Notes From the Nightstand: MaddAddam

Wendy – friend, librarian, bookworm, and giver of lit-gifts – sent me my copy of Oryx and Crake, the first book in Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy, as a Christmas gift several years ago. It's even signed (to me, personally!), which makes it that much more special. Atwood is one of my favorite authors, which is not so surprising because she's simply one of the best writers currently publishing. Some of her books, like The Handmaid's Tale, are already classics. And her more recent work like The Blind Assassin and this current trilogy are brilliant and visionary.

I was immediately swept up in the world and the characters in Oryx and Crake. Atwood is often called a science fiction writer, but I have read that she prefers to call her work speculative fiction, in that everything she writes has already happened, has already been invented, or could easily occur based on current events and research. She simply imagines modern day conflicts carried out to their possible (speculative) logical conclusions, rather then inventing technologies that don't currently exist for a fantasy future world.

The MaddAddam world, for example, is fairly recognizable: it's an America where gated, elite biotech research corporations rule a society that has relinquished it's democracy and public safety in exchange for consumerism and technology. The environment is in serious trouble, the food people eat is barely even food anymore, and god forbid you ever express any dissatisfaction with the status quo. Just play some "reality" computer games and go have your epidermis resurfaced and you'll feel fine!

However, in the very beginning of the beginning of Oryx and Crake, a plague wipes out most of humanity and it's ethically destitute civilization. One of the survivors, Jimmy, tells the story in retrospect of his best friends, the Aspergers-y genius Crake and beautiful but damaged Oryx, in the time before the collapse.

The three books do not have a typical series-style storytelling arc. Most of the criticisms I have seen of this final book, MaddAddam, have to do with people's disappointed expectations that it did not contain some dramatic grand finale plot event. The entire arc of the story is outlined in the first book, which could stand on its own without the other two (and probably was originally intended to). But there's so much more to the story, and I assume Atwood just couldn't put it down without telling the other parts. If the first book is Jimmy's Version of the Story, then the second book is Ren and Toby's Version of the Story, and the third is mostly Adam and Zeb's Version of the Story.

The second book, The Year of the Flood, revisits the catastrophe now known as the Waterless Flood from the viewpoint of a few other survivors. Toby, Ren, Amanda, and Zeb are members of God's Gardeners, an environmental-religious group led by Adam One who come from the urban wastelands that lie outside the walls of the corporation compounds where Jimmy and Crake grew up. The book is fascinating as it gives a view of the world before and after from the other side of the tracks and shows how other people managed to survive the meltdown.

In this new third portion of the story, the recently released MaddAddam, you get all the survivors coming together to try to start putting the world back together. Once again, there's a lot of backstory for some of the characters, particularly Zeb. You also get to see what happens after the point where most apocalypse stories have the hero ride off into the sunset. It's basically all denouement (the resolution portion of a story after the climax wherein all the loose ends are tied up), which is unsatisfying to some people. I, on the other hand, am so in love with the characters that I wanted to see just exactly how they got on with the rest of the world happily/unhappily forever after. It's definitely not a perfect book and not as good as Oryx and Crake or The Year of the Flood, but it served a very specific and important purpose for me, who had read and loved the other two. But it isn't really all tied up neatly in a perfect little trilogy package.

My copies of these books, on the other hand, are tied up neatly in a perfect little trilogy package, because this book is also signed by Margaret Atwood, a matching bookend to my copy of Oryx and Crake. My friend, Amy, to whom I had given The Blind Assassin as a gift - ah, the literary karma! - invited me to go see Margaret Atwood speak in Cambridge last month. Atwood is deadpan and hilarious, both when reading from her work and when answering questions from the audience. She also wore her purse on her shoulder the entire time and had to borrow reading glasses as she had forgotten hers, which cracked us up. She reminded me of Agatha Christie's author character, Ariadne Oliver - a little scattered and eccentric, but very likeable.
 

So, like author, like book: MaddAddam is also deadpan and hilarious, scattered and eccentric, but very likeable. If you haven't read any of them, start with Oryx and Crake, of course. And if you can't put the story down and walk away from it afterwards, keep going. It's worth it.

