We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin is going to haunt me for a while. Even though you know what’s going to happen at the end, Shriver throws in a heartbreaking twist that, honestly, nearly had me in tears. Along with the dread the Shriver builds and builds as the narrator approaches that climax, that narrator also meditates on blame, hindsight, and–above all–guilt. Reading the dust jacket, you might think that this book is a product of its time, of those few years there were so many school shootings at the end of the millennium. But I think this book has a timeless quality in that, we are always going to wonder where human evil comes from. We’re still wondering about Jack the Ripper and Hitler, aren’t we?

The narrator, Eva Khatchadourian, tells her story in a series of letters to her husband, Franklin, over the course of a handful of months. She tells him of her life now, after that Thursday. (She always puts it in italics.) Once, Eva was a successful travel writer, with her own company that published a series of books for low budget travelers. In their mid-thirties, Franklin started to pester Eva about having a child. Eva gave in eventually, but she confesses to serious reluctance. She was never maternal. She didn’t know what she was doing but, to a certain extent, she fell for the propaganda that of course she would love her own child.

Kevin, it becomes clear, is a sociopath. Even as an infant, he delighted in tormenting just about everyone. The first nanny quit after a day and they were blackballed from the agency after two years. Because Kevin behaves differently around him, and because he so wants to have a perfect family, Franklin believes that there is nothing wrong with Kevin. He thinks that Eva is exaggerating or is always thinking the worse of the boy when she tells him what the little spawn is up to. Reading about Kevin’s early years, I was reminded of my mom’s stories from kindergarten about the the boy in her class who, even at the age of six, had the look of pure evil about him.

Later, Eva writes about a civil suit lodged against her by of the parent of one of her son’s victims. Because that parent so desperately wants someone to blame, they allege that Eva’s bad parenting is the cause of Kevin’s actions on that Thursday. Eva admits that she was a bad mother, but I think that’s only because she thinks that good mothering is natural. She was not a natural parent. Part of that admission, I also suspect, comes from the fact that she can’t like the little jerk. She doesn’t love him the way other parents love their kids. But when you have a kid like Kevin, how can you teach him to feel empathy? To care about the feeling of others? She did everything she was supposed to, and Kevin still killed 11 people at the age of 16.

Eva was one of the few people who could see through Kevin’s facade but, how can you predict something like that? He was very, very careful and very, very cunning. Even with hindsight, there were only a few things that could have tipped even the most suspicious person off. When I read Kevin’s line from that day (“Sure you don’t want to say good-bye to Celie one more time?” (p. 365)), even I read it as just another sarcastic comment. Now that I’ve finished the book, that line chills me to the bone.

This book, in my reading, asks two vexing questions (with a lot of corollaries). First, what does it mean to be a good mother? What’s normal when it comes to being maternal? For Eva, with her deep seated reluctance, it never comes naturally. She expected to love him when he was born. (But again, with a kid like Kevin, can you ever hope to be a normal parent?) She freely admits that she resents the little shit. To the extent that Kevin is able to feel, he seems to resent her right back. And there is little doubt that Kevin is aware of what he is doing when he torments others. He knows what he is doing is wrong.  He destroys a room that Eva put together with care, because he can’t understand why people get attached to anything. He doesn’t like anything or anyone, but Eva is the only one he will admit this to. Later, he begins to commit small acts of violence against other kids (always without witnesses and no one can ever definitively prove anything). He talks a girl with eczema into clawing at her own skin until she bleeds. He kills his little sister’s pet and then, worse, destroys her left eye with drain cleaner. And then, there’s that Thursday. So again, the sub-question again, how do you teach empathy to someone who is incapable of feeling it? How can you punish someone who isn’t attached to anything and who you don’t dare hit?

Parenthood is a source of serious anxiety for people. In my observation, there are so many parents trying so hard not to mess up their kids. There are those parents who compete with each other to be the best, to raise the best kids. With all this pressure, is it any wonder that Eva feels the stress she does? That she feels such severe guilt? She seems to get as much punishment from the people of her town as Kevin does in his juvenile facility. For some reason, no one seems to see the depths of Kevin’s sociopathy–perhaps because everyone gave the little schmuck wide berth when he was on the outside, as if they sensed something was seriously off about him.

