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Becky Ohlsen

Graphic Novels & Comics

Life sketches

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Putting the fun back in funeral and spicing it with tenderness, grit and regret, Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic grabs you from the first page and never lets go. It's like reading someone's diary, because essentially it is someone's diary, but this has to be the most painstakingly artful diary ever created. It helps, too, that Bechdel's gothic-tragic family is unconventional, to almost Tennessee Williams proportions. Her dad, who works at a funeral home in rural Pennsylvania, is tortured by a secret he can only partly hide. Her mom does theater and tries to fit the happy-spouse mold. Alison, meanwhile, grows up exploring her sexuality and intellect with equally intense self-analysis. The book's meshing of text and art is so smooth and organic you don't even notice it unless you notice how well it's done. Bechdel clearly understands exactly which parts of a story pictures can tell better than words. Which isn't to say she's a slouch as a wordsmith; she reads a lot, and it shows. Layering her family's tale with shades of Proust, Camus and Icarus, Bechdel gives her story depth while avoiding pretentiousness.

LAUGHING AT DEATH
An even more humorous take on a grim topic is Cancer Vixen: A True Story by Marisa Acocella Marchetto. A cartoonist for the New Yorker and other publications, Marchetto was an urban glamour queen who had just started seeing a sexy Italian chef when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her self-mocking approach to the distinctly unglamorous cancer-treatment process is nicely paired with her sly, sophisticated illustrations. Fellow cartoonist Miriam Engelberg takes an equally lighthearted approach to bad news in Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person. Her irreverent take on her illness culminates in the existential dilemma, If I could get rid of my cancer by teaching high school again, would I? The deliberately childlike drawings and scribbly lettering match the author's emphasis on goofiness as a coping technique.

FAMILY STORIES
Equally charming, but with an underlying sadness that's hard to shake, is Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums, a star-crossed love story about the Persepolis author's great-uncle. Satrapi's trademark artwork like elaborately festooned woodcuts lends itself to this heartbreaking tale of a famous musical genius who dies over something lost and irreplaceable. Though not quite a memoir, it adds to Satrapi's collected body of autobiographical work: The stories of our relatives often define the people we become. That idea weighs heavily upon the new memoir by children's book illustrator Martin Lemelman, Mendel's Daughter. Inspired by a vision he sees of his dead mother speaking to him in the night, Lemelman at age 52 digs up an old videotape of her telling stories about her childhood and her family's horrific experiences during the Holocaust. The narrative is told in his mother's heavily accented voice, and occasionally that of her brother; the artwork is composed of old photographs and documents as well as intricately shaded character portraits. It's beautifully done and has the feel of something that's been labored over like a sacred object.

READING HISTORY
Not so much a memoir as a valuable historical document, Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, written and illustrated by Stassen, provides a beautiful but harrowing reading experience. It follows the grim fate of a boy trapped in the midst of the Rwandan genocide, putting the violence into narrow focus by showing its devastating effects on just one young life. The lush, saturated beauty of Stassen's artwork provides a stark contrast with the brutal world he's recording.

DO IT YOURSELF
Everyone has a compelling life story; there's no such thing as a boring childhood. If you're inspired by these graphic-novel memoirs, why not try creating your own? Making Comics by Scott McCloud author of the groundbreaking Understanding Comics explains in step-by-step chapters how and why comics work to illustrate a story, and how the reader can use them to tell their own. There are tips on just about every aspect of creating a comic book, from how facial muscles work to how to make the most of a text bubble to what certain postures can tell readers about a character's mood. It's a handy guide for both aspiring artists and those who simply enjoy reading graphic novels.

Putting the fun back in funeral and spicing it with tenderness, grit and regret, Alison Bechdel's memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic grabs you from the first page and never lets go. It's like reading someone's diary, because essentially it is someone's diary, but this has to be the most painstakingly artful diary ever created. […]
Fiction

Picking up the pieces

Review by Becky Ohlsen

In the wake of 9/11, Brian Remy's consciousness is as thoroughly shattered as his country's confidence. The New York policeman wakes up a few days after the terrorist attacks, having apparently shot himself in the head, and it kind of goes downhill from there. His partner, Paul, can't stop talking about things that shouldn't be discussed out loud—like his involuntary pleasure at being a sudden celebrity, or like certain body parts they've found amid the rubble at the scene. Remy's having memory gaps, so he can't figure out precisely who the boyish-faced man in the suit he seems to be working for is and what, exactly, he's supposed to be doing. And his son is pretending Remy died in the attacks.

