Fascinating and sobering: Being Mortal

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande

Fast Facts

• Atul Gawande is a practicing surgeon, a professor at Harvard, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and in my opinion, a total rock star
• This book, his fourth New York Times bestseller, was just selected as one of NYT's 100 Notable Books of the Year (review here)
• Being Mortal runs 300 pages, or 9 hours of audiobook time
• Perfectly balanced mix of anecdotes and education on cultural approaches to caring for the elderly and dying over time
• Deeply moving and sad, but a great choice for a fiction lover looking for a foray into non-fiction
• Required reading for anyone who faces big end-of-life choices; or, everyone

Why Did I Pick this Up?

Typically, I steer clear of non-fiction in book form.  Other than trying to make it through the New Yorker every week, and clicking around newspaper sites as a respite/distraction from work, I rarely read non-fiction because fiction is typically so much more fun, enjoyable, and relaxing for me.  It's hard to view non-fiction as attractively escapist.

But lately, and the farther I get from those sweet years of formal education, I've been getting worried that my brain might turn to mush.  That's extreme, but work doesn't always give you the learning opportunities you were inundated with in school.  

So, I decided to dip my toes into the non-fiction pool, starting with an author whose long-form journalism I'd read before and loved.  Definitely check out:

• Gawande's brilliant and creative comparison of Big Medicine to the Cheesecake Factory, which is amazing
• Gawande's look at an incredible non-profit in Camden, New Jersey, which is trying to lower emergency room medical costs for low-income patients by targeting preventative care
• By the way - this article helped my incredibly inspiring friend/superhero Megan with her first job on the road to running the public hospital corporation in NYC - how cool is that?!
• For other recommendations, check out my friend Matt's blog.  He completed (almost!) a 100-books-in-a-year challenge - all non-fiction.  Maybe I'll follow in his awesome footsteps in 2015...

Summary, and Why You Should Read It

Many people who are brilliant in the sciences struggle to communicate their ideas effectively.  Gawande opens the book with this critique of doctors: just because they've made their way through tough medical schools and residencies does not mean that they are talented caretakers.  In fact, they may be ill-equipped address some of the most difficult choices that patients and their families must make.

It's a good thing this is clearly not Gawande's problem - I can't think of many writers who are more clear, compassionate, and fascinating.

He tackles the task of educating his audience on end-of-life care, both for the elderly, as well as for young people afflicted with terrible illness (a timely topic with the tragic activism of Brittany Maynard in the news).  Technological progress in medicine, and its associated high costs and social constructs, presents us with challenges that need to be considered, however sobering they may be.

Many of Gawande's topics were eye-opening for me.  As a child, I visited a grandparent suffering from dementia in a nursing home, but this book has made me consider the adult choices that must be made when considering care in Assisted Living or in nursing homes, and the history of how these methods of care evolved in America.

By way of illustration, Gawande describes how his grandfather in India experienced the end of his life, cared for by many family members at home and able to maintain his relative independence until age ~100.  This is contrasted with the story of Gawande's wife's grandmother, who lived in America: a fiercely independent woman who, after a series of falls, a car accident, and extortion by a home contractor, was put in a home that slowly sapped her will to live.

These are only two of the narratives that Gawande weaves throughout his explanation of how end-of-life care is administered.  The result is a well-paced, interesting, and personal account that manages to be informative, easy to understand, and difficult to put down.

Recommended as an Audiobook

I "read" Being Mortal as an audiobook (my first), while cruising in Maggie the Mazda around New Jersey, and commuting into the city.  I'd recommend this approach for someone like me, who usually reads fiction but likes public radio and podcasts.  What better way to start forcing longer non-fiction down my throat?  The only downside is that you might find yourself heave-crying on Sixth Avenue (to be fair, this only happened once).

"World War II Whimsical" (a new genre?): All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

Fast Facts

• To my abject delight, Anthony Doerr was raised in none other than Cleveland, Ohio - hence, his sunny world view?
• 544 pages
• 10 years of writing
• Selected for the Fiction Long List for the National Book Award
• Not just another World War II tears-and-torture fest
• An ode to the wonders of technology, the power of family relationships, finding love and beauty in strange places, and the special terrors of the war
• My first Anthony Doerr book, but certainly not my last

(A Little Bit of the) Plot
The story focuses on two children as they become very adult adolescents during the war: Marie-Laure LeBlanc, an immensely clever young blind girl trapped in her great-uncle's house in a coastal town, and Werner Pfennig, a brilliant white-haired orphan boy from a coal mining town with a penchant for radios.

