Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages

This is a pretty interesting book if rather predictable because I've read this story a million times before--allow me the hyperbole--only the names are different. The author, Carmela Ciuraru, delves into a brief biographical recap of five literary giants, and then how their wives suffered under the weight of all that "genius." All of these writers are basically monsters who can write. I mean that sincerely. These are assholes with a capital "A." They are cruel, arrogant, vicious, and petty, people I would avoid at parties no matter how scintillating the conversation.

Having spent several years doing a deep dive into the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage with more than a layperson's grasp of his marriages to Hadley, Martha, Gellhorn, and Mary, I found myself just nodding in weariness at the shenanigans and utter ridiculousness of these relationships. I asked myself over and over again, why are you staying with this man? And even though I find Martha Gellhorn to be made in much the same mold as Hemingway (a narcissistic bully), I also was applauding her from the sidelines for her just saying, buster, I'm done, and dusting her hands off on her trousers as she exited that toxic relationship (as all his relationship with EVERYONE became toxic after a certain point). All of these vignettes felt very familiar and, frankly, tired.

The five marriages analyzed are as follows: Una Troubridge and Raddclyffe Hall, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, and Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. I don't think it's surprising that the male authors in this house of literary horrors are English. The post-war years in Britain ushered in a type of unruly, arrogant, angry type of writer that glorified repudiating the values of pre-WWII Britain, and glorified the brutality of that rejection. Did they need rejecting? Sure, but because women are often the scapegoats of any social or political movement, misogynistic is far too mild a word to describe these men. They are vile and angry for the sake of being vile and angry. This is what sold in post-WWII Britain. Even though they needed women to bed and run the mundane aspects of their lives because they couldn't be arsed to hire people, they also loathed them, exactly like Hemingway.

Tynan, Amis, and Dahl used their wives, who let themselves be used because either one walked or one cooked and cleaned and kept one's mouth shut. In between all that washing up, if you managed to create your own art, well, you'd better not get more accolades than your husband. These weren't partnerships. It wasn't, oh, Patricia, my darling, you won an Academy Award, and just received a whopping big paycheck; now we can spend six months in France. It wasn't like that. Nope. Tantrums, pouts, and general all-around nastiness followed because how dare you be as talented as ME. And that's the kicker to these stories. You couldn't even be equal. You were always a lesser light. You couldn't be even a candle to a spotlight; you could be the flame to a match. Some days.  Between the three of them, Tynan, Amis, and Dahl, it's almost impossible to choose a more horrible husband. They were all lauded, all lionized, and all of them were absolute bastards to their wives and mistresses.

The relationships of Troubridge and Hall and Morante and Moravia are less fraught with these competitive dynamics. Troubridge, allegedly gifted in her own right as an artist, just gave it all up for John Raddclyffe Hall, and was perfectly satisfied in being bathed in secondhand glory. The case of Morante and Moravia wasn't so much about two authors competing against each other as it was that Morante was an absolutely impossible person, and their relationship seemed more cerebral than anything else. They respected each other's writing.

The question that kept arising when I was writing my historical fiction about the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage was, as a reader, do you accept the genius along with the cruelty? I was never much of a Hemingway fan (although at sixteen there were passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls that had me weeping) precisely because he only writes about men and how fucked it all is and how there is no honor anymore and how we should all put a gun to our heads because if you can't die with honor, what's the point? That said, I cannot deny his genius. I just don't have to read it. Same here with these authors. I don't want to read them. They might be amazing writers, but I cannot separate the man from the page. I think about the woman banging out meals and making beds, and tiptoeing out of bed at two in the morning to write a page or two or read a script. That is the person who has my admiration (but also my scorn because why did you put up with that nonsense for so many years?) That might be a character flaw, but so be it. 

Book Review: The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman

We come to the third and final book in the Lev Grossman Magician's trilogy. I almost loved the first book, I didn't like the second book, and the third book leaves me disgruntled.

