The Marriage Plot: So, Jeff, You Doing OK?

I fully expected to hate The Marriage Plot. I had read all the reviews. I read about how the supposedly main character, Madeleine, was really just a Mary-Sue. And I read about how the two male protagonists, Leonard and Mitchell, were just "Muppet-Baby versions of David Foster Wallace and [Jeffrey] Eugenides".  So I fully expected some kind of narcissistic, introspective literary craptacular that I would hate.

Instead, I was hooked after the first 10 pages.

It was obvious that Eugenides was working out some issues, and I wanted along for the ride. I wanted to make sure my pal Jeff (Can I call you "Jeff"?) was doing OK.

Initially I thought the book was about some unresolved issues Jeff had with Academia (Brown in particular).  Eugenides spent so much time describing insufferable academics and painfully smug students that I was sure that this novel was actually going to be about that. Then Leonard entered the scene. It was obvious from the get-go that the hard-drinking, hard-loving, utterly brilliant, but totally broken Leonard was DFW. I mean, Eugenides even gave the guy a bandana! How much more literal (literally!) can you get?

I didn't find our man Jeff for a while, though. Mitchell isn't as obviously Jeff as Leonard is DFW. Mitchell starts off being your typical Mr Sensitive Nice Guy and slowly builds up to being Jeff's literary doppleganger.

That left one character who needed identification: The Lady They Loved, Maddy. Who is Maddy, exactly? Is she some chick who rebuffed our boy Jeff at Brown and who Jeff is now punishing by making her clean up figurative DFW barf?

After much thinking about this, I submit for your approval that Maddy is, basically, The Reader. She is you. She is me. She is the guy from the New York Review of Books and the Guardian Books Editor and The Folks at Salon. She is all those readers who loved DFW unconditionally, enjoying the non-stop fuck fest of Infinite Jest, hanging on for the crazy mania of 10-page essays on Lobsters (with footnotes!), and waiting patiently during unbearably depressing sojourns at the grocery story.

While everyone's fawning over bipolar DFW, our boy Jeff is on a quest to better himself and the planet. He's making a pilgrimage to India and volunteering with Mother Teresa's organization. He wants to heal the world and make you whole. He wants to be the Bestest Jeff He Can Be.

Jeff respects you too much to just take you on the stairs. He's going to talk to you about Important Things and make sure you get home OK. He isn't going to play games with your emotions or suddenly run off to the casino in the middle of the night. But despite all this, you never fall in love with Jeff. You just keep loving DFW, even when he's all limp and fat, lounging around the house in ratty shorts, smoking cigarillos, and using too many parentheses.

That, people, is what this book is about. YOU are Maddy. YOU love a marriage plot. YOU have read too much Austen and now YOU are in love with Mr Darcy, despite the fact that a real Mr Darcy would not make you happy.

You. You would rather hang out in a dingy apartment, scrubbing floors waiting for a disturbed genius to return than tour the world with our boy Jeff. Jeff would show you beautiful, sad places, too, you know. He'd show you strange, beautiful, and sad people and places, but he'd keep you at arm's length from it and you'd never be in danger.

But you've read too much Henry James and what you want is drama! You want to be swept off your feet by an author who's different, troubled, and a little scary. You pass up our man Jeff for a guy who über-verbosely describes every emotion and thought that was ever had until the room is so full of descriptions that you feel you can't breathe. And just when you think he's opening the door to give you some air, he'll grab your hand, drag you to the bluffs, and make you look over the cliff, into the void until you beg to be left alone.

And even when DFW lets you down, you still don't run into Jeff's warm embrace of sublime descriptions of sad but beautiful melancholy places. Instead you have a one off with a dirty post-modernist who's stopped using punctuation. (I can only assume that shaven-eyebrow Thurston Meems would be that kind of author. I know I've read him when I've been let down by my usual favourites and need a change.)

You silly reader.

The only problem with all this is that our man Jeff doesn't realize that Mitchell -- his literary stand-in -- is an asshole.

I spent a lot of the book trying to figure out if ol' Jeff knew that Mitchell was a douchebag. Was Jeff aware that Mitchell is not really Maddy's friend? Mitchell is not a nice guy, but is instead pretending to be a nice guy to get into Maddy's pants -- something which is despicable and duplicitous. He wants to be able to grab Maddy, throw her on the bed and give her the fucking of a lifetime the way Leonard does, but he can't because he lacks the self-confidence to even respond to Maddy's direct advances. Instead he obsesses over Maddy, weasels his way into her life, and finally manages an uncomfortable and unsatisfying romp with her.

And then he dumps her. Because he's a nice guy and he knows that he'll just tie her down.

"FREEBIRD!"

So, no, Jeff does not realize that Mitchell is a duplicitous, false, fake, inauthentic, self-congratulatory jerk.

Or maybe Jeff does realize this, but he's actually a literary genius and wrote the character as if he didn't realize this, in some kind of weird double-fake-out.

And what does this means in terms of the literary analogy? That our man Jeff doesn't really respect the reader? That, in essence, he isn't so much interested in telling heartbreaking stories about oppressed teen girls as he is in just getting us to buy his books?

