Why isn’t this a Doris Day movie? Perhaps because Rock Hudson would never have accumulated old washing machines and bowling balls in the garage; and Doris Day’s anger never lasted longer than a bubble bath. Otherwise, Doris Day could have played this pretty, perky, 53 year old wife who breaks dishes, gets so mad at her husband she can barely speak, gossips with girlfriends, keeps herself trim, honks twice every time she drives past her sister’s house, and is everybody’s favorite third grade teacher in Parker, PA. And of course Doris Day would have redecorated the house after Rock Hudson moves into the next door neighbor’s bachelor house — during the break up phase. There is never any doubt that boy and girl will end up …. married.
T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton read by Judy Kaye
Kinsey is a tough dame. Brutally honest about herself and therefore about others. She’s twice divorced, and is determined to stay that way. As Kinsey says: “I’m difficult”. She says it to account for her reluctance to marry for the third time. Also because she likes to spend time alone. T is for Trespass is the clearest, most most republican, expression of the Kinseyian ethos: pay back what you borrow; don’t cheat your boss or your government; be neighborly; trust noone (or almost noone); exercise if necessary, eat what you love.
Social Crimes by Jane Stanton Hitchcock read by Barbara Rosenblat
All About Eve, Manhattan style. A generous but unwitting socialite wife is betrayed by a younger version of herself. Exiled from high society, kicked off the boards of the most desirable charities, she obsesses about the woman who took her place. Fat, friendless, and poor, she plots the woman’s downfall.
The Echo Maker by Richard Powers read by Bernadette Dunne
She is a portrait of competence. She works for the big distributor of computers that packaged itself after cows. She has a knack for customer relations. She enjoys convincing users, individual by individual, that the big company wants nothing more than to make nice and relate, long term. She has removed all excess from her life, all things huge, or insubstantial.
We find her in a hospital room waiting for her brother to come back to life, as if she is watching some overlong Swedish film… A problematic brother, liked by animals, but “…when it came to humans no one knew what to make of the boy…. “. The problematic boy, Mark, has been damaged.
The language is full bodied, rich, ripe, generously given. All in good time. Bernadette Dunne, as usual, is remarkable. She narrates people thinking in low, cool tones, as if she were playing jazz for a small group of friends.
Slowly, slowly, the author mixes in big words, medical words, technical words to explain the misadventures and mistakes of the brain, configuring the brain as a fabulous animal which never stays the same. Mark’s brain is not what it was before the accident; it cannot recognize the familiar as familiar, cannot recognize his sister as the same sister, his friends as the same friends, his dog as the same dog. This misrecognition effects another: the sister who is not recognized by her brother slowly doubts her own identity, which dissolves into a piece of a town, a piece of a bed, a piece of a river…
In the middle of fields of Nebraska wheat, one theory of the brain folds into another, from a brain that tells stories, to a brain which functions like boy scouts waving their flashlights in the dark, to the brain as a series of mappings of other brain-maps,
My brain, all those split parts trying to convince each other, dozens of lost scouts waving crappy flashlights in the woods at night….
The brother, the sister, his girlfriend, a nurse’s aid, a cognitive neurologist from SUNY Stony Brook having a mid-life identity crisis…all of them unable to recognize themselves, unable, too, to recognize other beings, or other species… Hence, too, an ecological crisis: all species depend upon recognition, or go extinct….
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon performed by Peter Riegert
1948 is a strange time to be a Jew. For Lonzman, the hero of this tale, it is the year the Jews in Israel are driven into the sea, and get a small beachside strip of Alaska as compensation. It is the year Lonzman’s father arrives in downtown Sitka where blue kerchiefed Jewesses sing Negro spirituals with jewish lyrics that paraphrase Lincoln and Marx. It is the year Lonzman’s father plays chess “like a man with a toothache, hemhorroids, gas, and a headache whose moves are like successive pieces of terrible news for the survivor Jews who play him. The survivors populate The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with their chess, their holy books, their rabbis, their clans, their latkes, their typical and atypical habits, their policemen, their crimes.
But I’m curious, do you really feel you’re waiting for Messiah?
It’s Messiah, what else can you do but wait?
And Palestine? When Messiah comes all the jews go back there, to the Promised Land, fur hats and all?
