I remember the night I fell in love with Tom Stoppard. He seduced me with shimmering language, ideas that revved my mind, and emotions that expanded my heart and left me breathless. Back in the spring of 1995, as I sat through a preview performance of his “Arcadia” in its U.S. premiere run at Lincoln Center, in New York, I was utterly his.
Who else could commingle chaos theory and carnal embraces — his characters positing that sexual attraction may be the one variable Newton left out and contemplating the “action of bodies in heat” — with such dexterity?
He waltzed through time with enviable ease, guiding characters and parallel ideas with a sure hand. The audience sat rapt, working hard to keep up — afraid to miss a key idea in the fast play of words. Yet “Arcadia’s” Septimus offers comfort: “We shed as we pick up,” he says of our collective desire to learn and understand, “like travelers who carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.”
Stoppard provided no answers, but rather posed question upon question, allowing his characters to hold each one up to the light and watch the insights glance off its facets. “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter,” “Arcadia’s” Hannah says of life’s unanswerable quandaries. “Otherwise we go out the way we came in.”
I emerged at the end not at all the way I’d come in. Whole chunks of the audience walked out mid-play, not yet told by critics how to react and frustrated by its challenges. But others picked up the ideas that Stoppard had shed.
New York Times theater critic Vincent Canby said “Arcadia” was “like a dream of levitation: you’re instantaneously aloft, soaring, banking, doing loop-the-loops and then, when you think you’re about to plummet to earth, swooping to a gentle touchdown of not easily described sweetness and sorrow.”
And while some reviewers complained about the play’s abundance of words and flashiness of ideas (a frequent criticism of Stoppard), San Francisco Examiner critic Robert Hurwitt gushed, “If ideas were flesh and all conception carnal, Tom Stoppard would be the sexiest writer of the modern stage.”
“Arcadia,” in which Stoppard allowed himself to mine human emotions more deeply than ever before, was but one highlight in the playwright’s long career writing for the theater, film and TV. For the last four decades, Stoppard has filled the theater world with clever wordplay, big ideas and palpable passion.
Thus far, he has turned out some 22 plays — including the Tony-Award winning “The Real Thing,” and “Travesties”; 10 adaptations and translations of works by Anton Chekhov, Federico García Lorca and Vaclav Havel; myriad television and radio plays; and a novel, “Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon.” His screenplays include “Brazil,” co-written with Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown; “Empire of the Sun,” based on the J.G. Ballard novel; and “Shakespeare in Love,” the Oscar-winning screenplay written with Marc Norman.
Whether on stage, screen or simply page, Stoppard questions everything from the nature of love to the nature of the universe, from the compulsion to act to the compulsion to act out, from the impulse to create to the impulse to procreate. And while absolutes are scant in Stoppard’s work, interrogatives and insights abound. “What a fine persecution — to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened,” observes Guildenstern in Stoppard’s 1966 breakthrough effort “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
Stoppard’s work invariably demands much from its audiences — head, heart, libido — and credits them with the capacity to learn. They must come prepared to laugh and to ponder the gravest of thoughts. If they do, they will find themselves not just intrigued and enlightened, but also moved and enlivened, with all their switches flicked on and buzzing.
Although Stoppard’s language and imagery are exquisitely British, he was born Tomas Straussler in Czechoslovakia on July 3, 1937. His father, Eugene Straussler, worked as an in-house doctor for the Bata shoe manufacturing company. In 1939, his family — Jewish, though Tom wouldn’t know to what degree until years later — fled the country of his birth just before the Nazis invaded. Settling in Singapore with his father, his mother, Martha, and his older brother, Tomas attended an English convent school until 1942, when the Japanese invaded Singapore and he was evacuated to India with his mother and brother. His father was taken to a Japanese prison camp, where he died.
The rest of the family found its way to Darjeeling, India, where Martha found a job with Bata. Tomas was sent to an American-run multiracial boarding school. But in late 1945, Martha wed Kenneth Stoppard, a major in the British army, who shared his surname with his new stepsons and moved the family to England with him after the war. Dispatched to boarding schools in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, Stoppard found relative stability. Although the family moved around a bit before settling in Bristol in 1950, Stoppard has said the main features of his schoolboy years were “a privileged education, a lovely house, acres of parkland.”
With adolescence, Stoppard grew restless. In 1954, at age 17, he found himself “bored by the idea of anything intellectual.” So he dropped out of school, moved in with his folks and got himself a job as a junior reporter at Bristol’s Western Daily Press. Within two years he was writing feature stories, but he calls his early journalism “indefatigably facetious” and self-referential.
