Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday February 10, 2011
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YOU KNOW WHEN THE MEN ARE GONE
Siobhan Fallon
Amy Einhorn
ISBN 978-0399157202
226 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Lily Burana, the author of "I Love A Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles"
The Army loves its acronyms. We all know SNAFU, AWOL and R&R. A lesser-known abbreviation among civilians is BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front. At any military meeting, the time-pressed leader invariably wants the BLUF: Get to the point, time's a-wasting. So, busy reader, here's the BLUF on Army wife Siobhan Fallon's first short story collection: "You Know When the Men Are Gone" is a terrific and terrifically illuminating book.
Fort Hood, the country's largest active-duty military installation -- where Fallon lived during her husband's two deployments to Iraq -- forms the ideal backdrop for these eight loosely interconnected stories of marriage and family life in this time of war. The spare, rural Texan landscape and the stripped-down post itself, surrounded by a ring of tattoo parlors and pawn shops that yield to rings of highways and chain-store sprawl, evoke the essence of military Americana: a war-machine hub bound by barbed wire, then loneliness rolling out for miles. Inside the security checkpoints, it's the same as any other Army post anywhere in the world: eggshell-thin walls between quarters; commissary parking lots clogged with cars on the biweekly paydays; women and children left behind, waiting.
In the title story, a young wife, Meg Brady, becomes obsessed with her glamorous Serbian neighbor, Natalya. Meg's fascination forms a powerful counterpoint to her own life, held in suspense by her husband's absence and her morbid thoughts, which crop up during seemingly innocuous activities such as grocery shopping: "She walked the meat aisle, passing her husband's favorites: baby back ribs, pork chops, bacon-wrapped filet mignons. She reached out, touching the cold, bloody meat through the plastic. The raw flesh both horrified and mesmerized, and she wondered if a human being would look the same if packaged by a butcher, the striations of fat, the white bone protruding, the blood thin like water in the folds of the wrap. She wondered if wounds looked like this, purple and livid, but with shrapnel sticking out, dust clinging to the edges, blood in the sand. She quickly put the packaged beef down, telling herself that she would not think such things after Jeremy was home."
"It's a small Army," the expression goes, and the entwined lives of Fallon's characters bear this out. In a heartbreaking story called "The Last Stand," injured specialist Kit Murphy journeys home from the Middle East to his wife, Helena. "His section of the plane was dotted with fellow battered soldiers leaning forward with sweat on their foreheads, all of them wondering if their wives would be waiting, and if they were, how long they would stick around when they saw the burn scars, the casts, the missing bits and pieces that no amount of Star Wars metal limbs could make up for."
He later shows up in the equally devastating closing story, "Gold Star," to be pressed into telling a young widow how exactly her husband -- a senior noncommissioned officer -- was killed. "I don't mean any disrespect, ma'am," he says, trying to dilute her pain to distance himself from it. "But does it matter? I'm alive because of your husband. ... He saved my life."
The highest praise I can give this book -- as a critic and a soldier's wife -- is that it's so achingly authentic that I had to put it down and walk away at least a dozen times. At one point, I stuffed it under the love seat cushions. If Fallon ever expands her talents into a novel, I may have to hide in the closet for a month.
Challenging as the subject matter may be, this is a brisk read. Fallon's sentences are fleet and trim. Her near-journalistic austerity magnifies the dizzying impact of the content: This is your brain on war.
There is grace in this collection, as well as willed forgiveness and valiant attempts at understanding. But mostly there is pain, of the ignoble sort. A steely thread running through these stories is the hard truth about modern military domestic life: In the endless grind of deployments, upheavals and uncertainty, there are more casualties than we can count. Marriages falter, vows get smashed into dust, suspicions simmer, children suffer.
