Half Changed World

Over the summer, Wayne at Rag & Bone Shop posted a list of 10 books he recommended.  One of them was The Street, by Ann Petry, a book I had never heard of.  Wayne wrote:

"If you want to encounter the volatile, turbulent issue of race in America, Petry’s novel offers a more relevant and authentic and comprehensive account of it, from the perspective of Lutie Johnson—intelligent, talented, brave, and doomed Lutie Johnson with her eight-year-old son. It’s coarse and claustrophobic and nearly hopeless—and very, very good."

Right away I requested it from my library, and eventually got it, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my library books.  And when it was due, I renewed it.  And when it was due again, I renewed it again, still without having picked it up.  They only allow two renewals, so I finally put it in my bag to read on the metro.  And then I started reading it, and I was hooked.

I don’t think it’s giving away anything of the plot to say that from very early in the book, it is quite clear that Lutie is doomed.  In many ways, The Street is a horror story, in which evil lurks around every corner but the heroine keeps escaping, until the end, when she doesn’t.  And even so, I didn’t see the final twist coming.

The edition that I got from the library has a cover blurb by Gloria Naylor, in which she says "Forty-five years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry in this painfully honest and wrenching novel.  Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic."  Nice of her to say this, since having read The Street, The Women of Brewster Place seems like a pale imitation.  (No pun intended — although I will note that this is one of the few English idioms where lightness is undesirable.)  While the story mostly follows Lutie Johnson and her dreams of a better life, some of the strongest parts of the story are where Petry changes perspective for a chapter, and dips into the point of view of one of the other people whose lives intersect with Lutie’s.  Suddenly someone who has seemed part of the scenery flickers into life as a full person, with dreams and fears of his or her own.

Lutie is a little too perfect to be fully believable as a character, and Petry gives her long interior monologues that are clearly speaking with the author’s voice.  But the anger and the frustration and the shattered hopes ring through as strongly today as they did almost 60 years ago:

"No matter what it cost them, people had to come to places like the Junto, she thought.  They had to replace the haunting silences of rented rooms and little apartments with the murmor of voices, the sound of laughter; they had to empty two or three small glasses of liquid gold so they could believe in themselves again.

"She frowned.  Two beers and the movie for Bub and the budget she had planned so carefully was ruined.  If she did this very often, there wouldn’t be much point in having a budget — for she couldn’t budget what she didn’t have.

"For a brief moment she tried to look into the future.  She still couldn’t see anything — couldn’t see anything at all but 116th Street and a job that paid barely enough for food and rent and a handful of clothes.  Year after year like that.  She tried to recapture the feeling of self-confidence she had had earlier in the evening, but it refused to return, for she rebelled at the thought of day after day of work and night after night caged in that apartment that no amount of scrubbing would ever really get clean."

This is the post I started last Tuesday, and then didn’t have the heart for.  Since it was the day that the Census Bureau releases the latest poverty statistics, I’m discussing two books about growing up poor.

First up is The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, by Terry Ryan.  It’s her memoir of how her mother, Evelyn Ryan, kept her family fed and housed by entering dozens of entries in every possible contest, winning everything from televisions and washer dryers to shopping sprees, trips and a new car (which they sold to pay the bills).  Mrs. Ryan had a determinedly optimistic outlook, which Terry emulates in this book, so she focuses on her mother’s determination, creativity, and humor, rather than dwelling on her father’s alcoholism and violence, or on the indignities, major and minor, of their persistent poverty.  The closest she comes to complaining is when discussing how the nuns who taught at the parochial school she attended registered her for all remedial classes when it was time to enroll in high school, in spite of her excellent grades.

Evelyn Ryan is an amazing character, and her story would have been a terrific magazine article, but the material runs a little thin by the end of the book.  The book has a great premise, but no plot or character development.  At the beginning, Evelyn Ryan is a plucky heroine who wins contests, and at the end she’s still a plucky heroine who wins contests.  There’s a movie of this book coming out at the end of the month; based on the trailer, it looks like they’ve reframed the story as about Evelyn’s defiance of her bullying husband. 

