Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday March 10, 2011
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GRYPHON: New and Selected Stories
Charles Baxter
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307379214
400 pages
$27.95
Reviewed by Jeff Turrentine, a former Washington Post reporter, is a writer living in Los Angeles.
Charles Baxter's short stories easily satisfy the genre's one nonnegotiable requirement: The central characters, through an encounter or an epiphany, must undergo some kind of transformation. What's most pleasurable, however, about the work-in-miniature by this celebrated American novelist ("The Feast of Love," "Saul and Patsy") isn't the way it fulfills its basic generic obligations. It's the way that Baxter lovingly teases anguish, humor and heart-rending beauty out of clear, unaffected sentences describing the gray-clouded interior worlds inhabited by his cast of (largely) Midwestern melancholics.
Here's how Baxter describes the grieving mother of a dead 3-year-old, a woman who has found she can no longer endure nature's glorious pageant of regular renewal: "She grew to hate the sun and its long, lengthening arcs. When living trees broke open into pink and white blossoms in the spring, Harriet wanted to fling herself against them. She couldn't remember what it was about life that had ever interested her." Or a pianist's cringing realization that the vocalist he's accompanying is ever so slightly off-key: "I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God's more complicated pranks." Or a recently spurned woman, reaching weakly for a prop of self-confidence as she falls into despair: "She stood naked in front of the mirror. She thought: I am the sexiest woman who can read Latin and Greek in the state of Illinois."
Sentences like these can stop a reader mid-page, demanding to be savored again before going any further. And they're to be found in every story in "Gryphon," a thoughtfully chosen collection that spans Baxter's career. Many of these 23 stories will already be familiar to his fans, all having appeared previously, but the effect of reading (or rereading) them in concert is a powerful one. They would appear to have been selected not only for their shimmering prose, but for the way they combine to suggest an entire lonely and somewhat ill-managed universe -- the kind where an alcoholic trying to get sober has "put his faith in the Almighty to get him through this episode and through the rest of his life," but where "God had declined the honor so far and was keeping up a chilly silence."
The center of this universe is Five Oaks, Mich. -- Baxter's semirural, Rust Belt Yoknapatawpha -- where many of these stories take place. Mythic locales, appropriately enough, are fertile habitats for mythic beasts. In the collection's title story, named for a fantastic creature with the head of an eagle and the body of a lion, an equally fantastic creature appears one day in a Five Oaks elementary school classroom. She's Miss Ferenczi, a substitute teacher who promptly does away with the curriculum and begins instructing her fourth-grade pupils in the hows, whys and wherefores of her own altered reality, in which diamonds are magic, Beethoven faked his deafness to get attention, angels live under the thick clouds of Venus, and 6 times 11 equals 68. (This last lesson is proffered by the substitute teacher as, fittingly, a "substitute fact.")
Miss Ferenczi tells the students that as soon as their regular teacher returns, "six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest assured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks." It's a prognosis, of course, and not a very hopeful one: After the fourth grade, she seems to be telling them, you'll all be subjects of the cold, empirical world, where whimsy and imagination have been smothered to death by science and data. You will lose something essential, and you'll never be able to get it back.
A deep and irreparable sense of loss is the shared condition of almost all the characters in these stories. In "Surprised by Joy," a young married couple must endure two tragedies: first, the loss of their child, and second, the fact that only one of them is prepared to heal and move on. The mirror-gazing classics teacher in "The Cures for Love," facing life alone after the abrupt exit of her lover, dreams of receiving romantic counsel from no less a therapist than Ovid, who advises her to avoid witnessing any public displays of affection. "If you don't want to love, don't expose yourself to the sight of love, the contagion."
Redemption, when it's available, always seems just outside the price range of these bruised and battered souls. In "Winter Journey," a man's drunken, dangerous attempt to rescue his stranded fiancee after her car has broken down becomes the stuff of Homeric epic. As he travels the short distance from his apartment to the Mobil station where she's waiting for him, he slides and skids over the snowy streets, hitting parked cars, busting his one remaining headlight and incurring a mysterious head injury that he's too wasted to remember even getting. He survives -- miraculously -- but something else dies that night, despite his heroic efforts.
