Everyday I Write the Book

"Sag Harbor" by Colson Whitehead

Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, got a lot of press when it came out in 2009. It ended up on a lot of "best of" lists that year, and I've been interested in it ever since. I finished it today - listened to it mostly on audio but also read the paper version too. I have very conflicting feelings about the book.

Sag Harbor is narrated by Benji, a fifteen year-old boy spending the summer at Sag Harbor, an African-American community on Long Island, at his parents' beach house. Benji and Reggie, his younger brother, were inseparable as kids, but have grown apart, and their parents only come out to the beach house on weekends, leaving the boys alone from Sunday to Thursday. Sag Harbor is a memoir of that 80s summer of Benji's fifteen year, and his friendships, his feelings about himself and his family, and his transition into adulthood. I always love a good coming-of-age story, which is why I was drawn to Sag Harbor. But like I said above, I had mixed feelings about it.

Whitehead is a beautiful writer. Breathtaking at times. His use of metaphor and description are masterful. Here's a passage I loved:

It is the nettlesome quality of elementary-school pictures to reveal the true nature of our childhoods. Nothing is how we remember it, and all the necessary alterations we've made in order to survive with semi-functioning psyches are exposed. Best to leave them alone.

There are so many phrases and sentences I could highlight in this post - I can't understate how good of a craftsman Whitehead is.

But.

It took me so long to get through Sag Harbor because there is simply no plot. No narrative tension. While the book loosely tracks Benji's summer, there are pages after pages of description and detail that don't really go anywhere. The book is like an Impressionist painting - you get a textured glimpse of Benji's life and the history of Sag Harbor, but at any moment your eye could really be anywhere on the canvas with no discernable direction. This meandering, almost indulgent pace made reading the book a chore. And the audio version was even worse - I found my mind wandering many times while I listened, with the narrative fading into background noise. Without a structure, something driving me forward, I was simply pulled along by the momentum of the pages turning, instead of tension or suspense or plot.

I considered giving up on the book many times, but I stuck it out. And I was richly rewarded by a final chapter that was so poignant that I was almost moved to tears. (Like I said, I am deeply ambivalent about this book.) During Benji's fifteenth summer, he comes to see his parents for who they are - an alcoholic and a submissive - and grows apart from his brother and absentee sister. Whitehead's older, wiser narrator  - looking back on his younger, awkward self - deeply conveys that combination of sadness and liberation that comes from the distancing from one's roots. Check out this passage, about an end-of-summer Labor Day picnic that Benji is attending for likely the last time:

We were all there. It was where we mingled with who we had been and who we would be.  Sharing space with our echoes out in the sun. The shy kid we used to be and were growing away from, the confident or hard-luck men we would become in our impending seasons, the elderly survivors we'd grow into if we were lucky, with gray stubble and green sun visors.  The generations replacing and replenishing each other. Every summer this shifting-over took place in small degrees as you moved closer to the person who was waiting for you to catch up and some younger version of yourself elbowed you out of the way.

Wow. The chore of the first 250 pages were almost worth the last 30 pages.

So those are my jumbled thoughts about Sag Harbor. If you decide to read it, go into it with your eyes open.

Yo! FTC! Audiobook was from the library and paper version was bought at a used book sale.

"Pictures of You" by Caroline Leavitt

The February EDIWTB book club pick was Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt. Pictures of You explores how one fatal car accident changes the lives of two women escaping from their lives on Cape Cod. April, married to Charlie and mother to Sam, mysteriously parks her car going the wrong way on a Connecticut road in deep fog. Isabelle, wife to Luke, finds herself driving down that same road on the same foggy day, and slams into April's car. The sad aftermath of that accident has ramifications for Isabelle, Charlie and Sam, for the rest of their lives, which Leavitt explores sensitively and poignantly.

Leavitt is a master storyteller. I am a slooow reader, but I had a hard time putting this book down and read it much more quickly than I usually get through 300+ plus page books. There were key elements in the story which she didn't reveal until very late in the book - elements which significantly affected my feelings about one of the characters - and I loved that plot twist. I found Pictures of You to be unpredictable - it surprised me at several turns and made me want to keep reading.

I liked Leavitt's depiction of the different kinds of love we can experience - love for a child, love for a longterm spouse, love fueled by passion or grief, forbidden love, and platonic love. I think she did a nice job of differentiating the many relationships in the book and exploring their limits and intensity.

Some reviews have mentioned that there are supernatural elements to the story. I didn't see it that way. In fact, I liked that it was grounded in realism - the messy, imperfect realism that makes our lives go in directions we don't always choose. While Sam wants desperately to believe in angels when he is processing his mother's death, I don't think Leavitt meant to suggest that April was truly present, in any form. I have a very low tolerance level for fantasy or otherworldly plot points, and I wasn't bothered at all by Leavitt's story in that respect.

