Alice Sebold, Debra Dean, and Elizabeth Berg

Occasionally, one of my reader friends will ask me why it is that I seem to review only books that I think are good, and my response is something like, “Well, there are so many really good books and so little time to talk about them, why should I bother to review the bad or the not so good.” Add to this that so much about our own histories goes into the reading of a book; so much is determined by our moods, our preoccupations, our comportment. Quite good books can appear otherwise if we are not ready for them as readers. At any rate, today I am going to depart from my customary habit and talk briefly about three books: one quite good one, one that caught my attention but did not leave the lasting impression I usually insist on for reviews, and one that has gotten lots of attention but that I think is not really deserving.

Let me begin with the book that has received lots of attention, but that I found to be quite unconvincing and strained. The author is Alice Sebold, and the name of the book is The Almost Moon. I’m sure lots of you have read Sebold’s previous best seller, The Lovely Bones. That book, allegedly penned by a dead girl who was the victim of a horrible kidnapping and rape, strained the suspension of disbelief so important when reading fiction, but in the end I was willing to bend a long way as a reader, especially since I had reason to believe that autobiographical events in Sebold’s life had prompted her to write the book. Even in that book, however, the events became more and more fantastical, finally to the point of being downright goofy as the dead girl witnessed and in some ways even guided the investigation of her own disappearance. Sebold’s new bestseller, The Almost Moon, strains the reader’s credulity almost from the beginning. Again, the theme is an important one: How does one deal humanely, compassionately, with a parent who is suffering from dementia? How much must one cease living one’s own life in order to care for a parent who is in almost all ways no longer really there? Sebold certainly does manage to present a vivid picture of the sorts of sacrifices and heartbreak involved in such care, but I have to say that I have had many friends who have been in situations as daunting (even more daunting) and who have done a much better job of coping. However, it is not the success or failure of the daughter, Helen, to cope with her mother that makes this book so unconvincing, it is simply the sequence of events described. My conviction is that Sebold could have presented the same dilemmas, raised the same sorts of issues about just how much of one’s life must be sacrificed to others, and yet not forced the reader to believe such an unlikely sequence of events. In the end, I felt that reading the book gave me a somewhat better understanding of the nearly impossible demands some of my friends have experienced in dealing with relatives, but I became increasing frustrated with both Sebold’s lead character and with Sebold herself. One reviewer calls the book “compulsively readable,” but I felt mostly relief when I turned the final page.

The second book, Debra Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad, is also the story of a woman who is quite rapidly losing her sense of a continuous self due to Alzheimer’s. However, unlike Sebold’s book, this one is utterly believable and told with a tenderness and compassion that carries the reader along, or, more precisely, carries the reader back and forth between a girlhood in Leningrad, with the German army poised on the outskirts, and an adult woman at a family gathering with husband and children hovering around her, trying desperately to believe that she is the woman she has always been. In fact, in her own words: “It is as though she has been transported into a two-dimensional world, a book perhaps, and she exists only on this page. When the page turns, whatever was on the previous page disappears from her view.
The young woman in Leningrad is involved in a hurried and desperate attempt to save, hide, and store the artwork in a large museum before the German’s steal or destroy all of it, including the Madonnas for whom the book is named. Now, although a grown women with children and grandchildren, she sees herself as that girl wandering the halls of that museum, memorizing for some future time the positions of pieces of art that are being packed and stowed away. She, Marina, is more often there in Leningrad than in her home in America. While we all in some sense live in the past, present, and future all at once, Marina is, as it were, taken in by each new scene, really living it, and jarred back to a present that is in most ways less real than the past she has just left. This story is told with such wonderful detail and in such fluid prose that it is hard to believe this is a first novel. Although I read it some months ago, it remains vivid and fresh for me, and I mean to read whatever else this woman writes.

