Salon’s staff is recommending summer books that will whisk you to another time and place without making you go through airport security. Previous weeks featured thrillers, chick lit and memoirs.
In this fourth and final installment, we focus on historical novels: a gripping fictional portrait of Queen Elizabeth’s early years, when she was still just “Lady Elizabeth”; a Victorian thriller featuring a mysterious housemaid and a gentleman obsessed with anthropometry; a juicy girl’s-eye view of Louis XIV’s court; and an intellectual romance that spans two centuries, partly set in Venice, where novelist George Eliot is on honeymoon.
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“The Lady Elizabeth” by Alison Weir
Elizabeth Tudor is a puzzle by any conventional standard of femininity, a woman who declared that if she had her druthers, she’d be “a beggar-woman and single, far rather than queen and married.” If she had a great love, or even a great passion, she never got carried away by it, or at least not far enough to let it interfere with the more important (to her) affairs of state. Did her public success hide a private tragedy — was she, in short, the prototype for Miranda Priestly (from “The Devil Wears Prada”) and every other emotionally unfulfilled career woman in popular culture? Or did she, as she proclaimed to her troops at Tilbury, truly harbor “the heart and stomach of a king” within “the body of a weak and feeble woman”?
Alison Weir’s novel of Elizabeth’s youth, “The Lady Elizabeth,” takes the queen at her word. In what appears to be the first installment in a series of historical novels, she depicts the proto-monarch as a girl who learns from a disastrous infatuation at age 14 (with her trifling fool of a stepfather, Thomas Seymour) that love is a treacherous diversion. Furthermore, “her father had desired her mother, and her mother [Anne Boleyn] had met a bloody end.” Is it any wonder, then, that the princess greets every suggestion of marriage with “a kind of horror”? Since “The Lady Elizabeth” ends with the queen’s coronation, and Weir’s last sentence lingers over the “warm and twinkling” eyes of Robert Dudley — regarded by some as the first serious test of Elizabeth’s resolve in this department — perhaps more romance awaits in future volumes.
So, instead of the usual Tudor soap opera of adultery, beheadings and martyred females — the kind of yarn that has kept Philipa Gregory, author of “The Other Boleyn Girl,” in Jaguars for the past few years — “The Lady Elizabeth” is a relatively sober work detailing the coming of age of a prudent, if brilliant woman. Initially a willful child, Elizabeth goes in and out of favor with her father, half-brother (Edward VI) and half-sister (Mary I), dodging scandals, treasonous conspiracies, religious persecution and efforts to marry her off to assorted inbred Hapsburg hunchbacks and weaklings. By the age of 20, she is cannily explaining to her elders why an unmarried British queen should stay that way: “If she marries a foreign prince, he might interfere too much in the affairs of the realm. Yet if she marries an Englishman, his rule might raise jealousies and factions.”
This is, in short, historical fiction not as romance novel but as speculative biography. Still, there are plenty of velvet gowns, jewels and palaces to feed a reader’s appetite for vicarious pomp, and where Weir has chosen to embellish on the established facts of Elizabeth’s life, she does so for reasons carefully explained in her author’s note. She has a firm grasp of the history, though a less certain hand with her dialogue — I’m pretty sure no 16th century Englishman ever told anyone to “tone it down”; As a result, on the occasions when Weir has a character quote directly from source materials, the sudden shift in tone can be startling. Nevertheless, that she makes a point of using those sources indicates how conscientious she is with her subject. Weir is more historian than novelist (this is only her second work of fiction, the first being the best-selling “Innocent Traitor,” about the life of Lady Jane Grey), and “The Lady Elizabeth” is best enjoyed as that: a dramatic, dishy alternative to a traditional biography, as well as the latest attempt to plumb one of history’s best-known, yet most enigmatic figures.
— Laura Miller
“The Dark Lantern” by Gerri Brightwell
Chamber pots: That’s what’s missing from the usual Merchant-Ivory depictions of the late Victorian era. However, Jane Wilbred, the heroine of Gerri Brightwell’s “The Dark Lantern,” set in 1893, can’t afford to ignore the unpleasant realities of life before flush toilets. She’s a maid in an upper middle-class London house, and emptying the chamber pots is one of her regular tasks. So is carrying heavy trays of tea things up and down narrow stairways in cumbersome skirts (any broken crockery will be docked from her meager pay). Jane feels lucky to have the job; as an orphan and the illegitimate child of an executed murderess, she thought she’d never escape the stingy, sanctimonious country vicar’s wife who deigned to hire her despite the “stain” in her blood. Unfortunately, to get this new position, she’s had to change her name and forge a letter of reference.
