Girlchild, A Book Club Dud

My book club met on Tuesday to discuss our June book, Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman. Based on the book's description on Amazon (see below), we were all expecting something light, funny, and endearing, i.e. the perfect summer read. 

Rory Hendrix is the least likely of Girl Scouts. She hasn’t got a troop or even a badge to call her own. But she’s checked the Handbook out from the elementary school library so many times that her name fills all the lines on the card, and she pores over its surreal advice (Uniforms, disposing of outgrown; The Right Use of Your Body; Finding Your Way When Lost) for tips to get off the Calle: that is, the Calle de las Flores, the Reno trailer park where she lives with her mother, Jo, the sweet-faced, hard-luck bartender at the Truck Stop.  

Rory’s been told that she is one of the “third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom.” But she’s determined to prove the county and her own family wrong. Brash, sassy, vulnerable, wise, and terrified, she struggles with her mother’s habit of trusting the wrong men, and the mixed blessing of being too smart for her own good. From diary entries, social workers’ reports, half-recalled memories, arrest records, family lore, Supreme Court opinions, and her grandmother’s letters, Rory crafts a devastating collage that shows us her world even as she searches for the way out of it. 

Well, our expectations couldn't have been more wrong. What the description should have said is something closer to the following:  This is the story of a little girl (Rory) who doesn't fit in anywhere, particularly because she is harboring secrets of long-suffered abuse (both sexual and psychological) by her babysitter and her babysitter's father, and she is too scared to tell anyone. She has one friend who suddenly moves away before they can really develop their friendship, and her friend later dies an early death. Rory receives little support from her own family and is ultimately left to fend for herself before she is even old enough to vote, much less drive a car. Rory is wildly smart, but she squanders her opportunities so as not to burden her mother with having to miss work to take her to the state spelling bee championship, and based on the book's ending, it doesn't sound like she will ever make it to college. She may get out of her trailer park, but you have to wonder, whether she will just end up some place similar.  

I did like Hassman's writing style. The mix of letters, social worker reports, diary entries, etc. was interesting, but the subject matter was just too bleak without any redemption or even prospect of redemption for the main character. Ultimately, this was one of the most depressing books any of us had ever read, and it elicited the least amount of discussion of any book since we first formed our club in September 2011. 

          

Cormac McCarthy's The Road - 2007 Pulitzer Winner

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road on Sunday night. I'll confess that it had been sitting on my bookshelf for years and was one of those purchases that probably had more to do with the "buy 1 get 1 half price sticker" still on the book's front cover rather than any interest I actually had in reading it at the time. I previously read McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and I confess, I was bored to tears. The  only reason I took the book from the shelf last week was to check the title off of my Pulitzer list. I wasn't looking forward to reading about a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, and I was relieved when I opened the book and realized the font was fairly large (i.e. the book wasn't very long). 

Then I started reading, and I have to say, I loved this book. Unlike many other readers, I didn't find McCarthy's lack of punctuation and lack of complete sentences distracting, which is surprising, because I have to confess, I'm a bit of a punctuation nut. I found his sparse prose beautiful and well suited to the subject matter. Based on McCarthy's well known distaste of the semicolon and other punctuation, I'm not sure that I agree with other readers that the punctuation (or lack thereof) in The Road is really meant to underscore the book's themes and to further illustrate the fact that the man and boy are on the precipice of starvation. But I do love the idea that his punctuation isn't a matter of personal style but was, rather, meant to convey something about the story. I'm just not buying it. 

The one thing I can't quite figure out is his lack of use of apostrophes in only those conjunctions involving the word "not," e.g. dont, cant, wouldnt, shouldnt, didnt, and werent. Why does he omit apostrophes from only these conjunctions and leave them in other words? If somebody knows the answer, please comment. I'd love to hear any theories.  

But enough about the punctuation, that's not the main event. This is the story of a father and son who walk along a road in a cold, dark world, heading for the coast. The father dreams only of survival, but the boy longs for the color of the sea, which he has never seen, and other survivors, namely other children. The man and his son are frightened, starving, and plagued by nightmares that come both on the road and in their sleep. In this bleak setting McCarthy explores themes of survival and faith, and he examines the human psyche in the face of such destruction.     

