Book Review, "The Marriage Plot" By Jeffrey Eugenides. Reviewed by Sara Falls

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides. Review by Sara Falls

            The Marriage Plot is a thinking person’s love story.  Which is to say, it’s not much of a love story in the traditional sense, but it is about romance and relationships, and it all is very smart and engaging.

            Eugenides riffs on all those Victorian-era romance novels consumed with “the marriage plot:” “Will the unlikely protagonist get the one they truly love in the end?”: Austen and Eliot and even Anna Karenina.  The riffing is self-conscious and up front, which is part of the fun of the novel.  Madeline Hanna is finishing her English degree at Brown.  She is in love with these stories, and she is also in love with Leonard, whom she meets in a semiotics class where all her notions of love and relationships get deconstructed.  Leonard is a brilliant scientist, but his manic depression haunts his and Madeline’s relationship; while Mitchell, a young man in pursuit of religious and spiritual truth, loves Madeline, who sees him only as a friend. 

Because all Eugenides’s characters are thoughtful and intelligent, they understand that love is more complex than the old storybook versions of love (though Austen, Eliot, and any of the good older writers also got this).  He further complicates what is already complicated by showing us love and relationships through the eyes of feminist and deconstructionist theories, by layering these different ways of telling the story of love, and by upending the usual storybook ending.

The Marriage Plot is largely a novel of ideas, but it also has Eugenides’s attention to detail and character development.  Each character is so finely drawn that you end up feeling like their friend and rooting for them despite their foibles and flaws.  Eugenides takes us to the East Coast in the 80s, to Europe, and India; he shows us Mother Theresa’s charitable work, Christian mysticism, radical feminism, and even yeast biology.  Aside from Austen, Tolstoy, and Eliot, he references Derrida, Salinger, and Talking Heads.

Many critics have written the novel off as pretentious, but I found it accessible and believable despite some of the high-mindedness.  I also appreciated getting the three characters’ points of view, and I enjoyed the way the narrative twisted and turned in time.

The Marriage Plot confirms me as a fan of Eugenides: I’ve enjoyed all three of his novels, and, while all of them are very different, they all, The Marriage Plot included, are thoughtful and thought-provoking.

             

"Stories of Your Life and Others" By Ted Chiang, reviewed By Sara Falls

Stories of Your Life and Others

By Ted Chiang

The predominant feeling I came away with after reading Stories of Your Life and Others is that Ted Chiang, the author, is infinitely smarter than me. This was a good feeling; it was like being in a deep conversation with someone whose intellect and new, creative ideas astounded me.


This collection of short stories has been classified as science fiction, and it is, in that the stories deal with scientific advancements, first alien contact, and more, but this classification feels a bit too limiting. The stories also address issues of religion, language, myth, and more. This isn’t to say that more standard science fiction doesn’t address larger issues—it can and does, but the feel here is a bit different. For instance, the first story, “The Tower of Babylon,” has none of the standard science fiction elements: It is instead a religious parable, a telling of the building of the Tower of Babylon and the nature of humans’ quests to contact God. It was also my least favorite story in the bunch in part because it remained somewhat abstract and allegorical, more an experiment of ideas.

In truth, a few other stories in this collection feel the same way: Chiang working out a novel idea: “What would super intelligence look like?” (“Understand”) or “What if angels really did appear to humans?” (“Hell is the Absence of God”), but these ideas feel truly fresh and provocative in Chiang’s hands.

Many of the stories are a play on science fiction, taking old science or religion as their jumping off point of “reality.” “Seventy-Two Letters” for instance has golems at its heart and takes now debunked science as a given, and “Hell is the Absence of God,” is Chiang in conversation with the story of Job in the Old Testament.

The best story in the collection is “Story of Your Life.” It’s a first contact story: a linguist recounts her contact with the alien “heptapods,” whose language she learns in order to learn more about them. In learning the language, the narrator’s worldview shifts, and in fact her entire perception of time shifts. This notion, while not new, is fascinating in the particulars that Chiang provides. It’s also a story of a mother/daughter relationship and becomes metaphorically about the inability to control other people, no matter how much we love them and the inevitability of death. It’s also terribly moving, sad, and beautiful all at once. And, because Chiang is so much more brilliant than me, it’s a hard story to encapsulate in few words.