Nevertheless, in 1958, the Bristol Evening World offered Stoppard a position as a feature writer, humor columnist and second-string drama critic, which brought him into the world of theater. At the Bristol Old Vic, in those days an extremely well-regarded regional repertory company, Stoppard formed friendships with actor Peter O’Toole and director John Boorman, early in their careers. And Stoppard himself became something of a notorious figure in Bristol, known more for his strained attempts at humor and exceedingly unstylish clothes (rock-star good looks notwithstanding) than for his writing.
Stoppard was, he told the New York Times in 1972, “an awful critic. I operated on the assumption that there was an absolute scale of values against which art could be measured. I didn’t trust my own subjective responses.” Stoppard longed, it seemed, to write for the theater rather than about it. And so, in 1960, after celebrating his 23rd birthday, he quit his newspaper job (though he did arrange a columnist gig to fall back on), and set about accomplishing his goal. Three months later, he’d written his first full-length play, “A Walk on the Water.”
It was a play of its time, like the work of so many other “angry young men,” inspired by John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger,” which had caused a sensation in 1956. “In England at that time seven out of 10 who wanted to write were writing plays,” Stoppard recalled in a 1977 interview. “Of these, four would be carbon copies of ‘Look Back in Anger,’ and the other three of ‘Waiting for Godot.’”
His own first work, he says, owed so much to Robert Bolt’s “Flowering Cherry” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” that he has since been moved to dub it “Flowering Death of a Cherry Salesman.” No matter, less than a week after Stoppard sent “A Walk on the Water” to an agent, he received “one of those Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists’ lives.” The play was optioned and was later staged in Hamburg and aired on British Independent Television.
Around that same time, Stoppard moved to London and began working as a drama critic for the short-lived Scene magazine. He tried his hand at other forms of writing, including short stories, radio plays (several of which were produced) and short television pieces. But Stoppard recalls being told by one TV exec that he should “stick to theater.” That, as it turned out, agreed with Tom. “I wanted to be in the theater,” he writes in the introduction to a collection of his works for the small screen. “It is simply the way I felt.”
In 1964, a Ford Foundation grant allowed Stoppard to spend five months writing in a Berlin mansion. He emerged with a one-act verse play called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Meet King Lear.” This evolved into Stoppard’s first big theatrical hit, the full-length absurdist romp “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” a comic retelling of “Hamlet” from the perspective of two of its minor characters.
When “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” was first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 1966, Stoppard felt it was received “politely rather than with hilarity.” But the play attracted the notice of critics. This led to a National Theatre production in 1967, under the supervision of Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, which in turn brought Stoppard, then the youngest playwright to have had his work mounted at the National, glowing notices and a bevy of prestigious awards.
It also brought him a New York production seven months later. A few critics sniffed that the play was derivative, drawing strongly not only from “Hamlet” but also from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” with dashes of Pirandello. But most critics lauded the work, which scintillates with Stoppard’s signature clever wordplay and quick-cut banter:
Ros: I want to go home.
Guil: Don’t let them confuse you.
Ros: I’m out of my step here —
Guil: We’ll soon be home and high — dry and home — I’ll —
Ros: It’s all over my depth —
Guil: — I’ll hie you home and —
Ros: — out of my head —
Guil: — dry you high and —
Ros (cracking, high): — over my step over my head body! — I tell you it’s all stopping to a death, it’s boding to a depth, stepping to a head, it’s all heading to a dead stop —
Guil (the nursemaid): There! … and we’ll soon be home and dry … and high and dry … (Rapidly.) Has it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven’t the faintest idea how to spell the word — “wife” — or “house” — because when you write it down, you just can’t remember ever having seen those letters in that order before …?
The New Yorker called “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” “a dazzling compassionate fantasy.” It won both the Tony and the Drama Critics’ Circle awards for best play of 1967-68.
Stoppard spent the next few years enjoying his success and overseeing productions of “Enter a Free Man” (the reworked version of “A Walk on the Water”) and the one-acts “The Real Inspector Hound,” “After Magritte” and “Dogg’s Our Pet,” as well as a few works for radio and TV, but he didn’t produce another full-length play until “Jumpers,” in early 1972. The play, which tackles ethical questions, took him two years to write, much of which he spent reading and researching. He sought to ensure that his insights “weren’t simply the average conclusions of a first-year philosophy student,” he told the Times of London in 1972, “which indeed they invariably turned out to be.”
Colleagues compare Stoppard’s relatively slow writing speed to that of a student cramming for an exam, and he himself admits that his process is anything but effortless, as he once told Time magazine:
I half commit myself to some distant future date. I often talk to someone about it and suggest that in six months it will be done, so I set up a kind of deadline. But most of the intervening period disappears in a kind of anxious state of walking about. You cannot start until you know what you want to do, and you do not know what you want to do until you start. That is Catch-22. Panic breaks that circle. Finally a certain force in the accumulated material begins to form a pattern.
