‘A Widow’s Story’ by Joyce Carol Oates

April 25, 2011 Leave a comment

I think I handled the grieving process better when John Dunne died than when Raymond Smith did.

Something about Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story, chronicling the aftermath of her forever husband’s sudden death, had me weeping before appointments, at Subway, and especially in bed. I don’t remember Joan Didion’s version, which proceeded this one by about five years and included a sick daughter, making me feel like someone broke my heart in half and dropped the pieces into a garbage disposal.

The world’s most prolific writer*, a woman who seemingly emits better-than-decent novels like they are mere finger belches, spent almost a year in silence unable to make enough words or the right words to cure the ache of losing her life partner. But when she finally does get down to the business of recording this place in time, she does it with sentences that are fits and bursts. Little poetic blurts, sentences riddled with long dashes that seem perfectly in line with the brain broken in sorrow.

Oates opens her memoir with a time both she and her husband should have died. A year earlier they had been in an accident that triggered the car’s airbags and left them bruised — but giddy with how alive they still were. Then when it wasn’t expected months and months and months later, Ray developed pneumonia, was hospitalized, and got a fatal infection in the hospital. Oates received the terrible phone call — he was still alive, though — rushed to the hospital, but got there too late. She imagines the way he died surrounded by strangers late at night. The paragraphs where she collects his things, his glasses, his papers is one massive soul suck.

From there things get a little repetitious. The minutia and the legalities involved with having a dead spouse, the inability to sleep paired with the unwillingness to take sleeping pills, the avoidance of certain rooms in the house they shared. Ghost images. The fear of learning something about her husband that will change the way he is remembered.

Friends invite her to dinner. She exchanges emails with Richard Ford and Edmund White. She considers her cache of drugs and imagines how easy it would be to kill herself and then later, how much she doesn’t want to do that.

There are some really magical scenes where she brings Raymond back to life by virtue of talking about their past. They met in a lecture hall. They spent a wretched year in Texas, which was worse than the years in Detroit. Raymond loved his garden. And the weirdest fact from the book: Raymond didn’t read her fiction.

JCO marries again less than a year after Raymond’s death. The romance isn’t featured in these pages, but husband No. 2 gets the briefest of brief mentions in the final page of the book. After 400 plus pages, it doesn’t do much to bandage the ache of the previous pages, but it is a little bit of cheer.

*This has not been proven by science.

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‘The Chronology of Water’ by Lidia Yuknavitch

April 25, 2011 Leave a comment

Sitting on my couch. Listening to noninvasive, lyric-less music with headphones. Reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir The Chronology of Water. I stop. Check the time. Two hours have passed since I last came up for air. Whoa. She just drugged me. Plopped me in front of a psychedelic screen saver and had her way with my brain when I wasn’t looking.

My friend sent me an email first telling me that she’d had a dream that she told me we don’t like the same books. We don’t in real life, this is true, she acknowledged in the letter. Except Haruki Murakami. Still, she tells me, read this book. But first she tells me that it starts with a dead baby and then segues into incest, heavy drug use and sex.

It does start with a dead baby. It does have heavy drug use. There is, indeed, sex. And there is this unconventional sentence structure, poetic snippets, soul-squeezing scenes that left me dizzy. This is not my style of reading at all. Prosey-prose, heavy with metaphor. The kind of writing that sounds like it should be read aloud to a room full of people who will later deconstruct it like they are putting puzzle pieces back into a box. In the hands of a lesser writer, which is to say almost any other writer, this would be too written-y and self-conscious. But damn Yuknavitch has a way with words. She knows how to write a word like “bloodsong” and not have it sound like a workshop cliche.

Consider the chapter at about dead center where she writes the story of falling in love with the man who becomes her second husband. It is about five pages heavy on activity and light on periods that reads like fast-forwarding through video footage of a relationship from beers and bars and bikes to the part where he meets someone else and Lidia loses a bunch of grief weight and everyone tells her how pretty she looks. It is pitch perfect.

It starts:

“Year one we drink Guinness mostly all the time and we ride Mountain bikes around Eugene at night and we go to the Vet’s Club we go to the Vet’s Club we go to the Vet’s club we go to the High Street Cafe hey I’ll give you my student load wad of $700 if you kiss the guy who joined us for a drink he does we laugh we drink we fuck.”

She is a swimmer, from birth, probably until death. And everything in her life comes back to water. She trades her strong back and wicked stroke for full ride scholarship to get out of Florida and away from her sexually abusive father and her alcoholic, limping mother. She goes wild in Lubbock, Texas. Falls in love with a James Taylor-sort. Marries him even. But they are separated when she leaves for Oregon to live with her sister, bulging with baby, and he follows her and moves into a place across town. The baby is born dead. Her ashes are spilled into water.

