Reading Addict

This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman is the story of a family in crisis.  Richard and Liz Bergamot have moved to New York City from Ithaca in anticipation of Richard’s professional advancement.  They have two children—a 15-year-old son, Jake, and a 6-year-old daughter, Coco.  One night, after attending a party, Jake receives an explicit email from a young girl.  He forwards it to a friend, who forwards it to another friend, until the email and its attached video has gone viral.  Yes, this is a ripped-from-the-headlines kind of story, which could have become a salacious or superficial novel focused entirely on the gritty details of plot.  Instead, it becomes a beautiful character study of the members of this shell-shocked family. 

Schulman sets this story in 2003, a time before social media would be so deeply entrenched in our daily routines.  Jake doesn’t post this video to Facebook or YouTube; he simply forwards an email.  He types in an email address and clicks forward.  A teenager using email almost seems antiquated to us now, and I think this is the point.  Jake seems so naïve, as does everyone else in this family.  His action is a single card shifting in a house of cards.  It is a seemingly small act that has enormous consequence.    

Schulman artfully explores the ways in which Richard and Liz respond to the situation.  Jake’s being in danger brings out sides of the Bergamots they have never before experienced.  They participate, however indirectly, in smearing the young girl and her family, hire a powerful attorney, and retreat into the eerie silence of their home.  Richard is put on a leave of absence from his high powered position, Liz sinks deeper into depression and withdraws, Jake is shattered and lost, and Coco is neglected to hours of television and DVDs.  Schulman creates a palpable sense of guilt, blame, and depression that hovers over the household.  Everyone feels guilty, but no one is willing to name their remorse. 

This Beautiful Life raises questions about morality, bad decisions, empathy, and the ways we protect those we love most.  Schulman puts the Bergamots under intense pressure and lets us observe them in a moment of truth.  The novel deftly avoids melodrama, but evokes a sense of regret for failings which we cannot undo.  If you enjoy non-didactic, issues-driven fiction, This Beautiful Life is worth checking out. 

In my estimation any book review that can be tagged ‘debut’, somewhere in the body probably would read ‘his/her scope and ambition far exceeds his/her execution and while there are some good ideas therein, much of the plot is meandering, aimless, and poorly developed.’  Fortunately, I am usually quite wrong and although I find it as incalculable as theoretical physics, young writers are publishing astonishing debuts and a dearth of excellent fiction, praise be the heavens, is not imminent.

Case in point:  The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.  Though Fielding is Harbach’s debut novel, he is in no way a wet behind the ears, inexperienced wordsmith. He graduated from Harvard and is the cofounder and coeditor of n+1, a wonderful, selective journal of news and literature.  Accordingly, he has the chops that the Art of Fielding further corroborates.  If you’ll excuse the somewhat reductive description, The Art of Fielding is a university novel, a novel of transition taking place on the small upper-Midwestern liberal arts campus of Westish University.  The plot, perhaps unintentionally, takes a cue from another baseball novel, Don Delillo’s Underworld, whereby a routine yet errant throw inexplicably sets in motion a series of events.  I’m not one for spoilers so I’ll simply report that the lives of five individuals become inexorably and unavoidably entwined.

The serious reader will find some missteps on Harbach’s part; but nothing unforgivable.  Some odd plot twists, some characters you wish had a bit more dimension, some questionable decisions. But both the serious and casual reader will appreciate the absence of clumsy sentences and the rapid pace of the novel.  And I believe all readers will fully value and come to love the empathy Harbach elicits.  Not in the least that elicited by Westish University as a character itself, a character that is wholly unique and separate from our own reality, and frankly something I found difficult to part with.

When my nephew was much younger and not yet acclimated to the pretend-gender-wars dynamic of family Game Night, he started to cry when my sister and I taunted the “boys” team with chants of “Girls rule, boys drool!”

(It’s okay. We apologized and explained, he felt better, and nobody remembers who won or lost because that’s not the point of Game Night, anyway, is it?)

But it reminds me of what it’s like to be a child – boy or girl – and how confusing, overwhelming, and lost you can feel when you’re expected to know the exact rules of each new situation.