Notes From the Nightstand: How to Be a Woman

I was introduced to Caitlin Moran through The Bloggess, one of my favorite bloggers. Moran is British and has been a  music journalist and TV presenter since she was in her teens. I can't believe I'm just now hearing about her. The Bloggess (AKA Jenny Lawson) raved about her, so I picked up her book How to Be a Woman. If you like funny women ranting humorously and telling vulgar jokes and talking about their UTIs, you'll like it. And if you don't, yeah. Don't.

The blurb on my copy calls it "The British version of Tina Fey's Bossypants. -Vanityfair.com", but I wouldn't really compare the two women. The only similarities are that they both are funny, both are women, and both talk about feminism. So, totally the same, of course! Caitlin Moran reminds me more of the Sedarises - more profane than Fey, more eccentric, and less of an overachiever. The one thing about Fey that makes me cringe is the sense I get that she does everything better and more efficiently than I do. Moran gives me the comfy feeling that she's even more of a wackadoo than I am. I love that quality in other women.

That is also exactly why her vision of 21st century feminism as outlined in this book is appealing to me as well. Her premise is that feminism doesn't need to be merely the domain of academics and self-serious activists. In order to revive modern feminism, feminists should feel free to easily, conversationally, tackle issues like Brazilian waxes and thong underwear and plastic surgery, in addition to pay equality and family/parenting leave and domestic abuse. Feminists could just be people who support women who also like to have a laugh and drink a beer.

I fully agree with her that all feminists need not be all things to all people - wonder women who save the world from all evils simultaneously with superhuman strength and focus. And when they don't succeed at this overburdened perfection, we shouldn't have to dismiss them as misguided failures. Ironically, even as she argues this in the book, online commenters and Goodreads reviewers criticize her for not addressing women of color, GLBTQetc.etc.etc. women, class issues, global women's issues, and so on, ad infinitum.

It's a humor piece, people. And a memoir more than a women's studies class term paper.

Really the best praise I could give this book is that I laughed and laughed and I could quote you whole passages gleefully, except that this blog is kind of a family show. Still, there are plenty of paragraphs that made me want to scrawl "Amen!" in the margins in red ink, like this one:

To be frank, childbirth gives a woman a gigantic set of balls. The high you get as you realize it's all over, and that you didn't actually die, can last the rest of your life. Off their faces with euphoria and bucked by how brave they were, new mothers finally tell the in-laws to back off, dye their hair red, get driving lessons, become self-employed, learn to use a drill, experiment with Thai condiments, make cheerful jokes about incontinence, and stop being scared of the dark. (pg. 218)

Or this:

Women who, in a sexist world, pander to sexism to make their fortune are Vichy France with tits. Are you 34GG, waxed to within an inch of your life and faking orgasms? Then you're doing business with a decadent and corrupt regime. Calling that a feminist icon is like giving an arms dealer the Nobel Peace Prize. (pg. 247)

Or this:

(On women who get plastic surgery) To be as privileged and safe as they are - but to still go through such painful, expensive procedures - gives the impression of a room full of fear. Female fear.

...I don't want that... I want a face that drawls - possibly in the voice of James Cagney, although Cagney from Cagney & Lacey will do - "I've seen more recalcitrant toddlers/devious line managers/steep mountain passes/complicated dance routines on Parappa the Rapper/bigger sums than you'll ever see in your life, sunshine. So get out of my special chair and bring me a cheese sandwich."

...Because there is an unspoken announcement commensurate with that look. Women who've had the needle, or the knife, look like they're saying: "My friends are not my friends, my men are unreliable and fainthearted, my lifetime's work counts for nothing, I am 59 and empty-handed. I'm still as defenseless as the day I was born. PLUS, I've now spunked all my yacht money on my arse. By any sane index, I have failed at my life." (pg. 282 , 286)

And yet, there are places where she and I diverge, just as Tina Fey and I aren't twinsies, just as Moran herself argues that all feminist icons can't be all things to all people. While I cheered her chapter on pornography, I had to shrug my shoulders at her chapter on strip clubs. And while I entirely defend her right to her position on abortion, I must admit that I could not relate to her experience or her conclusions at all. Plus, I suspect that her taste in music is not as good as mine. Ahem. This is the reality of women - we are not all the same. Our cause is not a monolith and one size feminist does not fit all.

