Goldfinch

      Donna Tartt seems to publish a new novel about every eleven years or so.  I was just about to dive into the first (that I know about) The Secret History, when I kept reading about her latest The Goldfinch. I was hooked by the reviews.
     The novel is told as a flashback between bookends of almost the same scene.  I had to go back to the beginning to discover that everything that was going to happen had been revealed.  (Nothing new there--Harper Lee does it on page one of To Kill a Mockingbird.)

     The main character Theo is about eleven when the actual story begins, living with his divorced mom in their New York apartment, setting out for a parent conference after his suspension from school.  On the way, though, nauseous from the cab ride, they hop out ahead of their destination and because of the rain and time they have to kill before the appointment, they go into a museum with a visiting exhibit of European artworks from around the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer. The Anatomy Lesson is there, along with a small painting by Fabritius, The Goldfinch, a small painting of a bird, its leg held by a barely visible wire.

     Along with a number of school groups, Theo also notices with interest a red-haired girl there with an elderly man he assumes is her grandfather.  While the two make eye contact, they never speak, yet he is intrigued by her.  As they get ready to leave, standing near the gift shop, his mother decides to go back for one more look at The Anatomy Lesson, but Theo decides to wait for her, hoping for a closer brush with the girl.  Instead, someone rushes in, there's a huge explosion, and he comes to later to find himself in the middle of the destruction of a bombing, presumably an act of terrorism.  The old man, seriously injured near him, gives him a ring and a package.  Unable to find his mother, Theo picks his way out of the museum to the chaos outside and finally decides to follow their established emergency plan if separated:  he goes home.

     The story from that point takes him to the antique shop where the old man had been co-owner, to Las Vegas for awhile to live with his alcoholic, gambling father and his girlfriend Xandra, where he meets Boris, a Russian immigrant in his class who becomes his closest adolescent companion until he leaves and returns to New York.

    Tartt weaves a long, beautifully told, even painful story as Theo reaches adulthood, taking the old man's place as a partner in the antique shop, but also dabbling with  art fraud and caught up in illegal drug use.  As important to him as his friend Boris, his partner Hobie and the mysterious red-haired Pippa, are the wealthy family of a classmate that took him in for awhile after the loss of his mother.  His life bears the indelible but inescapable mark of the tragedy at the museum, which he sees reflected in Pippa, also a scarred survivor.

     As a lover of museums, I find myself drawn to fiction--even nonfiction--about art and artists.  Reading this novel, I just assumed the work--like The Girl in Hyacinth Blue--was a fictional work of art, so my discovery after finishing the book that it exists, that my friend Carol, another voracious reader, had actually seen the painting at the Frick, means that now I have more research to do, another artist, another painting about which I must know more.  Maybe I'll figure out a way to visit the Frick Museum before the painting heads back to its usual place.
   

Goldfinch

Time to Read; Time to Write

Through this most hectic of holiday periods, I have found myself woefully behind in book posts, for which I apologize. I have, though, found time to read, even when everything else in my life has been frenzied and hectic.  One drawback of a teaching career is that I hit that grading/posting deadline twice a year, not just once.  (Think of April 15 for CPAs or December 25 for Santa and the elf crew).

The first year I taught was particularly stressful, and I had the foolish misfortune of having research papers due right around the end of the first semester.  That year, as many of my students may remember, we still didn't have a tree the Saturday before Christmas and might not have had one at all had not three of the boys from the senior class delivered on  they said they had cut themselves to my driveway. It was beautiful-- at least twelve feet tall, perfect for the out high ceiling in the living room. Recently, in a Facebook conversation with the goodhearted tree givers, most of them pled the fifth or asked if the statute of limitations was up.  Enough said.

This year, though, I've read a wonderful variety of books the last three or four weeks, so I can't wait to share some of them.  I will also be taking down my wall calendar for 2013 so I can transcribe a list of everything I read in the past year.

For now, though, I want to mention one I'm not quite through reading, Ann Patchett's recent collection of essays and other nonfiction pieces, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. I've been a Patchett fan for years, ever since I read Bel Canto. That book captivated me for many reasons. It's one of those books that has stuck with me in ways some books don't.  I remember tiny incidences, specific characters, impressions from the book.  I've had the chance to hear her speak three times--once with Allan Gurganus, one of her professors and a gentleman I have grown to admire for his writing and for his generosity of spirit, one at the NCTE convention in Nashville several years ago (in which she reinforced her support of assigning the classics to high school students), and recently at UNC-Asheville.

