa Harper admits “I had lost interest in pursuing the writing necessary to achieve a successful tenured career…  In short, I wanted to leave the world of theory, and attach myself to a life lived more practically” (225).  That was just how I felt when I decided not to pursue the Job.  The truth is, even if the academy had bent over backwards to make it possible for me to be a mother and an academic, I might still have made the choice I did.

            But, the academy wasn’t going to do anything of the sort.  Let’s be honest: only the very best and very brightest gets tenure track jobs in schools located in actual cities.  Everyone wants to be in Boston.  Duh.  There was no fucking way I was going to get to choose to live somewhere my husband could actually find a job.  And all the talk these days in the academy about helping “trailing spouses”?  They mean other academics.  They can’t do crap to change the fact that there are no jobs in the middle of nowhere for partners who are not academics.  Nor can they change the fact that there are fewer and fewer jobs in the humanities or that some of us just lost interest in the circle-jerk of academic writing.

            Mama Ph.D. tells the story of why academia is such a forbidding zone for mothers, but it also opens up a discussion that is much larger.  Because, unless two people are employed by the same company, two-career families are bound to bump up against the reality of geography, crazy work-hours, and very difficult choices.

            I opted out.  I chose my husband’s considerably more certain career with an actual salary over chasing some dream I wasn’t sure I wanted.  I chose family over career.  I’ll tell you a little secret: I am not really all that pissed off about it.  I get it.  I got some serious benefits from having kids and choosing to devote time to them.  And some people get other benefits from not having kids or from putting their careers first. 

            We can and should work hard to make the workplace more accepting of families, and that same male professor should be burned in effigy for once saying of a colleague, “She won’t want to be Chair of the department.  She just had a baby.”  Yes, there are serious issues in academia – like so many other professions – and it can certainly do better at making space for parents who want to be present to their children.  However, there are some realities that cannot be changed, unless you have a plan to move Appalachian State to the middle of Manhattan.

            And we all live with regrets.  Just ask Jennifer Cognard-Black.

Learning to Read: Musing Monday

For my first Musing Monday, I would have liked to have written something new, but I covered this topic a couple of years ago at my other place, so here it is, slightly edited.  The topic is: Do you remember how you developed a love for reading? Was it from a particular person, or person(s)? Do you remember any books that you read, or were read to  you, as a young child? My answer:

On my fourth birthday, my aunt gave me the perfect present.  I have had thirty-five birthdays, and no present has yet outstripped what my aunt gave me the year I turned four (unless you count Zachary, who was born three weeks before my thirty-first birthday or Lilah, born two days before my thirty-fifth). 

The year I turned four, my aunt called to ask what I wanted for my birthday.  My answer was swift and certain.  “Dorothy.”  Then, my sister got on the phone to translate.  A few weeks later, it arrived.  It was faux leather-bound with gold leaf.  Throughout the text, there were color illustrations, the bold yellow of the brick road and the intense red of the poppies only slightly less enchanting than that dress on Glinda. 

Oh, the dress on Glinda.

I wanted it read to me all the time.  Anyone who had advanced beyond a rudimentary understanding of the alphabet was conscripted to sound out a chapter or two.  Over and over, until, within a month or two, I had pretty much memorized the entire book.  I suppose I had probably already begun to read, but I clearly remember pairing the words I knew in my head with the words I saw on the page and so learning to read from The Wizard of Oz. 

Once I could read, things got a little crazy.  Books, magazines, newspapers, words I did not understand, concepts I could not process.  Shampoo bottles, delivery trucks, billboards.  I was addicted, and there were fixes everywhere.

It was just in the nick of time.  A year later, my father remarried.  My stepmother took over the household, and I read.  She started hitting us, and I read.  She starved us; I read.  She took away my clothes, our food, our father; I read.  When the leisure time disappeared, I read at school or while dusting the books. 

