Dragonfly in Amber (Diana Gabaldon)

Genre: Historical fiction (with a touch of fantasy)
Year Published: 1992

The first paragraph of the prologue of Dragonfly in Amber reads thus:

I woke three times in the dark predawn. First in sorrow, then in joy, and at the last, in solitude. The tears of a bone-deep loss woke me slowly, bathing my face like the comforting touch of a damp cloth in soothing hands. I turned my face to the wet pillow and sailed a salty river into the caverns of grief remembered, into the subterranean depths of sleep.

And if you think that prose is purple, you should read one of the multitude of sex scenes.

Then why read Dragonfly in Amber? Well, I have to give Gabaldon this: for all she natters on about destiny and love and honor, she also concocts some fascinating plots. As for myself, having read Outlander, I couldn't content myself with leaving the story where it ended; I didn't rush to get my hands on the next book, but the next time I made a run to the library, I picked up this one (as well as the next one . . . which I doubt I'll finish before its due date). Then, once I began it, I took it with me on the train to work and to lunch every day until I finished. As I mentioned in my Outlander post, Gabaldon is a compelling author above all else.

And whereas Outlander starts off rather slowly and only picks up momentum a couple hundred pages in, Dragonfly hits the ground running; I felt rather like I was being yanked along by the wrist on a cross-country race. The story is framed -- we begin and end with Claire as a woman of fiftyish in late Sixties Scotland, while the huge bulk of the middle is Claire at about thirty in the 1740s -- and this gives the reader an acute sense of just how far the story in the past will progress before dumping us back in the twentieth century. At 743 pages, though, the finish line seems like a long ways away . . . until you realize, all of a sudden, that you've reached it, and it's not a happy transition.

This is not to say that what lies at the end is unexpected. Both because of the inherent nature of the genre and because of the framing device, some of the subplots' resolutions are abundantly clear to the reader long, long before the pieces fall into place for our heroine. At first, I thought that Gabaldon was undercutting her own book by essentially telling us how things would turn out, but when I reached the end, I revised my opinion; knowing that Claire goes back to her own time lends the book a poignancy that outweighs the importance of the reader's foreknowledge.

And yes, the prose is occasionally purple. But it's in-keeping with the genre and plot, so don't be surprised if you become rather attached to her ornate turns of phrase.

Recommended? It's a long, long book. If you feel that your time is better spent reading real literature, I wouldn't hold it against you. But you'll have more fun reading this.

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Grace Paley)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 1974

Having been raised by a boomer mother, I can safely say that the events of the "long Sixties" (1958 to 1974) informed just about every aspect of my upbringing. My mom was, as we'd say now, old school: she marched on the Pentagon, wore white lipstick, and broke the glass ceiling in her department at her public university. She bought me The Beatles: 1967-1970 for my eleventh birthday and deconstructed the gendered messages in Cinderella. So the long Sixties is an era that I feel I understand, at least as much as one can who did not live through it.

Yet within that little dependent clause lies my difficulty with Enormous Changes: I did not live through that era, and in much the same way that I need to read an annotated version of Shakespeare because of his period inflections and references, there is so much that Grace Paley writes on that I have no hope of understanding without help. Her work in this book is imbued with a huge sense of time and place -- New York City during the "cultural revolution" -- which certainly is in her favor as far as realism and weight go, but a young reader like me has next to no chance of grasping all her points.

Let me back up a moment and say that Grace Paley is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. I've read Begin Again, the newest collection of her poetry, and though her style isn't really my thing, I can appreciate her brilliance. Similarly, while reading Enormous Changes, her writing abilities were never once in question. Take this tiny snippet from the story "Faith in a Tree":

Of course that is what Junior is upstate for: love that forced possession. At first his father laced him on his behind, cutting the exquisite design known to generations of daddies who labored at home before the rise of industrialism and group therapy. Then Mr. Finn remembered his childhood, that it was Adam's Fall not Junior that was responsible. Now the Finns never see a ten-speed Italian racer without family sighs for Junior, who is still not home as there were about 176 bikes he loved.

Her prose is sharp and lean and often hilarious or upsetting, or sometimes both at the same time. I can't off the top of my head think of another writer who has managed to squeeze so much into stories that are so short.

