Reflections on Identity

Our last several books have delved into questions of race, roots, identity, and how much control anyone really has over who they are. In Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, we meet a Native American boy struggling with the boundaries of his being - wanting to be both more in and more out. Rejected by his own people and other groups, he finds himself looking to carve out a new identity but being repeatedly drawn back into his own family and community by both triumphs and tragedies. The reality is, he is Native American and is inextricably tied emotionally to this community. His successes cannot be sweet without them and his failures are too much for him to bear alone. He is however, able to create an identity within these boundaries, and finding this balance infoms the narrative tension of the book. By the end, he is accepting those around them for who they are, not who he needs them to be, which happens to be what he has been seeking. The last scene of the book is a beautiful metaphor for this struggle, with which every person at some point grapples. Two of the main characters challenge each other to individually climb an impossibly high tree and find that, only with each other's support, is the climb ultimately possible. NW by Zadie Smith certainly tries to scratch the same itch, but from a very different angle. Here, the reader is dropped into the center of London's NW neighborhood, which, at least from the novel's perspective, is the city's melting pot. The story is told through three denizens of NW, two of which are close friends and the other a seeming stranger used to give the reader an extensive tour of the neighborhoods somewhat seedy characters. While there are many themes that Smith teases out with complex figures and plotlines, identity is shown to be a multi-layered meeting point of place, culture, and individuality. All of the central characters are looking to shed some of features that have long defined them, both good and bad. While Leah, for example, works to break free of her feminity, Natalie struggles with her race, family, and education; seeking sexual freedom as a substitute for control over her day to day life. In her attempt to run from her maternal routine and preppy lawyer identity, she collides with her poor, urban past in the form of an old friend, now living homeless in the neighborhood. Here, she must face the nature of identity: she cannot reject every element of her being and must be something. As her quest leads her down many roads, none seem to be in sync with the person that she thinks she is, even though much of her identity is linked to decisions that she ultimately made. This scene is truly the apex of the book, not only because of Natalie's various epiphanies, but also because of how much the reader gets to see of the neighborhood. The writing becomes so impelling, I literally felt that I was in motion with the pair, especially after they decide to smoke crack. Ultimately, the characters are trapped by their identities and in Felix's case, doomed. Smith's question then becomes not only where the gray area exists between the life we build and the one that we are born into, but if this struggle is the source of all of life's not only growth, but angst. As a sidenote, I recently read an interview with Zadie Smith where she said that she intended NW to be a book about female relationships, both familial and social. How do you think she expresses this, if at all?

Run! But where are we running?!

While Ann Patchett's Run! provocatively poses questions about family and relationships and invites readers into beautifully omninous and emotionally-charged landscapes, it never asks the question that the novel ultimately is trying to answer. Readers are given lots of information, but never really told what to do with it. Ann Patchett certainly has a knack for putting readers squarely in her characters' shoes. In past works, her characters often behave badly or irrationally, but Patchett is able to create a psyche so complete, it's easy for readers to be sympathetic to poor and unreasonable decisions. Run! is no different. Here, each figure is three-dimensional and Patchett is able to change the tone of the narrator to match the speaker's voice. She is able to weave to and from different perspectives and create an omniscient narrator that is able to speak in the first person. When Sullivan is speaking, the narrator knows his dirty secrets and feelings about them. The reader is able to learn why Tennessee did what she did and why Tip behaves the way he does, without clunky background dialogue or narration. Further, the scenery in the novel is so well used and portrayed, it essentially functions as another character. Clearly, Patchett had to create the blizzard for some of the plot pieces to work, but in a novel where there is such a stark contrast between character's inner monologues and outer actions, it helps to have them literally bracing against the frigid outside world. That said, the novel introduces potentially powerful questions surrounding the concept of family, i.e. what is family in the absence of an actual genetic relationship? Who are the people in our lives that we choose to love unconditionally? Patchett introduces these ideas in scenes between Sullivan and Kenya or between Tennessee and her sons. Unfortunately, Patchett spends so much time on inconsequential descriptions that any attempts to challenge these themes are completely diluted. There are moments when extensive and completely obscure detail seemed so useless that I was skimming pages at a time. This novel would have been well suited as a tightly distilled short story. And then there were the completely unnecessary, bordering on absurd plot points that made me wonder if her contract required that the novel be at least 300 pages. In her effort to portray each character, I felt it was wholly unnecessary to make sure they each had one quirky thing that they were obsessed with. In my life, I can't think of anything that any of the people I know have to do obsessively otherwise they will go crazy. Yes, everyone has activities that they are happiest doing, but the forced effort to give characters hobbies was bizarre. The fish, the speeches, the running! Why?! Finally, I have not been able to pin down why she chose the title. I get it, Kenya likes to run, but how does that pertain to the all-around familial theme? Any ideas are very welcome.

