Finding Iris Chang by Paula Kamen

Iris Chang was the author of The Rape of Nanking, a book that caused a huge stir when it came out back in the late 1990's. The Rape of Nanking detailed the atrocities committed by the Japanese during their occupation of the Chinese city of Nanking during the early part of World War II. The incidents at Nanking are partly the cause of the continuing tension between Japan and China. Chang was a dedicated journalist who spent years researching the gruesome events and advocating for the Chinese survivors of Nanking. I considered reading The Rape of Nanking when it came out, but to be honest I was a little fearful that it might be more history than I could stomach.

I did follow Iris Chang's career, though. She continued to write about Asia and about Asians in the U.S. and was greatly respected in journalistic circles and among readers of nonfiction. I was shocked by her death a few years ago, which turned out to be a suicide. Now Paula Kamen, Chang's friend from college, has written a biography of Chang that presents a balanced portrait of Iris's complex personality and relationships, and reveals the mental illness that preceded her suicide.

Here is an excellent post about this book on the blog Each Little World.

(Book 15, 2010)

Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson flies under the radar. I had never heard of her until this most recent collection of short stories, which did make a splash, at least in literary circles. But apparently she’s been around for a while, writing high quality short fiction and a few novels. Reviewers of Do Not Deny Me compared her to Alice Munro whom I think is brilliant, so I thought I would try these. (I see from a little research that Thompson was a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and has had books on the New York Times Notable Book list. I'm not sure how I missed her. As my kids say, "my bad.")

Thompson’s characters fly under the radar too. A lot of them are folks you might see at the gas station or the grocery store; people you wouldn’t notice but who nevertheless have real issues that Thompson explores with care and tenderness. In one story a woman worries that her neighbor’s children are being abused. She tries to make contact with the children but is frightened away by their father. Then the family moves away. That’s it. It was so real I felt like I could have been reading a newspaper story; not because Thompson uses a journalistic style but because the events were so mundane yet so universal.

The only problem with this approach is that the details don’t stick with me. Like the news I read in the local paper about apartment fires and car accidents, these stories run together in my head and I can’t really remember what happened to which character. That doesn’t mean they aren't excellent, and worth reading.

(Book 14, 2010)

Two Recent Misses

Two books abandoned in the past week:

Until I Find You by John Irving. This started really slowly. Jack (age 4) and his mother (the famous tattoo artist known as Daughter Alice) wander around Europe searching for Jack’s unreliable church-organist/tattoo-addicted father, William. By the time Jack and Alice arrive in Finland, always one step behind William, I was just really bored. Then I read this review in the Guardian and I was just plain weirded out. I have loved a lot of John Irving books, but not so many recently.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley. This got a lot of good press but I didn’t like it enough to stick with it. It’s a mystery novel starring the motherless 11-year-old science whiz/amateur sleuth Flavia de Luce and it’s set in the British countryside in 1950. Bradley’s writing is self-consciously eccentric; he adopts a kind of faux 1950’s detective story narration style with lots of breathless end-of-chapter revelations. Writing in the Guardian, reviewer Laura Wilson says “Flavia… is so precocious that, if she existed, every adult she met would be itching to slap her.” I wanted to slap her even though she doesn’t exist.

Messy Books and Bags of Junk

No, this isn't a post about lousy housekeeping.

I was talking with a friend yesterday about Lorrie Moore’s book A Gate at the Stairs which I wrote about a few weeks ago. I also had a short exchange last week about this book with the Citizen Reader in the comments on her blog. She and I were arguing about our choices for the most overrated book of 2009. She said A Gate at the Stairs and I said it was Brooklyn by Colm Toibin. Here is that post. (Note that most other commentors agreed with CR.)

Yesterday my friend said he thought that Moore’s book was really messy. He called it something like a “big bag of junk” where Moore threw in all kinds of stuff, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. I can’t say I disagreed with him. The whole subplot with the boyfriend who turns out maybe to be a terrorist—that was certainly the plot point that made the least amount of sense to me. And the part where Tassie climbs into the coffin with her dead brother? Oh come on, yuck; no one would do that. So yes, the bag contains some junk.