The second question that this book addresses–though not in such depth as the questions about motherhood–is: where does the evil to commit acts like this come from? Is it purely mechanical? Are sociopaths missing parts of their brain? Or are they created by their upbringing and their environments? As I said above, we’re still asking this question about some people. And I don’t think we’ll ever get a definitive answer. In the case of Kevin, Shriver shows that some people were probably always going to go bad. They were born that way. No amount of care or mothering will change them, because sociopaths don’t think the way we do. Perhaps with some criminals, upbringing does play a part.

Like with most people, who you are is probably a combination of both nature and nuture. But that still doesn’t answer the question of where real evil comes from. The most clinical answer I can think of is that they’re missing parts of their brains or psyches, especially those parts that allow us to feel for each other, to make attachments, to sympathize. They’re probably also missing those parts that make us want to belong, to follow society’s basic rules. Without at least those two parts, there’s nothing to stop them from committing whatever atrocities they can think up.

Throughout the book, various characters ask Kevin why. He gives as many answers as he has askers. The only time I think we get close to a real reason is when Kevin admits to his mother that it’s been so long that he doesn’t really remember. To me, that means that it wasn’t just one thing and/or there was no reason that we can really understand. Kevin has an evil in him. It was going to come out sooner or later.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is going to haunt me for a while.

The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht

The Tiger's Wife

Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife is a book you could spend years unpacking. There is a central plot, but the action of this book curls around that small plot so that what really grabs you is all that back story rather than what’s happening in the novel’s “now.”

The plot that frames the novel is simple enough to explain. A young doctor, Natalia, is on her way to an orphanage after her country split itself apart in a war when she learns that her grandfather has died in a small town. Her grandmother is adamant that Natalia retrieve his belongings, which she does after tangling with some local gypsies who are in the process of locating and reburying a long dead cousin. While all this is going on, Natalia tells her grandfather’s story, of his meetings with the deathless man, and his relationship with the tiger’s wife of the title. Through telling his story, Natalia tells the story of her country during the twentieth century, a story that reflect the history of any number of southern Eastern Europe.

Two things really struck me about this book, and they both have to do with the role of specific kinds of stories. First, there is the recurring theme of superstition. Superstition is everywhere in this book. Aside from the fact that this book is very definitely set in the twentieth and possibly early twenty-first century, there are scenes with villagers that sound like they could have happened any time in the last thousand years the way they go on about devils and rituals.

Superstition provides an explanation for crop failures and too long winters. The tiger that roams the ridges and kills livestock is a devil, and the deaf-mute girl they call the tiger’s wife is his accomplice. The tiger and his wife give the villagers a tangible target for their worry and their hate, rather than the actual, complex causes. Even in Natalia’s present, superstition is still there. The gypsies she tangles with are reburying their cousin because they believe that cousin is haunting them and causing their children to get sick. When she tries to reason with them, she hits a brick wall time and again until she gives in and helps them (though she does it on the condition that they bring their kids into the local clinic for treatment).

Obreht shows the reader repeatedly how stubborn people are about their traditions and beliefs. The only way that anyone can achieve a real solution is to manipulate those superstitions. Said another way, you just have to go with it to get anywhere.

Second, there is the inescapable grasp of history. This country is steeped in it’s own history in a way that I don’t think a lot of Americans have felt. I certainly haven’t. The stories and adventures and tragedies of the pass stick around in this country. Several characters remark on the fact that they have always either been at war or are recovering from one and waiting for the next one to begin. As Natalia tells her grandfather’s history, there are connections and hints of connections. Everything is tied together: her grandfather, the butcher who brought the tiger’s wife to the village, the apothecary, and the tiger itself. Though told separately, they’re really the same story–just told from different perspectives and at different points.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve moved around a lot, or I’ve lives in biggish towns and cities all my life, I’ve never felt the connection to a place the way that the characters in this book do. This novel shows how the current generation has roots that stretch back over the decades and centuries. Though Obreht never names the country where this novel is set, it feels very real, like this country could really exist. After reading this book, I wonder what it would be like to have roots like that, to live somewhere where my family has lived since anyone can remember. On the one hand, I think it could feel very smothering, as though you have to shoulder the mistakes of your ancestors because everyone can remember them. On the other, I can see how one could feel a strong sense of belonging, to be a part of a rich history and tradition. In this book, I think the role of history is that it provides a slightly more rational way of explaining how we all got where we are.

My reading of all this is that The Tiger’s Wife is about the conflict between superstition and reason, and about its symbiosis. It’s a very complex tale, and I think it would take a couple more readings to parse it all out.

