Category: Listen up

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik Performed by Ruth Ann Phimister, Christine Mcmurdo Wallis, Christina Moore, Kate Forbes and James Jenner

Four narrators read back to back the recollections of five ‘Angry Housewives’ in Minnesota. Each voice adds to the prism of personalities which reflects how different five women sound from one another, even when they are reading the same books.

Unlike the women in Mary McCarthy’s The Group,  which was perhaps the first of this type of novel about women in a group, the housewives do not show the marks of a common institution. Marriage and motherhood are not finishing schools.

Although the story spans across three decades, this is not a history told through women or through books.  The Angry Housewives is a book club, but the books are pretexts for meeting and talking and eating and feeling and being.

And speaking. But narrators rarely get credit for being there. Not the narrators of this book, either. No mention on the CDs or the book cover or the Recorded Books web site of Ruth Ann Phimister, Christine McMurdo Wallis, Christina Moore, Kate Forbes and James Jenner. How very mean.

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.

At Risk by Patricia Cornwell read by Kate Reading

This short sharp tale of a dominant woman D.A. who loves political office far too well adds new personae to the genealogy of Cornwell’s anger. Monique Lamonte, a moneyed, manipulative, Harvardy alpha female; Winn, her cop investigator pretty boy with a tarot-reading grandmother and a taste for Hugo Boss and Prada; Sykes, a pugnacious fortyish blondy girl agent from Tennessee, and Miss Dog, part beagle part Shepard part deaf part blind neighborhood pet.

In the middle of orchestrating an “Any Crime, Any Time” campaign to solve old crimes and open old cases, D.A. Lamonte is raped.

How does a dominant female sound when she’s bound and spread-eagled on her own King size bed by a man with a pistol?

“I’m a whore. I’m nothing but a filthy whore…”

The stuff of fantasies for many Cornwell fans, no doubt. But all the sex takes place off-stage. And the only thing that’s really fantastic is the way forensics can read twenty year old ruffled panties a la DNA for evidence as accurate as it is damning.

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?”

Judge and Jury::James Patterson::Joe Mantegna

One of the good Patterson & Gross collaborations, with a new villain called “the Israeli” and another called “the electrician”. The descriptions of Haifa and Patagonia could have been cut out of Wiki. Joe Mantegna does adorable Italian goombas, and respectable Chechnian, Russian and Middle Eastern hoods.

Seven discs should get you through check-in, security, gate wait, boarding, and a long crippling flight in the middle seat of a United jet. By the time you pick up your baggage you’ll forget what the hero’s name is. As I did. Alors.

Rituals of the Season::Margaret Maron::CJ Critt

CJ Critt’s sweet, well enunciated, sing song voice turns even a murder mystery into a fairy tale. Once upon a time, Judge Knott (pronounced Judge not!) found a book of manners, probably given to newly engaged 19th century women preparing for wedding, marriage and domestic life.
Each chapter begins with a maxim or rule of etiquette, which sets up the story content. Manners, social customs, rituals, ceremonies, are something a bride needs to know before she becomes a member of the married class. They structure and organize her life, and yet they are not the same as law. It is interesting to discover such mores alongside the local law, interpreted and applied by Judge Knott as she prepares for her own 21st century wedding.

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Good Faith by Jane Smiley read by Richard Poe

At what point can one say that a man is a cheat? When he buys a house from you, when he tells you how to avoid paying income tax, when you help him misrepresent himself, when he helps you find a woman you can marry, when he calls you his best friend? When he complains to you about his wife with the long red hair? When he tells you that everyone trusts you, likes doing business with you, and you could have more, much more? When you close down your business to help him turn an old farm into a classy residential community? When you’re a real estate agent, and it’s 1981?

Perhaps deception should be classified as a sexual crime, as a long form of seduction. Because this is what Good Faith maps out: the leisurely seduction of an average Joe, the leading astray, or leading aside, or leading apart of a country realtor (from the Latin s?ducti?, s?ducti?n-, from s?ductus, past participle of s?d?cere, to lead astray : s?-, apart; see s(w)e- in Indo-European roots + d?cere, to lead; see deuk- in Indo-European roots.)

It was June and summer was right on time.

This is the mood of a good seduction. Not so much an act or an agency as an atmosphere, an environment, a happy economic mix: inflation, undervalued property, optimism. Jane: a combination of older sister, receptionist and tease. Marcus: a persuasive, likeable, ex IRS agent. Joe: a small-town, laid back, bill-paying Christian. A well brought up boy who dusts and smiles at buyers, widows, bankers, and government clerks. Who seduces and is seduced.

The Nora Roberts Pool

In some possible Doris Day movie about a perky blonde secretary and a rich executive bachelor there is a perpetual secretarial pool typing out Nora Roberts novels in time to Sinatra or Liszt. There is no Nora Roberts. There is a pool of Nora Roberts, a herd of Nora Roberts, a barn full of Nora Roberts….

And on the Nora Roberts farm, there is no plagiarism, no copyright, because there is no original.

Sandra Nichols Found Dead by George Higgins::George Guidall

When a lawyer and a cop reconstruct the life of a pretty, jolly slut they recover hundreds of small, dishonourable wrongs, shameful and unpretty. Sandra Nichols loved to fuck, and she liked men, and she married them. And then she left them, and started again.

Her children are a sad disarray of nervous and neurotic plaintiffs in Kyle v Wade, the wrongful death case they bring against Sandra’s last husband. Peter Wade, who wasn’t meant for Williams College, nor perhaps for this planet, would not stand trial for the murder of Sandra Nichols. Instead, Peter would be compelled to give these demented children all the money he will have had to give Sandra, if he’d divorced her, according to the prenuptual agreement he had signed. A pretty good hat trick for a criminal lawyer, newly versed in Chapter 229 section 2 of the Massachusetts Criminal Code and the 1972 Compensatory Wrongful Death Act.