Week 20: Just Kids, by Patti Smith (2010: Ecco/HarperCollins, 283 pages)

“You do know you’re a week behind, yes?” my husband gently prodded earlier this week.

What is this season called spring? The time of rebirth and renewal has somehow morphed into a time when everything is nonstop, back-to-back, busybusybusy; schedules are packed, chock-a-block, and every waking hour is accounted for. Everyone I know seems to be having this experience. April is the new September, May the new December. More than once a week, I mutter to myself, “I want to move to a desert island.”

Excuses, excuses.

So it is with some relief that I read this week’s book, “Just Kids,” a memoir by musician/poet Patti Smith about her relationship with the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It recalls an era when time was slowed by the absence of technology; it paints a portrait of ‘70s New York City where the Chelsea Hotel, CBGB and Max’s Kansas City reigned supreme, when artists, musicians, writers, celebrities and social x-rays rubbed their bony elbows together in their race to the top. Or to the bottom, as Patti would say, since many of these luminaries (Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Tinkerbelle, Edie Sedgwick, the Warhol Factory crowd) would not make it: “Taken down, the stardom they so desired just out of reach, tarnished stars falling from the sky.”

That Patti Smith made it as artist, poet, musician and writer is no surprise after reading this memoir. She is, as the ad goes, the real thing. Coming from New Jersey to New York City in 1968, she knew absolutely nothing about the dangers of the metropolis or the burgeoning crazy time filled with drugs and rock ‘n roll: she simply went to be an artist. Harboring a love of the romantic poet Arthur Rimbaud, she goes to the big city to “be free,” and find work outside of a factory. Sleeping in the park, in doorways, on friends’ couches, on strangers’ floors, she had a beguiling innocence which floods these pages. She is fearless, but also full of love and generosity for others, feeling no envy or sense of vindication that she is “one of the handful of survivors.” “I would rather have seen them all succeed, catch the brass ring,” she writes of all her artistic contemporaries, and not just Mapplethorpe.

This is an amazing memoir, not only of this bizarre era, but also of a relationship so pure and innocent that it is utterly heartbreaking. Smith met Mapplethorpe in her first month of arrival to New York, by simple chance. He was beautiful, with golden curls and a beguiling smile, and she was, well, Patti Smith: thin, androgynous-looking, intense and whip smart. He called her Soakie because of her propensity to cry at the drop of a hat; she called him Blue or Robert, even though he had been known as Bob before that. They were joined at the hip, and made a vow to take care of one another, to nurture each other’s artistic vision, and always, always love each other. That he was gay was almost a minor blip in their connection (they would remain sexually intimate for years, even after he’d “declared” himself) – so intense was their bond. She was a muse, he was an artist, and in time they would switch roles, but always their work (i.e., art) remained the most important aspect of their lives.

If ever you have felt cheated by not being able to experience the New York that once was, then read this book. This was the Seventies, the time when The Chelsea Hotel (where Smith and Mapplethorpe would live for years in a single room) was “an energetic desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder,” Smith writes. “Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if nobody in the outside world.” Smith would labor for days on her drawings and poetry; Mapplethorpe hadn’t yet moved to photography, but would focus on installations, sculptures and jewelry-making. She was inspired by Bob Dylan, he would obsess about the fame and cult of Warhol and his Factory. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he would tell her daily.

It may be true. Their artistic inspiration seems so divorced from the cynicism, branding and one-upmanship now prevalent it’s almost quaint. She meets Gregory Corso, and is encouraged to hold poetry readings of her work. Sam Shepard writes a play with her, becomes her lover, and emboldens her to act. Heading into rock ‘n roll (or rather backing into it, after seeing Jim Morrison perform and feeling “both kinship and contempt for him”), she forms her band with the idea that will encompass poetry, performance art and simple artistic expression. She worries that “music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance and vapid technical complexity.” The year was 1974.

