Category Archives: Books

Lately I’ve been in a mood to read more contemporary fiction than I usually do (a mood that’s probably fleeting and influenced by people raving about new books on Twitter), and so I picked up Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies. I’m grateful to the people on Twitter because I enjoyed this one quite a lot.

The novel tells the story of Seabrook, a boys’ school in Dublin where Skippy is a student. In the opening pages, we witness Skippy dying a horrible death in a doughnut shop, and then the narrative backs up in time to tell about his life. The novel tells his story, and the story of his friends, classmates, and teachers. Skippy is a quiet, seemingly-normal kind of kid, the kind whose friends are much more colorful and memorable. Ruprecht, for example, is Skippy’s roommate (there are a few boarders at Seabrook, although most students commute) and is considered a scientific genius. Mario can think of one and only one thing, sex, and is capable of talking about it only in the crudest of ways. But Skippy is thoughtful and sensitive, and also in love with Lori, a student at the nearby girls’ school. Unfortunately for Skippy, Lori is way out of Skippy’s league, or everyone thinks so, and she has become involved with Carl, a drug-using, manipulative, thuggish bully.

The novel also tells the stories of the adults, most notably Seabrook’s history teacher Howard, who is unhappy in his current relationship and attracted to the beautiful substitute geography teacher (who is the only teacher who can really capture the boys’ attention in a school with very few women in it). Howard graduated from Seabrook and never thought he would end up there again, but his life has gone in unexpected directions. There is also Tom, another teacher and former Seabrook student whose relationship with Howard is long and complicated. And then there is the acting principle, whose devotion to Seabrook and its reputation is extreme to the point of being frightening.

Murray moves back and forth between these various stories, and in doing so, captures the feeling and mood of the place. The novel a reminder of just how hard it is to be a teenager — and how hard it is to teach teenagers. The kids aren’t in the least interested in learning anything, with the exception of Ruprecht, and only want to be free to hang out with each other and to dream about meeting girls, or, in some cases, to actually meet them. There’s a lot of longing, a lot of angst, and a quite a lot of drug use.

And, actually, the lives of the teachers aren’t so different. Howard can’t figure out what he wants out of a relationship and what he wants to do with his life, and he spends his time obsessed with the geography teacher, to the extent that he keeps teaching World War I beyond its allotted length of time because she expressed an interest in Robert Graves, a World War I poet. The novel is largely about dissatisfaction and longing, and this takes many forms: Howard’s obsession with a woman whom he hopes will transform his staid, boring life, for one. It’s also about Skippy’s hope that Lori — the beautiful girl who seems so far out of reach and whom he falls in love with while gazing at her from afar — will notice him. And it’s also about Ruprecht’s obsession with the possibility that other universes exist and that he might be able to make contact with aliens. Everyone hopes for something from outside them to transform their lives, when reality is boring at best and quite possibly very painful.

The story is an absorbing one, especially once it’s clear that the novel is going to tell how Skippy got to the horrible death scene in the doughnut shop. I found it hard to believe that Skippy really was going to die, and I kept rooting for him. Murray does some interesting things with narration, beginning many of the chapters about Skippy with a description of the video game he is playing, so that we are thrown into the world of the game and only eventually return to the story once again, mimicking the way Skippy loses himself in an alternate world and is reluctantly forced back into reality. Murray does a good job making us feel as though we know these characters and how their minds work and that we have something at stake in their decisions. The world he portrays is dark; he makes being a teenager seem like a curse and being an adult not a whole lot better. But the energy, compassion, and humor with which the story is told keeps some hope alive.

May Sarton’s The Small Room was a satisfying, thought-provoking read. I’m a sucker for academic novels, so I was delighted to find out that this book is about a young woman who travels to small-town New England to begin her first college teaching job. Lucy Winter is fresh out of grad school, although she wasn’t your typical grad student: she went through her Ph.D. program merely because she wanted a reason to stay near her fiance who was in medical school. But now the engagement is over and she unexpectedly finds herself with a job. As the novel opens, she is on the train heading north to Appleton, a women’s college.

What she finds is a small, close-knit community that appears to be sleepy and peaceful. She goes to a beginning of semester cocktail party to meet fellow faculty and teaches her classes for the first time, all the while trying to figure out her role in this new place. She opens her first class with a long account of her educational life, hoping to make an impression on the students, but she immediately doubts herself afterward. She wants to do a good job and is willing to take risks in the classroom, but she knows she is not entirely sure what she is doing.

Of course, she can’t stay on the outside of this community for long, and, of course, it’s not nearly as sleepy and peaceful as it seems. She gets pulled into its dramas and intrigues through one of her students, a star pupil of the campus star professor. When she discovers this student has plagiarized, she immediately reveals it to a colleague, an act that sets a whole train of events in motion, events that not only cause controversy, but that make the college think hard about what it is and what it stands for.

