The Clareverse

Well, ok, not my whole life, but certainly the part that I spend gardening, which is close to 15% of my life in the summer.

Everything that Douglas Tallamy says makes so much sense that it amazes me I didn’t know this stuff until I read this book:

1. Insects that are native to an ecosystem have evolved to eat only plants native to that ecosystem
2. Baby birds eat insects. Even normally seed-eating birds need a large insect population to support their young.
3. So, if there are fewer native plants around, there are fewer native insects, and fewer birds.
4. Suburban gardeners have a responsibility to rebuild the native ecosystem which the suburb has displaced.

Tallamy makes these points quickly, then spends a chapter on how to make a garden of native plants look attractive and formal so you don’t irritate your neighbors. The bulk of the book is descriptions of insects native to the eastern U.S. and the plants they live on, accompanied by attractive color photographs. I’ve identified the little red bugs on my coneflowers as the nymph stage of Red Milkweed Beetles.

For the last few years I’ve grown some native prairie plants because they are drought-tolerant and don’t require any attention. But I’ve also been planting various exotic ornamental species that are drought-tolerant, and it never occurred to me that they are just wasting space in my garden. Nothing can eat them, so they’re not in the food chain. I never thought about the insect part of the ecosystem, and how important it is to provide food and shelter for the insects that other local fauna depend on.

From now on only native plants and vegetables are allowed in my garden. And when I see that something is eating my perennials, instead of being irritated I’ll be happy that a tiny bit of the ecosystem is working as it should.

Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire is full of neato ideas about the effects of various plants on the evolution of human culture and the origins of western ideas of beauty, major religions, and other important memes. The chapter about psychoactive plants is particularly interesting. This just made me chuckle:

The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.

- The Botany of Desire, p. 130.

It reminded me of the time I came home to find my roommate prostrate on the couch, almost weeping in frustration. She had the flu and a high fever, and had been trying to read Count Zero. Early William Gibson isn’t the best prose for calming the fevered mind.

I think the most mindbending thing I’ve attempted was bourbon + Thomas Pynchon, which was done more to preserve my sanity than to experiment with it. There was no way I was going to make it through Gravity’s Rainbow without a few stiff drinks.

Warning: Spoilers, lots of spoilers. All spoilers, all the time.

Hi, I’m Amir, protagonist of The Kite Runner. I’m a lying coward and something of an idiot. It’s kind of weird that the book I’m in is at all enjoyable, since I’m such an unbelievable bastard.

For example, I spend the first several chapters of the book being a complete ass to my best friend, servant, and sidekick Hassan. Hassan has some kind of martyr complex, so it’s understandable that I would want to smash his face in, but you’d think that if his selfless devotion bothers me so much I’d just get some other friends.

Soon I’m watching as the neighborhood bully beats and rapes my buddy Hassan. This part is awesome because I do nothing to prevent it or to help him afterwards, and I never show him any concern. In fact, I frame Hassan for theft and drive him and his father from their home and livelihood. It’s pretty odd that I should be cowardly enough to treat Hassan like this, and yet also sensitive enough to be haunted by guilt about it for the rest of my life. I’m the most sensitive coward ever - totally in touch with my own moral failings and unwilling to do anything at all about them. I bet you’ll enjoy reading about my self-hatred.

The middle of the book is about my life in San Francisco after my charismatic heroic father and I escape from Russian-occupied Afghanistan. We live in an interesting and sympathetic community of Afghan immigrants and refugees. They’re all fun to read about. In this part I’m sort of likable because there are no challenges to my morals or physical safety; you kind of forget what a contemptible person I am.

The last part of the book is when you’d expect me to grow some balls and start redeeming myself. Things look promising for a while: I go undercover in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to find the lost son of my old buddy Hassan. Who, in an astonishing coincidence, is being kept as a sex toy and molested by the very same psychopath who raped his father. I rescue him by getting the crap beat out of me. Wait, no, I get the crap beat out of me and then the kid rescues me. And then, because although I have grown about half a ball I’m still a thoughtless idiot, I break the only promise I’ve made to this orphaned abused child. So he attempts suicide.