Patti and Robert would remain spiritually joined at the hip. She would become entangled with William S. Burroughs, Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult, Janis Joplin, Todd Rundgren. He would find a benefactor and a lover, and embark on a controversial and extremely successful career in photography, blurring art and pornography. They would weave in and out of each other’s life, sometimes falling out of touch after 1980, but remarkably generous with one another, never dabbling in schadenfreude. In 1978, they were walking down Eighth Street and her single “Because the Night” was blasting from every storefront. The single reached number 13 on the Top 40 chart, “fulfilling Robert’s dream that I would one day have a hit record.” He was “unabashedly proud of my success. What he wanted for himself, he wanted for us both.” He said to her in a tone “he only used for me — a bemused scolding — admiration without envy, our brother-sister language. ‘Patti,’ he drawled, ‘you got famous before me.’ ”

The title is a perfect reminder of a time of innocence for Smith and Mapplethorpe, two individuals intent on living their lives “free,” unencumbered by society’s expectations or values. Patti would make more albums, publish more poetry, and marry Fred Sonic Smith, a noted musician, with whom she would have two children and move to Michigan. Mapplethorpe would enjoy enormous success, with retrospectives at all the major museums in New York and around the world — the former altar boy succeeding in a realm that no one could have foreseen. When Mapplethorpe dies painfully of AIDS in 1989, that time of innocence is gone, but the bond between them remained: muse and artist, indelibly scratched on each other’s soul.

This is a book about pure love.

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 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 13: The Secret Scripture, by Sebastian Barry (2009: Penguin, 300 pages)

I’ll be honest: this week’s book just about killed me. Not because it’s a bad book, but really, folks: It’s the Winter Olympics! (Or rather, was.) I am not one for the figure skating, and Lindsey Vonn definitely tries my patience, but what cooler sport is there (apart from pro-cycling) than biathlon? If you haven’t seen it, get yourself on that NBC website and have a look. It’s already on my to-do list for 2011 to register for the Northstar-At-Tahoe “Introduction to Biathlon” Clinic next February. I’ve never held a gun in my life, and the last time I was on skis was perhaps 15 years ago, but I don’t care: I am obsessed.

Back to this week’s “lyrical,” “luminous” novel of “startling beauty.” Here’s a thought. When pull-quotes feature those kinds of adjectives as the selling point, I feel I’m in trouble. It’s not that The Secret Scripture is not lyrical, nor luminous, nor full of startling beauty – it’s all of those things, but I am hard-pressed to say a whole lot more about it.  Sebastian Barry is an extremely well-respected Anglo-Irish writer, having churned out a few good novels and many plays in his time, and this book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The language is gorgeous, the setting (Co. Sligo, Ireland) magical, the time period interesting. It also tackles the Civil War in early 20th century Ireland from the conservative point of view, a side not often heard, at least in my limited readings of Irish independence. (For a very truncated account of this convoluted time period in Ireland, click here.)

The story is of Roseanne Clear, a woman of 100 years, who lives in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where she has spent the last sixty years or so. The hospital is about to be demolished, and it is up to the head psychiatrist, Dr. Grene, to figure out who is sane enough to be let out into the outside world. Roseanne’s history is muddled: no one can quite remember why she first came, and the files on many of the elder patients have been either destroyed or lost. Dr. Grene begins to research her case, and the novel is a back-and-forth between his notes to himself about Roseanne, and “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself,” sheafs of paper she writes to herself about her secret history, and stores under the floorboards.

Naturally, there are vast discrepancies between Roseanne’s account, and the historical “facts” that Dr. Grene uncovers. This Rashomon-style narrative is a little trying to this reader, who feels at this point that we could dispense of this literary gimmick for a few decades and we’d all be a little better off. The novel begins very slowly indeed, and after one hundred pages or so, I felt the plot needed to take off or I’d be shelving this book with a poor excuse for a blog. But take off it does: Roseanne is a young, beautiful Presbyterian living in Catholic Ireland after the Troubles of the 1920s, and her enemy is a misogynistic, power-mad priest whom she unfortunately crosses. After marrying one of the town’s Catholic golden boys, she is fingered as a nymphomaniac, and sent to live in exile in an iron hut on the edge of town, where she slowly goes mad. (Or not.)

I love Irish history, and studied it in college, but I don’t think I’ve ever read any fiction dealing with the rise of the Blueshirts, which this novel touches on. Ireland’s neutral position in the Second World War, combined with a minority flirting with the rise of Fascism in Spain, has always been a bit of a sore spot for Irish historians. It’s a conflicted and shameful past, for a country that has had its fair share of conflict in the past 800 years. (Let’s not even get into the role of the Church, as yet another horrific chapter was revealed last November.)