I hear Messiah cut a deal with the beavers…
No more fur.
Landsman and Berkot confront Schmerle, the doorkeeper of the Verbove Rebbe, whose son, Mendele, has been found heroin-dead in a seedy hotel. Schmerle
“… looks east, looks west, he checks with the mandolin man on the roof…
“There is always a man on the roof with a semi-automatic mandolin.”
The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman performed by Mitchell Greenberg
Rina Lazarus is a religious woman who cleans the ritual bath, cooks huge Sabbath meals, and teaches Math at a Yeshiva for boys in “Jewtown”, near L.A. She dresses modestly, covers her hair with a kerchief or a wig, and celebrates the Sabbath by hosting huge home cooked meals for the rabbis of the Ohavei Torah community. After a woman is raped while walking home from the bathhouse, Rina finds herself in the middle of a rape investigation, helping the red-haired goy-detective in charge. Peter Decker is enchanted by Rina, who reveals herself to him as a lover of the Book — which is what “Ohavei Torah” means.
A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham
Imagine a big black woman, Myrna from Montreal, who decides to drive South, but feels peckish after an hour and a half and so stops and bumps into a one-vache town, a fairy-tale town:
Three Pines had what she craved. It had croissants and cafe au lait. It had steak frites and the New York Times. It had a bakery, a bistro, a B & B, a general store, it had peace and stillness and laughter. It had great joy and great sadness ….
It had sweet gay couples and poor married artists and old unmarried women; it had village size problems and village size evil and village style murder. It had Christmas, and at Christmas, “homes full of people there and not there,” yakking away in English and French. Myrna never leaves. Inspector Gamache, on the other hand, comes and goes. Each time there is a murder.
The bistro was his secret weapon in tracking down murderers. Not only in Three Pines but in every town and village in Quebec. First he found a comfortable cafe or brasserie or bistro. Then he found the murderer. Because Armand Gamache knew something that others didn’t. At the root of each murder was an emotion. Warped no doubt, twisted and ugly, but an emotion. One so powerful it had driven a man to make a ghost. Gamash’s job was to collect the evidence. But also to collect the emotions. And the only way he knew to do that was to get to know the people. To watch and listen, to pay attention. And the best way to do that was in a deceptively casual manner, in a deceptively casual setting. Like the bistro.
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta read by Campbell Scott
Firm writing, good characters, heavy social issues, but no story.
Meet Ruth. A divorced mother who teaches sex education at a public high school is more or less forced to teach abstinence according to a rosy if delusional Christian fundamentalist agenda. Meet Tim: divorced, saved and reformed by an evangelic Jesus-loving pastoral group, coaching soccer. Imagine supper:
Tonight was Lemon Pepper Mama, a recipe she had gotten from Five Hundred More Ways To Cook Chicken or It Doesn’t Matter How You Cook It It’s Still the Same Crap or Eat Chicken Till You Die. Because there were nights when that was what it felt like. Like you were just some stupid animal put on earth to eat a few hundred thousand animals who were even stupider than you were, then to disappear without a trace…
And so we are left in between chicken, abstinence and temptation.
Dead Street by Mickey Spillane read by Richard Ferrone
This was supposed to be about four retired couples, cops and wives, living in Florida and solving crimes (not cases). But Spillane turned it into a study of memory. Imagine a blinded amnesiacal lover secreted away inside a community of retired cops in New Jersey, and rediscovered by her old boyfriend after 25 years? What remains when memory disappears?
How does one lover make himself remembered to another?
If the boyfriend has the grainy voice of Richard Ferrone, and the nouns of a Mickey Spillane novel: doll, honey, kitten, what remains is instinct. And the girlfriend responds to being called a specific name by a specific voice. Hey, doll. All right, kitten.
The Race by Richard North Patterson Narrated by Michael Boatman
Slow, cloddish, cumbersome and overcooked dialogue stretches across this morality play about an ugly presidential election. Add the ‘aching sadness’ and ‘fatal failures’ and ‘eyes shining with tears’ of flat white characters, but read on. Hear the slimy campaign advise of slimy campaign managers:
“Girlfriend is bad. Black girlfriend is worse. Black actress girlfriend is the fucking trifecta.”
Yep, the divorced war hero candidate couples with a beautiful black actress in the middle of the campaign. Guess what happens?