Sarah's Key

I have a love/hate relationship with literature concerning the Holocaust. I grew up as a practicing Reform Jew, meaning I attended Hebrew school at least twice a week, put my time in on the high holidays. Throughout those Wednesday and Sunday sessions at religious school, I had the history of WWII presented to me again and again. Through documentaries, textbooks, poetry. I do not say this in contempt of my teachers or Rabbis – on the contrary, I respect their need to ensure that Jewish youth is fully informed about their history. But studying the Holocaust again and again, year after year, can get repetitive. Tragedy. Despair. Genocide. European names, impossible to pronounce, photos of emaciated corpses or piles of abandoned shoes. After a certain point, it stops being painful. Then, it stops being much of anything at all. It becomes a lesson, difficult and heavy, like trigonometry. Something that we have to learn in order to earn our grades. We begin to lose sight of the individual parables.

Every so often, something comes along that draws my attention to a specific chapter of the massive Holocaust historical volumes. The Pianist, a movie I saw with the remarkable Rabbi Sara and a friend my junior year of high school. A performance by my mother’s incredible organization that honors musicians suppressed by the Holocaust, the Music Reborn Project. And now, a book, published in 2007, that reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

Sarah’s Key is not a Holocaust story in your typical sense. The main plotline takes place in 2002. It is based mostly in Paris, France, nowhere near the haunting scenery of Germany or Poland. And, perhaps the most unexpectedly redeeming detail for me, our heroine Julia is not Jewish. She doesn’t claim to be an expert about the Holocaust. We travel this journey of enlightenment with her from start to finish, seeing how it affects her every step of the way. With a storyline so removed from the dramatic and over-exposed events of the early 1940’s, author Tatiana De Rosnay is free to explore the Holocaust in an unconventional way.

Julia was born in America. A tall, slim blonde reeking of her Boston upbringing, she is still known as “the American”, even after living with her French husband in Paris for close to 25 years. Julia’s husband, Bertrand, is like a giant inflated parody of a Frenchman. Impeccably dressed, irresistibly handsome, viciously condescending and cocky. He and Julia rock back and forth between the patronizing and the passionate in a marriage seemingly based on all the wrong things. For her job, Julia is assigned a piece on the “great roundup at the Veldrome d’Hiver” (or, as it is called throughout the book, Vel’d’Hiv’). Eager for an escape from her tense marriage, Julia throws herself into her research, discovering more than just the dates and figures she expected.

In July of 1942, the French police gathered thousands of Jewish families and forced them into Veldrome d’Hiver, an indoor stadium in Paris. They were kept there in sordid conditions for a few days, until they could be shipped out to labor camps across Europe. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Women were separated from their children and transported separately. Thousands of children were murdered without question, not by the Nazis, but by the French police. But at first, Julia knows none of this. Information on Vel’d’Hiv’ is not easy for her to find. The French have hidden the event in the back of their historical closets, behind their housecoats and their old wedding dresses, hoping that it will be forgiven and forgotten. Again and again Julia is scolded or turned away as she tries to gather information about the roundup, and the role that France played in the genocide of World War II. But eventually, pebbles of information begin to fall, loosening larger stones, eventually causing a massive landslide of history and emotion more complex and personal than could have she had ever imagined. She begins to question the people of France, both those that turned the other way during the Vel’d’Hiv and those that live, completely unaware of the event, today. The further she delves into her research, the more removed she becomes from her adamantly French husband and in-laws. Only her daughter Zoe, born of a French father and an American mother, seems an ally.

As Julia’s story progresses, a parallel plot unfolds. Even as Julia begins to learn more about the Vel’d’Hiv, ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski is waking up in early July 1942, about to experience it firsthand. The French police wake her family up in the night, demanding that they pack their bags and leave their home. Sarah’s parents have not prepared her for the situation; they have decidedly ignored her questions about the yellow star sewn onto her clothes, about the odd signs and behavior toward the city’s Jews. So she has no way of knowing that once they are taken, they will not be able to return; of knowing that she should refuse when her four-year-old brother requests to be left behind, locked into their secret hide-and-seek cabinet deep within the closet. “The girl could see her brother’s small face peeking out at her from the darkness. He had his favorite teddy bear clutched to him, he was not frightened anymore. Maybe he’d be safe there, after all. […] Maybe she should leave him there for the moment…She would come back to get him later in the day when they were allowed to go home again. ‘Are you afraid in there?’ she said softly, as the men called out for them. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid. You lock me in. They won’t get me.’” Sarah locks her baby brother into the closet with a flashlight, a storybook, and a small flask of water. She promises that she will come back for him later that day and then follows her family from the apartment, holding the key to the secret cabinet in her pocket.

It is with this heartbreaking mistake that Sarah’s life is pulled completely out from beneath her feet. And, with it, Julia’s. De Rosnay takes us skillfully back and forth from 1943 to 2002, blending Sarah’s journey back to her brother seamlessly into Julia’s steps towards understanding the horrific events that took place in the city that she calls her home. The two stories strain towards their respective pinnacles until suddenly, Sarah’s story crashes full force into Julia’s. The apartment that Julia and Bertrand have inherited from Bertrand’s grandparents is the same home that Sarah left long ago after locking her brother into the closet. The two women become connected, despite the sixty-year separation. As she becomes obsessed with Sarah’s struggle, Julia discovers that she is pregnant. Middle-aged and with a husband approaching fifty, she considers it a miracle. Bertrand sees it as a horrible mistake. He tries to push her into terminating the pregnancy, stating that the baby will be “the end of us.” Even as the weight of the death of thousands of Jewish children ignored by the country that betrayed them settles onto Julia’s shoulders, she has to consider aborting her second child.

Many authors attempt to weave multiple storylines together into one compelling novel. And in my opinion, most of them fail. Like the meager Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, most stories end up with a limping sort of footprint, putting far more effort or meaning into one character’s plight than the other. But De Rosnay nurtures both Julia and Sarah, and under her care, both characters become almost impossibly three dimensional and real. My heart aches for Julia as she realizes that the doors this journalistic project has opened can never again be closed, and that the changes they have caused in her life cannot be undone. How many times have we all wished that we could reseal Pandora’s Box?

It may seem as though, at this point, I’ve given away most of the plot of the book. But somehow, I’ve taken you less than halfway. Sarah’s Key continues, revelation after dramatic revelation, through its final pages. De Rosnay delivers so many page-turning surprises that it’s easy to forget that the basis of the book is a historical event whose outcome was long ago decided. On the other hand, there are certain aspects of Sarah’s Key that seem impossibly coincidental. But De Rosnay balances these karmic gifts with unexpected pitfalls, for a serious edge-of-your-seat effect. Although it falls into cliché dramatics at times, the book is a poignant mixture of history and fiction, with equal parts social and personal moral responsibility. There are flashes of themes like female empowerment, cause and effect, and journalistic integrity. Sarah’s Key becomes so much more than just another book about the Holocaust. Here, in my opinion, is a best seller that deserves its reputation.

I am equal parts satisfied and horrified that new stories so graphic and personal are still being written about the Holocaust. Like the Parisians in Sarah’s Key, I can’t seem to decide whether I would rather WWII’s gruesome events be soothed and put away or publicly mourned. Sarah’s Key leaves the reader wondering – is it better to leave the past in the past? Or do we owe it to ourselves to constantly relive it with the hopes that this will have a healing effect, or at least stop history from repeating itself? Whichever side you take, De Rosnay tells an important story in Sarah’s Key. A modern tale of woman’s need for independence and confidence, of the importance of understanding one’s actions, even if they are mistakes. And a story of the past, in which she sheds light on a not yet over-played melody from the Holocaust – that of the Jewish children of France, who, up until now, haven’t had a chance to publicly speak.

The Hunger Games

Every afternoon at 3:30 PM, I head into the elementary school gym to help with crowd control during dismissal. This task, euphemistically titled ‘bus duty’, usually requires all sorts of quick thinking, like snatching SpongeBob SquarePants backpacks before they can knock over kindergarteners like bowling pins. Last Friday, the melee was just as strong as ever. So I couldn’t help but find it odd when I saw one of the fourth grade students bent over a book, her classmates standing eerily untormented and unbothered around her. I walked over to her and asked what was so interesting. She held up a black book with a golden bird encased in a circle on the cover. “The first book of The Hunger Games! It’s so amazing,” she gushed, “I just can’t stop reading it.” At the mention of the title, four other fourth graders scampered over. They started chattering about the series, squealing and jumping up and down.

“The what games?” I asked. Cue uncool, out-of-date adult syndrome. Wasn’t Twilight the hot book series right now? When did they stop reading those? My students took pity on my ignorance and huddled around me, explaining. In exchange, I had to promise to go and get the book that very night so that I could discuss it with them on Monday. And I’m glad I did. Ladies and gentlemen, the unthinkable has happened. The Twilight saga has been dethroned as the leader in teen literature. The new model is sleeker, smarter, and more compact. It’s action-packed and addicting, with minimal babbling about destiny and soulmates. And it has tastes of a rebellion and independent thinking that poor little Bella couldn’t even dream of.

