Classics: Whose novel The Castle tells of K., a land surveyor who is summoned to a village and then not allowed to meet with anyone?

Non-Fiction: What nation of contradictions is the setting for Marjane Satrapi’s comic book memoir Persepolis?

Book Club: What novel by Jane Hamilton charts the tragic consequences of a single mistake by Prairie Center newcomer Alice Goodwin?

Authors: What author of the memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders began life as James Boylan?

Book Bag: Who penned Nightwing, about a Hopi reservation besieged by vampire bats, before finding success writing international mysteries?

I sat down with it one afternoon, thinking it would be an easy read, and it was, but it was more interesting and less compelling than I expected. It’s interesting because it doesn’t take the concept of invisibility and make it altogether metaphorical, and it’s less compelling than it could have been because of the suspension of disbelief necessary to get through the plot. I am capable of suspending disbelief to what strikes some of my friends as an astonishing degree, and yet reading this book made me go through some of my day testing out whether people were actually looking at me. (What I found was as mundane and homey as Ray’s books used to be—my son and husband didn’t notice what color I was wearing or when I had spinach in my teeth, but they did notice when I made a face, or that I had changed out of work clothes when I got home. To the people I met on my daily errands, I could have been just clothes walking around, but a couple that I usually stop and talk to would have noticed if there were no face attached.)

What happens to the protagonist of Ray’s novel, Clover, is that one day she gets out of the shower and when she looks in the mirror all she sees is her toothbrush “floating by itself several inches out from the cuff of my robe.” She runs into her sleeping son’s room, a son who has just graduated from Oberlin (where Walker is going next fall) and says “I need you to tell me if you can see me.” His response is “You don’t like your bathrobe anymore? You want to know if it’s becoming? I don’t know what you’re asking.”

It gets even funnier when she tells a friend, and the friend says “Are you kidding me? Except for a very few breakout moments, I’ve been invisible since the new millennium. The boys can be looking at naked women on Facebook and they don’t so much as twitch when I walk into the room. I can ask Steve what time he wants to eat dinner and he keeps on texting like I wasn’t even there. A woman wheels her cart right in front of mine and cuts into the checkout lane, a car cuts me off in traffic, I wave at the waiter and he’s looking at the wall behind my head. It’s just the plight of women after a certain age. No one can see you.” When Clover says that she’s talking about literal invisibility, the friend continues to talk about feeling invisible.

Finally Clover finds a support group for invisible women, who go naked but carry Kleenex so they can see each other. At that point the humor of the situation actually starts to diminish, because they figure out that a mix of three drugs–a hormone replacement, anti-depressant, and calcium supplement—is what’s causing the invisibility. What humor there is starts to get sad, about things that might not have changed for all women since the author’s generation: “They can see that the toilet paper roll needs changing and the wastebasket is full and that there is no more orange juice and we drink orange juice and orange juice is sold in grocery stores. They’ve trained themselves not to notice things because the less they notice the more we’ll just take care of it for them. They say, you should have told me you wanted my help when we had twelve people coming over for dinner! You should have told me not to sit in front of the computer looking at football scores while you’re running around doing everything by yourself. If you needed my help why didn’t you ask for it? I didn’t know you needed help.”

With the protagonist’s invisibility real and the lessons to be learned from it symbolic, like that it’s disingenuous to pretend that a person keeping a household going should have to ask for “help” or “how shameless people were in all they did not see,” the moral of the story gets bigger and more ridiculous, until the mother of a recent college graduate, a woman purportedly in her early fifties, is having a fit over her adult son getting a tattoo (a reaction I’d expect more from his grandmother than his mother), and the invisible women are out foiling bank robberies and school bullies. It’s fun, but keeps turning into a rollicking granny kind of fun.

The moral of the story seems to be that the drug companies should not be selling the drugs that make women invisible, and the women shouldn’t be taking them so unconcernedly. What the novel can’t seem to figure out is how essential these women are. Does the fate of the household actually rest on her shoulders–which makes the drugs an essential part of enduring an essential task–or are her efforts inconsequential, and so she’s simply a comic granny taking pills to make herself feel a little better in a world that’s passed her by? The mix of symbolism and realism makes it hard to see.

Classics: What play, Chekhov’s last, is set at the debt-ridden estate of Madame Ranevsky?

Non-Fiction: What newspaper, the subject of Gay Talese’s expose The Kingdom and the Power, inadvertently helped boost sales with a savage review?