A little less than half of the stories contained herein concern Paley's most famous character, Faith Darwin, a woman who is featured in stories throughout Paley's career. I have to say that I enjoyed these stories least of all the stories in the collection. Out of all the stories in Enormous Changes, they rely most on the minutiae of life in the working-class areas of New York City during the long Sixties, and thus were the least accessible to me.

My favorites in the collection include "Wants," the title story, and "A Conversation with My Father," the first and last of which seem very autobiographical. Thinking about it as I write this, what I think I really want from Grace Paley is a memoir, which would give me both her astounding writing and a firm context for it all.

Recommended? If you're over forty, I say yes wholeheartedly. If you're younger, I say yes with some hesitation.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Julia Alvarez)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 1991

There's a musical called The Last 5 Years that I love with all my heart and soul. It is less like a traditional musical and more like a song cycle, as nearly every song is a solo sung by one of two characters, and there is little dialogue. The premise of TL5Y is that the two characters, Jamie and Kathy, sing alternating songs about their relationship -- but while Jamie starts at the beginning and moves towards their eventual divorce, Kathy begins at the moment after Jamie has left her for the last time and moves backwards in time to the night of their first date. They meet in the middle for his proposal and their wedding.

It's an extremely effective device, particularly for Kathy's character, who seems so unreasonable and distraught at the beginning, and eventually becomes a hopeful, cheerful (if flawed) young woman. I've known relatively stoic people to be moved to tears by the last song in the show, in which Kathy is joyfully reeling from her first date with Jamie, while Jamie tells Kathy why he needs to divorce her.

What does this have to do with Julia Alvarez's first novel? Well, as you may have guessed, Alvarez employs a similar device in telling the story of the four García sisters: she begins in 1989 with the return of the third sister from the U.S.A. to her birth country of the Dominican Republic, and traces the sisters' lives back to 1956, when they all lived there, before they were forced to flee. This allows us to look at the girls' childhoods through the lens of foreknowledge, and lends a poignancy to the hopes and ideals of the girls, who, as they grow older, face the double hardships of being both female and immigrants during a turbulent period of American history.

Alvarez is an exquisite writer: her prose is immediate, compelling, and poetic. She writes in a blend of the past and present tenses, of first and third persons, so that she erases the distinctions of time and perspective. Her characters are eminently believable, as are the relationships between them. She is a superb novelist.

My chief complaint with the book is that the timeline seems heavily skewed toward the few years spent in the Dominican Republic, with little room left over for the decades the girls lived in the States. Two of the girls, we are told, suffer psychiatric breakdowns that require hospitalization, but we know next to nothing about the causes or outcomes of those stays. The eldest survives a bad marriage that we are told nothing about. While the stories set "on the Island" are vivid and telling, the storytelling seems almost to break down when they immigrate, and though the "girls" are in their thirties at the book's beginning, their paths through life seem nearly untraceable after college.

Recommended? Yes, but be prepared to want more. (Alvarez has published a companion volume that I may have to search for at the library.)

Blue Shoe (Anne Lamott)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 2002

Years ago, I used to read Anne Lamott's work on Salon.com, and while I found her writing both inspiring and comforting, I used to wonder about the white woman with dreadlocks whose ecumenical spiritualism seemed to reach its fingers into every corner of her odd little writing life.

I forgot about her, mostly, until I spotted a copy of her novel Blue Shoe at the local secondhand shop. Then I recalled how much I enjoyed her weird relationship with God and her expansive authorial style, so I bought the book and took it home with me.

Blue Shoe is only a novel in the sense that it is fictional and not too short or long. There isn't much of a narrative arc, though there is a lot of character development. It reads more like a novelization of three or four years' worth of a woman's diary than a traditional novel. The main character, from whose third-person point of view the novel is told, is Mattie Ryder, a divorced woman with two children who is barely able to make ends meet. The novel centers around the important relationships in her life, those with her best friends, her brother and mother, her children, and God.