The second book is the provocatively titled Welfare Brat: a memoir, by Mary Childers.  Childers writes about the endless contradictions of her childhood, of loving her mother and not wanting to be anything like her, of fitting in neither among the kids in the gifted class (where she stuck out for being poor) nor among the kids in her neighborhood (where she stuck out for caring about school), of living in decaying neighborhoods where all the other white families were fleeing, but also of taking advantage of her white privilege to get department store jobs.  She writes of hiding the money she had earned so that her mother couldn’t take it, but also of giving up a birthday celebration so that there would be cake for her little sister.

Perhaps the most heartfelt passages in Welfare Brat are where Childers talks about her dreams of going to college, but also of her depths of ignorance about it.   Desperate to get away from her mothers’ overcrowded apartment, she’s horrified at the prospect of sharing a dorm room.  She doesn’t understand that "full scholarship" still usually means loans, and has no money to pay for the incidentals that colleges assume are too minor to mention.  Her family doesn’t understand why she’d want to go to college, and even her friends think she should just get a job.  After her guidance counselor pulls strings, she winds up at a "mediocre community college":

"Even in college, most people aren’t excited about ideas.  Outside of class I’m teased for obsessing about my difficulties finishing a paper comparing Martin Buber’s notion of the ‘I-Thou’ relationship to Picasso’s representations of how we are three- and four-faced, and thus slated for prismatic complexity interacting with others.  Several teachers drop hints that I would have no trouble transfering to a better school.  When I explain my scholarship and aversion to debt, they reply that practically everyone borrows to attend college, as if no one should refuse a common fate."

(For maximum effect, these passages should be read alongside this essay about class and college admissions.)

Childers finishes her book with a statement about welfare reform. She writes "It’s clear to me that I could develop from welfare brat to chip-on-the-shoulder chick to contributing dissident citizen because I had the good luck to come of age when many people in the United States approved of a war on poverty rather than what Herbert J. Gans calls ‘the war against the poor.’"  This statement may well be true, but it isn’t supported by anything that’s come before in the book. While Childers is sympathetic to her mother’s struggles, she seems to have suceeded in spite of the parenting she received, not because of it. 

I’ve spent much of the day with a window on my screen open to a news source, checking the progress of Katrina and the misery that she’s inflicting on the people of Louisiana and Mississippi.  The rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, the rich and the poor, but the rich have a lot more ability to get out of the way:

"Julie Paul, 57, sat on a porch yesterday with other residents of a poor neighborhood in central New Orleans who said they had no way to leave town. ‘None of us have any place to go,’ the AP quoted her as saying. ‘We’re counting on the Superdome. That’s our lifesaver.’"

And a leaky lifesaver it was.

The flooding reminded me of one of the best history books I’ve read, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry.  Barry weaves together several stories: the (flawed) engineering masterpiece of the levees that controlled the Mississippi, the terror of the flood, the race and class tensions that affected the response, and the federal and private relief efforts that followed.  The title is multi-layered, referring both to the rampaging Mississippi, and (ironically) to the proverbial tide that lifts all boats. It’s literally a page-turner.  I’d definitely recommend it.

(As it happens, just last week, my dad loaned me Barry’s recent book on the 1918 flu epidemic.  It should be an interesting read.)

Red Cross Relief Efforts

Union for Reform Judaism Disaster Relief

Today’s book is Unraveled, by Maria Housden.  The subtitle of the book is "The True Story of a Woman Who Dared to Become a Different Kind of Mother" and the "different kind of mother" that Housden became is a non-custodial parent.  When she and her husband divorced, she let him have primary physical custody, accepting a standard visitation schedule of alternate weekends and several weeks over the summer.  For a while she moved to California to be with her boyfriend (now husband), but now she lives on the east coast, not far from her children.  The book challenges its readers’ assumptions, raising the question of why is it shocking that a "good mother" — not one on the brink of collapse like Laura Brown, the runaway housewife of The Hours — would give up custody of her children, when millions of fathers do so all the time. 

