20th Century Ghosts

Read it for a book group. Meh...

Christopher Golden (who wrote the introduction) called it "subtle," but I'd call it

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

This is a series of interconnected short stories that I just wasn't ready to read. I like Bloom's style, but some of her characters were off-putting, in the way that I almost want to dissect them to figure out what exactly it is about them that's so distasteful--perhaps it's something I need to explore further.

The set of characters that bothered me most were William and Clare. Although they have both been happily married to other people for decades, they are seemingly unable to resist each other now. William is grotesquely obese and superbly spoiled and Clare can't stop thinking that William's wife Isabel is a better wife to him than she is as his mistress.

Why can't I find empathy with either character? I like to think that I'm an empathetic and open-minded adult, but I'm hitting a wall here. Is it the affair? I don't think that reading about an affair necessarily turns me off from the characters--I did enjoy Emily Giffin's fictional foray into affairs in Heart of the Matter. Is it because the characters are old? Or maybe because they're not attractive or young? Or because their spouses are portrayed as so decidedly good. I may have to revisit this book in a few years to see if I can accept the characters, foibles and all, in the future.

From a later story in the book, a brother is talking about his brother's relationship:
p. 116: "My brother married someone more beautiful and wild than I would have chosen. They had terrible, flying-dishes fights and passionate reconciliations every few months, and they managed to divorce and remarry in one year, without even embarrassing themselves. Jewelle loved Buster to death and told me she only left when he needed leaving, and my brother would say in her defense that it was nothing less than the truth. He never said what he had done that would deserve leaving, and I can't think that it was anything very bad. There is no bad even in the depths of Buster's soul, and when I am sick of him, his undaunted, fat-and-sassy younger brotherness, I think that there are no depths.

And finally, from one of the last stories, about the aftermath of a murder:
p. 177-178: "I don't miss the dead less, I miss them more. I miss the tall pines around Lake Pleasant, I miss the brown-and-gray cobblestones on West Cedar Street, I miss the red-tailed hawks that fly so often in pairs. I miss the cheap red wine in a box and I miss the rum and Coke. I miss Anne's wet gold hair drying as we sat on the fire escape. I miss the hot-dog luau and driving to dance lessons after breakfast at Bruegger's Bagels. I miss the cold mornings on the farm, when the handle of the bucket bit into my small hands and my feet slid over the frozen dew. I miss the hot grease spattering around the felafel balls and the urgent clicking of Hebrew. I miss the new green leaves shaking in the June rain. I miss standing on my father's shiny shoes as we danced to 'The Tennessee Waltz' and my mother made me a paper fan so I could flirt like a Southern belle, tapping my nose with the fan. I miss every piece of my dead. Every piece is stacked high like cordwood within me, and my heart, both sides, and all four parts, is their reliquary."

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

I've officially fallen for Alice Munro. She's so articulate, writing beautifully about the complexity of ordinary lives. Plus she's Canadian. Plus she won the Man Booker Prize in 2009, with judge Jane Smiley remarking that "[h]er work is practically perfect. Any writer has to gawk when reading her because her work is very subtle and precise" (you can read Smiley's entire presentation of the award here). [Swoon!]

First I stumbled upon her newest collection of short stories, Too Much Happiness. That led me to a whole host of titles, so I dove into this 2001 collection. If you haven't read her, please--do.

Nina remembers her husband Lewis after his death by euthanasia:

from Comfort, p. 128: "They did get job, both of them, at the high school--though Nina gave up teaching a few years later, when Latin was phased out. She could have taken upgrading courses, preparing herself to teach something else, but she was just as glad, secretly, to no longer be working in the same place, and at the same sort of job, as Lewis. The force of his personality, the unsettling style of his teaching, made enemies as well as friends, and it was a rest, for her, not to be in the thick of it."

A retired professor is visiting his Alzheimer's stricken wife at the nursing home, where she has become romantic with a fellow resident, Aubrey. He recalls his own (and fellow professors') indiscretions throughout their marriage. I love the brevity and complexity of the last clause (talking about the wives).

from The Bear Came Over the Mountain, p. 302: "Scandals burst wide open, with high and painful drama all round but a feeling that somehow it was better so. There were reprisals--there were firings. But those fired went off to teach at smaller, more tolerant colleges or Open Learning Centers, and many wives left behind got over the shock and took up the costumes, the sexual nonchalance of the girls who had tempted their men."

War Dances

As always with Alexie, awesome. He writes roughly and truthfully and sweetly all at once. If you haven't read anything by him, check out The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

Too Much Happiness

Divine.

The View from the Seventh Layer

Wow. Check it out, especially "Fable containing a reflection the size of a match head in its pupil." It starts out:

Once there was a city where people did not look one another in the eye. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Old married couples lowered their heads like swans as they sat on park benches together. Young mothers stared sweetly at the folds of their babies' necks. Whenever two people met in conversation, each would rest his gaze on the blank surface of the other's shirt, and though occasionally, in a fit of daring, the most intimate of lovers might go so far as to watch each other's lips move, to venture any higher was considered the gravest of social transgressions.

The stories are all beautiful and haunting. I would reread this on a chilly fall night with an afghan over my feet and a cup of tea on the table. Or I would curl up in bed with a lover and read him one story a night before we laid down to sleep. However you read them, they each deserve a moment of quiet consideration before you allow your mind to gallop on to other matters.