I want to end this review with a very arresting passage from the end of the book, because I can’t express what Obreht has done in this book nearly so well as Obreht did originally. But I think this passage reflects that symbiosis between rational, objective history and irrational, subjective superstition:

There is, however, and always has bee, a place on Galina where the trees are thin, a wide space where the saplings have twisted away and light falls broken and dappled on the snow. There is a cave here, a large flat slab of stone where the sun is always cast. My grandfather’s tiger lives there, in a glade where the winter does not go away. He is the hunter of stag and boar, a fighter of bears, a great source of confusion for the lynx, a rapt admirer of the colors of birds. He has forgotten the citadel, the nights of fire, his long and difficult journey to the mountain. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger’s wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore. (337*)

* From the 2011 Random House hardback edition.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird

I haven’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird since I was a teenager. All that I remembered about the book was the court case, Boo Radley, and the immortal line about it being a sin to kill a mockingbird. To Kill a Mockingbird, however, is a richer book than I thought it was. I finished it on Monday and scenes and ideas are still sparking for me. I’ve since read that the literature on this book is sparse, relatively speaking. But there’s so many ideas and characters to explore.

I won’t waste time on a summary of this book. If you haven’t read it, you should. So, I want to jump right into the ideas that are still roaming around inside my noggin. First, feminism of all things. Scout Finch has a lot of models of womanhood around her. There’s the strident and militantly proper Aunt Alexandra. There’s the quirky neighbor Maudie. And there’s the elegant and strong Calpurnia, the Finch family’s housekeeper. Throughout the book, Alexandra and Calpurnia try to mold Scout. Maudie doesn’t do much other than threaten Scout when the girl is about to cause some kind of property damage. As I read the book, I saw Scout grow and not necessarily for the better. At the beginning, Scout is an unapologetic tomboy. She rebels against dresses and the strict manners others try to push on her. I love early Scout. She’s the kind of kid I would have been if I’d had more guts. By the end of the book, Scout has learned–painfully and dragging her heels every step of the way–to hold her piece, to present herself as the kind of girl her Aunt and Calpurnia want her to be. I found the transformation very melancholy. As I finished the book, I wondered what Scout would have been like as an adult. Would she continue to kowtow? Or would she hold on to her spark until she could be herself?

I can’t write about To Kill a Mockingbird and not talk about racism. But I forgot how much classism plays a part in this book. At several times in the book, different characters lay out the hierarchy of Maycomb. For everyone except the African Americans in the community, there’s someone to look down on. Only the outsiders don’t know how the system worked. Everyone in the community has stereotypes for each other because the families have all been around for over a hundred years. A lot of behavior is dismissed as, “Well, they don’t know any better” or “That’s just how they are.” The classism and racism are deeply ingrained. Only a few characters seem to rise above it. When the jury takes hours to come back with a verdict for Tom Robinson, you feel a little bit of hope that it’s not a forgone conclusion–at least until Lee smacks you upside the head with the inevitable. It’s clear by the end of the book that it’s going to take a long time for Maycomb to change their attitudes, if they ever manage to change them.

As a corrollary to this idea, the community does seem to be able to change those attitudes on an individual level. You can change a person’s mind, given the right methods and motivation. It’s the community as a whole that has a hard time changing. Lee shows us this in the scene where the mob confronts Atticus at the jail where Robinson is held. When Scout singles out Mr. Cunningham, the entire scene changes. It’s a brilliant piece of writing.

Moving on. The trial of Tom Robinson is a gut-wrenching miscarriage of justice. With a decent jury, the case would have been tossed out of court and the Ewell family would have faced some investigation. In spite of the best efforts of the judge and Atticus Finch, Tom Robinson was facing the ingrained racism and classism of Maycomb. The Ewells were higher in the hierarchy. The community had terrible ideas about African American men. The jury failed to see through the transparent lies of the Ewells. It’s so painful to read. I wanted to climb inside the book and shake every member of the jury until their teeth rattled. How could they not see the truth when Atticus put it right there in front of them?

As much as I love Scout, what really makes this book for me is Atticus. He’s the embodiment of a quiet hero. He does the right thing no matter how hard it is because it is the right thing. Atticus knew he wouldn’t be able to hold his head up if he failed to do his duty by Tom. Facing down the scorn and hatred of his community is harder than going off and fighting an enemy. It must have broken Atticus’s hear to see the depths that his neighbors could sink to. And yet, the experience doesn’t break him, even though he lost. He’s still the same steady good man as he was before. That’s strength. As a Taoist or Buddhist would put it, Atticus can bend without breaking. He’s a character type that sadly doesn’t appear much in fiction. Both in real life and fiction, we could use more people like Atticus.

