Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday September 30, 2010
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ROOM
Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown
ISBN 978 0 316 09833 5
321 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor at The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Everything about Emma Donoghue's "Room" sounds mawkish and sadistic, as though she's arriving late to the popular genre of child-abuse thrillers that Maureen Corrigan recently lamented in our pages. But don't bother if those lurid books are your thing, and please keep reading if you'd enjoy one of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year.
You'll recognize the premise of "Room" from several sensational news stories, including the horrific experience of Elisabeth Fritzl, the Austrian woman who was imprisoned by her incestuous father in a makeshift dungeon for 24 years. Using these reports as grim inspiration, Donoghue has invented the abduction of a 19-year-old college student, who's been kept in a soundproof garden shed for seven years. The room has a hot plate and a sink, a toilet and a television. Her captor brings her enough food to survive, disciplines her by cutting off electricity and heat, and rapes her several times a week. This is, as I said, a story I cannot imagine having any interest in reading.
Except that it's told by the woman's 5-year-old son.
Jack has lived his entire life in the 11-foot-square room, and his mother has devoted every moment to creating a realm for him that's safe and enchanting. Although he's preternaturally observant, he rarely sees the scary man -- Old Nick -- who makes his mother's bed creak at night while he's "switched off in Wardrobe." Restricted to Jack's vision, we don't see much of Old Nick either, although we overhear him tell Ma, "I don't think you appreciate how good you've got it here. ... Plenty girls would thank their lucky stars for a setup like this." While the story is sometimes terrifying, Donoghue consistently de-emphasizes Old Nick, a strategy that reflects Jack's limited perspective but also demonstrates that she has no intention of trafficking in the sexual charge of abduction thrillers.
Instead, the novel stays focused on Jack's elemental pleasures and unsettling questions. With the few items at her disposal, Ma has developed the pleasant routines of their day: Phys Ed and Simon Says, Orchestra and Labyrinth, Bath and Hum. "We have thousands of things to do every morning," Jack says, "like give Plant a cup of water in Sink for no spilling, then put her back on her saucer on Dresser. ... I count one hundred cereal and waterfall the milk that's nearly the same white as the bowls, no splashing, we thank Baby Jesus." Determined not to rely too much on the TV, Ma makes sure that Jack is fluent in stories from the Bible, Shakespeare and Mother Goose, whose tropes and characters mingle comically in his imagination.
He's pale and small, with an undeveloped immune system and the strange muted voice of someone who's spoken only to his mother in the dead silence of their cell. But like some child-version of Henry David Thoreau, Jack lives in a state of open-faced delight with the simple objects of Room. And it takes nothing away from the injustice and horror of their circumstances to appreciate the sustaining philosophy these two survivors have developed.
For such a peculiar, stripped-down tale, it's fantastically evocative. Moving beyond those lurid news stories, one thinks of the thousands of prisoners around the world condemned to solitary confinement, those desperate Chilean miners half-a-mile underground, or Kaspar Hauser, the 19th-century German boy who grew up in total isolation. Perseus, remember, was born to an imprisoned mother, too, and others will catch the parallels to Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful," about a father's efforts to entertain his son in a Nazi camp. But Ma isn't trying to deceive Jack or distract him so much as help him make a practical, hopeful life in an extraordinarily constricted situation.
We meet Jack on his fifth birthday, just before Easter, when his mother begins revealing to him the outlandish idea that there's a world beyond their tiny cell. "My head's going to burst from all the new things I have to believe," he says. It's like trying to explain that most of life actually takes place in the fourth dimension. Imagine describing "skies or fireworks or islands or elevators or yo-yos" to someone who conceives of the universe as a sparsely furnished, 11-foot cube. Jack experiences a little Copernican revolution before our eyes, and it's alternately frightening and inspiring to witness, a reminder of just how much we overlook. "When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid," he says in an echo of fellow prisoner Saint Paul, "but now I'm five I know everything."
