reviews

You are currently browsing the archive for the reviews category.

Rusty Sabich’s Second Act

July 1, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

Innocent, by Scott Turow
(Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, May 2010)
Erin Lewenauer

It is likely that questions concerning Rusty Sabich’s fate have been knocking around in the minds of Presumed Innocent fans for the past 22 years…questions which can now be answered with Turow’s definitive sequel, Innocent.

Turow is the king of the Legal Thriller Genre, which is to say, he defined it, and set the bar high. His near-abnormal ability to focus is apparent, especially in Innocent, in the seamless reintroducing of his realistic characters and a refreshingly complex plot, which switches between perspectives and points in time.

In 1987, with the release of Presumed Innocent, readers met a slew of absorbing characters and identified with their individual struggles. In 2010, returning to Turow’s beloved Kindle County, Illinois, readers find former lawyer, Sabich, a Chief Appellate Judge, turning 60. His sensitive and brilliant son Nat, has recently graduated from law school, following in his father’s footsteps, and Sabich has managed to somehow maintain his marriage of 36 years to bipolar Barbara.

“Barbara and I have resumed our normal mode,” Sabich says. “There is no sound, no TV, no dishwasher rumbling. The silence is the absence of any connection. She’s in her world, I’m in mine. Not even the radio waves that come out of deep space could be detected. Yet this is what I chose and more often still believe I want.”

Then one morning, Sabich wakes up next to a dead wife and chaos ensues. He waits 24 hours before reporting her death, casting a shadow of a doubt on his character. Was this murder? Suicide? An accident? The public demands an answer. The cards are not stacked in Sabich’s favor when it is revealed that a 24 hour window would have allowed incriminating chemicals and evidence to disappear from Barbara’s bloodstream.

Tommy Molto, a former acting prosecuting attorney and Sabich’s nemesis, who unsuccessfully prosecuted him for killing his mistress decades ago, resurfaces alongside cocky and shifty, Chief Deputy Jim Brand; both are determined to go after Sabich once again. His candidacy for a higher court in an imminent election and his most recent affair with his magnetic law clerk, Anna Vostic, 26 years his junior, combine to shift his life once again toward downfall. On top of this, his former attorney Sandy Stern, who saved his life the first time around, is now in poor health and the question remains, whether he, or anyone, can save Sabich from himself a second time.

Turow will always stand out because of the seriousness with which he approaches his work and the weight he gives his characters. It is comforting and discomforting to revisit Sabich, his family, and his cohorts. Readers see evidence of their maturity, yet a new sadness blooms, revealing sharp insights about relationships.

“It’s prosaic most often, but so is much of life at its best—with the family around the table, with buddies at a bar,” Sabich says.

Most of Turow’s old characters long for the unattainable and mourn their past choices. New characters, dynamic Anna and hilarious Judge Yee among others, provide some relief from the dark turmoil that accompanies scrambling with unchangeable mistakes and flaws. Sabich concludes, “The Declaration of Independence said we have a right to pursue happiness—but not to find it.” Innocent’s airtight plot will have readers racing toward the end, while battling an impulse to slow down and appreciate Turow’s craft at its best.

Erin Lewenauer is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She has also reviewed Manhood for Amateurs and Elephants in Our Bedroom for Hot Metal Bridge.

Disorder in the House: Sarah Waters’ Marxist Gothic

May 15, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
(Hardcover: Riverhead, April 2009; Paperback: Riverhead Trade, May 2010)
Kathleen Davies

It is 1947, and the English countryside is still reeling from WWII. Doctor Faraday has been summoned to Hundreds Hall, the home of the Ayres family, to look in on a servant girl who claims that she is too ill to work. Faraday determines that the girl is merely homesick but, before he leaves, she confides that she keeps hearing strange noises. She believes that the house is haunted.