So this book is really something. The scenes painted in a fantastic way and the stories are edited to a sexy, sometimes shocking, truth: Lidia, drunk, sitting on a statue of Buddy Holly. Getting into a fight with her boyfriend. Screaming at him as he drunk drives them home, passing out before they get there. She opens the car door and runs off into the night; Lidia and her best friend picked up by a boyish-looking classmate, a woman who whisks them away for a free love weekend at a hotel; Lidia having a manic laughing fit, waist-deep in water, while trying to get rid of the ashes of the daughter that was stillborn.

This book made me want to go swimming. Me. A non-swimmer. A person who hates to get her face wet. She made me want to jump into the deep end, feet first and sit on the floor of a pool, watching people float over me. She’s that good.

I will concede that I can only read sentences referencing how wet underwear/panties/the seat became after this or that happened without tiring of it. She uses it literally, she uses it metaphorically. It loses its energy. And every once in awhile Yuknavitch turns to face her audience and address the reader, which is distracting. Other than that, big ups.

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Review: ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith

February 19, 2011 Leave a comment

I’ll say this for Patti Smith: Homegirl certainly knows how to write lifestyle porn.

Somewhere between the Chelsea Hotel and the insertion of a millionaire benefactor I closed her love letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, bonked myself in the head and said “Knock it off.” I needed to stop being dazzled and wooed and to start seeing through clear eyes or I’d wake up in a bus stop in Detroit clutching a one-way ticket to 1971.

People do that. Chuck it all, grab a blanket, commit 100 percent to making things. Music. Pictures. Words. More than just teacher-school dropout Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethrope, a skinny kid on the lam from the Catholic church.

Every day, maybe even right this second, a kid is climbing off a bus at some junction in New York City, schlepping a dirty military backpack filled with notebooks filled with poetry filled with nature imagery, A copy of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles in his back pocket. He’s got two weeks worth of dinero in a two-toned teal velcro wallet and a breathlessness about doing “whatever it takes, washing dishes, cleaning toilets as long as I can write.”

He might, like Patti Smith, sleep in a doorway or two. He might, like Patti, find a street angel who will teach him about day-old bread and primo napping places in Central Park. He might get a job at a book store; move into an extended stay hotel full of eccentrics; become a regular at corner bar. He might meet someone who is first his lover, then friend, muse and soulmate.

He’ll observe and jot and wait for a Warhol-ian figure to notice him, all while experimenting with couplets, then, perhaps free verse, then, perhaps starvation. Published in a zine. A promise for publication on a friend of a friend’s website. And after all those PB&Js, after he maybe even finds a word that rhymes with orange, maybe we’ll hear about him. We probably won’t. Maybe he’ll write a book about his soulmate and win a National Book Award.

This is in progress right now and right now and even right now.

This review was originally published at Minnesota Reads on Saturday, February 19, 2011.

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Review: ‘Rat Girl’ by Kristin Hersh

October 24, 2010 Leave a comment

Two weeks ago, if you had asked me to tell you everything I knew about the band Throwing Muses, I would have gone dough faced and dead eyed. “Canadian punk band?” I would have un-educatedly guessed. Somehow this foursome escaped my musical reckoning in the mid-80s.

I would have been wrong. But that wrongness at least says this: One does not have to be a Throwing Muses Head to want to metaphorically rub lead singer Kristin Hersh’s memoir Rat Girl all over her body in hopes of absorbing a fraction of the smarts, words, and ideas directly into one’s blood stream. Because science is not yet that sophisticated, I settled for turning the book into an origami version of itself, with at least 30 percent of the pages dog-eared.

This memoir, shelved in the bi-polar section of your local bookstore, is (for the amusement of using an out-of-character word) so lovely.

This is not the gelatinous mess that is a typical celebrity memoir — to be expected as Throwing Muses is not a typical band. (I can say that now. I’ve downloaded plenty of its backlog in the past few days. For free. www.kristinhersh.com). Hersh captures 1985, the year Throwing Muses went from a bar band to label magnet in a series of vignettes and song lyrics, snippets pulled from the journals of a 19-year-old.

Blue-haired Hersh is squatting in a dead guy’s house, taking college-level classes at a university where her father, whom she calls “Dude,” teaches hippie-based courses that start with deep relaxation exercises of the soul-scorching kind. She breaks into backyard pools in the middle of the night to swim laps to combat her insomnia. Her best friend Betty is of AARP membership age, a former Hollywood starlet who imagines she is one wrong turn from an onslaught of paparazzi.

Throwing Muses play gigs at local clubs they aren’t even old enough to patronize, and sometimes get stuck paying a cover charge if they walk outside before their set.

Ever since she was hit by a car, Hersh hears music in the white noise around her. And when a song strikes, she must immediately work it out on her guitar.

Throughout the rest of the year she will move with her band mates into an apartment in Boston, space shared with other artists, and with Harvard thugs for neighbors. Hersh is diagnosed as bipolar. Throwing Muses will attract a following and get good chatter from local press. Fans will leave gifts on their door step, and a dude with an international phone number will express an interest in signing the band. And, despite any hint that Hersh has ever seen a naked man, she gets pregnant with the band’s baby.

