Everyday I Write the Book

Elizabeth Strout, "Olive Kitteridge"

OK, I feel old. Some authors that I featured in the earlier days of this blog already have another book out, since the last time I wrote about them. And of course, I still haven't read the first book I discussed.

Back in February 2007, I wrote about Elizabeth Strout's book Abide With Me. I had read and enjoyed an earlier book by Strout called Amy and Isabelle, and thought that Abide With Me also looked good. Well, Strout has a third book out called Olive Kitteridge which is a collection of interconnected stories that, like her other books, takes place in a small New England town.

It was just reviewed by Entertainment Weekly. Here is the review:

The interconnected stories in Elizabeth Strout's new book, Olive Kitteridge, follow small-town Maine folk, particularly the stolid, blunt schoolteacher of the title and her husband, Henry, the amiable local druggist. The tales meander with them through the years, weathering their attractions to other people; the adolescence and marriage of their son, Christopher; and finally Henry's illness.

Sometimes the couple are at the center of the action; at other times, they hover on the fringes. Strout, thrifty as any Down Easter, conveys their marriage in the sparest language possible. When Henry wants to invite Denise, his young employee, for dinner, Olive tells him, ''Not keen on it.'' But when he does so anyway — he has a crush on her — the tenuousness of their marriage surfaces in this exchange: ''For dessert they were each handed a blue bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream sliding in its center. 'Vanilla's my favorite,' Denise said. 'Is it,' said Olive. 'Mine, too,' Henry Kitteridge said.''

Through all her passive aggression, Olive emerges as an opinionated and often sad woman who imagines her own depression as ''a thing inside me...sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.'' Her father committed suicide, and now Christopher suffers the same dark moodiness. The scene at his wedding, when Olive overhears the bride and her mother denigrating her dress, just might break your heart. Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch. A

Any Strout readers out there?

Q&A with Lionel Shriver, author of "The Post-Birthday World"

A few weeks ago, EDIWTB held its second online book club, on Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World.  Lionel was kind enough to respond to some EDIWTB reader questions. Personally, I found these very satisfying and a lot of fun to read. Thank you. Lionel!

Here are the questions and answers:

1. Why did you choose to use major world events such as the death of Princess Diana and 9/11 as benchmarks within the story? Were they to give readers a frame of reference, or to show that even our reaction to big events are colored by the choices we've made?

Major world events punctuate one’s personal life, even if they may take place in the background.  My own experience of the world is always influenced by what’s happening in the newspaper.  This novel is set in a specific set of years.  Any realistic novel covering 1997 in Britain surely has to acknowledge the death of Diana.  Any realistic novel covering 2001 anywhere in the world surely has to acknowledge 9/11.

Otherwise, yes, I found these two events useful in illuminating the different ways that the two men deal with them.  Irina’s experience of world events—the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, for example—is heavily affected by whom she’s in love with.

2. Children and motherhood play a very small role in this book – in the Ramsey scenario, Irina has a miscarriage, and in the Lawrence scenario, the couple is infertile.  Neither one of these developments seems to bother Irina particularly.  My question is – did you choose not to bring children into the plot in order to make both the relationships and the ethical choices less complicated? Or did you simply want Irina not to be a mother?

Two reasons: structurally, I wanted to bring the two parallel worlds together at the end.  If one of these relationships produced a child, the two worlds would never come together.  If they both produced children, these would be different children, and again the worlds could never come together.  So I needed to devise two different routes to the same result.

Second reason?  My last book was We Need to Talk About Kevin.  I have done exhaustive—and exhausting—publicity for that novel since 2003.  That novel took apart motherhood in forensic detail.  The very last topic I had any interest in writing about was motherhood.

3. I read a review of the book that suggests that your ending shows that you have a preference for one of Irina’s choices over the other. Is that true? Do you admit to having a "favorite" Irina?

