Category: Fiction

Mystery Solved – sadly

The Mystery of Grace by Charles de Lint is the story of a young woman (Grace) who dies unexpectedly but, instead of Heaven or Nirvana or nothingness, what she gets is a rebirth in her apartment – but in a world inhabited only by all those who died in the same small area of town in the last 50 years.  A twist on a familiar theme, it is the story of star-crossed lovers with a serious impediment – one of them is dead.

I have already sung the praises of de Lint once or twice in this blog, so I won’t tell you again how much I love his work and how I feel like some of his books have literally changed my life and my way of thinking.  Someplace To Be Flying and Forests of the Heart are books I will have to bequeath to someone, because they will be in my book collection until the day I die (hmm, maybe I’ll have them cremated with me).  Unfortunately, The Mystery of Grace fell short of the incredibly high bar de Lint has written for himself.

I am most certainly not saying that TMoG is a bad book. It is not.  It is a good book.  Grace is a girl who loves hot rods (as I do) and actually works on them (as I do not), and the guy she falls for is someone I would probably fall for.  But as I read the book, I felt like I’d read it before – not the details, but the general storyline (TMoG is brand new).  At first, I chalked it up to having read and re-read the 50 stories or whatever that de Lint has written in his decades of writing (he has lots of short story collections in addition to a dozen or more novels).  Then I picked up Promises to Keep this week – another de Lint I thought I hadn’t read before. Well, I had read it before – it’s really more of a novella, published as a young adult fiction novel.  It is the story of Jilly (a recurring character in many of de Lint’s Newford books) and how she is offered the perfect life by a friend of hers – a life in a world where some of the dead go after they pass on.  The bones of this world – which Jilly ultimately rejects – are the same as the afterworld in TMoG.  That’s why it all seemed so familiar.

It’s clear that the idea showed up in Promises to Keep, and de Lint developed it much more fully (and more interestingly) in TMoG. but it still bugs me.  It smacks of a lack of ideas – a need to fulfill a contract and recycling stories to do it.   And I expect a lot more from my uber-favorite author – probably unfairly.

And while I’m venting, the gear-head stuff in the book does not ring quite true.  It reads like something very well-researched, but not as believable as almost everything else in his work.  I am a gear-head, I love it, and it felt just a little bit ‘tacked on’ as something cool rather than something real and true to a person.  And in general, the book felt thin – like the world and the characters in general lacked a certain depth.  I’m sure this is partly due to my being spoiled by the Newford stories, where I have dozens of stories worth of history that inform even the short stories.   But this one reads more like something he wrote in the early years – when he wrote short stories.  His writing (like most great writers) has improved over the years, so this one would have been a fabulous short story, but is instead a not-so-fabulous novel.  It pains me to say anything negative about my boy, but I won’t pretend that I loved TMoG. If someone else had written it, I would have said it was a de Lint rip-off that did not quite live up to the master.  That the master himself wrote it does not make it masterful.

Just Can’t Find the Love

Did you ever read a book that you didn’t like – and you didn’t know why?  It doesn’t happen to me very often (I can usually tell you exactly why I didn’t like it), but this is the story of one of those books.

Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd is a book I read in my graduate Contemporary Fiction class.  The book follows several writers in a few different eras, all connected to each other.  Sounds good so far, right?   Thomas Chatterton ( a real person) was a young poet in the mid-1700s that invented a medieval poet monk and published poems he himself had written, claiming that he’d found them in a church.  The poems were very popular and critically acclaimed.  Chatteron died before his 18th birthday – apparently a suicide – so we’ll never know if his talent would have grown.  He is known as a forger, but of course he wasn’t really a forger.  He just lied about being the ghost writer for a non-existent person.

We also meet George Meredith, a real poet who posed for a ‘portrait’ of Chatterton fifty years later, painted by Henry Wallis (the portrait image is on the cover of the book).  In modern-day England , we have Charles the poet (fictional) and his family as well as Harriet the novelist (also fictional).  Harriet is getting old and still ruled by her guilt and shame for plagiarizing the plots of a few of her novels, and Charles is ill and thinks he’s discovered new information about Thomas Chatterton – like the fact that he faked his death and wrote some of the most famous works of the late 1700s pretending to be famous poets.

