books

Make me care. I dare you.

/ lynnkanter / 3 Comments
Photo by David McSpadden

Photo by David McSpadden

Over the years I’ve read and cherished many books that speak directly to my interests. A brief glance at my bookshelves reveals a few examples.

Fiction

  • People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
  • American Woman by Susan Choi
  • The Hours by Michael Cunningham
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  • Is This Tomorrow? by Caroline Leavitt
  • Sleep Toward Heaven by Amanda Eyre Ward

Nonfiction

  • Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss
  • Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
  • Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
  • The Temple Bombing by Melissa Fay Greene
  • The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
  • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

It was easy for these authors to woo me as a reader. They wrote about topics in which I was already intensely interested.

But the kind of literary seduction I love most is when writers, through the power of their words and ideas, force me to care about issues or stories that hold no intrinsic attraction for me.

You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it.

The novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is one example. Thomas Cromwell? Henry VIII? Meh. But her writing drew me in immediately, and I devoured all three books in the series. Other examples include the novel Doc by Mary Doria Russell, the biography Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, and pretty much anything ever written by John McPhee.

Recently I’ve encountered two nonfiction books that fall into the category of literary seductions.

My latest literary seductions

One is Home Fires by Donald Katz. (Yes, audiobook lovers, that Donald Katz – the one who founded Audible.com. He had a distinguished career as a writer before he got the crazy idea that people would buy audiobooks over the Internet.)

At first glance I thought: 640 pages that chronicle four decades in the life of a Jewish family in America? No thanks; I have a Jewish family of my own. But in fact the book is riveting, and illuminated much about the decades of social and political upheaval everyone my age has lived through.

Another seductive book is The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson. The fact is, I don’t care about the soil (although I like to eat – and breathe). I come from generations of apartment dwellers, and I have never gotten the hang of gardening. But Kristin’s sparkling writing and clear, persuasive case compelled me to care – and made me understand both the promise and the stakes of what she called “our great green hope.” Full disclosure: Kristin is a friend of mine. But I read and loved her first nonfiction book, Stalking the Divine, (another seducer) long before I met her.

Why are we talking about this anyway?

I started thinking about this question of books you end up loving despite yourself because of a minor controversy I’d been hearing about on Facebook and Twitter. Apparently some guy wrote an article about how attractive 42-year-old women are. Many women writers thought the article was hilarious, and not in a good way.

If you held a contest to find a topic I would pay good money NOT to read about, the question of how middle-aged men perceive 42-year-old women would be a sure winner. The only way to make me care about it less would be to fold in something about sports or the stock market.

Yet I read an essay by a writer named Julie Checkoway that was a response to the original article, and her essay was so funny, wise and beautifully written that I’m still thinking about it, days later. Her essay may not qualify as a full-fledged literary seduction, because I still have zero interest in the original article or the kerfuffle it sparked. But I am grateful that the utterly boring controversy led me to discover her as a writer.

Guilty pleasures

Have you been seduced by a book that at first appeared totally unsuitable for you? Do tell.

 

 

News from Book World

/ lynnkanter / 2 Comments
Photo: Mr. T in DC

My idea of heaven.                 Photo: Mr. T in DC

So much has been happening in the process of turning Her Own Vietnam into a real live book! Let me catch you up.

An ARC is born

Tomorrow my book will go to the printer, who will produce Advance Reader Copies or ARCS  – the semi-final version of the book. It looks almost exactly like the finished book – it has cover art, a brief description of the novel and even a couple of blurbs – and the text is laid out as it will be in the final version.

But an ARC is not a final version; it’s an uncorrected proof. It still needs tiny tweaks and corrections. So if a brainstorm hits me with a brilliant new way to end the novel, can I still revise it? Nope. The book is essentially done. Within a few days my publisher will send out the ARC to reviewers who may appreciate the book, or savage it, or – and this is the most likely scenario – ignore it.

Blurbs to the rescue

In a previous post I described the nerve-wracking process of asking well-known writers for blurbs. Well, the writer who had been so kind to me in the past was generous once again, and provided a wonderful blurb. To do so required her to lug my printed manuscript on a family vacation. I am more than grateful, and really hope the karma of her kindness will come back to her in the end.