It turns out that Jane isn’t the only resident of 32 Cursitor Road with a secret. The mistress of the house, Mina Bentley, keeps wheedling her husband to move back to Paris, where they met, and tries not to go outside any more than is absolutely necessary. She fired the previous maid because she spotted the girl talking to a suspicious-looking man on the street; what is she so afraid of? On Jane’s second day, a mysterious stranger manages to bluster his way into the house by pretending to be Mina’s husband, Robert, then rifles through the study, apparently taking nothing. The cook is skimming off the top of the household accounts, and the senior housemaid manipulates a complex and inescapable web of favors and obligations that has all the rest of the servants at her mercy.
Brightwell has delivered a delectably sinister picture of the snake pit seething behind the facade of respectable Victorian affluence. Only Robert Bentley himself can afford not to lie, and that’s because he’s at the top of the heap. Then his brother dies in a shipwreck while returning from India and a young woman who claims to be his widow is rescued from the disaster. She is the only surviving witness to their shipboard marriage; if she’s telling the truth, she inherits the house.
A proponent of anthropometry — a method of comparing very precise measurements of the various features of an individual’s body — Robert is locked in a professional rivalry with the champions of fingerprinting. Each side is trying to persuade law enforcement officials that they have the key to setting up a new system for “the complex process of identification.” Since half the people in Robert’s own house may or may not be who they say they are, the irony of his situation is rich indeed.
The multiple deceptions and misperceptions of the residents of Cursitor Road mesh like the gears of a Swiss clock, each ticking the next one a turn closer to disaster. Eventually, even the reader is drawn into the machinery, wondering which stories — and which hearts — are false. The surprises that wait at the end are more a matter of emotion than plot, and that makes them all the more satisfying.
— Laura Miller
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“Mistress of the Sun” by Sandra Gulland
Seventeenth century France may have revolved around that most kingly of monarchs, Louis XIV (aka the Sun King), but Sandra Gulland’s entertaining novel “Mistress of the Sun” finds its center in a less exalted figure — that of Petite, a pixieish horse-crazy girl of minor nobility who would grow up to become Louis’ first mistress. Gulland seems to specialize in conveying a woman’s-eye view of great men: Her previous trilogy of novels retraced the life of Josephine Bonaparte, whose tale is unraveled via imaginary diaries.
“Mistress of the Sun” opens when Petite (aka Louise de la Valliere) is 6 years old, living with her family in the famine-ravaged French countryside, a place where old pagan superstitions comingle with religious belief. Tomboyish and precocious, Petite has already taught herself to read well enough to peruse the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. When a band of local gypsies blows into town with a pack of wild stallions, Petite is transfixed by the most ferocious one — a white creature named Diablo — and begs her adoring father to buy him.
When the white horse turns out to be untamable, Petite fears her father will slaughter the beast and desperately turns to a chapter in her ancient horse-training manual on “Bone Magic.” The enchantment she performs works, but it also sets off a series of unfortunate events and darkens her soul forever — or so she is convinced.
Like most girls of the era, Petite has no control over her fate. With no dowry or title, she gets passed around and handed off like a pretty object, first sent to be “waiting maid” to Marguerite, a raucous and misshapen young royal who has high hopes of marrying the teenage Louis. The girls follow the king’s activities as if he were a boy-band heartthrob: “It was reported that he was comely, that he refused to wear a wig, that he loved hunting, music and theater and danced the lead parts in ballets.”
Eventually, Petite comes into close contact with the regal one himself when she is sent to live at court as a lady in waiting to Henriette, a lively English princess who is married to Louis’ brother. The palace is a hothouse of gossip and trysts, and Petite spends her days fulfilling the whims of bored royals, whether dancing or singing or accompanying her cohorts on hunts.
Our heroine is far more interested in riding horses than she is in flirting, or in anything else, really. She observes the pomp and ceremony around her (and boy is there a lot of pomp) with a distant curiosity. Gulland delights in the details of her surroundings, and squeezes great amusement out of minor characters, like Petite’s horrible bore of a stepfather, a self-important marquis. He marks their first meeting by oversharing — blathering on about “the state of his bowels (unforthcoming), the enema and purge he took once a week to balance his humors, his hippo-tusk false teeth,” the latter of which he brags work far better than plain old elephant ivory.
It is not Petite’s beauty or purity but her spectacular riding skills that eventually excite the admiration of the (by now married) king. At which point “Mistress of the Sun” morphs from an engaging, intricately described girl’s-eye view of history into a bodice-ripper. (His breath? “Fragrant with wine.” Hers? “Coming now in gasps.”) Or at least it does for a few chapters.
But the known facts of Louise de la Valliere’s and Louis XIV’s life — recently detailed nonfictionally in Antonia Fraser’s “Love and Louis XIV” — lend themselves all too well to torrid treatment. The rest of the story is laced with all kinds of political and sexual intrigue, as well as religious guilt and public suffering. Gulland’s gothic touches sometimes seem overripe but not inappropriate in this easily devoured historical romp about a girl, a king, her horse and their nation.