The novel is fundamentally about teaching — what it means to be a teacher and a student and the ways the two can interact. Lucy struggles with the question of how much of herself she should share with her students. Her opening speech about her education starts things off on a personal note, but she is reluctant to respond warmly when a student shares her private troubles. She feels there should be boundaries between teachers and students, and she also knows that allowing those boundaries to drop away can be exhausting. Teaching demands a great deal of energy, and teachers need to protect themselves from giving up too much of themselves to others.

And yet strict boundaries are impossible to maintain: students are persistent in their efforts to get a personal response from Lucy, and once she stumbles into the plagiarism scandal, she is drawn even further into their lives.

The novel is also about what it means to be a woman who teaches. Early on one of the characters says, “Is there a life more riddled with self-doubt than that of a woman professor, I wonder?” The novel was published in 1961, and the question of whether it’s worth while to educate women who will just get married and raise children lingers in the air. The faculty at Appleton take a strong stand on this: as one character claims, “We don’t teach domestic science; we are not interested especially in producing marriageable young ladies.” Lucy wonders, though, what her own commitment to the intellectual life is, and what it would mean for her to stay on at Appleton. She wants a family, but with her engagement over and her life established in a quiet town full of married couples, she is not sure that will be possible. She considered her Ph.D. program as a joke, after all; does she really want to devote her life to scholarship and teaching, at the possible expense of other relationships? As I read this, I kept thinking about Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night, which is also about women intellectuals struggling with the sacrifices the intellectual life can demand. In a culture that expects women to be wives and mothers or, if they want to take work seriously, to give up those roles, what is a smart woman supposed to do?

The novel is short and is a quick read, but it takes up a lot of great questions and offers some interesting answers. It’s satisfying to watch Lucy figure out who she is as a teacher and what she wants her place in the Appleton community to be. It’s also interesting to think about teaching generally — what really helps students learn and what roles a teacher can and can’t play. The novel shows well what a complicated job it is to try to inspire other people with the love of learning and at the same time to remain a satisfied, whole person oneself.

Posting will most likely be light around here for the next few weeks, as I get myself through what feels like the busiest part of the semester. Once I reach Thanksgiving, things begin to wind down a bit. For now, I need quiet evenings for reading more than I need to keep up-to-date with the blog.

But I did want to write at least a little bit about what I’ve read over the last month or so. That includes Sam Savage’s novel Firmin. I’m not entirely sure what to think about this book. I want to say I’ve been in a little bit of a fiction slump and haven’t liked things much for that reason, but I just picked up May Sarton’s A Small Room and am loving it, so I wonder whether it’s my own reading that’s at fault or whether I just haven’t found books that work for me.

The short version is that I hoped to love this book, and I only ended up responding to it in a vague and not particularly enthusiastic way. It should be a book I enjoy, since it’s all about reading and loving books. That it’s about a rat who can read should have made the book quirky and charming. I think it’s the voice that didn’t quite work — it’s jaded and slightly bitter, worldly-wise but also able to remember youthful enthusiasm fondly. That all is fine, but it’s also a bit pompous and affected in a way I don’t like. Even though I liked the first sections of the book and it took me a while before I began to sour on it a bit, it’s passages such as this one, near the beginning when he is describing difficulties writing his life story, that capture what I mean by tone:

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. It begins, like all true stories, who knows where. Looking for the beginning is like trying to discover the source of a river. You paddle upstream for months under a burning sun, between towering green walls of dripping jungle, soggy maps disintegrating in your hands. You are driven half mad by false hopes, malicious swarms of biting insects, and the tricks of memory, and all you reach at the end — the ultima Thule of the whole ridiculous quest — is a damp spot in the jungle or, in the case of a story, some perfectly meaningless word or gesture. And yet, at some more or less arbitrary place along the way between the damp spot and the sea the cartographer inserts the point of his compass, and there the Amazon begins.

Somehow, and this is a vague thought, it doesn’t feel like the narrator has earned the right to get all poetical and metaphorical on us in this way. There’s a self-dramatizing quality and a self-consciousness about it that began to grate a little.

But the narrator — Firmin himself speaking in the first person — can certainly claim to have a very sad story to tell. He is the runt of the litter and takes to reading books in consolation for losing the battle with his siblings for food. Somehow by eating the pages, he learns to read them, and soon becomes a voracious reader. He lives in a building that houses a bookstore and spends his time gazing down at the books, the people browsing through them, and most especially the store owner. He feels he has found a kindred spirit in this man who loves books so much too. Alas, when the store owner spots Firmin staring down at him from a hole in the ceiling, all he does is put poison out. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Firmin to communicate his intelligence and sympathy to the people around him. His reading fills his mind with longings and romantic images, but then he glimpses his rat face in a window and despairs. He seems doomed to loneliness.

