I picked up Distances at WisCon last year, but it sat on my shelf for months. Earlier this month, the Carl Brandon Society gave it their Parallax Award for 2008, so I thought now was as opportune a time to read it as any.

The back cover blurb made the book out to be one that dealt with higher order math. I was worried that this would be too Greg Egan-esque for me. He’s the fellow who likes to write stories where the math itself is what is important, the characters are just foils for plot around the math. It’s generally been not my thing when I’ve read his short stories, but perhaps some day I’ll pick up one of his novels and see if it works better in long form.

Distances central character experiences math as a sixth sense, like vision or hearing. It turned out to be quite un-Egan like. Anasuya’s visions of mathematics for a key stretch are basically a form of virtual reality, requiring little of my It’s Been 20 Years Since I Took Math. I did not need a paper and pen to take notes while I read, as Egan recommends for his stuff.

Anasuya is a member of a tribe where most receive super-power like abilities sometime between the age of 5 and adolescence. Some learn languages for societies that don’t exist, for instance. Anasuya’s is the math thing, which first manifests as sensing the harmonies of waves as she swims. Her tribe is also very water oriented. Much of the plot takes place in a large city, where many tribes make appearances. Hers does not, though how she came to be in the city and not with her tribe comes much later. In the city, Anasuya works/studies at a temple devoted to mathematics, where offworld visitors come to get help mapping out some complex mathematics. As the best, Anasuya becomes the key person helping them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy most of the book. What I did like was the world-building, which was inventive though not particularly well fleshed-out. The key problem was that it seemed so very disconnected at an individual level.

Anasuya lives in a pentad, a five-person coupling. Her living situation receives the focus for several scenes, and then only cameos afterward. The Master of her temple plays a large part in the beginning and once again toward the end. But in the middle he only pops in to criticize and then he’s gone. Anasuya sees a ghost in the machine as she explores the off-world mathematics. This Vara mouths to her that she must make art. Why? Why does she show up in the mathematical virtual reality? Why does Anasuya care so much about this non-corporeal being who can barely communicate with her? The reclusive member of the pentad goes away and the relationship for everyone else falls apart. How did the one who won’t talk to anyone else become key? I constantly had questions like these, for most of the characters.

It’s not that these things are wrong. It’s that I didn’t get any motivation or backstory for the characters. Got plenty for the cultures and the world, but not for the individuals. Distances might have succeeded better for me had it been novel length, with more space to get me invested.

Title: Distances
Author: Vandana Singh
Cover creator: Lynne Jensen Lampe (designer) / Thomas E. Duchamp (artist)
Series: Conversation Pieces; 23
Imprint / publisher: Aqueduct
Format: Paperback
Length: 154 p.
Publication date: December 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-933500-26-3

A Year of Feminist Classics also had Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter as a January read as well as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

So Long a Letter is a letter from Ramatoulaye to her expatriate best friend Aissatou, the wife of her husband’s best friend. Both are first wives of men who suddenly took second wives. In the cases of the second marriages, neither of the first wives were consulted. Aissatou divorces her husband, learns a skill, and moves overseas to work in the country’s American embassy. Ramatoulaye remains married but lives separately and raises the couple’s 12 children alone. The start of the letter informs Aissatou that Ramatoulaye’s husband Modou Fall is dead. The rest of the letter relates her reaction to her widowhood and rehashes the history of her marriage to explain how she feels now.

The introduction to the book claims it to be one of the first books that presents African women not as victims. Perhaps that suggestion influenced how I viewed the book, as the practicality of Ramatoulaye shows through, as well as her resilience in the face of adversity. You can almost hear the Gloria Gaynor song fading in during the soundtrack to the movie version.

The two main women come across as flawed but sincere women who have strength and integrity. Both are educated. One second wife is portrayed as a conniving gold-digger, the other as a clueless dupe. Both of the husbands are weak, not able to face down their first wives or families. Not all men get that treatment. One of Ramatoulaye’s suitors is very dashing, intelligent, and thoughtful of Ramatoulaye’s needs without neglecting his own. I’m not sure how I feel about these portrayals. It feels just a tad manipulative, but for all I know, that’s exactly how most men who take second wives in Senegal act.

Ramatoulaye is interested in Senegal’s politics. She reminds her suitor, a member of parliament, that only 4 of the deputies are women, less than one per province. But it’s also clear that with the division of labor, women can’t participate very well. Ramatoulaye has 12 children under her care. Even before her husband abandoned her, she had little help from him in the day to day care of them. It’s not coincidence that women started gaining political power in the U.S. when they started having access to birth control (as ineffective as it was around the turn of the century) and could start reducing their family sizes. Which is one of the reasons why I think some the U.S. most effective aid is that which goes toward family planning.

