Don't Feed the Bears

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Who needs Mars?

Tinkers
Paul Harding
2009, Bellevue Literary Press


Every year, I wait in anticipation for the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize and do my damnedest to request the fiction finalists before the library system gets bombarded with requests. This year, my class prevented me from having access to a computer until very late in the afternoon. I figured to myself, Who really is going to request these books before you? and was content to wait until several hours after the announcement.

In the past, I was happy to discover that the need to request was null, for I had already read the book awarded the fiction prize - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

While the book was available for request, I was rather surprised to find that afternoon that the Pulitzer website had crashed from an excess of traffic. To further my surprise, I discovered after ten minutes of refreshing the page that this year's winning novel was a work I'd never heard of: Tinkers by an author I'd never heard of, Paul Harding.

Paul Harding, as it turns out, is one of the finest writers I've had the privilege to read in my life. His novel Tinkers takes place on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which coincidentally, is where I live.

Tinkers is about death. The main characters are George, a man reminiscing about his life from his deathbed, and Howard, George's father whose own mortal troubles are recounted not so much in flashback as simultaneously in a time-warping feat of narrative. One man's consciousness bleeds into the other. George's death illuminates his father's life, Howard's life lends gravity to his son's.

But while Tinkers is primarily about death, it is so much more about life - about what the experience of consciousness is, about how to (re-)discover the world around you, about ways of perceiving the physical world, about how to cope with the emotional world, about how the intertwining of our lives necessitates man's need for spirituality.

Most excitingly, though, it's about how good writing can reinvent the world, reinvigorate the soul. Rather than continue writing about the novel, I will instead include a lengthy excerpt from the book (which at a mere 191 pocket-sized pages leaves you no excuse not to read this book). I will warn in advance the the book does indeed contain a narrative (of sorts) and that the sample below is representative of the author's jaw-dropping wordsmithing and is not representative of the way the entire novel reads.

This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it. The book has a red marbled cover. It has large pages. The pages are made of heavy paper the color of blanched almonds. The book is filled with writing. The writing is in blue ink. The ink is heavy and built up in places the way paint builds up on canvas. The paper did not absorb the ink. The ink had to dry before the book was closed or a page turned. The blue of the ink is so dark that it looks black. It is only in flourishes tailing off of serifs or in lines where the hand lessened its pressure on the pen that you can see the blue. The handwriting looks like yours. It looks like you wrote the book. It is a dictionary or an encyclopedia of some sort. The book is full of reports from the backs of events, full of weak, cold light from the north, small constructions from short summers. Let me read you an example...

Cosmos Borealis:
Light skin of sky and cloud and mountain on the still pond. Water body beneath teeming with reeds and silt and trout (sealed in day skin and night skin and ice lids), which we draw out with silk threads, fitted with snags of fur or bright feathers. Skin like glass like liquid like skin; our words scrieved the slick surface (reflecting risen moon, spinning stars, flitting bats), so that we had only to whisper across the wide plate. Green drakes blossomed powder dry among the stars, glowing white, out of pods, which rose from the muck at the bottom of the pond and broken open on the skin of the water. We whispered across the galaxies, Who needs Mars?

Such prose moves me to tears. "Skin like glass like liquid like skin." I mean... shit.

Like his protagonists, Paul Harding is a tinker. He twists and pulls the mechanics of being, manipulating syntax and perception, and re-examines the world through his heart-stopping prose. Harding is nothing short of a visionary.

I hope that this excerpt, if not my somewhat dumbfounded recommendation, spurs you to read this book. You won't regret it.

Conventional Cortices

A Single Man

by Christopher Isherwood

1964, Simon & Schuster

A colleague at work who teaches drama suggested this book to me. I dislike very much reading books that are just about to or just have been adapted into films - it seems to cheapen the literary experience and invite inevitable unfavorable comparisons between the two media. (Worse yet is the embarrassment of reading a book with film stills on the cover accompanied by the phrase 'Now a Major Motion Picture!') I'm not sure at one point I will see the film adaptation of A Single Man (probably sooner rather than later, as it stars my former paramour Julianne Moore), but I am rather glad I read the book despite its coinciding with the film release.

A Single Man, by Christopher Isherwood, is an appropriately svelte novel. It details a day in the life of George, a middle aged professor of literature at a college in California. The novel is ascetic in scope; the action is confined to the professor's movements throughout the course of a single day (what will turn out to be his last). The prose is relatively spare and is quite intimate with its subject.

