Category: Listen up

Mary Peiffer reading Sue Henry

Once upon a time, in a movie made long  ago, there was a beautiful fairy who helped a poor little girl. You do not remember the movie. You remember the voice. It is the voice of Mary Peiffer.

This time the movie is not about a little girl. It is in fact not even a movie. It is a book, about a woman, who comes from Alaska, and lives in the cold,  with dogs.

Mary Peiffer’s lovely, ringing, good witch voice, turns every book into a fairy tale.  Sometimes the tale is about not so little girls who grow curiouser and curiouser. Sometimes the girls get into trouble and sometimes they almost die. But always they are found by a voice which wraps itself around them like a shawl against time.

The Beach House by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

“Don’t you know I’m going to live happily ever after anyway?”

After painting, waxing, polishing, wallpapering, and flowering up her old Nantucket house, Nan tells Sara about a man she met and loved. Sarah replies: but wouldn’t it be nice if you met him again and fell in love and lived happily ever after…?

It is then that Nan replies: “Don’t you know I’m going to live happily ever after anyway?” Thus an overgrammatical, nervously detailed book about women becomes a different kind of woman’s book. For it is a woman’s book. Men do not want to read about hypercritical wives with unemotional husbands. No, men do not want to read about the thousand layers of feelings baked into 3 women with marital problems. But then neither do women.

This is not just another old-woman-who-turns-an-old-house-into-a-bed-and-breakfast-and-finds-X (money, god, sex, success) book. This is a book about Nan, a lovely, lipsticked, free and sentimental gardener who smokes and bikes and lives in a big old house alone. Nan gathers around herself an assemblage of half couples, gay, divorced, confused and lonely. Somehow they mix and change each other — if only for the duration of a summer.

Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA by Kris Radish read by Barbara McCullough

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.

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.

Merciless by Rich Montanari read by Scott Brick

It’s always interesting to explore a place through its crime scenes. Like the not yet totally gentrified neighborhoods of Northwest Philadelphia, on the eastern bank of the Schuylkill River. Which runs through this mystery as it runs through Pennsylvania. All along the river young women are being murdered in horrible ways. Murder is always local.

Beverly Hills Dead by Stuart Woods read by Tony Roberts

The House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (on which sits Dick Nixon) is looking for Communists, and finds a few poor schmucks in Hollywood. Some Jews are inquisitioned, black-listed, and disappeared from the credits. Their words are found in screenplays by unknowns from Wyoming and Maine.

Other Jews give advise. Like Hyman Greenbaum:

Don’t buy a car until you can pay cash for it. And it should be used. You should live modestly. And don’t go to expensive restaurants unless the studio or somebody else is paying. You keep putting money in the bank. You don’t marry a co-star. You don’t buy a house until you can pay cash. You don’t ever take a job because of the location or the costar or even the director. You take jobs for good scripts, that’s all. If you can stick to that program you’ll become very rich. . . They’re going to want you to see a dentist… I’ll make them pay for it.

Good advise for any post-war generation.