Both their journeys are heart-wrenching, as they struggle to survive in unimaginable circumstances and in the midst of excruciating separations from their most cherished loved ones.  Their bright curiosity and talents, the mystery of a diamond hunt, and the lingering question of who will survive and how their lives will collide, dissipate some of the depressing weight of their circumstances.

(Maybe that sounds a bit like a book jacket, but I would hate to spoil such a highly-recommended read by giving any more away!)

Structure Makes it a Speed Read
Doerr bounces around time periods within, and briefly before and after, the war, using short chapters and shifts in point of view.  Primarily, you follow the perspectives of Marie-Laure and Werner, but you also uncomfortably spend time in the point of view of the antagonist, a Nazi sergeant major hunting down an enormous diamond (think the Titanic stone, but offering an immortality that Jack and Rose never enjoyed).

Each chapter is a morsel so perfectly proportioned that you'll keep saying "sure, I'll have another," until your eyes are burning and the sun comes up.  With such dark subject matter, how can you take so many of these sections at one time?

Well, because it's lovely.

What Makes it Lovely

Yes, this book is deeply dark and depressing.  But it has garnered rave reviews and captured attention because it offers some human redemption - something that books in all genres, not simply World War II fiction, could use in healthy doses.

That redemption takes many forms, and I'll offer a few of my favorites.

Radio.  Sometimes, I feel so surrounded by and inundated in technology that I forget the sheer wonder in it.  This book makes you feel genuinely excited by, and in thrall and terror of, the radio.  Doerr hits you over the head with this towards the end, but I forgive him for his final lack of subtlety because of how perfectly he puts you into the time period and into Werner's passion.  In an NPR interview, Doerr summed up his inspiration (the first recorded instance of creative inspiration on a New Jersey Transit train):

"I was on a train heading into Penn Station from Princeton, N.J., and we started going underground. The man in front of me was on his cellphone call — this was in 2004 — and the call dropped. And he got kind of angry, a little embarrassingly angry, unreasonably angry.

And I just remember thinking, what he's forgetting — really what we're all forgetting all the time — is that this is a miracle. He's using this little receiver and transmitter, this little radio in his pocket, to send messages at the speed of light rebounding between towers to somebody maybe thousands of miles away. He might have been talking to someone in Madagascar for all I knew. For me, that's a miracle.

So ... originally, the real central motivation for the book was to try and conjure up a time when hearing the voice of a stranger in your home was a miracle.

 (Reminds me of Louie CK's Miracle of Flight sketch, but less funny.)

Experiencing coastal France without visual imagery.  Marie-Laure and her father leave Paris for Saint Malo, on the Brittany coast.  Marie-Laure's experiences there, discovering the salt and vastness of the ocean, are absolutely gorgeous.

Daniel LeBlanc's model towns and letters.  Marie-Laure's father builds her perfect replica model towns of the places she lives.  The way he builds them, and the games he concocts for her, are described so tenderly that they are truly memorable.

Treasure hunt.  The book has a good, old-fashioned treasure hunt, and a suspense-building game of cat and mouse (allusion to Art Spiegelman partly on purpose.)  This adds a layer of enjoyable tension to the difficult subject matter.

Compassion for a German soldier, without total forgiveness.  I loved and pitied Werner more than anyone in the book.  I often wondered how I would behave in his circumstances and alarmingly, it is nearly impossible to think that I would have acted differently.  Making a reader step into Werner's shoes so thoroughly must have been a difficult, and impressive, feat for Doerr.

Something Happier for Your Dreary Fall?

I just finished a summer of bingeing some delicious book junk food:

1) The last book in the Discovery of Witches trilogy, in which the hot-and-heavy will-they-won't-they vampire-witch power couple finally have some babies and visit their string of beautifully decorated villas around the world, and

2) All three of the Hunger Games books (Thanksgiving cannot come soon enough for that movie!  I read the third book in a 24-hour blitz that needs some Jennifer Lawrence recapping, stat.)

After all my pleasure reading, I figured it was probably time for me to pick up Proust or something.  Failing that, I kept coming across All the Light We Cannot See, and I'm very glad that I finally pulled the trigger, because despite all the accolades, this was a tough book for me to purchase.  Who can jump from Katniss, Diana the witch and her hunky Matthew the vampire, to a depressing Holocaust novel?