I say relatively spare because of a rather bombastic beginning in which Isherwood describes his subject's physicality in nearly cosmic turns. As though a camera beginning on a tight extreme close-up and gradually pulling back to reveal its contextualized subject and in doing so revealing also the inherent trickery in the distorting effect of such a close up, Isherwood introduces the novels' protagonist. "Waking up begins with saying am and now. That which has awoken then lies for a while staring up at the ceiling and down into itself until it has recognized I, and therefrom deduced I am," Isherwood begins.

This high abstraction of the process of regaining consciousness after sleep is just that - an abstraction. Putting into words such an inherently wordless process is difficult and while Isherwood would begin to look silly should he continue in such a manner, he eventually broadens his frame to establish character, and in some small way, theme:

It stares and stares. Its lips part. It starts to breathe through its mouth. Until the cortex orders it impatiently to shave, to brush its hair. Its nakedness has to be covered. It must be dressed up in clothes because it is going outside, into the world of other people; and these others must be able to identify it. Its behavior must be acceptable to them

...It knows its name. It is called George.

The emphasis here in the beginning of the novel is largely a fatalistic foreshadowing. George is established first as an almost mechanized entity, neurons and dendrites firing or what have you, emphasizing quite clearly the impermanent nature of such machines. Eventually, its gear wear down. Eventually, it will die.

And yet these mechanized neurological feats - brushing, dressing, shaving - are emphatically associated with social obligations and herein lies some of the essential thematic content of the book. George's physical death, the winding down of his gears, is symbolically synonymous with his spiritual death. George dresses because he must be made presentable to the world, and it is this need to be acceptable that has stifled his soul.

Isherwood's protagonist is a middle-aged gay man who is still in the process of grieving the untimely death of a long-term partner. George's relationship contributes largely to the fatalistic vibe of the novel; all things, especially good things, must end.

George's willingness to submit to society's demands (albeit rather sensible ones, like dressing) is a sign of his inner death, a death begun at the loss of his partner. George has become conventional, and is accepted by his neighbors and colleagues.

Initially, this acceptance was confusing - this novel was published after all in 1964, hardly a high-water mark in terms of gay rights (a half-decade before the Stonewall riots, for example). But thematically, George's neighbors are accepting because George has done nothing to challenge them. He has lead a tame, suburbanized lifestyle, attempted to "settle" into a house with a domestic partner and, having failed, has settled further into the complacency of middle age. He has given his neighbors nothing to be angered by except perhaps his own paltry imitation of their lives.

George is angered by his own inability for a less conventional life. He obsesses over books and academia, imagining his intellectual abilities a suitable substitute for the more "Howl"-like expressions of soul-searching for which he yearns and he flirts with sexually ambiguous students who exhilarate him with their freedom from societal constraint. But while George is invigorated by these dalliances with youthful abandon and is comforted by the sense of self-worth that his epistemological investigations through academia provide him, George's life is one ultimately filled with a quiet (read: restrained) anger towards himself for choosing to play by social rules.

In this regard, the book reads as a polemic towards complacent gays and is an interesting read in light of some of the more domestic ambitions of the contemporary gay rights movement: namely, marriage and children. The acceptance (I suppose a better word in this case would be tolerance) George is granted by his neighbors comes mainly from his desire to conform to their standards of expression (notably, of love). Isherwood seems to argue that surely an acceptance based on such a limp aspiration is not worthy of seeking.

George chafes at his own domesticity, snapping at close friends (a middle aged woman, for example, who asks George to move in as though his domesticity has negated his sexuality) and continually thinking a stream of occasionally vitriolic thoughts about colleagues and students. (Isherwood, too, chafes at the conventions and expectations of novel-writing with frequent scatological comments.)

George seizes an opportunity to loosen his shackles when he skinny dips with a significantly younger man (the aforementioned sexually ambiguous student) but this event thrills George for its novelty. He is not a truly adventurous man and is unable, after taking the youth home, to effectively seduce him.

This reprieve: the stripping in public, the bracing cold of the ocean, the drunken flirtations with a more liberated younger man - it all proves to come to naught. George's last grasp at authenticity is a desperate one and his body by the novel's end has caught up finally with his ruined soul.