We are in familiar territory from the moment we enter Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger: there is a rational man of science, a repressed and restless heroine, her scarred and reclusive brother, her alluring mother, even a long-dead child who may be the “little stranger” of the title. There are also mysterious fires, madness, and things that go bump in the night. And of course, there is a house. Still grand despite patches of dry rot and peeling wallpaper, still impressive despite the encroachments of Council estates and nouveau riche neighbors, Hundreds Hall may be the central character in Waters’ novel (as in any good haunted house story). However, it is the unfamiliar spin that Waters puts on these familiar material that elevates her tale above a good rainy day read.

Best-known for bringing queer sensibility to Victorian generic conventions, Waters here turns a critical eye on the type of sedate country-house ghost story embraced by Henry James and Edith Wharton. But in this case, Waters doesn’t focus on sexuality (perhaps because sexuality is so often the subtext of gothic horror; the house becomes a symbol of buried impulses). Instead, she takes a good look at the house itself as an object of desire, locating the discontents of gothic horror in socioeconomic resentment rather than psychosexual neuroses.

Waters’ (very unreliable) narrator, Doctor Faraday, is keenly aware of himself as an expression of class aspiration. The son of working-class parents, he frets that his position as the village doctor’s partner doesn’t warrant the sacrifices his parents made for him. Faraday also worries about the effect that the introduction of the National Health Service will have on his income and ambitions. He is thus both flattered and relieved when the Ayres family begins to depend on him – first for medical advice, later to provide a rational explanation for a spate of bizarre sights and sounds. The characters’ relationship to the house and its haunting are informed by class. Both Caroline Ayres and her brother Roderick fear that they have given up productive lives in the larger world in exchange for preserving the family estate. Unsurprisingly, they are readier than Faraday to accept the possibility that the house has taken on a malevolent life of its own. (In one memorable scene, household objects seems to attack the family in a ghoulish parody of commodity fetishism.) But Faraday also may be haunted by the house. As a child, he was so taken with the place on his sole visit that he chipped off a piece of ornamental border as a souvenir. And, in that single neat image, Waters blurs the line between acquisition and destruction, forcing us to wonder if Faraday’s concern with the Ayres family is entirely benevolent.

Waters’ adherence to gothic narrative conventions and style has its drawbacks. Her style here is leisurely and circumspect (which may come as a surprise to readers who know her playful and robust prose from her debut novel, Tipping the Velvet) and a good hundred pages pass before the muted shocks of footsteps in empty corridors give way to something more visceral. Further, Faraday can be a frustrating presence – at one crucial moment, he literally can’t see what’s right in front of him, and the disconnect between his actions and his intentions becomes increasingly painful. Still, if you’re interested in seeing how old houses can be inhabited by new spirits, The Little Stranger offers a lingering chill sharpened by social critique.

Kathleen Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.

You Might Have Missed…Monkeys

March 15, 2010 in books, reviews by Robyn

[Editor's Note: Watch for regular reviews of older titles with the heading "You Might Have Missed..." coming each month.]

Monkeys by Susan Minot
(Dutton, 1986)
Rosemary McMillen

I hadn’t heard of Susan Minot’s book Monkeys until recently, when it was recommended to me by one of my professors. Originally published in 1986, the book was reprinted in August 2000 by Vintage Contemporaries, a division of Random House. It ended up being one of those books I spent all day reading from cover to cover, and I’ve been passing on the recommendation since.

Although the nine short stories that make up Monkeys follow the same characters over the course of thirteen years, the book cannot be called a novel. Many pivotal events happen off-stage, and it is left to the reader to infer what has happened between stories: break-ups, a death, a marriage. What binds the stories together are the Vincent family—Mum, Dad, and their seven children—and their relationships to each other. Minot’s prose is sparse and economic, but she portrays these characters with a warmth that allows you access to their lives.

