Everyday I Write the Book

"Free Food For Millionaires"

From the Politics & Prose Bookstore (Washington DC) weekly newsletter comes this review of a new book called Free Food For Millionaires:

Min Jin Lee, in her first novel, paints a vast New York landscape that brings to mind Bonfire of the Vanities, updated 20 years. The young graduates of the “best” universities and business schools are scrambling up the ladder.

But Lee’s story is very much one of the gap between the striving immigrant parents and their children. The children are straddling the immigrant world and the cool New York City scene. Casey Han’s parents manage a dry cleaning establishment and send their two daughters into the Ivy League. Casey, unlike her compliant younger sister Tina, is full of ambivalence.

She wants success but is unable to choose a profession. She wants to reserve the right to be critical but needs support and sympathy. She feels comfortable among Koreans but wants to belong to the wider American society.

There is fantastic energy in this book about Casey’s search for her place. Casey is at once exasperating and endearing. The jacket copy compares Lee with early Philip Roth, and I think it’s an interesting and apt comparison.

Here's an excerpt from a USA Today review as well:

As much as this is an immigrant story, it's also an American story full of class struggle, rugged individualism, social status and above all, the money haves and have-nots. Most of all it's an epic meditation on love, both familial and romantic.

Lee offers us love in all its tenacious and painful glory. Free Food is littered with betrayals, illicit sex, numerous levels of unfaithfulness, surprise twists and unexpected turns of the heart.

If an author is compared to Philip Roth and to Bonfire of the Vanities, she's probably worth noticing...

"Drives Like A Dream" Doesn't Read Like One

I just finished Porter Shreve's Drives Like A Dream. It's the story of a woman in her early sixties whose three grown children have moved away from home, and whose ex-husband remarries a younger woman.  The book opens when her children have returned home for the weekend to attend their dad's wedding.  After they leave, she meets a man at a museum and starts an email correspondence with him, and then decides she needs to get her children's attention, so she inflates the importance of the relationship with her email friend and worries them enough that they come home, in turn, to check up on her.

I wanted to like the book, for a few reasons. Porter Shreve is a good writer. The book is set in Detroit, the city where my parents grew up and lately, my home away from home. The main character writes about cars, and specifically about GM, the company that is the reason that Detroit is my home away from home. So I enjoyed the GM references and the little insights about Detroit.

In the end, though, the book wasn't very good. First, the characters are kind of silly, especially the main character. (This became even more apparent to me when I typed the first paragraph, above -- trying to summarize what the book was about made me realize how silly the plot was.) Second, I was annoyed by the fact that the characters always say exactly what they feel. There is no subtlety, no confidence on the part of author that his readers will understand what's motivating the characters if he doesn't say exactly what they are thinking. 

One user review on Amazon summed this book up perfectly:

I loved the premise of this book - linking the downfall of a city and industry to the downfall of a family entrenched in its history. The execution could have been much better, though. It was a good idea and worked in the beginning. Having spent time in Detroit, I liked the settings. Shreve did a decent job of bringing the city to life on the pages. When I'm in Royal Oak and downtown next month, I know I'll be looking for sights mentioned in the book.

The characters were shallow, barely more than cliches. In the beginning I liked Lydia and sympathized with her, but quickly lost patience for the far-fetched lies she created. She became as unlikeable as her wishy-washy ex-husband and immature, bratty daughter. As for her sons, they were little more than character sketches that didn't illicit much in the way of emotional connection.

And the ending? Please. That was one of the most sloppy, lazy endings I have ever read. The ending ruined the whole experience for me. I didn't get the feeling that the characters learned much from their experience.

I wanted to like this book. Really, I did.

(By the way, the person who wrote that review has a cool blog and writes often about books she's read. This post about the books she read in 2006 has a lot of books that I have talked about on this blog too.)

I'd skip Drives Like A Dream.

Brown Alumna Author Andrea Seigel

One place I like to learn about books is in my college's alumni magazine. I often discover books I probably wouldn't otherwise have come across if the author hadn't gone to Brown.

In the May/June issue of the Brown Alumni Magazine, I read about Andrea Seigel's new book, To Feel Stuff. (Once again, irritating - she's much younger than I am: Class of 2001). The book is about a young woman who suffers through several illnesses in succession, becoming so sick that she literally moves into the Brown infirmary.  The story is told from three points of view: her doctor's, and hers and that of another student with whom she corresponds and falls in love.

From Amazon:

Seigel's sophomore effort is a scattershot case study in illness, love and the unexplained. Elodie Harrington is an undergraduate at Brown University who lives in the college infirmary, suffering from a series of unrelated illnesses "piggybacked one upon another," so that she never fully recovers. Her story is told from three points of view—Dr. Mark Kirschling's account of her confounding symptoms in the Journal of Parapsychology and letters between Elodie and Chester Hunter III, a fellow undergrad she meets in the infirmary. Though the structure is a bit contrived (the letters and journal article are filled with dialogue), each section picks up with little repetition. As Chester mends and Elodie get sicker, it becomes clear that their blossoming love is threatened by the specter of health. It doesn't all hold up to close scrutiny, but Seigel has crafted believable characters to anchor the fantastical circumstances, and it's a testament to her ability to captivate that the book ends at what feels like just the beginning.

This is Seigel's second book. Her first, Like the Red Panda, came out in 2004, and is about a disaffected high school senior bent on killing herelf before arriving at Princeton at the end of the summer. Amazon's site calls it "astute, confident and keenly articulated," and "bleak but sharply humorous, and even redemptive."  There are a lot of blog reviews of this book out there too - see here and here.

