Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday March 3, 2011
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AGAINST ALL ODDS: My Life of Hardship, Fast Breaks and Second Chances
Scott Brown
Harper
ISBN 978-0062015549
325 pages
$27.99
Reviewed by Steven Levingston, the nonfiction editor of The Washington Post Book World
Scott Brown's life could have veered horribly wrong so many times, as he amply demonstrates in his disquieting memoir, "Against All Odds." Instead of ending up as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts -- the famed Republican who snatched the seat long held by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy -- he could have spent stretches of his life in the lockup or badly injured from the violence in his childhood home.
What saved him, Brown reveals, was good luck, good looks and a reflex to stand his ground when threatened. In unsentimental prose, he describes a Dickensian childhood of poverty, sexual predators and brutal stepfathers. His mother, who married four times, was often the sole provider for Brown and his sister; though his mother worked hard, sometimes at several jobs, her boy had to resort to stealing food.
"I was ... ravenously hungry, to the point where my stomach would often ache, and I would sit on the couch with my knees drawn up to my chest, as if I could physically shrink the space between my lungs and my abdomen," Brown writes in the memoir, which is to be released next week. The Washington Post obtained a copy early.
When the men in his mother's life terrorized her, Brown had to step forward to protect her. Her third husband had been injured in an industrial explosion that blew off his fingers, leaving his hands with nothing but sharp stubs that, Brown writes, "had almost no sensation (and) were brutal in their efficiency, in their ability to maim and bruise deep beneath the surface of the skin."
One night, when the future senator was in college and was "185 pounds of solid muscle from lifting with the Nautilus machines," he pinned the abuser against the wall, "the bone of my forearm against his chest, my left fist pulled back and balled ... and I told him, 'You ... touch my mother again, you ... touch my sister again, and I will kill you." This husband was eventually taken away by police.
Brown also learned to protect himself. As a youngster at Christian camp, he screamed when one of his counselors fondled him in the bathroom, bringing an abrupt end to the attack. At 7, he was walking with a teenage friend in the woods when his companion suddenly smacked him and revealed a knife. The teenager "undid his belt, and soon his pants were down. He had a look in his eye that I had never seen before," Brown writes. To fend off this attack, he stealthily picked up a rock and, catching the teenager off guard, drove it into his face and ran.
Restless and unsupervised, Brown made trouble of his own. His home life was unstable -- by 18, he had moved 17 times and lived in at least 12 homes, including those of his grandparents, his aunt and his mother's husbands. "I was angry, angry all the time," he writes. "I was always in trouble, at home, at school. I seemed to gravitate to it, as if it had tentacles that it could unfurl and draw me in." He was attracted to the power and danger of a lighted match and once set the woods on fire near his home, a blaze that took firefighters an hour to extinguish.
The only bright spot in his life -- the one activity that took him away from the "swallowed-up emptiness" he felt -- was basketball. Brown excelled at the sport and took his basketball to bed with him. "I would lie in the dark, sometimes crying, sometimes thinking, but most of the time just talking to my basketball, and I would fall asleep with it in the crook of my arm," he writes.
His life reached a bleak turning point when he was hauled before a judge for stealing music albums. But luck intervened. The straight-talking judge awakened the kid and set him on a proper path. He "did something few adults ever seemed to do," Brown recalls. "He listened." And he gave the kid a break -- no incarceration. Instead, Brown was required to write an essay on how he had disappointed people.
What the judge and several tough mentors recognized was that Brown -- despite the long hair and the penchant for running away from home -- was at heart a responsible, competitive, intelligent boy. Once, when a key figure in his life, social studies teacher Judy Patterson, overheard him making a cutting remark to an unpopular girl in the hallway, she grabbed him by the hair and dragged him into her classroom.
"You know what?" she said. "You've got everything in the world going for you. You're tall, you're good-looking, you're athletic. You could be smart if you put your mind to it. But you're a jerk. How dare you say that to that poor girl? How do you think she's going to feel now for the rest of her life?" Brown was stunned. "I was the kid who always felt like a loser, who felt I had nothing going for me," he writes, "and Judy said I had everything in the world going for me."
Thanks to the guiding hands of a few teachers and coaches, Brown was able to demonstrate his remarkable skills on the basketball court and in the classroom. He became team captain. And his proficiency in Latin sent him to the national Junior Classical League convention representing Massachusetts students. His grades and athletics earned him a full basketball scholarship to Tufts University.
Brown's early life was so horrible, it seems a marvel that he surmounted it. No matter your political affiliation, a reader will get an everything's-finally-right-with-the-world thrill from his success in life: his selection as "America's Sexiest Man," his lucrative modeling career, his studies at Boston College Law School, his happy marriage and family, his stint as a practicing lawyer and his terms in the Massachusetts legislature.
