Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for the curious novel, Olive Kitteridge.  Oprah selected it for her book club.  Several friends recommended it, and I stated to read it, but I found the title character a miserable, thoroughly unpleasant individual.  The “Rule of Fifty” quickly took over, and I had almost forgotten it, when a miniseries of the novel appeared.  Olive was played by Frances McDormand, an actor I greatly admire.  I decided to watch the 4-part miniseries, and I am glad I did.  Normally a film follows a reading, but in this case the film drew me back to the novel for a second go.

Olive is married to Henry, a pharmacist in a small town in Maine, and they have one child, Christopher.  Olive is a demanding wife and mother, and she never misses an opportunity to skewer Henry, or her son, her students, or anyone else not up to her standards.  Olive does not suffer fools lightly.  Henry obviously loves Olive, and he most often silently submits to Olive’s barbs.  Occasionally, he will come back at Olive, but then ends up submitting.  Strout writes, “Olive had refused to go to church the day before, and Henry, uncharacteristically, had spoken to her sharply.  ‘Is it too much to ask,’ he found himself saying, as he stood in the kitchen in his undershorts, ironing his trousers.  ‘A man’s wife accompanying him to church?’  Going without her seemed a public exposure of familial failure. // ‘Yes, it most certainly is too […] much to ask!’  Olive had spit, her fury’s death flung open.  ‘You have no idea how tired I am, teaching all day, going to foolish meetings where the […] principal is a moron!  Shopping.  Cooling.  Ironing.  Laundry.  Doing Christopher’s homework with him!  And you –‘  She grabbed on to the back dining room chair, and her dark hair, still uncombed from its night’s disarrangement, had fallen across her eyes.  ‘You, Mr. Head Deacon Claptrap Nice Guy, expect me to give up my Sunday mornings and go sit among a bunch of snot-wots!’  Very suddenly she had sat down in the chair.  ‘Well, I’m sick and tired of it,’ she said, calmly.  ‘Sick to death’.”  // A darkness had rumbled through him; his soul was suffocating in tar.  The next morning.  Olive spoke to him conversationally.  “Jim’s car smelled like upchuck last week.  Hope he’s cleaned it out.’  Jim O’Casey taught with Olive, and for years took both Christopher and Olive to school” (9).  Now, I can’t help hearing Frances McDormand as Olive. 

Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins

Olive has numerous struggles in her life, not the least of which involve Henry and Christopher.  She also has a secret life, which has a tragic ending devastating to Olive. Unlike the novel, which begins innocuously with Henry opening the pharmacy one morning, the film begins with a scene of Olive contemplating suicide.  This subject comes up several times in the novel with various results following Olive’s chance encounters with other characters outside her family.  Spoiler alert, she does not follow through with her plan. 

I am sorry I did not get back to Elizabeth Strout’s funny/sad, poignant/obnoxious novel, Olive Kitteridge.  A good example of why keeping those novels I abandon early on safely on the shelf patiently awaiting a second chance.  Still, Olive did make me a bit squirmish, so I give it 4 stars

--Chiron, 6/25/15

 

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

771 pages: a large book by any standard.  Unfortunately, because of teaching and other duties, I rarely have time to spend a couple of weeks on a behemoth of a novel.  But several friends were so insistent I read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I decided during a break in grading to clear all other priorities and tackle this novel.  I started on a Thursday and finished on Sunday. 

This might sound silly, but I actually enjoyed holding the book and feeling the silky smooth paper.  Then I got to the novel, and I was completely blown away.  This is my first experience with Donna Tartt, but I can guarantee it will not be my last.

Donna Tartt was born and raised in Mississippi, but she left the south for Bennington College in Vermont in 1982.  She was raised in a family of voracious readers.  She told one interviewer her mother read novels while driving.  While at Bennington, she began writing her first novel, The Secret History, which became a bestseller.  Her second novel, The Little Friend, won the prestigious W.H. Smith Award in 2002.  Tartt is a slow writer – each of novels take about 10 years from conception to publication.  The Goldfinch is her third novel.  The detail in this compelling novel attests to the level of work that took ten years She writes by hand on paper and note cards.

Theo Dexter lives in Manhattan with his, mother Audrey, a part-time model, actress, and artist.  Theo’s father, an alcoholic with a gambling addiction abandoned the family about a year before the story begins.  One day, Theo and his mother decide to stop into a museum to view some notable old masters on display.  Theo spots an attractive young girl with red hair accompanied by an elderly man.  He loses interest in the exhibit and begins to follow the young girl, when he is knocked to the ground by an explosion.  Unhurt, Theo begins moving toward the exit now blocked.  He encounters an elderly man, who has been mortally injured.  He gives Theo a ring and asks him to take it to a certain address.  The dying man also tells Theo to take a small painting which has fallen off the wall.  This is The Goldfinch of the title.  He does not see the young girl.  He takes the ring to the address, and meets the elderly man’s business partner, Hobie.  Together they ran an antique store.  He learns that Pippa, the red headed girl, is recovering from her injuries at the home of Hobie and the elderly man, Mr. Blackwell.  Meanwhile, Theo wraps the painting securely and hides it in his room.  All this action occurs in about the first 50 pages. 

