An Embarrassment of Riches

Never Ask for What Ought to be Offered - by Jen Never. Never ask for what ought to be offered.

These are the words of sixteen-year-old protagonist Ree Dolly in Daniel Woodrell's book Winter's Bone, giving her younger brother a lesson in conduct. Their father has not been home in days and they are hungry. A family across the way, to whom they are related, has freshly killed carcasses hanging in the trees; he is wondering about requesting some of the meat.

Ree's father cooks crank and the story picks up after he is missing and in danger of skipping a court date; if he does, the family will lose the house and land--their only security, pledged to a bail bond. Ree's mother, mentally ill and a vacant shell of her former self, is a burden Ree carries without question, along with her two younger brothers. They are family, and family is all.  

This novel is atmospheric, darkly lyrical and devastating. While the gritty portrayal of hardscrabble Ozark life is striking, even more compelling is the seeming resignation and acceptance of the status quo by adults, children and the law. The questioning Ree is a lone and exposed nail waiting for the hammer of the system to come down. She is clear-eyed about the risk she is taking but she also knows that without that risk she will sacrifice her life and the futures of her small brothers to the ravenous and self-perpetuating cycle of drugs and poverty.

She knows that searching for her father will take her deeper into darkness than she wants to go, but she also knows it is her only chance of finding the light.

The Truth about True Grit - by Alison

I've been thinking lately about the nature of true grit. Like many others I made a point of seeing the movie, having been a huge fan of Charles Portis's original book. In the late 60s and early 70s, books about young women with gumption were sometimes hard to come by. Oh yes, there was Nancy Drew, but she so often relied on 'the boys' to help her out when the going got rough; There was also Pippi Longstocking, but she was for a younger readership.  I was glad to see that the Coen brothers were true to the original Mattie and her enterprising spirit. Truly, she was the hero of the story, and not Rooster Cogburn, as the 1969 John Wayne film version would have you believe.

Ree Dolly, the tenacious teenager from the movie Winter's Bone is cut from the same cloth as Mattie Ross, though the story is darker. The movie follows follows the mostly falling fortunes of 17 year old Ree as she discovers that her meth-cooking father is on the lam, having put the family house up for bond. If he doesn't show up in court, the family - 2 kids and a mentally absent mother - will lose everything. She sets out to find him among all the hard luck people living in her corner of the Ozarks and gains some unwanted attention from those who wish her father to stay hidden. The book is based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, an author whose works have been called "country noir".

Another novel featuring a woman who finds herself in an untenable situation is the award-winning Outlander by Gil Adamson. In the winter of 1903, Mary has lost her baby son to sickness and is frequently beaten by her abusive husband. She takes desperate measures to escape her situation, killing her husband and fleeing west. She is pursued by the vengeful twin brothers of her husband, a pair of single-minded, 'Terminator' type characters who turn out to be excellent trackers. Along the way she falls into the company of a group of eccentrics in a hard-scrabble mining town at the bottom of a mountain. 

Though these stories aren't science fiction, all of them share an apocalyptic feel - an unforgiving landscape, a sense of lawlessness, and a determined underdog on a quest. And there are more of these than you might think: Molly Gloss's story of eastern Oregon, The Hearts of Horses, the somewhat obscure and spoofy Caprice by George Bowering, and Away by Amy Bloom. All of these stories feature strong female characters who move the action along. If that's your cup of tea, then happy reading and watching.

Big Love Under Construction - by Jen

I sat down to dinner recently and noticed something amiss. My otherwise-perfect and untouched plate of food sported an ear of corn with a shaggy crop circle in the middle of the cob about the size of a preschooler's mouth. I looked to Child the Younger, sitting to my right, and asked him if he knew what had happened. He smiled jubilantly, his baby teeth clotted with yellow kernels.  

"Sowee, Mommy."

Sorry indeed.

I have learned from parenting that there is birthed, along with the child, a never-ending list of things-- both done and undone-- for which to be sorry on both sides. This parenting thing is a project without blueprints, continually under construction, using tools that are as frequently inadequate, shoddy, missing or downright dangerous as they are right for the job. If a day on the parenting jobsite is particularly heinous, I may think of the list I have posted at my desk just to remind myself to laugh:

The Six Phases of a Project:

1. Wild Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment of the Innocent
6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants

One project I managed to complete on my recent vacation was reading Brady Udall's magnificent novel The Lonely Polygamist. This is a Big Book, in both a physical and an existential sense; it is the American family writ large. Golden Richards is a big man (known to some as "Sasquatch") with three houses, four wives and twenty-eight children. He has problems. Big problems. While his lifestyle creates and magnifies difficulties, his internal struggles could belong to anyone. He attempts to keep his contracting business and his family finances afloat with a morally questionable project: his wives think the brothel he's building in Nevada is a senior center. His wives don't understand him and his children don't really know him. The story builds upon the alternating points of view of Golden, Trish (his fourth and newest wife), and Rusty (the eleven-year-old son of his third wife.) Trish is at a crossroads in her marriage while Rusty hatches a revenge plot for the bungling of his "special" birthday. At the center for each of these characters is a smoldering sun of grief blinding them in various ways to the complicated landscape. Golden grieves a lost daughter, Trish grieves a lost son, and Rusty is a ticking time bomb of grief waiting to happen. In all of this Udall manages to find the inherent humor in each situation, much of it laugh-out-loud funny. Within the mundane Udall raises Big questions, but the one that percolates through and ultimately lifts the book far above anything else I have read recently is this:

How big is love?

This is a question echoed by the deservedly popular HBO television series Big Love which I also highly recommend. Bill Henrickson is a modern-day polygamist living in suburban Salt Lake City with his three sister-wives, their numerous children and houses, and all of the complications and frustrations of his chosen lifestyle. His ties with a fundamentalist compound bring trouble, as do his business arrangements. Can one man find a way to keep it all together when forces both internal and external threaten constantly to tear it apart? Faith and love are big, but are they big enough?

In her memoir The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance Elna Baker discusses the issues that come with Big Faith. By turns utterly hilarious and painfully embarrassing, this described "Mormon Tina Fey" tells tales of what it's like to be an abstinent and religious single young woman in a city that's pretty much...not. Along the way she loses eighty pounds and takes a series of fascinating jobs ( I was entranced by her description of life as an "adoption specialist" for ridiculously expensive baby dolls at FAO Schwarz.) The heartbreak that ensues is predictable, but Baker finds the humor in each situation and manages introspection along with stories such as showing up to a Halloween dance dressed in a failed costume that makes her look, quite accidentally, like a giant part of the female anatomy.

The holds lists may be lengthy for some of these, but believe me: the love is Big. And worth the wait

The Great American Cow...Girl - by Alison

If I say 'women in the wild west' what do you picture? For me it's an image of a beautiful young woman tied to the railway tracks as the train looms, a villainous mustachioed man lurking somewhere in the background. And that's too bad because there are plenty of Wild West stories with female characters who determine their own destiny.

True Grit was a great read long before John Wayne rode into the film version as Rooster Cogburn.  As a young teenager I reveled in the story of Mattie, a 14 year old girl who enlists the mean as dirt U.S. Marshal to help her find her father's killer and avenge his death. For girls growing up in the late 60's and 70's, female characters with gumption were few and far between, with the exception of Pippi Longstocking. It was a relief to see that there was room in the world for characters like Mattie Ross.

Another story of the vengeful female protagonist is the strangely compelling Caprice by George Bowering. A school marm turned vigilante sets out to avenge her brother’s death at the hands of two-bit criminals. Caprice is a stunning red head, over 6 feet tall, and a fine hand with a bull whip. She saddles up and chases the perpetrators across the west, circa 1890’s. The book is both a satire of the traditional western and a celebration of it, complete with no good varmints, honorable gentlemen and two Native American characters who observe the goings-on and provide philosophical commentary.

If there's any theme here, it's that women can be just as vengeful as their male counterparts. Jane Fonda starred in the incredibly campy Cat Ballou in 1965, an era in which women rarely played the lead role in a western. Cat hires a gunman to protect her father's ranch, and then later to avenge her father's death. When the hired man fails miserably at his job, Cat takes matters into her own hands. In between scenes, a comical pair summarize the plot in song.

If you're looking for a less satirical picture of women in the west, take a look at Molly Gloss's The Hearts of Horses. Set in 1917, when many of the men in Eastern Oregon have gone to war and ranch hands are in demand, Martha sets out to find work breaking horses. But her method is not to ‘break’ them so much as gentle them. Martha begins as an outsider, drifting in and out of the lives of people as she works with their animals. Eventually she becomes connected to the people and must let go of her comfortable perch as an observer from the saddle.

Lawyers and Solicitors and Barristers, Oh My! - by Ruth All of my siblings are attorneys which means that the conversation at family gatherings can be a bit contentious and peppered with legalese. This talk, coupled with the law classes I took as an undergraduate in political science, has at least given me a decent grounding in the American legal system. Most everything I know about the English judicial system, however, has come from mystery novels and television.  A patron recently introduced me to a great but, alas, short mystery series starring some young London legal eagles and an Oxford professor. I am sometimes baffled by all of the lawyerly terminology, but that hasn't prevented me from enjoying the banter that goes on amongst the five principal players including Cantrip who has an "inferior" education (Cambridge rather than Oxford) and Julia, who gets her knickers in a twist on a fairly regular basis. The Shortest Way to Hades finds them investigating the death of a young woman who has turned greedy and demanded 100,000 pounds in exchange for her signature on a document that will allow an heiress to avoid massive taxes on a multiple million pound inheritance. Was the girl pushed over the balcony or was it suicide?  As Hilary Tamar (the Oxford professor) points out, if it was murder, then the wrong girl died. For more judicial antics, try the Rumpole of the Bailey series by John Mortimer. While not the first in the series, Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders provides the back-story on Horace Rumpole's early years. For a wonderful television show about an English law firm and some courtroom drama, watch Kavanagh Q.C. starring the fabulous John Thaw. Any other great stuff out there to amuse me while also increasing my knowledge of law in Great Britain?