— Joy Press
“The World Before Her” by Deborah Weisgall
Not all of Deborah Weisgall’s historical novel takes place in Venice, but that ancient, sinking city, so full of beauty and ugliness and decay, is the appropriate launchpad for her tale of two women who visit the city, a century apart. Each journeys there in an airless, stagnant marriage — one 10 years old, one new. And Venice for each of them evokes memories of earlier and more vibrant loves.
In 1880, 60-year-old Marian Evans, by then a celebrated novelist under the pen name George Eliot, is trying to bring herself, and her writing, back to life after the death of her partner, philosopher and “Life of Goethe” author George Henry Lewes. Evans lived with Lewes (whose wife had left him but not divorced him) out of wedlock for 25 years. After his death, Evans finally married the financier John Cross, 20 years her junior. “The World Before Her” begins with the Crosses honeymoon arrival in Venice.
In 1980, a Rumpelstilskin-obsessed sculptor, aptly named Caroline Spingold, is visiting the city with her husband of 10 years, a financier 20 years her senior. Malcolm Spingold has brought his wife wealth and some happiness, but their decade together has sapped her of something essential — her spirit and perhaps her artistic self. Now he has brought Caroline to Venice, where she spent a childhood summer before her father left her mother, because he is scheming a way to bring Venice back from the economic death that seems inevitable.
Much of “The World Before Her” is about the dream of reviving things that are dead — cities and memories and relationships and ambitions — through art. “Art doesn’t fool,” says Caroline. “It transforms. It makes the mess bearable.” Both Marian and Caroline have woven art from their messes; they create sculpture and stories, making endings happy when life does not promise them the same good fortune. They make pieces of art that should be immune to the passage of time and to decay, and yet are utterly shaped — in both creation and reception — by the currents of life and love around them.
Marian fears she cannot write without her late lover; and when she looks at paintings in the Academia with her new husband — so cowed by her ardor that he literally cannot rise to meet her — she feels numb. “Fifteen years ago, when she saw them with George, these paintings had affected her like music. All her senses had been receptive; she had been in love, she had been open to the world. Love gave her clarity. It had been a kind of ecstasy.”
Weisgall, who has written about music, ballet and painting, jams her book with not only Eliot and Lewes, but James McNeill Whistler, Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann. Marian and Caroline both search for texture and meaning. They want to spin life into art, to laugh and breathe and soak in beauty, while the men they’re with seem wan and lifeless, emotionally and artistically impermeable.
In some regards, Weisgall is taking a page from A.S. Byatt’s century-spanning intellectual romance “Possession.” It jumps back and forth in time, forming intricate patterns with the life of the mind and the life of the body, worrying about morality both past and present, sending small clues from one woman’s story shuttling a hundred years back into the other’s. But for all the academic heft of a book that makes a meal of literature, painting and sculpture, and that takes as its setting a heavy, slightly rotted city, “The World Before Her” does not seem as heavy or plodding as might be feared. Weisgall’s style is diverting and compelling; the book zips by, even as its meditations on art and time, god and marriage, get full-bodied treatment, and even as she skillfully dips readers in and out of memory and flashback, introducing dozens of characters, some real and some imagined, in two centuries and on two continents.
The novel tells a brief and beautiful story of how we get over love, and how we have changed in our struggles to name and contain it by marriage. “The World Before Her” is not the lightest book you’ll pick up this summer, but it might be one of the smartest, and most vibrant.
— Rebecca Traister
OK, it’s a little more than midyear at this point. The days are already getting shorter, and that stack of books on your nightstand is only getting taller as your DVR queue gets longer. It’s time to concentrate on what matters. So we’ve asked our crack culture team to pick what you need to experience to be the well-rounded, culturally fluent smarty you want to be, and ordered them by importance. See how many you’ve already checked out, and dive into the rest.
You’ll be better for it – and seriously entertained.
URGENT (Do this right now!)
