From a Far and Lovely Country, Funny Story
In the last two days I read two quiet books about people trying to learn to care more about each other, and that was comforting during a hard week.
The first one I read was From a Far and Lovely Country, Alexander McCall Smith’s latest about the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. As I learned when I started reading this series, it’s a good idea to relax into one of these books; they can’t be rushed. This one eases the reader into that in a similar way to a story I’ve always loved, Faulkner’s story The Wishing Tree, which starts with Dulcie waking up on her birthday. When Precious Romotswe wakes up on her birthday, she thinks:
“those first few seconds of consciousness could be quite detached from everything else. You knew who you were, of course, and you knew you were in your bed, but you did not necessarily remember where you had just been: there might still be drifting around a few fragments of a dream, the remnants of some curious and unreal events in which the sleeping you had just been participating, and you had to put those out of your mind as the real day began. The mind was good at that—it remembered not to remember, so to speak, because it knew that dreams could not be allowed to clog up memory, which had far more important things to do. And so, the strange conversations of the night, the odd transports back to childhood, the unlikely dramas and surprises—all these were swept away as the light of day signalled the beginning of your real life, as yourself, facing another day of being you.”
There are a few jokes in this one, and my fondness for the characters made me enjoy them, like when Precious and her husband J.L.B. Matekoni are talking about signs and he told her:
“he had once seen a sign that had simply said Beware of but nothing more. ‘They must have run out of paint,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps they had forgotten what it was they were meant to be warning the public about.’
‘Yet it was good enough advice as it stood,’ Mma Ramotswe said. ‘We must beware of, I supposed, even if we do not know exactly what it is. Better to be safe than sorry.’
‘Perhaps it was Beware of lions,’ Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni suggested. ‘But before the poor man could paint the word lions, he heard a noise…’
‘A sort of growl?” prompted Mma Ramotswe.”
The second one I read is by Emily Henry, Funny Story. It’s a slow burn romance, starting with the two main characters—Daphne and Miles–getting jilted by two people who go off together and ending with them falling in love.
I like the part where Miles is showing Daphne around and he takes her to a beach on one of the great lakes, where she has a bookish thought: “it’s easy to imagine that this random group of people might be the last on earth. Station Eleven-type nomads.”
And I like that Daphne’s process of falling in love includes learning to care about Miles’ sister and also someone she works with at the library. She’s learning to care in general, and she’s also learning how to be more than just a man’s appendage. Out with her friends, she thinks “here, tonight…I’m in the center of everything.” That’s fun to see happening.
The friendships aren’t perfect, though. She lets down her friend and co-worker, Ashleigh, at one point and has to find a way to be forgiven. Ashleigh and Miles’ sister also let her down—and I found this a bit of a flaw in the plot because the novelist never calls attention to that fact, using the occasion to bring Daphne and Miles together, rather than have her deal with her feelings about her friends asking her to try on the wedding dress she bought for the wedding with the guy who jilted her and then just running off and leaving her alone in the apartment.
Miles lets Daphne in on the secret of being a “cool, fun, laid-back person” and then confesses that it’s no longer what he wants to do, because he cares about her too much to pretend to be cool about it any longer. That’s a good romance. And the climax of the novel is a library Read-a-thon, which is fun for book lovers like us.
Two good books for those rainy days in May when you feel like you need some sunshine.
I checked out four books recently that I was glad to get to read but have no desire to own: Laurie R. King’s The Lantern’s Dance, Cassandra Clare’s Sword Catcher, Ragnar Jonasson’s and Katrin Jakobsdottir’s Reykjavik, and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These.
The Lantern’s Dance is another good novel about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, this one with a twist I didn’t expect.
Reykjavik, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, is a slow-paced mystery that goes back and forth between 1956, when a girl disappears, and 1986, when the mystery of her murder is solved. I read it because I’m planning a trip to Iceland this summer, and it’s always fun to read about a place before you go. The part that struck me as most foreign was when one of the main characters “fried some mince he had in the fridge and boiled spaghetti to go with it.” I looked up “mince” to see if it’s something like ground beef in the U.S. and it is, only more finely chopped.
After two so far, Claire Keegan’s short novels are not at all to my taste. Her stories are too minimalist. The title of this one, Small Things Like These, comes from a married couple’s pillow talk about the small events of their day, a day when the male main character has noticed what a hard life some of the local children are leading. The best part, I thought, is when he thinks about how he and his wife, like their neighbors, “always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things?” This story is about exactly that, a moment when one character pauses.