One thing to note is that the polygamy portrayed here is not the polygamy most in the U.S. are familiar with, that of the fundamentalist Mormons. Although the women are young, they are not coerced or kept powerless. The harms caused are different than the ones we’re used to seeing. Abandonment and an inability to support families is what comes up in the book. Abuse is the problem we see in the states.

No links again this time. Check A Year of Feminist Classics for roundup posts and more discussion.

Title: So Long a Letter (originally Une si longue lettre)
Author: Mariama Bâ
Cover creator: Tony Richardson (designer) / John Montgomer (art)
Series: African Writers Series
Imprint / publisher: Heinemann / Pearson
Format: Paperback
Length: 96 p.
Publication date: September 2008 (originally 1979)
ISBN-13: 978-0-435913-52-6

I read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as part of A Year of Feminist Classics.

Don’t read the book like I did though. That is to say, don’t go to Project Gutenberg, download the text, and read that. It’s tempting because it’s free. I discourage this not because it’s stealing from the author. No, I discourage this method because Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book around 1790. In other words, because of the language and style of writing back then, I had know idea what she was talking about about 2/3 of the time. Sometimes it’s the archaic words, though those can be looked up. Sometimes it’s the context. Much of the text is a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom I haven’t read, for instance. And some of it is just obtuse. I counted fifteen clauses in one sentence.

Do yourself a favor and buy an annotated and footnoted edition. You’ll get a lot more out of it than I did out of this.

Originally, I planned to write something more detailed. Instead, I think I am going to just put in some reactions I had as I read through the text, with just a little bit of context for each.

Introduction. The male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. – Wollstonecraft makes lots of scientific pronouncements of fact that just aren’t so. I don’t think it’s unusual for the day and age. The scientific method didn’t become firmly established for another hundred years, was badly implemented often even then, and even intellectuals today get it wrong. Wollstonecraft invokes reason as the basis for modern thought, but reason and science aren’t exactly the same. To me, science should be the basis for knowledge and action, with reason as a supplement. Wollstonecraft’s reason is sometimes imperfect, but especially here it becomes awful because it is based on false premises. What’s more, and what stood out in this and a few other passages was that her false premises work against her ultimate aim, to secure rights for women. I don’t expect perfection from an early work of feminism (or even current ones), but it sure makes me cringe to see her blithely accept some of these things.

from every quarter, I have heard exclamations against masculine women, but where are they to be found? I love this bit. The internet did not spawn concern trolls.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces Is that sarcasm? I sure hope so!

The Rights and Duties of Mankind Considered. Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual Wollstonecraft wants to base her vindication on first principles, which she considers to be reason, virtue, and knowledge. Certainly it’s a step up from divine revelation, but there’s a lot of fuzzy wiggle room in there, particularly with virtue. What one person considers to be virtuous is a sin to another. And shortly afterward, Wollstonecraft identifies a flaw in reason…

Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed Yup. We still do. In our defense, I think this failing is common to humanity. But it’s particularly dangerous to classes of people that do not have power when those in power do this.

the regal power, in a few generations, introduces idiotism into the noble stem Wollstonecraft has a very anti-authoritarian bent. Through the book, she criticizes kings, men, the military, and parents as their mere exercising of authority makes them stupid. I wonder what level of authority she would have found acceptable.

The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed. Many are the causes … that contribute to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses. One, perhaps, that does more mischief than all the rest, is their disregard of order. Wollstonecraft is careful to lay the blame for this one women’s education, but her overall frustration with how much women hurt their own causes comes through. She rails over and over against the predominant view that men think and women feel, and that’s the way things are supposed to be.

Youth is the season for love in both sexes, but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment, provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes the place of sensation. This is another thread that runs throughout the work, that how women are taught to behave isn’t a good basis for a lasting companionship. Being flirty and pretty is good to attract the attention of a man, but it isn’t good to hold it. Wollstonecraft repeatedly praises the value of friendship and respect in marriage. I don’t exactly cotton to her notion that gallant love has little place after the initial attraction has passed, but she’s quite correct that people really need to have something to talk about to make them effective long term.

however convenient [gentleness] may be found in a companion, that companion will ever be considered as an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness, which easily degenerates into contempt. I don’t have anything to say about this one. It just needs quoting.

Let [women's] faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale. One of Wollstonecraft’s arguments seems to be, paraphrased, What have you got to lose? If I’m wrong, women will still be at the place they are intellectually, and it won’t have been imposed on us by fiat. She makes this argument over and over in various ways.

The Same Subject Continued. That a girl, condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses or to attend at her mother’s toiler, will endeavor to join the conversation is, indeed very natural; and that she will imitate her mother or aunts, and muse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence. Just pointing out that supposedly differences in the sexes don’t occur in a vacuum, so that even the differences that appear early in life aren’t necessarily innate. It’s passages such as this that make me think that Wollstonecraft sometimes uses the word “education” in a broad context, though sometimes she also uses it to refer only to formal teaching.

Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes. I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving trivial attention, which men think it manly to pay attention to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. Again, just needed quoting.

if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. There are likely underlying emotional differences between women and men due to differences in hormones, but I’m of the firm belief that they are generally minor. I think nearly all of the emotional differences are the result of cultural inculcation.

many girls become the dupes of a sincere affectionate heart, and still more are, as it may emphatically be termed, ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice: and thus prepared by their education for infamy, they become infamous. Wollstonecraft laments the pernicious effect of what is now commonly called slut-shaming, but being a person of her times, sees the remedy as better education to avoid being a slut, rather than not shaming people. In a later passage, Wollstonecraft seems to be expressing even more dismay at people’s lack of sexual virtue than even those at the time held. There’s a streak of feminism that’s based on a prudish morality. That’s not surprising given that Western society as a whole has been pretty prudish. Feminism, for all it’s radicalness, can’t completely get away from the society from which it comes. The branches that I identify with more will be the ones that celebrate sexuality. Perhaps that’s merely the male gaze in me, but I’ll live with it.

Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt. As the conduct of a woman is subservient to the public opinion, her faith in matters of religion, should for that very reason, be subject to authority. Every daughter ought to be of the same religion as her mother, and every wife to be of the same religion as her husband … As they are not in a capacity to judge for themselves, they ought to abide by the decision of their fathers and husbands as confidently as by that of the church. What is to be the consequence, if the mother’s and husband’s opinion should chance not to agree? … Indeed, the husband may not have any religion to teach her though in such a situation she will be in great want of a support to her virtue, independent of worldly considerations. First, I had never heard the word “animadversion” before, and I love it. This chapter has Wollstonecraft doing what I’m doing here: quoting other writers on the woman’s place, and giving her comments. First up is Rousseau, who Wollstonecraft rightly calls out for his serious WTFery. If you are prone to religious bullshit, Rousseau’s advice is hideously dangerous to your eternal soul. Here you are going to heaven for your belief, and then you get married and your husband immediately consigns your soul to eternal damnation by making you believe sinful things. Of course, Wollstonecraft’s most dreaded fear is that the husband gives the woman no religion, which I should think would be an improvement over giving you one. Which also makes me wonder, was Deism as popular among Europe’s elite as it was among America’s around the same time?

true grace arises from some kind of independence of mind Quoting the section where she rips a Dr. Fordyce.

Modesty Comprehensively Considered and Not as a Sexual Virtue. What can be more disgusting than that impudent dross of gallantry, thought so manly, which makes many men stare insultingly at every female they meet? Is this respect for the sex? This loose behaviour shows such habitual depravity, such weakness of mind, that it is vain to expect much public or private virtue, till both men and women grow more modest — till men, curbing a sensual fondness for the sex, or and affectation of manly assurance, more properly speaking, impudence, treat each other with respect It would be hypocritical of me to rail against the male gaze because I do love to look at pretty women, but the woman does have a point.

On this account also, I object to [women being cloistered]. They were almost on a par with the double meanings, which shake the convivial table when the glass has circulated freely. But it vain to attempt to keep the heart pure, unless it is furnished with ideas. This is the passage I noted above, where it seems like Wollstonecraft is more prudish than those with whom she associates. They seem to have no problem with using double meanings in their dinner conversation, but it does upset our author.

Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation. Although I agree with the gist of Wollstonecraft’s criticism that women bear the brunt of bad reputation effects, again her solution is to hold everyone to unreachable standards of sexual morality. Rather, I say, Good Reputation is Undermined by Sexual Notions of Morality. For the most part, people ought not to care about who people are fucking. That’s another time though.

Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise From the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society. But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace, surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools, and chronicle small beer! No. Women might study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurse. And midwifery … They might also study politics … Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue. Another set of things that just needed quoting.

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship, instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers — in a word, better citiznes. Which reminds me I do need to point out that although some of Wollstonecraft’s complaints about sexual prejudice remain relevant today (we still often assume women aren’t good at math), her prescriptions wouldn’t work today. In fact they didn’t really have the effect she thought they would when they were enacted.. She thought educating women would turn them into paragons of virtue. All she had to do was look at educated men to realized that education does not make people behave righteously. It makes them smarter, and able to stand on their own, which are sufficient reason alone. Don’t expect better government or business when women and minorities finally make it to the head of the table in force. They are as fallible as the rest of us in the patriarchy.

On National Education No quote here. This is the meat of Wollstonecraft’s policy prescription. By and large it’s come to pass in Western society. She proposes a government paid for and run system of school that will educate everyone, rich and poor, male and female. She desires for them to be day schools. That is, not boarding schools. Wollstonecraft felt that the approach of vacations made boarding schools a bad choice for education. They would be co-educational; she felt that was the only way to get teachers to treat the sexes equally. That also would allow the students to cross pollinate and develop grand passions for the arts, or politics, or whatever. Whether public schools have had the effect of reducing inequality I’ll leave for the exercises.

