Category: Clever

Le Mariage by Diane Johnson read by Suzanne Toren

Yes, this is about a French woman who is preparing to be married, about the dozens of chores, duties, invitations, financial arrangements, foods, realtors, contracts and miscommunications fringing the prolonged event called a ‘wedding’. But it is more about the bureaucracy of French life, the stiff protocols, the delicate rules of engagement, the intricacies of public manners and traditions, and the entire merde-ridden fantasy of a plan of the couple.

It is, in short, about the beginning of one couple at the intersection of many others, slowly or not so slowly decomposing, when this couple is located in France, at a time when Americans were even less popular than usual….

Americans weren’t popular this season… The U.S. was embarked on a rescue mission in the Balkans that was seen by the French as a barely submerged drive for world domination…

Tim, the American reporter on the brink of marrying a Parisian woman who buys things in the Pouc, the flea-market, and sells them at high prices to decorators et al., is accused of his intrusive, neo-colonialist birthplace at a party where he meets another American ex-patriate, Clara, the beautiful, vulnerable, devoted wife of a rich, vulgar Hollywood director.

David Rakoff, Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Grass soup is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a recipe for food of last resort that my father has apparently squirrelled away somewhere. I have never actually seen this recipe but it was referred to fairly often when I was a child. Should everything else turn to shit, we could always derive sustenance from nutritious grass soup… At heart, it’s an anxious romantic fantasy that disaster and total financial ruin lurk just around the corner. But when they do come, they will have all the stark beauty and domestic fine feeling of a Dickens novel….

Hide by Lisa Gardner read by Maggie-Meg Reed

A family is a system. For Annabelle, aka Tanya, aka Sienna aka Sophia, it is a rigorously cheerful, rigorously protective, rigorously mobile system. It packs up and moves every 18 months. Until Kansas City, when the system’s mother drinks herself to death, and the rules are preserved by the father and the daughter.

The 32 year old remains of the system is now a woman, who wants to live in the suburbs,  plant roses, and forbid her husband to buy suitcases.

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen read by Carol Monda

This is a charming very digestable story about one sister told by another. The sister in the spotlight is a freckled lovable morning news show host, with a perpetual trousseau of people who dress her, praise her, and advertise her friendship. A black limo brings her from Central Park West to the television studio and back. The other sister rides the subway everywhere, works at a battered women’s shelter, and dates a cop. Her’s is a pedestrian perspective.

The poor sister looks at the rich sister succeed, and then, one day, fail. Accidentally on purpose, pretty, married, red-haired Megan Fitzmaurice says “fucking asshole” on morning TV, live, just before going to a commercial and just after interviewing a married California millionaire and his pregnant surrogate girlfriend.

It is not surprising that there is a release of glee and ressentiment from the usual fans and friends of the successful. What is surprising is the resentment the successful feel toward the incompetent, the ineffectual, the unproductive. Drunk but articulate, Megan tells her sister:

You’re the one who gets to have the illusions. I’m the one who has to deal with reality. That’s our deal. Someone has to be the bitch so someone else gets to be the nice one. Someone has to be the one who pushes so someone else gets to be the one who takes it easy. Someone has to be the driven one so someone else can take their time, and figure things out, and follow their bliss. ..Someone has to be in charge so someone else can relax. Someone has to be willing to do everything so someone else can do nothing.

This could be the New Yorker’s mating call. (Although it may have originated in New Jersey: “Trenton makes, the world takes”)

Interesting, eh? The huge burden of those charged with making things, and making things happen. Even when it seems as if they are only reading the news out loud.

The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler::George Guidall

As the eighties crash down around him in images of newly divorced women and unusably long nails, Macon emerges as a peculiar species of American male bent on reorganizing the world. Author of guidebooks for businessmen who hate to travel, Macon Leary writes about the latest KFC opening in Paris and the whitest hotels in London. He works at home. He micro-manages his world and everything in it. He reduces foreignness. He is, in fact, a perfect mascot of a decade of globalization, OCD and telecommuting.

His son dies. His wife leaves. His dog becomes passive-aggressive. He meets an outrageous, frizzy, single mother who trains dogs and talks too much and wobbles on high heels. He takes her son shopping. He doesn’t change.

Ethan was dead and gone but Macon was still holding up shirts saying “This one?” “This one?” “This one?”