Sword Catcher, a 604-page fantasy novel, sets up a number of interesting mysteries and doesn’t resolve any of them. It’s a very long prelude to a new series, and I guess anyone who wants to find out what happens will have to read another thousand pages or so before any of the storylines reach a conclusion.
The story of Conor, a prince, and Kel, his sword catcher (a bodyguard/double) is set in a fictional medieval Europe, where most of the countries have a Jewish ghetto except that their religion has to do with magic. Clare does some updating—for instance, when Conor is faced with marrying to cement an alliance with another country, we’re told that “Conor’s general preference was for women, but it was by no means a rule. If Conor married another man, a woman of good breeding would be chosen to be the Lady Mother who would bear Conor’s child, nurse it, and give it over to the two kings to raise….Marriages between two queens were rarer but not unheard of, either.”
The quasi-Jewish people, called “Ashkar,” use magic, although not the way they used to in the old days, before most magic was destroyed. In those olden days, we’re told, some tried to do “bone conjuring” or necromancy, which was forbidden.
There are occasional moments of humor, like when an Ashkari healer is captured and taken to a mysterious “Black Mansion” and left in a room to wait, and she thinks “it was one thing to be snatched from the market under false pretenses and another to be made to wait around afterward. The Ragpicker King could at least behave as if kidnapping her was a priority.”
The Ashkari healer, Lin, is set up to be the one true love of Prince Conor and also the reincarnation of a goddess who will restore magic to the world but use it well. We know this because we get to know her character and also because when she reads about how to use necromancy to raise an army of the undead, she thinks that “every power can be used for evil….But she would not do so.”
These books can go back to the library. I’ve learned a few things, mulled over some ideas, and enjoyed meeting several new literary characters, but I don’t really want to keep these on my shelves.
The Future
The Future, by Naomi Alderman, is (like her previous novel The Power) a revenge fantasy. It’s fun and easy to read.
In this only-slightly-fictional future, the Big Tech owners of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and Google (for simplicity’s sake there are three of them) have made their money without worrying too much about ethics and, having ruined the world, are about to escape into their bunkers for surviving the end of it. Two of the characters who find out about the bunker plans have survivalist training, and one is the daughter of the leader of a fundamentalist Christian cult, so she is used to basing arguments on Biblical topics. The story of Lot’s wife is brought to life in a scene that takes place after a mall shooting.
You’d think that if there were any hopeful characters in the novel, they’d be opposed to the people trying to survive the end of the world, but in this novel they aren’t openly opposed. The wife of one of the Big Tech owners, a person who has a guaranteed place in his bunker, has a dream, but it’s a secret one:
“There is a beautiful world on the far shore, where we’re not destroying all the species anymore and our cities are clean and beautiful and full of wild birds, and our cars are all electric and all shared, and the streets are safe for kids to play in, and we get to keep TV and the internet and concerts and ball games and all that good stuff, and fine, we’re eating mostly vegan food but it’s good, and if we can just get through the pain barrier as quickly as possible, then we’re there.”
There’s an interesting and detailed description of a program called Happy Meal that’s designed to make the world better—it works by changing comments made by people on the internet slightly, so whatever they’re commenting on gets more views. Adding one word to a comment about a wildlife video makes it get more views, while deleting one from a comment about monster trucks makes it get fewer. Happy Meal turns out to have some technical problems, though.
We get periodic updates from a fictional online forum called Name the Day, and in one of these, the daughter of the cult leader posts a long screed about what’s wrong with the world today that includes this:
“Unfortunately these days quite a lot of people on the internet seem happy to live by the rule of salt. That’s a rule of infinite vendetta: scroll back years through a social media timeline, the worst thing you can find another person has done is totally legit to do to them. But then, that’s the worst thing you’ve done, and it’s legit to do it to you. And on and on, everyone trapped inside this same worsening cycle. That’s where we are right now with the media and the internet: stuck inside a cave with the worst person we know, finding increasingly degraded things to do to each other and feeling righteous while we do them.”
That seems to me like an accurate description of one aspect of onlife life.
The scariest and most realistic part of this novel is about the use of drones. One of the Big Tech characters explains that “the feeling was that in a future pandemic or other catastrophe, governments around the world might pay to have a drone army patrol the streets and deal with rioting or looting. Private hospitals might need protection. Certain Senate subcommittees had been persuaded to leave certain loopholes open. No private company could have fifty thousand Predator hunter-killer missile drones, obviously. But sonic technology, something intended just to encourage people back into their homes? There was a case for that.”
