She Reads Books

This book is exquisite. Seriously: the prose is so good that I want to roll around in it. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume I: The Pox Party) is exquisitely written, and tells the story of one Octavian Gitney, a boy slave raised by a New England philosophical society just prior to and during the American revolutionary war. Octavian and his mother, Princess Cassiopeia, live a life of leisure; Octavian, dressed in finest silks, is taught Latin, Greek, and music from boyhood, receiving one of the finest classical educations of his day.

Until it all changes, that is.

The war plays havoc in Boston — rumours are adrift, smallpox is marching toward the city, the British navy is massing in the harbour, and nobody knows which side will win. Octavian’s master and all his household remove to the country for a Pox Party; they will innoculate themselves against the coming plague, and dance the war away.

Until that all changes, too.

I don’t want to give too much away, because this is a book full of twists and turns, and it’s so beautifully written that I’d want all of you to just go out and read it, anyway. Here are four passages to whet your appetite. The first begins a day out in the country:

Shortly after two o’clock on June 3rd, 1769, Venus descended into the plane of the ecliptic and came between the Earth and sun. It is with awe that I treat of the event — so minute, so silent here upon the Earth — but there — one can scarce imagine the roaring of that vast orb through those frigid depths, tumbling, flung through the plane of our orbit; the glaring heat, the searing glare of Sol — and the gargantuan prodigality of that body, consuming its own substance ceaselessly while planets whirled like houris, veiled and ecstatic around the thrown of some blast-turbaned, light-drunken king. (96)

The second is the most elegant way I’ve ever read of telling someone to do what she tells him to do:

“Mademoiselle, you are delightfully scurrilous.”

“This is no banter, sir. This is no game.” I could hear the fury in her voice. “This is no jest, no frolic, no badinage. I was a princess, once; I am a princess still. Royal blood will mix only with other royal blood. Otherwise, it demeans the line. Tell me what nation you offer me, what alliance, what regal house — or leave.”

Still in a tone of play, he said, “My lady, you know what scepter I offer, and what orbs.”

There was a stunned silence. And then she replied, “Then, sir, look out at the privy. There is my throne. Reach inside, sir, and you shall find the wedding feast. Eat well, My Lord. Eat abundantly.” (107)

This passage comes during the preparations for the Pox Party:

A harpsichord was rented for the festivities. We placed it in one of the experimental chambers and hauled the philosophic machines against the wall so there should be space for dancing. The day before the party, one of the grooms was employed to wax the floor.

He wore a slipper on one foot and a brush on the other. They required him to dance there alone for three hours.

I passed and watched.

In the silence, he skated.

The afternoon sun was cast across the floor. Where the bowing and leaping should soon commence, there the old man slid and spun by himself, his arms fluttering, making pretty courtesies to chairs; pausing for a pas de Basque; his heels thumping; executing secret glissades in beeswax.

Silence and sunlight were his partners. (188)

And after Octavian does some very exciting things, and then has time to repose:

The times, the seasons, the signs may have been mythical; but the sufferings were not. I lay in the dark with the breathing of men around me and knew that then, at that selfsame moment, where dawn groped across the sea, my brethren lay bound in ships, one  body atop another, smelling of their green wounds and fæces; I knew in dark houses, there was torture, arms held down, firebrands approacing the soft skin of the belly or arm; and still — there is screaming in the night; there is flight; mothers sob for children they shall not see again; girls feel the weight of men atop them; men cry for their wives; boys dangle dead in the barn; and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. (326)

This was the book that had me incoherently tweeting about wanting to lick prose. It’s gorgeous and difficult and poignant, and I think it will stay with me for a very long time.

5 stars. (Nay, 5.5! Nay 6 even would I grant unto this book!)

This is not your childhood’s Judy Blume.

Summer Sisters begins with a phone call, as someone named Vix (Vix?) finds out that someone named Caitlin is going to marry someone named Bru (Bru?). Then Vix runs to the bathroom to puke, and then BAM! It’s flashback time.

It keeps being flashback time for about the next forty chapters, as the readers meet Caitlin Mayhew Somers, and Victoria Leonard, and then it’s all cottaging on Martha’s Vineyard, and having le sex, and growing up and going to college, and boo hoo I am poor, and Caity is a right self-centered slattern, and oh yeah, more sex. I have to warn tell you, it’s pretty explicit. Sensitive readers: be aware. (A lot of it is kinda squicky, too — movie stars making out with 15-year-olds, people sleeping with each other’s fiancés the night before the wedding, etc. Even if you don’t accept moral indictions against extra-marital sex, there are still things that just aren’t ethical. But perhaps I digress?)