The changes in those relationships comprise most of the book: Mattie struggles to parent her children alone, barely copes with an aging mother who is quickly spiraling downward, falls in love, and uncovers the truth about the life of her late father. The blue shoe of the title is something that Mattie finds in her father's old car and tries to place in her father's life. As she learns more about him, she is simultaneously horrified by the revelations and desperate to know more about a man she feels was almost a stranger to her. All the while, though, she is falling apart in a thousand other ways -- her children are beset with anxiety and anger, her mother doesn't want the help she needs, the man she loves is married to another woman -- and Mattie clings to her life by her fingernails.

Throughout it all, though, Mattie's spiritualism (which is, unsurprisingly, much like Lamott's) is her anchor. It is not rigid or demanding, but rather flexible, forgiving, and patient. Her spirituality does not overwhelm the book, or even form a major plot point. It is just a part of Mattie, like the fact that she is a size 12 or that she loves dogs. This was, to me, a point in the book's favor: so few authors seem willing to make their characters quietly religious that most novels are populated either with fanatics or blithe agnostics.

I cannot say that I enjoyed Blue Shoe; it is too emotionally difficult to enjoy. Lamott's prose is beautiful -- she can cobble together the most exquisite metaphors -- and her characterizations are astounding. Yet I can't see myself ever rereading this novel. Mattie's pain is too real, and the book is too close to life to offer any sort of resolution at its conclusion. Lamott seems to be fighting the idea that there are any easy answers or simple solutions in life -- true enough, certainly, but it makes for a tough read.

Recommended? It is a very good book, and it will make you look at the world a little differently. If you think you can swallow the requisite angst, take a stab at it.

Love Between Equals (Pepper Schwartz)

Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 1994

Dear readers, I apologize most profusely for my attenuated absence. For most of the past week I've been trying to get through a Mark Strand anthology, which did not go well. (It's not that I dislike his work -- quite the contrary -- but I find it very difficult to get through.) I was flailing to find something else that could grab my interest for the week, but when one of my close friends had a piece published on Salon that was tangentially related to peer marriage, I thought I would pick up Love Between Equals again and read it through.

I try not to review books here that I've read before, since I like to come to each read with a fresh take, but in this case I had one anyway, as I barely remembered anything about the book. Love Between Equals is the end result of a sociological study that Dr. Schwartz conducted regarding a certain kind of marriage, one she terms "peer marriage." (Unsurprisingly, I first read this as a requirement for a class in college.) Peer marriages are ones in which the traditional male-first hierarchy is toppled, and husband and wife have forged an equal partnership. In Schwartz's words:

They want a marriage that has intensity and partnership and does not create the distance between men and women that is inevitable between people of unequal status and power . . . . The common theme among these peer couples is the preservation of intimacy, the desire to be neither oppressor nor oppressed, the commitment to a relationship that creates a shared universe rather than parallel lives.

This work is interesting to me as a feminist, as a heterosexual woman who one day plans to marry, and as a friend of many heterosexual women who will soon be getting married. (Today's post actually coincides with my discovery that I will be assuming the mantle of bridesmaid for the wedding of my college roommate!) It's frustrating, as someone who cares about women's rights, to see the advances that are made every day in the public sphere (just looking at today's news, I see that China is increasing the number of female delegates in its parliament) and to observe that the private sphere remains largely unchanged: women still do most of the housework, most of the childrearing, and most of the emotional work, regardless of whether they work outside the home. (And, similarly, they are of course much less likely to work outside the home.) What's a feminist woman who someday wants to get married to do?

Well, in Schwartz's view, the idea of marriage and the idea of equal partnership are not mutually exclusive. She interviewed dozens of couples who claimed to have egalitarian marriages and tried to pin down exactly how they achieved those ends, and what the rewards and failings of this lifestyle were. Those interviews comprise what I think are the most intriguing and compelling sections of the book, where Schwartz's academic language (which is at a minimum, but not nonexistent) falls away to reveal the heartfelt words of the people living these peer marriages.

I enjoyed this book very much, because it is clear about its agenda (i.e. getting couples to think about egalitarianism as a way of life) but also honest about the various consequences of peer marriage. Additionally, unlike the raft of self-help books about marriage and gender relations, Love Between Equals is heavily researched by a Ph.D. in sociology and as such, is written at a highly intellectual level and supported by hard data.

Recommended? Absolutely. While you're at it, pick up a copy for any friends of yours who are engaged or recently married.