Reading Wednesday! Aww yeah.
What are you reading now?
Just started The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which.....isn't great, but is at least about one topic and the life of one person, which makes it a lot easier to read compared to....
What did you just finish reading?
.... Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, which, OY, can be best described as a Piping Hot Mess. Remember how I said there's one book every season that everyone else loves which I am baffled by? Yeah, I was wrong, it's this one. Everyone else I know (especially people of the parental persuasion) is writing sniffly teary-eyed reviews about how this book is about Hope and Acceptance and Love, and I'm stuck going "....but this is bad. Well, I guess its.....heart....may be in the right place?" (DOUBTFUL) " -- but it's so bad." This is what gains me the reputation of Heartless Bitch. But, seriously: while usually I complain that most modern nonfiction books are clearly expanded magazine pieces, this book's topic bites off not only more than Solomon himself can chew, but more than that guy who's won the Nathan's Famous Forth of July hotdog-eating contest for the past six years running could chew, in all six years. Solomon's approach works okay with more limited topics such as "Deaf," "Dwarf," and "Down Syndrome," especially since he's written, well, magazine pieces about them before, but -- to take just one example -- with "Rape" he veers wildly from women raped by strangers to sexual abuse in families to (oh no, he's not going to go there....oh yes he is) rape as part of genocide and extreme torture in Rwanda.
And this points up a huge problem with his entire project: there are experiences that just aren't comparable. He makes all sorts of interesting points about disability identity and whether conditions like dwarfism or deafness should be viewed as disabilities (and what happens to people with those conditions if they aren't), and his personal hook into the topic is that his own parents thought his homosexuality meant he would be cut off from having children, or any family at all, and homosexuality itself was not removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the famed DSM) until 1973 (that always amazes me. I was three years old then). But the sudden introduction of the horrific rapes in Rwanda -- which topic could fill a book, or several books, just in itself, and which also is taken as a kind of shorthand to stand for similar horrors from the Sabine women to "the former Yugoslavia" -- reveals the shakiness of the entire scaffolding. To a lesser extent, his interview with Dylan Klebold's parents at the end of his "Crime" chapter does the same thing. There's something grotesque about summarizing such huge, terrible, almost cripplingly tragic topics into soundbites to support a thesis, and this problem underlines another, greater flaw with the book.
Essentially Solomon's book is about what happens when you're a hit-and-run victim of the Wheel of Fortune. Some people collapse under the terrible crushing weight of tragedy. Some people are deformed by it to such an extent that they lash out themselves, and help ruin someone else's life. Some people can find the inner strength and grace -- usually enabled by things like familial support, social status, and money -- to not only integrate the tragedy into their own lives but somehow transcend it, and while Door Number Three is the one we all, including Solomon, like to focus on and what Oprah specials are made of, there is a particularly modern American viewpoint I've talked about before which views this kind of extreme spiritual grace as an expected duty. One reason Americans ate up that terrible novel The Lovely Bones a while back was the philosophy contained in its title -- that in the absence of someone dearly loved who was taken away by extreme horror, love itself can create something almost beautiful. This can be true, but the limitations of this viewpoint are shown most clearly in his treatment of Susan Klebold, whom he compares to Cordelia, which....makes no sense. (Again, we're back to the Heartless Bitch thing: "Hers was a love as dark and true, as embracing and self-abnegating, as Cordelia's." This makes no sense. Dark love? And why is it admirable for a mother's love to be self-abnegating? And isn't parental love so blind that said parent entirely misses out on any danger signals that can lead to violence not a good thing?)
"Privilege" is a very loaded word nowadays, but I was struck, over and over again, reading this book, by how many parents Solomon spoke to were very affluent -- they could afford to have one parent (usually the mother) stop working in order to become a full-time caretaker, or retrofit an entire house for the benefit of a disabled child, or even better, build an entirely new one. Solomon does interview some poor families, but the way he treats them veers between a kind of weird exoticising and extremely patronizing -- this is shown to greatest effect when he goes to Rwanda and makes judgements based on the personal appearances of rape survivors: one is "mousy" and beaten-down while another, described much more approvingly, is stereotypically tall and elegant and spotlessly groomed despite extreme poverty. Solomon never appears to think how these women might feel about talking to a man about their brutal experiences, much less a well-off inquiring white male visitor -- in short, a tourist. The book is filled with such unfortunate sentences as "To understand how children of wartime rape differ from children conceived in less systematic rapes, I traveled to Rwanda" (there are equally unfortunate and self-revealing moments in the "Crime" chapter, including one truly stereotypical moment where the Repressed White Man visits a Swingin' Black Church).