Unfortunately Housden spends far too long trying to justify her choice, rather than challenging the need to do so.  And her justifications left me hollow: "I knew in my heart that my gift in the world was more as an artist than an everyday kind of mother.  And my real responsibility to my life, the lives of my children, and the world, was for me to have the courage to create a sense of home and work that would allow me time to explore and express the things I wondered about and knew."  I find this language incredibly insulting to the thousands of men and women who manage to be creative artists without walking out on their kids. 

I’m not criticizing Housden’s choices.  Unlike many of Laura’s commenters, I don’t believe that parents have an obligation to stay in unhappy marriages for the kids’ sake.  She had married young, and (at least in her telling) her husband’s expections for their marriage were stuck in the 1950s of the Feminine Mystique.  They had watched their 3-year-old daughter die, the sort of crisis that either makes or breaks relationships.  Her husband was willing and able to be the custodial parent (with the help of an au pair).  But I lost patience with the new-agey language, the constant claims that this was necessary in order to find her authentic self. 

Sandra Tsing Loh reviewed Unraveled in the September Atlantic.  I requested the book from the library based on the start of the review, only to discover later that Loh hated it, for mostly the same reasons that I did.  But Loh then uses the review as a launching point for a semi-coherent rave about Oprah, Anna Karenina, and "female-rage anthologies by overstressed working mothers bitterly wrestling with husbands and playdates and deadlines."  If anyone who has read Loh’s review can explain the last two pages, I’d love to hear it

***

Updated:  Go read Jody’s post on this subject.  Thanks.

When I initially heard about We Need to Talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, I had no interest in reading it.  It’s the story of a teenage mass murderer, as told by his mother in a series of letters to his father, and I just didn’t want to go there.  I figured there are enough horror stories in the newspaper that I have to read, why should I read fiction about a Columbine-style massacre?

Then I read flea’s heartbreaking review of the book, and picked it up on my next library trip.  I’m glad I did, as I thought it excellent and thought-provoking, even if it did work its way into my dreams for a couple of nights.

The biggest theme of the book is our desire to find causes for everything — and preferable, someone to blame.  In an odd way, I was reminded of Stephen Mitchell’s introduction to his translation of Job.  Mitchell argues that both Job and his "friends" are stuck in contradictory syllogisms.  Job argues "I am a good person, bad things are happening to me, therefore God is unjust."  His friends argue "God is just, bad things are happening to Job, therefore Job must have sinned."  Mitchell suggests that the Voice from the Whirlwind teaches us that "Job is a good person, bad things are happening to him, God is just."  No therefores.

Eva Khatchadourian’s neighbors blame her for Kevin’s sociopathy.  The parents of one of his victims sue her in a civil case, arguing that Eva was a bad mother, Kevin is a murderer, and therefore Eva is to blame.  At her lawyer’s insistence, Eva’s defense in the case was to argue that she was a good mother, and therefore couldn’t be to blame.  But in We Need to Talk about Kevin, Eva makes a much more disturbing case, admitting her many failures as a mother, but arguing that nonetheless, she was not responsible for her son’s actions.  No therefores.

The chilling part of the book, what makes it a horror story, is Eva’s insistence that even as an infant and toddler, Kevin’s actions are deliberately chosen to hurt others — especially Eva herself.  She believes that his constant crying as an infant, his destruction of her belongings, his delayed potty training are all designed to torture her.  As he gets older, she blames him for a series of incidents of increasing magnitude in which things go very badly for classmates, neighbors, his sister, a teacher.