That being said, this seems like the type of novel something like Firefly Lane was trying to be. The two books have a lot of the same elements: two friends from different backgrounds thrown together as pre-teens, the story taking place largely in the 1970s-90s, the narrative mostly flashbacks, etc. Summer Sisters pulls it off, though — it’s the sort of book that you should be able to dismiss as trash, but can’t, quite. As with all Judy Blume, there are some Big Issues that get touched on / worked through, and though it’s definitely summer reading, it’s not brainless by any means.

One thing that personally surprised me is the way that it touched on AIDS. Now, I wasn’t surprised that a book would talk about AIDS — far from it — but it was strange to me in the way that it was talked about. Two peripheral characters (who exist offscreen) die of “the disease”, as it’s styled, and everyone’s freaking it out and the token neurotic character starts covering toilet seats with toilet paper just in case … and it occured to me that I’ve never actually known a world without AIDS in it, and that I’ve never experienced that sort of new-disease freak-out (SARS doesn’t count, surely?) that occured in North America in the late 1980s. Isn’t it strange, sometimes, to think of the things that have always existed for you? TV and computers. Compact discs. AIDS.

Blah, blah, blah, me. Summer Sisters was a basically entertaining novel, and would make excellent beach reading.

3.5 stars.

The tag-line for this book reads “Max was just a hillbilly . . . until he became STARMAN JONES”. Is that not amazing?

The rest of the book — the innards, I mean — is pretty good as well, although with all Heinlein it reads as terribly dated. Starman Jones was first published in 1953, which is not so much the issue; there are many books much older than that that read as period pieces and don’t feel stale. But Heinlein was a  science fiction writer, of course, and the future he wrote is not the one that we’ve ended up with.

There are two basic things whose importance he never seemed to anticipate: computers and women. Granted, it would be difficult to anticipate the way that computers would shape our lives, writing in the early 1950s. And maybe it would be hard to anticipate how women’s social/political/etc. roles would expand during the next handful of decades. But in any case, Heinlein’s fiction — Starman Jones being no exception — tends to come across to me as impossibly passé. I still enjoy it, quite a bit, but it doesn’t feel real.

There are no female starship pilots in Heinlein novels. There are no female soldiers, or doctors, or politicians, or anything really. If there’s a woman on a ship, you can bet that she’s either a passenger or a secretary. Most of his novels are as near to all-male as it’s possible to get without including at least some women as window dressing and/or spacemen’s main squeezes. Starman Jones is no exception and is full of snippets like this:

Once when Ellie had fought him to a draw Max said, “You know, Ellie, you play this game awfully well — for a girl.”

“Thank you too much.”

“No, I mean it. I suppose girls are probably as intelligent as men, but most of them don’t act like it. I think it’s because they don’t have to. If a girl is pretty, she doesn’t have to think. Of course, if she can’t get by on her looks, then –” (210)

Charming, no? Of course, she turns out to be her planet’s 3D chess champion, and whips him soundly before marrying the other man, but still. It’s in there.

There are other gems of the time, too. Like this:

“Aye aye, Captain.” Kelly sat down at the console, Max took the Captain’s seat, feeling self-conscious. He wished that he had learned to smoke a pipe — it looked right to have the Captain sit back, relaxed and smoking his pipe, while the ship maneuvered.” (236-7)

Yup. Smoking his pipe on his spaceship. Like Popeye.

Walther abruptly changed the subject. “That phenomenal trick of memory you do — computing without tables or reference books. Can you do it all the time?”

“Uh? Why, yes.”

“Do you know all the tables? Or just some of them?”

“I know all the standard tables and manuals that are what an astrogator calls his ‘working tools.’” Max started to tell about his uncle, Walther interrupted gently,

“If you please, sir. I’m glad to hear it. I’m very glad to hear it. Because the only such books in this ship are the ones in your head.” (229)

Books! Imagine! The computers in this novel seem to essentially function as giant calculators, into which digits are punched by techs reading out of manuals. Nothing is digital; everything is “on tape” or on microfiche or on paper. It’s wacky.