A close second for “favorite” is “Liking What You See: A Documentary,” again a thought experiment that takes place as a kind of debate: against or in favor of a technology that inhibits the user’s ability to judge whether or not someone is attractive. What I found so compelling about this story is that both sides were equally interesting, compelling, and convincing. It’s a familiar theme: The idea of inner versus outer beauty, but here Chiang goes far beyond the cliché, and I appreciated getting to think anew about ideas that I thought I’d already pinned down.

All in all, this collection of short stories was one of the highlights of my year of reading. Chiang has won a number of awards for his short stories, and I anxiously await coming work.

"Lords of Misrule" By Jaimy Gordon, Reviewed by Sara Falls

Lord of Misrule is a really good book, but I almost didn’t realize it.  I read it more out of a sense of hometown pride—Hey, someone who teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan won the National Book Award!—than any real knowledge of or interest in the book. 

And at first I was stumped: Gordon takes us into a world that seems so foreign and gritty—the world of horse racing—and leaves us there to fend for ourselves.  I know nothing about horse racing and have never been interested in it, and Gordon doesn’t over-explain.  The book opens with a hot-walking machine, and I’m still not even sure what this is.  Even the book’s epigraph, an excerpt from Ainslie’s Complete Guide to Thoroughbred Racing, meant (I think) to help clarify certain elements of horse racing for us, had me confused.  I had to keep going back to reread it to make sure I understand the plot elements that hinged on this particular bit of horse-racing. 

Reading the book at first really felt like work.  And then suddenly it didn’t.  Once I got used to the dialect of certain characters (“Sadday” for “Saturday” and other invented spellings) and the heavy racing vernacular, I was hooked. 

The characters could, in less sure hands, be mere caricatures of a type—the Black medicine-man groom, the innocent young girl who gets caught in the seedy world of the track, and the young handsome, heroic lead; but Gordon pushes through these flat types: Her medicine-man isn’t sure of his own powers; the girl, though innocent to horse racing, is sharp enough to understand the world she’s in, and the handsome hero is off-kilter and dangerous.  None of these characters’ flaws specifically lead to their undoing, and the novel doesn’t follow any sort of predicable trajectory.  Instead, the story is unpredictable while still being believable.  It’s brash and big in its style yet subtle and realistic in its portrayal of the world, not just the horse-racing world, but the world that the rest of us know.

Great House by Nicole Krauss, Reviewed by Sara Falls

Great House by Nicole Krauss
Reviewed by Sara Falls


Nicole Krauss has a lovely, resonant poetry to her writing. Her characters are interesting and complex, and her Man Walks Into a Room is one of the most thought-provoking books I've ever read. So I was anxiously awaiting her newest, Great House, a National Book Award finalist, to come out in paperback. I was prepared to love it, for it to make my list of all-time favorites. And so maybe I just set this book up to not meet my expectations. But I didn't love it, and I've been trying to figure out why.

The book is a series of stories tied together into a novel. I tend to find this a risky choice for an author--Krauss has to tie these stories together in a way that rises above gimmick. And she does, mostly. The stories' characters are loosely intertwined around a massive, important desk and the death of a young poet at the hands of the Pinochet regime. They are also tied together thematically around the idea of loss: One narrator has lost his wife of many years; another has lost a son (not to death but to distance and lack of understanding), and of course there's the loss of the poet--a friend, a would-be lover, a would-be son.

Despite these connections, as I read I worried that the weave of the book was tenuous, that certain characters too coincidentally looked just like people in the other stories, that the plot pieces that held these stories together as a novel, and not just a collection of short stories, was mere gimmick. I half hoped that all the characters would suddenly be revealed as actually all being part of the same story in a twist of story-telling ingenuity, and I half hoped this wouldn’t happen, knowing all too well that it would feel like a trick. But I longed for something to tie these sad characters together beyond the mere devices of plot Krauss had constructed. It’s not until the end that the title is explained, and in this moment, the thematic connections become truly moving. Here, ten pages to the end, we learn the meaning of “great house”—it comes from the Old Testament and the idea that “every Jewish soul is built around the house that burned” when Jerusalem burned. Krauss writes, “Bend a people around the shape of what they lost, and let everything mirror its absent form,” and we suddenly truly understand what she’s been doing all along in giving us these lonely, empty characters—she’s been showing us the ways that people become defined by their losses in life.