I'm still putting Caitlin Moran on my short-list of women that I would like to have one too many bourbons with. On my imaginary crazy-lady-date, we would have a long, overwrought convo about UTIs and childbirth, taunt some college-aged boys about their jukebox selections, stagger arm-in-arm down the street cackling over tasteless jokes, share an ill-advised late-night burrito, and then someone would lose a shoe.

That's highly unlikely to happen, but a girl can dream. In the meantime, I'll just put another of her books, Moranthology, on my book store shopping list. Cheers!

Notes From the Nightstand: Hard Laughter

When I cracked open Anne Lamott's first novel, Hard Laughter, and saw my favorite e e cummings poem on the very first page, I was convinced that she and I were soul mates. I have really enjoyed a couple of her nonfiction books, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, and was looking forward to exploring some of her fiction writing. I viewed that "I thank You God for most this amazing/day:" as a sign of great things to come. Unfortunately, I really struggled with this book, and it took me forever to read (because I rarely can allow myself to completely give up on a book - I just end up dragging myself through the ones I don't like at a snail's pace).

Hard Laughter was Lamott's first book, and first novel, which she wrote in her early 20s for her father after he was diagnosed with brain cancer (from which he eventually died). As so often is the case, the first book is never the best book, and I think you have to cut this one a little slack as such. However, I couldn't recommend this book to anyone as it really has no plot and the characters are all so odd that probably very few people would identify with them enough to pull you through the stream-of-consciousness meandering.

As is her usual style, Lamott has some truly hilarious observations and there are some honest and heartwarming moments, but there are too many head-scratching, bonkers, Northern California hippie commune moments and characters that overburden the good points. There also just isn't enough storyline about her father's battle with cancer - supposedly the point of the book - to carry the rest of the nonsense.

The main character, Jennifer, who is a stand-in for Lamott herself, is a complete nut. And one of her best friends is a precocious ten-year-old girl, which I never could get into. Her other friends and lovers are also fairly annoying personalities, although her family members are endearing in a kind of kooky Royal Tenenbaums fashion. I don't usually have a problem with drugs and weird sex and mental institution escapees in my reading material, but I could have used less of them here, replaced hopefully by more plot.

Where she's best, as she is in all of her books that I've read, is when Lamott is writing about writing. Jennifer and her father, Wallace, are both writers, as are Lamott and her own real father. The passages describing Jennifer's writing process and why she chooses to be a writer are the only parts where I turned down the corners of the pages to mark the good spots. As she says in the book, "Happy work is as gratifying as sex or hard laughter or love or good drugs." I believe her.

If you're looking for a book to take on the airplane to Vacationland with you, I'd say skip this one - unless perhaps you're on your way to Marin County to drop a lot of acid for your summer holiday. Then, by all means - you can have my copy. Everyone else would be better off to pick up Operating Instructions instead.

Where the Wind Comes Sweeping Down the Plain

In the March 28, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone magazine's cover article on Mumford and Sons, bassist Ted Dwane was quoted saying, "We kind of are Okies at heart. I don't really know what an Okie is, but I feel like one."

Well Ted, I can tell you what it means to be an Okie. It means that you come into this world knowing that you're going to take a beating, so when life knocks you down, you just get right back up again.

Timothy Egan described the kind of people who settled the Oklahoma plains in his book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. He wrote about people who had failed everywhere else, who couldn't be content or get along anywhere else, who were looking for their "last best chance" on the last American frontier at that time. They were a people who had nothing left to lose, who nonetheless were forced to stand by and watch as their last best chance dried up into dust and blew away. And yet they endured, watching the horizon for rain, full of hope.

