Citizen Reader

Not your typical cozy British village.

Good lord, if you've got any kind of trend toward depression, don't pick up Nicola Monaghan's The Killing Jar.

Monaghan's slim novel is set on a council estate* in the British city of Nottingham, where life's anything but cozy cups of tea and Miss Marples and Christmas crackers and any other jolly British stereotype you can come up with. This novel is filled with poor people, mothers addicted to heroin ("brown") who can't be bothered to care for their children, and children themselves who start selling drugs and living together as young teens to form their own family units in lieu of any kind of other normal childhood and young adulthood.

And yet? I really, really liked it. I liked Monaghan's main character, Kerrie-Ann Hill (most frequently called "Kez"), even though or perhaps she grew up in a shitty world and did what she could to survive, including falling in love with Mark Scotland, her childhood friend and, in the beginning, a fairly sweet guy who looked after her younger brother when she got sent to the British equivalent of juvie and her mother spent most of her time high.

But I'm not going to kid you. It is a relentlessly dreary novel. If you don't think you can stomach reading about junkies and beatings and people who never stop letting other people down, I can't recommend it. But it does offer moments like this:

"They reckon you feel love in your heart but that's bollocks. True love, the type what strikes you down and makes you change forever, you feel that kind of love in every fucking organ inside you. Liver, kidneys, heart, and spleen. Every tiny cell what makes up your brain and your spine, your bones and blood and muscles. It keens through you." (p. 270.)

Oh, that gave me shivers. That gave me Emily Bronte-esque shivers, the way I shivered when I first read Wuthering Heights and found Cathy's monolgue about Heathcliff: "My love for Heatcliff is like the eternal rocks below, a source of little visible pleasure, but necessary."

*Evidently council estates in Great Britain are the equivalent of our "projects" here, found in urban areas. If you'd like to see what they look like, check out an episode of Shameless, which is set on a council estate (in Manchester, I think) and leaves VERY little to the imagination.

My mission in life...

...I have decided, is to mock Jodi Picoult mercilessly. I can't help it. I know she's popular. I know a lot of people read her, and we just have to be happy people are reading. I know it's not nice to hate people at all, much less people you've never met. But God, do I hate Jodi Picoult.

She's got a new book out, Handle with Care, and if you want to read 477 pages of unrelenting and unrepentant ugliness, consisting of a baby being born with a degenerative disease called OI (osteogenesis imperfecta*) and her mother's wrongful birth lawsuit against her former best friend and OB-GYN (contending that her OB-GYN had seen evidence of the disease early enough in the pregnancy that the mother could have aborted, but had not told her), this is the lighthearted novel for you. Throw in the fact that the mother's a former pastry chef and periodically, weirdly, there are pastry recipes thrown in, and the creepy factor of this novel increases exponentially. Oh, and if there was any doubt as to which character is speaking when, even though each chapter is clearly labeled with that chapter's narrator's name--the chapters are actually printed in different fonts.

My God. Is this what we've come to, as readers? I've watched television and played video games that were more intellectually stimulating than this, so if this is the literature we're clinging to, well...I don't know. But it does make me sad. I don't even understand who can read books this ripped from the headlines, this tragic, not to mention this unbelievably long. I think that's why I keep beating my head against the Picoult wall; short, positive schmaltz I can understand. Although Tuesdays with Morrie was not for me, it was short, and it was uplifting. THAT I can understand. But nearly 500 pages of tragic, depressing, not patrticularly thoughtful schmaltz? Who has the energy to read that after a long day of just trying to make it in this world? I simply do not get it.

Now. Because nobody can illustrate how bad Jodi Picoult is better than Jodi Picoult, here's a little prose sampling. Enjoy:

"For two months now, we had known that you'd be born with OI--osteogenesis imperfecta, two letters of the alphabet that would become second nature. It was a collagen defect that caused bones so brittle they might break with a stumble, a twist, a sneeze. There were several types--but only two presented with fractures in utero, like we'd seen on my ultrasound. And yet the radiologist could still not conclusively say whether you had Type II, which was fatal at birth, or Type III, which was severe and progressively deforming. Now I knew that you might have hundreds more breaks over the years, but it hardly mattered: you would have  a lifetime in which to sustain them." (p. 6.)

And:

"The outcome of this recipe is a work of art, if you can make it through the complicated preparation. Above all else: handle everything with care. This dessert, like you, is gone before you know it. This dessert, like you, is impossibly sweet. This dessert fills me, when I miss you the most."

Ugh. Just re-reading that makes me depressed. Have a good weekend, all.

