Mirror Image

I haven't abandoned my pledge to read paper-and-ink books. But I do love being read to while I'm walking. For short stories I highly recommend NPR's Selected Shorts and the New Yorker Fiction, both available on iTunes. When listening to a full length book, I've found, like Dorothea, that mysteries work the best. So, having enjoyed listening to her earlier book “In The Woods”, I loaded Tana French's The Likeness. The main character, who also appeared in the earlier book, is detective Cassie Maddox of the Dublin Police Department. Although she is no longer on the murder squad, she is drawn back into that world when detectives find a murdered girl who bears an uncanny resemblance to her.

And I'll say right now that suspending disbelief is not something I take lightly. I know we supposedly all have a double out there somewhere, but what are the odds that your splitting image lives in the same place you do? And do you really believe it would be possible to fool people who know your doppelganger? But I recommend that you accept this premise and dive in.

Cassie, pretending that the murdered girl has survived, assumes the identity of Lexie Madison, a grad student at Trinity University in Dublin who lives outside the city in a gone-to-seed Georgian mansion called Whitethorn House with four other grad students. Her task as a detective is to determine if one of her housemates is the killer. But, having spent her life as an outsider, she is drawn to the circle of friendship that Whitethorn seems to offer her. The group mantra is “No Pasts”, and they form a sort of substitute family that appeals to Cassie.

French creates a sense of foreboding in the early chapters that she sustains throughout, but the tension is broken by Cassie's combative, irreverent exchanges with her boss Frank. The story unfolds slowly (maybe a little too slowly) and the plot requires Cassie to make some foolish decisions, but French has made each of the housemates, as well as the other residents of the tiny village of Glenskehy, believable, three dimensional characters, and I was drawn in. One day I pulled weeds in my garden for an hour, just so I'd have an excuse to keep listening. Special kudos to audiobook reader Heather O’Neill, who does a wonderful job with the various Irish accents.

Take the Pledge

With the introduction of the iPad tablet, reading in the digital age has taken another step. The question is whether it is a step forward or back.

Along the same line is an article in the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" by Nicholas Carr. Carr describes the work of Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University. "...the media and other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains...We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works."

Try this experiment (but finish reading this blog first). Start reading Carr's article - it's 6 pages of small type when printed on paper - and see how far you get without being distracted or losing focus. It's especially dangerous to read it on-line with all of the hyperlinks. One link can lead to another..to another...to another and you may never find your way back to the starting point. Maybe that makes for a richer reading experience...or maybe not. I urge you to read this article and would be especially interested in your Comments.

So here is the pledge:

"I support the printed word in all its forms: newspapers, magazines and, of course, books. I think reading on computers or phones or whatever is fine, but it cannot replace the experience of reading words printed on paper. I pledge to continue reading the printed word in the digital era and beyond."

(Courtesy of readtheprintedword.org)

Grief-Stricken

Authors often use children at different ages to narrate a novel. It is sometimes easily apparent that the child narrator is not that reliable, for different reasons. In “Mathilda Savitch”, Victor Ladato, a well known poet and playwright, uses the voice of thirteen year old Mathilda Savitch as the narrator. Victor Ladato’s first novel is a gripping story about a family’s overwhelming grief surrounding the death of Mathilda’s older sister, Helene. Mathilda is a child who is totally lost. She adored her older sister but fought with her the last morning she saw her. Mathilda’s mother is in a fog of grief and guilt, drinking her way to oblivion. Mathilda’s father is trying to keep it all together. Mathilda thinks “if she is bad, really bad they will notice her”. When that doesn’t work Mathilda decides she will find out for herself how and why her sister died.

Here the author skillfully lets the reader know that Mathilda is an unreliable narrator. Everyone else seems to know how and why Helene died, but Mathilda is in denial. In the hands of Victor Ladato, Mathilda’s cluelessness can be laugh out loud funny. When Mathilda slips into a church she meets a nun who suggests that Mathilda could say the words of a prayer to comfort her. Mathilda thinks to herself, “She was a lunatic, I decided. You almost have to be in her profession.”

The story moves quickly as Mathilda follows Helene’s footsteps and emails to retrace her last day. The writing is very good. Using Mathilda’s skewed view of the world, after Helene’s death, and beautiful imagery, Ladato brings the reader to a point of total empathy with Mathilda. There are subplots involving friends, school, boys and terrorists but they all add up to an adolescent girl’s sad life, one that she is trying desperately to make sane.

I enjoyed Mathilda Savitch, the novel and the voice. I think it is definitely a feat when a man can make a young girl’s life, her angst, and her heartbreak so real to a reader.

Fact and Fiction

Do novelists sometimes set the bar high for themselves, just to prove that they can rise to the challenge? I think Barbara Kingsolver may have done that with her latest novel The Lacuna. In addition to the normal difficulties involved in crafting a successful novel, she adds two more hurdles.

The first is that she sets her main character, Harrison William Shepherd, alongside historical figures, and larger than life ones at that. Shepherd, son of an American bureaucrat father and a tempestuous Mexican mother, winds up as a cook in the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and eventually serves as a secretary to their house guest, exiled revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Kingsolver does an excellent job of seamlessly weaving her fictional character into this real life story. The vivid personalities of the two artists seem authentic, and the description of their volatile relationship is both humorous and poignant.

The second hurdle is the form of the narrative, a long series of Shepherd's journals. Because he always feels himself to be an outsider, both because of his mixed heritage and his closeted homosexuality. Shepherd makes an excellent 'fly on the wall' observer of the complicated lives of the colorful Mexican household. But later in the book, when he returns to the United States and becomes a successful novelist, the passivity that made him a great diarist makes him not quite so interesting when he becomes the central actor in his journal. Luckily he gets an assist from his plucky secretary Violet Brown, who provides editorial notes, and by the inclusion of correspondence, newspaper clippings and even the transcript of a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, which detail how Shepherd's Mexican past and the populist slant in his novels, even though they are set in the time of the Aztecs, make him an easy target in the Red Scare era.

There were times late in the book where I was a little too aware that Kingsolver was preaching, stacking every card in the deck against Shepherd in order to make her political point. But nonetheless I ended up with great admiration for this book, a rich, complicated, vivid story told with amazing skill.