If you're feeling post-summer melancholy, my recommendation is to battle the evil vampires and President Snow first, and afterwards pick up Doerr's beautiful book to assuage your guilt.



The Donna Tartt Edition

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch and The Secret History: the literary world's well-deserved Huge Crush

The "It" Girl

My latest fan mail would read as follows:

Dear Donna Tartt,

You write a staggering work of fiction once every ten years.  Your sharp suit perfectly matches your sharp bob, and I hope you always accessorize with that pencil.  Don't listen to the bitter literary critics whose only chance at being in Vanity Fair is taking the unpopular view of panning you.  They're just jealous, and frankly, some of the pretentiousness in your books (see: all the Greek/classicism rambling in The Secret History) should have been enough to satisfy them.  You tell a @#$(*& good story, and all the references to The Goldfinch as "this generation's David Copperfield" strike me as true.  Except, I stopped a hundred pages short of finishing David Copperfield, and I could never have done that with your beautiful book.

Love,

Em

P.S. Please write faster next time.

P.P.S. Knowing that you and Ann Patchett are friends is almost too much.  It cruelly fuels my fantasy that someday I could have a glass of wine with the two of you.

The Goldfinch: my favorite of the two

Background

This novel recently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is seemingly everywhere - I swear the ads are (nearly) as pervasive as for a blockbuster film.  My expectations were high and I did my best to avoid reading anything about the book before I finished it - which meant that I missed seeing the titular painting on special Limited Time Only display at The Frick, 10 blocks from my apartment, by just one day.  (Good thing, I guess - the lines of book clubbers trying to see The Goldfinch and Girl with the Pearl Earring were insane!)

The book follows Theo, a troublemaking 12-year-old who lives alone with his mother in New York City, his alcoholic father having recently abandoned the burden of his family.  It is immediately a page-turner, as Theo recounts in striking detail the last day of his mother's life.  The extremely close pair visit the Metropolitan Museum before a special school meeting regarding Theo's mischief, and a terrorist bombing changes the course of his life.

What makes it so awesome

One of the most memorable traits of the book is Tartt's ability to deftly tell the story from Theo's 12-year-old perspective, without being too heavy-handed with obvious manipulation. The Met sequence, post-explosion, is dreamlike, reflecting Theo's injury and trauma, and in this haze, Theo believes a dying old man in the rubble has given him a small Dutch 17th century painting of a bird. Everything that happens in the immediate aftermath smacks of Theo's shock, grief, and piecemeal information he is given due to the protectiveness of the adults in his changed world.

Another aspect I loved was that Tartt wasn't afraid to make her narrator, otherwise very sympathetic because of everything that had happened to him, into a huge jerk.  It just feels true that Theo, growing up among relative strangers after such a horrific loss, would be bitter, angry, drug addicted, selfish and lonely, a self-absorbed kid who grows into a self-absorbed adult.

As a prime example, take Welty, an antique restorer who provides the only real stability, parenting, financial support, sense of purpose, and friendship in Theo's life.  He is a stranger who takes Theo in, ultimately raises him, teaches him a trade, and seems like the most generous and kind-hearted character ever (think furniture-maker Aidan, from "Sex and the City", but as an older, kindly uncle).  I know he isn't real, but I still want to give him a hug.  Still, Theo jeopardizes his business by committing fraud on Welty's customers, uses Welty to get to Welty's niece (Theo's unrequited love interest, Pippa,) takes innumerable banned substances in Welty's home, and speculates as to Welty's sexuality.  See?  Don't you kinda hate this guy?

I actually felt guilty being upset with the way Theo treated those who were kind to him, after what he'd been through. How interesting to bring such dislike and such guilt out of a reader. I have to recognize and respect that Tartt's narrative choices here were gutsy and added to a real uniqueness and realism in the book.

Whether you find him likable and/or pitiable or not, Theo's adventures are fascinating.  He is taken in by a wealthy family of characters, socialites and sailing buffs, in a Park Avenue town home.  He moves to Vegas with his nauseatingly horrible father and his spacey new girlfriend, Xandra, another two memorable characters you'll love to hate, from whom poor Theo gains his painkiller addiction and many of his more abominable characteristics.  He lives a life of crime, at times as a sidekick to his dark and hilarious friend Boris, and at times on his own.  Is it always realistic?  Maybe not, but it is a really, really great story.

The Bird is the Word!

