The Reader Travels

I was talking to my teen-aged nephew Alex about how we both remember the answers to tests by visualizing the place where we read them in the book. I know a lot of people are like that, but I think there’s something genetic about the way we both do it. Alex’s father doesn’t really think that way, but his grandfather does. I’m thinking maybe it’s a recessive trait.

My sister and I were staring at the bloody head of John the Baptist at that Russian icon exhibit back in December. So, we’re both gawking at this gruesome image, nodding our heads, saying, “huh, huh, coool,” like we’re Beavis and Butthead, and she says to me, “It reminds me of that awesome picture we saw at that art exhibit a few years ago.”

My memory failed me, because I couldn’t bring up the image. But I remembered exactly where we were standing in the exhibit, and the path we took around the other paintings to get to this one in the corner that just floored us, and we stood gawking just like we did last month at John’s noggin. Just so you can get an idea of what we were seeing, the painting was Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes.

Anyway, I was talking before about Alice Walker’s The Temple of My Familiar, a book which takes journeys from South America to San Francisco to North Carolina and Georgia, to Africa to England, back to South America and San Francisco. Because my spatial memories lend themselves to geography, I find that this book is inextricably linked in my mind to Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune, which also takes an important trip from South America to San Francisco.

Ah, San Francisco. I think it’s time we went back there.

About fifteen years ago I was helping my mother chop down a magnolia tree in her back yard. The poor tree was crammed into this tiny space between the house and the concrete deck surrounding a swimming pool. It was a mercy killing as much as it was a defense of the pool and the house’s foundation.

That same day we received a phone call from my uncle. My grandmother had fallen ill and had to be hospitalized. She had been grief stricken following the death of her husband a few years earlier, and there were speculations about a suicide attempt. She would never come home again, though her body yet lives.

In my mind, the killing of the tree, and the demise of my grandmother were connected. My grandmother had always told me, “Ann Marie, you should write our family history.” But I had waited too long. I could no longer ask her about the stories. She could no longer tell me. And my mother had always been strangely bereft of a memory. She couldn’t tell me either.

I wasn’t going to give up, though. The “family history” would have to be a “family fiction,” and the magnolia tree would lend her vast memory where my family had none.

Poor Bigger Thomas in Native Son was so disconnected, no control over his own life, a poor black man living in a rich white man’s world. Since ancient times, people have been committing atrocities when it’s the only thing they can do to grasp some semblence of control over their own lives.

My favorite such story is that of Euripides’s Medea. It’s a supremely powerful tale of a woman so bitterly and irrevocably scorned by her man that she kills her own children to get back at him. Every time I hear about a story in the news where a woman has murdered her babies, I think of Medea and the utter desperation that would drive a person to do such a thing.

Contemporary writers like Amy Tan and Toni Morrison have also tackled the subject of women who would stoop to such desperate measures. There are tales of slave women in the US who murdered their own babies, whether out of mercy or rebellion over the men who controlled them.

Of course, then there’s people like the Boston Strangler, henpecked wimp of a man who murdered women all over town because the women at home so thoroughly controlled him.

Wow. I didn’t mean to get so heavy. That’s what Richard Wright does to me.

When I think of the south side of Chicago, two songs come to mind - Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and the theme song to the ’70s TV show Good Times. Recently, Chappelle’s Show taught me that the lyrics to the theme song were not, “Blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah,” but, rather, the title of this post. I was glad for this newfound knowledge.

The songs and the TV show give us images of a tough life, but with a comic appeal, so we don’t get buried in heaviness like the world of Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Leroy and Jay Jay were thriving some 40 years after Bigger went down. Certain things had gotten better, while others just got worse.

I’ve never been to South Chicago, but I have lived in the working class metropolis of Houston, Texas, especially the area south and east of Houston, along the ship channel lined with oil refineries. We can laugh about the pollution and the high cancer rate. We can laugh about the wretchedness of race relations and the pedagogy of the oppressed, wherein the oppressed become the oppressors. We can laugh about high crime and high debt.

How can we laugh, you ask? Because no matter what, we have TV. Good times.

When we left our travels, we were in Russia with Dostoevsky, whose most famous novel is Crime and Punishment, about a young hoodlum in St. Petersburg, who commits crimes and is punished.

If I wasn’t a Web site programmer, I might like to teach English literature. I’ve thought about topics for papers where the students might be challenged to read and compare similar books like 1984 and Brave New World, or Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse-Five.

One of those combinations could be Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which is about a young hoodlum in Chicago, who incidentally commits crimes and is punished.

Wright was a card-carrying Communist in his youth, and he had a thing for Russia and similarities between the plight of the Russian working class and that of African Americans. I tend to think that Native Son is somewhat of a tribute to Dostoevsky’s famous novel. I don’t know if Wright intended it as such, but I like to think of it that way.