But I also found lots of things to like in the book, most of which I mentioned in my earlier post. So the question is, how do you talk about books like this, how do you describe how you feel about them? Can you still like a book that is a big messy bag of junk? I say yes!

What if someone came over and gave you an actual bag of junk and you spent a half hour or so going through it. Inside the bag was a broken clock and some old newspapers, but the bag also contained some funky retro jewelry, the soundtrack to Guys and Dolls, and a freshly baked muffin. How would you describe the experience of going through that bag? Fun or disappointing? Some might say that the bag wasn’t worth the trouble because everything in it wasn’t top notch. They might feel obliged to complain about the bad stuff in the bag, and point out to everyone that they noticed it. I, on the other hand, would have fun with the jewelry, and would eat the muffin while listening to the music. The rest of the stuff I would just ignore, and I would pronounce the bag of junk a positively entertaining experience.

Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh

Pennsylvania coal mining country isn’t a glamorous setting for a novel. Coal mining is dirty business and the eponymous Baker towers are two huge piles of coal mining waste that dominate the town of Bakerton. The Italian and Polish immigrant miners of Bakerton in the 1940’s are just getting by, living in company houses, shopping at the company store. The Novak family, whose story this is, suffers from more than its share of troubles, including the premature death of Stanley, the patriarch. His wife Rose soldiers on and manages to raise five children with mixed results. In Baker Towers we follow the lives of Rose and her children through the 1940’s, 1950’s and early 1960’s. There’s lots of coming and going, and coming of age, as children grow up and leave, but cannot stay away.

This book reminds me a lot of After This by Alice McDermott. Haigh uses the same light touch, checking in and out of her characters’ lives over the course of many years, illuminating both their disappointments and their victories. Both books feature working class Catholic families and describe the cultural upheavals experienced by this group in the middle of the 20th century. Both authors have the gift of understatement.

In Baker Towers the middle daughter Joyce is born in the mid-1930’s, around the same time my mother was born. My mother grew up in the anthracite coal mining region of Pennsylvania around Wilkes-Barre, which is east of, but similar to, the area described in Baker Towers. Her grandparents were Lithuanian immigrants and her father started working in the mines when he was 8 years old. By the early 1950’s most miners were making good union wages and my grandparents could afford to send my mother to nursing school in Philadelphia, thereby ensuring her escape to the middle class. In Baker Towers the fatherless Joyce isn’t so lucky.

(Book 13, 2010)

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I avoided this book for a while. I was afraid it was going to be exploitative, opportunistic, manipulative, a cheap bid for attention. In some ways it is those things, but not in the ways I expected. In the author’s notes and on her web site Kathryn Stockett goes out of her way to make us understand her motivations for writing this book: her childhood in segregated Jackson, Mississippi and her complex relationship with her grandmother’s African American maid. Set in Jackson in the early 1960’s, The Help is the story of two African American maids, Aibileen and Minnie, and the white women they work for. It’s also the story of Skeeter, a young white woman who is stifled by the restricted life available to her the deep south and who has ambitions to be a writer. To this end she sets out to write Aibileen’s and Minnies’ stories; this is a dangerous task for all three women to undertake in the same year and city in which Medgar Evers was assassinated.

The chapters narrated by Aibileen and Minnie are written in dialect. This was a risky choice for Stockett, a white author, but she pulls it off. Aibileen’s quiet dignity and Minnie’s rage are equally moving, and you get used to reading the dialect and can hear their voices in your head.

The book’s problems have more to do with Stockett’s portrayal of the white women. Skeeter’s chapters reveal her heartbreaking naivete as she struggles to forge connections with Aibileen and Minnie. While we certainly want the best for Skeeter, it’s hard to get too worked up about her problems, considering what Aibileen and Minnie deal with every day. And the book’s villian, a young Junior Leaguer named Hilly, is almost cartoonishly evil, like a parody rather than a real flesh and blood character.

I thought this book was pretty well done. It’s not subtle but I don’t know how it could be. I give Stockett credit for trying, and if she seems to be overreaching a little, and aiming too much for the book club crowd, well, that didn’t make me enjoy the book any less. It just made me a little more self-conscious as I was reading it. (Janet Maslin, writing in the New York Times, was less forgiving than I am.)

(Book 12, 2010)