Drawn To It - by Steve

I used to be a voracious reader. My time spent riding the bus everywhere usually involved a thick novel balanced carefully on my lap. However, with summer creeping slowly closer, I have been riding my bike more and my reading time has been trimmed considerably. I find myself turning to graphic novels more often to get a great story, but in a condensed version.

I discovered FreakAngels by accident. Warren Ellis is truly an icon when it comes to graphic novels. I read his first full-length novel, Crooked Little Vein, a while back, thoroughly enjoying every word. When I saw that he was working on a new online webcomic, I had to check it out.  Each Friday, I get a little delivery of genius to my RSS reader.  FreakAngels is an excellent post-apocalyptic tale of survival. The twelve main characters, each with their own special ability, were the cause of something cataclysmic for which they're now trying to repay humanity. Murder, mayhem, and community gardening: a match made in heaven. Lucky for me, the second volume was recently added to our collection.

Speaking of murder, Whiteout takes place in Antarctica where the U.S. Marshall stationed there to keep the peace has to solve a gruesome murder. Then another. Then the killer comes after her. Will she survive the incoming storm while running for her life? Yes, because there’s a volume two. Greg Rucka’s storytelling is dark, and Steve Leiber’s illustrations match the writing perfectly.

I recently finished the first volume of Bayou by Jeremy Love. Another book that started as a webcomic, this lilting story from the Antebellum South follows a special girl trying to clear her father’s name. He’s been lynched for abducting a white girl, but she saw what really happened, and knows that it was actually a monster.  She travels to a bizarre land where she befriends a hulking giant.  Unfortunately, the story ends as they start their quest together, but I managed to track down the whole story on the site where the comic first started.

I Love L.A. - by Markrid

A few things about Los Angeles.

The ocean is always cold and rough and full of riptides.

The backbone of L.A. County is made of steep wild mountains covered with sweet combustible chaparral, and sometimes also with snow, and within 20 minutes you can be right in among them from most of the 626 and 818 area codes.

Most of the movie-and-TV stuff happens in a very small part of the west side. “Everyone on the West Side is ‘on location’!” a friend said, describing the showbiz self-importance which tilts into the ridiculous.

In most of the county, though, there's a huge and vital kind of human plate tectonics going on: Latin America's cultures grinding against the Pacific Rim's. An excellent place to see this in action is at the Costco in Alhambra on a weekend afternoon.

No place else changes as fast. “I think I get it,” another friend said thoughtfully. We were sitting outside the Melrose Avenue Johnny Rocket’s, watching the highly embellished human parade. “You might as well have your art on the hoof.”

You are free to invent and re-invent yourself endlessly there, and people will mostly take you for whoever you say you are.

Poinsettias will grow into fair-sized trees, given the chance. If you spit a date pit over the side of the porch, a little palm tree might pop up. There are black widows in the garage, and in bad drought years tarantulas come out in the daytime. A flock of feral parrots can screech loud enough to blot out thought.

If you get off the freeway, you’ll find the most anonymous-looking suburbs have little time-warp Main Streets that will just break your heart.

A little more about LA:

Chavez Ravine is the area north of downtown where whole neighborhoods of Mexican-Americans were uprooted to make room for Dodger Stadium. It’s also the name of two great related works, the reissued 1949 album of Don Normark’s photographs documenting the vanished community, and Ry Cooder’s 2005 music CD on the same theme.

Nobody gets LA’s smudgy pink air and belief in magical possibilities as well as Francesca Lia Block. Her Weetzie Bat books for young adults, and Quakeland for grownups, have equal parts glitter, loneliness, hope, and strong female characters.

The electrifying documentary Rize shows African-American kids in South Central making beautiful community art - the dance form known as krumping - out of nothing but passion.

Follow the rise of the Crips in Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member.

Carolyn See is one of those authors who immediately seems like a favorite friend.

Her look at family weirdness in her memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America is so recognizable that we all might have grown up next door to her; yet her blue-collar 1950s Eagle Rock - little stucco bungalows, cracked sidewalks, brown grass - is pure LA.