Oddly, I made few marks in the last chapter. The only big one is the portion where Wollstonecraft inveighs against novels. These days, novels and the theater are considered cultural. Some day, perhaps, reality television will be considered in the same manner.

No links to other blogs. I read that A Year of Feminist Classics will do some roundup posts, so follow them to see what other people are saying about the tome. I’m going to move on to January’s second book, So Long a letter, by Mariama Bâ. January is going to be a very feminist month. I’m also going to be reading the recent Carl Brandon Parallax Award winning Distances by Vandana Singh. The back cover blurb appears to make it out to be about math.

Title: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
Imprint / publisher: Project Gutenberg
Format: Electronic book
Length: approximately 120 p.
Publication date: September 2002

And after that overlong discussion about Slow River, I’m going to follow it up with a relatively short discussion of Gene Wolfe’s classic The Shadow of the Torturer, the first in his Book of the New Sun series. I’ve seen a few people call it a classic. I don’t get it. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the items I hate about fantasy but it has a few.

It’s dour, lifeless and ponderous. Not just the setting and characters. Also the plot and language.

It features an apparently lowly orphan who is destined to rise to a throne.

The protagonist starts on a journey, becomes part of a band of misfits, and participates in unconnected episodic adventures along the way.

At least it doesn’t have any magic. The book sort of hints at the fact that society has devolved from one that had inter-planetary travel and has lost contact with fellow worlds. Some of the scenery implies a technological past. See, it’s science fiction in fantasy guise! It needs far more of a selling point than this.

Other blogged reviews:

• Ruthless Culture
• Sandstorm Reviews
• bombastic bagman
• The OF Blog
• Das Übernerd

Title: The Shadow of the Torturer
Author: Gene Wolfe
Series: The Book of the New Sun; 1
Imprint / publisher: Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 262 p.
Publication date: May 1981
ISBN-10: 0-671-54066-1

Nicola Griffith’s Slow River is the first selection of the Feminist Science Fiction Book Club that I joined. It’s also the first electronic book I’ve purchased from the Barnes & Noble bookstore. I am not impressed with the formatting job that Random House did to convert the book to epub (or whatever base format the B&N store uses). The book tells four stories of Frances Lorien van de Oest: before, during, immediately after and long after she is kidnapped. There’s no visual cue when the text transitions from one to another. No horizontal rule, no graphic, nothing. Every transition not done at a chapter break confused me until I figured out I was in a different setting. This could have been done much better.

The story itself qualifies as mundane s.f. In the somewhat near future, we appear to have suffered a slow ecological disaster due to pollutants. The van de Oest family business repairs environmental disasters, up to huge sizes. They also control the patents for a number of methods of clean up and for the genes for a number of bacteria and plants that are used in their methods. Consequently, they are very very rich. While the details are not central to the story, Griffith geeks out including some elaborate information on the running of a water treatment plant. Much more interesting than some of the hard s.f. that’s out there.

Slow River starts with Frances Lorien Lore van de Oest’s escape from her kidnappers. Bloody and beaten, she’s left on the street and no one will help her. No one except Spanner, who uses no other name in the book, who just happens to work outside the system in a number of scams. That suits Lore just fine; she does not want to resume her life as a member of one of the richest families in the world. She’s come to believe her father molested her siblings and wouldn’t pay the ransom to free Lore because she might reveal his perfidy.

So begins a life of grifting for Lore. But at the beginning of the book she’s also left Spanner, one of the four periods of Lore’s life that gets its own narrative. While still disillusioned by the rich life, she’s come to think of her life with Spanner as degrading. Assuming the identity of a recently deceased person, she takes a job as a grunt in a water treatment plant she’s qualified to manage and struggles to establish herself honestly based on her abilities. It’s not so easy though.

I didn’t care much for Lore in the first half of the book, but I did come to like her later on. Too much rich kid. Despite being a capable manager of large projects for the family business, she reverts to being a child after the kidnapping. I suspect I’m just a little too callous for wanting her to hold it together better. I also didn’t like that, at the water treatment plant, she couldn’t sit on her knowledge in order to maintain her fiction as a grunt. It was just too tempting for her to point out things that revealed she knew way more than a basic grunt would. I didn’t like these qualities. I kept on thinking If you want to live your life a certain way, you have to commit to it. Over the course of the book I gradually warmed to caring about what happened to Lore.

Still, my favorite character of the book was Cherry Magyar, Lore’s immediate supervisor at the water treatment plant. She’s got her position without adequate training and doesn’t have the power to do much about it, but was smart enough to know it. Magyar also had the self-assurance to listen to people who knew more even if they had a lower station. She treated her employees as genuine people on whose success hers depended. I checked Ms. Griffith’s web site, but I can’t tell if Magyar has featured in any other stories.