Book Club: What novel by Michael Chabon lets Josef Kavalier and Sammy Klayman escape from the horrors of war by creating a comic book?

Authors: What British public school hired John le Carre as a teacher before he went on to write spy novels?

Book Bag: What light-hearted Douglas Coupland book follows a gaggle of Microsoft workers who escape to form their own company?

What is the most fun is seeing Walker and his friends crossing the stage, being celebrated repeatedly as the best and brightest. I never get tired of that.

Once I told Walker that the deadly sin I am most prone to is pride. Is there anything bigger and more obvious than a mother’s pride for her youngest child? All these ceremonies are the last ones, and the splendor of his accomplishments has whisked us through them with a sense of culminating triumph. I hardly even have the decency to act modest, which reminds me of the opening line of “On Distinction” by A.F. Moritz:

We won’t pretend we’re not hungry for distinction
but what can ever distinguish us enough?
This country, this language won’t last long, the race
will die, later the cockroach, earth itself,

and last this beer bottle: silicon fused by man,
almost indestructible, like a soul:
it will go spinning ever farther from the nearest thing
until space, continually deepening, drowns in itself.

Yet we keep a hungry eye on old schoolmates
and everyone born in the year of our own birth,
and spend the nights in ranting over them,
their money, fashionable companions, pliant critics.

To live just a little longer than they do:
that would be triumph. Hence exercise and diets,
and the squabble over who will write the history
of this paradise of demons casting each other out.

After all these years of noticing whose kid appeared in a photo in the local newspaper, next year I won’t be at the awards ceremonies, to write about the accomplishments of the kids Walker started school with. They will blaze for a moment, while he will be finding his way in a bigger world, where the other parents will not remember the song he sang at the fifth grade talent show or who wore the plastic breastplate at his sixth birthday party.

Dieting is something I know about. My first experience of it was at six months old, when a pediatrician told my mother I was too fat and that she must start me on low-fat milk. When I was a child, my eating was continually commented on and restricted. At the age of 12, I started skipping lunch. Here are the ages at which I succeeded in losing a significant amount of weight, 50 pounds or more: 15, 19, 29, 37, 50.

During the past year, I gained back 70 of the most recent 80 pounds I had lost. I see people look at me and assume that I’m weak-willed and probably not very smart, when I am actually one of the most strong-willed people you will ever meet, and I’ve read and thought about most of the books about eating and dieting that have been published in my lifetime. Many of them were from the library, but here’s a sample of the ones I found when I looked around my house: 
Fat Is a Feminist Issue I and II, Susie Orbach. On Eating, Susie Orbach. The Beck Diet Solution, Judith Beck. Weight Watchers’ Complete Food Companion. The Philosopher’s Diet, Richard Watson. The Joy Diet, Martha Beck. The Four Day Win, Martha Beck. The Stress-Eating Cure, Rachael and Richard Heller. The Secret Is Out, Lisa Davis and Bradley MacDonald. 100 Days of Weight Loss, Linda Spangle. The New Me Diet, Jade and Keoni Teta. Also many books about eating, like Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Critser’s Fat Land, and Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food.

Only rarely am I not thinking about how to control my eating, which evidently puts me in the majority according to the New York Times (I found the article from this humorous overview at Cracked.com). Most adults move up and down what I call the spectrum of food thoughts over their lifetimes, from “trying not to eat” to “eating when hungry.” The middle part takes the most thought, as my chart shows:  

Because staying in the middle takes so much thought, there are people who slide off on either side, giving up by either trying to eliminate the need for eating entirely or eating everything without regard for the future.

Big Brother is the first novel I’ve ever read that goes clear from one end to the other of the spectrum of food thoughts. The protagonist, a woman named Pandora, starts out by realizing “I’d come to squander an appalling proportion of my mental time on empty vows to cut down to one meal a day, or on fruitless self-castigation over a second stuffed pepper at lunch. Surely on some unconscious, high-frequency level, other people could hear the squeal of this humiliating hamster wheel in my head, a piercing shrill that emitted from every other woman I passed in the aisles of Hy-Vee.”

This is an issue that Lionel Shriver has evidently spent a good bit of her time pondering.  In the linked article, she sounds very much like her character Pandora, who worries on the morning after her brother Edison’s arrival because “no one…had addressed my brother’s dimensions head-on. I myself had not once alluded to Edison’s weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so—he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit.”