Bob Dylan, acolyte of that good old Oklahoman, Woody Guthrie, got it just right when he wrote these words in his epic poem, "Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie":

You need something to make it known
That it's you and no one else that owns
That spot that yer standing, that space that you're sitting
That the world ain't got you beat
That it ain't got you licked
It can't get you crazy no matter how many
Times you might get kicked
You need something special all right
You need something special to give you hope
But hope's just a word
That maybe you said or maybe you heard
On some windy corner 'round a wide-angled curve

As an Okie, Woody was the perfect person to bring that message of hope and endurance to a weary nation of people beaten down by depression, drought, and war. For all their faults, and they have many, Oklahomans may be best equipped to speak this truth to the world. Hard times are their strong suit.

This morning, Kate's teachers asked about my family in the wake of the enormous tornadoes that have ravaged Oklahoma in the last couple of days and dominated the news cycle all over the country. They asked me how anyone ever gets used to living under such a threat of this kind of deadly weather. How do people live in a place where total disaster strikes so rapidly and mercilessly? And how do they endure it when it happens again and again and again?

It's obvious that Okies are crazy, that's why.

They are crazy with determination. They are the Last Best Chancers. They have pioneer spirit. They are people who've seen the worst of it, who have taken a lickin' but still manage to get back up into fighting stance. They know there's always a wild possibility for rain or sun tomorrow, so don't pack it in just yet. Never let the world get you down for good. Never give up.

More tragedy. More hard times. Oklahomans took it on the chin, but they were back up on their feet before the sun even went down yesterday. They've already been hard at work all through the night, rescuing the living, mourning the dead, patching up the wounded, and cleaning up the mess. They won't stay down. They'll keep putting one foot in front of the other. That's what Okies do.

Hope and Endurance.


Woody Guthrie's "Dust Can't Kill Me"

The Pioneer Woman has a good list of places you can go to give assistance.

Notes from the Nightstand: Clapton's Guitar

Clapton's Guitar is subtitled, "Watching Wayne Henderson Build the Perfect Instrument," and it is far more about the guitar maker and how he makes his world-class instruments (in addition to a variety of tangential topics both guitar-mythological and -historical) than it is about Eric Clapton. In fact, Clapton comes off as a distant and maybe somewhat pompous rock star, regarded by this clan of Appalachian old-timey flatpickers as an amusing curiosity from the outside world. There is certainly no "Clapton is God" mentality in Rugby, Va. (pop. 7), where Henderson's workshop is located.

Wayne Henderson, retired mailman and grandson of a casket maker (guitars are also just wood boxes, he says), began building guitars as a child. He shows the author the first guitar he ever built - out of a cardboard box - and the first real guitar he built as a teen out of scrap wood from a mahogany door. As a musician himself, he established a reputation for making incredible-sounding, Martin Guitars-inspired instruments among the traditionalists and bluegrassers he played with on the flatpicking contest circuit and later while he worked as a repairman for Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. The two guitars he builds over the course of the book are #326 and #327 of all the guitars Henderson has ever made over the course of a lifetime. Each is a handcrafted piece of art.

Allen St. John, the author, contacts Henderson at the beginning of the book to ask to have a guitar made for himself. All Henderson guitars are made on request and specifically personalized for the buyer. St. John quickly discovers that if you hope to receive a finished Henderson guitar in less than a decade or more, it's in your best interest to make a nuisance of yourself. Guitars get made when a buyer camps out in Wayne's workshop, plying him with pies and jokes and threatening post cards. Wayne Henderson, like any stereotypical artist, works in his own unique time frame.

So St. John plants himself on a stool in Wayne's shop with the other General Loafers, a motley crew of friends and relatives who hang around telling stories and cracking jokes and supplying bags of fast food sausage biscuits while Wayne works. The author is fascinated by Wayne's nonchalance about Clapton's decade-old guitar order, and smelling a good story in the making, convinces the luthier to shift from his own guitar to Clapton's guitar and a twin that can be auctioned off for charity.

In addition to the detailed descriptions of how a fine guitar is made, St. John covers the difference between old-time music and bluegrass, histories of guitar making and guitar makers, a discussion of tonewoods and the scarcity of Brazilian rosewood, the backstories and legends of historic guitars that pass through the shop, and a multitude of other related topics. The passion that some people have for hunting down, collecting, or even just playing these high-end and antique guitars is a constant theme. Every character in the book has an eye out for the next hidden diamond he might get his hands on.

