ABAW, Sonar-Style: Wells' Time Machine and Colfer's Opal Deception

Bedtime reading has been wonky around here, with interruptions from overscheduling, but a long car ride gave us some extra time to read. Sonar X7 has found the 39 Clues books, managing to swallow up three of them over spring break. Now he’s working on some of Mike Lupica’s middle-grade sports books.

Sonar X9 reread the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series as a segue into reading The Heroes of Olympus series for the first time. Oh, it was hard to wait his turn to get his hands on a library copy of the much-coveted Son of Neptune.

Sonar X11 has scored the biggest coup, I think, recently finishing The Silmarillion. Few people I know have attempted to read that one, and fewer still have finished. Oh, so he was reading it as part of a graded school assignment. He still did it, and liked it.

We also managed to finish a couple of books out loud.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Kindle free edition.

I suggested The Time Machine to the Sonars for bedtime reading (which is subject to a rigorous vetting regimen). They are becoming less likely to read anything I recommend. Which is to say that my recommendations are a sentence of doom to any book. I’ve taken to tucking books innocently in the reading basket or leaving the Sonars completely to their own choices without any input. They stand a better chance of not ignoring the good stuff that way. For whatever reason, The Time Machine caught their attention in spite of my suggestion. 

I’m not sure how well any of them would have handled this one alone. It’s short, but the century-old style and diction feels foreign to them, as does the boys’-club setting of the group of men meeting for dinner and cigars. Together we were able to navigate some of the that difficulty and get a chance to enjoy the story.

The coolest part (at least for me and the older Sonars) was recognizing sci-fi tropes that for Wells were innovative, but we know them as routine or even cliche. We also enjoyed some surprise at how modern the nineteenth-century philosophy and science was. We share many social concerns. Wells’ vision of the future was both weird and uncanny. And in the end, the Sonars were riveted by the suspense and puzzled by the vague ending. 

Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer. Scholastic 2005.

This is the fourth book in the series about the preteen criminal mastermind. I’m not sure I have anything new to say about Artemis Fowl. The Sonars love these books and they’re fun to read out loud. 

Artemis - his memories of anything fairy-related erased in the previous book - returns to a life of crime, specifically stealing a painting from another thief. But pixie-villain Opal Koboi has escaped her coma and incarceration to seek revenge on those who jailed her. She wants to frame Holly for murder, feed Artemis to trolls and destroy the fairy world of Haven before setting herself up to rule humanity as a precocious human girl. Can Artemis and his human and fairy friends survive, stop Opal, and save their reputations before Mr. and Mrs. Fowl return from vacation???

As soon as I finished reading the last page, the Sonars wanted me to start reading The Lost Colony (Book 5) right away. but it will have to go into the queue behind The Phantom Tollbooth and The Order of the Phoenix. 

Franzen's Freedom (again)

In my previous comments about Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, I did not discuss the title. In his much-ballyhooed 2010 Time Magazine article about Franzen, Lev Grossman wrote:

There is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something. Freedom is not enough. It’s necessary but not sufficient. It’s what you do with Freedom — what you give it up for — that matters.

Freedom begins with agency. Freedom involves a lack of restraint and an ability to act. In Freedom, once characters throw off the strings of the family who raised them and begin making their own decisions, they have an agency that can be called Freedom. But that is also the point at which the Freedom ends, as each choice has consequences, eliminates other options, and piles up casualties.

No one in these stories is free. Those advantages they enjoy are bought by someone. Walter and Patty’s upper-middle-class gentrification and their bright children? Paid for by Patty’s decision not to have a career and to give up an independent identity. Some opportunities are bought with money inherited by earlier generations. Patty and Walter’s marriage? Bought at first by Richard’s superhuman (for him) self-denial of temptation. Wildlife could be preserved, but only after mountaintop removal mining or the death of a loved one. All those transactions restrict subsequent choices and limit freedom. The birds that seem so free, must adapt to an existence that is increasingly circumscribed and exponentially depleted. Further, the resentment felt by Walter and his forebears is located in the belief that they have paid but someone else has enjoyed the spoils. 

Perhaps Franzen wants us to see the characters’ (and our) short-sighted entitlement, that there is Freedom even if we do not feel free. Perhaps, writing from his spartan, cell-like space, with his (now habitual) wad of tobacco, Franzen’s Freedom is an ironic title for a story about entanglement. I’ll spare you the Bobby McGee quote.  

