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

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

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.

I liked Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self bunches, but I’m somewhat at a loss to explain why exactly. The best I can say is that there’s a realness to the characters that I connected with, which is somewhat disconcerting because disconnectedness is a running theme throughout the stories. But sincerity in characters isn’t sufficient reason for me to read a book through in just a sitting or two (which is what I did). There’s something more here that I can’t quite figure out. I suspect I’ll see or hear someone else describe why they liked the book so much and I’ll have an a-ha moment. This is well worth reading.

The first adjective that comes to mind to about the characters in Danielle Evans book is that they are sad and melancholy. The stories feature mostly middle class blacks in not quite everyday situations, but not exactly extraordinary ones either. I’m not sure how to classify that. For instance, in one story a returned soldier from Iraq babysits his ex-girlfriend’s kid, but tells a story where he’s the girl’s father and it spins beyond his control. Because these aren’t tales of extraordinary people, everything they do is understandable, even when it’s clear they aren’t exactly doing the right thing. Or even that they are doing the right thing for themselves. But all very human.

What makes them seem sad is that they are very disconnected from their families or loved ones. They try to make connections during these episodes to fill a sort of sad void, but they mostly fail. In Virgins, two girls head into the city to spend a night clubbing after the local high school boys annoy them. They want someone to treat them well. The thing is, the attention of the city men is not effectively more meaningful, though they don’t readily recognize it. The story is filled with abandonment. Both girls leave Michael, their guy friend and escort, Jasmine leaves Erica, Erica leaves Jasmine, Erica leaves Michael (again). Looking for connections, but leave the ones they have. Other stories include the disconnect in ways other than abandonment.

Race in the United States infuses the stories, several of them explicitly. They don’t confront overt racism, the David Duke kind. Somewhat more subtle but still damaging prejudice appears. One story follows two girls dealing with reproductive issues: a white college student makes money selling her eggs, but no one wants to spend thousands for an egg donor with brown skin. Another features a school that is nominally integrated, yet the students from the whiter, richer neighborhood still receive preferential treatment. The smart black girl still does well, and might possibly be used by the administration as an exhibit for their fairness. But each character isn’t just a black person, but also a soldier, or a woman, or a parent, etc. Intersectionality is the term I would guess fits best, though I’m not knowledgeable about the sociological term to be quoted on that. Still, this is more complex than being about black life.

That’s about all I can say coherently (and that’s a stretch even) at the moment. Maybe after I see some other blog reviews something will pop into my head and I’ll leave a comment or two. I expect to see a few laudatory reviews, as it showed up on quite a few Currently Reading side bars during my searches just now.

Other blogged reviews:

• Postbourgie
• [tk] Book Bites
• 50 Books for 2010

Title: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Author: Danielle Evans
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 229 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-769-9

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for providing a review of the book on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $17.13 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

The Best Short Stories of 1915 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story is the first of the series that eventually became the Best American set of series of books. It’s in the public domain and available on Google Books. I grabbed it because I wanted to see what was considered the best way back then. I did not get or appreciate a few of the stories in the 1969 edition, but they were well-crafted. 1915 is another thing though. Several of the stories appear to be selected not for the quality of the story, but for the political content. I’m quite a fan of stories being explicitly political, but in at least a couple of cases in this collection, the entries had little else going for them. They were mostly ham-handed in their treatment of the politics as well.

Some craft things I noticed. Lots of stories were of the form where one person in the story tells another person a story. Today we’d see this done with a flashback or other method. In addition, three of those were of the form where the person tells a story about themself, but doesn’t reveal that until the end of the story.

The themes fit a couple of political and moral notes: respect for veterans, America is the land of the free, immigrants are good for our country, and most of all, right living will get a person ahead.

Did not enjoy this collection, and I probably won’t read the subsequent editions edited by Edward O’Brien even though a bunch of them are public domain and free.

The Water-Hole by Maxwell Struthers Burt

Back from a stint in Arizona, a man gets into a discussion with his drinking buddies about the nature of bravery. Is it instinctual or is it conditioning? To illustrate, the Arizona man tells a story of love, where a woman’s husband and another who loves her trek out to the desert in search of gold. The husband is a boor, and jeopardizes their lives as well. And yet, the other man saves his life (instinctively!). And in a preview of many other stories, at the end his buddies figure out the Arizona man is telling a story about himself.