Two novels that capture these deep feelings and frustrations best, in particular of young women in 1970s America, are Hillary Hamann’s Anthropology of an American Girl and Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville.

Turn to any page of Hamann’s epic masterpiece and you’ll find something lovely and deep and true, written in a poetic language of careful observation that doesn’t push the reader away but brings you closer – closer to the narrator, and closer to an understanding of what the narrator sees and feels.

Here’s one description I chose at random (seriously). Read it and tell me you don’t see/smell/feel this. Marilyn is the narrator’s stepmother.

“We knelt at the open window, reaching to feel the rain. Cars swished dreamily up Elizabeth Street. Tangerine strands of hair broke free from Marilyn’s braid and fluttered in the breeze like kite tails. Her skin was powdered. It’s always nice to kiss her cheek; it brings to mind the gentler things.”

Or this (also randomly chosen), about gym class and its familiar humiliations:

“The worst thing about the ropes was the panic you felt when you stood up, knowing everyone was staring. Though I sympathized with whomever was up there, I would stare too, since you were wise to feign interest. Ellie rose reluctantly, yanked her T-shirt down around her hips, went dutifully to the swinging rope, tilted her head as if wondering how to begin, then looked pathetically to Coach for some kind of break. But coaches never give breaks. They take their jobs seriously – you can tell by the way they wedge their clipboards into their bulging bellies, blow silver whistles up close and indoors, and wear neat-looking Adidas sweat suits, though they never break a sweat.” 

Beard’s novel is shorter and sharper, but just as evocative in description. She places in the eyes and mind of her nameless narrator as she babysits a difficult family with her friend, goes to football games at school, and fights with her mother.

And, most memorably for me, she is a reader herself who gets lost in books and even has a special place in her home, wedged behind an easy chair, saved just for reading.

So, for all of you (grown-up) boys out there who want to know what it’s like to be a girl – or the (grown-up) girls who want to re-live the experience – these lovely novels will take you there, with no actual (only literary) pain, periods, or pimples.

There’s a strange sense of pleasure I get from reading Tom Perrotta.  Although his novels have an entertaining, gossipy, and voyeuristic quality, they have substantial substance at their core.  They are at once laugh-out-loud funny and acerbic social commentaries.  In his latest novel The Leftovers, the world has experienced a rapture-like phenomenon.  Millions have disappeared, and those remaining are left to piece together their lives.  Disappearances are seemingly random, not breaking down among any affiliation (religious or otherwise).  What unfolds is the multitude of ways in which the Garvey family and those around them attempt to explain and understand the event. Laurie Garvey experiences it as abandonment:

Deep in her heart, as soon as it happened, she knew.  She’d been left behind.  They all had. .. And yet, she chose to ignore this knowledge, to banish it to some murky recess of her mind—the basement storage area for things you couldn’t bear to think about –the same place you hid the knowledge that you were going to die, so you could live your life without being depressed every minute of every day. (3)

In the small community of Mapleton, there are those who honor the departed as heroes, throwing parades in their honor and hosting remembrance ceremonies.  To give shape to their days, they attempt to return to school, work, and shopping as quickly as possible.  Another group, formed by a self-appointed leader known as Holy Wayne, contends that the “sudden departure” was not THE rapture and sets out to malign the disappeared.  The barefoot people are hedonists who see no point in continuing with social conventions. Those in the Guilty Remnant believe that they have been rejected by God and are seeking forgiveness through an ascetic lifestyle, which ironically involves smoking cigarettes.  Within the Garvey family, we witness each one of these responses. 

It is to Perrotta’s credit that we focus not on the inciting event—this supernatural disappearance of millions—but upon the characters’ emotions and thoughts as they respond to such unexplainable loss. What opens as a dystopic science fiction novel remains firmly rooted in suburban domesticity.   We feel compassion for each character even as we are laughing at the absurdity of their situation.  Perrotta’s novels make me a little uncomfortable in the way that good social commentaries should—with equal parts absurd humor and existential angst.   The Leftovers is a worthy successor to The Abstinence Teacher and Little Children.