The narrative, which sometimes lapses into repetition, is at its best in recounting the dramatic U.S. Senate campaign; the story is poignant in its reflections on the Democrats' hubris. You can't help but root for the underdog, dismissed by the competition and by the media, yet unrelenting in his pursuit of the prize.
By the end of the tale, we've been drawn right up to the present and understand why today Republicans and Democrats are wary of Scott Brown. His life has demanded that he think for himself. As a survivor, he answers to his own blunt ideology of self-preservation. Or as he puts it: "If you're looking for someone who is going to be a full-on ideologue always marching in lockstep with his party, I'm probably not your guy."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WEIRD SISTERS
Eleanor Brown
Amy Einhorn/Putnam
ISBN 978-0399157226
320 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles is The Washington Post's fiction critic. He can be reached at charlesr(at)washpost.com.
This smart, hopeful novel by Washington-born author Eleanor Brown will be the winter's tale for any book lover who likes her entertainment laced with a touch of Shakespeare. A family drama, gracefully costumed in academic garb and lit with warm comedy, 'tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. From Michael Gruber's "Book of Air and Shadows" to Ross King's "Ex Libris" and Karen Joy Fowler's "Jane Austen Book Club," stories about literature are especially delightful to those of us who prize novels above our dukedom. So if you know a Stratfordian who's always quoting the Bard, get thee to a bookstore.
As in Shakespeare's problem plays, in "The Weird Sisters" the curtain rises on a scene that looks oddly comic and tragic: Dr. James Andreas, a renowned Shakespeare scholar, has three daughters (I know you're catching the allusions already, but hang on). When his wife receives a diagnosis of breast cancer, he calls them home to the Midwest with a quotation from "Titus Andronicus": "Come, let us go; and pray to all the gods/For our beloved mother in her pains." And so they move back to their parents' house, these three weird sisters, all around 30 years old, all jealous of one another's success, each secretly convinced that she's a failure.
The title refers to Macbeth's witches, and the sisters' rivalry will make you think of "King Lear," but despite some considerable crankiness, they're not witches or rivals, and their distracted father is closer to Prospero ("The Tempest"), cloistered away with his beloved books on an academic island in rural Ohio. Even though "The Weird Sisters" makes a thousand allusions to Shakespeare, it's no "A Thousand Acres," no modern-day retelling of one of the Bard's plays. Instead, Brown has created her own charming story about star-crossed siblings who just so happen to know the greatest English verse much better than they know themselves.
"We have been nursed and nurtured on the plays," they explain. "Sonnets were our nursery rhymes. The three of us were given advice and instruction in couplets; we were more likely to refer to a hated playmate as a 'fat-kidneyed rascal' than a jerk." They grew up "uniquely good at extemporaneous iambic pentameter," but discovered too late that this was not a skill in much demand outside their father's house. Even their names carry the burden of his obsession into adulthood: Ultra-controlling Rosalind ("As You Like It") refuses to let her career or her life move on; sexy Bianca ("The Taming of the Shrew") has just been fired from her New York law firm for stealing; and carefree Cordelia ("King Lear"), the baby of the three, returns home pregnant after seven years of drifting around the country as a hippie.
The pretense is that they've all come back to help care for Mom, but clearly these three adult children are in a kind of psychological convalescence themselves, shocked by their lives' crash landings, awed by the depth of their parents' love for each other and convinced they'll never find such a marriage themselves. "Would we remain this way, forever and ever?" they wonder nervously. "Would Bean always be chasing one man or another, Cordy eternally chasing some shadow of a person she might never become, and Rose herself chasing some shadow of the way things were Supposed to Be?" How will they relearn to speak to one another, these smart, wounded women who've been trained to communicate their "deepest feelings through the words of a man who has been dead for almost four hundred years"?
The story follows the course of their mother's chemotherapy and surgery, an ordeal that pushes the daughters to consider their parents' mortality and their own prospects. But these darker moments are leavened by strands of romantic comedy, the idealized charms of small-town life and flashbacks to the sisters' delightfully odd childhood in a home where opened books covered every surface.
The novel's greatest risk is its plural first-person narration, a rarely used perspective that works marvelously here. Alternately arch and casual, and always with a touch of comic melancholy, the three sisters together tell the whole story, an impossible "we" that traces each one's private anxieties and indiscretions, and subtly argues for their sisterly union even in moments of strident confrontation.
But I am not barren to bring forth complaints. The language in these pages can sometimes turn flat and cliched, and all the characters outside the Andreas family are merely walk-ons: The old spinster librarian is no more lifelike than my plastic Nancy Pearl action figure; the boyfriend banter is painfully cute and artificial. Despite all the claims about the family's bibliomania, we rarely get to see what anyone is actually reading, and it never seems to affect them any more than knitting or bird-watching might. Which raises a more fundamental problem about the family's devotion to Shakespeare: Brown's characters display a concordance-like grasp of the plays and can always lay their hands on an apt quotation to engage in a little Bard-banter, but they seem oblivious to the heart of these great works, reducing Shakespeare's words to clever slogans, like the Monet umbrellas for sale at the Met.
