The Cue Card

I recently found out about author Elizabeth Crane from an article by L.A. Times book critic Carolyn Kellogg. I hadn’t known her books before, which include three short story collections, but I thought I would try out her debut novel “We Only Know So Much,” which came out last month.

It’s about a family of two parents, two kids, a grandfather and a great-grandmother who all live under one roof in a small Midwestern college town. Each of the family members seems to have their own issues or preoccupations: the know-it-all father fears that he is losing his memory; the withdrawn mother is dealing with the loss of a secret lover; the difficult daughter is trying to get on reality TV; the sweet, 9-year-old son has his first girlfriend; the hazy grandfather is suffering from Parkinson’s disease; and the 98-year-old great-grandmother is fussy but loves attention.

It’s a problematic American family coming apart at the seams with an inability to communicate with one another. Each of them is going in different directions and is too caught up in their own worlds to really relate to each other. There seems to be a complete family disconnect at a critical juncture for each of them. Yet it’s a family crisis that they seem quite unaware of.

Despite this theme, “We Only Know So Much” is not really a dark novel. It’s more quirky and empathetic. The book alternates chapters among the family members so you get a gist of all of them. But some are more fleshed out and better than others; the grandfather and great-grandmother seem less realized, and I thought the bitchy daughter perhaps the most developed and enjoyable.

The novel has well-done moments, but I can’t say it was a novel for me. Despite the entertaining way Crane writes, I thought the first half of the novel pretty slow. The family members’ issues are introduced and then their problems are just gone over again. There’s little change or development or much that happens. Towards the end, a few of the strands in it thankfully pick up. But at times it seemed more a portrait of a family than a story where something actually develops or happens. I’m not sure I really liked the characters, but I made myself not quit on the book and came away with a quirky picture of a family rather run amuck.

For another perspective, some over at Goodreads liked it much better than I did. I guess it’s a matter of different strokes for different folks.

Shortly after marrying a Canadian and becoming a Canadian resident, my sister-in-law thrust a book into my hands by Alice Munro, one of her favorite authors. I had known about Munro, the acclaimed Canadian writer who had won many awards for her short stories (including the 2009 Man Booker International Prize), but I am embarrassed to say before now I had not read any of her collections. Her stories were often in the New Yorker and I might have read her there, but I knew living in Canada that her books would be essential reading for my own cultural introduction to my new country.

Her short-story collection “Too Much Happiness, ” which is her most recent from 2009, didn’t disappoint but rather exceeded my expectations from the praise that preceded her. I guess I don’t often read short stories (though I have liked Raymond Carver’s, Jhumpa Lahiri’s and Somerset Maugham’s) but delving into hers were easy and absorbing, like falling into a world that sweeps you up. I was a bit surprised that this genteel author (78 years old at the time) from rural Ontario wrote about characters that drew you in so completely to such ominous or unsettling predicaments. Murderers, deviants and misfits pepper the stories of “Too Much Happiness,” which reminded me a bit of the dark aspects of Flannery O’Connor’s or Joyce Carol Oates’s stories.

In “Child’s Play,” two summer camp friends live with the repercussions of a terrible crime they commit, while in “Face,” a boy deals with the taunts from a birthmark that covers half his head. In “Deep-Holes” a family loses touch with a son involved in a cliff-falling accident, and in “Free Radicals,” an old woman saves her neck by telling a violent burglar of her own past crime. All 10 stories in “Too Much Happiness” are quite affecting; they grab at your lapels and shake you good. But perhaps the creepy “Dimensions” and “Wenlock Edge” are the collection’s most unnerving. It’s in “Dimensions” that an incident jars a wife to finally overcome her ties to her abusive jailed husband, and in “Wenlock Edge” where a student’s sexual violation steers her to turn in another.

It’s hard not to give too much away, better just to marvel at Munro’s mastery of these potent stories. Interestingly, her last story, “Too Much Happiness,” is quite a departure from the others. It’s based on a real person Sophia Kovalevsky, who was a prominent Russian mathematician in the latter 1800s, and deals with her life in the days before her death. Though interesting, I thought the other more contemporary, Canada-set stories pulled at me more. But regardless, I’m going to add Munro’s other collections to my reading list, particularly “Runaway” from 2004 and “The View From Castle Rock” from 2006. She’s definitely a writer to be treasured and one I’m so glad, no matter which side of the border, not to have missed.

I coincidentally was reading Hilary Mantel’s historical novel “Bring Up the Bodies” around the same time as I was watching the “Diamond Jubilee” celebration, commemorating Queen Elizabeth II’s amazing 60 years on the throne of England. Perhaps there’s not a direct correlation, but I’m definitely getting my fix of English royal history lately, with its influential monarchs and their reigns of power, accomplishments, struggles and scandals. It’s fascinating material to be sure.

Mantel’s latest novel about Thomas Cromwell, the court of King Henry VIII and the destruction of Queen Anne Boleyn has received unanimous gushing reviews as did her previous book of their earlier years, “Wolf Hall,” which was awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize. The print critics love her, with Janet Maslin of the New York Times going as far to say that “Bring Up the Bodies” is “this year’s best beach read” and the “one must-read of the season.”