These single serving stories don’t make a quote-unquote plot. They are carefully worded, and artfully selected moments in a life — many that inspired lyrics. They reveal Hersh to be genuinely surprised that Throwing Muses have fans, and even a little ambivalent about it. Her three band mates just make cameos, but they are drawn so tenderly. Not the way one would write about family, but with the soft touch one would use to write about a partner with whom they are truly smitten. (But Hersh kind of treats everyone like this. From the old ladies on the bus, to the junkies at their shows, her default seems to be liking people as much as is possible for a loner).

Rat Girl is light on glitz and glamour. (Hersh describes her style as homeless, and her hugest goal is to tour with her band and live out of a van). It is ripe with introspection and imagery. Hersh’s voice is so unique and her life so interesting that I imagine reading this book is a lot like what music hounds in the 80s felt when they first heard the band.

BTW: I judged this book first by its awesome cover.

This review was originally posted on Minnesota Reads on October 24, 2010.

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Review: ‘A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius’ by Dave Eggers

October 22, 2010 Leave a comment

I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for the first time in 1999, and it went a little something like this: Pop rocks. Coke. Shake. Brain.

Dave Eggers’ memoir-with-benefits was this thing that totally changed my understanding of what a good book could be. So influenced was I, that it necessitated instigating a Top 5 Favorite Books list, where just having A Favorite Book, or Two Books Tied for Favorite Book, would no longer do. If I recall correctly, I ushered in Y2K with this as my answer to a question no one would ever ask me: 1. The Sun Also Rises (Hem); 2. The Great Gatsby (Fitzy); 3. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Eggers); 4. The Awakening (Chopin); and 5. The Edible Woman (Atwood).

In the past decade, I’ve never really monkeyed with that list. I could probably still defend my picks in front of a jury of my peers, although I can’t say I’d make the same list right now. But I wouldn’t make a list right now because I’ve probably read like 600-plus books since I was 24, and to sort them would be akin to having a freshly sharpened axe driven into my skull by the Strongest Human Being in All of the Land.

Every other book on that list had been subject to a re-read, and in some cases re-(to the nth power)read. But I dared not touch the Eggers again. Until now. My boyfriend listened to it recently, was chuckling over some Eggers family hilarity, then picked me up a copy from the library.

I expected this to be spiritual. Like eight hours alone in the attic of your youth, flipping pages of a yearbook and trying on the old letter jacket. If the song “Mambo No. 5″ still smells like August on a highway cutting through Durango, Colorado to me, imagine the power of the words from one of my favorite books in conjuring up some residual 20-something bullshit.

Yeah. Nada.

The reading public’s introduction to the future Mr. McSweeney’s was this: The story about how Eggers parents both died of cancer within a few months of each other when he was in his early 20s, leaving behind an elementary school-aged blank slate for Eggers, etc. to raise. Dave and young Toph Eggers make a dynamic duo, technically a father-ish kinda-son relationship, that leans more big brother buddy and little dude.

Eggers runs a tight ship: No one swears around Toph. But they also consider the slide-ability of the hard-wood floors when rating an apartment. There is wrestling. There is Frisbee. There are massive freak outs when Toph has his first non-Eggers babysitter, or isn’t at the right door when Dave picks him up after a bar mitzvah. There are tender hair tousles, and cute insults. And the whole thing makes you wish that you had a supercool older brother who had taken you into his tutelage and taught you how to be hilarious. Or that you had your own blank slate to teach the trick involving the 360 degree spin before catching the disc.

In the meantime, it’s about being a 20-something in the 1990s and having friends, ideas, dreams, world domination fantasies, and connections to Adam Rich of “Eight is Enough.” Not to mention the fun cult ref drops like Vince Vaughn (Eggers went to high school with him), Puck and Judd from “The Real World: San Francisco” (Eggers was a finalist for a part as one of the seven strangers who would learn what it’s like when people stop being polite … and start being real).

Reading this book 10 years later is like reading one of those letters you write to yourself when you are a senior in high school. “Dear Christa … By now you have probably written a trilogy of bestsellers that not only have a strong mainstream presence, but are also critically acclaimed by book snobs everywhere.”

Except this is Eggers’ measuring stick. “By now you will do exactly what you wanted to do … create a website that appeals to literary sorts, publish a handful of novels, and have a sort of celebrity that is uncommon to people who work with words.” And now Toph is in his mid-20s, and highly Google-able for his own projects. Instead of a book about big plans, it is his to-do list, and he has done a remarkable job of emptying it.

It’s like his journal of non-embarrassing things. Which is a far better thing than if this book had sent me sailing back to 1999, which would have been a headache teeming with embarrassing things.

This review originally ran on Minnesota Reads on October 21, 2010.

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