Review: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Review by Kate

Publication information: Algonquin Books / 9 April 2007 / 335 pages

Genre: Literary fiction

Where I heard about it: In 2007, after nearly a year of reading literally nothing, I asked friends for book recommendations as I wanted to start reading again. Elle claims she was the first to recommend Water for Elephants, but as I thought someone else did, I will say it had multiple good reviews from friends. And then it sat on my shelf. For four years.

Spoilers: Nothing to write home about.

Review:

Though he may not speak of them, the memories still dwell inside Jacob Jankowski’s ninety-something-year-old mind. Memories of himself as a young man, tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. Memories of a world filled with freaks and clowns, with wonder and pain and anger and passion; a world with its own narrow, irrational rules, its own way of life, and its own way of death. The world of the circus: to Jacob it was both salvation and a living hell.

I’ve never been “into” the circus. My godmother happily retells the story of taking me along with her three daughters to the circus when I was about four. While they ate peanuts and cheered at feats of daring, I fell asleep for almost the entire show. Maybe that’s part of why it took me so long to read Water for Elephants, because on paper it should be a book I adore: the story of down-on-his-luck Jacob who, nowhere else to go, ends up the vet for a circus, all of it told by Jacob as an old man when the circus comes to town. I wish I’d had the sense to read the prologue about four years ago, because the excitement and mystery that is set up on those first few pages is a vein carried through the whole book. Gruen’s prose is beautiful and addicting. Jacob, even more so.

Uncle Al is a buzzard, a vulture, an eater of carrion. Fifteen years ago he was the manager of a mud show: a ragtag group of pellagra-riddled performers dragged from town to town by miserable thrust-hoofed horses.

In August 1928, through no fault of Wall Street, the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth collapsed. They simply ran out of money and couldn’t make the jump to the next town, never mind back to winter quarters. The general manager caught a train out of town and left everything behind – people, equipment, and animals.

Uncle Al had the good fortune to be in the vicinity.

It’s hard for me to really sort out how I feel about this book. It almost feels like a good ensemble drama, told specifically through the eyes of just one of the players: through Jacob we learn about Uncle Al, the manager who maybe is only out for himself; August, the charismatic but dangerous ringmaster; Kinko, the performing dwarf with a Jack Russel named Queenie; Marlena, the beautiful equestrian performer; Camel and the other men who do the grunt work. Circus life isn’t glorified in the way we’re set up to think of when we tell kids they can run off and join the circus if they don’t want to brush their teeth or eat their brussel sprouts. Everything Jacob experiences is shared through the lens of someone who never expected this life, and you get to feel the horror: in animal abuse, in the mistreatment of other workers, in the bombastic and oftentimes unconscionable ways the circus is run. Jacob is a compassionate lens through which to see some of the least compassionate characters I’ve ever read – and an honest lens.

An honest lens to an extent. Jacob is the sort of unreliable narrator who you trust the entire way through. He’s not really lying, as much as he’s leaving things out. Hinting at things without saying them. Ensuring that you never really know what’s going to happen next, even when you think you do. Gruen perfectly constructs Jacob so you never know if the obvious answer, the one you’d guess from the line of the narrative, is actually the right one. But you trust him, and you believe in him – and you aren’t really disappointed by him, either.

And what started slowly, as a tale about life in the circus that was interesting but not riveting, turned quickly into a story about love and trust and humanity in a way that I can’t really spell out without spoiling the whole book – and writing an ode to Rosie, the most compelling character of all.

Age is a terrible thief. Just when you’re getting the hang of life, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back. It makes you ache and muddies your head and silently spreads cancer throughout your spouse.

Metastatic, the doctor said. A matter of weeks or months. But my darling was as frail as a bird. She died nine days later. After sixty-one years together, she simply clutched my hand and exhaled.

It seems a misnomer to call Water for Elephants a love story, though every review and blurb I’ve read is dead-set on pinning the label through every page. Water for Elephants is a life story. There’s a love element in it, sure, but that’s because there’s love in life. But there’s hurt and fear, danger and despair, all beautifully told in a way that gave me that heart-sick feeling when I finished it, the one where I wished there was more. But on the other hand, I think more would’ve been wrong. I think it stays as everything Jacob needed to say and have understood about his life. And it ended up being exquisite.

9 strawberry shortcakes: A stunner. Well-executed.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: Famous Writers School by Steve Carter

Famous Writers School by Steve Carter

Review by Kate

 

Publication information: Counterpoint / 1 September 2006 / 252 pages

Format: Paperback that I haven’t ever taken the Borders sticker off of. Hmmm.

Genre: Contemporary literature

Where I heard about it: My mother bought this for me a couple years ago as a birthday gift. She’d wandered into Borders, picked it out, and then handed it over – despite the fact that I’d asked for about fifteen other books, of which this was not one.