Stoppard, who has been married twice and has four sons, two from each marriage, says he works best when his personal life is stable and serene. But he wrote “Jumpers” during the breakup of his first marriage, to nurse Jose Ingle (whom he married in 1965, separated from in 1970 and divorced in 1972). The playwright got custody of the couple’s young sons and married again in 1972, this time to Miriam Moore-Robinson, the head of a pharmaceutical company and something of a U.K. celebrity in her own right; the two divorced in 1992.
“Jumpers,” which wittily explores man’s place in a universe beyond his control, was mounted at the Old Vic in late 1972. It cemented Stoppard’s theatrical reputation and proved he was more than a one-trick pony. The radio play “Artist Descending a Staircase” followed later that year, introducing two themes to which Stoppard has returned over the years: the elusive nature of truth and the purpose of art.
With “Travesties” (1974), Stoppard began to address the role of politics in art. This was a departure for the playwright, a self-described conservative who had always striven to exclude politics from his plays for fear it cheapened the work. His plays, he wrote at the time, “must be entirely untouched by any suspicion of usefulness. I should have the courage of my lack of convictions.”
Nevertheless, both of Stoppard’s next two plays, “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” (written with Andre Previn) and “Professional Foul,” addressed human-rights issues. The latter focused on freedom of speech in Czechoslovakia, reflecting the fact that each play is a product not just of its time, but of a particular time in the playwright’s life. In 1977, Stoppard traveled to the Soviet Union and several Eastern European countries with a member of Amnesty International. In Czechoslovakia, he met playwright and future president Vaclav Havel, who had been imprisoned for nonconformism. Struck by what he saw, he subsequently worked with “Index on Censorship,” Amnesty International and the Committee Against Psychiatric Abuse, and he began to write newspaper articles and editorials about human rights.
Around this time, Stoppard’s work shed some of its self-consciousness and explored more deeply his characters’ emotions — though he continued to plumb morality, art and other ideas. His play “Night and Day” (1978) tackled the moral responsibilities and practical shortcomings of a free press. “The Real Thing,” first performed in 1982 and generally considered one of Stoppard’s best works, took on love, commitment and the place of art in society.
With “Hapgood” (1988), Stoppard melds the drama of a spy story with … physics. A double agent is like an electron, Stoppard posits, because trying to find out one’s side changes the results. Clearly, Stoppard’s dramatic exploration of wave/particle duality paved the way for his next big hit, “Arcadia,” which opened in London in 1993.
In his latest play, “The Invention of Love,” currently enjoying a successful run on Broadway, he delves deeper than ever into the personal implications of love. The play centers on A.E. Housman, the homosexual English poet and scholar who died in the ’30s, never having allowed himself to fulfill the unrequited love of his youth. Stoppard sets Housman’s temperate life against that of his contemporary, Oscar Wilde, who was tormented and reviled for his homosexuality, but who allowed himself to love at all costs. No matter that the two Victorian authors very likely never met.
“It’s a dream play, so it’s not literal biography,” Stoppard recently commented. Wilde proposes that “one falls in love with somebody whom one has helped invent,” Stoppard explains, adding that he himself is “not sure” he agrees with the contention that has inspired the play’s title.
And herein lies an element of Stoppard’s genius: Refusing to offer you a single pat lesson spoken by a character who serves as the play’s moral authority, Stoppard requires his audience members to piece together their own conclusions. “I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself,” he has said. “I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.”
But above all, Stoppard never loses sight of the play’s obligation to entertain. His comedies may “make serious points by flinging a custard pie around the stage for a couple of hours,” but he’s ever mindful that theater is “first and foremost a recreation.”
So as you laugh, you learn. As you listen, you question. And as you stretch your mind, you may feel something akin to love.
Kelle Hampton, the author of the eye-opening new memoir “Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected,” left for the hospital to give birth to her second child with “everything just — perfect,” packing not only the birth music, the blankets she’d made herself, the baby’s coming-home outfit, a special nightgown and a crown for the baby’s big sister, but also hand-designed, beribboned favors to pass out to visitors. Yet the moment her newborn daughter, Nella, was placed in her arms, Hampton’s concept of perfection altered in an instant: Though ultrasounds had signaled nothing unusual, Nella was born with Down syndrome.
Hampton writes with bracing, brave honesty about her initial response to Nella’s condition — “I think I cried for seven hours straight. It was gut-wrenching pain” — and her struggle to find hope, joy and an expanse of possibilities in what first seemed to bring only sadness. As on her blog, Enjoying the Small Things, the journey Hampton records in “Bloom” becomes a call — and not only to parents — to rethink our concepts of perfection, discover our capacities for resilience, appreciate the family and friends on whom we depend and, yes, find beauty where we may not have noticed it.
