It Ain't Abuse If You Don't Call the Cops -- The Enduring Wisdom of 50 Shades of Grey

Yes, I read Fifty Shades of Grey. After about four months of waiting, my turn finally came up at the library, and against my better judgement, I checked the thing out. Truth be told, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, seeing as I was prepared for Fifty Shades of Grey to be the worst book ever. It’s certainly better written that Twilight (though that's not saying much). But mostly, I was just confused by it, by its unparalled success – who are these millions of women who are avidly reading and recommending Fifty Shades of Grey? Okay, it wasn’t terrible, but it certainly was ridiculous. And fucked-up. And culturally damaging. And juvenile, which strikes me as odd considering it was written by a woman in her mid-40s. The dialogue was juvenile and ridiculous. Anastasia’s “cute” and overly repetitive quirks – like biting her lip, rolling her eyes, and her vocal inner goddess and subconscious – were ridiculous. I mean, the girl’s lucky she’s got any lip left. The sex scenes and Anastasia’s instant orgasms were ridiculous – so much so that if I was supposed to be turned on, it didn’t work because I was too busy rolling my eyes. And don't get me started on Christian Grey...

If you're not familiar with the premise, Fifty Shades of Grey is the tale of the naive Anastasia Steele, whose world is rocked when she takes up with the handsome, sexy billionaire Christian Grey. Ana manages to meet this god when she interviews him as a favor for her roommate shortly before her college graduation. She’s instantly attracted to him and can’t believe it when he seems to take a liking to her, too – because she’s plain and clumsy and boring, of course. They go through a little flirty-flirty, but they’re both in for a shock – she’s a virgin, and he only enters into Dominant-Submissive sexual relationships that come with a contract. In short, he's looking for someone he can abuse in his Red Room of Pain, and Ana spends the rest of the book hemming and hawing over whether or not she wants to participate.

 

Apparently this is the housewife fantasy. Which makes me really sad because at its core, Fifty Shades of Gray puts forth a really destructive message for women, one we've been fighting against culturally for a really long time. Seems like this is more than a few steps back.

 

Throughout Fifty Shades of Grey is the oft-repeated trope of the ugly duckling being turned into a swan because of a man’s “love.” Anastasia spends the entire book insecurely wondering why the devastatingly handsome and rich Christian Grey is attracted to her. “I am rendered speechless by the look of hunger in his eyes. Wow … to be this wanted by this Greek god.” (358)  It doesn’t matter that he has deep-rooted psychological issues that will damage her emotionally and physically – He’s rich! He’s handsome! He must be too good for her! Ugh.

 

And then beneath that, Fifty Shades of Gray presents the disturbing premise that beating your partner is arousing, not abusing – because hey, she doesn’t call the cops, right? He actually suggests at one point that it’s all in how you look at it, that maybe it’s only society telling her spanking/punishing (i.e. physical hurting) your partner is bad. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Ana should run for the hills, she's convinced that her love can fix him. That when he says he doesn't do the girlfriend thing and he's bad for her, he actually means the opposite. 

 

E.L. James uses this ugly duckling fantasy -- rich, handsome god-man falls in love with Plain Jane, recognizing her special specialness, breaking all of his austere rules because even though he's damaged, love makes him want to reach out -- to cloud the main issue. “I want to hurt you. But not beyond anything that you couldn’t take.” (376) There are a couple of passages like this, and all I can think is: HE STILL WANTS TO HIT YOU! The rest is bullshit. But what is Ana's response? “This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he’s lost … somewhere in his darkness. His eyes are wide and bleak and tortured. I can soothe him, join him briefly in the darkness and bring him into the light.” (377) God, bring back the vampires – this shit is toxic.

 

And the thing is, Fifty Shades of Grey only works because of Christian Grey’s superficial qualities. Strip away the youth, the wealth and the handsome face, and all you have a man who gets insanely jealous when his girlfriend talks to another guy, stalks her movements through her cell phone, is a complete control freak, and  gets his sexual kicks from fully dominating and beating his girlfriend (but only in places where others won’t see the bruises). Wow, so erotic. Usually, you have these types of guys arrested. So why has this book become housewife porn? Anastasia literally only recognizes these superficial things once. ONCE. And the second she admits it, she goes into the whole, oh, poor him, he’s so damaged, my heart hurts for him. Perhaps you think I’m irrationally angry because Fifty Shades of Grey is just a book, but the thing is, I’ve been there. And you know what happens? It doesn't matter how rich or handsome he is. You can’t heal his wounds with love. He just keeps abusing you. And it makes me so angry that this woman has made like $20 million peddling the idea there’s something erotic or sexy in that.

Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands: Yet another passive friggin' protagonist (#13)

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, goes the old adage -- and when in Rome, read their books. While I am still deep in the throes of Game of Thrones -- I've just started Dance with Dragons -- I've also realized that while I am spending time in Turkey, I should explore some of their literature and expand my horizons a little bit further.

And so I began with Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands, a novel by expatriate Lawrence Goodman that was published in Turkey, which accounts for its scarcity of Amazon.com. (Okay, so it's not exactly "Turkish" literature, but it is set in Turkey, on an island in the Sea of Marmara, just off Istanbul.) I didn't expect much from it, though I hoped it would be a sweet read in the vein of My Father's Glory & My Mother's Castle by Marcel Pagnol or Rosamunde Pilcher's Sleeping Tiger. But it wasn't to be, mostly because Sweet Confusion on the Princes' Islands features one of fiction's most passive protagonists -- something that any casual reader of this blog knows I hate. And most interestingly, for once that boring protagonist is a man!

The novel revolves around Ed Wilkie, a Californian in his early 30s who has impulsively decided to take a job teaching English at a boys' school on one of the Princes' Islands. It begins with his arrival in Istanbul -- he's a single man, accompanied only by his dog, Starleen -- and though things seem to be a bit odd, merely a sign of things to come, Ed takes it all in stride. It turns out that Ed never questions a thing -- despite all the bizarre incidents that happen over the course of Sweet Confusion, the man never shows the slightest bit of curiousity about anything. He doesn't even know the first name, nationality or specific line of business of his closest friend on the island. The book blurb calls him naive, but he struck me as sort of a dimwit.

Superficially, Sweet Confusion is a tale about the minor but zany adventures surrounding a naive young man thrust into a new world. But the adventures aren't always minor -- there is murder and drug trafficking, after all -- and they aren't particularly zany. And that's because the story is from Ed's point of view, and again, Ed never has a reaction to anything or asks any questions. As a result, nothing in the plot is well-developed; weird things happen, but it's generally without significant or emotional comment from any of the characters, making for a very flat book. Not surprisingly, the end was completely contrived and ridiculous.