So, would I recommend The Secret Scripture? Roseanne is a wonderful character, full of complexities and mendacities, but Dr. Grene is dull as dishwater, and I couldn’t care less about his meanderings about his dead wife. However, there’s a plot twist at the end which was both absurd and interesting — I could hear my Anglo-Irish friend Magda groan across the Atlantic — and if I were feeling charitable, I might say that it made it worth it. But the twist was a little silly, and the novel kept me from watching some of the Winter Olympics, so I’m one big Party of No on this one.

Week 12: Open, by Andre Agassi (2009: Knopf, 388 pages)

What is it about fathers and athletes? If you’ve watched any of the Winter Olympics lately, then you surely know that Apolo Ohno’s dad was the driving force behind his success. The same with Lindsey Vonn. Every time I turn on the channel, NBC is providing yet another glowing, soaring profile of an athlete (yesterday a Norwegian, a specialist in the Super-G) whose father gave him his first skis, skates, snowboard, whatever.

Why stop at the Winter Olympics? The Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, Steffi Graf, and the subject of our blog, Andre Agassi, all nabbed by their fathers at an early age and crammed into the pressure cooker of competitive athletics. Read any bio of those driven to succeed in athletics, there is some father whose presence (or in the case of Lance Armstrong, very absence) provided the catalyst for nothing less than crushing one’s opponent in a very public fashion.

It was coincidental that I read Open this week, and it’s such an honest and compelling memoir, told with such brio, that one doesn’t even need the Winter Olympics as a backdrop. Actually, you don’t even have to like tennis very much to enjoy this book, and that I can say is probably mostly due to the fact that it was “ghostwritten” by Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer, author of the memoir The Tender Bar. (I put that in quotations because Agassi generously thanks Moehringer and outs him in the Acknowledgments.)

Andre Agassi, like most athletes at that level, is a super-narcissist, trained at an early age to block out all others’ wants or needs in favor of The Big Win. So what can a super-narcissist possibly write that isn’t off-putting? For starters, he’s extremely funny, whether he’s describing trying to keep his hairpiece from falling off in the finals of the 1990 French Open, or having to borrow a shoe from a fan in the stands in the middle of a match in Stuttgart in order to finish the game (“It has to be a Nike, I add – because of my contract … though the man is a size nine, I force the shoe on my foot, like some half-wit Cinderella, and resume play.”) He also has a nice sense of irony, since as he tells as many times over, he hates tennis with a passion, and always has. Tennis is a lonely, aggressive business, “closest to solitary confinement,” and begun solely at the instigation of his tennis-obsessed father.

Mike Agassi built a souped-up ball machine for seven-year-old Andre, and had him out on the court daily and for hours on end. School was frowned upon, seen as a distraction. A former bantamweight boxer who competed in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics for Iran, Mike Agassi is one of those parents you see at your kids’ soccer games screaming on the sidelines, before getting into a fistfight with the ref. The guy is completely insane; young Andre watches as he beats a guy into a pulp after the man made the unfortunate decision to cut Mike off in traffic. “Such moments, and many more, come to mind whenever I think about telling my father that I don’t want to play tennis. Besides loving my father, and wanting to please him, I don’t want to upset him. I don’t dare.”

Agassi claims to hate tennis (and after experiences like that, who wouldn’t?), but I think it’s a bit more complex than that. He actually hates losing, and disappointing people. Groomed to be a pro tennis player, sent away to a prison-like tennis academy as a pre-teen, and with school taken out of the picture by the ninth grade, there really is nothing else he can do. He thinks constantly about quitting or retiring, and his inconsistent play over the years reveals that deep ambivalence. Nevertheless, the guy is clearly athletically gifted beyond belief, and when life intercedes with various conflicts or dramas (like divorce, the illness of a child, or simply the jealousy he feels when girlfriend Brooke Shields licks an actor’s hand in a scene of “Friends”) he doesn’t have any of the psychological tools that a normal person has to deal with them.