We see Ma only in Jack's adoration, but clearly she's an extraordinary woman, setting aside her own anguish to nurture the joy that Jack takes in their little world. As unspeakable and bizarre as their plight is, how many new mothers have felt the anguish of Ma, trapped in a room with a small child they love but desperately need time away from? How can she broach the subject of escape without shattering Jack's perfect harmony? And how will Ma ever establish the separation that must take place for Jack to develop into his own person, to comprehend the startling fact that he's not the only other person who exists?
The Irish-born Donoghue has written eccentric, otherworldly stories before ("Slammerkin" is probably her best known), but "Room" -- short-listed for the Booker Prize last week -- should appeal to an even larger audience. Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him -- whatever that would mean: Delivering him to the outside world? Keeping him preserved here forever? I haven't been ripped up like this by a novel since Kiara Brinkman's "Up High in the Trees," about a little boy with Asperger's trying to grasp his mother's death. But until you finish it, beware talking about "Room" with anyone who might clumsily strip away the suspense that's woven through its raw wonder. You need to enter this small, harrowing place prepared only to have your own world expanded.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT
Robert Hellenga
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608192625
342 pages
$25
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post
Don't start reading this book if you've got a dinner party coming up in the next few days, or a committee meeting or a golf game. You'll be calling people up with fake excuses and feeling bad about yourself -- at least that's what happened to me. I'd never heard of Robert Hellenga; I didn't think a book with the name "Snakewoman of Little Egypt" would hold any appeal for me at all. I was deep in another long, portentous novel that had been extravagantly praised by another major American newspaper, and feeling that I was locked in an endless civics lesson that was bound to do me good, if only I could get through the book. Then I opened "Snakewoman," which makes no claim at all to being a great American novel, only a wonderful one.
Jackson Jones, a 40-year-old professor of anthropology, teaches at a university in west central Illinois. He's enduring a mild midlife crisis: Should he stay here in sheltered academia for the rest of his life, or return to where he's done most of his fieldwork -- a place deep in the Congolese forest, close to the Ugandan border? He went native when he was there, acquired a cute girlfriend only three feet tall, with her teeth filed to sharp points, and had a daughter by her. But he's been sick, and he loves the comforts of his "real" home, this inviting campus in the heart of a cozily attractive Midwestern town.
The place where he lives now is extremely nice -- an appealing old house willed to him by his French anthropologist mentor, a giant in his field who believed that he had found the actual site of the Garden of Eden, again, deep in the forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo. That anthropologist left his notes to Jackson, who hesitates to publish them. It's a little outre, isn't it, to claim to have found Paradise?
In fact, Paradise might be right here in Illinois. After returning from his years of fieldwork, Jackson is bowled over simply by going to the grocery store. As he takes in the balsamic vinegar and fresh mussels, the author muses, "You could count on radicchio and fennel and arugula in the produce section. He ate well." Of course, over there in Congo Paradise, they feasted on termites and boiled monkey meat and sometimes elephant. All very good.
The late caretaker of the house Jackson inherited has willed him another sort of bequest. The caretaker's niece, Willa Fern, who will soon change her name to Sunny, has been serving five years in prison for shooting her husband (but not killing him). The sentence is light because her husband gave her every reason to shoot him. Earl is a zealous, snake-handling preacher of a very small church, who forced his wife to put her arm in a box full of snakes to test whether she was cheating on him. She took this very badly and shot Earl the first chance she got. She has just been released from prison, and before he died, the caretaker asked Jackson to keep an eye on her -- whatever that means.
Sunny, meantime, has decided to make some changes in her own life. While in prison she lost her faith: "God was a lot like Earl," she says. "A kind of a bully. The kind of guy who will lie and steal and cheat, slap you around. Look at the Garden. Look what happened to Adam and Eve. 'Disobey me, will you? I'll whup your tails until they won't hold shucks.'" Sunny is content to be merely hardworking and happy. She dropped out of high school to marry Earl; she knows nothing of the world except snake-handling and prison. Now that she's out, everything is new to her; she's drunk with possibilities. She's moved into a garage apartment on Jackson's property; she got her GED behind bars and is about to enroll in college.
