Do You Like Me Yet? Breaking into Siena

Slacker Hammagrael got Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi when she was home last week and said “read it.”  So I did and finished a few days ago, in time to return it to her and let her sister read it this week before it is due back at the library.  I think she motivated in part by the Track opening too early in July and there is a nice horse on SSiS.  (I only hope she didn’t connect the title instead with my younger son transferring into the Saints college … four seasons should do it for him.)

Rodi exposes all of his personality foibles and weak traits as he longs to become Sienese.  At times, he seems like a Mafia wannabe.  The idea of there being geographic/cultural enclaves still closed to new-comers is not an uncommon observation.  Rodi’s efforts at times seem like Sisyphus:  every year, he’s back in Italy and back at square (not the Piazza) one, regarded as a recognized tourist.  Siena is depicted as perfect, a sunny Brigadoon, where the teenagers are polite to their elders and respect traditions, where all the food is scrumptious, the women dressed in Giorgio Armani.  What’s not to like.  But Rodi writes that even those who married into one of the competing neighbors are labeled as an outsider.  You must be a centuries-old born and bred and genetically pure Worm; if you wear the colors around your neck you are still a poseur.

So is this a story about a place or about an outsider?  To me, Rodi seems penultimately insecure, returning to answer the question of “do you remember me?”  All the chores he assumes, all the routines, cannot easily graft to his alienation.  He travels annually without his partner; he exhausts his meager savings to pay for transatlantic flights.  He seems like Gulliver trying to be a Brobdingnagian.  

To me there seems to be two major personality types:  those who are deeply rooted to the land of their birth, their town, and reluctant or even incapable of living happily anywhere else (e. g., younger son); and those who are born to be adventurers, explorers and pioneers, jumping out of their nest and seeing the world (older son).  Rodi introduces me to another hybrid class:  people who want to transform and be successfully grafted into another world.  So I find it disappointing that he doesn’t become a full émigré or at least an international snow bird.   Having tasted Siena, how can one give up this addiction?

America's Helen of Troy

See, I can find a tenuous theme to link together all these random books that fall into my lap.  This weekend, I set myself a goal of finishing at least three of the books that I have been dabbling in for months.  One down:  American Eve - Evelyn Nesbit/Stanford White - The Birth of the "It" Girl and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu (herewithing to be referred to as A-Eve).  While I longed to read more about the tempting wiles and motives of Helen in The Song of Achilles, Uruburu gives more than equal time to A-Eve Evelyn, her paramour White and her husband Thaw who murders White.

Evelyn was the real person, the young teenager actually, behind all those turn of the Century advertising photographs, the Heidi Klum, or for you older Slackers, the Twiggy of her day.  She came from Pittsburgh equipped with her own stage mother of sorts, a widow with no real intention of working herself, but who realized she could make money, fame and connections by exploiting her daughter's looks.  Evelyn eventually breaks out of Pennsylvania and hits New York City and the stage.  There she catches the eye of Stanford White, the famous architect and notorious seducer of vulnerable, naive young women.  Evelyn's mother practically throws her at White because she collects rent and living expenses as well.

The tale exposes naivete against lust, at a time when the entire country was moving from a time of high morals and honesty to an era of selfishness, corruption and titillation.  She was the personification of her time, the scandal journalists needed to sell their headlines.  

Uruburu is an English professor at Hofstra who was looking for examples for her course, Daughters of Decadence (I want to audit).  Occasionally, her use of alliteration is excessive and obvious, but the story moves along both quickly and comprehensively ... unless of course, like me the reader is juggling an entire book shelf of material at the same time.  

Another Orange Prize for Fiction Winner

I read The Song of Achilles (2012) after We Have to Talk about Kevin (2005).  Shriver is more memorable and forceful than Madeline Miller.  I selected the novel as an attempt to have some more depth in classical literature when going off tangent with my Latin scholar son.  Somehow I think he regards my efforts as “Homer for Dummies.”

So why would Miller rewrite or update the story of the Trojan War?  Is her intent to compare and contrast this Middle East war with the more current ones; to display cultural DNA; to show that base motives and degeneration into petty vanity is inevitable?  When I read the write up on the Orange Prize website, it mentioned that Miller threw out her first attempt after five years of writing.  Her “do-over” was to emphasize the voice of Patroclus, Achilles boon friend and homosexual lover.  So is she intentionally overlaying a gays in the military theme?  Where does one draw the line on revisionist history?

But are the writings of the ancient Greeks factual or mythical or hybrid?  Why does my son want his family, friends and students to read these classics, if possible, in their original tongue?  Are these Greek warriors patriot models for the current world?  Do we admire them as military role models, national heroes, literary prototypes? Does this version of Achilles loving Patroclus tarnish his reputation at the expense of making him more identifiable to a contemporary audience?

Sorry, the re-write doesn’t work for me.  Yes, it is better than the epic Troy movie which strikes me as so much computer animation and sweating muscles.  But Miller’s book imposes too much of personal motivation speculation rather than the call of honor, nation and valor.

Earliest Shriver

Once you read the acknowledgments and Qs and As at the back of We Have to Talk about Kevin, you would think that Lionel Shriver wrote nothing but clunkers previous to her Orange Prize winning book.  Not so, and my efforts to read most if not all of her earlier works has begun ... sort of adding box car books to this Lionel train (ooh, bad one).