Some of the best parts of Open, it must be said, spring from this reader’s voyeuristic tendencies. Brooke Shields doesn’t come off too well; the two are on a collision course from the moment they start dating until their marriage dissolves some two years later, meeting each other pound for pound in the narcissism camp. And yes, Pete Sampras really is that boring. Sampras, who was forever cast as the rival and nemesis of Agassi, is actually somewhat of a friend, but he is a butter knife to Agassi’s cleaver. “I drag Pete to the Eugene O’Neill Theater to see Brooke as Rizzo in Grease,” Agassi writes. It’s the first time Sampras has seen a Broadway show, but Agassi has seen Grease many, many times, and he is all over it, loving the competitive nature of the actors, their physicality, the nightly pressure. “All this is lost on Pete, however,” Agassi observes. “From the opening number he’s yawning, fidgeting, checking his watch. He doesn’t like the theater, and he doesn’t get actors, since he’s never pretended anything in his life.”

Why does Agassi continue, then, if this hatred and “whirl” as he calls it, is so distasteful and crazy-making? Much has been made of Agassi’s admission in this book of his use of methamphetamine, which is such a non-event compared to everything else in his crazy life that I am frankly puzzled why it got so much press. (He used it recreationally, during a period of deep depression, not as a performance-enhancer.) It seemed to me the real turning point of his career was the ill-fated commercial he made for Canon, in which (goaded by the director) he sneers, “Image is everything.” You’d think that someone on his team would have the presence of mind to warn him that this may not be such a good line for someone as flamboyant as Agassi to say, who’d already been the punching bag for every sportswriter on the planet. He begins to hear this line twice a day, then six times a day, and overnight “the slogan becomes synonymous with me. They say I’m just an image, I have no substance, because I haven’t won a slam. They say the slogan is proof that I’m just a pitchman, trading on my fame, caring only about money … Fans at my matches begin taunting me with the slogan.” Agassi is crushed by the “wave of hostility and criticism and sarcasm it sets off.” As the ridiculous throwaway line slogan is used over and over, and “creeps its way into every article about me, I change. I develop an edge, a mean streak … I’m becoming my father.”

The problem is that there was no team behind Agassi. The realization leads him to find, ironically, a real father figure, someone to watch out for him, which he does in his trainer Gil Reyes. That friendship sparks something divine for Agassi, and leads to his expanding his heart and wallet, opening a charter school, the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy in Las Vegas, and eventually finding the love of his life, his now-wife Steffi Graf. Tennis finally becomes the means to the end, not the other way around.

It’s true that I do love sports, and celebrities, and this memoir has the magic mixture for me. I can’t tell if Agassi is really that articulate, insightful and ultimately humble as he seems to be, or if it is all J.R. Moehringer. But after finishing Open, it didn’t matter.

Week 5: Lit, by Mary Karr (2009: HarperCollins, 386 pages)

This week’s book has broken a few blog rules for me. First, as you (someone? anyone?) may have noticed, I’m posting rather late in the week. (More on this later.) Second, Lit is a book on everyone’s Top Ten for 2009, so I’m not exactly doing anyone any favors by “reviewing” it. Third, I don’t swerve off the critics’ highway on this book either; I agree with most of the gushing, awestruck, overwhelmingly positive reviews this memoir has garnered. I will however, say that reviews for this memoir seem more like a Rorschach test for critics than other reviews I’ve seen. Simply put, what I walked away with after reading Lit is very different from, say, what the reviewer at the Washington Post seemed to zero in on.

Let’s get some housekeeping out of the way. This is the third memoir from the poet Mary Karr; the first was the wildly successful The Liars’ Club (about her abusive mother, absent father and horrible upbringing in East Texas), the second was her crazily popular Cherry (about her drug-taking, wild girl adolescent self) and now the third, which chronicles her marriage and motherhood, and descent into alcoholism and suicidal depression. You may sense some eye-rolling on my part with these descriptions, and you would be correct. Really, if it were not Mary Karr, the witty, erudite, beautiful wordsmith Mary Karr that wrote those memoirs (I mean, come on, the woman is only in her fifties … maybe one memoir but three?) all this eye-rolling would be justified, but Lit is so profound, so gorgeously told, so funny and full of humility and honesty and integrity that you just can’t help but be sucked in. I didn’t read the first two memoirs, either, so yes, it is a stand-alone job.