"I made it! I made it over here!" he shouts at his disbelieving and by now thoroughly disenchanted fiancee. And for that moment, Baxter invites us to celebrate with the driver his dubious triumph. The deck is stacked against him, as it is against almost all of these characters. But they get major points -- in their creator's eyes, and in ours -- for fighting back, however fruitlessly.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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WHEN THE KILLING'S DONE
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking
ISBN 978-1408811481
369 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor, can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com
In his superbly marketed blockbuster "Freedom," Jonathan Franzen lectured at us for a long time about the dire plight of the environment. Readers who had been busy in another room during the past 50 years learned from his earnest hero that the population is exploding, pollution is poisoning rivers and industries such as coal mining are destroying forests. There's probably a lobbyist in some circle of hell who might take issue with those claims, but in general, "Freedom" delivered its tirade very late in a silent spring.
Given the dismal state of our water, air and soil, how could anyone write a challenging novel about the environment? What's left to say amid this sea of carcinogens and greenhouse gases besides merely confirming the sad truths most of us already know?
Enter T. Coraghessan Boyle's terrifically exciting and unapologetically relevant "When the Killing's Done." Boyle doesn't have Franzen's marketing genius (journalists can't resist Franzen's mannered disdain for popular taste), but he demonstrates that it's possible to write an environmental novel that provokes discussion instead of merely thumping away on conventional wisdom.
His story's white-water prose propels us through 60 years of tumultuous history involving the Northern Channel Islands off the coast of Ventura, Calif. Long a master at scenes of quick-moving crisis, Boyle punctuates this plot with the best catastrophes of his career. After reading his series of disasters at sea, no one will ever sail with him again. Gripping as all that stormy drama is, though, it also emphasizes the larger theme of "When the Killing's Done" -- the chaotic randomness of the natural world, a world that human beings control but must ultimately submit to.
The earliest scenes of the novel show us a shipwreck soon after World War II, from which a woman washes up on Anacapa, a tiny island colonized by thousands of rats whose ancestors washed up 100 years earlier after another ill-fated voyage. Then in the 1970s, we see a makeshift family struggling to raise sheep on nearby Santa Cruz Island. Finally, the bulk of the novel takes place in the present day, when scientists in the National Park Service are implementing plans to return the Northern Channel Islands -- "the Galapagos of North America" -- to their natural condition.
Boyle darts briskly through this history, filling in curious political and biological details about an archipelago that's home to a menagerie of unique fauna and flora -- a spotted skunk, a dwarf fox, a deer mouse -- all endangered by a few voracious, invasive species (mostly rats and pigs). But he keeps the story rooted in the exciting lives of his characters. He never lectures or hectors, and he never reduces the drama to a vaudevillian conflict between white-hatted environmentalists and mustache-twirling industrialists -- the kind of bumper-sticker poses that can make environmental fiction sound so schoolmarmish. He leaves melodrama largely behind and instead animates the contentious debate of this novel in the lives of antagonists who are all ardent defenders of the natural world.
Alma Takesue is a scientist and a director of information for the National Park Service. The 33-year-old vegetarian feels guilty about taking hot showers and agrees with her boyfriend that they shouldn't bring another child into this crowded world. It's her job to explain to the news media and a skeptical public why the Park Service should spend millions of taxpayer dollars to slaughter animals in an effort to preserve nature: Nonnative rats, snakes and pigs pose a devastating threat to endemic species in the Northern Channel Islands' tightly contained ecosystems, and the way to restore the islands to their pre-human state is to poison and hunt those predators until they are gone. It's a counterintuitive argument for preserving biodiversity that involves a shocking amount of bloodshed.
That violence is exactly what offends some animal rights activists, particularly a wealthy electronics store owner, Dave LaJoy. Converted years ago by a grisly pamphlet about the horrors of industrial farming, LaJoy believes that "the loss of a single animal -- a single rat -- is intolerable, inhumane and just plain wrong." Boyle crawls right into the furnace of his mind. Easily irritated and quickly frustrated, LaJoy considers himself "a life-giver," but he's a bully who antagonizes the Park Service at public meetings, pokes legal sticks into its restoration plans and resorts to acts of sabotage that spin out of control like a PETA version of "Survivor."