1Q84 zzzzzz

Normally, I wouldn't default my review of a book to another reviewer, but I really feel like I already spent too much time on Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. Here is the AV Club's review, with which I wholeheartedly agree: http://www.avclub.com/articles/haruki-murakami-1q84,64876/

Road trip across America, or stuck in a car with nothing but Narcissism?

When I finally realized how behind I am in my literary reports and reviews, I debated whether or not to go back and comment on each of the books that we've read or to just move forward with Killing Yourself to Live, which we just read. I decided to maybe tie all of the books together, because I would say, other than the Master and Margarita by:Mikhail Bugalov, all of the last several books have been entertaining but disappointingly shallow.

Without giving a summary of each book, including my own expectations and then utter letdown. In thinking about this pattern, definitely some of the books were much more disappointing than others. For example, Fingersmith had an active plot that kept me engaged and distracted from the fact that many of the characters were one-sided and lacked the necessary depth for me to really feel any connection to their problems and supposed intricacies. The same is true of The Island, although much more so, as Victoria Hislop's book is the written version of a Greek soap opera; selfish characters were seemingly selfish for no reason, other than the trait's necessity for the plot to advance.

Running with Scissors is almost certainly not shallow and packed-full of entertaining anecdotes from a terrible childhood. Augusten is surrounded by the most selfish characters possibly ever portrayed, in fact so selfish that they believe their selfishness is a selfless necessity for the betterment of society as a whole. While I'm sure based on real characters, Burroughs must be exaggerating them in order to make the book more entertaining. At some point the hyperbole of the characters becomes repugnant and Augusten, the character, becomes tainted by their behavior. I stopped rooting for him and became annoyed that he hadn't taken any action to rid his life of them. By the end I was glad the whole lot of them was out of my life as my reading time had become more stressful than entertaining. As to which character is the most hated, the jury is still out. (Sidenote: the movie in no way captures the characters that Burroughs created, save the mother.)

Along the same lines, Klosterman's account of his cross country road trip to visit sites where musicians became legendary through death, had such great potential but was ruined by Klosterman's focus on himself. It seems he used the book as an opportunity to sort through his own (pathetic) relationship problems. In this case, he is the obnoxious character. I was giddy with anticipation when I read the first chapter of the book, where Klosterman outlines the premise, but as I progressed, the author's disrespect for musicians and seeming nonchalance about the reasons that various events had such a profound impact was exhausting and enraging. Honestly, I think Klosterman has an amazing memory that he has saturated with musical trivia, which is nowhere near the same as feeling emotionally connected to music and the people that created it. This is coupled with long stories about women that I failed to see the relevance of. That said, there were a few moments of interesting analysis. I thought that what Klosterman wrote about Kurt Cobain's death was exactly what I was looking for after I read the first chapter. Sadly it was the last chapter and too little too late. Jane said she would have loved the book when she was 18 or so, and I wholeheartedly agree.

More like the Particular Incompleteness of Potential Plotlines

Thank you Jane for hosting a wonderful meeting and serving a delicious cake, filled with genuine care. It seems that Aimee Bender's novel left many of us with lots of feelings, which we really delved into (perhaps overdelved to a point of demonizing) and were able to explore.

First, I think that all of us agreed that there were moments of the book that we loved and that the conceptual basis of the book is fantastic. That excitement, unfortunately, was snuffed as the plotline veered into strange and, honestly, uninteresting territory. The idea that Bender's main character can taste the emotion with which a cook makes a meal is fantastic and opens the door to so many different plot possibilities. I, for one, was enthralled through the first part of the book, excited to see where such an unusual and phenomenal trait would land the character. The possibility that not just a child, but a woman, with real insight and emotional experience, would be given such a gift/curse is tremendous. Unfortunately for readers, this road is never explored. The character avoids food and becomes emotionally detached. Throughout the book, any moment that may, through deeper exploration, have proved to deepen any of the characters is abruptly shallowed. Her love interest, whom she kisses once, suddenly gets married, an event at which the narrator is completely detached. Any possible story lines when real depth, especially given the main character's insight, are simply never approached.

