Terrific page-turner: 11/22/63

11/22/63, Stephen King

Fast Facts

• 849 pages - perfect summer read (on Kindle - less heavy!)
• One of New York Times' 10 best books of 2011
• Book website is pretty cool, but inaccurate - the diner doesn't exist in 1958, where Jake lands, or in 1963
• Not always a fan of Stephen King, ages ago I'd enjoyed The Stand and Thinner and The Long Walk, although I just couldn't get through It and a number of his others - but I unequivocally loved 11/22/63
• Hulu tells me that you can watch James Franco in the lead role in its recent adaptation, which would be worth watching if it's half as good as the book
• Premise: a high school English teacher discovers a portal to the past, and time travels with the goal (among others) of saving JFK and changing the course of American history

A Reminder that Stephen King isn't Just a Commercial Success

With an author as prolific as Stephen King, readers might be dismissive on the grounds that high productivity can't possibly mean truly high quality.  It had been so long since I'd read any Stephen King, after abandoning It partway through, that I was ready to put him in a James Patterson category of writers whose success was impressive, but whose work didn't really appeal to me.

After seeing 11/22/63 on the New York Times list, and reading Sarah Hepola's memoir, where she writes about King as the author who inspired her to become a writer, I decided to give it a shot.  After the heaviness of When Breath Becomes Air, Blackout, and My Name is Lucy Barton, I was ready for something lighter.

What an incredible storyteller.  High brow or not, this is such an entertaining novel - you'll be hooked immediately.

Tiny Plot Teaser

King's narrator is Jake Epping, an English teacher with an alcoholic ex-wife who frequents a suspect diner in his Texas hometown.  Opportunity presents itself in the form of the diner's owner, Al, who contracts a mortal condition seemingly overnight, and urgently convinces Jake to use a portal in the diner pantry which will transport him to 1958.

Jake is convinced to spend significant time in the past in small part by loneliness and in large part by a desire for adventure and heroism.

Twin goals beckon: the chance to stop a heinous crime committed against one of Jake's students, and the chance to prevent the assassination of JFK and change the course of history.

Take Me Back!

The time travel - marked by the butterfly effect (of course) and King's rule that all of Jake's acts committed in the past are entirely erased with each new trip down the pantry - is a delight.  And it's also a terror - particularly the section in the fictional town of Derry, Maine (it IS Stephen King, after all).  I can't imagine a scarier place.

I certainly wished that, like protagonist Jake, I could go back in time and taste root beer the way it was meant to taste, buy quality merchandise for pennies, and drive Jake's beloved 1950's car.  The nostalgia is so strong and colorfully evoked that even though I finished the book a few months ago, I still smile when I think about Jake's librarian romance, swing dancing, and school plays in small-town Jodie, Texas.

King revels, as you will, in the alternate history and imagining what Lee Harvey Oswald and his family would have been like, and how he could have been stopped.  A historic episode that could feel tired from cultural saturation really feels bright, new, and exciting - highly recommended.

Three Good Cries: When Breath Becomes Air; Blackout; My Name is Lucy Barton

Each of these relatively short books is a tear-jerker in its own very different way.  I hope to have some more upbeat options to recommend soon, but there is value in each of the choices below that shouldn't be ignored just because they might make you sad.

In order of importance:

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi

(with a beautiful epilogue by Lucy Kalinithi)

256 pages

Kalanithi's memoir, written as he is finishing his residency in neurosurgery and undergoing treatment for terminal lung cancer, is absolutely brilliant. I'm certainly not the first to recommend it to everyone with blood running through their veins - I've seen the book recommended in every publication I read (it was even in People!), and it has been touted by Ann Patchett and likened to Oliver Sachs' and Atul Gawande's work.

This is not "just" a book about cancer.  Kalinithi was an English major and a doctor - a likely unique, and necessary combination of interests and talents.  He writes poetically and simply about his love of literature, and his desire to connect medicine to an understanding of humanity, in all its complexity.  No easy task, while also finishing training as a highly sought-after brain surgeon.

One of Kalinithi's goals was to write a book, which he hadn't had time for as a neurosurgical resident who had also completed a fellowship in neuroscience.  After his shocking diagnosis - he was only 36 years old - the impetus to put what he had learned about life on paper became more urgent.  The result is a thoughtful consideration on caring for patients and the meaning of life, and a testament of love to his wife and baby daughter.  (The couple's decision to visit a fertility clinic to conceive after Paul's diagnosis, but before the ravages of chemotherapy, is so hopeful and hits like a sucker punch).