Deus ex Machina, by Andrew Foster Altshul

Deus ex Machina

Andrew Foster Altshul’s Deus ex Machina is a hallucination of a novel that blends reality TV and Heart of Darkness into an unsettling social commentary. The novel shifts back and forth between timelines and settings without warning, and the only anchor is the unnamed producer. The novel shifts between a Survivor-like show currently filming somewhere in Indonesia and the unnamed producer trying to keep the show going while pleasing his new and much young boss. The producer wants to make a show about truth–but doesn’t know how to do that or even what truth would be in this setting. But everyone around him in the control booth is out to make the most scandalous and shocking season they can. The players just want to win and are more than willing to show how low they can sink.

The show within the book, The Deserted, reads like a more extreme version of Survivor. One of the players actually dies at one point, and two others get close to it. The point of the show, according to the producer, is non-interference. The producer wants the players to have free will, though the players are required to participate in challenges and follow the rules of the game. They’re removed if they don’t. The show, like they all seem to, has become formulaic. The producer notices that they all fall into the same roles. There’s always a Hero, a Schemer, a Whiner, etc. Only the first seasons were original and the producer is under pressure to make the show even more shocking to win back some viewers. Some of his team have already jumped ship and are following orders directly from the new boss. On top of all this pressure, the producer is haunted by a horrific season in Benin and his wife’s awful death. It’s little wonder that the producer starts to slid into paranoia and insanity.

While the plot is interesting and the characters are horrifyingly interesting to watch, the thing to pay attention to, I think, is the social critique. At several points, the producer muses on the extreme sorts of reality shows that The Deserted is competing with. Later in the book, he learns about the hyperbolic criticism from the audience. In these moments, Altschul approaches delightfully uncomfortable satire, highlighting the disconnect between the life-threatening risks the players have to take and the fickle attention of the audience. To the audience, it’s just TV. It can’t be real. We trust the lawyers and underwriters to keep things from getting too dangerous. The audience knows that the show is script to some extent, so they want drama. In spite of the pressure and the elaborate sets they’ve built and challenges they’ve designed, wants the show to be real. It’s a mundane goal. Or it would be if the producer wasn’t competing with with the ghastly storylines his team wants to put in place.

Deus ex Machina is a hard book to get a grip on, mostly because there are so many things that a reader could take away from it. There’s the satire. There’s the vaguely theological metaphor of the producer as god and everyone getting upset about the free will experiment. There’s the social commentary on the reality TV phenomenon. It’s amazing what Altschul can do in a little over 200 pages.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield

Summing up Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is impossible. It’s a whole life crammed into 877 pages. I don’t mean that sarcastically or ironically. When I started reading it on last Sunday, I met Copperfield when he was born. As I read during the week, I watched him grow up. I saw his triumphs and miseries, his loves and his hatreds. I wanted to give him advice and cheer him on. When I finished the book earlier today, it was like saying goodbye to a friend.

I normally don’t read bildungsromans, because unless the character is really interesting, I’m usually more interested in the plot. But this book–while ostensibly about David’s life–is crammed with subplots. But first: David Copperfield himself. David has a sharp sense of humor (another appeal for me), and his engaging voice pulled me right into the story. As I said, we meet David as he is born. The very first part of the book is about his early life, with his sweet mother and faithful nurse, Peggotty. But things start to go wrong for David when his mother remarries. His stepfather is a horrible man who tries to mold his new family and make them “firm.” The first third or so of the book is about David’s trials at a terrible boarding school and then at a bottle factory. Things get so desperate that David runs away to live with his eccentric aunt. The novel then starts to jump through time, and introduces two mysteries: the fate of Little Em’ly and the schemes of Uriah Heep.

You can see the book’s origins as a serial as it’s very episodic. Each chapter skips along to a new event or encounter. Characters like the Micawbers, the Peggottys, Heep, the Wickfields, and David’s relations weave in and out of the story. They’re all fully realized people, though for the most part more attention is paid to their flaws than to their virtues. The Micawbers are a good example of this. They are very entertaining people, loyal to their friends. But for most of the book they are incapable of living within their means. I forgot how many times Mr. Micawber was arrested for his debts and of how many fits Mrs. Micawber threw about her misunderstood husband. Until the very end, when Mr. Micawber manages to get his act together and become a magistrate in Australia, every time David runs into them its pretty much the same story all over again.