A Feast for Crows: Weakest of the group, SPOILERS AHEAD (#12)

By the end of a Storm of Swords, the third book in George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, I felt like I'd gone through a war (and barely survived). At that point, nearly all of the main characters have died, usually in the most brutal of ways, and those that are left have escaped off into the world, their status and location generally unknown. PLEASE STOP READING NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO'S ALIVE AND WHO'S DEAD AT THE BEGINNING OF BOOK FOUR.

As I said in my last post on the series, Storm of Swords contains somewhat of an ending. There's a definite lull in the action -- the war for the throne seems to have mostly abated with the deaths of Robb Stark, Joffrey and Renly, and Stannis' choice to instead fight at the Wall, so there is somewhat of a peace in the realm. Almost everyone else of major importance to the story -- Arya, Sansa, Tyrion, Bran and Rickon -- has skipped off to locations unknown, almost all outside of the kingdom.

It's a definite and necessary lull in the action, and I expected that A Feast for Crows, book four, would pick up that thread, following the far-flung characters. They are the major characters left, after all. But that's not what happens at all, and it's very perplexing. Martin chose to dedicate the bulk of A Feast for Crows to the activities of minor characters, and the result is a pretty boring 800-page tome. Tyrion, Bran and Rickon, and Daenerys Targaryen are not in A Feast for Crows at all; Jon Snow only makes a brief appearance in Sam's narration. Instead, the book focuses heavily on Brienne of Tarth's fruitless search for the Stark sisters, family intrigue in Dorne and power struggles on the Iron Islands; the most interesting segment of the book is Cersei's, where she finally, at the end, gets what she deserves. Samwell Tarly, Arya and Sansa do make appearances, but not a lot happens with them.

Ultimately, A Feast for Crows spent too much time on the details. The book ends in a really interesting place -- it just didn't need all the minutae to get there. Apparently when George R.R. Martin was writing the book, he couldn't stop, and when he realized he had too much material, he split the story (and characters) into two books -- A Feast for Crows and book five, A Dance with Dragons. But I feel like he would have been much better served to cut the minor characters from this book (or at least limit them to a chapter), creating a tighter, more exciting read. Having said that, I know expect A Dance with Dragons to be a fireworks show...maybe it will be worth it?

March: A grimmer vision of Little Women (#8)

When I was home in late May, I was excited to get a couple of books of out of the library that I can't get here, ending up with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (Laurie Viera Rigler) and Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, in addition to Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer Prize-winning March. I'd had March on my to-read list for a couple of years, but I never got around to it. And when I was home, it was once again at the bottom of the pile; I started both of the other two, but as it turned out, I couldn't get into either -- Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict was un-fun fluff and the tone of Bel Canto, which seemed akin to reading a Woody Allen movie, put me off. So, after many years of good intentions, I finally started March.

March takes its title from the last name of the main character, the much-missed father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, imagining what his experience was like as a chaplain during the Civil War, the cause of his absence in Alcott's book. The novel starts out after a devastating battle, and basically, because of a chance encounter with a woman named Grace, a former slave, that he had met as a young man, he starts to remember his past. The book alternates between his reawakened memories and his present circumstances in the Union army, and March struggles to stay true to his family and his own highly held values while existing/surviving in his wartime reality.

March is an incredibly well-written book but I can't say that I loved it, mostly because I didn't like Mr. March all that much. Generally the main character in a novel -- the hero, if you will -- will learn something about themselves and the world, growing and changing in the process, but I don't think he did, not really. March is incredibly selfish from the start and enjoys playing the martyr, while not seeing the hardships he puts upon others, especially his family. I think this is what bothered me most about him, and the novel in general -- in Little Women, his wife Marmee and their daughters Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth miss him so much and have to make so many sacrifices in his absence, and it turns out, in this telling, that he's a selfish bastard who didn't really deserve it. He never honors the individuality of his wife or makes an effort to truly connect to or understand her. He’s so willing to help others, but never really his family; he always sacrifices them to the bigger cause, while they sacrifice themselves for him. And this never changes.

He also doesn't get himself up from hardship. Since he feels that he's shamed himself (by not winning an unwinnable situation), he refuses to go home, saying his work is not done, that others died or were taken back as slaves because he was not "brave enough." But really, he's choosing the easier path, one where he doesn't have to tell the truth to those he loves, as well as giving into his fondness for playing the martyr. In the end, he's literally forced to go back to his family. Grace has to reject him for him to go home, and John Brooke has to physically bring him back, gripping his arm as they make their way to the house. He doesn’t choose it and he doesn’t change.

But most importantly, he never has to atone for his initial stifling and later betrayal of Marmee. This is why he doesn't want to go home -- if he stays away, he doesn't have to tell her about his entire past or reveal the untruths written in his letters. But in the end, he doesn't really have to say anything. Marmee figures it out for herself and basically just decides to understand after she realizes it’s hard to write the truth when she’s writing to the girls, and she wants to keep the family together. She learns something, but he doesn't.

I am really not sure why Geraldine Brooks chose to write Mr. March this way. He's fairly passive and ineffectual, making him a weak character as things happen to him, when he should really be the one instigating the events of the novel. My only guess is that she's trying to reflect the harsh realities of war -- he's broken by what he's seen and done, and that can't be fixed. I suppose in this novel, the main character did change, but instead of growing, he shrank, ultimately making March the protagonist, but not a hero.

A Game of Thrones is really about Turks

There was a funny story about Game of Thrones in a Turkish newspaper earlier in the month. Supposedly (and this is a very important word for stories concerning the military's bad behavior),  officers at a school in Izmir showed the series to a group of teenage boys in an English-language class at a military academy. After they'd wrapped up the lessons, 10 weeks later, someone anonymously complained about it, saying Game of Thrones "involved 'corrupted and perverted' sex scenes and depicted Turks as 'a barbarian tribe with perverted religious rituals'."

It's really unfortunate because the parts with the Turks were my favorites. I think everyone was drawn to how they -- oh, wait a minute, I must be thinking of something else BECAUSE THERE ARE NO TURKS IN GAME OF THRONES. My only guess is that someone decided the Dothraki were the Turks (of nearly 1,000 years ago) in disguise and got their panties twisted into a bunch. 

According to this story, nine officers were accused of sexual abuse and "insulting Turkishness," which is in fact against the law in Turkey. The charges were dismissed until the Minister of Defense personally overruled the charges, and supposedly this ridiculous case is in progress.

