Washington Post Book Reviews
Thursday June 17, 2010
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| THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE Aimee Bender
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385501125
292 pages
$25.95
AMERICAN MUSIC Jane Mendelsohn
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307272669
237 pages
$23.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Right next to those mature, realistic novels you've been reading with a nagging sense of weariness lurks a small collection of books with a dash of magic. Don't worry: No vampires, no space aliens, no time-traveling Scottish hunks strut through these pages. I'm talking about perfectly respectable-looking novels in which strange things take place out of the corner of your eye. These subtle surrealists describe domestic life just one turn of the screw away. If you find yourself in the elevator wistfully looking for floor 7 1/2, stop and get off here.
Two odd and oddly beautiful novels this month will tempt you to see what talented writers can do when they rip little tears in the fabric of reality. Each in her 40s, Aimee Bender and Jane Mendelsohn are not particularly prolific, but they've earned lavish critical praise. Mendelsohn's first novel, "I Was Amelia Earhart," became an unlikely best-seller in 1996, and Bender's weird short stories, most recently in "Willful Creatures," already seem destined for anthologized immortality.
Their melancholy new novels depict young women overwhelmed with extrasensory impressions, a burden of sympathy and insight that's as revelatory as it is painful. In Bender's "The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake," 9-year-old Rose Edelstein sneaks an early piece of her birthday cake and feels her mouth "filling with the taste of smallness, the sensation of shrinking, of upset." She can't articulate it yet, but she knows instinctively that she's detecting the state of her mother's soul. Experiments conducted with a friend at school confirm that Rose can taste the feelings of anyone who prepares her food: Oatmeal cookies from a rushed baker taste "like eating the calendar of an executive"; soup at the hospital "tasted of resentment, fine and full"; a depressed woman prepares a sad pie. As Rose's friend says, "She's like a magic food psychic or something."
Too much of this could quickly overwhelm the flavor of a story with the cloying aftertaste of Alice Hoffman's most overcooked novels, but Bender is sparing with the pixie dust. And besides, what really interests her is the sympathy Rose feels for her family, shown in a series of small, delicate scenes that convey the loneliness of these lives. Rose's father behaves like a polite guest in his own house. Her mother manically jumps from hobby to hobby while clinging to her two children with desperate, almost panicked affection. She seems like one of those women who would breastfeed her son till second grade. Rose's uncanny taste buds aren't really such a stretch beyond most children's ability to detect the strains in their parents' lives, those flavors of guilt, disappointment and resentment that we try to overwhelm with suburbia's artificial sweeteners.
But the most moving section comes in the latter half as Rose grows more aware of her brother's troubles. He's never diagnosed -- his mother won't tolerate that -- and Bender never pins down his condition with a label like Asperger's or agoraphobia, but clearly something is wrong. "All that came through," Rose says, "was that he just wanted to be as alone as possible, aloner than alone, alonest." His agony has nothing to do with food, but in a way he suffers from Rose's hypersensitivity toward those around him. It's here, in a climactic scene that's creepy and delicate, that the real magic of Bender's writing takes place, a tribute to the struggles of people who feel the world too much.
Jane Mendelsohn is a different kind of writer, more openly romantic and lush, but you'll detect a similar strain of the surreal in her new short novel, "American Music." At the opening, Honor, a physical therapist, comes to the VA hospital in the Bronx to work with a badly injured vet. "She possessed an uncommon discipline of mind," Mendelsohn writes, "and a fierce sensitivity to the physical world." The soldier, a young man named Milo, is suffering from a spinal injury and post-traumatic stress inflicted by a roadside bomb in Iraq. At first he won't speak to Honor. "She knows only his back, his neck, his arms, his legs," but as she massages him, she begins "to feel as though she could read him, as she could interpret the meaning in his knots and sinews. Sometimes, and this was not the first time she had questioned her sanity, she received visions from his limbs, his muscles, his bones."