And when we do and don't like the story, and don't give him praise and a prize, he'll shrug it off and decide that maybe we'd be better off without him. Because he's Better Than That.

Either way, it doesn't matter. I liked the book and couldn't put it down. I didn't care if it failed the Bechdel Test. It made me laugh and I actually cared about the characters. And I actually wanted to watch Jeffrey Eugenides work out his issues in a book.

And for the record, I never, ever, ever liked David Foster Wallace. I always found him too dramatic and morose.

Fifty Shades of Grey: One Shade of Shit Brown

In the spirit of reading only trash for the remainder of the year, I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey.

I feel pretty stupid for having attempted to read this pile of garbage. I succumbed to peer pressure and media frenzy, the same way I did with The Help. I'm an idiot.

Unlike The Help, though, I did not purchase Fifty Shades of Crap; I checked out the eBook from the municipal library.

I did not get past Chapter 2, so I can't even comment on the smut. I can't say whether or not the relationship between the two protagonists is truly a BDSM relationship or if it's actually an abusive relationship. The book was so bad that I couldn't even bother reading ahead to the smut (of course that's also partially the fault of the asshatty eReader that my municipal library required I use on my htc Whatever S phone).

Now I get that the work started as Twilight slash fiction and hence was captastically written by a bored netizen with lots of time and little talent, but I had assumed that the manuscript would have been edited at some point. I assumed wrong.

There is no way that Fifty Shades of Dung was edited. Had it been edited, at least one of the zillion references to Whatisface's "penetrating gaze" would have been changed to something else. It was funny the first time (was it supposed to be funny?), but by the third time it had become tiresome.

There is also no way that a competent editor would have left in a non-ironic use of "put the pedal to the metal". Nor would a competent editor have left an incredibly long-winded description of a commute -- including make and model of the commuting car -- in this book.

And presumably a competent editor would have told "EL James" that you can't be confronted by a desk. You may enter a room and find yourself facing an imposing desk. Maybe you were even confronted by a tall blonde behind an imposing desk. But you sure as hell weren't confronted by the actual desk. Desks, by nature, are not confrontational. They're inanimate objects; they can't accuse you of being a fraud -- though I wish the ones in the book had.

I know it sounds like I'm nitpicking, but I assure you that after fifty pages (Fifty Pages of Bleuch!) of little or no character development, no plot development, and no actual insight, it is hard to overlook the book's incredibly awful writing and nonexistent editing.

Sometimes bad writing can almost become art in and of itself (see Irene Iddesleigh), but this is not one of those times. There's no emergent poetic or amusing properties arising out of Fifty Shades of Yuck.  It reads like a bad teen novel written by a teen.

I am astounded that so many people have managed to get to the end of this book. I now know that the collective IQ of my neighbourhood -- a place where the municipal library has a waiting list of 78 people for Fifty Shades of Shit, but no waiting list at all for The Marriage Plot -- is lower than its walk score.

Rubyfruit Jungle: Passing The Bechdel Test on a Technicality

Excellent as a coaster.

I resolved to read trash for the rest of the year and decided to start with Rubyfruit Jungle.

I had meant to read it ever since I saw Educating Rita (the movie, obvs). At one point Rita tells Michael Caine that she's been reading Rubyfruit Jungle, and Michael Caine rolls his eyes in response. Who could not want to know why Michael Caine was so dismissive of this book?

Wikipedia told me Rubyfruit Jungle was a bildungsroman (seriously, the next person to use "bildungsroman" without being ironic is gonna get a smack upside the head) and a Lesbian coming-of-age book. Molly, the protagonist, is supposedly funny and strong and blahblahblah...

...YaddaYaddaYadda....

Whatever.

This book reeked.

It's true: this book is a stinky mess of crap. It's just bad.

It started off OK. Molly's young and obviously gay. She has a thing with another girl. She's not sure what the hell's up with her. It's all good: Molly's growing as a character; the narrative is funny; the conflicts are set up; it looks like it's going to be a fun ride.

But then her family moves to Florida and the narrative becomes stupid. The rest of the book might as well be called "Molly: The World's Most Out Lesbian Evah!"

I've known feminist lesbian activists in 1999 (arguably the last time it was still scandalous to be gay) who were less out that Molly is supposed to be in 1960-whatever.

Molly announces her gayness to the world in flashing neon lights. She flaunts it to the point where it's almost like her gayness defines her more than anything else. Everything is about her being gay.

"Hey Molly, what time is it?"

"It's Gay-O'Clock, buddy!"

But that isn't a problem in and of itself. No, the problem is that the story is thin and poorly-written. The entire book is about how Molly fucks her way through life with a zillion attractive women who're all cool with being out from the get-go. In 1960-something.

I have met a lot of strange, horny people in my life -- both LBGT and het -- and I have not known a single one to have the pick-up success as our intrepid little Molly. Molly basically fucks everyone she wants to fuck. Not once does she get "no" as an answer. She bats 1000 without even trying. Even all the het girls she wants to bang say yes because...because they're secretly gay? Because they're bi-curious? Because Molly is just so gosh-darned alluring? I don't know.