The Hunger Games, the first book in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, is a breath of intellectually fresh air in the sometimes soupy genre of teen literature. The books take place somewhere in the future after North America has been destroyed by natural disasters. The continent, now called Panem, was split into thirteen separate districts. Each district is controlled strictly by one government called The Capitol, a government reminiscent of 1984’s Big Brother (War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength!). Legend has it that early in Panem’s development, the Districts revolted against The Capitol in order to escape the squalor forced upon them. The government defeated districts 1-12 and, in an unnecessary action, obliterated the 13^th. After that revolt, The Capitol made their full-time job squashing any future rebellions. They had to find a way to remind the citizens of Panem that they are in total control. From that, The Hunger Games were born.

Once per year, the names of all of the youth, ages 12-18, from each district are added to a massive lottery. Those that need assistance from the government to survive (and they make sure that most do) may receive it in exchange for greater odds of being drawn. A representative chooses one female and one male name from each of the twelve districts. Once the names are selected, those unlucky teens are labeled “Tributes” and whisked away from their lives and their families. Twenty-three of the twenty-four will be murdered within the next few weeks. They are put through a week of training and then tossed into an arena of the government’s design, where the competition begins. From then on, the twenty-four tributes are left to battle to the death – the last one alive is the “winner.” Consider the television show Survivor, except the competitors must murder each other in cold blood.

Not grotesque enough for you yet? The Hunger Games are the Superbowl of Panem. The whole thing is recorded and broadcast to every single citizen as required viewing. They watch gleefully as the young adults starve or freeze to death, catch fire, drown, suffer at the jaws of wild animals, or murder each other. Bets are made on who will be the next murderer, who the lone survivor. Every single detail is recorded, edited, and smacked with a compelling soundtrack until it looks like a Nicholas Sparks movie.

Once I caught the jist of the plot, it was easier to understand why the heroine, Katniss, is so masculine and cold (it took me a full six pages to realize that she was a girl). The book opens to her hunting illegally outside of her district with her best friend Gale, on the morning of The Reaping. Katniss is boyish in her actions and her love for the woods and the hunt, as well as her simple and bitter thought processes. But as her narration continues, the reader learns of her father’s early death, and how she was forced to take over the role of provider for her family – her mother, who became paralyzed with grief, and her little sister, the light of her life. The reader has little time to catch a glimpse of what Katniss’ life is like in the slums of District 12 (called the Seam) before the shit hits the fan. The name of this younger sister, Prim, is chosen from the thousands of slips of paper by the district representative. She has been called as a tribute into the Hunger Games. Without a second thought, Katniss volunteers to take her place.

Katniss is catapulted from the dark, coal-coated world of District 12 to the shining streets of The Capitol. She is thrust in front of hundreds of cameras shaved and painted by a team of publicists, paraded around for the Hunger Games’ opening ceremonies. Throughout training, she meets the other tributes from the other districts (some of which have been training for this opportunity all of their lives – Collins calls these tributes the “careers”, because they make a career out of training for the games) and gets to know the male tribute chosen to compete alongside her from District 12.

From the beginning, Katniss and Peeta (the male tribute) are directed by their team to stick together. While the other tributes maintain their distance – after all, they are going to have to try to murder each other within the next few weeks – the District 12-ers hold hands and make small talk. It becomes clear that the team is trying to play the star-crossed lovers card with the public, to attract some attention to the district, which hasn’t had a winner in years. The more the public supports them, the more of a chance they have to survive the games. And just because Katniss and Peeta live in a dark, futuristic world doesn’t mean they’ve got their hormones figured out – as the story continues, the lines between what their publicists suggest, what they really feel, and what they must do to sway the public all get tangled in a gigantic mess of feelings, adrenaline, and codependency. What’s real, what’s forced, and what’s based out of pure terror?

The rest of the book unfolds smoothly, with such careful pacing that it’s impossible to put the book down between chapters. Collins keeps the story dark and gruesome without being overly gory, somehow communicating the horrific situation without overdoing it. The plot flickers back and forth enough between the Games and the relationship between Katniss and Peeta so that the reader is never bored with one subplot, and the two are weaved together wonderfully at the end. I won’t spoil the book here, because it is just so enjoyable to read.

One of my favorite things about The Hunger Games? Collins doesn’t skimp on the good writing just because she knows her main audience will be reading it in study hall. Sure, the writing isn’t exactly up to par with some contemporary adult fiction. But the main difference between the genres, to me, is that teen authors don’t feel the need to impress as much as adult authors. They can write what they want to write, knowing that their critics are more interested in plot and character than vocabulary and Hollywood connections. It gives the books innocence, as if they are unaware of the rat-race, working at their own pace. There is an openness and simplicity in Young Adult Fiction, which is pleasantly present in Collins’ book.

Katniss is a complex and well-rounded character, sharing her positive and negative personality traits with the reader. She can be stubborn and angry, but those moments are balanced by loyalty and genuineness. She is likeable, of course – if she wasn’t, no one would read – but she’s more realistic than many modern heroines. According to an article on Entertainment Weekly.com by writer Tina Jordan, “Frankly, compared to Katniss, Bella is simply the more passive character: For the most part, things happen to her. Katniss, on the other hand, copes with disaster by strategizing–and bulldozing–her way through the situation.” (http://shelf-life.ew.com/2010/09/21/why-the-hunger-games-isnt-the-new-twilight/) And this, to me, is a wonderful thing; it teaches girls that they don’t have to be agreeable all the time, that strength can be found in the difficult or unpleasant moments, as well.

The Hunger Games’ plot follows some of the most basic and most written-about ideas of all time – the battle of Davd vs. Goliath, of the underdog challenging the overruling bully. Survival in the wilderness, survival of the fittest. Absolute power corrupting, absolutely. In fact, there isn’t much about The Hunger Games that’s groundbreaking, especially considering Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series was released to wide popularity only 5 years ago. The two series are similar in many ways; they both take place in a futuristic dystopia, both feature unusually strong female heroines, both have their characters challenging a government that everyone around them follows without question. But in Uglies, this challenge is a life or death situation. It is Collins who takes it a step further by making the government’s cruelty a game – a game! – which really adds that extra twist of the knife.

But Uglies isn’t the series that’s making the news in its comparison to The Hunger Games – it is, of course, Twilight. The two book series are being mentioned together more and more in the media as the buzz around The Hunger Games grows exponentially. Unfortunately for author Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games was slapped with the label “the next Twilight” the second fourteen-year-old hands started snatching it off of the shelves. But the two series’ are incredibly different. In another snippet from the Entertainment Weekly.com article, Tina Jordan puts it nicely: “Stephenie Meyer’s is more of a traditional romance (populated, I grant you, by some pretty untraditional characters); while Suzanne Collins’ is a tale of war and survival.” To me, the bottom line is this – where Twilight is mostly romantic mush, Hunger Games features sharp, dangerous, and though-provoking situations that call into question the very things that make us human.

If I were a parent, there is no question that I would be sneaking into my children’s rooms and replacing Meyer with Collins while they were out. Let’s look at it this way – while Meyer could be considered a watered down Danielle Steele, Collins can take her place along with Orwell (1984), Lowry (The Giver), and Westerfeld (the Uglies series). She has created a badass heroine who feels no need for leather pants or breast implants, who battles inwardly with both the urge to do good and the need to do evil. Here is a young girl seeing, for the first time, the terrifying truth about her government – that they are blatantly tyrannical, sending their children to die. It teaches children that instead of accepting life point blank, they should question and fight for the things that they don’t understand or don’t agree with. And it shows that those with power do not always handle it the way that they should, and that that is not acceptable.

Will administrators and officials approve that message? My main concern is that this book will end up on the banned/challenged list along with books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Brave New World, A Clockword Orange, Flowers for Algernon, James and the Giant Peach, and the Harry Potter series. Each of these books make either administrative or government committees uncomfortable enough to have them removed from school curriculums or libraries for a multitude of sins – comments that would be considered disrespectful, racist, communist, anti-religious, dealing with anarchy, beastiality, or witchcraft. And then there are the books that are just “frowned upon” by parents and teachers, which include many stories with female heroines, featuring a child living an unusual lifestyle, or addressing a disability or traumatic event. With its plain questioning of government leadership and morality, clear and unapologetic multiple murders, and a female character that does anything but cry into her petticoats, The Hunger Games don’t carry the message half as subtly as some of the classics that have landed on that list.

But if Twilight, with its blood sucking, dry humping, and body burning has lasted this long, then hopefully The Hunger Games can outlast the censors as well. It would be a shame for teens to lose one of the most enjoyable and worthwhile young adult series I’ve seen in awhile. Preteen or middle aged, I suggest the first book of the series for a fast-paced, thoroughly entertaining and smooth read. Plus, my fourth graders think I’m totally awesome.

