I can't stop reading this book, yet I can't seem to finish it either. Instead, I find myself crawling through it page by page waiting for the slightly monotonous magical realist tale set in post World War II Iraq to come to a close. Many fascinating characters are housed within the pages of The Last of the Angles, but overall the book smacks of something intended for a middle aged ladies' book club.
It is rare that I find a book in the free book pile at work that really strikes my attention. It was one of those rare situations the other day when I came across Ali Smith's contribution to the Cannongate myth series, Girl Meets Boy. The title might be deceiving. It is a contemporary retelling of Ovid's Metamorphosis. I am always surprised upon reading these modern myth re-tellings because they are all quite potent and relevant. As the title might suggest, the book is about gender, in part the point of intersection where two genders become fluid, and multiple. But the book is also about corporate culture, art and resistance. Not only the subject matter was fascinating, but the writing style was infectious. Reading the book was like entering the minds of the characters and following them around for a while. I didn't want the very short novel to end. But inevitably, I finished it quickly, then proceeded to flip back through to find the most wonderful morsels of language. I have loved all three of the books in this series that I have read thus far. Mostly, I just like how Ali Smith tells a story.
It would probably be more educational to read a sociological study, but reading this book is the next best thing as it is crafted with sociology and "scientific method" in mind. I never considered certain academic styles to be literary devices before, but Lydia Davis reveals that they can work as such (while providing a nice framework for an alternative plot-line). Breaking free of standard plot is the thing Davis does the best. The stories in this book of very short fiction range from a few sentences to several pages long. Style is elevated above character development. The stories often read like sociological or psychological studies. Some are like snipets of a conversation you might overhear on the bus. This is a highly unusual book.
I took a break from reading this book because it wasn't really that riveting and I acquired a stack of quite appealing reads while I was trying to get through this one. But after I finished The Accidental, I decided to take Self Storage up again. The more I read, the more disappointing I became in both the writing and the plot. This is ostensibly a plot-driven book. It's not really about the beauty of language or the construction of interesting sentences, despite the author's attempts to draw Walt Whitman into the book to serve as a common thread throughout the story. I am curious about this aspect of the book because I have no idea if she is going to draw the story together somehow with Whitman or center the main character's epiphany around it. But I stopped reading it again. The book became too annoying. It was reading like a bad movie plot, and it was a bit boring despite the author's attempts to spice up the story by making the neighbor run over the main character's daughter. I have no intention of picking up the book again. There are too many other things to read.
Last night I finally got around to finishing The Accidental. Aside from the fact that it was heavily inconclusive and that the last chapter was excessively disjointed from the remainder of the novel (except for the first chapter which matched the theme and substance of the last), I liked the book. I am certainly a fan of Smith's style. The twelve-year-old girl Astrid was certainly the most likable character. And despite how repulsive Amber was, she really was the center of the novel who provided the way for each individual character's personal crisis to come to the surface. In Magnus' case, she may have even helped him work through a crisis, in a certain sense. A few of the characters were ill-realized, namely Eve. Her midlife crisis was obvious from the outset, but she was depicted so free of moorings that it was impossible to judge the breadth of the crisis. Michael was painted as a weak individual, and this characteristic was essentially the strength of his character.
I have a weakness for unusual language, and this book certainly satisfies this soft spot I have for seemingly mixed up syntax and points of view verging on strange. Like Hotel World, The Accidental is told through multiple voices. Each member of the family the story centers around gets a chance to narrate. This provides a veritable collage. It is a fascinating, quilt-like story, pieced together in a very careful and beautiful way. While many of the characters are quite annoying, they couldn't be this way with a less well-crafted story. Amber, who at this point in the story appears to be "The Accidental," is the worst of all. She is crazy in that charming way so as to avoid being pinned down as such by the other characters in the story who aren't particularly well-adjusted themselves. The mother has writer's block. The father, an English professor, has compulsive affairs with students. The 17-year-old boy is seriously disturbed. And the 12-year-old girl, who also happens to be a focus-point of the story, is just blatantly innocent, adolescent and a perfect character for someone (Amber, with her non-conformist, oddly adolescent ideas, perhaps) to take painful advantage of.
At about half-way through the story, I am hooked. I remember when this book was released a bit over a year ago, it was certainly talked about enough for me to hear about Smith and acquire a few of her other books. But until now, I never happened upon this particular book myself. I definitely look forward to the rest.
Self Storage is post-chick lit trying to be just smart enough to garner an audience beyond those who read little more than the Shopaholic series. But invoking Walt Whitman in a chick lit novel might be even more dangerous than invoking Charlotte Bronte (e.g. The Bronte Project), who after all is one of the grandmothers of the genre. The author of Self Storage invokes Walt Whitman and Jean Baudrillard. But I have to give Gayle Brandeis credit for penning this tale of a self-storage auction obsessed twenty-seven-year-old mother of two who likes reading Whitman and is married to a lazy postmodern academic. This is not your ordinary chick lit.
This week in San Francisco, The Believer editor Vendela Vida will be talking up her latest book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. The novel details one woman's quest, prompted by her father's death, to shed light on her own past, reconnecting with those she lost and ultimately shedding this past for a new life. While the bulk of this short novel was enthralling, the end was a disappointment. It was almost as if Vida decided to tack on an ending in an attempt at resolution. But the ending she decided upon reached to far into the territory of a new story altogether. But regardless, it's difficult to resist a book with such an enchanting title, apparently drawn from a line by a famous Sami poet.
Vendela Vida will be speaking at Book Passage in Corte Madera this Sunday, January 7 at 4pm; at Books Inc. on Van Ness on Monday the 8th at 7 pm; and at Cody's in Berkeley on Thursday the 11th also at 7 pm.
I anticipate that this book is going to contain a plethora of very odd stories. The flourescent green galley is sitting on my desk. I read one of the stories. It was about a spy/assassin doing a job in an airport. I thought the stories were supposed to be about "human love" so I was quite perplexed when I happened upon this particular story. But drawing upon the fact that the introduction is written somewhat sarcastically by the author's second grade art teacher, I wasn't about to take my first reading of the book particularly seriously.