AS ALWAYS SPOILERS! YOU ARE WARNED!

The Good:

There is no disparaging Grossman's descriptive ability and his world-building skills. Pretty much damn perfect, as far as I am concerned. There is a beauty and mastery of the pen here, superb descriptions that leave the reader smiling. The visuals are stunning and intricate. I could literally "see" the images he was creating with his writing. All marvelous stuff. Which is exactly how I felt about the last two books. You cannot fault this writer's ability to craft a world. He's a master at it.

I also felt the ending was acceptable, although there was more of a "this is the way it needs to be" as opposed to "this is why it's happening." That said, the "death" of Fillory seemed manufactured to me. I kept asking why is it dying? The "first" near-death in book 2 made so much more sense. There was a definite why Fillory was collapsing. This second round of death didn't have an organic cause--although I will say that the scenes of Fillory dying are beautifully written. I suppose we're just supposed to go with the flow.

The Bad:

Oh, wow, this is really key to why I didn't like this book. With the exception of Quentin, who seems to have finally grown up, the rest of the cast of characters remains immature and stuck in their 17-year-old selves. The dialogue is trite, smarmy, and sounds like teenagers trying to be cool. This worked when the characters were at Brakebills, but now they are thirty frigging years old! I became bored with it and wanted to shake them out of their sarcastic, arrogant selves. Janet is especially odious, and it's not because she's bitchy. It's because she's odious. Well, there's this little bit of Fillory that should be ours and it isn't and I'm just going to take it because it's there and I'm bored. And if you don't like it, fuck you, I'm High Queen of Fillory. Eliot's character is similarly arrogant with a similar, hey, I'm bored, so I'm going to beat the shit out of guy and show him who is boss. His arrogance blinds him to why this invasion is happening.

Key question: If Fillory is so amazing and beautiful and is the epitome of all that is wonderful and magical, why are the majority of these characters so bored there? WHY? Quentin's boredom was the catalyst for the entire plot in book two, and it's a major issue that moves forward both Janet and Eliot's character trajectory in book three.

This is my main problem with these characters. They do not deserve to be High King and Queen of anything. With the exception of Quentin (ironically enough) who has redeemed himself and yet finds himself in exile again, albeit, by his own will, Janet and Eliot (Josh and Poppy are negligible characters and clearly only exist as baby-making machines) are not worthy of their honor. There is a delicious symmetry here that should probably be up in the Good section. Alice saves Fillory from Martin Chatwin in book one, and Quentin saves Fillory from internal destruction in book three. If ANYONE should be high king and queen of Fillory, it's these two.

Grossman's can write teenagers like anyone else, but he seems to be incapable of writing adults. The majority of these characters are immature jerks who get off on their power. Not only that, the scenes with them almost seem pointless. They are filler until we get to the heart of the story: Quentin's quest to bring back Alice. THIS is the heart of the story and yet we dance around this with manufactured crises and detours that do nothing to move the plot forward (even as they are described in beautiful language).

And this is another flaw. So much of the truly beautiful world-building is pointless. That whole whale thing? Gorgeous writing. Did it matter? No. Was it a bonding moment between Plum and Quentin (ala Quentin and Alice as foxes)? No, it was purely a mechanical exercise to show us Grossman's magnificent world-building skills. But it didn't matter at all to the story. Five pages of being whales for no reason. I could see this working if Quentin and Plum didn't trust each other and turning into whales dissipated that distrust. Nope, just because we can be whales, we are going to be really cool whales.

I think that there are two key problem with this book: (1) much of the magic in this book has devolved into filler material, basically there to show off Grossman's writing skills, e.g., Eliot's mano-e-mano battle, Janet's standoff with the desert people, and Plum and Quentin's decision to be whales. J. K. Rowling also had a similar problem as her series progressed, where story and characterization sacrificed itself to the world-building; and (2) the other characters (with the exception of Alice) are stuck in their selfish teenage selves. Quentin now commands our attention as an adult. I was irritated and bored with the others. Would be that there was a bridge to maturity for them.

