Natural Artiface

Carole King’s memoir, Natural Woman, needs remixing and engineering.  As a songwriter, it was only until late in her career that she ventured into lyrics.  Her earliest attempts were more like scat, doo-wop sounds.  Her first husband and later a collaborating poet came up with the words that she put to music.  And there is the rub:  she just doesn’t have the literary heft to be a robust author.  She puts her life down in sequence, like she would in ordering songs on an LP, but it doesn’t come through with one single message or even a clear, honest assessment of her life.

Carole comes off as caught up between being a female rocker and a good Jewish girl from Brooklyn.  For someone who wrote the background music to pre-British invasion teenage summer loves, she made absolutely awful choices in marriages and lovers.  Her first husband got caught up in the 60s drug culture; her second physically abused her; she ends up in Idaho as a 1980s earth mother figure, or a female John Denver, singing about simple pleasures and middle age pain.  Of course, she crossed paths with everyone, Lennon and McCartney, to Bono.  But see drops names rather than describing who knowing them changed her life or perspective.

With four children from her first two marriages, Carole was often an absentee mother, touring or surrendering them to their fathers on the excuse of schooling needs or geographic preferences on their parts.

The best memoirs I’ve read begin after the author has thought about his or her life, determined what events or emotions have been determinants or emerging from experiences, and interpreted and valued them.  Natural Woman is a diary or chronology.  Carole describes the needlework she did when recording Tapestry, a simple piece of busywork that embellished the words thank you to be given to her producer.  Her autobiography is just as superficial, a collection of sample stitches, nothing like Gobelin artistic depiction of history.

Reads Like a Screen Play: Unholy Night

I enjoyed Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter and assumed his latest, Unholy Night, would be just as clever and original.  It isn't.  SG-S has rewritten the story of the three magi, turning them into criminals who happen to escape from jail after stripping the clothes off the three priests who come to console them the night before their scheduled execution.  Balthazar takes the lead, also known as the Ghost of Antioch, whose career began as a pickpocket, moved on to grave robber, and then to just out and out highwayman.  Gaspar and Melchior are interchangeable side kicks, notwithstanding one's prowess as a sword fighter.

And of course all the other New Testament folk make their appearances:  Herod, Pontius Pilate, Augustus Caesar, as well as JMJ on their flight to Egypt.  That escape is the most Indiana Jones of all:  not only do legions of Roman soldiers pop up continuously and relentlessly but the last "real" remaining magus whom Caesar sends to Herod raises the dead from their catacombs to attack the fleeing holy family.

If an author is going to fictionalize history or myth, do it big -- make the President a vampire.  As much as SG-S writes to make the story visual and fast paced, it is droll and predictable.  Nothing I would recommend.

Strained Relations, Strained Ending

I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything by Lisa Scottoline before but I quickly read Come Home, her latest, this weekend. I love it when the library only gives me two weeks to read three books … what a motivator. 

When I got to the acknowledgments in the back of the book, the author explained that her theme was the ties of motherhood and mothering, even when the children are not biologically your own. The mother in this story is Jill, a part time pediatrician, who has one natural thirteen year old daughter and who is about to enter into her third marriage. (Her first husband and Megan’s father died; her second husband, William, was the father of two daughters who abruptly re-enter Jill’s life after William himself dies.) So much for serial marriages, broken homes and step children in crises in America.

The step daughters are now young women, still hostile about William and Jill’s divorce. The younger suspects her father was murdered and shows up on Jill’s doorstep, drunk and needy asking for help to find the killer. (Yes, I’ve fallen off my bucket list for 2012 and am back to mysteries … well, so is the book club this month too.) Jill’s fiancee, Sam, has no use for these unexpected family ties, and the story focuses on the angles, tensions and demands of adult versus dependent child “love.”

The story is best when everyone is angry and acting out. Jill is multi-tasking as fast as she can: trying to save an infant’s life at work, discover her second husband’s hidden life of crime, fending off phony FBI agents, ignoring each daughter in turn, depending on which “pot” is boiling. Her being frazzled and unfocused on what is most important makes her an unsympathetic character.

