Big, Big, Big Love

One of my favorite TV programs, Big Love, focuses on the three households maintained by fictional polygamist Bill Henrickson, who practices the "Principle" of plural marriage with his three wives, Margene, Nicky, and Barb. If there's drama in a regular marriage, it's obviously multiplied when numerous women share the same man, which is part of what make Big Love so doable--the storylines that arise from the multiple marriages are only one layer of the drama. Religious in-fighting, secrecy, and loads of other potential problems await the characters and lend themselves to endless plotlines.

The same is true in Brady Udall's novel The Lonely Polygamist--Golden Richards, a man with four wives and twenty-eight children, struggles financially and morally to keep his life from falling apart. Away from his homes on a construction job, he meets and falls in love with a quiet, child-free woman who offers him respite from the complications of his marriages and children, but that relationship (like all of them) does less to alleviate his frustrations than it does increase them--and given who the woman is married to, Golden's love for her puts his family in jeopardy. His liaison with her puts him not only in moral peril, but physical danger.

But his family is falling apart anyway. His most fragile wife, Rose-of-Sharon, has recently been hospitalized with a nervous breakdown; his first wife Beverly fights constantly to maintain her control over the household and the other women, and his fourth wife, Trish, finds herself alone and lonely during Golden's absences, and contemplates a tryst of her own. The most endearing character in the book is the one whose problems also spiral out of control and yet also lead to the resolution--however heartbreaking--of this amazing book. Eleven-year-old Rusty reminded me of the character in "The Ransom of Red Chief." Neglected amidst the chaos of his home, Rusty seeks entertainment wherever he can, primarily by sneaking out of the house and riding his bike around town and plotting ways to get his father to pay more attention to him. Unfortunately, in this regard, he eventually succeeds.

Polygamy? Not a fan. It's unfair to women and children, complicated, and disastrous in terms of the long-term well-being of families (what happens if the sole provider dies?) Besides the major issues, it's impractical and likely to be unmanageable and miserable on a daily basis. Regardless, watching Big Love and reading The Lonely Polygamist (even though they are fictional) gives me a little more understanding of how and why people choose this lifestyle. "...this after all, was the basic truth they all chose to live by: that love was no infinite commodity. That it was not subject to the cruel reckoning of addition and subtraction, that to give to one did not necessarily mean to take from another; that the heart, in its infinite capacity could open itself to all who would enter, like a house with windows and doors thrown wide, like the heart of God itself, vast and accommodating and holy, a mansion of rooms without number, full of multitudes without end."

This is the best novel I've read in 2010--multi-layered, often very funny, beautifully written, and insightful. No matter how many people you live with or love, there is likely to be a piece of your truth in these pages, and even if there isn't, Golden's story of the perpetual quest to define to define oneself internally and to the world at large is unforgettable.

Who are YOU?

This will be a short post because I don't want to take up the time I think you should be spending at the bookstore or library purchasing and reading this recommendation.

Mysteries and thrillers often fall victim to formulaic plots and stereotyped characters (crusty old private eyes, sassy teenage girl detectives, etc.) but Dan Choan's novel, Await Your Reply, suffers from neither of these problems, and establishes itself as one of the most unique and intriguing suspense stories I've read.

Without giving too much away, the plot is a tritych of stories whose connection is woven so subtly into the events as to be eerily dreamlike--you'll find yourself wondering if you imagined mention of one clue in another part of the story as you read.

In the opening pages, a young man with a severed hand is rushed to the hospital by his father; in the second introduction, a teenage girl with a forgettable past leaves town with her high school history teacher; in the third, a man searches the icy Canadian landscape for his missing identical twin. The thread binding them together is the mysterious nature of identity--and identity theft.

If you liked House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Days by Andred Dubus III, Chaon's book will claim a couple of hours of your life, too--and you won't be sorry.

Things I will never be: a teenage boy, a person who never sleeps (or for that matter, a person who never sleeps during the day, given my proclivity for napping), a person who reads comics/graphics novels/whatever you want to call those books with all the drawings and dialogue bubbles, a person who will probably never be able to extricate herself from high school drama, humor, and life.