Of course, she and Jackson start an affair, but he already has something going with a lady professor who teaches creative writing and is married to a very nice minister. And Sunny has to worry about Earl, who has long since recovered from his wife's gunshots and is prowling about. But life is nice. Sunny learns to cook -- veal Marengo with crayfish and poached eggs. She's dazzled by the idea of writing fiction and speaking French and learning about the big-bang theory.
When Earl does come around, we see he's not such a bad fellow, just nuts. His church advocates handling snakes to push the edge of the cosmic envelope, to blur the line where the self meets the larger world. The oldest woman in his congregation has been prayed back from the dead a couple of times, and she's seen her version of the Garden of Eden, too.
All these characters have the sense to know that they're already there -- in the Garden. They practice their French, cook wonderful dishes, take long car rides, write novels, play timpani. It's not that they don't have their torments; they just don't value them very much. Sunny gets a chance to use her snake-handling skills by signing up for a biology experiment that involves moving a bunch of snakes from one place to another. Jackson -- an anthropologist, after all -- gets involved with Earl's little church. What a strange version of civilization they've got going down there in Illinois! There's no question of Jackson and Earl fighting over Sunny; they all like each other too well for that.
But this is a novel, so someone gets snakebitten, and someone gets shot, and someone dies. People who seem to be in love with one person may well end up with somebody else. Meanwhile, they all learn about each other's lives -- the importance of style as well as ethics, the importance of the vision of the Garden of Eden.
Sunny isn't called "Snakewoman" for nothing. Her nature is to be mysterious and implacable. She's harmless enough if you don't threaten her, but deadly if you do. And there's a wonderful two-headed snake here that's important to the plot. You wish -- well, you almost wish -- that you knew how to handle snakes. Or at least play the drums, or speak fluent French, or cook.
I contented myself with the last and created, under this novel's influence, a pasta dish with Gorgonzola and plums. A masterpiece. Thank you, Mr. Hellenga! For, among other things, inspiring your readers, instead of trying to edify them.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE SADDEST MUSIC EVER WRITTEN: The Story of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings
Thomas Larson
Pegasus
ISBN 978-1-60598-115-4
262 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Writing about music can't be easy. An art historian can direct the reader's attention to that little patch of yellow in Vermeer's "View of Delft," conveniently reproduced on an adjoining page of his scholarly tome, while a book reviewer can quote whatever illustrative passages he favors from that new novel.
But music critics must either attempt to describe the evanescent and ineffable, which can lead to gushy impressionism, or they must transcribe bars of music notation and start talking about subdominants, rallentando and other arcane compositional matters. In the first case, the reader must already know the music to appreciate the floundering description of its particular clang-tint; in the second, he or she must grasp elementary music theory.
Thomas Larson adopts the subjective approach in "The Saddest Music Ever Written," his rather too personal account of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, an achingly beautiful nine-minute piece written in 1936, deeply revered by music lovers and recognizable to moviegoers from its use in the soundtracks of "Platoon" and "Lorenzo's Oil."
Larson's title is, of course, a debatable one, and some readers might argue that a greater sense of the forlorn can be found in various pieces by Bach, or in the traditional Irish song "Danny Boy," or even in Patsy Cline's "Faded Love," not to overlook any number of jazz saxophone ballads. In the competition for most doleful, Larson himself mentions the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 and several funeral marches and dirge-like hymns such as "Nearer My God to Thee." Still, Barber's Adagio is the clear go-to favorite for funerals, memorials and other solemn occasions, such as tributes to the victims of 9/11 or relief benefits for Haiti. Its sustained mournfulness -- lyrical, anguished and full of yearning -- builds to an eventual, but only partial release. As Larson writes:
"Barber composed the sorrow of the Adagio by first concentrating on familiar musical elements: a chant-like melody, rising and falling patterns, restful pauses, growing intensity, string consonance. But then variation, where the composer's genius lies, interrupts the familiarity. Barber's melody, one of many contrasts, is consistently inconsistent, snaking and looping, ascending and falling, traversing longer and shorter lengths. Walter Simmons argues that the Adagio's 'sense of pathos' arises from its many soft dissonances, the suspension, or appoggiaturas, that delay resolution and heighten unease. These suspensions help disrupt the expected harmony, so the piece, exploring the uncharted, sounds new. Or, better put, sounds old and new simultaneously."
