Wednesday, May 17, 2006

May 2006: Peace Like a River


Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Discussion: Tuesday, May 30th at Alison's

New York Times Book Review
By Katherine Dieckmann
Published: September 9, 2001

It's tough to give magic realism an all-American spin, since God always seems to get mixed up in the equation, transforming fragrant lyricism into something that, to all but true believers, seems implausible: the perfectly timed miracle. Such convenient mysticism crops up frequently in Leif Enger's unabashed throwback of a first novel. Set in rural Minnesota in the early 1960's, it might as well be staged in frontier days, with its spunky, resourceful characters, rough-and-tumble adventures and folksy homilies along the lines of ''Yes, yes sir -- routine is worry's sly assassin.'' In this world of goose hunting and Bible quoting, it's virtually impossible to imagine that the story takes place just before Beatlemania and during the civil rights movement; even the appearance of an Airstream trailer seems jarringly anachronistic.

''Peace Like a River'' revolves around the coming of age of a boy named Reuben Land, a reticent, well-meaning kid who was born with ''swampy lungs,'' meaning that when dramatic convention requires it, he gasps for breath on cue. Reuben's life is turned upside down after his older brother, Davy, shoots two intruders in their home, gets arrested, then breaks out of jail and flees town. So it is that the Land family -- Reuben and his father, who is a poetry-loving elementary school janitor, and Swede, his tomboyish little sister -- head off after Davy. (When the children were small, Dad was carried four miles by a tornado without suffering a scratch, and Mom skipped out on the family, apparently lacking an appreciation for a husband who is touched by angels.)

From here on out, ''Peace Like a River'' mostly traces the Lands' travails along the inevitable path to the lost son. There are myriad problems with this approach, the chief being that Davy never really comes alive as a character or seems particularly worthy of this dogged pursuit, beyond the obvious motivation of blood ties. He's a symbol, stolid and ineffable, and he remains remote throughout. His sole function seems to be to demonstrate the principles of fate; or, as Reuben puts it, ''History was built into Davy so thoroughly he could never see how it owned him.''

Such sentiments seem a bit lofty coming from an 11-year-old narrator. While it's true that this is a tale told in retrospect, the heightened, present-tense feeling serves to make Reuben come off as improbably, annoyingly wise when he says things like: ''You can embark on new and steeper versions of your old sins, you know, and cry tears while doing it that are genuine as any,'' and describes traveling uphill on horseback as follows: ''I could feel Fry angling upslope and my own rear slipping rumpward, a cumbrous type of riding demanding on my part a chronic forward scoot taxing muscles novel to me.'' In fact, this book would be far more compelling and convincing if Swede, a burgeoning young poet, were at its center, the sole girl in a male-dominated family, refreshingly cool and no-nonsense as she struggles toward creative self-definition. But Enger's fusty traditionalism demands that this be a boy's own story.

And when that story becomes too plain, along comes a well-timed miracle to juice it up. A pot short on soup, for example, suddenly becomes bottomless when a stranger shows up for dinner. We know this kind of thing stems from Reuben's oddly spiritual father, because early on the boy sees him step off the end of a flatbed truck and walk on air. Given the usual fate of noble innocents, it's no surprise that dad meets a less than joyful ending during the novel's climactic shootout.

It is testimony to Enger's storytelling skills that this final bit of action is possessed of a certain breathless energy; as clichéd as his basic enterprise is, he manages to infuse sections of this novel with some surprisingly lively writing and deftly turned sentences. But ultimately the book suffers from a surplus of pretension (one chapter is titled ''The Throbbing Heart of News'') and a dearth of surprises. Enger's world, full of simple pleasures and populated by deep-thinking naïfs, seems unlikely to have ever existed, in this century or any other.
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Monday, April 03, 2006

April 2006: Gilead


Perhaps in a nod to Amy and Abby's home, we are reading the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

