Review of The Blue Star

The sequel to Jim the Boy is considerably more grown up, and we found it to lend perhaps more insight than we wanted into a teen boy's mind. Nevertheless, Tony Earley is capable of transporting us into that mind and another time.

We like to think youth is a simpler time than adulthood, small town life than the big city, or the 1940s than the 2010s, but The Blue Star blows those fallacies/fantasies out of the water. What could be more fraught with hazard than love in any age? Or war, conscientious objection, and race relations?

Similarly, who could be under more pressure (peer or otherwise) than a high school senior or a pregnant teen? Who's life is more at risk than an impoverished, beautiful woman? Who is more dangerous than a powerful, jealous man?

There is little of the boy Jim's charm in the teenager he became, except at his most awkward moment late in the book the the kitchen with his girlfriend's mother. Parts are very strange (Jim's dream/vision during the truck ride up the mountain with Bucky's coffin, conversations with Dennis Deane).

A discussion question asked whether Jim was our favorite character in the novel, and why or why not. I'd have to say not, because, as in the earlier novel, the uncles stand out. Here are men who've passed through all that teenage angst, know themselves, are assured of their place in society, and accepting of their responsibilities. They have honor -- a virtue that we barely recognize.

Jim is just learning what love costs the beloved. In this sense, The Blue Star is anti-romance, and maybe that's the male perspective shining through. A worthy perspective.

March selection: The Blue Star

We read Tony Earley's charming Jim the Boy the first year of this club's existence. Now we turn to its sequel, The Blue Star. About the two books, a New York Times reviewer wrote:

In an interview eight years ago, Earley described Jim the Boy as “a children’s book for adults,” and The Blue Star has a similar feel. It’s such a deceptively simple strategy — to take the unembellished storytelling style of children’s literature and to bend it to adult themes — that many novelists will feel like smacking themselves on the side of the head for not having thought of it themselves. But it is no easy feat, especially to stay inside the hazard lines of sentimentality.

USA Today says:

I'm happy to report that Earley's The Blue Star works as a sequel and a lovely coming-of-age story that can be savored on its own.

Earley's debut dealt with a year in the life of 10-year-old Jim Glass, guided by a widowed mother and three bachelor uncles in a tiny North Carolina town during the Depression.

The sequel covers Jim's senior year in high school. He's come to "appreciate that there were no older boys. He and his friends were it." It opens in the fall of 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor. World War I still is thought of as "The Great War."

Discussion questions

Review: February selections

The Michigan Murders, by Edward Keyes, lived up to its billing as a classic in the true crime genre. How does a writer maintain suspense throughout a book when the reader knows from the outset the killer's identity, the fact he was caught and convicted, and that he sits in prison to this very day? Right up to the verdict I was convinced he might somehow get off!

The "Coed Murders," as they were known, occupied vague space in my girlhood memory. It is satisfying now to have those recollections demystified without the tale losing any of its power to alarm. How different Michigan was before the killing spree began -- hitchhiking a routine travel option, doors left unlocked. John Norman Collins stole a piece of our innocence. It was good to be reminded of something I knew, but of which I was barely aware.

I think Keyes succeeded because he patiently registered the humanity of the tale -- the quaintness of his usage of pseudonyms for the killer and victims, the normalcy of lives interrupted by a loss or horrible discovery, the near misses of dedicated and diligent policemen, the methodical building of a case, and the anxiety over the possibility of acquittal. How in the world did police ever solve cases without cell phones and DNA evidence?

My one disappointment was in the new epilogue for this special edition, by Laura James. I expected she would update us on how DNA evidence pointed to a different killer for the 3rd victim, Jane Mixer (a.k.a. Jeanne Holder). And how an 8th victim (counting the one in California) has been tied to Collins -- Eileen Adams, kidnapped from Toledo and found in Ypsilanti in 1967. This information I came up with via Google search. I was left wondering whether any other remaining evidence from the unsolved murders had been submitted to modern tests.

Stiff: The Curious Live of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach, left much more to be desired, at least according to half our group. I expected to be let in on the secrets of autopsy and forensic science, but instead was "treated" to the author's self-absorbed insights, annoying asides, wild tangents, inane observations, and sick humor. To my thinking, she belongs in the order of a Jack Kevorkian for all her fascination with the macabre. I just couldn't feel as she did about her subject.

I'm not more squeamish than most, but admit I stopped reading a chapter short of the one on cannibalism lest even one of my eyes detected a single vowel therein. (I cannot abide any mention of Hannibal Lector or The Silence of the Lambs.) Yet I think I approached the book with an open mind. We discussed it as a matter of respect, and again I think we differed on whether the author shares that sense. I did sense, however, that the people she interviewed -- in the various labs and morgues and mortuaries -- did have respect for the human dead. She seemed curious about their respect in the way she kept remarking on it.