I myself am not a guitar player. Our friend Max, who knows that Mike plays and that we are into traditional music, recommended the book to us. Mike read it first and loved it, so I just had to read it, too. It was a fascinating, quick read. It's never too dry or technical, even when the topics turn to the bending of guitar sides or the serial numbers on old Martins from the '20s. And Wayne Henderson seems like a very likeable, admirable person and a true craftsman. I always love to hear about people who can build something beautiful and useful with their bare hands. Honoring those traditions makes life feel richer and less plagued by soulless modern consumer culture. St. John decides at the end of the book that what makes a guitar great is the goodness of the guitar maker's soul, and a Henderson guitar is an act of love.

Notes from the Nightstand: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

I'm a fan of Sherman Alexie. I've written on this blog about his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and about Smoke Signals, the movie that is based on the short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He's an amazing writer and an important voice in American literature and culture. He has things to say that someone really needed to come along and say. He has important stories to tell about all of us.

Having seen Smoke Signals a couple of times and having read other work by Alexie (he publishes short fiction in the Stranger), I wasn't completely bowled over when I read this book. It felt like well-trodden ground, although I was interested to see how he put the stories together on paper rather than on screen. It's much more chopped up and jumpy than the film, of course, because there needed to be a full-length, linear narrative for a movie to make sense. The short stories contain the same characters and some scenes, but it's less concise. Given that this book was Alexie's first, I think a lot of forgiveness is in order.

One of my favorite stories was "Because My Father Always Says He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock." I loved the idea that Victor's father was a huge Jimi Hendrix fan because Jimi's warped, rock 'n roll version of the national anthem spoke to him as an outsider American.

"After all the shit I'd been through," my father said, "I figured Jimi must have known I was there in the crowd to play something like that. It was exactly how I felt."

The story, like most of the stories in the book, focuses on the father-son relationship, particularly when the father leaves.

On a reservation, Indian men who abandon their children are treated worse than white fathers who do the same thing. It's because white men have been doing that forever and Indian men have just learned how. That's how assimilation can work.

And yet the father and son connect through music and the stories they tell about it and the memories that are tied to it, as so many people do.

Those were the kinds of conversations that Jimi Hendrix forced us to have. I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he's been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is. Music turned my father into a reservation philosopher. Music had powerful medicine.

As a whole, it's not a perfect book. There are noticeably weak parts jammed in between the jewels. But, if you're curious about Alexie's point of view and his style, then it's worth reading. If you haven't read anything else by him before and are looking for a place to start, it's worth reading (although I still would probably start with True Diary unless you just hate YA). Some people also just can't get into magical realism as a genre, although a lot of the stories are just really real realism, and poignantly so. If you are curious about what real Indians are like in modern day life, Sherman Alexie is the man to see. He doesn't pull any punches, fistfighting in heaven or down here in America.

Notes from the Nightstand: Wild

If I were a different kind of person entirely, I might have been able to enjoy this book more. But honestly I kind of knew that already going into it, having read a bunch of reviews first. From the descriptions alone, it seemed that the author was kind of a basket case, but I guess I just wanted to judge that for myself after reading the whole story. Your mileage may vary.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is a memoir recounting the summer 20 years ago when Cheryl Strayed hiked the PCT from California to Oregon. I have read A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson's humorous account of walking the Appalachian Trail (the PCT's East Coast counterpart), and loved it even though I'm not much of an outdoorswoman - as you all know. He blatantly outs himself (as Strayed also does) as being terribly underprepared and out of shape for his journey, but his self-deprecating humor lets you identify and commiserate with him rather than spending the whole book thinking, "What the hell is wrong with you?" Which is exactly what continually popped into my mind while reading Wild.

