Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore's newest novel, the first that I have read, wasn't as wonderful as I had hoped it would be.

The novel follows a year in the life of Tassie Kjeltin, the daughter of a Wisconsin potato farmer who is in her freshman year of college a few months after the attacks on 9/11. She seeks employment and finds it, becoming a nanny for the Brink-Thornwoods who are adopting a child and want her to be a part of the process. The first child doesn't go well, but they finally find a match with a young mixed race girl named Mary, who the mother dubs Emma and soon becomes Mary-Emma, or Emmie.  Tassie becomes deeply involved in the life of the child, the politics of the parents, and the strange mystery of their past.  A romance develops with a fellow student, who also is strangely mysterious, and her brother, Robert, has decided to join the military.  To round out the cast is her aloof roommate, Murph.

This novel left me cold.  I found that I often could not get into the characters and there seemed a constant disconnectedness with the character's emotions.  With very little conflict in the novel, it merely seems like a year in the life of a college student.  The apathy the character displays towards nearly everything, with perhaps the exception of her brother, makes it difficult to really climb into her story.  Some points were very well written, and I found myself in love with the language, but very often, the narration slips into an almost comatose rambling that made me often want to scream "Get on with it", since none of it seemed overly important.

There seemed to be little character development, though the most interesting character was the mother herself, Sarah Thornwood-Brink, who has secrets in her past.  A restaurant owner, she and her husband Edward, are nearing middle age and want a child, and look to adopt.  But even she seems obsessed with her own snobbery as a restaurant owner and is difficult to connect to as a character.

The most memorable part of the novel for me was a funeral, where Tassie climbs into the casket and describes the smell of the body as "a chemical one, like the field fertilizer used by the agrabiz farms"  (298). The body in the case isn't buried whole, one hand left behind, unable to be retrieved, and is stuffed with cardboard and newspaper and legless.  The image is disturbing, but also one of sadness and loss.  I only wish the connection to the deceased had been greater in the novel during life.

Altogether, I felt that this novel was a bit disappointing.  I had been introduced to the novel through the short story discussion group that I help run in Second Life.  The story that we gleaned from the recent pages of the New Yorker, called "Childcare", received a decent response, and so I had hopes for this novel, which I received as a Christmas present.  The best part of this novel for me was the thought of the friend who sent it to me.  Because of that, I will always cherish this novel, though I doubt I will read it again.

On to Confederates by Thomas Keneally!

Books

As we are about to get very poor, my book budget is going to take a serious dive. However, upon review of my bookshelves, I have at least a year's worth of reading to do just in books that I have bought and forgotten, mostly because I get distracted by something else and forget to read. With this list of books, I sort of wonder where all the room is for the books that I have read.. but.. they're there too. I'm thinking of sorting these into their own bookshelf in my writing room and then slowly emptying these out.

Anyways, here is my list

Self-Esteem - McKay/Fanning
Words in Air -correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Succulent Wild Woman- SARK
Spunk and Bite
SARK's new creative companion
The Right to Write- Cameron
Erotic Myths and Legends
A Year of Ritual
You can be a Super Quilter
The Teaching of Buddha
Burning down the House- Charles Baxter
Zuckerman Unbound- Philip Roth
Elements of Style- Strunk and White
The Jungle- Upton Sinclair
Peony in Love- Lisa Sec
Mythology- Edith Hamilton
Inferno- Dante
Odyssey- Homer
Haunted - Chuck Palahnuik
Lost Horizon- Hilton
For Whom the Bell Tolls- Hemingway
Life of Pi- Martel
Because They Wanted To- Mary Gaitskill
The Woman Warrior- Hong Kingston
Demonic Mnemonics- Suid
Mere Christianity- CS Lewis
The curious incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Blithe Spirit/Hay Fever/ Private Lives- Noel Coward
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen
Ulysses - James Joyce (oddly, I just bought this, thinking I didn't have it, but I did!)
Walden- Thoreau (one more try and then I'm chucking it)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell
The Best American Erotica of 2004
Love in the Time of Cholera - Marquez
The Oedipus Cycle
Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Middlesex -Eugenides
Sophie's World
The Sot-Weed Factor
Blink
Possession: A Romance - Byatt
Best American Short Stories of 2007
Measure of a Man - Portier
Dawn- Wiesel
The Accident - Wiesel
The Bluest Eye -Morrison
Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Everyman - Philip Roth
Paradise Lost
The Dark Tower Series - King
Best American Short Stories 2009
Light in August - Faulkner
The Mammary Plays - Vogel
Tom Sawyer- Twain
Mrs. Dalloway - Woolf
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Stowe
Moby Dick - Melville
Plays and Poetry by Yeats
Doubletakes
Bodacious Book of Succulence by SARK
Tales of Beedle the Bard - Rowling
History of Love - Krauss
Confederates - Thomas Keneally
A Room with a View/ Howards End / Maurice - Forster
Revolutionary Road / Easter Parade - Yates
Dear John - Nicholas Sparks

