Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday October 14, 2010
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LUCY Laurence Gonzales
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 27260 7
307 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Michael Sims, who writes mostly about the cultural response to nature in books such as "Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form" and his upcoming book about E.B. White and "Charlotte's Web"
Clunky naivete is the hallmark of generic science fiction such as Laurence Gonzalez's novel "Lucy." The title character is the offspring of a human father and a bonobo mother. Gonzalez spends little time explaining how this technological miracle came about. The publisher describes the book as a "biotechnical thriller," but it's as short on biology and technology as it is on thrills. What it's best at, unfortunately, is doing exactly what you expect it to do, chapter after yawn-inducing chapter.
When her father is killed in a guerrilla raid in the African jungle, 14-year-old Lucy survives by hiding in a tree. What's the jungle like in Africa? "Morning came slowly. A mist began to rise." That's about it. Oh, and there's a deadly cobra that sends Jenny Lowe into "a Tai Chi move," but she's saved by a timely mortar shell. Perhaps to aid the casting of a movie adaptation, Lucy looks exactly like a full-blooded human being except that, up close, she has downy dark hairs on her limbs. She is, of course, beautiful. Jenny, a primatologist, joins forces with the girl and takes her home to the United States; no doubt Sandra Bullock is already auditioning for the role.
The predictable things happen: People find Lucy strange but don't know why. She decides that American society is loud, smelly, confusing, coldhearted and unnatural. (This was the point at which I felt most sympathy for her.) She has superhuman strength that enables her to triumph in her high school wrestling team. She falls for fellow student Amanda Mather, who is, of course, beautiful. When Amanda's mother learns that her daughter's strange pal is rumored to be half ape, she shrieks -- wait for it -- "You can't have a monkey as your best friend."
Amanda is just as unconvincing as the rest of this cast. When Lucy makes the cover of Rolling Stone ("in torn jeans, her hair slightly spiked out, standing in a sort of rock 'n' roll pose holding a banana and slouching"), the allegedly high-school-age Amanda casually remarks, "It's this, like, Orwellian grope through all the political and sociological and ethical issues that they could sweep out of the gutter." Throughout the book, the dialogue is inept. Couldn't Gonzalez have visited a high school or a primate lab with his tape recorder? The obligatory scene of a congressional hearing about Lucy reads like a dashed-off memory of a bad TV show. Wacko creationists chase Lucy. Wacko government agents chase Lucy.
I'll be getting popcorn if you need me.
It's a shame that this book is so bad. Western culture has a noble tradition of primates in fiction. Women have ape lovers in "Candide." In 1817, Thomas Love Peacock wrote of an orangutan that ran for Parliament. A century later, Edgar Rice Burroughs plunked another noble savage into pop culture with Tarzan, who is fully human but reared by apes. In 1930, John Collier published the saga of Emily, the chimpanzee star of "His Monkey Wife." ("You've married me to a chimp!") Three decades later, French novelist Pierre Boulle published "Planet of the Apes," whose heavy-handed satire (the apes drive cars and drink in nightclubs) inspired an American franchise of action movies.
But Voltaire was brilliant and Boulle at his best had a wicked sense of humor. In his topsy-turvy world, one ape scientist explains how they outpaced human evolution: Humans were handicapped with only two stubby hands instead of four nimble ones. Don't look for such wit in "Lucy" -- or much excitement.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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YOUR REPUBLIC IS CALLING YOU
Young-ha Kim. Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim
Mariner
ISBN 978 0 15 101545 0
326 pages
$14.95
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University
It's never a good sign when I have to flip to the back cover of a novel I've just finished to find out what it was supposed to be about. In the case of "Your Republic Is Calling You," a new novel by the celebrated Korean writer Young-ha Kim, I don't think the book jacket writer had a clue what was going on either.
If, however, you enjoy the cryptic literary acrobatics of Paul Auster, perhaps you won't be as annoyed by this novel as I was. That's because "Your Republic Is Calling You" is a politically inflected variation on the kind of suspense tales that Auster -- and his absurdist forefathers like G.K. Chesterton ("The Man Who Was Thursday") and Graham Greene ("The Third Man") -- are best known for: meditations on the befuddlement that is human identity, presented in the guise of highly self-conscious mysteries. One either likes this sort of thing or one doesn't. But even taken on its own existentialist terms, "Your Republic Is Calling You" is a knotty read.
