Week 17: The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake (2010: Amy Einhorn/Putnam, 326 pages)

Probably the question I’m asked most about this blog is: “How do you choose the books?” I wish I could say there was a magic formula, but the answer is just how you might expect: I read some reviews, I think about what’s going on in the world, I look at my past reading list, and sometimes it’s even more prosaic than that. Sometimes it’s just, “oh, I read this book and you should read it, Courtney – you’d like it.”

Then there’s this week’s pick, which came to my attention simply by a friend telling me they’d gone to college with the author, Sarah Blake. And that it was “supposed to be good.” So I picked it up in the bookstore, looked at it closely and ignored all the warning signs. The effusive, near orgasmic pull-quotes from other authors (“This is a superb book!” gushes Andre Dubus III; “Beautiful, thought-provoking!” exclaims Kathryn Stockett). The ominous copy on the inside dustcover: “Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight …” And, probably the worst offense, the cover art: a photograph of dried lavender rose laid on top of an old letter; clear pandering to those middle-aged women like myself, trawling the bookstores in search of good “literary fiction.” (Yes, you can judge a book by its cover.) I steeled myself, and thought about what my friend Ann said one time, speaking of The Help – a similar book with social issue buttons and tear-jerky moments: “I have to remind myself that just because everybody likes a book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book.”

I have since forgotten which friend recommended The Postmistress, which is a good thing since I spent a lot of time wanting to throw it across the room. Here’s the premise: it’s 1940. “Leggy blond” Frankie Bard is an American war correspondent who smokes her Lucky Strikes with defiance. She is determined to get to the bottom on the gathering storm in Europe. She’s heard some rumors involving refugees, Jews, trains being full, exit visas being denied. She contrives a way to get to London, where her boss, Edward Murrow (groan) directs her to get to Berlin then Lisbon, and interview these so-called refugees herself. She takes an old-fashioned version of a dictaphone (which doesn’t really exist in 1940, by the author’s own admission, but never mind) and gets these people on tape: name, where they’re from, where they’re trying to get to. You see, Frankie needs to do this because people in America are not paying attention. Not paying attention! Attention must be paid! Get that, reader? If you didn’t the first hundred times the phrase is used, maybe you will the next hundred times.

Meanwhile, in a sleepy little Cape Cod town called Franklin, the middle-aged spinster of a postmaster Iris James is sorting the mail. (For most of the novel, she is referred to as a postmaster -  I’m sure Ms. Blake has a reason to suddenly switch gears and call her the postmistress in the last quarter of the book but I have no idea why.) Order, reason, clarity are her mottoes. Everything in its place. The war belongs over there, we are over here. The doctor’s wife, Emma Fitch wanders in. She is the third of the triumvirate of women around which this novel is centered – again, I have no idea why, as she is a boring, opaque character who whines about being left by her do-gooder husband when he feels the need to contribute to the war effort by going to London to provide medical assistance. (Oddly, the doctor meets Frankie Bard in a bomb shelter. What a strange coincidence.) She hasn’t heard from him in many weeks. Where are his letters? Does Iris James know? (Hmmm … in the beginning pages, an older Frankie Bard had been reminiscing about her war years, and poses a question at a modern dinner party: “What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?” “Don’t tell me any more,” a woman had cried in delight, shining and laughing between the candles. “I’m hooked already!” Gee, you people need to get out a little more.)

Back to 1940s Europe. Frankie boards the trains, and duly gets her radio report. But she doesn’t have the story, all she has are these disembodied voices, these refugees, the middle of the story but not the beginning or the end. She knows Murrow wouldn’t like this, nor Paley (groan again). But despite the fact that Frankie being a leggy radio gal who takes no guff from any of the old boys, she is changed by her experience. She limps back to America, and finds her way to the sleepy Cape Cod town, where she bears a secret that must be told. In the feature film, Nicole Kidman will hopefully agree to take the role of Frankie, but some say that it will be Nicole Ritchie’s real breakout role in film.

You see, cynicism begets cynicism. The problem with The Postmistress, among many things, is that it is so obviously written with “movie” in mind that I couldn’t possibly take any of it seriously. It is my personal pet peeve when fiction plays around with real people and what’s more, nurtures historical inaccuracies (e.g., the war posters papering London of “Keep Calm And Carry On” – a simple Google search will tell you this now-ubiquitous slogan was never used publicly). And – the dictaphone? And – the windows in the Underground station? Windows … in a subway station?