By the end of the book things are looking up and I’ve forgiven myself (and I’ve even apologized to the kid!), but by now you probably don’t even care and you wish that all the other characters in the book would just walk away from me and go be in some other story that’s not narrated by a self-indulgent moral coward who might be some kind of anthropomorphic metaphor for modern Afghanistan.

I just finished Persuasion, and it made me want to re-read Post Captain, by Patrick O’Brian. Post Captain is a great companion for Persuasion: same setting, and the first few chapters of it read like an Austen novel told from the man’s point of view. Which is fun - it’s like chick lit, with all the interpersonal drama + drinking and fighting.

The two books have the same plot setup: It’s 1802 and peace has been temporarily declared between Napoleon & England, so all the officers in the royal navy are on extended shore leave looking for entertainment, and all the ladies are excited to have eligible young men move into the neighborhood. In Persuasion the story of the young ladies trying to hook up with the various officers is told from a respectable young virgin’s point of view.

Louisa … burst forth into raptures of admiration and delight on the character of the navy; their friendliness, their brotherliness, their openness, their uprightness; protesting that she was convinced of sailors having more worth and warmth than any other set of men in England; that they only knew how to live, and they only deserved to be respected and loved.

- Persuasion, Chapter 11.

In Post Captain, the men are onshore looking for fun and trying to get laid, and the male author and modern sensibility make the young women less prim and more entertaining than they are in Austen’s story of the situation. Only the first few chapters of Post Captain are about flirtation, balls, and hunting. After a while war breaks out again and the men spend the rest of the book sailing around Europe fighting the French and blowing things up. There’s also an interlude with a bear costume that borders on the surreal.

‘When one sea-officer is to be roasted, there is always another at hand to turn the spit,’ said the bear. ‘It is an old service proverb. I hope to God I have that fornicating young sod under my command one day. I’ll make him dance a hornpipe - oh, such a hornpipe.’

- Post Captain, Chapter 4.

Even if you don’t usually enjoy reading about the early 19th century or naval adventures, Patrick O’Brian is tremendously entertaining. Go read some.

I go to a book club once a month; the other members all work at the high school where my sidekick teaches, and so have daily experience with current education legislation. This month we read Persuasion and a modern retelling of Persuasion: Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs. The modern book was an entertaining piece of chick lit in which the Anne Elliot character is a guidance counselor in a high school. I reread Persuasion for the 4th or 5th time and prepared for a nice discussion of antiromanticism, gender roles, and the class system. The main talking point of the discussion turned out to be the wrongheadedness of No Child Left Behind. See, the modern retelling is set in a high school, so there’s a connection.

This is a recurrent theme in my book club discussions. A few months ago we read Fahrenheit 451. I took lots of notes and had a nice “Ray Bradbury is a big ol’ misogynist” argument prepared. Bulk of discussion: how much the dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 reminded everyone about the wrongheadedness of No Child Left Behind.

I think we got all the way through A Walk in the Woods and Marley and Me without a detour into NCLB-sucks-landia. I skipped the Memory Keeper’s Daughter meeting because I hated the book so much, but I bet the subject of raising a child with Down Syndrome tied in nicely with NCLB. Faking a child’s death is bad, as is leaving one behind.

I think for the next meeting I’ll prepare some bullet points on how the book we’re reading ties in with NCLB, so I can join in the discussion. It’ll be easy: any bad, useless, or wasteful policy or decision is like No Child Left Behind. Which sucks, y’all.

Here’s a book meme I found on Land-o-Lulu:
1) Grab the nearest book once you read this.
2) Open to page 161.
3) Find the 5th full sentence, and post the text, along with these instructions.

My results, from Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall:

“If you had some work to do, you’d be doing it.”

