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In the annals of depressing books, Still Alice by Lisa Genova ranks pretty high up there. It's about Alice, a fifty year-old cognitive science professor at Harvard who is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. The book tracks her first moments of memory loss and confusion and the inevitable, steady descent into dementia that follows in a shockingly short period of time. The book is told from Alice's point of view, so the reader is able to understand, in horrific detail, the extent to which Alice loses her cognitive abilities, as well as her professional and personal identities. It is a sad, sad book.
But I am very glad I read it. Alzheimer's is such a presence in our society, with so many lives affected by this disease, whether as sufferers or caregivers or family members. The author, Lisa Genova, is a neuroscientist, and she clearly shares Alice's analytical, scientific mind. Her writing is clear and compelling, and she delivers a lot of information about the disease without compromising Still Alice's structure or flow as a novel.
I put off reading Still Alice for a long time. It has a penciled $3.50 price tag on the inside cover, so I must have picked it up at a used book sale somewhere. It has been sitting in my TBR pile - I just couldn't bring myself to pick it up. But I eventually did, and as I mentioned earlier, I am so grateful for having read it. This book will stay with me - haunt me, even - for a long time, which I think is the point. I now have a much better understanding of the experience of having Alzheimer's - not just the stark facts about the disease.
I just checked Goodreads, and there are over 27,000 ratings of Still Alice, with an average rating of 4.23 stars (out of 5). I am clearly not alone in my admiration for this book.
What is it with books about disappearing kids? This is such a common theme among fiction writers - it seems like there are endless books on the shelves about kids, big and little, who disappear, and the aftermath left by their absence. I read a post recently (which I can't find now) that said that it's a good theme for a book because it's so rich - it's every parent's worst nightmare, and there is so much rich emotional material to mine.
A few years ago, I picked up one of these disappearing kids novels in a used bookstore - The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond - and it has sat on my TBR pile ever since. But I found the audio at the library a few weeks ago and decided to give it a try.
Abby is a thirtysomething photographer living in San Francisco who is engaged to Jake, a high school teacher with a six-year old daughter named Emma. When the book opens, Abby and Emma are walking on a foggy beach at the western end of the city. Abby is momentarily distracted by a dead seal on the beach, which she is moved to photograph, and when she looks up, Emma is gone. The rest of the book is about Jake and Abby's search for Emma, and is told from Abby's perspective. Richmond explores what Abby and Jake go through after Emma's disappearance - the search, the impact on their relationship, the people they turn to for comfort, and, of course, the mystery surrounding what happened to Emma.
The Year of Fog is very readable, and the suspense of the mystery propelled me along. I think Richmond is a good writer; in addition to just telling a suspenseful tale, she explores the nature of memory and photography, and how they can each trick people in believing different things and shaping their perspectives on life. I also loved the San Francisco setting - lots of detail and description about a place I love.
In retrospect, though, I don't think The Year of Fog is a perfect book, nor close to it. There are almost 350 pages between Emma's disappearance and the resolution of what happened to her, which is way too many. Abby's search for Emma is repetitive and monotonous, for sure, but that could have been communicated in a less repetitive and monotonous way. Abby's relationship with men is also sort of weird - there are lots of men floating around who are interested in her, but she doesn't seem to know how to deal with them, nor does she communicate particularly well with Jake. And then there are little factual details that didn't make sense, and which bothered me - like Emma sitting in the front seat of Abby's car (kids aren't allowed to ride in the front) and people using actual film in 2008 and Emma doing or saying things that six year-olds are really too young for.
I would have preferred less time spent on the year of fog, and more time spent talking about what happened when the fog lifted. There was so much buildup and backstory that the actual denouement felt rushed and skimpy on detail.
I listed to the first half of The Year of Fog on audio, and read the second half. The audio was fine - totally adequate. I eventually got impatient with the audio because I think I was impatient with the story - reading is so much faster than listening so I opted for the faster option.
Again, this is a compelling story, and there are some flashes of powerful, writing throughout, especially when Richmond talks about memory and how we process what has happened in our lives. I just would have liked some editing in the middle and some slower pacing at the end.