Let’s just overlook all those minor discrepancies. What is intensely irritating about this novel are the stock characters, the trite theme, and the schoolmarmish tsk-tsk tone. At its best, The Postmistress is an ABC-TV Movie of the Week, dressed as literary fiction. At its worst, it is a Harlequin romance. You don’t think so? Take a peek:

Her back was flat up against the rough brick of the pub wall and she opened her eyes to watch him kiss her again, and when he did, she kissed him, hard. Over the ridge of his shoulder, people passed in the dark, passed in the street, and as he lifted her up and she sunk down on him, she moaned out loud … but it was dark and it was deep and we returned to the cave and the fire and the glint of life in each other’s eyes, never mind the sigh escaping, the unmistakable oh oh oh — it was all right, we were only human.

Ugh.

The Postmistress is going to be wildly popular, no matter what I write, so I don’t feel badly if I steer my few loyal readers away from it. And, while I hate to admit it, the train journey section is fairly gripping, but it is unfortunately offset by sections like the above and the silly, silly goings-on in the tiny Cape Cod town.

Read at your peril.

Week 16: The Water Giver, by Joan Ryan (2009: Simon & Schuster, 260 pages)

As regular readers of this blog well know, I’ve spent some time up at UCSF recently when my three-year-old had a teeny-tiny outpatient procedure: a tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy. The surgery went fine, the recovery was at times very trying, and the sleep deprivation we parents experienced was like Abu Ghraib. But it’s almost three weeks later now, and the experience is becoming a hazy memory, as our daughter returns to school and no longer snores like a truck driver who’d been boozing it up all night.

Nevertheless, as any parent will tell you, almost any surgical procedure your kid has never feels teeny-tiny at the time. However, after reading the memoir The Water Giver — about a mother’s experience when her teenager suffers a devastating brain injury — I feel like the luckiest mom on earth. Written by Bay Area sports journalist Joan Ryan, the book details not only the three months her teenage son spent in the hospital after a skateboard accident, but more to the point, the affect it had on her as a mother. And while the science/medical/hospital part is interesting, it is the ruminations on motherhood that grabbed me a bit more. Yes, yes, as if we need another book about motherhood … but this one is seen through the lens of a devastating incident, and it got me thinking a lot about seeing and judging others, particularly mothers.

Why does one read about a book about a horrible accident? And the subsequent decisons? If you’re like me, you read about it because you’re slightly neurotic, and feel deep down that if you study these things — disasters, acts of violence, craven behavior, things out of your control — then you’ll know what to do if it happens to you. Of course, this is ludicrous.  But this memoir invites judgement and analysis, and moreover, it’s detailed, fast-moving, clearly narrated and at times, a real page-turner.

Sixteen-year-old Ryan Tompkins was a pretty normal kid: friendly, active, social, and also highly unpredictable. Diagnosed with ADHD at a young age, the parents of this only child were often at their wits’ end trying to control his erratic behavior and school performance. Often cheerful and affectionate, he could fly into a rage and throw a coffee mug against a wall, or push a school desk over, or tear up homework, only to feel guilty and embarrassed afterwards. The next day, “he would be the greatest kid in the world.”

Coming from a strict Irish-American working class background, the journalist Joan flip-flopped between reading and researching everything she could on the topic of ADHD, and coming down hard on Ryan with punishments and recriminations. Her experience of motherhood was wracked with guilt: for not looking like one of the Stepford Wife Marin moms, for not being organized enough to bake cookies for school events, for erupting into anger and judgment when Ryan misbehaved. Summed up, Joan’s motherhood was “still more about me. I was still raising the child I expected, not the child I had.”

When helmet-less Ryan falls off his homemade skateboard and suffers a critical head injury, Joan reacts with curious aplomb. In the hours after the accident, she keeps waiting to take him home from Marin General (despite her the fact that her son is in the ICU), and she is calm in the face of medical chaos, almost “glowing.” She and her husband maintain a vigil at the hospital while her son goes through several operations, but it takes weeks until she can finally grasp that Ryan may not fully recover from this seemingly innocuous fall. Put into a deep coma to prevent further injury from his swelling brain, there is a question if Ryan will ever wake up, or walk, or talk, or think. Friends and family are silently appalled: “I talked as if Ryan were in for a tonsillectomy,” she writes, and later her friends tell her what is obvious – that Joan was in serious denial about her son’s accident and outcome. To Joan the answer is a little more complicated: everything else in life (bill-paying, answering emails, etc.) was put on hold, and “perhaps for the first time ever I as giving myself over to being wholly and completely Ryan’s mother.”