Here is Andrea Seigel's oddly compelling blog.

Thanks, Brown Alumni Magazine.

"Evening": The Movie

Exciting news this summer: one of my all-time favorite books, Evening, is being released as a movie in late June.

Evening, by Susan Minot, is one woman's look back on her life from her dwindling dying days. As Ann Lord passes in and out of consciousness, visitors and keepsakes trigger memories of different points in her life -- and her various romances.  Sometimes her memories are clear; sometimes they rush back in fragments and blurs. It is a beautiful, sad novel, full of wistfulness and passion. I absolutely loved it.

The movie comes out on June 29 and stars Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, Toni Collette, Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson, and Vanesssa Redgrave.  I can't wait to see it and will definitely report back after I do. I hope I am not disappointed.

"Black & White"

Just in time for Mother's Day: Black & White, by Dani Shapiro.

I read about this book in The Washington Post on Tuesday. It's the story of Clara, the grown daughter of a famous photographer named Ruth Dunne.  Ruth coerced her daughter into appearing in her photos from ages 3-14, and Clara has permanent scars from the experience.  She has completely distanced herself from her mother, severing ties by moving away and not telling her own young daughter a word about her childhood.

As the book opens, Clara learns from her sister that Ruth is dying, and the novel is the story of how Clara comes to terms with her dying mother as well as her own relationship with her daughter. Here are some excerpts from the Post review:

After setting herself up for so much potential failure, Shapiro does something rather thrilling with her story: She gets it just right.

After 14 silent years, there isn't a trace of sentimentality in the reunion of Ruth and Clara. Instead, Clara becomes entangled convincingly in a snare of complex emotions: anger, guilt, fear, regret and, most painful of all, inescapable devotion. Ruth is a surprisingly sympathetic character whose love for her daughters, while ruinous, also seems genuine.

It seems natural rather than forced that Clara turns abruptly contrite during Ruth's swift decline, and returns to Maine to fetch Sammy to New York for a last-minute introduction. A scene at this point perfectly displays Shapiro's commanding craftsmanship: Ruth, with the demonic burst of energy that often possesses end-stage cancer patients, insists on taking Clara and Sammy gallery-hopping through Chelsea. Funny and tragic, the episode expertly describes the milieu through which Ruth has glided like an empress all her life, at the same time taking stock of Clara's dread and Sammy's childish ennui. It's a portrait in three dimensions that beautifully captures both the stark black-and-white urgency of the moment and a range of subtler, softer shades of gray.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1.

I've always wanted to read Shapiro's Family History, but never have. Any Dani Shapiro fans out there?

Guest Review: "Breakable You"

Back in January, I posted about a book called Breakable You by Brian Morton. My colleague Len V. read the book (in about an hour, it seems) over the weekend and wrote up a guest review for EDIWTB. Thanks, Len!

Here's the review:

Brian Morton’s Breakable You is one of those books I couldn’t put down.  The characters are engaging, even though they’d really irritate me if they were my friends.  I found myself wanting to know more about them and how this piece of their stories would end.

I loved how well Morton drew each character, particularly the ways he lets us see each character’s blind spots by having other characters relate the same events from different perspectives.

Since my mind works in this way, I also spent some time looking at the metaphorical meaning of the title for each character and came away amazed to see how close each of them (and any of us for that matter) are to breaking at any given moment.  The most interesting stories often seem to come right at the line between breaking and not—like the most profound events in our lives.

I have two criticisms of the book. 

First, a major, life-altering event happens in the novel...and it couldn’t have been more obvious what was coming.  That said, the chapter containing that event was well-written and can easily be read as a metaphor for the lives of each of the characters.  (Me and the metaphor again—what’s that about?)

Second, this novel suffers from the same plague that afflicts much contemporary fiction: a pat, somewhat trite and all-too-quickly wrapped up ending.  I can’t decide if this type of ending is worse than the other very common type of ending—no ending at all.  I've read a few books that seem to end with nothing more than a period, and that irritates me to no end.

I found myself not wanting to, and not being able to, put the book down, and I was bummed to get to the end.  I definitely recommend Breakable You, and I can’t wait to get to Morton’s A Window Across the River.

"I Love You Beth Cooper"

In the May/June Issue of Blueprint magazine, there are recommendations for "For The Bedside Table" books and "For the Beach Weekend" books. Here's one for the beach weekend - I'll turn to more serious fare later.

The book is I Love You, Beth Cooper, by Larry Doyle, who has written for "The Simpsons" as well as penned a number of screenplays that have made it to theaters. In it, the main character, a smart but dorky high school valedictorian, confesses his love for a popular cheerleader in his graduation speech. Later, she shows up at his graduation party, and what follows is a coming-of-age story with stock high school characters who turn out to be more complex than they initally seemed.

Blueprint calls it "hilarious, suspenseful and a little good-kind-of-sad," and "a mashup of John Hughes movies, notes on white-bred suburbia, and a plausibly implausible plot." [John Hughes movies? I'm in.]

Larry Doyle has a blog, and you can read a bunch of good reviews of this book here and at the book's website.  You can also read the whole first chapter of the book if you click on "Read an Excerpt" at the bottom of the home page of the website.

The book hits stores on Tuesday so I doubt anyone out there has read it yet. I may request a review copy and will let you you know if I read it.