Half Changed World

I’m trying to get back into the pattern of posting a book review on Tuesdays.  This week’s book is The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver.  The book begins with a woman in a long-term relationship having dinner with another man to celebrate his birthday, an acquaintance more than a friend.  The chapter ends with them on the verge of kissing.  The rest of the book plays out, in alternating chapters, what would happen over the next several years if they did or did not kiss.

I remember being flabbergasted by the alternate endings when I first read The French Lieutenant’s Woman in high school, but the novelty of the concept has worn off.  Shriver carries it off anyway because she spins out the alternate paths with such skill and nuance.  One of the major characters in the book is a professional snooker player (snooker is the more complicated British cousin of pool) and snooker is the implicit metaphor behind the entire book, with the three main characters bouncing off of each other and the world around them and recombining in unexpected ways.   Minor changes have huge impacts, but not always in the direction that you’d have predicted.

It’s interesting to compare this to the last book I wrote about, Arlington Park.  None of Shriver’s sentences are as elegant as Cusk’s — in fact, they tend to disappear into the woodwork.  The only individual sentence in the book I can remember is one that didn’t ring true to me, a description of the collapsing World Trade Center as resembling a deflating accordion.   But I kept reading because I wanted to see how Shriver was going to play out the game.

The Post-Birthday World isn’t as stunning, or as horrifying, as Shriver’s last book, We Need to Talk About Kevin.   But it is quite compelling in its own way.

I can’t say that I liked the first book I read by Rachel Cusk, her memoir A Life’s Work.  While I thought her prose was remarkable, I found it incredibly infuriating that as intelligent a woman as Cusk clearly is, would do something as irrevocable as having a child with so little forethought about how it would affect her life.  It’s one thing to hate the tediousness and isolation of parenting a newborn; it’s another thing to be surprised to discover that caring for a newborn can be tedious and isolating.

But her writing was powerful enough to make me pick up her new novel, Arlington Park, when I saw it at the library. The good news — Cusk still writes some extraordinary sentences.  The bad news — Cusk doesn’t feel compelled to have any plot at all.   The book is just about a group of women who live in a suburb of London, and what they do one rainy day — drop children at school, drink coffee, go shopping, take care of children, go out to dinner.  But when I say it like that, it sounds something like Mrs. Dalloway.  So imagine Mrs. Dalloway if the author didn’t have any affection for her subject, and you’ll have something like Arlington Park.

Here’s a paragraph chosen pretty much at random to illustrate what I mean:

"’Gypsies,’ Maisie said.  She shook her head.  ‘What a place to have to live.  Right where people come to pick up their sofas.’

Christine pondered the caravans and tried to work out what Maisie’s remarks signified.  It wasn’t the nicest thing to have a pack of Gypsies staring at you when you came to collect your sofa, she could admit, but it wasn’t the end of the world either."

Ultimately, for a book like this to work, I think you need to enjoy the company of either the author or the characters, and I was left quite cold about both.

This week’s book, The Places in Between, should win some sort of an award for having the blurb that best captures exactly what the book is about: "Someone in Kabul told me that a crazy Scotsman had walked from Herat to Kabul right after the fall of the Taliban… I thought the story was an urban legend.  I was wrong.  The crazy Scotsman was called Rory Stewart…"

Stewart is certifiably nuts.  It would have been crazy for him to walk from Herat to Kabul on his own in any case.  But then he decided to take the straight path (according to the map) and walk through the central mountains in the middle of winter.  Oh, and he decided to adopt a dog halfway along, even though he had no way to feed it and dogs are considered unclean by most Afghanis.  Why he did any of this, he never adequately explains.  He was violently ill most of the way, and if it had been a slightly worse winter, it would have killed him.  But it makes for a fascinating read.

The book includes a bit of history (Stewart’s path was the same as that taken by Babur, the first Mughal emperor of Afghanistan; he names the dog after Babur), and a bit of modern political commentary (he is critical of westerners’ claims to understand Islam and of modern aid workers who travel from crisis to crisis), but the heart of the book is Stewart’s description of the people he met along the way.  He traveled with a minimum of gear and depended utterly on the Moslem tradition of hospitality to get people to feed and house him.  And, while the quality of both food and shelter was not always great, he didn’t starve and he didn’t freeze to death. 

What makes the book a pleasure is that Stewart is neither judgmental nor sentimental about the people he meets.  He describes their casual attitudes towards violence and their generosity toward him, their frequent disinterest in their own history and their understanding of the wider world.  He describes communities that are incredibly isolated from the rest of the world, where feudalism still reigns — in the sense that loyalties to individuals far outweigh any sense of ideology or a nation-state.