A Song of Ice and Fire (#5, 6, 9): The stuff of obsession

There's this series of fantasy books called A Song of Ice and Fire -- have you heard of it? Hahaha, of course you have. Courtesy of the HBO adaptation Game of Thrones, I think everyone by now has heard of it, but I'm sure I'm not alone in admitting that I'd only heard of it because of the series. And as a good little read-the-book-before-you-see-the-movie type, that's just what I did -- and now I'm kind of obsessed. I've even dreamt about Joffrey, waking myself up swinging my arm around like I had a sword in it.

I've seen the series (which currently stands at five books, with another two planned) described as having three principal story lines -- the fight between various powerful families over the Iron Throne, and the attempted of exiled princess Daenerys Targaryen to regain that throne, which her father held, and the threat from the supernatural Others who live beyond the protective Wall in the North. But I think A Song of Ice and Fire is much simpler than that -- it's the epic tale of the Stark family, the principle nobles in the North, who are torn apart in books one and two and are trying to make their way back together. They're the heroes of the books, the good guys -- and even though a number of them have been murdered by the end of book three and all seems lost, they're the ones you're rooting for. Everyone else -- and there are a LOT of 'em -- is just a part of that, affecting how that (presumed) resolution and reunion happens. 

After an encounter between some men of the Night's Watch and the Others, book one, A Game of Thrones, begins at Winterfell, home to Eddard Stark, his wife Catelyn, their five children Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran and Rickon, plus Ned's bastard son Jon Snow. During Catelyn's narration (each chapter is narrated from the point-of-view of a various character), we find out that the king's right-hand man (appropriately called the Hand) has died, and the king and his party are on their way to Winterfell, a fateful trip that will change all of their lives. Ned will be asked by King Robert, his closest friend, to be his new Hand, and come live at the palace in King's Landing, and after he discovers some royal secrets, he attracts the queen's ire, bringing the Starks in direct conflict with House Lannister, one of the realm's most powerful and ruthless families. (In fact, one of the messages in this series is that ruthlessness equals power.)

That's all I'll really say about the plot, so as not to ruin it for y'alls. By the end of book one, the Stark family has taken a direct hit, and a war over the throne erupts. But, like all good heroes, the Starks will spend these books having their notions about goodness and honor tested, and they will go through horrific situations on their road to getting back to each other. Martin seems to support this interpretation; he told The Atlantic, "With the general construction of the books, in some ways I took the Lord of the Rings as my model. Tolkien begins very small, in the Shire with Bilbo's birthday party, and from there, the characters all accumulate. ... But then at a certain point, they begin to go separate ways... You get this sense of everyone being together, and then the world gets bigger and bigger. My scheme is very similar to that. We begin in Winterfell, and everyone except Daenerys is in Winterfell, even characters that don't belong there, like Tyrion. And they set off together and then they begin to split. ... It has always been my intent, as with the Lord of the Rings, that eventually it would curve around and they would start moving back together."

Overall, the series is a grim one -- Martin has absolutely no compunction about killing off main characters, and in the most horrible ways, and by the end of book three, I'd say about 70 percent of the main characters have bit it, through beheadings, poisonings, massacres, and even a crossbow in the groin. As for the main characters that have managed to survive, almost all of them are in a place unknown to the others, some presumed dead. Book three is actually an interesting place to stop for a review, because the first three books make up a good unit; at this point, the series isn't resolved (clearly) but a lot of the story lines have been "wrapped up," in the sense that the remaining characters have come through their storms and are in a safer place. There are more trials to come, judging from what's already been, but they've hit a welcome lull.

For me, it was also welcome. I read A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings (book two) one after the other, took a two-week break to read two other books, and then read A Storm of Swords (book three) while watching Games of Thrones season 2. So book three ended up being a good place to stop...at least for a little awhile.

To read or not to read: 50 Shades of Grey

I'm trying to decide whether or not to read 50 Shades of Grey, and I am genuinely conflicted. On the one hand, I think it's important to read what the masses are reading -- I think that's part of the definition of being well-read -- and with the author having earned a reported $20 million paycheck, the masses have clearly read and spoken. So with that thought in mind, I put myself down in my library's request system for 50 Shades of Grey, resolved to read it. All I'd really heard about it was that it was an erotica version of Twilight, but even more poorly written -- which is what was giving me pause, as we all know how I felt about the ending of that series, but still, I was resolved.

And then, by chance the other day, I came across a teeny excerpt (beware -- naughty words ahead): “Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly. “No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck… hard. Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.” My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so… hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified. “You want to play on your Xbox?” I ask. He laughs, loudly. “No, Anastasia, no Xbox, no Playstation. Come."

That paragraph was just brutal. I'm just not sure I can do it, runaway bestseller or no. What I may do is write my own housewife erotica to earn my own $20 million, but I am just not sure I can stomach this one. Life is short, and I already resolved not to read any more books that I knew from the outset would likely be bad.

On the bright side, I am patron 197 out of 334 on my library's waiting list -- they only have 12 copies, so I guess I have some time to decide.

Has anyone read it? Thoughts?

A Giant Catch-Up: Robert B. Parker and the Night Circus (#2-4)

Well, I suppose this is what always happens...I neglect my blog for a period of time and then realize that I need to come up with something insightful to see about books I read months ago. Why do I continually do this to myself?

All the way back in January, I read Robert B. Parker's first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript. I came across it when I was reading the Amazon reviews for Painted Ladies last year; a couple of reviewers had praised it, but to be honest, I didn't think it was all that great. The Godwulf Manuscript and Painted Ladies tread the same basic ground -- a priceless work of art is stolen, college students are involved, Spenser continues with his search even after he's removed from the case -- and neither of them held all that many surprises. There's not a plot twist in either -- the person who seems guilty is, in fact, guilty.

I'm not going to mention the third book I read this year -- it was a biography that I read in the course of research for a project, and it wasn't terribly well-done. And besides, it's not relevant to these here discussions.

In February, despite my crazy job, I managed to read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, which I  enjoyed and also sports a kickass cover. Morgenstern's debut novel is about two "magicians," Celia and Marco, who are pitted against each other in a contest by their teachers but don't initially know it -- the venue is the Cirque des Reves, a magical circus that moves from place to place unexpectedly, enchanting its patrons. There's a subplot about an ordinary boy named Bailey, who ends up befriending two twins who live in the circus, that really reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Stardust, I think because Bailey and Stardust's main character, Tristran, have the same sort of innocent hope.

