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How To Be Good ::
What is it about spiritual crises? They seem to seek out the best of us. We, the members of the upper-middle class, spend all our lives being self-interested, materialistic, and neglectful of other people; we surround ourselves with unquestioning friends with whom we have in common the same short-sighted, selfish goals, we get expensive educations that lead you to a well-paying careers that allow us to lavish ourselves (our families) with the latest luxuries; we don’t so much deny the existence of God so much as we just make any questions of spirituality completely irrelevant; in short, we do everything we can to protect ourselves from eventually freaking out about the fact that our lives have no meaning. Yet eventually, the crisis finds us.
And that crisis finds Katie and David, a quintessential young, middle-class couple living in London. It finds them at the time when David’s foundering writing career is about to sink and Katie’s dissatisfaction with her marriage has led her to pursue an affair with another man and ask David, over a cellular phone, for a divorce. Soon after that, a searing back pain forces David to be cared for by a faith healer (he seems to have had a thing against the medical profession). Suddenly, where he was once sarcastic and mean-spirited, he is now good-natured and kind, interested more in social justice than in criticizing what he sees as cultural stupidity. He cares about feeding the poor and sheltering the homeless and generally making this world less cruel place in which to live. This epiphany also leads David to claim the moral high-ground in his relationship with Katie, which, as a medical doctor and the real breadwinner of the two of them, was once a position she’d been quite comfortable with. It also forces Katie further question her worth, which further threatens her already fragile emotional state. (At one point, she even goes to church!)
But really, the idea behind How To Be Good is a respectable one. The idea is this. It is easy for us to be comfortable with our “liberal moralism” when we get ourselves into a position where our beliefs are unchallenged; it becomes difficult when someone starts questioning us. That’s exactly what happened with Katie when David suddenly discovered the meaning of his existence. But the problem with the book is that Hornby tries to communicate this concept without making tangible the spiritual and emotional worth of his characters, and as a result, I found them at best uninteresting, at worst, self-righteous or self-interested, and always bordering on loathsome. If you’re going to have the question of characters' moralism, beliefs, and spirituality as a major issue in the book, it helps if you make characters that have some redeeming characteristics to them.
The Professor and the Madman ::
It was Jessamyn who told me about the literary phenomenon of “pop history.” This is that strain of book that tells (or sometimes retells) the story of a historical event with a tone that is updated, a narrative that is intensified, and a series of characters that are complex and compelling. It seems to be an attempt on the part of the publishing industry to make history marketable. There has been no shortage of “pop history” books in the past decade, and The Professor and the Madman is one of them. It chronicles the story of William C. Minor, who was one of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary, and was also insane. He performed his work while incarcerated in an insane asylum. He was a murderer, and it seemed that he was attracted to working on the OED for a number of reasons, but chiefly because he found the work redeeming. He needed a way to make up for the awful things he had done.
While the story was seductive, I felt a certain wariness about the whole affair, which goes beyond just this one book. The “pop history” phenomenon seems somehow dangerous -- in order to create a story that people will find interesting to read, an author must find some new fact that is tantalizing, compelling or, sometimes, even tawdry. And, if all of history is actually the collection of our stories of what has happened to us, such tawdry details wind up having an effect on our stories, and thus how we conceive of ourselves. Which isn’t intrinsically bad, but we do run the risk of cheapening the story. So while books like this one make for great reading, and they make us feel intelligent and knowledgeable after we read them, we must be careful not to take them very seriously. Which is no different from all of commercial literature, I suppose.
The Perfect Storm ::
A substantial amount of activity occurs during a storm. Its energy is mind-boggling, its destructive nature is terrifying. There’s a longstanding fascination with storms on the part of all of humanity, which I think results in some of us going out and getting educated in meteorology, others leading lives that butt heads aggressively with the all but unpredictable weather patterns of the earth. Which leaves the rest of us to sit at home and clutch our loved ones and our pillows whenever a significant front comes through. Here we sit, ignorant of the science and terrified of the possible deadly outcome. What can help abate our terror?