I don’t think I’d have picked this book up on my own if my brother and sister-in-law hadn’t given it to me for Hanukkah.  I’m very glad they did.

A few weeks ago, one of my commenters wondered: "What is your criteria for getting rid of books – how do you decide which
one goes out??? – I’m having a hard time getting rid of them, maybe I can be enlighted??"

We’re struggling with this now as we contemplate packing our large collection of books.  (We have a good sized room with two walls entirely built-in bookshelves, and are still overflowing.  We are definitely going to need to buy or build more shelves if we get this new house.)

Fundamentally, we’re pretty terrible at getting rid of books.  We purge reluctantly, and with pain.  The only reason that we’re not completely overrun with books is that we mostly get books out of the library rather than buying them.  (I pretty much only buy books these days when neither of the local systems has them available or when I need a paperback to read on an airplane.  I stay out of used book stores because I’ve discovered that my propensity to walk out with piles of books is by no means limited by my lack of reading time.  At least when my eyes are bigger than my stomach at the library, I eventually have to return the books.)

Via Jenny Davidson at Light Reading, I read this interesting discussion of whether your personal book collection should consist of mostly read or mostly unread books. I’d guess that mine is probably about 90 percent read.  I used to re-read a lot, but these days almost never do — too many
books I haven’t read that I still want to read.  But I keep books that
I’ve read around for a number of reasons — because I want to lend them to friends, because I want to be able to look up passages from them, because I know they’re impossible to find, because they’re of sentimental value, or just because seeing them on the shelf reminds me of the pleasure I had when I read them.

So, what categories of books do I get rid of?

• Books that are disintegrating, unless they are truly irreplacable.  1970s-era paperbacks are not worth keeping around.
• Books that I’ve read and I know I won’t ever read again (and don’t want to keep to lend to friends).  Maybe I didn’t like them, or I liked them but they were fundamentally fluff, or I liked them but they were 800 pages and life is too short.
• Books that I’ve had for several years and not read and I finally admit to myself that they’re never going to make it to the top of my to read pile.  Some of these were gifts, but these days they’re also likely to be very long and dry history books that I had all the best intentions of reading.
• Classics that I know I’ll always be able to find at a library.

*****

I’m up to the last chapter in reading I Was a Rat! by Phillip Pullman to D.  I thought it was great, but I’m afraid most of the humor went over D’s head.  It’s definitely suitable for younger children than Pullman’s The Golden Compass, but I’d still say probably better for a 9 or 10 year old than for a 6 year old.  Oh well.

Today I’m reviewing two books that were sent to me by their publishers.  Both are about health and disease prevention, and have a forward or introduction (what’s the difference?) by the authors of YOU: The Owner’s Manual.  One focuses on kids, while the other is organized decade by decade, from pre-natal to "the eighth decade and beyond."  Both of them basically tell you to exercise regularly, eat your veggies, and wear sunscreen.

First up is the book about kids: Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, by Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD.  The email I got offering me the book showed the cover, which has the title spelled out in refrigerator magnets, with a carrot and some broccoli magnets thrown in for good luck, so I knew it was likely to push some buttons for me.  As long-term readers of this blog know, I have some issues around nutritional advice for parents — I know darned well what a healthy diet looks like, and that my older son’s diet isn’t quite making it to Planet Power but have more or less accepted that we can only control what we offer him, not what he eats.

So, when I got the book, I was predictably irritated by the blithe assumptions that involving children in food prep and cutting food into fun shapes would be enough to win over a picky eater.  But I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the book covers far more than nutrition, covering topics from good hygiene (wash your hands, floss your teeth) to safety (buckle your seatbelt, wear a bike helmet) and emotional well-being (spend one on one time with kids, develop relationships with extended family).  Overall, the book offers pretty solid, standard advice. 

My fundamental concern about the book is who is the audience for it.  It seems to me like the sort of well-educated middle-class parents who are likely to buy this book will generally know almost everything that’s in it already.  Certainly, that seems to be the conclusion of the parentbloggers who have reviewed it.  Anxious new parents might buy it, but relatively little of the book is about babies. Maybe it could be a text for a parenting class?  Or you could give it to grandparents who might listen to a doctor about seat belts more than to their children?  I don’t know.  I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone reading the book cover to cover.

The second book is The Checklist: What you and your family need to know to prevent disease and live a long and healthy life, by "Dr. Manny" Alvarez.  I focused on the chapters for 0-9 (the age of my children) and 30-39 (that would be me). 

The chapter on young children suffers from the problem that they’ve only got 38 pages to cover a huge developmental range.  So Alvarez makes no attempt to discuss the full range of health issues, but rather goes through a checklist of topics that you might have heard about in the news — cord blood, circumcision, vaccines, autism, ADD.