Shriver does get some things right about the desire to get fat, but always insists that the longing for a grand gesture must be mixed with an impulse towards suicide: “his appetite for Cinnabons and suicide alike, his insistence on building his life along such drastic lines that thinking big had manifested itself in his proportions.” In order to make Pandora seem more sympathetic she gives her an even more ascetic husband who “did experience Edison’s overeating as a form of assault.” Whenever I started to pull away from the story, Pandora would say something so full of insight that I would be pulled right back in:
“Confronting a photograph of oneself is always a fraught business, for one’s own image doesn’t merely evoke the trivial fretting of ‘I had no idea my nose was so big.’ This sounds idiotic, but every time I see a picture of myself I am shocked to have been seen. I do not, under ordinary circumstances, feel seen. When I walk down the street, my experience is of looking. Manifest to myself in the ethereal privacy of my head, I grow alarmed when presented evidence of my public body. This is quite a different matter from whatever dissatisfaction I may harbor over the heft of my ass. It is more a matter of having an ass, any ass, that other people can ogle, criticize, or grasp, and being staggered that to others this formation, whatever its shape, has something to do with me.”
I would suggest that people who get very fat are even more prone to this kind of thinking than thinner people are; there’s a sense that you must get very big to be regarded at all. As Edison himself observes, later, about being fat, “when you walk down the street, it’s all people see. You big as a house, but in any meaningful way you’re invisible.”

Pandora believes that a person who thinks too much about food has to find a way to stop, like an alcoholic reaches a point where he has to go to AA. When Pandora gets Edison to admit that nothing besides eating gives him pleasure, she “wondered if that wasn’t the answer to the mystery, countrywide. It wasn’t that eating was so great—it wasn’t—but that nothing was great. Eating being merely okay still put it head and shoulders above everything else that was decidedly less than okay. In which case I was surrounded by millions of people incapable of deriving pleasure from anything whatsoever besides a jelly doughnut.”
This strikes me as a privileged point of view–lots of things give me pleasure, but few of them are available for less than $2, the price of a jelly doughnut at the local Tim Horton’s.

Because of her privileged position, Pandora can afford to put herself and Edison on a liquid-only diet for months, and even rent an apartment where they won’t be confronted with the need to prepare or socialize over food. When she has lost all the extra weight she can afford to lose, though, Pandora panics when she has to learn how to eat again, and says
“I wasn’t alone in this hysteria. You could see the same frenzy all over the Internet: diatribes about sugar, clever tips about using tiny plates or drinking lots of water, profiles on celebrities who claim to have ‘eighty meals a day,’ the charts listing the glycemic index of parsnips and potatoes. You could see it in the accelerating demand for extra-wide caskets, roller coasters reinforced with I-beams, and elevators redesigned to carry twice the load. You could see it in burgeoning retail sales for ‘bountiful’ apparel, in the return of the corset. You could see it in the market for airline seat-belt extenders….”
Have any of you ever seen anyone ask for a seat-belt extender? I’ve seen (and been among) a number of people who quietly pretend to fasten it, rather than single themselves out any further.

There’s a surprising reversal at the end of the novel, a might-have-been scenario that the author says is written out of pain and guilt over what she failed to do for her own brother. I think she should feel less guilt; losing weight isn’t just about “becoming more attractive or less prone to diabetes” but about finding ways to control yourself, and other adults can’t help you with that. The fictional brother “proved it possible to reverse the most nefarious of misfortunes: those that you’ve authored yourself.” Shriver’s real brother evidently did not reverse them, and I don’t think there’s much she or anyone could have done to help that process along.

I’m not suggesting that she couldn’t have tried, or that the discouraging studies mean that no one should work on ways to take off weight that makes them physically unable to do things they want to do. Anyone who is fighting to keep their weight from going out of control always has to spend a lot of time somewhere on the spectrum of food thoughts, weighing, planning, and selecting, People who have been fat can’t quit eating entirely for the rest of their lives, nor can those people ever eat when hungry again, because they’re almost always hungry. The hardest thing to do is not to go overboard, to enjoy a measured amount of food day in and day out without having to demonize it.

Shriver’s novel shows extreme behavior on either end of the spectrum, the places where people stray so far from being able to enjoy human interaction over food that they isolate themselves. It’s a warning sign for an individual to want to eat alone. The novel is trying to show that it’s a warning sign for a society, too. How many of us eat alone, before or after occasions for eating with other people? Our stacks of diet books tell us to “eat just a little before” so we can keep control when faced with party food, but how many of us keep better control over our desire for food when other people are watching?

Classics: What new name did Larry McMurtry’s first novel Horseman, Pass By get in 1963, to cash in on a popular Paul Newman movie adaptation?

