"Keep Your Seat, Trash"--Review of Charles Portis' True Grit

During the publicity tour of the Coen Brothers' adaptation of True Grit , reviewers described Charles Portis as an unsung master of American letters. Being unfamiliar with Portis, I am surprised and delighted by the humor and wit found in his writing. Told from the perspective of precocious narrator Mattie Ross, the story juxtaposes the naivete of a headstrong girl with the violence and harshness of the unsettled west. Mattie and her pompous airs are inadvertently funny, especially when read against the harsh cynicism of her traveling companions Rooster Cogburn and Mr. LaBoeuf. Portis' style reflects the novel's landscape-bleak, harsh, sharp, yet on occasion beautiful and lyrical.

The novel touches on all the classic themes of the western: violence, loneliness, alienation. Despite the nihilism expressed by many of the characters, there are clear moments of heroism from unlikely sources, such as the iconic scene where Cogburn charges a phalanx of outlaw holding pistols in both hands and clenching the reins in his teeth. Cogburn's grudging admiration for Mattie Portis' "grit" evolves into stronger affection for the girl, a bond that challenges our normal understanding of standard archetypes found in the Western . Ultimately, True Grit is an exploration of friendship, and Portis leaves his readers wondering whether true understanding and friendship is possible in a selfish and cruel world. True Grit clearly belongs in any list of great westerns, and I think it should be considered on any list of important American novels.

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Cutting for Stone--review

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Vintage
667 pages

Cutting for Stone begins with one of the goriest birth stories I've ever read.  A beloved nun is ripped asunder by the father of her twins during delivery in an effort to save both mother and babies.  Not an auspicious beginning for her children, who begin their lives abandoned by their panicked and grief-stricken father, a famous and emotionally distant surgeon.  The novel is narrated by one of the twins, Marion, and relates the boys' coming of age during a particularly tense period in Ethiopian history and within the make-shift family that developed to care for the infant twins.  As they mature, the boys struggle with establishing their identity, both as brothers and as orphans, and betrayal and heartbreak mark their lives' important milestones. The word "trauma" kept coming back to me as I read:  Marion deals with the physical trauma of the operating room and with the emotional trauma of failed relationships.  The story is punctuated by moments of graphic human destruction--the scene where the protagonist describes his culpability in the death of a soldier is particularly awful and sad.

This is a beautiful book, although it is slow going.  The novel is heavily descriptive and frequently digresses from the main storyline with surgical narratives and information about Ethiopia's political/social history.  I think Verghese might have benefited with some courageous editing to help the masterful parts of his work shine. However, the story is worth slogging through the slow parts, and I recommend it to anyone willing to put in the time with this dense novel.  Verghese is at his best when he's exploring the intimate relationships between people and the trauma we can inflict on those we love the most.  I'm looking forward to his next work.

Happiness is a free book

I hate waking up as early as I do to get ready for work.  You may sympathize.  I'm sure you too were up at midnight reading some book, even though you had a wake-up call at 4:45 a.m. So it was with little sleep and a bad attitude that I faced my early morning alarm.  And this was a Monday 4:45 a.m. wake-up call.  And I was facing a surly child and even surlier teenagers in the coming hours.  In short, it was an unkind alarm, and I was unhappy.

All this Monday morning unhappiness was mitigated, thank goodness, by the happier email from Goodreads I found during 5 a.m. email check:    finally I have won a FirstReads book give-away contest.  The only stipulation to my new fortune is that I have to write a review of my free book.  Well, technically, I don't have to write a review, but the email stressed how I may never, ever, receive another free book if I don't.   So, dear friends, expect a review over the new novel So Much for That in the coming months.  Thanks to GoodReads for their continued support of my obsessive reading habits.

The Bronte sisters are like Goth Twins

Here's a link to Carl McGrath's profile of the new Jane Eyre film opening this Friday.  I have a feeling that I may struggle with the director's vision...but I'm trying to have an open mind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/movies/06eyre.html

Damn the truth, just tell a good story

American Rose:  A Nation Laid Bare:  The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee
by Karen Abbott
Random House
422 pages

When considering the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, the epigraph Karen Abbott chooses for her biography says it all:  "Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances."  The John Paul Sartre quote is Lee's story writ small--the abused ugly duckling who rises to stardom despite horrible circumstances.  Like all stars--Lee created an identity for public consumption, although where the creation started and stopped was the source of serious familial and romantic friction throughout her life. 

Like her subject, Karen Abbott's biography is a flawed yet compelling work.  Abbott presents the strands of Lee's life you would expect:  the troubled stage mother whose grip on sanity is tenuous; the tawdry burlesque scene that propelled Lee to stardom; the larger-than-life stage persona that kept Lee from true intimacy in her relationships.  Abbott also relishes in the mythological, especially when relating the misbehaviors of Lee’s mother Rose Hovick.  Hovick is  obviously disturbed:  Abbott relates one story where Hovick violently murders a kitten to torture her husband and children.  The truly sadistic stories where Abbott connects Hovick to two mysterious homicides are apocryphal, documented only by second-hand sources and grounded more in rumor than evidence.  My primary quibble with the book is the thinness of the facts surrounding its most sensational episodes-stories designed to cast Hovick as a villain and to offer motivation for Gypsy’s cruelties and idiosyncrasies.  Much like Gypsy’s own approach to her personal history,  Abbott tells a good story while winking and flirting with the truth.  