Another author spills her writing secrets

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my writing process. Now you can get a glimpse into the writing process of another writer, Kristin Ohlson. Her third book, The Soil Will Save Us, is sparking national conversations about a cheap, innovative and practical way to combat climate change – and it’s been under our feet the whole time. Take a look here.

Help me re-name a major character in my novel!

/ lynnkanter / 22 Comments

I started working on Her Own Vietnam more than a decade ago. The main character – the nurse who served in Vietnam – is named Della Brown. I named her sister, another major character, Rosalie Brown.

In a plot twist I could not have invented, my publisher is also named Rosalie. And she doesn’t think a major character should be named after her.

Darn it, she’s right.

Here’s where you come in

Can you help me come up with a new first name for my character? Her last name, of course, will remain Brown.

I will give you some parameters, and you can post your suggestions here. I am on a deadline, so all suggestions need to be posted by midnight (Eastern USA time) on Wednesday, April 23.

If I choose a name you suggested, I’ll thank you on the book’s acknowledgement page.

What you need to know about the character formerly known as Rosalie Brown

  • She was born in 1953 to a middle class white family in upstate New York.
  • Her other family members are older sister Della Brown; mother Ruth Brown; father Thomas (Tommy) Brown; partner Anne Isaacs.
  • The name needs to be three syllables long. (Why? Because otherwise the rhythm will be messed up in every sentence that currently includes Rosalie.)

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Ready? Re-name!

For a novelist, naming a fictional character is personal, like naming a child. It’s possible I will come up with my own new name for her – and it’s certain that my decision will be based on subjective criteria (the name is pretty, it reminds me of my second cousin, it just feels right, etc.).

I will miss Rosalie Brown terribly. But I’m looking forward to seeing the names you suggest before midnight on Wednesday the 23rd of April.

Hope springs eternal.

Hope springs eternal.

On rereading “Mrs. Dalloway”

/ lynnkanter / 3 Comments

 

Can't. Stop. Reading. Photo: David McSpadden

Can’t. Stop. Reading.
Photo: David McSpadden

Every decade or so I reread Mrs. Dalloway, the stunning 1925 novel by Virginia Woolf. Each time I find something new to admire and appreciate.

The novel takes place in London, during a single June day in 1923. World War One is over, but its impact can be felt everywhere. Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class woman in her 50’s, is preparing to throw a party. Peter Walsh, who once loved her and whom she rejected for the more predictable Richard Dalloway, has just returned to London after five years in India. A veteran is going mad in a way that makes perfect sense after the horrors of the war, and his immigrant wife is growing desperate. All of these people, and more, connect and intertwine and pull apart in unexpected ways as Clarissa Dalloway’s past and present collide.

A book for the ages – my ages

I first encountered Mrs. Dalloway when I was in college. I was intoxicated by the novel’s glittering, faceted language, its swirling points of view, its complex sentences and circuitous paragraphs.

I was also struck at 19 or 20 by the fact that this acclaimed novel dealt with something I was just beginning to discover myself: that women of all kinds sometimes fall in love with other women – intense and romantic, even when utterly chaste. The long-married Mrs. Dalloway, looking back on her years, considers the moment at 18 when Sally Seton kissed her as one of the happiest of her life. “Had that not, after all, been love?”

The first time I read the book, Clarissa Dalloway was older than my mother. Today I am older than Clarissa Dalloway, and I understand and appreciate her character in ways that were unavailable to me earlier. The discursive, stream of consciousness inner monologue; the way Clarissa’s thoughts swoop like birds through time, alighting briefly on instants in her youth, then the present day, then back to childhood; the power and presence in her daily life of people long gone – all of these are familiar to me now.

Laughing out loud

For such a serious book, which broke all kinds of narrative conventions and introduced new ways of creating character, the novel is full of wit. I laughed out loud at this caricature of myself and my activist friends, people whose “causes” had “made them callous”:

Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians, but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensible was she…[S]he was never in the room five minutes without making you feel her superiority, your inferiority; how poor she was; how rich you were; how she lived in a slum without a cushion or a bed or a rug or whatever it might be, all her soul rusted with that grievance sticking in it…

 Keeping some secrets

Despite many readings, the book has yet to yield all its secrets. For instance, why is the phrase “very upright” repeated so often and in so many contexts, starting with a description of Mrs. Dalloway herself? What is the purpose of the roses that appear in so many scenes?