In fact, I have no idea why anyone would agree to have sex with Molly. Molly is a really unpleasant individual. She's mean-spirited, vindictive and cruel. She torments coworkers, antagonizes employers and blackmails educators. She thinks she's funny, but she's really a bit of a bully. Why everyone wants to get naked with her is beyond me.

But our little Molly does face adversity. She faces sexism all the time -- apparently. You hear all about it when she tells people about it. Yes, she'll tell people -- people she's trying to fuck -- all about how men hate her and whatnot. It's like listening to Stacy in accounting bitch about how Stan in procurement has been giving her a hard time.

In the end, I got so sick of the book that I didn't even read the last few chapters. I read the ending, though. The dénouement is that she finally becomes a movie director. I had forgotten that Molly was working toward becoming a director. It wasn't like you ever read about her actually doing any directing or going to film classes. I thought her life's ambition was winning the award for Most Sex By A Female in a Gay Lead.

I was so surprised by the ending that I read backward to see if at any point she discussed the movies she was working on or anything. I found nothing. Working toward being a director was almost like an afterthought by the author: "I need my protagonist to do something that is impressive but doesn't involve spending hours in a library. Hmmmmm.... Oh! I know! She'll be in film school!"

It reminded me of people's professions in soap operas: "Ridge is a fashion designer, but he spends most of his time seducing women and impregnating them with babies that aren't their husbands'."

Rubyfruit Jungle is a remarkably shallow book that isn't much better than most daytime soaps in terms of feminist message. Unlike daytime soaps, though, Rubyfruit Jungle does pass the Bechdel Test -- but only because Molly doesn't date men. Had Molly been heterosexual, this book would have failed the Bechdel Test in a very, very spectacular way.

The Sun Also Rises: Man, He Feels Like a Man!

Many things have been said over the years about The Sun Also Rises. Many High School and College students have written reams and reams of essays on this book. Teachers and professors have discussed it ad nauseum.

But the one thing no one has ever said about this book is that it is so dull that the Today's Parent magazine from 1998 in the dentist's waiting room looks like an exciting read in comparison.

That said, I can see why men love it. Because Hemingway writes like a man. He doesn't write about sissy things like emotions or feelings. He describes sunsets and scenery in stark, plain language, without telling you about any unwanted tingly feelings Jake, his protagonist, may have had as a result.

Jake observes the scenery. The sun is in the sky. It shines on the houses below. There are trees. There is grass. There are peasants. 

How does all this make Jake feel? Who the fuck knows! And who the fuck cares! Jake is a man and he doesn't feel. He observes and drinks and fishes and watches bullfights! He has no use for feelings!

You see, Jake, is a man. Even though he is impotent, he is more of a man than any of his fey companions. His companions sicken at the sight of the bullfights -- they are not real aficionados. He is a real aficionado. Jake fishes fish, guts them, and cooks them. His companions, though, blow off fishing to spend time with lady friends in hotels the next town over. Jake drinks but doesn't get drunk. His companions, though, can't hold their liquor.

And at least one of his companions doesn't like to box. The nerve!

But Jake's companions -- these fey men who prefer to fuck the ladies rather than kill the fishies -- are fucking Jake's special lady friend, Brett.

Brett, you see, is not like other ladies. She bangs the men. She flirts. She fucks matadors. She drinks. She has a man's name. She gets along with Jake like a house on fire because she also has no use for emotions or sentimentality or softness. She is, basically, Jake in a skirt. 

Jake and Brett, meanwhile, can't stand Robert Cohn, the guy who doesn't like to box and who thinks the bullfights will make him sick. He's not a real man by any stretch of the imagination, and plus he's Jewish. This is pointed out prettymuch every second page.

Now, let me just pause for a moment from the plot to say that I really wish my ancient Scribner edition from 1954 had been annotated because I'm pretty sure I'm missing context. The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926 when the lingo and mores were different. For example, Robert Cohn keeps being referred to as "the Jew" or "that Jew". I don't know how to interpret this. Why is the fact that he's Jewish important to the plot? Is the assumption that Jewish men aren't real men? Is it just that that's how people talked? I don't know. Some context would have been nice.

Similarly, all the characters occasionally say that they're doing things because "they're tight". I have no idea what that means. At first I thought it meant that they had no cash. Then I thought it meant they were drunk. I thought the drunk interpretation (which is the Internet's favourite interpretation) was the correct one until I met some passage where it didn't seem to make sense.

Back to the actual story. From what I can tell the entire book is about what makes a man a man. A man is a guy who, if he feels an emotion, won't let on that he has. A man is a guy who can catch his own food, clean it and cook it; he is self-sufficient in the Wilds. A man is a guy who likes danger and likes to conquer danger, even if that means taunting a bull and killing it. And a man is a guy who digs watching some other guy taunt a bull and then kill it for no particularly good reason. 

And dammit, a real man doesn't tell you how he feels about the bullfights or the fishing!

Jake, our narrator and hero, being a real man, doesn't give you any insight into his or anyone else's state of mind, personality, or emotions. He just states the facts that he observes. While I understand that this is A Thing (the Iceberg Style of writing...where everything is under the surface), I don't have to like it. In fact, I hate it. Aside from making the prose choppy and -- let me be blunt here -- boring, it caused me to feel absolutely nothing for any of the characters. In fact, I felt more investment in the peasants in the bus with Jake than I did for any of the main characters. I honestly couldn't have cared less about these characters.

