Thoughts of a Have Not

#5 Best of 2011: A Half-Dozen Books That Blew Me Away

2012-01-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

Five

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

“How strange, that this one profession should be so associated with loneliness, virginity, female desperation.” --Rebecca Makkai

The problem is that ten-year-old Ian Drake is more interested in girl stuff than boy stuff. Also, he'd rather read than play. Actually, the problem is that his conservative religious parents want him to be more interested in boy stuff than girl stuff. To that end, they enroll him in anti-gay classes with a celebrity pastor who claims to keep children on the straight and narrow. The Drakes also give town librarian Lucy Hull a list of the types of books Ian is allowed to check out (nothing with wizards, Halloween, or the Theory of Evolution, for instance). Not much gets a librarian more upset than censorship—especially if said librarian is the daughter of a Russian who came to the U.S. precisely because of the freedoms promised in the First Amendment. So what is the twenty-six-year old librarian to do when Ian runs away from home and she finds him the next morning camped out in the library? I mean what is she supposed to do after he gives her the wrong home phone number, the wrong address, and, when she finally gets him in the car and is driving around trying to find his house, catches sight of him “crumpled up on the floor of the backseat, his arms up on his head like in a bomb drill....his whole body heaved with crying or vomiting”? She keeps driving, of course.

This is a charming story about a road trip that might be a kidnapping or might be a rescue. What's so impressive about The Borrower is how author Rebecca Makkai negotiates the ambiguities, how she balances the charm with the serious weighty issues that lie just underneath. So on the surface, we have this smile-inducing quirky-independent-film relationship: lovable creative prepubescent boy who figures out how to smuggle censored books past his mother, meets his soul mate, a librarian who wears a Violent Femmes T-shirt under her cardigan and shares his love of books and likes him for who he is. But even as we're smiling, we have to ask, as the increasingly anxious Lucy does, hard questions about parental rights and overstepping bounds, and how to do the right thing when you can't figure out what's the right thing to do. Think Thelma and Louise picks up Little Miss Sunshine and meets To Kill a Mockingbird at a rest stop.

In her own words:

“And so they set off, our comrades the librarian and the bright-cheeked lad, as the sudden winds bent the grass in the fields and raged against the car, seeming almost to lift it from beneath and carry it down the street. When the clouds finally parted and the winds died down, the still-rising sun slid beams of red light through the windows, shining on their hair so it looked for all the world as if they were on fire. There were several roads nearby, but it did not take them long to find the one painted with yellow lines and dotted with weathered billboards. Within a short time they were driving briskly toward the west, the boy navigating with directions that came from no place but the lovely magic of his imagination. The sun shone brightly and the birds sang sweetly and Library Lady hummed as she drove on the black and sparkling road, and although (truth be told) her face betrayed some anxiety about the journey ahead, she did not feel nearly so bad as you might think.”

Next Up: Another extraordinary child gets an audience with the Sultan...

#4 of Best of 2011: A Half-Dozen Books That Blew Me Away

2011-12-30T18:28:00.000-08:00

Four

Damn Sure Right: Flash Fiction by Meg Pokrass

“There is always a story inside a story inside a dog.”--Meg Pokrass

Full Disclosure: The author of this book is a friend of mine. But it was this book that made me befriend her; I made friends with her after I read her book and precisely because it blew me away. Therefore, I feel one hundred percent comfortable—in the ethics department as well as quality control—including Damn Sure Right by Meg Pokrass in my half-dozen favorite new books of the year. If you thought there was nothing innovative happening in the art of storytelling, I urge you to open this collection of very short stories, from one to three pages long, and some consisting of a single slender but satisfying paragraph. Also known as micro fiction and short-shorts, flash fiction is not new, but it is on the rise, with a growing presence in print and online—where its size makes it a perfect fit for webzines.