In the reviews I have read, almost everyone has focused on the alcohol and redemption part of the book, skimming over what I thought the book was really about, which is Karr’s complete and utter crossover from vociferous non-believer to Bible-thumping Catholic after her “nervous breakthrough.” (OK, perhaps not Bible-thumping, but damn close.) As a vociferous nonbeliever myself, this kind of transformation I normally would find rather mystifying (to say the least), but instead it is told with such humor and anticipation of those eye-rolls that it’s impossible not to feel as if you’re talking to your best friend about this topic. (One chapter is entitled “Celebration [Nonbelievers, Read at Your Own Risk: Prayer and God Ahead].”) Karr herself seems apologetic in her telling of how prayer literally sent her (in her view, anyway), among other things, a poetry chair at Harvard, money for a car, a literary agent who goads her to write her first blockbuster memoir.

But God, at least in the beginning, is more of a feeling of grace for Karr (“Vis-a-vis God speaking to me, I don’t mean the voice of Charlton Heston playing Moses booming from on high, but reversals of attitude so contrary to my typical thoughts — so solidly true — as to seem divinely external … View it as some sane self or healthy ego taking charge, if you like”). An example is her internal dialogue about her toddler’s poor health, which had her running to the hospital in the early morning hours on a regular basis, which went from “Fuck you (God) for making me an alcoholic .. for making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny … what pleasure do you get from … from smiting people?” to “The voice — the idea– comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos, and it says, If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking …”

Okay, so much about the prayer stuff. While Lit is the story of a daughter becoming a mother, and becoming her crazy alcoholic mother in the process, it is also a story of the birth of a successful poet. Writers, sit up! Just read this description of her first class as teacher to a group of mentally disabled women:

As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snagggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie.

Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been ground underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.

I could go on and on about Lit, but in fairness, I think one takes from this book what floats their own personal boat, whether it be her relationship (finally resolved) with her batty mother, or her story of alcoholism/redemption, or her tortured strivings to be a good mother while in a cloud of booze. And then there’s the God stuff, which is fascinating to me … like viewing a tropical island from a cruise ship, never really knowing if it is mirage or reality.

(A note on why this blog is late. My toddler has been sick for the past six days or so, necessitating some all-nighters and emergency trips to the doctor. Unfortunately, the grace described by Mary Karr has yet to enlighten me as to why this would befall my family the last week of our vacation, but maybe all shall be revealed at a later date … )

Week 3: The Wife, by Meg Wolitzer (2003: Scribner, 219 pages)

Let me pose a question to those of you considering a goal such as mine: How many unread books do you have sitting on your nightstand? Four? Seven? Twenty-two? I have about fifteen, but one less this week, because The Wife — which has been sitting and glowering at me for six years — has now been read, and of course I am kicking myself for not reading it sooner.

What a wonderful gift of a novel! I have to admit that as much as I enjoyed my past few weeks’ literary forays, I was up for something a little lighter … maybe a book not examining war or religious zealotry or the cultural affects of ethnic cleansing. Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap was in my Top Five last year; I gave it to plenty of my friends, and talked it up incessantly at my son’s Book Fair. It’s fair to say I knew The Wife was not out of my literary comfort zone.

Compact, precise, smart and achingly insightful, The Wife is ostensibly the sketch of a marriage finally gone south, told from the point of view of, yes, the wife, Joan Castleman. She is married to the uber-novelist Joseph Castleman, who in his eighth decade has collected numerous literary prizes and accolades for his novels examining the lives of women and men; he is Philip Roth or John Cheever without the swaggering. “Critics had always admired Joe’s vision of contemporary American marriage, which seemed to plumb the female sensibility as thoroughly as it did the male, but amazingly without venom, without blame … Joe’s work was from the old, postwar, ‘marital’ school — husbands and wives stranded in tiny apartments or boxy, drafty colonials … The men were deep but sour, the women sad and lovely, the children disaffected.”