I was thrilled to see a mature Quentin, and if his self-exile was to point out that Janet and Eliot are in an emotional time warp, that they can't grow up while in Fillory, then it's a very subtle, miniscule point that was lost on me. And if this is Grossman's intention, then it only underscores my point that you have this magical kingdom being ruled by immature teenagers, who are chronically thirty years old but mentally are seventeen.

In short, this is an uneven book with much beautiful writing that doesn't have a whole lot of purpose. If world-building is the cream in your coffee, you will be thrilled. If pacing and characterization float your boat, it won't work as well for you.

Book Review: The Marriage Plot by J. Eugenides

There is a recent trend lately whereby in an attempt to boost sales, shameless publishing marketing gurus frame a book as a modern Jane Austen. These books hint that if Jane Austen were alive today, she'd be writing this sort of book. Having written an actual Jane Austen mash-up and having read all of her books about a bazillion times, I consider myself something of an amateur expert on this subject. And the only book that I can say without a single equivocation that could have been written by Jane Austen, a book that captures her humor, wit, and commentary on society, is Bridget Jones' Diary. This is a wonderful book and, if by chance you've been living under a rock for the last fifteen years, I suggest you read it.

Despite the barrage of marketing nonsense that states that The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is a modern-day Jane Austen, it is not. This is, as Jane Austen would say, a gross falsehood. Sadly, it also isn't a very good novel.

SPOILERS!

Within the first ten pages I knew that the author had gone to Brown University (like his protagonists), and that this would be a payback novel. That all the slights and emotional traumas that he'd experienced as a student there would be relived in these pages. In that I wasn't disappointed. Yes, it's a payback novel, and it captures the pretension of snotty undergraduate education beautifully. I went to a similar school, and the inflated self-importance walking hand and hand with crippling insecurity that characterizes ninety percent of undergraduates (as well as insufferably pretentious academics) was beautifully written.

In fact, this is one of those books that is hard to critique because there are parts of this novel that are stunning in terms of language. And that's about the only positive thing I can say about it. I relished the language even as I pined for a really good editor to whack this novel into shape.

First of all, the first third of the book is backstory.  I tend not to mind backstory. Unfortunately, it always undermines the pacing of a book, but what well-written backstory offers in terms of fleshing out a story is well worth the lag in pacing. This didn't happen here. All three main characters are given pages and pages of backstory, and at a certain point the reader is aching to get back to the real story.

Second, the book suffers from the real modern affliction that almost none of the characters are particularly likable and one of them totally odious--something I suppose I will have to get used to. It seems to be de riguer these days. Except that because they are such jerks, we don't understand the sad little love triangle that holds the novel together. We are told that the main protagonist is beautiful (and yet has no one interested in her for the first two years of college, figure that one out), and her attraction for the second (likable) protagonist is inexplicable. She's selfish, manipulative, and thoughtless. We can't help but start to get irritated with the second protagonist because he loves this thoughtless selfish woman and we don't know why. And the third protagonist is a manipulative sexual predator whom everyone finds endlessly fascinating and brilliant, and they all want to sleep with him. He is, in short, an asshole of the first order, and yet the reader is supposed to be dragged along in the general adoration. This is the main problem with the book. We are told that this character loves this character. We are told this character is brilliant. We are told everything, and yet nothing that is written compels me to feel anything about these characters other than dislike or pity.

Third, the novel does not go anywhere. We go through mental breakdowns, searches for God, and a wildly ill-conceived marriage, and the characters end up at the same place they were at the beginning of the novel. There is little to no internal movement. It's what I have come to term "the nihilistic novel." They seem to be fashionable these days. I don't know if they are emblematic of the existential crisis of realism or some such bullshit, but I want my books to go somewhere. I want them to move. I don't need them to be happy. I don't need them to resolve everything. But I want something to happen. Nothing happens in this book. It's all filler.