The whole book is an exploration of art: What makes art great?  Do we read/see art differently based on biographical information about the artist?  Where is the line between inspiration and plagiarism?  Is any work of art ever truly original?  And how can you really know, even if you are the one who ‘created’ it?  I don’t think there are any simple answers to these questions, and the book does not try to answer them, it merely gives the reader plenty of food for thought.

I can’t explain why Chatterton does nothing for me.  It’s not a bad book. It’s not a boring book.  It has interesting themes and characters, and my favorite professor loves it.   I reread it to see if I could figure out what I missed the first time around.  I did like it better this time around.  But in the end, it just didn’t excite me.  No light bulb in my head.  Maybe because I didn’t feel like Ackroyd really added anything to the conversation on art he was so interested in.  Maybe because all the writers in the book are sad creatures that come to sad endings (not poetically sad or lyrically sad, just sad).  I don’t know.  Still.

A Master of Illusion

Paul Auster sticks in my mind as one of the most challenging authors I read while working towards my B.A. in English.  We read The New York Trilogy and I liked him mostly because he was really difficult, yet I could understand him. Not to say it wasn’t a great book – it was – just a very complicated, multi-layered text full of obscure references and stylistic flourishes not always easy to understand.  When I had to write my first ten-page paper ever, I chose his book because I knew there was more to write about in that book (all 384 pages) than any two other novels we read that semester.  I got an A, and my professor (thank you, Patty) suggested I present it in a Student Showcase, which I did.  Maybe that was more information that you really needed to explain my positive associations with Auster, but I have a bit more.  I picked up The Brooklyn Follies early this year and thoroughly enjoyed it – another great book by Auster, but much less challenging (though no less interesting).

The Book of Illusions I picked up on that fabulous sale rack at Powell’s.  Now looking at it, the eyeball shot on the cover brings hints of Lost (which I’ve recently become addicted to and watched voraciously for weeks on end).  I must have bought it before I started watching that show, because it never occurred to me before.  I suppose at some point you’d like me to actually tell you about the book I read?  If you insist.

I really enjoyed The Book of Illusions.  It is the story of a man who loses his wife and children when their plane (which he was not on) crashes.  He drinks and drifts for almost a year until he sees a clip from an old silent film on TV that actually makes him chuckle for the first time since their deaths.  He becomes a bit obsessed with the comedian in the film and decides to find and watch all the films he made.  In the process, he discovers the actor is alive and is invited to meet him.  It is a sad, powerful story about grief and guilt and the strange things it makes us do.

I liked the book for several reasons.  It is written almost completely in the first-person (as many of Auster’s books are) and the internal monologue rings true,  painting a vivid picture of David’s internal life.  The narrative is convincingly erratic (like the thought processes of a human being) without being inconsistent or difficult to follow. I love a story that takes the scenic road to get to the point and doesn’t always give you clear directions.  His descriptions of the movies he ‘sees’ are so rich, you feel as if you are watching the films with him.

Some of the themes embedded in this narrative are also favorites of mine – the mechanics of how and why stories work, and why they are important.  The conviction that we all write our own lives (stories), and therefore we can change our lives if we work hard enough.  Affirmation that – regardless of the present moment – the future always offers hope.  So it’s not surprising that I devoured the book and closed it feeling happy, uplifted and wishing I could write half as well.  He is never boring, never predictable, yet entirely convincing.

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Bad Bev

I’ve been a big slacker lately when it comes to keeping my blog up-to-date – partly because it’s no longer a part of my real job and partly because it was making reading feel like an obligation – like I was a bad girl if I didn’t blog about what I was reading.