A Child Called It

When I was younger, I had a serious issue with getting attached to inanimate objects. Furniture, stuffed animals, balloons – you name it, and I had named it, given it a backstory, and fallen in love with it. I dragged things around for weeks until they were dirty and falling apart. I cried when I had to eat pieces of candy shaped like animals. And, in one of the most memorably traumatic experiences of my childhood, I nearly had a stroke when my mom tried to sell her car. It was a big blue van that we had affectionately named “Bluie”, and I had, as usual, become obsessively attached to it. The day she took it back to the dealership, I sobbed. I threw a fit as she talked with the employees, and screeched when we started looking at the new vans. It broke my heart to drive away in a new, much nicer, but less blue van.

I realize how lucky I am that this is one of the most emotional memories from my childhood. Some go through unspeakable trauma, and here I am, lamenting the trade-in of a used car. Because the early years of my life were so gosh darn normal and uneventful, it can be difficult to relate to some of my more troubled students. My student teaching placement is in an economically depressed area, and many of the students come from difficult or dangerous home lives. Some of the situations from home that students talk to me about make my jaw drop. I have no idea how to deal with most of them.

It makes me think back to a class that I took when I was about fifteen. My high school offered a series of classes called Child Development which were the first peek that I got into the world of teaching. We got a taste of teaching’s unique difficulties – ranges of intelligence and emotions in children, proper handling of negative situations, and the ever-present question of what happens to the child when they leave your care. Within these courses, we had a small unit on Child Abuse. We learned that it would be our responsibility as teachers, parents, etc, to watch not only our children but also those around us. As a class, we read David Peltzer’s celebrated book A Child Called It. At the time, I remember being bothered, perhaps even disgusted, by the book. But when I finished a chapter and set the book down, the story didn’t follow me. I was learning to drive and breaking my curfew, there was no time to worry about starving children or conniving mothers.

More than 8 years have passed since I first signed up to take those Child Development courses, but the questions and subjects that we covered in Child Development are more relevant than ever. Emotional or physical abuse is no longer a hypothetical, a chapter in the casebook assigned by my Classroom Methods instructor. Instead, emotional or physical abuse is a first grade girl who curls into the fetal position and cries if you give her negative feedback, or a third grader whose only means of communication is violence because that’s all he’s ever learned. In the case studies, the neglected and abused children were easy to tell from the others; they had black eyes and torn clothes, they wept in your arms about their daddy’s temper or their mommy’s drinking. They never hid their wounds or defended the villains. In the real world, we’re not so lucky. It was this realization that inspired me to revisit David Peltzer’s story.

A Child Called It is Peltzer’s first-person account of a horribly abusive childhood, his battle for survival, and how he eventually escaped. Peltzer is tortured by his mother, a mentally ill woman who abuses alcohol and shows many symptoms of bipolar disorder. Peltzer begins by describing a happy early childhood where he plays with his two brothers, vacations with his family, and basks in his parents’ affection. He is well fed, clean, and loved. A place for everything, and everything in its place. But as time goes on, Peltzer and his brothers start to make mischief. It seems to be a requirement for all young boys to run and break and ruin, and the Peltzer boys are no exception. But for some reason, only David Peltzer is punished for their collective misadventures. The other boys are sent outside to play while David stands with his face smashed against the mirror for hours on end, repeating phrases like ‘I am a bad boy’ or ‘I hate you’ at his own reflection. And the beatings begin.

At first, the other members of the family are concerned for Peltzer’s safety. His father, so weak and worthless against his mother’s rage that he is never even named, makes a few feeble attempts to defend his son. The brothers initially treat him as one of them, a simply unlucky one of them. But soon the mother’s brainwashing does away with those luxuries. David is no longer a member of the family. He is now ‘the Boy’, or ‘It’, a creature lower than the dog. He is beaten and burned, forced to work like a slave, to sleep under the kitchen table on a pile of newspapers and eventually in the garage. All the while the emotional abuse intensifies, the mother constantly sneering and jeering and convincing David that his life is worthless. As a child, you automatically think that your parents are the smartest people in the world. So when your mother says she wishes you were dead, who are you to argue?

Peltzer’s mother, or ‘The Bitch’, as he begins to call her, continually searches for new ways to assert her power. Eventually, she stops allowing David to eat. Do not confuse this with stops feeding David, as it is not that simple. She sorts through the garbage to make sure that there are no edible scraps. She forces him to empty the contents of his stomach into the toilet every afternoon so that she can inspect it, to make sure that he hasn’t found a way to satisfy his hunger. Most of the time it is two or three days between the reward of getting to eat the leftover cereal that his brothers leave in the bottom of their bowls, but there are stretches of up to ten days without a single scrap of food to eat. Peltzer gets thinner and thinner, angrier and angrier. He starts to lash out at school, stops believing in God, and stops feeling any kind of pain.

These limitations don’t stop his mother from torturing him. After her actions become enough of a pattern that Peltzer can attempt to work around them, his mother realizes she is being outsmarted. Because he has stopped responding to physical beatings, she locks him in the bathroom with a mixture of Clorox bleach and ammonia for up to an hour at a time, in a game she calls ‘gas chamber’. Having just given birth to David’s third brother (he will eventually have a fourth, and both of these boys will be raised to hate him), she forces him to eat the contents of a used diaper. She makes him swallow teaspoons of ammonia, tears his arm from its shoulder socket, stabs him in the stomach with a carving knife.

All the while, his family, neighbors, and teachers do nothing.

The first time I read A Child Called It, I was bothered by the abuse. The acts themselves, the calculation, and the severity of it. But this time, what truly upset me was the inaction of other members of Peltzer’s life. Clearly, Mrs. Peltzer is mentally ill. How else do you hold your child’s arm down against a lit burner on the kitchen stove? She is the obvious villain, and quite a terrifying one, but she at least has insanity to blame for her actions. What about David’s brothers? Or his father? The staff of his elementary school that dismissed him as a problem child, never bothering to connect the dots between stolen food, uncontrollable anger, and an increasingly emaciated child with obvious physical wounds? Maybe what really changed is the knowledge that I now hold the responsibility that those same community members shirked. When I read the book at fifteen, I automatically saw myself in the place of the child, which was impossible to imagine. But now, I am in the place of the adult that turned away and pretended not to see a child so desperate to be rescued. It was a completely different way to experience the book.

Peltzer’s writing is simple. The book is written with the point of view, tone, and vocabulary of a child. You won’t find long, beautiful phrases between the covers of A Child Called It. Instead you will find a story that has been stripped to a skeleton. There is no need for setting description; Peltzer’s childhood consisted only of pain, hunger, and the inside of a cold garage. No time is spent on character development, because no other sides of his makind were ever revealed to him. But this simplicity is chilling. Vivid descriptions and witty turns of phrase would only distract from the book’s message: this unbelievable story has happened to a child. He never had the opportunity to fully develop his writing abilities into something flowery or jaw-dropping. We get the simple facts in short, stoic sentences of a child never allowed to bloom. If it weren’t for that, the book wouldn’t have the power that it does.

There is a downside to Peltzer’s simplicity. The book is heavy with cliché, and with repeated phrases. The book is meant for discussion groups and school lessons, so the message is far more important than the diction – but the generic language was still bothersome at times. The childlike qualities of the narrator are a double edged sword. As I said, it further twists the knife of the book’s purpose. But it also makes the book less interesting for me to read.

This brings a question to my mind. When a writer chooses to tackle a morally difficult subject, should they make the writing pretty? Should the diction be approached in the same way as a novel meant to pass the time in a beach chair? Or should these writers be excused from the ‘rules of literacy’, free to create their own voice, one that worries more about truth and weight than readability? I am equal parts literature-lover and tree-hugging human rights activist, so I have no idea how to answer this question.

I suppose this is why books are divided into genres, so that the reader can begin with expectations set in place. One should not necessarily pick up a discussion text on child abuse expecting Sylvia Plath’s poetic tragedy or Roald Dahl’s whimsy. Instead, it is important that the reader take the book for what it is – a tale of warning, both for children and for parents. If we are not careful, we can slip so easily into the pernicious roles of either David or his mother.

Since it was published in 1995, A Child Called It has been used across the country as a discussion text in classrooms, discussion and focus groups, and book clubs. In becoming a New York Times bestseller, it has accomplished what very few other ‘textbooks’ have. Through the eyes of a child, Peltzer effectively communicates to the world some of the most terrifying truths about child abuse. Although the book will be difficult for those with a weak stomach, its message is crucial. I wish that I could give this book to specific parents as assigned reading. The world can be a difficult place, and the pressures of daily life can be a struggle to handle. But stories like Peltzer’s help us to understand the importance of not taking our pain out on each other. And the importance of caring for those around us, even if they do not belong to us – every child, no matter their situation, deserves protection and care. What seems like a lifetime after learning it in Child Development, this is clearer to me than ever.

On Chesil Beach

“I was thinking it must be strange to read Chesil Beach aloud, given that it seems to much a book about things not being spoken and not said. And so much of the book happens outside speech, as it were…” A very British and charming sounding voice stole the words right out of my mouth with this comment, the opening to a bonus interview attached to the final CD of Ian McEwan’s novel, Chesil Beach. McEwan responds with a description of one of his most recent live readings, where he chose to read a particularly painful stretch of narrative from the excruciating novel. He had expected silence as a response. Instead? “I read it in Stanford, and people laughed. In ways that sort of amazed me…some women in the audience – I had to stop. I thought they were going to have to be carried from the hall. And it seemed as if I had touched some memories, or some nerve or profound discomfort. […] I took it as praise. I have always taken the view that there’s something funny about good writing. That it’s… innately funny. Or comic, maybe. And that if you get laughter in scenes that are not actually slapstick, or, amusing in the obvious ways, and go between the little cracks and small print of ordinary experience, then you can take it as a kind of endorsement.”