If Eva’s perceptions are accurate, Kevin is indeed a character out of a horror movie, clever and evil, beyond anyone’s control but his own.  But if Eva is wrong, she’s a monstrous figure as well, projecting her ambivalence about motherhood onto the innocent child and treating age-appropriate behavior as a crime. Her husband is duly horrified when she tries to convince him of Kevin’s malignant nature, seeing her, not him, as the freak of nature.  And so Eva is further isolated, helpless to prevent the tragedies that she and the reader both see coming.

I am struck that, in spite of all of Eva’s protestations to the contrary, flea still believes that she’s a good mother, pointing out that Eva "gives up everything she ever loved, and all of her time and energy and focus trying to crack the impenetrable shell of a hostile, sullen, sociopathic child."  I’m uncomfortable with sacrifice as the right measure of maternal quality.  Moreover, Eva would say that those are all the motions that she went through to play the role of the good mother, precisely because she was missing something underneath.  And she argues that Kevin always knew the difference. 

Today’s book review is my entry in the Daddy Types Baby Book Review Contest, otherwise known as the good, the bad, and dear lord don’t make me read this again.

The Good

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems.  I love this book, in which a pigeon employs a series of negotiating tactics to try get to drive a bus.  My son and I usually read it together, with his job being to say "NO!" each time.  At age 4, you get to hear "no" a lot, so he loves being the one to say no.  The line drawing pictures are funny, and convey the pigeon’s increasing desperation as the book progresses.  The book has also provided a means to turn real-world whine-fests into a game, as we point out strategies from the pigeon that D. has skipped (e.g. "You forgot to say that you bet my mommy would let you.")  The bus driver comes back before the pigeon gets to drive the bus — but then it sees an unoccupied truck.

The Bad

My Big Train Book, by Roger Priddy.  This falls into the category of "train porn."  No attempt at plot.  No clever drawings.  No rhythmic language.  Just close-ups of trains.  Red trains.  Yellow trains.  German trains.  Japanese trains.  Commuter trains.  Freight trains.  High-speed trains. 

Dear Lord, Don’t Make Me Read This Again

The Berenstain Bears’ Bedtime Battle, by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  We got this one as a gift, and I hate it.  So of course, D loves it.  I keep trying to bury it at the back of his bookshelf, and he keeps digging it out.

So what do I hate about this book?

• The generic characters, identified only by their roles in the family.  Of course Brother plays with dinosaurs and Sister is scared of spooky stories.
• The way the parents give in to the kids’ whining and foot-dragging.  I’d be happier if Papa only said "Ok, because you asked nicely" instead "If I must" before carrying the little bears up the stairs.
• The way the father is portrayed as incompetant, unable to give a simple bath without putting too much bubble bath in the tub.
• The insipid drawings, which don’t tell any story beyond the text.

Today’s book is Because I Said So, an anthology of essays about diverse experiences of motherhood edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses.  Peri and Moses used to edit Salon’s Life section, back when it was called "Mothers Who Think" and some of the essays have appeared on Salon or elsewhere.

The essays are a mixed bag.  I think my favorite is Peri’s "Prayin’ Hard for Better Dayz" about how her son "went ghetto," in part as his way of coping with her cancer.  Ayelet Waldman’s essay about how she loves her husband (and sex with her husband) more than her kids is just as embarassing to read as it was in the New York Times on Valentine’s day.  I’m not sure if I’m relieved or horrified to learn that even Ariel Gore’s teenage daughter thinks that her mom is embarassing; if the original HipMama is un-hip to her kid, I might as well relax and not even bother trying.

But overall, I’m afraid I found the book to be less than the sum of its parts.  I think the upswelling of mommy blogs makes a book like this somewhat besides the point.  It’s no longer a relevation to hear the voices of smart, thoughtful, funny women talking about motherhood.  I read them every day.