The Wake by Donn Byrne

Wealthy farmer marries a girl, because her father had given her to him. Only thing was, she was in love with another named Kennedy, and he with her. After the marriage, she wastes away in the farmer’s house in quick order, and Kennedy vows revenge. The farmer has an interesting reaction. Other than the ugly morals of the time, this was a good story until the end, where it kind of falls apart.

Chautonville by Will Levington Comfort

Russian generals hire a folk singer, Chautonville, to inspire the men on the front lines to fight. Despite his fear of dying, he sings to them.

La Dernière Mobilisation by W. A. Dwiggins

Kind of a cool story about soldiers mobilizing at the end of a battle. Very short.

The Citizen by James Francis Dwyer

At the swearing in ceremony where he takes on U.S. citizenship, a Russian immigrant remembers back to his days in Russia when he found his Dream (capital D) of freedom in America. Very didactic.

Whose Dog—? by Frances Gregg

Young boys torment a homeless guy at the dock, where his life isn’t very valuable. Depressing.

Life by Ben Hecht

A young playwright comes across a living metaphor, and the metaphor is him. And it’s ugly.

T.B. by Fannie Hurst

Young woman works in a basement sale department under arc-lights. At night she goes to dance halls with a beau. Her roommate constantly chastises her. Then she happens on a tuberculosis exhibit and clinic and begins to think she has it because bad air and dancing gives you T.B. Also, men at dance halls are jerks who will drop you at the slightest hint of trouble.

Mr. Eberdeen’s House by Arthur Johnson

Ghost story that I didn’t quite understand. Visitor to the Eberdeen house has visions that put him in place of a ghost he sees.

Vengeance Is Mine by Virgil Jordan

An Allied pilot is assigned to check out the battlefield before the troops engage with the enemy. There’s no sign of the Germans, so the pilot lands, and can’t take off again for ugly reasons.

The Weaver Who Clad the Summer by Harris Merton Lyon

A parable about finding contentment in one’s Work, even if it won’t last but the moment (as the work of a sculptor or painter would). Also, another story where the speaker tells a story to another listener in the story, and at the end the speaker says, and it was about me!

Heart of Youth by Walter J. Muilenburg

A young farming family is faced with moving west to a place with dryer air for the health of the family’s mother. The young son wrestles with whether to stay behind and work the old farm on his own so that the family won’t have to sell it. Prepare yourself for the maudlin touching moment at the end.

The End of the Path by Newbold Noyes

Two young lovers are separated when the woman suddenly becomes enamored of her religion and joins a convent. Feeling particularly put upon, the young man enters the chapel and stabs a statue of the Virgin Mary to express how the church torments him. At that exact same moment in the convent, his former betrothed falls dead! Yet another story within a story where the storyteller exclaims and it’s about me!

The Whale and the Grasshopper by Seumas O’Brien

Decency as explained by a whale and a grasshopper. Parables. I need them explained to me.

In Berlin by Mary Boyle O’Reilly

Short short. Woman on train behaves oddly. Girls on train giggle at her behavior, thinking her worth a laugh. Man on trains explains to chagrined girls why woman behaves oddly. It has to do with the war.

The Waiting Years by Katharine Metcalf Roof

Unrequited, and very very creepy, love. Different standards from day. I get it. But reading about a man of 24 lusting after a girl of 15 is off-putting. Particularly because the man doesn’t think of the girl as a woman, which I would sorta get under the standards of the day even though I have a hard time thinking of a 15 year old as a woman. But he keeps calling her a child, and expressing his desire for her, though he’s willing to wait for her to reach adulthood first. Squick!

Zelig by Benjamin Rosenblatt

A Russian Jew comes to America for his grandson’s Bar Mitsva to keep his wife happy. He’s cranky and crabby and wants to go back to Russia, and bring the grandson back as well, even though in Russia he could not go to college because he’s Jewish. I’m missing the message in the story.

The Survivors by Elsie Singmaster

A stubborn ex-Confederate soldier spends the rest of his life trying to ruin the Memorial Day parades populated by the Union ex-soliders in his hometown by dressing in his Confederate uniform, despite his pre-war friendship with the men of the town. Another very didactic story.