Finally, let me say just a few words about a not new novel by Elizabeth Berg; although I love her writing and read up her novels as soon as I find them, this 2000 novel somehow escaped my attention until now. The title of the book is Open House, and it deserves a review all its own. It is only because I have talked to you so often (and so recently) about Berg’s other novels that I choose only to give passing mention to this one.

Samantha, Sam to most, is almost surprised when her husband, David, announces one morning that he no longer wants to live with her and their eleven year old son. Shocked, stunned, and yet also simply hearing what she already knows: “You know before you know, of course. You are bending over the dryer, pulling out the still-warm sheets, and the knowledge walks up your backbone. You stare at the man you love and you are staring at nothing: he is gone before he is gone.”

At least for this reader, Berg writes always from a position of knowledge. She describes what she has seen, what she has experienced, what she has understood, and with a prose as witty and refreshing as any writer I can think of. This is clearly a feminist piece, and yet obviously told through the eyes of a woman who loves men and who understands them. As always, she writes of real relationships, real hardships, real life, and yet the reader is carried along effortlessly, eagerly. She instructs as well as entertains, and this book is simply another reminder that I want to read her up.

And there it is, an excellent book, a good one, and a hot best-seller that is not so good.

The Great Man by Kate Christensen

The novel I’m going to review today should really have been called Four Women or perhaps Six Women, and it should be obvious enough to any attentive reader within the first few pages that the actual title is meant to be ironic. The novel is Kate Christensen’s The Great Man. The alleged great man is an artist, a painter of female nudes, who has recently died and is now about to be immortalized by two male biographers, both of whom (in the end) think much more highly of him than the women in his life do, but then, of course, the men didn’t know the ‘great man,’ the women did.

Although there are many amusing insights in this book about the art world and about how arbitrary and fleeting fame in that world can be, it is really a book about aging women and cultural stereotypes of aging that so woefully miss the mark. Oscar Feldman is the painter whose life and work is so passionately loved by the two biographers, Henry and Ralph—the former a middle-aged, probably unhappily married man with a young child, the latter a younger, still closeted gay black man who hopes his biography will propel him into graduate school and eventually a professorship in art history. The rough sketches Christensen provides the reader of these two characters are often humorous and perceptive, but they remain simply sketches, shadow-characters compared to the wife, mistress, and sister. The fourth main character, Lila, is the lifelong friend of the mistress, Teddy.

The reader is introduced first to Teddy who, within the first dozen pages begins to set the record straight about the great man. She is being interviewed by Henry, who she can see has a starry-eyed view of Oscar.

‘You’re a romantic,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you? You love artists; you think they’re better than the rest of humanity. Like modern day saints……Oscar was the furthest thing from a genius I ever knew. He was a very good painter with a shtick and a way with women. He knew how to stir up a scene, how to create a buzz before anyone every heard of buzz. But you should go back to his paintings and really look at them. Really look. What you see through all those moths’ wings is a slapdash crudeness in his brush strokes, a boyish swagger in his adulterous success.’

This is not a bitter assessment through the eyes of an abused mistress; it is, she insists, simply the truth. She loved Oscar, still does, and misses him terribly. But she misses who he was, not the great artist others see him as.

Much more important than the interview is Christensen’s wonderfully perceptive and sympathetic portrait of the seductive sexuality of Teddy. Christensen is so well aware that at least in this culture, only young women are seen as sexual. Once the bloom of youth has faded, women are supposed to quietly take their place—as wives, mothers, grandmothers, support-people. But through the conversations between Teddy and her lifelong friend Lila, widowed for the second time, the reader is invited to see that these women, both in their sixties, are simply the sexual beings they have always been, and while they, too, are often surprised by what Simone de Beauvoir calls ‘the stranger in the mirror,’ their inner lives are a continuum, and their desires very much as they have always been.

Maxine, the sister of Oscar and also a painter of some repute, is in her seventies, ten years older than Teddy and Lila. And while Maxine, a lesbian, realizes that the younger women in her life suppose she is now sexless, admired only for her art, her sharp, cynical tongue, and her contempt for most men, she understands that whatever external changes have occurred, her inner self is very much what it has always been. She is careful not to offend her younger friends by coming onto them, more-or-less satisfied simply to admire and desire from afar, but she knows just how distorted their views of sex and aging are.