Through the step-mother years, I let myself go with Beverly Cleary.  Through the years with my grandparents, with Judy Blume and Isaac Bashevis Singer.  Through the Aunt years, with Tennessee Williams, Jane Austin, Douglas Adams, Sidney Sheldon, and Margaret Mitchell.  Through flight delays, bad boyfriends, skipped classes, social failures.  Waiting for the fry cook to get my order up, sitting in waiting rooms, dripping with sweat on the elliptical.  Through Octavia Butler, James Baldwin, Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, and one short fling with James Joyce (long book, short fling).  Through fertility treatment, pregnancy, breastfeeding.

Reading is portable, good for the soul, and as cheap as a library card, but it is bad for the eyes. Every year, my prescription got worse, till the optometrist had to call in reinforcements each time I lost a contact lens.  I couldn’t see my own feet in the shower, but I was sure ready for the verbal section on all those standardized tests.

My children, too, seem to have learned there is incredible comfort in books.  One day, I left toddler Benjamin along in the living room.  After a few minutes, I got a little nervous, because there was no banging, shouting, or squealing going on.  I peeked my head back in.  My little 14 month old was sitting in the middle of the floor with “Quack Quack,” a book he adored due to his waterfowl obsession.  He had it open to the page with the sheep and was reading it to himself.  “Baaaaah,” he said softly.

I quietly backed out of the room.  No one likes to be disturbed in the middle of a good book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Apologies in advance; I cannot figure out how to get my Mac to put an accent over the letter I.

            Junot Diaz is all about the footnotes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, because his narrator would not think of sending his readers out to face the world without his rather unique approach to Dominican history.  He informs us of important bits of information such as the fact that the dictator, Trujillo, was “also known as “El Jefe, The Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface” (2).  Good to know. 

            These historical tidbits become important to the text, as really all good footnotes are, or they wouldn’t be there in the first place.  What first read as amusing asides eventually weave into the plot, and a reader would be ill-advised to skip any of the footnotes.  Plus, they are funny as hell.  The narrator has a complex voice, part street colloquial, part Spanish, part SAT words.  A fly kid who uses words like “bitches” to refer to women partly ironically, partly seriously, and partly ironically about being part ironic and part serious.  The footnotes do heavy lifting to construct the layers of this voice, setting up his authority as a dude telling the truth with the facts to back him up, but doing so while farting in the direction of uptight historians who probably have poles up their asses.

            My favorite footnote comes a third of the way through the text.  It is worth quoting in full:

In my first draft, Samana was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie, resident expert on all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches in Jarabacoa.  Beautiful rivers but no beaches.  Leionie was also the one who informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, “GhettoNerd at the End of the World”) wasn’t popularized until the late eighties, early nineties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much.  Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me! 132

Now, what are we supposed to do with a narrator who sets himself up with all sorts of gossipy historical footnotes only to blithely undercut himself like that?  We throw up our hands and settle in for the ride, is what.

            One hundred and fifty pages later, in the text, we get “A Note From Your Author,” shortly after he introduces a the character Ybon, an aging protitute:

I know what Negroes are going to say.  Look, he’s writing Suburban Tropical now.  A puta and she’s not an underage snort-addicted mess.  Not believable.  Should I go down to the Feria and pick me up a more representative model?  Would it be better if I turned Ybon into this other puta I know, Jahyra, a friend and a neighbor in Villa Juana, who still lives in one of those old-style pink wooden houses with the zinc roof? … But then I’d be lying.  I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi into the mix, but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 284-5

In other words, he’s totally toying with us, people.  It’s not one of those annoying books that forever reminds you that the narrator is unreliable.  No, it’s a book that amuses itself with the fact that the narrator is unreliable.

            This is not to say that the book is flighty.  It is a serious book, but it has a sense of humor about itself.  The footnotes, for example, are real notes, with actual helpful information, but they are also ironic because they are written in a decidedly un-academic voice, but you never get the sense that Diaz is admiring his own irony.  Rather, he is wry about his wryness. 

            There is, of course, much more that I could write about in this book; those Pulitzer people knew what they were doing with this one.  But, so much has already been written by other people, and if you actually haven’t read this one yet, I don’t want to include any spoilers.  That’s going to be a running theme around here – I am going to talk about books in a way that doesn’t negate the need for you to read them if, by some chance, your teacher is planning a reading quiz tomorrow morning.