This kind of misery tourism inevitably brings to mind the spectre of celebrities visiting "war-torn areas" and dutifully reporting back that for the extent of their visit, their bubble of privilege and good fortune was heartbreakingly pierced, as was ours, sitting at home and listening to them in the five minutes before the commercials for luxury goods air. It is the equivalent of a television reporter flying in to a place they would never visit otherwise to do a "stand-up" in order to give the illusion of authenticity. It is the opposite of such true immersive journalism like Wiseman's documentaries or the amazing Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, where the focus is not on how the reporter feels but the people themselves, in all the glory and misery of their daily lives.
This privilege is most unfortunately -- and probably unconsciously -- flaunted in the triumphant end to Solomon's book -- in the end, through the rather labyrinthine modern methods that lead to such phenomena as "twiblings," he and his husband have their own baby boy who is part of an extended, happy family, and one cannot help but be happy for him, especially after his poignant descriptions of lifelong yearning for children of his own. But there is a terrible moment just after his son's birth when a concerned doctor orders a CAT scan and it seems Solomon himself will have to face the "difficult love" a parent can have for a challenged child, which he has been praising for the past seven hundred pages -- that in Woolf's inimitable phrase, "tragedy had once more put down his paw, after letting us run a few paces." But, as in the occasion Woolf was describing, the wheel of tragedy swerved away; Solomon's son was perfectly healthy. Again, one cannot help but be happy for him, especially given the wrenching details so many families supply in his book, and yet at the same time the author celebrating his own good fortune after chronicling the disasters so many others have endured cannot seem anything other than exquisitely tasteless.
WELL THEN. I also read Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt and In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe (yes, that Katie Roiphe), both collections of well-written essays with intriguing insights by totally different women into the same self-mythologized kingdom of New York. I finished the "Rivers of London" series by Ben Aaronovitch, which is up to three books so far: Rivers of London (badly titled Midnight Riot in the US), Moon over Soho, and Whispers Under Ground. The first book is fantastic, tightly plotted and almost wholly lacking in the awkward "infodumping" of so many genre novels; the second and third installments are less impressive, but still very enjoyable, especially in their treatment of multicultural London and female characters. The first-person narration by a mixed-race constable who also finds himself apprenticed to magic is vivid, witty, sharp, and utterly real. I'd recommend this series highly, except I do hope some dangling series plot threads get wrapped up, or at least embroidered a bit, in the next few novels. The next one, Broken Homes, is scheduled to come out June of this year, I think.
What do you expect to read next?
After Henrietta, I'm still hoping to get to Seven Gothic Tales. Or possibly the shorter fantastic fiction of A.S. Byatt; I have the series of those small black-covered hardbacks and they look sort of like delightful candies for the mind, or something.
ETA HOLD UP THE NEW BIOGRAPHIES OF AUSTEN AND PLATH JUST ARRIVED. //dives in
Skeptical acquaintances -- or even friends -- have often expressed disbelief at how much and how fast I read, implying that I lie about it or something (I mean.....why? Why would you lie about being a book nerd? It would be like lying about your USCF rating, like, the opposite of cool) or, worse, that I don't retain anything from reading so quickly. First, that "reading is my superpower" tag is not a joke: it's one of the few things I am good at. Very, very good at. You know that theory that talent doesn't count (haha; Solomon actually writes about this), it's more the ten thousand hours of practice? I have logged a lot more than ten thousand hours of reading books. I can't tell you how many impromptu pop quizzes I have had to endure from friends or even family members -- "You did not read that whole book in one day!" "Yes, I did." "What did you think when so-and-so DIED, then?" "He didn't die, and you're being rude." It takes me longer to read some books than others -- about two days each for The Looming Tower and Far from the Tree, I think. Also, because of agoraphobia, I rarely leave my apartment. I can't work. But this is the main thing:
I don't have a television set.
Sure, I have DVDs of movies and TV shows, I waste way too much time on the internet, and I don't read half as many challenging books as I'd like. (Let's not even talk about my awesome ability to procrastinate.) This means I am tragically out of step with most modern pop culture, but, well, that's been the case since I was about eight, so it's a little too late for me to try catching up now.
Reading: it's what I do.
descensus Averno facilis est