Best beach read? Hmm, I had to read it. But now that I’m done, I can tell you, if you like “War and Peace” or Shakespeare on the beach then perhaps you will definitely like this one. Otherwise, I’d stick to something lighter and easier to sink into. “Bodies” definitely has the elements of a beach book, with power plays, intrigue, rumors, gossip, revenge, adultery, violence, but it swirls around for quite a while, muting its impact. Its narrative language though beautiful by Mantel is a bit of a challenge for the beach; it’s not Olde English but it’s not exactly contemporary either. You’ll have to work a bit to get the array of characters and who is speaking when and what is being said. At times it can be a bit confusing or even a slog to read, but I did successfully plow through it and came away with a more vivid picture of the poisonous atmosphere at the court during Anne Boleyn’s last months.

You don’t have to read its predecessor “Wolf Hall” to understand “Bring Up the Bodies”; I went right to the latter one, which is meant to be the second in a trilogy — all told from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view. Cromwell was King Henry VIII’s right hand man, his secretary and power broker, who comes to believe he must destroy the Queen before she destroys him. Mantel paints him as more human than just ruthlessly evil, which is how he is often portrayed, though he’s still cleverly shrewd and harsh in the end.

The book takes place over nine months from 1535 to 1536. As it begins, Queen Anne Boleyn has replaced King Henry VIII’s first wife Katharine of Aragon with much ado, leading the King to break with the Catholic Church in Rome. All is momentarily at peace. But after three years, the king grows restless as Anne is unable to produce a male heir and he begins to favor Jane Seymour. Thereafter the Queen’s days are numbered. Cromwell uncovers a web, eventually arresting her along with five men on trumped up charges of adultery and incest (with her brother). Whether she is actually guilty as charged is a mystery preserved in the book, though it sides with it being unlikely. In an interview, Hilary Mantel has said the Queen gives the impression of being guilty, whether or not she really is, is not known.

Surely the book is quite dark; everybody’s out for themselves and trying to gain their advantage with the King and the court. It seems Machiavellian. Some have sympathies with the last Queen, while others are aligning with the future, Jane Seymour. The plot gangs up on Anne Boleyn, and it is quite chilling to read about a woman’s place then and the abuse of the court’s power — all because Henry VIII wanted a new wife. There’s not really a redeeming character in the book to latch onto, and despite what it’s about, not a lot of action. I was hoping for more. It’s mostly filled with the verbal sparring, court gossip and posturing amid its unseemingly cast. I took away quite a bit from it but not without considerable persistence and effort — something that I don’t hope for in my next (real) beach read.

“Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” ignited a firestorm last year, which I successfully steered clear of until my book group picked it to discuss this week. I can tell the book group moms are ready to sink their claws into this memoir and tear it apart, knowing good and well it’s about a “tiger” mother who uses harsh parenting practices to raise and gear her two daughters for success.

No TV for them, or sleepovers, or playdates, or computer games, or grades less than an A; these girls must be fluent in Chinese and practice endless hours of piano and violin after school and even on vacations. To their mom, childhood is less about having fun than being “a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future.” The Chinese parenting approach, she says, is very different from the Western way, which values independence, creativity and questioning authority. Western kids are allowed to follow their “passion,” which just turns out, she says, to be 10 hours on Facebook which is a total waste of time and eating digusting junk food.

For the Chinese, she says, authority is always to be respected and kids’ self-esteem isn’t a concern; parents regularly criticize their kids (she refers to her daughter as garbage at one point) and expect more from them (she rejects their inadequately made birthday cards). Chinese parents also decide all their activities and what’s best for their children. Kids, in turn, obey and don’t talk back. They owe their parents everything.

Author Amy Chua sets up “Tiger Mother” as a “clash of worldviews”; there’s the weak, easy Western way of child-rearing, she seems to say, and the stronger, harder to follow Chinese approach, which she does her best to adhere to with her daughters while living in Connecticut, where she’s a law professor at Yale. Her husband, a law professor there too, plays only a small peripheral role in this memoir.

In many ways her book is like stomaching the world of a type -A drill sergeant who pushes her kids as prodigies and family to the brink. It’s insufferable in parts what she believes and how she acts. And yet I was surprisingly glad to have read it (I didn’t hate the book. It’s even well told and isn’t heartless). I don’t believe the West has all the answers on child-raising, nor by this account does the East either. Her book raises valid questions about parenting. Perhaps there’s some kind of middle ground or hybrid approach worth exploring or trying, which Amy Chua herself concedes towards the end, though she doesn’t seem ready to reconcile to that way of thinking.

She says her memoir has been greatly misunderstood; that it’s really “supposed to be funny, partly self-parody” about her own transformation as a mother. Throughout the book, she seems to know she’s an overbearing, controlling fanatic to her kids, but that doesn’t seem to stop her any; only the possibility of losing her daughter seems to affect her path, which is a bit sad. You feel for the kids, no doubt. It would be comical perhaps if it weren’t all so borderline true to what she’s like. I did laugh some because she really is a piece work, this tiger lady.

