Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday January 27, 2011
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COCAINE'S SON: A Memoir
Dave Itzkoff
Villard
ISBN 978-1400065721
221 pages
$24
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
I had a first husband who was embarrassing. Cute enough to marry, but embarrassing enough to divorce five years later. He went on being embarrassing, though -- never once owning a pair of shoes, dressing in caftans and causing his children no little embarrassment, too. But when they complained, he met their objections with a benign, forgiving smile. "That's what parents are for," he said, and still says today.
This memoir by Dave Itzkoff, "Cocaine's Son," implies by its title that the author was tormented in his youth by having a dad who was a cocaine addict, but as the descriptions of this father pile up, he seems more and more to be simply a deeply embarrassing guy who happened to have done a lot of cocaine in his remote past. For years Itzkoff's grandfather and great-grandfather, Russian Jews, have been in the business of buying and selling furs -- not fur coats, but the furs themselves: pelts flattened and stretched, still pungent. Their stock is filled with stacks and stacks of them, primitive, smelly and, by definition, unrefined. The business, even while keeping the family in plenty of money, was, on the face of it, faintly embarrassing.
The family in which Itzkoff grows up is traditional, far from any cliche of an addict's drug den. He has a mom, dad, sister, brother. The mother, acknowledged in the dedication as the one "who kept us together," is beautiful and patient and seems to love each one of her charges equally. The sister is barely seen in this story. So any drama or conflict is almost entirely between father and Itzkoff, who's university-educated, a writer for the New York Times, about to be married to a wonderful woman, a person who would appear to have every reason to be confident in his role as a successful American male.
But Itzkoff is a veteran of a Terrible Childhood, at least as he remembers it. His father, though officially in recovery from his cocaine addiction, still has a few memorable slips. When Itzkoff is 15, his father calls from Manhattan, lost in the city, stoned out of his mind, begging to be found. "I answered him in spite: 'I'm not coming to pick you up. You figure out how to get home.'" When his father does manage to get home, the tables are turned: "You have raised an awful, awful child, Maddy," the father raves to his wife. "Let me tell you something ... he is done in this family. Finished! He is cut off from now on. I'm not giving him anything." Except that on the next page, his parents, in tears because of a high school teacher's mean remark, offer to buy Itzkoff a nose job, which he readily accepts.
This memoir, though fascinating, seems to be less about cocaine than about who "owns" the family -- who is the hero and who is the villain, and how a family can pull together to assimilate its troublesome ethnic history. Itzkoff and his father can't shut off each other; they drive each other nuts. Eventually, when Itzkoff has become a young adult, they go for a year of couple's therapy (!), which, of course, is a yearlong lesson in embarrassment because Dad won't play by therapy rules, won't accept his place as a lowly client and eventually suggests to the sweet therapist, "I wonder if you would ever consider going into therapy with your father. I think you both might benefit from it." Itzkoff stops speaking to his dad, who, after obliviously jabbering on for a few more hours, asks, "Well, aren't you going to say anything?"
"Not until you apologize."
"What did I do?"
"You know what you said."
And so on. Dad won't mend his ways. He's hell-bent on remaining his own embarrassing self. Itzkoff finally, one way or another, lets go of his own fixation. His father's addiction was a long time ago. And maybe it wasn't the cocaine that was upsetting Itzkoff anyway. Maybe it was the way his dad shouted on the phone in his office at the top of his lungs. Or persisted in treating his own home as if it were his castle.
By the end, Itzkoff grows up and allows himself to be happy. But just wait until his first kid is born.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE POISON TREE
Erin Kelly
Pamela Dorman/Viking
ISBN 978-0670022403
322 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air"
Voice-overs are always bad news, aren't they? Think of poor Joe Gillis at the opening of Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," preposterously yakking away to the audience as he floats facedown in Norma Desmond's swimming pool, lifeless as a waterlogged bandage. Or Mildred Pierce, in the eponymous novel and movie, recalling, with chilly fatalism, her original sin of yearning to break free of that dinky bungalow kitchen in Glendale, Calif. Or even Nick Carraway, in the very first pages of "The Great Gatsby," which is supposed to be our soaring Great American Novel, wistfully letting us know that everything he's about to tell us has already ended in disillusionment and death. Voice-overs -- be they literary or cinematic -- mean the finale is preordained, all exit doors locked.
