Everyday I Write the Book

"Revolutionary Road"

I read in IMDB's daily news report that Titanic co-stars Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio will reunite in a movie adaptation of Richard Yates' 1950s novel Revolutionary Road. I hadn't heard of this book before, so I did a little research.

Revolutionary Road is one of Time magazine's Top 100 novels of all time.  Here's how Time describes it:

We think of Updike and Cheever as the masters of postwar American suburbia, of its sunlit euphorias and its drunken discontents. Add Yates to the master list, just subtract the euphorias. His great novel is a bitterly funny and bitterly unfunny account of lethal disappointment in the Connecticut suburbs in 1955. When they were single and in love, Frank and April Wheeler thought of themselves as different—smarter, hipper, more alive. Then comes marriage and the steamroller of daily existence—his job for a big company, her wife-and-motherhood. The rewards of the material life seem like small compensation for the daily blows to the ego, which eventually detonate their lives. This may sound like a common predicament, but Yates gives it uncommon force. Though none of his six other novels enjoys the enduring prestige of this one, it doesn't matter. If Revolutionary Road doesn't make him an immortal, immortality isn't worth having.

On Wikipedia, I found this statement from RIchard Yates:

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs — a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the Joe McCarthy witchhunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that — felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit — and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.

Kristen over at Books for Breakfast read Revolutionary Road earlier this month as part of her goal to read the Time Top 100, and here's what she had to say:

Happy suburbanites Frank and April Wheeler pretend to buck conformity and plan on leaving their 1950s life of safety and security for an unknown adventure in Paris. Or Europe. Someplace. Just anywhere but there, where lawns must be mowed perfectly and friends dance with each other's wives.

Not. Gonna. Happen. Of course. Or there would be no point to this tale.

Though there are some similarities to An American Tragedy, this book is much cleaner, its language like vodka instead of moonshine.

But this isn't a challenged/banned book? Whuut? I am confused by the definition, then, of what is needed to be considered a challenged/banned book.

Lovely work, amazing imagery. It's the first one I've truly liked in a while, and that feels good.

Now I want to read this book. Before the movie comes out.

"The Crimson Portrait"

I know I don't usually write about books about war or historical fiction, but here's one to throw into the mix. The Crimson Portrait, by Jody Shields, has gotten some decent reviews and might merit a little reading outside my comfort zone. 

It's the story of a pastoral estate in England that is transformed into a hospital for soldiers whose faces have become disfigured during World War I.  The owner of the estate was a soldier who lost his life in the war, and his wish was for his widow to use the estate to help other soldiers with terrible facial injuries.  The plot centers around his widow and her relationship with one of those soldiers, as well as the main doctor in charge of rehabilitating the wounded men.

According to The Washington Post:

The Crimson Portrait is not really a hospital drama (of which we have plenty anyway) but more a meditation on healing (of which we have far too little). Although Shields's elegant prose keeps it from ever growing dull, the plot progresses about as quickly as a skin graft fuses. There are a few shocking surprises and outbursts, but for long stretches there's no apparent forward momentum as McCleary contemplates how to encourage a face to regenerate, how to join "two wet surfaces . . . or mesh snowflakes." Shields moves from one subtle character to another, carefully turning over moments of muffled agony or muted desire. Even rare passages of dialogue seem purposely stilted and mannered to emphasize the stillness of the hospital, the endless process of waiting.

A summary of this unpleasant plot risks scaring away thoughtful readers (or mistakenly attracting ghoulish ones), but anyone interested in the profound issues Shields raises should look at The Crimson Portrait. Without a false line, she's managed to write beautifully about what, on the surface, seems too hideous to contemplate.

OK, so it's not a light read.

The Seattle Times says, "The book falters occasionally when its prose becomes overwritten and overwrought. It's at its best when Shields trusts her gift for unadorned and precise language — thankfully, that's most of the time. In particular, she writes intelligent, credible dialogue and provides fascinating medical details — graphic but not repellent. The author also has a gift for describing her characters' sharp observations."