The reader is introduced to the Vincents through the eyes of nine-year-old Sophie, who narrates the first story, “Hiding.” Because of her youth, Sophie notices many things innocently, without understanding their significance. Thus unknowingly, she introduces the reader to the problems that will haunt the Vincent family throughout course of the book: Dad’s alcoholism, his distance from the family, Mum’s hunger for his affection. Sophie describes Dad’s withdrawal while Mum dances for her children:

She bangs the floor with her sneakers, pumping and kicking, thudding her heels in smacks, not like clicking at all, swinging her arms out in front of her like she’s wading through the jungle. She speeds up, staring straight at Dad who’s reading his book, making us laugh even harder. He’s always like that.

Because she doesn’t understand the implications of what she sees, and so does not dwell on them, Sophie’s observations become an example of what the jacket blurb calls Minot’s “sparely eloquent” writing.

While it is impossible to develop the personalities of all seven children in the space of 150 pages, as a whole the Vincent family is believable and knowable from story to story. Mum especially comes alive with her zest for life. On the way home from fancy parties, she goes swimming in the ocean in her cocktail dress; she holds protests against the Vietnam War. Her joy in life is passed on to her children, expressed in their enthusiastic welcome of new births in the family. She surrounds her children with affection to make up for their aloof father; but her own unsatisfied need for love cripples her. The reader is never given direct access to her thoughts, but sees her through the eyes of her children, who perceive more of her pain as they grow older.

Although most of the stories were published individually before the release of Monkeys in 1986, the book does come together into something more than a collection of individual works. Each story draws subtle details from others that would otherwise lay dormant—a box of postcards in one story from a lover in another; a seemingly irrelevant ghost story that becomes foreshadowing.

And despite the gaps between them, the stories trace an arc that would be incomplete were any of them missing. By the final story, “Thorofare,” the emotional journey is brought not so much to a resolution as to a revelation of the tragic effects that Dad’s distance and alcoholism have on each member of the family. The pain here, as in all the stories, is tempered with graceful understatement, a fitting conclusion to this soft-spoken, heart-rending book.

Rosemary McMillen is an MFA student in fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.

Reines Lays Out Baudelaire

October 15, 2009 in books, reviews by Emily

My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Ariana Reines
(Mal-O-Mar Editions, October 2009)
Chad Vogler

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.

Keep On Keepin’ On: Pynchon Rewriting American History

September 15, 2009 in books, online, reviews by Emily

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

(Penguin, August 2009)

Bradley J. Fest

The publication of Inherent Vice makes even more apparent that one of Thomas Pynchon’s fundamental projects for the past fifty years has been to rewrite the history of the United States. If the novel is not exactly an alternate history in the mode of something like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), it is surely a history that privileges the outsider, the deviant, the interstitial, occluded, and secret. If the Tristero was the mark of global conspiracy in the 1960s, it is the “Golden Fang” which reinscribes that secret history of the world into the aughts. In this way, Vice finds its closest companion in the Pynchon oeuvre in The Crying of Lot 49. A psychedelic-noir set near the end of 60s in Los Angeles, Vice is relatively and surprisingly straightforward… for a Pynchon novel. Romping into the seedy underbelly is as-always-wonderfully-named-Pynchon-character Doc Sportello, a private detective who quickly becomes embroiled in a tangled network of postmodern intrigue. But instead of being named the executor of an estate, an old flame of Doc’s comes walking up to his office. Cue Humphrey Bogart smoking a joint.

I do not think it a mistake to call Vice a sequel to Lot 49, but a sequel that only forty years of hindsight could provide. Like if Lucas didn’t screw up and wait another ten years before telling Jar Jar Binks’ story. And this is what makes it so weird. First of all, though I won’t tell you how, the book ends on an explicit contemplation of our current moment in which distributed networks are becoming the form all social interaction. Unlike Gravity’s Rainbow, whose ending feels like a cheap, untimely meditation on technology, Vice explicitly transposes the 20/20 significance of ARPAnet (in brief: the internet) onto the fabric of the tale. In considering Vice as a sequel, however, I must acknowledge that its similarities to Lot 49 are not always its strongest suit. The sixties were kinda-sorta promising in Lot 49, whereas that optimism, or spirit of the time (if you will), is surely on the wane in Vice. The main weavings of narrative motion—sexual escapades, drug use, mysteries wrapping into mysteries, protagonists who never really “get it” even if they show pluck and aplomb throughout— are still on display, and haven’t necessarily aged well. Pynchon is every bit as foot-loose and fancy-free as before, but after publishing two massive novels Mason Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006), he rides Inherent Vice like the last leg in the Tour de France when the winner is already more-or-less crowned and merely has to coast in.