New York Times Book Review by James Wood
November 28, 2004

To bloom only every 20 years would make, you would think, for anxious or vainglorious flowerings. But Marilynne Robinson, whose last (and first) novel, ''Housekeeping,'' appeared in 1981, seems to have the kind of sensibility that is sanguine about intermittence. It is a mind as religious as it is literary -- perhaps more religious than literary -- in which silence is itself a quality, and in which the space around words may be full of noises. A remarkable, deeply unfashionable book of essays, ''The Death of Adam'' (1998), in which Robinson passionately defended John Calvin and American Puritanism, among other topics, suggested that, far from suffering writer's block, Robinson was exploring thinker's flow: she was moving at her own speed, returning repeatedly to theological questions and using the essay to hold certain goods that, for one reason or another, had not yet found domicile in fictional form.

But here is a second novel, and it is no surprise to find that it is religious, somewhat essayistic and fiercely calm. ''Gilead'' is a beautiful work -- demanding, grave and lucid -- and is, if anything, more out of time than Robinson's book of essays, suffused as it is with a Protestant bareness that sometimes recalls George Herbert (who is alluded to several times, along with John Donne) and sometimes the American religious spirit that produced Congregationalism and 19th-century Transcendentalism and those bareback religious riders Emerson, Thoreau and Melville.

''Gilead'' is set in 1956 in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and is narrated by a 76-year-old pastor named John Ames, who has recently been told he has angina pectoris and believes he is facing imminent death. In this terminal spirit, he decides to write a long letter to his 7-year-old son, the fruit of a recent marriage to a much younger woman. This novel is that letter, set down in the easy, discontinuous form of a diary, mixing long and short entries, reminiscences, moral advice and so on. (Robinson was perhaps influenced by the similar forms of the two most famous books narrated by clergymen, Francis Kilvert's diary and Georges Bernanos's novel ''The Diary of a Country Priest.'')

Robinson, as if relishing the imposition, has instantly made things hard for herself: the diary form that reports on daily and habitual occurrences tends to be relatively static; it is difficult to whip the donkey of dailiness into big, bucking, dramatic scenes. Those who, like this reader, feel that novels -- especially novels about clergymen -- are best when secular, comic and social, may need a few pages to get over the lack of these elements. In fact, ''Gilead'' does have a gentle sort of comedy -- though there is nothing here to match the amusing portraits in ''Housekeeping'' -- but it is certainly a pious, even perhaps a devotional work, and its characters move in a very small society.

The great danger of the clergyman in fiction is that his doctrinal belief will leak into the root system of the novel and turn argument into piety, drama into sermon. This is one of the reasons that, in the English tradition, from Henry Fielding to Barbara Pym, the local vicar is usually safely contained as hypocritical, absurd or possibly a bit dimwitted. Robinson's pastor is that most difficult narrator from a novelist's point of view, a truly good and virtuous man, and occasionally you may wish he possessed a bit more malice, avarice or lust -- or just an intriguing unreliability.

John Ames has cherished baptizing infants: ''That feeling of a baby's brow against the palm of your hand -- how I have loved this life.'' He loves the landscape too: ''I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.'' When he informs us that he has written more than 2,000 sermons, and that he has written almost all of them ''in the deepest hope and conviction,'' the reader surely protests: ''Never in boredom or fatigue or sheer diligence?'' and perhaps thinks longingly of Yorick, the parson in ''Tristram Shandy'' who, at the bottom of his eloquent funeral eulogy, is seen to have written an improper ''Bravo!'' to himself, so secularly pleased is he with his own eloquence.

But while John Ames may be a good man, he is not an uninteresting one, and he has a real tale to tell. His grandfather, also named John Ames and also a preacher, came out to Kansas from Maine in the 1830's and ended up fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. He knew John Brown and lost an eye in that war. The book's narrator remembers his grandfather as a formidable, old-fashioned warrior for God who used to conduct church services while wearing his pistol.