They are both powerful works. The St. Petersburg tale traps you in the mind of a murderer, raging with mania and guilt, while the Chicago tale steps outside of the mind, just to let you watch and observe the crimes and the necessary punishments. We watch as life happens to Bigger Thomas, whose world on the south side of Chicago is out of control, and when he takes control for a brief moment, he abuses that control and loses it forever.

Needless to say, Native Son is not something you want to read during the hectic month of December, but it might be a challenge for the new year. If you haven’t read it, you should know, it’s a lot easier to get into than Ulysses. It’s just seriously heavy.

The Namesake took me on a journey from India to New England and back to India, and when I put the book down, it guided me forward to Russia.

Gogol’s parents moved from India to the United States, landing in the Boston area, where Gogol’s father taught school. Their early adventures include a small drama around the naming of their son, exploring the Bengali traditions and failing at them in this foreign place.

Because Gogol’s father is a huge fan of Russian literature, he names his son after his favorite author, Nikolai Gogol. The novel makes several references to the Russian’s famous short story, “The Overcoat.” So, of course, that was the next stop for my journey.

I read “The Overcoat” looking for a connection between the two stories. What I found was a brief exploration of Russian child naming traditions with the hero’s mother also failing to follow them. Like Gogol Ganguli, Akaky Akakievich had a hard time fitting in too.

So be careful what you name your child, my friends. You could end up like Sonny and Cher, naming their child Chastity, as if they never wanted her to ever have sex with men. They got what they asked for, right?

My man used to ask me why our gay friends always wanted to hang out at gay bars. After all, we don’t always want to hang out at straight bars. They should live a little, mix it up, you know?

The reason was obvious to me. People want to hang out where they can be comfortable being themselves. And Gogol Ganguli’s parents in The Namesake want to hang out with other Bengali people because there is comfort in sameness. Strangers in a strange land, they cling to home by flocking together.

One of my best friends is from China, and she doesn’t understand her Chinese friends and their need to hang out with only other Chinese people. As far as she’s concerned being from China is just a granfalloon (see Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut).

On the surface my friends all look very different. But despite age, race, religion, nationality and sexual orientation, we are the same in crucial ways. We flock together because we can see that sameness, beyond, above and beneath the surface.

I love you guys!

I’m not sure who “they” are, but they say that with good writing, the writer disappears, so you never think about technique; you just get swept away in the story. I really enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, but I was a little distracted for the first few chapters, because everything was happening in the present tense. I was watching things happen, but I wasn’t swept away.

The way she wrote, it felt like she was setting up the scene, and at any moment, she would start telling the story. When I realized that the whole novel was written this way, I had to set the book down and take a breath before I could go on.

Then I got swept away. And when it was all over, I thought about the writer again and her choice to write the story of Gogol Ganguli and his family like it was happening right now and forever. It’s the story of a family who moves to a faraway place and holds onto the little pieces of their culture that they can grasp in the foreign land. It’s the story of people feeling like they don’t belong, like they will always be different from everyone around them.

It’s a universal story, an eternal one. It’s happening. Now.

Somehow I’ve found myself back in New York with Ann Beattie (beet’ee), and it’s getting colder out. Ah, the Chilly Scenes of Winter.

We’ve been all over the country, from New York and Connecticut to Baltimore, to Georgia and Florida, to New Orleans, Texas, Missouri, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma, California, Idaho, Iowa and back to New York. We’re always traveling in circles, leaving so we can come home again.

In my real world it was 70 degrees out today and yesterday and the day before, but it’s supposed to freeze by Thursday. I’m sure it’s not 70 degrees in New York right now.

It’s hard to think of Charles as anything but chilly, as if he only exists in Beattie’s winter. And because it’s so cold in his world, things move slowly for him. He’s slow to learn, so slow, I’m not sure he ever will. As the title suggests, the novel is written as a series of scenes, all present tense as if it always was and always will be winter.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley takes place in rural Iowa, but it has the depravity of a story that might take place much further south. Though Smiley doesn’t really compare to writers like Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, she can be praised for her honest portrayal of alcholism, incest, abuse and denial, like some of the best southern writers have done before her.

Douglas A. Greenberg’s review on Amazon.com states, “There is so much depravity here, in fact, that after a while I found myself (figuratively) rolling my eyes at each new twist in the plot.” Personally, having come from a family with the same kind of depravity and drama, I didn’t think it was over the top. I thought it was pretty realistic.

On the other hand, I related more to Rebecca Wells’s Little Altars Everywhere, which also dealt with alcholism, incest, abuse and denial. Not only did it take place in Louisiana instead of Iowa, but the denial was tempered with humor instead of hard work. These people in Smiley’s Iowa may be depraved, but they take themselves way too seriously.