Barber was born in 1910 to a well-to-do family in West Chester, Pa., and never had to work at anything but his art. As a student at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, he met fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti, with whom he shared most of his subsequent life. Today Menotti is best known for his short operas, especially that Christmas favorite, "Amahl and the Night Visitors." Both men won Pulitzer Prizes for their music.
When Barber was 26, he and Menotti rented a chalet in Austria and there he worked on a string quartet, ultimately re-scoring its slow movement to create the Adagio for Strings. As Larson admits, almost nothing is known about the genesis of this orchestral masterpiece. By inclination, Barber seems to have gravitated to writing for the voice, as in his second most famous work, the haunting "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," based on a prose-poem by James Agee, and a signature piece for the soprano Leontyne Price. In later years, the composer would mount two operas, the Pulitzer-winning "Vanessa" and the resounding flop "Antony and Cleopatra." Barber never wholly recovered from the latter's failure and gradually sank into bitterness, depression and drink. He died of cancer is 1981.
The summary account of Barber's career is arguably the best part of "The Saddest Music Ever Written." Look out, though, whenever Larson grows personal and essayistic. As early as page 19, sentences such as "The brooding photo of Barber reminded me of my father" hint at what is to come. Several chapters eventually recreate the early life of Larson's parents and chart their later afflictions. What's more, Larson tends to ramble on about melancholia and family sorrows and musical expressiveness, while also repeating over and over the same legitimate points about the Adagio's universality and beauty. All this is meant to underscore the deep humanity of Barber's music but generally seems either misguided or self-indulgent.
Neither is the book helped by the author's sometimes disconcerting diction: "Every claw and nail of the characters' travails erupts from their nuanced voices." On two successive pages Larson employs the bizarre word "self-serious" three times. And then there's his tendency to pop psychologizing or bathetic imaginings:
"No doubt, when Menotti heard the B-flat held above the E-flat minor seventh and the F major chords, then resolve to A, followed by the chant-like melody, he got excited and appreciative, grabbed his handsome young composer from America and held him close, later made love, saying yes we are blessed to have each other yes we wake and walk and live together and yes this is the garden from which our musical selves will grow."
Someone at Pegasus should have alerted Larson to such excesses and urged him to stick with facts and avoid most if not all his egregious personalia. Maybe these economies would have allowed for an index. As it is, much of the most entertaining material in this scattershot book lies in the endnotes, where we learn about various performances and recordings of the Adagio -- those by Arturo Toscanini, Thomas Schippers and Leonard Slatkin are the most admired -- and find amusing anecdotes and bits of trivia. You might or might not be interested to know that the Adagio was played at the funeral of Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary, or that some scholars have speculated that Barber was inspired by reading Virgil's "Georgics," or that the composer and Andy Warhol "liked each other a lot and once got thrown out of a Manhattan restaurant for telling bawdy jokes too loudly for the other patrons' comfort."
If you're a serious Barber fan, you'll probably want to read "The Saddest Music Ever Written" no matter what critics say about its quirks. Anyone else, though, would be better off buying a couple of Barber CDs -- probably the 1991 Slatkin, which emphasizes the orchestral music, and the Schippers-Price compilation highlighting the vocal works, including the ethereal "Knoxville: Summer of 1915."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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C
Tom McCarthy
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 59333 7
310 pages
$29.95
Reviewed by Samantha Hunt, the author of "The Invention of Everything Else," a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla
The end of Tom McCarthy's extraordinary novel "C" takes readers back to its very beginning. Englishman Serge Carrefax arrives in Egypt as British rule is dissolving. He's an architect studying destruction among the sediment of the earliest civilization. The Rosetta stone mingles with the 1919 revolt. Cleopatra with the Ministry of Communications.