In its intensity and overwhelming sense of loss, the voice-over that opens Erin Kelly's terrific first suspense novel, "The Poison Tree," is most directly reminiscent of the unnamed narrator of Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" ("Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again ..."). Karen Clarke, like du Maurier's heroine, is a nice person who has had terrible things happen to her because of a Bad Girl who wouldn't play fair and insisted on scooping up all the men and attention. But just as "Rebecca" has enthralled generations of female readers with its story of a mousey maiden's triumph over her glamorous beyond-the-grave rival, "The Poison Tree" also offers the twisted pleasures of vengeance within its eerie narrative.
Forlorn Karen first meets her fate in the form of a charismatic schoolmate named Biba Capel when the two students stumble upon each other in the dreary halls of Queen Charlotte's College in London. Biba is a fledgling actress with the silvery voice of a BBC announcer and a signature look that turns heads. As Karen reminisces: "It was the summer when the Spice Girls were inescapable; most of the university's female students had declared a fashion allegiance to one or other of the singers, decking themselves out like clowns or children or girls who worked at a perfume counter. The girl before me appeared to be dressed like all five of them at once." Biba needs help mastering a German accent for a play. Karen is a whiz at languages; in fact, she's a shoe-in to be awarded a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. at a more prestigious university when Biba ensnares Karen with her dazzling smile. There is clearly a romantic element to Karen's infatuation with Biba, but Karen, with the benefit of hindsight, insists: "It wasn't until years later that I realized it wasn't about sex. It was affection and confusion, the thrill of peer acceptance at last."
In no time, Karen is happily swallowed up by the bohemian goings-on that Biba and her older brother, Rex, orchestrate in a tumbledown mansion in Highgate (Manderley?). Karen and Rex become lovers, and a glorious summer passes in a haze of sex and red wine and loud parties that tumble out into the gnarly garden behind the house. The trio act like erotic children abandoned in the wild -- an impression heightened by the fact that the Capels' mother is dead and their father, a famous film mogul, has remarried and wants nothing to do with them. Two-thirds of the way through this tale, when passions erupt into violence, a reader realizes that the father, though heartless, may have also been wise.
"The Poison Tree" is graced with a distinctly druggy power. Kelly burrows deep into Karen's young life and vividly dramatizes the anxiety of an isolated first-generation college student who's out of her league in terms of looks and polish. When Biba appears and offers a mishmash of a family for Karen to join, the euphoria of belonging sweeps all caution out to sea. Slowly, the awareness that all is not right with Rex and Biba intrudes into Karen's reluctant brain; but her yearning to preserve the Edenic household fatally overrides her good sense. Narrating the grisly events of that summer some 10 years later, Karen is a different person: resigned and wary. But she is right to look over her shoulder, to start at the slightest creak on the staircase. The worst isn't quite behind her; in fact, a horror materializes that Karen doesn't even know she should fear, reaching out its hands to grab what's most dear.
In "The Poison Tree," Kelly gives readers a compelling creeper that intelligently invokes the conventions of the Gothic and plays within the doom-laden confines of the voice-over. More please, Ms. Kelly! Quickly!
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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FOREIGN BODIES
Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0547435572
255 pages
$26
Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who is a critic in Los Angeles
The story behind the story in Cynthia Ozick's new novel -- her sixth -- is Henry James' "The Ambassadors," whose plot Ozick has repurposed in a different time period with a new set of characters. This venture will come as no surprise to Ozick's many longtime admirers, who know that she wrote her master's thesis on "Parable in Henry James," that her long first novel, "Trust" (1966), was a self-consciously Jamesian enterprise and that she archly explained in a well-known 1982 essay called "The Lesson of the Master" how James ruined her youth.
