Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
Chronicle Books, 1996
Category: Biography

The books I like best are all about people, places, cultures that are far removed from my own. This explains why most of what I read is speculative fiction–you cannot get farther away than imagined worlds–but it also means that I love historical fiction, hard science, and travel memoirs. Traveling through literature is satisfying in a different way than traveling for real; you miss out on actually being there, but you also get to see the world distilled through someone else’s eyes, free from the little annoyances of being in an alien place that can ruin your experience. Like Peter Mayle settling in Provence, Frances Mayes came to Tuscany and became caught up in the place, suggesting that each of us has a home of the heart where, if we are lucky, we’ll be able to live.

This book is not a true biography or even a travel book, but it is the kind of memoir that becomes biography just by being an accurate depiction of events. Fresh from a failed marriage “that was never supposed to fail” Mayes has just begun finding herself in a new life, with a new companion, when she buys this abandoned villa in Italy and sets about the awesome task of repairing it. As she tells of each new development, each moment in her new life, Mayes also reveals the person she is becoming, her development paralleling subtly the rebuilding of the house. She and Ed, who married in 1998 (and I mention this because she fascinatingly never refers to him by any relational term like “boyfriend” or “life partner”), put a lot of themselves into the work, mostly because of the cost, but in the end because it’s unimaginable not to. At one point Mayes compares the heavy lifting of clearing stones to the aerobic workouts she does back at “home” in California. Both build the body but only one is actually fun. I started imagining myself clearing out the small patch of garden at the side of my house or actually learning how to care for the rosebushes, which dangle forlorn dried-up pods, or buds, or something leftover from last summer at the tips of their branches. Another disadvantage to traveling through literature is the horrible dissociative shock when you step back into reality and it has thorns.

This is also not a book to read when you are on a diet, particularly a low-carb diet. Why do southern Europeans love their food so much? The only times I’ve ever wished my religion didn’t forbid wine is in reading about French and Italian cuisine, where the great variety of wines seems not to exist for the sake of intoxication but as an integral part of the meal; I get the sense that refusing the bottle the waiter brings to the table is sort of like wanting your food served without tomatoes, or something like that. On the other hand, it’s very clear that traditional Tuscan cuisine is the sort of thing I could enjoy cooking, because it is so simple. You people who love to cook and refer to certain recipes as “simple” often don’t remember that you’re comparing that recipe to something that takes ten hours and a dozen reductions. “Simple,” from my perspective, is the recipe for cold tomato soup: chopped basil and tomatoes stirred into chicken stock and refrigerated. Mayes’s travels throughout the countryside include frequent descriptions of the places she and Ed stop to eat and how basic and unvaried the menus are (“menu” in this case meaning “what the lady of the house decided to make that day”). I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Mayes is, at heart, a poet, and I think prose written by poets is always either unbearably purple or beautifully right. Mayes’s writing falls into the last category. It even infected me, not a poet of anything beyond limericks or fake haiku, and I can feel even now how my syntax in this review is altered because of it. I can heartily recommend this book to a wide variety of readers–lovers of Italy, lovers of good food, lovers of poetry, but most especially to those who find themselves at a point in life that is not so much a crossroads as a trackless wood.

The Woman in White  by Wilkie Collins
First published 1860
Category: Classic

Wilkie Collins’ novels are considered the forerunners of today’s mystery and detective novels.  What this usually means to the modern reader is a book that seems dull, cliched, with an easy to predict plot–because all the mysteries we’re used to have developed beyond the originals, and what was new and fresh a century and more ago has now been done to death.  This is definitely not the case with The Woman in White.  It’s suspenseful and gripping and had me unable to stop reading until all its secrets were revealed.

This is another one of those semi-epistolary novels of the 19th century–a style I love to see reconceived in the 20th and 21st.  The conceit is actually more of a collection of testimonies that taken as a whole recount a very strange story.  The main narrator, Walter Hartright, mentions occasionally how he managed to get verbatim records from the different people who tell the story, including how one of the first chronologically was the last he took down.  It’s a very effective conceit that allows for different perspectives without stretching belief.