Still, it is fascinating to juxtapose pretty much straight-up noir with the psychedelic culture of the late 60s. And it’s a viciously fun tale. Having also recently traversed the sky with the Chums of Chance, I cannot, as a late comer, feel more and more tickled by his work. So, some bias, eh. But that doesn’t change the fact that Vice is, like, fun to read. The pages turn, and all that; and it’s kinda sexy.

And here Pynchon is always pretty successful. Juxtaposing one popular generic construct with another, as in Gravity’s Rainbow’s convergence of WWII stories with the spy narrative (mostly a Cold War thing), Vice permits noir to go beyond its recent status as merely inspiration to La Nouvelle Vague and historically enter a world which, to vastly oversimplify it, is a cross between Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, and Law and Order: Charles Manson’s Internet Dating Show. In other words, it combines popular culture, established genres, and detritus pretty well.

Vice is definitively adding to Pynchon’s fifty-year paranoia project, multiplying the global conspiratorial forces whose goals could be anything from world domination in the form of eugenics (Alex Jones) to merely a tax haven for dentists . This is ultimately the success of Vice: its paranoia is relevant. Against the Day’s anxiety over time and light, to boil it down, was perhaps too metaphysical. GR’s permanent implied mark of importance upon Slothrop prevented the materialization of the conspiracy of Rocket 00000 (or whatever) to escape farce, even if an infinitely complex farce. Vice, however, lets the apocalyptic Pynchon—the Pynchon who imagines a “more-perfect-world” through a Tesla who never existed, an ARPAnet which throws Humphrey Bogart into the ash-bin of history (as Tarantino just did to WWII)—breathe deeply in returning to the late 60s. In this late, strange age, it feels like something of a call to “remember” the sense of the future contained in that moment when the past was slowly falling away (rather than forget, something which Doc is constantly doing), when the revolutionary nature of the “hippie” lifestyle was becoming aware of its own narcissistic naïveté, when the apocalypse had already happened and everyone was clear about what exactly that was or meant. There is simply too much of the 21^st century here to see this as merely a critique of the LA (or the America) of the 60s and what it led to. For there is a strange suggestion that “perhaps” it all went in the right direction: “Someday. . . there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.” In other words, Pynchon seems to be suggesting that if what we’ve gained from history is the ability to discern ourselves within a community of people, even if it be of the Facebook type, and if this is all we have of the past, of the perverted promise of it, then so be it.

Bradley J. Fest received his MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, where he is now a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature, with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse.

Unflinching, Uncomfortable, and Unsettling: The Easter Parade

January 25, 2009 in HMB, books, fiction, reviews by Sal

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
(Delacorte Press, August 1976)
Sal Pane

When a novel begins with the opening line of “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” you know you’re in store for a bleak take on the world. But that’s to be expected from Richard Yates, the voice of the postwar age of anxiety made fashionable again thanks to the film adaptation of his first book, the heartbreaking Revolutionary Road. The Easter Parade is his fourth novel and the book that rescued his career for very good reason. Here, Yates shows a good deal of growth as he chronicles the lives of the Grimes sisters for forty desperate years in the intellectual wastelands of New York City.