Scottoline then tidies up the ending with her alienated fiancee returning as a new age metro sexual welcoming a doubling of the family; her renegade daughter whom she reported missing to the police in at least three states was conveniently in a government protected safe house; her angriest stepdaughter finds love with a real FBI agent who was entrapping her father; and her biological daughter ends up like Pollyanna pushing her would be boyfriend into the school swimming pool after her photo-shops a nude picture of her across the Internet. Way too contrived. Yes, Scottoline can pull on your heartstrings and give you so many traits in her heroine that one or more might resonate with a female reader, but it is overloaded, too contemporary, and manipulating.

Catch my Drift

My younger son was appalled, appalled when he saw my latest library book on the dining room table:  Drift by Rachel Maddow.  He said he couldn't believe I was reading something by her.  Just to show you the generational problem I have, I told him I never heard of her before and that my review would be predictably tepid.  So I am assuming her television show is the typical glaringly liberal diatribe of all major network political commentators, so I was surprised to find several statements and positions in her book that I agreed with.

First of all, a discussion about the lack of declarations of war arises more often in our house than probably most others without a family member serving in Congress.  Maddow has researched Presidents and their advisers going back to LBJ through Barry to track the sure but steady transfer of war-making powers from the legislative branch to the executive.  This is no "conspiracy" piece of work ... it is simply a knitted together timeline of several major and minor decisions that have resulted in the public's disconnect from all things military, thus making "war" based on the expediency and expanded options of one person and not a deliberate body.

And now the specific arguments and observations Maddox makes that mark her as more of a strict constitutionalists than a hippie flower child:

"The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter.  Their great advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war.  With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it -- uncomfortably -- every second we were at war.  But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us -- of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happening -- war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state.  It never stops."

Not Up to a Full Semester of Flannery O'Connor

The blog list for 2012 just recorded my need to read A Good Man is Hard to Find. The book that came with that short story in it from the library was 1,220 onion skin pages of all Flannery's writings, including her personal letters. If this was an elective, I might have slogged through it all; but let's call it the equivalent of a pass/fail course. I read as much as I wanted and now the library won't renew it, so I'll call it a day, month, whatever.

Starting with A Good Man is Hard to Find. Obviously, I can't judge a book by its title. Shades of the 2011 Lust List lingers, making the good man I am looking for about 180 degrees opposite O'Connor's. Her said referenced male is a killing criminal ... not a hint of sexual attraction about him. He is sympathetic only to the extent that the reader intensely dislikes the woman he kills. She is a insistent busy body, hyper-controlling her her family, calling all the shots, including indirectly those that kill them all.

And this is the theme that I cull from the other stories I read from this collection, many of which I really did like: The Life You Save Maybe Your Own; A Temple of the Holy Ghost; The Artificial Nigger; Good Country People; The Displaced Person; I can't list them all. And what did I learn about Flannery? She is cruel. She loves depicting her Southern fellow citizens with all their glaring faults. She is 100% honest, to the detriment of not showing much understanding or forgiveness. Here are all the flaws, nasty ambitions, self-centeredness, racial biases of "unenlightened" Southerners. Yes, she writes powerfully, and even lyrically. But unlike Colum McCann, who can write about characteristics weaknesses, even sins, without a mean bone in his body, Flannery is petty. She wants to settle scores and distributes just desserts, retributions.

Do I like her style and themes? Actually no. Maybe I am overreacting since I have had friends, fellow Slackers, tell me I write like her. God forbid I am that vengeful.

"A Reminder to Look Up" Let the Great World Spin

The book club for March is memorable: not only was the selection a solid 10, but our hostess and her house were way above par. A good time was had by all, even though several admitted they hadn't finished or that they disliked Corrigan, one of the story's central characters.

I finished the book sometime in February and ordered my own copy, lent it out to a fellow clubber, and skimmed it again the night before our meeting to bring back to mind what I liked most about the book. First of all, like my distraction with TC Boyle as a native New Yorker, I want to also meet Colum McCann who teaches creative writing in NYC and who I hope will one day venture north to speak at our Writers' Institute. Let me further extol the book by saying it will remain on my short list, along with All the King's Men, of candidates for the Great American Novel. This is a novel that reads better each time: it can be read for nostalgia, for admiring McCann's clever structure and parallel characters, for the best sense of NYC being a "small town" and folks interconnected, for inspiration.

McCann like Boyle favors puns and poetic phrases that both seduce the reader and flourish the characters. Speaking of the folk who populate the story, I don't think I'd ever want any of them as best friends. But all are strikingly real and ultimately likable. McCann, like Corrigan, cannot help but see and portray the best in everyone. Pain is consoled by community; forgiveness abounds; generosity permeates a city know for being cold and aloof.