First read of 2012, and it was a good one: Fathermucker, by Greg Olear. Add this one to the canon of recent dad fiction (see Domestic Violets, The Financial Lives of the Poets), a nice counterpart to all the books out there written from the perspective of mothers.
Fathermucker is about Josh Lansky, a thirtysomething Brooklyn transplant living in New Paltz, NY with his wife and their two children - Roland (5), who has Asperger's, and Maude (3). New Paltz is an ultra-liberal suburb (Olear describes nearby towns where "church attendance is higher, Republican sympathy stronger, mean household income lower, college degrees rarer, gun ownership more common, and NASCAR interest more acute, than they are in New Paltz"). Everyone in New Paltz drives a liberal bumper-sticker emblazoned Subaru or minivan and is "outpoken about their contempt of chain [stores] of any kind."
Josh is a stay-at-home dad (SAHD), and Fathermucker takes place over the course of a single day - a Friday - during which he attends a playdate with his daughter, goes with his son on a class field trip to the pumpkin patch, and learns from another parent that his wife may be having an affair. She, meanwhile, has been gone all week on a business trip, only exacerbating Josh's exhaustion and desperation. Roland is a handful, with the quirks of an Asberger's child, and Olear doesn't shy away from the reality of raising a child "on the spectrum".
Fathermucker is funny, yes, but it is also a poignant book. It's incredibly honest about the challenges and rewards of parenthood - and specifically stay-at-home parenthood - and the isolation and erosion of self-esteem that often accompany it. In addition, Fathermucker is chock full of pop culture (Josh is addicted to US Weekly), music references (Olear brilliantly weaves song lyrics through his prose), and incredibly sharp social satire. What more could you want?
My one complaint -I really don't like books that take place over a single day. I find them exhausting and unrealistic, in that it's hard to believe that so much can actually be taking place in one day. Then again, Josh's life is exhausting, which is part of Olear's point about parenthood. It can be draining and seemingly endless, and sometimes you look back and can't believe you're still living the same day.
I highly recommend Fathermucker - it's a great read. Thanks to Harper Paperbacks for the review copy (hi there FTC!). 2012 is starting off strong - Olear just set a high bar for future reads.
My final read of 2011 was The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. This was my second Otsuka novel - the first was When the Emperor was Divine, which I read just before The Buddha in the Attic and reviewed here.
The Buddha in the Attic is about picture brides who came to the U.S. from Japan in the early 1900s in search of promising futures with young, handsome men whose pictures they carried with them on the long trip over. Most of the women were met by men who looked very different (older, shorter) and were significantly less wealthy than they had promised in their letters. On arrival, these women were forced into lives of sharecropping, farming, laundering, cleaning houses, or other physical labor - a far cry from the luxurious existences they had expected.
The Buddha in the Attic isn't a linear story; instead, it's like diary entries from a hundred women compressed into a mosaic. The book is grouped loosely into chapters covering the trip to the U.S.; the first night with their new husbands; the reality of their new lives; the babies they had; the Pearl Harbor attack; and (as described in much more detail in When the Emperor was Divine) the Japanese internment in which most of the women lost their homes, their jobs and sometimes their husbands. Some people may not be fans of this almost poetic approach, but I liked it a lot. Otsuka wrote in the first person plural, kind of like a Greek chorus. I loved the breadth of the women's experiences, and how she took a single defining event, such as the first night of marriage or the trip over on the boat, and showed how different women experienced it.
The Buddha in the Attic was a finalist for the National Book Award, and I can see why. It's fresh and different and moving. I think between the two novels, I slightly preferred When the Emperor was Divine. It was a little more satisfying because it followed one (admittedly nameless) family. But I liked The Buddha in the Attic a lot too. These women led such difficult and painful lives, and Otsuka really captured them, poignantly, in great detail.
This is a quick read, and I really recommend it.
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Jill Bialosky: History of a Suicide: My Sister's Unfinished Life
Lee Kravitz: Unfinished Business: One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things
Mary Ann Shaffer: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Elyse Schein & Paula Bernstein: Identical Strangers: Memoir of Twins Separated & Reunited
Margaret Sartor: Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s