Maybe Bryson's book was also more palatable because at the time of his trip, he was a middle-aged man who took a buddy along with him on the trail, while Strayed was a young, twenty-something woman who insisted on hiking alone. I don't know ANYTHING about wilderness survival, but I know that you should never go out alone, even if you're a 300 lb. linebacker for the the LA Raiders who's carrying a gun. You can still break a leg and be totally screwed... or have to cut your own arm off like that guy from 127 Hours. A young woman alone, especially a very trusting and impulsive woman like Strayed, is just asking for trouble. The fact that she never actually gets into a situation she can't get out of is chalked up to the kindness of strangers, but I think she just got really lucky.

Aside from her impulsiveness and foolhardiness, Strayed is also in mourning. Her mother died when she was in her early twenties (a few years before her PCT trip) and her despair and self-destructiveness were so great that she divorced her first husband, whom she claimed to still be in love with, in the wake of losing her only parent. She cheated, she did heroin, she couldn't keep a job. She decided to hike the PCT to be alone and sort her life out. It's a little Eat, Pray, Love, although admittedly with less self-delusion and self-congratulation. Strayed is pretty honest about being screwed up and about how the trail doesn't really fix her life, but a stoic like me still can't help but want to reach out and shake her.

A person like me also feels exasperation with the girly girls who say things like:

By necessity, out here on the trail, I felt I had to sexually neutralize the men I met by being, to the extent that was possible, one of them. I'd never been that way in my life, interacting with men in the even-keeled indifference that being one of the guys entails. It didn't feel like an easy thing to endure, as I sat in my tent while the men played cards. I'd been a girl forever, after all, familiar with and reliant upon the powers my very girlness granted me.  Suppressing those powers gave me a gloomy twinge in the gut. Being one of the guys meant I could not go on being the woman I'd become expert at being among men. It was a version of myself I'd first tasted way back when I was a child of eleven and I'd felt that prickly rush of power when grown men would turn their heads to look at me or whistle or say Hey pretty baby just loudly enough that I could hear. The one I'd banked on all through high school, starving myself thin, playing cute and dumb so I'd be popular and loved. The one I'd fostered all through my young adult years while trying on different costumes - earth girl, punk girl, cowgirl, riot girl, ballsy girl. The one for whom behind every hot pair of boots or sexy little skirt or flourish of the hair there was a trapdoor that led to the least true version of me.

Yet she can barely give up the need to please and attract men long enough to make her own journey in safety, despite the fact that she acknowledges it's in her own best interest to not be too appealing. She carries a large pack of condoms with her on the trail even though she only has one change of clothes and the barest essentials of food and water, hauled in an overweight, burdensome backpack. She picks up guys all along the trail and assesses all the men she meets based on their sexual appeal. At one point she even has a friend mail her a resupply box containing lacy black underwear so she could feel like her "real world" self again in a town where she planned to make a stopover for a couple of days. Then she actually seems more upset about the underwear than about the $20 she desperately needs for food when the box fails to show up on time.

She makes her "girlness" sound pitiful, but she never really acknowledges that it doesn't serve her in any way, that it isn't helping her achieve her goals, and that what she wants and what she needs are not in alignment. She touches on her issues with her deadbeat father and the foolishness of her choices, but I so wanted to her to just come right out and say that looking for love in all the wrong places makes you a victim. And your beauty it isn't a form of power you have over men; it's your neediness to be desired at all times that still gives men the power over you. She never can bring herself to fully go there.

I love memoirs, but they are tough to get right. They sometimes seem a bit too opportunistic. To fight through suffering that you can't avoid makes you brave. To create a world of suffering for yourself and then write a book about it is... what? Masochistic? Self-exploitative? Ridiculous? I guess you could describe me with the same words for reading the whole thing. I guess I just wanted to see if she changed at all, but I don't really think she did. She talks about maturing and finding an end to some of her grief, but I think a lot of this is just her core personality: she's the kind of person who walks across half of California with only twenty cents in her pocket because she didn't realize she'd need to save up more money for her trip. I'm just not like her. Thank goodness!

Notes From the Nightstand: Accordion Crimes

I have probably read this book four times now. I love all of Annie Proulx's books (The Shipping News is her most famous one, I think), but this is my favorite, and one of my favorite books ever, really. The combination of history and music and narrative takes everything I love and rolls into one nearly perfect experience for me. I return to it again and again and probably always will.