"Does the Sabbath exist independently from the preparation, from the tradition?  Can you meet your family for a pizza dinner on Friday, relax together for the first time all week, drive home after dark, snuggle up to a video tape, feel happy to be alive, and call it Shabbas?  Can you go to the beach with your family on Saturday, enjoying the creation on a beautiful day, and fulfill the observance?  The rabbis rather firmly say no.  A tired man and woman might prefer yes.

"Here’s a puzzle: If you race home from the office, snap off the cartoons, shake your roast chicken out of a box, and light the candles exactly by sundown; if you bound out of bed next day though you desperately need your sleep, and then head out to services in the rain on foot when driving would be more restful; if you stand and sit in the chapel, your concentration constantly interrupted by children, and then you return home in the rain: this might pass for Shabbas, and the rabbis would probably confer their blessing.

Possibly religion is not appropriate for parents of young children."

— Elizabeth Ehrlich, Miriam’s Kitchen.

I finished the Harry Potter book — I liked it better than #5, but not as much as the first four.  This is the first of the Harry Potter books that T and I haven’t read out loud to each other — after the disappointment of the last one, we weren’t ready to dedicate the amount of time involved in reading a thick book like this out loud.  (The boys are way too young for these books, so it would have come out of our very limited free time.)  I read it right away not so much because I was dying to find out what happened next, but because it’s fun to read books that your friends are reading so you can talk about them.

Right now I’m reading In the River Sweet, by Patricia Henley, which is the first book we’re discussing for Shannon’s Naptime Books group.  I’m enjoying it.  It cuts back and forth between modern Indiana and the same character 30 years earlier in Saigon — both versions of Ruth Anne are complex and believable.  The discussion hasn’t really taken off yet, though — I think we’re still trying to figure out how to make the online setting work.

I’ve just gotten out of the library The Life of Pi, which is the next pick for my real life book group.  I admit that I’ve been somewhat resistant to the book, mostly because it has a reputation as a "book group book."  Plus, it doesn’t really matter if I read the book, because the group tends to spend about 10 minutes discussing the book and the rest of the time chatting about everything else.  I don’t mind, because the group is made up of moms of kids from my son’s preschool class, and it’s a good chance to socialize with them. Since T does all the pickups and dropoffs, I don’t get to see much of the other parents, and the "book group" helps me stay in the loop.

A little while ago, I got a very sweet email from Melanie Lynne Hauser saying nice things about this blog and asking if I minded if she linked to me.  Of course, I don’t mind.  Her book, Confessions of Super Mom is coming out next month, and it sounds like fun.  Super Mom’s powers (the result of "a horrible swiffer accident") appear to be to clean up any mess with a zap of her fingers, to read children’s minds, and to understand the beeps of the scanner at the supermarket.  Not exactly the superpowers that I’d pick if I had the choice, I’m afraid.

Part of what made The Incredibles really work is that they did such a terrific job with Elastigirl.  They figured out a set of powers that really would be helpful for a stay-at-home parent —  trust me, a solo road trip would be a LOT easier if I could reach what the boys drop without taking my eyes off the road — but that also make her a kick-ass superhero.

My all-time favorite superhero story, however, is Scott McCloud’s Zot! comics.  Unfortunately, my favorites are the "Earth Stories," which are the only ones that were never published as books.  In them, Zot is accidentally trapped on our Earth, and hangs out with his girlfriend Jenny and her geeky friends as they try to cope with such real-life problems as divorce, homophobia, and surviving high school.  And he tries to cope with the fact that he can’t single-handedly solve all of the world’s problems.  They’re just wonderful.  If you ever get a chance to read them, do it. (We have a full set of them, but we don’t lend them out; you can read them here if you wash your hands first.)

My husband has written a role-playing game in which you get to play a superhero (or supervillian, if you insist).  It’s called Capes and it’s just been nominated under Best Rules and Best Game in the ENnies.  I’m very proud of him.

If you did get to pick a superpower, what would it be?  I think I’d pick flying.  Other things might be more useful, but I can’t imagine anything being more fun.