Books: “Solar” by Ian McEwan

by anneMoore on April 25, 2011

Unexpected book grief. Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is that rare thing: a wickedly funny satire about science featuring a wholly unlikeable main character. I loved every page of it.

When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and his public comments about women’s intellect has made him a reviled household name. Even a boondoggle to a polar region, to witness global warming, turns sour: Beard mangles the skin of his penis when it freezes to his zipper.

And he keeps getting fatter.

Why read on? I fell for the lunacy of Beard’s situation. He’s a snob. It’s great fun seeing him brought to his knees by wives, lovers, thinkers, artists, outdoorsmen, doctors, business associates, scientists and the young daughter he most certainly did not agree to father.

Charmed by a serial adulterer? I was. Beard pines for his wife, nursing himself with excess wine and late night television, listening to Patrice dress for her lover and leave the house. ”No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have.”

Same with his misadventures in the polar region. Always the last to arrive, in ill-fitting outerwear and cracked goggles, the one who can’t find the “start” button on his ski-doo: Beard tugged at my heartstrings.

I even bought into his complicity in framing Patrice’s lover for a murder.

Not so much his theft of a dead colleague’s research, which he’ll use to create an energy source that could save the planet. Couldn’t he share credit?

Of course not: Beard is liar, thief, cheater, glutton. Beard is the Military/Industrial Complex: brilliant but uncaring, consuming, destroying, polluting.

And he keeps getting fatter.

“As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.”

McEwan is one of our finest living authors, smart and accessible. His blockbuster “Atonement,” and smaller works such as “Saturday” and “On Chesil Beach” are skillfully told, but serious, even grave.

“Solar” is playful, outrageous. McEwan tells it with great calm, one nutty situation rolling into another. It’s a delicious situation: a man who won’t save himself may hold the key — which he stole! — to saving the planet.

A very funny, uncomfortable read. (My friend Libby hated it.)

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Half a Life by Darin Strauss

by anneMoore on April 4, 2011

It’s no fun throwing daggers at a flawed book but I spent $22 and a few days of my vacation making my way through Darin Strauss’s slender memoir, Half a Life. A better title would be: Half a Memoir.

At 18, in the last days of high school’s senior year, Strauss drives his buddies to a mini-golf course. Bike rider Celine Zilke, 16, swerves into traffic and collides with Strauss’s car. Celine dies; Strauss is held blameless. Strauss finishes school, goes to prom, attends college, dates a lot of girls, publishes novels, marries, fathers twins…and still can’t shake the ghost of Celine Zilke.

Reduced to its essence, this sounds like an interesting read, right? Add Celine’s mother’s admonition to Strauss, to live doubly, and I’m hooked.

But Strauss’s story is so superficial I felt like I was floating above it instead of getting sucked into it.

I bought the book because I’d liked the first page so much. “The breeze did its open-window work on the hair behind my neck and ears. We had a month before high-school graduation. I was at the wheel.” It seemed Strauss would peel back and explore the magic and misery of high school’s senior year. Nope.

Strauss floats over his life; we don’t know his parents, his sister, his friends, the women he dates and drives away with his awkward retelling of the accident. Wife Susannah is the sole dimensional person.

Most problematic for this tale: Strauss didn’t know Celine, and by the end of the book, neither do we. The dead girl is an object in this story; it becomes grotesque reading about his inability to put Celine, and the accident that caused her death, to rest. On and on and on and over and over again: his grief seems like extreme navel-gazing.

Strauss ties up the story by submitting it to us as his cure. (Ew.) He tells us that victims of “complicated grief” make a tape of their story, listen to it, then put it on a shelf. They own it. This book is Strauss’s tape. Now I own it.

Reading this reminded me of why I avoid most memoirs. They tell the story that was, instead of fiction’s what could be.

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Chicago: Unabridged Bookstore

by anneMoore on March 22, 2011

I confess: I loved Borders. I spent many hours and countless dollars there.

Not the store on North Avenue so much, but the one on Michigan Avenue. HIgh ceilings, four full floors of pricey real estate, a cafe with a spectacular view of the avenue, deep collections of poetry, travel, photography and fiction (who cares about the rest, really?)

True, the checkout area was littered with tarot cards and packaged candy and beaded book thongs. And the checkout experience was on par with airline security screening.