She also gives us a terrific, racy fable about art, survival, and finding one’s vocation in The Handyman, which may be the perfect LA novel: funny, breezy, and wise.

Let's See...Old Mother Hubbard... - by Nicola

…went to the cupboard to eat her curds and whey. Wait, that’s not right!  Well, it has been a very long time since I've even thought about nursery rhymes, but I did think about them a lot while reading two books in the Nursery Crimes series by Jasper Fforde (pronounced “ford” like the car).  Are these books even for adults?  Oh yes!  Many children would have trouble with all of the nuances Fforde inserts into his whimsical stories. The Big Over Easy is the first title in the series. The main characters, Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and his assistant Mary Mary, are head of the Nursery Crimes Division of the local police constabulary in Reading, England. Their assignment is to investigate the death of Humpty Dumpty. The second  book in the series is The Fourth Bear.  Was there a fourth bear?  Why didn’t Mama Bear and Papa Bear sleep in the same bed?  And how could Jack Spratt not look for the violent Gingerbreadman who had just escaped from the supposedly secure mental hospital?  Well, mystery readers won't be surprised that Jack will not forget the Gingerbreadman is on the loose, even though he has been suspended for screwing up another assignment involving Red Riding Hood.

Jasper Fforde’s highly imaginative books are not for everyone, but those with a sense of fun will enjoy going along for the ride with him wherever his mind takes them.  

Lives of Comic Desperation - by guest blogger Marc Acito

Our guest blogger is the novelist, humorist and screenwriter Marc Acito. He was the winner of Oregon Book Awards' 2005 Ken Kesey award for Best Novel for How I Paid for College. His latest book is the sequel Attack of the Theater People.

I'm a promiscuous library user. At any given time, I've got two dozen books out and as many on hold. I got into the habit when I was poor and couldn't afford books. I probably shouldn't say this, since it's in my best interest that readers buy books, but I never buy a book I haven't read. I figure why own it if I'm only going to read it once?

So I use the library to test drive--promiscuously. If I love something enough that I need to own it, then I buy it, underlining and scrawling marginalia as I re-read.

As a result, I'm a familiar fixture at the Hillsdale Library, my local branch. Yes, it's true. Despite being a gay guy with a trendy haircut, a ready wit and the same waist size I had in junior high, I live in Deepest Suburbia. I prefer to think of it as the Lower West Hills.

Living as I do in the burbs, I’m a huge fan of books about desperate housewives. Reading stories about smart, funny women who are miscast in their lives is like having a marathon phone call with your best girlfriend, assuming your best girlfriend is hilarious, brilliant and completely honest.

A perfect example is the compulsively readable We Are all Fine Here by Mary Guterson, in which a married woman finds herself pregnant after a liaison with her old boyfriend in the bathroom at a friend’s wedding. You know those friends who are constantly screwing up but you secretly enjoy it because it makes you feel better about your own life? That's what reading this book is like.

We Are All Fine Here delivers Hitchcockian suspense without anyone being chased by a crop duster or rappeling off Abe Lincoln’s nose. From page one, questions abound: Who is the baby’s father? Who will the heroine end up with? How much longer can she hide her morning sickness? (announcer voice) These questions and more will be answered As The Stomach Turns.

In contrast to the friend who screws up is the friend who’s got it all together. For that, you must turn to Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther. Forget the melodramatic MGM weepie with Greer Garson. This slyly comic story of a well-bred Englishwoman on the eve of World War Two fascinates me with such pressing concerns as how do you find a charwoman on short notice and what do you say at a shooting party?

But Mrs. Miniver’s contentment with her privileged life is tempered by her wry observations, like how she longs to invite the scintillating half of the couples she knows to dinner, then invite the boring ones another night that she could cancel. It’s like Mrs. Dalloway for Dummies.

The best literary friend of all, however, is the narrator of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, who is the perfect synthesis of the first two—a mild screw-up who still has her head screwed on straight. Long before Nora Ephron felt bad about her neck, she wanted to wring the neck of her philandering husband. Because the novel is reportedly based on Ephron’s own calamitous marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein, it’s difficult to imagine anyone other than the acerbic author herself in the role, even after Meryl Streep played her in the movie.

This book proves the adage that “Writing well is the best revenge.” The heroine of Heartburn writes cookbooks—which is appropriate given Ephron’s totally edible prose. It’s a delicious book, one you alternately want to gorge on yet savor, and the kind of hilariously wise and well-observed novel that makes readers wish the author were their best friend and makes writers like me contemplate suicide.

While I lead my own life of quiet desperation, however, I depend on these fictional friends they way I do my real ones: for comfort and laughs and inspiration. I take solace in knowing that there are others in the same boat. Especially if that boat is dry-docked in Deepest Suburbia.