Some of these supporting characters are so interesting and entertaining that they threaten to steal the show. The real attraction is supposed to be David. It’s hard to say what’s special about David, now that I come to think about it. At first, he was notable for his naiveté. He couldn’t be trusted with any money that came into his possession, because other characters with less scruples could instantly talk him out of it. It takes a long time for David to get wise to the ways of the world. In spite of the forces against him, David stays a good man. The only people he really hates he has reason to hate. Otherwise he’s upright, but foolish in love.

There is so much going on in this book that schools of English majors could cheerfully pick it apart and find new topics for centuries. You could write about how marriage is portrayed, how virtue is rewarded and vice punished, society in Victorian England, and hundreds of other topics. Each characters could probably inspire whole seminars. This is a rich book. I almost feel bad for reading it in just one week. This is a book that’s meant to be savored.

One theme that reached up and grabbed my attention was the importance of choosing the right mate. There are a lot of good and bad relationships in this book. David himself has both kinds. David’s childhood is essentially ruined by his mother’s choosing the wrong man. David’s first wife had the maturity level of a child. Little Em’ly paired up with a philanderer. Over and over again, Dickens shows his readers what happens when you either don’t take the time to learn your partner’s character or if you listen to the lies of someone who wants to get in your pants.

And then, towards the end, Dickens shows you what can happen if you choose wisely. Incidentally, critics often point to David Copperfield as highly autobiographical. So I can’t help but wonder if we also get to see what Dickens valued in a wife: steadiness, wisdom, and a loving and kind spirit. After reading the Brontes and Austen, where we get the woman’s perspective on courtship and marriage, it’s interesting to see the male perspective. David is as giddy as one of the younger Bennett sisters when young, but it’s heartening to see him mature emotionally and realize that there’s more to a wife than her looks and frivolous charms.

I’m glad I read this book. Up ’till now, the only Dickens I’d read and enjoyed was A Tale of Two Cities–and I loved that book because of the terrific plot and the heroism of Sidney Carton. David Copperfield I liked for the variety. There’s something new and different in each chapter, with plenty to think about afterwards.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane

The Red Badge of Courage

Somehow I managed to get all the way through high school and a bachelor’s degree in literature without having read Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. But with this year being the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War, it seemed like an appropriate time to finally read it.

If you’re at all familiar with it, The Red Badge of Courage is a very short book–not even 150 pages. Any yet the main character, Henry Fleming, seems to hit the absolute highest and lowest points possible for a soldier of his day. It wasn’t what I’d expected, based on what I’d heard of Crane’s work. I’d understood him to be of the Realist school of writing, but this book seemed to be an early form of stream of consciousness. The reader spends the whole book not precisely in young Henry’s head, but we get to hear, see, and feel everything he does as well as get every single though that crosses his mind. After a brief introduction, we follow Henry to his first (unnamed) battles and the whole book takes place over just a few short days.

Summaries of this book are easy to come by, so I want to focus on what struck me most about the book. Believe it or not, what caught my attention was the language Crane used. First of all, Henry’s thoughts are described in elegant prose–that’s the best way that I can describe it. It’s not overdone, but it’s very poised and elegant. Even when Henry is in the thick of the fighting, I didn’t really get a sense of how dirty, terrifying, and loud that I know the battles must have been. Second, I think Crane must have really captured how Americans used to speak in the mid to late nineteenth century. It reminded me a lot of the dialogue of Twain’s books. There are consonants dropped all over the place and speeches are peppered with what sounds to me now as quaint expressions. I completely understand now why the writers of Deadwood updated the language, because we just can’t take the authentic language seriously.

A lot of the books I’ve read that feature soldiers and war use a kind of shorthand about the experience, particularly lines about waiting and moments of absolute terror. But Crane expanded on ideas like that. I know this book was written well after the war. Crane wasn’t even born until after the war. But in this book, it’s as if you–the reader–are plunked right down into the thick of it. We get to watch Henry muse about camp life, rumors, and marching. One thing that Crane captures particularly well, I think, is the sense of confusion. Henry is at the bottom of the military totem pole, and can’t give the reader any larger sense of what’s going on. Once the fighting starts, it’s particularly hard to keep track of what’s going on. Though I will say that Henry seems to have the luck of the devil. Apart from being smack in the middle of the Civil War, he’s pretty lucky considering what happened to the rest of his regiment.