Robinson's portraits of the old man are vivid slashes of poetry. Marvelously, we see Grandfather Ames as ''a wild-haired, one-eyed, scrawny old fellow with a crooked beard, like a paintbrush left to dry with lacquer in it.'' He seemed to his grandson ''stricken and afflicted, and indeed he was, like a man everlastingly struck by lightning, so that there was an ashiness about his clothes and his hair never settled and his eye had a look of tragic alarm when he wasn't actually sleeping. He was the most unreposeful human being I ever knew except for certain of his friends.'' Our narrator recalls entering the house as a little boy and being told by his mother that ''the Lord is in the parlor.'' Looking in, he sees his grandfather talking with God, ''looking attentive and sociable and gravely pleased. I would hear a remark from time to time, 'I see your point,' or 'I have often felt that way myself.' ''

But our narrator's father, also called John Ames and also a preacher, was a very different kind of man. He was a pacifist and he quarreled with Grandfather Ames, so that the older man, who had been living with his son, left the house and wandered off to Kansas, where he died. ''Gilead'' is much concerned with fathers and sons, and with God the father and his son. The book's narrator returns again and again to the parable of the prodigal son -- the son who returned to his father and was forgiven, but did not deserve forgiveness. Ames's life has lately been irradiated by his unexpected marriage and by the gift of his little son, and he consoles himself that although he won't see him grow up, he will be reunited with him in heaven: ''I imagine your child self finding me in heaven and jumping into my arms, and there is a great joy in the thought.''

Gradually, Robinson's novel teaches us how to read it, suggests how we might slow down to walk at its own processional pace, and how we might learn to coddle its many fine details. Nowadays, when so many writers are acclaimed as great stylists, it's hard to make anyone notice when you praise a writer's prose. There is, however, something remarkable about the writing in ''Gilead.'' It's not just a matter of writing well, although Robinson demonstrates that talent on every page: the description of the one-eyed grandfather, who ''could make me feel as though he had poked me with a stick, just by looking at me,'' or one of a cat held by Ames's little son, eager to escape, its ears flattened back and its tail twitching and its eyes ''patiently furious.'' It isn't just the care with which Robinson can relax the style to a Midwestern colloquialism: ''But one afternoon a storm came up and a gust of wind hit the henhouse and lifted the roof right off, and hens came flying out, sucked after it, I suppose, and also just acting like hens.'' (How deceptively easy that little coda is -- ''and also just acting like hens'' -- but how much it conveys.)

Robinson's words have a spiritual force that's very rare in contemporary fiction -- what Ames means when he refers to ''grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.'' There are plenty of such essentialists in American fiction (writers like Kent Haruf and Cormac McCarthy), and Robinson is sometimes compared to them, but their essentials are generally not religious.

In ordinary, secular fiction, a writer who ''takes things down to essentials'' is reducing language to increase the amount of secular meaning (or sometimes, alas, to decrease it). When Robinson reduces her language, it's because secular meaning has exhausted itself and is being renovated by religious meaning. Robinson, who loves Melville and Emerson, cannot rid herself of the religious habit of using metaphor as a form of revelation. Ames spends much time musing on the question of what heaven will be like. Surely, he thinks, it will be a changed place, yet one in which we can still remember our life on earth: ''In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.'' There sings a true Melvillean note.


As the novel progresses, its language becomes sparer, lovelier, more deeply infused with Ames's yearning metaphysics. His best friend, an old Presbyterian minister named Boughton, who lives nearby and is also ailing, has a wayward son, now in his 40's, who returns to Gilead in the course of the novel. Boughton's son comes to Ames for spiritual counsel, and his sad story provides a counterpoint to the relationship Ames has with his 7-year-old -- which he would dearly like to continue beyond the grave.