The secret of saving the world turns out to be “how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.”
I’m glad I spent an hour or two of my life reading this novel.
What Kind of Woman
The day before my trip, the day the friend I was going to see died, I went out to my local bookstore to find a book to bring her in the hospital and found Kate Baer’s volume of poems, What Kind of Woman. I read a few of the poems while standing in the store and thought my friend would like them (she wasn’t hard to please, especially with poetry).
One of the poems I read was “Nothing Tastes as Good as Skinny Feels,” a phrase any 21st-century woman has heard over and over, and I liked its list of “unless you count” things, including “your grandmother’s/cake” and “the taste of the sea.”
They’re accessible poems, suited to being read while standing up in a bookstore and feeling one or two sparks of recognition. If you’re looking for more, these poems won’t deliver, but you may be satisfied with the delight of the situation Baer sets up in each poem, like “For the Advice Cards at Bridal Showers” which draws readers in with
“Go to bed angry. Wake up with a plan. When
someone asks for the secret to a happy marriage,
remember you don’t know. This is not a happy
ending. This is not a fairy tale. This is the beginning
of a life you haven’t met.”
I found the ending of this poem less satisfying than its great beginning:
“For now just remember how you felt the day you
were born: desperate for magic, ready to love.”
Similarly, there are poems entitled “Commencement Address,” “Vow Renewal,” “On Our Anniversary,” and “For the Advice Cards at Baby Showers.”
There are three poems characterizing what people say in various situations: “Things Men Say to Me,” “What Children Say,” and “What Mothers Say.” I found these evocative, enjoying lines like the men saying “Fun fact! I don’t normally read women writers/but I have read you” and the children saying “You need to help/me. Help me faster. Do it the way/I asked you to.”
My favorite poem in the volume is “When I Ask My Grandmother Why She Let Him Come Back Home”:
There is so much more to love.
I would have missed it—
the ducks and chickens, children calling
from the yard. The way he’d say you are so
beautiful. One cannot complete the other.
One cannot hold on to brokenness.
The cruel things we could have done—
I would have missed the ball games. His
eyes searching across a swarming table,
the thrill of spring and heavy snow.
Think about it—every wedding, every
Sunday, every light strung across the living
room.
I would have missed all this.
The last poem in the volume is about grief, and that’s a nice bonus for a book I bought to give someone else and will now put on my own bookshelf. It ends with the thought that, whatever happens, you can “listen for the catbird calling. No matter/the wreckage, they still sing for you.” That’s true outside, right now (according to the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone). And Tristan is sleeping on the stairs, where the yellow azaleas are blooming.
My Beloved Monster
Every story about a cat who was loved is a story of loss. I once stood next to a woman I didn’t know who had tears in her eyes at a pet store, both of us admiring a macaw, and she leaned over and confided to me that her dog had just died and she was thinking about getting a pet that would outlive her. But for any person who considers the feelings of animals, that means making arrangements for someone to adopt your animal at your death, and that’s a dicey proposition for anyone who loves a cat, since they tend to choose one person in all the world. My cat Tristan chose me. Our cat Melian chose my husband. Caleb Carr’s cat Masha chose him.
I’d heard of Caleb Carr before reading his memoir of life with his cat Masha, My Beloved Monster. I’d read his novel The Alienist and heard him referred to as a “Kenyon author.” So I was surprised to find, in the pages of his cat memoir, that he feels that he was forced to go to Kenyon for a couple of years as a second-choice school, and to be reminded that he didn’t graduate. I felt a bit “put in my place” as someone who picked up his book because I love cats and thought we had Kenyon in common.
Also I hadn’t read about Carr’s father Lucien, who was evidently famous as one of the “beat generation” writers, along with the more famous Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg, and infamous for killing an older man who had been his teacher. Caleb Carr assumes the reader has heard of his father, referring casually to his parents as alcoholics and revealing his own childhood abuse, describing himself as childless by choice so as to break the cycle of abuse.
The subtitle of this memoir is “Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me,” and there’s a parallel drawn between the physical effects of Carr’s own childhood abuse and Masha’s, whose first owner, a veterinarian said, must have kicked her hard enough that she suffered a fracture that didn’t heal quite right, causing arthritis throughout most of her life. Reading about how strong Masha is—strong enough to survive fights with bears, dogs, and fishers, and strong enough to tackle Carr and bring him down—makes readers realize, among other things, how bad the American system of breeding cats is, a system that allowed an apartment owner to adopt what seems to have been a full-bred Norwegian Forest Cat and leave her shut up in the apartment alone.