We asked Hampton, via email, about “Bloom” and the experiences and impulses that inspired it. It may be typical of the author that she immediately turned the task of tackling our questions into an event worthy of celebration, writing, “I’ll put some good music on tonight, light a candle, grab a beer, and completely enjoy the process.”
The Barnes & Noble Review: One remarkable aspect of your writing is your knack for tapping into emotions, both your own and your readers’. Has motherhood — and particularly Nella’s birth — made you more connected to your emotions?
Kelle Hampton: I feel emotions very intensely. Expressing them is another story. I think we’re all conditioned to mask certain emotions because we think they won’t be accepted or they’re “too much.” Motherhood definitely compelled me to express emotions more freely. The depth of love, the fear of losing, the need to protect, the unearthly joy — it was too much for me to contain. That’s why I started writing more. And writing something I was thinking seemed more acceptable than saying it out loud. Then with Nella’s birth, there were these contrasting emotions that were so difficult to deal with — grief, fear, sadness, shame. But once I expressed them through writing and realized other women related to them, it gave me the freedom to express myself in a way I had never done before.
BNR: ”Bloom,” like your blog, uses photos and text to tell your story. Why did you choose to combine both elements?
KH: The book is a testament to my journey that first year, and writing and photography played equal parts in my healing and perspective shift. Because the book deals with Down syndrome, a condition that has many negative stereotypes, the photos are a powerful way to showcase the beauty of these children and the beauty Nella brought to our family.
BNR: Early in “Bloom” you mention a book you read shortly before Nella’s birth, Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” which spoke to you of “the power of challenges — how living a life of comfort does nothing to make us grow, and how hard times shape us.” But you also say you couldn’t fully grasp Miller’s message until you went through your own challenges. Can we learn life lessons from books or only from our own experiences?
KH: I’ve thought about this question a lot, especially from a parent’s perspective, because we make efforts to keep our children from pain and to give them happiness. No one wishes heartache for their child, and yet I know a lot of my happiness and contentment today comes from challenging experiences and sadness in my past. I think we can learn a lot from others’ experiences, and books give us an opportunity to do that. But life without any pain is unrealistic, and the great thing about reading books and learning from others is that when we do go through hard things, we’re more equipped to handle them and don’t feel quite so alone.
BNR: I initially assumed that, before Nella’s birth, you’d led a life without much difficulty. But then you discussed challenges you faced during childhood, in particular the breakup of your parents’ marriage when your father, a preacher, came out as gay. Did those childhood challenges help prepare you for those you’ve faced as a mother?
KH: My siblings and I talk about this a lot — the fact that we are so grateful for our past, even though it has a lot of pain, because it made us tough and definitely more compassionate. Once I started writing those chapters from my past, it really hit me how much those painful memories created a foundation for later challenges in my life. Does that mean someone who had a dreamy, heartache-free childhood is at a disadvantage for handling hard times as an adult? Not necessarily.
It’s important to me, as a mother, not to shield my children from life’s more disheartening realities but to bring awareness to them in a way that gives my children both a sense of gratitude for what they have and the motivation to bring positive change to their world. I want my girls to know that life isn’t going to be without pain, but I also want to equip them with love and confidence and a perspective that allows them to face these challenges when they come.
BNR: You learned fairly early in life to embrace difference. But still you struggled at first to embrace the ways Nella was different from the daughter you had envisioned. How has your sense of “perfection” changed since you had Nella?
KH: I’ve definitely shifted my views of perfection away from image and more to inner happiness, and that shift has taken away so much pressure and allowed me the freedom to really be myself. That, in itself, is happiness.
BNR: After Nella’s birth, your close circle of girlfriends — your “Net,” as you call them — stayed with you, giving you incredible support. What do you think is the secret to having such close female friends?
KH: I think women’s friendships get a bad rap in the media. They’re portrayed as catty, jealous and unsupportive. That saddens me because I know how amazing it is to be part of a group of women where you find love and support. I think women have high expectations for each other, and sometimes we are inclined to run or drop a friendship at the first sign of drama. I embrace my friendships with the understanding that because we are all women with fiery personalities, big dreams, and a hell of a lot of passion, some drama is inevitable.
You have to approach it with compassion and forgive mistakes, because we all make them. Of course, yes, you also need to make choices to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you, who challenge you, who bring good energy. Those who don’t aren’t worth exhausting efforts.
Secondly, if you want close relationships with friends, you have to be vulnerable. I know how much it means to me when a friend admires me enough to call, crying, asking for help or trusting me with an intimate conversation. Likewise, I want to do the same and reach out to my friends, revealing my own vulnerabilities. My friends are great for shopping, laughing, or going out for drinks, but the best, most beautiful moments I’ve experienced with them are far more serious. And when you experience heartache with a friend at your side, it is bonding in a way that can’t be forgotten.