Is it sad that a horrendous accident had to occur to turn her into a kind, loving, and very patient mother? Perhaps, but there for the grace of God go I, is what I say. Like most people my age, I’ve been witness in recent years to some accidents and disasters and crises — friends with cancer, couples who’ve divorced, an acquaintance paralyzed from a bike accident, a family dealing with a serious head injury. If there is one adage that consistently emerges, it is that you just never know how you will react until it happens to you. So, when I read The Water Giver and I start feeling, why on earth did they stay at a community hospital and not move him to UCSF, I have to remember that I have no idea what I would actually do.

The Water Giver ends on a very upbeat, and slightly false-sounding note: Ryan comes home, he is grateful for being alive, and he is for the most part back to his old self, with his ADHD just intensely magnified. Except: he’s not. He’s on dozens of drugs, he has terrible, inconsistent rages, and at least from this reader’s point of view, it seems inconceivable that he would ever go off to college on his own or be trusted to remember where his house or car keys are. Joan, meanwhile, says the accident has given her redemption, by allowing herself to let go of control, to be accepting and realize what she can and cannot fix. “Is it selfish to be thankful for something so horrible?”

To which I counter: Who am I to judge?

Week 15: The Blue Horse, by Rick Bass (2009: Narrative Library, 50 pages)

I know what you’re thinking. I know this looks like a tremendous cop-out. Does a novella qualify as a book, you might well ask? Or: when is a novella a short novel, and not a long short story? I admit that last week, when I was foraging for a book that I could actually finish during this rather trying time, the length of this slim volume is what attracted me. My friend Carol, who is a wonderful writer in her own right, suggested it and I leapt at the chance. I should have known Carol would not steer me to a book simply because of length — in calmer times Carol has also offered up the The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt — so I knew number of pages is not a real consideration for her when selecting a book.

Luckily for me, The Blue Horse is a profound, and very poignant read. (By the way, you can only get this on Amazon, as it is published by Narrative Library,  part of Narrative Magazine.) Rick Bass is one of those writers that I think I have read before, but when I look at his (prolific) work, I don’t think I have. (I may be mixing him up with Rick Moody.) He writes many essays having to do with Montana, wildlife and environmentalism, and I have probably discounted him in the past because I have no interest in fishing nor hunting, subjects which haunt his short stories, novellas and novels (so I am told).

But The Blue Horse is a book about loss, so hunting seems a good hook upon which to hang his narrative. The story is about two old friends, Robert and Jack, who take an annual pheasant hunting excursion, this year to the wilds of Montana in mid-October. Robert, a former painter, has been married for nearly two decades, and for vague reasons he and his wife Jennifer seem to be nearing the end of their union. Jack, on the other hand, is newly married, and in the throes of newlywed bliss, “still wandering about in such a state of wonder and disbelief at his good fortune that almost anyone could see it radiating from him.” With these polar-opposite emotions heavy in each man’s heart,  they set upon the countryside with their dogs for a two-day forage for pheasants.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m no hunter, but after reading descriptions of the central Montana landscape, I can start to see the allure. Does this not sound like a fairyland? “The leaves on the chokecherry bushes were blood crimson, and the giant cottonwoods along the river burned a deep and luminous yellow. Snowberries hung like pearls at the ends of their bushes’ branches, and the twisted trunks of the younger cottonwoods were as black as licorice, black as the exposed river bottom soil in the community garden, just turned fallow, outside the schoolyard.”

Robert and Jack have chosen an expanse of land this year that belongs to a religious sect (“Jack had been unclear as to the nature of the co-op’s zeal — were they Mennonite? Amish? Mormon? Hutterite?”), and the story of their interactions with the leader of the sect, one Henry Bone (with “pale blue eyes,” of course — don’t they all have pale blue eyes?) and his over-eager wife Claire and their hundreds of children are eerie, and wonderfully mysterious. Bass is a master storyteller of the show-don’t-tell variety, and to read his work is to feel comfortably in awe of a writer who knows exactly what he is doing. The sect’s main focus, at least from the outsider’s point-of-view, is “the industry of labor — farming, gardening … animal husbandry — and, strange as it seemed to Jack, interested too — vitally, almost fiercely — in the industry of money.” The price to hunt on their land, however, “seemed about fifty years out of date.” They could have charged ten times that amount, and “it was as if, in dropping out of the world, they had lost the ability to measure the value of the thing.”