The Waterfall was published in 1969. It’s about an English woman in the 60’s, before feminism and the sexual revolution but while an antiquated and pathetic class distinction is still in place. The narrator has a baby (at home! with horrid 1960’s obstetric care!) and falls in love with her cousin’s husband, who visits her to help her out in the days she’s stuck at home postpartum. It sounds really dull, but I find it pretty entertaining, even funny. It apparently really sucked to be an intelligent educated woman in a time and place when intelligence and motherhood, or even womanhood, were supposed to be two different things. The style of the book is really modern, all psychological self-analysis and internal monologue, but the narrator’s attitude towards herself and her role in the world is so antithetical to a modern American woman’s that it might as well have been written by an alien. Reading this book makes me very glad I was born in the 1970’s and that I didn’t grow up in middle-class England.

Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year Anne Lamott, 1993.

Being more pregnant than I’m used to (i.e. at all), I’ve been taking a break from reading fiction to cram as much prenatal information into my brain as will fit. I’ve read Pregnancy for Dummies, Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, Buff Moms-to-be, Your Pregnancy Week by Week, and a small portion of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists website. So, brain full of impersonal and occasionally conflicting health information, I wanted a non-medical professional writer’s perspective on the mental and emotional impact of having a newborn. I have a mental fetish that goes “acquiring information = everything will work out fine”. Anne Lamott kept a journal in her son’s first year, and I figured it would give me the insight into the brain-rewiring process that I hear new motherhood is.

The book turned out to be very entertaining, but not something I could really identify with. I’m having a baby, but I’m not a single, broke, churchgoing, recovering alcoholic. Fortunately. Unfortunately, I’m also neither an insanely hilarious writer nor living in a redwood grove in northern California. I didn’t feel like I had much in common with Lamott, but I was still mesmerized by the book and read it twice. The narrator’s very personal voice and her witty self-awareness were compelling.

One of the most interesting parts of the book was the mental tricks and habits Lamott uses to manage her emotions. Since giving up alcohol she had to learn how to deal with her feelings without artificially dulling them. I’m not an emotional person and haven’t felt much rage and confusion since my early 20’s, so it was interesting to follow along with the mental workings of an intelligent articulate woman trying to sort out her own emotional extremes. It didn’t sound at all like my internal monologue, but it was interesting reading and maybe when the hormones kick in I’ll feel just like she did.

My favorite phrase of Lamott’s is “I’m on a bullshit-free diet”. I’ve been thinking that to myself occasionally since I read the book - seems like a good way to approach life.

Audrey Niffenegger, 2003.

I have rarely read a book that interested me so much in the first 40 pages. Audrey Niffenegger might as well have been writing this book to me. Here’s the first few things that sucked me into the book:

1. The heroine’s name is Clare, and she spells it like me. So naturally, I want to read about how smart, talented, beautiful and wonderful she is.

2. Clare lives at Hoyne and Addison. That’s exactly where I lived when I first moved to Chicago. It’s like Niffenegger is writing about me and my fabulous romantic life! Oooh, keep reading.

3. This sentence: “I now have an erection that is probably tall enough to ride some of the scarier rides at Great America without a parent.” First, that’s funny. Second, “Great America” is exactly how a Chicago kid would refer to our local amusement park, regardless of Six Flags’ marketing. So the novel is not just set in Chicago, Audrey Niffenegger knows the city well and is writing her characters as Chicagoans. OK, you got me. Read read read.

So I’m sitting on the living room floor with the sidekick, reading while we’re playing Scrabble and watching Life of Mammals, and this is a transcript of me reading the next few chapters:

Me: Hey, they’re going to the Field Museum!
Sidekick: Yeah?
Me: Now they’re breaking into the Army Surplus store on Belmont!
Sidekick: Huh.
Me: And they’re eating at Ann Sathers!
Sidekick: Wait, did you write this book?

