The Condition by Jennifer Haigh

I thought this book was unremarkable. Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, did not agree. I wish I had enjoyed it as much as she did. Maslin said, “Ms. Haigh has a great gift for telling interwoven family stories and doing justice to all the different perspectives they present.” In this book we follow an affluent family in New England from the 1960’s through several decades as they come to terms with changes in themselves and in society. It’s a similar premise to Baker Towers, but the family in Baker Towers is working class and their troubles just seem more genuine and less TV-movie-ish than the ones the McKotches face in The Condition.

I will agree with Maslin, though, that Haigh does a good job of balancing a family saga with an unfolding medical drama without turning the book into a “tragic family secret” story. Gwen, whose condition is Turner syndrome, is just one character out of many in this book, and everyone gets his or her turn in the spotlight. So why did Haigh title the book the way she did? She could just as easily have called it Frank and Paulette Get a Divorce or The Gay Older Brother, two plot strands that get just as much ink as Gwen’s medical condition.

Meh. Read Baker Towers, or Haigh’s first book, Mrs. Kimble. Both of those were more original and more compelling than this one.

(Book 23, 2010)

This One is Mine by Maria Semple

I’ll start with a quick synopsis: In Los Angeles, Violet, a mid-30’s former TV writer, new mother, and wife to David (rich, self-absorbed, and clueless), falls for Teddy, an all-round bad sort. Meanwhile, Violet’s sister-in-law Sally embarks on an ill-conceived quest to marry Jeremy (also rich, self-absorbed and clueless, but for different reasons). Trouble ensues. Everyone is forced to examine what is really important in their lives. End of story.

Semple avoids the worst of the Hollywood-novel clichés. It’s a character-driven story and the shopping and real estate are pretty peripheral, if not completely absent. Characters have backgrounds and depth, and are not from central casting. In a departure from what I expected, Semple bravely makes Teddy a truly loathsome character, forcing us to ponder what is really motivating Violet.

Maria Semple’s publicist contacted me about this book, then Maria and I e-mailed about it and I was sent a free copy. At first I was a bit wary, not being much of a fan of books set in Hollywood. But I enjoyed this. Sometimes it’s good to read stuff that is out of your normal comfort zone. I can’t read about WWII all the time.

(Book 22, 2010)

My Mother Also Read a Book a Week

The question keeps popping up: How do you read a book a week? I've answered it before (I don't watch TV, I don't play golf, etc.) but I've thought of another factor and thought I'd write about it today, on Mother's Day. The other factor is just habit and example. My mother read a book a week. Trips to the library were built into our weekly routine, like trips to the grocery store. Her mother read a book a week, and my other grandmother read a book a week too. Her daughters, my aunts, do too. My stepmother and sister read that much as well. It's just something that mothers and daughters do in our family. I know my friend Anne and her sister Julia read a book a week also, a habit they got from their mother. In these families books are like food. You wouldn't let the cupboard get empty and you wouldn't be without a book (and a backup book) either.

I am thankful that my mother set this example, though I'm sure she didn't think of it that way. On this Mother's Day I want to remember all the departed mothers in my life: my mother Patricia, her mother Marie, and my father's mother Virginia, great readers all.

The World to Come by Dara Horn

This book is like a big party, to which everyone has been invited: An art thief and an art forger (who are brother and sister), their father (a one-legged Vietnam vet), their mother (a plagiarist), Marc Chagall, and Der Nister, the Yiddish folktale writer who hid some of his forbidden stories inside the frames of Chagall’s pictures. Like a noisy crowded party, it can sometimes get annoying, and not all the guests fit in as well as others do, but it’s a lot of fun! And at the end it turns into some kind of drunken hallucination where you can’t figure out what is real and what is not, just like some parties do.

There’s a lot to love about this book, and it’s not hard to read, despite how confusing I make it sound. I just loved how the strangest things kept popping up. Here’s one: this book contains several little stories about Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, who was one of Der Nister’s favorite 18th century scholars. Rabbi Nachman was a great believer in the power of happiness to bring us closer to the divine. In Israel right now there is an active group of Rabbi Nachman’s followers. These guys drive around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in white vans, and several times a day they stop to play loud techno music and dance in the streets, all in the name of reminding us of Rabbi Nachman’s teachings. We saw them more than once when we were in Jerusalem, which was where I happened to be when I was reading this book. So here I was, reading about Rabbi Nachman, and watching people be happy about Rabbi Nachman, and then I felt happy, too, and it all just seemed so cosmic.

(Book 21, 2010)

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Apparently there was a lot of hue and cry when this won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. Critics thought that Adiga was too young, that the book was too rough, not polished enough. Stuart Jeffries, writing in the Guardian, wonders where Adiga “gets the nerve” to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor when he (Adiga) is a child of the Indian privileged class. To this question Adiga responds “I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me." I actually think it was kind of insulting for Jeffries to ask this at all; good writers take on other voices all the time.

And Adiga does it effectively. I really liked The White Tiger, which tells the tale of Balram Halwai, a rickshaw puller’s son who, against all odds, pulls himself up by his bootstraps (and commits murder along the way) to get established in the “new India.” The whole book is in the form of a series of letters from Balram to the visiting Chinese premier, and it’s a great device for mixing trenchant observation and humor. Balram lays it all out: the poverty, the abuse at the hands of unscrupulous employers, the corruption of the Indian democracy, the complete lack of health care and education for the laboring classes. It’s like he’s pulled back a curtain on the current image of India as a hotbed of innovation to reveal the ancient sick society underneath. Yet Balram’s optimism, creativity, and verve carry us along.

The white tiger (also known as the Bengal tiger) has long been a symbol of the old India. In this book it is Balram himself who is the white tiger, a rare creature, intelligent, strong, and resourceful.

(Book 20, 2010)