The story itself verges on the Gothic just enough to make it creepy, but not totally unbelievable.  Hartright is engaged as a “drawing-master” for two young women, half-sisters, who live at the Limmeridge estate with their sort-of guardian, Mr. Fairlie.  Marian Halcombe is dark, unattractive in face, and poor; Laura Fairlie is fair, beautiful, and an heiress.  Marian is the clever one, and Laura is sweet and innocent.  Guess who Hartright falls in love with?  That’s right.  Jane Austen had something to say about this–about how an unaccountable bias toward a pretty face often leaves a man married to a very silly woman–but Laura is at least an honorable, decent girl. Unfortunately, she’s engaged to someone else, and Hartright is too poor to marry her anyway, so tragedy ensues.  Complicating matters is the occasional appearance and disappearance of the “woman in white,” the mentally unstable Anne Catherick, whose instability is either more or less than we realize, and who has a remarkable resemblance to Laura Fairlie.

That’s the setup.  I would be doing you a serious disservice (see, Collins’s prose has infected me!) if I said anything else about the plot, because from this point it becomes a true mystery.  Who is Anne Catherick?  What Secret does she know about Laura’s fiancee and later husband, Sir Percival Glyde? What power does his strange Italian friend Count Fosco hold over him?  Collins sets things up so there are obvious answers to these questions, but they’re all the wrong ones; and even when you think you know the real answers, you still don’t know the why of anything.

Collins isn’t any better about gender than any man writing in his time.  The book is full of crap about “women’s gentler natures” and even Marian, that strong-minded heroine, says derogatory things about her own sex and their weaknesses. And, of course, Marian’s mannish face and wits condemn her to a life of being her sister’s companion rather than having a family and life of her own.  I wonder only that any intelligent woman of that era could bear the condescension without hauling off and punching someone.  It’s a stark contrast to Bram Stoker, writing barely forty years later, who idealizes his female characters but also allows them strengths they don’t have to apologize for.  Still, I’ve always had a hard time criticizing writers simply for being a product of their environment; I’d like to think that a writer would be able to see past the fog of societal convention, but they’re just human, after all.  And Collins is a Romantic as well as an early Victorian (middle Victorian?), so the overflowing of emotion everyone has is almost as annoying to me as his editorializing about What Women Are Like.

Go read it.  Read The Moonstone, too, for another great example of early detective fiction.  It is, like Dracula, a kind of prose we modern readers are unfamiliar with, but the payoff is worth the struggle.

The Glass Castle  by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 2005
Category: Biography

This book is my worst nightmare.

Not the terrible things Jeannette and her siblings went through, though that’s bad enough.  My worst nightmare is becoming like her parents, those shiftless, selfish, hopeless dreamers whose manias exposed their children to hardships no one should have to face.  They have just enough good characteristics–imagination, independence–to keep them from being completely awful, but those characteristics are so often warped by their selfish natures that it was impossible for me to feel compassion for them, not for more than a page at a time.

The Glass Castle is the story of the author’s childhood, growing up rootless with a couple of iconoclastic parents and her brother and sisters.  Rex Walls was a genius and a drunk who believed his intelligence made him better than everyone around him; he never kept a job for long because he would argue with his bosses or claim that they were part of a vast conspiracy ruled by the Mob.  His passion was to strike it rich by mining gold with a unique invention created by himself, but never actually completed.  Rose Mary Walls was an artist, both a painter and a would-be writer, obsessed with hoarding things and money, always looking for a bargain.  Their children’s young lives in Arizona and California were wonderful and terrible by turns.  I actually admire some of what the parents taught their children about self-reliance and toughness, even as I’m horrified by how they neglected their kids in the name of thriftiness or independence.  The family moved around to avoid debt collectors, packing up in the middle of the night and leaving everything behind.  Jeannette carried a single geode with her for years because it was the only thing she could manage to keep.