WATCH “Poetry,” directed by Lee Chang-dong. It’s taken some time, but word has gradually spread about this beautiful and moving story of death and life from Korean academic-turned-filmmaker Lee Chang-dong. With apologies to Terrence Malick’s many defenders, “Poetry” is the movie released so far that has the pure cinematic craft, human appeal and emotional depth to be called a masterpiece. You almost couldn’t invent a less sexy or less trendy film: “Poetry” is a leisurely character drama about a dotty, girlish 66-year-old woman who may have early-stage Alzheimer’s and her relationship to her rude and lumpish grandson, who may have committed a terrible crime. I won’t mislead you by claiming this is a thriller, but as this silly, vain and resolute grandma struggles to do the right thing and to write the first (and perhaps last) poem of her life, she seems to speak for all of us, caught between birth and death, remembering and forgetting, with only a few precious moments to grasp and then let go. –Andrew O’Hehir
READ “The Pale King,” by David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s third and final novel was unfinished at his death in 2008 and assembled from completed portions and notes by his longtime editor. You’d never know it. In Wallace’s earlier fiction, it could often be hard to pick out the figure in the carpet — and at the same time very easy to enjoy the individual sections. With “The Pale King,” the reader is off the hook, and free to take each part of this funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and profound book as it comes. As has often been repeated, “The Pale King” is “about boredom,” although that is only where it starts. It’s also about the transformation of America from a stakeholder society in which citizens view themselves as active, responsible participants into a consumer market in which people simply demand value for money. And it’s about existential dread and loneliness, which the main character, “David Foster Wallace,” suspects of being the reason people fear boredom, and drives themselves to distraction, seeking “enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there … Right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.” — Laura Miller
WATCH “Game of Thrones” (HBO). In retrospect it seems unthinkable that HBO’s lavish adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” debuted around the same time as AMC’s “The Killing,” a remake of a hit Danish procedural, but was taken far less seriously by critics. Why? Maybe because AMC’s series was set in something resembling “reality,” where “Thrones” unfolded along pop culture’s J.R.R. Tolkien/Dungeons and Dragons axis, upon which movies and TV series are still considered zit-inducing ComicCon crap no matter what their artistic pretensions. But where “Thrones” slowly kept a phenomenal number of characters, motivations and plotlines straight, sparking arguments about its sex scenes and narrative density, all the while building and building to a stunning finale, “The Killing” made hash of just one story, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bad-faith contrivances. “Thrones,” meanwhile, felt like fantasy fiction’s answer to the first two “Godfather” films, with bleak, often ironic commentary on love, sex, family and power, plus warring kingdoms, barbarian Bacchanals, secret incest, slumbering supernatural menaces, undead stalkers, assassinations, beheadings and dragons’ eggs that were ported about from episode to episode like big green plot grenades. — Matt Zoller Seitz
WATCH Melissa McCarthy in “Bridesmaids.” You’re already not having too shabby a year when you’re the titular costar of a hit sitcom. But with her scene stealing turn in “Bridesmaids,” “Mike and Molly” actress Melissa McCarthy took what could have been a one-note, horny big girl shtick and created a character who runs rings of sanity around Kristin Wiig’s self-loathing flake. No wonder she’s reportedly set to star with Jon Hamm in Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s next comedy. Bonus: When asked about Maura Kelly’s hateful Marie Claire piece last year on TV “fatties,” she sagely told EW this spring, “I thought, what a sad, troubled person.” Score: match point to McCarthy. — Mary Elizabeth Williams
LISTEN “21,” Adele. The London crooner can seem old beyond her years, and her voice sounds like a tool from some forgotten age of pop music: a real instrument. Say the critics: “Adele … [towers] in the same landscape where some of her contemporaries, beehived or not, have lost all their bearings” (LAT); “Timeless” (EW); “[If] you’re looking for a record that’ll make you wanna trash your beloved’s belongings and have make-up sex amid the ruins, 21′s your jam” (Spin).
MANDATORY (Worth faking a sick day for)
READ “Townie,” by Andre Dubus III. The Avenues, the New England mill town neighborhood where Dubus — a novelist best-known for “The House of Sand and Fog” – grew up, was a domain of swaggering bullies and weak, negligent or absent authority figures. As a boy, he resolved to “get so big I scared people, bad people, people who could hurt you.” Dubus’ memoir, “Townie,” recounts his sojourn in the kingdom of violence, and its counterpoint, the time he spent with his father, Andre Dubus II, an acclaimed author of austerely beautiful short stories about the anguish of working-class life. For Dubus, salvation lay in getting at the stories imprisoned within a reality that at first seemed merely brutal and mindless. This is an unusual story of the making of a writer, and a completely unforgettable one. –LM
WATCH “The Tree of Life,” written and directed by Terrence Malick. From the origins of the universe to the first stirrings of prehistoric reptilian compassion (a phenomenon unknown to paleontologists) to a memorable portrait of a mid-century Texas family presided over by a severe but loving Brad Pitt (giving his greatest acting performance) to an almost alarming vision of the afterlife, Malick’s long-long-gestating “Tree of Life” offers more to chew on and disagree about and be baffled by than any American film since “Mulholland Dr.” I’ve been publicly on the fence about “Tree of Life” since first seeing it, but I also don’t kid myself that I’ve mastered the film or that I’m done thinking about it or that I know what I’ll make of it in five or 10 years. –AOH
WATCH “These are the decisions that keep you alive”: Coverage of a natural disaster had never been more brutally captured by camera than when the 8.9 earthquake sparked a tsunami that swept into Japan. Perhaps the most mesmerizing video originating from Japanese network JNN, and recrafted by Britain’s TBC Channel 4, that showed the critical ways a news crew — and assorted other survivors including a father and his two small terrified children — managed to escape being swept away to a certain death in Sendai, Japan. — Kerry Lauerman
READ New York Post headlines on Weinergate. Give a Murdoch newspaper an unfortunately named Democrat and a tawdry sex scandal, and it’s like Christmas every day. –MEW
READ “It’s the Inequality, Stupid,” 11 charts by Mother Jones. Nothing fuels awareness of class inequity and the staggering gap between rich and poor than recessionary times. And nothing can fuel your understanding — or your rage — like this illuminating, handy breakdown by Mother Jones. –KL
WATCH “Friday,” the Bob Dylan-spoof version. When Rebecca Black’s bubblegum pop anthem “Friday” hit YouTube and became a sensation, parodies were inevitable; the best was surely New York singer-songwriter Mike Bauer’s version, arranged, performed and recorded in the style of Bob Dylan circa 1965. On top of its already formidable bona fides as a fetish object — check out the period-accurate Columbia Records 45 RPM logo! — it inspired what is, without question, the funniest and most imaginative YouTube comments thread of the year to date — an ongoing in-joke between the performer and the listeners, who play along with the ruse and insist that, yes, this really is a Dylan tune.
