An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

This slim little book is about loss, specifically the loss of a baby. Too depressing, you might say? Maybe for some, but it’s also about hope and about recovery. And it’s quite funny and upbeat in places, if you can believe that. McCracken’s first child (a boy) was born dead in 2006 while she was living in France. Her second child (also a boy) was born healthy barely a year later, and is doing fine. The two events are so closely linked that it’s difficult to separate them; they are like two sides of the same coin. McCracken’s book doesn’t take a chronological path through these events but still manages to be a coherent and moving portrait of what happened and how she and her husband dealt with it. And her writing is beautiful: witty, matter-of-fact, and searing, all at once.

I went through a phase where I couldn’t read stories about dead children. I think there still might be some books like this that I won’t ever read (A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton, for one). But something about McCracken’s approach drew me in, and I had read such good reviews! Interestingly, even though I thought it wasn’t getting to me, I ended up having a weird dream where I kept mixing up McCracken’s dead baby with my own firstborn son. My son, who is very much alive, left last week to take a summer job far from home and then is going away to college. So I am facing my own loss, which is nothing like McCracken’s but which nevertheless is obviously bothering me on some subconscious level. And I thought I was fine. Hmmmm. It’s obvious that writing this book was therapeutic for McCracken, but it’s also therapeutic to read it; in my case it’s bringing up issues I didn’t know I had.

(Book 24, 2009)

Dumbfounded by Matt Rothschild

You know how sometimes a movie trailer can make a movie look funny and unique, but then you go see it at the theater and you realize that all the best bits were in the trailer and the rest of the movie is a big disappointment? This book is like that. I read several reviews (like this one) that made the book sound great, but it turns out that in between the funny events described in the review are just long boring parts where nothing happens.

Dumbfounded is Matt Rothschild’s memoir of his offbeat adolescence in Manhatten in the 1980’s. It’s a fish out of water story: a Jewish kid in a WASP enclave, a gay kid surrounded by macho private school jocks, a young lonely boy raised by elderly eccentric grandparents. But Rothschild can’t sustain the momentum necessary to make it all work as a book, and he has to resort to filler. He also includes episodes of pathos (an unpleasant reunion with his flighty socialite mother) that try too hard to evoke a certain response from the reader. “Oh, now we are supposed to feel sorry for him.” I felt a little manipulated.

Some of his stuff isn’t bad, though; I think Rothschild’s story would have made a funny article for the New Yorker (or a good movie trailer).

(Book 23, 2009)

Lulu in Marrakech by Diane Johnson

I loved Diane Johnson’s three earlier books about American expatriates in France: Le Divorce, Le Mariage, and L’Affaire. All three were funny, original, compelling, and delivered laser-like critiques of both French and American culture. Johnson writes with a distinctive breezy style that belies her sharp observations and subtle characterizations.

I was really excited to discover that Johnson had a new book, Lulu in Marrakech. Oooo, I thought, let’s see what she does with the French expatriate community in Morocco. Alas, this one did not measure up to the previous three.

Johnson’s portrait of the French, British, and American expat society in Marrakech is as good as anything she’s written, and most of her characters don’t disappoint. Unfortunately, the problem lies with Lulu. At the center of each of Johnson’s three previous novels is a woman who lives in both worlds. In Le Divorce this woman is Isabel, an American who is staying with her sister in Paris, as the sister divorces a Frenchman; in Le Mariage it’s Anne-Sophie, a young Frenchwoman who is marrying an American journalist; and in L’Affaire it’s Amy, an American business woman who becomes entangled with a complicated French family and the even more complicated French system of inheritance.

Lulu, the live-in girlfriend of a British businessman in Marrakech has this role in the new book, but for some reason that wasn’t enough for Johnson and she had to go and make Lulu an undercover CIA agent as well. It just feels wrong. It feels forced and artificial, and to top it off, Lulu is a terrible spy. She makes all kinds of mistakes and hardly accomplishes anything. I just didn’t think it worked, having Lulu bounce back and forth between providing piquant social commentary and participating in botched rendition assignments. The New York Times didn’t think it worked, either.

(Book 22, 2009)

In Love With Jerzy Kosinski by Agate Nesaule

In the book In Love With Jerzy Kosinski we go inside Agate Nesaule’s head because that is where all the action is. Or rather, we go inside the head of Anna, Nesaule’s fictional alter ego, a woman who has a lot in common with her creator. Both are English professors, both endured World War II as young children in Latvia, became refugees, and immigrated to the United States in their teens. And both (according to the author’s note) are obsessed with the late Polish writer Jerzy Kosinski.

Hardly anything happens in this book. Anna learns to drive and leaves her husband with little fanfare. She gets a job and a boyfriend, and she thinks about Jerzy Kosinski. She reads, she gardens, she cooks. But Anna’s past is never more than a millimeter below the surface, and her memories are triggered by the smallest event. The sight of a traffic cop paralyzes her because he reminds her of the Russian soldiers who took away her father. A warehouse fire convinces her that a war has begun in the city where she's living. Anna’s horrific childhood in Latvia colors nearly every moment of her life but on the surface she is calm, measured. One secret of survival, it seems, is to never let anyone know how much you are struggling.

It is the contrast between Anna’s serene exterior and her roiling interior that makes this book so interesting. Nesaule plays up this contrast by juxtaposing Anna’s controlled existence in the present with the chaos of her memories. No drama in Anna’s adult life can begin to match the drama she has already lived through. No man is as needy as her father was after the Russians were through with him. Is this why Anna is so drawn to Jerzy Kosinski, a man who made his professional reputation recounting the drama of his own life in the clutches of the Nazis in Poland? Anna must remain in control, but Jerzy Kosinski can reveal everything at the top of his lungs; indeed can embellish and even falsify the real story to achieve the greatest possible effect.

Agate Nesaule is also the author of A Woman in Amber, a memoir of her life in Latvia. Might someone ask whether In Love With Jerzy Kosoinski is just a fictionalized retelling of that same story? I don’t think it’s that simple. Just as Anna’s everyday reality is colored by the events from her past, so is Nesaule’s. I don’t believe that Nesaule could write anything that wasn’t influenced by her earlier life. No, let me rephrase that. Nesaule is an extremely talented writer who could write anything she wanted; I just can’t imagine anything that would be as powerful and heartbreaking as the truth.

(Book 21, 2009)