...In the Friscalating Dusklight

Ghosts of Wyoming
by Alison Hagy
2010, Graywolf Press


During the ELA MCAS every year I stock up with several books. It's hard to get through several days of testing (several hours each) without some brain candy. A few weeks ago, I was forging through Alyson Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming and had it out on my desk when a colleague stopped by to drop off extra #2's or something. Upon seeing the book, she exclaimed, "Ooh! Ghosts!" While my knee-jerk reaction was to explain that the "ghosts" in question were haunting figures of the past who have imbued Wyoming with a sense of hard-earned history, I just laughed a little and grabbed the pencils.

This turned out to be true. Hagy's stories were indeed populated by those "haunting figures of the past" etc. But imagine my surprise when I discovered my coworker wasn't so off the mark after all - in at least one story in this collection a bona fide ghost appears, an occurrence that in and of itself would not necessarily turn me off. (I do, after all have an enormous affection for magical realism and the likes of Garcia Marquez and Aimee Bender.)

Ghosts of Wyoming is somewhat disjointed in tone. The book opens with a tragic gem of a story called "Border" in which a teenage runaway steals a Collie puppy to be a travel companion during his journey to flee his past. It is a difficult story to read because its emotional impact is quite powerful. It is simultaneously a portrait of people at their best and at their worst, and is about the disappointments that ensue when we confuse the two.

The second story, "Brief Lives of Trainmen", functions as a series of sketches adopting similar voices of people working at a train yard. The story is interesting to read despite its lack of plot. It feels as though it would be better placed as a prologue of sorts to a longer novel. Hagy manages to persuasively capture the voices of these men but does not imbue them with any of the urgency that creates interesting fiction, or even the most basic semblance of conflict.

Up to this point, I was pretty satisfied with Hagy's collection. "Border" was a fine story, "Trainmen" an interesting exercise in voice. The third story in the collection, entitled "How Bitter the Weather", is where she began to lose me. The story concerns a narrator who is sleeping with a man named Armand who has disappeared. It took me about ten pages to figure out whether the narrator was a man or a woman, and by the time I did, it was too late to work up a sufficient emotional reaction to the narrator's plight. (In retrospect, the character is referred to by name in dialogue on the second page of the story, which I apparently missed.)

The ghost story, "Superstitions of the Indians", occurs about half-way through the book and where the stories that have come before it were rough, gritty little stories written in realistic mode, "Superstitions" is downright silly. A graduate student meets a ghost in the stacks at the research library who infects the student with tuberculosis or something and subsequently helps the grad student win the championship in Frisbee golf. It's a turn so befuddlingly off the Wyoming road map Hagy has been crafting that it created a stumbling block that I needed several days off before I could continue reading the collection.

When I finally picked the book back up, the damage had clearly been done. The next piece, "Oil & Gas" was structurally similar to the preceding "Trainmen" story in its alternating points of view and actually did seem to have a plot. But I was disappointed to find that this plot was buried in the story like anthropological artifacts under layers of sand and silt, waiting for an industrious fellow to excavate them carefully. After my encounter with the librarian Frisbee golf-enthusiast ghost, I was far too impatient for such an undertaking and was contented instead to glean snatches of plot when possible.

My experience with the book quickly went from bad to worse. The next story, "The Little Saint of Hoodoo Mountain", was so riddled with arch, self-serious prose that I was frequently laughing out loud, reminded as I was of Owen Wilson's Cormac McCarthyesque nonsense in The Royal Tenenbaums. One passage in particular truly tickled my fancy:

Her mother said dreams were to be saved, written down as soon as you could get from your pillow to a pencil. But Livia almost never remembered her sleep dreams. If she could have designed a dream like she sometimes designed beaded hatbands, the dream would be about flying - soaring over the Red Mask Ranch, gliding up the silver vein of the river into the black shadow heart of the Absaroka Mountains where nobody went except sheep hunters and loners who believed it was important to walk all the way into Yellowstone Park. If she could fly like hat, she'd know where the raspberries first came ripe in August. Where cow elk bedded down for the morning. Where the cutthroat trout were fat, unhidden, unhurried.

Beaded hatbands? This kind of completely bombastic, self-conscious folksiness pervades the rest of the book. It reads like an E. Annie Proulx undergraduate discard. It could also inspire a new parlor-game where at the end of each one of these sentences you could tack on the Eli Cash-ism "in the friscalating dusklight." "Where cow elk bedded down for the morning... in the friscalating dusklight." See? It works!

