Points for Creativity: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Oh, Hi! I think I used to have a blog here. It's been a busy month. I got hired at a new library, quit my old one, fell into a lethargic depression as a result of the weather, and also did some rather interesting binge-drinking. Of course I read too, but more slowly than usual. This book, which should probably be read in only a few sittings, took almost a week. Note the illustration to the right. I selected it for two reasons: First, we've all seen the real cover by now because "The Time Traveler's Wife" was enormously popular when it was published a few years ago and second, the real cover (think knee-socks, mary-janes, and a thermos) is too hideously cutesy to contemplate. This illustration is cutesy too, but at least we haven't seen it hundreds of times.

It's possible that I selected this book because I wanted to give something a bad review, and I was sure I'd hate it. I'm always avoiding books with titles like this (The So-and-So's Wife, or The So-and-So's Daughter) because they annoy me. Also, according to the back cover, "'The Time Traveler's Wife' is a story of fate, hope and belief, and more than that, it's about the power of love to endure beyond the bounds of time." Am I a jerk for finding that description irritating? Am I alone in this? Anyhow, it's not that bad. It's hugely imaginative, and the characters are all unique and likeable. But take away the (admittedly pretty awesome) fact that Henry is an unwilling time traveler (which, by necessity, actually gives the book a really interesting structure), and what are we left with? A saccharine story of epic and fated love which I don't really feel is enough for a book to be about. Don't get me wrong- I don't believe that writers should ever write with a particular message in mind. The best writers don't because otherwise it would feel forced, but they at least communicate something larger and compelling by accident and then fine-tune in later drafts. There's not much of anything being said here other than "Henry and Clare have a profound romantic connection that you, reader, will never in your life experience because it's completely false and ridiculous. Sorry!"

Am I being all sour grape-y? Not at all. I completely prefer love of the ugly, improvised, and uncertain variety. I want to love the hell out of the wrong person and make it work. Fate is just so boring.

The Highest Standard: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Everyone had read this book but me. Friends who recently saw me with it in my hands said, "You're reading that again?" and I replied, "Nope, I'm reading it for the first time." Then they'd ask, "Didn't you have to read it in high school?" and I'd say, "No, we didn't read books with female characters" (this is mostly true, though I didn't even realize it myself until years later).

But I wish we'd read "To Kill a Mockingbird." I don't mean to suggest that I was unmoved by what we were required to read, but I was admittedly an atypical case as a total bookworm. "To Kill a Mockinbird" seems to me like the perfect book for high school students to read, and I'm glad that some are still required to. My evidence: At work I'm always getting surly-looking, uninspired teens trudging up to the reference desk asking for it. Now (as in this past week) I tell them, "You're going to love it," and they look at me like I'm approximately 85 years-old and therefore completely unqualified to comment on what they might like. I wish just one of them would come back and tell me that they loved it, because it would at least confirm my suspicion that it's exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. I'm going to repeat that because it's important: I suspect that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what what we're hoping for whenever we open a book. It is the standard to which I'll now hold everything else I read.

Without going on about the plot and the characters and the themes (I'm sure it's unecessary because, like I said, everyone had read this book but me), I'll just back up my theory by saying that it's a hugely complex book about ugly realities, and it still somehow manages to be the most enjoyable entertainment. It's perfect. Obviously it goes to the top of the list. I can't believe it took me 27 years to pick it up.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961. Enormously influential, it stirs readers in all directions to this day: It has made the American Library Association's annual list of banned/challenged books almost every year since its publication in 1960. Again, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is exactly what we're hoping for whenever we open a book.

Silk Has a Secret: The Human Stain by Philip Roth

I love Philip Roth, but don't necessarily love reading him. That is, I appreciate his intelligence. I appreciate his ability to weave together a number of incredible stories, each with its own complexity, and link them all thematically. The trouble is that I rarely feel like I'm really enjoying myself. While i'm admiring of his craft, shouldn't he be tricking me into not noticing it? There, I said it, and you can all hate me if you want to.

"The Human Stain" is a fantastic book, no question. It takes on far more than the other books I've reviewed here and handles its massively complicated subject matter wonderfully. It's a novel about political correctness, judgement, aging, race, and the American quest for individualism. Set in 1998, with president Bill Clinton's impeachment hovering in the background, and sanctimoniousness in the air, "The Human Stain" follows protoganist Coleman Silk through his success as an academic, his disgrace as an accused racist, and his bizarre death at the hands of a troubled, jealous, and very violent Vietnam War vet.