Laughter? As a response to this novel? I can’t imagine it, short of the sort of laughter that’s only purpose is to hold back an anxiety attack. On Chesil Beach is a compact little novel that packs a hell of a punch. From the very beginning, nothing is simple. We are tossed straight into to Florence and Edward’s honeymoon suite with no background, or warning. They are sitting awkwardly at their table, unsure of how to act towards each other now that the matrimonial technicalities are finished. Upon that shaky foundation, the plot begins to build. For five chapters, McEwan weaves an unbelievably intricate story between and around newlyweds Edward and Florence. The roads traveled in their past, the way these two paths met, and where they planned on traveling together. Between these flashes of background information we learn of their thoughts in the present, their wedding night, from their differing points of view.

Edward is a typical early-twenties ball of testosterone. At times throughout his sections of the novel, it seems as though he proposed to Florence simply to get into her pants. He loves her to the best of his ability, but the ability itself seems to be stunted. Edward has just graduated college with a degree in history, and is desperate for the “real” part of his life to begin. He has no idea what that actually means, but he seems to be pretty sure that it has to do with his groin. Florence, on the other hand, is an anomaly, in both a positive and negative way. She has just graduated from University as well, but her degree is in music. She is a passionate violinist who is determined to spend her life performing. Florence is gentle and intelligent, sometimes a bit too quiet and eager to please for her own good. Upon first glance, these two make a happy couple. They sit at dinner having just arrived in the suite, giggling and awkward at their newly found titles of man and wife. But as the story progresses and delves deeper into their thoughts, McEwan reveals a massive miscommunication between them.

In the most stereotypical of ways, Chesil Beach outlines one of the major traumatic issues between partners. Differing levels of libido, unspoken expectations in the bedroom, and secret fears or problems with intimacy occur in almost every relationship. We’ve all heard our friends complaining about their fellas’ ridiculous sex drives or their wives’ frigid boudoir behavior. Physical intimacy is just one of those things that doesn’t translate well between the sexes. Florence is completely inexperienced, and libido doesn’t even show up on her radar. She loves Edward and enjoys emotionally intimate moments with him, but finds any sort of carnal attraction, even a deep kiss, revolting. Edward, on the other hand, desires Florence to the point that he can’t complete a sentence. He proposed in a moment of unrequited lust and has been counting down the hours to their wedding night. In his eyes, he has been extremely patient for an entire year, only stealing light kisses and obeying her conservative limits (he doesn’t hide his distaste for these limits very carefully). Somehow these two have made it through over a year of dating and wedding planning without communicating about sexuality or intimacy at all. Florence, although unaware of quite how sexually driven Edward is, knows that eventually someone will have to break. She dreads the moment when she will have to discuss her issues but truly believes that their love will be enough to solve the problem. Edward, on the other hand, is so lost in the blood going straight to wrong part of his body that he hasn’t even noticed anything is wrong.

The tension mounts as the evening goes on. McEwan dances back and forth between the points of view of the two main characters, and the difference between their thoughts are so great that the unspoken tension becomes almost unbearable. Eventually, it has to break. McEwan gives this moment all of the hideous, humiliating, cringing attention that it deserves. From then on, Chesil Beach is one big freefall. The title is derived from the novel’s emotional finale, a standoff on Chesil Beach across the street from the couple’s honeymoon suite. Emotions wash in and out of the scene with the sand, carried away by the waves and replaced with new grains every passing second.

On a side note, this is a book that I wished I hadn’t experienced on tape. Ian McEwan is British. Really quite British. His accent is thick and strong, which makes some of the more intense passages difficult to understand. These intense passages, coincidentally, are almost all explicitly sexual. So you either have to crank up the volume and replay the phrase “…she reached down to touch his penis” sixteen times until you understand all the words, or let it pass by, knowing that she could have been touching, munching, or flushing, and hoping that precise word choice doesn’t throw you off from the plot. Another issue? My dad is British. That accent will always remind me of my father, despite the context. I don’t think I need to go into any more detail about why that was a problem.

Although I love that McEwan dared to tackle the sexual elephant in the room, I wish he hadn’t done it in such a predictable way. Yet another piece of literature that paints women as frigid and out of touch with their sexuality while the poor men just try to get what they deserve. After all, they agreed to marry the ladies, didn’t they? Surely that ultimate sacrifice is enough to score some tail? So much for the sanctity of marriage and the idea of spending your life with another person for their heart and their company – Edward’s thoughts haven’t even considered a post-coital sandwich. Just once I’d like to see a writer turn the tables. Not in a cartoonish, hormonal, vampy woman kind of way, but simply to see a wife that craves more intimacy than her husband. To see a relationship struggle because the man ‘isn’t in the mood.’ It just doesn’t seem fair that the females are getting all the blame.

Whether it’s fair or not, Ian McEwan has an incredible power with the English language. He creates unbelievably complicated relationships between his characters and reveals them layer-by-layer to the reader. Each tiny piece fits into the big picture so precisely that you wonder how you couldn’t have realized there was a hole there before. In some ways, this is maddening – the story begins zoomed in on a particular spot, and just as you think that you’re starting to see the picture, it zooms out again and you realize your last hour’s work was just a spot in the left-hand corner. Another chapter, another outward zoom, and you’re somewhere in the middle right. Only in the last few pages do we find out what’s really happening. I had this similar insecure, walking on eggshells feeling throughout Atonement, another of McEwan’s novels that I read for a fiction class last year. His writing captures the reader’s emotions so intensely that a long read can be exhausting.

With every paragraph, another thread is added to the spider web of Florence and Edward’s relationship. At moments the web seems beautiful, catching a certain ray of sunlight or moving with the wind. But at other times it’s lopsided and claustrophobic. It’s incredible the way the two characters see the same moments throughout their relationship in such opposite ways. It makes me wonder which events in our relationship Brett and I have internalized differently. Do we each remember our first kiss the same way? That night that I dismissed as a misunderstanding, does it still haunt him? Does he find as much comfort in certain memories as I do?

Chesil Beach is just as powerful after the words have stopped. Long after the last CD ended, the book left me considering interpersonal relationships – mine, yours, the worlds’. No matter how long another person has been in our lives, is it possible to ever truly know a human being? Even if we are to know everything about who they are on the surface, without insight into their heart and mind, can we ever truly consider ourselves familiar with each other? And if the answer is no, what does that mean for love? If we are a world of strangers, then compatibility and contentedness aren’t much more than a gamble. With a roll of the dice, you could reach your golden anniversary. But if the wind is blowing the other direction, you’ll be signing your annulment papers within the week.

This entry is unusually pessimistic for me, which follows in the tone of McEwan’s diction. The book is compact and powerful, but it is unarguably dark. My experience with Ian McEwan thus far is reminiscent of the question that lingers in your mind; the one you’re dying to know the answer to but terrified to ask out loud. You can live your whole life refusing to speak it, safe but maddeningly curious. Or you can release it into the atmosphere. Once released, no matter the intentions, the question will take on a role completely out of your control. Once Chesil Beach is released into your subconscious, there’s no turning back. If you’d rather keep things light, there is a review of Sloane Crosley for you a few entries back. But if you decide that honesty is more important to you than blind safety, then you are the kind of person that will enjoy On Chesil Beach. Just prepare yourself – much like that question, your brain’s reaction to Edward and Florence’s turmoil can’t be undone. 

Bag of Bones

This has been a month of firsts. I finished my first internship, which was a wonderful summer as the Assistant to the Director of Youth Services at the Murrysville Community Library. I gleefully accepted my first (and hopefully last) marriage proposal on a hot and sticky Thursday evening, and celebrated with my first post-engagement pizza. I moved into my first apartment with said first fiancé, and we shared our first argument about furniture – a white bookshelf, to be specific. I began my first full-time position as a student teacher at Glenwood Elementary School in Perrysburg Ohio, teaching grades K-6 five days a week with the help of a cooperating teacher. I taught my first lesson to a group of first graders, and then my second, and my third…I’m now teaching grades 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I attended my first staff meeting and participated in my first tour of ‘bus duty’, which is quite complicated with kindergarteners. I took part in my first cookout combining the ‘new’ family, both Brett’s and mine together. I purchased my first real vacuum cleaner. And used it, willingly, for what was most definitely the first time.

Between all of that, I had time for another first. One that I never thought I would experience. I am a literary purist – this is pretty much the only part of my life in which I am conservative. But in a time of electronic readers and novel “apps” and books-turned-movies, someone has to stand up for the little guy. What’s so wrong with a hardback? Does industry really think that a machine, even a beautifully sleek and backlit machine, can replace the lovely scrape of a page across a page? How can you dog-ear a DVD to mark your favorite quotes? I have been tempted by books on tape before. My sister is a die-hard fan of them. “You can read while you’re cleaning the kitchen!” She cries. “You can read while you drive! They’re amazing!” But I was too stubborn to give in to the industry that was so vehemently trying to put me out of work.