Once the prose took such a floral turn for the worse, Ghosts of Wyoming was a struggle. It took several days to read only sixty or so more pages.

I was truly surprised to discover that the last story in the collection, "The Sin Eaters", was as strong a story as the first in the book. "The Sin Eaters", based in part on true accounts, tells the tale of a missionary caught in a bloodbath between lawless frontiersmen. The story, whose prose was only marginally less ridiculous than that quoted above, managed to evoke a quietly amoral mood that was riveting. "Sin Eaters", while self-serious, was not self-conscious or forced. The story accumulates great dramatic momentum and I followed the story with a great sense of unease.

Hagy's prose in this final story successfully walks the line between the ridiculous and the gripping:

The gathering heat of the day began to take its toll. Porterfield wiped real and imagined perspiration from his brow. Twice he asked Drumlin to halt the freighter so he might relieve himself among the prairie grasses. Still, the pangs in his bowels rose like air bladders to press against his lungs. Drumlin talked of Lander, of the great mountains there, but Porterfield could not make sense of the driver's words - the phrases seemed strangely purloined from his own unfinished letter to Phyllis.

This reads to me eerie and haunting, unlike the dream ostentation of early passages in the book.

"The Sin Eaters" is long. Its plot gathers and disperses like sand in a windstorm and its characters are obscured from the reader, as though glimpsing figures in turmoil through such a storm, at a distance. The effect is distressing, and all the more magical for it.

While I was relieved to see Hagy redeem her book with the final story, the emotion that lingers for me after having read it is sharp disappointment. Such mastery as is evident in "Border" and "The Sin Eaters" is not maintained throughout the collection. The book is susceptible to sketchy writing exercises and downright silly writing and these missteps are more painful when compared with the highs of its bookend pieces. I'm not sure if the book would have benefited more from a less indulgent editor or a larger pool of writing from which to select the work. Either way, I don't doubt I will read Hagy again, even though it will be with a wary eye.

Stormy Weather

One D.O.A., One on the Way
by Mary Robison
2009, Counterpoint


In college, I read Mary Robison's Why Did I Ever. I can't recall who or what recommended this book to me (I suspect it may have involved by obsessive perusal of Amazon.com listmania! pages). Whatever the circumstances were, they were fortuitous.

Why Did I Ever is a brilliantly funny little book, collected in hundreds of scraps of ideas (the longest chapter was several paragraphs long) and scenes and anecdotes and sketches. Alone each of these was a marvelously cynical little gem and together comprised a very witty novel whose plot was abstract at best but that packed quite a punch.

(A sample chapter:

16.

Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.)

Why Did I Ever was apparently published at the end of a decade of writer's block and it reads as such; Robison's frustration is evident in the sharp, jagged edges of her worldview.

One D.O.A., One on the Way, Robison's first novel in the eight years since Why Did I Ever was published, shares a lot in common with its chronological predecessor. The chapters are remarkably short (the longest this time a little over a page) and these chapters do not develop a plot so much as they immerse the reader in an experience, the experience of how frustratingly hard it is to know someone intimately despite being privy to their most emotionally revealing experiences.

The object for our consideration is Eve Broussard, a location scout for a movie studio (the main character of Why Did I Ever was a script doctor) who lives in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eve is prevented from fully exploring her work because of the ruins in which Louisiana has been left since the storm and also because her husband, Adam, is sick with a grave illness. (The awkwardness of the coupling's names is mined for all the humor it's worth throughout the book; the main character of Why Did I Ever was named, amusingly, Money.)

Robison's observations about daily life - both its mundane activities and its moments of incredible importance - preclude the need for a traditional plot. If there is one, it's that Eve, while in love with her husband, conducts an affair with his indistinguishable twin brother. This plot is interesting for thematic reasons but the plot is not traditionally structured and the novel is the better for it.

One of the novel's great pleasures is Eve's sarcastic nicknames for the twin brothers: "Smash & Grab are here to join us for lunch"; "I'm with Rhythm & Blues and their parents at an eatery called The Half Moon"; "Here are the twins, I've Seen Fire & I've Seen Rain, propped on their sides on the bed, a chessboard between them", etc.