However, I did find some of the coincidences to be a too convenient. No one remarked on how unlikely it was that two women from the same small Cape Cod town would collide on a remote Connecticut street hours away. I had a hard time with Isabelle happening across a flyer for a photography course in New York City that was posted in her small-town bookstore. (Um, really?) And of course, Isabelle ends up falling for the guy who owns the restaurant she just happens to walk by on her way home from a New Year's Eve party. I know that Leavitt could have found away to construct this story without these contrivances, and it would have made for a more powerful book for me.

That said, I did truly enjoy reading Pictures of You. It kept me turning those pages and eagerly absorbing the storyline and Leavitt's memorable characters.

Thank you to Algonquin for supplying the books for the EDIWTB book club.

So, EDIWTB readers - what did you think?

Giveaway of Susannah Gora's "You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried"

Last year, I reviewed Susannah Gora's excellent book about the Brat Pack movies of the 80s, You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried. It is now out in paperback - just in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pretty in Pink- and Gora has generously agreed to give away two copies of the new paperback here on EDIWTB.

To enter the contest, leave me a comment with your favorite moment from a Brat Pack movie in the 80s. I will pull two names at random on Friday March 4. To find out more about the book, check out its website.

Here's my favorite 80s movie moment, hands down: Sixteen Candles, when Samantha is standing outside the church holding her sister's veil, and the cars pull away one by one, and there, at the end, stands Jake Ryan and his Porsche. Gets me every time.

Good luck! 

Andrea Askowitz in The New York Times

In 2008, I reviewed a book called My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy by Andrea Askowitz. I liked it a lot - it was a very honest look at, well, the author's lonely lesbian pregnancy. She has a column in the New York Times' Modern Love section today about finding a partner and having a second child. Check it out if it sounds interesting.

"Open" by Andre Agassi

I am definitely not a big non-fiction reader, as you can see by the books listed on the right side of my blog. So it's rare that I pick up (and finish) a non-fiction book, and even rarer that it's a sports memoir. But I was intrigued by Andre Agassi's autobiography Open when it came out. Agassi was such a character on the tennis court, and I remember reading a New York Times Magazine profile in the 90s about the rivalry between him and Pete Sampras which painted him as a man of many contradictions and internal tensions. So when I came across Open at the library (why hello, FTC!), I jumped on it.

Open did not disappoint. It is a pretty exhaustive memoir of Agassi's first forty years, starting when he was a young kid pushed into tennis by a relentless, unaffectionate father who was bent on having one of his four children become a tennis star. It chronicles his years at the Bollettieri Academy in Florida, and his (secretly reluctant) entry into professional tennis at 16. The next twenty-five years are a swirl of training, tournaments, Grand Slams, rivalries, relationships, marriages, and soul-searching. I found it hard to put this book down and looked forward to getting back to it, thanks to good writing and a very compelling subject.

Yes, Agassi's self-absorbed - his "team" of trainers, coaches, managers and advisors who accompany him over his career to every tournament is testament to his many needs, both physical and emotional. And at times the book falls into a pattern - he's up in the rankings, or he's down; he's losing against Sampras, or he's beating Sampras; he's recommitting and training, or he's losing and disconnecting. But I suppose that's the reality of a 20-year professional tennis career. Agassi was inconsistent and sporadic in his playing, and this book captures the ebb and flow that he displayed on the court. His memory of individual players and games from countless tournaments played all over the world is impressive; in the Acknowledgments, he deservedly credits the researchers who must have painstankingly recreated his career for him as he went through the process of writing the book.

Agassi professes to hate tennis - the game that made him famous (and very rich) - yet he is unable to walk away from it, even when he's in control of his own destiny. At the core of this book is this tension between hatred and dependency, and how Agassi powered through it to become one of the most successful players in history.

I especially enjoyed the depiction of his two marriages - the first to Brooke Shields and the second to Steffi Graf. Not surprisingly, his current wife (and mother to his two children) fares much better in the book than his first, who comes across as self-centered, materialistic, and not particularly interested in or supportive of his career. A mismatch, for sure.

One minor complaint - I wish there were more photos! Agassi's appearance played a big role in his image as a player (rightfully or not), and I'd have liked to have seen more pictures. (Of course, a Google image search can satisfy that curiosity). The cover photo, though, is amazing - I saw it up close (and huge) at the National Portrait Gallery in November and it's a very affecting picture.

In all, Open was an excellent read. I'm very glad I went outside my comfort zone for this one. Highly recommended.