The Yellow Cat by Wilbur Daniel Steele

This was actually a pretty interesting story, though hard to follow at times. A sailing vessel is discovered unmanned at sea, and the sailor who boards it to bring it home starts thinking there’s a ghost on the ship that turns into a yellow cat when he’s not looking.

The Bounty-Jumper by Mary Synon

One man’s shame at having been a bounty jumper during the Civil War, not because of greed but because of cowardice, and his vow to atone for his wrong.

Title: The Best Short Stories of 1915 and Yearbook of the American Short Story
Editor: Edward J. O’Brien
Series: Best American Short Stories; 1915
Imprint / publisher: Small, Maynard & Company (scanned to Google Books)
Format: ePub electronic book
Length: 274 p. (not including supplementary materials)
Publication date: 2009 (originally 1916)

I hated this book. It’s literary fiction of the people having affairs variety. It has three main characters: Li Jing (aphasia patient), Zhou Meiling (his wife), and Rosalyn Neal (one of his doctors). A few secondary characters appear, and some even get a little of the story told from their perspective. But it isn’t enough to relieve the tedium of the main characters’ bad behavior.

Li Jing is the owner of an investment company, a wheeler-dealer. While having lunch with his father (whose full name I don’t remember but who is mostly called Professor Li) at the Swan Hotel, a gas explosion tears through the place, embedding a piece of glass in Li Jing’s head. When he wakes up, he can’t remember how to speak Chinese. He can, however, remember some of his English from his childhood in the U.S. Rosalyn Neal is a bilingual aphasia specialist brought in from the U.S. to treat Li Jing.

Li Jing at first clams up because he is so demoralized by his loss of Chinese. Later on he not only clams up but refuses to interact with his wife unless he’s playing a victim. Zhou Meiling won’t communicate with her husband as she takes on his role as president of the investment company. Both of them treat each other like crap. Rosalyn Neal, while supposedly an aphasia researcher, spends most of her time acting like an ugly American version of a sorority girl. She blunders her way through Li Jing’s life, causing problems with her closeness to Li Jing.

All of these people make such bad choices and behave so badly I could not feel for any of them when things blew up in their faces. Leave your husband with your kid and then you are hurt when he isn’t home when you decide to come back? Throw your kid’s laptop against the floor and wall and cry when your wife won’t speak to you afterward? Lead a fellow expatriate on and then act hurt when his friends no longer embrace you? These are not things that endear your character to me. They make me actively hate them. Those are but an opening into the hollowness of these characters. I liked one character only, the interpreter Alan. When given a choice to do the right thing, he’s the only one in the whole damn book who chooses well.

You know the saying about how literary fiction is books about when bad things happen to people you don’t like very much. This is the epitome of that.

Given the blurbs for the book, I expected something more about the beauty of language and culture and what happens when a person is cut off from that. This is the same old people having affairs crap set in a city with which its American readers are less familiar.

On to better books, hopefully.

A couple other blogged reviews for balance.

• Susan Blumberg-Kason
• B.A.B.A.E.L.

Title: The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Author: Ruiyan Xu
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 340 p.
Publication date: October 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-58654-6

I received a review copy for this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be published on LibraryThing. There are no restrictions on the content of the review. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $16.59 (the price of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

I call these things I write about books reviews, but for most items, these aren’t really reviews. They are chronicles of my experiences with books. Sometimes that’s more review like. Sometimes not. I never really try for objectivity. Lots of times these writings are more about me than they are the book. Sometimes the experience I have reading a book won’t be close to the experience someone else has. I am pretty sure that no one else will even come close to having the same experience I’ve had with Split, for a couple of reasons.

The first reason has to do with Deepa D. I bought Split in a charity auction for Con or Bust. I’ve mentioned them before. It’s an attempt to make a bigger science fiction bigger tent by paying the way for fans of color to attend science fiction conventions. Deepa offered a signed copy of her friend’s book, with her own post-it notes included. That’s what attracted me. I love talking books with intelligent book people (which Deepa is), and this could be a slice of book conversation.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from her notes. It wouldn’t be like a review, written after the fact. I figured they would be more immediate and personal. And these were. Since you, dear reader, did not get these notes and will not ever get these notes, you did not read the same thing I did. They changed the experience of reading Split, and enhanced it. Deepa didn’t write anything particularly expository. Just little bits of her own personal reactions as things went along. (If it were Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, it’d be stuff like Oh Sandman, why so emo?) The effect was akin to watching a movie with a friend sitting in the next seat. I comment in their ear periodically (and they in mine). Not loudly, and not long, because no one wants to miss what’s going on next. Just little bits here and there. That’s what this was like, and it was awesome. At least it was with Deepa’s commentary. I’m only going to post her first note, because I paid well for the privilege and don’t feel like sharing.