Claire, the wife, is intent on showing the two outsiders all the food they have stockpiled, from huge animal carcasses that they smoke and store to all the jam and jellies and fruits and vegetables that they canned, stored in huge cellar like vaults. Is it for the end of the world? For a nuclear bomb attack? For a government incursion that cuts them off entirely? It’s not clear, and Robert and Jack’s discomfiture mirrors the reader’s. She is a strange, oddly amusing character, and her entrance in the story underlines the sense of unreality amidst this very real, hardscrabble land, where men are men and women are … mysteries.

Have you ever experienced a time when you are out of your place, out of your comfort zone, and it is all clicking and it is all wonderful, almost other-worldly? Perhaps it is when you are running on the trails in the first days of spring, or cycling up a huge mountain listening to your heart and your breathing, or hiking somewhere in a foreign country, or simply gazing at a landscape, the journey to which was hard and relentless? This is the world that Bass inhabits:

“In Robert and Jack’s lives there was no other tradition as deeply etched as hunting, nor one in which all the sense were felt as sharply.

Each of the men had hunted long enough that it no longer mattered to them as much as it once had whether or not they shot well, or whether or not they found birds. What they loved most was watching their dogs work, and, increasingly, the men loved the landscape they hunted, especially in autumn. They loved not just the shape and beautiful colors and cool temperatures and dense odors of autumn, the geese honking close overhead and the north winds blowing, but also, perhaps most of all, the incredible loneliness that seemed to loom over everything in October, and especially over the high prairie.”

I won’t spoil the mystery of what the title refers to, but it loops back to the sad, beautiful loneliness that Bass so expertly describes.

I’m dedicating this week’s post to Sarah Verdone: 1964 – 2010. Rest in peace, finally.

Week 14: Hiccup

It just about kills me to write this post, but it seems the title of this blog may have to be “51 Views” after this week. Yes, I failed. In fact, I was going to title this week “Week 14: Abject Failure,” but my husband gently suggested “Hiccup.”

Yes, life has intervened this week, and not only did I not finish a book, I barely started one. The novel is “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” by Keith Gessen. (And no, I did not choose it because it matched my mood.) Regarding this goal of reading fifty-two books in a year: I’m thinking I’ll double up some week when I have oodles of time and am just bursting with creative energy, maybe in the run-up to Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Not that you asked, but what could possibly have deterred me from my goal? Actually, a pretty good reason: my three-year-old had a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy (coyly referred to as “a T&A procedure” by those in the know), with ear tubes, this week. Here she is in the recovery room, wearily watching Dora, having no idea what’s in store for her once the anesthesia wears off.

The surgery was OK — if you feel that having your toddler under general anesthesia for almost two hours is OK — but the recovery has been slightly brutal. Maybe if we were a little younger we could withstand the sleep deprivation better, but my husband and I have never been great in that department. Our daughter, meanwhile, probably feels that she was sold this surgery on false premises (tons of ice cream! Delicious popsicles! Unlimited TV watching!) when in truth she’s in so much pain she’s not interested in popsicles or ice cream — only TV, and then only when Mommy is sitting right next to her doing absolutely nothing else. No computer, no books, and certainly not even looking at the two other children to see how they’re faring during this crappy time.

Meanwhile, I received a cheerful email reminding me that the deadline for the catalogue of our preschool’s spring auction is this week. Oh, yes … I guess I did volunteer to help write the catalogue describing over two hundred items. Ladies Beer Hike anyone? How about a Sterling Silver Lariat Necklace Garnished with Pearls and Peridot? Better start jogging that part of my brain that turns out the pithy turn-of-phrase. Note to self: next time, do not agree to hearty spring volunteer jobs in early November.

Still, I have this goal: 52 books in 52 weeks. I’m going to do it – I am nothing if not dogged. (Please send all recommendations of poetry collections my way.) See you next week, if we make it!