Spoilers: No more than Amazon.

 

 

 

Claiming to have penned more than seventy stories, essays, and reviews, as well as a forthcoming novel, Wendell Netwon is the writer-in-residence, founder, and director of The Famous Writers School correspondence course. Wendell’s eccentricity is matched only by that of his students: a seductive, slightly seedy torch singer and confessional memoirist; an enigmatic housewife whose letters and stories are becoming increasingly more bizarre; and an author of dark detective fiction that provokes the seething envy of his instructor.

 

There is a certain amount of fear that climbs into my heart every time my mother says that she’s found a good book for me. My mom reads, sure, but not in the way I read; she’s a fan of Jodi Picoult and James Patterson ghost-writes, neither of which rank high on my list of quality literature. Most the books she’s bought me are unopened on my shelves with me promising that I’ll read them someday. I thought Famous Writers School would be the same thing – but then one day, I got bored and decided I’d give it a go.

Famous Writers School is a lot of things. It’s told entirely through letters and pieces of the characters’ novels, for one. It’s raucously funny, for two. And above all else? It’s just brilliant.

 

 

It was a bright Saturday morning seventeen years ago when I first sat down to write fiction. In the next room, an unsigned divorce agreement lay on an unmade bed like a three-day-old mackeral whose odor I could not escape. I had a pack of Dunhills, a yellow legal pad, and an archaic fountain pen that my great-uncle, an RAF fighter pilot, used to write love letters that convinced my aunt, an American Red Cross volunteer, to marry him, althought now the pen stained my fingers if I so much as touched it.

 

 

Famous Writers School is one of those books where it’s hard to describe without giving too much away. Three hopeful authors corresponding with their teacher, admittedly, doesn’t sound like a great premise for a book, but Carter builds from each excerpt and letter so perfectly to the next that you almost forget you’re reading snippets of the authors’ stories. Everything locks together like expensive puzzle pieces, and there’s no wiggle room in the form of holes or unanswered questions. The ambiguities are meant to be ambiguous, to make you wonder what is really happening outside the letters to fuel these characters on.

And that’s the other little surprise about this book: all four characters – Wendell, Laura (the housewife), Dan (the detective-writer), and Rio (the ABD lounge-singer) – manage to be discrete personalities with different interests, different obsessions, and different writing styles. Pieces of who they are come out in their letters to Wendell and, moreso, in their writing, which really just makes you wonder: how much of our selves are injected into our writing, and what do those pieces say about us?

 

 

The Poet asked me to go to the drive-in with him. I told him we’d have to wait until my husband was out of town and my children could be left with their grandparents. He said the drive-in was open from April through October. Finally we went. Holding hands, eating out of the same popcorn bucket and flimsy bowl of nachos. Splitting a mammoth candy bar. Later, a remembered innocence in our fumblings. Clothes everywhere. In the background, the voice of Schwarzenegger.

 

 

A lot of avid readers want to be writers, and if we’re talking universal truths, a lot of writers think they’re talented enough to “make it”. I think that’s why stories about writers are appealing, to see how they are in fact normal people who have some talent and eventually “make it”. Famous Writers School is the other side of that coin. It’s about ego and what makes actual talent. It’s about the way authors live in their heads, about obsession and jealousy and a need to be recognized, and it’s perfectly done.

 

 

I’m sure you know that detective fiction is written with an eye to keeping the reader interested. Fairly exciting stuff happens every few pages, and I think my opening chapters are within the bounds of what most detective fiction does. I also think the chapters accomplish what you said in lesson 2 about putting pressure on your characters, so if I toned down the action the way you suggested, I would actually be going against your advice. I guess I’m just confused about how to proceed.

 

 

Writers should read this book. People who think they’re going to be the next great American novelist should read this book. Really, everyone should.

 

9 strawberry shortcakes: A stunner. Well-executed.

(For more rating information see here.)

Review: Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy

by Elle (a contribution to Angieville’s Retro Friday)

 

Publication Information: John Murray / 28 May 2004 / 272 pages

Format: Paperback reprint. The book was originally published in 2003 and repackaged to go with Meloy’s other books Half in Love and Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it.

Genre: Contemporary Literature

Where I heard about it: I read this back in 2003 and couldn’t remember why when I first went back to thinking about it but I have since seen that it was a Richard and Judy Summer Read so that will have been the reason I bought it originally.

Spoilers: Nothing that you won’t get off the book jacket or Amazon.

Review:

 

Yvette Santerre met the photographer on the beach as her children played, and he offered to take their picture for her husband, away at war. When he arrived at her house with his camera, the last thing she expected was that he would try to kiss her. But that kiss will haunt her family for generations.