Despite this powerful idea, I finished the book with some criticisms nagging at me: Why are there unexplained plot holes? (At one point it seems that another character has hit and killed someone with her car, but we never know who the victim is. What happens to the disappeared son?) Again, this feels gimmicky, an overly wrought attempt to make us question. And finally, given Krauss’s skill as a writer, why do all her narrators have the same voice? Surely she could offer more variety in their sad, swallowed-up, yet poetic narratives.

In the end, I found Great House an admirable yet flawed book. I look forward to reading Krauss in the future; she clearly has a gift for seeing deeply into people, and I look forward to another book that, like Man Walks Into A Room, will make my all-time favorite list. 

"Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo, Reviewed by Sara Falls

I was twelve the first time I read Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun.  I was a heavy metal fan, and Metallica’s first music video of “One,” based on the novel, piqued my interest.  Twenty-two years later, rereading it felt like reading it for the first time.  I’d remembered nothing except the premise and the power of that premise: a man lies in a bed, the casualty of war; no arms, legs, sight, hearing, or speech.  Fragments from his life float into his consciousness, and he struggles to make meaning of his life and how it got him to this point. 

Dalton’s story and prose live up to the power of this premise.  The book is not only an angry tirade against the rhetoric and realities of war; it’s also beautiful at times, sad, and continually relevant.

Trumbo’s introduction and addendum (written in 1970) explain his struggle over the banning and censorship of the book and his work.  Johnny Got His Gun was published two days after the beginning of World War II, and it is virulently anti-war.  Joe Bonham, Trumbo’s symbolic narrator, contemplates his utter lack of liberty and how rhetoric of war led to his condition.  He thinks, “America fought a war for liberty in 1776.  Lots of guys died.  And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn’t fight at all?...Can you look at a guy and say he’s an American who fought for his liberty and anybody can see he’s a very different guy from a Canadian who didn’t?”  He contemplates his own war that trapped him in his body, his coffin, “a dead man with a mind that could still think,” and asks, “The war was to make the world safe for democracy…for everybody.  If the war was over now then the world must be all safe for democracy.  Was it?  And what kind of democracy?  And how much?  And whose?”  These continue to be relevant questions that any supporter of our continued military actions in the Middle East should at least consider.

The book works powerfully as an anti-war novel.  However, it’s also more than this.  It’s also a story about the importance of human connection and communication.  Bonham, unable to speak, hear, or sign, discovers his ability to communicate with his nurses and doctors using Morse code.  When he finally breaks through after years and is able to communicate with a nurse, he contemplates how utterly happy he is: “His legs that were smashed and gone got up and danced.  His arms that were rotted these five six seven years swung fantastically free at his sides to keep time with the dance.  The eyes they had taken from him looked up from whatever garbage heap they had been consigned to and saw all the beauties of the word.  The ears that were shattered and full of silence rang suddenly with music.  The mouth that had been hacked away from his face and now was filled with dust returned to sing.”  All this because of the very small notion that he could “take a tiny little idea in” his mind and “put it into her mind two maybe three feet away.”

Trumbo’s own life mirrors this narrative, the yearning to connect and communicate and the silencing that comes from those in power feeling threatened by what that communication might say about them.  He was one of the Hollywood Ten and blacklisted due to his involvement with the Communist Party.  The novel works on all these levels: emotionally it is impactful; symbolically it still resonates; and it is lyrically and beautifully written. Seventy years later it is still an important novel.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Reviewed by Sara Falls

Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway who becomes Bertha Rochester, the crazy lady in the attic, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Rhys, troubled, as she should be, by the handling of Bertha in the novel (she remains a wild woman who never speaks and eventually sets the house on fire) here gives us Antoinette’s story growing up a Creole in Martinique and narrates the marriage between her and Mr. Rochester (who remains unnamed throughout Rhys’s novel).