The second reason is less exclusive, but still extremely personal. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I know this is the first time I’ve written about it on this blog. My father died when I was just two years old, and my mother remarried a couple of years later. My step-father hit me far more than is acceptable. I won’t write more about that right now, because I’ve made peace with him. Making peace doesn’t fix things though. I was, and to this day remain, somewhat broken.

Split is about the aftermath of child abuse. I did not know this when I bought the book. I did not know this until I started reading the book. I might have left the book alone had I known. I expect fiction about child abuse to feel exploitive. Graphic descriptions trigger very emotional responses in me. I don’t want to go through that for something that exploits my experience. Split was very triggering, not just because it’s graphic, but because it’s very good. Ms. Avasthi gets it, in more ways than one.

Split opens with Jace Witherspoon showing up on his brother Christian’s doorstep in Albuquerque. Christian left home five years earlier at age 17, and Jace hasn’t heard from or seen Christian since. After Christian left, their father turned his violent attention toward 11 year old Jace. Their mother received a good share of violence too. Both boys reached a breaking point. The solution both turned to was leaving. Their mother remains living with Judge Walter Witherspoon.

Split is about what happens afterward. Much stuff I’ve seen is about what happens before. Sometimes it’s about how the cycle repeats and the abused turn into abusers. Split is different. Split is about recovery. Fucked up, messed up, painful, recovery. The people present don’t drag them down. They build them up. Jace and Christian build relationships. Split is hopeful all the way through, but not so positive as to be a sure thing. Steps forward and steps back, and I read through to the end worried that I would lose my friendships with these characters in one final giant leap backward. Either way, in Ms. Avasthi’s hands, it would have been the right ending.

Nearly every character in the book is likable but flawed. Jace and Christian are the highlights, of course. But even the secondary characters like Christian’s girlfriend Mirriam Ngu down to Jace’s soccer and romantic rival Eric were people I cared about.

A few paragraphs back I wrote that often fiction about abuse feels exploitive. There’s a few aspects to that. The most obvious is the feeling that it’s written for looky-loos, the people who slow down at an accident on the freeway to see what happened. Everyone has done something like that on occasion, including me, and some more than others. Child abuse stories go the route of voyeurism much of the time. Fine caring people can read it and think oh how horrible for those children and soothe themselves with their own caringness. One reason I don’t write much about my experience is I don’t want people tut-tut-ing over me.

A second way is when some awful stereotypes are used. I cringe whenever I read a story where an abused kid starts hurting animals and by chapter three is cackling as he uses a laptop to remotely cause a plane to crash (or similar kinds of evil-doing). Less of a caricature, but still just as cardboard, is the abused kid who grows up to abuse his own kids. That happens a lot in real life, but to be written in a non-exploitive manner requires a lot of work.

Split manages to avoid those issues very well. One of the things that is apparent very quickly is that Jace is a bastard. He can be charming as hell, but when something sets him on edge, he isn’t very nice. A good example is in his new school he goes out for the soccer team, which is pretty bad when he joins mid-season. The coach is condescending toward him, as is the team captain. Jace keeps quiet, but promptly embarrasses several teammates defending against him in scrimmage. He’s not just showing he knows his stuff; he wants to put them in their place. He knows the effect his actions have, and regrets it at times. But when irritated or angry, he does it anyway. It’s subtle characterization that makes him very believable.

Christian, like me, handles his past by not talking about it. For him, talk takes him back and he relives. He also runs. Running becomes a zen-like meditation for him, taking him to a mental space where he just is. His methods help him successfully cope, but they also have not fixed him. They are merely temporary.

I bring these two characterizations up because the brothers handle things very differently. This is key to avoiding the exploitive caricatures. And too often in real life people assume there’s a one size fits all pattern to us as well as how to handle us. There isn’t. At one point in the book, Christian realizes that his brother’s experience is not his experience. By leaving, Christian changed the household dynamic. He has no idea what the experience might have been like because he wasn’t there, even if he knew Jace had been abused using the same methods.