Even so, Borders on Michigan Avenue was my nerd heaven: a huge bookstore on the same stretch as Neiman Marcus, Tiffany’s, Ralph Lauren, Dior, Chanel.

And now it’s gone.

What’s a book junkie to do?

Barnes & Noble on Clybourn? Ugh. Save for the original Barnes & Noble in New York, I can’t stand B &N. They’re all the same: beige, and poorly stocked. (For me. See above.) Except for a collector set of J.D. Salinger for my son’s 18th birthday, B&N never surprises me and typically disappoints. I can’t find the book; I can’t even find the section the book would be in.

Setting off for a week in the sun, I needed a few new books. So did my tween daughter. It was too late to order from Amazon, so we went to another North Side neighborhood to a store that’s been selling books since 1980. Unabridged Bookstore, 3251 N. Broadway, Chicago is three adjoined storefronts. Gay and lesbian titles is a focus. One room is devoted to children’s books and young adult books; their offerings are wide and deep.

My daughter found more books than she’d set out for. “Two walls of young adult books!” Shelved within those was Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” I hadn’t thought of it as a young read, but we scanned the first few pages and found it just right for her.

Fiction! I found books newly in paperback, including Ian McEwan’s “Solar” (sounds wicked) and Julie Orringer’s “The Invisible Bridge,” a new favorite among my best reader friends. On display, I picked up Darrin Strauss’s memoir, “Half a Life.” I loved the first page; I had to have it. Also “New York Stories,” an Everyman Pocket Library I’d never seen before.

Unabridged clerks are knowledgeable, helpful, approachable. Checking out felt special, even cozy; we were the only ones at the register!

Alex and I left with a heavy bag. We’ll be back.

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Books: Rona Jaffe’s “The Best of Everything”

by anneMoore on March 18, 2011

Do you like television’s “Mad Men?” I sure do.

Imagine my delight, then, to fall into Rona Jaffe’s first novel, “The Best of Everything” (1958). Set in the early Fifties, the story follows a handful of working girls at a Manhattan publishing house.

Leisurely told, Jaffe (1931-2005) has a light touch with heavy themes. I lapped it up.

Caroline Bender makes her way to her first day of work on a “cold, foggy midwinter morning in New York, the kind that makes you think of lung ailments.” That wry tone is the voice of this engaging read. Caroline is a recent college graduate whose heart was broken by her Harvard man, who sailed away for a European summer and returned married to a Texas oil heiress.

What’s a Radcliffe gal to do?

Live at home and work in the city. “The job was more than an economic inconvenience, it was an emotional necessity.”

Also at the publishing house: Mary Agnes, the office gossip, saving up for her wedding in two years. Barbara, divorced, mother of baby Hillary. April and Gregg, sometime actresses, who take temp work at the publishing house to pay rent.

With the exception of the deliciously lazy and mean editor Amanda Farrow, the office is run by “Mad Men” characters. Mr. Shalimar (really!) liquors up the young typists and impresses them with tales of his friendship with Eugene O’Neill. Shalimar manhandles all level of female employees, after hours, and crawls under the table at a company party, like a dog, to admire a girl’s legs. He’s a fool. He’s also the boss. More likable but no less damaged is Mike Rice, an editor, who falls for Caroline. A divorced father living in a hotel, Mike drinks so prodigiously I quit trying to measure.

Caroline is interested in Mike, but pines for Eddie Harris, her Harvard man. She strings along pallid but decent Paul and teases movie idol John Cassaro. Meanwhile, a married ad exec pursues Barbara. Mary Agnes finally marries. April falls for socialite Dexter Key, who seduces her, gets her pregnant, arranges the abortion, then casually dumps her. Afterwards, April goes on a boy bender that made me blush.

Gregg’s love affair with Broadway producer David Wilder Savage is a lovely and tragic sub story. He loves Gregg, but her neediness is so extreme he has to let her go. She stalks him, disastrously.

The end belongs to Caroline: it’s wild and wonderful, surprising but fitting.

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Dining: Vincent bistro Chicago

by anneMoore on March 3, 2011

When was the last time you stumbled on, or into, a great restaurant? It’s the foodie’s curse to know about every new place to try, and why.

