21. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, plus two more memoirs

Some book reviews! I am woefully behind on my book reviews! I feel woefully behind on many things, which is peculiar, because I could not in fact list anything that I'm actually behind on. Oh, well...

I've been reading a lot of memoirs lately, so I'm grouping their reviews here.

1. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? And Other Concerns, by Mindy Kaling

I don't have anything particular intelligent to say about this book, but I wanted to mention thatI'd read it because it is hilarious and if you want something funny to read, I highly, highly recommend it. I started reading it while walking home from the library, barely missed walking into traffic, and forwent dinner in order to continue reading, because it was so entertaining.

2. All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India, by Rachel Manija Brown

I both like this book and admire it immensely. Brown presents herself as the Plucky Young Girl Warrior - one whose pluck and warrior skills are tragically inadequate to deal with the miserable situation in which she finds herself, but nonetheless quite real - and it's simply a lot of fun to read.

Moreover, Brown's memoir of her rotten childhood on an Indian ashram could easily have bogged down in bitterness and recriminations (and who could have blamed her?), but she leavens the misery with both a fine eye for the absurd and a great compassion. She never forgives her parents for their failures, but she tries to understand and to explain why they failed the ways that they did - which is more interesting and more incisive than rote forgiveness.

3. The Sex Doctors in the Basement: True Stories from a Semi-Celebrity Childhood, by Molly Jong-Fast.

Reading this right after All the Fishes Come Home to Roost makes for an especially unfortunate contrast. Brown has clearly grown and changed since the events she's depicting, and is clearly looking back at them with some psychological distance - while Jong-Fast still seems defined by her childhood. All advice to "write what you know" aside, I think being too close to one's subject can be detrimental: it's impossible to get any perspective on it, to interpret it for readers, to do anything but recount what happened.

Jong-Fast recounts very well, and she's often funny, but there's a sense of hollowness to the book. Jong-Fast presents herself very much as a "spoiled, self-centered New York rich girl: Jewish edition" - quite deliberately; she plays her faults and foibles for laughs. And she can be very funny sometimes, but...I'm just not sure why she chose to present herself that way. And there doesn't seem to be anything beneath the surface gloss of faults: she's a bunch of mannerisms rather than a character.

I feel that this book would have been much better had Jong-Fast spent a few years digesting her past before writing it.

In The Hand of the Goddess

The great Tortall reread continues! I've finished In the Hand of the Goddess, and naturally enough, I've been thinking about Pierce's handling of the gods. Her gods peaked in Alanna: The First Adventure: there's a sense that of the gods are distant, unknowable, powerful and perhaps benevolent but still terrifying.

Whereas In the Hand of the Goddess begins with the Goddess showing up to act as Alanna's life coach, which rather drains the mystery and the terror from her. And the gods only become more knowable from here on out; by the Trickster books, they simply seem like extremely powerful, but ultimately petty and fallible humans.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that - the Greek gods are much like that in myths - except that, 1) Pierce doesn't seem to want to take this to its logical conclusion - she seems to have these fuzzy ideas about these gods being just and benevolent and wise that she can't quite shake, even though they don't really play out in practice; and 2) the characters don't find the gods nearly as terrifying as they should, given that the gods are just petty humans who happen to have the ability to toss around thunderbolts.

...my thoughts on this issue are still fuzzy. I think I'll have more to say once I've reread In the Realms of the Gods, which I barely remember, because I never reread it, because I was so displeased by the (to my eyes) utter out-of-left-fieldness of Daine/Numair.

A:TFA also has the best sense of the Gift as something powerful but precarious. In the later Tortall books - indeed, in a lot of fantasy books - people talk a lot about magic going wrong and backfiring spectacularly, but we never see it happen. Magic seems about as dangerous as electricity.

And electricity can be very dangerous, I know, but no one worries that they're going to set their house on fire every time they flip a light switch. I suppose for magic to be really useful, it would need to be pretty reliable...but that makes it seem much less, well, magical.

(A lot of worldbuilding advice suggests that a good fantasy world needs to have strict rules for magic, which I don't agree with. I think it's important for magic to have limits - and for authors to stick to those limits - but for magic to have specific rules, like laws of physics, that it follows every time, makes it so much less numinous or mysterious or interesting.)

On a completely different note, Pierce's take on romance is skeevier than I remembered it being, and I was never really big on her romances. There's this line, about George's pursuit of Alanna: “He hadn’t kissed her since Jon’s birthday almost a year ago; but he let her know - with little touches, with softness in his eyes when he looked at her - that he was stalking her.”

Stalking her? Maybe that word didn't have all the negative connotations in the 1980s as it does today? But...even without extra negative baggage, a hunter stalking a deer is not really an attractive image.

And this isn't even getting into Jon. (I'm going to discuss Jon more after reading Woman Who Rides Like a Man.) What strikes me about Jon, in this book, is how perfunctory his characterization is: he's more of a character space on which readers can project their fantasies about princes, than a fully realized character in his own right.