I found the world of The Night Circus entrancing -- Morgenstern's descriptions are quite vivid, and her imaginings of the different kinds of magical exhibits Celia, especially, comes up with were incredibly creative. The plot was a little weaker, though. With this kind of a set-up, I expected a much more epic story, with greater stakes -- a life-or-death situation for the two contestants -- but it was never really like that, and nothing was ever terribly urgent. As Laura Miller wrote in Salon, "Plot is this novel’s flimsiest aspect, however, serving mostly as a pretext for presenting readers with a groaning board of imaginative treats," which I think sums up the novel well. But despite this, overall, I still enjoyed the time I spent inside the world of The Night Circus.

Divergent: Am I the only person who didn't like this book? (#35)

Spoilers, discussing the ENTIRE plot...

Veronica Roth's Divergent is supposed to be the next YA lit sensation - Summit Entertainment has already snapped the film rights up and it has 332 five-star Amazon reviews - but I thought it fell flat. I'm actually surprised that it has such an ardent fan base because I think has a couple of major flaws, including a lack of tension, a premise that doesn't hold up under scrutiny, and an inconsistent protagonist. It got to the point where I couldn't wait for the book to end, never a good sign.

The Divergent world is limited to a futuristic Chicago where society has broken itself up into five factions based on the members' personalities: There's Dauntless (courageous), Candor (honest), Amity (friendly), Erudite (learned), and Abnegation (selfless), which is the faction protagonist Beatrice Prior comes from. People without factions are homeless and live in the no-man's land between the faction areas. When children turn 16, they must take an aptitude test which tells them which faction they're meant for, and then at a ceremony, they can choose whichever faction they want to belong to. If they leave their own faction, they lose their family. When Beatrice takes her test, she gets a mixed result - she could be good in Dauntless, Abnegation, or Erudite - which makes her, egads, Divergent. It's so bad that her tester deletes her results and makes Beatrice swear she'll never tell anyone what happened.

When the choosing ceremony comes, Beatrice decides to betray her family and choose Dauntless. But it wasn't all that surprising and I think this was the first mistake in the book - Roth spends very little time describing Beatrice's life in Abnegation or her parents, so there's no attachment for the reader (which is absolutely essential at the end of the book). So when she chooses another faction, it's like who cares? All we really knew about Abnegation was that it was a place where you could only look in the mirror once every 90 days and children weren't to speak at the dinner table - and who wants to live like that? Beatrice's decision seems pretty easy, which leads to Divergent's second flaw...

Despite the interesting premise, the book lacked tension - and this was an utter failure in the set-up. In most books, the protagonist struggles against a force greater than themselves, and they are often shoved into this struggle without a choice. This always happens at the beginning, creating tension and epic, life-or-death struggle that sucks the reader in. In Harry Potter, Harry starts out ignorant but quickly finds out that he's survived an attack by the wizarding world's most powerful dark lord; in the Hunger Games, Katniss immediately sacrifices herself for her sister and must figure out how fight to the death to survive a regime that sacrifices teenagers; in Persuasion, Anne struggles from the get-go against society's preconceived notion that she's too old for love; even Twilight has it, presenting this idea of true-love-at-first-sight potentially doomed by unavoidable natural tendencies (i.e. wanting to suck your lover's blood). But Divergent completely lacks this kind of set-up as the conflict is introduced WAY too late in the novel; as a result, the novel meanders in terms of plot. Starting out the novel, it's unknown why the world came to this (or even whether the world is more than Chicago now) and there's no desire for renewal or return, so no conflict there. There's no real conflict with the apititude test; regardless of the results, teenagers can choose whichever faction they want, so no one's being forced into anything. Beatrice freely chooses Dauntless and even though initiation is tough and she has to get into the top 10, she never really regrets her choice. We don't know why being Divergent is bad until p. 154, that it's life or death, and despite a bit of displayed prejudice against Abnegation, we don't know that there's actually something happening against them until about page 200. This is out of 295 pages (on my Nook anyway).

Beatrice always gets to choose - and everything that happens to her in the first 240 pages or so emerges from her choices. There's no huge struggle - for the most part, until the factions start trying to kill each other at the end, it's a really simple story about a girl trying to fit in to a new environment. Most of Divergent could easily have been set in a high school, as new girl gets teased, struggles to make friends, and flirts with resident mysterious bad boy. That's a fine set-up for a story but it's not EPIC - but the creation of this dystopian world is promising epic. In the end, it's nice scenery that doesn't amount to much. Despite the tagline, Beatrice doesn't even change all that much, not really, internally.

That nice scenery barely holds up to scrutiny, too. I can suspend disbelief and accept the premise that people have mentally simplified enough (my assumption) so that easily fit into one of five categories and don't possess any of the other qualities. The problem is that Roth doesn't stick to this. All of Beatrice's initial friends in Dauntless are transfers from other factions and because they have grown up in other factions, they do indeed possess the quality of their original faction. It's mentioned several times that Dauntless characters are annoyed with or Beatrice is surprised by the Candor-transfers' honesty/sarcasm. So clearly people DO possess multiple qualities...which destroys the premise and the finale conflict, as it's hard to believe that only Divergents are immune from mind-control. (The mind-control thing really stretched credibility, omg.)

I could go on - discussing, for example, the unlikelihood that the virus controlling every mindless Dauntless solider is stored on only one computer, making it easily destroyed - but I won't. I'll just stop and forget I ever read this book.

Jane Austen's Persuasion: Hilariously antiquated, odd ending (#34)

Be forewarned: I'm going to discuss the entire plot. Having said that, I don't think it's giving anything away - Persuasion is a classic romance, which means there's very little in the way of surprise. People fall in love, hooray! But not all that shocking.

I've only read two other Jane Austen novels - Northanger Abbey and of course Pride and Prejudice - and while I enjoyed both, I can't say that I subscribe to that particular Austen frenzy which has launched countless movies, tribute books, etc. But I've wanted to read Persuasion ever since I saw the movie The Jane Austen Book Club (based on a book; see what I mean?). They never really get around to discussing Persuasion because of an unexpected death but at one point, one of the older characters says, to paraphrase, that it's her favorite Austen book because the older heroine gets a second shot at love with a former flame. And I really liked that idea, that of an emotionally healing once all seemed lost.

And then I actually read Persuasion and found out that that "older" heroine is in fact only 27. And because Anne Elliot is so very, very ancient and was "persuaded" not to marry Captain Wentworth when she had the chance (because at the time he lacked prospect), she is of course doomed to be a spinster. "No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look..." (40). Again, SHE'S 27! From the perspective of 2011 and with sentences like this, it was a little hard to take Persuasion seriously.