What you probably can't see on the cover up there are the words "Everyone Knows." They're scrawled on a piece of paper and tucked inside an envelope, which is seen from above. Get it? It takes a minute to understand what you're looking at. Whoever designed that cover did a great job because those are easily the most important words in the novel. "Everyone knows you're sexually exploiting an abused, illiterate woman half your age" is a message that Coleman Silk receives anonymously in the mail one day. He is, in fact, sleeping with an abused, illiterate woman half his age, but that's not really anyone's business. Everyone loves crucifying a success, and especially one who has already lost his job, wife, and good reputation because of false accusations of racism (Coleman, a respected Classics professor and former dean at a New England liberal arts college, referred to two absent students as "spooks"). But what no one knows is Coleman's biggest secret- a secret he's spent decades worrying that everyone will find out: He has spent almost his entire life passing as a tan-skinned Jew, when he is in fact a light-skinned African American from East Orange, New Jersey. For one thing, this makes his being an accused racist all the more surreal, but it also introduces another layer of complexity to the book. What appeared to be a novel about political correctness and sexual morality in Clinton-era America, is actually much bigger. It's a novel about the American impulse to shed one's skin, start over, and succeed based on one's merits, despite the fact that it's nearly impossible to do so.

While Coleman's decision to abandon his ancenstry and live as a white man is enormous and shocking, other characters are reinventing themselves: Faunia Farley, a damaged, abused, and illiterate janitor who Coleman is sleeping with; Les Farley, a deeply traumatized, unpredictably violent war vet; and Delphine Rioux, a French academic who despises Coleman and leads all charges against him for her own personal reasons.

Roth's writing is expert (Faunia, for example, has "the laugh of a barmaid who keeps a baseball bat at her feet in case of trouble") and at times infectiously frantic. The gradual unravelling of Coleman's past, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman (a recurring Roth character), is slow, detailed, and gripping. The final scene, in which Nathan Zuckerman is both threatened and a threat, is exquisitely imagined, tense as hell, and probably more visual than any other scene in the book.

Writing this is making me love the book, and I know it's the smartest book I've read so far for this award. It's without a doubt the most ambitious. I just didn't have a great experience reading it, so I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm putting it on top. Roth is risking more than every other author on this list so far, and he still comes through with a novel that I can't find a single specific complaint about. It would be crazy to put him below Natsuo Kirino, and maybe I just read it at the wrong time.

"The Human Stain" won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.

Whatta Guy: Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

Which cover is better? I'm partial to the one on the left. The one on the right is a bit too tra-la-la for my taste, and is totally misleading in light of the book itself. The book is not, after all, about a loveable, wholesome English farmer who cycles between villages selling eggs from a basket. It is about a madman who-- and I sincerely hope I'm not the only one to have found this-- is enormously charming.

By the time we find out that Mike Engleby is a freak and a murderer, Faulks has made quite sure that we're in a position where we'll find this difficult to accept. Engleby is our narrator, after all: He's the fictional author of the fictional "autobiography" we're reading. Unreliable narrators are nothing new to the literary landscape, but this one is so confessional to begin with, so intensely likeable, that when we figure out his true nature, we're disappointed, embarrassed, and worried by the fact that we fell for him hook, line, and sinker.

By the time we find out that Mike Engleby is suffering from "schizoid personality disorder...will elements of narcissism and antisocial personality disorder", we've learned about his difficult, impoverished childhood (no self-pity, though!). We've accepted his snobbish, blasé outlook of academia ("'The Crucible'...is about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Good that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised") as typically adolescent. We've accepted his shoplifting and pickpocketing to be a result of class resentment and basic need. The way he describes his drug and alcohol addiction is actually kind of hilarious and anyhow, it's the seventies, and he's an undergraduate and Cambridge. In a voice-driven book, Engleby's voice is welcome, appreciated, and enjoyed. He's unintentionally hilarious and hugely entertaining.

Gradually, things get suspicious. Engleby has only one friend, and it becomes painfully clear that they're not even that close. There's a girl, too, and Engleby describes her as being close to him, even a girlfriend, but she can't really be more than a casual acquaintance. When she disappears and is presumed to be dead, the gaps in Engleby's memory, coupled with his dillusional view of their relationship, and his occasional rages, become worrisome, but the case goes cold, and Engleby is accused of nothing. Later, as an adult, we see him settle into life as a journalist ("It's basically quite unbelievably easy"), and are distracted by his success. We're charmed again by his cleverness. Even though he's a suspicious oddball, we still want to hear his opinion about everything: Inane dinner parties, English politicians, journalism, you name it.