So in the end what I got from the book is that Spanish peasants in the 1920s were nice, generous, sharing, fun people who liked to drink wine out of leather pouches.

Oh, and that the one thing that doesn't make a man is a penis, working or otherwise. 

The Help: Wow. Crappy.

I can't bring myself to finish The Help.

I'm 3/4 of the way through.  I don't have that far to go.  But, fuck, each time I pick up the book to finish it and I see that chapter I'm stuck at, I can't do it.  I lose my will to finish the book.

Some books you can't finish because you know they're going to end badly or because they lose steam, but this one...yeesh.  It's just a waste of time -- a colossal waste of time.

You should not read this book.  No one should read this book.  If, however, you do decide to read this book, please either borrow it from the library or a friend, or buy it used.  Just don't increase the demand for it.  This book should not continue to be printed.  People should not be allowed to continue to profit from its sale.

Now, I know there are many awful books out there.  Like none of us would be worse for wear if Danielle Steele's entire canon were to somehow end up in one of those deep-ocean sulfur vents, never to be retrieved ever again.  However, the works of Danielle Steele -- and Jilly Cooper, Sidney Sheldon,  VC Andrews, and Harlequin's entire stable of writers -- are fun, interesting and engaging.  They're good fun on a long train ride when you don't want to think.  Most importantly, though, they don't take themselves seriously.  They don't think they're Important.  They're the book equivalent of watching a TV soap opera, or a Summer Blockbuster movie.

But The Help?  It thinks it's doing Important Things.  It thinks it's talking about race and rebellion and whatnot in Important Ways.  It doesn't realize that it's trash -- and not even particularly good trash, at that.

Then again, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe Kathryn Stocket fully intended to write a superficial piece of crap that screamed "Movie Option".  Maybe she figured that making most of her characters cardboard cut-outs would make it easier to option because then the movie guys would be able to just fill in the blanks without worrying that they weren't being true to the book.  I mean, the woman included a zillion cliffhangers (all with anticlimactic resolutions) into the book.  She must have realized what she was doing.  Right?

At first I thought the book was racist because all the Black characters were stereotypical characters who  didn't do anything but comment on their relationship with the White characters.  They didn't seem to have any interests outside of the families they were working for.  It was like the author couldn't imagine that these people didn't see themselves as anything other than the White Peep's Help.  And when any mention is made of their lives outside of the White Peep's Help, Stocket's motto appears to be "Tell, Don't Show".  You don't see these people interacting; you hear about them interacting.  It's like that part of their lives -- the part that makes them whole characters -- isn't worth exploring.

But then I noticed that the White characters also don't really have depth or personality.  One character, Elizabeth, appears to be some kind of placeholder for a character.  She's like Stocket's Note To Self that says, "[INSERT INDIFFERENT AND LAZY WHITE MOTHER HERE]".  The "racist" character might as well been lifted from A Very Special Episode of Matlock.  

The only character that has any sort of depth whatsoever is our hero, Skeeter.  And she isn't much of a hero given that  she's just writing stories about The Help to get a job at a New York newspaper and get the fuck out of the south.  Moral ambiguity in a character is all well and good, but the author needs to actually know that their character is morally ambiguous to write it well.  Stocket doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that Skeeter is actually just a selfish White chick topped off with a splash -- just a splash -- of White Guilt.

Anyways, I suffered through all this before one chapter did me in.

The whole book is written in the third person, but each chapter is written as a narrative about one character.   That is, until you get to the chapter about The Benefit.  Then it's just a third person narrative about The Benefit.

I read one paragraph.  I was hoping that it would be a third person narrative about The Benefit as if The Benefit were a character.  But alas, no.  It's just a chapter about what happened at The Benefit.

Again, there are many books where the narrative style suddenly shifts.  Douglas Adams did that a lot, for example.  But when you break the narrative, you better have a good reason and you better be doing it for the right effect and not just because, oh, I don't know, you don't have the patience or skill to write the same event from the POV of 5 different characters!

So screw this.

If anyone reading this wants a copy of The Help, I'll send it to you, postage paid.

Skippy Dies: Paul Éluard Saves the Day!

"Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci." ("There is another world, but it is in this one.")

Skippy Dies is all about other worlds.  It's about how the same place and series of events is experienced and lived differently by different people, effectively making each experience a different reality entirely.  

It's also about String Theory, Samhain, White Goddesses, Black Goddesses, Frisbees, pop music, prescription drugs, mistakes, redemption, sin, eating disorders, unwanted erections, brass bands, donuts, WWI, blow jobs, sex, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

It's about all the things that makes life what it is.

Before I go on, I gotta say that Skippy Dies is, hands down, the best book I've read in the past two years.  It stirred my emotions, made me reflect, and prevented me from sleeping.  It made me remember other books and movies and songs.  It was hard to read sometimes because I knew that things were going to go badly.  But I had to keep reading it because despite the shit and the death and the sadness and the utter despair, it was funny and fun and full of life.