No matter how incredible my adult experiences (I have a truck! A house! I can go to the store and buy candy any time I want!) there is an inexplicably seductive quality to high school life--not the real thing, of course, but the imaginary world of sex, secrecy, and snark that exists in my favorite TV shows: Friday Night Lights, Glee, Veronica Mars.

I recently flew to San Francisco for a conference and a 4-night stay in a boutique hotel that looked like it was decorated by a Manhattanite with a 400-square foot apartment who thinks a $50 throw pillow is a bargain. I flew first class because through some quirky karmic wormhole, I was bumped from my original $119 flight to first class, plus a $300 ticket voucher. I mention this not just to be an obnoxious braggart, but because it is exactly like the forces that rule high school life. No one deserves seat 1D (first row, first class) anymore than anyone else deserves backne, untameable curls and dyslexia. But teenagerhood and flight are similar that way: sometimes you're a size 4 cheerleader with a rack like Jennifer Aniston, and sometimes your flight is rerouted to Fargo and your brand-new Swiss luggage is circling a luggage carousel in Dayton, Ohio.

Being a high school teacher/librarian for the past twenty years has given me some insight into teenagers and also fortified me against many of the evils of the world. I continued to be fascinated by this weird 4-year period in life, and I keep reading about it. It's not enough to endure adolescents for seven hours a day, I also have to tack on another few hours reading about them. The Crazy School by Cornelia Read is one of my recent favorites, combining some of my favorite topics: mystery, sass, boarding school, bizarre psychological stuff, and teenage life.

Protagonist Madeline Dare is hired to teach at an expensive boarding school for troubled teens, and establishes a great rapport with her students, given her snarky humor and tenacity. Despite her good relationships with kids, however, Madeline is aware that something weird is going on at the academy--a student commits suicide, another disappears, and the headmaster requires everyone, students and teachers, to participate in counseling sessions. As she investigates the recent events, Madeline comes closer to discovering the dark secret at the heart of the institution, and only by joining forces with one of the academy's most dangerous students can she get to the heart of what's going on.

Nothing like this ever happens to me at my school, and I'm thankful that most of our mysteries are things like who spilled raspberry smoothie in the hall during first lunch? and who used up all of the ink in my printer? Nevertheless, the high school culture and the students rang true and entertained. If you like your mysteries smart, funny, and sexy, put this one one your list!

Walk Right Back. Or Don't.

Tim Farnsworth, the protagonist of The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, is a lawyer leading a seemingly ideal life with his devoted wife Jane and their daughter, Becka, when he is afflicted by a nameless, unexplained compulsion to walk until he falls down. He leaves his office or his home when the urge to walk becomes impossible to ignore, takes the pack that Jane has lovingly prepared for him, and sets out to wander New York City until it becomes physically impossible and his wife has to come pick him up.

Needless to say, Farnsworth's disorder impacts every aspect of his life: his teenage daughter withdraws, his marriage becomes strained, and his work defending a wealthy and prominent murder suspect suffers. He and Jane seek advice and medical treatment from every expert they can think of, but no one is able to explain the compulsion--although it manifests physically and has serious health implications, it has the characteristics of a mental illness.

The Unnamed moves along briskly, fascinating for both its examination of a psyche under seige and for the legal drama lurking in the background. But what makes it so powerful a read isn't the reading, but the having read. I put this book down and could not stop asking myself, "wtf?" What did I just read? Who writes a book about a guy who just walks, inanely and dangerously, without explanation? And why? Why is it so interesting? Tim Farnsworth doesn't kill anyone or have any hidden childhood trauma or deep, dark past or engage in any bizarre sex acts. Then I remembered my secret weapon for answering questions about books I read: a B.A. in English.

I'm not claiming to have any definitive interpretation of The Unnamed. I'm not even claiming that there is or should be anything more than a thoughtful analysis of any work of literature. You can say whatever you want about a poem or a story or a novel and its "meaning," and that's fine with me. I might think you're a kook, but if (unlike far too many students I've worked with), you take the time to actually think about what you read and say something besides "that's stupid" or "that's boring" or "I don't get it," you're doing more with your brain than just storing it in your skull behind a sign that says Here I Am Now Entertain Me.