Regarding Jane Austen: The only thing that this book has in common with a Jane Austen novel is that someone gets married. That's it. Marriage in Austen has a point. It's not merely a vehicle for financial salvation. It happens because the characters in the novel have some sort of personal epiphany. It is a physical manifestation of an internal self-reckoning. In The Marriage Plot, the marriage is, in fact, the nadir of the book, and does not signal any sort of personal epiphany. In fact, it's the opposite. It signals the desperation and wish fulfillment of a spoiled young woman taking advantage of desperately ill young man. In Austen's world, she would be the villain not the heroine of the novel. She can only move forward emotionally and even physically by divorcing this man.

I suppose that's the point. Hello, modern-day nihilism.  But Jane Austen was the opposite of this nihilistic view of the world, and the next time the back of a book announces that it's the modern Jane Austen, I will look on it with a jaundiced eye. And reach for a real Jane Austen novel.

Book Review: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

As a reader I never noticed this distinction, but as a writer it now seems like a no-brainer. There are writers and there are storytellers. I'm more of a storyteller than I am a writer, and while my ego would like to be considered part of that rarefied group of writers, in truth, I don't mind being a storyteller. Because there are some very good writers who are primarily storytellers, and Stephen King is one of them. Pretty good company to keep.

I consider King a damn good storyteller, perhaps the finest storyteller we have in the U.S. today. I also feel that way about James Lee Burke, but Burke has a foot in both camps (I consider In the Mist of the Confederate Dead one of the most lyrical books I have ever read; it's up there with F. Scott Fitzgerald according to my lights), so he doesn't really count. But King? A damn fine storyteller.

On the book: I loved it. It is the first book in probably two years that I have sat down and inhaled every single frigging word. I couldn't put it down. It has been so long since that has happened that I was beginning to think that I was just a malcontent. Too stuck up to enjoy a decent book. Too wedded to standards that were persnickety and harsh and unfair. It was nice to be proven wrong.

For those of you who've been living under a rock, this book is the sequel to The Shining. There are only two books out of everything that I have ever read that scared the living shit out of me. The Shining is one of them; Ghost Story by Peter Straub is another. I STILL cannot see topiary animals without looking over my shoulder. To this DAY, I half expect to feel the rip of a claw/branch down the length of my back. THAT is how powerful that book was. And it was a little ironic that I was in Disneyland this weekend, and as I rode by the topiary "zoo" dotting the Small World ride I couldn't help but smile because I had Doctor Sleep in my luggage just waiting to be cracked open that afternoon.

So we have Dan Torrance many years later, an alcoholic like his father, so scarred, stumbling through life, falling a lot, drinking a lot, this boy has become a man and it's not pretty. There are a cast of characters and I won't bore you with basic plot details. I will say that this is a true circle novel. We come back to the Overlook, Dan Torrance must finally face the demons of those years, and once again try to survive and more importantly defeat evil. I think some readers might find this a little too pat, but I enjoyed it. It seemed to me to check off all those boxes that sequels need to do. It finished his story arc. There certainly is room for another story should King wish to pursue it, but Dan Torrance's story seems finished to me. It was very satisfying for precisely the reasons that usually float my boat. This is a book about atonement, a theme that always resonates with me.

Some critiques I've read said that they thought the last third of the book was too soft. I can see that. A younger King would have killed off a couple of people we would have mourned. This older King doesn't feel the need to do that. It did strike toward the end that this had very much a Ghost Story feel about it, with the tribe of evil types being led by a woman (much like Ghost Story), and the ending of the book featuring a road trip. But this is a quibble because maybe books like this just end like this.