So what changed? Time. Suddenly, my afternoons weren’t mine anymore. They belonged to lesson plans and wedding blogs, to staying after school for disciplinary meetings. My evenings were dedicated to seeing Brett after a full 12 hour day apart (he has officially signed his full-time contract with New York Life and has about 3 minutes at home per day) and trying to stay awake long enough to eat a full meal. And night time? Forget about it. We’re in bed by 10 and asleep within minutes. The only time that really belongs to me is my travel time. About twenty miles to school and twenty miles back everyday is free to curb my appetite for good reading. But in the real world, its not possible (safely, at least) to read while driving. So I have two choices – give up reading for pleasure all together until my schedule clears or bend my convictions and participate in the gradual destruction of society. Bring on the destruction!

The book of choice with which to begin my freefall? Stephen King’s Bag of Bones. Appropriate, as I’ve always thought of Stephen King as one of the figureheads of literary destruction. After all, what writer doesn’t scoff at ultra-wealthy authors, as well as those that churn out hundreds of books? “He’s so mainstream,” we sniff, sipping our snobby lattes in our snobby coffeehouses. “He writes for the masses! How pathetic! Where’s the heart? The creativity? Real artists scrounge quarters from the sidewalks and live in their parents’ basements. Real artists don’t make millions.” The same book-on-tape loving sister swears up and down by the genius of Stephen King. So on my way from Pittsburgh back to BG I decided to give the tapes a try.

That was just about a month ago. In bits and pieces, most about a half an hour apiece, I have worked through the 16 tapes that make up Bag of Bones. The book centers around Mike Newnan, a moderately successful author of mainstream thrillers (well isn’t that funny!), and the hole where his life used to be. Because in the first few minutes of Bag of Bones, Newnan’s beloved wife Jo drops dead in a drug store parking lot of a brain aneurism. As if that wasn’t enough of a bang for a beginning, she was pregnant, and didn’t tell her husband. Need more? They’d been trying to have kids for ten years.

With such a slap of events in the very beginning of a book, it can be difficult to decide if you really like the story or if you’re just drawn in by the immediate action. I can’t even count the number of books I’ve started to fall in love with because they draw me in from the very first page – but forty pages later, once the action sequence is over and the plot begins, I’m bored to tears. But right after Jo’s death there comes a sad little scene that hooked me right away. Newnan sits down at his kitchen table with his deceased wife’s purse. He dumps it out and shifts through the contents, still emotionally numb from seeing her dead body in the morgue. This is where the reader would expect an emotional monologue of epic proportions. I was sitting, ready to be harassed by cliché after cliché about losing a loved one and wading through waves of grief. Instead, Newnan discovers a small chocolate mouse, filled with marshmallow, that his wife had purchased before exiting the drug store. He turns it over in his hands and studies it. Then he quietly and eats it. Newnan can’t deal with the insides of his own body right now, so he nibbles on the mouse’s. This man has just lost the love of his life as suddenly as one can lose anything, and he is finding temporary solace in a small chocolate mouse whose insides are made of marshmallow. It’s beautiful.

Over the next four years, Newnan’s life changes dramatically. He becomes a bit of an invert, having lost the social half of his marriage. He throws his attention to crossword puzzles, almost obsessively. He has also lost his ability to write – in the past he had churned out as many as three full novels in a year, and now being anywhere near a computer with a word processing program induces a massive panic attack. At the end of his rope, Newnan heads to the summer property that his wife, Jo, had loved. Sarah Laughs, which sits in the fictional town of Dark Score Lake in Maine, is a beautiful old wooden lodge right on the lake where the pair had spent countless summers together. Newnan heads there because he assumes that he has nothing else to lose. He is, of course, incorrect.

At this point, a marvelously rich tapestry of characters, scenery, and plot begins to form. Past friends and acquaintances mix and mingle with new ones, and the property of Sarah Laughs itself comes alive. Eventually Newnan meets, in an incident simultaneously lucky and unlucky, a little girl named Kyra DeVore and her young mother, Maddie. These women turn Newnan’s life upside down, as women often do. What’s not so common? A haunted property teeming with battling ghosts – of mistreated African Americans from Maine’s racist past, of Newnan’s wife, silenced abruptly and perhaps not as naturally as the coroner had thought, and a cornucopia of other spirits smattered around the lake and throughout Sarah Laughs, each wanting to be heard and avenged.

And then, as my mother (who gave me the tapes, thanks mom!) so delightfully puts it, “all shit breaks loose.” Once you’re at tape four, there’s no turning back from Bag of Bones. But when you get to tape nine, you don’t even want to get out of the car. You find yourself wanting to drive in circles just so you can get through the next chapter. We need milk? Oh, darn… I don’t like this grocery store, I better go to the one in the next town over. Yes! Fifteen minutes of book time!

The most interesting thing about this story, to me, was the characters; but more than that, one specific character. Maine. King makes Maine come alive. I mean this on a few different levels. For one, the characters are so lively, and so attached to their little chunk of the world, that it personifies Dark Score Lake. Lively, bitter, two-sided and deceptively dangerous, Maine is as good a villain in Bag of Bones as I’ve ever seen. Second, in trying to fulfill their ghostly goals, the spirits in and around Sarah Laughs literally bring the landscape to life. Newnan is haunted by trees, rocks, paths, the house, and of course, the dark and ominous lake, most dangerous not only because of its size but also because of the murky secrets within. And finally, Maine comes to life through King’s carefully chosen figurative language. Foreshadowing and symbolism are hanging from every branch and hidden beneath every rock. The entire tone of the narration shifts as Newnan travels to and from Sarah Laughs, and around Maine. 

I learned two huge lessons from Bag of Bones. First and foremost: all you literary snobs, quit bitching about Stephen King and pick up one of his books. Perhaps it’s just this specific story, or maybe it’s all of them – but he’s great. The characters are three-dimensional and entertaining, the plots are complicated and twisting nonstop. Sometimes the current is slow, and sometimes it’s a bit too quick for comfort, but there is definitely no time to get bored. The dialogue is realistic and interesting, and the figurative language is strong and creative. I’m not a huge ghoulie and ghostie person, but I still found myself captivated and spooked by King’s descriptions of supernatural events. On top of that, the guy reads his book himself. All sixteen tapes. I like to think that this is because he put so much of his heart into this book that he couldn’t chance the idea of someone else butchering it vocally. King gives a captivating performance - including singing, screaming, and a special voice for the character of a three year old girl. Now that’s dedication.

I may have changed my mind about Stephen King, but I’m still not 100% sure about books on tape. There are some definite pros and cons. The pros, of course, include the fact that you can listen to a tape while doing just about anything. Driving, cooking, cleaning, running, you name it – you’re in northern Maine battling ghosts with Mike Newnan. That makes reading easier and more accessible for people who don’t have a lot of spare time, or who don’t enjoy the act of reading. But there are some serious cons.

First of all, tapes can be damn hard to deal with. They’re bulky, they break easily, and it’s not easy to find a player for them anymore. They love to disappear down into the cracks between the seats and they don’t do well in the heat – poor tape number 7 didn’t quite make it, to my dismay. This left a gaping hole in my story. It’s not easy to lose an entire chapter out of hardback book. If you lose a book, you lose a book. But with tapes, if you misplace one, the whole story is thrown off. I still enjoyed the rest of the book, but I will always wonder what that disappearing hour entailed. In the climax of the story, there were references to a specific dream I didn’t understand. I wasted most of tape eight grappling, trying to catch my footing again. Yes, it’s my fault for losing the tape, but it still counts as a con, because I say so.

My favorite thing about books on tape, other than the time well spent? They up the ante. When you read, you’re free to imagine the scene in your mind’s eye. But when you hear the novel, you’re left with all of that extra brainpower to create a full blown movie in your head. The novel is all around you. You’re hearing it, seeing it, feeling it, experiencing it. Consider a film without sound versus film with sound. Turning up that volume makes everything more powerful. And in this specific case, you’re hearing every word exactly the way the author meant it to be heard. There is no opportunity for misplaced pronunciation or sarcasm. What King meant is what the reader hears. There is a certain power in knowing that.

My first book on tape experience has been a lot like all of my other first experiences this past month. Scary, exciting, aggravating, funny, and over too fast. Overall, the experience left me slightly shaken, but smiling. Shaken because my firm anti-book on tape beliefs have been seriously wounded. Smiling because the story was addicting and my urge to go to Maine is even stronger now than it’s ever been. So where do I stand now on my battle against “over-convenienced reading?” I have no idea. But hopefully, no matter where the future of the book is headed, Stephen King will be there.

How Did You Get This Number?