At the center of it all, there is Theo's quest to keep and protect "his" painting.  Some critics have interpreted this as Theo's attempt to connect to his mother's memory, but I don't agree.  Theo's life has been shattered by random tragedy.  He is a boy becoming a man who wants to assert some kind of control over what is otherwise an uncontrollable universe. He wants to believe his life has real meaning, and how better to do that than to cast yourself as Grand Protector of a lasting and powerful art work?

Summing it up

All the hype and debates over literariness aside - I enjoyed The Goldfinch so much, more than many books I've read recently. Whether it has lasting power culturally or not, I read it six months ago and have clear and emotional recall of many parts of this novel - it will definitely have lasting power with me.

The Secret History: Tartt's 1992 debut

Background

I loved The Goldfinch so much that I had to read Tartt's probably second most-acclaimed book, her debut novel that launched her new literary legend status. When she dated Bret Easton Ellis in college, she shared some passages of what would become this book, and he was apparently adamant about getting it in front of his agent.

I didn't like The Secret History quite as much as The Goldfinch, but I still think it's a terrific story and an impressive read, particularly given that she wrote it when she was so young.

(In terms of college genius first novels, I still prefer Zadie Smith's White Teeth, but then again, Zadie Smith hasn't yet written her Goldfinch, in my opinion. Give her 20 years, I guess.)

In the opening chapter, you learn that the narrator and his group of college friends have murdered a member of their clique.  Gone is the more traditional narrative structure, a chronological buildup to a shocking twist and then a conclusion.  Here, first comes the twist, and still, somehow, everything that follows still smacks of mystery.  What caused this horrible act?  Will they be caught?  What are the consequences and aftermath?  What will happen to this group of "friends"?  This is the drama that drives the story.

Comparing the two, "Secret History" falls short

Like The Goldfinch, it's a page-turning story, vividly delving into the characters' minds and their surroundings (in this case, a very cold, haunting, and disturbing Vermont campus.) You've got an even more detestable narrator named Richard Papen who, without the benefit of a sympathetic sad backstory, is probably the hugest jerk whose brain I've been forced into.  There's an unattainable, ethereal crush - Richard's Camilla is Theo's Pippa, but with more blood in her hair.  There are acts of violence, and bad guys who you somehow are manipulated into rooting for.  There is plenty of substance abuse for all.

There were parts, though, that I didn't love nearly as much as The Goldfinch.  Tartt starts off with a whole section on Richard's Greek classicism training and snobbiness that established his academic know-it-all obnoxiousness, but was also so off-putting and dull that I nearly put the book down.

The other large problem with the book was the real lack of redemption or likeability of any of the characters.  Even Bunny, the murder victim and moral center of the book, is someone you'd never want to spend an afternoon with.  The group of friends that Richard so desperately wants to be a part of is so abhorrent that I hoped with every page that they'd all be arrested.  Julian, the classics teacher they all adore, is a spineless, arrogant twit.  By contrast, I do think I would want to spend time with Theo and company (though in the case of his father, it would just be to deliver a couple of sucker punches.)

Still worth a read!

It's unfair to pit the two against one another when I liked The Goldfinch so much, I suppose.  Don't get me wrong - Secret History is still very much worth the time, especially if you like a good murder mystery.  Tartt weaves an excellent, well-paced, different, and enjoyable narrative. I have yet to read her second book, but I can definitely say that she is only getting better.

Love: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fast Facts

• One of The New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year
• 496 pages, hefty but still impossible to put down
• Like Ifemelu, the protagonist, Adichie grew up in Nigeria
• I will never look at getting my hair done the same way again

Premise

The novel starts in the present in Princeton, New Jersey, where the protagonist, Ifemelu, is planning to go back to Nigeria after over a decade in America.  Ifemelu gets her hair done at an African beauty parlor, and after a series of flashbacks, and hundreds of pages, we seem to keep ending up at the salon - an ode to the hours spent and pain endured by many black women to style their hair. 

(Aside - I went with my friend Mel once to get her hair braided.  Meaning, I stayed with Mel for a few minutes, then went shopping and ate multiple meals, and came back, and her beautiful braids STILL weren't done.  This was a mind-boggling lesson in patience to me, and I feel shame when I think that I can barely manage to get an up-keep 15-minute haircut every 6 months.)