Accordion Crimes isn't exactly a novel in the traditional sense, but I feel like it's a little more than a book of short stories. When I read Olive Kitteridge, which is a series of stories about the title character told from different people's points of view which together tell Olive's life story, I was reminded of Accordion Crimes. The pieces are separate but combine in a satisfying way to tell a larger tale.

Proulx's book follows a green accordion from it's creation in Italy and immigration to America with it's Sicilian maker in the 19th century through seven other stories set in various immigrant and ethnic communities across America up to the present day. Each chapter (or short story) introduces the little two-row button accordion into a region, a culture, a musical tradition, an era of American history that, when strung all together, tells a vagabond story about us as a nation and a people - how alike we are, and how different. From Sicilians in New Orleans to Germans and Tejanos in Texas to French Canadians in Maine and French Cajuns and Black Creoles in Louisiana to Poles in Chicago to Irish-American and Basque ranchers in Montana to Norwegians in Minnesota, we Americans have a complicated set of identities, histories, habits, and tastes. Individual experiences combine to tell a common story of migration and settlement, music and food and religion, xenophobia and assimilation.

Music is one of the great treasures of American culture. In our attempt to hold on to our pasts, to maintain our identities in a New World, we have hung on to the musical traditions of our ancestral homelands, celebrating them and preserving them. But we are an amalgamation nation, and it's not surprising that the music has been combined and melted down and reshaped by Americans into new styles and new sounds: jazz, blues, zydeco, bluegrass, country, and rock. So often, the little unassuming, under appreciated accordion is at the center of it all.

The stories Proulx tells are not pretty. They are as harsh and cruel and violent and dirty and tragic as migration and homelessness are. America is rough country. The characters are not particularly lovable or genteel. They are survivors, scrabbling at the edges of civilization, determined not to be snuffed out. And if you listen to any traditional American music, you will hear their sorrow, suffering, and defeat, mixed with their joy, celebration, and perseverance. This is what it means to be American. This is our story.

Notes from the Nightstand: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

My friend, Wendy, sent me this book for Christmas after she read this post on my blog about how much I like to read Native American history and literature. I had mentioned a movie called Smoke Signals, which is based on another Sherman Alexie book of short stories, The Long Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.

Wen is a public school librarian and always sends me Young Adult literature, all of which I have to admit (Ow! My arm - it's twisting!) is superb. (She has excellent taste - that helps.) So, this book, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is of course also written for teens, although the rest of Alexie's work isn't necessarily aimed at YA readers.

In real life, Sherman Alexie left the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state as a teenager to attend a nearby, predominantly white public school in search of a better education. In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie tells the fictional story of Arnold (Junior) Spirit as he walks the gauntlet between the accusations of betrayal and abandonment that come from his tribe on the Rez and his own need to belong and succeed at his new white high school. Junior is a cartoonist, so the book is illustrated by Ellen Forney with hilarious and heartbreaking cartoons that perfectly reflect the humor and melancholy of the writing.

Alexie's hyper-real portrait of a typical American teenage boy is as brilliant as his hyper-real portrayal of modern day American Indian life. He is unapologetic, poetic, emotionally honest, gross, and funny. It's a quick, easy read (my sister-in-law, Jasmin, stole it from me and read it all over the Christmas break while I was distracted with bourbon and conversation with the relatives) that tells a story that feels like a punch in the gut. Wendy says it's perfect for boys who say they don't like to read, and I think it's perfect for people who are looking for an authentic Native voice.

Notes from the Nightstand: Hickory Dickory Dock

In case you've forgotten, I've been reading all of Agatha Christie's books in (mostly) chronological order for the past few years. Here's the post from my other old blog that explains it all. I'm now up to the 1950s and just finished Hickory Dickory Dock (1955).

Christie wrote quite a few novels with nursery rhyme titles and themes: And Then There Were None, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Five Little Pigs, Mrs. McGinty's Dead, and A Pocket Full of Rye. And Then There Were None is totally inspired and an all-time favorite of mine, and A Pocket Full of Rye is quite clever, but I think the others are pretty forgettable. Hickory Dickory Dock definitely falls into this last category.