Reading through this recent collection, I sometimes feel guilty for presuming to think I know an author simply because I've read her books, for even daring to think I could breach her wall of privacy.  She comes across as both private and approachable, a confusing mix.  Since I always visit Parnassus Books, the store she co-owns, when I'm in Nashville, and because she lives in a city I've loved since my own college years, I am always overwhelmed by the sense of the familiar when I read her essays.

I also feel a particular connection when she touches on topics of interest to me.  Case in point:  She has one essay explaining the controversy that arose when Clemson selected her memoir Truth and Beauty as their freshman read, after which an alum decided the book was vile, as must be its author.  She also publishes the speech she wrote and delivered at Clemson (accompanied by a bodyguard provided by the college.)  My overwhelming takeaway is the need for students--especially college students--to see their educations as something in which they engage, not as something done to them.

When I make reading assignments in my classes, I try to do so with conscientious purpose.  I would never choose something prurient for the sake of shock; however, I sometimes find a book or a story worth reading together, even when I find some ideas or language or situations objectionable.  Teaching English and literature, I've always believed, is about teaching people to think.  I don't know if it's possible to teach anyone HOW to think, but I certainly try to encourage the process of critical thinking. Already, I'm considering ways to interject some of these pieces in my upcoming composition  course, where I hope to engage my students in thinking, talking, and writing about their own learning, their educational goals, the development of their own system of values, perhaps shaped by their families, but adopted intentionally.  I don't think they'll find any of that in Spark Notes.

Time to Read; Time to Write

David and Goliath

While I've read articles and heard plenty of references to Malcolm Gladwell's writing, I hadn't sat down and read anything of his in its entirety. This book, though, caught my attention.  Several book reviews lured me in, and then when I visited Malaprop's bookstore in Asheville, I was invited to log on and help the store win a visit from the author.

As I have said often before (and contradicted by my actual reading), I tend to prefer fiction to nonfiction. Maybe what grabbed me with this book then, besides the subject matter, was Gladwell's use of narrative.  He begins, naturally, with the David and  Goliath story from the Old Testament, pointing out discrepancies between the actual story recorded there and the selective details we tend to remember or misremember.

From that point on, Gladwell points to the many ways in which one's disabilities, misfortunes, and weaknesses can actually become strengths and our apparent strengths can hold us back. He used examples from history--the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Impressionists painters and their exclusion from the  Salon.  He told the stories of ordinary people--or those who became extraordinary despite what others might have perceived as weakness. I was particularly fascinated by his evidence of the number of extremely successful people with dyslexia and the creativity and life success of people who had lost parents during their childhood.

One of the points that kept surfacing was the way individuals can choose to respond.  The story he told of a Mennonite family whose daughter was murdered, but who chose not to react the same way as the father of another murdered child who came to their door.  They chose to forgive and move forward.

He also presented what economists might call "the point of diminishing returns"--the U-shaped curve. He used the principle to discredit the effectiveness of California's "Three Strikes" legislation and the unquestioning push for smaller classrooms.

I liked the way the book made me think; I especially appreciated the way it keeps echoing in my day-to-day life, its principles coming to life.  I may have to do some remedial reading and check out Gladwell's earlier books now.

David and Goliath

The Other Book

It's been awhile since I read Robert Hicks' first novel (as far as I know), Widow of the South, a story set in and around the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) when the McGavock's home became a makeshift hospital and the lady of the house took it upon herself to bury and account for all the dead, rather than to let them be left anonymously where they fell.

Hicks' next novel, A Separate Country, also historical fiction, takes place after the war, but in New Orleans, rather than Middle Tennessee.  While he tells his story from a number of perspectives, they are all connected to the Confederate General John Bell Hood.  According to this story, near death from the "yellow jack" that also took his wife and oldest daughter Lydia just days earlier, he calls Eli Griffin, a young man he met during the war, and asks him to help him set his story straight.  According to the narrative, he's given the draft of his war novel Advance and Retreat (which he did actually write) to Gen. P. T. Beauregard, but now has second thoughts and wants the book destroyed. In its place, he has written an account of his life since.  At the time, Griffin finds the journals of Hood's late wife Anna Marie, letters written to their daughter Lydia.  Between the two stories, Griffin is able to put together what has really passed.