Anyhow, we learn about Ifemelu's relatively rosy and privileged childhood in Nigeria - her religious mother, her government servant father who suffers a difficult layoff, her aunt's precarious affair with an army official known as The General.  And, most importantly, the beginning of her love affair with Obinze, the boy everyone in high school loved.

Ifemelu and Obinze's stories eventually split.  During college, after a series of teacher strikes that constantly closed universities in Nigeria, Ifemelu is able to obtain a student visa and moves to Brooklyn, and then Philadelphia, and then Baltimore, and finally to Princeton for her studies and (fantastically told) relationships.  (I still want to meet her red-headed boyfriend, Curt.) 

Meanwhile, Obinze, who had always been obsessed with American literature and life, was denied an American visa due to terrorist concerns, and spends some time in England.  Ifemelu and Obinze's experiences overseas show a cruel reality for immigrants in America and England, even those with huge financial and educational advantages.  This window into immigrant life was eye-opening, fascinating, and disturbing to me.

Overall, the plot is well-paced and throughout the novel, you're faced with the dangling carrot presented in the beginning: will the star-crossed lovers reunite?  Where will Ifemelu ultimately call "home"?

Love me a good love story

I can't resist a good love story, and as love stories go, Americanah is so, so great.  I don't want to short-change Adichie, who took on serious racial identity questions, problems, and experiences, and somehow taught a wide breadth of lessons on being black in America without sounding cliche, tired, preachy, or pedantic.  But the thing that kept me reading, obsessively, with the final sprint in bed on a Saturday till 3pm because I hadn't finished yet and I just had to, was finding out how Ifemelu's Obinze story would end.  You can't help but root for these characters individually, but what you really want is for them to be together at all costs, because it's hard to think of a couple as sexy and two-halves-of-a-whole as these two.

Nitpicking

Despite how much I loved the book, I have to admit that Adichie was pedantic sometimes.  One of Ifemelu's lovers, Blaine, is a Yale professor with the preachiest group of friends and family ever, and sometimes their rants on race were about as subtle as a club over the head.  This can be forgiven, given how enjoyable it was to learn about Ifemelu's experiences and to read her blog entries on race that were delivered with more aplomb.

If you could have cut out the Blaine relationship entirely, really, and in particular their insufferable dinner parties with his horrible sister, the book would have been even better, in my opinion.  Being with Blaine gives Adichie an outlet to talk about what Obama meant to her characters, and most importantly, an African-American counterpoint to Ifemelu's African-in-America views.  And having had an annoying ex-boyfriend, I suppose their irritaitng relationship made Ifemelu a fuller and more real person to me.  But good lord, I hoped with every page turn that they would break up!

Ifemelu, can I be your clueless but adoring white friend?

I have seen a lot of films and articles and media analysis delving into the subject of what it means to be African American in this country, but this novel is driven by a different, but related, topic: what it means to be an African immigrant, seeking love and stability in America and England. 

I've never been to Africa, and my knowledge of regional conflict there and the immigrant experience is limited to representing a client from Guinea, and asking my friend Dani, who is doing public health work in Liberia, a thousand questions.  Despite my narrow perspective, one of this novel's biggest achievements is that I still couldn't help but feel that its protagonist, Ifemelu, was so very relatable.

Ifemelu writes a blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known As Negroes) by a Non-American Black" - by turns hilarious, scathing, educational, and like its title, a mouthful.  One of the best entries focuses on her clueless but adoring white friends, and having just finished this novel, I would love to count myself among these friends - I'm already deeply missing spending time with Ifemelu.

Joyous: Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter

"There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact." -Milan Kundera (opens the last chapter, with the title name)

Fast Facts

• Walter has been a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Allen Poe award
• Journalist-turned novelist
• Beautiful Ruins (a great name for a book) took him 15 years to write
• He provides an afterward explaining how obnoxious this admission is, and detailing his blue collar work ethic and approach - it made me love him even more
• Do you want to travel to a small Italian village and fall in love?
• You do?  Then just buy this book.  Immediately.
• Funny and down-to-earth and descriptive and a great, engaging story
• Time period jumping, character jumping, stylistic jumping - Walter does it all, and does it well
• This book is an easy-to-digest joy.  Judge it by its cover and enjoy how delicious and sad and romantic it all is

How this Beautiful Story Starts

Where to begin, recapping a book I enjoyed so thoroughly that its perfect, no-ends-left-untied finish felt bittersweet.

If it takes me 15 years to write a book that brings someone else such relaxed pleasure, then it was a 15 years well-spent.