*To her credit, Picoult does suggest at the end of her book that charitable donations can be made to the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation.

Is it me or is it the book?

Over the weekend I read Kate Atkinson's well-reviewed and bestselling novel Case Histories. It's a literary crime/suspense novel featuring former police detective and current private investigator, Jackson Brodie, and the three different cases he's brought in to investigate: a little girl's disappearance (which happened in 1970); the seemingly random attack on an eighteen-year-old office worker; and a woman's post-partum stress and her murderous attack on her husband.

It totally sucked me in; I wasn't really able to put it down until I was done. I liked the characters, including Jackson Brodie, and of course, Kate Atkinson is a British author, lending her narrative that certain British something that I can't define, but I usually recognize and always love.

And yet?

When I was done with the novel I felt bad. There's no more nuanced way to put it. And I don't know why that was. It just made me sad. It's not shocking in subject matter, but throughout the story the author does provide glimpses of the nasty underbelly of her stories. It was actually quite well done; Atkinson did a nice job of slipping the ugly in and not reveling in its descriptions. (I wonder if that didn't almost make it worse.) So what bothered me?

I gave it a little thought, and eventually shrugged and marked it up to the mood I was in the day I read the book. I do believe that one's mood can affect the reading experience, so I was satisfied with that. (Although doubts still niggle--I've read a lot uglier books, like Irvine Welsh's Crime*--and liked them, so is playing the mood card the easy out?) And, I can't say I was completely unpleased with my personal reaction. Sometimes I feel like I'm not much of a book "reviewer," in that I believe in saying what I think about a book, even if I didn't like it; but I do like to think there's a difference between calling a book bad and recognizing that a book is good, but simply not for me. (Hence the two categories in the sidebar; "Phoning it in" is for the bad books, "Not for Me," well, is self-explanatory.)

Case Histories was a good book. Why it made me so unhappy I don't know. When I want to figure it out I might pick up its sequel, One Good Turn, make a note of the mood I'm in when I read it, and see how it makes me feel.**

*Okay, this is really weird, but if you search Powell's for "welsh crime," the top titles, several of them nonfiction, all feature similar cover art of people holding hands with or standing near children, photographed from the back. Did the cover designer for Welsh's book know that?

**I know, life's too short to read books you don't love. But, honest to pete, charting my reading experiences and reactions is a hobby. Then, when people pick on me for not being very well-rounded in my hobbies, I have my own defense: "I don't only read." They don't really have to know that my other hobbies include making notes of my reading experiences, writing about reading, touring area libraries, visiting bookstores when I travel, and watching BBC adaptations of British novels.

Back on the Irvine Welsh train.

Previously I've stated that I am not fond of what I call "ugly fiction"--fiction that describes ugly, mean, cruel, or otherwise completely distasteful subjects, for no reason whatsoever (unless that reason is to cash in on morbid curiosity). Jodi Picoult is my favorite example of an ugly fiction author--take ugly topics like school shootings, using healthy children as donors for your unhealthy children, etc., wrap them up in schmaltz, sell millions of copies.

After reading--and loving--Irvine Welsh's latest novel, Crime, I may have to rethink my heading of "ugly fiction." Because this book is about as ugly as it gets: Ray Lennox, of the Edinburgh police, takes some mental-health time off after a particularly nasty murder case involving a young girl. Traveling to Florida for a vacation with his fiancee, Trudi, Lennox is unable to escape his demons, and finds himself alone in a bar hoping to score some cocaine. He gets more than he bargained for: going home with two women, he is there, and high, when other men arrive at their home to join the party, and one of them tries to molest one of the women's pre-teen daughters. Lennox rescues the girl and eventually ends up removing her from the home and trying to get her elsewhere for safety. To make a long story short: he's stumbled on a pedophilia ring, where men get to know single mothers with drug or other issues and then take advantage of their pre-pubescent children.

Okay, that's about as ugly as it gets.

And yet, I loved the book. I loved Welsh's most well-known book, Trainspotting (book and movie version), as well, but I haven't been able to finish anything else of his before this novel. I tried--I love Scottish and British authors, so I always picked up his new books, but I just couldn't get into them. So why this one?

For all its ugliness, I don't get the feeling Welsh was writing about it to cash in on "ripped from the headlines" stories. His characters are complex; I loved Ray Lennox and felt terribly for him and the things he must have seen as a cop. His relationship with Tianna, the ten-year-old girl, is also written very well--he doesn't really want to get in the middle of that situation but he can't quite get himself to leave her until he can leave her somewhere safe. And, just like he did in Trainspotting, Welsh left me with the feeling that, while there are many very ugly things in this world, sometimes it is possible to get through them. That's the difference, I think. Reading ugly Welsh books makes me feel like there might still be hope, even in the presence of despair; reading ugly Picoult books makes me despair that I'll never have hope again.

