Living in a  Fictional World: Of Rabbits, Holes, and Hatches (and One Hutch)

I keep meaning to write another blog entry. After all, I read almost constantly. I always have a lot of books going at the same time. Currently, I am reading:

• The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Machado de Assis
• An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960's, Doris Kearns Goodwin
• Evening in Paradise: More Stories, Lucia Berlin
• The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories, Joy Williams
• The Stories of Richard Bausch, Richard Bausch
• Through the Safety Net, Charles Baxter
• The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
• Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Four of these are books of short stories by authors I admire (Richard Bausch, Joy Williams, Charles Baxter, and Lucia Berlin); two are classics I am returning to (The Count of Monte Cristo and Anna Karenina—the latter for our book group); and one is non-fiction (Doris Kearns Goodwin). I've actually read more non-fiction in the last year than I have in a while, as I am trying to resurrect myself as an actual author and have been doing some research on the middle part of the 20th century. In fact, I've read more than a few novels that have launched me in that direction over the last few years: Ian McEwan's Lessons, Rebecca Makkai's I Have Some Questions for You, Mary McCarthy's The Group, and Alice McDermott's Absolution.

On the surface, I don't think these four novels have much in common. But McEwan, Makkai and McDermott all are written from the perspective of very consciously looking  back into the past to understand the behavior, ethos, and interactions of a certain group of people. McCarthy's book is written like that, too, but was published in the 60's looking back on post-WWII America among a very specific subset of women. Each of these spurred in me a desire to dig into my own past, to understand what went on and why it went on. I've set myself a tall order, indeed, one which I may never be able to fulfill in the way I want to.

Another book I read recently was in a similar vein. I stumbled on James Frankie Thomas's Idlewild almost by accident. I had actually googled "novel set in Quaker school" and there it was. Set in Manhattan in the early 2000's at an elite, artsy Quaker high school called Idlewild, Thomas's novel is sharp and witty. It is the story of the evolution of a friendship, set against the tall shadows of 9/11. It's about the dynamics of theater, literature, masks, race, lies, queer culture and power. The writing is brilliant and funny, bouncing between first person and third. It's a spot-on portrait of the type of school in which I used to work and what the school I went to eventually became, one obsessed with image over values, with mere lip-service of Quaker values juxtaposed against the bottom line of public relations and admissions numbers. The books is smart and sassy and Thomas's voice is unique and arresting.

All of these books have led me down a little bit of a rabbit hole, thinking about the 60's and 70's and schools; the liberal, boundary-less nature of my education and growing up; and the specific and idiosyncratic nature of what I experienced back then. How do I make sense of everything that happened to me?

By looking at the list of books I've read recently (to the right here), you can see that I have a tendency to have little love affairs or flings with certain writers. Lately, it's been Daniel Mason, Alice McDermott, Matthew Dicks, and Kevin Wilson. I'll throw Jasper Fforde in there, too, but I keep turning back to Fforde whenever I need to laugh. So, why do I keep returning to Alice McDermott? She doesn't make me laugh, but she does make me think. Her life and her concerns feel so different from my own. There is so much about Irish Catholic experience that I don't yet understand. Her work stretches me in ways I'm not used to, as guilt, service, and faith are themes that run throughout her work, as well as themes of feminism, family dynamics, and trust. So there are things that are familiar, often set against the context of modern Catholicism which is unfamiliar to me.

Absolution was such an interesting book. As a student (and child) of the 60's, it was fascinating to read about pre-war Vietnam, women's roles as "helpmeets", and the delicate balance between service and self-serving. What motivates us to help, both in private and public settings, and even, in a larger sense, between nations? What are the limits or reaches of patriarchy, of subjugation? What are the power dynamics between the helper (the benevolent white overlord, the caring Catholic woman, the beneficent charitable organization) and those that they help (darker skin, different language and culture, different relationship to the empowered, to money, to help)?

I read two Irish novels in the last few months, How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney and Bee Sting by Paul Murray. The books don't have much in common at all, other than being Irish. Feeney's novel is closer in structure and tone to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night in that its main storyline is about a high-functioning autistic kid, trying to make his way through a school. Unlike Dog, however, the novel also focuses on the other characters in their small town, all of whom are trying to muddle through their own lives with varying amounts of success. It's a quiet, small book filled with astounding beauty and moments of real wisdom.

On the other hand, I have very little positive to say about Paul Murray's Bee Sting. Similarly, we are in a small town, not far from Dublin, peopled by characters who are also trying to muddle through—some of the scenes are quite brutal and disturbing. This novels is more similar to Fargo (the movie) in tone and subject matter than to Feeney's novel. There are multiple threads, multiple plates spinning in the air. The past is used to explain and excuse the present of the novel, facts are twisted and toyed with, punctuation is used sparingly and annoyingly. In the end, it left me totally annoyed and unsatisfied. Not my cup of tea.

More my cup of tea was a strange novel called Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. Almost immediately, the reader has to suspend disbelief and totally buy into the idea that the main character is an alien, placed on earth as part of an anthropological study. The only way she can communicate with her race back on her distant planet is through a 1980's era fax machine. Adina is an observer, a learner, and searches for meaning and understanding in much the same way we all are. I was surprised at how much I loved being with Adina and how much I totally bought into this strange little novel.

I wish I could have enjoyed Leif Enger's Virgil Wander more, because it was also filled with little pearls of wisdom:

    The surface of everything is thinner than we know. A person can fall right through, without any warning at all.

    There is no better sound than whom you adore when they are sleepy and pleased.

But the novel shares the same landscape as so many other small town America novels, so many Garrison Keillor small hamlets, even the same territory as Frederik Backman's Sweden. And all those towns are filled with characters, loveable waitresses at the town diner, oddball loners, ruthless rich landowners, and petty small-minded spats. I think this has really become a genre of its own. Other books like this I've run across recently include Suzzy Roche's The Town Crazy, anything by Richard Russo, and many other writers.

I've written way too much here. But that's OK. I don't think anyone actually reads this. I realize that I've written a ton about my recent reads and haven't even gotten to the rabbit parts yet. Well, first off, I've been down many rabbit holes in my reading these past six months or so: the 60's, adoption, post-WWII women and their roles, Catholicism, wrangling with one's past...and many other themes and topics both in fiction and non-fiction. But I've also read about rabbits. 

First up, Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch, an ambitious first novel which is again filled with multiple voices, multiple narrators, multiple stories and perspectives, all from the various inhabitants of the Rabbit Hutch, a low-cost housing unit in a dying midwestern town. At the heart of the novel is the perplexing death at the very beginning—the MacGuffin that motors the plot—who? what? how? why? Some of the characters are enigmatic, fascinating psychological studies of religious fanaticism. Act times the books is deep and erudite; at others, it toys with sensationalism and fetishism. Another book that was not quite my cup of tea because, in the end, what did it all add up to?

More my cup of tea was Jasper Fforde's The Constant Rabbit. Fforde is the master of creating these strange literary worlds, all with their own logic, laws, and reality, and playfully toying with them with his own bizarre Welsh sense of humor. There is no one who write like he does and I always find his books fun and distracting, even when he is skewering something quite serious, as he does in this book in referencing racism, anti-immigrant feelings, and even Brexit. And it all happens due to the Event back in the mid-1960's that anthropomorphized a group of rabbits (and a few other assorted animals). The Rabbits fight for acceptance and against the "othering" by some humans who see them as threats to their existence and ways of life. It's a funny, beautiful satire that has more in common with Monty Python than with a political screed.

There. That's my rabbits, holes, and hutches. Now. Off I go to read something else wonderful and absorbing.