Of course, there is a tremendous amount of scholarship on Virginia Woolf’s work, and it’s likely I could find the answers to my questions there. But for now I prefer to mine the novel’s meaning myself, through the slow pleasure of reading and rereading.

After all, it is not the book that changes over the years, but the reader.

 

Are these books your cup of tea?

/ lynnkanter / 5 Comments

For a change of pace, I thought I’d stop talking about my own book and post some mini-reviews of books I’ve read lately. Some I loved. Others were, well, not my cup of tea.

Let’s start with four books I enjoyed.

These books were my cup of tea

My cup of tea! Photo: Girla Obscura

My cup of tea!
Photo: Girla Obscura

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon.
In 1977 William Least Heat-Moon lost his job and his marriage, and decided to pack his truck and drive across America on small country roads – depicted on maps as the “blue highways” that trickle off from the major expressways. In his travels he meets fascinating people, explores dwindling small towns and their human history, and considers what to do with the rest of his life. Although he identifies as Native American like his father, Heat-Moon resembles his white mother, so he frequently hears the unselfconscious racism that white people share with one another. The book is a satisfying meander through territory that is by now twice-vanished: the rural towns whose singularity was already being erased by television and superhighways; and the America of 1977, still reeling from the Vietnam War and the social upheaval of the 1960s.

Margot by Jillian Cantor.
What if Margot Frank, Anne Frank’s older sister, had survived the concentration camps? What if she tried to shed her past by moving to Philadelphia and creating a new identity for herself as a non-Jewish woman named Margie Franklin? This is the premise of Cantor’s compelling and haunting novel, which takes place in 1959 just as the movie version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” sweeps across America.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko.  
This sprawling novel takes place in modern-day Ukraine and in the Ukraine of 60 years ago. The plot hinges on the friendship between two women in today’s Ukraine: a journalist who hosts a popular TV interview program, and a respected artist who is killed in a freak car accident. Their story develops with a parallel story about a woman freedom fighter during WWII, about whom the journalist is trying to make a documentary. The novel is a bit challenging to read – the plot swirls around in time and place (some of it taking place in dreams) – but well worth it for the revelations about life in Ukraine, explorations about how people absorb or fail to absorb seismic political and cultural shifts in one lifetime, and wise observations about human nature and friendship among women.

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss.
A collection of essays about race, written by a white woman. The essays are brilliant, incisive, brave, and unpredictable, drawing surprising connections and provocative conclusions about everyday American life and the hidden and overt dynamics that bind us together and tear us apart.

Not my cup of tea

Not my cup of tea. Photo: Ege Maltepe

Not my cup of tea.
Photo: Ege Maltepe

Here are two books that got lots of buzz and critical praise, but that I found disappointing.

Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner.
A bold but naive young woman, known only by the city of her birth (Reno) moves to New York to be part of the cutting-edge art world in mid-1970s. What Reno loves is speed – as in skiing and riding motorcycles – and men. These two appetites get her involved with the black-sheep son of a rich Italian family that manufactures motorcycles, and ultimately in the radical politics of Italy. Despite the critical acclaim it received and the fact that on the surface this book should appeal to me strongly, I was only lukewarm about it. Reno’s passivity in her relationships with men got tiresome.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwen.
I’ve tried and tried to like Ian McEwen, but to no avail. While I can appreciate the clarity and precision of his prose, it has always seems soulless to me. And when his novels reveal their startling plot twists at the end, you can practically hear the Law & Order “cha-chung” sound in the background. His depiction of the inner lives of women characters is particularly unconvincing, although that actually turned out to be a strength in this book. All that being said, Sweet Tooth does have some things to recommend it. The novel is about a young university graduate who almost accidentally finds herself working for MI5, the British Secret Service, after being groomed for the job by an older professor with whom she had an affair. Her undercover task is to find and encourage with grant money the right sort of young writers whose work will provide cultural and intellectual support for the anti-communist side of the Cold War. Set in the 1970s, the novel does an excellent job of portraying the atmosphere of Britain in decline, beset by terrorism, economic woes, cultural upheaval and self-inflicted political wounds.

So many books…

I just finished reading the novel The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd (my cup of tea!) and started Redeployment by Phil Kay. Among the many, many books on my teetering “to be read” pile is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

How do you handle the perpetual problem of so many books, so little time?