A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

James Ellroy and Sexual Violence

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LA Confidential - James EllroyWatching L.A. Confidential again last night, I started to reflect on my long history with James Ellroy. I was young when I first started reading him—maybe eleven or twelve—and The Black Dahlia was not my first of his books. When I started with Clandestine or Brown’s Requiem, the noir voice had me, a girl who had grown up on the movie The Big Sleep but never read Raymond Chandler, hooked. The Black Dahlia was the second book of his that I read and as a burgeoning woman, I wanted to be as beautiful and as desired as Betty Short. I was young enough and immortal enough that the extreme violence committed against her didn’t even phase me. Even after reading L.A. Confidential and several other books, I didn’t key into it or how it might be affecting me.

If you know anything about Ellroy, you know that his mother was brutally murdered and that his books, especially those early ones, are places where he is dealing with that trauma. Elizabeth Short’s death was not dissimilar to his mother’s and there is often at least one Bud White in each early James Ellroy novel trying to save the girl—any girl—from harm. I believe that the resulting works show a respect for women, even if it borders on unhealthy worship.

I was still very young and unsettled when I watched the premiere of L.A. Confidential in 1997 at SIFF. I still wanted to be one of the women that the foul-mouthed writer would worship, and I still thought murder, even brutal serial killer style murder, was interesting enough to take Bob Keppel’s class on Ted Bundy.

In the last few years, maybe as I’ve begun to see myself more as a mortal person not merely a sexual object, I’ve started to wonder about the sexual violence against women we expose ourselves to through various media. I used to enjoy Criminal Minds, but now I realize that (despite some smart detectives) the stories are populated with women as victims and the violence is often heinous and sexual. The last few years, the torture rape filled horror movies have ruined for me one of my favorite film genres. The only conversations I can have about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are about whether the sexual violence is for titillation and I’m still not convinced it isn’t.

Violence happens. I’m headed to Croatia soon and one of the things I can’t get out of my mind is the rape camps of the Bosnian War and that we can barely talk about it still. Humans are animals and at times that is far too evident. I don’t think we should ignore it, but I also don’t think we should normalize it. At the same time, it can be interesting to learn about those uncontrolled parts of ourselves.

I try not to read about rape (no more Stieg Larsson for me and I’ll skip The Kite Runner, thank you). I did write about rape in Polska, 1994 because I wanted to try to understand it. I’m glad I did, because through writing about Magda’s victimization, I was able to see myself as a whole person (rather than a victim) with power in my actions. My fear is that for many people scenes of sexual violence and torture are becoming sources of excitement rather than cautionary and we are teaching our children that women are victims not people. Even James Ellroy saw women as victim-objects to be saved.

I don’t have any answers, but the long-lasting effects of the victimization of women in media is something I will continue to think about.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of L.A. Confidential from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Wildness of Women Who Run with the Wolves, a Story of Becoming

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Opening Women Who Run with the Wolves by , I found a scrap of adding machine tape with my mother’s handwriting. In the top left corner was my own writing from the days when I was learning to shape eights from sixes (before I decided I liked two circles better). I remember sometime long ago when my mother gave me the book, but it had sat so long on the to-read shelf that it was dusty and I no longer remembered what she had said that day.

I enjoyed reading about wild women who trust their instincts and feed their souls. I found post-its beneath important passages and imagined what my mom was thinking about my dad. I’m old and settled enough in myself now that I want her advice on life and love, but it is a newish feeling and I am still hesitant to ask. The mystery deepened when one of the post-its was covered in handwriting that was not my mother’s.

Reading this book and feeling a connection to my mom and to all womanhood was a wonderful way to spend this weekend. Clarissa Pinkola Estés touched on the importance of growing into ourselves and trusting ourselves. She talked about what to do when we have been diverted from the path to ourselves by our families, culture, and choices. I could feel this book feeding my newest novel (the one I’m not ready to talk about). I could feel it feeding me, too. I was learning about my spirit and also my psyche. I was reading about Baba Jaga and Jung. I was integrating and growing.