The marriage of Anna Marie Hennen, the socialite daughter of a prosperous New Orleans family, to Hood, bearded, with a useless arm and a missing leg, souvenirs of his war experience.  He fails in every business he attempts, in part because of lack of business acumen, in part because of the yellow fever epidemic that keeps merchandise from reaching the city.  Instead, he loses himself in a movement--perhaps just a drop in the bucket--to help the city's black residents to escape the miasma of the city.

Hicks' characters include three childhood friends of Annamarie, two orphans--a dwarf and a young white-skinned man with just enough blood to be considered black in the post-Civil War South--and a former street tough Michel, who has become the priest Father Mike.  Hood has also been haunted by Sebastian LeMerl, a New Orleans native of French descent who served under Hood and killed ruthlessly during the war.  His one gift, killing, has not deserted him in the years since.  It is he, however, to whom Hood wants his book delivered to see if he has cleared himself of his demons.

The novel not only paints curious, interesting characters, but a portrait of New Orleans--the sounds, the smells, the action.  I could not wait to look into the life of Hood, finding that the historical details are true and his reputation as a military leader who took unnecessary risks remains intact. I couldn't help wondering how many other famous men and women, having published memoirs with much of their lives remaining, would wish to have rewritten or amended their stories.

Note that misspelling of proper names (which I will edit when I look closely at my print copy of the book) are a direct result of my audiobook experience.

The Other Book

Junot Diaz: What is youth good for?

Living in this part of the state, I am presented with so many amazing opportunities to hear great music and brilliant writers.  This week, Junot Diaz, the Domincan-American author and Pulitzer Prize winner, spoke at Lenoir-Rhyne University as part of their top-notch Visiting Writers Series, just celebrating its twenty-fifth year.

As much as I enjoyed his reading a selection from his Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was even more moved by his earlier comments, based on his experience as a teacher.  He asked the question: What is youth good for?  What can be done when you’re young? 

He suggested the answer: Adventure. He also pointed out that no parents told their children, “Move out! Major in whatever the hell you want.”  In fact, he says the 17 to 19-year-olds he encounters have been socialized to think like 68-year-olds. Their baseline is fundamentally FEAR.  He said even at MIT, where he teaches students considered the best and the brightest, those who should be most confident, they exist in waves of fear:  (Need to think every day about how to get a career, to make money.)  Adults, he said, know that there’s no controlling your world. Young people should have horizons, not fear.

He says the only way to become an artist is to begin at that place without fear—a hopeful place.  The artist, he says, imagines despite culture that what he or she is doing is irrelevant (“You’ll go broke.  Nobody cares what you do.”) Artists, he said, must have a “tremendous, almost evangelical hope.”  By contrast, people are geared toward “instrumental” vocations.  He said he wishes schools would put more art near students.  When we read the books we love most, he said, art grants us back to our better selves.  We create a safe harbor for our souls.  To trust what’s most important to anybody else, he says, is a bad idea.

He went on to say that the point of college is to be utterly transformed.  The fearful know nothing about compassion.  He says that his students so rarely have compassion for themselves.  They need to know, despite being told otherwise, that it is okay to fail. “The voyage of discovery is not possible without failing,” he said.  “The only way you discover anything new is by first being lost.”  There can be no life or learning without failure. 

Growing up in military family, he lived in a “culture of respectability.”  He says you “smoke the culture’s crack or you rebel.”  You have to grow and practice those [truth-telling] muscles.  He said, “I had to learn to tell the truth.” 

By the time he read from his work, the audience was his.  As he read a passage from the point of view of a young girl whose mother finds a lump in her breast, we were ready to suspend our disbelief and enter that world. As I left, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about how to help my own students overcome their fear.  Maybe I’ll start by surrounding them with more art—visual, literary, and musical.

Junot Diaz: What is youth good for?

Lookaway, Lookaway

Most Southern family stories are set in small rural towns in the distant, if not the faraway, past.  Wilton Barnhardt's newest novel Lookaway, Lookaway is plopped down right in the middle of Charlotte, North Carolina, over the last decade, and the family Johnston and Jarvis families at the center of the story are far removed from tales of sharecroppers and hardscrabble living.  Instead, he shifts back and forth among the members of a family at the center of Charlotte society but at the end of their fortune.