I have never had a one night stand. I am a bit traditional (I'm sure most men would say 'prude'), distinctly female in my links between emotional and physical intimacy. You can't love someone right when you meet them, etc. etc. I'm generally not quick to trust, and certainly not quick to hop into bed. But when it comes to books, I am quite a little strumpet. I will read the first two chapters and declare that I am in love. If the book jacket has more than three colors and a snazzy phrase, I am smitten. And if I actually enjoy the book? Forget about it, I'm gone. Completely head over heels in love. The author becomes an object of affection, an imagined close personal friend. There are a few times that I've been close to sending them valentines in the mail...luckily Brett has a pretty steady crazy-meter and stops me before I can get arrested.

If you remember correctly, this is what happened with James Frey. After A Million Little Pieces, I was one step short of tattooing his name on my bicep. Then Bright Shiny Morning hit, and there I was, ready to avoid his gaze if I saw him on the street in the following weeks. You would think that I had learned my lesson from this experience and would guard my heart more carefully the next time. But Sloane Crosley disarmed me just as easily, the little minx. The literary equivalent of one wonderful night together and I was ready to call her my soulmate. But to give myself a little credit, Crosley's first collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake had everything a girl could look for – humor, emotion, reality, ceaseless sarcasm and mocking. It was the George Clooney of social satire books. Unfortunately, How Did You Get This Number didn't quite live up to the first-date hype. Yeah, we still had a good time. I laughed. But I also spent a bit of it awkwardly looking at my watch, or pushing my food around my plate.

The second date started out rocky, and wavered between 'good' and 'okay' for the remaining eight essays. It had some wonderful high points, some embarrassing low points, and a lot of so-so in between pages. But overall, it didn't live up to the expectations that Crosley's first book left me with. Perhaps it's my own fault, for falling in love so fast. Maybe I should get to know books and their intentions better before I trust them with my heart.

I Was Told There'd Be Cake was beautifully effortless. The hilarious stories and jokes seemed to tumble accidentally out of Crosley's mind and onto the pages. Reading each essay was like watching a stand-up comic at his best - they were vivid, lively, and incredibly entertaining. But mainly, they were impressive because they seemed inherent. Crosley came across as charismatic, eccentric, and a Mad Hatter sort of genius. But she's not quite as charming in How Did You Get This Number? The stories are still funny, and Crosley's hijinks are still quirky. But the prose is more lumbering. Its like that same stand up comic running out of material. She's reaching farther and working harder to make the audience laugh.

Maybe Crosley caught “I'm funny and I know it disorder”, which can be deadly for humor. Think about it. Perhaps you're a natural jokester, and you've always considered yourself the jester of your group. Whether you make the jokes for your own benefit or for the benefit of those around you, one thing is always true – you want other people to think you're funny. You stay creative, constantly on your toes, for that reason. The second someone tells you you're funny, you start to slip. Your head gets bigger and your list of material gets smaller. Why keep working so hard? You're already funny. And if you're funny once, you're funny forever. That's a rule, right?

When her book sales started soaring, America made the mistake of letting Crosley know just how funny she is. So suddenly her sneaky, self conscious jokes have changed shape. They have morphed into something much more obvious, something laborious and tiring. Where we had quippy one liners or creative observations, we now have paragraphs with semi-colons and parenthesis, explaining a maze of puns and metaphors. The humor is still there, but its different. Its lost some of its charm and innocence, as well as its attractive effortlessness. And a lot of its appeal.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the book. In How Did You Get This Number?, Crosley travels farther out of her comfort zone than she did in her first collection of essays, both emotionally and physically. She travels – to Paris, Alaska, and, in a whim of childhood fantasy, plays the old “spin the globe and pledge to travel wherever your finger falls” trick and ends up in Lisbon, Portugal. Many of the essays are still laugh-out-loud funny, like If You Sprinkle, where we get to enjoy a Mean Girls-esque mental revenge on an elementary school rival from Crosley's past. I was rolling on the floor when this former queen bee ended up crawling beneath a dirty bathroom sink in order to keep her drooling niece from playing with mace.

But what made the book even more enjoyable for me were the rare moments of real emotion. Crosley dares to lift the funny-girl curtain and let the reader get a glimpse of her other sides, and its incredibly rewarding. In Lost in Space, it's hard not to sense her shame when Crosley describes her mother's disappointment in her intellectual fall from grace. As a child, Crosley was ahead of the curve. She was advanced for her age group and her mother celebrated her genius, considering putting her in a special school and mapping out her future presidential campaign. But as she grew up and her development fell to the level of her peers and, eventually, below it, her mother couldn't cry 'genius' anymore. Eventually, they both had to deal with a\the truth – that Crosley had a learning disability that kept her from being able to comprehend simple things like ScanTron tests, maps, and analog clocks. The story hits its pinnacle when she gets lost shopping with her father in a large market.

“It was the indignity of it all that bothered me. Consequence-wise, the experience of getting lost is not the end of the world. Unless you do it imprudently, veering toward poorly lit parking garages and uncovered manholes nothing terrible beyond tardiness is going to happen to you. But that's the thing. A learning disability doesn't exactly qualify as an emergency. It's a subtle problem for everyone except the person that has it. Standing in the middle of the aisle with the shoppers buzzing around me, I told myself I would trade breaking a bone just once rather than continue with a lifetime of this crap. Because at least with a broken bone you get a cast or a sling. People see your problem coming. But how do you explain an eighteen-year-old trapped and teary-eyed in front of a pile of season gourds? Where is her excuse?”

In How Did You Get This Number, we get to see Sloane as a human being with a heart for the first time. This hits me hardest in two separate stories; Lost in Space, mentioned above, and Off the Back of a Truck. In the latter, Crosley finally gives the reader a peek of her romantic life. It takes two full essay collections, but we finally get to see just what Sloane Crosley is like when she's in love. And it is just as complicated and hopeless as Crosley's character and experiences thus far would suggest – she lets herself fall for a smart young New York fella after carefully making sure that he and his long-term girlfriend had put an end to their relationship. They live happily (more or less) for awhile, and Crosley gets some of her charm back when describing her affection and slight obsessiveness for the boy. But after dating for over a year, our heroine receives a call from her boyfriend's still live-in girlfriend (not only girlfriend, but high school sweetheart – ouch) to alert her of his true character. The moment is painful, but illuminating. All of Crosley's stories are entertaining, but this one has substance. This gives us insight into her character, which helps us to further understand why she is the way she is. She doesn't show emotion because she doesn't trust. Why doesn't she trust? Well I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons, but here's one spectacular example of untrustworthy douchebaggery right here. Plus, not only does it gives us a glimpse into her soul, but the essay gives some heavy advice about relationships.

“If you have to ask someone to change, to tell you they love you, to bring wine to dinner to call you when they land, you can't afford to be with them. It's not worth the price, even though, just like the Tiffany catalog no one tells you what the price is. You set it yourself, and if you're lucky it's reasonable. You have a sense of when you're about to go bankrupt. Your own sense of self-worth takes the wheel and says, 'Enough of this shit. Stop making excuses; No one's that busy at work. No one's allergic to whipped cream. There are too cell phones in Sweden.' But most people don't get lucky. They get human. They get crushes. This means you irrationally mortgage what little logic you own to pay for this one thing. This relationship is an impulse buy, and you'll figure out if it's worth it later.”

Light Pollution is another gem. In the story, Crosley has traveled to Alaska in order to be a part of a close friend's wedding. The bridesmaids, bride, and a soon-to-be-regretful groom are on their way to a hike when a drunk driver on the road in front of them hits a baby bear on the highway. A collection of vivid snapshots follows in the next few pages – the bear laying pathetically on the asphalt, its blood spreading from its body. The bridesmaids, still piled into the back two rows of the SUV, crying to an unexpected soundtrack as their “Bear Warning Bells” (part of their Out-of-Town hospitality packages) ring sweetly from where they are tucked into their ponytails and braids. The chilling silence as one panicked bridal attendant realizes how likely it is that a momma bear will be close behind. And that cold, hollow feeling of 'I will never be able to forget this moment' that both the narrator and the reader feel when the baby bear is finally shot and put out of its misery.

“The blood goes black. Our bells are silenced. The sound of gunshots reverberates off of the tree trunks and rocks behind us. I wonder about avalanche triggers. There's a collective whimper in the car. I have always wondered what I would do it I was in one of those movies where someone gets stabbed or eaten alive while I'm in the closet or under the bed. […] Now I know. I would do nothing. I would just stare. Make a note of it and replay it later.”

Painful, awkward, fish-out-of-water moments like this are Crosley's specialty. The most touching moments of this book seem to happen when she's out of her element and put to the test. It's almost as if Crosley is afraid to express her feelings when she's within the confines of her own life. She can only be vulnerable when traveling internationally, visiting the past, or communicating with a stranger. It's frustrating, but is also a part of her charm. Yet another reason that Sloane Crosley is someone I like to read about, but who I would never want to be.