One other way that books about abuse can fall down is where the point is obviously to teach readers how they can help by having a caring and persevering teacher/social worker break through the kid’s shell. It’s a version of the Freedom Writers for a different social problem. When it’s a social worker’s story, you know either the kid’s gonna make it, or the social worker’s life will be enriched by the whole experience as he moves on to his next challenge. Split is not a social worker’s story. It’s doesn’t condescend that way. As a story about the kids, it becomes unpredictable and very real.

After reading my review over a few times, I realized something I forgot to write about. I mention that I forgot because it’s indicative of my history, and illustrates one of the reasons why I believe that reviewing really can’t ever be objective. I’ve been writing mostly about getting abuse right and wrong. That’s not the only way to look at the novel though, but in retrospect it’s what my head spins around. It’s also very much about the complex relationship between the brothers. Neither of them change on their own. And neither do they fall in together as soldiers fighting a common enemy. They love each other. They scared each other. And they need each other. Christian feels duty bound to help Jace when he shows up on his doorstep. But he doesn’t want to throw himself into it. Jace disrupts his strategy of burying his past. Occasionally the text moves away from the pair, but Ms. Avasthi brings it back quickly (and sometimes forcefully) every time.

There are two things about the book that I have mixed feelings on. They aren’t drawbacks exactly, but they make me think about things somewhat differently. As they both involve spoilers, I’m going to put them on page 2 (as well as something I really liked about the ending).

Split covers the most important part of child abuse aside from stopping them in the first place, what happens afterward, an under-explored part of the picture. It does so with believable plot and flawed characters I liked. The narrative and author obviously care about kids in these situations, making for fine story.

A few other blogged reviews:

• Shadowy Duck in Asian American Literature Fans
• The Heart Is a Lonely Reader
• Abstractions of Chinchilla
• GAL Novelty
• Engine Summer

Title: Split
Author: Swati Avasthi
Cover creator: The Heads of State
Imprint / publisher: Alfred A. Knopf / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 282 p.
Publication date: March 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-375-86340-0

Note: These were distributed as podcasts during March. It appears that the show airs on the radio somewhat differently.

An Hour with Sherman Alexie

I don’t often get emotional over my reading. I’m just not that kind of guy. But listening last year to Sherman Alexie read his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian got me sniffling pretty damn good. As short as it is, it’s still a long investment in time and money. Selected Shorts gives you something free, and requires less than an hour of listening. Click on it now. Download. Listen. This is amazing! What is it? Well, it has an interview with Sherman, and he reads a few of his poems. Those parts are good. But what’s great is a reading of Alexie’s story Breaking and Entering by actor B.D. Wong. I only know Wong as the psychologist on Law & Order: S.V.U., but he’s got a number of awards for acting on Broadway. And his reading here is incredible! A Chinese American reading a story written by a Native American about a Native American mistaken for a white man who kills a black teenager. Kid breaks into a house he thinks is empty. In a scuffle, the owner kills him. The story is from his book War Dances. Did I mention it’s amazing?

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Mysterious Circumstances

The first story in this episode is Thomas Walsh’s Double Check. It’s an old pulp story from Black Mask in 1933. Detective investigates threats against a bank executive. The banks is on the rocks, and so there are lots of people who stand to lose money because of the guy. Lots of people with reason to threaten or off him. Gangsters get involved. Explosions! A complicit woman! Wisecracks! And a really good reading by gravelly voiced James Naughton.

The second piece is Dave Barry‘s False Alarm from his book Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up, read by Larry Keith. Some typical Dave Barry bits about how he can mess up his home alarm system repeatedly. I’m not really sure why, but Dave Barry humor doesn’t really do a lot for me. Including this story.

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Creatures of the Night

Vampire stories!

The first story is Stephen King’s Popsy published in Nightmares and Dreamscapes and read by Michael Imperioli. Sheridan is a gambler who got in too deep. Now he grabs little kids for a pedophile who pays off Sheridan’s marker to the mob. In this case, he tells a crying kid in the mall that he can help find the kid’s Popsy. Only Popsy finds him. This one didn’t really do a whole lot for me. It’s obvious where it’s going. It isn’t really scary. It isn’t really that creepy. Maybe I’m just desensitized.

