Half Changed World

A short post, since Logan airport was fogged in last night, and I wound up taking the overnight train home and not getting much sleep.

While I was sitting around Logan waiting to see if my flight was going to be canceled, I finally got to watch Little Children, which I had out from Netflix.  I’m not sure it quite came together as a movie, but some of the individual scenes — the pool scene with the sex offender, the book club — are so perfect that they were almost painful to watch.  (The sex scenes are also sufficiently graphic that I was more than a little uncomfortable watching them in the middle of a crowded airport.)

I read the book of Little Children shortly after it was released* and I spent much of the movie comparing it with the book.  Sarah and Brad are both more convincing characters in the book, and their relationship is far less about the sex.  (In the movie, they’re struggling to keep their hands off of each other from the beginning; as I read the book, they’re lonely souls looking for companionship, and are themselves surprised when it turns into something else.**)

I think that the narration in the movie, which I hated, is an attempt to include some of their internal monologues.  But the balance between the Sarah-Brad plot and the Larry-Ronnie plot works better in the movie.  Watching the movie made me want to re-read the book to figure out exactly what they moved around.

* I had to read the book — a) one of the main characters is a SAHD, and b) I took a writing class with Tom Perrotta in college.

** I still hate the plot contrivance of having Brad always use a double stroller even though he only has the one kid.  No one would use a double jog stroller if he didn’t have to.  They corner like a constipated elephant.

Inspired by Hornby, I’m going to write about whatever it is I’m actually reading, even if I don’t have anything earthshattering to say about it.  And this week, what I read is The Jane Austen Book Club, by Karen Joy Fowler.  I didn’t especially love it, although it was good enough that I read it in a few days (even with Hornby’s advice to stop reading books that you’re not enjoying ringing in my ears).  I have to admit that 2/3 of the way through it, I was still flipping back to try to keep the characters straight in my head, which is never a good sign.  But I know other people who liked it, and it got a truly glowing Washington Post review, so I guess it’s a matter about which rational people can reasonably disagree.*

One of Hornby’s running jokes in his Believer columns is that they won’t let him say anything nasty about the books he’s reviewing (although he seems to have won an exception to that policy for The Dirt.)**

I was reminded of the wisdom of such a policy last week when I discovered that not only had Jo Walton read my discussion of Farthing and alternative history, she linked to it from her blog.  This isn’t the first time that a writer has read/commented on my post about a book she wrote — thanks to the wonders of Google, mentioning someone by full name is a semi-reliable way of getting their attention.  I’m not going to only write about books I adored, but it’s a good reminder not to write anything that I would be ashamed to have the author read.

* I’ll offer a prize to anyone other than my husband who can identify the source that this is a reference to.  I’ve got a stack of review copies that I’m willing to give away.  (If no one gets it by next week, I’ll reveal the answer.)

** Oh, Genevieve deserves a prize too for explaining the title of Housekeeping versus the Dirt to me.  Give me a way to contact you if you want something.

I picked up this book in the library because of the title.  As longtime readers of this blog know, I’m mildly obsessed with how people think about housework (as opposed to being obsessed with doing it, which I’m clearly not).  And then I saw it was by Nick Hornby, and figured that it was worth reading.

Well, the book has nothing to do with housekeeping.  It’s about books.  Specifically, the full title is Housekeeping vs. The Dirt: Fourteen Months of Massively Witty Adventures in reading.  It’s a compilation of Hornby’s columns for the Believer, in which he lists the books he’s bought in the past month, what he’s actually read, and chats a bit about them.  And to pad the book out (it’s still only 150 pages), there are excerpts from a few of the books that he discussed and particularly liked.

It’s great fun.  I’ve suspected from reading Hornby’s novels that he’d be great fun to hang out in a bar with, but now I think he’d rise onto my short list of people I’d want to be stuck on an elevator with.  I’ve read a few of the books he discusses, but have never heard of at least half of them. He makes me want to read most of them, but doesn’t make me feel guilty for not having done so.  (And in fact, in the preface, he makes a passionate case for reading books that you think you’ll like, not books that you think you ought to read, or worse, books that other people think you ought to read.)  And he freely admits to buying books and then never quite getting around to reading them.

And Hornby’s got a sense of humor that appeals to me (although the recurring joke about the editors at The Believer censoring his columns wears thin).  He writes about hunting down a book that he thinks his son will enjoy "only to be repaid with a soul-crushing enthusiasm, when I would have infinitely preferred a polite, mild and temporary interest.  Needless to say, I won’t be taking that sort of trouble again."  In discussing Candide, he notes that "if ever anyone lived in an age that had no need for a savage debunking of optimism, it is us.  We believe that everything everywhere is awful, all the time.  In fact, Voltaire was one of the people who first pointed it out, and he was so successful that we find ourselves in desperate need of a Pangloss in our lives."