Non-Fiction: What unique items were featured in Fred Albert’s 1999 photo book, Barkitecture?

Book Club: What Chuck Palahniuk book gets rolling when an angry young man demands of his roommate: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can”?

Authors: What British writer is famed for her strong female characters Martha Quest and Anna Wulf?

Book Bag: What novelist claims her fictional sex-crime prosecutor Alex Cooper is much like herself, only “younger, thinner and blonder”?

After that, I turned a page and there, in print, was my favorite essay which I’d only ever heard before on an audio collection, “Laugh, Kookaburra.” It is so beautifully written. I’m glad to have it in print, especially because now I can refer more easily to the metaphor about the four-burner stove: “’One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.’ The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful, you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two.” I like to ask people which burner they’ve turned off.

As usual, he makes me feel a little of what’s it’s like to be a person like him:
“I was in London during the inauguration and watched the ceremony on the BBC, which reminded me every three seconds that Barack Obama was black and would become American’s first black president. At first I thought this was for blind people, a little reminder in case they forgot. Then it became laughable: Barack Obama, who is black, is arriving now with his black wife and two black children, a group that will form American’s first black First Family, which is to say, the first group of blacks elected to the White House, which is white and not black like them.
It got on my nerves, but then I thought, If America elected its first gay president, I might want to hear it a few thousand times. It might take a few thousand mentions just to sink in.”

A favorite new to me in this collection is “Understanding Understanding Owls,” the title of which comes from a bit that David and Hugh evidently like to do, referencing a book they’ve owned for fifteen years:
“You know,” I’ll say. “There’s something about nocturnal birds of prey that I just don’t get. If only there was somewhere I could turn for answers.”
“I wish I could help you,” Hugh will say, adding, a second or two later, “Hold on a minute…what about…Understanding Owls?”
There follows a story about what a taxidermist showed David when he was shopping for a present for Hugh, and then the most beautiful conclusion, one that makes me think about Ron and about my friends who often notice the same kinds of things I do (yes, Ben, I mean you):
“Hugh and I don’t notice the same things either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superficiality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil—point this out, and he’ll say, “David? My David? Oh no. He’s not like that at all.”
It’s the loveliest little love story.

I thought of a bit from this collection last night at an awards ceremony, whispering to nearby parents who got the “best dress” award and having one of them look at me sideways like “is that a real award?” to which I responded that I give it every year, whether the kids are aware of it or not. Hugh and David evidently talk like this too: “as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we’re kings or warlocks.”

And, for his final trick, David Sedaris nailed what I’ve been trying to explain to everyone from my remaining Facebook friends to my friend Doug, the checkout clerk at Kroger, about how if I get too busy writing down everything I’m doing or shopping for, I won’t have time to actually get out there and do it or buy it, much less bring it in the house and cook it up for supper. I’ve always compared this to Tristram Shandy, unable to get up to the moment of his birth when trying to write his memoirs, or Walker Percy, who says (in The Message in the Bottle) that you can’t actually look at the Grand Canyon if you’re photographing it to look at later. David explains it in terms of keeping a diary: “It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not ‘Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece’ but ‘Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!’”

So which burner do you turn off? And how often do you shop for groceries? If you live in my town, or the next one over, you’ll see me in there often, wandering around with a nine-item list and a full cart.

We didn’t need another cat. We had two, Samson and Delilah, who we’d gotten at the shelter as 8-week-old kittens after deciding that our young children were bothering our old cat, Rossi, too much. We did need a black and white cat, though, because that color combination had been 4-year-old Eleanor’s wish before she fell in love with the gray-striped cat she named Delilah.

Chester’s shelter name was “Wiley” and even though it suited him, Walker, who was almost 2, said he needed a “yellow name,” the name of the yellow cat from the Bunnicula books. Chester especially loved Walker, mostly because he liked to be petted when he settled on a lap. Chester demanded attention. He would seize a pencil from your hand and bite it, and he liked to curl up with Ron, who would scratch his neck, up the sides of his face, and behind his ears. He would bump Eleanor’s hand when she was drawing and paw her pen. Every night he would follow me into the bedroom and wait on the bed until I would lie down with my book, and then he would put his front paws on my chest and demand petting while I read for the 10-15 minutes I usually read before going to sleep. When I closed the book and turned off the light, he would usually hop off the bed and go find something else to do.