Written in 2009, it is a wonderful tribute to the World Trade Centers, especially for us older folk who remember working and eating there and being always anxious to visit. They were more than inspirational because they were alive, not designed as a city's signature visitors center. Although unnamed in the novel, Petit becomes the icon of work as personal fulfillment. His dedication, determination and training contrast with his judge and with Corrigan's chosen careers.

The plot investigates what it means to inspire and to connect with one's fellowmen. It is idealistic and inspirational, American ... written by an Irishman about a Frenchman. I hope I have time to peruse it every now and then. I guess it belongs on my coffee table and not in the bookcase upstairs.

Tempted by Newly Published: Coming Apart

Right out of the gate, let me say I am one of those few people who like Charles Murray's thesis in The Bell Curve. That book was scholarly, statistical, but echoed with common sense and universal observations. When the New York Times gave a miserable review to his latest, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010, I knew I had to read it as another counter blind liberalism treatise. I did not enjoy the book as much as The Bell Curve; I suppose the rancor Murray was exposed to has somewhat tempered either his own writing style of spurred his editors to modify his arguments to be more centrist.

Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts: the formation of a new upper class, of a new lower class and why it matters. I only started dog-earring pages once I got to part three. Murray's premises and observations which he lays out in multiple graphs and through the comparison of two hypothetical towns of Belmont and Fishtown do not seem as scholastically rigorous as the data he employed in The Bell Curve. Maybe he had to argue more exhaustively about phenomena that are not readily observable, to wit, people's mental capacities. Here is mathematically backing up trends that are much more observable where people live, what work they do (or can't do), how they educate their children, what their social networks are like (if they still have any).

But the third section is strong. Murray quotes deTocqueville, and as any Slacker blog reader knows, I'm a sucker for writers who stand on Alexis' shoulders Murray cites four founding virtues as being the attributes that made America different and great marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Over the last fifty years, he finds Americans at the lower end of the economic curve to have devalued these social principles almost to the point of lacking critical mass to recoup and bend the slope upwards. In many ways, Murray is also standing on the shoulders of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Although Murray avoids also racial comparisons, once burnt, twice shy, he writes about white women not marrying, white men claiming disability so as to avoid working to support a family and about "bowling alone," with the decline of participation in civic and religious groups.

I guess it is my Yankee upbringing that stresses industriousness above all. (After all, there always are hidden scarlet letters and folks can be facetious about how they spend their Sunday mornings.) But to support your lifestyle and facades you need to make some money. Trade, and here I am leaking into Pinker's premises, underlies democracy and comity. Work confers pride, status, and a tolerance for reciprocity. Idleness promotes aloof dependency and drives a demand for "Big Daddy/Big Government." Or as Murray writes: "But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with the lack of money. When communities are no longer bound by their members' web of mutual obligations, the continuing human needs must be handed over to bureaucracies -- the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for getting people the kind of help they need."

Part three often reads like very well thought out and written Sunday editorials, but Murray is a cut above the typical blather:

"... People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned ... and they only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling next context, and that context is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences ... Responsibility for the consequences of our actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards."

Murray sees signs that the new upper class is weakening, or at least moving towards the European model of entitled happiness and ease. He quotes from the McGuffey Readers as the conveyance of the code for males. He says that code of behavior has collapsed. "In today's new upper class ... the code that has taken its place is a set of mushy injunctions to be nice. Call it the code of ecumenical niceness ... The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead ... The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births ... When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." Ah-yuh, have you all noticed this in the media and presidential campaign?

Speaking of candidates, think of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum against this observation: "The most powerful and successful members of their class increasingly trade on the perks of their privileged positions without regard to the seemliness of that behavior. The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL."

Finally, Murray exposes the underlying foundations of a welfare state. As opposed to the founding fathers four principles, today's policy makers believe that people are equal not just in the ways that the Declaration of Independence meant equal in the eyes of God and before the law) but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. The corollary to this is that human nature can be changed. The second belief paraphrases liberal political party platforms: "... at bottom, human beings re not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten -- they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum ... Thus it is morally appropriated to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state ..."

But he is not a Debbie Downer. Murray believes that America is ripe to move beyond its current moral stagnation and enter a new age. Unfortunately, Murray attests that this is his last book; we will not have his insight to assess any improvement, or woe is us, deterioration.