And yet this book was only short listed for a handful of unknown awards, the most well-known being the Costa Book Awards, an award given to books that convey "enjoyment of reading to the widest possible audience". 

Meanwhile, The Sister's Brothers, a book about nothing except death, that doesn't give anyone any sense of joy, wins a billion accolades.    I swear that the prestigious prizes are handed out to the books that are the most opaque and mirthless.  Books that when you read them you think, "I don't understand where this is going.  What's happening?  Who are these people?  Why should I care?  This is painful.  It must be too smart for me."

Skippy Dies isn't a Danielle Steele novel or a Harry Potter book that you can read in a week on your commute.  It's a heartbreaking real novel about a group of boys and their teachers in a boarding school in Ireland.

The students are adolescent boys filled with hormones, smarts, secrets, sadness and, in some cases, copious quantities of prescription drugs.

The teachers are broken human beings, full of flaws, unfulfilled dreams and regrets.

The religious order that up to this point used to run the school?  They are surprisingly human.

And the writing is fucking brilliant.  Paul Murray, whoever this guy is,  somehow manages to write adolescent boys, washed up teachers and sad teen girls with a realism that I don't even think actual adolescent boys, washed up teachers or sad teen girls could achieve, if they were so inclined to write about themselves.  Which they probably wouldn't be.  And Paul Murray knows that.

The writing is funny.  The narration switches point of view between -- I swear -- at least 20 different characters and never once did I get confused about who was talking, unlike some other books I could mention.  (*cough*The Help*cough*)

Basically, there is this boys school where there are some boarders, including our intrepid Skippy.  Skippy is a quiet boy who likes to play video games to escape the sad reality that is his home life, not to mention a bunch of other unpleasant memories.  His best friend, Rupert, is a "science nerd" who is trying to discover the other, parallel universes posited by String Theory.   The rest of his friends are your usual bunch of confused, screwed up, and incredibly funny teen boys.   Skippy falls in love with Lori, of the girl's school next door.  During one inexplicably magical Hallowe'en dance when it appears that the portal to another universe has opened up and the White Goddess (and some roofies in the punch) influences events, Lori falls in love with Skippy.

Skippy's behaviour gets misinterpreted by the school's acting principal -- the only character in the book who is a bit cartoonish -- who decides Skippy is a bad egg and has him sent to the deaf priest who acts as guidance counselor.  It's all fun and games until Skippy dies.

That's when it all goes to shit.  It's like that point after the 1980 New Year's Eve party in Boogie Nights when everything suddenly goes bad and then it stays bad until everyone hits rock bottom and they realize that even if they aren't Big Stars, they can keep living and doing what they do.

At the end, everyone -- well, except one character -- finds redemption and hope.  They realize that they are more than individuals and that their whole is greater than the sum of their parts.  They also realize that performing unannounced musical distortion at the Christmas Pageant is a Bad Idea.

And so life goes on.  It goes on without Skippy, but it goes on.
 
PS: I know that NPR has told you to read The Help.  According to my book, NPR says that if you read only one book this year, it should be The Help.  I'm telling you if you're going to read only one book this year, read Skippy Dies.

Please Tell Me You're Smarter Than This: Discussion Question at the Back of The Help

I've been trying to read The Help.  I wanted to read something less depressingly introverted and self-loathing than Of Human Bondage, and more uplifting than Skippy Dies. (I don't know if I'll ever be able to finish Skippy Dies.  I don't think anyone will be redeemed.)

The Help is...well...banal.  I'm sorry.  I don't care what NPR and the Entire Universe said.  It's banal.  It's horribly horrible.  It smashes vases on your head and screams. "THINGS WERE BAD IN THE SOUTH IN THE 60s!"  It has all the subtlety of an eighteen wheeler with LED decorations.

It was so bad that midway through a sentence I took a moment to go to the back of the book and check the race and background of the author.  (I was pretty sure the author was white and -- sure enough! -- I was right. So there.)

It was as I was searching for the author bio that I discovered the Discussion Questions.  (As an aside, this is why books are better than eBooks.)

Look, I don't know who you are reading this blog.  I know someone is reading this because of the occasional comments and because Blogger tells me that about 10 people per week read it.   I know that half of you are looking for that quote from When Harry Met Sally ("That symptom is fucking my wife!"), or searching for "Bondage" and landed on my posts about Of Human Bondage (Google fail), but at least some of you want to talk books, right?  Brontë Sisters fans read my post about Villette, so there's that.

So tell me (or don't), has the state of reading groups gotten so bad that they need discussion questions -- banal discussion questions -- suggested to them at the back of books?  Isn't just reading the book stimulating enough to generate a discussion?

I've only read about a quarter of the way through The Help and already I want to find someone else who's read it and say, "Did you not feel that the conflicts were a bit contrived and obvious?  Didn't you find the characters to be caricatures, without subtlety?  Wasn't the way the perspective switched distracting and unnecessarily dramatic, like they were creating cliffhangers for a movie?  I've never seen a book yell 'Movie adaptation -- Please option me!' so much since The DaVinci Code."

Then again I did buy the book at Walmart, so what did I expect?