A lesser problem is the ponderousness of Abbott’s prose.  One example is Abbott’s description of Lee’s final moments in her battle with cancer:  “ Her body begins working in reverse, exhaling, exhaling, exhaling, giving everything it has, taking nothing in return. With her knowledge but never her permission, it relents at last” (Abbott 341).  Abbott’s writing is gimmicky, much like Lee’s own shtick of dropping straight pins into the tuba bell while disrobing  

Despite the problems, there is much Abbott gets right.  Her discussion of the tawdry history of vaudeville during the 20s and 30s is fascinating, and she shows great insight when drawing connections between politics, money, and sexuality during the era’s culture wars.  However, Abbott is at her best when discussing Lee’s stage act, whether as a child playing the overweight foil to her beautiful sister or as the masterful diva elevating the striptease to art.   In the end, Lee’s story is the quintessential American “rags to riches” tale--how one can rise to greatness though grit and charisma.  While the book raises more questions than it answers about Lee’s life, Abbott offers her readers an intelligent discussion on the constructedness of female celebrity and the complicated intersections between love and ambition in Lee’s personal life. 

Strip Tease

I've begun Karen Abbott's biography of Gypsy Rose Lee.   While this project isn't high intellectual fodder, I am intrigued by self-made, intelligent women who cultivate sexualized identities on their way to the tops of their profession. Such duality is displayed in a fabulous picture of Lee wearing a teddy and balancing a typewriter in her lap, tapping out short stories and a novel between sets.   Clearly, contemporary entertainers like Madonna and Lady Gaga owe a debt to forerunners like Lee, who used a larger-than-life marketing scheme to sell her goods.

While I'm always in favor of cutesy titles, this one is laborious:  American Rose:  A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee.  So far, the writing style is as ponderous as the multiple subtitles.  However, Lee's mother is deliciously horrifying as easily the worst stage mother ever.

The Cookbook Collector: Yummy Sensuality

The Cookbook Collector

By Allegra Goodman

Dial. 394 pp. $26

Intrepid Jane Austen fans may be forgiven for being a tad suspicious of Allegra Goodman’s latest novel The Cookbook Collector, lauded by critics as a love letter to Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  I’ve struggled with the cottage industry that has sprung up around Austen’s works:  the purist in me rebels agains the idea of Elizabeth Bennett fighting zombies or of Mr. Darcy outed as a closet vampire.   I don’t want to know what happened after Darcy and Elizabeth perambulate into the sunset--and I maintain any attempt to replicate Austen’s devastatingly snarky tone is doomed to failure.  Thus, I regard any author heralded as the “new Jane Austen” with raised eyebrow.  However, it is with pleasant surprise that I found The Cookbook Collector to be much more than an attempt to ride the coattails of a great novelist.  Goodman presents a charming  portrait of a problematic yet loving relationship between two sisters:  Emily, the sensible computer wunderkind with a technology start-up worth millions, and Jess, the decidedly UN-sensible graduate student in philosophy.  While both sisters are involved in love relationships with predictably caddish men, it is their relationship with one another that makes for the most interesting reading.  

The novel fluctuates between Emily’s and Jess’s stories, as well as the stories of their respective lovers Jonathan and George.  While the men struggle with how to develop and maintain a genuine love relationship, the greatest love story in the novel is Jess’s “affair” with a collection of beautiful and rare cookbooks she has been hired by George to catalogue.  The original collector of the cookbooks covered the pages with luscious descriptions and provocative sketches of his Beloved, and as Jess becomes increasingly obsessed with the cookbooks and their owner, she grapples with the complexities of love relationships in her own life.  Goodman’s descriptions of food and food preparation are heady and sensuous, mirroring the developing sexual tension and release between Jess and George.  When Jess declares herself a vegetarian who will not eat meat, George leaves the juiciest of all peaches on his kitchen counter for Jess to eat privately--a stroke of deferred sexuality that symbolizes Jess’s complicated understanding of intimacy and trust.   Emily’s ability to create a trusting relationship with her partner also is compromised, and her failings are played out against the larger background of the technology boom-and-bust of the go-go 90s and the tragedy of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.   

Like Austen, Goodman explores how love can be our greatest salvation, but she simultaneously offers a contemporary nod that love can be nightmarish as well.  In the end, The Cookbook Collector is a traditional love story played out in a complicated modern world, and Goodman offers her readership a sophisticated and intellectually honest vision of love’s redemptive and healing powers.