Book Seven – The New Yorkers, by Catherine Schine

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I picked this book up because one of my favorite things about being a dog owner is going for a walk every day. I’m continually astounded at how many people you meet when you’re following a small animal on a leash (yes, following. Not leading, like Cesar Millan always tells everyone. I was definitely being walked, not the other way around).

Dogs and dog ownership is pretty much what unites all the characters in this book. Jody and her white pit-bull mix, Beatrice. There’s Polly and her brother George, who find an abandoned puppy in Polly’s new apartment (vacated in that most New York of ways, when the previous tenant commits suicide). There’s the restaurant owner and his puppies. There are Doris and Everett, who don’t care much for dogs at all but find their lives transformed, indirectly, because of contact with them. And Simon, a reclusive social worker who lives down the street, who enters into a complex relationship with Jody.

The New Yorkers isn’t a deep read, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyable. I did enjoy it, very much. Some of the stories were heartwarming and funny, and others made me bust out bawling. The Amazon listing for the book cites a Seattle Times reviewer who says that if The New Yorkers ever became a movie, it’d be directed by Nora Ephron, and everyone would be wearing fuzzy sweaters. Sometimes that’s not so bad. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you want in a book: a good laugh, and a good cry.

I’m not going to pretend to be a literary snob with this list. Ultimately, I like a good book, and good books are good for any number of reasons. There are plenty of books I’ve read over the years that make me savour every word, to linger over sentences and dissect how the writer put it all together. There are others that do nothing more than offer escapism, with colourful characters and diverting plots. The New Yorkers was one of the latter, and that’s fine with me!

Book Six – The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

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Confession: for a long time I thought this book was going to be about jail.

Get it – corrections?

I don’t know why I thought that. I think I had it mixed up in my head with The Reader or something, which isn’t about jail but is fairly bleak, and so I had this sort of POW, Holocaust thing attached to it, rather than the satire it is. I finally found out it wasn’t about jail, and I really wanted to read it. And then I read that Franzen told Oprah to go take a flying leap when she wanted to add this book to her Book Club, and I really wanted to read it. Especially when she called him ‘elitist, so there.’ (I don’t know about the ‘so there.’ It’s implicit, if you ask me.)

So anyway. The Corrections is not about jail, The Corrections is about a dysfunctional modern family. “Is there any other kind?” you ask. Well, no, probably not. But a book about a perfectly functioning family would be a very short book. It would also be total, total fiction. And boring.

The story starts with Chip Lambert, a college professor who is toiling away at a screenplay that he at first believes is brilliant but rapidly realizes, after giving it to a high-powered movie exec, probably isn’t. It’s a stack of paper he desperately wants back in order to make the titular “corrections” that he believes will save the story and, for once, allow him some success. Chip has a few issues with the media and society in general, and spends most of his days trying to get his students to realize that pop culture is filled with Corporate Agendas and Hidden Messages. His students don’t appreciate Marshall McLuhan or Noam Chomsky as much as Chip does, though that doesn’t seem to stop Chip from starting an affair with one of them. Long story short, everything self-destructs, Chip loses his job and ends up working in Lithuania.

Meanwhile, his parents, Enid and Alfred, are facing their own issues. Alfred is struggling with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and dementia, and Enid is struggling with her embarrassment and inability to deal with a future that doesn’t match her vision of twilight years spent surrounded by a loving family.

But it doesn’t stop there. Chip’s siblings are also battling personal demons and lives filled with upheaval. His brother Gary is, despite appearing to have everything, hopelessly depressed. His sister Denise, who seems, on the surface, to have everything under control, has made some seriously questionable decisions (the kind you think only Chip could make) that have left her life in ruins.

What it all seems to boil down to for the Lamberts is a the modern family’s impossible search for happiness. Their relationships are often empty and unfulfilling, their lives filled with stuff. The book traces the family from the early days of Enid and Alfred’s courtship, through Chip, Gary, and Denise’s childhoods, to the “one last Christmas” Enid is dying for them to spend together. In the meantime, Franzen fills in the corners with disquieting accounts of big business, whose benevolent message, as usual, hides something deeper.