I guess I expected that it wouldn't contain discussion questions that were reminiscent of high school English classes lead by lazy teachers.

Here are some of the questions (and I quote):

•  Who was your favourite character?  Why?
•  What did you think motivated Hilly?  On one hand she is terribly cruel to Aibileen and her own help, as well as to Skeeter once she realizes that she can't control her.  Yet she's a wonderful mother.  Do you think one can be a good mother and, at the same time, a deeply flawed person?  [I don't know...Can you be a question about one thing, as well as a leading question about something else?]
• How much of a person's character would you say is shaped by the time in which he or she lives?
• The author manages to paint Aibileen with a quiet grace and an aura of wisdom about her.  How do you think she does this?  [What you mean is that she created this character using the oldest Black Stereotype in The Book, right?]

This book had already insulted my intelligence by being unsubtle (why didn't you just hire a sky writer, Kathryn Stocket?). And now this book's publisher has insulted my intelligence by providing these "discussion" questions devoid of critical thought.

I don't know if I can get past this.

Addendum:  After writing this, I decided to check whether book clubs were actually using these dumbass questions and what did I discover?  These are from the Oprah Book Club.  Oprah.  Oprah!  The Color Purple Oprah.   

I am going to go into a corner now and weep.

Or scream BE LESS STUPID.

Either way.

Maurice: It's OK To Be Gay

Like all EM Forster books, Maurice is about English social norms and mores and how they fuck with people's happiness.  Unlike most EM Forster books, though, Maurice is easy-to-read: you can easily finish it in a week.  That's why it's a great book for taking on your morning commute or a retreat vacation.

Maurice is, at its heart, a classic doomed love story: Maurice meets Clive; they fall in love; they pursue a secret relationship because Society doesn't approve; Clive breaks Maurice's heart by eventually marrying someone acceptable so that he can have a career in politics.

Clive never gets over Maurice, really.  But Maurice can't hang around forever being Clive's Secret-on-the-Side.  In many books (and modern movies), these two would buck society and reunite, living happily ever after.  I can just hear the dramatic music that would play during the Hollywood Ending!  Would Justin Timberlake be too old to play Maurice?

But EM Forster was a realist.  He knew that Clive would never stay "a confirmed bachelor", or even keep Maurice "on the side".  His political career was way too important for that.  Plus, Clive did a pretty decent job of lying to himself.

Instead, Maurice elopes with the gamekeeper.  Personally, while I love a happy ending -- and I love this happy ending -- I feel that Forster kinda tacked it on at the end to make a point.

And that's the thing with Maurice: aside from it being a really sad doomed love story, it's also a discussion on how being gay shouldn't be a crime.  Maurice spends a good deal of the novel trying to become "normal", but he can't do it.  He can't undo his own nature.  The whole point of showing Maurice doing this is to make him sympathetic and show that even though he doesn't want to be this way (it's not a lifestyle choice), he can't help it.  He's born this way, baby!

Now, as for the gamekeeper, Alec:  I would have liked it to have taken more than 10 pages for Maurice and he to go from "who the fuck are you?" to "you wanna come fuck my brains out?", but given that Lucy and George in A Room With A View go from sharing Meaningful Glances to macking in a field also within about 10 pages, all is forgiven.   Plus, George and Lucy have to elope to get married and who knows what happens after with them, either?  Just like Lucy and George, Maurice and Alec will end up living at the edges of society, not really ever fitting in.

Of Human Bondage: Philip Deserves Better

After writing that last post on Of Human Bondage, I felt pretty bad.  I wasn't really fair to the book or Somerset Maugham. Also:  I read the foreword.

The cover art is the best thing about my copy.

I know, I know, I should have read the foreword to begin with, but I never read forewords or introductions to novels.  Anyways, from the foreword it seems that the book is loosely autobiographical.  After reading that, I surprisingly hated the book more.

Mr Maugham, Mr Maugham, Mr Maugham!  Why the self-loathing?

Poor Philip! He's orphaned and spends his childhood living in the austere environment of his aunt and uncle's home.   No one really loves him, even though his Aunt Louisa is rather fond of him.  He's just a sad lonely boy.

He gets sent to a good school, but he has a club foot and gets tormented for it.  He finally strikes up a friendship with a boy, falls in love with him (the book doesn't say that outright, but you can tell).  Then gets all inexplicably (to himself) jealous after their relationship "cools down".  
 
He's dissatisfied with his life and doesn't want to go to Oxford just because he's supposed to.  He runs off to Germany instead, where he falls in love with Hayward (the book doesn't say that outright, but you can tell).

Then he has to go home. He becomes an accountant (or something) and hates it.  Then he decides to move to Paris to paint.  He's an OK painter, but he's not spectacular.  After Fanny Price commits suicide, he decides that he's not going to be stupid and be a suffering bad artist; he's going to become a doctor.

And that's where I stopped reading.  Because Mr Maugham, he is full of recrimination and lack of sympathy for poor Philip.  He takes every opportunity to tell us how Philip is being a moron because he's young, naive, and not the sharpest tool in the shed.