From USA Today: "Shields deftly uses facial deformities as a literary device to explore questions of identify, memory, self-esteem and social acceptance.  This very literary novel also ponders the sometimes insurmountable levels of grief and suffering brought on by war. There's nothing uplifting in this novel, but that shouldn't keep readers away. It's beautifully presented and, as in Shields' first novel, The Fig Eater, shimmers with her wonderfully descriptive and poetic style."

Anyone want to weigh in on Jody Shields?

Tom Perrotta's Book Picks

I love The Week. If you haven't heard of it before, it's a weekly magazine that collects notable stories from the week's newspapers, magazines, etc. into one place. So if you don't have a lot of time -- and who does? -- you can read the best of the week's offerings quickly, in one place.

The Week features book reviews as well -- usually reprinting three major book reviews, a digest of recent book reviews in a particular category (memoir, sc-fi, debut novels, etc), and - my favorite - a spotlight on a particular author and his or her favorite books. A few weeks ago, they featured Tom Perrotta (whom I have blogged about here and here) and his favorite books.  An interesting list - The Great Gatsby, Our Kind, The Keep, Lost in the City - and the one I am most likely to read: This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff.

This Boy's Life is one of those books I have seen around but never really focused on. Here's what Tom Perrotta said about it:

A contemporary masterpiece. Wolff has written an inspiring and heartbreaking story about the way we transform our lives through the lies we tell to and about ourselves.  A sly moral defense of fiction as a survival mechanism, this also happens to be one of the funniest books I've ever read.

From Amazon:

Fiction writer Tobias Wolff electrified critics with his scarifying 1989 memoir, which many deemed as notable for its artful structure and finely wrought prose as for the events it describes. The story is pretty grim: Teenaged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up--not bad training for a writer-to-be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that most readers come away exhilarated rather than depressed.

The book, which was released in 1989, was made into a movie in 1993 starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.

Has anyone read This Boy's Life? Worth it?

"Love is a Mix Tape"

Ok, I was intrigued off the bat because of this book's title: Love is a Mix Tape. As someone who has spent her life making mix tapes, CDs and, now, playlists, I was curious as to what this book was about.

Turns out it's a well-reviewed memoir by Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield about his relationship with his wife, who died suddenly at age 31.  From the Village Voice:

Sheffield writes about their life together with such excitement that her death never looms; its inevitability fades. We meet Sheffield as an awkward kid in Boston and follow him through high school and college. When he encounters Crist, they're both grad students in Charlottesville, Virginia. We see them fall in love and get married and go on road trips and argue and watch TV. The boy-meets-girl stuff might not be anything new, but Sheffield tells the old story with an impressionistic warmth. And so when she dies, it's a sudden jerk out of a hazy dream. It's a hard book to finish.

Sheffield builds his story around 15 mix tapes that he and Renée made. The device would be insufferably precious in almost any other writer's hands. But Sheffield is a music critic (as was Crist), and the constant talk of music never feels like a self-conscious distancing technique; it's the prism through which the two saw the world. Sheffield's love for Renée and for music are so tightly intertwined that it's a wonder he was still able to listen to anything after she died. But he kept all those old tapes, and has built an enormously moving book out of them.

I love this quote from Sheffield:  "Every fan makes [mix tapes]. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life."

The Denver Post says: "As if there was any question, this is Renee's book. Sure, Love Is a Mix Tape also touches on Sheffield's early years making mix tapes for school dances and his current life as a Rolling Stone contributing editor who spends his nights at rock clubs holding hands with someone not Renee. It's a loving homage to an extraordinary relationship, and Sheffield obviously took a great deal of time, nuance, love and care in crafting this, his greatest mix tape yet." 

However, the review also says, "Sheffield's post-Renee depression is drawn out to the point of exhaustion. The sadness is overwhelming, and even the jaded will sympathize with him. But the tone isn't the problem. The length is. Just as Renee emphasized life, this book should spend more time on the living, love and lives that Sheffield is so adept at capturing." So the book is not without its flaws.

Here is a blog post on Love is a Mix Tape from the Bad Muse Blog.