Don’t believe reviews.  No, I really don’t have a preference for one of these men over the other.  One of the pleasures of writing the novel was being able to have them both.  However, many readers have strong preferences for one over the other, which is just swell.  Happily, the readers from whom I’ve heard do not agree with which man Irina is better off, but tend to cleave straight down the middle.  Anyway, determining what Irina should have done at the end of the first chapter—given into temptation or resisted Ramsey’s charms—is up to you.

4. What was your original inspiration for the story?

I had to make a similar choice in my own life between two wonderful but drastically different men. I was on such a knife edge as to what to do that for some time after I made the choice I was haunted by an alternative universe in which I had chosen the other chap instead.  That’s where I got the idea for the structure: it mirrored my own emotional experience of second-guessing myself.

5. What has surprised you most about people’s reaction to The Post-Birthday World?

How many other women—men, too, actually—have had to make similar difficult choices in their romantic lives, and the degree to which Ramsey and Lawrence uncannily correspond to archetypes in readers’ real-life relationships.  I can’t tell you how often I’ve had a reader in a signing queue confide, “I left a Lawrence for a Ramsey, and it was a disaster!” or “I stuck it out with a Lawrence and have never stopped regretting that I let my Ramsey go,” etc.

6. I'm still stuck on the facing the wall sex, and never knowing in all those years what Lawrence wanted, and then the switch to hot incredible sex with our favorite snooker player...any basis in reality? Was it difficult to write such personal things.  How did you deal with that?   

Writing about sex is always tricky.  Another writer a long time ago warned me that “however much you make up, readers will always assume that sex scenes are autobiographical.”  I’m sure protests to the contrary would fall on deaf ears. 

I don’t think it’s important whether this or that is from “real life.”  It’s only important that these scenes resonate with other people’s experience.  So far, I’ve got the impression that they do. 

"Trespass" by Valerie Martin

Back in October, I wrote about a book called Trespass by Valerie Martin.

I read it, and highly recommend it. It's an intense, sad, upsetting book, but well worth it. It's also one of those books that is so engaging that I found myself irritated at anyone who interrupted me while I was reading it, including the poor woman giving me a pedicure who only wanted to know what shape I wanted for my toes.

The story opens as Chloe, a middle-aged book illustrator living outside New York City, is meeting her son Toby's Croatian girlfriend Salome for the first time. She immediately dislikes Salome, believing that she is trying to trap her son into a relationship, marriage, maybe a green card. At the same time, Chloe is also dealing with a roving poacher on her land, who hunts rabbits and fires rifle shots that leave her deeply unsettled.

As the book goes on, the stories and characters widen and become more complex. Martin introduces Toby's historian father, Salome's immigrant father and brother, and ultimately, her presumed dead mother Jelena, who somehow survived the horror of the Serbian-Croatian genocide.

Trespass is aptly named. Xenophobia runs strongly through the book, manifesting itself in emotions ranging from discomfort and suspicion to hatred.  The book opens as the U.S. invades Iraq --ironically, I finished it on the war's fifth anniversary -- compounding the theme of violence and invasion. Yet the trespasses are personal and emotional as well - such as Salome's unwelcome entry into Chloe's family, the poacher on the land, Salome's angry, violent brother.

I received a review copy of this book, and tucked in with it was a article from Bookpage. In it, Martin is quoted: "I was conscious early on that the book was about both the fear and the attraction of foreignness, which I think Americans feel particularly.... The notion of people who live in the light, and those who come from the dark is so important to that book, and I liked the idea that Americans live in realms of light and live in fear of the intrusion of the realms of darkness."

The story of Jelena's horrific survival of the genocide is haunting. And what I found most compelling from Martin's story was the conclusion that sometimes experiences like living through a war or losing a parent or child so indelibly mark us that we never recover, never return to the people we were before.  The tragedy of war is its inescapable legacy of damage.