The story should be touching, and it sometimes is, but the narrator’s tone kept me feeling distanced from it. I do like its exploration of the dangers of reading — that reading can cause unhappiness and dissatisfaction as well as pleasure is an old, old story, and this is a potentially interesting twist on the idea that reading and education can lead to isolation. And yet I’m not sure that making the main character a rat really takes us in a new direction with the theme. It simply makes the isolation deeper and the barriers to communication higher. So he pours his energies into communicating with readers in the form of the book itself. It’s an understandable move, and yet, sadly, his self-portrait failed to win me over.

Alicia Gimenez-Bartlett’s Death Rites was the book up for discussion at my latest mystery book group meeting, and I am, in spite of having thought about the book before the meeting quite a lot and having spent several hours discussing it with the group, still not quite sure how I feel about it. I liked the book when I first started reading it, but then at some point I began having doubts, and then I enjoyed it again, and then I doubted, and after I finished my reaction wasn’t any clearer. Then I listened to other members of the group explain why they didn’t like it, and it was hard not to be swayed by the general consensus.

I’m not usually so indecisive. The problem seems to be that the book never quite came together for me, so I liked this part of it, didn’t like that part, and could never quite pull everything together to have a real opinion.

Much of the problem for the book group was the translation, or at least the possibility that the translation might be bad made it hard to judge whether the book itself was any good or not. The writing was certainly awkward, with badly constructed sentences and bizarre images (although some of the bizarre images I liked). But there were other problems — a main character who can be intensely unlikeable, a plot that floundered at times, and a resolution that was too predictable.

To say something about the book itself, it’s set in Barcelona and tells the story of Petra Delicado, an inspector who has been working in the documentation department and who gets called upon unexpectedly to investigate a rape case. She is assigned to work with Fermin Garzon, a rather plodding, obedient type who is close to retirement. The two have to figure out not only how to run an investigation, something Petra at least has little experience with, but also how to deal with each other. There is tension between the two of them from the very beginning; Petra isn’t used to being in charge and has to figure out how to exert authority in a world that grants it to women only grudgingly, and Fermin has to figure out how to respond to a boss who knows less about investigating than he does. Plus Fermin has some pretty old-fashioned ideas about women that Petra does not like.

The two do a pretty bad job of investigating, or at least that’s what members of the press accuse them of. They have no good leads for a very long time and spend a surprisingly long period floundering about desperately looking for some kind of breakthrough. I’m not entirely convinced that they are bad investigators, though, or at least that they are bad as people think they are. They do make some mistakes, but they are rookies, after all. But even more so, I wonder whether this portrayal of an investigation isn’t more realistic than investigations often are in novels. What do investigators do when there are no clues? When no clues appear for a very long time? When every trail they follow leads them nowhere? The press accuses them of failing in their job, but I wonder whether other, more experienced investigators would have been able to do it better. In novels, investigators struggle and take time to solve their cases, but I wonder whether they struggle a lot less and take a lot less time than real-life investigators do.

We also talked in my book group about how often Petra and Fermin take breaks from their work and how often they are to be found in restaurants or bars, rather than working on the investigation. This is probably one of their most serious mistakes, but I have to say, I’m entirely in sympathy with their commitment to eating well and resting up. This is illogical of me, I suppose, since with a rapist on the loose, they really do need to be in a hurry. And yet I do get tired of detectives who never seem to sleep and who skip meals all the time and who basically act like their non-working lives don’t matter in the least. Petra has just bought a new house, and she’s trying to settle into it, and I sympathize with her occasional feelings of resentment at a job that’s pulling her away from it.

So these elements I liked, and I also liked Petra’s vocal feminism and the struggles she goes through to figure out how to establish and maintain power, and also how to use that power effectively without abusing it (which she fails at spectacularly a time or two). But at the same time, the narrative did get dull now and then and Petra’s character remains a bit elusive. There was some spark, something lively, missing from the book. And the translation was a problem.

That’s the best I can do with this book, it seems. For other thoughts, you can read Emily’s post.

I was in the mood for something Victorian not too long ago, and Margaret Oliphant’s The Perpetual Curate was exactly what I needed. It’s a long (relatively long, 500 not-too-dense pages), absorbing story with interesting characters and an amusing tone. Its mood is light, but it deals with serious situations and genuine problems, so it never felt frivolous.

The story is about Frank Wentworth, the perpetual curate of the title, a young man who loves his work but understands that it doesn’t pay enough for him to marry the woman he loves, Lucy Wodehouse. In order for that to happen, he would have to become a rector. This is actually quite possible, as he has three aunts who will soon have a living to bestow, but, alas, Frank and the aunts do not see eye to eye when it comes to how one should run a church service. The aunts lean toward the evangelical side, while Frank is more solidly, traditionally Anglican. The aunts unexpectedly show up to Frank’s Easter service, and are shocked at the sight of flowers on the alter and are displeased with his sermon. Frank realizes that those pesky flowers, which he is not sure he cares all that much about, may have ruined his chances for married happiness.