My first critique is the book is not tightly written. Estés goes on and on in loops and often says in ten paragraphs what she could have said in one. But as she was repeating things, I was taking the chance to daydream about the lessons she was imparting and the fairytales she had introduced. I had the space to create my own thoughts and get closer to myself. I was sorry the length of the book (and my mistaken assumption that it would be dense) kept me from reading it all these years.

My second critique is that this book need not be geared toward women only. There are some lessons that are women-centric (most men, I’d wager, don’t spend time worrying if they are nice enough), but the ideas of learning from instinct and trusting yourself and becoming are universal. Though it will be easier for some women to enjoy the book because it is geared toward them (and I’m sure most of the self-help market is women anyway), I felt sad that men might not see this book’s value for them as well.

Third and last critique. Estés often uses Spanish words where English would have done. I think she was trying to create a voice that was more open and free while evoking her own heritage. As a Spanish speaker, I kept looking at the words wishing that there was a reason they were in Spanish, that there was a strong connotation only Spanish could capture, when often the English meaning is the same.

On Mother’s Day, I spoke with my mom about the book and about how much I was learning from it. She said she never could get into it. A friend had given it to her saying that my mom was a wild woman. Perhaps she couldn’t get into it because my mom already is a wild woman. Perhaps I was quietly learning lessons she already knew. Perhaps I started reading this book at exactly the right time.

My copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves is now heavily underlined and the dog ears at the bottoms of pages grow more frequent toward the end. Those turned corners along with the initials “HG” denote passages I will explore as I write my new book. A book about being a woman not a girl. A book about wildness. A book about becoming.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Love Note to Jonathan Lethem

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Seven years ago my husband taught me to love Jonathan Lethem. This is unusual because, though my husband is a deep and careful reader with a fantastic memory, I am the voracious one who recommends authors and always hungers to discuss the latest book with him before I forget it. When he kept telling me about this fantastic detective novel he was reading for school, I picked up Motherless Brooklyn and never gave it back.

This week I pulled Gun, With Occasional Music from my to-read shelf because I was tired after a long Soviet binge and wanted something familiar, something easy, something I knew I would enjoy. I have read exactly one novel I didn’t like—Amnesia Moon—but even that may have been my mood. Late at night as I picked up this new read, I didn’t even care what the book was about—I simply sought comfort in Lethem’s pages.

I should have taken a clue from the Raymond Chandler epigraph, still I was surprised by the classic detective novel opening. I’ve read a lot of detective novels and one of the things I liked about Motherless Brooklyn was how it reimagined the genre whereas this book seemed to be pulled straight from it. I closed the book to examine the blurbs—references to both Chandler and Philip K. Dick. I’ve (sadly) never read Dick, but I have watched Blade Runner more times than I care to count. I started reading again and I started to understand—Lethem had immersed himself deeply in the genre so he could play with it from the inside. And it was fun.

One of my favorite things about Lethem is the freedom and playfulness with which he writes. From The Disappointment Artist to Men and Cartoons, I always feel like he is enjoying the writing process and that makes my reading all the more fun. I could go on and on about all the craft elements, and Lethem is an artist, but this week I simply want to appreciate the gift of a writer who loves writing.

I am reading this book slowly—savoring it—so it has been at my bedside for many nights. When my husband saw it, he mentioned how much he had enjoyed it. I said, yes, I loved Motherless Brooklyn but that this was a different approach to a detective novel. He said he’d read Gun, With Occasional Music years ago and asked me whether the kangaroo had started to talk. It was his copy I was marking up night after night and it must have lain on my to-read shelf for years. I’m glad I picked this book this week. I’m even more glad I can discuss every delicious page with my husband.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Gun, With Occasional Music or Motherless Brooklyn from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Jay Gatsby: Boat Against the Current

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the great gatsby f scott fitzgerald

Jay Gatsby is set in opposition to the other characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The harder he tries to row towards them, the farther away he gets. Where other characters are fleshed out in their foibles, Gatsby is silent on the beach against the moonlight, drawing the characters and the reader to seek him out. Fitzgerald accomplishes this through his characterization of Gatsby.

