Friday, September 19, 2014

The Graphic Truth

If you are a New Yorker reader you're familiar with Roz Chast, the cartoonist whose squiggly-lined drawings manage to make the mundane, the maudlin, or even the misanthropic events of everyday life seem unexpectedly funny. My favorites often involve parents and children, and the ways in which they can drive each other crazy. So I expected that her graphic memoir “Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant” would offer similar enjoyment. And it does. But this book is so much more than that.

Chast's parents George and Elizabeth are an eccentric, mismatched pair, essentially friendless, who have lived in a decidedly untrendy section of Brooklyn for over sixty years. Her father is gentle and kind, but also fearful of everything and ineffectual. Her mother is angry and critical. No surprise that Roz exited as soon as she could. But old age begins to take its toll on both of them, and Roz reluctantly accepts that she has to step in. What follows is the familiar litany of memory loss, emergency room visits, hospital stays, confusion, guilt, financial worries, resistance, anger. As grim as this sound, it is also very, very funny.

If you or anyone you know has dealt with the struggle of aging parents, you will find this story unerringly accurate and brutally candid. Chast does not paint herself as a saint. In fact, her drawings of her angry and frustrated self – bulgy-eyed, teeth-bared, hair crackling - are searing (and hilarious). But her humor and honesty make this a powerful and compelling story.



Wednesday, September 3, 2014

A Girl and A Boy

Time for my beach read, and this year it is All The Light We Cannot See. It's a story about a girl and a boy. In August of 1944, in the waning days of World War II, the picturesque Breton town of Saint-Malo, occupied by the retreating German army, is being bombed by Allied forces. Alone on the top floor of a tall narrow house, a French sixteen-year-old blind girl named Marie-Laure LeBlanc fears for her life. Five blocks away eighteen-year-old German private Werner Pfennig, a radio specialist stationed in a grand old hotel, is assigned to intercept messages from Allied sympathizers and eliminate them. The two have never met.

Having set them so close together, author Anthony Doerr then jumps backward to 1934, to tell the parallel stories of their childhoods. Hers is the tale of a comfortable life in pre-war Paris near the Jardin des Plantes, with a loving father who teaches his daughter that her blindness is no handicap. His is the harsher existence of an orphan in a coal mining region outside Essen, but he is saved from a life in the mines or on the front lines by his extraordinary talent with radios. In brief chapters, Doerr cuts back and forth between Saint-Malo of 1944 and the paths each took from the start of the war to their current precarious state.

I know, I know. Blind girl, orphan boy, war, danger, love conquers all, sentimental and predictable. Not at all. This beautifully written book is many things – suspenseful, emotional, nuanced, heartbreaking, joyous – but it is resoundingly unsentimental. Yes there are a few coincidences, but none that disturb the flow of this haunting story. An added plus – short chapters! Beach, plane trip, waiting room, DMV line – this book is the perfect choice.