My daughter once had a craniosacral therapist like this who totally freaked me out, but Mendelsohn isn't really writing about a clairvoyant masseuse anymore than Bender is writing about psychic taste buds. Honor articulates how both these novelists might defend their odd pursuit: "She didn't care if none of it seemed possible. It wasn't possible, but it was true."
As Honor continues to work with Milo, therapist and patient become aware of three different stories that emanate whenever she touches him: One involves a childless marriage breaking down during the Depression; another describes a famous but lonely photographer in the 1960s; and the third one takes us back to 17th-century Turkey, where a sultan's concubine struggles to survive court intrigue.
These various sections are helpfully labeled, so keeping them straight isn't a problem, but deducing their meaning is a mystery to Milo and Honor -- and us -- a mystery only partially explained by the end of the novel. What's clear, though, is what a captivating storyteller Mendelsohn can be, and ultimately "American Music" is a novel about the power of stories. She's remarkably good at setting scenes quickly and evocatively, raising up characters we care about immediately and drawing us into their conflicts. And like Bender, she's willing to break our usual three dimensions and let something miraculous slide along the margins: a winged man, a porous wall, a body like a haunted house. If her affection for rich, epigraphic lines sometimes tempts her to sound pretentious, more often she writes the kind of lovely, wise phrases that will have you underlining passages.
Ultimately, this is a romantic story of romantic stories, full of love and longing, despair and loneliness, and one woman's connection to all of them. Milo faces a "cold and unlit (life) lived in a small room," but the tales he experiences with Honor gradually draw him out of the myopia of his own pain. When she asks how he knows he's getting better, Milo replies, "Because I want to know what's going to happen next." That, don't forget, is the reason we started listening to stories in the first place, and here are two sophisticated novelists who can still cast that primal enchantment.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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| BEACH WEEK Susan Coll
Sarah Crichton/Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978 0 374 10925 7
320 pages
$25
Reviewed by Lisa Grunwald, the author of the novel "The Irresistible Henry House" Jordan Adler is a 17-year-old high school senior adjusting to a new hometown, recovering from a serious injury, avoiding her parents' tensions, chasing an ambivalent guy and preparing for life after graduation. Leah Adler, her mother, is a 40-something housewife with a growing need for the very control that having a teenage daughter obliterates. And Charles Adler, Jordan's father, is an increasingly flummoxed participant in the lead-up to the D.C. area graduation ritual known as Beach Week.
In Susan Coll's fourth novel (after "Acceptance," which explored the similarly comic-tragic turf of applying to college), the ostensible question is whether the Adlers should allow their daughter to go to Beach Week at all. This may seem like a red herring in a novel titled "Beach Week." But the real question is not the prudence of trusting teenagers to behave sanely in the weeks before they fling their tassels over their mortarboards. The deeper problem is how and when to let go of one's children, and "Beach Week" is in some respects an exploration of the chaos this challenge creates.
Like so many women who use the month of May to store up tissues for the month of June, Leah is in the throes of a perfectly predictable but still excruciating dilemma: How do you watch your daughter step up to receive her diploma without throwing your arms around her ankles and making her drag you up the aisle? As the mother of a high school senior who is just about to don her graduation robe, I found myself sympathizing with Leah and her riotously conflicting impulses to hover and let go, instruct and observe. The standard nest contract has always kept the "empty" in fine print.
But perhaps because I shuddered with the recognition of my own wackiness, I found myself less drawn to Leah than to the two main male characters. Charles, playing his role in this version of Will-They-Split Lit, is admittedly hapless and irresponsible, but he does his best to keep his act -- and his family -- together. Noah, the owner of a seedy Delaware beach rental where the kids end up, seems the most corrupt character in the book, but he's actually the most innocent, guileless and confused.
The teenagers, meanwhile, are definitely neither innocent nor guileless. When most of them wind up in, around and on Noah's house, readers are treated to the full tour of teenage vices: Beer pong, vodka disguised as bottled water, tequila shots, the use of parents' prescription drugs, random hookups and three-way sex are only the half of it. Other teen habits on display during Beach Week include jealousy, malaise, self-doubt, deceit, mindless property destruction and mind-blowing stupidity.