It isn't until close to the end of the book that we get a portrait of Engleby from another character's point of view. The dissonance is very disconcerting, perhaps partly because it's been right under our noses- albeit between the lines- the whole time.

That "Engleby" is dark goes without saying. I was reminded instantly of Ian McEwan, although to my knowledge McEwan has never written a fictional "autobiography." Who has? William Boyd, apparently, but I've never read it. "Engleby" is like nothing I've ever read before. I spilled beer all over the library's copy of this book, and will probably have to buy it, but I don't really mind.

A Woman's Work is Never Done: "Out" by Natsuo Kirino

I'm basically in love with Natsuo Kirino. A hugely famous and well-respected literary novelist from Japan, Kirino was introduced to North America in 2003 when "Out" was translated into English. Earlier this year, I read her second novel to be translated: "Grotesque." It knocked me straight onto my (formidable) ass- I had never before met such a spiteful, unlikeable, complicated main character. Sadly, because I read it in the early summer, it's ineligible for a clammy. Picking up "Out" was, in a way, my strategy for making Natsuo Kirino eligible. Frankly, I think I like "Out" better than "Grotesque," which is an enormous compliment because both are brilliant.

"Out" begins in a bleak box-lunch factory in the suburban outskirts of Tokyo, as four women- Masako, Yayoi, Yoshie and Kuniko- work the night shift together. Simultaneously grueling and tedious, the work is awful, but all four women need to do it for their own reasons. Masako is hardly on speaking terms with her husband and son, so she's there in order to work opposite shifts from them. Yayoi, the young and pretty one, is helping her husband save money so they can move into a new apartment with their young kids. Yoshie is widowed and taking care of a teenaged daughter and invalid mother-in-law. Kuniko is fat and vain, obsessed with fashion, makeup, and imported cars, and is understandably struggling under a mountain of debt.

One night, when Yayoi's husband comes home drunk, admits that he's spent all their savings on gambling and prostitutes, and then hits her, everything changes. In a strange, surreal moment of rage and psychosis, she strangles him with his belt. Later, at the factory, she confesses to Masako who, for reasons she herself is unsure of, agrees to take care of everything. The four women cut up Yayoi's husband's body in Masako's bathroom, divide the pieces among themselves, and scatter them in dumpsters across the suburbs. What follows is a grisly, disturbing novel as the women get away with the crime, but are ultimately found out by the man who was accused of it and later released for lack of evidence.

While Yayoi, Masako, Yoshie, and Kuniko are given almost equal narrative attention, this is really Masako's story. Masako is the one woman out of the four who originally insists on not being paid for her part in cutting up and disposing of the body. What's more, through crossing this line, Masako finds that she has a predilection for sociopathic behaviour. She encounters another criminal- a thug she crossed paths with in an earlier career- and realizes that they have a lot in common. Together with Yoshie (by far the most financially desperate of the women), they start a business cutting up and disposing of bodies for a Tokyo gang, all the while being stalked and threatened by the man who has found them out.

It would be easy enough to say that "Out" is propelled by shock-value alone, but that isn't really the case. There is nothing gimmicky about Kirino's clever depiction of a bleak world where a woman's choice of husband determines her destiny. This book is as much theme-driven as it is plot-driven, being ultimately about perverse feminism, vigilante justice, and our own potential for evil. In one of the most memorable scenes in the book, Yoshie flatly says that cutting up bodies isn't so different from changing her mother-in-law's diapers or working the line at the boxed-lunch factory. It's the work no one else wants to do.

A few critics have argued that the prose is flat and wooden. It sometimes is, but I'm tempted to blame the translation. Even the Guardian's Stephen Poole, in a lukewarm review, admits that the "flat, funtional prose" is occasionally illuminated by a strange lyricism. I was particularly impressed by this line about the gradual deadening of expectations and hope in the women's suburban lives:

"When stones lying warm in the sun were turned over, they exposed the cold, damp earth undernearth; and that was where Masako had burrowed deep. there was no trace of warmth in this dark earth, yet for a bug curled up tight in it, it was a peaceful and familiar world."

"Out" won Japan's top mystery award when it was published in its original language in 1997.