After the Clare-trapping entertainment of the first few chapters, the novel tells an interesting story with big neat ideas and weepy romantic drama. The time travel in the book is well-thought-out and thoroughly explored. I love to see a single magical or sci-fi idea applied to the normal world and then investigated in detail. Niffenegger did a lot of work getting her chronologies straight and thinking about what uncontrollable time travel would do to a pair of lives.

But as in the best science fiction, the book isn’t just about time travel. Niffenegger uses time travel as a metaphor for anything that can interrupt a relationship: illness, work, circumstance. The book is full of all kinds of ideas about the transience and permanence of love, with sex as the grounding force that keeps the couple together. Time travel is also explored as a metaphor for memory and imagination, the way we live in bits of other moments all the time, wandering in our minds from the present instead of inhabiting it and paying attention to what’s going on now.

Niffenegger obviously put a lot of thought into her ideas, and wrote details into the book that build on her main themes. For example, Clare makes paper and Henry’s a librarian at the Newberry Library, So she’s creating new blank sheets for recording something, and he’s at the other end of the book spectrum, working with historical collections of records on paper. This mirrors their relationship, where they’re coming at their marriage from opposite ends, each knowing part of the story because he’s been coming from his future to tell her about it. She’s the blank page and he’s the story already told, making her into the woman he knows she will be because when he first met her she told him he would.

Henry and Clare are idealized lovers who turn each other into the person they want and use their mad time skillz to create a temporarily perfect life. They’re not at all regular people with ordinary lives. Their characters are not gritty or realistic, but that’s fine in this book. The narrative is engrossing, there’s some wonderful images, and it’s really fun to read an mythic love story set in modern Chicago.

The main thing I didn’t like: Why is the man always the traveler? Why does the woman always have to stay home? I always hated how Penelope got stuck at home waiting for Odysseus. I’m sure it was great being queen of her own island and doing whatever she wanted because the king wasn’t around, but nobody wrote an epic poem about that. I find man=wanderer and woman=home a tedious repetition of traditional gender role stereotyping. Henry and Clare are kind of metaphors of ideal lovers, rather than actual people, and the book is otherwise awesome, so this didn’t bother me that much. But speaking as a woman who moved to another continent 3 days after her wedding - with the husband’s prior approval, of course - I’d rather read about a woman going on crazy adventures while the man stays home. I guess I should just write my own story.

Mark Haddon, 2003.

What a fun book. Like The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, it’s a story about the effect of a “special needs” child on a family and a terrible deception, but unlike MKD this story is well-written, smart, and entertaining. Let’s compare and contrast with The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which I hated.

1.) How the mystery is handled. Unlike MKD, which starts by telling you exactly who did what, Curious Incident starts with the discovery of the existence of the mystery, and then the plot involves the narrator investigating and reflecting on the recent past and exploring the present while trying to figure out what happened. My curiosity kept me engaged with the story as it progressed; I kept reading because I wanted to find out what had happened and what would happen. In MKD, that simple pleasure had been removed by the lack of en media res and the the stupid spoilery dustjacket that summarized the main plot points of the story.

2.) The narrator’s voice. So well done! The narrator of Curious Incident is a high-functioning autistic teenager, and everything is told in his voice and explained as he sees the world. It’s funny and interesting, and I always like reading a story with an unreliable narrator because you get the extra entertainment of figuring out how their version of their world is different from the “real” version. Having a personal insight into the mind of the main character makes them more likable and makes the story more involving because you care what happens to them. I didn’t care if any of the robots in MKD ever achieved personal happiness. Although I knew which ones would, because, again, of the dust jacket.

3.) “Redemptive power of love”. The father in Curious Incident doesn’t go around navel-gazing and reflecting on his woeful lot as a parent of a “special needs” child, or his own personal tragedy, he just tries to do his best. His emotions aren’t detailed in long descriptive passages, but implied by his actions, which is a particularly effective technique since the narrator can’t interpret emotions instinctively and has to figure out how people feel by observing them. I thought the father was very believable and likable, even when he was obviously making horrible mistakes.