I want to be entertained by novels and stories and movies and songs. I want to "get" them. But there's something even more satisfying about not getting them and being forced to listen to their complexities rattle around in my brain for a few days until I form some sort of intelligible "aha!" That's what happened with The Unnamed. I went from "huh?" to "how about this...?"

My "how about this" regarding The Unnamed is that Farnsworth's compulsion to walk is a sort of metaphor or symbol for all our unexplainable compulsions--but his is just weird enough to make us stop and wonder. But then, it's not that weird. Ok, so he walks endlessly and suffers psychic and physical harm. But don't we all have compulsions, or at least habits, that are less than healthy or at least, when viewed by onlookers, a bit strange? Why do I bother to keep six chickens that don't lay eggs? Or a collection of several hundred rubber stamps that I don't use? Why do I keep ingesting cheese and candy and wine when I know they're as bad for my ass as Tim's walking was for his toes?

There is no magical formula for understanding novels or stories or poems or (especially) other people. But what is magical is reading something and letting it tickle your brain for the time it takes to makes some sort of sense of it; once you've accomplished that, you've been entertained in the best way possible.

That's What She Said

I'm a sucker for collections of articles that I probably would never have read when they were first published online or in magazines, mostly because the only magazines I ever look at are of the craft porn variety (you know, those with lots of pictures of cool projects I'll probably never get around to doing).

But there are collections of articles and essays that are published every year that catch my attention for whatever reason--sometimes because of the editor (Dave Eggers and the Best Nonrequired American Reading, for example), occasionally because of the provocative cover, most frequently because of the topic. Such is the case with Best Sex Writing 2010.

Now I know there are people out there yawning and thinking boorrriinnnggg, who wants to read about sex? so you folks can go back to studying biscuit recipes or the latest issue of Cat Fancy and I'll continue writing for that segment of the audience interested in sex. You know who you are.

Despite its tantalizing cover, this collection of essays isn't as prurient as it appears; although a few of the pieces are specifically about their authors' sexual experiences and/or interests, most are more intriguing, more political, and more about social issues related to sex than they are about exciting the reader. Nevertheless, there is a lot to be intrigued by and educated about in this collection.

Of particular interest to me were the articles about teen sexting, which is a big issue at the high school level and a concern of teachers and parents; another about sex ed and the failure of abstinence-only programs; a reassuring article by a guy who appreciates women's bodies, even the imperfect ones, and one about the crazy trend of plastic surgery on women's private parts. Yikes.

Here's my challenge, reader friends: find a book that you thought you'd never read, or one that makes you uncomfortable or a little sheepish or that you might have to hide from your kids. I think you'll find it oddly satisfying...

This is My Story, and I'm Sticking to It

"Ms. Belben, have you read Moby Dick?" a student asked me today. "Nope," I responded gleefully. Stunned, he stared at me for a minute. "Why not? You're a librarian! It's a literary classic!" I shrugged and gave him a variation of the same response I gave my roommate the other day when he expressed shock that I had not read Lolita. "I have read thousands of books," I told Q., laughing. "I prefer not to be judged by the ones I haven't read."

I also prefer not to be judged by the books I have read and have not blogged about, since my blog has been hibernating since Veterans' Day. I wish I had some witty or impressive explanation for that, like being too busy training for the Ms. Olympia contest, or having spent the past two months studying manuals on exciting new sexual techniques, but I can't claim anything of the sort. I've been reading, but I've also been lazy (BTW, if you haven't seen the first three seasons of Friday Night Lights, they're awesome). Also, I handmade 90% of my holiday gifts this year, and it's hard to sew and read anything, let alone Moby Dick.

Perhaps if I had a clone, one that I could program and assign some of my tasks (wrangling the chickens and cleaning up after Frida come to mind), I would get more read and written. But I don't have a clone, and I don't want one. I don't think the world wants one. And after reading the amazingly well-written novel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, I'm more than a little frightened at the prospect of cloning, anyway.