I'm currently nearing the end of A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore. Good book. Once that's done.. I'll start making a dent in all of these. Whatever powers there are.. please help me. :)

The Lithium triplets and a bag of pyrite

This is, I fear, going to be a fairly whiny post. You can stop now, if you want. I don't mind. I'm writing this mostly for myself.

I'm sitting here eating what may possibly be the last chinese dinner I eat ever in my life (sweet and sour pork, chow mein and beijing beef, in case you were wondering). As I slowly masticate, I wonder about, I guess, the meaning of life, writing, dieting, and medication... we'll start with the last and go backwards.

A friend confided in me today that he thinks I am insane. I'm afraid he may be right. I stare now at three very small white pills, lined up on a box from a pen I got recently (Red Pelikano Jr, which is in my pocket with Passion Red ink in it - good for grading). They sit there, taunting me, each with the tiny numbered faces talking to me, telling me that I'm just too insane to love. The Lithium triplets, ladies and gentleman, whisper to me in their small, salty voices (I hate the taste of these pills), in the voices of my father, my sister...and sometimes my mother... and they tell me that I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough. That I have to depend on them, or I will be nothing. I hate these pills. I want to crush them beneath the heel of my birkenstocks, which, I might point out, aren't really all that made for crushing. My only recourse is to swallow them with my Beijing Beef, and hope that they drown in the stomach acid. It makes me feel a little better.

Dieting next, right? (as I munch on my high sodium and high calorie chinese food, the repast of a dying stomach).

I decided to start the sign up process for weight loss surgery. To say I'm frightened is an understatement. My whole.. everything.. is frightened. There are a few reasons I'm afraid. First, is the extra skin. I realize this is incredibly vain of me, but I want to be beautiful. This goes back to the whole "not loved" thing. I want to be so beautiful that men will stop to look at me... that men will notice me and maybe even wonder who I am. I am invisible as I am, or worse, the subject of ridicule and derision. Because I look like this, people sneer and don't even bother to get to know my mind... and not more than once, when they have gotten to know my mind first, through some internet experience, perhaps, once they do see me, who I really am... they back off, or back away and tell me they want to slow down.... or I never hear from them again. So, when I worry that I may look like a sharpei after the surgery because my skin's elasticity has been affected, this is a major fear of mine.

I guess the other concerns would be minor to that, though major to some. Not being able to eat the foods I like, gaining back the weight despite the surgery, having to buy all new clothes, the risk of infection or possible death (a .02% chance). However weighing all of those options against a longer life span, and maybe the ability to move freely again without very serious pain... even my vanity loses out. I have to do something. My willpower won't let me. Maybe surgery will.

Writing... I'm getting to a place where I'm at the "what's the point" of writing. I'm not very good at it. I definitely know I could be better, but when I sit down to write, typing or otherwise, nothing spectacular comes out. Funnily enough, when I pick up a fountain pen, the first thing I scrawl isn't a poem, or a bit of prose, but my signature - every time I put pen to paper. I love my fountain pens, they are gorgeous, and fun to play with, but.. well.. a wise man once told me that the pen in my hand is merely a fetish. I believe that it can cause magic because of of what it is. I believe a nice fountain pen can make a better writer, but.. it can't. Nothing really can. I write how I write. I can edit, which I hate doing, as I don't feel that it's creation. I have been negative about my writing for over a year now, tying it into a heartbreak that should have never occurred in the first place. I tied my writing life into that relationship and because of that, once the relationship ended, my writing became stunted. It wasn't his fault; it was mine for tying it to anybody else in the first place.

If I want to be a writer, I have to write for myself, and not worry about whether or not it's crap at first, but be happy that I am at least writing something. If my writing group tells me it's crap.. I just won't think about publishing it and put it in the "nice try" pile. When you're mining for gold in a river full of iron pyrite, you're bound, once in a while, to find a nugget of something good there. (and I've seen a lot of iron pyrite published too!)

So.. life will sort itself out. I'm done whining now. The Lithium triplets are safely tucked away for the evening... and I have about 5000 words to write to catch up to my fellow Nanoers.