The “corrections” in the book refer to far more than the editing of Chip’s screenplay. Every Lambert is trying to “correct” something – unhappiness, loneliness, missed opportunities. Each other. In the end, we can realize it’s an impossible task, even if they can’t.

So totally not about jail.

Book Five – Howards End, by E.M. Forster

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And so begins a flurry of posts! Even though I haven’t written here, I’ve been reading, ravenously. And while I still miss my favorite reading buddy, we’re slowly getting used to the extra room on the couch. And because she and her mate always started what they finished (whether a walk or a DentaBone), I figured I’d better get back on the posting wagon. So, onwards.

I’ve wanted to read Howards End for a long time. I saw the Merchant-Ivory movie in the 90s, and I loved the story, but for some reason shied away from the book. I’m so glad I finally picked it up. Forster wrote it in 1910, before the First World War, but I found it in many ways a very refreshing read. There were things he wrote about – the rampant development in London, the isolation people felt from their neighbors – that resonated with me in ways I didn’t expect.

The story follows the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, who live in Wyckham Place with their brother, Tibby. The Schlegels are “intellectuals” – they are not wealthy by the standards of their circle, but they enjoy going out to concerts, reading, and discussion topics of Great Social Importance with their friends. The story begins when Helen Schlegel goes to stay with the Wilcoxes, a wealthy family the sisters met on vacation, at their country home, Howards End.

The novel chronicles the relationship between the two families, starting with Helen’s (extremely) brief affair with one of the Wilcox sons, the subsequent fallout, and the relationship that develops, awkwardly at first, between Margaret and Mrs Wilcox. Knowing the Schlegels are going to be evicted from their home (to make way for a complex of flats!), Ruth Wilcox leaves Howards End to Margaret, someone who appreciates the beauty of the place as she does. When Ruth passes away, her family conspires to keep the property within the family – not because they care for it as much as Ruth did, but because it’s a financial asset to them.

(OK, whoops, I didn’t mean to hit ‘publish’ there. Not done!)

Of course, you have to know hiding this information from Margaret could not possibly end well, and it certainly doesn’t, especially since she ends up marrying Henry Wilcox. Meanwhile Helen has an unfortunate entanglement with Leonard Bast, who is trying to work his way up in the world as a clerk. Forster neatly illustrates the divide between the classes with the Wilcoxes, Schlegels, and Basts and makes some interesting comments on the blurring boundaries of the new twentieth century.

As I said above, even 100 years later this book holds a surprising relevance, as the Schlegels lament the rampant greed and consumerism that seems to color their social circle. They seem to be searching for meaningful relationships and connection in a society that’s slowly steering towards the impersonal and disconnected. One can only wonder what they’d think of Facebook, condo complexes, and front-drive garages.

Book Four: Little Children by Tom Perrotta

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I discovered Tom Perrotta by accident. I was looking for someone else on the shelves of my library, poking around in the Ps, and there he was. I picked up Little Children because I’d heard of the movie (but never seen it), and when I read the back and realized he’d also written Election, I knew I had to check him out. The writer who invented Tracy Enid Flick bore further investigation.

As it turns out, his style is exactly the type of style I aspire to. I am a huge fan of stories inspired by people living regular lives. I was thinking about this earlier. I really often aspire to write like, say, Alice Munro or Richard Ford, but let’s be real here. I’m not nearly that poetic. I’m not as poetic as Tom Perrotta, either, but his style is much closer to my reality. The people are real, the situations are authentic, and the narrative is filled with wit.

To recap the story briefly: Sarah and Todd, both stay-at-home parents of toddlers, meet one summer. Both are in marriages that have lost their sheen, living lives vastly different than those they expected. Todd is (half-heartedly) working towards passing the bar exam while his film-producer wife is the major breadwinner, and Sarah, married to a middle-aged ad executive, has long given up her dreams of activisim and PhD’s.