The flashes in Damn Sure Right center on relationships—between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, lovers, ex-lovers, best friends, neighbors, strangers, and passersby—and they pack the whole intricate history of these intertwined lives into just a couple hundred words. How does Pokrass fit so much nuance and charge into such a thin slice of life? Partly it's her startling choice of words and the way she puts them together into compact, slightly twisted sentences that do double and triple duty delivering plot, character, setting, attitude, insight. And partly it's her sensate writing hand, which seems to plug itself directly into the gut-level wisdom airing on the all-visceral all-the-time channel. As Frederick Barthelme, editor of the renowned Mississippi Review (now Blip online) says (in what may be the best blurb ever) “Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body.” This is what we're talking about: “The city smells salty, orange light sneaks around his shower-curtained window, cabs call like geese or mothers of missing children.” Also this: “There's a hum of electricity before the ring—mimics birds, cheap clocks, Buddhist meetings. It's summer. I'm sleepwalking, holding his phone number like a straight or flush.”

Often dark and unsettling, sometimes sly with humor, her stories are about running away and starting over, dangerous attractions and repulsions, surviving and barely surviving, and finding salvation in dogs, rats, and strange men. One of the funny ones, “Scotts,” follows a woman who has a crush on a guy she works with. She declares her affection on the relative safety of Craig's List, in a posting that reads “Do you feel the same way, Scott F.?” When she receives a positive reply, she's elated. Then comes the inundation of replies from Scott F's all over the region thinking their undeclared love has just been declared. The story ends on the woman, who now avoids her crush, eats “outside alone facing the mountains.” But one can't help but wonder what kind of mayhem is ensuing in the working lives of all those other misled Scotts. Danger lurks and lingers, even when the surface is glassy.

Another slice of life according to Meg Pokrass in Damn Sure Right:

“Not until my fourteenth birthday did an electric switch turn on. Out came the family neck, the swan neck—as though it rose from my birthday cake where it had been sleeping. My eyes became purple, and boys called them “picture windows.” Well, not boys exactly, but one girl did. Junie. It was still a compliment, since Junie was a ballerina and valued physical beauty, especially the neck above all else—she knew what to look for, called herself a slut. She had an unnaturally gravelly voice, as though she'd been smoking for forty years, as though she were half man, and when she laughed got worse.”

Next up, a reckless librarian goes on a road trip—or is it a kidnapping?

Best of 2011 Cont'd: A Half-Dozen Books That Blew Me Away

2011-12-29T21:37:00.000-08:00

Three

Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

From NYC in the Jazz Age (in Amor Towles' Rules of Civility), we jump to the alt-rock scene of L.A. in the '80s, '90s, and '00s, delivered in gritty detail in Dana Spiotta's Stone Arabia. Brother and sister Nik and Denise Kranis grow up in a rickety family with a single mom just barely keeping it together. But they have each other, and then they discover rock and roll and they have that, too. Nik ends up a musician—a brilliant failure—with uber fan Denise always there to bail him out and prop him up, to pay the rent and break bad news to bosses and girlfriends. The story-within-the-story is an elaborate alter-ego, alter-band, and alter-career that Nik creates for an audience of two: himself and his sister. Told in Denise's warm but weary, slightly frenetic voice, this is a story about:

The (mostly antagonistic) relationship between art and commerce;

What happens when we've always lived in the moment and now we're almost old;

Those human urges that can only be satisfied—and only for a time—by electric guitars and garbled vocals and vivifying drum beats;

Drugs, escape, and creativity;

Rusting vs burning out vs fading away.

But at its heart Stone Arabia is a love story, about the ties that bind siblings, especially when they share a tough childhood and favor the same tonic. It is also a testament to the pursuit of artistry despite—and to spite—the star-making machinery behind the popular song. Given the topic and the setting, I was expecting an overdose of snark, grunge, and cynic hipness. What I found was passion, compassion, and hard-earned insights about how to endure.