As a side note, why do so few people question why we adopt cats from shelters, calling them “rescues,” when what they are is the result of a breeding program where only the most feral cats get to reproduce? We responsibly spay and neuter our pets, and then we continue to adopt the offspring of cats who have succeeded in eluding capture. Rather than breeding for companionability and contentment, we breed for wildness and strength and then some of us turn around and preach that such cats should be kept strictly indoors all their lives while failing to provide enough stimulation to keep pet cats sane, much less contented.
Luckily, Masha found Caleb Carr, a person suited to catering to such a high-needs cat. While Carr goes further than I would in asserting that his cat could communicate and understand his speech, I will certainly attest to his assertion that cats can be taught to understand some words and they can definitely lead a relatively safe and satisfying life outside after being taught to stay close to home and come inside before dark each night. It does help to live in a rural place with some room for the cat to roam, far from roads, although the more rural, the more chances of running into wildlife dangerous to cats, like coyotes. At Carr’s rural upstate New York property, the wildlife evidently includes bears and fishers, a kind of weasel.
Carr tells about Masha’s adventures with a lot of ominous foreshadowing at the end of chapters, like “very soon, Masha would, in her efforts to protect her territory, her house, and me, face the next great physical peril of her young life; and I would face another emotional crisis.” He also intersperses his story with the stories of all the other cats he loved before finding Masha, each with its own sad ending.
Carr really identifies with his cats. As he is telling the story of a cat named Chimene, he says
“we became full tomcats over the next few years—of slightly different varieties, true, but together. And just as it was never my initial intention to drive the Quaker administrators at my school half mad with exasperation, I don’t think that Chimene ever meant to make me crazy. Yet I would certainly master the first technique, to such an extent that the Quakers would one day sabotage any chance I had at attending a really first-rate college; while Chimene, for his part, would innocently but certainly end up giving me more than a few tormented days and desperately sleepless nights.”
Like a cat, Carr wanders where he wants with little thought of who could be watching, or who he might offend. He characterizes bringing another cat to the home he shared with Chimene as “an error of ignorance” and attributes it to his careless upbringing; readers of the embedded story will feel grateful that he learned this lesson before meeting Masha.
I love the stories Carr tells about Masha. I particularly love how he writes about what happens when she sees deer in the yard, as it’s a good description of what happens when my own cats see deer in their yard:
“The sight made her a strange kind of excited. It wasn’t that she thought she could taken them on: she knew how big they all were and stayed clear. But she also seemed to know that they were harmless, and watching them made her more than content: it made her happy, just as it made people happy. Yet in the not-so-back of her mind she also knew that those herding animals had not yet learned that she was the boss of all she surveyed, and she could get very agitated, sitting in her northern windowsill, if she saw them start to move in groups without her having given any signal that such behavior was allowed.”
Despite some of Carr’s opinionated didacticism about cat behavior, much of what he says rings true, especially about a cat’s need for companionship:
“you can leave a cat alone in your home with some food and think it’s all right to depart for much of a day and most of a night; but you know, deep down, that it’s not. Companionship is likely the most consistently underrated of a cat’s basic needs; and though a lonely cat may forgive your absence, repeat the behavior enough and—however deep his feelings for you may run, however much his first choice may be that you stay with him—the bond will rarely move past insecure. It exists; but it will be subject to refocusing, should something more consistent come along.”
The title becomes clear on p. 257, when Carr says to Masha, who he sometimes calls “Mash” for short, “Well, monster….(I’m not sure when I started calling her that, or started singing her the song I’d derived it from, but the name was by then one she recognized, and the song a familiar theme that she endured.)”
In his final statement of the memoir’s theme, that man and cat rescued each other, Carr shows he appreciates how difficult other people can find him, in something of the way people who don’t understand cats find them difficult:
“for Masha, I was always enough. How I lived, what I chose to do, my very nature—all were good enough for her. Since falling onto this Earth, it seems, I have proved as difficult for my fellow human beings, past the easy points of social convention and amusement, as they have often proved for me. But from Masha, no such questions. I was enough; and not just enough, but enough that I warranted defending. It may seem a simplistic, even a childish notion; but no one ever fought so strenuously and valiantly for me, to get back to me, to keep danger away from me, as Masha did, to the point that I had to sometimes discourage her efforts. What will cynics call this, if they will not call it love?”