This behavior (with the possible exception of some plot points that I won't give away but that involve seriously endangered lobsters) should not shock anyone with a child in high school -- or, for that matter, anyone who caught even one episode of "Laguna Beach," an admittedly less nuanced but no less nerve-racking view of the teen scene. That the behavior surprises and shocks Leah and Charles is itself a bit surprising; at one point, Leah is upset even by the discovery that her daughter has started to wear makeup. But perhaps these blind spots are typical of the insular world Coll depicts, one in which petty rivalries, money squabbles, cocktail snacks and legal indemnities seem to be the grown-ups' most pressing concerns.
As for the kids themselves, they appear no more capable than the grown-ups of consistency or grace. With their vows of compliance roughly equal to their acts of defiance, they exhibit the lack of forethought that has recently been explained by what scientists call "the teen brain": the apparent inability to grapple with the concept of consequences. Or, as neurologist Frances Jensen has put it: "It's not that they don't have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they're going to access it more slowly." Alone among her classmates, Jordan struggles to use that part of her brain and, with it, to achieve something akin to true freedom.
With its highs not all that high, and its lows not all that low, "Beach Week" proves to be -- like Beach Week itself -- fun, slightly scary and ultimately fleeting.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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| A LITTLE BOOK OF LANGUAGE David Crystal
Yale Univ
ISBN 9780300155334
260 pages
$25
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom. Five years ago, Yale published Ernst Gombrich's "A Little History of the World." Its text, intended for children, was originally written in German during the 1930s, but Gombrich -- one of the greatest art historians of our time -- slightly revised its 40 chapters for the English edition. He died in 2001, at age 92, and, alas, never saw the finished book.
"A Little History of the World" proved to be phenomenally successful, and not just among young people. Like the "Harry Potter" novels and the "Twilight" series, the book was read by many adults, who rightly admired its beautifully crafted and concise overview of humankind's past.
Recognizing a winning concept, Yale has now followed Gombrich's history with "A Little Book of Language," by the eminent and prolific linguist David Crystal. Best known for the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and "The Stories of English," Crystal here writes for the true beginner, but does so with his usual clarity and authority, as he ranges from ancient etymologies to modern text-messaging. The chapters -- again 40 of them -- are made doubly engaging by Jean-Manuel Duvivier's frolicsome, highly stylized black-and-white illustrations.
Crystal begins at the beginning, with baby talk. He notes, for instance, that a newborn can already recognize its mother's voice. In one experiment, scientists "put a teat into the baby's mouth and wire it up to a counter. The baby sucks away at a steady rate. When it hears the dog, man, and woman sounds, the sucking speeds up a bit and then slows down. But when it hears the mother's voice it sucks like crazy! It recognizes her!" That gosh-wow tone is, I suspect, one of the few signs that "A Little Book of Language" is directed primarily toward young readers. While Crystal sometimes quotes Shakespeare and Dickens, he refers just as often to J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl and Terry Pratchett. One chapter describes Grimm's Law -- the way that Latin "pater" becomes German "Vater" and English "father" -- but never mentions Jakob Grimm (of fairytale fame), who first noted this pattern. Indeed, apart from passing references to the slang expert Eric Partridge and to Sir William Jones -- who promulgated the idea that many European languages, as well as Sanskrit, derive from ancient Indo-European -- this book resolutely focuses on the most basic elements of linguistic study. There's nothing in the least academic or pretentious about it.
Two early chapters examine just how our throats and mouths make sounds; other sections take up the reasons for grammar and explain some of the idiosyncrasies of English spelling. There are plenty of no-nonsense definitions throughout: Sentences "help us to make sense of words." That, emphasizes Crystal, "is what sentences are for." Vivid anecdotes clarify important points: "The day I kill three buffaloes and draw them as three dead animals on my cave wall, I'm being an artist. But the day I kill three buffaloes and invent a sign for them and mark up on my cave-wall, then I'm being a writer."