Second story is a spoof written by host Isaiah Sheffer called Hotel Transylvania, read by the author. Here’s the thing. Spoofs written by outsiders have to be really good. Sheffer’s piece just comes off as condescension toward the horror genre.

Third story is Night Calls written and read by Lisa Fugard. Not a vampire story. A man cares for a rare heron in the bird sanctuary where he works. His daughter visits. The heron gets out. The father searches for the heron. Very melancholy tale.

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The Things They Carried

A replay of an earlier performance of Tim O’Brien‘s The Things They Carried from the collection of the same title, read by Dylan Baker. This is a Viet Nam war story. I’d never heard of it before, but it sure shows up as important in my Google searches. It’s less a war is hell story than a war is soul sucking story. At the beginning, O’Brien describes a platoon of soldiers by what they carry. At the beginning it’s stuff like P-38 can openers, pocket knives, heat tabs. Gradually, the things he describes them carrying become more and more immaterial, poise, and dignity. Really amazing story, and you really do get to know the men by the things they carry. Baker’s reading is superb.

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Lost and Found

Four stories this episode.

First up is Etgar Keret‘s Good Intentions read by Leonard Nimoy. I believe the story was written originally in Hebrew and translated to English by Miriam Schlesinger. It can be found in his book The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories. A hit man who thinks he has no feeling anymore finds out he can’t kill a man he admires. This felt very trite and unoriginal.

The second story is actually an essay by Colson Whitehead called Lost and Found from The Colossus of New York. It’s read by Alec Baldwin. I really liked this essay. Both Sag Harbor and this essay center on the place of memory and nostalgia in our lives. From saying that there are eight million New Yorks (or more), one for each person who experiences the city, to nailing down the experience where a place becomes fixed to a viewer at first view, Whitehead nail some really common experiences of place. Mix that in with some personal attachment to New York makes for something special. I think having a native New Yorker read this helps.

Third story: My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid from At the Bottom of the River, read by Laurine Towler. Unfortunately, I didn’t get this at all. It’s a mother and daughter story, but I only get that because Isaiah Sheffer says it is and the narrator keeps referring to her mother. This story is above my pay grade.

And last story is Charles Johnson‘s A Soldier for the Crown performed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. The story appears in Johnson’s collection Soulcatcher and Other Stories. First off, I had no idea about the history of the Black Loyalists during the American Revolution. This is something my history classes never covered, and I’m kind of pissed and kind of ashamed I haven’t learned about it before. Johnson’s story is about a fifteen year old slave who adopts the name Alexander Freeman after abandoning an American master to fight for the British along with a brother and a cousin, neither of whom survive the war. Alexander Freeman does though. It’s second person, which would be tougher to read in print, but works well in audio format. The story is good, though possibly that’s partly my thrill at learning something interesting about American history that I should have known.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

I’ve come across Selected Shorts on occasion when I turn on the car radio in the evening. Unfortunately, I invariably flip on the radio in the middle of a story. That’s just no good, so I usually turn the radio back off.

I’ve been looking for fiction podcasts, particularly general fiction. PRI has made Selected Shorts available as a podcast, so I subscribed when I ran across it in January. I’m not always amazed by the stories, but Selected Shorts certainly gets some talented readers. They have some truly amazing readings. The readers are generally actors, so they have some dramatic chops. And it’s clear that Selected Shorts actually plans and directs the shows before the readers step on stage for the performance. Most are done before a live audience. So far, this is my gold standard for how to do a fiction podcast right.

Note: These were distributed as podcasts during February. It appears that the show airs on the radio somewhat differently.

Vantage Points

An excerpt from Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann, performed by Brian Stokes Mitchell. I believe this is the opening section of the novel. It’s a description of New Yorkers as they watch Philippe Petit on the edge of the Word Trade Center just before he did his high-wire walk between the towers. Some poetic license with the facts, and the text bored me.