This memoir highlights how brutally unfair the world can be, while making you grateful that Kalinithi was not only able to accomplish incredible feats as a doctor in the time he was alive, but was also able to give readers the precious gift of his reflections and honesty.

I can't eloquently put into words how close this memoir, and his wife's gorgeous writing, made me feel to Kalinithi and his family, who are strangers.  Suffice it to say that When Breath Becomes Air is very powerful, hard-to-forget, poignant, and devastatingly important.

Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget, Sarah Hepola

240 pages

I heard Sarah Hepola's interview on Fresh Air and read her article on online dating before deciding to try a Kindle sample of Blackout.  A memoir about a woman overcoming alcoholism doesn't sound like entertainment, but like the interview and article, I found the sample to be so unexpectedly engaging and, in a perverse way, amusing, that I had to buy it.

Hepola is a witty, funny writer who you will immediately want to be friends with.  The ability to make someone laugh while writing about difficult and embarrassing episodes is a great talent, and Hepola is terrifically interesting.  She's a writer and editor for Salon!  She is best friends with Bobby Flay's ex-wife, one of a seemingly unlimited number of friends!  She spent years as a journalist in Texas and New York City and, in a particularly memorable vignette, Paris!  How could this woman ever think that she wanted or needed alcohol to be the life of the party?  

It is an achievement that Hepola makes her story and her disease so accessible and relatable, and that she has exposed many painful secrets in a glaring light.  What's more, she has written a narrative that has (we hope) an obvious ending, and somehow made it into a page-turner that defies cliché.

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
209 pages

This was another book that I caught wind of by listening to Strout's interview on Fresh Air.  What I enjoyed even more than the book was the revelation that Strout didn't become a full-time published novelist until she was 43, while teaching at a Manhattan community college after having graduated from law school, practicing law for 6 months, hating it, and quitting.  As she shares in the interview, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and had miniseries rights purchased by HBO for her novels Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys, by the time she was 58.

Of the three books I've reviewed in this post, My Name is Lucy Barton is probably the least entertaining or essential.  I didn't find it nearly as engrossing as Olive Kitteridge (both the book and the excellent miniseries).

But that's not to say that I didn't appreciate the book, and how fully enveloped I became in Lucy's story and her fully-realized character.  Much of the book takes place when Lucy is at a Manhattan hospital for an extended period, seriously ill, when her husband won't visit (hating hospitals - don't we all?), and she is terribly lonely and misses her two small girls.  

The heart of the novel is Lucy's unexpected, multi-day visit from her estranged mother.  The reasons for her familial estrangement, the details of her impoverished and possibly abusive childhood and her later success as a writer, and her experience navigating her new family and new city in adulthood, all feel like interesting, but ultimately unnecessary, background.

The book comes most alive when Lucy and her mother re-hash stories of neighborhood acquaintances.  Strout cuts to the quick of a universal mother-daughter relationship, in all its emotional highs and lows, so well that the truth of the relationship brought me to tears.

For starved Serial Season 2 fans: The Yellow Birds

The Yellow Birds, Kevin Powers

Fast Facts

• If Kevin Powers had written a book about his favorite breakfast cereal, I would buy it
• Powers served in Iraq and spent four years writing this incredible, poetic novel about Private John Bartle, a twenty-one-year-old soldier's experience in Iraq and the aftermath stemming from his complex relationship with fellow Private Daniel Murphy and Sergeant Sterling
• 241 pages
• National Book Award Finalist
• Winner of the Guardian First Book Award
• Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction
• Michiko Kakutani called it one of her top ten books of 2012
• I am still picking my jaw up off the floor after finishing this masterpiece - not light reading, not for the faint of heart, but breathtaking and worth every minute

Serial Has Gone Bi-Weekly - Read This While You Wait

This season's Serial podcast on runaway soldier and Taliban captive Bowe Bergdahl is engrossing and requires every ounce of a listener's attention - otherwise, prepare to be utterly lost and have to rewind.  With a little more intellectual and emotional energy, I would re-listen to all of the episodes uploaded so far.

While Sarah, Julie and co. are busy flexing their journalistic muscles, use your (long) time between episodes to get a flavor from Powers of what it is like to be a soldier in a Middle Eastern battlefield.

The story flows backwards and forwards in time, beginning in fall of 2004 in Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq (perhaps a stand-in for Tal Afar, a stronghold currently held by ISIS); flashing back to training in Fort Dix, New Jersey; jumping forward to an air base and nearby town in Germany and then to Bartle's home in Richmond, Virginia after his tour of duty; and finally finding Bartle, all grown up and reflective, in 2009 Kentucky.