Ozick is now in her 80s, and James is ruining her still. In the title story of her last book, "Dictation" (2008), she imagined James' young amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, forming a mischievous alliance with Joseph Conrad's typist. And now Ozick offers this palimpsest of "The Ambassadors," the ground-breaking 1903 novel that James regarded as his best.
Regrettably, "Foreign Bodies" is far from Ozick's best, displaying few traces of the searing authorial command she has demonstrated in the past, most notably in her stories "The Shawl" and "Envy: Or Yiddish in America." The new book is an overworked and cramped affair, whose prose reads as if it were being tweezed out of a tiny hole. And worse, the characters here are brittle, shadowy creatures. Despite evident effort, Ozick has not managed to infuse them with a breath of life.
In July 1952, Bea Nightingale is a 48-year-old high school English teacher living alone in a small apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Long divorced from a once-serious composer who's now a Hollywood hack, Bea is equally estranged from her brother, Marvin, a wealthy manufacturer of plastic airplane parts living in California with his wife and two children.
Enter unpleasantness: Marvin suddenly and imperiously dispatches Bea to Paris to retrieve his wayward 23-year-old son Julian. Bea has never met her nephew and has no wish for involvement in this family drama, but Marvin is a bully, so an ambassador she reluctantly becomes.
The Paris that Bea encounters is worlds away from the refined fin-de-siecle metropolis that seduced James' hero, Lambert Strether, in "The Ambassadors." Ozick's mid-20th-century Paris is shell-shocked and tremulous, overrun with traumatized refugees from every corner of war-ravaged Europe. Bea learns that one of those refugees, a Romanian Holocaust survivor in her mid-30s named Lili, has taken up with Marvin's son, supporting him with her meager wages as a translator at an immigration center. This is nothing but bad news for Marvin, who got himself through Princeton and married a girl from the WASP-iest family he could find in order to remove himself completely from his European Jewish heritage.
If only this Paris and this Lili were the main events in "Foreign Bodies." They are dramatic and they are riveting. Yet they're also frustratingly peripheral, pushed by Ozick into the background while she lavishes attention on the mutually spiteful behavior of pallid Bea and angry Marvin, both of whom use Julian's defection as an opportunity to incriminate the other for their poor life choices. Despite Ozick's attentions, though, Bea and Marvin remain obliquely and sometimes mystifyingly represented. Of Bea and her middle-age discontents, the author writes: "Her entire body was no better than a latticed basket leaking stale lost longings." Marvin, for all his pugnacity, is equally dimensionless. "A virtuoso of self-interest," he manifests only fury and inspires in others only an urge to flee, sending his wife into the safe haven of an upscale Beverly Hills mental institution and his son, followed shortly by his once-dutiful daughter, all the way to Europe.
Without these flaws, so much would be impressive here: Ozick's ambition to recast James' novel, with its New World-Old World tugs of attraction and its indelible admonition to "live all you can; it's a mistake not to"; her intention to carve her stylus into the waxwork ideal of Paris, transforming it from James' city of light to a city of ghosts; and her eagerness to show, through Marvin and Bea, how willfully we go about manipulating others while refusing to change ourselves.
But novels rise and fall on execution, not intention. Too many passages make the reader want to beg Ozick to write plain English. At one point, for instance, she attempts to explain how European relief agencies dispensed with their refugees, "harrying the displaced willy-nilly onto ships headed for Haifa and whatever other dingy ports lay along the newly Hebraized Levantine littoral."
If only Ozick could have swapped some of this verbal complication for more complexity in her characters, all of whom are always only one thing: tyrannical Marvin, passive-aggressive Bea, gravely wise Lili, frivolous Julian. Where "The Ambassadors" suggests the limitless variety of emotional experience, "Foreign Bodies" offers only a dispiriting narrowness.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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CARIBOU ISLAND
David Vann
Harper
ISBN 978-0061875724
293 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter (at symbol)RonCharles.