A Book A Week: The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. Henry Holt and Co. 2009 (Via Brilliance Audio 2009, read by Natalie Ross).

2010 Newbery Honor Book 

Calpurnia Virginia Tate, practically twelve years old, lives in Fentress, Texas in 1899. She has three older brothers and three younger brothers and much to the chagrin of her mother is more interested in the strange new grasshoppers she’s seen around the farm than in her needlework. Calpurnia’s father now runs the local cotton gin, a business begun by her grandfather. Her grandfather, a retired businessman, former Civil War Confederate Captain, and crotchety old man, opens the world of naturalism to her, by including Calpurnia in his observations about the natural life around the farm and letting her read his treasured copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In addition to the grasshoppers, and an interesting specimen of Hairy Vetch, Calpurnia is just beginning to notice the importance of her family in the town, and opening her eyes to the advantages she enjoys as a Tate. At the same time that she is noticing the limitations of being a girl and is frustrated by the tasks and options available to girls and women at the turn of the century.

This is a smart, gentle story, probably most appropriate for middle-grade readers. Each chapter begins with a quote from Darwin, and there are hints about the controversial nature of Darwin and his theories at the time. The story is full of new experiences. Calpurnia’s first taste of a new drink - Coca Cola - and first sight of a motor car at the county fair, the first telephone in the town, the still rare experience of portrait photography. The story is not frightening or emotionally difficult, though early in the story Calpurnia’s grandfather does relate a rather grim tale of his last day in the Civil War, a story of the horror of war mixed up with an enlightening observation about a bat. That minor vignette doesn’t change the tone of the novel, but illustrates grandfather’s character, and his absent-minded respect for Calpurnia’s maturity.

Calpurnia’s life feels conscripted by the expectations of her, but there is hope in all the changes that are occurring in technology and society, that her options might also evolve. We do not know if she has any real hope of attending the University in Austin, like her oldest brother, or whether she can be a woman scientist. We do not know how Calpurnia’s life will unfold in the new century, but in that year, we know that she was changed. Knowledge once earned, cannot be erased, opportunity once granted will not be relented easily. And we are left with the reassuring hope that people can and do change, and that Calpurnia will adapt, and find a niche in which to grow and flourish.

A Book A Week: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2010. 

If you haven’t read this book, and want to enjoy it unsullied by the taint of spoilery revelation, then you might want to stop reading this post and come by when you’ve experienced Freedom first-hand (see what I did there?). See you in a few weeks.

[whistling]

Finished? How’d you like it?

Me?

First, Franzen makes it difficult for me to enjoy his work. If he’s not flogging Twitter he’s lamenting eBooks, cell phones, and instant gratification business models. I would have finished this book much sooner if he hadn’t been standing on his Old Media lawn shaking his fist at newfangled sociodigital networkishness. I don’t completely understand my reaction to Franzen’s positions either,  because I don’t really disagree with him.

This book is smart, wryly funny, and painfully insightful about American behavior. Here are a few ideas I jotted down while reading.

- By the time people realize a relationship is bad news, they’re too ensnared to escape without shedding some flesh. So more often than not, they stay, letting the punctures heal and calling the snares body jewelry.

- All relationships (or hookups, mates, best friends, parents, kids, business partners, roommates) are bad news in one way or another.

- All of the relationships in the story are circular. In families especially, behviors are repeated generationally. The details change, but the essential actions and emotions repeat over and over. The payroll gets bigger and the drugs of choice come and go.

- Core relationships are galvanized around age twenty. After that, all emotional actions yo-yo back to that twenty-year-old triangle. Embracing, rejecting, tolerating, reconstructing, tolerating, pining, blasting, aching, loving.

I’m not sure I agree with those staked out points. And I could really be spared Franzen’s one dishonesty: the happily-ever-after ending. I could not believe it, and when I got it, I didn’t want it. But the ending was a small problem compared to the surprising lack of emotional connection I felt reading the book.

I’m a crier. Poignant moments, sadness, pain, death, frustration, injustice, joy, victory, gratitude, love. They all make me cry. Sometimes just a quivery vapor. Sometimes book dropping sobs and shuddering.