In Dana Spiotta's own words, via Denise Kranis:

“After [my sort-of boyfriend] gave me my birthday present, we watched Odd Man Out. I didn't tell Jay any of my birthday anxieties. Not because I wanted to withhold something. I just didn't feel them when I was with him. I didn't want to talk about myself; I wanted to talk about movies. Somehow, in the time between being young and where I was, the life-story recital grew too long, both dull and complicated. When I was eighteen, I wanted to tell my lovers every inch of every moment that led to this miraculous moment. I thought that would make them understand me, and then they would have to love me. But now that I was older, and actually had a life story, I didn't feel like telling it or hearing it. I just wanted him to press against me as we slowly figured our bodies out. I understood our real stories lived there anyway.”

Next up: Fresh Flash—short-short stories that pack a twisted punch...

A Half Dozen Books That Blew Me Away in 2011, continued

2011-12-27T09:48:00.000-08:00

Two

“Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people's vacations?” --Amor Towles

If my first pick, Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, scratched my magical realism itch, my second, Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, skips the magic and goes straight for the real. But it does so with restrained prose, amiable wit, and a setting—New York's Café Society of the 1930s—with a built-in sense of the unreal and over-the-top. Narrator Katey Kontent is a smart young secretary living in a boarding house in lower Manhattan. Equipped with the mouth of Dorothy Parker (though not as caustic) and the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald (so observant of the telling detail, especially in matters of class), she tells a story of ambition, of what people are willing to do for love and money and status. At a Greenwich Village jazz bar, Katey and her roommate Eve meet, charm, and fall for a handsome youthful bachelor well out of their league. On their third drunken outing together, the bachelor drives the three of them into a milk truck, and Eve, the only one requiring surgery, emerges with permanent cosmetic damage, a maiming she uses to her every advantage in the love triangle. The rest of the book follows an eventful year in the life of the threesome—and numerous other engaging characters from both the secretarial pool and the upper echelons—as they navigate the new “rules of civility” being invented by a mixing of the classes in a time of financial extremes (sound familiar?).

The time and place— the lingering Depression, the aftermath of Prohibition, the impending war—give rise to rollicking scenes of carousing and lamenting, of working girls and millionaires and the desperate charades both sets play. I especially loved reading the vivid details of women's work—the offices, the steno pools, the backstabbing, the care-taking, and how hard it was for a woman to rise out of the secretarial ranks no matter how intelligent, talented, and educated she was. But it's the voice of the narrator—clever but kind; sensitive but sensible, with a pinch of audacity—that makes the novel so delightful. I shouldn't be impressed by this, but I am: author Amor Towles, a middle-aged man who works as a principal in an investment firm, has created one of the juiciest, most nuanced and believable female heroines I've read in a while. Both Katey and Rules of Civility are brisk, sharp, and engaging—smart with heart.

See what I mean:

“Since first meeting Dicky at the King Cole bar, I had tagged along with his traveling circus a few nights. For a group freshly spilled from the country's finest schools, they were surprisingly aimless, but that didn't make them bad company. They didn't have much spending money or social status, but they were on the verge of having both. All they had to do was make it through the next five years without drowning at sea or being sentenced to jail and the Mountain would come to Muhammad: dividend-paying shares and membership at the Racquet Club; a box at the opera and time to make use of it. Where for so many, New York was ultimately the sum of what they would never attain, for this crew, New York was a city where the improbable would be made probable, the implausible plausible, and the impossible possible. So if you wanted to keep your head on straight, you had to be willing to establish a little distance now and then.”

Next up: an almost in the L.A. music scene...

Best of 2011: A Half-Dozen Books That Blew Me Away

2011-12-26T13:35:00.000-08:00

Everyone's doing it, so why not me? I've been the book review editor at several national magazines (including Body+Soul, now Martha Stewart's Whole Living) and am currently the reviewer for Good Housekeeping (those four Book Picks in every issue: I pick 'em and write 'em up). I have published hundreds of reviews in newspapers, magazines and online journals; receive book catalogs from every major publisher and many small presses; and get some 200 advanced review copies sent to me each year in the mail. But here, and only here, do I share my complete and unedited thoughts on the books that knocked me over and woke me up with their exciting originality and arresting charm.