Alma is clearly the more attractive personality here, but is her scientific confidence any less self-righteous than LaJoy's? Shouldn't she have more qualms about covering an island with poison in the name of saving it? Is the moral calculus really so clear -- that thousands of animals must die gruesomely so that others she considers more authentic might thrive? Finding her car vandalized yet again by animal rights activists, Alma has a crisis of faith as she admits to herself that she's "a killer in the service of something higher, of restoration, redemption, salvation, but a killer all the same. Sadness, with its rotten edges, fills her -- and weariness, weariness too, an exhaustion that saps her like the first withering assault of a winter cold." These are the qualms this novel explores in the most dramatic and provocative ways, even while it introduces us to the fascinating methods of modern ecological restoration.
Boyle doesn't quite recapture the emotional pathos of his most famous polemic novel, "The Tortilla Curtain," but "When the Killing's Done" presents a smarter, sharper vision of our environmental challenges than his doomsday novel, "A Friend of the Earth." By corralling all these pigs, rats, dwarf foxes, golden eagles and human beings into one stormy tale, he's created a raucous exploration of the clumsy role that even the best-intentioned people play in these fragile environs.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FOREMOST GOOD FORTUNE
Susan Conley
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307594068
276 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post
Beware of people who say they "love to travel," especially when they invite you on some glamorous excursion. My first husband, when we studied for a year in France, couldn't pronounce pamplemousse, and yet he craved grapefruit for breakfast. Every morning, I'd brave the contemptuous sneers of greengrocers to bring him his morning meal of sour citrus, which he chowed into triumphantly, while I sobbed and sulked and the baby shrieked for her breakfast, too. It was the '50s, we were only in our 20s, and we didn't know anything about marriage or love or breakfast or who has to apologize.
Susan Conley, on the other hand, would seem to be a bona fide grown-up with enough smarts to carry her through a long and momentous trip. "The Foremost Good Fortune" is a tough and gritty memoir about spending over two years in Beijing with her husband and two boys during the months leading up to the 2008 Olympics. She's traveled a lot, both with and without her husband, Tony. And Tony, thank goodness, has been studying Mandarin since his days at Stanford University. The two of them love to travel; they crave adventure; they yearn to grow as a family and as individuals.
They're not sightseeing at five-star hotels. They're attempting the hardest part of foreign travel: moving across the world as a group of four, attempting to masquerade as a "normal" family.
Early in the story, Susan is transported in a van by a gentlemanly driver named Lao Wu. Dizzy with jet lag, she arrives to pick up her sons, Aidan and Thorne, from their first day of school. They, predictably, burst into tears. The little one wails, "Do you have a snack for me? Do you have water? I'm thirsty. I'm hot." And "You should have come earlier," the older boy says, "You shouldn't have come to school so late." Of course, she's come to school perfectly on time. But she's dragged them into hell without telling either of them first.
The China they're in is contingent on things the family can't be sure of. They live in a fancy new high-rise, just standing in sandy soil -- no sidewalks. Across the street, the remains of an old hutong, or traditional form of Chinese housing with public toilets, still stands. From their apartment window, they can see neighbors in the hutong strolling about in bathrobes, carrying toothbrushes. There's no "center" for Conley and her family, no middle. They want to live an authentic Chinese life, but what does that mean?
As with many hardworking American families, the husband is often absent, at work. Susan is uneasy in her dealings with the other moms at the international school her sons attend. She's shy and a little too educated for them. She's a writer, finishing a novel set in Paris. She frets because other mothers demand more homework from their kids.
She hires a Mandarin teacher and, later, a personal trainer, crankily coming to terms with this two-year crack in time where people smoke and blow their noses without using a handkerchief. She has to keep fielding her sons' frequent tantrums and enduring her husband's blissful ignorance about what she thinks of this life.
And then she gets cancer. The fretful, frightened mother absorbs the hit, almost shattered by the news and how it plays out in her family, in her body.