Oliphant piles problem after problem on poor Frank’s shoulders. Not only does he have the uptight aunts to deal with, but he is seen in what looks like a compromising situation with a pretty, young shop girl, and rumors begin to fly. The town that has stood behind him for the five years or so he has worked there now starts to have doubts. Then the local rector, newly arrived in the town, gets angry at him for running services for the poor in his district. And then his brother, Gerald, decides that he wants to convert to Catholicism and become a Catholic priest, even if it means abandoning his wife. There is also the strange, unpleasant, badly-dressed man who shows up in Frank’s lodgings, and whom Frank takes in for mysterious reasons, even though his neighbors are none too pleased.

Much of the novel has Frank running around from one disaster to another, trying to figure out how to appease his family, friends, and parishioners while at the same time staying true to his principles. Fortunately, as Oliphant frequently points out, Frank is young and can bounce back from disasters quickly. But still, it’s chilling to read a convincing description of how suddenly, and for no real fault of Frank’s, everything can suddenly go wrong. People misread events and misunderstand conversations, and because Frank can sometimes be a little oblivious, he doesn’t always realize when this happens. Suddenly his world is falling apart around him, and he hardly knows how it happened. This can happen to any of us, the novel implies, at any time, and there is little to be done about it.

The things that could be done to rectify the situation Frank rejects as impossible because of his strong sense of pride and honor. He can’t simply go to his aunts and declare he really didn’t mean it about the flowers because he can’t stoop that low, and he can’t simply explain that he doesn’t care anything about the pretty shop girl because he doesn’t want to dignify the accusations. This sense of pride and honor, which he and Lucy share, becomes so powerful and his and Lucy’s feelings are so delicate, that they threaten to become absurd. In fact, by the end of the novel I was wondering whether Oliphant was having a little fun gently mocking them. This suspicion was reinforced by the way Oliphant frequently draws attention near the novel’s end to the fact that it is a novel that she’s writing, as though she is pulling away from the narrative a bit to evaluate her characters more directly than she ever did before. Endings are tricky, she seems to be saying, and sometimes they can be a little silly or unrealistic, so don’t take it all too seriously.

The Perpetual Curate is part of a series of novels called “The Chronicles of Carlingford,” and this novel is the fourth book of six. I’m pleased to know this, because it means I can return to this world and to these characters five more times if I want to. If I’m able to find the books, that is. I will certainly be on the lookout for more Oliphant in the future.

I’m listening to my first Sara Paretsky novel right now, her 2005 V.I. Warshawski mystery Fire Sale. I’ve been meaning to read Paretsky for a while, ever since reading about her in Maureen Corrigan’s book Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, where Corrigan has a chapter on mystery novels and praises Paretsky highly. With the caveat in mind that I am more likely to like a book I listen to than one I read on paper, I’m really enjoying the story so far. The novel is set in Chicago, and Warshawski is a private investigator. She has a thriving business, but in this novel, she is involved in a investigation she won’t be paid for: a case of arson and murder that she stumbles upon after agreeing to serve as a substitute basketball coach at her old South Chicago high school. The mother of one of the players asks her to investigate strange happenings at the factory where she works, and the next thing she knows, she’s caught up in a story of big business and corporate intrigue.

The basketball coaching and the investigation force her to spend a lot of time in South Chicago where she is confronted by her past, which was a harsh one. This novel doesn’t give very many details, but we do find out she lost her mother when she was young, and that she grew up to be a tough street fighter. In this novel, she still has that toughness, but also the perspective and experience of a woman who has seen more of the world. She is brave and courageous, although not without fear, and there’s a certain amount of sadness to her character, which, of course, is not at all surprising for someone who makes a living as an investigator.

The plot is overtly political, as Warshawski investigates a big Walmart-like corporation that exploits its workers and is run by a family full of nasty, suspicious, racist tightwads. The fact that they claim to be committed evangelical Christians makes them even worse. I suppose the argument here is a little too easy and too obvious — the religious characters are hypocrites, or at least the rich ones are, and all big business owners care about nothing at all but making money. But still, Paretsky’s picture of how families struggle to make a living working in low-paying jobs and are first exploited so they can barely get by and then condemned for the very fact that they struggle is a powerful one. Paretsky explores the complicated causes of poverty on the south side and why it is so many young people struggle in school and so many teenage girls get pregnant, while the big business owners live in their gated mansions in the suburbs, getting rich through their stinginess. The ideas and issues may be familiar, but Paretsky does a good job bringing them to life.