Factoids abound throughout this latest "little book": There are, for instance, around 6,000 languages in the world. However, without some effort toward preservation, roughly half of them will die out in the next 100 years. Did you know that nearly three-quarters of the human race grows up learning two or more languages? Today, "in half the primary schools in Inner London, over half of the pupils do not speak English as a mother tongue." Because there are competing sign-systems for the deaf, when the play "Children of a Lesser God" -- about a teacher and his deaf student -- was staged in London, "British deaf people couldn't understand the signs, and they had to employ an interpreter to translate from American into British Sign Language."
In other chapters, Crystal tells us about the origin of geographical place names and our own personal names. "The word 'nickname,'" we learn, "first began to be used in the Middle Ages, where it was originally an 'an eke name.' 'Eke' (pronounced 'eek') meant 'also.' A nickname was an extra name, showing a special relationship." There are several excellent pages on how to use a dictionary (though Crystal refrains from making any particular lexical recommendations). Later sections on computer slang and texting duly remind the censorious that people have always used abbreviations and playful neologisms. Many adults, Crystal writes, will remember the meaning of the apparent gobbledygook of "YY U R YY U B I C U R YY 4 ME." Read properly, this means "too wise you are, too wise you be, I see you are too wise for me." He also discusses puns -- "You shouldn't write with a broken pencil because it's pointless" -- and palindromes ("Madam, I'm Adam") and other word games.
Words may be used for play or poetry or persuasion, and Crystal reminds us that one important reason for studying language "is to make ourselves aware of the way people often try to manipulate our thoughts and feelings by the way they speak and write." Hence, the very same action may be described as "Terrorists Move South" or "Freedom Fighters Move South." In its closing chapters, "A Little Book of Language" proceeds to focus on linguistics itself, a discipline whose students don't necessarily try to learn lots of languages but instead aim to discover just how those languages work.
At the end of his book, Crystal lists six causes that are important to him and that he hopes will become important to his readers:
1) The preservation of dying languages.
2) The appreciation of minority languages, those spoken only by small groups of people.
3) The pleasure of learning at least smatterings of languages other than English.
4) A greater appreciation of the variety -- the dialects and accents -- within one's own native tongue.
5) The importance of knowing many styles of English, from the most formal to the slangiest.
6) The need to help people who, for whatever reason, have difficulty in learning to speak or write.
Like Gombrich's "A Little History of the World," Crystal's "A Little Book of Language" may be for children (of all ages, as the saying goes), yet it's by no means childish or juvenile. In other words, buy it for your son or daughter, but read it yourself.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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| ANTHROPOLOGY OF AN AMERICAN GIRL: A Novel Hilary Thayer Hamann
Spiegel & Grau
ISBN 978-0385527149
606 pages
$26
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who regularly reviews books for The Washington Post "Anthropology of an American Girl" is, among other things, a stern rebuke to chick lit everywhere. Coming in at some 600 pages, it reminds us that all human lives are potentially sacred; that no lives should be judged and dismissed out of hand; that young women, though seen for eons as primarily just attractive objects, actually possess soul and will and sentience. This novel follows one girl as she grows up in an Eden she takes for granted with the solecism of youth. The actual place is the town of East Hampton on Long Island; the book's second half is set for four hectic years in Manhattan during the early '80s, with all its sex and cocaine and money and AIDS whirling in a merciless torrent of social change.
The novel, with its many pages and its extensive cast of characters, aspires to comparison with "War and Peace." It's as vast and ambitious as the country itself, a panorama of a particular culture being born and dying and being reborn again. But the book is a lengthy exegesis on the merits of first love and true love -- in this case, two very different phenomena.