The whole book is "Philip is young, stupid and doesn't realize that everyone around him is just bullshitting him.  He's impressed because he's a simple.  And, like most youth, he's an obstinant hot-head who lets his emotions get the better of him."

Now, I don't mind reading autobiographies where people look back on their lives critically, but this is supposed to be a work of fiction.  Yes, it's loosely based on Somerset Maugham's life, and I'm sure he looked back on his life (Philip's life) and realized he had been, well, stupid.   But how am I, the reader, supposed to feel anything for Philip when the author/narrator is telling me that the guy's a loser?

I feel bad for Philip that no one --  not even the narrator, who ostensibly thinks Philip's story is worth telling -- thinks that he is anything but sad and pathetic.

Are we not supposed to like Philip?  Is this like those paintings that are ugly, but you're supposed to find beauty in ugliness?   Or is this some kind of manifesto of self-loathing on the part of Somerset Maugham? 

I don't know.

But I know that I can't feel interested in the protagonist's life if the narrator/author thinks the protagonist is a loser who is barely deserving of our contempt.

Why Am I Reading Of Human Bondage?

I first read Of Human Bondage when I was...Actually, I can't remember when I read Of Human Bondage the first time.  It didn't really stick with me.  What I recalled about the book was (SPOILER ALERT!):

• Philip, the protagonist, has a club foot.
• Philip goes to Paris to become a painter.
• While there, this chick falls in love with him, but he hates her because she's gross and eats the crust of her brie instead of cutting it off. (I didn't know you were supposed to cut it off.  I like the crust of the brie.)
• She subsequently commits suicide.
• Philip falls in love with some hussy named Mildred.
• Mildred's hair was "flaxen", a word I needed to look up in the dictionary because I read the book before the advent of the internet.
• Ultimately, Philip becomes a doctor and marries some chick he knocks up.

The book was so useless to me that it just became a string of facts.  I didn't remember if I liked the writing.  I couldn't remember if I read it in the subway or the park.  I couldn't even remember if I had to read it for a class (I might have).

Then last November I was sitting in the break room at work and I mentioned that thing about the brie.  I couldn't remember how it went, so I downloaded the (free) eBook and tried to find it.  I couldn't.  I ended up having to read the stupid book.

What struck me about the book this second time around, was that Philip was gay.  I don't remember him being gay.  Then again, maybe he wasn't gay; maybe men were just closer and more intimate in the early part of the 20th century than they are now.  And of course W. Somerset Maugham was bi, so maybe Philip was bi.

In any case, Philip was totally enraptured with Hayward in Germany and didn't give a flying fig about the womenfolk. 

By the time Christmas rolled around, I still hadn't gotten to that passage about the brie, mostly due to the fact that I only read the eBook during lunch at work.   I decided to find my physical copy of the book at my parents' place and start reading it outside of my lunch hour.

It's March and I've finally found the stupid passage I was looking for.  The reason I couldn't find it by doing a search is that Fanny Price eats the crust off her camembert not her brie.  I was going to keep reading to the end, but then it occurred to me that this book is boring me to bits.  I don't like Philip and I don't care what happens to him.  I'm not emotionally invested in it at all.  It's leaving me cold.  This is why I can't remember reading it the first time: it wasn't because I was young and immature, it was because the book didn't speak to me at all.

Even the realization that Philip may be a bi man living in a very queer-unfriendly time doesn't make it any more engaging.

Nope.  I think I'm gonna just stop where I am and move on to another book.  Actually, I have moved on already.  I'm onto E.M. Forster's Maurice.  If I'm gonna do olden days gay, I might as well do it right.

Mid Winter Depression: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Have you seen Blade Runner?  I bet you have.  I bet you've probably seen the original and the Director's Cut, maybe even as a late-night double bill at some repertoire theatre.  You were probably in University and sat around in a all-night coffee shop/diner discussing whether or nor Rick Deckard is a replicant.

I did all that, but I never bothered to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  (Let's shorten that to DADoES.) I always knew that Blade Runner was based on the book and I was intrigued by the title of the book, but I never actually bothered to read it.

I borrowed DADoES from my uncle in 2002 or so.  The book moved with me twice but remained unread.   My uncle eventually stopped asking for it back.

Then, last year, in the dead of winter, I got a nasty injury and spent some time off work, hanging out in radiology clinics and physiotherapist offices.  I don't know why I grabbed DADoES to read in the waiting room, but I did.  I think it was because it was a slender book that fit nicely into my purse.

In any case, there I was, in the middle of a bad winter, sitting in garishly-lit physio offices with dingy beige walls and signs asking you to have all your paperwork ready if you suffered from a workplace injury, reading this book instead of the office Marie-Claire magazines.

I should have read Marie-Claire.

Don't get me wrong:  DADoES is a great book!  It's well-written, dramatic, engaging.  The premise is interesting, the characters are believable and the protagonist is sympathetic.  But my god is it a depressing book!

Blade Runner is a sexy movie.  The dystopia Rick Deckard lives in is a sexy one.  There are zeppelin ads and cool Asian guys selling tasty food.  Deckard says glib things and has a sexy world-worn look about him.  He doesn't own a sheep.   He doesn't want to do this one last job so he can buy a cat.  He and his wife don't adjust their moods using some kind of strange device.  He doesn't even have a wife.  And he certainly doesn't subscribe to a hokey religion that preaches empathy and shared suffering.