Pretty damn good book.

From here on out, I’m gonna write up some thoughts in preparation for the book club. These will contain spoilers, so look away if you care.

Everyone has a set of privileges that arise as a result of their race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, class, etc. For instance, I have the privilege of not working due to family inheritance and lucky timing in a former job. Some of my hard work went into getting me this position, but quite a bit more is the result of outside factors. More subtle is that I have different fears when travelling after dark than a woman generally would. I don’t have to worry about getting raped, for instance. I can also be driven and ambitious at work and be admired for it, while a woman runs a far greater risk of that attitude being viewed negatively. See how Hillary Clinton was treated in the media for a prime example of that.

In Slow River, Lore tries to renounce her privileges that stem from membership in the van de Oest family. She’s unsuccessful in a lot of ways. For one, she can’t unremember her education. She can’t unremember the confidence the family bred in her. Is it laudable to even try? Should someone give up their privilege just because someone else doesn’t have it? Most of Lore’s privileges are good. If she doesn’t use them as a sword, she could in good conscious keep them. Claire Light has a really good piece on privilege titled White Privilege in which she knocks out her thoughts on privilege that can and should be given up, and ones that can’t or are destructive to take away. I haven’t found anything to quibble with in her article, and I re-read it every few months since I came on it about a year ago.

Giving up privilege comes to a head in Slow River. Lore’s workplace is subject to sabotage, and people would die if Lore did not use her superior knowledge of water treatment to avert disaster. Her and Magyar’s budding attraction faces a test. Not only has Lore really lied, but their stations can no longer be viewed as equal.

While Lore can give up being van de Oest, she cannot give up the option of being van de Oest. Just having the option makes her different. When Lore reveals who she is to Cherry Magyar, Magyar’s reaction is angry:

I don’t understand. Why are you angry?

Because I feel like a fool Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.

Just like that. Dismissed. But…

But what? Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She could just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else … But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it — to be treated as a real person?

That she always had the option to return to the rich life meant she always had an out. It might be distasteful. It might have problems. But it’s something she can do that Magyar can’t. And for Magyar, the revelation of Lorien’s identity brings further complications. She’s now with someone who can walk away from her at any time. If she stays, it’s a testament to the relationship. Most of us, however, are with partners who can’t walk away from us free and clear. We shouldn’t want them with us merely because they have these ties, but they are something we assume and both get to live with and have to live with. Magyar runs a greater risk of her love walking away than most do, simply because she can without consequence.

A few years ago, I walked away from a high paying software development job. I took a job at Barnes & Noble shelving books. That I could walk away from that job at any time, that I didn’t depend on it in any way, made my experience there very different than most of the employees. If a customer got irate with me, I didn’t fear managerial backlash. Twice, managers publicly and overbearingly berated me. I shrugged it off. In fact, I told fellow employees to blame me if a problem came up, and I meant it. The job was a fun pastime for me.

A lot of the moral issues in Slow River deal with class issues. However, gender issues play a part too. Less as an item that is food for thought, I liked very much that the female characters got the majority of the ink. The Bechdel rule is so far in the rear view mirror that it puts the rest of the field to shame. Lesbian relationships merit no particular mention, they are presented as perfectly normal, and that’s exactly how it should be.

But Griffith does reverse some gender stereotypes though. Child sexual abuse features prominently, but the perpetrator is a woman. Not female sexual abuser as a sidekick to a male abuser, or even a teacher/counselor/person in power who exploits her position for favors from a vulnerable nubile young man. That’s something that rarely gets our approbation to the same extent that men using teen girls does. The van de Oest matriarch, the one who runs the business, molests her own children. I haven’t unwound my feelings toward this phenomena in general, and I haven’t the head space at the moment to do so even with the book as a spur. I think the role reversal is important to unpack though.

The last (at this time) moral issue brought to my mind by the novel is one of consent. For a chunk of the book describing Lore’s life with Spanner, Spanner’s normal scams are insufficient to live by, and Spanner turns to prostitution. Not only that, but Lore participates. Spanner drugs her. Griffith makes it somewhat less of a moral quandary later on by revealing that Lore got dosed only after the sex started. Things aren’t completely clear cut to me.

I don’t really call myself a feminist except in the broad sense of the word: I believe in equal political, social, and economics rights and opportunities for women. There’s a lot of different feminist theories, and I only know the beginning pieces of a few of them. I say this because I’m not sure where my next opinion falls in the grand scheme of feminism, if at all.