So, in honor of Hornby, what stuff have I been reading?  Well, Harry Potter, for one.  I bought it Saturday afternoon and finished it over the weekend, mostly by staying up far later than I should have.  I have to admit that I kept reading in part because I wanted to know how it ended, but mostly because I wanted to be able to hang out with my blog friends and hear what they thought of it.  And I’m in the middle of an excellent mystery called Case Histories that I had never heard of, but found on the book swap shelf at work .

(I just noticed that Hornby actually mentions Case Histories, but all he says about it is that it’s set on streets where he used to live.)

Jenny Davidson at Light Reading recommended Farthing by Jo Walton, so I picked it up at the library.  It’s a classic English country manor mystery, with the twist that it’s set in an England where the Hess mission was successful and England has made peace with Nazi Germany.  It’s a clever twist that pumps fresh air into a somewhat stale genre, and Walton does a nice job with it.  Nothing spectacular, but a good read.  The politics (warning of how fragile democracy can be) are a bit heavy handed, but certainly timely.

Davidson explicitly links Farthing with some other recent, more literary alternate histories — The Plot Against America and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.  Of the three, I think Plot is probably the best, not as clever as YPU, but better executed.  But the comparison set me thinking about alternate histories, and wondering about a) why alternate histories are often considered a subgenre of science fiction and b) why so many of them take WWII as the point of divergence.  So that’s really what I want to write about.

I think the main reason that alternate histories are often considered sci-fi is that the authors who write them are often primarily associated with sci-fi, with Philip K. Dick as an early example and Harry Harrison as a more recent example.  My personal judgment is that if an alternate history story involves time travel or movement between parallel universes, it qualifies as sci-fi, but otherwise it’s probably not.

In looking up links for this post, I ran across the wonderful listing of alternate histories, ordered by the data of their convergence, at UChronia.net.  This list, which includes essays and newspaper articles as well as fiction, suggests the divergence points are more evenly spread out than my subjective impressions would have led me to conclude, but I still think that most of the memorable alternate histories I’ve read diverge either at World War II or at the Civil War.  Those are times when the course of history clearly changed — and mostly for the good.  As a rule, writers are far more interested in divergences where things could have gone horribly awry than in divergences where things could have gone right for a change.  In alternate histories, even when good things happen — Lincoln survives the assassinated attempt — they turn out to have horrible consequences. 

I don’t think it’s because writers are inherently cynical, but it’s hard to turn things going right into a story.  Let’s say those chads didn’t hang, and Gore was elected in 2000.  I think 9/11 would still have happened.  I could write a story in which the US didn’t invade Iraq and Hussein was still in power but we captured Bin Ladin somewhere in Afghanistan and the government had a reasonable response to Katrina, but unless there’s some ironic twist somewhere, this may be good propaganda, but not much of a story.

I seem to be on a fiction-reading kick lately, and I think that’s bad for my book reviews, because there’s not a thesis for me to explain and argue with.  Sorry.

I finished two books this week, and they couldn’t be more different.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessel got a lot of buzz last year when it came out.  It’s the other book that my brother and sister-in-law gave me for Hanukah last year, along with The Places Inbetween.  As you can tell by the fact that I’m just finishing it now, it wasn’t exactly a page turner, at least for the first 300 or so pages.  I kept picking it up, reading a bit, and putting it down.  I’m not sure I’d have finished it if it hadn’t been a gift.

I’m generally a sucker for stories about intellectually precocious teenage girls.  (See Arkady Darell)  But I never really believed in Blue, or cared about her.  You know from the beginning of the book that Hannah is going to die and Blue is going to live (and go to Harvard),
so the question isn’t what is going to happen, but how, and why.  And I found the endless literary references (both real and made up) more annoying than anything else.  Lots of people have compared this book to The Secret History (because both involve elitist cliques and things going horribly awry), but it reminded me most of Infinite Jest.  At least Special Topics had an exciting 100 or so pages at the end to reward you for the long slog.

The other book I read is Alice McDermott’s After This, which is a series of vignettes about moments in the life of an Irish Catholic family in New York in the 60s and 70s.  The trick here is that McDermott repeatedly breaks the narrative flow to tell you what is going to happen to these people 10 or 20 years down the road.  It gives the whole book an Our Town-ish feel, where ordinary moments are bathed in a golden light by virtue of hindsight. 

Here’s a bit I liked:

"Annie had cried herself to sleep every night that her mother was gone, in full misery the first night, in anticipation, on all subsequent nights, of her brothers’ sweet solicitation as they climbed onto the cot with her and said kindly in the dark, without teasing, that their mother would be home soon, with a new sister for her to play with, and she shouldn’t cry."