Here's the premise: Ki-yong works as a foreign film importer in South Korea. He's married (unhappily) to Ma-ri, a saleswoman at a Volkswagen dealership, and is the father of a sullen teenage daughter. For the past 21 years, however, Ki-yong has been harboring a secret: He's a North Korean sleeper agent who, as a teenager, was expertly trained in the accents and customs of the South at a fake village straight out of that old 1960s TV excursion into Sartrean discourse, "Secret Agent."
One morning, Ki-yong goes into his office, turns on his computer and finds this haiku by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho in his in-box:
The jars of octopus --
brief dreams
under the summer moon
Stunned, Ki-yong recalls that the haiku signals "Order 4": "Liquidate everything and return immediately. This order will not be revoked." Ki-yong reflects that "Basho's haiku, like the order itself, hints at the end of dreams."
Kim's novel follows Ki-yong throughout the rest of that day, as he wrestles with the dilemma of what to do. Should he obey the order and return to whatever awaits him in Pyongyang? (Death? A medal in gratitude for long service? Servitude in that Potemkin village, where he'll be forced to train other agents?) Or should he ignore it and risk death or exposure to the South Korean intelligence forces?
Meanwhile, Ki-yong's wife and daughter are in the dark about his long-hidden identity and his present torments and so are free to go about their normal activities. In the daughter's case, this means slipping away after school to meet a disturbed boy at his family's tiny apartment. Ma-ri's adventures are a little friskier: To please her callous younger lover, she sneaks off for a soul-deadening menage a trois at a nearby hot-sheets hotel. Both of these curveball subplots about anomie emphasize Kim's political point that the prosperous South Koreans are no more fulfilled than their miserable counterparts in the Communist north.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apart from its occasionally interesting observations on contemporary South Korean society, "Your Republic Is Calling You" is too aloof to be compelling. Something has to pull readers into a story like this. If it's not the characters (who are little more than sketches) or the plot or the atmosphere (which are not paranoid enough), then the overall effect is chill and derivative -- like remixed Korean Kafka. I'm sure this exasperating novel will attract critical fans who will see all sorts of political and metaphysical significance in it, but my advice to mystery readers regarding "Your Republic Is Calling You" is to set your ring tone to mute.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE GOOD DAUGHTERS
Joyce Maynard
William Morrow
ISBN 978 0 06 199431 9
278 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books regularly for The Washington Post
I was just sitting down to write a stern review of Joyce Maynard's new novel, "The Good Daughters," when I myself received a vigorous piece of hate mail. I don't get that much of it -- and please don't feel you have to rectify that situation! Usually, it comes in defense of a particular writer, but this woman just disapproved of me across the board. It left me bewildered for the rest of the day. "We're all just doing the best we can," I thought, and as my old Texan dad would have said. "An angel would do no worse, and a donkey would do no better." Then I began to think that maybe the universe was issuing me a friendly warning: Don't pick on Joyce Maynard. An angel can do no worse. ...
Still! There are quite a few things wrong with "The Good Daughters," having to do with character, plot, general interest and plausibility. It's the critic's job to say something about those things.
In 1949, in the course of a world-class hurricane, Edwin Plank, a New England farmer and volunteer fireman, sets out to clear a downed tree. He looks forward to getting home in time to make love to his wife, even though she's no erotic picnic. She has a "short, utilitarian body," and she's already thinking her own grumpy thoughts: "Her husband may bother her in bed tonight. She had been hoping the World Series would keep him occupied a while." But Edwin gets sidetracked.
Flash-forward to the Fourth of July 1950, when two daughters are born on the same day to different families in the local hospital. One of these babies, Ruth Plank, will grow up to ponder this event in her early years: "My mother never took to me as she did to my sisters. ... I was different from my sisters. Different from my mother most of all." Ruth is tall, thin and blond, and wants to be an artist. Her sisters and mom are short-waisted and thick. The Dickerson family lives just down the road. The Dickerson mom, Val, is tall, thin, blond and an artist. Her daughter, Dana, born on that same eventful day, is short, stubby, thick-waisted. "I'm not sure I ever felt I had parents," Dana says. And one of her teachers, just to confirm this, writes on a report card, "Dana has her feet firmly grounded on earth."