The novel's subject is ostensibly the collision of the aforementioned facets of life: the trivial and the significant. Because the chapters are so short and alternate so rapidly the discordance between scenes of emotional turmoil and domestic routine are jarring and produce a sense that both of these things are farcical in their own way; the trivial is made more trivial by demonstrating the time we waste on it when there are more important things to consider, and the significant is muted by the distraction of the trivial.

Here, for example, is a scene of the mundane:

[65]

It's 6:30 in the A.M. Collie's opened my bedroom door a little. I see her eye.
"Where do you keep the paper cups for baking cupcakes?" she asks me.
I say, "This is Mars and we're on it."
"They're colored paper cups," she says.
I say, "Oh, those. They're in the drawer with my parakeets."
"Nevermind," she says, and steps in and leans against a wall.
Scooting along the wall now.
I say, "You could go out and rock the porch swing off its chains."
She heaps herself onto the end of my bed as if to climb it. "What's the difference between lying and when you're making things up?" she asks.
"I know of none," I say.
"What about stories in books?"
"They don't count," I say. "They're made of writing."

Now compare that observantly funny (but ultimately insignificant) scene with this shorter observation, which delivers a stronger emotional wallop:

[180]

I have memories of being in love with Adam, sure. Of the music we were listening to before its sound became a ting in a bucket.

To say that these are separate moods would be true; however, the narrator is one and the same. Eve's feelings of disenchantment with her husband are cutting and color all her observations about life. These two perspectives do not really need justifying because they present a beautifully rounded, realistic sense of character.

The book is punctuated further by listing statistics, mostly about public facilities, about a post-Katrina New Orleans. These facts are at the very least disturbing and contribute at length to the murky tone of cherished-things-lost that pervades the novel.

Framing the novel in terms of the wider perspective of exploring what it means to live in New Orleans years after the storm lends considerable gravitas to the book; it feels much less slight than Why Did I Ever but the trade-off is in creating a substantially more morose tone. What's humorous is made darkly so, and what is ruminative or nostalgic is made doubly so.

Eve seems to be a woman dissatisfied with a life that should be satisfying. Her observations are colored by her disenchantment with her husband; even her affair with his identical brother has none of the spice that hackneyed love affairs are usually flavored with; at some points in the novel Eve is unsure which brother she's bedding.

Eve's voice is freighted with reluctant urgency. She is attuned to the world around her and takes in its beauty ("Her champagne hair, immaculate skin, a gargantuan sweater," she observes of a friend), all the while attempting to extricate herself from it.

One D.O.A., One on the Way reads like Eve's journal, a melange of observations of the world and of half-revealed emotional truths. Reading it feels like the intrusion of reading someone's diary and is marked particularly by that sensation of the incredible distance that is maintained even when seemingly engaging in such an intimate act. What is strange, and sad, about reading a diary is in how much is left out - reading between the lines of someone's painfully real emotional experiences. Robison creates the sensation of feeling close to someone while remaining distant, of knowing someone but not wholly, of understanding the why's of someone's life, but not exactly the what's.

The experience of reading One D.O.A., One on the Way is steeped in melancholy, but it is the kind of melancholy I am most familiar with: nostalgic for what once was and can no longer be, acutely observant of the comedies of life, appreciative of the vast, heartbreaking beauty of what it means to live.

If You Lived Here, You'd Be Glum by Now

Model Home
by Eric Puchner
2010, Scribner


I have a rather large literary soft spot for contemporary family dramas. The modern American middle-class family, which I am privileged to have taken part in, is a very confusing and tumultuous place to come-of-age. I suppose part of this compulsion of mine has to do with a need to see my own experience somehow captured in the pages of someone else's book (my own attempts to capture it in fiction have fallen sadly short).

Model Home is a novel I read about in the Sunday New York Times Book Review and immediately requested through the miracle of interlibrary loan. While my rather adolescent hope to find a character with whom I could closely identify was stymied, there was something of my own experience in Eric Puchner's depiction of the trappings of adolescence: lusting for a more hard-edged image, sexual misconduct, a desire to project a more human face on one's parents, and a subsequent disappointment when these projections become depressingly real.