Then the family moves to Welch, West Virginia, and the tale becomes truly grim.  Jeannette writes of scavenging in the school garbage cans for her classmates’ discarded lunches because they can’t afford food, of living in a house that was falling apart with a toilet that was just a hole in the ground, of abuse suffered at the hands of her father’s mother, a bitter woman who was likely responsible for some of her son’s eccentricities.  Showers taken haphazardly at the homes of relatives or friends, living on pinto beans for a week because it was cheap, inadequate clothing or heating…the list of physical deprivations goes on.  But what’s worse is the spiritual degradations these children suffered.  Their mom was likely manic-depressive and untreated, their father’s drinking got worse; the children couldn’t count on their parents to support them in any way.

Whatever good qualities Rex and Rose Mary Walls had were completely subsumed in their overwhelming self-centeredness.  They never thought of anything but their own needs.  The scene where Jeannette and her sister find their mother chowing down secretly on an enormous chocolate bar when the kids have been hungry for days sticks with me–the mother sobbing about how she’s a sugar addict and she can’t help herself, as if begging them to forgive her.  Or Jeannette going with her father to "make some money" hustling pool at a dive, which ends with Jeannette almost being gang-raped and her father dismissing her complaints because he "knew she could handle herself."

It’s amazing that three of the four kids made it out not only alive, but came out successful:  oldest sister Lori became an artist, Jeannette went on to be a reporter, and Brian, the only son, became a police officer (an ambition he first realized when he had to call the cops to break up his parents fighting).  Maureen, the youngest, fell apart for a while–I had to go and hug my own exquisite blonde-haired blue-eyed daughter at this point–but even she seems to be pulling her life back together.  And yet I’m angry at those who would point to this story as a success simply because the children didn’t follow in their parents’ grimy footsteps.  What parents do matters.  Just because the Walls siblings made it out alive doesn’t excuse their parents from being complete failures.

I honor Jeannette Walls for being able to love her parents despite their massive failings–for finding a way to make love not mean accepting the horrible things people do.  She was literally scarred for life because of them, and chose to make her life matter instead of using her experiences as an excuse to fail.  Hers is an amazing story, and she is incredibly brave to tell it to the world.

Dracula  by Bram Stoker
First published 1897
Category: Classics

I think the reason I never read this book is that I was so very, very bored by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  I mean, Frankenstein–Dracula–famous monsters–same era–had to be the same, right?  I never examined that assumption even though I knew full well that Mary Shelley was deliberately trying to Make A Point with her novel, hence the high levels of philosophizing.  And, yeah, I read Frankenstein when I was a teenager and still developing as a reader, so maybe I’d like it better now….

Anyway.  This review is about Dracula,  which is thoroughly enjoyable and cleverly written.  I admire the epistolary (is there a word for novels told through journal extracts?) method Stoker uses, which absolutely would have had his contemporary readers on the edge of their seats.  The story of Dracula is so well-known today that much of the suspense Stoker built through the mystery of the Count’s true nature is simply gone, and yet the book retains a high level of creepiness and horror.  Jonathan Harker trapped in the Count’s castle with the ghastly women, the final death of Lucy Westenra, the creeping transformation of Mina Harker…modern horror writers are free to use shockingly graphic details of violence, but Stoker’s quieter, insidious details still send a chill up your neck.  (There’s also the further engagement of the reader in the many, many times you want to reach into the novel and shake Van Helsing and crew by the neck, screaming "MOVE HER TO A WINDOWLESS ROOM!")