But this is really a love story. The man's love for his son is so deep that it fuels him. His only interest is in protecting his child. Thoughts of suicide and of death are constantly present, but the man keeps moving along the road, fighting for his child's survival despite questions of whether the child wants to survive or whether survival in the face of such horrors should really be his goal. As they fight for survival, the man attempts to bring joy to his son's life, carving him a flute, remembering the boy's toy truck when they are forced to leave many of their possessions behind, and feeding a starving man, even though they too are starving, because it is what the boy wants. He also struggles to teach his child that good does exist, telling his son that they are the good guys, and they carry the fire, even though I don't think the man believes this anymore. We also see how well the man has done in the face of such adversity because the boy truly is a "good guy," always ensuring that his Papa shares their provisions equally and wanting to rescue others that they meet on their journey. Despite growing up in a world so desolate and peopled by evil men who eat other humans, the boy is still amazingly uncorrupted and trusting.

I think this book also appealed to my early interest in pioneer stories involving people who lived off the land and struggled to survive (although in this case, everything is dead, and they are forced to scavenge for old canned goods, which is a bit different than the Laura Ingalls Wilder books of my youth). Despite my early misgivings, I highly recommend The Road to other readers.       

This Is Your Brain on Fiction

While talking to my sister-in-law this morning, I mentioned that I haven't read a nonfiction book in quite some time. In fact, I think the last one might have been The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I read over a year ago. Perhaps overly defensive of the lack of nonfiction on my recent reading lists, I rationalized that there is so much to be learned from great fiction. Of course, it's obvious that we broaden our knowledge of language and often of history and sociology through fiction, but my sister-in-law also referred me to a recent New York Times op-ed about discoveries in the field of neuroscience regarding the impact fiction and descriptive language can have on the brain and on our ability to empathize with other people.

According to this op-ed, the brain may not actually distinguish between reading about an experience and actually experiencing it because in both cases, the same neurological regions are stimulated.  According to the op-ed:

In a study led by the cognitive scientist Véronique Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were scanned as they read sentences like “John grasped the object” and “Pablo kicked the ball.” The scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. What’s more, this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg. 

Another study found that metaphors such as "The singer had a velvet voice” or “He had leathery hands” roused the sensory cortex, while phrases with similar meanings such as “The singer had a pleasing voice” or “He had strong hands,” did not. 

This is all interesting, but what does it mean to us as readers? And how does it impact whether we like a piece of fiction or not? Or does it? I recently read Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones, which takes place in the days before Hurricane Katrina, and each time I put the book down I found myself looking nervously outside, surprised to see the sun shining and no signs of a hurricane, much less a drop of rain. Did the words that Ward selected stimulate my brain to trick me into these feelings of apprehension about the weather? I now find myself wondering about those truly precious books that you can't wait to finish but that you don't want to end, was something happening to my brain while I read that made those books so much more special than the rest?      

To check out the op-ed for yourself, follow this link: Your Brain on Fiction (New York Times March 17, 2012).

Pulitzer Project

Several months ago I committed to reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners in fiction. I was shocked when I printed off the list and realized I had read less than 15! It turns out my recent reading lists have been a little heavy on novels like The Hunger Games and Twilight trilogies and pretty light on anything that could be considered actual literature. I had a long way to go.

I'm now about 25% of the way through the list, and I am really enjoying this project. My husband keeps reminding me that I don't HAVE to read ALL of the books on the list. These comments are met with blank stares from me. Does he really think I would leave 2 or 3 unread? No way! There's definitely a disconnect between us when it comes to things like this. My husband can be totally engrossed in a book, and put it down with 20 pages left and forget about it. I won't go to bed or go to dinner with only 20 pages left in a book, and I would NEVER not read the last 20 pages of a book! I will finish this project, and now I've committed to it in writing.  

These are the ones I've read so far:
2011: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding
2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008: The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1918: His Family by Ernest Poole  

21 down, 64 more to go. So far the prize winner that I really just don't get is Tinkers by Paul Harding. I found it really disjointed, and I couldn't wait to finish the book just to check it off my list. If I had to pick the top 5 so far I think it would be the following (in chronological order): Middlesex, Empire Falls, The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Ask me tomorrow, and you may get a different list.

I would love to know other people's favorite Pulitzer books. For a complete list of the prize winners follow this link: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize_for_Fiction