ToryLynn

Review: Idiot Girl and the Flaming Tantrum of Death by Laurie Notaro

I had high hopes for this book when I bought it. I had read a review in the New York Times, thought it sounded at least amusing, and so I decided to get it for my Sony Reader. It was convenient, and I thought it would be a quick funny read. The Times assured me so. There were parts where I found myself laughing out loud as I read, things that made me giggle, but I didn't really enjoy this book. The author comes off as a paranoid hypochondriac, someone I would sit with and talk to a while if I were stuck next to them at a really boring sports game, but I wouldn't want to hang out with on a regular basis. I almost put this book down and didn't finish it, but then decided that I was better than that and needed to finish what I had started. I found a few redeeming qualities, but not enough to make me pick up another Notaro book any time soon.

Review of March by Geraldine Brooks

One of the best written historical novels that I have ever read. Historical fiction has never really been my forte, but a recent interest in the Civil War has caught my attention, and this book was recommended during a short story discussion, so I thought to pick it up on my Reader and take a look. Lately, I haven't been reading very quickly (a vampire romance novel goes fast, but anything else creeps), however this novel went quickly for me. The pace and the story had me up at night wanting to know what happened to Mr. March next. The story takes one of the classic books written by a superb American writer, Louisa May Alcott, and pulls an absent character, the father, out into a fully realized person, who comes with his own guilt, his own background, and his own moral and mental wounds. Definitely a wonderful book and highly recommended! I know why it won the Pulitzer. It is great.

The value of a journal

I wonder if having a more expensive notebook is better for me in the long run...

I used to own a Moleskine softcover Extra Large notebook. I actually have several of these, but I would use the one at a time. They cost about $20 and the soft oilskin cover felt really good in my hand, making me think of someone finding it, years later, and it's bent back corners and a few modifications I make to my notebooks. (one is to put a wax seal on a finished one with the dates on the inside cover of when the notebook was used. It's easier for cataloguing and finding older journals. A vague index may sometimes be made in the back). But these notebooks would hold everything.

Recently, I switched to the cheaper, but just as well made, Piccadilly Notebooks. They have the same oilskin cover, though so far.. only in hardbound.. they recently came out with softcovers, but I haven't found them yet. I may order offline... but then again.. I may not. So the purchase ratio from Moleskine to Piccadilly is about 1 Moleskine for every 3 Piccadilly's. I thought.. great! I can buy my journals cheaper.

I actually now have 4 Piccadilly notebooks floating around. Contents of these notebooks: one is used for notes on teaching; one is used for notes on the Civil War novel I'm writing; one is used for the Foster Care novel I recently abandoned; and the last one was just general scribblings that is currently defunct. I think that is all, but who knows where the others are. I currently cannot find the one with my Civil War novel in it, once again proving that if I have too many of one thing.. I tend to misplace them.

With the more expensive (and thus more precious) Moleskine, all of thse novel notes and writings and school notes would be kept in once place. True, it would run out faster, but then I would start a new journal. I have one short story that spans 3 different journals, in dribs and drabs and edits and notes. Most of what I write (other than SL poetry) starts out written by hand in these journals. Even if I moved on to a new journal, I could always go back and find the other journal that I used and glean the (mostly chronological and somewhat indexed) information from the hand numbered pages.

So does having a more expensive notebook make me keep things in a more orderly fashion. It's possible.. and in fact it is probable. I miss keeping all of my notes and novel picking, short story ideas and dribs and drabs of poetry in a single edition that continues. Since college, I have used many notebooks in my quest to find the perfect journal. I wonder if I will ever find the right one.. or if I already have.

(Also posted to my blog: the WW ning http://writtenword.ning.com)

Researching to Write

Overwhelmingly enough, I have decided to start writing a Civil War novel... so I am eyeball deep in artillery and armies decked out in blue and grey and.. butternut? I am learning all sorts of new things lately.

Anyway.. here is a new poem that I wrote for the Blue Angel.

Love Song to Autumn
by ToryLynn

The first tinge of gold
At the edges of the willow tree
Bring the idea of autumn
And the crisp apples
Blush, dropping from the tree
Languishing for the harvest.

The autumn of life
Is the best season
The fruit so ripe and willing;
Knowledge dripping
Off the vine

Truth lives in this golden time
When lies are no longer necessary
Free to love what lives
Looking towards death.

Sitting back, sipping the cool tea
Commenting on the winter
we bathe in life.

And don't look towards
The death

That is coming.