It was a relief to me to find that Carr outlived Masha, because anything else would have been a betrayal of her trust. This is why I can’t get another cat after Tristan, who is 15, and why we have to continue living in our house for the rest of Pippin’s and Melian’s lives (Melian is now 6 and Pippin 9). I have a friend my age who has adopted a couple of cats through a program run by hospice, finding homes for cats whose owners have died. I think that’s the only way anyone who is over sixty years old should be allowed to adopt a new cat.
Are you a cat lover? If so, you might enjoy reading this memoir and wishing you had met this splendid cat, so capably and lovingly described.
Missing Laura
She was tall and loud and strong.
She was so strong. She could endure longer than you’d think was humanly possible, until you got to believing in it.
She was a poet. She was a better poet than I am, but she had less time to write.
One time she and I went to a poetry conference downtown at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C. We left at the same time as Howard Nemerov, walking behind him towards our Metro stop, and we kept giggling when he gave us paranoid looks over his shoulder because he thought we were following him.
Her house had these paintings of Venice that she’d made lined up along the mantel in the living room.
She had a big laugh.
She enjoyed the humor of The Simpsons.
One time my parents took her with me and our friend Sarah to a fancy brunch at the Watergate Hotel and we dressed up and tasted everything and remembered it all the rest of our lives.
She had a lot of curly yellow hair.
One time when we had been driving to see each other, I told her about how I worried about running into a deer on the highway and she said deer aren’t that scary, wait until you run into an elk.
She liked to watch the tv quiz show Jeopardy! and actually appeared as a contestant.
She sent gloriously crazy gifts, like a fancy china teacup I didn’t know I wanted and a pair of Batman socks with wings at the ankle.
When she was 23 years old, pulling out things from her backpack for a class, doing an exercise about drawing conclusions from a list of details, she pulled out a tampon that had worked its way out of the plastic wrapper and gotten coffee spilled on it. Afterwards she told everyone this story and laughed.
We were friends for 32 years.
I was packed for a trip to visit her when I got the call she had died that day. I just missed her.
She wanted me to miss her.
I know that because she wrote in one of her poems that
“love and grief
Exist like eris and eros, strife and love,
As the ancient Greeks knew it,
Two sides to the same coin. You will know
as loss stabs you clear through, love and grief
love and grief, they are one and the same.
You will miss me.”
I do miss her.
Days of Wine and Roses
Last weekend we had a solar eclipse party with friends from our college days; they came from Colorado, Washington State, and Toronto, Ontario because my small town was in the path of totality. And what a view we got!
We had champagne and a cookout and “the good Canadian wine” on Saturday, and a tea and poetry reading on Sunday, with sandwiches, scones, and an assortment of sweets.
There were some memorable poems (none of us will ever forget the “silvery tay”). I read a few of my favorite poems, but I did not read the one I’ve been thinking about since, Ernest Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam,” from which we get the phrase “days of wine and roses”:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Monday was an extraordinarily nice day for early April in Ohio. We packed a picnic and the croquet set and went out to a local park about 10:30 in the morning. It was warm and sunny. I’d made jokes about not needing sunscreen because the sun was going to be hidden, but we definitely got some sun while we ate our picnic lunch and played croquet.
As the moon started going over, we kept taking looks at the sun through our special eclipse-viewing glasses. We saw a bald eagle fly over the park. Around 2:30 it started getting dark and the temperature dropped, and when the sun was almost completely covered, the automatic lights all over the park came on, including on a tower brilliantly lit with blue lights. We took our glasses off to see the sun’s corona around the moon and a mysterious glowing red ember at about 7 o’clock, later revealed to be a “prominence.” People all over the park cheered.
Then the sun started coming back out. A lot of people got in their cars and sat in a minor traffic jam trying to leave the park. We stayed, watching the moon move across the sun until about 4:30, when it was completely gone. Then we went to see the Dog Fountain.
We had a few days of wine and roses, briefly beautiful and forever memorable.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
I borrowed The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, from a friend who recommended it and like almost every other reader I know, I enjoyed it. Like with other novels by James McBride, however, I did not find it a page-turner.
The way this novel begins with a mysterious skeleton in a well and the information that the colored folks and Jews in a place called “Chicken Hill” managed to escape officers of the law who could not provide justice is less intriguing than opaque.