There is a deep and ominous connection foreshadowed between Bartle, Murph (the fellow soldier and friend that Bartle has promised to protect,) and their Sergeant Sterling.  "What happened over there?" Bartle's mother asks pointedly when Bartle returns, and her voice echoes the reader's on this major source of suspense pushing the story forward.  (I'm wondering the same thing about Bowe.)

Staggering Subject Matter, Gorgeous Writing

This is some of the most magnificent writing I have ever read.  I haven't spent much time reading poetry since 10th grade English class (too much work, too boring, no clear answers, not enough story - lots of excuses).  I didn't fully realize how poetic narrative fiction could be until I began reading Powers.  This is how he starts:

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire. 

Every paragraph of this novel was filled with Powers' masterful command of language and often beautiful imagery, despite (and often enhancing) the stark subject matter.  I am not typically drawn to books or films about war, finding it difficult to relate to experiences so uniquely traumatic and geographically distant.  This book, however, is worth the special effort and discomfort.

Another poignant example describes the futility Bartle feels before a battle in an orchard:

We'd go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of season.  We'd drive them out.  We always had.  We'd kill them.  They'd shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages.  Then they'd come back, and we'd start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops.  While we patrolled the streets, we'd throw candy to their children with whom we'd fight in the fall a few more years from now.

There are too many other examples to share and spoilers to be avoided, but suffice it to say that I am in awe of Powers' hard work and talent.

Stay Tuned for the Movie

When I started reading articles after finishing the book, I learned that Jennifer Aniston will play a supporting role in the movie version of The Yellow Birds coming out this year.  I felt some snobby disappointment for about 30 seconds, but overall, I'm glad that this will bring more attention to an excellent novel.  (How I wish Justin Theroux played a soldier or something - anything!)

The role of John Bartle is an incredible one, as his mental anguish is painted in such detail throughout the book.  I'm interested to see whether Murph and Sterling, characters that felt a bit like cardboard symbol markers by comparison in the book, are fleshed out more on-screen.

While I wait for the big screen version, I'm going to pray that Powers writes another novel immediately, shamelessly push The Yellow Birds on everyone I know, and refresh my Serial feed in vain.

Spend time with a wonderful, dysfunctional family that isn't yours: A Spool of Blue Thread

A Spool of Blue Thread, Anne Tyler

Fast Facts

• An immediately engrossing, wonderful portrait of the Whitshank family and their patriarch's dream home in a suburb of Baltimore
• This is Anne Tyler's 20th novel, but the first I've read, and surely not the last
• A perfect book to read after you've recovered from family time over the holidays
• 370 pages
• Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker
• Sweet and highly recommended - you'll recognize some of your own family members in the Whitshanks, and feel as close to the characters as though you were a member of their salt-of-the-earth clan

Family Stories that Become Folklore

Tyler's lovely book is solidly founded on family folklore - the anecdotes you tell and re-tell one another at every Thanksgiving, and the examples you use to define and explain your family members to an interested friend or acquaintance.  The one about the sibling who ate all the Christmas cookies and hid the crumbs under his pillow, the one about the drunken uncle's hilarious wedding speech, etc.

The novel opens with ageing married couple Red and Abby Whitshank, lying in bed waiting for their estranged son Denny to call them back after he has called to say that he's gay and then immediately hung up, never to mention the topic again.

This is the first of many Whitshank anecdotes that feel familiar and real without being stereotypical.  Within paragraphs, you are enveloped in the comforting habits and quirks of Red and Abby's decades-long marriage, and you've begun to understand Denny's moody tendency to bolt at the first sign of conflict.

The House that Junior Built

The book revolves around the home Junior, Red's father, built for another family but eventually moved into himself.  The house becomes a character in its own right, its merits and flaws both a setting and a metaphor for the little family dramas it hosts.

Each question posed by the family home opens the door to a story that is ordinary in its subject matter and extraordinary in its compassionate, lovely, raw telling.  How did Red's parents end up in the home that raised four generations?  How do adult siblings deal with one another and with parents growing older, with bodies and minds beginning to fray?  What was on Abby's mind the day she and Red fell in love?  What is it like to be on the Whitshanks' annual beach vacation?  What does it mean to join and truly be part of a family?

Tyler has built her novel with as much care as Junior built the Whitshank home.  Every time a story had reached the end of its narrative (blue) thread, the scope or generation of focus would seamlessly shift, and Tyler would fill in a detail previously only hinted at that would feel crucial and satisfying.

I enjoyed every moment I spent with the Whitshanks - if you're looking for something to fill the hole in your time and heart after the Neapolitan novels, this is the book to start with.