Life Imitates Art: The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

Look at this slender, handsome thing! The cover effortlessly beats the hell out of that pastel embarrassment that encloses "Prep." Recommended to me six months ago by a friend, "The Mystery Guest" was devoured today over the course of two subway rides and a half-hour dinner break. Book covers are important. They ARE. One must feel confident reading a book in public, and I'm not ashamed to say that I felt great reading "The Mystery Guest" on the subway today. Commuters were peeking at my book left and right, and I felt like I knew an important little secret. I felt sorry for my peers for not being in on it.

Breakups are bullshit- humiliating and devastating for the dumped because, really, when it comes down to it, being abandonned by a loved one teaches us that we're "a less exemplary person than [we had] thought." The first few pages floored me- I can't recall having read such a true description of the emotional wreckage that follows such a blow:

"I was home in the middle of the afternoon, and it was cold out, and I'd gone to sleep in all my clothes, wrapped up in a blanket, the way I generally did when I was home by myself. Cold and oblivion were all I was looking for at the time, but this didn't worry me. Sooner or later, I knew, I'd rejoin the world of the living. Just not yet. I felt I had seen enough. Beings, things, landscapes...I had enough to last me for the next two hundred years and saw no reason to go hunting for new material. I didn't want any trouble."

The above, by the way, is five years after the nameless Gregoire has been left, wordlessly, by his girlfriend. If he doesn't want any trouble, he gets it anyway, as the phone rings and it's the heartbreaker herself, calling suddenly after five years, not to offer any explanations or to ask to see him (or even to acknowledge their past at all), but rather to invite him to a birthday party--for a woman he's never met--where he is to play the role of "the mystery guest". What follows (as Gregoire prepares for the party and spends his rent money on a vintage bottle of wine that no one will, in fact, ever drink) is a frantic, Woody Allen-esque internal monologue bursting with hope, imagined reconciliations, speculation, faux significance, and, most importantly, fiction-like logic:

"For once I wasn't cooking the data. Not this time. Appearances never deceive (I told myself), they are their own meanings and there's nothing to look for behind them, and I rejoiced, and the reasons for her call rose up more and more vividly and gloriously into view. And the thing was, the reasons had nothing to do with her! Because it wasn't as if SHE had decided to call late in the afternoon on a Sunday and send me a coded message. No one was that roundabout, I told myself. At least not that pointlessly roundabout. So there had to be something else--call it a force--a force seeking some means of self-expression, struggling to give me a sign, and unbeknownst to her this something had told her to pick up the phone and dial my number at that moment, of all moments, the meaning of which apparent coincidence only I could discern. Yes, I was convinced that this had to be the explanation: for reasons unknown to me, but which might have had something to do with the death of Michel Leiris, something in her clicked and, taking advantage of her need to find a 'mystery guest,' the force stole this chance to slip her hand into mine, to wave a handkerchief like a prisoner locked in a tower."

Simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious, this narrative is really concerned with the consoling power of fiction, with the sometimes silly but always very real need to find symbols and portents in the everyday, to create meaning where there is little or none, and to ultimately make our messy lives feel as though they're at least heading towards some sort of satisfying, insightful, and fated ending. What's astounding is that we actually get a satisfying, insightful ending, but I won't give it away. I'll leave you instead with a hilarious bit about turtlenecks:

"Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left. Basically, I never took them off. No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck-undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse. You could even say they'd INFLICTED themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself. But if that was the price I had to pay, I told myself, so be it. We brick ourselves up in prisons of our own devising, we spend our lives losing touch with ourselves, disappearing behind what negates us."

A Portrait of the Artist in Boarding School: Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

I love the hell out of boarding school novels, and the reason for this is probably that I love the hell out of novels with child and teenaged protagonists. The boarding school bildungsroman, in particular, makes me want to tap dance all over the place because the gated and turreted school setting will doubtlessly serve to not only enclose and isolate a huge group of kids (some snobbish, some shy, all hormonal and crazed), but also serve as the perfect place for an insightful outsider to be miserable, to be observant of the rituals and mores of privileged classmates who at once intimidate, fascinate, and repel her, and to ultimately come into her own.