Gatsby is physically separated at his house in West Egg, across the bay from the rest of the cast in East Egg. The only other character we meet from “the less fashionable” West Egg is the narrator, Nick Carraway, who is also set apart from the in crowd. By setting these two characters (one of whom is the point of view character) across from the others, I felt the distance from East Egg and that East Egg is the lifestyle these characters desire. But even more so, I felt the desire to know Gatsby.

Fitzgerald introduces the phantasm of Gatsby on page 2 as the man who “represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn” but he doesn’t speak until page 47 where he is initially unidentified. Until then, his physical presence is an enigma in the moonlight, a man stepping from the darkness and stretching “out his arms toward the dark water.” His reputation, though, precedes him. Gatsby is frequently brought up as the hero or more often villain of endless rumors that tease the reader until I was gagging for a chance to meet the man. He is either related to Kaiser Wilhelm, has killed a man, is a German spy, a bootlegger, or an Oxford man; perhaps he is all. Even the concrete “truth” about the man is first revealed in a summary by Carraway. He is most certainly a man who picks his words with care.

In contrast, the rest of the characters have verbal diarrhea and reveal themselves all over the place, even without always speaking directly about themselves. Daisy speaks of her daughter, “I hope she’ll be a fool-that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” Tom speaks of Myrtle’s new puppy, “It’s a bitch…Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.” Myrtle’s sister Catherine speaks of a trip to Monte Carlo, “We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started, but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms,” even the man in the library reveals himself in marveling at Gatsby’s books, “What thoroughness!  What realism!  Knew when to stop, too-didn’t cut the pages.” Daisy comes across as horribly jaded, Tom is an ass, Catherine blames the world for her circumstance, and the man in the library is a snoop though capable of change. All of them are world-weary and cynical.

Fitzgerald draws Gatsby by filling in the negative space around him. The absence of direct observation leaves the reader to accept or deny the conclusions other characters have made about him. By the time Gatsby finally starts speaking for himself, I felt his character was already all sewn up. And in many ways, he was. If he isn’t a bootlegger, he has a “business gonnegtion,” though he didn’t graduate, he did go to Oxford; I don’t know if he killed a man, but he was a soldier in World War I. What Fitzgerald shows us is that these tidbits don’t define Gatsby at all. Reaching across the water that first night was the only true thing the reader knew about Gatsby. He is defined by his quest for Daisy. Everything he appears to be and has done was created for her.

In creating a mysterious façade and giving the reader a meaty parallel story, Fitzgerald sets up a slightly shady but impervious hero. Fitzgerald hints at what he is doing. Carraway’s first encounter with Gatsby has the effect of “stimulating my curiosity,” speaking of Jordan Baker he notes “most affectations conceal something eventually,” even when Gatsby is revealing his past for Carraway, Carraway notes, “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore.” Despite this, I thought I had him pegged, but when Gatsby meets Daisy for the first time, he glows and “a new well-being radiated from him.” His soft center, his Achilles heel, is revealed and he becomes an entirely different man. Because he was so distant before and because the tease was so compelling, I fell for the man and empathized with him as he is reintroduced to Daisy, loves her, loses her, and dies. Gatsby is revealed as a man with a passion for love and for life. This sets him against the cynicism of other characters and earns him Carraway’s derision

In my novel, Polska, 1994, I also have a character who exists mostly as a legend. Fitzgerald manages to make Gatsby the focus of the book even when he is not present not just through the title, but by always having him mentioned by other characters. Even when he is not present in body, he is being talked about and the reader is getting a sense at least of who he is perceived to be. By creating conflicting accounts of the man, a crook who also replaces a girl’s damaged dress, Fitzgerald keeps the reader interested and also hints at the depths of the man. It is a difficult thing to do, to draw around a character. The juxtaposition of his absence against the cloying presence of other characters is one way to make the reader hunger to know more about that character.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Great Gatsby from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Don DeLillo: The Man behind the Curtain in Mao II

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A novel is a fiction, necessarily orchestrated to form a cohesive story. In Mao II, creates a fictional world structured around specific historical events. The reader suspends disbelief and goes along with the author on the journey he set in motion. However, DeLillo seems to resist the submission by the reader to the story. He creates a world that feels cinematic instead of authentic. Then DeLillo slips in moments that feel so true, they pull back the curtain, show the two-dimensionality of the façade, and remind the reader of the fictional contrivances of the rest of the book.