When negotiating consent, I don’t believe there’s a bright line that divides the acceptable from the unacceptable. There’s a lot of shades of gray. Things that fall to one end of the spectrum or another are clear. Situations in the middle are murky. One one hand, Lore has a (self-induced) power imbalance with Spanner, she can’t just walk away. She is also placed under the influence of drugs which make the experience pleasurable. Although after Lore’s initial decision has been made, she can’t change her mind when drugged like that, and she didn’t choose to take the drugs. On the other side of the ledger sit the fact that Lore participates for a year (if I remember correctly). She has ample opportunity to walk away, and eventually does. The length of time isn’t clearly on one side though. That inures a person. What’s one more time, since I’ve been doing it so long? Things can become acceptable in a person’s mind if they’ve been repeated long enough. In spite of Lore’s perception that Spanner holds power over her, she still holds her option of being Frances Lorien van de Oest, which tilts things strongly in her favor.

One reason why I don’t fall into the camp that consent is only legitimate if there is no power imbalance whatsoever is that power is never perfectly equal. It can be roughly equal. But at best, in my opinion, relative power between two people will shift from one person to another.

So I’m not sure where exactly I stand with regard to Lore’s consent to be pimped by Spanner. She doesn’t seem too worked up over that Spanner perpetrated a wrong against her, though she does question her own consent somewhat after she’s withdrawn it. Her attitude seems to be one of pragmatism, of moving on and not dwelling too much on it. That tends to be my own reaction to things, but I’ve also never felt as if I was pressured to do something sexually that I didn’t want to do. And I’m not likely ever to either.

Other blogged reviews:

• This Ain’t Livin’
• Libritouches
• Eve’s Alexandria

Title: Slow River
Author: Nicola Griffith
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine Books
Format: electronic book
Publication date: originally 1995
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-46448-4

I wish I remembered where I saw this book recommended, because I really would like to thank the person who got me to put it on my to be read list. Devices & Desires is a history of contraception in America, covering the late 1800s until the early 1970s. The coverage focuses on the makers, proponents, and users of birth control, rather than the legal and political status. I haven’t done the independent research to know whether Tone’s tome is accurate (voluminous end notes notwithstanding). Because Tone wrote about both the warts and the virtues of the characters involved, I tend to credit her with completeness. And of course, it’s an interesting subject matter. Who doesn’t want to know more about the history of making sex more risk-free?

I have to warn potential readers of something though. Don’t read this book if you are squeamish. It’s not just that some of the early methods of contraception (camel dung!) are distasteful. There was quite a bit of quackery involved in selling and marketing birth control. Birth control was illegal for so long, and other restrictions remained in place long after the ban was lifted. We can’t regulate the content of items that aren’t within the realm of legal products. And so, we got Lysol as the leading form of contraception for decades. Lysol doesn’t even work as contraception but its makers sold it that way, and millions of American women inserted a caustic cleaning product into their vaginas in order to kill off sperm after sex. Then again if you are reading it here, you might as well read the book.

The biggest takeaway from the book is the trajectory of birth control from banned product to something controlled by medical professionals. Margaret Sanger embraced medical control of birth control for several reasons. It carved out an exception to the existing bans on contraception in place with the Comstock laws. Medical prescription also reduced the dangers from unregulated birth control. However, medicalized contraceptives means that those who need them aren’t in sole control of whether and when to use them. There’s got to be a doctor or nurse involved. Devices & Desires covers the history of how Sanger embraced the medical profession from initial radical revulsion.

The second main focus in the book is on those who made the devices. Condoms and diaphragms in the 19th century required very little to make. Some rubber and some chemicals and a place to put it together. Douches, although not particularly effect, could also be made cheaply. Combined with legal bans that kept larger legitimate companies from selling them, small proprietors could thrive. Many of the small proprietors were poor, immigrant, and frequently women. As birth control became more accepted, the smaller companies became bigger, or disappeared. Particularly interesting to read about was the story of the creation of the Pill, created by male scientists but funded and encouraged by philanthropic motivated women.

The last main thrust to draw from the book is the effect on people who have sex. Tone’s book covers the benefits to women primarily, but touches on men in a few cases as well. One of the big moves from illegality came as a result of World War I, where millions of men contracted venereal diseases. Pregnancy wasn’t considered by society to be morally acceptable to prevent, but disease was. It’s one of the many instances of disparate treatment of women that Devices & Desires highlights.

I do wish Devices & Desires covered the science more in depth. I don’t mean that this should have been a book about how contraception works. I mean the social science. What gets people to use contraception? Why did the idea of contraception as sin go by the wayside? From a history perspective, we can see the events that happened but not always the reasons why. After World War I where the military started providing condoms to soldiers, what was the mechanism by which they were accepted? I wish there was more sociology here than there was.

I noted this on Twitter: I think this is the best non-fiction book I’ve read in several years. Never dry, it was balanced, informative, and interesting.