That’s what put four of us in a far north Chicago neighborhood, hoping to score platters of mussels, venison ribs and craft beers at Hop Leaf (5148 N Clark Street.) Hop Leaf is a first come, first serve tavern and Saturday night we hit a two hour wait. The bar was so crowded it wasn’t even worth staying for one of those enticing house brews. www.hopleaf.com.

Winter in Chicago is no time to be traipsing an unfamiliar neighborhood looking for a place to eat, but that’s what we did, sloshing and slipping north on Clark Street, from Uptown to Andersonville. Our friend Keith wanted to try Great Lake pizza and knew it was nearby. Jacqui called; there we’d have a 15 minute wait to be seated.

We arrived, and indeed, they would seat us at some point. Problem is, there’s no place to wait inside Great Lake. That’s an observation, not a complaint: Great Lake is spare, serene and holds only an eight-seat communal table. (1477 W. Balmoral Avenue.)

We spilled back into the cold wet night and found, next door, an inviting bistro with not one person sitting at the bar. Surely we four could sit, drink, talk and wait for our table at the ethereal pizza place.

Where were we? Vincent, 1475 W. Balmoral Avenue.

Waiters passed us, bearing platters of mussels. Isn’t that what I’d set out for? A couple sat down beside us at the bar and ordered dinner: more mussels, and frites, and batter-fried haddock. Why leave? The bartender was efficient, charming and knowledgeable. With its mirrored bar and tiled floors, I thought the place Parisian. Jacqui, a Parisian, declared it New York, like Raoul’s. We New Yorkers agreed, but this place seemed spiffier.

We canceled pizza and stayed at Vincent’s bar. What a meal!

Moules frites ($19) five ways. I went for the Provençal, a broth of white wine, tomato, caper, olive, garlic, anchovy. Five days later I’m still dreaming of that broth, their Long Island sourced mussels (long, meaty) and the hunk of baguette served alongside, to mop up the broth. A generous side of salty frites fed all four of us. More perfection: the bartender paired my meal with a crisp Riesling.

Foie gras, duck cassoulet, endive salad and more: this is bistro food at its best. Now that I know it’s there, I can’t wait to return. www.vincentchicago.com.

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Books: Where You Once Belonged by Kent Haruf

by anneMoore on February 24, 2011

I read and loved Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong” when it was released in 2000. Beautiful, spare, moving, grounded in time and place. About a pregnant teenager taken in by two old men, brothers, both bachelors. I weep just remembering their story; how they save her and how, in turn, she saves them.

The other day I was stocking up at my (now closing) Borders and came upon Kent Haruf’s “Where You Once Belonged” (1990.) This story is similar to “Plainsong” in its scope but tighter (176 pages) in its telling. I loved this one, too. (His “Eventide,” published in 2005, not so much.)

Haruf sets these novels in Holt, Colorado. It’s small town agrarian America. People work hard, drink too much, start businesses and families, revere their high school athletes, cheat, steal, die, get mangled, and sometimes ruin each others lives. Sounds tawdry? It feels real in Haruf’s hands, expertly told. We feel the harsh winds off the prairie, the crunch of fresh snow, the hunt for arrowheads after a hard rain. It’s Laura Ingalls Wilder on fast forward, R-rated.

“Where You Once Belonged” begins with the return of a native, Jack Burdette, a football star who woos Wanda Jo, the town’s prettiest girl, and lands one of the most respectable jobs: manager of the Farmer’s Co-op Elevator. The story is told by Pat Arbuckle, another native son, a classmate of Burdette’s who owns and runs the town’s newspaper.

Burdette leaves on a business trip and returns a day late and…married. So long Wanda Jo, hello Jessie Miller. Jack and Jessie Burdette have two boys, and when she’s pregnant with a third, Burdette flees, first outfitting himself royally from the town’s clothiers. With the help of the co-op’s accountant, Burdette has skimmed $200,000 of co-op money.

Mad? The farmers want to kill him. But you can’t kill what you can’t find: Jack Burdette has vanished.

Wife Jessie is the one who suffers. She signs their house over to the co-op and gets a job waitressing at the town’s diner. A devoted mother to her two little boys, it’s unsettling to read how she behaves while pregnant with her third, a girl who doesn’t survive.

Recovering from his own double loss, newsman Arbuckle falls in love with Jessie Burdette. Theirs is a sweet romance. Can it last?

