Reverberations

On a summer afternoon in suburban Melbourne, a group of friends and family gather with their assorted children for a barbecue. The host Hector is of Greek descent, his wife Aisha is Indian, and their guests are a mix that probably represents Australia in the 21^st century – white, aborigine, Muslim, Jewish, gay, straight, wealthy and working class, young and old. Three-year-old Hugo has been behaving obnoxiously all afternoon, but his parents keep making excuses for him rather than correcting him. Finally, wielding a cricket bat, he vaguely threatens nine-year-old Rocco, whereupon Rocco's father Harry, Hector's cousin, slaps him.

That's the starting point for The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, and the reverberations from that slap ripple through the entire story. Tsiolkas divides his book into eight sections, each one exploring the inner life of one of the characters from the party. Some of the storylines directly follow the effect of the slap – Hugo's parents press charges, family and friends are forced to take sides in the dispute, friendships are threatened. Others explore more personal stories – marriage and infidelity, mid-life crisis, the bonds of friendship, adolescent coming-of-age and dealing with the loss of aging friends. Through them Tsiolkas examines racism, homophobia and class prejudice without ever preaching or sentimentalizing.

Every time I thought he was headed for a stereotype he swerved from it to give a realistic but sympathetic view of a character. I found some stories more compelling than others (maybe I've just read too many coming of age tales?), but Tsiolkas does an admirable job of keeping all eight threads woven together. Starting with a single shocking act he paints a nuanced picture of a network of complex relationships.

Spies...and More Spies

With the recent release of the new movie version of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I thought that I would read the book instead. (I am no longer going to say "re-read" even if I remember that I read it previously because my memory of the details of the book will be virtually non-existent). I was immediately struck by the epigram attributed to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes:

TINKER,
TAILOR,
SOLDIER,
SAILOR,

RICH MAN,
POOR MAN,
BEGGARMAN,
THIEF

The version that I learned growing up started with:

DOCTOR,
LAWYER,
INDIAN,
CHIEF

Oh, well. Another one of life's mysteries. Maybe there's a dissertation here on changes in cultural norms.

Having now finished the book and while gathering my thoughts for this blog, I happened to open the latest issue of The Hoover Digest and there it was: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...Priest?", Donal O'Sullivan's article about "two treacherous clerics and the Communist infiltration of the Vatican." Yikes!!! The KGB had 2 agents, Pine and Sun, posing as theology and law students in Rome from 1956-1963. Their "mission" was "...to identify anti-Soviet elements, collect compromising information on Lithuanian priests living in Western Europe, and close down secret communication channels between the Vatican and its bishops behind the Iron Curtain." It doesn't get any stranger than this in Le Carre's fiction. You can read the full article here.

TTSS is 99.9% plot: minimal introspection, minimal description, no sex, no violence (what there is of both takes place out of sight). Much of the plot is told through flashbacks (which makes it a great book for a Kindle so that you can look up the previous references to a particular character or code name.) For this aging brain, the intricacies of the plot were best handled in a compressed time frame. That was just the right prescription for a weekend getaway without leaving home.

Changing The Past

Do I really want to read a Stephen King novel? Especially when it's 849 pages long? I'm not a fan of the fantasy/horror genre, so in all honesty I had never read a King book. But years ago (Wikipedia reveals that it was in 1990) he wrote a wonderful essay in The New Yorker called “Heads Down” about his son's Little League baseball team. I thought it was one of the best pieces of baseball writing I'd read in a long time (and I do love baseball) and I vowed to try to read something else by him.

Twenty-two years intervened before I revisited that vow. And it took a book title that resonates strongly for anyone of a certain age to make me tackle his latest novel. The premise is a monumental 'what if'. What if you could go back in time and undo the assassination of JFK on 11/22/63?

That's the challenge that faces high school teacher Jake Epping when a dying diner owner in Lisbon Falls, Maine shows him a rabbit hole/portal in his storeroom that leads to the Lisbon Falls of September 9, 1958. The rules are simple, and laid out early in the story, so this is not a spoiler. First, no matter how much time you spend in the past, when you travel back to the diner of 2011 only two minutes will have elapsed. Second, if you travel back in time again, everything you did on your previous visit will be erased. In addition, Jake has to consider the butterfly effect – what are the ripple effects of any change he makes to history?

Fortunately for me, King spends not much time on the fantasy/supernatural portion of this dilemma, and far more time on its more human aspects. There are some sluggish passages while King navigates Jake from 1958 to 1963, as he simultaneously tracks Lee Harvey Oswald's movements and falls in love, but there's plenty of suspense as well. King creates a poignant love story, a valentine to the simpler 1950's of big cars, rock and roll music, and rotary phones, and a thoughtful examination of the power of friendship and the persistence of evil.

Life on the Stage

I don't read a lot of non-fiction, but I am sometimes attracted to biographies about people I find intriguing. That was the case with Julie Salamon's Wendy and the Lost Boys:The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein. I admire Wasserstein's plays, especially her Pulitzer and Tony winning “The Heidi Chronicles”, but what really piqued my interest was an essay she wrote for The New Yorker describing how, at the age of forty-eight, she underwent in vitro fertilization and gave birth (three months prematurely) to her daughter Lucy Jane. It was written in such an honest and open way that I felt as if I knew her. And I was shocked when just seven years later she died of lymphoma.

Salaman traces Wasserstein's life from her comfortable childhood in Brooklyn and Manhattan, through her years at Mount Holyoke and Yale Drama School, to her successes and failures in the theater and in her personal life. She was a larger than life character, a mainstay of the New York theater community, a woman with a huge network of devoted friends. And yet it is clear from Salamon's account that although many friends thought they knew her well, each knew only a piece of Wendy.

The characters in her plays were often conflicted and insecure, trying to please their families, find their soul mates, achieve their ambitions – all with a bracing sense of humor. Clearly they reflected Wasserstein's own psyche. Salamon's biography captures the many facets of this complex women.