None of these quibbles mattered. I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

Book Review: Blue Nights

I should preface this review by saying that I adore Joan Didion's writing. There really is no one better at cataloguing the social chaos and energy that defines a specific shot of history than her. I grew up in the California of the 1960s and 1970s, and if anyone asks me about those years, I point to her. Like most of her readers, I read with such sadness about the death of her husband and daughter, and finished her book The Year of Magical Thinking with such profound respect; she defined unfathomable grief with words.

Blue Nights—her ode to her daughter, Quintana—is also a well-written book, but when I finished it, I slapped it down on my dining room table with a rare sense of irritation. With most books there is you, the reader, who is, hopefully, at the mercy of the author. The author pulls you into their world. Generally, you don't pull them into yours. When that happens, a book sort of fails. I didn't get pulled into Joan Didion's world. As a parent, I couldn't help but pull her into mine, and the parent in me was snorting in disbelief and sometimes outrage. There is an underlying question throughout the whole book: was she a good enough parent? I can't really answer that question. It's a question that all parents ask themselves frequently, although usually not hand-in-hand with mourning a child's death (and, yes, this is the worst thing that can happen to a parent, bar none). But it's hard not to stare in disbelief when she comments that her daughter was terrified that her father would go first because then Quintana would be under the care and responsibility of her mother. Why wouldn't she be terrified? This is the same woman who felt it was perfectly acceptable to bring her infant to a reporting assignment covering the fall of Saigon. Who thought it appropriate in response to this assignment to go out and buy a bunch of designer clothes. And while this disconnect with reality is a trademark of hers, it might work for her persona as a writer, it fails when we consider her as a parent. As a writer, we might find it privately amusing that she would fly from Honolulu and arrive in Hartford when it was below zero without a sweater. When it’s her kid shivering, then it’s impossible to not judge her. The reader takes a back-seat to the parent.

Didion's detachment has always been her strength. But it's an odd detachment, which is why I think it works so well in her writing. Because it's the detachment of the walking wounded. Someone so battered by reality that detachment is the only way to survive. It's the detachment of someone trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. As a parent (and please don't assume that I think I'm a fantastic parent--merely adequate), I'm listening to her questioning her efficacy as a parent, and I feel like shouting, honey, it's not about you. That's what parenting is. It's not about you. Which seems manifestly unfair because her writing has always been about her and not about her. But you can't carry that sensibility into parenting. I read over these verbal snapshots of her life and marriage, and all I can think of was that Quintana never got to be a child. She’s described as being precocious in this book, but to me it feels like more of a coping mechanism. They may have loved her unquestionably, but the Dunnes went on location, stayed in swanky hotels, wrote their articles, movie scripts, and books, and dragged her along for the ride. She had to become an adult in a child’s body.

So much for the personal issues I had with this book. We come to the writing. The last third of the book is devoted to Didion’s sense that she is losing her ability to write. It's part and parcel of other physical frailties, but although the physical maladies are terrifying, they pale in contrast to the idea that she's losing her truly wonderful way of parsing words. That her style is becoming trite, that an ability to write so clearly about the lack of center is now suffering from not having its own center.
And while I can't say that her writing falls short (the beginning of this book is as masterful a beginning as I've ever read), there is a sense of, um, where's the editor? Her repetition of phrases and concepts that in previous works united a bunch of seemingly disparate events to create a fractured whole, now does seem something of a tic.

Another stylistic choice that seemed to dominate this book was, for want of a better word, product placement. And by that I mean it is never a pair of shoes, a hotel, a sweater; it's Laboutins, the Dorchester, cashmere. Truly, are we supposed to lament that Bendel's is no longer the same? Even people are nothing more than product placement. This actress, this director gave a speech at Quintana's wedding.