No, this isn't a light book. But it is very readable and compelling and I had trouble putting it down. Martin's gift as a writer was summed up perfectly by Booklist: "Martin is a coolly dispassionate storyteller with a narrative voice that is at once inviting and disquieting." I completely agree - her style is spare, which ultimately draws the reader in rather than alienating.

I have some issues with the ending - as I often do - but I don't want to give anything away so I will keep those thoughts to myself.

Highly recommended.

"The Book of Dahlia" by Elisa Albert and "Dervishes" by Beth Helms

Marie Claire's March issue had short reviews of two books that looked good to me.

The first is The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert. Marie Claire's description:

The quarterlife crisis? We know it well. At 29, slacker Dahlia Finger hasn't done much with her life -- her hobby is watching the same DVDs over and over while stoned. Not the stuff of a future CEO. So when she is diagnosed with a brain tumor, Dahlia turns her film-lover's eye on her own story - hitting rewind and revisiting those who wronged her, from her absent mother to her brother-turned-rabbi. But this is no tearjerker. Instead, Elisa Albert creates an antihero whose spunky candor reminds us that attitude - even a bad one - is everything.

[Note: I almost didn't include this review because of its use of the word "spunky.']

From the JBooks online Jewish book community:

Albert's answer... is that only good comes of self-acceptance, but self-acceptance doesn't mean salvation, nor should it. Death is absolute, trumping familial bonds, societal expectations, and fear. By coming to terms with the failures of her life, by embracing and then stripping away the anger, the humor, the self-loathing, and the sickness, Dahlia realizes she's all that's left...

Watching Dahlia arrive at this conclusion is not without its awkward moments, especially when she seems to be the black sheep in any given social situation—whether it's family-, friend-, or cancer-based—but that is exactly the point Albert is trying to make. No wonder, as Dahlia spirals towards the inevitable and still surprising conclusion, she is seized by panic, the feeling of hesitation "like at the end of a phone call in which important things had been left unsaid." Death, as Albert reminds us, doesn't offer finality; we're lucky to be left with the lingering traces of unfinished movement

This is kind of cool: The Largehearted Boy music blog has an essay from Elisa Albert that includes a music playlist of songs that are somehow related to the book: she listened to the songs while she was writing it, they are songs she imagined Dahlia would like, etc.. The last song on the list is one that is very dear to me: "Orange Sky" by Alexei Murdoch. She says she's never listened to the song without choking up - I hear you, Elisa.

The second book is Dervishes, by Beth Helms. From Marie Claire:

Imagine you were a 12-year old girl forced to move to Turkey with your unhappily married parents. Your diplomat pop is never around, and your in-a-funk mom is as foreign to you as your new home. Canada and her mother, Grace, are in similar turmoil: Grace is forced to socialize with a bunch of wealthy expats, while Canada navigates tricky preteen friendships (leading to a betrayal). If only the two were there for each other. A lush novel with a climax that is both inevitable and full of surprises.

The Bookpage blog had this to say:

Dervishes is an excellent way to visit Turkey in the turbulent 1970s. Helms, who grew up abroad, writes with authority about what it's like to be the daughter or wife of a man attached to the American embassy, a man who gets phone calls in the middle of the night, takes the suitcase he keeps packed for such times, and disappears for weeks at a time. His 12-year-old daughter Canada muses, "We must have trusted the government to return him to us when they were finished with him." Canada, who knows her parents are having problems, wonders if her mother is aware of "the changes, when he had gone, in the very texture of the atmosphere around us, in the molecules and the spaces between them, in even the temperature of the air."

Helms is a beautiful writer. Grace, Canada's unhappy mother, describes the way her daughter smells: "her girlish, horsey, filched bath-salts odor"; she fantasizes about spending time with her Turkish lover "while long, gorgeous minutes slip by." Canada's best friend's looks fascinate Canada: "What would it be like in there—moored inside Catherine's flawless self?"