But let these objections exeunt stage right! Even the Immortal Bard could clot up a great play like "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with some tedious prattle. Brown is such a clever writer, and she's written such an endearing story about sisterly affection and the possibilities of redemption, that it's easy to recommend "The Weird Sisters." Take Polonius' good advice and "read on this book."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE WORD EXCHANGE: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation
Greg Delanty and Michael Matto
Norton
ISBN 978-0393079012
557 pages
$35
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday
J.R.R. Tolkien once described "Beowulf" -- and by extension much of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, poetry -- as "a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death." He further emphasized -- in his scholarly essay "The Monsters and the Critics" -- what he called the "unrecapturable magic" of ancient English verse. In poems like "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer" and "The Battle of Maldon," "profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harpstrings, sharply plucked."
Note that Tolkien calls this poetry's magic "unrecapturable." Because of "The Word Exchange," that's no longer entirely true. Nonetheless, a little of this bleakly dour alliterative verse -- even in superb modern English versions -- goes a long way. This isn't gaily ribboned Camelot or Merrie Olde England. This is a wintry February world of cold iron, gray dawns, stoicism and lonely exile, with little brightness to life apart from an occasional cup of mead in a thane's household or a shining ring bestowed by some noble lord to an honored warrior.
When these poems aren't about the epic defense of a narrow place against odds, they frequently give Christian dogma and story a distinctive Dark Age twist. For example, "The Dream of the Rood" -- called "The Vision of the Cross" in Ciaran Carson's translation -- presents the Crucifixion from the Cross' point of view. "This man of mettle -- God Almighty -- then stripped off/for battle; stern and strong, he climbed the gallows." Eventually, "battle-weary," the "dear warrior" is taken down by His followers. In the future, the Cross becomes God's army's banner so that none need fear God's wrath "who bear upon their breast" this "brightest emblem."
Anglo-Saxon phrases, as Tolkien observes, often resound "like harp strings, sharply plucked." In his preface, Seamus Heaney points to a supreme example of such resonance. Although "The Battle of Maldon" -- about a bloody encounter between native Anglo-Saxons and invading Norsemen -- stands among the half-dozen greatest old English poems, it is still a fragment, one that tellingly opens with the words "brocen wurde," that is "(it) was broken." Those two words, Heaney writes, "could almost function as a very condensed history of Anglo-Saxon poetry." For the Anglo-Saxon hegemony was shattered in 1066, when the Norman French conquered England and brought with them their softer, more flowing tongue. The resulting hybrid, Middle English, while still sometimes hard going, is recognizably a language we still speak. It is Chaucer's dialect: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote."
But Anglo-Saxon remains alien.
"The Word Exchange" includes original poems -- 123 of them -- on its left-hand pages and the English versions on the right. "Caedmon's Hymn," traditionally viewed as the oldest surviving example of such poetry, opens this way: "Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard." With effort one can make out that the words mean roughly: Now we shall praise the heavenly kingdom's guardian. It's relatively easy to see the English word "heaven" joined to the German word "Reich," while "weard" calls to mind the old phrase "watch and ward." But things grow more difficult in the second line with "meotodes meahte and his modgethanc."(I've used "th" to represent the Old English letter called a thorn.) Harvey Shapiro renders these two lines this way: "Guardian of heaven whom we come to praise/who mapped creation in His thought's sinews."
The more than 70 poets called upon by the anthology's editors, Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, are certainly distinguished. The roster includes Heaney himself ("Deor"), Paul Muldoon ("Wulf and Eadwacer"), David R. Slavitt ("The Battle of Maldon"), Derek Mahon ("Durham"), Robert Hass ("The Battle of Brunanburh") and Yusef Komunyakaa ("The Ruin"). Much Anglo-Saxon verse takes the form of riddles, charms, prayers and maxims, and scores of these are Englished by Billy Collins, Carol Muske-Dukes, Michael Collier, Molly Peacock, Dennis O'Driscoll, Jane Hirshfield and others equally notable. Many of the poets were assisted by Matto, who provided "cribs, glossaries, and interpretive direction." In an appendix, David Ferry, Eamon Grennan, Rachel Hadas and nine other contributors offer mini-essays on their experience of turning Anglo-Saxon into modern English.
