A Certain Slant of Light

I loved Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (the serial killer parts got kind of repetitive, but the Chicago World's Fair is endlessly fascinating), so I've been waiting basically forever for his new book - In the Garden of Beasts, about the American ambassador's family in Berlin in 1933 as Hitler solidified his hold on the country.

And I finally got a hold of it this weekend and I've gotten about seventy pages in and I'm not sure I can continue, because I've conceived such a violent dislike of the American ambassador and his kith and kin. The ambassador has resolved to be open-minded about the current regime, for the value of open-minded that involves rationalizing away evidence that the current regime might be evil.

(I get that he has fond memories of Germany from his youth and thus wants to give the country the benefit of the doubt, but really, there needs to be doubt before you can give someone the benefit of it. He was getting daily reports of government officials beating up unassuming bystanders with impunity. Any doubts he had were self-imposed.)

But he's less obnoxious than his daughter, who not only whole-heartedly ignores any and all evidence of that Germany might be going wrong - even unto ignoring brutality that takes place right in front of her face - but actively excuses it, because, as far as I can tell, she finds brutality attractive. She meets the leader of the secret police and is all "Oooooooh you're the leader of the secret police and everyone thinks you're terrifying! IT IS SO SEXY HOW YOU BEAT UP INNOCENT PEOPLE!"?

To be fair, she doesn't seem to have thought beyond the "everyone thinks you're terrifying! (and that's so sexy!)" to why everyone finds him terrifying. But at some point being thoughtless becomes a form of callousness - cruelty even.

***

And then I tried to watch St. Trinian's which I had also been looking forward to, and had to give that up because schoolgirls being horrid to each other just wasn't hitting my hilarity buttons. Ugh.

I just read an awesomely awesome ridiculous book from 1916. It's called The Red Cross Girls on the French Firing Line and is about the adventures of four young women who go to France to be Red Cross nurses, although there's much more sightseeing in Paris, touring the rear trenches (where the soldiers have somehow managed to grow a garden!), and living in an awesome little house on the grounds of a tumbledown chateau than actual nursing.

And naturally there are ridiculous, ridiculous romances. My personal favorite was between the stern Bostonian Eugenia (things I've learned from early twentieth century fiction: do not name your daughter Eugenia. It never helps) and the dashing young French captain Castaigne.

The first time they meet Captain Castaigne thinks Eugenia is the most disagreeable girl he ever met, which naturally means he will be madly in love with her ere long.

The second time they meet, it's on a dark road at night and Captain Castaigne thinks Eugenia is a deserter or possibly a German spy and sends his trusty hound to knock her over so he can interrogate her.

The third time they meet, Eugenia has just been knocked on the head with a bit of shrapnel which knocks her unconscious for five hours or so but otherwise evidences no ill effects, only to wake up to find Captain Castaigne's trusty hound pacing anxiously around. He fetches - drumroll! - the grievously injured Captain Castaigne!

And they are STUCK BEHIND ENEMY LINES!!!

So Eugenia takes him back to the little house on the grounds of the chateau (to which chateau, incidentally, Captain Castaigne is heir, although he never mentions it because he stands firmly behind republican France and therefore is a suitable spouse for a strictly raised Bostonian girl), where she nurses him back to health until the Germans retreat and Captain Castaigne's mother, who is the current owner of the chateau and possessed of awesome dignity, takes charge of his care.

And then Eugenia and Captain Castaigne meet a fourth time, by a pool that one of Eugenia's companions has named The Pool of Melisande, and he confesses his love and Eugenia is all "It's just GRATITUDE you're feeling, you'll forget about me in six months because you are WAY out of my league of attraction."

"Never!" cries Captain Castaigne.

And thus the book ends. And I CAN'T FIND THE SEQUEL ONLINE ANYWHERE WOE.

Last post I raved for a while about books about Evangelical Christian culture. Those books are excellent and I love them, but they're really just a road map. If you want to get down and dirty with Evangelical books, then you have to read Francine Rivers' A Voice in the Wind and An Echo in the Darkness.

Or, okay, you don't, but I'm going to tell you all about them because I just have to SHARE. They're shlocky, they're historically risible - Rivers never misses a chance to throw in evangelical buzzwords, never mind how un-Roman blathering about alternative lifestyles sounds - they're very Moral Majority; but they're nonetheless strangely page-turning.

( You guys, you guys, I have so much to tell you. )

So, yes. Basically these books are irredeemable potboilers with banal prose and warped values. But still…but still…despite all their problems, the unlikely plot contrivances and the hammering of a message I find highly disagreeable, still, there's something here.

The characters may be exasperating, they may be twisted to suit the messages, but I care about them. I want Julia to find an author who doesn't want to make an example of her and Hadassah to realize that Alexander is by far superior to Marcus. They breathe.