Part of the strength of Didion's work written in the 1960s and the 1970s is that the protagonists of her essays were no different than you or I, except that maybe they were part of Manson's family. And although that is a hell of a difference, in her hands it was also not a hell of a difference. A "there but for the grace of God" sensibility dominated. In her current work everyone has a name. A big name. Almost like these larger than life people had no right to up and die. Unlike you and me. Because we don't have names. It's unsettling at first and then becomes annoying. It undercuts the real issue in this book. The loss of her daughter. Does it really matter that she went to school with and had dinner at this restaurant with this Hollywood icon? It doesn't make her passing any more tragic, although there is the hint that she was special because of it. When in reality, she was special because she was so loved.

In the end I certainly would recommend this book because Joan Didion is one of the most thoughtful and fantastic writers of her generation, but Blue Nights doesn't have the strength of The Year of Magical Thinking. I think this is the most personal of her books (for obvious reasons), but it's also one of her weaker books, perhaps the inevitable fall out of the detached finally becoming attached with little to attach to.

Book Review: Juliet, Naked

I'm in a rut, retyping the same sentence over and over again. Where is the editor? Yes, I know that Nick Hornby is a great writer, and I can't dispute that based on this book. This is a beautifully written, badly conceived book, IMO. I'm sure I'll get flamed for this, but I found it profoundly misogynistic, and therefore, angry when I finished it.

What do you do when you have a book where all the words are put together in such a marvelous way and yet it doesn't work for you (or me, I guess). The sum is much shittier than the parts!

I think there are two ways to view this book. Either it is unrelentingly cynical, where we are all doomed to be selfish and myopic for the rest of our born days, or it's one of the most sexist novels I've read in a long time. Neither view is particularly appealing.

The good. Well, the writing. Wonderful, witty, insightful, funny, and, I can't disagree, masterful. This novel is written in three distinct POVs--no mean feat. The depiction of fandom is so right on that I thought, hmmmm, what fandom does Nick Hornby belong to? Because I am heavily involved in fandom, and his descriptions definitely had an insider's feel to it. The sense of a worldwide community juxtaposed to the pettiness, the factions, and obsessive-compulsive nature of fans. Being in fandom, it didn't seem bizarre at ALL that someone would make a pilgrimage to a toilet. So yes, that worked for me completely.

The bad. The last third. We have this man (the musician) who is described as a layabout who lives off of women he impregnates. He has children scattered all over the globe that he doesn't seem to care about. Aside from one child (and why this one child is so much better than the others remains a complete mystery), they all irritate the shit out of him. Just because he admits he's an abysmal father doesn't mitigate the fact he is one. And we, the reader, are supposed to give him a pass because he ends up sacrificing his art because of a ten-minute fuck? Sorry. No. No. And can I say no. He does not get a pass. As much as the author would like us to like him (as the female protagonist clearly does), it doesn't wash. I acknowledge his charm for one second, and then I think about all these children he could care less about. And I think, you know, if you had this epiphany in the bathroom, why didn't you invest in condoms and STOP POPULATING THE WORLD WITH CHILDREN YOU ARE AT BEST INDIFFERENT ABOUT?

This is such a male fantasy. This guy is a jerk and yet all these women fall in love with him and bear his children. Not that I want this fantasy where's he's this amazing guy, so therefore, our female protagonist falls in love with him, because how Barbara Cartland of me. No, I want these women to stop falling in love with an asshole. I want them to grow a pair.

And now we get to the real crux of why this book is so sexist. Because the women are idiots. Because they don't use birth control. Because this man has a history of impregnating women and them dumping them. In fact, they have a little club together, Dumpees United, where they can commiserate over what a horrible father this man is. And yet our female protagonist thinks that it's a really good idea to have a relationship and a child with this man.

For the life of me, I don't know why she's so desperate for a child that she doesn't sleep with her old boyfriend. Because, frankly, it doesn't matter. She's leaving one selfish man for an equally selfish man.

I disliked everyone by the end of this book. For their choices, for their lack of choices, for their apathy, for their stupidity, for their shocking lack of self-respect. Not even the beautiful, beautiful writing could save this book for me.