The daughters are criminally slow on the uptake. Ruth's real mother is Val Dickerson; Dana's real mother is Connie Plank, a humorless woman who compulsively reads her Bible and seems always to be putting on pots of beans for everyone to eat, although the Plank family farm grows a vast array of tasty vegetables and, in particular, strawberries, which are reputed to be the best in the neighborhood.
Time passes. President Kennedy is assassinated; man walks on the moon. There's the Vietnam War. By this time we know that short, thick-waisted Dana Dickerson, who really should be one of the Plank sisters, is extremely interested in farming, just like Edwin Plank. She's also, by now, a lesbian. Tall, blond, thin Ruth Plank, who really should be a Dickerson, has fallen in love with the Dickerson son, Ray, who has "a wild, birdlike grace." The reader knows this is a bad idea because they're brother and sister, but that's what plots are made of.
The story is told in alternating chapters by Ruth and Dana, and another way you can tell they're half sisters is that they speak in exactly the same voice. It's an orderly, prim voice, and decidedly aggrieved. (Of course they would be aggrieved, since neither woman feels she's been loved by her "mother," and of course both women are right about that -- as far as they know.)
The plot is close to 100 percent implausible. Poor Ray Dickerson, for instance, has to be dumb enough that he doesn't recognize his own sister. Edwin, painted by both daughters as a paragon among men, commits an egregious crime against humanity with no particular motivation -- he just feels like doing it. (He also manages to have sex with his uninterested wife so close to the time of his escapade with Val Dickerson that the issue of both these sexual acts are born on the same day.) Most preposterous of all is a series of scenes from pages 147 to 150, where Ruth is "made" to do entirely unbelievable things. She explains it all away by this: "The world went dark. ... I screamed and wept. ... I know all kinds of things must have happened. ... I could only believe I had lost my mind."
It's like those old movies that used to be made at Republic Studios, in which the hero is stuck outside the castle. He has to get in, but the castle is impregnable. Next scene: He's inside the castle. In novelistic terms, Ruth does something entirely unbelievable because the author wants her to. End of story.
In sum, then: The characters here are nearly indistinguishable. The plot is both predictable and implausible. It's very hard to read this novel. Yes, I know. We're all doing the best we can. But in this instance, I feel, the author could have done a lot better.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE DIARIES OF SOFIA TOLSTOY
Cathy Porter
Harper Perennial
ISBN 978 0 06 199741 9
607 pages
$16.99
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
So you think you have an unhappy marriage? On Oct. 8, 1862, just two weeks after she wed the 34-year-old novelist Leo Tolstoy, the former Sofia Behrs was writing in her diary: "The whole of my husband's past is so ghastly that I don't think I shall ever be able to accept it." Tolstoy had just let his sheltered, 18-year-old bride read his own youthful diaries, in which he described his gambling, drunkenness and debaucheries. A few days later, Sofia confesses that she doesn't make her husband happy and that his "coldness will soon be unbearable." By Nov. 23, she is talking of killing him. Later, she spoke frequently of killing herself and attempted to do so on at least two occasions.
On Nov. 13, 1863, the young wife describes her existence:
"I am left alone morning, afternoon and night. I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture. I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think -- and life is tolerable. But the moment I am alone and allow myself to think, everything seems insufferable."
Whenever Sofia shows a little spirit or playfulness, Tolstoy finds her "stupid and irritating." She starts to copy his manuscripts for him -- she would go on to transcribe the manuscript of "War and Peace" over and over, parts of it seven times -- and there she does find a kind of peace: "As I copy I experience a whole new world of emotions, thoughts and impressions. Nothing touches me so deeply as his ideas, his genius."
At the same time, though, she is kept constantly pregnant, eventually bearing 13 children. Always, she yearns for something more. "I sometimes search my heart and ask myself what I really want. And to my horror, the answer is that I want gaiety, smart clothes and chatter. I want people to admire me and say how pretty I am, and I want him to see and hear them too; I long for him occasionally to emerge from his rapt inner existence that demands so much of him. ... I hate people to tell me I am beautiful. I never believed them, and now it would be too late anyway -- what would be the point?"