You hear about riveting prose, and this is it. The story is nailed down, noisily, in metal. "The Foremost Good Fortune" is just about as honest a book as you'll ever read. The trip Conley went on was to a far more complex place that she envisioned. This is a beautiful book about China and cancer and how to be an authentic, courageous human being.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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WE, THE DROWNED
Carsten Jensen. Translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund with Emma Ryder
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0151013777
678 pages
$28
Reviewed by Peter Behrens, whose next novel, "The O'Briens," will be published next year
When was the last time you relished sitting down with a 678-page Danish novel? "We, the Drowned" might just be too much book to tote to the beach next summer, but it's powerful reading for a long winter's night. For many nights, in fact.
Carsten Jensen's epic unfolds across nearly 100 years, from 1848 to 1945. Interwoven stories play out in seaports all over the world, from Samoa to Newfoundland, but the men and the boys, and most of the women, are Marstallers, citizens of a tiny seafaring town on the Danish island of Aero, on the eastern side of the Jutland peninsula. The North Sea boils on the west, the Baltic on the east, and for centuries, Marstal ships -- mostly wooden -- sailed the seven seas. Marstal is Jensen's hometown -- and home port for this ambitious, restless, Nordic saga.
The story starts in 1848, as Marstal men are drafted onto Danish warships to fight Germany over possession of the disputed province of Schleswig-Holstein. Jensen's description of the Danish ship-of-the-line Christian the Eighth running aground in Eckernforde Fjord and being knocked to pieces by a German shore battery transcends anything Patrick O'Brian ever wrote about wooden ships and iron men. (And these Marstallers, by the way, are anything but iron.)
When the survivors are herded off the beach as prisoners of war, Jensen's prose -- though occasionally overballasted with earthy Nordic irony -- develops a bite and a scabrous, wandering beauty. "We'd stopped thinking in terms of victory or defeat," the narrator says. "Our battle was to escape the sight of the wounded, and questions rang in our heads like an echo of the destruction around us: Why him, or him?" At such moments "We, the Drowned" sets sail beyond the narrow channels of the seafaring genre and approaches Tolstoy in its evocation of war's confusion, its power to stun victors and vanquished alike.
The Marstallers who survive the battle in the fjord return home to do what Marstal men have always done: sign on as crewmen aboard ships that sail the world, leaving wives and children behind again.
One survivor of the 1848 battle happened to be standing on the deck of Christian the Eighth when she blew up. "Laurids Madsen should have been dead," Jensen writes. "But death didn't want him, and he came back down a changed man." Laurids comes home, signs on for a voyage and disappears.
But in a seafaring town, sailing away is only half the story; being left behind is the other half. Laurids' son, Albert, furious at being abandoned, searches for his missing parent across the entire Pacific. With shrunken heads, unforgiving seas and men unmoored from moral sense, "We, the Drowned" sometimes feels like a novel with Joseph Conrad at the helm. But the heart of darkness is never upriver: It's usually back home, in Marstal.
Far surpassing his father, Albert becomes a successful captain and ship broker, rich in the Marstal style. His ships ply the world, but he has no pretensions, no office and spends his days wandering the harbor, keeping all his accounts in his head. Building, owning and sailing ships are what Marstallers do, at least until wooden ships and wind give way to steel and steam.
During World War II, the Marstallers prosper by running German and English blockades, but dozens drown when their ships are sunk by U-boats or blown up by mines. Still, the town cemetery fills up very, very slowly -- not that Marstal men don't die, but they rarely die at home. The town has struck a deal with the sea, or the devil. The two are just about the same, or so it seems to those left behind. Marstal, town of sailors, really belongs to wives, widows and orphans.
Laurids, his son Albert and a boy whom Albert almost adopts are all fatherless. Abandonment, kinship and destiny connect their densely interwoven stories. When a sailor's young widow inherits a fortune, she uses her newfound power to throttle the shipping industry that has made life in Marstal so prosperous, so deadly and so lonely for wives and children left behind. Her business partner finally grasps what she's doing -- "You want the impossible! You want to whip the sea until it begs you for mercy" -- but the realization comes too late.
This gorgeous, unsparing novel ends during the last days of World War II with a captain struggling to bring his crew home after their ship is torpedoed. The sea is Marstal's life and Jensen's unstrained metaphor: luring the Marstallers away from home, offering uncertain passage and providing few harbors that are safe for long.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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