Yates’ vision is unflinching, uncomfortable and unsettling. Emily, the younger sister, is the protagonist of the book who we follow through her humble beginnings and her quest to become a bohemian. Along the way she indulges in meaningless relationship after meaningless relationship, all the way while comprehending nothing about life. “She often said ‘I see’ about things she didn’t wholly understand,” Yates writes of her, and it’s a phrase Emily uses constantly throughout the entire novel. Emily ends up alone and miserable, and her sister doesn’t fare much better. Yates wisely juxtaposes “the original liberated woman” with her sister Sarah who marries a “limited man, and in many ways an ignorant man.” Her domesticated life falls apart in a crumbling countryside manor while her husband beats her and discourages her from partaking in any form of outside life, even one of the mind.

Although The Easter Parade is a breathtaking portrait of two women’s lives following World War II, it does feel dated in places thanks to Yates’ occasional cheap shots at feminism. When Emily is completely alone and at her wit’s end, she meets a woman who runs a “female masturbation clinic” and a scene ensues in which Yates brutally mocks the early stages of women’s lib. But despite the fact that a few scenes and themes have aged badly in the thirty years since The Easter Parade’s publication, what’s truly startling is how contemporary the majority of the book still feels. At its heart, Yates’ fourth novel deals with human beings searching for happiness when there are only limited options available to them. In this sleek volume he examines the pros and cons of not only married life but that of the intellectual as well, and what he discovers is alarming not only because of the pointlessness of it all, but also because of Yates’ deeply nihilist bent. The Yates mantra, as spoken through Emily Grimes, is as simple as it is chilling: “Yes, I’m tried. And do you know a funny thing? I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve never understood anything in my whole life.”

Silber’s ‘World’ is big. Almost as big as the next edition of Hot Metal Bridge.

January 16, 2009 in Contributors, HMB, books, fiction, online, reviews by Emily

The Size of the World by Joan Silber

(Norton, June 2008)

Emily Stone

Catapulted between New York State and Thailand, Florida and Chiapas, and even New Jersey and Bloomington, Indiana, the six interlinked monologues in Joan Silber’s The Size of the World explore the “elusive connection between place and happiness.” Silber, whose Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, is a master of crafting overlaps in plot that imply larger meanings without compromising unity. Here, honest first-person accounts, equal parts confession and meditation, reveal a shared sense of freedom and displacement that marks American expatriates and, in one case, immigrants living as Americans. Recounting his life in Thailand, Toby describes himself as “a foreigner washed up here once by war.” Kit, a hippie single mother in Mexico, explains, “I was a traveler: I liked my comfort, I was not always brave, and I was only just starting to be curious.” In some cases, the relationship between parallel narrators is apparent within a speaker’s first paragraphs: Toby and Kit, for instance, were high school lovers. In others, the connections are more aloof, less linear–siblings’ stories are separated by decades, and a husband and mother-in-law paint a Rashomon-style portrait of the woman between them.

Of course, tales of international exploration are also tales of international conflict. Silber’s stories in The Size of the World are war stories, but, like the people who tell them, they are inherently off-kilter and framed by peculiar circumstances. Toby begins his story in Vietnam but as a civilian engineer rather than a draftee. Annunziata’s World War II story is of a contented life in rural Sicily under the Fascists until economics prompted her husband to emigrate. Owen alludes to the trenches in the First World War, yet his life in the book only begins (in a chapter spoken by his sister) during the following years when he is a soldier of fortune in Southeast Asia. Mike, a politics professor who raises a liberal voice against the American “War on Terror,” acts as much out of anxiety over losing a wife’s affection as he does out of conviction. In the final chapter, Owen returns as a pensioner and anti-war protester in California in the 1970s, a man whose small actions unintentionally attach him to the fates of the book’s other characters.

On occasion, Silber belabors the connections between her protagonists, assigning them awkward statements about a high-school science teacher or a first husband’s grandfather only in the service of connecting disparate narrative lines. Her writerly voice, too, can break through the scrim of the monologues, though her intellectual omniscience is less jarring than it is utterly captivating. She prompts Mike, the most contemporary and also the most sedentary of the narrators, to say that “if you longed for another place, you longed for another time,” signaling that the “elusive connection” between travel and emotion is the product of contradiction layered over romance.