The chapter on 30-something adults has a different problem, that there are very few health problems that are unique to this age group.  So instead you get a bland discussion of nutrition, skin care, and urinary tract infections, and then a laundry list of ailments that (fortunately) relatively few people in this age group are actually likely to experience, from cervical cancer to MS.

Fundamentally, I think the decade by decade organization just doesn’t work.  Good preventative habits don’t really change that much from decade to decade, and the litany of diseases would have worked better in simple alphabetical order.   The only people I could imagine reading this book cover to cover are hypochondriacs looking for new diseases to obsess about.

Also, the writing/editing was sloppy.  For example, from the circumcision discussion: "The AAP also found that the risk of penile cancer in an uncircumcised man is three times more likely than in a circumcised man, though penile cancer is rare in the United States, just one in one hundred thousand males has it."  Someone get this man a semicolon.

As I explained in the first ever post on this blog, the name "Half Changed World" comes from the subtitle of Peggy Orenstein’s book, Flux.  Before I started the blog, I googled Orenstein’s email address, and wrote her to ask if she minded my using the name.  She responded with a very gracious note, pointing out that you can’t copyright a title, but  wishing me well.  Thus, when I received an email a few weeks ago from Orenstein announcing the publications of her new book, Waiting for Daisy, and offering me a review copy, I was happy to take her up on the offer. 

In Flux, Orenstein examined the changing expectations and experiences of women in their 20s, 30s and 40s, especially focusing on their choices whether to have children and whether to work for pay.  The not very hidden subtext of the book was her own attempt to decide whether to have a child, what it would do to her career, and whether she would regret it down the road if she didn’t.  Waiting for Daisy is explicitly about Orenstein and her husband’s decision to have a child, and how almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong (cancer, a molar pregnancy, miscarriages, failed IVF, a failed donor egg cycle) and the ultimate improbable conception of their daughter Daisy.  Or, as the subtitle puts it "A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother."

I have been fortunate enough not to have personal experience with the world of fertility treatment.  But I’ve read enough fertility blogs that little in Waiting for Daisy was a surprise to me, not the callousness of the doctors, not the way that the couple was sucked into more and more involved procedures, in spite of their initial ambivalence.  If anything, it seems like Orenstein may have had the ironic blessing of responding sufficiently poorly to medication that she and her husband weren’t tempted into cycle after cycle of trying.

The part of the book that moved me most is probably the description of Orenstein’s encounter with the Japanese ritual for mourning miscarried or aborted fetuses.  (This is a revised version of an article that appeared in the NYTimes Magazine several years ago.)  I also really liked the way that Orenstein writes about her anger at Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s "chicken little natalism" even as she feels herself turning into the "poster child" for Hewlett’s thesis.  She’s clear-headed enough to see both the big picture and her individual reality at the same time, and neither to believe that her life is prototypical nor to deny her own reality because it’s inconsistent with her story about the world.  So, yes, she did ultimately get pregnant with her daughter without medical intervention, but no, that doesn’t mean that infertile women will conceive if they "just relax."

This is a quick read — I read it over the course of a weekend.  While she covers some serious topics, Orenstein writes about them lightly.  I enjoyed the time in her company.

Given all the time I’ve spent blogging about housekeeping and feeling overrun by toys, I couldn’t resist a book called A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder.

The authors (Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman) acknowledge that there is such a thing as too much mess.  Their argument isn’t that all mess is good, but that we have such knee-jerk reactions against mess that we waste a lot of time, effort and money trying to maintain excessive levels of order.  They suggest that the money spent hiring professional organizers might be better spent in most cases on additional storage space, and that piles on your desk are an efficient way of keeping the most frequently used resources close to hand.

Except that this argument wouldn’t be enough to fill an article in Real Simple, let alone a 300 page book. So they throw in whole bunch of anecdotes that are loosely connected to the idea of mess. They hop around from subject to subject — touching on everything from classical music to the discovery of penicillian, from professional organizers to decentralized organizational charts to noisy cell phones.  I’d say that the book itself is messy, except that at other times the authors becomes excessively organized themselves, e.g. developing a taxonomy of messes (clutter, noise, blur, distraction, distortion, etc).

I don’t have a book to review this week, mostly because I’ve fallen back into my bad habit of reading multiple books at the same time.  Here’s what I’m in the middle of:

The Female Thing.  I requested this from the library because of Flea’s positive review.  (While she thought she was behind the curve in reviewing it, I had never heard of it.)  So far, it’s mostly annoying me.  Kipnis seems to be provocative for the sake of being provocative, and to believe that "women’s magazines" are an accurate reflection of women’s psyches.