As a teenaged protagonist, Lee Fiora is pretty much the best we could ask for: self-conscious, ordinary, sensitive, and enormously observant. While her almost constant discomfort makes her appear by turns sullen and aloof to her classmates, Lee's interior life is rich. Her voice is strong, clear, uniquely insightful, and often heartbreaking. As a scholarship student at a school that costs $22, 000 per year in tuition and houses glamorous and wealthy students with names like Aspeth, Horton, Cross, and Tullis, she is obviously an outsider. At Ault School, Lee's once solid sense of identity is supremely challenged. Of her first bewildering weeks at Ault, she says, "I always worried that someone would notice me...and then when no one did, I felt lonely." What makes her character particularly realistic and complicated is her own role in maintaining her status as an outsider. For example, when a romantic relationship (albeit a sloppy and awkward one) begins to develop between Lee and the popular, easy-going Cross Sugarman, it is the insecure Lee who, in a misguided attempt to be accomodating, suggests that they keep it secret. She's hurt and appalled, however, when he does exactly that. The fact that her interior and exterior personalities are so different makes her a frustrating character, but it's also what makes her character so human and lovable. It's what makes all of us want, at least sometimes, to do high school all over again.

Some of the most touching parts of the book are the strangely nostalgic reminiscences offered up by the adult Lee- particularly those pertaining to her painful and disastrous relationship with Cross:

"I already recognized, even then, the sadness of another person lying on top of you. They will always leave (what's someone going to do, just lie there forever?) and that's the sad part. You can always feel the imminent loss.

It seemed to me, and it kept seeming like this for a long time, that this was what it was like to love a boy--to feel consumed. I'd awaken in the morning, without him, thinking, 'I love you so much, Cross.' Knowing that other people would not consider what went on between us to be love-- of course they wouldn't-- only made me more certain. When he arrived at night, tapping my shoulder in the dark, then the two of us walking down the hall to the day student room, then finally being in bed again, our bodies overlapping, my arms around his back-- that was one of the times when not telling him I loved him required willpower. Also when he was about to leave. I loved him so much! Later, with other guys, I'd think, 'Do I? Is this what it feels like? does love feel different with different people?' But with Cross I never wondered. There was nothing about him I didn't like. The other guys, guys in my future, were maybe too tall but as slim as girls, they listened to classical music and drank wine and liked modern art, and they seemed to me like sissies. Or we had enough to say to each other to fill an evening, we could go to a baseball game, but it never stopped being an effort. Or their fingers were--not stubby, but not long and sure. If I kissed these guys, I'd wonder if it would turn out to be an obligation, if I was moving forward into a situation from which I'd later have to extricate myself. It's not that they were unattractive, and they weren't boring either. But I never thought of what Cross wasn't. I never had to explain or defend him to myself. I didn't even care what we talked about. It was never a compromise. Or maybe for him it was. But it never was for me."

And later,

"I heard him swallow, and then--all this time, he had been holding the basketball against his right hip--he leaned down and set the ball against the floor. When he was upright again, he said, 'Lee...' and when I dared to glance at him, he was looking at me in a way that was both predatory and tender (I do not think it's an exaggeration to say that my life since then has been in pursuit of that look, and that I have yet to find it a second time in just that balance; perhaps it doesn't, after high school, exist in that balance) and it was because whatever he was about to do was exactly what I wanted while also scaring the hell out of me that I folded my arms and said, 'I'll have to take this all under advisement.' I knew immediately that I'd sounded sarcastic, and I did nothing to correct the impression."

The novel's first six or seven chapters function as fully independant short stories, which led me to believe that I was actually reading a story cycle, in the tradition of "Lives of Girls and Women" and "Funny Boy." The final chapter, though, is a sprawling, 118 page climax and denouement that doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book's structure and concludes with Lee's rather quick and predictable discovery that "the world [is] so big!" It's disappointing, partly because of it's predictability, but mainly because of it's suddeness. It feels tacked on. Also, I find it almost impossible to believe that Lee could be as poor a student as Sittenfeld describes her as being. Depressed and uninspired, sure. Overwhelmed and intimidated by the academic expectations at Ault, definitely. But surely an observant and introverted teenaged girl who (as Sittenfeld at the very least implies) is meant to become a writer would write an interesting story or be impressed by a particular novel in English class.

"Prep" was nominated for the UK's Orange Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of The Best Books of 2005. It's a damned good novel and, while flawed, perhaps in the same league as "The Catcher in the Rye," "A Separate Peace," and Kazuo Ishiguro's recent "Never Let Me Go"-- all masterpieces of the boarding school genre. "Prep" is without a doubt one of the best books I've read in a while, and Sittenfeld's voice is an exciting new discovery. That said, I didn't feel as blown away reading it as I did reading "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl last year, or "The Little Friend" by Donna Tartt the year before.