Hot Metal Bridge BOOK REVIEWS. Welcome The First.

October 3, 2008 in Blogroll, HMB, books, criticism, fiction, online, reviews by

Breaking Dawn Dominates (and I want to gush about it)

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
(Little, Brown and Company/August 2008)
Alexandra Rae Valint

Vampires are cool again. Of course, to we steadfast lovers of the bloodsucking mythical creatures, vampires have always been cool: stealthy, seductive, and inexhaustible metaphors for sex, empire, death, and desire. However, vampires have not always been as sexy as they are now, and as they undeniably are in Stephenie Meyer’s cultishly popular Twilight Saga, the finale of which came out on August 2.

Edward Cullen, our vampire hero and star-crossed love of our human heroine, Bella Swan, is perfection: a chiseled, cold, god-like body paired with an enviable IQ. He’s a guy’s guy who plays baseball and loves fast cars, but he’s also the type of guy you bring home to your parents, who opens doors for you and lovingly records you a CD of songs he’s composed for you on his piano (which, by the way, he’s kind of a prodigy at). Oh, and he’s totally okay with just kissing. He’s inspired a legion of loyal fans who endlessly extoll his flawlessness. He’s nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who for all his manipulative magnetism always aroused equal amounts desire and repulsion. Neither was Dracula quite the same brooding, tortured type that the vampire has become in today’s fang-friendly pop culture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s resident vampire-with-a-soul, Angel, brooded with a stern, apprehensive face and morose eyes for three seasons before broodingly departing (at night, in shadow, without a word) to spin-off show Angel, where he brooded successfully for many more seasons. The recently aired (and cancelled) CBS series Moonlight starred another brooding vampire with a conscience who was, again, in love with a feisty blonde mortal. Such TV series have continued the trend towards the humanization and sexification of the vampire, along with the concomitant lessening of the danger and violence associated with the vampire’s demonic desires. Those sickly anemic looks, pointy fangs, and unwilling neck-scarred human victims have become stunning paleness, a set of perfect teeth, and a jug of extra blood from the hospital or leftover from the butcher’s shop. The vampire has increasingly become the repository for our hopes and anxieties about the human status as hero/victim: trapped within an everlasting yet bloodless and therefore blood-lusting body, the vampire struggles above his demon—his own self—to be “good,” “selfless,” and as “normal” as possible. The vampire has come to represent the human situation. Edward Cullen embodies this paradigm to the hilt, desperately trying to be good and moral in every way still open to him.

Clearly, there is nothing new about vampire lit. After Stoker and Polidori, Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, and Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries (the basis for HBO’s fall series True Blood) followed. But no other vampire lit, to my knowledge, has caused this kind of frenzied, impassioned ferment. Witness: bookstores sponsor nationwide midnight release parties a la Harry Potter; a high school girl band, The Bella Cullen Project, gets their Twilight-inspired compositions distributed on iTunes (I recommend “Switzerland”); I’m up reading wide-eyed until 4 a.m., only to finally go to sleep and dream about the characters, only to wake up and write an acoustic-folk song with my sister (also a fan), only to then brag about said song to all my friends, who one-by-one I have converted to the series (my book conversion rate has never been higher).

To the still un-converted, the premise of the series is fairly simple: Bella Swan, our narrator, moves to Forks, a sleepy, rainy city in Washington State. Her first day at school, as she gazes across the abyss of the cafeteria, she locks eyes with a handsome pale boy sitting with other beautiful pale people (his adopted vampire family). Indescribable attraction and inevitable love ensue, even when she discovers he’s a vampire and even after he confesses that he must restrain himself from biting her because her blood is pretty much the best smelling liquid in the beverage store. Various threats to their love/life occur in the first three books, and through it all Bella desperately yearns to be turned into a vampire so she can live with Edward for ever and ever. The arrival of the fourth and final book in the series, Breaking Dawn, had the Twilight universe atwitter. Would Bella go through with the wedding? Would she become a vampire? Would Jacob (Bella’s best friend and a werewolf) imprint? Would Bella and Edward have sex? When August 2 arrived, and I cracked open the hefty hardback, I nearly read the 754 pages in one sitting.