This year I will…  A little book with advice on how to achieve your goals, from losing weight or quitting smoking to being more patient with your kids.  Nothing wildly innovative, but a useful set of reminders.

The Lay of the Land.  Richard Ford can sure write amazing sentences.  But I’m not sure that anything’s going to happen in the entire book.  When I finish a chapter, I feel no compulsion to start the next.

With no one as witness.  One of the recent Lynley mysteries by Elizabeth George.  I’m not liking it as much as her earlier ones — I think they were more interesting when Lynley and Havers hated each other.  But it keeps me turning the pages.

This post is a solicited review.

Dawn at This Woman’s Work is trying to make some money by setting up, Get Them Blogging, a database of bloggers who are willing to receive samples to review.  I signed on a few months ago, both to support Dawn and because I like to do book reviews, and a couple of weeks ago I got my first pitch, from Brighter Minds Media.  They asked me how old my kids are, and the next week my husband called me at work to say that I had gotten a huge box.

The boys were very excited when I told them that the box had stuff for them.  We opened it up, and went through it.  The books were attractive and well-designed, if a little too overtly educational for my taste.  D immediately grabbed the lift-a-flap alphabet book and wanted to see what was behind all the flaps, but lost interest as soon as he had seen them all.  I liked the idea of the puppet built into the book, but was less thrilled to discover that it had an electronic voice.  (We may pass it on to my nephew as revenge for all the noisy toys my brother has given the boys in the past.)  When N is starting to learn his letters, we may break out the alphabet book that encourages finger tracing.  Overall, I’d rate the books a B- there’s nothing objectionable about them, but nothing that made them stand out as books I’d want to read over and over again. 

The package also had two computer games.  D quickly grabbed the Land Before Time game, and I gave Caillou’s magic playhouse to N.  D’s had practice with computer games before, and was soon navigating around the game.  His favorite part was probably the dinosaur pinball game.  He’s played it a once or twice since.  I think that because there’s not an obvious goal that you’re supposed to achieve, he’s not drawn back to it as much as he is to games where he can see that he’s making progress.

N has only played games where something happens no matter what you hit, and so he struggled a bit to figure out his game.  The box says that it’s for 2-6, but I find it hard to imagine that a 2 year old could manage the mouse well enough to play; N can do the sub-games where the object you’re clicking stays still, but not the ones where it moves.   He’s also never watched the tv show, and so doesn’t quite get the video clips that you "win" when you solve a game.  But he loves the way Caillou nods or shakes his head and says yes or no when you move the cursor over the right.  He’s asked to play it again almost every day.

On a somewhat related note, I agree that the Baby Einstein reference in the state of the union address was odd.

Today’s book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, by Barbara Ehrenreich was published in 1989.  I picked it up because I read a reference somewhere that made me think that Ehrenreich might have made the connection I’ve been trying to draw between high-intensivity parenting and the increasingly competitive economy.

Ehrenreich does argue that middle class parents are highly insecure about their ability to pass their class status on to their children, but doesn’t really go with it in the direction that I’m interested.  Rather, she suggests that middle-class status is largely a function of the willingness to defer gratification, whether in the form of extended education and low-paid entry level jobs or in the form of the savings needed for homeownership.  Parents are anxious because there is little they can do to assure these values among their children.  Ehrenreich argues that this is why the 60s were so unsettling to middle class adults — their children were rejecting the very values that made them middle class.

While the book made some interesting points, overall, it was so dated as to be of little interest.  Fundamentally, Ehrenreich is trying to explain the shift to the right of American politics in the 1980s.  She rejects the idea that it was due to a significant shift of the working class (the Reagan Democrats) and argues instead that it’s because the upper middle class chose to identify with the upper class corporate elite, rather than joining in solidarity with the middle and working class.  I find that an unconvincing argument.

I also think it’s absurd to talk about the increased appeal of investment banking and law to college graduates in terms of an ideological shift without any acknowledgment of the increased burden of student loan debt.  And as a Gen X-er myself, I found myself irritated by her idealization of the 60s without any acknowledgment that the boomers didn’t exactly live up to their youthful promises to build an egalitarian society.  Ehrenreich also discusses the middle-class "discovery" of poverty in the 60s without any mention of the role that poor people played in the war on poverty.

So, I can’t recommend the book.  But I don’t regret taking the time to read it.  I found parts of it very interesting, especially the discussion of how the media hyped the idea that blue collar workers were opposed to the social activism of the 60s, and downplayed the role of unions in progressive coalitions.