This thought-provoking book is not a light, isn't-it-interesting-growing-up-in-a-foreign-culture novel. Much of what Helms turns her intensely observant eye on is painful, ugly, embarrassing or grim. (This can be a particularly tough book for animal lovers.) Canada and Catherine pass time making recipes from The Officer's Wife, a 30-year-old guide for women whose husbands are in the foreign service, a book whose attitudes only sound antique. And in the relationships between the Turkish characters and the American and Canadians who reside in their country as guests, there's little that isn't flinch-worthy, although there are faults on all sides. For those interested in the true complexity of the East-West divide, Dervishes is a trip worth taking.

These two books are pretty new - has anyone out there read them yet?

Books To Re-read

A few days ago, I did a giveaway on EDIWTB and asked entrants to tell me the name of a book they like to read over and over again. I got some really interesting responses and thought I'd share them here, and ask other EDIWTB readers for their favorite re-reads.

Here are the ones that came in:

• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (submitted twice)
• Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver
• Cane River, by Lalita Tademy
• The Expected One, by Kathleen McGowan
• Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• Sahara, Clive Cussler
• Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden
• Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

First, I have to commend Betsy, the person who picked Harriet the Spy and Pride and Prejudice. Harriet the Spy is tied with The Westing Game as my all-time favorite book when I was a kid. I must have read it over 50 times. I loved it.

As for me... the two books I most enjoy re-reading every few years are Pride and Prejudice and Lolita. Pride and Prejudice is, to me, the most romantic story I've ever read, and I love its feminist angle as well. Lolita is worth a re-read just for sheer joy of reading Nabokov's writing, though I do find that the ending sucks every time. :)

So, EDIWTB readers... what are your favorite re-reads? Please comment below - this is a great way to learn about new books.

"The Soul Thief" by Charles Baxter

A few years ago, I read a book called The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter, for a book club. At the time, we all agreed that the book was neither a feast nor even really about love. It was, in my opinion, mediocre and entirely forgettable. However, I know that Charles Baxter is usually reviewed very positively, and that he is a literary giant in Ann Arbor, MI, where he lives. Someone in Hollywood liked The Feast of Love enough to option it for a movie. So others clearly disagree with my assessment of Charles Baxter.

He has a new book out that was quite favorably reviewed in today's Washington Post Book World. It's called The Soul Thief, and it's about a grad student in the 70s whose identity is slowly stolen by a fellow student. Says the Post:

The Soul Thief is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader really should savor this book twice. Not a chore, since Baxter writes cleverly and with the emotional intelligence that has distinguished his best short stories and novels (among them, the acclaimed 2000 novel Feast of Love, which re-imagined -- or "stole" -- the plot of "Midsummer Night's Dream")... Throughout The Soul Thief, Baxter riffs eloquently on how people become someone else -- either through death or the distortion of memory or trauma or the slow disintegration of aging. Lots of things out there lie in wait to steal our identities, Baxter warns.

I also found this review at Shelfari:

In The Soul Thief, Baxter ups the metaphysical ante once again. There are doubles, dreams, impersonations and a climactic bit of trickery that turns the entire novel into a kind of narrative Möbius strip. Yet after a cryptic preamble, we seem to be on the solid ground of naturalism. The year is 1973. The setting is Buffalo, N.Y., a decaying eyesore that embodies "the noble shabbiness of industrial decline." In short order, we meet grad students Nathaniel Mason and Jerome Coolberg, whose freaky symbiosis is at the heart of the novel…

…We are all soul thieves, in other words. We beg, borrow or steal our lives from others. Coolberg argues that this is a distinctly American trait. "[W]e've got disguises on top of disguises," he tells Mason, "we're the best on earth at what we do, which is illusion. We're all pretenders." He's absolutely wrong, of course: It's a global racket. But can there be a more flagrant offender than the novelist himself? To create a work like this one, with its flaws and scattered sublimities alike -- well, it takes a thief.

I want to like this book - it sounds good. But I am still wary of Baxter after The Feast of Love. Any Baxter fans out there who want to stick up for their man?