A book, that’s what. The Perfect Storm is filled with meteorology, economics, and small bits of culture, all of which explain not only how storms work, but what drives a certain small group of Sword fishermen to drive their boat headlong into the worst storm we have seen in the past 100 years. We see not only the collision of a hurricane with a Nor’Easter, but also the block-headed decisions of many different people to not be scared of the weather, which lands them in a situation that is significantly more dangerous than it had to be, had they decided to simply stay home and not challenge the forces of the world that kill people.
This book was so strong in some respects -- the research involved and the ability of the author to make the information he retrieved interesting and digestible for the lay audience -- that it made its weak parts more unbearable. The combined facts of 1. you knew what was going to happen in the end, and 2. you didn’t wind up really caring that it did, really made the narrative aspects of the book torture (which probably at least partially explains why the cinematic adaptation was as bad as it was). The simplistic characters (whose lives could be summed up thusly: he lived, he drank, he hid from his wife, he neglected his children, he ran outta money, he hit the sea when he shouldn’t have, he died) only exacerbated the weak story. I didn’t even feel remorseful when they finally perished.
But for all its problems, I feel a bit better having read it. Because the next time the sky begins to summon up all its black fury and spray down wind, lightning, hail, and snow, I can look to that scared person across the room and simply say, “don’t worry, that’s just a dissipating tropical storm colliding with a weak Nor’easter. Seen much worse in my lifetime. It’ll all be over soon enough.”
I wouldn’t want to be out on the open ocean, though.
The Risk Pool ::
There’s a certain sub-genre of literature out there that, though it has no formal name (at least that I know of), is well-defined and recognizable. Books of this sub-genre usually take place in rural New York or New England, and always seem to address the dysfunction that occurs in small towns in that region. That usually means that alcoholism plays some role in the characters' lives, as well does neglect and sometimes emotional, if not physical or sexual abuse. Many of the characters of these books are uneducated, and depend on seasonal manual labor that is risky for their income. Then they usually squander the small amount of money they make on their self-destructive lifestyles. In this setting, the hero is many times a child who, as we watch him grow up, we get the sense is cut out for more than what his small town can provide for him. He is destined for great things, like a higher education, student loans, a house in the suburbs of some city out west. This is our hero.
I bring this up becauseThe Risk Pool fits into this genre all too perfectly. Which is not to say that it is a simplistic or predictable. In this book, Russo seems uses the sub-genre as a platform, as a good starting point, from which he can build his story. It’s is an interesting technique that is characteristic of his writing style -- keep the plot structure simple and recognizable, then focus on the development of the characters. He is then able to keep me interested by creating a character I could understand, sympathize with, and laugh at, which is what kept me compelled enough to continue turning pages. Which is not an easy thing to do, especially when I look back on all the books I tried to read in the past year that failed to keep my attention.
So would find plenty of evidence to support a claim that Russo is a sub-genre writer. You might even be able to claim that he does nothing new or innovative with the novel. But what he does do, with all the books I’ve read of his, is create characters that are as unique and real as a old friend. That’s a quality of a narrative that transcends any sort of quantification of the newness of his writing style. I find his sort of talent talent is invaluable and unquantifiable, and it keeps me interested in his work.
The Sweet Hereafter ::
When people are hit with an unimaginable tragedy, they contort themselves in ways that would seem impossible. They go through a denial, the fight with themselves and with each other over what happened, they do everything they can to ignore the awful truth that lies before all of them. They do it because to face the truth is to face an utter collapse of hope, and of life.
That was the case with the people of Sam Dent, New York, when a school bus carrying fourteen of the town’s children runs off the road in a snowstorm and crashes into a quarry’s undrained sand pit. All the children die except one, and she is left paralyzed. The event traumatizes the town, and those parents who have not gone off into an internal landscape of hopelessness and death have gone on a legal rampage that is fueled by a New York City Lawyer who is convinced someone is to blame for what happened.
The narrative does not lapse into the author’s fanciful dreams of the strength of humanity in trying times, nor does it seem to speculate on the psychology of the characters who are fighting with what happened. It is always believable, it created a world I could see as clearly as I can my own. I realized when I finished reading this book, how literature can be an important guide as we try to navigate the tragedies of our own lives.
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