I confess that I love Jane Eyre and, like most people, rooted for her in her love of Rochester, and yet I’ve always been annoyed by Bronte’s use of Bertha as a mere plot tool to deepen Jane’s plight and make readers all the more heartsick when she (and we) learn Rochester’s terrible secret. So I was eager to read Rhys’s novel and surprised by how different it was from what I expected it to be. For one thing, I didn’t expect to get so much of Rochester’s story and voice—he narrates nearly all of the second part. I also didn’t expect it to be so rich and complicated in the world that it presents. It’s not just Antoinette’s story and a story of an unhappy marriage; it’s also a meditation on race, colonialism, and the line between sanity and insanity.

It’s also a nearly perfect book—poetic, intricately written, and full of complex characters. Rochester is far from the villain one might expect given that the marriage was mostly one of financial convenience, and then, you know, that whole thing about the attic. He is someone who is made afraid because of the fear he is surrounded by in a colonial, post-slavery land, and this fear doesn’t allow him to love Antoinette, who, though Creole (and therefore white) is of less fine breeding than the wealthy former slave owners in the West Indies and is someone who is intimate with the blacks of the island. He desires her but never feels like he can know her. This is a story about the distances between people: Antoinette is hated by the blacks because she is white, hated by the whites because she is poor, and suffers because she has no real place, the result of colonialism. Rochester too feels this distance. He says of the West Indies, “I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know…Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.”

I say it’s a “nearly perfect novel,” not perfect. The first part feels underwritten to me. I had to rely on footnotes to understand some of the context (and then many of the footnotes (in the Penguin edition) felt unnecessary and distracting—I know what a cockroach is!) and I wished that the story had stayed with Antoinette as a child longer. But once we get to part two and the marriage, I was wrapped up. Rhys spent a great deal of time crafting her language, and it’s obvious; I found myself as in awe of the poetry of the prose as I was the complex story she’s telling. And finally Bertha’s telling of her life in the attic is affecting, heady, and dream-like.

Norwegian Wood By Haruki Murakami, Book Review By Sara Falls

Norwegian Wood,  by Haruki Murakami Book Review by Sara Falls

I’ve loved other novels by Murakami, loved them despite being maddened by them; novels like his most famous The Wind Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore are riveting and compelling while being obtusely fantastical with no attempt to tie anything together or explain the unreal happenings.

Norwegian Wood is a completely different book: It is a realistic love story (there is not a single fantastical event), but it is also riveting and beautifully written. Norwegian Wood is a coming of age novel. Its protagonist, a somewhat solitary, thoughtful young man, Toru Watanabe, lost his closest childhood friend to suicide at the age of seventeen, and so he moves through his life with caution, afraid to open himself up too much, unsure of the direction his future should take him. The novel is a flashback, told eighteen years after Watanabe’s nineteenth year, and it recounts his love and social life during his first and second years of college.

What makes this a successful novel is how beautifully written the characters are. Watanabe is in love with a young woman, Naoko, the lover of the childhood best friend; she is equally damaged by his suicide and struggles to make meaning of her life. And then Watanabe meets Midori, who, in less masterful hands, could end up becoming a stereotype of the liberated young woman, but Murakami also paints her with complexity and thoughtfulness. Even a more minor character, an older woman Watanabe meets, is given a rich back story, (the title comes from her playing the Beatles’s “Norwegian Wood” on the guitar for Naoko and Watanabe), and her perspective, in some ways, is the heart of the story: “If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow…”

Norwegian Wood is sexy, sad, moving, and beautifully written. It invites us in to get to know its characters, and, despite its simplicity, it lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

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Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Book Review by Sara Falls

Consider the Lobster
By David Foster Wallace

There's an appropriate meta-experience a reader of this collection of essays by David Foster Wallace encounters. On one hand, much of Wallace's writing is laugh-out-loud funny--I certainly embarrassed myself a few times reading on public transportation. Wallace also comes across as broad-minded, sharp, and full of humanity, which is why it's impossible not to be aware, while reading, of what it means to be reading the work of someone who took his own life at such a young age. I couldn't help but wonder the whole time I was reading how someone who seems so aware could not figure out a way to keep living. Thus, at the same time that these essays are so enjoyable to read, there is also a sadness to it.