Ames does not want to die and dislikes aging, not least because he cannot play vigorously with his son: ''I feel as if I am being left out, as though I'm some straggler and people can't quite remember to stay back for me.'' At the end of the book, Boughton's son leaves Gilead even as his own father is on his deathbed, and Ames registers the filial cruelty of this act: ''It was truly a dreadful thing he was doing, leaving his father to die without him. It was the kind of thing only his father would forgive him for.''

Only his father and only His Father. The link between the terrestrial relationship and the religious one is made explicit when Ames recalls that ''Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. 'He will wipe the tears from all faces.' It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.'' Heaven, then, as Ames sees it -- and perhaps Robinson too -- will afford a special kind of amnesty, a sublime gratuity, in which those who least deserve forgiveness will most joyously receive it. Ames hints at this when he reflects on his own unspectacular filial piety: ''I myself was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father's house. . . . I am one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained.''

Robinson's book ends in characteristic fashion, with its feet planted firmly on the Iowa soil and its eyes fixed imploringly on heaven, as a dying man daily pictures Paradise but also learns how to prolong every day -- to extend time, even on earth, into a serene imitation of eternity: ''Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.'' ''Gilead'' closes as simply as it opened: ''I'll pray, and then I'll sleep.''

The Church at Dawn

It's a plain old church and it could use a coat of paint. But in the dark times I used to walk over before sunrise just to sit there and watch the light come into that room. I don't know how beautiful it might seem to anyone else. I felt much at peace those mornings, praying over very dreadful things sometimes -- the Depression, the wars. There was a lot of misery for people around here, decades of it. But prayer brings peace, as I trust you know.

In those days, as I have said, I might spend most of a night reading. Then, if I woke up still in my armchair, and if the clock said four or five, I'd think how pleasant it was to walk through the streets in the dark and let myself into the church and watch dawn come in the sanctuary. I loved the sound of the latch lifting. The building has settled into itself so that when you walk down the aisle, you can hear it yielding to the burden of your weight. It's a pleasanter sound than an echo would be, an obliging, accommodating sound. You have to be there alone to hear it. Maybe it can't feel the weight of a child. But if it is still standing when you read this, and if you are not half a world away, sometime you might go there alone, just to see what I mean. After a while I did begin to wonder if I liked the church better with no people in it. . . .

In the old days I could walk down every single street, past every house, in about an hour. I'd try to remember the people who lived in each one, and whatever I knew about them, which was often quite a lot. . . . And I'd pray for them. And I'd imagine peace they didn't expect and couldn't account for descending on their illness or their quarreling or their dreams. Then I'd go into the church and pray some more and wait for daylight. I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come.

Trees sound different at night, and they smell different too. From ''Gilead.''
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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

March 2006: Ella Minnow Pea


Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn.

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet

  • "Ella Minnow Pea is the first political satire of the 21st century, and, appropriately, it's a kinder, gentler satire. (...) Dunn has produced something between a crossword puzzle and a witty political allegory. (...) There's the whiff of a classic about Ella Minnow Pea. It's lighter than those high-school standards 1984 or Brave New World, but even when only LMNOP remain, it's touched by sweetness." - Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

  • "We slowly conclude that without language, without culture -- the two are inextricably bound -- existence itself is at stake. And we forget that the novel is only playful. Soon we see that a void, a blankness, awaits us." - Irving Malin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  • "Dunn obviously spent significant energy and creativity to write without certain letters, and there are several nice turns of phrase in the book. As a novel, though, Ella Minnow Pea reads like a literary StairMaster -- a decent workout, but don't expect to go anywhere." - Mark Luce, San Francisco Chronicle

  • "As will be apparent, Dunn’s book is really a fairy story about intolerance and mass hysteria, in the form of a technical exercise. It is a sweet-natured piece (.....) But compared to Perec, Ella Minnow Pea is as simple as ABC." - Kevin Jackson, The Spectator

  • "As freedom of expression becomes increasingly problematic, one begins to search for Dunn's satirical target. And it is hard to identify, for this is pure allegory. Animal Farm, written for a simpler ideological world, was easy. But are we talking about religious fundamentalism here (a latter-day Tale of a Tub) ? The collapse of literacy ? Or are we allegorising allegory? Who knows? Perhaps Dunn is lambasting evil men who would suppress lipograms." - Giles Coren, The Times
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Monday, February 13, 2006

February 2006: Short Stories

“A Small, Good Thing.” Raymond Carver: Cathedral, 1983.