So this tragic spinsterhood is where the novel starts. Anne is the second of three sisters and the daughter of a self-absorbed widowed spendthrift; according to the good family friend Lady Russell, she is the best of the lot. Her older (and gasp! still single) sister Elizabeth is too similar to their father while younger sister Mary, though married, is too flighty. Anne on the other hand is serious, thoughtful, and grounded. Because the family is living beyond its means, they're persuaded to rent out the manor and move to the English city of Bath. Their new tenants end up being Admiral Croft and his wife, and Mrs. Croft, by chance, is the sister of Captain Wentworth. This, in addition to a number of other coincidences, is how Wentworth and Anne end up in each other's lives again.

I generally found Persuasion to be a little underdeveloped; perhaps it's not fair to compare it to Pride and Prejudice, but I thought it lacked the latter's zing and wit. (Having said that, it was published after Austen's death, so perhaps she hadn't truly finished it.) The main reason is that Anne and Captain Wentworth, the players in the novel's major love story, spend very little time together on the page. Before the novel opens, they've loved and lost one another; it's briefly mentioned that he was a "remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit, and brilliancy" and she was an "extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling" (16) and those qualities, combined with a boredom arising from country life, created love. We know that Anne still loves him and regrets being "persuaded" away from him, but we never really see why on the page. We never see the love or the kind of passion necessary to make their feelings last eight years, and it's weird.

Later, when life throws them together again, they still spend very little time interacting together, despite being together all the time. People love Pride and Prejudice because of the way Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy push and pull against each other, but Anne in Persuasion spends much more time in her head, regretting past decisions and convincing herself that Wentworth's feelings are long gone. There's very little spark on the page so it's hard to see why they love each other; you're just supposed to accept that they do because they say so.

The ending cracked me up, just because it was so totally random. While we know a number of characters are sailors - including Wentworth - it's sort of a minor detail. But then Austen ends on a total tangent; she says that Anne enjoys being a sailor's wife and then concludes that sailors' manners at home might be more valuable than their national defensive importance. I was like, what? So random. I mean, I know she's been making a social commentary throughout the novel, showing the sailors all as hard-working, upstanding, self-made citizens whose demeanor is in contrast to the remaining male characters, all self-important, lazy inheritors of fortune. But Persuasion is ultimately and mainly about the reuniting of Anne and Wentworth; theme is secondary (I hope).

Overall, I enjoyed Persuasion and once I got used to the language, found it to be a quick read. It could have been stronger but I still found it entertaining. Still, if you're new to Austen, I'd probably read Pride and Prejudice first - it's a classic for a reason.

The Paris Wife: Another passive protagonist (#33)

I finished Paula McLain's The Paris Wife about three weeks ago but it was kind of a miracle as I was seriously tempted to put it down around page 120. And it makes me sad - I'm fairly passionate about Hemingway (I love the books that I love and absolutely detest the ones I detest = passion, no?) and I really wanted to love this book. But guess what? The protagonist is yet another f*ing wallflower! Pray tell, what is the sudden fascination with this kind of ho-hum character?

The protagonist is 28-year-old Hadley Richardson, a passive female well on her way to spinsterhood who ends up - miracle upon miracle! - catching the eye of  a young, charming Ernest Hemingway in Chicago. Even though he's only 20, he already seems to be pretty passionate - he has wild dreams of writerly success, unexpected and dramatic fallings-out with friends, and a bevy of female admirers - and even though a friend warns Hadley against the union, she marries him anyway. He soon sprits her off to Europe and she goes along for the ride - both literally and figuratively. As portrayed in The Paris Wife, Hadley has zero personality and zero ambitions for herself. I get that she's supposed to be the steady rock which allows him to climb to greatness during their six-year union but omg, if she doesn't make for fiction's most incredibly boring martyr.

This book has gotten a ton of buzz which I find a little surprising - especially because the reviews aren't unanimous in their praise. While The Paris Wife does currently have 162 five-star reviews on Amazon, it also has 70 reviews of varying stars that thrash it (plus another 78 four-star reviews which are decidedly mixed). The New York Times essentially made fun of it, calling Hadley a "stodgy bore" and calls McLain's use of research "confounding."

The Paris Wife was boring, and in my opinion, it had a lot to do with the author's style choices. Yes, Hadley herself was boring. But McLain amplified that in trying, I strongly suspect, to write like Hemingway in "short, declarative sentences." The biggest issue in the novel was that reactions were never described, making it really difficult to emotionally connect with any of the characters or the situations. For example, there are multiple instances when Ernest and Hadley find themselves at a bar in Europe with lively friends and acquaintances, a situation which always seemed to include a few lovely ladies. And invariably, Ernest would end up in close conversation with one of them, but nobody's facial expressions or tones of voice or reactions would be described. Isn't body language supposed to make up like 90 percent of communication? It made for a really hollow book - you never knew if Ernest was innocently flirting, having a serious conversation, or making a move; you never knew if Hadley felt betrayed or naively didn't notice. This happened throughout the novel, this lack of emotional explanation, and and as a result, it was really hard to become attached to either of them or what they would struggle with as their relationship changed.

State of Wonder: Oh, to be in the Amazon...

I finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder at the beginning of October and while I was a little disappointed by the inconclusive ending, I thoroughly enjoyed the journey and would absolutely recommend this novel. I've never read anything by her before though I know people loved Bel Canto so it's yet another book I may have to add to my 2012 reading list. (The year hasn't started yet and already my book list is way, way too long...)

In order to talk about the ending, I'll have to thoroughly talk about the plot so don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens. In fact, if you're planning on reading the book, you should probably stop now - the discovery of what's happened and why is an important element of the book's emotional journey and I think it would lessen the book's "wonder" to know what will happen.

So, with that out of the way...State of Wonder is the story of Marina Singh, a failed OBGYN with daddy issues who now works as a laboratory researcher for a large pharmaceutical firm. She has a good working relationship with her lab partner, family man Anders Eckman, and is having an affair with the head of the company, Mr. Fox (who she always calls Mr. Fox up until the last third of the book, even though she hopes he's already kinda-sorta proposed). Like some other protagonists we've discussed in recent posts, Marina is pretty darn passive about her life at the outset of the novel. She’s a researcher at Vogel because of an accident in medical school (where she felt like she didn’t live up to her teacher’s expectations), her father abandoned her as a child and left her with nightmares, and of course she refers to her secret lover "mister." Marina is a waiter, someone waiting for something to happen in her life, and until then she's just going to plod along.