On the eve of his winning the internationally coveted Helsinki Prize, as Joan considers finally leaving this marriage of deep inequality, she ponders the years that have led them to this point. “It kills me to say it, but I was his student when he met,” she starts, recounting Joe’s arrival at Smith to teach English 202 in 1956. Married, with a newborn, cracking walnuts and popping the nuts into his mouth during lectures, he is immediately smitten with Joan, who as it turns out, is an enormously gifted short-story writer herself. They enter headlong into an illicit love affair, which culminates in the wronged wife throwing a walnut straight at Joan (“one solid bop in the middle of my forehead, making a sound like a cobbler’s hammer”), a scene which reappears in Joe’s first novel entitled — what else? — The Walnut. The novel is of course a gigantic success, and from that day forward, Joan is relegated to support role: helper, listener, nurse, chauffeur, hand-holder, wife.

Wolitzer is so smart with her story, so controlled in her every sentence and character description, that if The Wife has a flaw, it is that one can’t imagine the strong-willed and razor sharp Joan putting up with such “Mad Men” type shenanigans from Joe year after year, decade after decade. Joe is needy, remarkably egotistical and stunningly self-centered. Joan is … what? You can’t be sure. Wolitzer is crafty; because the story is entirely from Joan’s point of view, one feels there is some other side that is not quite being revealed. “Joe wanted me beside him,” Joan says of their years together. “He needed me there with him before a reading, and during it, and after it was over.” She recounts an article written about Joe by a critic, which says “Often, during, this early, fertile period of Castleman’s career, his second wife Joan was by his side. ‘She was an extremely quiet person,’ remembers Lev Bresner. ‘Her reticence had a certain kind of mysteriousness about it, but her presence was itself a kind of tonic. He was nervous, and she was very, very soothing.’ ” There is something very funny about Wolitzer including this passage written by critic, quoting another writer, about the actual narrator of The Wife – a kind of Russian doll literary exercise which turns out to be extremely revealing when the book delivers a fairly shocking twist at its conclusion.

I loved this book for that twist, but I would have been utterly content with simply its musings about men, women, marriage and writing. Of her unfulfilled career as writer (she was, by all accounts, more talented than her husband), she says: “I could have been like Joe … I could have swaggered around; I could have been hostile, lyrical, filled with ideas … I could have been the female version of him, and therefore not lovable but repellent. But I wasn’t Mary McCarthy or Lillian Hellman. I didn’t want the attention; it made me skittish and unsure.” For a novel only 219 pages, Wolitzer has tackled some pretty hefty subjects, and she’s done it in an almost clinical, yet poetic manner.

For me, The Wife was a perfect reading experience.

Week 2: Pictures at an Exhibition, by Sara Houghteling (2009: Knopf, 243 pages)

War-torn Kashmir last week, bombed-out Nazi-occupied France this week. A good friend handed me this book for my birthday, and now in the spirit of “I-will-read-anything-anyone-recommends-highly-for-the-good-of-my-blog,” I tackled it the next day.

“Tackled” is a funny verb for this novel concerning stolen WWII art, as its tone is so dream-like that at times I wondered if this was the protagonist’s imaginings, or a history lesson by an opium addict. It begins in Paris in 1939, from the first person point-of-view of one Max Berenzon, the son of a distinguished Jewish art dealer, whose two sole interests are wooing the elusive Rose Clément, his father’s gallery assistant, and trying to prove to his father that he is worthy of entering the family business. There are ominous signs of Nazi encroachment — an anti-Semitic comment here, a nervous mother’s fretting there — but Paris is described through the lens of Max’s twin obsessions, and there is where the problem lies. Describing a beloved (and later looted) painting of his father’s, Max says “There was a claustrophobia to Morisot, or the sense of standing too close to someone else.” This book being historical, I kept waiting for the writer to pull back the lens, and alas, we stay firmly entrenched with Max. He is, unfortunately, not the most reliable or interesting of narrators.

We then leapfrog to the end of the war, when father and son return to Paris. The Berenzons, we learn, had fled south to Le Puy during the war years. It comes as no surprise that the father’s collection — works by Picasso, Manet, Degas, Morisot, Cézanne — have disappeared from their carefully concealed vaults. The gallery has been destroyed, the lives of the Jewish Parisian art dealers have effectively been erased. Max’s obsession now turns to finding the paintings, and also of tracking down Rose, whom he is convinced can help him.