Still, her chapter on how death is determined and currently defined was enlightening. Plain English is helpful for understanding a topic so vital to questions raised by organ donation and end-of life care.

Review: Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

How did Pi survive? By learning to live with a tiger, or learning to kill a cannibalistic cook? That is the question.

Pi's questions -- Which is the better story? Which do you prefer? -- throw us off. Any answer to these questions are pointless, except to show the bent of the reader's mind. I'm more interested in the author's mind.

Answering Pi's questions does, however, seem to be the task he wants us to undertake. In his not-to-be-missed essay, "How I Wrote Life of Pi", Yann Martel reveals that his theme is "that reality is a story and we can choose our story."

To me that exercise is less interesting than contemplating the one "fact" we know: Pi survived longer than any other castaway. Was it survival of the fittest? Or was it part miracle, part human domination of nature? Is it an evolutionary tale, or a tale of biblical dominion?

Strangely, the tale without animals is more about natural selection than the one with animals. It's more brutal and hopeless. Man is just another animal. There is more evil in it -- the French cook kills for no reason -- without an explanation for evil. In fact, could that be the point of the book, that evolution has no explanation for evil (or for good)?

The story with animals takes care to not attribute evil to them -- they're just acting by instinct, yet that instinct can be curbed and molded to the will of the subduing human. That's why it's much more hopeful, and why, I believe, Pi survives. It's not so much that Pi survives in spite of the tiger (and the hyena), but because of them. They keep him sharp. Richard Parker gives him purpose, an object to admire and even love.

This is why descriptions of the book can be so oxymoronic. Life of Pi is a book of terrible beauty. It is both horrifying and delightful.

And this is why the story with animals is better, and the one I prefer. Could it also be why it's the one that sparks the imagination most, inspiring such stunning visual depictions? I hear they're making a movie.

Illustrations: http://education.theage.com.au/cmspage.php?intid=136&intversion=268; http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2011/06/02/hobbit-news-triggers-release-date-shift-for-life-of-pi/; http://thesefleetingmoments.deviantart.com/#/d1sokfl. Find more by Googling "Life of Pi."

Next up: Stiff and The Michigan Murders

For 2,000 years, cadavers -- some willingly, some unwittingly -- have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. Stiff, by Mary Roach, is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. (Her latest book is Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, which also looks interesting.)

Southeastern Michigan was rocked in the late 1960s by the terrifying serial murders of young women, whose bodies were dumped in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. In each case, few clues were left at the scene, and six separate police agencies were unable to end the horror. Then, almost by accident, a break came. Edward Keyes wrote the true-crime story, The Michigan Murders, which will be a second February selection.

Review of Home, by Marilynne Robinson

This book illustrates the dichotomy between the idea of home and its reality. "Home" the idea might evoke feelings of comfort, safety, companionship, desire fulfilled; synonyms such as "refuge," "shelter," and "haven" come to mind. Who wouldn't want to live there?

The book shows that a home might actually be a place of discomfort, disappointed and stifled longing, and misunderstandings; if not a place of outright danger it might house prickly-edged sensibilities that must constantly be circumvented or soothed.

The Boughton home is the latter, as much as the old man and his grown son and daughter long for it to be the former. The distant past -- the lore and furniture of ancestors -- encroaches and cannot be removed. Glory and Jack are clearly not "at home" there.

Page 102: "He lets us wander so we will know what it means to come home. What does it mean to come home?"

Page 282: "What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him."

It's not, of course, that the current occupants are bad people or don't try to be a family. Indeed, they work very hard at loving each other, but are constantly thwarted because their own more immediate and unavoidable pasts join the fussy, dark curtains in crowding out the sun.

Experience had taught [her parents] that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. They had learned that excessive devotion to even the highest things seemed and probably was sanctimonious, and that the one sufficient measure of excess was that look of annoyance, confirmed in themselves by a twinge of embarrassment, that meant the line had been crossed. They recognized grace in the readiness of the darkest sinner to take a little joke, a few self-effacing words, as an apology. This was something her father in particular, who was morally strenuous but sociable, too, had learned to appreciate cordially. Truly there were perils on every side in the pastoral life, and her father was wary of them all. (page 17)

Kindness, however, was one of the things that irked Glory. She found her black-sheep brother too polite as he tip-toed through the minefield, and her father too quick to forgive (before he had been able to reconcile his tone of voice with the intent of his heart). Rev. Boughton had taken the view that a man's "crime was his punishment."

Maybe great sorrow or guilt is simply to be accepted as absolute, like revelation. My iniquity/punishment is greater than I can bear. In the Hebrew, her father said, that one word had two meanings and we chose one of them, which may make it harder for us to understand why the Lord would have pardoned Cain and protected him, and let him go on with his life, marry, have a son, build a city. (page 101)

The most telling line is on page 247: "Her family was slower to forgive a failure of discretion than they were to forgive most things actually prohibited in Scripture."