“I think what Dylan ment by ‘Friday’ was any means people use to escape the reality and avoid seeing the truth. For some it could be booze and for some it may be drugs. What Dylan wants, is us to stop. Do not let your personal ‘Friday’ to come.” “I was contemplating suicide when this version of ‘Friday’ came on the radio. I dropped the razor blades & started crying at the simplistic & awe-inspiring beauty of the lyrics.” “I remember returning from the Grenada war in 1983. This song was playing over the loud speaker at the airfield when the wheels of our C-130 touched˛ down in Homestead Florida. The war had been 2 hours and 28 minutes of sheer horror and all I could think about was those that I loved the most but I didn’twant to go home yet so I called a $5 hooker and enjoyed the beach, this song, and some pretty good ass for 10 days. I was so happy when I made it home to my wife. My sunburn was getting bad.”
–MZS
LISTEN “Anna Calvi,” Anna Calvi. “Sumptuous, seductive and a little bit scary, this velvety debut will stalk your dreams,” (NME).
ESSENTIAL (Skip “family time” if you have to)
WATCH “Southland” (TNT). This tough, smart series about beat cops interacting with the public in Los Angeles debuted on NBC in 2009, then got booted to cable to make room for Jay Leno’s disastrous prime-time talk show. Its large, ethnically diverse cast of beat cops, detectives, top brass, city officials, civilians and perps sparks fond memories of “Hill Street Blues,” the early seasons of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the novels of Joseph Wambaugh (“The New Centurions,” “The Choirboys”). Granted, there are more altercations and chases than any real police force would ever see in a week, but in every other way, this is the most realistic cop series on American television. Its second season finale was one of most moving, horrifying, bleakly funny hours of TV in a very long time. Catch up now. — MZS
READ “The Tragedy of Arthur,” by Arthur Phillips. Like the narrator of this novel, the real-life Arthur Phillips has written a novel titled “Prague” and has the same editor, agent and publicist as his fictional doppelgänger. Presumably the real Phillips is not also the son of a small-time con man and the reluctant editor of a play that experts have anointed as a long-lost work by Shakespeare. Presented as Phillips’ skeptical introduction to the play, this treat of a book is an elegant tribute to Vladimir Nabokov (whose “Pale Fire” clearly inspired it) as well as the story of a man whose self-inflicted, tragicomic woes are as affecting and wincingly believable as those endured by the hero of any more conventional novel. — LM
READ “Obama’s Young Mother Abroad,” the New York Times Magazine. Janny Scott’s portrait of the president’s late mother (an excerpt from her book, “A Singular Woman”) is not only a story of the woman who gave birth to great hope and a million conspiracists, it’s the distinct story of a woman of her generation charting a fascinating, difficult and previously unimaginable new path for herself. — KL
SEE “The Book of Mormon,” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. A Broadway musical about America’s favorite homegrown brand of Christianity from the genius misfits of “South Park” and “Team America,” and Robert Lopez, the raunchy composer of “Avenue Q,” could be expected to be irreverent. But in the same season that the star-powered “Spider- Man” became the Great White Way’s biggest punch line, how did “The Book of Mormon” win over not just “South Park” fans, but the matinee-going out-of-towners, the New York Times and, ultimately, the Tonys? It might mock the arbitrary absurdity of organized religion or the gruesomeness of a place where a cow carcass marks the town square, but it does so with all the abundant sweetness of a Latter Day Saint’s coffee hour. –MEW
READ “The Apostate: Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology,” by Lawrence Wright, Feb. 14, 2011, the New Yorker.