What impresses me is the unique regard Stoker has for his female characters, particularly Mina Murray Harker.  She organizes everyone’s records, puts together clues from different sources, and is basically the core of the entire group–Van Helsing gives her the backhanded compliment of having a brain "like a man’s", thank you Victorian sensibilities, and all the men look to her for direction.  Then comes the point where they all decide to protect her by keeping her in the dark about their hunt for Dracula.  It’s a completely unexpected and sexist turn on their parts, and one that directly leads to Mina becoming Dracula’s next victim.  This is where I have a huge amount of respect for Stoker, who uses this plot twist to subtly speak against that sort of reflexive sexism; the men’s attempt to shield Mina through ignorance actually puts her in danger, and not until they change their position are they all able to finally defeat Dracula.  Mina remains the strongest of the bunch, even partially under Dracula’s sway.  In some feminist circles, this portrayal of the feminine divine is considered a particularly nasty form of sexism, but I see Mina’s character as better representative of a rebuke to the prevailing Victorian attitudes about women’s strengths and (more abundantly) weaknesses.  I can see now why Alan Moore made Mina the leader of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the real one, not the movie version) though the novel makes it unlikely that she would have joined under the circumstances that she did.

Very good book.  Very worth reading.  The prose is, naturally, as alien to modern readers as any 19th century novel, but familiarity with the story should make it easier for most people to get past that little stumbling block.  Though I did not read it for Halloween, I did finish it on St. Patrick’s Day, and since Bram Stoker was working in Dublin when Dracula was written, I call that pretty good symbolism anyway.

Flipped  by Wendelin Van Draanen
Knopf, 2001
Category: Young Adult

I’m familiar with Wendelin Van Draanen from her delightful Sammy Keyes mysteries.  Despite being juvenile literature (side note: "Juvenile" in literature is not derogatory; it means books marketed to the 8-12 year age group.  The first Harry Potter books are considered juveniles, and you know how many teens and adults are addicted to those)–anyway, despite the juvenile tag, the Sammy Keyes books are well-suited to readers of any age.  I especially like the characterization and the way in which adults figure into the main character’s life; sometimes the near-mandatory erasure or stupidification of adults in juvenile or YA fiction gets tedious.  (Stupidification is my new word for the day.)

On the other hand, I’ve never read any of Van Draanen’s YA work (YA=books marketed to 12-17 year age group.  I know you were wondering) and you’d be surprised how often this happens to me even with authors I like.  I loved the Kitty Norville books, but did I go out of my way to pick up Carrie Vaughn’s young adult fantasy?  No.  Big fan of the Alcatraz Smedry books, but The Way of Kings languishes unread on someone else’s nightstand…no, wait, that’s because it’s over a thousand pages long.  Never mind.  The point is, often when I enjoy an author’s books in a particular vein, I’m reluctant to see what they do with a different genre or age group.  It’s not all that uncommon for an author to be good at one particular type of story and one only.  What if they suck at the new story type?  I don’t *want* a favorite author to suck.

I shouldn’t have worried.  Flipped is a brilliant, easy to read book that has more substance to it than it seems.  Told in alternating voices, Bryce and Juli grow from children to almost-teens together.  Juli loves Bryce because he is so gorgeous, even as a child, with dark hair and amazing blue eyes; Bryce dislikes Juli because she’s weird, with her loud habits and obvious attraction to him.  Over the course of the novel, Juli learns to see Bryce for who he is–cowardly, shallow, unthinking–and Bryce discovers that Juli’s odd behaviors and strong convictions make her a truly amazing person he would be lucky to call his friend, or more.

The alternating voices are Van Draanen’s first brilliant move.  Bryce tells his story first, and then Juli tells the same event from her perspective, which always has the effect of revealing facts Bryce doesn’t know and how his behavior really appears.  This allows us to see Bryce’s selfish characteristics without completely losing sympathy for him–necessary, since this story is ultimately a romance.  As with the Sammy Keyes books, Van Draanen makes adults a necessary supporting part of the book, particularly Bryce’s grandfather Chet, who sees in Juli the same spark his wife had, and Juli’s father, a landscape painter who goes from being perceived as a layabout to being someone who has sacrificed probably too much for his family.

As easy and entertaining as this is to read, it’s got a level of truth to it that a less skilled author would have tried to hammer home.  By focusing on the story, Van Draanen lets the truth speak through her characters’ actions, which gives Flipped a staying power rarely found in such a non-ponderous book.  Find it, read it, give it to your children, and let them see it for themselves.