"Lost City Radio"

Auction. Is. Over.

Which means... I can blog again! Thank god. Sorry for the lapse in posts... it was unavoidable. But I am back and hopefully better than ever.

Today's pick is Lost City Radio, a book by Daniel Alarcon that I've read a few reviews of this year.  It is set in a nameless Latin American country in the aftermath of a civil war.  The main character, Norma, hosts a weekly radio show in which she reads the names of people who have disappeared during the war, in the hopes that they can be reconnected with their families. She herself has lost her husband, and her program is as much therapeutic for her as it is an attempt to find him. Through her program, Norma meets a young orphaned boy from a distant village who hopes that she will be able to help him find some of his family, including a father whose identity he does not know.  From him, Norma uncovers some clues as to her own husband's fate, and she travels with him to his village to try to learn more.

The book is as much about Norma and the boy's personal losses as it is about the effects of war and the politics of Latin America, "the existential suffering of Third World political misery, and the ordinary dangers of middle-class life under a system in which values float without notice from democracy to autocracy and back again," according to The San Francisco Chronicle, which also calls the book "shadowy and brilliant."

From The Washington Post:

These are all interesting and appealing characters who emerge as discrete human beings rather than mere cardboard representations of certain inescapable Latin American social and political realities. Still, the dominant character in the novel is not its protagonist, Norma, but the war itself. Its malign effects are felt everywhere, from the anonymous hamlets of the jungle and mountains to the wealthy neighborhoods of the capital and its sprawling barrios, acre upon acre of shacks steadily climbing up the bleak hills surrounding the city as more and more people flee there from the beautiful but violent countryside.

Here are some excerpts from online/blog reviews of the book:

From Book Closet: "Not very often do you come across a story as elegant and impressive as Lost City Radio and this book was a delightful read. Don't miss it!"

From the KQED website (public radio station in San Francisco): "I got a few odd sidelong glances from my fellow coffee shop patrons the other morning. But I couldn't blame them. I was, after all, hunched over a book and alternately biting my lip, putting a hand over my mouth, and even, in the final few pages, wiping stray tears from the corners of my eyes. I am not usually such an emotionally demonstrative reader, but then again, not every novel is Daniel Alarcón's Lost City Radio, a book so insanely good that I've been forcing it on everyone I know."

From Illiterati: "Go out and get it, and then come back here and tell me how much you loved it, because you will."

Have any EDIWTB readers read Lost City Radio yet?

Fiction vs Non Fiction

First, I am sorry for the long delay in posting.  I have only four dreaded words to explain my absence: nursery school auction database. Let's just say that I made a very, very bad decision a few months ago when I signed up to do the database, figuring I could do it at night while watching TV. Needless to say, I won't be signing up to do it again next year.

My topic today is fiction vs. non-fiction.  Bottom line is that I simply can't get into non-fiction the way I can with fiction. I have tried on multiple occasions over the last several months to get hooked on one non-fiction book or another, only to find each time that they just didn't grab me the way fiction, even average fiction, does.  Now, these are not "good for you" books that I thought I *should* read, like Obama's book or one on current events or politics. No, these are books on topics that really interest me, such as Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live and One Train Later, Andy Summers' memoir.  (To be fair, I haven't allowed myself to skip ahead to the part where Andy joins The Police; that would surely raise my enjoyment level of the book).  I even started a book I blogged about here called Money Changes Everything. It's a good book about a topic that interests me - yet, it sits unfinished, on my nightstand, next to the SNL and Andy Summers books.

What's the deal? Why can't I get into non-fiction? What is it about fiction that sucks me in? Perhaps it's the fiction writer's ability to create perfect pacing, suspense and satisfying endings.  Perhaps I just love the escape of reading fiction, knowing that the characters don't really exist.  Perhaps my mind is simplistic and plot-driven and prefers to follow stories rather than facts.  Whatever the reason, I know myself - and I know that I am just not satisfied when I am not in the middle of some novel.

Does anyone else feel this way? Is it, as I have heard, a male-female thing?