The book opens as the younger daughter Jerilyn heads to UNC in Chapel Hill, determined against her mother's wishes to pledge a sorority--and not even her mother's staid sorority but the edgy Sigma Kappa Nu, referred to as Skanks, even by the members themselves.  If the first chapter or two reads like an episode out of the movie American Pie or Animal House, readers can expect it to zig and zag quickly.  Jerilyn's parents, Duke and Jerene Jarvis Johnston are living in a home in moneyed Charlotte, where he has a Civil War room holding his collection of guns and collectibles from the period.  He actively organizes and participates in a reenactment of a minor Skirmish just over the state line in South Carolina, and financial pressures move him to collaborate with developers who convince him they plan to preserve the field as a historical landmarks, keeping houses tastefully distant.  The agreement is closed with a gentleman's handshake, but these men are not gentlemen.

Barnhardt introduces every possible current controversy, particularly those hotbed topics in the South, with each new character.  While Jerene manages the family's trust at the Mint Museum of art, her brother Gaston Jarvis churns out a series of highly successful but hardly literary Civil War novels, failing to live up to his early promise, and never actually writing the novel he and his brother-in-law and college friend Bo Johnston dreamed up in Durham, Lookaway, Dixieland.  He spends his days in the bar at the country club to which he gained membership because of his Johnston family connections.

The Johnston's gay son Josh works in a men's clothing and searches the internet for potential  African American liaisons, usually under the watchful eye of his closest friend Dorrie, a black lesbian woman with an attraction to white society women. Meanwhile, his brother Bo pastors a prestigious Presbyterian church, aided by his wife Katie, who's just a bit too rough around the edges for her mother-in-law's tastes.  Rounding off the Johnston's siblings is the older daughter Annie, working through her third unsuccessful marriage as she builds a high profile real estate business in Charlotte.

The plot winds through the banking turmoil festering in Charlotte, the mortgage and housing decline, all with a balance between dark humor and tongue-in-cheek wit.  Barnhardt and his cast of characters manage to address race, gender, society, religious, financial scandal, literary rise and fall, university life, and politics.  At the heart, though, it is a family story.  With the huge ensemble cast, readers may find themselves reaching the final pages before deciding this is Jerene Jarvis Johnston's story most of all, particularly since she gets the literary last word.

Lookaway, Lookaway

On Book Clubs, Literary Fiction, and Independent Bookstores

I have a number of book review to post, but I thought I might take a moment to add a few miscellaneous book notes.  First, while I was in Southern Pines last weekend on a retreat with my writing group, we went to the sixtieth anniversary celebration of The Country Bookshop downtown.  Entering an independent bookstore poses dangers for me.  I see so many books I already know I want to read, and then I discover new ones.  I did walk away with a signed copy of Allan Gurganus' new novel Local Souls.  I enjoy his work and I love to hear him speak too.  At the checkout, though, the gentleman working recommended another book, and I was sold.

I also had the honor or presenting a program for the "No Name Book Club" in Hickory Tuesday.  The members of the group each get to choose one book for the club to read, and Helen selected by poetry chapbook Let the Lady Speak.  I was especially pleased to get to talk poetry with readers who generally choose fiction--or at least prose.--because I have a pending poetry project with book clubbers in mind. I have always been amused to hear which poems of mine appeal to different readers.  Since I could at least assume most of them had read the chapbook, I hated just to read the poems to them, so I first shared a couple of other poems by poets I admire that I thought would also appeal to them.  I also talked about hos many of my poems were "born."  They asked me to read some particular poems they'd enjoyed. I also loved to hear what others are reading, so naturally, I left with a few additions to my "to read" list.

Finally, I wanted to comment on a recent article I read in the Charlotte Observer about some research on the "Theory of Mind" that indicates the positive cognitive effects of reading literary fiction.  The study confirms my gut feelings.  They found that "reading literary fiction helps improve real-life skills like empahy and understanding the beliefs and intentions of others" (Belluck).  Those who read literary fiction scored better on tests than readers of popular fiction and of nonfiction. With so much emphasis on teaching "informational texts" (see Common Core), many schools are making the mistake of replacing literature with these other nonfiction prose texts (analogous to the "education lottery" money that didn't add to education coffers but freed up what had gone to schools for something else, leaving school budgets no better at all.  Oops.  I've climbed up on a soap box again.)

I'll be signing on again in a day or so to share my review of Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt--and maybe a few other recent reads. Stay tuned.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

On Book Clubs, Literary Fiction, and Independent Bookstores