Christian wrestling. It sounds peculiar, doesn't it? Insert "Turn the other cheek" joke here. But it's a real thing: Christian wrestling, just like WWE except with more chances to save your immortal soul.

It's this sort of thing that makes American Evangelical culture endlessly fascinating to me. A vast subculture, tens of millions strong and politically active, in my own country - and aside from VeggieTales I knew nothing about it!

(In case you don't know, VeggieTales is a video series that retells Bible stories with anthropomorphized vegetables as the main characters. They are awesome. They're like Bible Muppets.)

This weekend my reading culminated in Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple, which is awesome. (Thanks for the rec, exuberantself!)

Roose, a secular liberal student at Brown University, transferred to Jerry Falwell's conservative evangelical Liberty University for a semester, as a sort of alternative study abroad, on the grounds that for a secular American liberal, American evangelical culture is much more alarming and foreign than many actual foreign countries.

And he's probably right. Most study abroad programs are not going to net you a class in Creationism, or a three-second rule for hugs (four seconds are verging on the lascivious), or an anti-masturbation club or floor prayer meetings or any of the other hundred things that Roose chronicles with admirable compassion and open-mindedness.

Though he doesn't become an evangelical, he comes to appreciate aspects of evangelical culture that he never thought he would: prayer, the willingness to go the extra mile to help people, even the spirit behind the three-second hug rule. Sure, that specific rule may be absurd and legalistic, but it creates a dating culture that is much more genuine and less self-centered than one where the participants are thinking about nothing but "How far are we going to go tonight?"

This book makes a fascinating companion piece to A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically. Jacobs' book is much less focused on evangelicalism; rather than moving into an evangelical enclave, he reads the Bible and tries to follow as many of the rules within it as possible. Don't cut your beard. Don't eat fruit from a tree less than four years old. (This pretty much limits his fruit consumption to cherries.) Don't shake hands with women who are menstruating or men who haven't been ritually purified since their last ejaculation…

As you can imagine, Jacobs' experiment makes for a lot of awkward conversations.

Jacobs is Roose's mentor, which accounts for a similarity of spirit between their books. They wend their way to similar conclusions: that evangelicals (or religious people generally) are often excellent people, some of the kindest and gentlest you will ever meet, who nonetheless often whole-heartedly believe some rather awful things.

Roose and Jacobs both tend to emphasize the nice people over the awful things, although they never lose sight of the latter; the dramatic tension is what gives both books their page-turning appeal. Both books are lively, thoughtful reads; either is a good introduction to Evangelical culture in America.

I'm going to post about something other than books at some point, I swear, but I just keep READING things and then I have stuff to SAY about it and, well. Here be reviews!

First, E. Lockhart's Fly on the Wall, a slim novel about a girl who is transformed into a fly on the wall of the boy's locker room at her school.

Let us begin by admiring the brilliance of this premise. It makes absolutely no sense (and no explanation is ever offered), but it allows Lockhart to write a hundred pages thinly plotted pages about boys being naked. I bet this book enjoys a lot of covert popularity among junior high girls.

( Unfortunately… )

On a slightly different but still disappointed note, a review of Jaclyn Moriarty's The Ghosts of Ashbury High, the fourth of her Ashbury High companion novels.

I loved the earlier novels - especially The Murder of Bindi Mackenzie - and therefore approached this latest effort in a pitch of anticipation so fevered as to be deleterious to anything short of a tour de force. And, though Moriarty's characters are buoyant and beautifully realized as ever, The Ghosts of Ashbury High is hardly a tour de force.

For one thing: not nearly enough Bindi Mackenzie.

More seriously, though, The Ghosts of Ashbury High has pretty epic pacing issues.

( More )

I read Charles Finch’s A Beautiful Blue Death a few months ago and liked it so much that I hied myself forthwith to the sequel.

Unfortunately, The September Society has pacing issues, and is moreover…well, it’s about a murderously conspiratorial society, and I hate murderously conspiratorial societies. They’re just fine in something that’s meant to be ridiculous, an episode of Psych or The Avengers, but in serious works they quickly make everything ludicrous.

But I love Finch’s portrayal of mid-Victorian London so much – people, this is how historical fiction ought to be written! – that I came back for The Fleet Street Murders and A Stranger in Mayfair, the third and fourth books about Charles Lenox, gentleman detective.

BEST DECISION EVER. The conspiracies are gone, the pacing issues have been solved, the period detail is as deftly handled as ever, and the characters –

I love Finch’s characters. Lenox’s circle of friends and relations is a delight, not just because it is well-drawn and memorable – which is always a plus, but is not uncommon – but because they are excellent people. There’s a thoughtfulness about the way that they treat others – everyone, even people they dislike – the desire to bolster others and put them at their ease, insofar as it is possible without sacrificing truth or justice.