Title: Devices & Desires: A History of Contraception in America
Author: Andrea Tone
Cover creator: Skouras Design
Imprint / publisher: Hill and Wang
Format: Hardcover
Length: 292 p.
Publication date: 2001
ISBN-10: 0-8090-3817-X

The Mercy Killers starts off with a bar scene and a murder. Old Jerry is Charlie and P.T.’s grandfather and the person they lived with much of their lives after their mother committed suicide and their father beat them. Jerry complains all the time about his decrepit state and asks everyone to off him because he doesn’t think he can do it himself. P.T. is somewhat slow as a result of all the beatings as a child. P.T. lets Jerry talk him into assisting in his own suicide. Charlie tries to protect P.T. by dumping the body to make it look like drowning, but when that doesn’t work, confesses to killing Jerry. Instead of prison, Charlie gets sentenced to Vietnam.

That’s the setup for the novel. There’s a lot of psychological drama involved here. Like previous Reardon books, most of the characters are functional to the extent that they haven’t forgotten how to eat or talk, but are unable to deal with other people in anything resembling a normal fashion.

The problem with the book, and it’s a big one, is that there doesn’t seem to be a point. Vietnam screwed people up? We knew that. Brothers care for each other in screwed up ways? Knew that too. Both of those points are told in what’s really not very interesting fashion. There’s a reason only messed up people go to the bar where only messed up people go. We learned these lessons young because they are obvious.

I think the missing piece in the book is that P.T. is too much of an enigma and too much of a stereotype retarded kid. He slips too easily under the sway of other people. In one scene, a hooker talks P.T. into wearing her slip. There’s no reason for it other than to show how dumb the kid is. Sometimes P.T. tells outrageous stories about his own life. Sometimes he tells flat out truth. Why he picks each time is a mystery. I have no idea how such a character should be written. Any key character in a psychological drama should be multi-dimensional, and one that’s written as a mentally disabled person even more so. P.T. failed this book.

One other blogged review:

• Erica Hanson’s blog for writers, readers, and educators

Title: The Mercy Killers
Author: Lisa Reardon
Cover creator: Brad Foltz (designer)
Imprint / publisher: Counterpoint / Perseus
Format: Hardcover
Length: 256 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1-58243-318-6

Last year Lisa Reardon attempted to kill her father after her cat died. According to the newspapers, she claimed to be protecting relatives from abuse, though no abuse has been alleged by anyone but her. I don’t have any idea if abuse happened in her family or not. I did read her book Billy Dead, which I loved, but which featured some pretty twisted family dynamics. I decided to get her two other books from the library this year, and see what I see. Call it me a looky-loo.

One of the tenets of reviewing is that the book’s voice is not the author’s voice, except when it is. An author is usually capable of writing characters with opinions she does not hold herself. Nevertheless, as many a book blogger can tell you, some authors abandon the book-author separation when a reviewer criticizes a book. Suddenly it’s intensely personal.

I say all that as a prelude to this: I couldn’t help but look for clues about Lisa Reardon herself when I read Blameless. I tried not to. There’s every likelihood that my conclusions are completely wrong.

Blameless tells the story of Mary Culpepper, a school bus driver in Michigan. The first hundred pages or so are actually pretty dreary. Mary isn’t working. Her father was a womanizer, but is dead. She has a strained relationship with her mother, her sisters, and her ex-husband. She has a cat named Frank. A neighborhood girl, Julianna, stops by periodically to play cards and to tell Mary about her imaginary road trip to the North Pole. Mary plays softball.

I had a hell of a time following along during that portion. Too many names. Too little differentiation between the characters’ personalities. But there’s definitely some inkling of something really really wrong. Mary can’t sleep many nights. The Night Visitor, a stone gargoyle like thing, sits on her chest in bed. There’s also an upcoming murder trial in which Mary is to be a witness, though what exactly about isn’t clear for some time.

Mary’s essential problem is a combination of two things: overwhelming untethered guilt, and an aversion to facing or even acknowledging her guilt and other problems. For instance, she never had it out with her ex-husband when he cheated on her and left her for someone else. Instead, she was a bridesmaid in their wedding! It’s pretty messed up, and that’s not the worst of it. When Mary starts flirting with a married man, the pigeons come home to roost. (I do have to say this is not a people-have-affairs-and-feel-guilty-about-it novel.)

It’s fascinating actually. It helps that most of the characters are charming, though a little evilly so.

Back to Lisa Reardon. Both books are filled with people who have secrets. Both are filled with very dysfunctional and screwed up people. Parallel to her own life? Stuff she saw around small town Michigan? Completely made up? You don’t chase your father through the house with a shotgun if everything is all right in your world.

Title: Blameless
Author: Lisa Reardon
Imprint / publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 319 p.
Publication date: 2000
ISBN-10: 0-375-50405-2

Here’s a book that combines science fiction and fantasy in a way that I actually enjoyed. Normally, I don’t like these two genres mixed, despite the fact that the line between them is blurrier than my unaided right eye at 2 feet (I’m farsighted).