Walter's novel jumps fluidly between the small fishing village of Porto Vergogna in 1962, the present day, and points of interest to the characters in between.  This makes a summary somewhat difficult, but here goes.

Pasquale, a handsome college student in 1962, lives with his newly-widowed mother and his crazy, ugly witch of an aunt in their 6-room "hotel": the Adequate View Hotel.  No one comes to this fishing village, which is quickly losing its fishermen to larger vessels and faraway factories.  Pasquale's dream is to transform the village into a tourist destination, given its location - it's the bastard cousin of the Cinque Terre, and lobbies unsuccessfully to be the sixth town in that beautiful Italian coastal string of villages - why?  Well, it's smaller, more remote, and less picturesque.

The hotel gets its name from its only guest, an alcoholic American World War II veteran and unprolific writer named Alvis Bender.  Alvis finds the word "beautiful" to be too inflated, and tells Pasquale's father Carlo that it has lost its meaning after the war.  To have a real effect, Carlo gives it this name, and like the title of the book, I find it wonderfully satisfying.

Pasquale is a replacement son for parents who lost both their boys in the war, and when we meet him, he is scraping away at a dusting of sand near the water, trying to make it into a beach (failure).  He also spends his days moving rocks on a cliff at a task that even Sisyphus would laugh at - Pasquale wants to build a tennis court.  On a cliff.  Never having seen an actual game of tennis played, and only imagining that the American tourists who will flock to the hotel will never miss, he doesn't realize that every ball will fly off the cliff into the sea.

He's just that kind of romantic.

And who better for him to fall in love with than a beautiful American starlet who arrives (accidentally?) at his doorstep?  Dee Moray, with a supporting role in the movie Cleopatra, filming in Rome, has had the misfortune of comforting star Richard Burton, when Burton was on the outs with Elizabeth Taylor. (Glamorous much?)  She experiences horrible bouts of pain and vomiting, and is told that she is dying of cancer before she is sent to Porto Vergogna, and then on to Switzerland for treatment.

I Can't Tell You Any More

Really.  I can't stand it.  What happens to Pasquale and Dee is too interesting to read that I can't bear to spoil it.  I've already blathered on too long about just the first couple of chapters.  Instead, let's talk format and characters.

Format and Characters

If novels struggle to keep your attention due to conventional format, Beautiful Ruins will feel like a breath of fresh air.  The chapters are told not only from the perspectives of different characters, all fascinating and fully formed, but Walters frequently varies the formats. You read:

• the first and only chapter in Alvis Bender's wartime novel of his 20-second love Maria, before her fall
• the final chapter of Alvis, years later and still a romantic, through the eyes of his wife as he asks for another round of drinks
• the rejected chapter of legendary film producer Michael Deane's autobiography about his rise to power on Dee's back, struggling to keep the passion between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton alive in order to make back the money that the studio sunk into Cleopatra
• a movie pitch for Donner!, a far-too-expensive biopic about settlers heading west and into cannibalism
• a play about a drug-addicted, lost, manipulative, and charming comedic musician who looks like someone famous

In the present day, we're given Claire Silver, Michael Deane's production assistant, a lover of great movies who is forced to hear pitches from Michael's friends for zombie thrillers and reality garbage.  She's spent years dating a beautiful zombie extra with a porn addiction.

Then there's Michael Deane himself.  We see him, an unflattering portrait of a man at any point in time, and in the present day he is so old but so preserved by plastic surgery that he has a smooth baby face that causes strangers to stare.

And Shane Wheeler, a thirty-something living in his parent's basement, divorced and out of a job and out of his characteristic confidence.  He has tattooed "ACT" on his arm as an inspirational reminder to "act as if Ye have faith and it shall be given to you."   He finds out years later that this quote he'd lived by wasn't biblical as he'd thought, but was instead pulled from a Paul Newman movie.

And they're all just in supporting roles.



The Beautiful Part



Each of these characters - Michael and Claire in Hollywood and Shane on its cusp; Pasquale in the past and the present; the lovely, enigmatic Dee - they're all, as Dee tells Pasquale, waiting for their lives to start.  This idea, that everyone is waiting for their big adventure, climax, and true meaning, feels real beyond the novel and beyond the movies.

Watching them as they wait, and as they live through the most significant moments of their lives, making big decisions and falling in love and traveling and finding themselves and trying to make right the wrongs of the past, is a joy.