So we learn all this about Marina as Anders get sent to the Amazon to check up on an expensive but mysterious project that Vogel is funding. It turns out that Marina's former teacher, Dr. Annick Swenson, believes she has found a way to stop menopause, naturally extending a woman's fertility, but she's kind of a strongwilled rebel who demands total secrecy and no limitations on her research. When a letter arrives saying that Anders has unexpectedly died, Marina gets sent to Brazil – ostensibly to pick up where he left off but really to find out what happened to him for his wife and kids. In some ways, this is where the novel starts, but she doesn't find Dr. Swenson in Manaus until page 97 (on my Nook, anyway) - it was quite a delay but it was interesting and I felt like I was on the journey with Marina.

At this point, Annick takes Marina into the jungle to the research station, set among the Lakashi tribe, who it turns out is eating forest bark. She gradually becomes a part of the research group and eventually becomes Dr. Swenson's heir apparent. She's admitted to the circle of trust only to discover that altogether different things are going on - for Dr. Swenson, very little besides science matters and anything that gets in the way of that is worth covering up. As a result, Marina is faced with some difficult moral choices.


But there is where my disappointment set in. There are some really interesting questions posed - and a lot of time spent building up to them - but aside from deliberately rescuing Anders (and the trade-off that takes, plus the odd decision later that night), I didn't think it was clear what Marina would choose to do. It seems like she'd changed...but how? Would Marina return to Brazil to continue Dr. Swenson's work or rat her out? What would she do about Mr. Fox...and did she even love him anyway? I don't think there was even enough to make an educated guess, making it such a strange, unresolved book that needed much more at the end.

Many, many people have compared State of Wonder to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which obviously makes sense, but in the book, when Marina is at the glorious opera house in Manaus, she compares herself to Orpheus and Anders to Eurydice. And it's probably a more apt description - while Marina is going on her own internal journey to face her demons, she is primarily going to rescue Anders from death (by ostensibly finding out what happened to him) and only encounters her own demons along the way.

Personally, I thought the Amazon sounded amazing, deadly creatures and all, and have now resolved to move it higher on my travel wish list. Apparently Ann Patchett didn't feel the same - in an Amazon.com interview between her and Elizabeth Gilbert, she says that she kinda hated the Amazon when she went there to do research. "I absolutely loved the Amazon for four days. It was gorgeous and unfamiliar and deeply fascinating. Unfortunately, I stayed there for ten days. There are a lot of insects in the Amazon, a lot of mud, surprisingly few vegetables, too many snakes... I can see how great it would be for a very short visit, and how great it would be if you lived there and had figured out what was and wasn’t going to kill you, but the interim length of time isn’t great." I don't know why this cracks me up but it does - I guess I'm tickled she wrote an entire novel about the Amazon while hating the Amazon.

Painted Ladies: Alas, not Robert B. Parker's best (#31)

I've always enjoyed dipping into Robert B. Parker's crime novels - it's not usually my genre but I enjoy his humor, and over the years I've let the books find me. (Although I haven't read one since 2006; apparently the path can be long and twisty.) I noticed this one of the library's website and checked it out on a whim, intrigued by the premise - yet again - of an art mystery. It was kind of amazing how much this one mirrored Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair, which I had read only two months before.

But I wasn't a big fan of Painted Ladies unfortunately - which seems disrespectful, considering that he died in January 2010 before this novel was published. (His last book, however, appears to be Sixkill.) Publishers Weekly called it "lackluster," which is an apt description. Painted Ladies was missing both Parker's usual zing and a complex and/or thrilling plot.

The plot centers around the death of art historian and professor Ashton Prince who Spenser agrees to protect during the recovery of a fictitious Dutch painting called "Lady with a Finch." But things go awry and Prince dies and the painting gets incinerated - which Spenser won't tolerate under his watch. So Spenser decides to figure it out, making it his own personal mission. And like the painting in The Rembrandt Affair, "Lady with a Finch" turns out to have a sordid history, having also been confiscated from a wealthy Dutch family during the Holocaust. (Even the families have similar names: Herzberg here and Herzfeld there.) In the present day, Spenser tries to charm - both successfully and unsuccessfully - a mother, daughter, and a mysterious art foundation.

But it never felt suspenseful; the links were just too easy. There was also one major inconsistency, which I was really surprised that the editor or copyeditor didn't catch: On p. 177, Winifred goes from being a certain someone's ex-girlfriend to being his ex-wife for the rest of the book. And while that seems minor, about 20 pages before, another character made a huge deal of the fact that they were never married, saying, "Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left" (p. 152). It really stuck out to me.

So all in all, not my favorite of the four Robert B. Parker books that I've read. But as I was perusing the Amazon reviews (most people seemed to like Painted Ladies for sentimental reasons), I saw many mentions of his highly praised first novel The Godwulf Manuscript which I will add to my booklist for next year.

This Charming Man: Otherwise known as book #30!

Yes, it's true...I have reached book 30 for the year. Huzzah! In fact, it happened at the end of August which should tell you something about my blogging efforts (though I've been getting better - have you noticed?).

I picked up This Charming Man, by Marian Keyes, when I was in Italy. Even though this particular edition was enormous, I still couldn't resist - her books are generally light and fluffy but loveable. I have been carrying around a soft spot for Angels for years. This Charming Man centers around popular Irish politican Paddy de Courcy and the four women who have been most affected by him. The novel starts with Lola, completely crushed as she learns that Paddy is getting married - because she's his girlfriend but not the fiancee. It then turns to Grace, a journalist, and Marnie, her alcoholic sister, who knew Paddy as teenagers. Lastly is Alicia, Paddy's surprise fiancee, who has an odd role as a wallflower (and as it turns out later, a backstabber). Each woman has her own section in the book as we see their life and Paddy's effect, either past or present on that, until they come together as a group near the end.

This book was a little darker than the other Keyes' books I've read. To the world, Paddy is a JFK-like figure but it turns out that he's conniving, selfish and abusive, and has done some serious psychic damage to these ladies. There's a really delicate balance that has to be made between chick-lit lightness and topical seriousness but overall, I thought she did it well, and I ended up giving the book to my mom to read.