Rather than complicate the novel, this mash of cultures serves as a decoder ring. Meaning, quite suddenly, is doubled, tripled. Scenes that were, on first take, merely finely crafted historical fictions are revealed to be the work of a mind entranced by refrains. Only the dullest of readers will be able to resist diving back into the text for a second look. Thoth, god of secret writing, is grafted on top of Serge's own boyhood preoccupation with codes and communication; Alexander the Great stands in for Alexander Graham Bell; and the Rue des Soeurs in Cairo harks back to a name for heroin, "sister," reminding us of Sophie, Serge's beloved and doomed sibling. Culture gets recycled in this novel, but rather than bore us with each reappearance, it provides the dizzying thrill of familiarity.
What happens in "C"? Serge grows up in the early half of the 20th century. He leaves the silkworm farm of his childhood. He goes to war. He goes to Egypt. He does a lot of drugs, meets a lot of women. And "Ulysses" is the story of a man taking a walk ...
Shortlisted last week for the Booker Prize, "C" moves in circuits, forever closing in on its topics: radio, World War I, drugs, Egyptology, seances, sisters, spas and silkworms, to name a few. McCarthy's genius comes in convincing his reader of the connections between these distant planets.
"C" traipses through such lush locales as a deaf school in the British countryside, a vaguely Eastern European spa, the air space above France during the Great War, and the spiritualist communities of London. McCarthy dwells in the historical, but he is hardly bound by the constraints of time. He selects events that, having once happened, reverberate infinitely. There is the sinking Titanic. There is Marconi sending his first "S" across the sea. And there are the hordes of tourists shuffling past the pyramids.
This narrative method is reflected in one of Serge's Egyptian discoveries. Deep inside a tangle of tombs and burial chambers, he points to three ebony statuettes.
"What are those?"
His companion answers, "They're figures for the ka -- the soul -- to dwell in."
"They look like the same person done in different sizes."
"They are: if one gets broken, the ka moves on to another; plus, they show the dead man in three periods of life -- childhood, youth, age -- so that he himself can relive all three, enjoying them simultaneously."
These circuits speed up and repeat. Patterns and people reappear. Scars are reopened. While recovering from a loved one's suicide, Serge studies a tapestry in a German spa that depicts a scene of torture. In it he sees the face of both his physician and his childhood pediatrician: "Maybe Dr. Filip's just the latest incarnation of a character as old as this town itself, Serge thinks to himself -- a figure who reappears in era after era, like Dr. Learmont's face repeating through the sickbed afternoons of his childhood, but on a larger scale, one to be measured not in the memories of a single life but over centuries."
Indeed, after brief costume changes, McCarthy's characters, images and symbols all play multiple roles. The dead return in slightly altered forms. Even Serge himself works a double shift. It's hard to deny the similarities between him and Sergei Pankejeff, the Russian aristocrat whom Sigmund Freud referred to as "Wolf Man."
Representing "a semi-fictitious avant-garde network" called the International Necronautical Society, or INS, McCarthy published a manifesto in 1999 that announced: "Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit. ... We shall attempt to tap into its frequencies. ... Our ultimate aim shall be the construction of a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, then at least persist. With famine, war, disease and asteroid impact threatening to greatly speed up the universal passage toward oblivion, mankind's sole chance of survival lies in its ability, as yet unsynthesised, to die in new, imaginative ways."
Colonizing death? Dying anew? No wonder it's hard to say where this book starts and ends.
Language and letters are not left out of McCarthy's cycling. The C of the title certainly stands for Carrefax, but also for cyanide, Sophie's poison of choice; cysteine, the amino acid that darkens the spa waters; his father's coils of copper wire; the caul Serge was born under; the air corps where he first snorts cocaine; Morse code; and even the cc of Serge's carbon-copied reports. Like these reports, everything here is ink-stained, including the author. McCarthy reignites the literary pyrotechnics of Perec, Calvino, Joyce and Sebald. Words are celebrated in vocabularic feats -- page 117 alone delights a word-lover with "syzygy," "invigilator" and "fusee." Poetry is fired in gunshot blasts that, at times, hit actual human targets: "The words fly from his gun into the sea, hammering and splintering its surface."
As the novel closes, Serge, in a fever, becomes the thing he so often held in his hands: a radio receiver, open to every channel, jammed with all that's come before. In creating a work that recycles itself and our culture, McCarthy has produced something truly original.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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