Book Giveaway: "The Secret Scroll"

I have a book to give away. It's called The Secret Scroll, by Ronald Cutler.

From Amazon:

Josh Cohan, a work-obsessed archaeology professor, has a recurring dream about a great secret. He follows his instincts to the Judean desert, where he makes a fantastic discovery an ancient scroll which seems to have been written by Jesus Christ. The Israeli Antiquities Authority has a claim on the scroll, but another, more sinister organization wants the scroll as well. The Guardians, members of an ancient extremist religious sect, are willing to kill to get what they want.

Josh joins the government-sponsored team of translators who believe the scroll might be genuine, and falls in love with Danielle, the fiery daughter of one of the translators. When a friend turns up dead and Danielle goes missing, Josh realizes that the scroll might be more powerful and controversial than he had ever imagined. Will Josh be able to prevent something terrible from happening to the woman he loves without giving up the most important discovery mankind has ever made?

If you're interested in this book, send me an email to [email protected] and tell me a book that you enjoy re-reading every few years. I'll pick the winner by the end of the week.

"The Post-Birthday World" by Lionel Shriver

I know I am really enjoying a book when I find myself thinking about it at odd times throughout the day (in the shower, while walking the dog, etc.) and trying to cram in pages here and there whenever I can so that I can get back into the story as soon as possible.  Such was the case with the current EDIWTB online book club selection, The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver. I have a feeling that this is a book that will stay with me for a long, long time.

Shriver's inventive novel opens with Irina, its fortyish protagonist, facing a decision: should she remain faithful to Lawrence, her steadfast policy wonk partner of ten years, or should she kiss another man - Ramsey, a dashing yet immature snooker player? The first chapter ends at that crossroads, and from there, alternating chapters relate the two different worlds that could follow - the one in which she resists temptation, and the one in which she gives in.  Of course, Irina's life turns out very differently depending on which road she takes, thus following the classic "what if..." daydream to its natural conclusion.

Shriver creates a detailed, convincing, flawed, yet rewarding life for Irina under both scenarios, which only makes reading this book more complex and almost tortuous, in a good way. I found it difficult to condemn either of her choices, or either of her partners.  The two men were often infuriating, yet also seemed to redeem themselves in often surprising ways.  Thus, if one of Shriver's intentions was to convey the messy unpredictability of life and the danger of seeing things in black and white, she succeeded.

I love Shriver's writing - eloquent, insightful, funny, rich. My copy is full of dog-eared pages marking passages I want to re-read - passages that were so well-written that they took my breath away.

Readers of The Post-Birthday World  will also notice the deftness with which Shriver sets up small parallels between the two worlds - lines of dialogue, for example, that are repeated in the two "competing" chapters (though sometimes spoken by two different characters), or identical conversations or plot points that are treated differently depending on which world we're in (the Ramsey world or the Lawrence world).  Even something as simple as which dress Irina wears to the same event (or her partner's reaction to that dress) takes on great significance in each post-birthday world, especially when contrasted to how it takes place in the other world.

While I was reading the book, one thing kept bothering me. I felt that Shriver had taken some license with Lawrence (as is her right, of course) - in one scenario, he seemed to have one personality, and in the other, he was very different. This bothered me because I felt like she was stacking the decks in favor of one choice vs. the other, that she was prejudicing the reader.

I was extremely lucky to be able to attend a book reading by Lionel Shriver last Friday night at Politics & Prose, and even luckier to be able to tell her in person about this reservation I had about the book. Her answer was perfect, and enhanced my appreciation and understanding of the book. As she explained, the book is not just about Irina; it's also about the other characters in the book and how they are affected by Irina.  Her actions toward them - in this case, the reception she gives Lawrence when he returned from the business trip that provided her the opportunity to be alone with Ramsey, ultimately affected his path, as well as hers. Shriver intentionally played with how Irina's actions changed the lives of the others in the book.