People of the Book: Good but sorta passionless (#29)

Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book has a lot of promise: Rare book expert Hanna Heath travels Sarajevo in 1996 to inspect and stabilize the refound Sarajavo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish codex that miraculously survives the ravages of time. The book actually exists and from what I remember of the plot, Brooks pretty closely follows the real Haggadah's history as is known but inserts fictional characters and develops plausible vignettes around them. I found People of the Book to be interesting, certainly, but I wasn't captivated by it - and what I most want from my books is to be swept up. Partially I think I just don't connect with Brooks' writing style as I had the same reaction to Year of Wonders, a novel about a plague that wrecks havoc on a small English town.

As the title implies, People of the Book is about the people whose (imagined) lives were touched by the Haggadah. Hanna is only the last of them and her story - along with her unresolved love issues, both with her domineering mother and a librarian she meets - bookends the novel. Which is fine and dandy - except that I found Hanna to be an incredibly frustrating character. She's good at her job but a wallflower in all other aspects of her life and yet again, I had a difficult time empathizing. She eventually gets it together and owns her identity but hot damn if it didn't take the entire book. (I know, I know, it's character arc but does she have to start out so passive?)

As Hanna does her inspection on the Haggadah, she finds tiny items in the book - a moth wing, a white hair, a wine stain - which then launch the vignettes, as we see how each of these items made its way there. The individual stories were interesting but also disconnecting  because Hanna herself never and cannot discover such historical detail - and I found it strange that the reader takes a journey that the protagonist has no clue about. As much as I disliked Hanna, it was still her story and I thought it an odd choice to effectively dump the protagonist in sections along the way. (I also thought it was weird that the stories went backwards in time - I get it intellectually but on paper it felt like a dismantling rather than a building up to something.) It was again emotionally separating and so while I liked the book, I never found that I cared all that much. You knew from the outset that this precious book was safe (or ostensibly anyway - there ends up being a last-minute mystery) so the connection has to be through Hanna...and for me, it just wasn't there.

Photos of the Haggadah's gorgeous illuminations, including the one I used at the top, can be found here: http://www.haggadah.ba/?x=2&y=1#. It now lives in Sarajevo's National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Help: Surprising myself, I liked it (#28)

My mother had tried to pawn The Help off on me some time ago but I demurred - it seemed a little too Oprah-y for me and you know how I hate those Oprah selections. Or maybe it was the cover - what are those little birds doing there and what do they have to do with this novel? But then all the movie hype started and I for whatever reason, I decided to pick up this book - and then, surprise upon surprise, I actually liked it.

The Help is the story of the relationships between and among a group of white women and their black housekeepers in Jackson, Miss., in the 1960s. All of the white ladies are married and doing the society thing except for Skeeter, an aspiring writer who wants a different kind of life - and in searching for it, ends up convincing housekeepers Aibileen and Minny (and eventually others) to anonymously tell her their on-the-job anecdotes, both good and bad. Their project eventually becomes a book, riling many a temper in town, especially as people begin to suspect who is who. Overall, I thought it was a very sweet book - there's a lot of affection between the "good" characters which I thought was The Help's biggest strength.

There are a lot of people who love The Help, if 3,765 five-star Amazon reviews are anything to go by. But when the movie came out, for the first time I started hearing negative things about it as well. The main criticism seems to center on the fact that the protagonist is one of the white women and the book's subliminal suggestion that Aibileen and the other maids couldn't have accomplished anything without her. As Martha Southgate wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column, "Minny and Aibileen are heroines, but they didn't need Skeeter to guide them to the light. They fought their way out of the darkness on their own — and they brought the nation with them."

I can totally see Southgate's point though it doesn't dampen my enthusiam for the book. And that's because, from a literary standpoint, Skeeter is the protagonist. (You can argue that the protagonist should have been Aibileen but then maybe that's not Kathryn Stockett's book to write.) In this book, which is Stockett's fictionalized memoir-ish, Skeeter is the protagonist and the book doesn't work if the protagonist is not the hero. The Help is Skeeter's journey as she returns home from college and realizes she no longer fits in to her world, and thus has to find a new world for herself. The civil rights stuff, in the novel, is ultimately nothing but background and context for that journey.

But of course, the world is not one big English class and I'm not sure how much literary form matters here. If it was my personal history, I might be pretty pissed too. (Interestingly, a real woman named Ablene Cooper - who happens to be Stockett's brother's housekeeper - alledged that Stockett unlawfully used her name and likeness in the book, though the lawsuit was eventually thrown out because it exceeded the statute of limitations.) All in all, I think it's best to read The Help with the proverbial grain of salt: Enjoy it while keeping the criticism in mind.

Sisterhood Everlasting: Break Out the Kleenex (#27)

I was pleasantly surprised by Ann Brashares' Sisterhood Everlasting, the adult follow-up to her immensely popular series that started with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. I assumed it would the shallowness of Sweet Valley Confidential but she really took this novel to a dark place which the publisher's write-up doesn't even begin to hint at. I'm not ashamed to say I spent most of this reading experience with a Kleenex wadded up in my hand.

The four Sisterhood books are about four girls - Lena, Carmen, Bridget, and Tibby - who have been best friends from birth. One summer in their teenage years, they discover a pair of jeans that fit them all, despite their wildly varying body types - and they decide these pants must be magic. (How could they not be, really?) But as they face their own individual challenges, like death, divorcing parents, and heartbreak, that summer and beyond, they start to drift apart - but they send the pants back and forth between them and it helps keep them linked together. In the last book, as in the second movie, the pants sink to somewhere at the bottom of the Aegean, alas, and they realize that they don't really need them, their friendship is stronger than a piece of fabric, etc.

Sisterhood Everlasting fast-forwards to about 10 years later, when the girls are in their 20s. At first, it's not all that surprising what they're doing: Carmen is a successful actress but due to her daddy issues is engaged to a self-absorbed jerk; Lena is an emotionally crippled art teacher in Rhode Island who's still afraid to take a risk on life; and Bridget is still a free spirit who, despite settling down with Eric in California, feels caged in such a domestic lifestyle. Only Tibby is the mystery - she moved to Australia with Brian but the girls have barely heard from her, effectively breaking their sisterhood. Then one day, Tibby sends them each a letter with a plane ticket to Greece, for a reunion similar to the one in book 4. But then the three girls arrive and Tibby isn't there...and that's all I say about the plot. Except get out the box of tissues. You'll definitely need the tissues.

Nefertiti and Outliers in Brief (#17, 18)

Sorry, I lied when I said we were talking about Sweet Valley High next. I forgot about these two books, both of which I mostly enjoyed when I read them at the beginning of the summer but now am grasping to remember.