However, I had absolutely no desire to abandon Theo, Pippa, and Hobie.  Every page of this novel contains interesting characters, situations, descriptions, interior monologues of the highest order.  I could not stop reading.  The list of characters far exceeds the few I have mentioned here.

Janet Burroway, in her creative writing textbook, Writing Fiction, says, “every story must have a complication, crises , and resolution.”  Tartt has filled this novel with a series of complications, which create one crisis after another for Theo, which he manages to resolve, through pluck, intelligence, and hard work.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch moves to the top of my list for the year, and perhaps the decade.  I have rarely encountered a novel of such grace, beauty, heartbreak, sadness, joy, and with thrills, mysteries, and even some chilling moments sprinkled on almost every page.  This novel has it all, and I could not urge my listeners more strongly to read this book as soon as possible.  You will get to know Theo; you will become a part of his family; you will be forever affected by Tartt’s power as a storyteller.  I have to raise my scale to 10 stars for this extraordinary novel, which I have just learned, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

--Chiron, 4/13/14

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

If someone set out to write a book that would frustrate all believers in the “Rule of 50,” this book would win the prize. A friend recommended this book, and she has a good track record with me, so I decided to read it. I struggled past the first fifty pages with characters I did not like, and a story line I had difficulty following because of all the bungie jumps through time. Only occasionally did a clue appear hinting at a time shift.

Another annoying habit of Egan’s involved her suddenly telling the reader what would happen to a character in the next 20 or 30 years. She often dropped these as an afterthought at the end of a chapter.

Egan wrote one chapter entirely in second person. A cheap trick and a tired gimmick, if you ask me. Chapter 12 took the form of a power point with flow charts and pie graphs. Like the form in its usual incarnations in business meetings, this chapter had “No power and no point.” I could not even begin to tell you what ideas this chapter tried to convey. All I got out of it was a well-scratched head.

The characters who populate this story had not one ounce of charisma – except for a few women characters drooled over by some of the men. Second-hand charisma is phony.

A Pulitzer Prize? Give me a break. A Visit from the Goon Squad doesn’t even come close to any book awarded the Booker Prize.

This novel is gimmicky and not worth the read. 1 star

--Chiron, 7/4/11

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Usually, for some unknown reason, I do not follow the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but a good friend recommended Tinkers, so I thought I would give it a go. This peculiar novel recounts the last couple hundred hours in the life of George Washington Crosby as he lay dying. During this time, he reminisces, hallucinates, and briefly becomes lucid as to his surroundings.

Most of the prose has a smooth, dreamlike quality, but I was puzzled by frequent shifts in viewpoint from George, to his father Howard, and to George’s grandfather. Harding tells some of these flashbacks and memories in first person and some in third person. This seemed confusing at times.

George’s hobby concerned clocks – collecting and repairing them. He made lots of money which he squirreled all over the place. Many of the images of people getting sick and dying resembled the winding down of a clocks works. George and Howard both had missing fathers.

The psychological aspects of this novel, however, really stand out. The hallucinations, the memories floating in and out, all punctuated with those moments of lucidity when George had to recollect where he was, who all the people around his bed were, and why he couldn’t wind his clocks.

A decent novel, a worthy addition to the Pulitzer Prize canon, but the confusing bits bothered me. 4 stars

--Chiron, 12/31/10

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra is arguably, as Stacy Schiff stated in a recent interview, the most famous woman we know so little about. I would add the most famous woman about whom so many myths and misperceptions swirl about her. Schiff has set down a detailed biography drawn from contemporary sources, including Plutarch, Dio, and Josephus. She carefully points out inconsistencies in these accounts, and deftly explains the political and social reasons her history appears as it does today.

Schiff disposes of several myths. She was not Egyptian, or even African – she was Greek through and through. She was not beautiful. Some Romans chided Julius Caesar for his liaison with her, because, “she’s not even beautiful. Lastly, she did not take her life by the bite of an asp. Alexandria held a reputation as a center for the finest poisons in the known world. Their potions acted quickly, irreversibly, and with no pain.

The Romans – great admirers and imitators of the Greeks – seem to have taken a cue from Euripides, who wrote, “Clever woman were dangerous” (qtd. in Schiff 4). She had an impressive education – the finest anyone could receive at the time. She spoke nine languages, and routinely negotiated difficult agreements and treaties with foreign kings without the aid of an interpreter. Even her contemporary critics “gave her high marks for her verbal dexterity. Her ‘sparkling eyes’ are never mentioned without equal tribute to her eloquence and charisma” (33).

The Romans treated their women as little more than personal objects to be bought, sold, traded, or discarded on the slightest whim. Cleopatra’s world, however, provided an environment in which women thrived socially, politically, financially, and educationally. According to Schiff, “as much as one-third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands” (24). After her death, “a golden age of women dawned in Rome” (295). Suddenly, they enjoyed unprecedented freedom and political power.