Mary Jo Salter's was perhaps the most daunting task, as she had not only to translate "The Seafarer" but also to resist the influence of a powerful precursor: Ezra Pound's classic (if slightly truncated) version, a masterpiece of sinewy diction and syntax. Adopting a smoother line, Salter opens: "I can sing my own true story/of journeys through this world,/how often I was tried/by troubles." The narrator goes on to contrast loneliness at sea and life on the land, with Salter at one point employing language that seems to echo the depiction of spring in Horace's famous "Diffugere nives" ode: "Groves break into blossom,/the towns and fields grow fair/and the world once more is new." She ends with the maximlike observations: "A man must steer his passions,/be strong in staying steady/. ... Let us ponder where our true/home is, and how to reach it."
Anyone who has been put off Anglo-Saxon poetry because of the stiffness or academese of older translations will discover much to enjoy in "The Word Exchange." Almost everything is here, with the exception of the book-length "Beowulf." Still, bear in mind that the softer passions are seldom mentioned, and this is definitely not a book for a late Valentine's Day present. But there is wonderful stuff here, as in these closing lines from Bernard O'Donoghue's translation of "Widsith," the reflections of a wandering poet:
So the minstrels of men go wandering
by the dictates of fate through many lands.
They express what is needed and compose thanks.
Always, south or north, they find someone
with wise taste for poems, generous with gifts
who wants his name raised before the people,
to achieve valor, before everything fails,
light and life together. He earns their praise:
so under heaven gains exalted glory.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE HISTORY OF HISTORY: A Novel of Berlin
Ida Hattemer-Higgins
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307272775
319 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ruth Kluger, a retired professor of literature and the author of "Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered"
Berlin, the least storied of the great European capitals, not much more than an oversize village as late as the 18th century, is today one of the most vibrant cities on the continent, though it has a ferocious 20th-century past: Nazi headquarters, Allied aerial bombardment, destruction by the Russians at the end of World War II and its walled-in existence during the Cold War.
Although Ida Hattemer-Higgins' "The History of History" is a novel, it's also a virtual guide to the city, as its subtitle suggests. The protagonist, Margaret Taub, is an American history student at the Free University, working part time as a guide for English-speaking tourists. The painstaking detail of her narrative map of Berlin and the plausible, often amusing reactions of her customers to her explanations of the sites form the realistic side of the novel. The other side is a fantasy about the merging of past and present, beginning with Margaret's partial amnesia when she wakes one morning in a forest and has forgotten what happened to her in the past few months.
Amnesia is such an easy trick to get a story rolling that we have a right to expect an extraordinary tale to warrant it. At first, the novel's many original twists seem an arbitrary jumble, but by and by some coherence emerges. There are electrifying scenes, often confrontational, in which the author succeeds in melding a sensitive outsider's subjective experience of the city with its documented history. But other scenes leave an impression of strained improbability. We're left wondering about the validity, let alone the depth, of the ideas that are meant to make these disparate moments coalesce.
Here are some of the startling things that happen to our heroine:
-- Margaret, an ardent reader of Nazi history, comes to identify with Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler's propaganda minister, who poisoned her young children in the notorious "Fuehrerbunker," where the Goebbels family, together with Hitler and an assortment of high-ranking thugs, were holed up until they committed suicide. Frau Goebbels takes on the shape of a menacing bird and stalks Margaret.
-- Margaret plays a game of cards with the ghost of a Jewish woman who also killed her children. Listening to the woman's story, Margaret decides to fall in love with her.
-- Margaret is summoned by a blind doctor who inserts a speculum into her body while showing her a blurry film that is meant to reveal the fullness of life.
-- Margaret suffers from the illusion that the city's buildings have turned into living flesh.
All this (and more) is certainly ponderous with significance, but the reader has to decide whether it isn't also over the top. Moreover, do the fireworks of this remarkable style fizzle out in moral truisms or are they revelatory? Consider this typically opaque passage: "A cephalopod builds its multichambered shell according to the nacreous laws of its species, and so too, this flickering figure of Magda Goebbels, without hardly meaning to, vanished inside layers of narrative artifice ... all emanations from her personality which built rightness and naturalism, in layer upon layer, for things that were beyond right or nature."
In the end, the enigma of Margaret's initial amnesia is lifted, and communist Berlin comes into play as part of her suppressed memories. Family secrets and the blind doctor's true identity are revealed. Margaret's and Germany's ghosts belong to one another. The author explains, "It is remarkably easy to conflate one kind of guilt with another. Guilt is a quicksilver that loves its brothers; it flows naturally according to its own code of gravity, eager to rejoin its own, and in the final reservoir, there are no distinctions." Yet isn't it a dubious assumption that the greater evil should get subsumed and must serve to explain the lesser one? Does history in the end become a mere stage prop for a private story? A Kafkaesque irrationality pervades the best passages of this novel with images of angst and anxiety. But there is also a "Wizard of Oz" quality in the many wonders Margaret encounters that doesn't go well with the gravity of genocide.
This is not a major work, but it's an ambitious first novel, written with a great deal of intelligence, skill and a narrative energy that raises hopes for more and better to come.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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