Finished The Female of the Species last night, her first novel, with a picture of her on the back when she was only 29.  Although the plot outline could not be more different from the household tension in Kevin, there are nascent sub themes that carry forward.  Gray is a 59 year old anthropologist, single, never married, childless, tall, athletic and completely independent, in part due to the subservient devotion of a fellow anthropol, Errol, 12 years her junior and with a decades old crush.  Errol is the novel's narrator whose personal fantasies and frustrations permeate his rendition of Gray's enchantment with a 24 year old graduate student, Raphael.

While Gray's descent into sensuality is the story's main exploration.  Gray has many characteristics in common with Eva from Kevin:  she is highly intellectual, aloof, self-involved, with female "BFFs" and most herself when traveling the world, far from American culture.  Raphael previews most of Kevin's sociopathy:  he is completely manipulative, sarcastic, amoral, and plotting.  So here we have it:  Shriver's view of the sexes.  Men are the fatal attractions; personal decisions are open to judgments regarding their morality or impact on society.  Shriver is still in a bad guys die young structure and it will be interesting to see if that continues.  Her female "heroines" are left to age alone, opining about the interactions.

What is clever about this novel is having Gray be an anthropologist who can see patterns in primitive cultures and even extrapolate them the the burnt out, crack infested Bronx.  But she cannot understand people on a one to one basis.  It is like those eye charts of optic degeneration we have at work:  all she has is peripheral vision.  She cannot see the moral equivalence of Raphael to the WWII deserter she encountered in Africa when she began her career -- only the physical resemblance.

Early in the novel, Shriver introduces what her characters will continue to experience, as she describes Gray interacting with the threatening, attractive AWOL, Charles Corgie:  "The two of them stood face to face.  Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence:  to know exactly how little they cared.  Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo:  Who cares about you, or anyone?  Who needs you, or anyone?  I blink and you disappear.  I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always.  I am tall and smart and powerful without you ... You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know ... So if ... you dissolve into the heavy air ... I will not care -- I will be thinking about my important work."

The following quote could just as easily have been placed in Kevin:  "... How did you get like this?  We have always been like this.  There was something before ... That was the mystery.  There was no explaining.  Raphael was a certain way and he had always been ... in his crib his eyes shone like that, like the metal on airplanes in the sun, and there was nothing to say about that, no explanation."

On to the next one.  

Talking Heads

The book club selection for last month was Lionel Shriver’s We Have to Talk about Kevin.  I decided I did not want to talk about WHTTAK in a setting where the “bookies”-- for the most part -- work for or retired from the Office of Mental Health.  In fact, in April, one bookie asked the group what she should do to try to socialize a young boy in her Hebrew class who seemed to have no empathy at all and whose parents saw no problem.  Sort of a preview of the plot and continuation of this diagnostic conversation.  

But even with piles of books on the night stand and my blog list unattended I was curious.  I am so glad I picked up WHTTAK.  First, I loved Shriver’s juxtaposition of an 18^th Century epistolary novel with a 20th Century character who is aloof, lives only in her head, and over-analyzes everything.  Second, I loved Eva and Franklin, who, to me, represented the ultimate married couple.  I tend to look at married couples and decide if they look like salt and pepper shakers; when I conclude they do, what I am concluding is that they sort of match, definitely are a pair, and are "put together" for the same intent or purposes.  While Eva and Franklin resemble more a box of dried prunes and a overripe bowl of cherries, psychologically, they are a marvelous study in parental child rearing conflict.  I was about to type compromises, but neither can move from their entrenched personality traits.  

Life to Eva is a glass half-full.  She tries to fill up the emptiness with world travel and business acumen and a standard of perfection that is stratospheric.  Franklin not only wants the glass to be bigger, overflowing and its contents carbonated, but also to be the source of all solace.  Franklin’s idealized view of America extends to his desire to make the perfect family, creating a dialogue and scenes that match up with the Happy Days reruns he watches. 


As NYC yuppies, E&F agree to accessorize their carefree life with a baby as Eva approaches 40.  As soon as she gets pregnant, Franklin sets out to mold her to his idealized stereotype of a mother:  no strenuous exercise, no alcohol.  Not that she was an alcoholic athlete, but Eva resents the loss of her personality.  Kevin is born more than cranky and /or Eva has PPD. Maybe she just doesn’t smell maternal.  Anyway, I find Kevin more a symbol against which Shriver expresses Eva’s existence.  Instead of being a high school mass murderer, he could have easily caused a major traffic accident or blown up the house like one boy did down our street.  The stigma on the family and the self-doubt about family life that outsiders see as having been the prime cause of a deviant or delinquent child seems the major, ur-theme.

The more I thought about vehicles Shriver was using in her writing, I kept coming back to the family/society issue.  Maybe this train of thought spilled over from the book club's discussion of the June book, our re-reading of The Great Gatsby, where the group concluded Fitzgerald was writing an allegory about American characteristics using the traits of his characters.  Along that line of analysis, Shriver seems to be saying that while it is the basic building block of society, the family in the late 20th Century is torn between being a "re-enactment" of an earlier ideal and being completely an incohesive unit of self-involved individuals, each ranking themselves above the needs and demands of sustaining a marriage and raising unruly children.

I kept my copy way beyond its due date so I could finish this blog entry with selected quotes, only to realize this morning I didn't dog-ear any pages.  For whatever reason, The Band's Cripple Creek is running through my head to describe Shriver's voice for Eva, when lyrics describe Spike Jones' music as the girl not liking his songs but loves "the way he talks."  No one would expect that preference and I did not expect to love Eva's internal dialogues.  I can't imagine the movie captures this even with Tilda Swinton ... and I prefer to keep the scenes of violence in my imagination rather than sensationalized on the big screen.