So when I reached the climax of this story, the moment when an important character dies a tragic, ironic, unexpected death just when we think that a renewed sense of peace or happiness or contentment is possible? Nothing. It was a showstopper for me. Not because of my emotional reaction, but because of my lack of emotional reaction. I even reread that bit, wondering how I could be so crass, so unfeeling toward these characters I’d been hanging out with for hundreds of pages.

And then I realized that as plausible Franzen’s portrayal of these characters might be, I felt nothing, did not care about them. I only vaguely liked one or two of them. Oh sure, I can identify with Patty Berglund’s struggle to define her own purpose and self-identity. I can enjoy the banter and style of Patty and Walter and Richard and believe in their human characteristics as if they are people that I know in real life. But I still did not care about them. And that made me feel a bit empty, wishing that on top of this engaging book about complicated ethics, about business and personal relationships entwining and mirroring one another, if Franzen had just been able to communicate an equally real sense of empathy and compassion, then this merely smart and interesting book could have been a great book.

ABAW (or three): Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy, Alfred A. Knopf 1992 (via Picador paperback 2010).

McCarthy’s writing intimidates me. It demands attention to read and it demonstrates a finely tuned attention to the essential details of objects, places, and people. McCarthy’s ascetic attitude toward technology and publicity is also manifest. He clearly weighs every word in these stories that often feel more like tense, tightly wound poetry. 

I don’t know if I completely understood the meaning of the stories. They haunt me though, coming back to me again and again in the two months since I read them. And the ending of the final book still irritates me. 

All the Pretty Horses is the story of John Grady Cole, a teenager with a talent for training horses who wants to be a cowboy. But the world is changing. His grandfather has died, his mother has sold the family’s ranch. So John Grady sets off to Mexico to slow down time and find a place where a ranching life still exists. He finds trouble in the form of another wandering boy and a rancher’s daughter. In spite of the pain and the ugliness, John Grady always tries to do what’s right. The Badlands of Mexico don’t change that in him.

The Crossing is the story of Billy Parham, another teenage cowboy, this time in New Mexico. Billy’s life takes a strange turn as he follows trap lines to catch a wolf that has wandered up into the mountains out of Mexico. Though he knows she will kill him if she gets a chance, Billy can’t bring himself to kill the wolf once he’s caught her. She is an anachronism, and he decides to try to lead her back to her home range in Mexico. We are reminded repeatedly how dangerous and crazy Billy’s idea is. Early on, his character is almost indistinguishable from John Grady, chasing a philosophy of doing what is right at all costs to himself. Billy and his wolf are captured and he kills her rather than allow her to be a slave in a dog fighting pit. That choice earns him no friends. He returns home to New Mexico to find that his family - except for his younger brother - have been murdered, and their horses stolen. With nowhere else to go, Billy gathers his brother and returns to Mexico to reclaim the horses. Billy’s losses only grow, and he does change, becoming a cynical young man who sees himself as a broken sinner, but who cannot turn away from service to a good man, or to his country in a time of war.

I don’t entirely trust myself to talk about Cities of the Plain because the ending felt so incongruous and trite. The story brings together John Grady and Billy, working together on a dying New Mexico ranch that is about to be swallowed up by the White Sands Missile Range. John Grady is a decorated veteran (the All-American Cowboy, as his buddies half-disdainfully call him behind his back), but Billy’s heart condition kept him (bitterly) out of service. When Billy leads him unwillingly to a brothel, John Grady falls in love again, this time with an epileptic Mexican prostitute named Magdalena. Magdalena’s owner also loves her. Things don’t go so well for the American men when they attempt to rescue Magdalena, but their actions at every turn are consistent with their characters through the entire trilogy. They act on their anguish, their anger, their disdain, and their loyalty to one another to the end. In a way they are brothers, bound by their love for a lifestyle or world view that probably died before they were even born. I was ok up to that point. But the aged homeless wanderings and underpass conversations with a character that might have been Death? That felt too much like ham-fistedly trying to cram a THEME onto a trilogy that had up to that point been more nuanced about potential meaning and symbolism.

Still, McCarthy gives us evocative and stirring imagery of the Southwestern landscape, about plains, horses, and men out of place in their own time.