Half of the story takes place in a near future dystopia. Nation states on the wane, some multi-nationals on the rise. Many large land mammal species dead. The war on terrorism still ongoing. Laura Byrd and two co-workers are at a research station in Antarctica on a publicity stunt for Coca-Cola, which intends to use the ice to make and sell a drink. Back in civilization, someone releases a virus that kills people within a day, and is particularly virulent at the same time. Millions die, but Laura Byrd is oblivious because of her remote location.

The other half of the book takes place in the afterlife. After dying, everyone lives in The City for as long as living people can remember them, or at least that’s the guesswork of the people residing in The City. When the last person who remembers you dies, you move on. It’s a large city, millions stay there. Until the Blinks start wiping out people. As the population of Earth gets smaller, there’s fewer people to do the remembering, and The City empties out.

But not only is The Brief History of the Dead an apocalyptic tale, and a tale of the afterlife, it’s also an adventure story. Having more important things to do, the Coca-Cola corporation abandons Laura Byrd’s team. Though they have some more advanced technology than we do now, it doesn’t work well because the expedition is a publicity stunt and the company scrimped to save money on it. Byrd and her mates must travel from their interior camp to one on the Ross Ice Shelf, where a working radio exists. It’s not a pleasant journey.

I loved the interplay between the remaining residents of The City as they tried to figure out why they were still there when so many people disappeared. It’s a different version of a person’s life flashing right before their eyes just before they die. That vision comes to life and gets to interact with other people’s flashing lives.

One chapter follows a Coca-Cola PR executive in the afterlife. He still goes to the Coca-Cola office. And despite the approaching end of the world, still cares about the reputation of the company he works for, and the people who ran it with him. No one cares anymore but him. It’s a powerfully pathetic scene.

I’m somewhat disappointed in the ending, though it has a lot of symmetry with the first chapter. Both the first and last chapters are woo-woo visions of the city. In between Brockmeier treats us to some pretty nuts and bolts experiences. If there is an afterlife (which I sincerely doubt), I want it to be like The City. Lots of stuff just happens, for instance new streets materializing without anyone noticing to accommodate new residents. But those people live day to day lives, they fall in love, they eat, they pursue the dreams they didn’t when they were alive. It’s refreshing. The mystical stuff I could do without.

Other blogged reviews:

• Bookfraud
• Coalescent
• Book Cannibal
• Try Harder
• Stainless Steel Droppings

Title: The Brief History of the Dead
Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Cover creator: Archie Ferguson (designer) / Patrik Giardino (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Pantheon / Random House
Format: Advance Readers Copy (ARC)
Length: 238 p.
Publication date: February 2006
ISBN-10: 0-375-42369-9

Wow. I do not know what to make of this book. I’m not sure if it’s satire, something that’s supposed to mess with your head, or both. There are some brilliantly off characters. Not off in that there’s something slightly wrong with them. Off in that they are just wrong. They’re thinking is unrecognizable. This isn’t just a book of anti-heroes. With an anti-hero, at least I can understand their motivations, even if I don’t like them. These characters are all train wrecks, and I couldn’t look away.

A group of six young men meet regularly for parties. Only they don’t know how to throw parties, even for themselves. They hold tournaments of rock, paper, scissors to see who will be lead singer in their monthly karaoke. Karaoke which they set up themselves on a deserted beach in the middle of the night. During a chance encounter, one of them murders a middle-aged woman he meets on the street. She’s a member of a group of middle-aged women called the Midoris, because they all share the same last name. They, in turn, take revenge by murdering one of the five youths. This begins a vicious cycle.

What makes the book is not the plot. It’s the off characters. And apparently there’s social commentary going on here, but I don’t know enough to make a lot of sense of that. For instance, when the young men head to the country to buy a guy for the next round, their dealer sagely describes their motives as pure for wanting revenge on an oba-san. This is just after a discussion between them on what kind of oba-san she is, the kind that prepares pickled daison strips, or the kind that sings fashionable pop songs (it’s the latter, they conclude). Is this commentary on how culture hates on people who sing pop songs?

The book is readable. The oddness makes it somewhat interesting. Kind of like watching a shock comedian, not because he’s funny, but because you want to see what he’s going to say next.

I struggled on what to write about this book. It’s been nearly a week and I still don’t know what I think about it. So I struggle no longer. Decided just to write out my basic response, stop trying to deconstruct, and move on to my next book (which I’m loving so far).

Title: Popular Hits of the Showa Era
Author: Ryu Murakami (村上 龍)
Translator: Ralph McCarthy
Imprint / publisher: W. W. Norton
Format: Advance Readers Copy (ARC)
Length: 193 p.
Publication date: January 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-33842-3

I received a review copy for this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be posted on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $10.17 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.