"Anthropology of an American Girl" is also a very respectable and serious descendant of the work of D.H. Lawrence. There are repeated references to what it might mean for any of us to be "masculine" or "feminine," as in: "I discovered my soul's invention, the feminine genius of me," which comes smack dab in the middle of the book. And at almost the very end, the heroine makes this melodramatic plea to the villain: "Don't let hurting me be the measure of your manhood."
The book has an interesting history that speaks to the determination of its author: When no one would publish it, she founded her own publishing house and released it herself in 2003. She sold out a first printing of 5,000, an almost unheard-of achievement. It seems to have taken her around five years to send it out again to commercial publishers, and one hopes that people were encouraging her all along to shorten the damn thing; it could lose 100 pages and still impart the information she wishes to impart, but, obviously, she would have none of that. To quote my children, she's "a woman of strong opinions and she doesn't mind sharing them." So here the book stands, once the darling of the underground, now available in commercial form.
The plot itself is simple. Young Eveline (as in Eve, the mother of all mankind), grows up in a small beach community, raised by a divorced mother who works hard to support the both of them and pays Evie the compliment of treating her with benign neglect. Evie saves her filial adoration for her best friend's mom, but that woman dies in short order, and Evie is left -- not really alone, but not really supported either. In her junior year she falls in love with Jack, a beautiful, self-destructive rebel who's the son of a monster-father who wreaks havoc when he can. Kate, Evie's best friend, moves in with her after her mom dies, probably -- in terms of the narrative -- so that Evie can learn to separate from her friends and prepare herself to find the perfect mate.
And in her senior year, she does find that person, in the form of a substitute drama teacher -- a young fellow in his 20s, seven years older than she, named Harrison Rourke, who is also a professional boxer with tenuous connections to the New Jersey mob. It almost goes without saying that Rourke is dazzlingly handsome, has a sterling character (according to his own lights), and deeply respects his mother. Both he and Evie struggle against this grand passion, to no avail. By the time she graduates from high school, Evie has broken up with Jack. She and Rourke spend a magical summer in Montauk, plumbing the depths of their attraction to each other. Then the summer is over. Rourke goes off to fulfill mysterious duties, and Evie enrolls in NYU.
She ends up living with Mark, a sniveling, reptilian, sidewinder-stockbroker who has coveted her for some time. He also hates Rourke with a dreadful hatred, since Rourke is a good person and he is not. But Mark and his family have been there in East Hampton all along -- one of the rich families living cheek-to-cheek with the poor. Evie lives with Mark for three, long, desperately unhappy years, and this is the part of the book that most tries the reader's patience. "For heaven's sake," one longs to say to her, "move back into the dorm if you hate him so much! Especially if you disdain riches as much as you say. Stop being so doleful and spiteful!" But -- if I read correctly -- the author is making the (doubtful) point that without the correct man to complete her, a woman is paralyzed, a woman is nothing. Mark uses these three years to plot and scheme, to be disagreeable and misbehave at parties, to dabble in cocaine and heroin. (Not Rourke; he's way too pure for that.)
The first 300 pages here are unique, a wonderful rendering of decent kids enjoying a tenuous peace and contentment they can barely comprehend. The second half, the city half, has been done before, mostly by Bret Easton Ellis, but it's good, nonetheless. We see that the 1980s really are definitively in the past; you just don't see that kind of cocaine around anymore.
Two last things: Readers can judge their emotional age by whether they side with the kids or the parents here. And after 600 pages, you realize what's been missing all along: not a single giggle from any of these young girls over a period of five years; not one breath taken in mirth, no code words, no silliness, no eruptions of goofy joy. Yes, true love is serious, but please God, not that serious!
Nevertheless, I finished this book with regret. Hamann has put together a carefully devised, coherent world, filled with opinions that need to be spoken -- and heard.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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Coupon Mom shows how we can save lots of money -- without being "cheap." Coupon Mom has been featured on Oprah and Good Morning America, and CNN. Watch this video now. Sincerely.
The ArcaMax Editors
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From the ArcaMax Book Club
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