The story "Leave," in which a warrant officer sneaks home from Iraq and breaks into the basement of his own house to spy on his wife, is one of this collection's most powerful stories. He lurks below, wondering if she's cheating on him, wondering what he will do once he finds out. The takeaway from the story, and all the others, is this: When the men come home, the real battles begin. And if the war doesn't kill you, the fiery re-entry just might.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE RED GARDEN
Alice Hoffman
Crown
ISBN 978-0307393876
288 pages
$25
Reviewed by Anne Trubek, the author of "A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses"
Alice Hoffman's "The Red Garden" is a dreamy, fabulist series of connected stories set in Blackwell, Mass., a small town in the Berkshires. As we learn in the first story, "The Bear's House," feisty Hallie Brady founded Blackwell, originally named Bearsville, in 1750. Hallie, unlike the other settlers felled by the winter's cold, was unafraid. She kept families alive by stealing her husband's boots and gun and hunting in the woods, where she spent many happy, freezing nights in a bear's den. She loved that bear and the wild mountains. When the other settlers warmed up and established a small village, Hallie missed her forest. She often "gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living." In her civilized sorrow, she gardened and created the curious patch of ground that gives the book its title.
Hallie is the first of many women in "The Red Garden" who desire something found only outside Blackwell. The subsequent stories tell of more such women. Most are accompanied by a date: "The Year There Was No Summer" takes place in 1816, "The River at Home" in 1863, "The Truth About My Mother" in 1903 and "The Red Garden" in 1986. As the decades and centuries pass, women disappear, pine for the wild or die young. Some stay in town resigned to a life of constant longing. As one character says at the end of her tale, "I already knew I would never get what I wanted."
Sound bleak? Don't worry. Individual tragedies are offset by Hoffman's penchant for fairy-tale syntax and events. The extraordinary happens daily in Blackwell: Men revert to a wild state, women become eels, trees bloom in the snow, and a ghost in a blue dress calls from the river's edge. Hoffman's consciously simple style transforms people's pain into mythic parable. The morals of these stories are satisfying, particularly the endings, which add just the right combination of finality and resonance: "She was the town schoolteacher and the love of his life," one narrator concludes. "I was the girl who had nearly drowned, but had managed to save myself instead, in the year I turned ten." But elsewhere, when describing places and people, Hoffman's straightforward prose is too pat: A character "didn't feel the cold, perhaps because he was burning up with ideas."
The author of two earlier story collections and a number of best-selling novels for adults and young people, Hoffman has developed her own brand of magical realism. Lulling and thought-provoking, she conjures soothing places where readers, like the children to whom we tell fairy tales, can learn with pleasure. Famous people from history stop by Blackwell, and their unlikely visits seem no more implausible than a woman becoming an eel.
"The Red Garden" can also be read as a narrative of nation-building. A small New England town makes a good lens through which to view American history and its co-dependent relationship with nature: First, the eels feed the citizens, and then they become material for industry in the form of eelskin boots, only to be replaced later by leather. Meanwhile, the eels, so plentiful in the 18th century, are scarce by the 20th, when hippies set up a communal farm in the apple orchard.
The wars, illnesses, trends and events that structure this novel -- the Civil War, the Depression, World War II -- should add a background of historical authenticity. But some of the stories are as unlikely as a garden that turns all flowers red. Blackwell opens a history museum in the 1860s, when few such museums existed. An earnest WPA writer, Ben Levy, visits Blackwell to record tall tales. Levy is a mild-mannered Jew who graduated from Yale in the 1930s when few Jews attended the Ivy League school, and he drinks with his friends at the Plaza's Oak Room. Such a figure would have been unlikely, yet Hoffman does not remark on this. The omissions are notable, too: Hoffman addresses the Civil War and its horrors but not slavery.
These historical anachronisms make the novel's use of enchantment unsettling. But perhaps trying to figure out if this history could have happened is playing the wrong game. "A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart," Hoffman writes in "The Fisherman's Wife," a story about gossip during the Depression. These tall tales, with their tight, soft focus on America, cast their own spell.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SPURIOUS
Lars Iyer
Melville
ISBN 978-1935554288
188 pages
$14.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
The narrator of "Spurious," this short, academic, allegorical tale, is Lars -- not, one hopes, too much like the one who wrote this book, which recently attained great popularity as a blog in England. The real Lars Iyer is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Newcastle. The Lars in the novel seems to be holding down an office job, or perhaps an administrative post at a university. Either way, he's wasting his time, as his merciless friend, "W.," constantly reminds him.