Either way, I may need to rethink the broad heading "ugly fiction." Maybe "ugly fiction" and "ugly sellout fiction"?

What do you suppose I like about him?

There's no doubt about it. I have now read enough of Ian McEwan's novels to have formed the opinion that he is one weird dude. His 1981 novel, The Comfort of Strangers, which I finished a few weeks ago, is not only weird, but also deeply unsettling (violence included) in the end.

So why do you suppose I like him so much?

I can't honestly say that I liked The Comfort of Strangers. It was weird. It was uncomfortable reading all the way through, because I knew something violent was coming, I just didn't know what it was, and when it came, I hadn't been expecting the form it took at all. In my previous crusades against what I call "ugly fiction," I'll admit to not liking books that just seem dark and ugly for no reason. And this seems like it would be a textbook example. But yet...I was hypnotized by it (just as I was by Atonement).

It helps that much of McEwan's fiction (particularly the titles I've been reading) are short; this one clocks in at 128 pages. There's not a whole lot of story here, either, which is usually okay by me. Brits Mary and Colin, an older but not too old (frequent mention is made of Mary's school-age children, left behind at home), unmarried couple are on holiday in an Italian seaside village. They are passing their days with lazing, napping, and uninspired wandering, until they meet a native of the village, Robert, who wines and dines them at his establishment, and eventually brings them to meet his wife Caroline. Robert and Caroline seem to have some rather weird fixations, as well as some interesting ideas about gender roles, and that weirdness becomes horrifying at the end of the book. 

Did I mention that this is one weird book?

But the fact remains, for me at least, that there is something deeply sensual about McEwan's writing. I can't put my finger on it, but just reading his prose makes you feel a bit sultry. Maybe because it's a bit on the edge? A bit deviant? A touch too smooth?

"Through the warm nights, in the narrow single bed, their most characteristic embrace in sleep was for Mary to put her arms around Colin's neck, and Colin his arms around Mary's waist, and for their legs to cross. Throughout the day, even when all subjects and all desire were momentarily exhausted, they stayed close, sometimes stifled by the very warmth of the other's body, but unable to break away for a minute, as though they feared that solitude, private thoughts, would destroy what they shared." (p. 82.)

It sounds lovely, that. Keep in mind it occurs after what had been days of companionship but no real passion, and their renewed intimacy only appears after they dine at the weird couple's house. Hmm. 

Did I mention that this is one weird book?*

Anyway. So I'm now on the quest to read all of McEwan's novels (Enduring Love is up next) and try to figure out why he creeps me out, and why I don't mind. Any ideas what I should call this experiment? Sex, Lies, and Ian McEwan? Adventures in Ian?

*Even weirder? It was also made into a movie starring Rupert Everett, Helen Mirren, Natasha Richardson, and...wait for it...Christopher Walken.

Ugly fiction: Beautiful Children.

Every time I try to read new, well-reviewed, good word-of-mouth literary fiction, it always bites me in the ass.

Consider Beautiful Children, by first-time novelist Charles Bock.  This is the book-jacket synopsis:

"One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn't come home.  In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son's room and tortures herself with memories.  Equally distraught, the boy's father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy."

Okay, borderline intriguing.  Then you have the critical blurbs, like that from The Washington Post:

"In the no-man's-land of Bock's Vegas there remain only the survival strategies of the hopelessly inept young. I cannot think of another novelist who has dared to attack this most pressing and complex issue so ferociously."

And then you have the text itself:

Editor's note: I made it through about 100 pages of this book, and then I just stopped.  I've been looking through the text this morning, trying to find a quotable snippet that would illustrate why I can't read it anymore, but taken out of context, any bits I'm finding seem either just profane or too descriptive of some of the less savory aspects of strippers' and street kids' lives.  And that's not really the point.  Bad language doesn't bother me, and I've read lots of weird descriptions of violence, sexuality, evil, what have you (I read both true crime and fiction by Chuck Palahniuk, so evidently I'm getting jaded?).  So no quote here.  Just a vague sense of feeling dirty, and that the world is icky, and that I am annoyed with literary fiction for being "ugly fiction" and for always making me feel this way.  Now I'll be off novels again for a while.  I'm sorry I can't illustrate what I mean better.