Not when Jack Burdette comes back to town.

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Doorstopper: David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land”

by anneMoore on February 16, 2011

Ah, the year’s first thunk: David Grossman’s “To the End of the Land.” So lauded, so bloated. To invest in ($26.95) and lug around (576 pages) one would expect, and should receive, a Franzen.

In its simplest form, this is the story of an Israeli woman who gathers up her son’s father and takes him hiking and camping the length of the country. During their journey, Ora describes to Avram the adult son, now serving in the Israeli army, he has never met.

Heartbreaking? I wish.

Their son’s name is Ofer. We learn about his birth, his feeding at the breast, his first steps, his early shift to vegetarianism, his …blah blah blah. Worse, we learn first about the family Ora and Ilan made, with baby Adam.

Babies are fascinating: to their parents. Reading this, I felt like I was stuck on a long car ride with a chatty mom bragging about her precocious kids.

Why keep reading? To find out if Ofer survives, if Avram rejoins the living, if Ora and Avram reunite.

Too, I was hopeful the hike would offer some comedy. Ora is a middle-aged, twice abandoned housewife, unnerved by her son’s presence in the army. Avram is an out-of-shape pill popper who has given up on life. What are these two doing in the woods?

The hike is the frame for the story, which reads like a hodgepodge of memories. llan abandoning Ora and newborn Adam. Avram’s tortured body returned by the Egyptians. Avram loves Ora, who pines for Ilan, who’s disinterested. Ora is Avram’s girlfriend, fucking Ilan. Ora is Ilan’s wife, fucking Avram. Ew.

I expected to be chilled by their everyday life. After all, Israel is perpetually at war and their parents are Hitler’s survivors. Grossman shows us Ora and Ilan standing over their newborn wondering if they’ve created another warrior for the state. Ora’s mother tearing at her flesh, hating herself for not being taken by Hitler. Ofer telling his mother to leave Israel if he is killed.

Themes raised, left unexplored.

Like a needle stuck in an LP, over and over and over we’re trapped within the the same triangle: Ora and Ilan and Avram, and the children they created.

Anyone want my copy? No backs.

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Books: Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”

by anneMoore on January 27, 2011

Then a poet rocker, Patti Smith gave a reading at the small Catholic girls school I went to in Manhattan in the late 1970s. Most of us knew of her from our own late nights downtown, at CBGB’s or Irving Place or St. Mark’s Church. Getting her in the door and up into our auditorium was a coup for my high school classmates, who’d persuaded our headmistress of Smith’s talent, then begged Smith to appear at one of our weekly assemblies.

It was a beautiful spring day, the school’s huge windows flung open to Fifth Avenue. Smith arrived late, annoyed, in tattered clothes. She interrupted her first poem to make fun of us, chiding us for our school’s posh location. After another poem, about Adam and Eve, she stared down our school’s priest and snidely asked: “How’d you like that one, Father?”

Rude, crude, mean. That’s my memory of Patti Smith.

That’s why it took two ardent recommendations, and a National Book Award, to bring me to “Just Kids,” Smith’s memoir of her love for and life in New York with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989. (Thanks Jen, thanks Perla.)

What a charming read! We find Smith as a sickly girl, directing her siblings in fantastical worlds, a bedridden Peter Pan. That fairy tail ends when she’s a teenager and has to leave home to give birth to a child she’ll give up for adoption. Certain she’s an artist, Smith heads to New York in the summer of 1967. She finds work at a bookstore. A manager preys on her; Mapplethorpe comes to her rescue. Their romance begins.

What a pair. Mapplethorpe is so beautiful men and women seek him out. Smith is so slender the poet Allen Ginsberg tries to pick her up, mistaking her for a pretty boy. Both declare themselves slaves to art, and go hungry choosing supplies over food. Smith draws and writes and harbors a secret kinship with rocker Jim Morrison. Mapplethorpe, who became a celebrated photographer, spends years making collages and jewelry before someone hands him a Polaroid. Even then he can’t afford the film.

They’re so broke Mapplethorpe hustles to pay their rent; when he begins dating men Patti thinks she’s failed him, and they part. When they get back together they find a happy home within the Chelsea Hotel. They part for good when Mapplethorpe takes up with an older man.