Model Home takes place in the mid- to late-eighties and features a family of five living in coastal California. The book is split into three parts, the first taking place in summer of 1985, the second a year later and the third six months after that. The plot traces the lives of the members of this family: a father who is a real estate developer, a mother who makes educational films, a son who plays in a band and lusts after his girlfriend's younger sister, a daughter who loses her virginity to a Mexican security guard, and a much younger son who exhibits troubling attention-seeking behavior like dressing head-to-toe in orange.

Puchner portrays the family as being essentially strangers to one another and yet his authorial perspective is intimate with each; chapters are written in alternating voices of each of the main characters (albeit noticeably avoiding the perspective of the carrot-colored youngest child until very late in the novel) and occasionally some of the supporting characters. Puchner is largely faithful to the close third-person voice; there were very few moments when he (accidentally) provided the perspective of both characters in one scene. In two interesting chapters, he unites the close third-person perspectives of each of these characters who are sharing a common space, producing an effect much like the climax of an Altman film when all the seemingly unrelated characters collide and interact - a nicely ironic touch considering these are members of a nuclear family.

These disparate voices are successfully captured, bringing to mind the incredibly absorbing work Jonathan Franzen did with his cast of characters in another trials-and-tribulations-of-the-modern-American-family novel The Corrections. The most compelling thing about the novel is the outright suspicion with which it treats adults. Puchner's best writing is when embracing the two teenaged children's perspectives. Puchner manages to capture the sexual frustration as well as the confusion of identity of adolescence extremely well - and especially the mistrust of adults inherent in coming-of-age.

Dustin, the son, is an extraordinarily handsome guy - but in a blandly warm way. He is eager to shake off his image as all-American surfer boy through his exploration of gritty alternative bands like the Butthole Surfers and the Stooges, mistakenly thinking that one can cultivate a worldview as simply as building a music collection. This mistake reveals itself shockingly half-way through the book when the reasons behind worldview and attitude are harshly revealed to Dustin. He is subsequently forced to confront the idea that your life experience are not something that you can fashion yourself, a truth that is perhaps obvious, but only until after you've had the chance to discover it yourself.

Lyle, the daughter, is another character developed with a sharp sense for the disappointments that coincide with maturity. Lyle is eager to partake in the adult world - she is a precocious reader - and experiments with adulthood through alcohol and sex. While this scenario is certainly not unique to either literature or life, Puchner develops carefully Lyle's fragile sense of ego with deft hands. She is defensive of her image and, like her brother, works hard to cultivate an identity. Both Dustin and Lyle care greatly about undermining their physical appearance: Lyle is embarrassed by her seeming naivete and Dustin by his approachable good looks.

The siblings both use sex as means to accomplish their quests to confound others' expectations of them. Lyle experiments with a sensitive, although perhaps unhinged, Mexican poet and when the affair goes bad, she is newly embarrassed by her attraction to this strange, broken creature. Dustin's sexual experience goes along similar lines, abandoning his generically pretty girlfriend for her twisted, self-destructive younger sister whose deceptively fragile, outwardly misanthropic edginess Dustin tries to collect her as he does his vinyl.

Their parents are portrayed with none of the same sympathetic identification which Puchner demonstrates towards the children. He writes them as self-involved and unsympathetic, particularly their father whose desperation leads him to deceptive personal and business dealings.

Moreover, Puchner does not seem as gifted in imbuing them with the same level of psychological depth. Both parents are barely developed cliches: the mother a "perfect" liberal housewife who gradually picks up chain-smoking and flirtation with European mean (to rekindle her sense of nostalgia over her lone-gone youthful indiscretions). The father is a husk of a man whose pride is ruined by his inability to provide for his family and who engages in garden-variety infidelity towards his wife.

These are obviously sketches drawn from cliche and imagined (as opposed to lived) experience, at best. (The chain-smoking mother is a particularly weak caricature.) Puchner's perspective is too closely aligned with that of the children that his development of the adults betrays an adolescent's view of parenthood.

I am reminded, for example, of the film The Squid and the Whale, where Noah Baumbach was able to heartbreakingly render the awful pain of coming of age but was unable to portray the adults in question, lacking the same kind of complicated multifaceted depth. Or, for another example, the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright who writes so well about the difficulty of navigating the youthful quest to develop image and self-worth but whose songs about his parents remain nothing better than underdeveloped sketches, impressions of adulthood marred by lingering adolescent emotions. The portrayal of the adults in all these works are satisfactory on a surface-level only; that is, we accept the kernel of truth in them insofar as they capture how an adolescent views or imagines the adult world while remaining permanently outside it.