W. has made it his lifetime commitment to torment and denigrate poor Lars, and if W. is not very innovative or original, he's nothing if not persistent: He mocks Lars' speech: "You stammer and you stutter, and you swallow half your words." This must come from Lars' body's rebellion: "Something inside you knows you talk rubbish. Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth." But W. is just getting started. "When did you know you weren't going to amount to anything?" He refers to Lars as "the idiot in the forest," and asks him, "Do you think it's possible to die of stupidity?" Actually, W. doesn't think too much of himself or his friend. He dismisses them both as "apes" and torments them both for their inability to think (which is sad since they're both self-proclaimed intellectuals).
W. is bitterly competitive, even as he pretends to dismiss the hapless Lars. "His IQ's higher than mine," Lars notes. "Just a little bit, but that's what separates us, man from ape. And he's from a higher class than me."
"I have manners," W. tells his friend. "You have no manners. ... Why do you keep touching your chest so much? Does it arouse you? Keep your hands on the table where I can see them. Read your book."
During this particular exchange, W. and Lars are traveling through continental Europe, trying to discover some of the dignity and profundity of the Old World. They're searching for ancient and venerable thoughts, but not coming up with all that much. We never know what Lars actually thinks about the world of knowledge. He has his own personal problems, which have to do with the degeneration of his hideous basement flat back in England. W., to his credit, focuses his mind on loftier thoughts, although they are riddled with cliches. W. is convinced, for instance, that the end of the world is nigh. The apocalypse is coming along any minute now, or maybe it's already swung by, and he and Lars just haven't noticed. W. is also fascinated by the possible coming of the Messiah -- though he doesn't believe in God. But W.'s intellectual reach more than exceeds his grasp. He's forever trying to read the great thinkers of our civilization in their original languages, except that he's forgotten all his Latin and Greek. Perhaps that's one of the reasons he can't cease hounding the pitiful Lars, who is -- in W.'s eyes, at least -- repellently fat.
When you come down to it, there's not much these discontented companions can do -- except drink. And this they do with pure enthusiasm, saluting the oceans when they pass one, considering pouring libations into rivers. But they'd rather keep their alcohol to themselves: "Last night," Lars remembers, "we had a bottle of red wine, then beer, then we drank Tequila from the bottle. Then we finished off the bottle of Plymouth Gin, then a bottle of Cava and then a bottle of Chablis."
The truth is, these men have both come up against a philosophical blank wall. Perhaps they are at the end of a certain kind of time, a certain way of thinking and mapping out the world. The old world is gone, and the new one hasn't come yet. If W.'s rhetoric doesn't make this point, poor Lars' flat does. The place is mysteriously drowning. All the electric fans (philosophical hot air?) can't change the apartment's inexorable decline. "I'm freezing," W. rants at Lars. "How can you live like this? And it's dark. There's no light. I can't see anything. And it's damp."
"It's better than it was," Lars answers lamely, but he knows he's lying. His way of living is washed up.
Who should buy this book? Intellectuals who face intellectual troubles in their own lives. There's a lot of biting satire about the shortcomings and general foolishness of the so-called life of the mind. This is graduate student wit, which is fearsomely funny if you know the grad students and professors in question, but really not as funny if you don't. And reading this in blog form must have been easier; in one long narrative string, however clever, it becomes relentless.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR: A Selected Edition
Henry Mayhew. Edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Oxford
ISBN 978-0199566082
472 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday
First published in 1850-52 in periodical form and eventually collected in four volumes in 1861-62, Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor" takes the fascinated and appalled reader deep into the world of the Victorian underclass. In Mayhew one encounters the real-life equivalents of such Charles Dickens characters as Fagin, the Jewish receiver of stolen goods; Krook, the rag-and-bottle-merchant; Jo, the sickly crossing sweeper; and the Artful Dodger, leader of a band of youthful pickpockets. In the words of its title page, this journalistic classic focuses on "Those That Will Work,Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work."
As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst notes in the superb introduction to this volume of selections, "London Labour and the London Poor" was "originally advertised as a 'cyclopaedia' of street life, implying that the finished work would be a compendium of facts for dipping into rather than a book to be read from cover to cover, and it certainly lived up to its billing. In its 2,000-odd cramped pages, totaling close to 2 million words, there is scarcely a paragraph that does not contain an eye-opening or ear-catching piece of information. ... London Labour and the London Poor was not only the first major work of sociology (a word first coined in the 1840s). It was also the greatest Victorian novel never written."
Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) was himself a Grub Street hack, who cranked out romances and plays, edited short-lived periodicals and helped found the comic magazine Punch. Here, though, he brilliantly combined interviews with lists and statistics, packed on the local color and wrote as vividly about London as any novelist. He once called himself a "traveler in the undiscovered country of the poor" and said his aim was to give "a literal description of (the people's) labour, their earnings, their trials, and their sufferings, in their own 'unvarnished' language."
His usual procedure was first to define a category -- for instance, "street sellers" or "street performers, artists and showmen" -- and then to zero in on the various professions comprised under that rubric. Whether discussing sewer scavengers or dustmen, beggars or prostitutes, he would begin by carefully noting their physical appearance and often idiosyncratic garb:
"The rat-catcher's dress is usually a velveteen jacket, strong corduroy trousers, and laced boots. Round his shoulder he wears an oil-skin belt, on which are painted the figures of huge rats, with fierce-looking eyes and formidable whiskers. His hat is usually glazed and sometimes painted after the manner of his belt. Occasionally ... he carries in his hand an iron cage in which are ferrets, while two or three crop-eared rough terriers dog his footsteps. Sometimes a tamed rat runs about his shoulders and arms, or nestles in his bosom or in the large pockets of his coat. When a rat-catcher is thus accompanied, there is generally a strong aromatic odour about him, far from agreeable; this is owing to his clothes being rubbed with oil of thyme and oil of aniseed, mixed together. This composition is said to be so attractive to the sense of the rats ... that the vermin have left their holes and crawled to the master of the powerful spell."
Mayhew brilliantly describes the tohu bohu of the Covent Garden flower and vegetable market, takes us along Petticoat Lane with its myriad street vendors of secondhand goods, and reveals the multiple uses for a piece of castoff wool clothing. One learns about the "pure" pickers who collect dung, of the "mud-larks" who wade into the Thames ooze searching for salable detritus, of how a performer practices to swallow a live snake and how a pickpocket learns his trade. "A coat is suspended on the wall with a bell attached to it, and the boy attempts to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing." Shades of Oliver Twist!
Powerful as his own descriptions are, Mayhew can't compete with the quiet horror of his transcribed testimonies. A legless man hawks nutmeg graters, a blind man lives by selling bootlaces, and an 8-year-old peddles watercresses. "I ain't a child," says the last, "and I shan't be a woman till I'm twenty, but I'm past eight, I am." Yet even among the most desperate, Victorian class awareness remains. "'We are the haristocracy of the streets,' was said to me by one of the street-folks, who told penny fortunes with a bottle. 'People don't pay us for what we gives 'em, but only to hear us talk. We live like yourself, sir, by the hexercise of our hintellects -- we by talking, and you by writing.'"
Listen, then, to the bravura patter of a street-corner salesman:
"I've not come here to get money; not I; I've come here merely for the good of the public, and to let you see how you've been imposed upon by a parcel of pompous shopkeepers, who are not content with less than 100 per cent for rubbish. They got up a petition -- which I haven't time to read to you just now -- offering me a large sum of money to keep away from here. But no, I had too much friendship for you to consent, and here I am. ... I've in this cart a cargo of useful and cheap goods; can supply you with anything, from a needle to an anchor. Nobody can sell as cheap as me, seeing that I gets all my goods upon credit, and never means to pay for them. Now then, what shall we begin with? Here's a beautiful guard-chain."
Mayhew talks to anyone -- vagrants, swindlers, omnibus drivers, wandering purveyors of joke books, even a provider of artificial eyes. He learns how old horses are killed for dog food and how ashes from coal fires are collected and sifted to be turned into bricks. At times he pauses to compute the cost of this and the amount of that. "The information collected shows that the expenditure in ham-sandwiches, supplied by street-sellers, is 1,820 (pounds sterling) yearly, and a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches."
A rather sullen prostitute once called Mayhew "a very inquisitive old party." No doubt he was -- to our benefit. Of manageable length, this "selected edition" of "London Labour and the London Poor" includes contemporary illustrations and notes explaining Victorian terms. It's a book you'll want to keep as well as reread.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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