WATCH “The Lincoln Lawyer,” directed by Brad Furman. A would-be career-relaunch for star and producer Matthew McConaughey, “The Lincoln Lawyer” was a relative flop when it was released in March. But this stylish and gripping L.A. crime drama has steadily grown in the rearview mirror. There are even whispers that (gasp!) McConaughey’s performance as the sleazy, charming Mick Haller might sneak into the Oscar race. (The DVD comes out on July 12.) — AOH
WORTH IT (Neglect your Facebook and/or Twitter)
WATCH Margot Martindale as “Mags Bennet” on “Justified” (FX). FX’s modern western about a Kentucky-born U.S. marshal (Timothy Olyphant) investigating drug trafficking and racketeering in his kudzu-choked home county, is a terrific show in its own right. But the acting puts it over the top, and this season’s scary, lively, narcotics-smuggling bad guys, the Bennet clan, were truly memorable. But they are all overshadowed by their big, bad mama, Mags Bennet. She was a master of multitasking, playing a land-grabbing mining company against an environmentally skittish citizenry, plotting and executing complex criminal schemes, negotiating truces between rival crime organizations and her own squabbling sons, all while doting on her adopted granddaughter, the only child of a man she murdered with poisoned moonshine. As played by Margo Martindale, Mags was the best kind of villain: one who thinks she’s the hero, and conducts herself with a twisted sense of honor that demands wary respect even as it makes your blood run cold. — MZS
READ “State of Wonder,” by Ann Patchett. With audacity and ambition, Patchett has transfigured the story line of “Heart of Darkness” by setting it in the present day and turning both the seeker and the sought-after into women. “State of Wonder” follows a Midwestern research pharmacologist who is sent up the Amazon to check on a brilliant and imperious doctor developing a fertility drug in a remote village where the women are reputedly able to bear children into old age. As with “Heart of Darkness,” the seductions and corruptions of power haunt this novel, but it is the power of the Bad Mother — in contrast to the Bad Father embodied by Conrad’s Kurtz. Maternity is the awesome totem at the book’s center, the dubious object of Swenson’s research and an elemental power, capable of possessing Patchett’s dueling doctors, compelling them to do terrible things. — LM
WATCH “Beginners,” written and directed by Mike Mills. Mills really did have a gay dad, who came out of the closet with mixed results and then died a few years later (he talked about it in this great “Fresh Air” interview) and that has resulted in the funniest and most loving portrayal of homosexuality ever created by a straight person. It’s rare to encounter a film that’s so formally audacious, so heartfelt and so beautifully acted, but this one’s three-for-three, anchored in hilarious but understated performances from Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer. Don’t even get me started on Mills’ slide show on the history of homosexuality in America, or the moody Jack Russell terrier who communicates with subtitles: “Tell her that the darkness is about to swallow us if we don’t do something.” — AOH
WATCH “Nuclear Boy,” by Kazuhiko Hachiya. A Japanese artist explains nuclear meltdown in the simplest terms possible for his littlest audience members: through poop and farts. — Drew Grant
WATCH “We need to go faster, it’s coming straight at us.” Home video of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Ala. After watching the awe-inspiring footage taken by two teens in their car when the tornadoes touched down, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more powerful example of nature’s terrifying thaumaturgy this year. — DG
LISTEN “Bon Iver,” Bon Iver.
EXTRA CREDIT (Better than anything on Bravo)
SEE “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. The unlikeliest hit of the season has already been seen by over 350,000 people who waited up to two hours to say they were there. The stars? A bunch of dresses. Even before his suicide in 2010, Alexander McQueen could fascinate and exasperate with his provocative, highly charged approach to haute couture. He tattered and splattered his clothes, festooned them with horns and feathers, made them as torturous and romantic as a Byron poem. On display at the Metropolitan with Paul Treacy’s wild haberdashery — and featuring an audio tour that includes Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Burton and Naomi Campbell — his defining works prove the art of fashion, and create a glorious tribute to a sartorial one of a kind. — MEW
READ Roseanne Barr’s New York magazine essay on the continued sexism, classism and pure, nauseating awfulness of the TV industry.