Ms. Houghteling is a fine writer, an incredible researcher and a beautiful observer, and so when the novel shifts to the mystery of the looted art (which she painstakingly based in detailed fact, from her study of Lynn Nicholas’ The Rape of Europa and Hector Feliciano’s The Lost Museum) the narrative gets a much needed kick in the pants. While there is much to admire and learn from Pictures at an Exhibition, a thrilling page-turner it is not. As a protagonist, Max is too passive to be compelling, and when he finally seems to have a sense of purpose, it is the details of his historical hunt that are the most interesting. Houghteling seems both constrained and liberated by the facts of the Nazi’s systematic plundering; Rose Clément was based on the real person of Rose Valland, a former curator at the Jeu de Paume during wartime, and while she may be a fascinating historical character, her motivations for this novel are unclear. Even Maurice Chevalier makes an appearance, and his cameo feels forced.

I wanted to like this book more than I did; by the end, I felt full of admiration for the doggedness of the writer, but not very moved. Inside every historical novel, is a nonfiction book struggling to get out? I am not a lover or connoisseur of historical fiction, so perhaps this is the nature of the beast.

Week 1: Fidali’s Way, by George Mastras (2009: Scribner, 388 pages)

I will be the first to say that Fidali’s Way is out of my comfort zone. It is not about relationships, women, motherhood or infidelity. It is not about cycling. Nor is it written by a woman, nor is it about popular culture, nor is it set in Manhattan.

But part of my reason for doing this project is to make myself feel a little uncomfortable. Fidali’s Way was a top-seller at our school’s annual book fair, due entirely to the fact that a selector on the Adult Fiction committee enthusiastically praised it, practically thrusting it into the shoppers’ hands, with the stern warning, “You will love this book.” (This selector, by the way, is one of those people of whom I am in awe, reading a book a day and then some. She and I rarely like the same books, I hasten to add.) Set in Pakistan, and the Himalayas, it is about Nick Sunder, a disaffected American lawyer who has been backpacking the dangerous region for some time, attempting to escape his internal demons. After his girlfriend is found murdered in the Tribal Regions, Nick is fingered for the crime and thus begins the saga. Losing his money, passport, backpack as he attempts to escape the Wild Wild West of Pakistan and Afghanistan, he meets two strangers, Ghulam and Fidali, natives to the area, who mysteriously help the unenlightened American as he negotiates his way, identity-less, toward Indian-controlled Kashmir.

There is nothing easy about this journey, obviously, and Mastras does a more than admirable job of describing the punishing landscape of the Tribal Areas and the Hindu Kush (home to Bin Laden, the Taliban, and many other sociopaths) and unbelievable beauty of the Himalayan region. More than once I felt physically sickened reading of the taxation on the bodies of Sunder and his companions Ghulam and Fidali, but I was also enormously struck by Mastras’s confident prose, especially in his description of the pristine vale of Kashmir, and in his commentary on the political situation there. Sentences like, “In the end, however, so long as influential nations of the world failed to find the will to intervene with sufficient persuasion, the savagery for the people of Kashmir would endure” would normally fail in that Creative Writing 101 adage of show-don’t-tell, but it feels entirely appropriate here.

There is so much to admire about this novel: the gripping nature of the tale (bordering on the “thriller” genre), the examination of the many facets of Islam and fundamentalism, and the larger philosophical questions which are posed by the Kashmiri smuggler Ghulam, standing in for Mastras himself, I suspect. What is less compelling or believable are the romantic relationships, which feel forced and showy. The so-called “beautiful girlfriend” who was murdered is a pretty despicable person, and it’s hard to feel that Nick could feel that much attachment to a woman who seemed to spend most of her time alive insulting him. The other main female character, Aysha, is also a little bit of a cardboard cut-out: a woman doctor whose beauty seems to stun the men with whom she encounters into silence or submission or both.

Normally, this would irritate me, but I was so enthralled by the storyline, and the characters of Ghulam and Fidali, that I was willing to overlook all of that. The novel comes to a somewhat depressing conclusion, but a realistic and timely one. By the novel’s conclusion, I felt lucky to read of this magical and doomed area of the world, mostly so I wouldn’t have to go there. Of course, by the time you read this, there will be about 30,000+ soldiers who will experience it (or places nearby) firsthand in the not too distant future.

Bravo George Mastras: a thrilling debut, and I look forward to your sophomore creation.