And who I probably wouldn't want to date. After our second run-in, I've found that my feelings for Crosley are lukewarm. The passion and intrigue from our first encounter have faded, and I'm starting to see some of her shortcomings. The attraction isn't as strong as it once was. But I still can't deny that How Did You Get This Number? is an experience worth having. Even if there aren't worthwhile moments on every page, those moments you can find in the book are worth the wait. So I guess I'll shuffle Crosley into my “maybe if I'm in town and I don't have a boyfriend and there's no one interesting at the bar” pile – keep the number in my phone in case there's nothing better going on, and leave the door open just in case I ever want to try again.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

This post was brought to you by a recommendation from David Wegehaupt, who was a classmate during my time as a music student at BGSU. He has since then graduated, and is a grad student at Arizona State University. David is an uber cool, hip, skinny and big-haired kid (think Kenny G., but trendy) who is always two or three steps ahead of the masses. I would label David as a “scene kid”, but he is fiercely interested in his own thing, never following in anyone's footsteps or accepting society's norms without question. He is an absurdly talented saxophone player that focuses mostly on modern music and performance, and also olds a degree in recording technology. If you're looking for what you think you know about the saxophone to completely explode, look up some of his performances. He's into the vegan, tattooed, outdoor living kind of life, and is cooler than approximately 60% of the people I have ever met. Along with this aura of awesomeness, David happens to be wicked smart and a voracious reader. Because of this cocktail of coolness and intelligence, I take his book recommendations very seriously. And that brings me to today's entry.

Knowing that I am a die-hard memoir fan, David suggested that I read Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, which he gave the high honor of being one of his favorite books of the year. Anyone reading this, please explain to me how you could turn down a title like that. I am a sucker for both catchy titles and cover art, and this book is la crème de la crème of both. The reviews on the book jacket were also top notch. “A heartbreaking, searing story... It is a story of self-discovery in the best sense, and also a story of the dissembling of history, the fight to keep oneself whole, and the inherent obligations of biology.” Said A.M. Holmes, author of Music for Torching. Brad Land, who wrote Goat, said “A wonder, both sweet and agonizing, a fusion of the lyric and the well-wrought story. It shatters convention with every word, and Flynn makes that destruction flawless.”

You were right, David – this book is awesome. Nick Flynn's book is not the kind of memoir you would expect from a kid with such a sad, screwed up story – he writes with passion and creativity. The book could be broken down into prose poems, instead of chapters. His words seem to take shape on the page or the tongue, jumping around as figures in your mind's eye. When he describes a blanket-covered lump shivering under the snow in a concrete corner, you don't just imagine it. You see it, you feel the ground pushing up against your shoulders and the snowflakes melting into the crevices of your ears.

The story is complicated and twisting, never following one path for too long. Nick Flynn is just another troubled kid trying to find his way and figure out what he's here for. His mother left his father and his lying, oily ways not long after he was born and he has grown up with no father figure in his life, not hearing a word from the man until he's in his upper teens. When he finally does hear from him, he discovers a man who lives a life of lies and unkept promises. He has no roots, no job, no home, no plans to remedy any of this. His father lives by the idea that he is a great writer (although he has never really written anything), and that someday, his book will be an American classic. “If you asked me about my father then – the years he lived in a doorway, in a shelter, in an ATM – I'd say, Dead, I'd say, Missing, I'd say, I don't know where he is. I'd say whatever I felt like saying, and it would all be true. I don't know him, I'd say...”

Like so many of us, Nick is discontented with his life and his family, hates school, drinks his way through his teenage years. He lives with his brother, his mother, and her endless cycle of boyfriends, all teetering on the edge of criminal or insane (or criminally insane). They aren't poor, but they're not rich; they're not happy, but they're not in despair; they don't communicate, but they aren't silent. It is a life of mediocrity and settling, and Nick feels understandably aloof. But unlike most of us, he turns this restless feeling into a want to do good for the world. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he sees his situation in perspective with those less fortunate. And so he turns his efforts to living an isolated life on a house boat, learning to rely on himself and to live without a solid home base. Then he finds a job at The Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless shelter in the city of Boston.

Around this time, Nick starts hearing more regularly from his father. He has received letters over the years, demented unfinished sentences declaring his life a famous and glorified success. I cannot even imagine the disappointment that he must have gone through when this reunion finally happened. Put yourself in his shoes – you are a child growing up knowing that your father lives around the area, that you could be passing him on the street at any time, and that he just doesn't want to bother to have anything to do with you. Through random letters, you are being prodded to believe that this is because he is rich and famous, wildly talented or creative, any sort of genius that keeps him too busy and tormented to visit his child. And then, when you finally meet?

“One day, out of nowhere, my father telephones – 'Get over here with your truck.' The first time I've heard his voice on the phone, the first time I've ever spoken to him, really, beyond that 'Hi' when I was eight. I'm sitting behind my door with a shotgun, he now says, waiting for the knob to turn. […] I find him sitting naked in a galvanized tin tub in the center of his room, bathing and drinking straight vodka from a silver chalice, like some demented king from in the Middle Ages.”

It doesn't take long for the fantasy to fade. Jonathan Flynn is a washed up alcoholic, clinging to a pointless dream and shuffling from place to place once friends tire of his outlandish stories and attitude.

Nick is still working at the homeless shelter. “I've been working in the shelter for a couple years,” he writes, “And I want to see how close to the edge I can come without falling.” He is an emotionless soldier on the front lines of the battle against homelessness and hunger. Through his words, we are taken on a no holds barred trip through the dark, cold streets. “If not for the rats you could crawl beneath a bush. A bush. A bench. A bridge. The alliterative universe. Rats too can pass through that needle's eye to enter heaven, as easily as they pass into a box imagined into a house. Houses inside buildings, houses inside tunnels, some exist for only a day, some, miraculously, longer. This box held a refrigerator, the refrigerator is in an apartment, a man is in the box. Tomorrow the box will be flattened and tossed, you've seen the garbagemen stomping them down to fit into the truck. Wake up on the grass, soaking wet. Dew is the piss of God. 'Another bullshit night in suck city,' my father mutters.”

Once his father starts showing up more regularly at the Pine Street Inn and causing the inevitable trouble that comes with the combination of vodka and ego, Nick switches to another shift, where he is driving the Inn's van around the city at night, handing out blankets and food and trying to coerce the stubborn to spend the night indoors. The view from here is even more sad. People are huddled inside of 24 hour ATMs, Dunkin' Donuts, anywhere unlocked in order to get warm. They tape garbage bags around their bodies to stay dry, lay on air vents to catch the warm current and stay until morning, sweating, uncomfortable, because if they move they will surely freeze to death. Nick learns their names, their stories. Many are normal people who simply caught a bad hand. Some carry around pieces of their old life with them, to remind them that they are still real people. One man drifts in and out of the shelter wearing extremely expensive shoes.

These people make up much of Nick's 'family'. But the other part of Nick's family, those to which he is blood related, complete the story. The tragic fate of Nick's mother makes up a large section of the book, but we don't see much of the relationship between his brother and himself. Nick has a ten year on-and-off relationship with a girl named Emily, one of the few who know his history. But the center of the story is, of course, Nick and Jonathan's relationship. There are no words to describe the interactions between the two. Nick himself cannot explain why he bothers with the man, who still shows no affection and only comes to him when he needs money or a place to stay. The only thing that Jonathan seems to have passed on genetically is chronic alcoholism; time after time Nick admits that he has no idea why he is interested in his father, why he has faith in him. But unlike his father, he has compassion, and does his best to help. “Here is a man, shaped like a blanket, shaped like a box, shaped like a bench. Easy to miss. If this is my father, if I leave a sandwich beside his sleeping body, does this become a family meal? Is this bench now our dinner table? Are we inside again? Is this what it means to be holding it together? Am I coping? How's my driving?”

The most difficult part of the book, for me, is Nick's lack of emotion. Here is a kid handed one of the biggest piece-of-crap lives I have ever seen, but he floats through it all, seemingly unscathed. His father swings a club with a nail sticking out of it inches from his face, and he barely bats an eyelash. We see some emotion towards Nick's mother after she passes, but this is a single ripple of feeling. Some may complain that this makes the book less personal and interesting, but I don't think that Nick purposefully kept his emotions from the reader. I think that he expressed them as best he could, and this is what lodges itself under my skin – there are people whose lives are so painful that they must shut off their ability to feel pain in order to survive. For some, stoicism is survival.

The book doesn't always move in chronological order, which can be confusing. The writing flicks casually to the past and the future. It seems to be written as more of a journal entry than a novel – casual and conversational, with swooping metaphors and intricate descriptions. You really feel as if you are in Nick's mind, he brings you so closely into his thought processes and feelings. But the lack of structure adds to the tumultuous and unpredictable mess of Nick's life. The story is inspiring, stoic, heartbreaking, wonderfully real. Here I will hand out my highest honor in terms of vernacular – both the writing and the plot are extremely refreshing. I was delighted and terrified within the same pages. I wish that we had gotten to know Nick's blood relatives a little better, as well as Emily, his long-term girlfriend. But these shadowy characters and plotlines only make those which receive the spotlight shine more beautifully – and harshly. This book reaches out and grabs you, like all the best do. It reminds me in some ways of Theresa Williams' The Secret of Hurricanes, with the lyrical writing and straight emotion. Both writers refuse to apologize for their stories, which is something that makes me fall in love with them both.