Approach David Vann's first novel the way you would a fresh grave -- with a mixture of fascination and fear. "Caribou Island" follows the author's story collection "Legend of a Suicide," inspired by his father's violent death. Clearly that tragedy still haunts Vann -- how could it not? -- but now he's written a novel that breaks out of the autobiographical boundaries of his own grief and exposes our friable ties to those we love.
Of course, there's no shortage of dreary tales, but Vann isn't writing in that popular school of static despair. Despite the crushing sorrow of "Caribou Island," it progresses with tremendous momentum. Inspired by the experience of his stepmother's parents, this story of a family in southern Alaska comes to us in a series of vibrant moments as bracing, invigorating and finally as deadly as the icy water that surrounds these characters.
When the novel opens, unhappily married Irene and Gary are setting off on a Henry David Thoreau adventure, but they are light-years from the inspiration found at Walden Pond. Gary has always wanted to build and live in a small cabin on Caribou Island in Skilak Lake south of Anchorage, and now that his wife has finally retired from teaching, she's out of excuses. Except that she doesn't want to live in the howling wilderness in an unheated shack built by a man with "no plans, no experience, no permits."
What Gary thinks of as a search for authenticity, Irene sees as "an expression of despair ... a sign that Gary hadn't found a way to fit into his real life." With a rising sense of panic, she senses that he plans to discard her -- or work her to death. His tiny 16-by-12 cabin is a fitting expression of the cramped dimensions of their life together. And so, through the course of the novel, they haul and saw and hammer, ripping into each other with accusations and resentments stored up over 30 years, both of them baffled by the ruin of their marriage. That they love each other makes their irritation all the more painful as they labor on, often soaking wet, frequently in the dark, in subzero temperatures.
This story of a mismatched couple lost on the tundra of retirement would be almost too much to bear if it weren't warmed a bit by the antics of their adult children. They're doing a poor job of hammering out their own relationships on the mainland. The novel focuses particularly on 30-year-old Rhoda, who senses that something horrible is happening to her parents on Caribou Island. But she's distracted by her plans to marry a schmuck named Jim, who's preparing for their marriage with plans to bed as many people as possible. There are some genuinely funny scenes here involving this pathetic creep as he cheats on Rhoda with a woman half his age -- fiancee and mistress showing up together for dinner, a game of Twister that leaves Jim lusting away even as he panics about the threat of exposure. It's another indication of Vann's daring and skill that he can integrate this sex comedy into such a tragic story in a way that stretches the novel's emotional range without shattering its poignancy.
Men don't come off well in these pages, a reflection, I'm tempted to speculate, on the author's experience with his own father, who shot himself while speaking to Vann's mother on the phone. "Caribou Island" presents a world of irritable, depressive, even stupid men who lament their limited options, poisoning everyone around them with bile.
Alaska, too, gets stripped of its romance, despite Vann's ability to portray the water and the wilderness in all their lush beauty. "No one stayed unless they were stuck," Rhoda muses bitterly, and that judgment gets repeated in a variety of convincing ways. We see Irene "slumping down in raingear, hiding, making herself as small as possible, fending off mosquitoes that somehow managed to fly despite the wind. Feeling chilled and alone. Not the expansive vision you'd be tempted to have, spreading your arms on some sunny day on an open slope of purple lupine, looking at mountains all around." The reality, as etched here by these jaundiced citizens of the 49th state, is one of economic stagnation, loneliness and grinding physical labor.
Vann, who was born in Alaska, handles conflicted feelings of love and resentment, and the raw, existential cries of ordinary people, extraordinarily well. And although he's a graceful writer, he never spins the kind of poetic prose that infects too many literary novels with distracting prettiness. But is the ending too much, too Gothic, too masochistic in its determination to make these hapless characters pay for surviving, for imagining that hope isn't a cheat? As the final pages rise into the piercing registry of Cormac McCarthy -- or Euripides -- some readers may spot Vann's thumb on the scale, making sure every drop of agony is paid. But just wait: For a few moments after this perfectly choreographed horror, it's impossible to say anything at all.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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