Twists and surprises and answers to the aforementioned pressing questions make it almost impossible to talk about the book beyond page 25. However, from my investigation into the massive online response, Breaking Dawn has been met with more resistance and less unconditional glee than the previous three books received. Of course, a beloved series’ final book will never be met with hugs and kisses from everyone, and the book does take a distinct turn in subject matter, narrative structure, tone, and mood. The book feels more adult and less young adult, and perhaps that’s why some of the young fan base feels a bit alienated and betrayed. The book is no longer concerned with proving Edward and Bella’s love, but rather with handling the crises that come after love is assured. Such a maturation was to be expected; Bella leaves high school and parents behind, and she ventures into the unknown terrains of marriage and vampire existence (comically, the first causes her much more dread than the second). Even Meyer’s oftentimes inflated, indulgent prose feels more controlled, descriptively tighter here; she spends less time, though still a lot of time, expressing mushy love and describing steamy kisses and instead takes both the mushiness and steaminess of Edward and Bella’s relationship for granted (although the cold planes of Edward’s chest still receive an undue amount of attention).

Meyer is writing a different kind of book in Breaking Dawn: not girl gets boy, or girl gets boy back, or girl gets stuck in a classic love triangle. Breaking Dawn’s winding plot is harder to stereotype as frothy teen fantasy romance when it’s mostly preoccupied with the reasons we form the families we do and the ways we keep them from disintegrating. Thematically, the books have always emphasized choice and sacrifice (ironically within a framework of destiny), but yet again, such topics have matured and broadened in this final book. Breaking Dawn’s climactic showdown, a more psychological and nuanced battle than the one in Eclipse, features relevant questions about power, war, corruption, and the necessity of resisting the politics of fear.

I have spent a lot of time wondering why these books are so gosh-darn popular. Certainly, there is the refreshing, yet endearingly sexy, abstinence of Bella and Edward and the drug and alcohol free high school scene, both which makes the world of Gossip Girl a drunken and stoned red-light district by comparison. Of course, there is the grand, love-at-first-sight, fated passion between Bella and Edward, a soul mate scenario which invokes Juliet and Romeo and Cathy and Heathcliff (Bella and Edward actually quote from Wuthering Heights to express their mutual infatuation). But, I think, at the heart of readers’ intense investment in the series is that Bella, a seemingly ordinary girl who doesn’t fit in in “this world,” whose life in “this world” is defined by mind-numbing mediocrity, has another viable option; she has an escape.

And here is the core fantasy behind the series: not that an average looking girl instantaneously mesmerizes a beautiful and brilliant supernatural being (although that is another fantasy), but that she possesses something special and inherent that makes her belong more to that other world, the glamorous supernatural realm, than to this mundane world of cafeteria lunches and graduation thank you cards. Of course, when Bella bemoans her life of mediocrity she also reveals her own, distinctly not-average strengths: her incredible bravery, loyalty, and ability to notice that an important letter is written, crucially, on a page torn from her copy of The Merchant of Venice. Despite her clumsiness and her human need for food and sleep, she’s always possessed a “superpower.” Although Edward’s superpower is the ability to read everyone’s mind, Bella’s mind has consistently been a closed book to him (it aggravates him; delights her). Bella’s mind is a fortress of sorts, defended by steely resolve and a wry individualism. Breaking Dawn satisfyingly follows this potential in ways that, again, I can do no more than hint at. Bella’s mind becomes her ultimate strength and her ultimate gift—a capitulation proving that an intelligent girl is always already a superhero.