WATCH Those twin babies, talking to one another. Seventeen-month-old twins Sam and Ren McEntee became YouTube stars after their parents put up a video of the two holding an intense conversation in baby talk, confirming our deeply held suspicion that babies know more than they are letting on. — DG
WATCH “Natalie Portman Cries a Lot,” Screenrant. This mashup was neck and neck with this year’s other big Natalie Portman viral video: a loop of her odd laugh during the Golden Globes. But ultimately Screenrant’s supercut of tears wins out, because once you watch it, you can never watch a Portman movie again without wondering when the waterworks start. — DG
WATCH “Portlandia,” IFC. The most outstanding Internet success story started as a series of viral videos for ThunderAnt, starring the unlikely duo of “Saturday Night Live’s” Fred Armisen and his friend, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein. IFC picked up “Portlandia” for six episodes. Cult classic from episode one. — DG
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A friend of mine has been vowing to read Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” every summer for the past several years. Yet once he nestles into his seat on the plane or flops down on the grass in the sun, he just can’t bring himself to crack open that hefty chunk of 20th-century German bildungsroman. The handful of times he has summoned the discipline to try, he found himself falling asleep or swiping a friend’s copy of the latest Michael Connelly mystery instead. After all, isn’t he supposed to be on vacation?
Many people swear that, come summer, they’ll finally get around to reading a classic work of literature they missed during their student years; “War and Peace” is a perennial candidate. For some, this is the intellectual equivalent of using a week of paid vacation to finish a big household project, like installing a patio. Others honestly believe that a 900-page Russian novel that seemed too daunting a prospect in November will somehow be easier to scale in a hammock. Too often, these grand plans end in shirking and a vague sense of failure. “Moby-Dick” the novel becomes almost as elusive as the white whale himself.
Here’s a modest proposal: Try listening to it instead. I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles. I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. As someone who reads for a living, I’m eager to get out of my armchair and give my eyes a break after a long day’s work, but with audiobooks I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot of recreational reading around the edges.
Audiobooks are, furthermore, an ideal way to finally get to those bypassed literary classics. I was never going to find the time to sit down and read all 1,072 pages of “Don Quixote,” but I listened to the whole thing over the course of a month’s worth of waiting in post-office lines and doing lat pulls. With the advent of downloadable digital audiobooks and portable MP3 players, it’s possible to keep recordings of several titles on hand at all times, snatching 15 minutes of Balzac here and there. Still, a long car trip accompanied by an audio version of a Dickens or Austen novel may be the most sublime use of the form.
It’s also the most summery. Listening is less work than reading from a page; it feels like a treat rather than an assignment, and treats are what vacations are all about. If your attention goes a little out of focus during a long paragraph of 19th-century landscape description, who’s to know?
There are a few important things to understand about audio recordings of classic novels. First, avoid abridged versions, which publishers seem to be phasing out anyway. Second, be sure to check out a sample of the recording before you buy. Many of the audio classics on the market are older recordings, with poor sound quality and unappealing narrators. (I can’t recommend the Oxbridge toff who read “Don Quixote” to me, for example, though the material did transcend his performance. And whose idea was it to have an American narrate Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” — a biography of the quintessential Londoner, written by a Scot — anyway?)
A talented narrator, however, can enrich your understanding of a novel. My late-blooming passion for the work of Anthony Trollope is partly due to the performances of Simon Vance and Timothy West. Disdained by modernist critics as an uninterestingly bourgeois Victorian novelist with an overly intrusive authorial persona, Trollope is rarely assigned to college students, but he has a devoted cult among common readers. Since driving from New York to Maine, blasting “Barchester Towers” all the way, a few years back, I’ve joined it. Trollope’s novels are primarily about class and, as read aloud by Vance, each character has a voice and accent that instantly conveys his or her social background.
Able, professional actors cost money, and that’s one reason why audiobooks can be pricey. However, there are economical ways to acquire them. Audible.com, which has practically cornered the retail market, offers a tiered membership plan that dispenses a certain number of credits monthly, with each credit good for one book. You can also buy books outright, at discounted member’s prices. It’s not the simplest system in the world, but it means that you can get decent audiobooks for $15 or less. And while the Audible site is not great, especially for browsers, the company is owned by and linked to Amazon, so you can cruise for titles using Amazon’s dense database of tags and customer referrals, then easily check to see if they’re available as audio downloads.
Sites and apps offering free audiobook downloads of public domain titles almost always use recordings made by LibriVox, the audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg. Volunteers record themselves reading chapters and submit them to Librivox, who distributes the files online for free. This is a noble, selfless project, and a boon to readers with visual impairments who want access to more obscure texts. But if you’re accustomed to professional narrators, chances are you’ll find the LibriVox recordings hard to listen to; many of the readers are wooden, others are outright grating. The recordings frequently switch narrators in the course of a book, which means that even when you find a narrator you like, chances are he or she won’t be sticking around for long.
Alternatively, many libraries loan out audiobook downloads as well as CD and cassette tape sets. (There are also software programs for converting CDs to digital audiobook files for MP3 players, but the process is time-consuming and a bit of a hassle.) Libraries use a service called OverDrive which may have the single worst support documentation I’ve ever encountered, so expect to invest some time in getting it set up. The idea is that you download OverDrive’s console software to your hard drive, then you download specific titles from your library’s website and can play them via the console for a limited period of time.