This novel is meant to be comedic but always with a sharp eye to the truth—about age, about the way ‘great’ men are coddled and forgiven, about the importance of friends who, unlike children and families, continue to see their lifelong friends for the ‘children’ they really are quite apart from the roles society places on them. Again I am reminded of Simone de Beauvoir remarking that adults are nothing but children puffed up with age.

I have not yet mentioned that Oscar managed to maintain two separate families, both of which are subsumed to his art, his life and lusts. With his wife, Abigail, he has an autistic son whom he barely knows and makes little effort to understand, and with his lifelong mistress, Teddy, he has twin daughters who long for his attention and resent his absences. It is the two daughters, Ruby and Samantha, who make up the remainder of the cast in this story about six women. Samantha wants to do right what she is sure her mother (and Oscar) did wrong, and so she devotes herself to her husband and child. Ruby, on the other hand, reacting to the same upbringing, chooses to have neither children nor a steady man. Both daughters are quite certain that they have learned from their parents both how not to live and how to get it right.

Christensen does a fair job of speaking through the mouths of all six women, each contributing to the view of Oscar, to the final canvas that emerges of the great man. It is the sister’s voice, Maxine’s, that emerges as the strongest and most convincing. The reader discovers ultimately that Maxine is a better painter than her brother, and has, indeed, painted one of the nudes attributed to him. But the wife, Abigail, and Lila (Teddy’s friend) are the most sympathetically drawn characters; the relationship that begins between the two is one of the most touching parts of the book. To this reader’s ear, all of the female voices sound too much the same; I was always aware of the author manipulating her characters from off stage. It is for this reason, among others, that I would not call this a great (or even a very good) book. I also sensed a vein of some sort of sexism in this novel, not because of its humorous (and all too often very accurate) view of men, but because of the ways in which the lesbian women are portrayed and because of the language Christensen uses. On the jacket cover, her writing is called clear-eyed and muscular, and I suppose it is that, but some of its muscle would seem simply like rather crude sexism coming from the mouth of a man. Does the fact that she is a woman writer forgive this? Perhaps, but I’m left feeling uneasy, in much the same way that I am by black writers who insist that they can use racist terms that white writers would be justifiably condemned for using.

At any rate, I think this book is perceptive enough and humorous enough to deserve a reading.

Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life by J.M. Coetzee

I want to talk to you today about a remarkable man, a remarkable writer, and a fictionalized account of his own childhood. As I read this little book, I took it to be straight autobiography, but others refer to it as fictionalized memoir of his very early years ending at age eleven. The writer is J.M. Coetzee, and the book is entitled Boyhood: Scenes From Provincial Life.

The prose in this book is as unadorned as the lives it describes, economical and sparse but with a kind of fierceness that rises up out of the simple words. As most of you probably know, Coetzee is a South African writer, and all of the events in this book take place in Worcester and Capetown South Africa. The boy grows up in what he calls a housing estate just outside the town of Worcester where all the houses are new and identical, set in large plots of red clay earth. Although he has an Afrikaans surname, his family speaks English, and his schoolteacher mother makes him wear shoes, speak English without an Afrikaans accent, and think of himself as special. Although his relationship with his mother is very close and he has little respect for his Afrikaans father, he also feels her love as confining, suffocating, creating expectations of him that he is bound to fail.

I can’t recall any autobiographical account written by a man where the relationship with the mother is so paramount, so meticulously described, and so boiling with contradictory feelings. Again and again the young boy in this story returns to the ambivalence of his relationship with his mother, one that swings between love and rage. He knows that she is the pivot point of his life, that she loves him totally, would sacrifice everything and anything for him.