Before he dies, Mapplethorpe urges Patti to tell their story. This is it, and it’s well worth reading. It’s a love story set in a New York that no longer exists.

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Books: Paul Auster’s Sunset Park

by anneMoore on January 13, 2011

More book grief!

Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” grabbed me from its first sentence. “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.”

He is Miles Heller, an Ivy League drop-out working foreclosures in Florida, inspecting abandoned homes for banks. He finds himself cataloguing, via photographs, the things people have left behind: lipstick, rifles, tennis racquets, flat-screen televisions. Unlike his coworkers, Miles doesn’t steal.

A native New Yorker, he’s been in Florida long enough to regard the sun as an unrelenting curse instead of a warm blessing. Reading “The Great Gatsby” in the park one day he spots a pretty girl reading the same book. They fall in love. But there’s a problem: she’s 17, a high school senior. An orphan, her three sisters demand pricey abandoned goods in exchange for their not-of-age sister. When Miles refuses, thugs beat him up, sending him back to New York, where he’ll wait the six months for Pilar to turn 18.

Kind, smart, decent, loving: why did Miles drop out of school? Why did he flee his parents’ comfortable Greenwich Village home seven years ago? Those answers are heartbreaking.

In New York, Miles moves in with high school friend Bing Nathan, who’s house squatting in Sunset Park, a tired Brooklyn neighborhood.

We get to know Bing and his two women roommates intimately. Ditto Miles’ estranged father, stepmother and mother — their disappointments and desires, their frustrations and triumphs. I didn’t want to leave any of them.

Indeed, my only complaint is this book’s abbreviated length. Auster tells when he could show: Pilar’s visit to New York, Ellen’s charming reunion with her teen-age love, Bing’s seduction of Alice’s boyfriend.

Like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” this is a story of contemporary America and its families, how they fall apart and come back together. A magnificent read.

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Books: Best of 2010

by anneMoore on December 10, 2010

Can a book bring you solace? Zachary Mason’s “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” was a comfort to me. Everything about this slender tome — its tone, its elegant paper cover — soothed me during a physically trying time earlier this year. It’s small and slender, even in hardback, so I could easily carry it with me. Waiting for doctors or waiting for the bus I’d open its pages to Mason’s ingenious “what if” retelling of the Odyssey. What if Odysseus never returned home? What if Penelope remarried? What if they gave up, and left Helen in Troy? Beautiful, smart, witty, moving. Made me cry.

I spied a friend waiting for a parent evening to begin reading Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” So heavy! How was she hauling it around? I had to keep my copy at home, where I lapped up every one of its 562 pages. My favorite read of the year: full-bodied, funny, wise, sad. A story of turn of-this-century America, Franzen’s characters engage, enrage, endear. I was sorry to reach its end.

Call it fluff, Cathleen Shine’s “The Three Weissmanns of Westport” cheered me when I most needed to be. I laughed so hard reading this I cried, publicly, on the #151 bus. A smart, breezy read about New Yorkers displaced to a Connecticut beach town.

“Star Island” has a lip-synching pop star, her body double, a pathetic and fat paparazzo, a one-eyed vigilante, a body guard with a chain-saw prosthesis, and a thieving real estate developer. Twists, turns, and finally, justice. Carl Hiaasen always delivers jaw-dropping satire. Thanks for the gift, Georgia.

Speaking of Georgia, I’m a sucker for literature set in the Hudson River Valley. Blame it on Edith Wharton novels and Georgia Dent’s delicious hospitality: this place feels like a second home to me. “Man in the Woods,” by Scott Spencer, plays out in this lush area. It’s a beautifully crafted thriller, a wonderful read.

How does an author keep a couple apart, but interested, for 20 years? I had to read “One Day” by David Nicholls to see how he pulled it off. The answer: brilliantly. Read this book before it’s the movie.

Having put down ”Portnoy’s Complaint” over and over, I was pleased to find myself quickly and firmly hooked by Philip Roth’s “Nemesis.” He grounds his story in Newark during a summer polio epidemic; heat and fear rise from its pages. There’s no joy in polio, but it’s a fine thing to be caught in Roth’s carefully wrought world.

Finally, Rose Tremain’s “Trespass.” It’s not a thriller, but the situation she sets up nabbed me. It’s about an estate in France: its owners, its buyers, its end.

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