The Romans respected Cleopatra, after all her fields and stores of grain fed the Roman Empire. But they also feared her wealth and her position as a queen with unparalleled support of her people. During her 22 year reign, not a single revolt or attempt on her life ever occurred. Rough estimates of her personal fortune place her among the wealthiest people of all time – over $100 billion dollars in today’s money. Kings would routinely give her a gift of thousands of silver talents, when 220 of the coins could feed and equip a Roman Legion for a year. Favored Court officials might be paid a single talent a year and believe themselves well-compensated. Yet her generosity with her people and her guests was legendary at the time.

Near the end. Schiff writes, “In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same ‘wily and suspicious’ marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed.” (299)

The only problem I had with the text came in the lack of connection to quotes and over 40 pages of notes. She opts for endnotes marked only by the page they reference. However, the notes have a detail, and at times a touch of humor, absent in such a vast undertaking. Schiff tells the true story of one of the great love stories of all times. She cites dozens of versions of her story, including Shakespeare’s, perhaps his greatest love story. Even if a reader’s grasp of Roman and Ptolemaic history resides in a dim college classroom, this biography will enthrall and amaze. The slight inconvenience in searching out and reading notes is well more than worth the effort to shine a brilliant light on those memories. 5 stars.

--Chiron, 12/12/10

March by Geraldine Brooks

Near the end of the first chapter, I nearly flung this book against the wall in disgust. How could an Australian immigrant tell such a fetid, disgusting story about the most horrible episode in American history -- slavery. More importantly, how could such a tale of happy, well-cared for slaves win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction? My own disbelief in the answers to these two questions is the only thing that kept me reading.

When I finished, my disgust was even greater -- for an entirely different reason. I continue to marvel at the brutality, the horror, the inhumanity of one human being against another, simply because of skin color. After Cold Mountain, after Mudbound, after The Life of Frederick Douglas, after slave narratives I have read, I simply cannot get my mind around the capacity of sentient human beings for torture, murder, rape, and mutilation.

What started out as a pleasant little tale about Mr. March, who built his fortune as an itinerant peddler in Virginia in the 1840s, quickly descended into the maelstrom of slavery in the antebellum, and Civil War-ravaged, South.

I can’t help reflecting on the death last week of Jesse Helms. Some allegedly good people of North Carolina voted this man into Congress and Senate election after election, despite his openly bigoted and racist views. Then I remember Strom Thurmond, David Duke, and others too numerous to list. Unfortunately, no one, who shares the views of these despicable individuals, is likely to read this novel, or if they did, would they be moved by it in the slightest. I can hear them now, “Propaganda!” “Nonsense!” and “Bull shit!” Even more ominously, “Who cares?” and “Get over it.”

I hope we never forget.

The first two-thirds of the story is a first person account told by Mr. March (of Little Women fame), who leaves his family to join soldiers, as a chaplain, and heads south as the Civil War begins. March recalls his adventures as a young man in Virginia. These memories startlingly return to him following a battle in the early days of the war. Confederate troops rout some Union soldiers, who cross a river and come to Oak Landing, a plantation March once visited on his travels. Although the place is physically changed, Grace, one of the slaves he knew then, is still there, caring for Mr. Clement, the owner of the plantation and Grace.

Loosely based on the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Brooks also drew on real life experiences of Alcott’s abolitionist father, Bronson, recounted in his letters and journals. In an afterword, Brooks explains the shift in time from the journals to the novel. LMA sets her story in the early days of the war, but Brooks advances her novel about a year.

March struggles with ideals and principles, while desperately trying to do some good in the chaos of the retreat near Oak Landing. Sometimes his principles work; sometimes they don’t, but his mixed results are overshadowed time and again by tragedy.

It is hard to believe the horror that must have been the Civil War, but Brooks does a masterful job of telling this story in a 19th century voice complete with semi-colons. March compares favorably with the tone provided by Ken Burns’ quoting of letters and diaries in his marvelous documentary on the Civil War. In one typical passage, Brooks writes,

“I found her in the pleasance, pacing the muddy brookside, ruining what I knew to be her last pair of decent boots. I saw to my dismay that the storm had not yet broken. I had learned the meteorology of Marmee’s temper: the plunging air pressure as a black cloud gathered, blotting out the radiance of her true nature; the noisy thunder of her rage; and finally relief of a wild and heavy rain – tears, in copious cataracts, followed by a slew of resolutions to reform. But the dark cast of her expression told me we were still within the thunderhead, and as I approached she confirmed this by raising her voice to me” (130).

Nineteenth century novels are always a favorite of mine, so I was at home in these pages. Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and, a runaway slave, who I suspect may have been Harriet Tubman, all make cameo appearances.

Not as intense as Mudbound by Hillary Jordan, but a great story, I read it in about two afternoons. As the story sped to the end, I could not put it down. This story needs to be remembered, and everyone should read it. Five stars.

--Chiron, 7/19/08