Compare these pieces with Rufus's father's own songs about his children, which are heartbreaking in their truthfulness, their willingness not to erect veneers to be studied but rather textured surfaces to be felt. Or, for a literary example, Philip Roth's portrayal of parenthood in American Pastoral, where the main character's uncomprehending grief regarding his daughter's violent reactionary behavior felt confused and alive and not merely studied.

These perspectives on adulthood in Model Home do not mar our enjoyment of the novel, but rather enhance our understanding of the adolescent characters and their own misapprehensions of their parents. These poor characterizations of the parents make the book and its sensitivity towards youth (and youth's struggle for adulthood) more endearing, rather than less.

The plot, while initially quite intriguing, takes a turn for the ridiculous when the youngest child runs away and begins narrating his own section of the book, where he is picked up by a mute who brings him on a Grateful Dead tour of California. This second son narrates his chapters while second-hand stoned and the grace with which Puchner endows the teenaged children evaporates in a misguided attempt to introduce, well, I'm not sure exactly - satire? black comedy?

Thematically speaking, the book plays off the image of the American home successfully. The family lives in a luxurious home, the picture perfect Southern California residence, that it can scarcely afford and which proves to be as false an image of contentedness as does the nuclear family itself. They move instead to one of their father's misbegotten model homes in the desert which is shoddily constructed and which the father had tried to sell to numerous people despite a toxic dump in the area.

There are also mobile homes that stay put and mobile homes that move with a community. It seems almost a joke that this latter "home" is really the most welcoming and communal of all; the Grateful Dead-Heads who use it are more caring and far less concerned about maintaining an appropriate image than the cast of main characters are.

Yet the point seems to be that however false aspects of these homes are, however broken the lives of these people are, they still inevitably form a family. While this family aspires for picture-perfect appearance, its failure in that regard does not dissolve the actual connective tissue keeping them together.

The strength in this book is in the accuracy with which it portrays how very distant from one another the members of a nuclear family are ("distant as satellites," the mother laments) and in the tender development of coming-of-age.

These wonderful qualities are not at all diminished by the inability to conjure up psychologically satisfying adult characters or to sustain the plot's climax without some rather confusing left-field shenanigans. Puchner, quite young as far as I can tell, has certainly has had little enough life experience not to be (thankfully) too far removed from the urgent pathos of adolescence but (unfortunately) also little enough to conjure up the anxieties of parenthood without some fair amount of bathos.

Now & Then

The Way We Live Now
by Anthony Trollope
1875


Having a book club has been a recurring goal in my adult life. The first attempt was several years ago, when I tried to get a bunch of my friends to read Sarah Vowell's wonderful Assassination Vacation, which largely failed to capture anyone's attention enough to merit even a short discussion.

Living in large apartment complexes offers plenty of opportunities to organize social groups and a few months ago I managed to meet with exactly two (!) other residents in regards to forming a book club. After much discussion, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (a convenient choice as I was teaching it in my reading class) was selected as our first book and we managed to attract an additional three people to meet for it. At that meeting one of our new members mentioned that she was involved in a different book club, for which she was asked to read Anthony Trollope's serialized Victorian novel The Way We Live Now, a behemoth at 800-odd pages. Much to my chagrin, I discovered a month later that I was the only person up to the task of conquering those pages - although the book club has thankfully not stalled out and has selected a John Irving novel for the month of April.

The Way We Live Now is concerned with two primary topics: arrangement of marriage in Victorian society and the dawn of stocks in the British economy.

The story revolves around Lady Carbury, a widow who dreams of publishing marvelously successful novels (with atrocious titles like The Wheel of Fortune) in order to provide for her two children, Sir Felix Carbury and Hetta Carbury. Each child embodies one of these two primary themes. Hetta is in love with a young man who may or may not have already promised his hand in marriage to an American woman who may or may not still be married to her first husband. Lady Carbury will not permit this marriage and prefers instead that Hetta marry her cousin, Roger Carbury.

Hetta's plight tugs at one's heartstrings throughout the book. Hetta is an honest, modern young woman struggling to remain faithful to social mores while fashioning a new kind of courtship. Hetta is headstrong and strong-willed and the behavior of the men in her life, both her would-be suitor and her cousin, are respectful and passionate because each man senses these valuable traits. The conflict between the two men largely interrupts Hetta's quest for happiness, but Trollope makes it apparent that it is more the outdated conventions of courtship that prevents Hetta from embracing her chosen mate.