Not reading is absolutely not an option – that would be akin to being cheerful in the morning or not drinking tea.  But not blogging – hell, that’s as easy as making toast.  To add to the fun, writing has always been a weird thing for me.  I love it, but the avoidance maneuvers I have in place make it difficult to be disciplined about getting it done – especially if there is no real ‘deadline.’  School papers, magazine articles, cover letters – these all come with built-in deadlines that force me to sit in front of the computer and shift gears from the Verbal Bev to the Written Bev. And the Written Bev is a happy girl, it’s just the gear-shifting that is a significant speed-bump.

I know this is yet another thing that – as a supposedly-mature adult – I should be doing.  That is, living up to my promises (not blogging; one need not be mature nor an adult to blog, and many a mature adult has made the cut without a blog to their name, phew!).  And I’m pretty good at living up to my promises and responsibilities – except when they are promises to myself, and responsibilities that affect only me.  No one gets fired if I don’t write, my ‘A’ is not in jeopardy if I go 10 days without updating my blog.  I just have to listen to the increasingly-irritated voice in my head that says I’m a loser for not doing it.  It’s the same voice that yells when I send birthday presents late and don’t call my mother.  I can ignore a certain level of bitching, but when the volume gets loud, something has to be done (and we all know I’m not going to call my mother).

So, to recap some things I’ve read lately – that I’ve decided in my all-powerful position as The-Boss-of-Me do not require a full write-up on this here fabulous blog:

I read the entire series of The Chronicles of the Cheysuli by Jennifer Roberson, borrowed from a fellow sci-fi fan and infinitely enjoyable.  The books tell the story of a magical race (the Cheysuli, of course) who have been persecuted and lost many of their powers. If they can fulfill the multi-generational prophesy, there will be peace and a return of powers they’ve lost.    No deep-thinking required here – like dessert for the hard-working brain.  The first book and the last two books were the best (there are eight total).

I re-read Jack of Kinrowan by Charles de Lint.  This is a two-book compilation of Jack the Giant-Killer and Drink Down the Moon.  JoK is a fun re-telling of the Jack and the Beanstalk fairy tale in a modern urban setting.  Not his greatest stuff, but – again – a good read.

I have also read The Book of Illusion and Outliers, but those deserve a space all their own, so look for them soon.

I apologize to those oodles of faithful readers out there who have come recently to BoB and been disappointed – but I can’t promise it won’t happen again.  I may be a slacker, but I’m not a liar.  Happy Reading!

Pardon me while I Bitch

How could you resist a book with the name Bitch Posse? Especially with the dozens of accolades plastered on the back and inside flap.

The premise is good – three women, best friends in high school, who experience a tragedy that tears them apart.  They lead separate lives, but must eventually get back together before they can be happy.  Who doesn’t have one friend from when they were young that they still miss?  Most of the women I know – and many of the men – realize how much emptier their lives would be without a best friend in their life.  Humans have a penchant for the What If? game, and many of us know how ugly those other lives might have been without our best friend to help us make the right choices.

Well, I’m sad to say that this is not the book it could have been.  What we have are three adult women who are incredibly self-destructive, much like they were as young adults. Yes, they all had crappy parents and terrible childhoods, but none of them seems to have a clue how to be honest with themselves or anyone else.  We spend about 165 pages each on the teen years and their adult tragedy, and maybe five pages on them reconnecting and starting to put their lives back together.  Ridiculous.

And the worst thing – in my opinion – is that fact that there are dozens of sex scenes in the book, and NOT A SINGLE ONE is healthy or emotionally satisfying for the women involved. Not one.  How pathetic is that?  Hot, crazy sex – well-written, to be sure! – but it is either statutory rape, drug-enabled, sexual harassment or some other kind of emotionally destructive interaction.  It’s disgusting.  There is plenty of that kind of sex out there – in real life and in fiction of all kinds – but in a book that pretends to be about the redeeming qualities of friendship, at least some of the sex should be empowering and life-affirming.  The one semi-healthy relationship in the book only give us one incidence of that couple having sex – and it is the first time they meet, in the college library without a word exchanged.  That is the best this book has to offer.

My bitch posse is a much happier, healthier group to hang with, and anyone who thinks these ladies have it good needs a shrink and a real friend.