A Book (or two) A Week: The Poison Eaters and Kin by Holly Black

A pair of Holly Black’s…

The Poison Eaters by Holly Black, Big Mouth House, 2010

There are fairy tales and there are Faery Tales. This book has both, with short stories that explore boundaries around the edge of both fairy and Faery. Many of the stories feature someone trapped in a world where he or she feels like an outsider: a fairy trapped in the mundane world, a designer in a small town, a human with vampires. Some of the stories are grim, but no more so than those other stories that are Grimm. Some stories are dark, but no more dark than some corners of reality. My favorite story, “Paper Cuts Scissors,” has a rather clever mixing up of mundane reality with the literary world. The featured characters in the stories are teenagers and young adults, and the stories are gritty fun. Some drug use and sexual content may make this collection less appropriate for younger readers.

The Good Neighbors, Book 1: Kin by Holly Black, Graphix, 2008

This graphic novel has a lot of the same flavor of Black’s short story collection. The renderings have a dark edge. The sinister fairies hover around the seamier corners of the world, but danger lurks in both human and fairy form, leaving Rue Silver orphaned and unsure who to trust. I found the pacing of the story a little slow, and the story lurches once or twice in confounding ways, but I look forward to the way the story evolves in subsequent episodes. Sonar X11 found it mildly engaging. The other Sonars weren’t interested. 

A Book A Week: House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, Random House, 1999 Via the First Vintage Contemporaries Edition, 2000 (with movie tie-in cover)

A tax error, which sounds very trivial, sets in motion this tense, elegant thriller. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict who lives in a house she inherited from her father. A hard-won stability starts to slip away from her when she is abandoned by her husband and the county tax office evicts her for non-payment of taxes. Sheriff Lester Burdon witnesses her eviction, just doing his duty, but afterward he can’t get Kathy out of his mind. Colonel Behrani is an Iranian refugee, once wealthy. Here in the U.S. he patches together jobs that are embarrassing to him in order to maintain the illusion that he is still wealthy. Taking a chance with the last of his savings, he bids on a house at a county auction, hoping to flip it for a profit and begin to rebuild both his wealth and pride. 

This story is knotty, the characterization excruciatingly detailed and realistic. As the lives of these three people—each desperate for something—become tangled around each other and this house, the tension becomes suffocating. When the eruption finally happens, the outcome is shocking. I don’t want to spoil the ending, so I’ll just say that I found the final few pages puzzling. While the resolution for two of the characters is undeniably tragic, I’m less certain about how we are to view the conclusion for the third, which, though dramatically changed, feels somehow safer. 

Check in to the comments and let me know if you’ve read this one and what you think about the last few pages.

I have not seen the film, and as I’ve grown increasingly sensitive to depictions of violence the past few years, I’m not sure I could watch this one. If you’ve seen the movie, what can you say about the level of violence? How graphic is the ending?  

ABAW: The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

Still catching up. 

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, Penguin Press, 2011 (library copy)

When the Washington Post published an excerpt of this memoir in January, a mommy-war firestorm erupted. I read the excerpt, and some of the responses, mainly out of curiosity. Chua tells the story of raising her two daughters in what she calls a Chinese parenting style, like a Tiger Mother, limiting sterotypical Western childhood freedoms and demanding a lot from them, even as very young children. The most controversial bits are Chua’s admissions of hyperbolic parenting rage (calling her daughter garbage once, rejecting their homemade birthday cards, threatening to burn their stuffed animals.)

Now that I’ve read the book, I think the controversy is blown way out of proportion. Chua’s writing style is dry, and very funny. Her biggest target in the book is herself, and she presents her story of parental adaptation honestly. The take-home message from Chua is that like all other parents, she thought she was doing the right thing. Some things her children have done vindicated Chua’s choices, some things castigated them. Whether she was too strict or too demanding, she expected as much or more from herself as from her daughters, and the loving response of Sophia tells us more about the metatruth of Chua’s parenting than anything else. Sophia’s letter to her Tiger Mom.

ABAW: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Houghton Mifflin, 1986 via Anchor Books, 1998.

This is Atwood’s classic book about a dystopian near future in which a Christian sect (anti-Baptist, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, misogynist, totalitarian, and violent, among other things) takes over the United States and establishes communities of surrogate pregnacy based on a very narrow reading of the Bible. This book terrified me. Atwood brings the tale of the dissolution of the US into Gilead so close to reality as to make it feel immediate and tangibly possible. Even now, more than twenty-five years after its first publication. 

The mood of the tale is claustrophobic. There is only isolation. Touching is a privilege mostly denied. The main character is isolated in her mind. No talking. No touching. No knowing. No trusting. Only grief, and fear, and uncertainty among the patterned certainties.

The only hope in the book is that the society is untenable. It is cruel and corrupt and in the process of collapsing on itself.

Two confessions.

1. While I am an academic nerd, I found the academic epilogue off-putting at first. I thought about it for some time before I understood the purpose of the pseudo-academic discussion of Gilead. I was still grated by the subtle cues that while Gilead had failed and the world had changed with the passage of time, that world still bore a great deal of the subtle and not-so-subtle misogyny that we can witness right now without much effort. Atwood deftly points to the biases that academic culture often bears when examining the “quaintness” of the past. And I use that word, “quaintness”, with a very sharp degree of etymological calculation. 

2. I did not — in spite of my time living and breathing inside The Canterbury Tales for several years of my life — connect the title of this book with Chaucer’s collection until I read that epilogue. (I know, duh) I’m still digesting the implications of the connection.

Beautifully wrought story about the horrors of fanatical and narrow-minded governance from an important contemporary social critic.

ABAW: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

I have some catching up to do.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, William Morrow & Co. via Harper & Row Perennial Fiction, 1988 (personal copy)

Art Bechstein sets out to have a summer of dissolution in Pittsburgh following his college graduation. He doesn’t want to think about what career he’ll begin when the summer ends, or about his gangster father, or his recent ex, Claire, or his dead mother, and he certainly doesn’t want to think about himself.

So of course, everything that happens over the summer comes back to questions of Art’s identity and his relationship with his family and the family business.

The friends and lovers Art finds that summer - chiefly Arthur, Phlox, and Cleveland - reflect back to Art a portion of his character, even as he feels like he is bending and morphing himself around his feelings for them.

The attention to language, the subtle foreshadowing, the way Chabon manages to take the wasted summer of a bunch of college kids and make it into something epic and tragic, all add up to a satisfying and lyrical novel.

Favorite lines:

“I never understand how people can be perfectly frank all over the sidewalk like that in public.”

“[Cleveland] would breach the barrier that stood between my family and my life, and scale the wall that I was.”

“They have vultures everywhere they have food chains.”