 

Angie from Angieville put it better than me in a recent review for Sara Manning’s Unsticky when she said, “I’m still just a little bit protective of my feelings over this book. Do you ever feel that way after finishing a book that completely threw you for a loop (in the very best way)? I feel distinctly protective of our relationship, the book and I.”

Liars and Saints came at the right time in my life. I was stuck at home during a period of being laid off, I had raging insomnia and I was addicted to daytime telly because it kept the house noisy enough that I didn’t feel completely cut off from reality (I didn’t even realise I did that until Kate mentioned it a few weeks ago). I wasn’t in the mood for anything heavy and Liars and Saints is a short book which has a deceptively cheery cover, so in I delved.

I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.

 

When he was a boy, there was a priest Teddy believed to be a member of the family: a man who ate suppers with them, another Father. When Teddy was six, his grandfather died, and the priest stood over the big dirt hole with the white box in it, and said things Teddy didn’t understand, and then Teddy’s grandmother threw herself like a great black bird in her black dress, down into the hole, and held the box in her long, thin arms, crying “Il est mort! Il est mort!” still more like a bird, and they had to pull her collapsed from the grave. Was that what Teddy wanted from Yvette? He thought it was. It had frightened him, but was still his model for devotion. He wouldn’t throw himself into Yvette’s grave if she died – it was too hysterical for a man – but he would do more. He was quite sure he would do more.

 

Meloy’s back catalogue includes two short story collections and, though I couldn’t pin my reaction it down at the time, Liars and Saints does feel like a collection of interweaved short stories – single vignettes following individual characters. Normally such a trait wouldn’t be high on my list of positives for a novel-length piece but Meloy has that sparkle that only truly amazing short story tellers have: she uses every single word and every single one of them counts. (The fact that every single one of them is simultaneously like a little firework and a square punch between the eyes helps.)

Liars and Saints follows the Santerre family over several decades of their lives, following a different character each time a new era rolls around, right from the 1950s onwards. The transitions are never choppy, yet never seem logical; as every fresh point-of-view arrived, I found that I had sunk so deeply into it and invested so much of myself that I had barely even realised that there had been any change at all. Multi-generational novels are sometimes difficult because by default there must be at least one unsympathetic character in the history of a family but even the most unsympathetic character Meloy treats with the same scathing and pointed scalpel. I never failed to find the humanity in any of them, or to feel for them.

 

“Mother,” Yvette said.

“It’s true! The only women who were pure were his sister Rosalie and the Blessed Virgin. The rest of us were faithless whores. And I could tell you a few things about Rosalie!”

Yvette helped her mother inside the house. She sat her down at the kitchen table, and turned on a light. The kitchen hadn’t changed since her childhood, and now it looked like a museum exhibit. Homelife in the Depression: respectability clung to through tidiness and thrift.

 

Catholic guilt is a trope that I’m done with now in contemporary literature. There is a ridiculous amount of novels out there which explore the concept without any great depth and with a goodly amount of drama. Once again, however, Meloy managed to treat the idea and the function Catholic guilt more realistically than any foray into the subject I had ever seen before. The mounting family debt to the confessional and the evolution of the family’s faith throughout the novel is a tiny but intricately woven thread which provides the backbone of the story. Teenage pregnancies, affairs and catastrophic lies are only a few of the surreptitiously held secrets which the Santerres harbour but Meloy somehow manages to treat them all with the same vaguely caustic sardonic that makes for copious snorting-out-loud moments whilst also leaving you wondering if the sharp stick she’s poking is landing a little too close to home.

Meloy has a prose style that you either love or hate. The novel is simultaneously like being confided in by someone who holds fifty years worth of dark secrets and like listening to a contemporary George Eliot observing the intricacies and eccentricities of modern life. Liars and Saints is a character-driven novel and not one that’s fuelled by dramatic plots but the time flew by so quickly that I sat down to read at noon and only looked up when I realised that I couldn’t see because it was so dark outside.

 

“Your Mom and Margot wouldn’t want me to say anything,” Teddy said. He had planned to get right to the point, but now he seemed to need an introduction. He had practiced this moment over the years, and in his mind he had told it simply and directly, but now he found he didn’t know what to say. “Your mother and Margot -”

“Oh, my God,” Jamie said suddenly. “Oh, my God. Stop.” Teddy heard something crash in the background. “Don’t tell me, Dad,” Jamie said. “Please.”

 

I’m saving my reread of Liars and Saints for a time in my life where I need a wry sense of reality again to make me realise it’s not so bad after all.

In the meantime: Read. It. Readitnow.

Overall rating: 9 strawberry shortcakes: A stunner. Well-executed.

(For more rating information see here.)