The way the novel continues, with a “Jewish theater manager” named Moshe isn’t particularly compelling. A complicated society divided by strict lines of nationality, religion, and skin color is described, centering on an east coast community during the Great Depression. Chicken Hill is described as “a tiny area of ramshackle houses and dirt roads where the town’s blacks, Jews, and immigrant whites who couldn’t afford any better lived” and where Moshe amuses his neighbors with “the story of his Romanian grandmother who jumped out a window to avoid marrying a Haskalah Jew, only to land atop a Hasidic rabbi from Austria,” a story “that brought smirks and chuckles to their faces, because everyone knew the Romanians were crazy.”
There are lots of supposedly hilarious stories about people from the different enclaves interacting. One is about a fire inspector who came to inspect the bar of a man named Fatty who works with his friend named Soap. When the inspector asks if a hose hanging on the wall has been tested, Fatty tells him Soap tested it, although
“Soap didn’t know any more about testing a fire hose than a hog knows a holiday. But being Italian and not speaking English too good, he saw Fatty nodding, so he said ‘Aye, aye, si si,’ or however them Italians say yes.
So the inspector pulled the hose off the rack and shook it. A peanut dropped out the nozzle. He said ‘I put that peanut in there six months ago when I was here before.’
Fatty said, ‘But it’s a clean peanut, sir.”
Then we get a supposedly amusing summary about how Fatty and Soap got fired and how Soap’s “momma will whip Soap bowlegged for losing his job.” I didn’t find this hilarious.
There’s a terrible story about Moshe’s wife Chona, who owns and operates the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and what happens with her informally adopted son, Dodo, and the local doctor who has had a crush on her since high school. The middle of the novel consists of an even more terrible story about what happens to Dodo and the friend he makes in the “Pennshurst State Hospital for the Insane and Feeble-Minded.” But the characters eventually come together with a plot to rescue Dodo and right some of the wrongs they see in their community, and this is where the novel gets good.
The plot is detailed and complicated, and readers will get caught up in seeing everyone come together. There are more jokes about how folks from different enclaves don’t understand each other, like this one:
“Miggy here works at Pennshurst,” she told the others. “She tells futures, too.”
“Can you tell mine?” Fatty piped up.
“No, but I could blind you,” Miggy said.
It was as if a barrel of sardines had suddenly fallen from the ceiling, for Fatty’s smile vanished. Paper thought she saw a faint, thin smile work its way across Nate’s lips as Fatty sat back, cowed. “I’d rather you didn’t do that, miss,” he said.
Miggy chuckled. “Not with a spell, honey. I drink with my pinkie out. Every time I sip, I blind the person sitting to my right.”
I enjoyed the last half of the book despite the generalizations about people, like that one character, a black man named Nate, believes that “the white man despised him in Pennsylvania as much as he did in the Low Country. The difference was that the white man in the South spoke his hatred in clear, clean, concise terms, whereas the white man in the new country hid his hatred behind stories of wisdom and bravado, with false smiles of sincerity and stories of Jesus Christ and other nonsense that he tossed about like confetti in the Pottsdown parade.” Like most generalizations and stereotypes, this one might have some basis in fact, but it’s reductive.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is a good story, and the acknowledgements at the end show that it has some basis in the author’s experience, but its characterizations are reductive. This does make their machinations more fun, like watching the events of a show with stock characters play out.
A Little Too Familiar, Rough Around the Hedges
A Little Too Familiar and Rough Around the Hedges, by Lish McBride, are “uncanny romance” novels by the author of Necromancing the Stone and Hold Me Closer, Necromancer, and they have the same humor and page-turning impetus. I read them because of Jenny’s review at Reactor, about “comfort reads,” and I did find them comforting because the heroes triumph over adversity and everything comes out all right in the end.
I read Rough Around the Hedges first because I’m not much of a fan of werewolf books, but that is not the way to do it; A Little Too Familiar involves some of the same characters and the events are previous. Plus, despite my prejudice, I enjoyed A Little Too Familiar.
I like the way McBride deals with the paranormal stuff in both novels, making it fun but mostly extraneous to what the characters are dealing with, except at points in the plot where having extra abilities ratchets the action up a few levels higher.