But the Rick Deckard in DADoES does.  DADoES Rick Deckard is a tired man, doing a job he doesn't like.  He lives on a dead planet where nothing lives or grows.  There is nothing sexy about DADoES.  It's all misery, all the time.

And there are piles of dead owls.

I have not been able to think about owls the same way since I read this book.  Basically, the inhabitants of Planet Earth realize that the nuclear fallout has gotten bad when they start finding dead owls everywhere.  Seriously, people, imagine waking up one morning and finding dead owls everywhere.  And then the same thing happens the next day and the day after that and the day after that until there aren't any owls left to die.

Rick Deckard lived that.  And he lives in the aftermath of the nuclear fallout where nothing lives or grows and everyone who can has moved on to the colonies.  He, along with everyone on the planet, subscribes to a strange religion that involves tuning in to some communal consciousness and caring for pets.  Everyone on Earth strives to own a pet.  If they can't afford a real pet, they get an electric i.e., artificial, pet.

Rick Deckard has problems retiring androids.  He's not sure that they aren't alive.  He doesn't like doing this work.  He takes this one last job, though, because one of the androids he needs to retire almost killed his friend.  He's also hoping to use the cash to buy an awesome real animal.

The androids, meanwhile, come up with devious ways of getting away from him.  They even construct a separate police headquarters, with re-routed phones, to make Deckard think he's gone insane.   It appears that the androids really want to live. 

In the end, Deckard retires the androids.  He decides to do it because it becomes obvious to him that they don't value life and can't empathize with anyone or anything.  It's a realization that both he and the "chicken brain" -- who had befriended the androids -- discover when they see how they behave towards the animals.

It's incredibly sad and incredibly depressing.   You finish the book and feel awful.  You feel this hopelessness.  You feel hopeless for the planet and for the future of humanity.  And you feel very, very sad.

After reading this book, you will not spend hours in an all-night cafe discussing whether Deckard was an android with your friends.  You will not talk about your favourite parts of the book at parties with people who also quote The Princess Bride.  All you will do is wonder why you don't see owls in the daytime.

I Bought The Help at Walmart

The Help.  It's a very hyped book and movie.  It's got mass appeal.  It's not the kind of book I'd pick up.  I mean, I have EM Forster's Maurice in my purse and I'm re-reading Sputnik Sweetheart in the vague hope that I'll finally understand it.

I don't read mass appeal books. 

But there I was at Walmart, staring at a pile of these books, and I thought, "You know, if there was a place to buy this book, it's here."  And I picked it up.  I didn't even feel embarrassed when I got to the cash.  It was all OK.  I was buying a book.  At Walmart. 

I also bought my favourite recycled toilet paper.

SOPA Blackout

I'm doing the SOPA blackout thing.   I don't know all the details, but I'm trusting Wikipedia on this one.

I also don't like the idea that, potentially, my blog could be shut down if someone complained about my quoting some piece of poetry or some book.  If that's possible.  Which it might not be.

In any case, I'm doing it.

I Hate You, eBook Previews!

I have a bone to pick with eBook previews.

I don't really read eBooks.  I prefer the good old fashioned books where you can keep your page, but skip a few pages ahead or behind without having to bookmark your page, tap the screen a few times, and then go back.  But this isn't about the merits of eBooks.

I buy most of my books online because 90% of the time the only book store anywhere close to where I live -- a big box bookstore -- doesn't carry what I want.  Because I can't go into a bookstore and have a "sample read" of most of the books I want, I rely on eBook previews to make decisions about what to buy.

Lately, though, I've downloaded a bunch of previews that only provide the table of contents, acknowledgements and dedications.  Everything else is locked.  And now, while I'm sure it's nice to know that a book was dedicated to Henry, Alison and Mooshy, and their baked goods, but it doesn't help me decide whether or not I like the writing, tone, cadence or subject matter of the book.

I mean, dammit, eBook publishers, it costs you almost nothing -- NOTHING! -- to publish an eBook.   Would it kill you to provide one chapter?  It's not like people are just going to keep reading that first chapter over and over again and never buy the book if they really like it.  The alternate scenario is that people won't buy books they might like because there is no preview.  Cuz it's not like you can return a book to Amazon.  (Can you?  Like what would you say?  "I'm returning this book because, based on a casual skimming of the book, I can tell that I won't feel anything but apathy toward the main character"?  What if you read the last chapter and didn't like the ending?  Is that a good reason to return a book?)

Anyways, my guess is that publishers don't think proper previews are necessary because there are enough people out there who buy books because Oprah told them to, regardless of the content of the book.  I mean even I bought stupid Villette because the Internets told me to.  (Though we all know that that ended in tears.)

*sigh*

You know what the worst thing about this is?  It's that the latest shitty previews I downloaded belong to books that even my local library doesn't carry.  But the story of how bad my library sucks is for another day.

Now I'm going to go back to Skippy Dies, a book I bought on a whim at the bookstore when a casual skim made me laugh out loud.