Sir Felix Carbury embodies the other theme. Sir Felix is portrayed as a garden variety laze-about cad. He mooches money of his mother, engages in trivial dalliances with many girls, and gambles away his afternoons at a club with other young man of privilege. Sir Felix becomes involved in an American business venture to build a railway from California to Mexico when he is named to its board. This decision is motivated for financial reasons; Sir Felix can draw upon his power as a chief stock holder to use this money as credit to fund his gambling, and can also ingratiate himself to Mister Melmotte, the financier behind the operation whose daughter Sir Felix intends to marry (for her money).

The Mexican-American railway never quite takes off over the course of the novel, although those involved in creating this business generate a large amount of hypothetical wealth from its stocks that they draw credit upon to finance other shady transactions. The money here is not real and the company mimics the gambling at the club Sir Felix frequents in that I.O.U.'s are generally passed around as acceptable tender while no ready cash exchanges hands. When Sir Felix runs out of money, he attempts to draw on these promissory notes, instigating a crumbling of the microcosmic financial structure of the club that foreshadows Mister Melmotte and company's own downfall as the credit upon which they build their fortunes vanishes.

Trollope spends a good deal of time on the Melmotte character, who stands as a sort of straw figure by which Trollope can expose the unstable and disingenuous nature of the social cache upon which both these marriages and capitalistic ventures are formed. The marriages are arranged on the concept of matching financial levels and marrying within social caste, but Melmotte's daughter, whose 'fortune' is a lure to a half-dozen young men and proves to be but a pecuniary mirage, demonstrates the faultiness of this system in modern times.

Melmotte, who is initially regarded as a charlatan by the privileged class of London, effectively buys his way into high society through the illusion of his wealth. Those, like Lady Carbury, who are drawn to wealth and social stature, are given a rude awakening when he is revealed be the fraud he was originally thought.

Lady Carbury with her scheming ways regarding her son's future and obstinacy regarding her daughter's intended marriage proves to be an unmistakable exception in Trollope's portrayal of women. Throughout the novel, the young man being bartered about in arranged marriages prove to be the most sincere, modern characters. Each one argues for fair treatment in terms of her relationships with men and is stymied by more traditional, misguided older generations.

Trollope's portrait of the American woman who may or may not still be married to her first husband is particularly sympathetic. She is broken by her would-be suitor, who back off after discovering her ambiguous past. The woman uses the traditions of being wooed to her advantage in order to manipulate her lover into remaining in her presence. However, she is also a fiercely independent character, determined to forge her own future on her terms and to manipulate the system (and the men who abide by it) to achieve her own ends, to effectively determine her own future.

The winning, sympathetic portrayal of women brings to mind D.H. Lawrence's knowing (albeit significantly more psychological) characterization of his female characters. This proved to be one of the most compelling reasons to finish the gargantuan novel.

The primary stumbling block to accomplishing this goal, however, proved to be the incredibly dense prose. While most of the book was readable and free of frustration (the dialogue was wooden but not especially indecipherable), there were some passages that were just ridiculous. Take, for example, this hifalutin tangle of words:

As the high mountains are intersected by deep valleys, as puritanism in one age begets infidelity in the next, as in many countries the thickness of the winter's ice will be in proportion to the number of summer musquitoes [sic], so was the keenness of the hostility displayed on this occasion in proportion to the warmth of the support which was manifested.

I, personally, was not aware of a connection of iciness and mosquitoes.

Here's another doozie:

That conclusion of antecedents which, in the hurry of the world, is often vouchsafed to success, that growing feeling that induces people to assert to themselves that they are not bound to go outside the general verdict, and that they may shake hands with whomsoever the world shakes hands with, had never reached him.

I mean.... really?

Largely, though, the prose was not an issue of intelligibility; instead, it offered numerous opportunities for guffawing at its bombastic aspirations. At the very least, I managed to learn a new word: contumely (n.): contemptuous or humiliating insults.

Like many hefty Victorian novels, The Way We Live Now was an ultimately rewarding, if somewhat slight, experience that lent me a greater feeling of the satisfaction of having completed a daunting task than the satisfaction of an intimate artistic experience.