I read Michelle Moran's Nefertiti first, inspired to check out her other books after the fabulousness which was Madame Tussaud. I don't know why I chose this one, her first, of all her Ancient Egypt-set books though it may have been the only immediately available at the library. Nefertiti, as the name implies, is about the famous Egyptian queen and fictionally explores her cunning rise to power through the eyes of her younger sister Mutny. Nefertiti becomes a second wife to Pharaoh Akhenaten and then basically struggles to outwit and overcome Kiya, his first wife (and the presumed mother to King Tut), and keep Akhenaten's outrageous ideas under control; Mutny, on the other hand, would just like out of the palace intrigues and to live a peaceful life tending her garden. Although some Amazon reviews criticized it for having thin characters, I found Nefertiti entertaining enough for a summer read, though clearly Moran's writing style has, not suprisingly, significantly improved since this first book.

After Nefertiti, I tackled Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I'd had on my bookshelf for ages. I'd wanted to read it after my mom had told me about hearing him speak at a business conference; the topic had apparently been on the part of the book that explores the hours of practice (10,000) it takes to be successful in any given field. Based on that, I expected that the book's message would be about the link between hard work and success, but that's not really what it was about at all. It was more about how people are randomly, statistically chosen for success and it doesn't have all that much to do with talent. For example, if you want to be a successful hockey player, you'd better have been born in January because kids are filtered into gifted programs at an early age and the hockey cut-off is December 31 - meaning that the January kids are likely bigger (being older) and from there, the advantages of being in gifted programs accrue and once you're slated into a track, it's hard to get out of it.

I think the premise is supposed to be uplifting in that there's no such thing as extraordinary individuals (uplifting for those who are not) but rather success is a combination of various societal factors that you have no control over. But personally, I found the whole thing depressing. If success is based on uncontrollable random elements and things set in motion before you were born, why bother trying? While his theory may be true, I felt that it lacked personal responsibility, that duty to get up and do your best to do your thing every single day. Still though, the anecdotes were fascinating, and I've repeated one or two in conversation.

Admittedly though, I was hooked to Outliers from page one, mostly because of a random (!) personal connection. The first story is about immigrants from Roseto, which is the little town in southern Italy that my great-grandfather was from. In the book, Gladwell tells how a bunch of Rosetians moved to Pennsylvania, to a small town they appropriately named Roseto, and a couple of researchers discovered that in the 50s and 60s they had an abnormally low rate of heart disease, which ended up being because of strong community bonds. Unfortunately for my great-grandfather, he chose to emigrate to a different Pennsylvania town, Philadelphia - where he died of a heart attack in the mid-1950s. :(

An Aside: All Over the Map cover error and Laura Fraser's book lists

A good chunk of Laura Fraser's All Over the Map takes place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is why I was surprised to see that the art director decided to go with a photograph of a different Mexican city on the cover. The top photo is bizarrely of the neighboring city of Guanajuato and the only reason that I know that is that I took a nearly identical photo when I was there a year and a half ago. Maybe the stock image was mislabeled? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

 

In other news, as I was browsing the web a moment ago, I discovered that Laura Fraser is a dork like me and also keeps lists of the books she's read. And apparently she's grappled with similar questions that I've had about my list and plan to blog about, which essentially distills down to this: Do all books make the list or are some not worthy? However, she says her list has made her pickier - "seeing the titles line-by-line brings home the realization that the number of books one can read in a lifetime — maybe 5000? — is finite" - while I'm still reading utter crap. Alas.

The Lovers and All Over the Map: F*ing depressing if you ask me (#14, 16)

I read Vendela Vida's The Lovers and Laura Fraser's All Over the Map just days apart all the way back at the beginning of June. I picked them up for different reasons - though I'd read several good reviews on The Lovers, it didn't seem like my cup of tea but was convinced to pick it up after I saw Vida was the screenwriter of Away We Go, the wonderful but alas underappreciated John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph film about an expectant couple looking for a new home. (To be honest, I was also inspired by the title of her other novel: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. How awesome is that?) I went for All Over the Map after realizing there was a sequel to the wonderful An Italian Affair, Fraser's sweet memoir of finding love on an Italian island. I read them practically back-to-back simply because of library schedules and unfortunately, I left the experience fairly disappointed in both books (though highly amused by the All Over the Map cover photo).

Both works follow the trend in women's fiction of depicting the life of a disappointed woman in middle age trying to recover something of a lost self...and it's fucking depressing. I get that in the end, the protagonist will have some sort of epiphany that will free her from the bonds of being a woman in the Western world but I have never particularly enjoyed the journey of these books…it’s like hundreds of pages of melancholy and bad choices and quicksand which five pages of redemption at the end can hardly make up for.

Specifically, The Lovers is the fictional story of the recently widowed Yvonne, who decides to spend a week in a rented house on Turkey's Datca Peninsula, hoping to recapture some part of herself at her honeymoon spot. But then it turns out she wasn’t really happily married and her daughter has problems and she befriends a little kid named Ahmet and then there’s a tragic accident and blah blah blah. But there's an epiphany at the end, all is well! Ugh.

In fact, there was a passage on page 211 that I thought summed up the book nicely: “She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier – and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself? She must have seemed – to Ozlem, to Ali, to Mustafa – profoundly so. A sad, aging woman with no anchor.” See what I mean? This book was hard to take, reminding me quite a bit of Anita Shreve novels.

I did like All Over the Map quite a bit better but like The Lovers, it seemed to have an excess of angst. The book starts out with an encounter with the Professor, the other half of her glorious Italian affair – she meets him in Oaxaca, Mexico, for her 40th birthday and he effectively dumps her, as he’s met someone else in Paris that he wants to settle down with. And Fraser feels pulled in two directions – she wants to be free and travel but then she also wants the love and stability of a relationship…and now that she’s turning 40, she sort of wonders if she’s missed the boat.

I found that I was continually frustrated with her, the narrator, and my overwhelming thought was how can you bitch about what you have (which seems like a lot, a career most travel writers would give their right arm for – or left, depending on which hand you write with) and keep actively creating what you have if you really want something else? She also really downplayed her career which I found annoying, probably because I am in the same field - magazines are sending her to Samoa, Mexico, Italy, etc., and she's published two books, but her career is not going well? I found that hard to believe and kept wondering why she was presenting herself as a sad sack (though I know self-image and how others see you can wildly differ). I mostly just wanted to reach through the pages and tell her to snap out of it.

On the bright side, you know what we're going to talk about next? Sweet Valley High, that mythical place in California where no one has even heard the word depression, all because I decided to take a trip down memory lane...