Apart from the language and the history, I know other readers will agree that the important thing about this book is Henry’s struggle with his courage. I wouldn’t say that Henry is a coward. It’s more as though he lets his (justifiable) fear get the better of him. That part I completely believed. But I had a harder time believing Henry after he started charging into fights. I could believe it better if it was clearer that Henry was just trying to ward off accusations of cowardice. But he seemed to turn into a nineteenth century Rambo towards the end.

I am glad I read this book. It was new and original for the time. I don’t see similar attitudes about war in literature until the World War I poets like Owens and Sassoon were published. I see this book as good history. Reading impressively big histories about the Civil War won’t transport you to the time as much as this book tries to do. Unless you read contemporary letters from the time, The Red Badge of Courage is the closest you can get to being there (if only for a few hours’ reading time).

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte

Reading Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series always gives me a hankering to read the classics–mostly so that I can get more of the jokes. The first book on the list of classics I should have read, but didn’t, is Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I’ve read the books by the other sisters and was divided on my opinion. I loved Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and I hated Emily’s Wuthering Heights. I can now officially say, I love two-thirds of the Bronte sisters.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is, I’ll admit, not the most skillfully constructed novel. It’s written in an epistolary style and uses a lot of flashbacks. But the letters and diary entries often turn into long passages of novel, complete with dialogue and internal monologues. The structure’s not the important thing about this book, its the subject matter. This is a surprising book for 1847, because at the center of the novel is a bad, bad marriage. Most of my knowledge of the first half of the nineteenth century comes from Austen, where it’s all about getting that ring. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is refreshingly blunt and honest about what can happens after the happy couple says I do.

The novel begins with a mysterious woman arriving, with her son, to take up residence at the falling down Wildfell Hall. This part of the book is told from the perspective of one Gilbert Markham, who tells the reader of how the whole neighborhood is desperate to find out who she is and what her history is. When Mrs. Graham refuses to talk about her past, some nasty rumors start up. Gilbert, who has been falling in love with Mrs. Graham, finally gets her to share her history. She gives him her diaries to read, which takes up most of the middle of the book.

This is where things start to get interesting. The novel jumps back in time four years, to a young Helen Lawrence who is a lot more naive than the Mrs. Graham we meet later. Helen has her pick of a couple of different men, but she falls in love with an irreverent young gentleman with an excess bon homme. Arthur Huntingdon is not a good man, but Helen is convinced that she can improve him. At this point, I wanted to yell at her, “No, you can’t!” Arthur behave himself until shortly after their wedding, at which point his true nature starts to reveal itself. Before long, Helen is spending all of her time at Arthur’s manor, while her husband lives it up in London.

Arthur, it turns out, is a selfish, shallow, and cruel drunk. He plays with his wife’s feelings, accusing her of not loving him when she tries to curb his behavior. He starts to giver her ultimatums. But the worst is when Arthur has an affair with a married woman, takes her money, and threatens to make Helen a prisoner in their house. Arthur teaches their son to drink and swear. It’s clearly over by then. If the novel were set a hundred-odd years later, they could have divorced and been done with each other. But Helen has no legal rights and few allies. It becomes clear that something has to be done.

The diaries make it clear that Mrs. Graham is the runaway Mrs. Huntingdon and, moreover, that her husband is still alive and drinking away the fortune somewhere. Markham is still in love her and she with him. But they’re stuck because of Arthur. The ending of the book is bittersweet and wonderfully satisfying. Bronte holds you in suspense all the way to the end.

Where Charlotte and Emily’s books are the very definition of gothic, Anne’s book is a tonic of realism. As I read it, I felt like I was getting a real glimpse of what life was like for women in the 1820s and 40s. It can’t always be Elizabeth and Darcy or Jane and Rochester. There’s happiness in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, sure, but the characters have to go through fire to get there.

The star of the book is Mrs. Graham/Huntingdon. Helen feels utterly real, even to the point of annoying me every now and then before winning back my sympathy. I wonder how many women of the Brontes’ time were like her–certainly more than fiction would have us believe. It’s depressing to contemplate, but on the other hand, this is a book with important depth. It sounds so simple when you try to summarize it; it’s a book about a bad marriage. But it’s more than that. It’s about a woman in an impossible situation who actually manages to do something about it instead of pining away artistically. I don’t understand why it’s not more well known.

And I still don’t understand why people seem to like Wuthering Heights so much.