I like the main character of A Little Too Familiar, Declan, whose wolfish characteristics include the impetus to take care of his adopted family—those he considers his “pack”– by cooking and cleaning. And I love that there’s a Lord of the Rings reference when Declan goes to therapy and his friends pledge their support:
“We’re going to dredge up things that won’t be pleasant for you….No matter what, though, during our sessions, remember that I’m on your side here. No one else’s. Not the Tribunal’s, not even Lou’s. I’m your emotional battle buddy.”
“You have her sword” Juliet said with a grin. “And my ax.”
I like Rough Around the Hedges too, despite the fact that reading it made me discover that I’m a little prejudiced about stories that take place in tattoo parlors (I have a personal experience that might explain that, but it’s not really my story so we’ll skip it for now). I also identify with anyone who grew up in a family that didn’t talk about feelings, so I really liked the way the main character, Vanessa, learns to express her feelings and deal with them:
“I didn’t discuss feelings well. Growing up with my dad, you not only didn’t talk about feelings, but you also hid them as best you could. If I expressed my love of something, my dad would know what to take away. If something scared me, upset me, he would know my soft spot.”
I also really like the way Vanessa’s love interest, Will, talks about reading romance novels:
“Just because it’s about feelings doesn’t mean it isn’t edifying. Emotional learning is learning.” That’s an idea some of us find kind of strange and new.
There are a number of really good lines in this book, which is characteristic of Lish McBride. One of my favorites: “Hades hath no fury like a vexed librarian. It was all that knowledge at their fingertips.”
The ending is supremely satisfying. Vanessa finally manages to tell Will what he means to her and fears it’s too late, but he replies:
“Vanessa, how I feel about you, my heart—it doesn’t have an expiration date. It’s not something you can be too late for. It’s just something that is….Saying you’re too late, that’s like saying you’re too late for the ocean, the wind, mountains….It’s an enduring, all the time sort of thing.”
These books are well-written and worth the short time it will take you to read them.
Crossings
Alex Landragin’s novel Crossings was lent to me by a friend who wanted to know what I think of the ending—and, I suspect, the kind of necromancy involved in what this novel calls “crossing,” which is crossing from one body into another, usually from an old, worn-out body and into a new, young one so as to go on living.
What I think of the ending is what I think of everything about the structure of the novel—it seems a pale imitation of narrative techniques used better by other writers. There’s a preface that tries to do what Laurie King does so well in her preface to The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, explaining how she came across the manuscript of the novel you’re about to read. Alex Landragin also claims not to have written his novel and tells a story about a collector who “accorded as much importance to a book’s binding as to its contents,” an attitude I very definitely do not share. Landragin ends the preface with seven suggestions about how he wants us to read his novel, as if we’re too dim to think of them on our own, and then he follows the preface with a “note to the reader” informing us that we can read the book “conventionally (that is, from first page to last)” or we can follow a complicated sequence of pages to read it in another order. Your attitude towards this might be different, but it puts my back up to be told to do so much extra work before I’ve been given anything to get interested in.
As soon as I start to get interested in the first of “three manuscripts,” I’m confronted with an extremely unflattering characterization of a literary figure, Charles Baudelaire. There’s no character to sympathize with in this novel; from first to last, they are, in varying degrees, flawed and unpleasant people.
One of Baudelaire’s real-life mistresses is, in this fiction, the subject of a “crossing” by another person, and when she tells him about it, he thinks that “the chance to live again, in a youthful body, the chance to escape the clutches of penury, insanity, and mortality, and perhaps above all the chance to redeem myself for my past failures—all of these taken together added up to a temptation I could not—perhaps even should not—resist.” Anyone who has read a book with necromancy in it, of course, knows better.
An onlooker to one of the crossings in this novel “said that the woman was a necromancer, and that I had been mesmerized.” That is essentially the case, as “crossing” involves prolonged eye contact. There’s are laws about crossing on the south seas island where the custom originates: “there can be no crossing without a return crossing” and “only a sage could cross without returning.”
Once the custom of crossing leaves the south seas, it gets continuously uglier, culminating with a scene of a man’s gold teeth being knocked out with a hammer. The characters continue to cross into new, young bodies and act in the same old cruel ways, and at the end, the remaining narrator says “time and time again I ask myself why I am still alive. I’m not proud of myself. I’ve been a thief. I’ve made a mess of things. I’ve tried to undo something that cannot be undone. I only seem to have made things worse.”
The ending promises that the cruelty and ugliness will go on forever, as you might expect from a tale of repeated necromancy.
Necromancy Never Pays 