On Garfield

March 7, 2008 in film, metaphor, online, reviews, writers by Adam | 4 comments

I have never liked the comic strip Garfield. It seems I was never young enough to find the antics of the strip’s obese orange tabby funny. And I haven’t gained any ironic appreciation of it over the years, no love-to-hate-it relationship as with Family Circus or Mallard Fillmore.

But after recently checking out Garfield on the web (for no real reason but boredom), I think I may have come up with a reason to appreciate the world of this Monday-hating, lasagna-loving cat and his desperately lonely owner, Jon Arbuckle.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll Give You Something to Cry About!

May 18, 2007 in HMB, Uncategorized, books, fiction, online, reviews, writers by Adam | 6 comments

On a day to day basis, I am a very laugh-y person. I giggle at incredibly innappropriate times, like when my large, short-tempered 3rd grade science teacher used to scream at our class to be quiet. While my fellow eight-year-olds cowered, my reaction was to muffle my laughter–surely bred out of fear–in the sleeve of my shirt. Sometimes I laugh so hard that my eyes get puffy and red, and the muscles of my face feel frozen in a perpetual, doughy smile. It’s actually a little painful.

But all that said, I also cry. A lot. Not because a road rager flipped me off or because I realize my bank account is devastatingly sparse or because I just ate about two week’s worth of calories in one sitting, and can already see it accruing on my thighs. I cry when something moves me, and I find it fulfilling to realize that I am moved by a quite a lot. Two of my favorite ways to get my cartharsis-on are by listening to heartbreakingly beautiful songs, and by reading a good novel. The list below details the who and what of both songs and books that have seriously moved me. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

Tunes:

“One More Dollar” by Gillian Welch.

Oh, Gillian. How I love you. You and your cowboy hat!!

I loved the lyrics to this song so much I wrote a story based on them. And while I wrote, I listened to this song on repeat. For literally days on end. If this particular tune doesn’t suit your fancy, try “Orphan Girl” or “No One Knows My Name.” If she doesn’t have you crying, she’ll have you tapping your bare toes and pensively sipping some moonshine.

“This is the Dream of Win and Regine” by Final Fantasy.

If you are already an Arcade Fire fan, this song may be that much lovelier (Win and Regine are married and play in their band, The Arcade Fire, as one gloriously artistic and adorable pair of musical lovebirds), but it stands its ground entirely on its own. Perhaps I am shamelessly sentimental, but this song embodies the kind of love and loneliness and sweetness and angst that I wish I could pour into my own writing.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

Say what you will about best sellers, but this book is a damn good one. Beautiful. I laughed, I cried so hard I had to put the book down until I got a grip, I laughed some more, I cried a lot more.

“Remember the Mountain Bed” by Billy Bragg and Wilco, lyrics by Woody Guthrie.

Um…I can’t talk about this one right now. I’m about to start crying.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

I’ve read this book several times and can’t decide if it’s a really twisted love story, or a story about a couple of miserable existentialists gone a little cuckoo from all those windy moors. What I do know is it is delightfully grim, and I can’t help but be moved when, psychotic or not, a guy loves his lady so much he’d dig up her dead body just to see her again.

(*giggle*/*sniff*)

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling (all six of them).

I have cried at the end of every single one of these babies. I don’t know if it has something to do with Harry’s whole Burdened Hero persona, his poor murdered parents, or the fact that by the end of each book I’ve spent a straight forty-eight hours prying my eyes open with toothpicks and abstaining from food and drink in favor of finding out what’s going down at Hogwarts. These books are well-written, funny, smart, sweet, and sad. Everything a good book should be, in my opinion.

I’m a sweet-and-salty kind of person, and I like my reading and listening materials to hold that same dual quality. It’s like Joni Mitchell (whose music often makes me cry) said: Laughing and crying, you know it’s the same release.

–Ashleigh