I have squandered hours of my life trying to figure out why so many of the New York Public Library’s downloadable audiobooks wouldn’t transfer to my iPod. I’ll try to save other Mac users the same frustration: Be aware that much of your local library’s collection simply can’t be played on any Apple device unless the file first goes through a Windows PC — presumably due to conflicts involving digital rights management. Only those audiobooks made available in MP3 format can be borrowed by Mac users; files in the WMA format, more than half of what my library carries, will not work. An OverDrive app recently released for the iPhone is affected by similar limitations. (I can’t testify to how smoothly OverDrive works on a Windows PC, so if you’ve tried it, please post a comment and tell us what you think.)
Finally, while the selection of audiobook classics in English is respectable, translation is another matter. Russian novels usually come in the much-derided Edwardian translations by Constance Garnett. With Proust, it’s C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s version from the 1920s. More recent translations are often still under the translator’s copyright, and publishers apparently think most buyers won’t know the difference, so why pay extra for the rights? It’s often impossible even to find out who the translator is from an audiobook’s product page.
That won’t be a concern for my friend, however: The only recording I’ve been able to find of “The Magic Mountain” is abridged and in Spanish, alas. Well, there’s always next summer.
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.
When I was 12 years old, I read most of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. That’s not to say that I understood the plays of George Bernard Shaw, or even that I passionately loved them. They just happened to be around the house, in a set of neat little green paperbacks left over from my father’s college days. I doubt that puzzling over the mysteries of “Pygmalion” taught me much about the British class system, but it definitely got me into the habit of searching for understanding in the pages of challenging books.
A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.
According to USA Today, another study, to be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide” — the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year. An experimental, federally funded program based on this research will be expanded to eight states this summer, aiming to give away 1.5 million books to disadvantaged kids.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of the USA Today article comes at the very end, where one Chicago schoolteacher tells the reporter that the importance of getting books into the house “seems so simple, but parents see it differently.” They’re as “excited” as their kids are when the books come in the door. It’s not that the parents are hostile or even indifferent to books. Most likely, books and reading feel like the privilege and practice of an unfamiliar world: a resource that’s out there somewhere, but not entirely accessible.
The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books — a big outdoor fair held on the UCLA campus every April — is an annual reminder that lots of people are interested in books even if they may not feel at home in a bookstore or library. Over 130,000 attendees turned out for this year’s festival, a mix of races and classes that often astonishes the authors who trek in from out of town. “If only we could get all of them to come to bookstores,” one writer wistfully said to me.
Easier said than done. If you happen to be comfortable in bookstores or libraries — if you’ve been to them many times before and know what to expect, what you want and where to find it, or if you know whom and how to ask and feel entitled to bother the staff with your questions — it can be difficult to appreciate how intimidating these institutions of print culture can seem to someone who has little or no acquaintance with them. I didn’t quite get it until I found myself wheedling a comics-loving friend into picking up issues of a comic book I wanted. “I’m never going to go into the comic book store,” I told him. “They’re confusing and the people who work there are so unfriendly.”
Whether or not I was right about all comics stores, my past experience of them was discouraging enough to put me off. I’ve never even set foot in a gun shop, but it’s equally hard for me to imagine venturing into one. The people who work and shop in such stores may not mean to be unwelcoming, but the same thing that makes these places so inviting to the initiated — the innate clubbishness of human nature — can scare away novices. As homey as a bookstore or local library branch might feel to you or me, they can make other people feel insecure, out-of-place and clueless.
This is, of course, assuming that poor families have bookstores and libraries in their neighborhoods, and that it’s safe and easy for a child to walk to them alone. Furthermore, a single parent working two minimum-wage jobs to keep food on the table may not have the time or energy to make a special trip between shifts. One of the biggest success stories in children’s book publishing, after all, is the Little Golden Books: racks of inexpensive kids’ books cleverly placed near the registers in five-and-dime stores, where the harried working-class parents of the 1940s could pick them up on impulse while running other errands.
Lastly, poor parents may feel that they just can’t afford books. Of course, you don’t have to buy a book to read it, but the act of giving someone a book of his or her own has an undeniable, totemic power. As much as we love libraries, there is something in possessing a book that’s significantly different from borrowing it, especially for a child. You can write your name in it and keep it always. It transforms you into the kind of person who owns books, a member of the club, as well as part of a family that has them around the house. You’re no longer just a visitor to the realm of the written word: You’ve got a passport.
Referred to in this article: This USA Today story by Greg Toppo describes the book giveaway program being rolled out in nine states this summer. An abstract for “Family scholarly culture and educational success: Books and schooling in 27 nations” by Evans, Kelley, Sikorac and Treimand in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. This blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education has a bit more detail on the study.