A few caveats. All but one of these is a debut; clearly I have a bias toward the new and undiscovered. Another bias: I tend to like art—literature, film, theatre, painting—with a ratio of approximately 27 percent surreal or magic or whatever you want to call it to 73 percent realism. Also, language matters as much as story to me. And finally, keep in mind that I did not read every book published this year; there are others out there that I could have, would have, should have.

One

Let's start with The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. You might approach the amply praised and prized Téa Obreht with disbelief, envy, even cynicism; she is, after all, the youngest writer on The New Yorker's new “20 Under 40” list and the youngest writer ever to pick up a coveted Orange. But then you open The Tiger's Wife and the eerie confidence of the twenty-six year old's voice melts away any resistance. Soon you have entered a world—an unnamed, war-torn Eastern European country—that seems modern and factual (didn't we read about this strife in the newspaper?) but ancient and fabulist at the same time. A young doctor journeys across the border to discover the circumstances of the mysterious disappearance and death of her grandfather—also a doctor—in an obscure village far from home. Clues come from his beloved copy of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book; a ghostly, ageless character her grandfather once betrayed; the granddaughter's own scant but vivid memories of the recent war that defined her childhood; and the myths, legends and superstitions that have long both guided and hindered the people of this region. Chief among those tales is the story of an outcast deaf woman who makes love to the very tiger menacing a mountain village. Stories within stories, like a Balkan Arabian Nights, but grounded in endless resonant truths and tragic contemporary social upheavals: how can an author so young be so wise about the workings of the world, especially in her complicated corner of the globe (Obrecht is from what used to be called Yugoslavia)? And how can she write about such eternal strife so enchantingly that I had to dole out the pages of her book in my nightly reading, limiting myself to no more than ten or twelve at a time, because I wanted above all to avoid the sadness that would arrive with coming to the end of this book?

This is what I'm talking about:

“If things had turned out differently, if that winter's disasters had fallen in some alternate order—if the baker had not sat up in bed some night and seen, or thought he had seen, the ghost of his mother-in-law standing in the doorway, and buckled under the weight of his own superstitions; if the pies of the cobbler's aunt had risen properly, putting her in a good mood—the rumors that spread about the tiger's wife might have been different. Conversation might have been more practical, more generous, and the tiger's wife might have immediately been regarded as a vila, as something sacred to the entire village. Even without their admission, she was already a protective entity, sanctified by her position between them and the red devil on the hill. But because that winter was the longest anyone could remember, and filled with a thousand small discomforts, a thousand senseless quarrels, a thousand personal shames, the tiger's wife shouldered the blame for the villager's misfortunes.”

Next up, ambitious secretary in 1930's Manhattan with the mouth of Dorothy Parker and the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald...

Torch Songs & Diaries

2010-12-29T11:49:00.000-08:00

What is the secret to writing about yourself? It has more to do with torch songs and less to do with diaries. Find out more on my guest blog at Chocolate Reality...

Are We There Yet?

2010-12-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

The whirlwind To Have Not Virtual Book Blog Tour has just commenced, and I'm already exhausted. How nice to pull off the road and into A Cozy Reader's Corner, where we can enjoy a refreshing cup of tea and a stimulating conversation about books. Today, I talk about my visit with a college English class that recently studied my book, and how even in the day of texting and kindling, young people still revere books. The full blog is here.

Welcome to the Future: A Blog Tour

2010-12-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I'm not the most dedicated blogger. I'm too busy writing books and articles. Also, tweeting. Yep, though I once declared "I don't know what Twitter is, and I hope I never do," I now see beauty and economy and expanse in those 140 characters. Like poetry, like anything small and limited, the restrictions seem magically to open up into possibilities. So you can keep up with me @MeetFrances, and also get poetic status updates at the Frances Lefkowitz Author page on Facebook.

But for the next month or so, I will be blogging like crazy. Guest-blogging. On my Book Blog Tour. Or maybe that's Blog Book Tour. It's a whole new world, and the terminology is still sorting itself out. But instead of getting on a plane, train or automobile, and traveling to bookstores, cafes, and street corners around the country to promote TO HAVE NOT, I will be getting on the internet and traveling virtually to 20 to 40 blogs around the country. Upside: saves a lot in gas; environmentalists should be pleased. Downside: I don't get to read to my audience, something that people on my actual (as opposed to virtual) book tour seem to love.