In the back of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, there are five completely blank pages. There are many different ways to consider these extra pages. An editing mistake. Something to make the book look longer, more full. A way of saying, “this story isn't finished.” An afterthought that never quite made it. I personally see this as a dedication from Nick to his father. Throughout the memoir, Jonathan Flynn is chasing after one single goal – to write. He calls himself a writer again and again, those who know him say that it is the only thread of self that he has. He clings to this word, writer, and it keeps him afloat through a sea of homelessness and alcoholism, of wasted time and missed opportunities. But each time Jonathan describes his book, the title changes. The number of chapters changes. The amount of cash the publishers are waving in his face wavers between two and four million. Nick believes that, just like the rest of the life that Jonathan claims, the novel doesn't exist – but then, suddenly, there it is. When it finally emerges, this 'great American classic' is anything but. And so, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City takes shape, in order to replace this masterpiece. He takes the burden from his father's shoulders to his own, and with it creates a truly beautiful work.

“For thirty pages or so 'The Button Man' shows promise – a hybrid of songs, letters, found documents and scrawlings smuggled out of a county jail, woven in with a tone and ideas sampled from 'Catcher in the Rye' – a meta text – but, like his life, it soon falls apart, dissipates into incoherence. What would I do if it was a masterpiece, an overlooked classic? What then? Would our blood be redeemed? Would time be made whole? Would I still have such ambivalence about calling myself a poet? Would I have more? Would I have some idea of what it means to be a father, would I still be terrified of becoming one? He cannot die, he tells me, until his work is complete. Perhaps I am digging his grave, perhaps the book you have in your hands is the coin for his eyes. Perhaps the story of his masterpiece is his life raft, what he's invented to keep himself afloat.”

Bright Shiny Morning (sort of)

My old roommate was obsessed with puzzles. Amy, who I lived with for three years, could sit for hours working with endless patience on a picture of ice cream cones, or an English garden, or the Backstreet Boys. A budding middle school English teacher, she would reward her work on lesson plans with allotted “puzzle time”. For her birthday last year, I decided to order her a custom puzzle with our picture on it. I chose a lovely shot of us hugging in front of a view of Windsor, Canada, excited about our trip. The day the puzzle came, I was so excited – I watched as she unwrapped the gift, waiting to watch her eyes light up with... confusion? She looked up at me, trying not to laugh. “You ordered me an Asian puzzle?”

I grabbed the box. On the front of the commemorative tin proudly sat a picture of a smiling Asian couple, with the words “Happy Anniversary Baby!” across the bottom. Its not that I have anything against Asians. In fact, I adore their delicious stir-fried cuisine. Still, I don't love it enough to display a random couple of Asian-American descent in a prominent place in my home. Needless to say, Snapfish sent me the wrong puzzle. Amy and I decided to put it together anyway, hoping that maybe they'd put the correct puzzle in the wrong tin.

As pieces started to come together, it was clear that this wasn't the puzzle that I ordered. We finished putting it together anyway – seriously, this girl cannot stop with a puzzle once she has started – despite knowing that we would be disappointed with the result.

This is exactly the experience that I had this week with James Frey's novel, Bright Shiny Morning. I “ordered” the novel wanting the same mind-blowing, life changing affect that A Million Little Pieces had on me. When it arrived and I took a quick glance, I noticed that it wasn't exactly what I had hoped for. But I decided to have some faith and put the puzzle together anyway. And then I was left with the literary equivalent of a pair of Asain lovebirds, staring back at me, not at all what I had wanted.

Frey's writing in Pieces changed the way that I thought about autobiographical writing entirely. In my very first post on this blog, I ranted and raved about Frey's bravery and honesty, about how much the book broke my heart and inspired me. So reading Frey's novel, Bright Shiny Morning, seemed like a natural progression. However, I was extremely disappointed. Where is the brave, unprecedented writing that we saw throughout Pieces? Where are the gritty details, the poetic sentences, the cringing physical descriptions? The first book was raw and honest. Bright Shiny Pieces seemed almost exactly the opposite.

From the very first page, the characters and their situations are heavy with repetition, cliché and vague language. I think that repetition and very general description are tools that Frey is trying to use to achieve a certain effect here, but the only effect i'm getting is laziness. Pick up a dictionary and find a better word for 'hate' or 'drunk' so we don't have to read them over and over again. If I see one more repeated adjective, I'm going to confuse this book for a Twilight novel. I suppose that the style (if you can call it a style) is the same that he used in A Million Little Pieces, so I'm not sure why it feels so different here. I guess in Pieces it was easier to accept choppy sentences and repeated phrases because the guy who was writing them was just so fucked up. But these characters are sober. They're awake, they're smart, they haven't damaged their brains with 10 years of massive continuous drug use. What works for one book doesn't necessarily work for another.

“She reaches the bottom of the stairs sits down on the last step puts her face in her hands hates herself, hates her job, hates this house and yard, hates the street and town, hates that she's here five days a week, hates cleaning doing laundry washing dishes dusting. Her face is in her hands and she hates that she has no confidence. Her face is in her hands and she hates that she allows [her boss] to humiliate her. Her face is in her hands and she hates that her life is not what it could have ben. Her face, her hands. Hates.”

Say it with me kids. Hates. We get it.

Other than the vague droning language, there are some other bones that I have to pick with Frey's novel. I think that the book is supposed to be a series of vignettes that link together in order to show the reader that although LA is a massive city, every little piece matters. Ideas like this work beautifully, when done correctly, although they can be a bit theatrical (think the movie Crash). I think that the key to making stories like this work, at least in a long piece, is to make sure that every miniature story pops. If each character doesn't stick out enough in the reader's mind, they can all start to blur together. If there are too many stories, its tough to remember what the heck your'e reading about.

Frey's characters are all completely flat. Those that are supposed to be innocent are innocent through and through, the evil has no soft side. For example, here is a snippet of the litany we get from a famous actor. “He picks up one of the fashion magazines flips through it he's better-looking than all of the men...he puts it down. He picks up another one. Same thing. Another one, same thing. He wonders what his life would be like if he wasn't so good-looking. He would probably be a world-renowned professor at a prestigious eastern university. Or maybe an English university.” This crap is nonstop. Because of his vague, unoriginal language, all of the stories bleed into one big blob. I start forgetting who is who. There's a couple that moved from Ohio – are they the ones with the meth problems? Is the hispanic girl the same who got raped in a parking lot earlier? And to make things even more difficult, there is no pattern to when the stories appear. We go right from the wealthy actor, an obnoxiously egotistical closeted homosexual, to the man who started Putt Putt Bonanza. Then on to the homeless man who lives in a bathroom. Then we're back to the gay actor. Suddenly we're with the spanish maid. And then we're with the couple from Ohio. And then back to Putt Putt Bonanza. Intermingling story lines can be a wonderful way to let multiple characters have a voice within a single novel. But I don't think Frey did it right.

Another problem? Mixed in with these characters we are supposed to be getting to know, there are random vignettes that dead-end. We hear about a man who owns a gun store maybe twice, and then he disappears. A woman gets raped and decides that she is either going to shoot her attacker or herself, and we never find out which. Different people are swerving in and out like crazy, to the point that your mind is running in circles trying to keep up with who matters and who is a throw-away character.

I will fully admit that most books like this tend to come together towards the end. That I am absolutely cutting off my nose to spite my face by retiring the book early instead of trudging through to the end to see what happens. And may I say that it is quite unlike me to give up on a story halfway through.If I kept reading, there's a big chance that everything would get tied up nicely into a work of moderate skill and sense. But I have over 250 pages of Bright Shiny Morning remaining, and I just don't think I can do it. And why should I, when there so many other books awaiting my love and affection?

The only character that really stands strong is the city itself. The city is large, cruel, schizophrenic. Frey does a great job painting the scene of the million dollar mansions across the street from the bums sleeping in dumpsters – of wealthy beach goers trying not to notice the homeless teenage girls moaning with hunger at their feet. It is difficult to hear that a city like this truly exists, but that is what the novel needs. Frey seems to have taken the gritty, pessimistic lens that he had focused on himself in A Million Little Pieces and instead turned it towards the city. The book sort of feels like a panoramic view, but with annoying little kids running around in the way. There's beauty in there somewhere, but you just can't seem to get them out of your line of vision so you can really enjoy it.

If you're looking for a book that takes all of the above pieces and puts them together in a way that actually fits, I suggest Bret Eason Ellis' Less Than Zero. The book, which was called a “modern-day, California based Catcher in the Rye”, may deal almost exclusively with the wealthy, but I still think that it gives a clearer picture. Plus, I actually enjoy reading it, instead of wanting to stab my eyes out with an icepick. If you're looking for a view of the mean streets of California from a lower socio-economical, more screwed up perspective, Nic Scheff's Tweak does an incredible job. I would recommend these two over Bright Shiny Morning any day.

Frey, you had your chance, and we're over. It was nice while it lasted. It's not you, it's....no, it's you. It's definitely you. There will always be a special place in my heart for A Million Little Pieces, but I'm afraid that I'm on to bigger and better things. Along with ordering personalized birthday gifts from Snapfish, I am putting this novel into my “not worth it” file.