PMS Outlaws::Sharyn McCrumb read by Barbara Rosenblat

A very clever book, horribly named.
Holly the perky divorced real estate agent shows Bill a very very big house after Bill’s partner tells him to buy Tara for their new law office. “Think what this house says about the people who live here….!” she says.

It says that they have spent a lot of money on a really big house and now they will spend even more money to keep it from falling slowly to bits. It says that they probably want to brag about owning the house to a lot of people they don’t like very much, so that those people will envy them and feel bad that their own houses are not so grand. This house could generate a lot of bad feelings…

Meanwhile, Bill’s newly widowed and melancholic sister, Elizabeth, has checked herself into a mental asylum, where she meets Emma O., who explains that she’s inside for the same reason that most women are: “I’m in here for not being beautiful.”

When you get right down to it there is only one universal currency, says Emma.
And that is?
Beauty. Beauty is the one status symbol that cannot be taken away. If you’re beautiful you can be set down anywhere in the world without your ID or your credit cards and people will treat you well… Anyhow, pretty people matter. The rest of us don’t.

Elizabeth thinks that Emma O would probably be a lot more useful to therapists outside the institution, drumming up business by making homely women even more depressed….

Friends in High Places by Donna Leon::Anna Fields

Venice is an old small town of old small sins. The Venice, that is, of Commissario Guido Brunetti, who may want no more of life than to read Xenophon and wait for his wife to come home from the Rialto with soft shell crabs. It is a Venice of officials, of officialism, and of greed. For Venetians learned very early to acquire, and to hoard.

There are many different kinds of greed. Consider, for example, the beautiful, intellectual greed of Paola, Guido’s wife of more than 20 years, who for a period of more than a month deserted her husband and family…

…in order to systematically read her way through, at his count, eighteen sea novels dealing with the unending years of war between the British and the French.

Or the greed of the tourists who pack the Rialto.

Why do they go to Rialto? Don’t they have markets where they come from? Don’t they sell food?

And then there is the greed of an emotional, protected, inefficient, aging political system and the customary ways it has worked itself into the persons and personalities of a Venetian type.

Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon::David Colacci

It is not unusual to hear unflattering descriptions of Americans in the press, but when did Americans get so ugly in fiction? Consider a white haired couple who seem to be wearing each other’s clothes in Donna Leon’s Blood from a Stone:

The woman wore a flannel checked shirt and thick woolen slacks, while the man wore a pink V-necked sweater and white tennis shoes. Both apparently had had their hair cut by the same hand. One could not say that hers was longer, it was merely less short.

It is not merely that the Americans are not pretty. Not merely that they are overweight, asexual, loud and wear white shoes. Underneath all that brute unloveliness is their tastelessness, their undercivilized nature. As if they were taken out of the oven too soon.

What, all because of the white shoes?

No, no. Nevertheless, it might be time for Americans to take a hard look at their representations in popular fiction. Often these representations are shameful. Often they are insulting. And often, they are true.

Nevil Shute No Highway read by Robin Bailey

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….

— John Masefield

Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.

Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.

India Knight’s My Life on a Plate read by Jill Tanner

More than a little over the top, Clara Hutt is dropping her 2 boys off this morning wearing her pajama bottoms (again) and wondering (again) why all the other mothers can arrive at school with perfectly starched blouses and expertly applied makiage. Not now, Darling, I’m Paaaarking,” and again, “I AM PAAARKING,” and again “Stop it, Charlie, don’t make me want to break your legs.”

There are so many things wrong with this picture that the fact that Clara doesn’t speak to her children like the mummies in books is, well, funny. Indeed, Charlie is six and already has a “vast panoply of hideous, faintly disturbing, terms of abuse.” “You tiresome retard” he says to his brother. Or to some hapless toddler on a play date: “God! You exasperating creature! What is it? Talk for God’s sake!! God. God. Bloody God!” She is, of course, to blame she thinks, while she watches Naomi The Perfect Mother and Crossing Guard doing her pelvic floor exercises. Hup two three four and hoooooolddd.

I think Clara is darling. In perfectly bad faith for the nought generation, Clara has all the elements of a mad Greek family member. But she is English, and thanks to Jill Tanner’s drawn out vowels and enthusiastic syntax, we are happy to relocate our tragic flaws.

Clara’s mother is, on the other hand, global.