Malinche, by Laura Esquivel

Malinche

Malinche, by Laura Esquivel, is a deceptively simple book. Told almost as a folktale, this novel read like a gloss on the life of Malinche, an interpreter who worked for Hernan Cortes during the conquest of Mexico. If you’re looking for a biography, or a novel that will transport you to sixteenth century Mexico, you won’t find that here. But if you’re looking for a meditation on Aztec beliefs, syncretism, conquest, cultural misunderstanding, and gender, Malinche is the book for you.

Malinche gets a lot of blame for her role in Cortes’s success. Reading the history, one might think that events would have gone very differently if it weren’t for Malinche and the myths about Quetzalcoatl‘s return from the east. In a sense, this book might be read as an apology on her behalf. In Esquivel’s interpretation, Malinalli (La Malinche) suffers abandonment and slavery before ending up with the conquistadors. After learning Spanish, Malinalli strives to interpret not just the words but the meaning, the intent, behind the words. She gives such importance to the power of words that she sees translation as almost a religious duty, one that gods might punish her for failing at.

As events inevitable progress, Malinalli starts to feel regret for her part in the destruction of the Aztec Empire. She wonders if she should have told the truth about what the Spanish were and what they wanted. Malinalli is far from a vengeful character. More than anything else, she strikes me as a person who has risen far above their pay grade.

It’s hard to get a grip on the historical Malinche’s feelings and motivations. As I said, this is not a biography. Malinche is written in what I see as a folk tale style. The language is stripped down, but with rhetorical elements like repetition of phrases and ideas. I suspect that this book is best experienced aloud, rather than by silent reading. Even better, it should be told with the folk song “La Llorona” playing on a loop in the background. The narrative is recursive, too, progressing chronologically forwards before drifting back in time. If I had to create a timeline for this book, it would look like a stretched out spiral.

For me, Malinche was not a satisfying read. I read and enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate, especially the supernatural elements. But it didn’t work for me with this book. It seems to me that there is so much history and culture that Malinalli’s story doesn’t need stylistic or supernatural embellishments. It was hard to me to lose myself in this story. I couldn’t see Mexico when I read it. Even when Malinalli reflects on her life and her beliefs and her fears, there was nothing subtle to ponder over. When Esquivel would state, in so many works, why Cortes did this or why Malinalli did that, it seemed shallow. I suppose parts of this book would appear profound, but to me it was all surface glitter.

The Lonely Polygamist, by Brady Udall

Lonely Polygamist

Brady Udall’s The Lonely Polygamist was a difficult book for me to wrap my head around. I’m still not sure if I understand what Udall wanted to communicate. The story revolves around Golden Richard, one of his twenty-eight children, and one of his four wives. The narrative moves between these three characters and, at the end, only a few things change. One of the few conclusions I reached was that the ending of this book doesn’t matter; it’s all about the journey. And, not to give too much away about the ending, I think this book is about how life–in whatever form it takes–just goes on.

The first character we meet is Golden himself. Unlike other polygamist patriarchs I’ve seen portrayed in fiction, Golden doesn’t have a lot of religions convictions. For most of the book, he seems bewildered, more than anything else, about how his life shaped up. We see his history in small interludes, not flashbacks. In his present, Golden is organizing the construction of a brothel in Nevada–the only job on offer at the time. He is desperate to hide this information from his strict older wife and the rest of his community. Ironically, he spends most of his narrative on his own, far away from his gargantuan family. Golden isn’t much given to reflection about his family. So while there was a lot of worrying on his part about a new woman who caught his fancy and about the way his Nevada job is spiraling out of control, it’s hard to tell what he really thinks about his role as pater familias. In a way, Golden falls into polygamy the way that children used to take on their parents’ jobs, because that was the way things were done. He’s certainly not taking on plural wives for religious reasons.

Another part of the book is told from the perspective of Golden’s youngest wife, Trish. Trish was the daughter of polygamists whose mother broke away after her husband’s death. But Trish drifts back into the life after a disappointing marriage. Trish is an outsider of sorts, given that her sister-wives are at least a decade older than she is. Trish also lives in a duplex, away from the rest of the brood. Like Golden, she doesn’t reflect overmuch about her marriage. Instead, she spends most of her time waiting for a piece of Golden’s time until she meets a sweet local oddball with a fascination for explosives. But through Trish, we do get a glimpse into how the household(s) function–and fail to function. We see the rigid order of the first wife and the rebellious chaos of the second wife and the fading of the third wife.