Christie periodically, but especially in the '50s and '60s, tried to branch out into youth culture and edgier topics like drug smuggling and addiction or revolutionary politics, with not very great success. Her best efforts are the classic upper class drawing room murders at country houses with butlers who did or didn't do it. Hickory Dickory Dock, unfortunately, is set in a youth hostel in London and has a cast of young international students (with '50s-era British racial sensibilities thrown in for good times). Lots of small thefts have been occurring in the house, which is upsetting but not catastrophic until, of course, someone turns up dead. But no hot-headed 20-something - or a syndicate of jewel thieves and drug-smugglers - can stop Hercule Poirot once he's on the case!

If you're interested in checking out an Agatha Christie mystery for a quick, easy read during the holidays or on a cold, snowy January Saturday afternoon, take my advice and pick up And Then There Were None instead. Really only the most hardened Christie fan should ever attempt one of her novels from the '50s - Great Britain was apparently a pretty grim place in the decade after WWII, and these novels surely reflect that sour "stiff upper lip."

Notes From the Nightstand: Operating Instructions

I have read so much about Anne Lamott and her writing, in particular about Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, which is considered to be a classic in the mom-memoir genre that has since spawned a million mom-blogs (this book was written back in 1989). She's a writer's writer who is able to strike a perfect balance between humor, poignancy, politics, religion, and her personal and public lives with just the right amount of self-deprecation and honesty that never feels like embarrassing overshare.

When she found out she was pregnant with her only child, she was 35 years old, unmarried, and only a few years sober after battling an alcohol and cocaine addiction. While this may seem like the kind of uphill battle that most people will not have to overcome while parenting their newborn, everyone does face their own particular collection of challenges in that first year, and anyone who has (or will) go through it will feel a sense of camaraderie with Lamott. I ended up reading the passages about her son's colic aloud to Mike (oh, I know how much he loves it when I do that!), and we both nodded enthusiastically in agreement with her black humor about that long, dark night of the soul.  If you're looking for the straight dirt on having a baby, this is it. It's a quick read, it's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it's true.

Lamott also writes fiction in addition to non-fiction about her faith, her addiction and recovery, and writing. I'm currently reading Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life. She also has written a memoir about the birth of her first grandson, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son, which I definitely have on my to-read list.

Notes From the Nightstand: Cloud Atlas

I have this other blog where I try to keep track of stuff that I'm reading, but I haven't posted there since March. Having two blogs maybe doesn't work very well for me, but I still do want to bore you with my opinions on literature, so I think I'm just going to start rolling those posts in over here.

I just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. The movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry (among many other fine actors) is out in theaters right now, so even if you haven't heard of the book you may have seen the trailers.



The book is total genius. It's six short stories nested inside one another, each in a different time period and told in a different voice/literary genre. The stories end abruptly at the height of the plot, and then are referenced in some way in the next story - as a journal or letters discovered by a subsequent character, as a manuscript sent to a publisher, as an old movie viewed in a distant future. All of the main characters have the same comet-shaped birthmark on their shoulders, and it's implied that they are reincarnations of the same soul. At the end of the sixth story, which is the middle of the book, the novel backs itself out the way it came in, finishing up each story's plot line in backwards order from the way they were initially presented. So Cloud Atlas begins and ends with "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing." A lot of reviews of the book describe it as a stack of Russian nesting matryoshka dolls, and I also think that's a perfect metaphor.

I have never read a book like this before. It's truly amazing and innovative. It's funny, thrilling, horrific, philosophical, tender. It's an amazing accomplishment. I can't recommend it enough.

I haven't seen the film, although I want to.  I've seen mixed reviews, so I'm very curious to check it out for myself. Movies, of course, are rarely as lovable as the books they were made from, and it would be an incredible feat to squeeze this vast story into a film's length. The imagery in the trailers and the repeated use of the actors in different roles looks amazing, so I'm sure my curiosity will win out.

Read the book, though. Then go see the movie if you want. That's always the best advice.

And if you're dying to buy me a present (Christmas?), Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is on my wish list!