Of course, I've left out the big details about Dee, just as the novel circles around her without actually hearing her voice until the gorgeous ending.  But as I've said, I refuse to be a spoiler about this book, because I loved it.

So go and enjoy Beautiful Ruins the way you would a long afternoon on Pasquale's non-existent Porto Vergogna beach, never wanting the moment to end but just glad, whatever its flaws, that it existed at all.

First post: The Orphan Master's Son

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel, Adam Johnson

http://www.amazon.com/The-Orphan-Masters-Son-Pulitzer/dp/0812982622

"Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack - if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous."

Fast facts

• 445 pages
• Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (among other notable awards)
• Johnson grew up in Arizona and didn't step foot in North Korea until three years after he started research for Orphan Master
• This is one of my favorite books - ever
• Yes, the book features:
• An ejaculating ox
• Stoning
• Bloodletting
• Kidnapping
• Starvation
• Tattoo removal with a knife
• No, I won't pause to think too long about how I may be voyeuristic/sadistic for loving it
• Have I mentioned, it's also a love story?  Think Casablanca

Bottom line

If you have the stomach for (horrific) adventures, including torture and killing as a matter of course, the pay-off is worth it.  I promise that despite all the gore, the exploits of protagonist Jun Do are fascinating, humorous, sometimes uplifting, and surprisingly beautiful.

No interest in or prior knowledge of North Korea is required, but once you're finished, you'll feel like an expert on what it's like to live under the oppressive egomania of the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. The author's white bread name and some terrific (and funny) encounters with Texan diplomats in the book are the only real clues that Johnson isn't from Korea.

All-in-all, I'm still upset that I've finished the book, and though the dark subject matter was difficult to read in long spurts, I had trouble putting it down.  Johnson is ambitious and terrific, and anything else he's written or will write is a must-read for me.

What you can expect - long-winded plot summary

Orphan Master is split into two parts chronicling parallel lives.  In the first part, "The Biography of Jun Do," we meet our hero, the John Doe Everyman of North Korea, an orphan (who swears he's not an orphan,) in the countryside of Chongjin. 

Some chapters are structured as propaganda announcements over the omnipresent loudspeakers installed in every home.  These announcements paint a picture of idyllic life in the country, and give hints of the narrative to come.  The opening announcement features:

• North Korean recipe contests
• Tales of American atrocities
• Reporting on the defection of an Olympic American rower to North Korean shores
• A description of military Commander Ga and his golden belt award
• Praise for the national actress and Ga's wife, the beautiful and talented Sun Moon
• Baseless rumors of Japanese kidnappings involving an opera singer

When we meet Jun Do, he's at an orphanage called Long Tomorrows, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father, the Orphan Master, who is heartbroken because Jun Do's mother, a singer, was kidnapped and taken to the city.  The stigmatized orphans, all named after important "martyrs of the revolution," work in fields and in factories and are forced to memorize Juche speeches on Kim Il-Sung's political theory.

The region is flooded and Jun Do, quickly losing what passes in the book as childhood, becomes familiar with death, as orphans are snatched into the current or fall into paint vats in the factories.  He observes the famine known as the Arduous March, and at age 14, becomes a tunnel soldier.  The skills he learns in the tunnels, primarily the ability to fight in the dark, become influential throughout his misadventures.

As though "zero light combat" were not terrible enough, an individual called Officer So appears to take Jun Do away from the tunnels.  Together with Gil, their translator, they take a boat to the Japanese coast.  Their mission?  Practice kidnappings of random Japanese citizens who have the misfortune to be alone on the beach, in preparation for their big catch: an opera singer named Rumina, with whom a Korean official has developed an obsession.

• Aside: It is hard, at this point in the novel, to decide whether Jun Do is simply an object of pity, for whom acts of evil are a means to survival, or whether he is meant as an anti-hero.  Regardless, he feels remorse for the lives that he ruins, and a western reader can only wonder how they would ever survive in a place like North Korea - would I have made these difficult choices?  Would I have faced culture shock and fear of the unknown and fear of the Dear Leader's reprisal for defecting?

After a stint in language school, our protagonist begins a "listening post" aboard the Junma, a fishing vessel, where he listens to foreign communications over a transmission device and tries to assimilate with the fishermen, each of whom bears an image of a faraway wife tattooed on his chest.  The crew's run-in with an array of Nikes lost at sea, and with an American ship, are memorable and fraught with tension.