“The Ceiling.” Kevin Brockmeier: The O. Henry Award: Prize Stories 2002, ed. Larry Dark.

“The Gilgul of Park Avenue.” Nathan Englander: The O. Henry Award: Prize Stories 2000, ed. Larry Dark.

“My Widow.” T. Coraghessan Boyle: The New Yorker, February 12, 2001.

“La Conchita.” T. Coraghessan Boyle: The New Yorker, December 12, 2005.

“Path Lights.” Tom Drury: The New Yorker, October 17, 2005.

“Early Music.” Jeffrey Eugenides: The New Yorker, October 10, 2005.

“The Hunter’s Wife.” Anthony Doerr: The Atlantic Monthly, May 2001.

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Wednesday, October 05, 2005

October 2005: The Killer Angels


Our October book is the winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A hardback anniversary edition was published in 2004.

In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war. Unique, sweeping, an unforgettable, The Killer Angels is a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny.

About the Author
Michael Shaara was born in Jersey City in 1929 and graduated from Rutgers University in 1951. His early science fiction short stories were published in Galaxy magazine in 1952. He later began writing other works of fiction and published more than seventy short stories in many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook. His first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. But it was a simple family vacation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1966 that gave him the inspiration for his greatest achievement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, published in 1974. Michael Shaara went on to write two more novels, The Noah Conspiracy and For Love of the Game, which was published posthumously after his death in 1988.

Reviews
Library Journal
The late Shaara's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (1974) concerns the battle of Gettysburg and was the basis for the 1993 film Gettysburg. The events immediately before and during the battle are seen through the eyes of Confederate Generals Lee, Longstreet, and Armistead and Federal General Buford, Colonel Joshua L. Chamberlain, and a host of others. The author's ability to convey the thoughts of men in war as well as their confusion - the so-called "fog of battle"- is outstanding.
--Michael T. Fein, Catawba Valley Community College, Hickory, N.C.

"Remarkable . . . A book that changed my life . . . I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive."
--Ken Burns, Filmmaker, The Civil War
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Friday, September 02, 2005

September 2005: Truth & Beauty: A Friendship & Autobiography of a Face

The book club will be meeting September 27th at Alison's house. We will be reading two books this month. The first book, Truth and Beauty is about the friendship between Patchett and Grealy (the author of the second book). Please see the descriptions below.

Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
"What happens when the person who is your family is someone you aren't bound to by blood? What happens when the person you promise to love and to honor for the rest of your life is not your lover, but your best friend? In Truth & Beauty, her frank and startling intimate first work of non-fiction, Ann Patchett shines a fresh, revealing light on the world of women's friendships and shows us what it means to stand together.
This is a tender, brutal book about loving a person we cannot save. It is about loyalty, and about being lifted up by the sheer effervescence of someone who knew how to live life to the fullest."

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
"At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit. Vividly portraying the pain of peer rejection and the guilty pleasures of wanting to be special, Grealy captures with unique insight what it is like as a child and young adult to be torn between two warring impulses: to feel that more than anything else we want to be loved for who we are, while wishing desperately and secretly to be perfect."
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Friday, July 22, 2005

August 2005: A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue



Discussion: Tuesday, August 23rd
7:30 pm
Alison's new house

The New York Times Book Review
by Emily Eakin
March 7, 1999

THIS is a book about an oppressed group that you might not have heard of before: virgins. The idea might surprise you. It might occur to you that being a virgin -- unlike, say, being black or short or gay -- is a universal (not to mention invisible) human condition; at one time or another, it affects every person on the planet. Why would anyone discriminate against virgins? Yet, according to Wendy Shalit, self-appointed spokeswoman for the moral minority and the author of ''A Return to Modesty,'' this is precisely what many of us do.