Aside from the twitch-enducing future-historical anomalies, Starman Jones is a pretty enjoyable book. It’s not the best that Heinlein’s written, but it’s definitely passable. The plot is unremarkable — kid from the sticks sneaks aboard starship, has adventures, becomes Captain — but doesn’t feel formulaic. If you’re interested in science fiction, especially in the stuff coming out of its golden age, you may well enjoy Starman Jones.

3 stars.

I’ve been on a minor Robertson Davies kick lately, and What’s Bred in the Bone has once again proved itself to be an example of Davies at the very top of his game. It seems to me that everytime I try to explain why he’s so great I end up dissolving into incoherency — blaasrhghghahrarhagh read it read it asdashfhsdkjhfaskdfh — but I will do my best.

The novel opens with a very fraught meeting between some members of something called The Cornish Trust, evidently a family business. Arthur Cornish has hired the Reverend Simon Darcourt, a historian, to write a biography of his late uncle, Francis Cornish. But Simon and Arthur are both getting cold feet: it turns out that Uncle Frank was perhaps a bit of a crook, and such details of his life as exist are noticeably sketchy. It may be beyond Simon’s skill as a biographer to resurrect him, and it may be beyond Arthur’s comfort zone to have the old man’s perhaps-shady past out in the open.

Enter the supernatural metanarrative element: at this point, after some discussion, the narrative of What’s Bred in the Bone is largely taken over by The Lesser Zadkiel and the Daimon Maimas — Maimas being Francis Cornish’s personal daimon, and Zadkiel being, of course, the Angel of Biography. Maimas, as a daimon, was a major influence in Francis’s life — perhaps not always for the best — and he reveals Francis’s life and his own role to Zadkiel, playing them both back as if they his life were a film. It’s a bit clunky sometimes, but it largely works.

That’s the setup. But the real meat of the story, of course, is the life of Francis Cornish. And we’ve got your bastardy, and looners locked in attics, and gross artistic fraud, and spy work, and bankers, and people named things like Prudence and Ismay and Zadok and Mary-Jim, and actually some more bastardy, and the whole thing is chockablock full of those random bits or erudition & ornamental knowledge that let you know that you’re reading something penned by the inestimable Davies. Plus, Dunstan Ramsay has a cameo, which charms me.

What’s Bred in the Bone reads more like the Deptford Trilogy than any of the Samuel Marchbanks books — that is to say, it’s Davies being intelligent and ambiguous rather more than intelligent and witty, though there are certainly comic moments.  It’s smart and chunky and thrilling, and all of you should read it, aarghsdk blargh blarghoo, the end.

I would have loved this book as a twelve-year-old, if I had been allowed to read it, which I wasn’t. I’m not sure why that is — well, I haven’t asked — but being a decade past the targeted reader age I figured that it was probably safe for me to finally take a look through it. I picked up a copy the same age as I am for $.25 at a rummage sale.

So, Margaret Ann Simon, age almost-twelve, is moved out of New York City and into Farbrook, New Jersey. Margaret beings grade six soon after moving, and the book details her experiences at school, her quest to find a religion, her longing for breasts, and her eponymous talks with God.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret has been frequently challenged for some controversial content: it talks frankly about menstruation and other puberty-related changes, and it shows a young girl from a non-religious Jewish-Christian family trying to choose a religion for herself. I didn’t find either of these to particularly threatening; it is a well-written story about the things that twelve-year-olds are already thinking and talking about.

Yes: the text is frank. Margaret visits a synagogue and several churches, and doesn’t find God in either of them. Margaret and her friends buy bras for the first time, talk about who has breasts and who doesn’t, wait eagerly for their first periods, and exchange lists of the boys they like.  But you’re kidding yourself if you think that Judy Blume is making these things up out of whole cloth, and that taking this book away will somehow stop your daughters from being curious about boys and sex and their bodies.  Same deal about religion.

For me, reading Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was like being that age again. My friends and I talked about the same things: do you need a bra yet? do you have hair growing anywhere? do I need to use deoderant yet? does anyone have her period? do I need to shave my legs yet? And Margaret and her friends make some dumb mistakes, and are catty, and find out eventually that the attractive boy is sometimes also a big jerkface. It feels real; Judy Blume is clearly a lady who remembers what it’s like to be twelve.

There are some anachronisms — belted sanitary pads, for one, which I had to actually look up. But overall, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a smart, relevant book that I would recommend to pre-teens and their parents alike.