On the Lighter Side

Sometimes I need a change of pace. After reading a series of a serious novels I was ready for a few laughs. So I turned to Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck. Ephron's book is a series of essays about cooking, New York apartments, ex-husbands, reading, writing, purses - and most especially Growing Older. I'd like to pretend I've never had a discussion with my friends about turkey necks or the horror of wattles (and the advantage of wearing turtlenecks), but I'd be lying. Ephron has these same discussions and hers are a lot funnier. For example - “You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck”. And then there's her observation that your neck never looks worse than when you view yourself from the backseat of a car in the rear view mirror. I thought I was the only one who had noticed this. And let me just expand on it for a moment. It's not just my neck that looks bad in that mirror. I have more than once been tempted to ask the driver to just drop me off at the Old Folks Home or the emergency room. Surely the rest of the people in the car don't want to be seen in public with me anyway. I mean, will I look any worse in my casket than I do in that mirror?

Where was I? Oh yes – Nora Ephron. The essay “On Maintenance” discusses this topic for women over forty. A simple Ephron definition: “Maintenance is what you have to do just so you can walk out the door knowing that if you go to the market and bump into a guy who once rejected you, you won't have to hide behind a stack of canned food”. It covers everything from hair (wanted and unwanted), nails and skin to exercise. Although I'm amazed to learn that a woman of her talents has not yet figured out how to blow dry her own hair, I completely agree with her theory that the increased use of hair dye has meant that more and more women look good in black. It can't really be true that “most everyone wears black – except for anchorwomen, United States senators , and the residents of Texas”, but it sounds right when Ephron says it. And her brief essay “Blind as a Bat” mourns the loss of such simple pleasures as reading a map or a pill bottle without finding your glasses. I think she could have added that the small print on price tags may in fact be a conspiracy to make older women spend more than they meant to. Are you really going to walk through Bloomingdale's with your reading glasses on a chain around your neck?

Other essays tackle more serious subjects, such as the death of a dear friend and a witty but scathing riff on her disappointment with Bill Clinton (“Me and Bill:The End of Love”). I have enjoyed Nora Ephron's writing for many years – her screenplays (“When Harry Met Sally”) as well as her essays, and I'm happy to report that her wry, witty, courageous observations still make me laugh.

Fact and Fiction

Ron Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy) teaches at Santa Clara University which is a Jesuit Catholic university in Silicon Valley, California so it is not so surprising that the main character in his latest novel Exiles is a Jesuit priest. What is surprising is that the priest is a real Jesuit, the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hansen describes this work as “fiction based on fact.”

Facts: Gerard Manley Hopkins was a seminarian living in Wales in December 1875 when the steamship “Deutschland” ran aground off the coast of England. More than sixty passengers died including five Catholic nuns who were on their way from Germany to Missouri in the US. Hopkins memorialized the incident in his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland”.

Fiction: Very little is known about the five nuns but Hansen has created individual biographies for each of them and described in detail their last moments on the ship.

At times the book reads like non-fiction in the biographical details of Hopkins’ life. Hansen switches back and forth between the events of Hopkins’ life and the events on the ship. He also weaves in certain relevant passages from the poem. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to understand the poem without the historical background.

There are a lot of details about Catholicism and religious life that will be better understood by readers over the age of 50 who were raised as Catholics. Being in that category myself, I cannot judge how important that is to an appreciation of the novel overall.

While Hopkins and the nuns may have felt themselves as exiles in spiritual terms, there are other very real levels which earn them this description. And here we are returned to Fact. One of the reasons that the nuns were on their way to the US was that during this period in Germany under Bismarck Catholic religious orders were prohibited from practicing their religion. As a convert to Catholicism, Hopkins was rejected by his family and unable to teach at Oxford despite being a recognized scholar. Hopkins was not published or appreciated as a poet during his lifetime – and he died young at the age of 44. I had no knowledge of how important and influential he was in the development of modern poetry. The full text of his “Deutschland” poem is reprinted at the end of the novel – and truthfully it is a challenge for me to understand it even with the historical context.