Cinematic Fiction

DeLillo crafted one scene in the book so masterfully it felt cinematic. When Brita is photographing Bill in his writing room, DeLillo writes: “Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.” Through this action, I could see exactly the jumble of his room and the mess of his thoughts. Then DeLillo goes on: “[h]e struck the match and then forgot it.” It was beautiful. I was enthralled. I knew Bill completely through that one gesture. I could see him distractedly cogitating on his relationship with the world outside his house. I felt like I was watching the scene on screen and I didn’t mind that it felt cinematic rather than real. But then DeLillo takes it too far as Brita is taking the last pictures of Bill: “[Brita] moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood their looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.” DeLillo has carefully placed the reader in the position of seeing Bill through the lens of that camera to further the point he is trying to make about images. But at the same time, he is forcing the reader to step outside of the narrative and help construct the fiction. He took me from my seat in the theater and put me behind the camera. I felt forced to participate in the contrivance of the image.

A Series of Unlikely Events

DeLillo also kept me on the outside of the book looking in by throwing together too many unlikely events. If it were just the story of a man (Scott) who is led by fate (we are to believe) to his reclusive idol’s (Bill’s) doorstep, a photographer (Brita) who has sought out this idol, and the idol and his relationship with his editor (Charles) and family, I can weave together the threads and follow the story without complaint. But DeLillo ads in a myriad of disparate and improbable characters: a girl (Karen, a girl so spaced out she knows Warhol’s hair color but can’t remember his name) who was married at Yankee Stadium by the Reverend Moon and who somehow runs into Scott; Arafat; and a poet who was kidnapped at exactly the right moment to become a vehicle for Bill’s come-back. The story was too big for me, and even with a strong belief in fate, I had difficulty making the leaps DeLillo wanted me to make to believe that these characters could ever come together at precisely the right times without divine intervention. It felt like he was reminding me this was a fiction.

Moments of Truth

In sharp contrast to the contrivances DeLillo presented, there were two moments in the book that felt heartbreakingly true. One was when Bill is speaking about his childhood: “I used to announce ballgames to myself….I was the players, the announcers, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.” Having read enough DeLillo to recognize his fascination with baseball, I felt like this was him ascribing his own childhood to Bill. It was so humbly written and so shockingly revealing of an author’s desire to be an entire world, this moment stood out glaringly from the rest of the text. I felt for the first time that I was reading something true. The other sentence where I felt like I could touch the author was: “[a] woman knows how to want something.” It was so cryptic and yet so universally applicable. It seemed like one of those moments where an author throws in an observation he has made that speaks more to a greater truth than to the characters. Again, I felt I was taken out of the narrative, but this time by truths rather than fictions.

I enjoyed the book. I was caught up in the breadth of the story and the seamless way DeLillo panned back and forth between the thoughts of various characters. The book felt important. He was talking about big ideas and trying to make a point beyond the flow of the story. I liked the thrust of all of that. But in trying to make his point, DeLillo forced the situation (I have to believe consciously) and as a result, the story rang tinny. I think he was making a point about the fallacy of images, but I would have preferred to have the story. DeLillo reminded me that the reader can innately tell the difference between fact and fiction. And if I lie to them, whatever story I am trying to tell or whatever meaning I am trying to get across becomes tainted. I don’t mean that I will write nonfiction–I mean instead that I have to carefully consider whether the characters’ actions and my situations ring true. My novel must be a carefully crafted world, but I have to avoid the feeling of contrivance.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Mao II from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.