Because he spent his first six months at the shelter, Chester had a respiratory infection that became chronic. After his first year, even our veterinarian could no longer get a pill in his mouth. Once when he got an infected bite, he had to go to the vet every day for a week to get an antibiotic shot. After that, though, he learned to let me squirt liquid antibiotic down his throat. He was smart.

He liked to sit out on our deck with the sun on his fourteen pounds of muscle and black fur, and then he would leap to life to catch bugs. He was good at it, too, with lightning-fast claws that would scoop them out of the air. He liked to play so much that when he was already ten years old and we brought home a new kitten, the two of them would chase each other around and take turns baiting both real and stuffed mice.

He was like the cat in this poem, “The Cat’s Song” by Marge Piercy.

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

Up until his very last day, Chester sang to us in the mornings, speaking greed with his paws and fear with his white whiskers. Love spoke him entire. We miss him.

I’ve actually met Ruth; when she was on campus at Otterbein in the fall of 2002, I signed up to bring my classes studying “Literature and Society” to meet the author of the common book; we had asked all the first-year students to read My Year of Meats the summer before they came to college. My two classes of 18 were combined with the class of another instructor, so there must have been about 50 people in the room. The author talked a little about writing the novel and answered questions. I thought she was dismissive of me and my questions because of the way I make jokes when I’m nervous, or maybe in the way that more slender people often were in the years right before my knee replacement, but it could just as well have been that she was an introvert confronted with meeting about a thousand people in two days.

So when she makes herself a character in this new novel–Ruth, who lives with Oliver and a cat on an island called Desolation Sound off the coast of British Columbia–I didn’t identify with the character, despite the fact that “they liked books, all books, but especially old ones, and their house was overflowing with them.” The part I like is the book she is reading, a diary written in purple ink by a schoolgirl in Japan on blank pages that have been inserted into an old cover of Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu. The girl, whose name is Nau (yes, there’s a pun on now) says she intends to write the story of her grandmother, a Buddhist nun, and means for the book to be “like a message in a bottle, cast out onto the ocean of time and space. Totally personal, and real, too, right out of old Jiko’s and Marcel’s prewired world. It’s the opposite of a blog. It’s an antiblog, because it’s meant for only one special person, and that person is you.” Turns out Ruth is the person, though, not the reader.

The attempts to do something interesting with fiction in this novel fall short, for me. In the first place it’s because Ruth is the reader (which is kind of like how the picture book The Polar Express fails for me at the end, when the sister is named and becomes just one person, rather than a character who could be anyone’s sister). In the second place it’s because this is another novel that attempts to use a scientific concept as a metaphor and ends up simplifying it down to the point where it becomes essentially meaningless. A Tale for the Time Being attempts to use quantum physics as a metaphor. There was a lot of this in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, and when Jenny asked me for an example, I couldn’t think of any because I didn’t like the novels, although I remembered that most of them used the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This weekend I was talking to my physicist friend, the one who made me the Necromancy Never Pays magazine cover–he’s the person who coined the term “qubit” that Ruth uses in this novel–and I asked him and Ron if they remembered any of those novels that tried to popularize Heisenberg. They mentioned The Dancing Wu Li Masters, but couldn’t remember any of the novels either. I think this is because they weren’t very good novels. A Tale for the Time Being isn’t a bad novel, but it doesn’t need all the padding that the meditations on time and quantum physics require; I think it could be shorter and better. Even the method that Nao’s dad invents for erasing all mentions of a particular person from cyberspace was already invented in fiction by Christopher Buckley, in Boomsday (May, 2008). Another thing it could lose is the jabs at blogging: “there’s nothing sadder than cyberspace when you’re floating around out there, all alone, talking to yourself.” Oh yeah? How about remaindered novels? How about poems sewn into fascicles and left in a drawer until after the author’s death?

Nao’s story is a sad little one until she spends the summer with her grandmother, when she learns to see more of the world, and hear it, too: “When you’re beating a drum, you can hear when the BOOM comes the teeniest bit too late or the teeniest bit too early, because your whole attention is focused on the razor edge between silence and noise.” By the end of the novel, she’s grown up enough to be able to talk to her father, to see and accept some of what he has been wanting to give her, and to listen when he tells her about why he lost his job developing video games, because “killing people should not be so much fun.”

Nao’s story is an absorbing one, even wrapped as it is in the layers of what it means to be a reader and a writer and try to live in the present. You, my readers, might want to try reading this novel like I used to read my parents’ James Michener novels when there was nothing else around the house—keep skipping through to the next good section and don’t worry about missing the parts in between. Are there other authors you’d recommend we read like that?