BNR: Do you think women can support each other in ways that men (even husbands) cannot in tough times, and particularly those involving parenting?
KH: As much I support equal rights for men and women, there are certain gifts women possess that men don’t naturally have and vice versa. Even though Nella is [Hampton's husband] Brett’s child and he, of course, was the only one who could sympathize with that personal parental loss of receiving her diagnosis, there was something so comforting that came from my friends — women who understood, in a way Brett couldn’t, the emotional aspect of the end of a pregnancy, a mother’s expectations, the ideal birth experience.
BNR: You write that you knew immediately, before anyone told you, that Nella had Down syndrome and worry that you didn’t show her enough love at that moment. We all sometimes feel a disconnect between the mother we want to be and the mother we fear we are in a particular moment. Should we even have a concept of what makes the “perfect” mother? Does that give us something to strive for, or give us only impossible standards we’ll never measure up to?
KH: I think we all have this imaginary version of the perfect mother we want to be. There is a quote I love about the fact that there is no way to be a perfect mother, but there are a million ways to be a good one. I try to focus on that, to know that when I try my best, acknowledge mistakes, follow my instincts, and remind myself of what’s most important, that is perfect parenting.
BNR: I wonder, too, about the dangers of our expectations for our kids. If we have a preconceived notion of who they should be, we may fail to appreciate them as they are. That’s a lesson you say you’ve learned. Is it something you feel is important for all mothers to learn?
KH: Yes! I’m learning it with Lainey [Hampton's elder daughter] just as much as with Nella. I’ve been challenging myself not to push Lainey to be a leader all the time. I have a preconceived notion that kids need to be leaders, not followers, and my husband recently reminded me that we do not need to tell our children to be leaders; we need to tell them to be themselves. It makes us all happier — to sit back, to lead by example, to accept what we are given, and to love our children no matter what path they choose to take in life.
BNR: Motherhood can be a touchy topic. Some of the emotions and responses you talk about in the book are bound to incite strong responses — mostly positive, but perhaps also negative. Were you afraid, writing about such personal topics, that you might be misunderstood and attacked?
KH: When I first published Nella’s birth story [on her blog], I discovered right away that being honest about touchy things is not always well received. It was good for me to read responses, even those “Oh my God, what kind of mother would say they want to run away!?” remarks. It initiated a personal process for me of challenging myself to write what’s true — in a respectful way, of course — and not to change my writing to cater to other people.
BNR: Did you ever find yourself pulling back? Or did you just write through those concerns?
KH: There were parts that I went to write and stopped to ponder the effects first. And, most always, I proceeded, hoping that people will understand this is my journey. Memoirs are personal, and not everyone is going to shake their head “yes” to every line, and that’s OK. The other side is that it has been incredibly fulfilling to read e-mails from women who have said, “Thank you for saying that. I felt it too, but didn’t want to say it, and you make me feel normal for admitting it.”
BNR: Do you worry about how your kids will respond to what you write when they’re old enough to read and understand it?
KH: What I wouldn’t do to have my own mother’s thoughts and photos and words and things that inspired her preserved from when we were little. I hope my children, through reading everything I’ve written — the good, the bad, the beautiful — will always read between the lines and be inspired by the constant truth of “Wow, she loved us. She celebrated life.”
BNR: One of the things you consider is how much you let your sense of how society perceives you shape how you feel about yourself. Was writing this book a way of shaping your own identity — and taking charge of your own narrative?
KH: I can’t begin to explain what writing this book has personally done for me. I owned every word I wrote, and as I typed it, I believed it even more. Empowerment — that’s what it is. I realize how much stronger I am, how much more effective I am in living purposefully, when I take control of how I feel about myself, my family and raising my kids, write it down, and put it out there for the world to see.
BNR: It sounds like writing is deeply therapeutic for you.
KH: There’s something mysterious and enlightening about the space I give myself when I write. It’s when I take all those loose philosophical/emotional thoughts I’ve had throughout the week and weave them together. I learn a lot about myself. I face my pain and struggles head-on, and I overcome them through the process of expressing myself. And, for me, when I write I’m going to do something? It’s even more powerful than saying it. When I write, “I’m going to rock this out,” it’s almost as if I hear the band in the background with each letter I type. I feel motivated, eager, excited. I’m inspired in a way I can’t explain. Writing is powerful — and it doesn’t cost near as much as therapy does.
BNR: Is it the same with photography?
KH: After taking pictures for a while, you begin to look at life a little differently, continually scanning landscapes, people, situations for that “framable” shot. In those first days, taking photos of Nella brought light to her beauty and made me recognize how perfect she was — the new, wrinkled skin on her fingers, those sparse rows of tiny eyelashes, her soft cowlick of silky hair. And it went beyond Nella as well. When I thought my world was this depressing reality, I’d pick up my camera and see the opposite — oh look, a sunset. Vivid blue skies. My child holding an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. A dimpled smile. My husband rocking his new girl to sleep. I never stopped taking pictures of these things, and it sinks in after a while: Look for the good, and you will find it.