His mother loves him, that he acknowledges; but that is the problem, that is what is wrong, not what is right, with her attitude towards him. Her love emerges about all in her watchfulness, her readiness to pounce and save him should he ever be in danger. Should he choose (but he would never do so), he could relax into her care and for the rest of his life be borne by her. It is because he is so sure of her care that he is on his guard with her, never relaxing, never allowing her a chance.

He yearns to be rid of her watchful attention. There may come a time when to achieve this he will have to assert himself, refuse her so brutally that with a shock she will have to step back and release him. Yet he has only to think of that moment, imagine her surprised look, feel her hurt, and he is overtaken with a rush of guilt. Then he will do anything to soften the blow: console her, promise her he is not going away.

Feeling her hurt, feeling it as intimately as if he were part of her, she part of him, he knows he is in a trap and cannot get out. Whose fault is it? He blames her, he is cross with her, but he is ashamed of his ingratitude too. Love: this is what love really is, this cage in which he rushes back and forth, back and forth, like a poor bewildered baboon.

All through this book, I was reminded of Nancy Chodorow’s excellent book, The Reproduction of Mothering. On the one hand, he sees her great strength, sees how she will stand up to her husband, to anyone, in order to protect her first-born son, but that very love and self-abnegation he also sees as a glaring weakness—she is a power in the home perhaps, but never a power in the world. Never, he thinks, will he give up his own life for another.

Her ant-like determination angers him to the point that he wants to strike her. It is clear what lies behind it. She wants to sacrifice herself for her children. Sacrifice without end: he is all too familiar with that spirit. But once she has sacrificed herself entirely, once she has sold the clothes off her back, sold her very shoes and is walking around on bloody feet, where will that leave him? It is a thought he cannot bear.

The boy realizes about himself that he is, already, an old man in a young boy’s body. He admires the Coloured children that he sees from a distance, admires their beautiful bodies, their smiles and carefree attitudes (though he knows full well that by the time they are his age, ten or eleven, they will be done with school and working, destined to lives of poverty and meaningless labor). In some ways, he even admires the crude Afrikaans children who are free of the high expectations of an exacting mother, though he is repulsed by their big bodies, their crude language, their constant bullying. He has looked up “childhood” in his Children’s Encyclopedia, read that it is supposed to be a time of innocent joy, full of meadows and bunny-rabbits and buttercups. “It is a vision of childhood utterly alien to him. Nothing he experiences in Worcester, at home or at school, leads him to think that childhood is anything but a time of gritting the teeth and enduring.”

If you are a fan of the many excellent novels of Coetzee (who, among many other awards, has twice won the Booker Prize) and of his keen social commentary, I think you will find this little autobiography particularly enlightening, and you will see that, indeed, the child is the father of the man. Along with the sparse, simple prose there is also a deep humility that emerges. He certainly does not see himself as a grand person or one whose early life deserves more than a quick gloss.

While I came away from the book feeling that I had a new and deeper understanding of Coetzee’s fiction, I would not call this a great autobiography. The Times reviewer called the book “The best description of a childhood I have ever read.” That leaves me wondering whether this reviewer had read many autobiographies or autobiographical novels written by women writers. In my view, many women writers write with an emotional fluidity about their young lives that makes this tight-lipped, emotionally constipated account seem hopelessly brief and one-dimensional. Indeed, it seems that the writer is deeply suspicious of emotion, of great joy or even of great sadness. When I compare it to say Lynn Sharon Schwartz’ Leaving Brooklyn, or Jane Lazarre’s On Loving Men, both of which manifest an abundance of emotional honesty and intelligence that stuns me, I have to say that I know little more about the inner life and workings of this sad boy than I knew before reading the book. He seems to guard his inner life from his readers almost as fiercely as he guards it from his mother.

Nevertheless, I appreciate Coetzee’s willingness to write autobiographical memoir, and I intend to pick up the account of his later years. His honesty as a writer is remarkable. I leave you with a final sad line. “Always, it seems, there is something that goes wrong. Whatever he wants, whatever he likes, has sooner or later to be turned into a secret.”