4.) The title. It’s so perfect for the book. It references the details of the mystery which opens the book (a dog is found dead) and ties in with both the narrator’s actions (he decides to investigate the dog’s death) and the narrator’s interests (he likes Sherlock Holmes). And the narrator likes Sherlock Holmes because the detective’s misanthropy and meticulous attention to detail are similar to the kid’s social dysfunction and hypersensitivity to stimuli. See, it works on a few levels. And like the book, the title is clever and funny.

The book is full of wonderful diagrammatic illustrations with which the narrator explains his view of the world, and there’s an appendix detailing the proof of an A-levels math question, which was way over my head. The whole book is touching but lighthearted, and very enjoyable.

Kim Edwards, 2005.

Let me start by saying I didn’t read this book, as such. I read the first 60 pages, then skimmed through reading 2 or 3 pages here and there, then I read the end. And all the time I was remarking aloud “This book sucks”.

From my survey of the book I got the idea that the author was saying: “Hey readers, children with Down Syndrome can grow into wonderful adults who are loving and brighten our lives, so don’t institutionalize them. Also, don’t fake your baby’s death and lie to your wife about it because deception is bad for marriages”. Sure, there’s a book in that, but I’d like to think it’s a more interesting book than the one I just read. So here are the reasons I hated The Memory Keeper’s Daughter:

1.) It’s boring. Everything you need to know about the book is written in the summary on the inside dust jacket. There is no mystery or suspense because the story starts by relating the event that sets the plot in motion, and then just follows through describing the repercussions, which are exactly what the dust jacket says they are. “Hey, will the family ever discover that their supposedly dead daughter/sister is alive and well? According to the dust jacket, yes, they will. I just have to read 200 more pages to get to that bit.”

2.) Writing style is impersonal and characters are one-dimensional and dull. All character emotions are stated by the third person omniscient narrator, and the characters have no particular personality features besides the one the plot requires them to have. Mother feels bleakness at death of infant girl. Father feels guilt. Nurse loves little girl she raises. Yawn. And all the characters seem to think in the same way and speak in the same voice.

3.) “Redemptive power of love”, my ass. The only person who needs to be redeemed - the father - died before the story was resolved. Nobody else did anything wrong that necessitated redeeming. Did the nurse need to be redeemed from her single childlessness? Did the mother need to be redeemed from years of grief? Maybe in the “to obtain release from” sense but not in the “to make amends for” sense.

I think the book would have been more entertaining if it had started in the middle of the story, say with the somewhat compelling scene of the mother finding the box of photos of girls, and then focused on her trying to figure out what had happened and why. The author could have used conversations or flashbacks to fill in what happened at the baby’s birth. And perhaps the author could have picked one character to get inside and focused on the story from his/her point of view, instead of being so detached with all of them.

4.) The title. The [noun] [verber's] [relative] pattern is so two years ago, e.g. The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. It reads like the publisher came up with something trendy to title the book, not like it grew naturally out of how the author was thinking about the story. If it had been published during the [verbing] [noun] title trend it would have been called ‘Keeping Memory’, or ‘Keeping Joy’ and the missing daughter would be named Joy. Also, the title evokes a magical realism which is totally lacking in the book, so I was mislead and pissed off.

And to show that it’s not just because I hate stories about the magical power of children to enrich our lives, here are some books with themes similar to The Memory Keepers Daughter that I enjoyed quite a bit:

• Our love for children heals us and engages us with the world: Silas Marner.
• Disavowal of a child and ensuing years of deception alienate a husband and wife: Silas Marner again.
• Woman comes to terms with death of infant and rebuilds her life: Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
• Death of infant erodes core of family: Cat’s Eye, Margaret Atwood. I think that’s the one - I’m thinking of the book where the mother has a miscarriage and then becomes obsessed with her parakeet. It was tragic, creepy, and interesting.

In summary, skip The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and read Silas Marner, which is actually about the redemptive power of parental love and is happy and sweet.