Once a country that ranked maidenhood among its highest virtues, America, Shalit writes, is now a place where sexual modesty is actively repudiated and the woman who voluntarily abstains from sex is regarded as neurotic, repressed, hostile, socially maladjusted or unhealthily obsessed with her father. And not just by insensitive cads. In their efforts to establish a ''nonsexist paradise'' free of ''all traces of patriarchal rules and codes of conduct,'' feminists, liberals, women's magazines, even well-intentioned parents, Shalit argues, have inadvertently made our culture more misogynistic than ever. ''Today men expect to be able to treat all women like prostitutes, only without just compensation,'' she declares, ''and the virgins are the ones who are now stigmatized, told that no man will have them.''

Shalit should know. At 23, she is a senior veteran of our culture's war on purity. Her battle scars date back to the fourth grade, when a strange woman arrived to instruct Shalit and her classmates in the mysterious properties of the number 69. Stumped by the lesson and the giggles it elicited from the back of the room, Shalit went home and reported the encounter to her mother. As a result, she found herself sitting out sex education in the library, embarrassed and confused but, most important, with her innocence still intact. There were to be other close calls: a fifth-grade teacher who made a desk drawer full of tampons and condoms available to her students; a counselor at high school debate camp who made lewd remarks and stroked her hair; the coed bathrooms in her college dorm; girlfriends who told her she was uncomfortable with her body; boyfriends who accused her of ''hang-ups'' and dumped her because she wouldn't sleep with them.

If Shalit survived these assaults on her virtue positively brimming with self-esteem, most girls, she assures us, do not. She depicts a generation of frightened, unhappy, overmedicated young women having too much sex too soon, and -- worse -- having it like a man, by which Shalit means having sex that is indiscriminate and loveless. ''I see so many young women around me spending half of their time sleeping with all these men, and the other half telling me how heartbroken they are,'' she writes. ''I wonder who gave them the idea that this is what they had to do in the first place?''

For women, Shalit insists, the new sex-equity ethos is exacting a terrible psychic price: epidemics of anorexia, bulimia and self-mutilation; soaring rates of sexual harassment, date rape and stalking. The proof is right there in the pages of Glamour and Cosmopolitan and the other women's magazines from which she so lavishly quotes. Why are there millions of women on Prozac? To make it easier for men to get them into bed, of course. ''By drugging these women, we have accepted the rapist's view of womanhood,'' Shalit concludes. ''Our culture is continually frustrated with women the way they are, and seeks to loosen them up.''

Shalit believes that female modesty is innate (''a reflex, arising naturally to help a woman protect her hopes and guide their fulfillment -- specifically, this hope for one man'') and thus that sexual promiscuity is a violation of female nature. This logic doesn't merely inform her thinking; it envelops her book like, well, a chastity belt, guarding against the kind of nuances, complications and contradictions that might help enliven her prose and even advance her case.
Populated by lecherous men, lovelorn young women and beaming virgins (''Why do these women then have that undeniable glow about them that is absent, for instance, in our modern anorexic?'' she muses), her world has the telltale contours of caricature. Likewise her solution to its ills.

Why, Shalit begs us to consider, are women flocking to Jane Austen movies? And why, she wonders, ''are none of my grandmother's friends anorexic?'' The explanation, she argues, is simple: As far as relations between the sexes are concerned, we were better off a hundred years ago, when dating a woman meant kissing her gloved hand and reading her Keats in the parlor, when sex meant love and marriage meant ''till death do us part.''