BNR: What are you most hoping readers will take away from “Bloom”?
KH: Life is full of challenges. But life is also as beautiful as you create it to be.
If Charles Homar, the narrator and antihero of William Giraldi’s debut novel, “Busy Monsters,” somehow showed up on your doorstep — on his way, perhaps, to murder a romantic rival, to capture the mythical beast Bigfoot, or to reclaim the giant squid-obsessed object of his affection, Gillian — you might want to shut the door politely yet firmly. Not only is Charlie seriously solipsistic, thoroughly trouble prone, given to talking as if he’s devoured a thesaurus, and occasionally weapon toting; you’d also assuredly find your foibles and failings flamboyantly recounted for the 600,000 readers of New Nation Weekly, where Homar’s memoirs regularly appear.
But as unpalatable as the fictional Homar would be as a real live person, he’s an absolutely delicious character, making a series of hilariously nearsighted (and outright bad) decisions to propel himself through this far-fetched (and downright funny) narrative.
Each wacky, action-packed chapter of “Busy Monsters” is an installment in the serialized memoirs Charles publishes in his weekly magazine column; he periodically pauses in the midst of his adventures to hammer out another segment on deadline “for my slave-driving editor.” Amusingly, the people Charles meets in each chapter have all read his preceding serialized installments — and have opinions on Charles’ story and style that may echo the reader’s own thoughts and responses. “I have a nagging suspicion that only about forty percent of what you write is true,” one character tells Charles upon meeting him. “I also think your people all speak alike.”
It’s a clever device, and less gimmicky than you might think, in part because Giraldi, who teaches writing at Boston University and is a fiction editor at the literary magazine AGNI, seems completely in control. The voice he has given Charles is singular and arresting; it’s flowery but a bit thorny, too — occasionally overwhelming like a heavy perfume — and filled with quirky turns of phrase, unexpected literary and cultural allusions, self-aware asides, and highfalutin word choices that would make Roget swell with pride.
The plot, too, is an exciting yet masterfully managed hodgepodge. “Stunned by love and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down South to kill a man,” the book begins. A different author might try to stretch the suspense stirred by that opening setup into an entire novel; Giraldi settles that plot point in the first chapter and then takes us all sorts of other surprising places.
One moment Charlie is drunk with love and breaking into a Virginia state trooper’s home with blood on his mind and “a killer’s knife tucked into my boot,” the next he’s mad with heartbreak, firing a borrowed rifle at the hull of a squid hunter’s ship. The latter escapade lands him in a pleasant Maine jail, where he enjoys gourmet prison food and shares a cell with a computer geek interested in the Loch Ness monster. And then he’s off to Washington state on a misguided mission to impress his far-flung former fiancée by bagging Bigfoot, accompanying a man whose business card reads “ROMP: I BRING IT BACK DEAD.”
Let us pause here for a description of Romp, courtesy of Charles’ friend Groot: “Hunter. Scholar. Priest. Negro. Prophet. Man of jazz and all items sacrosanct. Shaves with obsidian. Has razzle and the necessary dazzle to mix it with. Also copulated with Florence Ballard [of the singing group the Supremes] in 1974.”
Giraldi’s characters are all similarly kooky and compelling. We meet people like Sandy McDougal, Charles’s wall-eyed ex-girlfriend, who has traded academia for alien abduction and taken up with a pint-size Filipino flim-flam man; Morris Hammerstein, an enlightened Jewish astronomer and family man who ends up boxing an angry lesbian (stereotypes are self-consciously abundant in Charles’ narratives) in his backyard; and Richie Lombardo, a famous body builder with a couple of Ivy League-educated Asian call girls named Mimi from Madam Chung’s House of Superior Entertainment going at it near the basement barbells in his luxe New Jersey manse.
After all his randy and reckless romps hither and thither, by the time Charles finally, in the story’s finale, makes a decent decision — “People? This is how I develop here, people: by taking charge of this situation in a sensible fashion, by choosing order over chaos, by pushing instead of being pulled. I am asserting my will,” he tells a passel of characters urging a more dramatic and dangerous choice — readers may be ready to see him go. The same cannot be said of this entertaining debut’s author. Having invited him in, we’ll want to see Giraldi stick around awhile.