The father believed his prodigal was grieved to not belong, lonely in the midst of a large and boisterous family. "How could I be angry at that?" he says to Jack. Taking responsibility, he says, "I should have known how to help you with it."

No, it's not that this is a bad family, a miserable household. It's just very realistically drawn. Robinson patiently includes every gesture and eye-blink to convey how fraught with hazard love/home can be.

Jack cleared his throat. "It's been good to be home. It really has."

The old man raised his eyes and studied his son's face. "You've never had a name for me. Not one you'd call me to my face. Why is that?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't know, myself. They all seemed wrong when I said them. I didn't deserve to speak to you the way the others did."

"Oh!" his father said, and he closed his eyes. "That was what I waited for. That was what I wanted." (page 311)

At first I read into it the idea that what was wanted was the admission, but that seemed cruel, and the father was not cruel. What he wanted was the naming, to be known as "father" by the much-beloved son. He wanted his son to resume his proper place, to request -- even demand -- the fatted calf.

Home is a place we presume to belong, where we are accepted for ourselves.

Reviews of Lilith, The Man Who Was Thursday

Wordsmith and I had read these books in the past, and both found them to be quite different from what we recalled. Perhaps that's owing to their dreamlike qualities.

It's a genre I don't find tremendously appealing, but the books are very readable. There's enough in them to grasp hold of, to keep you from feeling that just anything can happen, as in the dreams we remember upon waking. The Man Who Was Thursday, by GK Chesterton, is subtitled "A Nightmare," but it hadn't seemed so "wild" the first time I read it. What I remembered was its suspense and intelligence. This time through I noticed more its humor.

My strongest impression of Lilith, (George MacDonald) from the first reading was the delight I felt in the Little Ones, a feeling shared with the narrator. They had awakened in him a protective, nurturing feeling, and that was something to which I could relate. But I had completely forgotten everything about the ending. More about forgettable endings later.

So, it's good to read things more than once, years separated, because you bring to them a different sensibility and you might learn more of what the author had in mind. For instance, as a young person when I read Lilith, I would not have been keyed in to all the epistemological and existential questions that the book asks and answers (Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I? How do I know what's real? What should I do? What happens when you die?). It's not that I wanted to learn the answers this time around, but that I could recognize them and see what MacDonald was trying to do.

A few important thoughts we took away from it:

Vane, the narrator, wants to be the hero in his own story. That's a fair assumption for a main character, but it's not to be the case here. He eventually learns the folly (vanity) of it.

At the beginning of the story, he's told that doing something -- seemingly any decisive deed -- will turn the strange world in which he finds himself into his home. He imagines himself capable of knowing what to do and bringing it to pass, but errs by resisting what is asked of him -- obedience, belief, dying.

He, like every one of us, thinks dying is what you do at the end of life, but it's really the beginning -- here and in the world MacDonald creates. Time and again Vane is implored to lay himself down -- die to self -- but it's so hard. Proper dying is surrender to the Maker's will, not to self-loathing or despair.

A few important quotes from Lilith:

When one says to the great Thinker:--'Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now! that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.'

[T]o understand is not more wonderful than to love.

In this world never trust a person who has once deceived you. Above all, never do anything such a one may ask you to do.

You lost your chance [to love the Little Ones], Mr. Vane! You speculated about them instead of helping them.

One of the sentences I highlighted in TMWWT is, "Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." Maybe that's Chesterton's point, although I liked it better when I read it as a straight suspense thriller. The levity kind of ruined it for me. I can't decide what Chesterton means. Is he saying that anarchists are ridiculous, or that people who worry about them are ridiculous? I guess both could be true.

Wordsmith and I spent more time discussing Occupy Wall Street than the book, and there could be lessons here for them and us:

You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would be from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

. . . When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich.

What I really couldn't understand was the ending. I didn't remember it at all. In fact, all that really stuck with me was the tension of the early chapters. (It was as though I'd stopped reading altogether.) The culmination affirms a biblical worldview, but is stranger than Lilith even though everything happens in "the real world." It calls into question what is real. My last highlight:

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal.

Upcoming selections

We went ahead at our September meeting and set out the selections for the rest of the year, based on the list we've been compiling of Books We Want to Read Before We Die.

First up, for October . . . Lilith, by George MacDonald, and The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton.

About The Man Who Was Thursday: "G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory."

About Lilith: "Rich in symbolism, steeped in paradox, this is a tale of a man's journey and his coming to terms with the frailty of humanity when it is seen in the light of God. MacDonald never hides the basis of his paradigm--that there is a God who loves us, who knows better than we do what is best for us--rather, he weaves it into a rich tapestry of adventure wherein key characters make known the paradox that is at the heart of Chrisitianity: he who would be first must be last."