THIS is what women really want. (As for men, those boors, it goes without saying: All they want is sex. It's up to women to teach them manners.) Happiness, she declares, is within our reach: ''We must decide as women to look upon sex out of wedlock as not such a cool thing, after all, and re-create the cartel of virtue.'' This, it must be said, hardly has the ring of a winning campaign slogan. (There must be a way to make the cartel of virtue sound less like voluntary house arrest.) But, more important, there is no evidence that women were happier about their sexual lives -- or more free of rape -- in the pre-sex-ed days of Jane Austen. (For all her admirable modesty and her fiction's devotion to the marriage plot, it's worth pointing out that Austen was never rewarded with enduring love. She died an old maid, a fact that some scholars believe accounts for the bitterness of her last novel, ''Persuasion.'')

Still, despite its limitations as historical or contemporary sociology, ''A Return to Modesty'' provides one invaluable service. There is a growing body of scholarly research on young adulthood that may, in the aftermath of Shalit's booming polemic, be more difficult to ignore. Thanks to the work of educators and psychologists like Carol Gilligan, Mary Pipher and William Pollack, we are beginning to understand that -- for both girls and boys -- the Sturm und Drang of adolescence can be far from benign. Most of us are grateful to have those painful years behind us, and would give anything not to relive them. But that's no reason not to look back and try to make that treacherous passage a little easier to navigate.
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Thursday, July 07, 2005

July 2005: The Kite Runner


Discussion: Tuesday, July 12th @ 7:30 pm
Alison & Amanda's house

Here is the full text of the New York Times Book Review:
by Edward Hower
Published: August 3, 2003, Sunday

This powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini's privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country's revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ''The Kite Runner,'' are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir's close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father's servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Amir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan; then he is driven to school in the gleaming family Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house. Yet Hassan bears Amir no resentment and is, in fact, a loyal companion to the lonely boy, whose mother is dead and whose father, a rich businessman, is often preoccupied. Hassan protects the sensitive Amir from sadistic neighborhood bullies; in turn, Amir fascinates Hassan by reading him heroic Afghan folk tales. Then, during a kite-flying tournament that should be the triumph of Amir's young life, Hassan is brutalized by some upper-class teenagers. Amir's failure to defend his friend will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Hosseini's depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction between the nation's different ethnic groups. Amir's father, or Baba, personifies all that is reckless, courageous and arrogant in his dominant Pashtun tribe. He loves nothing better than watching the Afghan national pastime, buzkashi, in which galloping horsemen bloody one another as they compete to spear the carcass of a goat. Yet he is generous and tolerant enough to respect his son's artistic yearnings and to treat the lowly Hassan with great kindness, even arranging for an operation to mend the child's harelip.

As civil war begins to ravage the country, the teenage Amir and his father must flee for their lives. In California, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school; on weekends he sells secondhand goods at swap meets. Here too Hosseini provides lively descriptions, showing former professors and doctors socializing as they haggle with their customers over black velvet portraits of Elvis.

Despite their poverty, these exiled Afghans manage to keep alive their ancient standards of honor and pride. And even as Amir grows to manhood, settling comfortably into America and a happy marriage, his past shame continues to haunt him. He worries about Hassan and wonders what has happened to him back in Afghanistan.

The novel's canvas turns dark when Hosseini describes the suffering of his country under the tyranny of the Taliban, whom Amir encounters when he finally returns home, hoping to help Hassan and his family. The final third of the book is full of haunting images: a man, desperate to feed his children, trying to sell his artificial leg in the market; an adulterous couple stoned to death in a stadium during the halftime of a football match; a rouged young boy forced into prostitution, dancing the sort of steps once performed by an organ grinder's monkey.

When Amir meets his old nemesis, now a powerful Taliban official, the book descends into some plot twists better suited to a folk tale than a modern novel. But in the end we're won over by Amir's compassion and his determination to atone for his youthful cowardice.

In ''The Kite Runner,'' Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence -- forces that continue to threaten them even today.
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