Last week, we hoped to spark conversation — and further suggestions — with a list of five amazing books to hand daughters this summer. We’re not leaving the boys behind. Here is our list of five great books for boys of all ages (books that will also, of course, appeal to girls, too). If your (or your kid’s) favorite book has been left off this list — John D. Fitzgerald’s “The Great Brain”? Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth”? The Lemony Snicket books? Or, for the sports-minded child, Dan Gutman’s Baseball Card Adventure Series, or Kadir Nelson’s remarkable “We Are the Ship”? — blog about it on Open Salon: Just make sure to tag your post “Building a bookworm,” and we’ll cross-post the best ones onto Salon itself.
And now for our list:
“Frog and Toad Are Friends” by Arnold Lobel (Ages 4-8)
The thing about Lobel’s Frog and Toad — see also the equally wonderful “Days With Frog and Toad,” “Frog and Toad All Year” and “Frog and Toad Together” — is that, despite the whole amphibian thing, they’re so damn human. Toad is crabby, self-doubting and, let’s face it, somewhat prone to depression. Frog has a sunny, can-do disposition. And they may be an odd couple, of the Oscar and Felix variety, but they are also kind, supportive, considerate, loving friends. And though these stories are, of course, beloved by children of both sexes, the way these two very different fellows take care of each other — and delight in each other’s company — seems like a particularly valuable example for young boys.
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid” by Jeff Kinney (Ages 9-12)
Kinney’s “Wimpy Kid” series may not be writing at its finest, but it has struck a major chord with boys, capturing the attention of even the most reluctant readers. Described as “a novel in cartoons” — with lots of drawn illustrations, a lined-paper format and a font that looks like handwriting — it has an undeniable charm, evoking the misery that is middle school in spare, deft strokes. Its beleaguered narrator, Greg Heffley, isn’t the most sympathetic character, selling out his best friend Rowley when the occasion suits him, but he has a keen eye for demoralizing details. Like the cheese that lies rotting and repulsive on his school blacktop, spawning the terrors of “Cheese Touch.” “It’s basically like the Cooties,” Greg explains. “If you get the Cheese Touch, you’re stuck with it until you pass it on to someone else. The only way to protect yourself from the Cheese Touch is to cross your fingers.” If that doesn’t take you right back to middle school, well, you’re luckier than some of us.
“Danny the Champion of the World” by Roald Dahl (Ages 9-12)
If there is a more moving depiction of the relationship between a son and his father in all of literature than the one in this rollicking adventure tale, we’d sure like to know about it. “It is impossible to tell you how much I loved my father,” Dahl’s narrator, Danny, tells us. “When he was sitting close to me on my bunk I would reach out and slide my hand into his, and then he would fold his long fingers around my fist, holding it tight.” But Danny’s love for his dad — a filling station owner and widower who is raising his only child in a gypsy caravan — is apparent in every line, every moment of this story. Danny’s dad, he tells us, is an “eye-smiler,” whose eyes flash and twinkle when he is amused, but who never much moves his mouth. “I was glad my father was an eye-smiler,” Danny writes, “because it is impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.” This gentle, funny, genuinely wonderful book will leave boys (and their parents) eye-smiling and deliciously amused.
“The Lightning Thief” by Rick Riordan (Ages 9-12)
Start your son on this first book in Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and watch him read away his summer. When we first meet Percy, he just seems like a troubled kid on the verge of getting kicked out of yet another school. In fact, he’s gone through six schools in six years: Bad things just seem to keep happening to him. It isn’t long before Percy (short for Perseus), and we, learn that those strange things he thinks he’s been hallucinating are actually real. Mythological monsters and gods — satyrs, minotaurs, centaurs — really are populating his life and he himself is a half-blood: His father, whom he never knew and had been told had been “lost at sea,” is, in fact, Poseidon. This popular series is a great read for any myth-minded kid who cut his teeth on “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.” Come to think of it, it’s a great read for any kid. Come to think of it again, it’s just a great read.
“The Giver” by Lois Lowry (Young Adult)
This book about a futuristic world that initially seems utopian (no crime, no poverty, no illness, abundantly good manners), but, as it turns out, is less than ideal (no color, no music, no sunshine), is creepy yet altogether compelling. As it begins, 11-year-old Jonas is apprehensively anticipating his Ceremony of Twelve, when he will receive his adult Assignment from the Committee of Elders. Will he be a Nurturer or a judge, like the parents who are raising him? Will be a Caretaker of the Old, like his friend Fiona? But Jonas does not receive a conventional assignment: He is selected to become the community’s next Receiver of Memory, tasked absorbing the collective recollection of pain and pleasure, which the community has long since eschewed in pursuit of comfort, stability and Sameness. Jonas meets daily with the previous Receiver, now the Giver, and learns to appreciate a world with choice and compassion — and love.
Memorial Day is just around the corner, and school is nearly out. Even if you’ve planned a full summer of activities for your kids — camps, trips, days at the beach — there may come a moment when they look at you, bored and beseeching, wondering how to fill those long, hot days. What then?