New Book from Jeffrey Eugenides - "The Marriage Plot"

I saw this on BookPage this week - Jeffrey Eugenides has a new book in the works. For you Middlesex fans out there, this is exciting news.

It is called The Marriage Plot, and it's due out in October. Here's what Eugenides has to say about it:

I don’t quite know how to describe it. A college love story? Maybe. It begins on graduation day, in 1982, and involves three main characters. The sweep of the action takes place over the next year or so, as the characters begin their lives outside the university gates. The book deals, among other things, with religion, depression, the Victorian novel, and Roland Barthes. I really don’t like to talk about it. It’s about 400 pages long so far, and two-thirds done. I don’t think it will be a long book, not as long as Middlesex, anyway. It’s different from my other books. More tightly dramatized, less fanciful. What else? It’s not a Detroit book, not this time. Though one of the characters comes from Detroit, the new book ranges in setting from Providence, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod to Calcutta.

A college love story set in Rhode Island? Count me in. Great news!

Book Miscellany - Saturday Night

It has been quite a few days since I've been able to post. I was in SF this week speaking at a social media conference. It was a very interesting conference - lots of presentations about social media strategy from a number of well-known companies - Zappos, Facebook, Coca-Cola, NCAA, and more. I talked about Shark Week and how we at Discovery use social media to build brand engagement with fans and customers. It was a long way to go, but lovely to be back in SF and to enjoy some warm(er) weather.

I am still listening to Sag Harbor on audio. I am not loving it. I will try to get through it, but I find an audiobook even tougher than a book to get through when I don't love it. I find my mind wandering too much. I am over halfway done with Andre Agassi's autiobiography Open and really enjoying it. Can't wait to finish and review it.

In other book related news - I was at a library book sale yesterday and picked up Carolyn Parkhurst's The Dogs of Babel and a book by Rachel Pastan called This Side of Married. Anyone read either of them? I still haven't read Pastan's last one - Lady of the Snakes - but I want to.

So, on the eve of Valentine's Day, I've been thinking about romantic books. The Washington Post just did a column on five recent books for Valentine's Day (other than #1, none of them appeals to me). It got me thinking - what are the most romantic books I've ever read?  It's an easy answer - there are two: Pride and Prejudice and The Time Traveler's Wife.

How about you? What's the most romantic book you've ever read? Why?

 

"You Know When The Men Are Gone" by Siobhan Fallon

I just finished Siobhan Fallon's You Know When The Men Are Gone, a collection of very loosely interconnected stories about the lives of military families. Fallon, who lived at Fort Hood in Texas while her husband was deployed twice to Iraq, writes about the lives of the women left behind and the impact of their husbands' deployment on both the husbands and the wives.

The war in Iraq - now Afghanistan - has been going on for years, and it's easy to forget, or at least not think about, the lives of the men fighting abroad and the families back at home. They become names and numbers on a newspaper page, rather than living, breathing people with complicated emotions and motivations. Fallon brings them into sharp relief, however, in You Know When The Men Are Gone. She looks at the women and men of these military families in a range of situations: women waiting for their men to return; wounded men returning to ambivalent wives; men who stay behind while their peers go off to fight; men who return with suspicions about their wives' fidlelity; women who wait at home with suspicions about their husbands' fidelity. Fallon has covered many perspective in her collection (though she writes in an afterward that she has so many more stories that she could share). Her stories are full of details about military life - the parking space at the supermarket reserved for families of dead soldiers, the baskets of cookies collected by military wives to welcome home their men, the "no cell phones during checkpoints" rules at the base - that only insiders would know.

I loved this book. Fallon's writing is spare but emotionally powerful. I am not always a fan of short stories, but the structure here allows Fallon to look at military life through ten different perspectives, which makes for a very rich experience.  The stories that stood out the most to me were "Remission" - about a woman who has just gone through cancer treatment and is having trouble connecting with her teenage daughter, while her husband feels guilty about his troops off in Iraq while he stays home with his wife - and "Inside the Break" - about a wife who checks her deployed husband's email and learns something she wishes she hadn't. But really, all of these stories are memorable. Fallon is a master of narrative tension and understatement, and the endings of her stories leave you wanting more.

In addition to being a great read, You Know When The Men Are Gone is an important reminder of the many, many sacrifices being made all over the world - both abroad and on military bases across the country - to fight wars that have become almost abstractions to many civilians. I highly recommend it.

Check out these other review of You Know When The Men Are Gone from Jenn's Bookshelves, Jen at Devourer of Books, and The Book Lady's Blog. Here also is a Q&A with Siobhan Fallon on her website.

Hello FTC! Thanks to Amy Einhorn Books for the review copy.