Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday September 1, 2010
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THREE BOOKS OFFER ADVICE
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ISBN NA
NA pages
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Reviewed by Fiona Zublin
"Nobody knows anything" is an adage cribbed from those in feature film development, but it applies to nearly everything in life. This doesn't prevent anyone from dispensing advice -- thus the advice column, which allows you to bare your deepest soul to a complete stranger, thereby bypassing all the intimacy that it would take to ask someone you actually know for guidance on your love life, your anxieties or your penchant for reading text messages out loud on the Metro. A recent spate of advice books runs the gamut from amusing to stultifying to ... useful? That may be taking it a bit far.
Most of the "advice" in "What to Do When No One Has a Clue: Advice for the Brave New World," by Stephanie Pierson and Barbara Harrison (Clarkson Potter, $18), reads like it was written by aliens whose only knowledge of the world comes from watching "Jersey Shore" and spying on us through a single telescope, which happens to be made of Jell-O. The authors have gotten everyone from "The Real Housewives of New York City's" Bethenny Frankel to anonymous folks like "a cosmopolitan twenty-seven-year-old woman" to answer the most pressing issues of modern life, with very little rhyme or reason as to who answers which. The questions are banal but acceptable: One in the "Dating" section is whether you should explain to a date that you used to be attracted to a different gender from the one you're now into. The answer, from designated wisdom giver and "dating guru" Helen Fisher, reads in part: "I wouldn't. It's like dropping a bomb. The peacock shimmers his feathers to attract; he doesn't drop bombs. So I'd act like a good primate and show the glowing side of my moon." The authors take care to mention that Fisher has a Ph.D., though they fail to mention in what subject. We are guessing it is not zoology, nor making successful metaphors. Also, this book warns that it's "emasculating" when a man lets a woman pay her own way on a date, and recommends that you take your children to the coming-of-age musical "Avenue Q," and ask them what they think is going on during the puppet sex scenes.
The problem with books like Jane Buckingham's "The Modern Girl's Guide to Sticky Situations" (Avon; paperback, $19.99) is that they stick too much to common sense -- you know that if you're dating more than one person, you have to be honest with your multiple man-friends about the situation; you didn't need an advice book to tell you that. You bought the book hoping for some sort of magic solution to your problem. (We have one: Stop acting like a jerk.) Other queries -- particularly anything involving Facebook -- will make the book obsolete as soon as Mark Zuckerberg comes up with his next big idea to revolutionize social networking. Buckingham also has some distressingly specific suggestions, such as encouraging you to shop at certain stores and buy certain products. If she's not getting a kickback from them, she should be.
"Aunt Epp's Guide for Life: Miscellaneous Musings of a Victorian Lady," by Elspeth Marr (Atria, $18) is ostensibly (are these claims ever true?) a collection of musings from editor Christopher Rush's great-great aunt, a cantankerous Scottish lady who had many strong opinions. The writing is often genuinely funny -- "(Heroes) do not make good husbands, but they do make excellent verses, so never marry a man with heroic aspirations. It is better to read about him afterward, when he is famous, calm and dead" -- and the book is filled with folk remedies, recipes and musings on women's suffrage, faith and especially sex. We cannot recommend actually trying her cure for baldness or for gold that has lost its luster, and we certainly cannot condone her rejection of Jane Austen -- "devoid of imagination," she says -- but Aunt Epp's advice is more useful than most, probably because she seeks to dispense general wisdom rather than, say, tell you what to do when you are too deeply tanned. Anybody who watches C-SPAN these days would know the answer to that one: become minority leader of the House of Representatives.
Fiona Zublin is a writer and editor for the Washington Post Express. Zublin can be reached at zublinf(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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STUCK RUBBER BABY Howard Cruse
Vertigo
ISBN 978-1-4012-2713-5
210 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle, a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
When I was growing up, there were essentially two kinds of comic books: the funny and the horrific. The graphic novel had not been invented yet, and few if any artist-writers would have considered panels full of drawn figures and speech balloons as vehicles for putting characters through ordeals like fighting against bigotry or coming out of the closet. If anyone had been crazy enough to invest time and energy in producing something like "Stuck Rubber Baby," Howard Cruse's long, complex, meticulously drawn account of racism and homophobia in a town that looks a lot like Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s, he would have restricted its circulation to a small group of friends.
All that had changed by the 1990s, when "Stuck Rubber Baby" was first published, but even then it had birth pangs. Cruse, who is best known for his gay comic strip "Wendel," explains that his own high standards were almost his undoing. When he started out, he recalls, he thought the book would take him two years to complete. He adds tersely, "It took four." To keep going -- to keep producing the densely shaded, profusely dotted drawings that give depth to his settings and flesh tones to his characters (that last is an important feature, given the subject matter) -- Cruse had to find a source of funding. Several friends, including playwright Tony Kushner and novelist Armistead Maupin, agreed to buy pieces of the art intended for the book "at higher than market value and in advance of its even being drawn." Thanks to that infusion of cash, Cruse was able to finish the book, which won him a pair of international awards.
His protagonist is Toland Polk, a college-age white guy who rarely sets off anyone's gaydar. This can be an asset in that time and place: While swishier friends get taunted and beaten up by rednecks, Toland rolls right along. On the other hand, it's easy for him to fool himself into thinking his attraction to men is just a phase, and in doing so he not only retards his own development but makes his girlfriend miserable. (To assert his "manhood," he gets her pregnant after the condom he has carried around for years proves inadequate to its task -- hence the book's title.)
At the same time, local black citizens are losing patience with the Jim Crow South. The book's two threads entwine at a local bar where just about everyone is welcome -- whites, blacks, gays, straights -- but which is also a favorite stop for rednecks wielding baseball bats. The action climaxes with a hanging, the aftereffects of which Cruse conveys on a harrowing two-page spread in which a much older Toland looks back on the event with a horror he can't forget -- so traumatized that his head splits into sections.
If occasionally "Stuck Rubber Baby" seems almost too ambitious for its own good, we should keep in mind what it commemorates. There wasn't a lot of subtlety to the heroism and villainy of the civil rights era in the South, and for that reason comic-strip art may be especially well suited to evoking it. "Stuck Rubber Baby" makes for a gripping way to revisit those lurid days.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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