When I originally began reading Never Let Me Go, I was following the advice of several writers (I think Steven King was one, but I can't remember) who placed the novel on their "best of the decade" list without going into detail about its plot, so I thought it was just another book about thirty-somethings reflecting on their years in an exclusive British boarding school, and all of the juicy secrets and liasions that permeate the lives of a bunch of teenagers living together.

But Ishiguro has created a much darker, much more sly world beneath the reminiscence-of-boarding-school facade. In this case, the students at Hailsham are, in fact, wards of the state who have been bred specifically to be used as donors for diseased and injured people. These children are the products of a society that has made the preservation of existing human life paramount, and its populace has become so accustomed to medical advances that it is a foregone conclusion that an amputation, a cancer, a failed organ will be replaced in what has become a fairly routine system. But the kicker is, the children don't know who or what they are--all they've ever known is life at the secluded school, and they haven't been told anything about what will become of them.

What makes this novel so stunning, so absolutely incredible and unforgettably powerful is the subtle, creepy, and truly masterful way Ishiguro subtley unveils the truth about the children's conception and their fate. Narrated by Kathy B., the story unfolds gradually but not slowly, as the 30-year-old narrator recalls the friendships she shared with others at Hailsham, specifically Ruth and Tommy. In retracing the development of their complicated threesome, she also exposes, piece by piece, the quiet clues the students pieced together through the years about the true nature of their existance. Without resorting to graphic description or gore, Ishiguro makes the culture that led to these characters' fate absolutely believable and horrible to contemplate.

Cultural critic and author Chuck Klosterman, a writer I consider an idea guru, has said that he doesn't think fiction has much importance anymore. "I don't think novels are shaping the way people think about the world, regardless of their merit as art." I would beg to differ with Mr. Klosterman on this point. Even if, as he points out, the best-selling novels are about wizards and vampires, I still think those shape how people see the world. Fortunately, though, there is other fiction out there that is also forcing us to reckon with the bigger, more realistic possibilities of our medical and technological advances--Never Let Me Go is one of them.

It's almost not entirely a coincidence that I'm writing about Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer on (or around) Veteran's Day. I would be writing about it anyway, eventually, so why not now? Even though I'm not quite done reading it, it's well worth recommending, and far more appropriate for a solemn national holiday than the other two books I just read, one entitled How Sex Works and the other a young adult novel in which the plot hinges on a scene where the narrator craps his pants.

If you're unfamiliar with the story, Pat Tillman was a professional football player who, following the 9/11 attacks, gave up his $3 million contract and joined the Army with his younger brother, Kevin. The two trained together and became members of an elite force, were sent to Afghanistan, and Pat Tillman was killed. Investigations into his death revealed that he had been accidentally shot by an American soldier and that the incident was covered up by the military.

Krakauer has a talent for delving deep into the backstory when he writes; Into Thin Air, Into the Wild, and Under the Banner of Heaven all provided thorough examinations not only of the individuals he wrote about, but the circumstances and politics surrounding their situations. His story of Pat Tillman's life and death is no different. Krakauer begins with an explanation of the conflict in Afghanistan, including the formation of the Taliban, that involved a lot of names and words that are really hard to spell and pronounce and which I will never remember. However, it did provide me with a better understanding of why the U.S. got involved.

The best parts of the book, however (and probably the reason most people will read it) are the details about Pat Tillman, his life and personality, and his almost unfathomable decision to give up his life's dream to go to war. Tillman was, as Krakauer clearly illustrates, a charismatic, intelligent and sometimes inscrutable character who doesn't fit the NFL stereotypes. Details about his life come mainly from his widow, Marie Tillman, who worked closely with Krakauer in writing the story and who continues to do work in memory of Pat Tillman.

I haven't finished reading Where Men Win Glory yet. I'm stuck on the portion about the Tillmans' relationship, their deep love for one another, and the affection that Pat Tillman wrote about regularly in letters to Marie and his own journals. The tragedy of his death is magnified by this fully realized portrait of who Pat Tillman was not just unto himself, but in the lives of those who were deeply affected by his charisma, humor, intelligence, and eventually, his death.