It’s a pleasure to spend time with such kind characters.

And! The fifth book in the series, A Burial at Sea, is coming out in November. I’m so excited!

Just finished E. D. Baker's The Frog Princess. What a dull, underperforming, and unromantic novel. The title makes the ending basically inevitable - obviously the book will end with the heroine and her frog planning their wedding! - but I had almost convinced myself it wasn't going to happen because the leads have nothing that might be mistaken for chemistry (not least because they have very little that might be mistaken for personality, either).

The hero's affection for the heroine is mostly limited to inappropriate and ineffective bursts of protectiveness, alternating with continued solicitation of make-out session, which the heroine always rejects as "Gross!" She never says anything to suggest she's changed her mind about this until the second to last page, or indeed does anything to suggest more than a transient fondness for him.

But so what if there's no textual evidence for mutual affection? It's a frog princess story! They have to get married! I'm suddenly remembering why I hated romantic subplots so vividly when I was twelve!

How Disney got from this book to The Princess and the Frog, which may have its problems but is at least possessed of interesting characters who have a cute romance in the midst of an exciting plot, I can't imagine. No, wait, I totally can. The movie bears NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE BOOK WHATSOEVER, that's how.

This isn't actually surprising, given that a school bears a close resemblance to a petri dish, but I am nonetheless shocked and appalled to discover that I've developed a sore throat. Anguish! Woe! Already! This is a sign of dark days to come.

On a brighter note! I finally got to be a book fairy! One of my students had a five point increase so he got to pick a book, and took Zombies Don't Play Soccer. "For the soccer or the zombies?" I asked.

"The zombies!" he said, as if it were obvious. Clearly a sterling young man!

Stanford Wong Flunks Big Time is a companion novel to Lisa Yee's Millicent Min, Girl Genius, which I did not find impressive. Stanford Wong is a much more successful book, not least because it's not narrated by Millicent in unconvincing genius-speak.

(Even reduced to a secondary character, Millicent is still not a convincing genius. I think the culprit is the mismatch between her vocabulary and her grammar. Millicent's sentences are grammatically too simple to support the number of big words she uses, which makes her sound like she's only pretending to be super bright.)

But Stanford Wong has other strengths, too. In particular, Yee does an excellent job portraying Stanford's growth from sullen kid to decent young man. The change is fairly subtle, and Stanford is clearly only half-conscious of it, but it's also easily discernible if you look.

I do wish Stanford's friends had been more clearly differentiated. He has four of them, and there are flashes of complex group dynamics which I would have loved to see explored, but in the end the only one who doesn't blur into the others is the mean guy, Digger.

It's in the family relationships that Yee really shines. She allows Stanford's family a messiness and an ambiguity which makes them fascinating. Stanford's difficult relationship with his stern, undemonstrative father is probably the most interesting in the book. While by the end it's on the mend, it's also clear that, though Stanford's dad loves him, he does not and may never be able to really understand his basketball-obsessed son.

Fortunately, Stanford's mother and grandmother find Stanford delightful. His grandmother Yin-Yin is especially fun: feisty, forgetful, high-spirited but tinged with sadness, she's both a good companion for Stanford and a great character in her own right.

It's not a perfect book, by any means. But it's a big step up from Millicent Min, so I may look out for Yee's next book.

Read a very nice book today: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and One Very Interesting Boy, by Jeanne Birdsall, a children's book about four sisters and their summer holiday in a guest cottage in the enormous garden behind a mansion. It was published in 2005, but feels old-fashioned in the best sense: strong sibling relationships, lots of adventure, a formula that I think was much more popular decades ago.

And no cell phones or internet, although one of the characters does type her book up on her father's computer. (She's a budding writer, and occasionally narrates her life in the voice of her alter ego/heroine, Sabrina Starr. She is awesome.) The Stargirl books are devoid of cell phones and internet, too - although I think maybe they're set in the eighties? Though maybe I just thought that when I read the first one, because of the lack of modern electronics.

I wonder if this bothers young readers today? Obviously in my time it didn't stop me from adoring Stargirl, but then I wasn't a very wired teenager; I didn't have a cell phone till I went to college. Perhaps they just think, as I thought with Stargirl, that books like this are something in the way of a period piece.

But this is a tangent. The eponymous Penderwicks are well-sketched if not deep; the aforementioned writer, Jane, was naturally my favorite, but I liked them all. The littlest sister, who goes by the delightful nickname Batty, reminded me of Mei from My Neighbor Totoro. They're both so very four. And the villains I thought were well-done: properly villainous, but not inhumanly so.

And! There are two sequels! I'm quite pleased.