A third part of the book is told by Golden’s son, Rusty, the family black sheep and scapegoat. This kid can never do anything right. One would think from this brief description that Rusty’s meant to gain the reader’s sympathy, but he’s a hard kid to like. He’s secretive, a little perverted, selfish, a Holden Caulfield without the vocabulary or the principles. He’s that kid, the one who smells funny and says things that are uncomfortable and bizarre. I suppose some readers might think that Rusty just needs a little attention, a little love to sort him out. But I think a little medication might be in order for this kid–or at least some counseling.

The three narrators lead such separated lives that reading The Lonely Polygamist is almost like reading three books at the same time. Only the fact that they’re part of the same sprawling family ties them together. Because none of them ponder about why they’re a family, about the religion behind it, it’s hard to know what this book is trying to say about polygamy. This is one of the hard things about this book for me. What is it trying to say? If it’s not trying to make a statement about polygamy, what is the message? With a topic like this, I have to believe that there is a reason why Udall chose polygamy. There are too many abuses in the system for the message–at least in my mind–to be that this is just another way of life, as valid as any other. When I turned the last page, I wanted to ask the author, “What are you trying to tell me?” And yet, the ending–without giving too much away–shows the Richards family carrying on after failures and deaths. They just…soldier on.

I feel a bit like I have to warn future readers. If you’re expecting Big Love on paper, this is not your book. This book is not about politics or scheming or sex. It’s about a family. Admittedly, it’s an odd family. But their stage is smaller than the stage the Hendricksons are playing on. Watching them reminded me of nothing so much as the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Lonely Polygamist perfectly illustrates the second half of that statement.

The Stranger, by Albert Camus

The Stranger

Continuing my efforts to read the books I missed as an undergraduate but should have read, I finished Albert Camus’s The Stranger last night. At first, I wondered that it was the work of the same author. The first fifty or so pages were so plain, almost entirely devoid of reflection or even adjectives.* The most interesting part of this book happens after the narrator is imprisoned. The book comes strangely to life at that point. It reminded me of the turning point in The Wizard of Oz, as if we moved from black and white into color.

For the first part of the book, until the protagonist–Meursault–kills an Arab, the writing is a very spare narrative and mostly just describes how he spends his days. The overwhelming impression I got of Meursault was that he was quite apathetic. Whenever someone asks him for his preference, he replies that he has none. When his girlfriend asks him if he loves her, Meursault replies that the word is meaningless. He has small pleasures, but nothing affects him. Even when his mother dies, Meursault doesn’t seem to feel any of the grief an ordinary person would feel. For many pages, I thought that he might be stupid, or autistic, or had some kind of affect disorder. Like the language of the book, the character really seems to come to life after he is put in jail for several months.

All the descriptions of the book I had read previously made me think that The Stranger was about the crime, with a Trial-like exploration of the judicial system. Indeed, Meursault’s trial is almost as absurd as Joseph K’s. Meursault’s victim is clearly an afterthought as the prosecutor and the judge’s are much more interested in how the protagonist reacted at his mother’s funeral. In fact, his defense lawyer exclaims at one point: “Is my client on trial for having buried his mother, or for killing a man?” (121**). As I read on, I wondered if the eponymous stranger was Meursault because no one else could understand him.

But The Stranger is more philosophical than it is absurd. As soon as I stopped trying to find a psychological explanation for Meursault, I found that I rather admired his acceptance of his death sentence. Critics will say that this is an existentialist book, but I wonder if Stoic might not be a better description. Meursault doesn’t worry about his place in the world or his purpose. He tries to appeal his sentence, but when that fails, he makes peace with his situation. Granted, Meursault doesn’t pursue virtue like a true Stoic would. But I can’t deny that he has the calmness of one. After a fascinating exchange with a chaplain who cannot accept his atheism, Meursault has this remarkable thought:

With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again. No one, no one in the world had any right to weep for her. And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again. It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indead, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. (154)

The line about the “benign indifference of the universe” particularly resonated with me. I’ve long believed in something similar myself. Like Meursault, I take comfort in it because it truly gives us free will. We make our own choices and have to live (or die) with the consequences.

Like all good books, The Stranger makes one think about what one believes. Like a great book, it makes one question what one believes. I’m sure other readers will be disturbed by this book, especially in the way that Meursault thinks about death and what happens or doesn’t happen after. The Stranger might seem a simple read, but I found it very profound.

* I apologize for the formality of my language. I’ve been watching the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice and this always happens to me.

** All quotations are from the 1965 Alfred A. Knopf edition.