Wallace is probably best known for his huge, sprawling novel, Infinite Jest, but these essays, ranging on topics such as prescriptive versus descriptive grammar, the art of the sports autobiography, the porn industry, and his personal reactions to September 11, 2001, while much smaller; have a depth that is equal to Infinite Jest. Part of the reason for this depth is that Wallace is so good at asking questions about his subjects and allowing the discussion that unfolds around those questions to shed light on his own curious thinking. The best essays in this collection are those that admit to Wallace's own ambiguity and delve into the difficult questions behind that ambiguity. His essays read much like someone's thoughts; he generously uses footnotes, sometimes footnotes to footnotes, as a way to capture the different levels of his thinking, and, for some readers this can feel tedious or pretentious. But I think it works simply because Wallace comes across as so thoughtful.

I was first introduced to Wallace's non-fiction when I read his 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College, which was recently published in the small volume entitled This is Water, and which can still be found here If you haven't read Wallace, or if you have but haven't read this speech, it's worth taking the time to read it. And then, if you like it, I recommend these essays. Some of them are dense; some of them are ntellectualbut all of them will challenge you to think and maybe even make you laugh.

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Summertime by J.M.Coetzee, Reviewed by Sara Falls

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee

Reviewed by Sara Falls

J.M. Coetzee's new novel is not just an interesting conceit. It is a luminous, complicated picture of the life of an artist and writer. But let's start with conceit, which is fun and intriguing: A biographer is writing the biography of the late J.M. Coetzee. This isn't that biography; rather it's notes from interviews the biographer collected from a handful of people who knew Coetzee, mostly women who held some kind of romantic interest for him, discussing their relationship and the kind of man that he was. To be clear, this is fiction: For instance, much of the narrative discusses Coetzee's relationship living with his aging father, yet accounts suggest this is not factually accurate. Further, what emerges is a not very flattering portrait of a man who seemed to only dabble in writing and wasn't taken seriously as an author--his real-life Nobel Prize and two Booker Prizes dispute this characterization; though his winning the Nobel as well as the real titles of his books are mentioned. Certainly much of the fiction is mixed up with fact, and the piecing out what is "real" is one intriguing aspect of the narrative: After all, don't we all have versions of ourselves we believe in, which may or may not coincide with the ways others perceive us? In taking on this conceit, Coetzee acknowledges that one's public life is a complicated affair, and that trying to write one's life story is even more complicated. Beyond this idea, the book is beautifully written. A brief exchange between cousins reflecting on growing up in the rural regions of South Africa evoked such nostalgia in me for a childhood I never had, and the book has such a longing melancholy that, while at the same time it seems to be describing the life of a man who barely lived, it encourages such a fierce desire to live.

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Introducing Sara Falls, First Guest Blogger for "Moyo Aflame"

Sara Falls is a high school English Teacher in San Francisco. Some of her fondest childhood memories include books, and so she hopes to inspire a love of reading in her students. Sara has also had a regular writing practice since she began publishing ‘zines at the age of fifteen. She writes essays, poetry, and short stories. In her spare time, aside from reading and writing, Sara studies martial arts, cooks, watches movies, plays board games, enjoys the outdoors, and hangs with her sweetie and their cat in a small cohousing community in Oakland, California.


Sara is a beautiful friend I know from my "California years." We lived together in that co-housing community in Oakland, California. I moved on to The Sonoran Desert of Arizona. Sara is still living there and tending to the chickens in the community.

I have been thinking about adding several guest bloggers here for several months. When I decided I wanted to add someone to contribute book reviews, Sara is the only person I really ever seriously considered. Sara's total passion and love for books and storytelling makes her a natural for writing book reviews. The fact that she is also an excellent writer made it an absolute no brainer.

Sara's first review will appear here in a day or two. I believe everyone who stops here at this blog will be appreciate Sara's wonderful life insights that I know will consistently make their way into her reviews.

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