Further, the second half of the book focuses on the older brother, who also possesses a hidden talent: the ability to disappear into furniture. Unlike his sister's talent, this skill carries with it no possible emotional insight upon which to build a story. He simply vanishes and people look for him, the implications of which are dealt with in one or two pages at the end of the book: some people are able to utilize their talents, while others never use theirs or avoid them. Hmmm...right.

Thus, the only person that the main character's talent ever illuminates is her mother, whose desperation is turned to an affair that, again, is never explored. Perhaps the reason the book is ultimately so frustrating is that the questions existed, but were left unasked by the author, despite them looming large in the minds of readers.

Never a dull moment while Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan's tale of a journey through the Northwest and the mind (although it is never clear which one is which) is one that I would put in the poetry category before I would label it as fiction. Trout Fishing in America toys with every literary device born of the beatnik generation, but perhaps is most beautiful and telling in it use of various images. Jane marked this delightful passage:
"The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillian hook. I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill. But as I got closer to the creek I could see something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motions that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself."

This passage certainly shows Brautigan's knack for images, but maybe is not overly representative of the book as a whole. This passage is much more of a narrative than the bulk of the book. Other passages are strings of images, seemingly unrelated.

The beauty of such images is that the book gives you feelings, without telling you stories, which is truly challenging. Initially, I found myself trying to follow a succession of events and only after forgetting this method entirely, was I truly able to be taken by the book, although not always somewhere that I wanted to go.

In discussing the book, it was great to be reminded of moments that others had loved that I had forgotten or not noticed. Please share if there are any images or passages that stuck with you!

Back on Track, although Lolita doesn't make it easy...

In celebrating life's lovely joys, from new babies to new jobs to new loves and experiences, it is difficult to find moments for thought or just sitting and not doing anything. More and more, I struggle with balancing getting involved with the things and people I love to be around and being alone to think and regroup. Weeks when I do too much, by Sunday my head is spinning and I'm completely exhausted and desperate to be alone. Weeks when I plan alone time, I get ansy and want to go out and see friends. Will I ever figure out how to plan just right?

That said, finding a quiet moment to read and then cracking open Nabakov's Lolita, is a bit counterintuitive. Not to imply that Lolita is poorly written or even not a proseful pleasure to read. Quite the opposite. It does however raise questions about the primal state of man that are not easy to grapple with, nor does it offer any resolution. In Lolita, famously, an older man falls helplessly in love with a pre-adolescent girl and will stop at no criminal behavior to keep from losing her. The book is a reflection on an adventure the pair shared to avoid suspicion of her imprisonment and an opportunity for her escape. The truly brilliant element of the book is that Nabokov allows Humbert, the pedophile, to tell the story, removed from the judgment of a third-party narrator. In doing this, Nabakov is forced to create a mental arena in which a man recognizes his lust for pre-teens, realizes its illegality, but must have the girl at any cost. Obviously, in his mind he is not crazy, but completely focused and logical about his pursuit, thus any air of judgment is nonexistent. Here the exquisite writing is crucial as readers are forced to ride the innerworkings of Humbert's mind and hear vivid accounts of his sexual encounters with Lolita.

The other point I have to make about the book is how oversimplified Nababkov's concept has been through pop culture. When the term "Lolita" is dropped into conversation or texts, it is often to label a pedophile. I think that Nabakov works very hard to create a highly complex character whose psychosis is much more inticate than simply a sexual preference for young girls. Humbert seems to truly prefer the unbridled mannerisms of young girls versus women who have learned to speak and behave a certain way. While certainly, physical characteristics play a role, it is more his obsession with simple, unmitigated thinking and behavior that perpetuates his unraveling. I would not say that at any point, Humbert's meditations win the reader's favor, but I would say that he is much more thoughtful and complex that the oversimplified pederasts on modern TV shows.

While Lolita is a tragedy and often heartbreaking to read, the writing is crisp, clear, deliberate, and at moments a pleasure to read. Unfortunately, it is difficult in these moments of brilliance to forget the previous imagery that is difficult to hear described.