Hand them a book. A really good book. To help you out, we’ve put together two lists of great books for kids, one tailored especially for girls, one curated with boys in mind, though of course all the books on these lists may be enjoyed by kids of either gender. This week we’ll start off with especially engaging reads for girls of all ages (the boys list will appear next Thursday):
“Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” by Kevin Henkes (Ages 4-8)
Plenty of people have other favorites by Henkes — “Chrysanthemum,” “Owen,” “Sheila Rae, the Brave,” “Chester’s Way.” But “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” stands out for its emotional nuance. Lilly, a young mouse who wears fabulous red cowboy boots, adores her teacher, Mr. Slinger. One day, Lilly brings her new purse to school, and is seriously excited to show it to the class. Asked to wait, she can’t quite manage to restrain herself, repeatedly interrupting the class to show off her new treasure. When Mr. Slinger takes the purse away until the end of the school day, Lilly, infuriated, gets revenge by drawing a mean picture of him and slipping it into his bag. Then, on the way home, she finds that Mr. Slinger has written her a sweet note, “Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better.” Lilly is filled with sickening regret. But she apologizes and is forgiven and, best of all, manages to forgive herself. Mr. Slinger’s words, and Lilly’s acceptance of herself — on good days and bad — are lessons that any fabulous little girl (or grown woman) who occasionally struggles to control her impulses can take to heart.
“Eloise” by Kay Thompson, Drawings by Hilary Knight (Ages 7 and up)
There’s a reason this book about a 6-year-old girl making all manner of mischief in New York’s Plaza Hotel, originally published in 1955, is beloved by girls and women everywhere. Actually, there are myriad reasons, Knight’s breathtakingly elegant, deliciously expressive illustrations significantly among them. But mostly, it’s Eloise herself — that never-bored, perpetually inventive little girl, who orders everything from room service with a definitive “and charge it please, Thank you very much,” torments her tutor, adores her nanny, misses her absent mom (though she’d never say so), braids her pet turtle Skipperdee’s ears first thing each morning (“Otherwise he gets cross and develops a rash”), and generally spends her days, well, pretty much as she pleases. She’s a far cry from the overscheduled, helicopter-parented children of today.
“Ramona the Pest” by Beverly Cleary (Ages 7-12)
There are those who would make a strong case that Barbara Park’s more recent Junie B. Jones series is the better girl-starring series for this age group. Then there are those who remember devouring Cleary’s books by the pile when they themselves were around 7. Those people will point to the books’ enduring popularity, and the fact that the adventures (er … misadventures) of the irrepressible Romana can still deeply absorb girls — and yes, boys, too — just transitioning to chapter books, and make them laugh and laugh. If Ramona is a pest, she’s a pest many children can truly relate to.
“Little Women,” by Louisa May Alcott (Ages 9-12)
Ah, the March sisters — coltish tomboy Jo; frail, sweet Beth; beautiful, practical Meg; pampered, artistic Amy — living in genteel poverty with their mother, Marmee, in their New England home and struggling to make the best of things while their father is away, fighting in the Civil War. As wonderfully warm and endearingly romantic as you may remember them to be, the stories that make up the novel are surprisingly insightful, fresh and modern. It’s a book worth returning to, if you haven’t picked it up since childhood, and a lovely book for girls in the midst of their own.
“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” by Judy Blume (Ages 9-12)
For many girls and young women, this book pretty much wraps up their preteen years: the angst over their changing bodies (or bodies that aren’t changing fast enough), the confusion over fitting in socially and staking a claim to their own beliefs, the deep desire to know right now what life will bring them at its own pace. Blume’s protagonist, 11-year-old Margaret, whose family moves to the New Jersey suburbs from New York City when she’s on the brink of sixth grade — that universally difficult year — contends with all of this, chatting with God in her bed at night though she has been raised in a non-religious home. Grown-ups who read this book years or even decades ago (it was initially released in 1970) can probably conjure images of first bras and first periods. And while they may recall how personal and real the book felt, they may have forgotten how funny it is, too.
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Is your favorite book sorely lacking from this list? Let’s face it, any list of five great books for girls is, by definition, woefully inadequate. Where, you might ask, looking over this handful of literary selections, is Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden”? Or Roald Dahl’s “Matilda”? Or L.M. Mongtomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”? Or Astrid Lindren’s “Pippi Longstocking”? Or Madeline L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”? Or Alice, or Madeline, or Coraline? Or, frankly, a host of other long-loved favorites?
If your most treasured read hasn’t been included here, don’t shake your fist in the air and curse the gods at the injustice of it all: Blog about your own summer reading suggestions for kids on Open Salon (make sure to explain what makes them so great). Don’t forget to tag your post “Building a bookworm.” We’ll be cross-posting your submissions on Salon in the coming weeks.