Both are very different, a little difficult, interesting. We should have a good discussion on the 20th.

November - Home, by Marilynn Robinson. We read Gilead our first year. This is a follow-up book. You might want to read Gilead if you haven't already. Great book.

December - off

January - Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. Winner of the 2002 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. "Pi Patel is an unusual boy. The son of a zookeeper, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior, a fervent love of stories, and practices not only his native Hinduism, but also Christianity and Islam. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. Life of Pi is at once a realistic, rousing adventure and a meta-tale of survival that explores the redemptive power of storytelling and the transformative nature of fiction. It's a story, as one character puts it, to make you believe in God."

February - The Michigan Murders, by Edward Keyes, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach

March - The Blue Star: A Novel, by Tony Earley. This is a sequel to Jim the Boy, our first-ever selection, a sweet tale. You'll want to read it.

April - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

May - The Spirit of Food, by Leslie Leyland Fields, and Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert

We settled on these, and then, on the way out the door at Schuler's I saw a book by a feminist writer I've appreciated: Naomi Wolf's The End of America: Letter to a Young Patriot. I'd like us to squeeze this in by making it our summer reading selection, or first thing next September. It would be a good lead-in to the 2012 election. And it has linkages to Thomas Paine's Common Sense. We should read them both.

Review: Silas Marner

Somehow I made it through school without having to read Silas Marner. If what Susan Hallender said is true, then I think that's a good thing. One sure way of killing great literature is to force a person to read it. I'm very grateful for Wordsmith's selection of this classic. I may never have read it otherwise, because unfortunately it has that taint of being "a book you read for school."

If I were a young person, I know I would have had a hard time completing the book. At one point I couldn't figure out Eliot's point in suddenly introducing the townsfolk through their lengthy discussion in the pub. Who are all these people and why should I care? For I while I put the book down because I cared about Silas and Eppie too much and feared something really awful would happen to them.

A good writer doesn't waste anything, and Eliot is a good writer. Tension is natural in any love story; she doesn't have to do anything really awful to her characters to keep you interested. And the scene in the pub is, after all, important because this isn't just a story. It's an examination of civic life. How do people live together? What orders their lives? How do they handle crises? How do they treat strangers?

It's also an examination of faith versus reason. Lantern Yard seems to represent a hyper-spiritual community, where faith is mistaken for mysticism and superstition. Knowledge and reason are mistrusted. It doesn't eradicate envy and greed, theft or falsehood. It doesn't know what to do with them.

Raveloe villagers, in contrast, have things, enjoy food and drink, go to church irreligiously. It isn't devoid of faith at all, as evidenced by the hearty exhortations of Dolly Winthrop. People know what they believe and have woven it into the fabric of their lives. (Nice metaphor, eh?) At least they behave correctly toward Silas, and they remind him to behave correctly, too. I'm thinking of the scene where Silas accuses a fellow who's been in his home of taking the gold. Another man reminds him of the law against presuming guilt until it's proven, a law derived from the scriptural requirement of two or three witnesses. They accept Silas, they help and seek justice for him. They support him in his adoption of Eppie. It's not accidental that Lantern Yard ceases to exist, overtaken by the Industrial Revolution, while Raveloe thrives.

Eliot seems to admire the natural and rustic. She writes of "unnurtured souls" and "least-instructed human beings" as being capable of the highest, finest qualities.

"There is hardly a servant-maid in these days who is not better informed than Miss Nancy; yet she had the essential attributes of a lady -- high veracity, delicate honour in her dealings, deference to others, and refined personal habits. . . ."

Aside from Silas, I found the character of Godfrey Cass most interesting. He was complex. There was more actual tension in the story concerning him. Would he sacrifice himself? Would he do right by Nancy? What kind of man was he? Would he insist on having his way? Would he ruin everything?

Nancy's a little flat, but she asks herself a good question, with which I'll close: "I can do so little -- have I done it all well?"

Wordsmith's Summer Reading

This summer I've read a couple of Daphne du Maurier books: The House on the Strand and Julius. Neither was what I expected - not like the mysteries I've read - but both were well written and really interesting. Julius follows the life of a man from birth to death and depicts the reality of and relationship between evil in the world and in the human heart. The main character of The House on the Strand lives in two worlds... or so he thinks. Du Maurier is so good at convincing you to believe something and then turning everything around to show you what's really true.
Right now I'm finishing up Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. Twain's never been a favorite of mine, but I might reconsider since I'm enjoying this one.
Next I'm planning to read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, then on to George Eliot's Silas Marner, our September selection. I love summer reading!