They  meet at the park one day, when Sarah kisses Todd on a dare (to the horror of the other mothers present). Over that summer they bring their children to play together at the park and pool, and start an affair that offers escape from their less-than-satisfying lives in suburbia. At the same time, Ronnie, a convicted sex offender who has been released from jail, moves in with his mother. His life brushes up against Todd’s and Sarah’s in some unexpected ways, and as with everyone in the story, no one is as they seem from the outside.

Someone pointed out that writing about suburbia is nothing new, and that’s true. But I often think it takes special skill to make us want to read about characters whose lives are so similar to ours. And that’s perhaps what I liked most about Little Children. It takes a darker view of suburbia, yes, but it does it through the eyes of three-dimensional characters.

One Small Black Dog, One Big Lesson

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I was hoping to come here and post about book four in my experiment, but instead I’m here writing about my small black friend, Len. We had to say goodbye to her yesterday, and our house feels far too empty and quiet for our liking. I thought it was quiet when we lost Ron, but we still had another small creature wagging her tail and asking for walks, and she provided a welcome distraction for us. Today there’s nothing but silence, something I feel especially keenly as I sit in my office. I’ve worked from home for five years, and this is the first day without an office mate. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it’s breaking my heart.

lenny_20021When I first met Mike (and Ron and Len), Len was only three. She still had that crazy-Dalmatian personality – they were both riotous bundles of energy who wrestled in the backyard and pulled for their entire walks. She was up in my face, literally – so much so that for a long time I thought she was the bigger dog. In reality she was a runt, a little stocky but also very delicate, but she was busting out all over with love, just waiting for someone new to discover how fabulous an hour of chin scratching  and Len-loving could be.

Over the years, as we got to know each other, she mellowed a little. She still loved a good run in the yard or a long walk on a sunny morning, but she also loved curling up with the pack to watch a movie or have a nap. In the last year or so, she’d taken to snuggling up on the couch beside me, her head resting on my leg, submitting to long love-ins while we all watched Dexter or 24 or whatever we’d recorded on the PVR. She’d actually coax us to sit on the couch together, milling about the room and staring at whichever of us had dared sit down in the chair across the room, until we relented and took our rightful place on either side of her. There’s a special dimension to movie night when you have a sweet Dalmatian head on your lap. I can’t explain how soothing it was to sit and rub those silky ears, to feel her burrow against me and hear her sigh.

She had a job to do, of course. She was the household Guard Dog. When Ron no longer hear, Len became her ears – they communicated effortlessly. She was the ears for all of us, really, alerting us to potential danger, whether it was her nemesis (the collie from down the street) or Jane’s Addiction (she wasn’t so sure about those dogs at the beginning of Been Caught Stealing). She sounded the alarm whenever the mailman arrived, the FedEx guy came by, or one of us came home.

leninoffice1For a long time she was also public liaison for the household. I met so many people in our neighborhood while we were out on walks the last two years. She won them all over, nudging them for affection and trotting off with a spring in her step after getting it. She even won over our crusty old mailman in the end – in the last few weeks he’d say hello and point out where all the ice was on the sidewalk; he’d seen her fall one day and struggle to get up, and I think he knew she was doing her best.

I know a lot of people say you can learn volumes from your dog, but it’s true. I’d often think on walks how she  and Ron were both filled with joy to be out in the fresh air. Len would come greet us at the door no matter what was going on with her that day. She’d lick your face if you cried, and sit beside you when you needed someone. She forgave instantly, ready to shake a paw the second you were – no hard feelings. She devoured every dinner with gusto and thought veggies were the best treat ever. She played hard, and she slept hard. It was all the simple things that made her happy.

I never thought I would own dogs, let alone fall in love with them so completely. I feel blessed to have known such a wonderful, small creature – and I feel doubly blessed to have known two. I hope that in spite of her rough beginning, Len knew in the end how much her pack loved her. And I hope that somewhere, she and Ron are snuggled on a couch together, butt to butt, in a universe with all the baby carrots and roast chickens they can handle. I can only hope to put as much love in the world as she did.