While this novel succeeds wonderfully in joining fact and fiction, in the absence of lengthy footnotes or annotations, I found myself frustrated in not being able to distinguish which was which. You can hear an interview with Ron Hansen on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91356850

Marital Love

Finding a good book to read sometimes feels like a treasure hunt. When I read “The Great Man” by Kate Christensen I discovered that she had won the PEN/Faulkner award for the novel. I then saw the short list for the award this year. On that list was “The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard. When I began reading “The Maytrees” I learned that Annie Dillard was a well known writer who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”. And so it goes. One good book leads to another and we discover authors we didn’t know about and reading literature takes on a life of its own.

“The Maytrees” is on the surface a love story that begins after World War II. It takes place in Provincetown, a famous artistic community on the tip of Cape Cod. Toby Maytree courted Lou Bigelow on the dunes and she met his friends, the quirky cast of characters with odd names, Deary Hightoe, Cornelius Blue, Reevadare Weaver and Hiram and Elaine Cairo from New York. Toby and Lou marry and eventually have a son, Petie. The story is a meditation on love and relationships.

Annie Dillard is a writer who understands nature. “The Maytrees” is full of rich descriptions of the natural landscapes on Cape Cod. But Annie Dillard is also a published poet and the story is filled with imagery. She describes the sea, “muddy sea ice” and the dunes in the fog…………… “From a white lake of fog opaque as paint, the tips of dunes and only the tips of dunes, arose everywhere like sand peaks that began halfway up the sky………”. She also uses words that are uncommon at best, such as, “alewife, tatterdemalion, zebus or epistomeliac“. And, sometimes it is difficult to understand exactly what Ms. Dillard is saying. But the language, the characters and the story win out.

After a blissful, serene fourteen year marriage, Toby has a mid-life crisis and their lives are completely altered. Ms. Dillard writes a story about marital love, how it begins, endures and sometimes slips away. Then circumstances can change again and people need each other and most of all they need the people who loved them. Annie Dillard tells us and the Maytrees show us that compassion and forgiveness are also part of marital love, “Lasting love is an act of will.”

“The Maytrees” is a short novel, only 216 pages, but it will surprise its readers with beautiful descriptions of nature, wonderful imagery, poetic prose and a captivating love story.

True Love

I'm not usually a fan of historical novels, so I wasn't certain I would be interested in Nancy Horan's Loving Frank, the story of a love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah (pronounced MAY-muh) Borthwick Cheney. Even the title was off-putting – it sounded like a gushy account from an enamored groupie. I couldn't have been more wrong.

Mamah and Edwin Cheney were a young married couple in Oak Park Illinois in 1903 when they commissioned Wright to build them a bungalow in his already famous Prairie Style. Although Wright was already married, a love affair began, and in 1909 Mamah and Frank both abandoned their families –including his six children and her two – and 'eloped' to Berlin on what the couple called a “spiritual hegira”. The public outrage that began immediately would follow them for years to come. The sensationalist journalism of the era, even in mainstream newspapers, feasted on the scandal, and Mrs. Cheney was frequently painted as the villain. Wright's wife called her a “vampire”, and the press described her as “of a highly temperamental disposition, capricious and sentimental to a degree”. Wright's career suffered as clients dropped him to avoid association with the scandal. After their return from Europe the couple eventually settled in the now famous Taliesin which Wright built in the hills of Spring Green Wisconsin, hoping to escape the public eye.

Nancy Horan, in her debut novel, attempts to rescue Mamah Borthwick Cheney from history's forgotten footnotes. She shows us a woman who struggles to find her own identity. In a time before women's suffrage, Mamah encounters Swedish feminist Ellen Key during her stay in Europe. She is profoundly influenced by Key's philosophy of female independence and free love, and even learns Swedish in order to translate Key's work for American publication. But Horan does not present Cheney as a haloed feminist heroine. Mamah is conflicted and guilt-ridden, always trying to find balance in her roles of mother, lover, writer, often disappointed with herself. And she is not simply an adoring acolyte to Wright. Much as she admires his genius, she clearly sees his shortcomings. But her love and understanding of his creative vision nourish him. Horan presents a complex, evolving woman, and I enjoyed her fictionalization of this fascinating and ultimately tragic love story.