She is, note, only in her late 20s. But already she is pathetically grateful for the least sign of tenderness: "He actually kissed me for the first time in days."
As the years go by, Tolstoy increasingly proclaims an austere, Christian-socialist ideal, eating a vegetarian diet and living as much as possible like a peasant. The novelist eventually takes to making his own shoes. Yet he still resides at his family home of Yasnaya Polyana and loads Sofia "with all the responsibilities for the children and their education, the finances, the estate, the housekeeping, indeed the entire material side of life."
Meanwhile, her life of drudgery continues:
"I am feeling ill, my back aches, my nose keeps bleeding, my front tooth is aching, and I am terrified of losing it, for a false one would be horrible. I copied Lyovochka's diary all morning, then tidied his clothes and underwear and cleaned his study until it was spotless; then I darned his socks, which he had mentioned were all in holes, and this kept me busy until dinner."
On one page of her husband's diaries, devoted copyist Sofia comes across this sentence: "There is no such thing as love,(BEG ITAL) only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.(END ITAL)" She acidly comments: "I only wish I had read that 29 years ago, then I would never have married him."
Still attractive despite continuously bearing and rearing children, in middle age Sofia starts to feel "persecuted by sinful thoughts." She spends hours playing the piano, constantly goes off for cooling swims, reads "dirty" books with titles like "Les Demi-vierges" (The Half-Virgins), and eventually finds herself passing as much time as possible in the "gentle happy presence" of a composer named Sergei Taneev. Naturally, Tolstoy grows violently jealous and threatens to kill himself. Convinced that she cannot live without Tolstoy, Sofia reluctantly gives up her friendship with the smitten composer.
Yet, as she poignantly remarks, "If he had one iota of the psychological understanding which fills his books, he would have understood the pain and despair I was going through."
By the late 1890s, Tolstoy has become a guru, attracting visitors and disciples, including the nefarious Vladimir Chertkov, who hates Sofia and manages to alienate the aging writer even further from his long-suffering wife. Meanwhile, the couple's sons have grown up to become wastrels, and their married daughters repeatedly miscarry. The deaths, illnesses and sorrows mount up. And Sofia -- who has taken to reading Seneca and Spinoza -- still yearns to live an authentic life:
"I am free to eat, sleep, be quiet and submit. But I am not free to (BEG ITAL)think(END ITAL) as I please, to (BEG ITAL)love(END ITAL) whom I choose, to come and go according to my own interests and intellectual pleasures."
People, nonetheless, keep pointing out that her husband is a genius: Aren't you grateful, a "worthless woman like you"? Sofia's dryly bitter comment could be echoed by many Washington wives with high-powered husbands:
"For a (BEG ITAL)genius(END ITAL) one has to create a peaceful, cheerful, comfortable home. A (BEG ITAL)genius(END ITAL) must be fed, washed and dressed, must have his works copied out innumerable times, must be loved and spared all cause for jealousy, so he can be calm. Then one must feed and educate the innumerable children fathered by this genius, whom he cannot be bothered to care for himself, as he has to commune with the Epictetuses, Socrateses and Buddhas, and aspire to be like them himself."
In 1910, just a month before the 82-year-old Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana on the trip that would lead to his death in a railway station far from his home, Sofia -- now in her late 60s -- celebrates her "name day," which is also the day that Tolstoy proposed to her. She asks herself: "What did he do to that eighteen-year-old Sonechka Behrs, who gave him her whole life, her love and her trust?" She sums up the 48 years of their life together: "He has tortured me with his coldness, his cruelty and his extreme egotism."
Beautifully translated and edited by Cathy Porter, "The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy" provides a harrowing portrait of a marriage. Tolstoy was clearly a fanatic as well as a genius, and Sofia was often half crazy from self-denial and the strains of living with such an intense man. Still, she never left him, and she lived on until 1919, safeguarding his memory and reputation. Her diaries, so rich in acute psychological awareness and observation, should be read for themselves, not just as a social document or biographical resource. They are infuriating, heartbreaking, unputdownable.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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