Testimony by Anita Shreve

Why did this book have to be so sad? It was really heartbreaking. Well it turns out that in Anita Shreve’s world, if you commit adultery, very bad things happen to you. Testimony is not the only book where this is the case. The Pilot’s Wife and The Weight of Water are two others where death, or the death of one’s child, are deemed suitable punishments by Ms. Shreve.

This book is also about teenage stupidity, a subject that is a little too familiar to me right now. After a late night of reading I found myself reminding my 18-year-old “don’t go with any underage girls.” He looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Mom, I’m a camp counselor. They would fire me.” Yes, and you might die too, if Anita Shreve was in charge.

If you can believe it though, I actually liked this book. Shreve builds tension slowly and with masterful control, as I’ve mentioned in other posts. In this story, a video of a sexual encounter among students at a posh boarding school is posted on the Internet. Who are the students? How did they end up in this situation? How does the headmaster handle it? The parents? The police? Shreve uses multiple points of view to reveal the various characters and what they are thinking. By including the voices of even very small players (the boy from town who provided the liquor) she adds layers of nuance to her story.

(Book 28, 2009)

Love Falls by Esther Freud

Esther Freud wrote Hideous Kinky, a good book that became an even better movie. Love Falls would be a good movie too, but it’s a lousy book. It would be a good movie because it would be set in Italy and have very pretty stars (isn’t that enough?). The protagonist Lara would be played by some nubile young ingénue who would flit around a Tuscan villa in her bikini, having sex with her boyfriend, played by some impossibly virile young male star. The older male lead (Lara’s father) would be played by someone handsome but remote, like Ralph Fiennes, and he would get his sex scenes also, with the 30-something female second lead. This part would happen in Florence, so there would be lots of café scenes and art museums, too.

I had to force myself to finish this book. The only things that propelled me forward were the descriptions of the villa and its gardens, the descriptions of the food, and the descriptions of Florence (more food, lots more art and architecture). I didn’t care one jot about any of the characters or what happened to them. I’m not even sure how it ended.

Plot summary, anyone? Lara, age 17, and her father go to Italy together to visit the father’s friend who is dying. They stay at the friend’s very cool villa near Siena. Lara gets involved with the son of the dissolute aristocratic English family from the very cool villa next door. Her father gets involved with one of their houseguests. The friend dies. They go back to London. Someone, please start filming this immediately.

(Book 27, 2009)

Escape by Carolyn Jessop with Laura Palmer

I don't usually read books about the issue du jour if you know what I mean. For some reason, however, I was attracted to this book by Carolyn Jessop, who escaped from the FLDS, the fundamentalist polygamous cult that was recently raided by the Texas authorities for alleged child abuse.

Carolyn Jessop was raised in the FLDS community in Colorado City, Arizona, and forced at age 18 to marry a man 30 years her senior, a man who already had three wives and numerous children. She endured more than 15 years of marriage to him and gave birth to 8 children. Her book tells the story of how she went from being a true believer in the tenets of her religion to understanding the real nature of the FLDS: that it brainwashes its followers through isolation, violence, and intimidation into total subservience to the leadership, which consists of corrupt old men.

The first part of this book, which details Jessop’s childhood and married life, is painful to read. Life in the FLDS compound was (for women, anyway) “worse than [under] the Taliban” (according to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who, with Carolyn Jessop’s help, targeted the FLDS for its crimes). It was especially interesting to read about the dynamics among the women in the household. For them, plural marriage seems to be essentially a zero-sum game, where every favor granted to one wife or her children means that a different wife or child will lose out. Competition among the women is cut throat and Carolyn’s children were routinely brutalized by their “other mothers.”

Before Carolyn Jessop, few women managed to escape from the cult, as local police were FLDS members who returned runaway wives to their husbands. But Jessop’s bravery and intelligence saved her and her children. The story of how she managed to escape and to retain custody of all of her children makes for great thriller-type reading.

Written in 2007, before the raid on the Texas compound, this book provides great background for understanding the legal battles that are still going on with the FLDS. Before reading this book I didn’t know much about the FLDS other than that they seemed like some creepy fringe group that was operating far off my radar. I did not realize how many women and children were (and still are) being held against their will, forced into sexual slavery, denied education, adequate medical care, and freedom to come and go--their basic human rights.

(Book 26, 2009)

The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger

This book is big and ambitious. Freudenberger tries to do a lot and usually she succeeds. It’s a complicated story of a Chinese artist who comes to Los Angeles on a cultural exchange program and the affluent American family who hosts him. Can I just list some of the topics Freudenberger tackles? Adolescent ennui, adultery, Chinese experimental art, culture shock, the nature of commitment, the Hollywood movie industry, identity, and Tiananmen Square. With this many balls in the air at once, it’s not surprising that a few of them drop and roll away without our ever knowing where they end up (the underdeveloped subplot about the American family’s troubled son Max is an especially annoying loose end). For the most part though, Freudenberger deftly manages her many characters, multiple points of view, and shifting chronology.

At 427 pages this is not a quick read; it took me almost 10 days. Recently I’ve been complaining about books that were too long but I think this book is just the right length. The 10 days includes some time re-reading parts that I misunderstood the first time through. You have to pay attention when you read this, but since when is that a bad thing?

Andrew O’Hehir, writing for Salon.com, calls The Dissident “an ingenious and strikingly mature book, entirely free of the callow attitude and self-absorption one associates with first novels.” I too thought this; I was very surprised to discover that Freudenberger is in her early 30’s and has only published one previous collection of short stores. This seems like the work of a more established writer, despites its flaws. It’s got some of the breadth and unpredictability of early John Irving novels, though without Irving’s oddball humor.

(Book 25, 2009)