Quick reviews of two quick reads:

• What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman.  A woman claims to be one of a pair of sisters who disappeared more than 20 years ago.  She knows things that no one else could know, but seems to be hiding something.  I’ve enjoyed Lippman’s Tess Monaghan mysteries, so picked this up even though the premise seemed a little too Oprah-ish for my taste.  I read the whole thing in about 24 hours. 
• A Map of the World, by Jane Hamilton.  This one really was an Oprah book club pick.  I picked it up a couple of years ago, and read the heartbreaking opening section, and decided that I couldn’t bear to read a story about the death of a child.  It was on the trade-a-book shelf at work, though, so I gave it another shot on a recent business trip.  It’s good, although nothing in the rest of the book matches the crystalline painful brilliance of the first chapters.

So, what’s on your reading list?  What should I be looking for at the library?

I fell in love with the world that Michael Chabon created in the Yiddish Policeman’s Union on the first page, when the main character, a Yiddish policeman of course, referred to his gun, his piece, as a "sholem"  (which is both Yiddish and Hebrew for peace).  I’m a sucker for puns, and when you make them multi-lingual and integral to the world view, I’m hooked.  Twenty or so pages in, Chabon hit me in the kishkes with a passing reference to the two million who died in the Holocaust.  (Just typing that gives me the shivers again.)

A few years ago, Chabon wrote an essay about a book he encountered, "Say it in Yiddish" and imagined it as a guidebook to an alternative world, one where you might have to ask about a bus schedule or buy a dress in Yiddish, in other words, one in which Yiddish was a living spoken language.  This book is set in that alternative world, one where the Jews were given chunk of Alaska as a (temporary) homeland.  It’s one where Hebrew is a dying language, spoken only by those with nostalgic memories of the long-past Zionist experiment, where the Chassids who wear the fur coats and black hats of their Polish ancestors are perfectly well dressed for the Alaskan winter.

Oh, and it’s also a murder mystery, and a hard-boiled detective story.   It’s a wildly ambitious book, and even though it doesn’t quite succeed at everything it reaches for (the last few chapters spiral out of control, and I didn’t know what to make of the ending), that still puts it ahead of most of what I’ve read lately.

This week I’m reviewing Writing Motherhood, by Lisa Garrigues as part of the MotherTalk blog tour.  It’s a how-to book, aimed mostly at the beginning writer who is feeling intimidated by a blank page.  Garrigues is a friendly, encouraging voice, telling the reader that yes, she does have a story to tell and that she just has to jump in and start writing. 

If you’ve read Julia Cameron, Anne Lamott, or Natalie Goldberg‘s books about writing, much of the specific advice — to carry a notebook, to write daily, to take some time to play, to free write first drafts without editing — will seem familiar.  But just because Garrigues didn’t invent these techniques out of thin air doesn’t mean that they’re not good advice.  And the book contains literally hundreds of suggestions for topics to write about, from birth stories to bandaids.  While I can’t imagine anyone finding them all equally inspiring, I can’t imagine reading through the book and not itching to pick up a pen or open up a file over one of them.  I think my favorite idea was to write down all the questions your child asks you in the course of a day.

Like Dani, I’m a little skeptical about the inherent virtues of longhand writing.  Garrigues is quite adamant that, whatever the virtues of a blog as a way to share writing with a larger audience, it’s no substitute for a Mother’s Notebook.  I agree that the public nature of a blog means that I’m not quite as uninhibited as I would be in a private notebook — there are some topics that I’m just not willing to share.  And I know that the nature of the medium discourages revision, and that my writing is better when I revise.  But knowing that there’s an audience out there reading keeps me writing far more regularly on my blog than I have in my journal in years.  Ultimately, I think there’s a role for both.  Garrigues loves her journal because it’s the one place she can be truly alone; I love my blog because it’s where I can always find company.

This week, I’ve also been reading some of The Elephant in the Playroom, which is a collection of essays by parents of children with special needs.   It’s very much a mixed bag.  My favorite piece in it is by Flea from One Good Thing, a version of her post about putting Alex on Ritalin.  What makes that essay stand out is that she’s not trying to summarize her entire life as Alex’s mom.  Rather, she describes, in exquisite (and hysterical) detail, a few specific moments in that life.  Some of the other writers also understand the importance of the moment and describe the phone call they received to find out that their child got into the school of their choice, a walk they took after a night when they didn’t get enough sleep.  Others tell, rather than showing. 

I know I’ve complained before that too many anthologies about the parenting experience draw too heavily on professional writers.  There’s an obvious reason for this — they tend to be good at writing — but it limits the perspectives that we get to hear from.  Garrigues believes that every mother has a story worth telling — and gives them the tools they can use to make it a story worth listening to as well.