Here are some other things I learned at the book reading:

• She wrote the chapters in the order in which they appear in the book, instead of writing about one post-birthday world in its entirety and then the next. This made it possible for her to set up the parallel narrative constructs that I mentioned above.
• In writing the book, Shriver was interested in "the little stuff" - how who you are with affects not just your happiness but everything in your life, down to your relationship with your mother, what it's like to go to the supermarket, your success in your career, etc.
• The last chapter, in which Irina meets Lawrence for a drink at Club Gascon, is meant to conclude both post-birthday worlds, just like the first chapter opened them both. (Did you notice that when you were reading it?)
• Shriver doesn't like reading non-fiction and will only do it if "a gun is put to [her] head".
• Shriver was born in America and doesn't speak with a British accent.
• In England, "snooker" rhymes with "euchre", while in America, it rhymes with "looker".

I could go on and on about this book - it seems that every day I have new thoughts about it, new insights, and new appreciation for Shriver's writing and the perfect construction of this wonderful book. But I have written enough and I'd love to hear what other EDIWTB readers have to say. So please add your comments below, and if you have any questions for Lionel Shriver that you'd like her to answer, add them to your comment or email them to me at [email protected] and I will send them along to her. She has promised to answer them in a later post.

My Blog Has Been Replaced By A Robot

Someone sent me a link this week to a site that tells you what you should read next, based on books you've enjoyed in the past. It's called What Should I Read Next? I believe you can create a profile and input a whole bunch of books so that the site starts to get to you know your taste and can fine-tune its recommendations.

I haven't had time to give it a good test-drive yet. So far, the results that have come up on the few that I have entered have been spotty, but not entirely off.

If you have some time to check it out, let me know what you think. I'd love to hear what kind of results people get.

Also, a reminder: the online book club for The Post-Birthday World is taking place on Monday. I will put up a starter post, and then anyone who would like to comment and keep the discussion going may do so. Also, please submit any questions you would like Lionel Shriver to answer.

Julian Barnes, "Arthur & George"

Here's a book I have read about several times recently, but I actually saw for the first time at a bookstore over the weekend: Arthur & George by Julian Barnes. According to my Book Lovers' Calendar:

Arthur & George is a beautifully structured story that interweaves the lives of Arthur (Conan Doyle) and George (Edalji). The Victorian setting teems with issues of class, morality, friendship and love. Chapter by chapter, Arthur and George merge and emerge. What you need to know comes along in its own good time, while you become completely hooked into this story of the world's most renowned writer of detective fiction and an unknown Staffordshire solicitor accused of heinous crimes.  Why and how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle proves George Edalji's innocent is Julian Barnes's brilliant achievement, a marvelous fiction based on a true and historically significant story.

The Washington Post says:

Beneath the appearance of a straightforward historical novel, Barnes develops a double-helix, alternating the storyline between his main narrators, before showing how these two disparate, and desperate, outsiders come to each other's rescue... More to the point, Barnes's artistry underscores that these two proper gentlemen are both, in fact, victimized by the systems they admire most -- the law and chivalry. Together, they are nonetheless able to redeem lives wracked by hopelessness and frustration.

Barnes's writing is, as usual, masterly throughout Arthur & George, not only as the pages shift from one man's consciousness to the other's but also in the way their author keeps the reader on edge. Facts are interpreted, then reinterpreted; the bigoted speak convincingly; nothing turns out quite as expected; and even the book's coda delivers a final shock.

The Bookdork blog is not as glowing about the book:

The first Barnes book I've read that wasn't a total slam-dunk, though it did win me over, eventually. I liked the dramatization of historical events, the weird quirks of the two main characters' lives, and the deft juxtaposition of two major narratives. The actual story just failed to grab me by the throat, that's all, and Barnes is at his best with contemporary characters who express themselves verbally - Arthur and George are both on the inarticulate/stiff side.

If any of you have read this book, please weigh in. I'd love to know what you thought.