For a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area last weekend, I got caught up in the book “The Devil’s Teeth” about the Farallon Islands and the great white sharks out there, 28 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge. Published in 2005, the book had been knocking around my book shelves for years, a present from my older brother who told me I must read it. Indeed he was right, especially while in the Bay Area where I could stare out to sea, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rocky and remote Farallones on the edge of the vast Pacific.

The Farallones have long been a mysterious and dangerous island chain, where nasty storms and waves could be treacherous. Just last month tragedy struck when five crew members attempting to round the islands were killed during the annual Farallon sailboat race when waves knocked them overboard and washed their boat onto the rocks. Similarly in April 1982, six others died when a storm blasted the Farallon race.

The Farallones are not for the light of heart and only a handful of scientists are granted access to be on the southeastern island, which is a bird sanctuary. It’s a place filled with bird guano and surrounded by waters infested from September to November with great white sharks.

Such is the environment journalist Susan Casey threw herself into, joining biologists Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson on the Farallones to monitor the sharks and their attacks on seals. Her book is heady stuff, as if you can feel these 18-foot predators swimming around you under their small boat. It’s eerie and informative, giving a broad picture of the sharks, how they hunt during the day, chomp on surfboard decoys and are segregated with the larger dominant “Sisters” staying in different areas from the males. It also recounts the unlikely history of the islands where in 1942 more than 100 people from the military and government and their families once lived.

Susan Casey can write the daylights out of nature and science, but it’s her personal anecdotes and adventures of life on the island and in the shark-invested waters with the biologists and a bold sea urchin diver there that are most entertaining and gripping, especially her three-week solo stay anchored on a yacht off the island, which gets truly harrowing when a storm hits. “Even as the place was trying to kill me,” she writes early on, “I had never felt more alive.” Such sentiments capture the island’s hold on those who work and return there every year — to a place, she writes, where “only wild things came.”

In the end the price she pays to get the story amid increasing managerial restrictions on the island and others pay to continue their shark pursuits is very high. Heads roll, for sure, but luckily all get through alive. The fallout is heavy though and leaves one wanting to know more about what happened to all in the aftermath. As for the sharks, hopefully they’ll continue to come back to the Farallones and be studied for many more decades to come.

“The Devil’s Teeth” definitely made me want to read Susan Casey’s latest book “The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean” somewhere down the line — as she is a writer who combines science and adventure in a truly intriguing and informative way.

With the opening of baseball season, I sought out “The Art of Fielding” as my next read. I have long been an avid follower of America’s pastime and once worshipped Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine circa 1973 to 1979. The team’s catcher Johnny Bench is still my all-time baseball hero. So I was psyched to pick up Chad Harbach’s debut novel, which I knew just two things about: (a) that it was about baseball and (b) that it had made the New York Times 10 best books of 2011 list: a combination of which definitely piqued my interest.

But I didn’t realize “The Art of Fielding” would be a long, sprawling novel of 512 pages nor did I know its storyline, characters, or the gay and straight relationships within. I went in blind and was rewarded with a very entertaining and heartfelt read. It enticed me with its strong sense of place of a Midwestern college campus and main characters who I felt entwined to by the end to the point that I’d miss them when all was said and done.

Many probably know, the novel’s about a baseball star shortstop named Henry Skrimshander who’s recruited and mentored to play at a small college along the shores of Lake Michigan. On the field, Henry is as good as gold, tying the record for innings without an error and catching the attention of major league scouts; that is until one game a throw gets wildly away from him and beans a teammate, forever affecting the fates of five people. There’s Henry, who loses his way amid self-doubt and team captain Mike Schwartz, who’s mentored Henry at the expense of himself; and college president Guert Affenlight, a Melville scholar, who finds himself falling dangerously in love with a student, Owen Dunne, who’s Henry’s gay roommate; and finally Pella Affenlight, Guert’s daughter, who returns to the college town to start again after a failed marriage.

It’s a coming of age story primarily about male relationships and friendships, and about love and loss. It’s considerably more than just a baseball story (you don’t necessarily need to be a baseball fan to enjoy it), though the sports writing in the book is quite impressive. Author Chad Harbach definitely knows the sights, sounds and feelings around a baseball diamond, and pursues the mental aspects, as well as the blood, sweat and tears an athlete goes through with great insight. The novel is quite dark at points as the main characters all seem to be going through a tipping point or break down at the same time. It’s likely your college anxieties will resurface as you speed through “The Art of Fielding” hoping for a brighter day for Henry, Schwartzy, Guert and Pella. I also enjoyed the school’s connection to Herman Melville, which the author creatively conjures toward the beginning of the novel.

You won’t soon forget this book as it breathes considerably life into its scenes. You go through a lot amid its 512 pages, rising and falling with its cast. And though it’s long, it’s a fast, breezy read that keeps you coming back (though you might not like some things that happen) until its final conclusion plays out. Kudos to Chad Harbach for his engaging debut hit, which apparently has been optioned by HBO in the hope of turning it into a series.