Salt (from War Dances), by Sherman Alexie, performed by David Strathairn. Sherman Alexie can do no wrong in my book. I was first introduced to his work through his movie Smoke Signals, but I think my memory about the movie is wrong. I could have sworn I first saw the movie when I was living in north Idaho where the movie is set. But it came out in June 1998, which is the month I moved to Boise. Anyway, Alexie’s trademark style is to handle sadness and pain with tenderness and humor. Salt is no different. A young Indian intern working the obituary desk at the Spokane Spokesman-Review confronts his own mortality. The piece didn’t affect me as strongly as some other Alexie pieces have, but it’s still awesome. And Strathairn, a pretty old guy, does a wonderful job reading the part of a young guy.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)

Inspired by the photography of Robert Frank

This episode is composed of works related to the photography of Robert Frank: an Allen Ginsberg poem because he was friends with Frank, two short shorts by young authors who wrote stories inspired by Frank photos at he Metropolitan Museum of Art, and two stories about immigrants because they are the quintessential Americans in Frank’s photography. Or so the podcast claims; I know nothing about Robert Frank.

The poem is Sunflower Sutra by Allan Ginsberg, read by Isaiah Sheffer (the host of the show). Well read, but as I rarely get poetry, including this, I’m demurring on any kind of commentary.

The Death of Jim Taylor was the first of two short shorts. Written by Elissa Hutson, Broadway actor Boyd Gaines performs the reading. Hutson imagines a white man’s reaction to the death of a black man in an industrial accident in the South in the 1950s. Decent story, but I wasn’t particularly moved.

Barbara Stanwyck, It’s Your Time to Shine was written by Bianca Galvez, and performed by Condola Rashad. Rashad, a budding stage actress, really makes this story shine. A quick elevator ride length exposition by a woman about her boyfriend Frank, done classic 1950s style.

Good Living by Aleksandar Hemon from Love and Obstacles, performed by Boyd Gaines. A Bosnian immigrant sells magazines door to door in the U.S. At one of the places lives a priest, and the immigrant deals a bit with the priest’s preconceived ideas about Bosnians, which our protagonist is willing to exploit. I love the unstated relationship and interaction between the priest and his gay stud houseboy.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, performed by Condola Rashad, from The Thing Around Your Neck. Rashad’s reading for this story is good, but not as amazing as for the Galvez story earlier. I didn’t like this story too much either. I think it’s because it’s told in second person. A woman from Nigeria comes to America and deals with (as in Hemon’s story) some typical American reactions to foreigners. In this case, someone who fetishizes foreigners. In addition to the second person telling, the story had it’s moral a little too much on the surface for me. That sometimes works, but in this case it didn’t grab me.

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Tales of Terror

Dracula’s Guest by Bram Stoker, performed by Aasif Mandvi. Yes, the guy who is the Muslim correspondent for The Daily Show. I didn’t know he did anything except comedy, but he’s good reading this story. Really good. The story isn’t particularly inspiring, but I’m not a huge horror fan. Seems to use a lot of horror movie cliches. Unseen creatures. Sudden drops in temperature. Characters who decide to enter abandoned towns despite warning of ghostly dangers. Granted, Stoker wrote this well before these were cliches, much less horror movie cliches. But I’ve seen and read them too much. Mandvi makes the story interesting though.

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, performed by Fionnula Flanagan. Really didn’t get this story. So there’s a disease plaguing a kingdom, and the prince holes up in a castle and throws wild parties while secluded from the dying populace. The the plague personified makes it into the palace, and things go wrong, as they do when the plague enters your home. I must be totally missing something here.

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Forbidden Fruit

This episode has a couple of stories about stuff we’re not supposed to do.

Yurt by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (from Ms. Hempel Chronicles), performed by Joanna Gleason. Superbly performed by Gleason. I particularly loved her voice for Mrs. Willoughby. A teacher leaves school for an extended trip to Yemen, and now comes by for a social visit after her return to the U.S. She’s pregnant, and appears to be abandoning her teaching career. You’d think the forbidden fruit would be the wild exotic sex life Ms. Duffy is having that’s got her pregnant, but I don’t think that’s really it. Solid story about people whose lives are in a rut.

Wild Plums by Grace Stone Coates (from Best American Short Stories of the Century, performed by Mia Dillon. A girl’s parents see picking and eating wild plums as something low class people would do, and forbid their daughter from picking or eating them. The neighbors quite enjoy their plums though, and invite the girl to go along with them. Not a particularly moving story, even with the humorous twit ending.

Download (link is to NPR-hosted MP3 and was valid as of the time of posting)