So, I finally read the book that was referenced in that discussion we had about better and worse ways to praise kids.  The book is Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol Dweck, and it’s vastly better than the magazine article that kicked off the discussion.

The basic argument in the book is that people approach things with either a "fixed" or "growth" mindset.  If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that intelligence, or athletic ability, or musical talent are inherent to the individual — you either have them or you don’t.  So you treat setbacks as a sign of failure, and avoid challenges whenever possible.  You believe that effort is a sign that you’re not naturally smart or talented.  By contrast, if you have a growth mindset, you believe in the power of learning and effort.  You treat setbacks as learning opportunities, and seek out challenges.  Dweck has lots and lots of examples, from sports, business, arts, and pretty much convinced me.

So, what’s wrong with praise?  The issue is that outcome-based praise generally reinforces the fixed mindset.  Dweck thus recommends praising kids for their effort rather than their good grades.

So, what bugged me about the articles?  First, they focused on the "right" way to praise.   But kids aren’t stupid — if you don’t mean it, they’ll see right through you. And if you praise their effort when they didn’t work hard, but got good grades anyway, they’ll know that you’re really praising the results, even if you use different words.  As Andrea argued, you need to actually believe in the growth mindset, or the change in how you praise will be totally superficial.

Second, the articles seemed to take a fixed approach to mindsets.  They seemed to suggest that if you praised your kids the wrong way, they’d never overcome the damage.  But Dweck argues that among the things that you can change is your mindset.  So even if you have a fixed mindset, you can work on developing a growth mindset.

Shortly before I read Mindset, I read Jennifer Niesslein’s book, Practically Perfect in Every Way: My Misadventures Through The World of Self-Help. It’s a funny exploration of what happens if you try to listen to ALL of the advice that’s out there, in short order.  Of course, it’s impossible.  For one thing, much of it is contradictory.  For another, there are still only 24 hours in a day and even if a plan only requires 15 minutes a day to follow, when you’re trying to follow 4 different plans at once, that adds up.  Of course, you could probably have figured that out without Niesslein’s book, but she’s enough fun to spend time with that it’s worth reading anyway.

The combination of books made me think about self-help books from the perspective of mindsets.  The good news is that self-help books are premised in the idea that improvement is possible.  The bad news is that almost all the books claim it’s going to be easy.  It’s obvious why — who wants to buy a book that promises them pain and frustration?  But when the going gets hard, it’s easy to fall back into a fixed mindset of: "See, I tried and I couldn’t do it, so obviously I’m just not the kind of person who loses 30 pounds/has an always clean house/has enough saved for retirement/quits smoking/whatever the goal is." Niesslein wanders into that territory occasionally, but she does ultimately conclude that she’s probably better off for the improvements that the books led her too, even if she doesn’t follow them religiously.

I’m interested in the various blog posts about The Dangerous Book for Boys.  The ones I’ve read seem to be divided by the ones like Moxie that are enthusiastic about the neat things that are included in it — how to tie knots and build fires and do coin tricks and use codes — and the ones like Jody and Phantom Scribbler who can’t get past their frustration at the title.

I admit that I got a review copy of the book, but never wrote about it precisely because I fell so squarely between the camps that I couldn’t figure out what to say.  It does have a lot of interesting stuff in it (along with some things that I can’t imagine my boys ever being interested in — grammar and rugby rules and historical lists of baseball MVPs).  And it does annoy me that it’s being marketed just for boys.  And if it’s true that the companion book focuses on daisy chains and sewing, that’s pretty sad/funny.

For what it’s worth, my sons are a bit young for the book, but they expressed only mild interest.  My husband scanned through it a bit, and then wanted to know how they could have a chapter of great battles in history and not include Agincourt.  The guy inspecting our old house for the buyers was fascinated by it.

I generally agree with Jody and Phantom Scribbler that words matter.  And yet…  I read my brother’s Boys’ Life, and when he stopped getting it, I asked for a subscription for myself and read it for years.  (I mostly wanted to find out what happened in the Tripods story, although I read the whole magazine as long as it was there.)  The "boys" part of the title never bothered me in the least.  Maybe it would have been more of an issue if my brother had actually been into scouting, but he didn’t.  (We lived in New York City.  I’m not sure how he wound up with the subscription in the first place, to be honest.)  The organization is exclusionary, but words are free to all.

I guess my feelings about the book are actually quite comparable to my thoughts about the Boy Scouts.  I really dislike several things about the organization.  But I may still sign the boys up when they get to the right age, if they’re interested.  And I’m probably going to keep this book.