My first guest blog is up at Crazy For Books. It's about the Xmas in the 'hood, San Francisco, 1974. And it features some priceless vintage photos of us raggedy kids: you won't know whether to laugh or cry, so just do like me and do both. I'll post the rest of the blog tour on the Events Calendar on my web site.

What Out Is

2010-06-23T00:16:00.000-07:00

"Is the book out?"
"When's your book out?"
"Isn't your book supposed to be out now?"

Well, to paraphrase the immortal words of a certain ex-president, it depends on what your definition of out is. Publishing, it turns out, is almost as slippery as politics.

The book exists; does that mean it's out? In fact, thousands of copies of it exist. They were printed, boxed up, and shipped to a warehouse. Is that "out"? They are now in the process of traveling from the warehouse to bookstores (virtual and actual) all over America (well, here and there) that are clamoring (or at least asking politely) for them so that thousands (or at least hundreds) of eager readers can buy and read them. Right now you can order the book from Amazon or your favorite local bookstore--that sure does sound like out to me. But the book is probably not yet on a shelf at a bookstore, and Amazon says it can't fulfill orders--not so out after all. In fact, Amazon recently sent emails to customers who ordered the book telling them it's not available. Now that's an out and out lie; in the next few weeks, my book will be as available as a certain ex-president. In fact, a sighting has been made in Brooklyn, NY, where one satisfied reader was able to get out and get one from an unnamed online source.

I feel your pain; I've been waiting more than ten years for this book to come out. All I can say is, it is worth the wait. Oh, and my first reading and signing event is July 8 at 7PM at Books Inc in Berkeley, CA. So the book will absolutely, positively be out by then. I hope to see you there.

The Pointed Questions

2010-05-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

We're compiling a list of questions about To Have Not for book groups, designed to spark enjoyable and insightful discussions, and maybe a few arguments. The questions target the book's themes (exclusion, infinity, and helicopters, for example), and its provocative pronouncements (such as, "Kill your dreams, I say. Kill them before they kill you."). Good questions, all. But then there are the questions you really want to ask. I once belonged to a book group in the sleepy town of Kennebunk, Maine, whose sole purpose was to bring a bunch of girlfriends together to drink wine and talk about sex. We had a lot of fun, but the book was incidental. With that easily-distracted group in mind, I pose this list of 5 more pointed questions:

1. Why is the author so hung up on what she doesn't have? Sheesh, she's got food, shelter, and surfboards. What right does she have to complain?

2. She describes meeting with Bonnie Raitt, Keith Richards, and Paul McCartney. Why all the name-dropping?

3. How could she go public with this book while her parents are still alive? Does she have no shame?

4. Why does she move so much? I think I counted almost 40 houses and apartments in California and up and down the Eastern seaboard. It's not like she's in the military or anything.

5. Speaking of sex, and settling down: shouldn't she be married by now? What's her problem?

It's a Girl!

2010-05-12T22:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I stopped into the offices of my publisher, MacAdam/Cage, to get my first glimpse and grasp of the memoir I have been writing for, oh, ten or maybe forty years. She's pink and fat and smiley, like a baby, and it will take some getting used to to refer to her as "my book" rather than "my so-called book," which is what I've been calling her in-utero incarnation. To be honest (and as a memoirist, what do I have if not honesty?), I had some fears of post-partum depression when I got the call from Mac/Cage to come in to see and hold the book. What if she had typos? What would I do with my life now that I no longer had to carry her unformed self around with me, worrying about chapter titles and commas and running themes? Would I be able to adjust my portion size after eating for two? So I postponed my visit--twice--and took five whole days to work myself up to it. Fear of success? Fear of failure? Fear of losing the project that has served as my constant companion for so long? All this and more, but...no more. She's lovely, I'm proud, and I hope you get a chance to meet her soon.