Jun Do's language skills and heroism aboard the Junma earn him a spot on a diplomatic mission to Texas: my favorite part of the book, and too good to spoil.  The entertainment of the culture clash with stereotypically brash Texans is much needed, given Jun Do's next stop at a prison camp that can only be described as a concentration camp on steroids.  It is here that we are told that the orphan known as Jun Do disappeared, and the first section of the novel ends abruptly.

In the second part, "The Confessions of Commander Ga," we find that our hero seems to have pulled off an impossible feat, impersonating the legendary martial arts champion military commander, living in the commander's home on a hill with his movie starlet wife and children, and rubbing elbows with the Dear Leader himself. 

Ga's journey is narrated in part by a nameless first-person narrator who works in Division 42, essentially a state-operated torture chamber in the heart of Pyongyang.  Though this narrator is a torturer himself by any definition, he composes biographies of his victims, which makes him believe that he is morally superior to the Pubyok, a group of old-school torturers who care less about their subjects' stories than about breaking their bodies in creative, terrible ways.  The narrator, too, is an object of pity, living on the top story of a high-rise with his elderly parents, who live in abject fear of him, spout propaganda, and (possibly) pretend blindness to avoid being truthful with their own son.

This second part of the novel is extraordinary and fast-paced, and it offers a spirit of hope and a love story that make all the terrors Jun Do experiences somehow less depressing.  Ga's interactions with Sun Moon and her children are poignant, and a testament to finding joy even in a dark place.

All done?  Food for thought

• How much of Johnson's vivid story was realistic?  How much could be tracked to true events in North Korea? 
• Blood-letting - really?
• If you became too sick, medical personnel would drain you of several units of blood till you died
• Labor camps - how common?
• The common knowledge/assumption was that if you defected, your family would be sent to labor camps
• But this was also hero treatment - Jun Do was sent to a camp, the Captain was sent to a camp, Pubyoks were sent to a camp, all begging the question why - simply because the government has no use for you? 
• How much of the population is in these camps? For example, when the first-person narrator stays out past curfew and is picked up by a bus on a work detail - how often does this happen?
• "Retirement" communities - where did grandma go?
• Elderly people were sent to retirement communities on the beach that, as Jun Do discovered, simply didn't exist
• Why doesn't Jun Do defect?
• He seems to be offered countless opportunities -
• At the end of a tunnel, as a soldier, when we know he has the opportunity to get out?
• When he wanders the streets of Japan with Gil, unsupervised?
• "In this whole stupid country, the only thing that made sense to me were the Korean ladies on their knees cleaning the feet of the Japanese."
• When Americans of USS Fortitude board the Junma?
• On the life raft with the Second Mate?
• During his trip to Texas?
• After Prison 33?
• And the kicker - with Sun Moon and the kids at the end of the novel?
• Role of women
• It's treated as common knowledge that women who are too pretty, particularly in the countryside, are kidnapped and forced to become officers' wives or into other forms of slavery.
• What ever happened to the Second Mate's widow?
• Sun Moon as heroine
• Her tenacity has brought her fame, along with a life under the Dear Leader's control
• Yet she's reliant on the Dear Leader for her role in North Korean society and film, as well as on Jun Do for her escape
• Mongnan as a mother figure
• Of far greater help than the Captain as father figure, she gives Jun Do true survival skills in the camp.  Meanwhile, like the Orphan Master, the Captain's instinct is to throw Jun Do under the bus
• The Rower
• Like Jun Do, she has killed, although her role in the death of the other rower is unclear.  And yet, like Jun Do, she becomes someone to root for.
• Is she a symbol for America?  She is responsible for keeping Jun Do full of hope on the Junma, and she becomes the vehicle for Sun Moon's escape
• Role of sex in a repressed society
• The real Commander Ga's homosexuality is a recurring theme
• Sad irony is that he is renowned for "purging the army of homosexuals"
• He has no outlet for self-expression other than cruelty to others, but is this supposed to make him a target for pity?
• The Division 42 narrator describes feeling sexual attraction for one of his victims through basic animal scent. 
• The reader is made to wonder whether the narrator has ever had a sexual experience in this repressive/oppressive society
• But again, like Commander Ga, is the narrator's sexual repression a mechanism by which the reader is manipulated into feeling pity for this torturer?
• Jun Do and Sun Moon only consummate their relationship when they're less than 24 hours away from experiencing freedom - largely, it seems, because no one can let their guard down long enough to trust anyone else