In 2005's Citizen Vince, Jess Walter described a tough guy caught off-guard by finding himself displaced from his normal gangster environment. In The Zero, it's another kind of disorientation altogether. The tough guy finds himself in foreign surroundings, but he hasn't moved anywhere—it's the world that's changed, or maybe it's his perception of the world. Suddenly, nothing makes sense. Between the gaps, Remy comes to in a series of situations he can't remember getting himself into: a torture scene, a conversation with his ex-wife, a meeting with a mysterious figure who hands him an envelope, a vast paperwork-filing warehouse, his girlfriend's bed. These flashes are usually accompanied by significant quantities of whiskey, which, along with his brooding silence, his inferred toughness and other people's failure to take his questions seriously, helps Remy skate along with his memory loss undetected.

The structure of the novel calls to mind works like Memento or Fight Club, in which the disjointed plot must be pieced together based on mostly faulty evidence. How much of what Remy remembers is real? Why can't he remember the rest is it 9/11 trauma, or merely horror at the kind of person he's become? And how did he (and implicitly, we) get to this point? The answers might not be clear, but the questions raised by Walter's perceptive, ingenious satire are both fascinating and important.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

 

In the wake of 9/11, Brian Remy's consciousness is as thoroughly shattered as his country's confidence. The New York policeman wakes up a few days after the terrorist attacks, having apparently shot himself in the head, and it kind of goes downhill from there. His partner, Paul, can't stop talking about things that shouldn't be […]
FictionShort Stories

Truly, madly, deeply

Review by Becky Ohlsen

There are good books and great books. And then there are books like Daniel Handler's Adverbs. Reading it feels like calling in sick when you don't feel sick so you can curl up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a fluffy blanket and watch the rain fall. It's a Bloody Mary for the hung-over heart. I have such a crush on this book.

You might know Handler better as his alter ego, children's book author Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events). He's written two other grown-up novels, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth. And now, as if that weren't enough, with his third adult book he proves himself a master of the love story. Adverbs is a collection of 16 interlinking stories built around the ways in which people love each other: soundly, obviously, naturally, often, etc. The book begins, as love often does, with the immediate, the obvious and the brief, moving quickly toward cold and complicated before winding up at barely and judgmentally.

Some of the stories are sadder than yours, and some are incandescently happy, and almost all of them are hilarious in places. The same characters or at least the same names show up in several stories at different ages, and key phrases or elements keep kaleidoscoping through the collection, giving the whole thing a disorienting, dizzy-in-love kind of feel. Is the Lila who's desperately ill in "Soundly" the same eye-rolling Lila who tears tickets at the theater in "Obviously"? Is Andrea at the bar also Andrea the ex-girlfriend and Andrea the cab driver? And just how many Joes and Hanks are in this book, anyway? You soon figure out it doesn't matter. It's not who loves, it's how they love that counts.

Trying to pinpoint the nature of love leads to some of the author's best observations. In "Frigidly," he writes, "When love appears it's a supernatural thing like the songs say, but eventually you have to get out of bed, even on the coldest of days, and pay the rent." That sums it up almost perfectly.

Becky Ohlsen writes infatuatedly from Portland, Oregon.

 

There are good books and great books. And then there are books like Daniel Handler's Adverbs. Reading it feels like calling in sick when you don't feel sick so you can curl up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a fluffy blanket and watch the rain fall. It's a Bloody Mary […]
FictionShort Stories

Evil lurks in Palahniuk’s story collection

Review by Becky Ohlsen

The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you scratching at bookshop doors to get in the minute the book comes out. There's no in-between, especially not when the main thing people are saying about this collection is that one of the stories makes audiences at author readings pass out, weep and vomit.

Well, don't be scared. The story in question, Guts, is such an over-the-top grossout spectacular that it ends up being more funny than disturbing. And that's a good thing. Palahniuk is a funny guy. Haunted is less a collection of horror stories than a warped satire, a combination of Survivor, Fear Factor and that Exquisite Corpse game where each person contributes a paragraph to the same story. The characters are named after their personalities: Miss Sneezy, Agent Tattletale, Miss America, Comrade Snarky. They all saw the same ad for a three-month writer's retreat. It's every aspiring author's dream: escape your real life for a while, and there's nothing to stop you from creating a masterpiece. But the retreat turns out to be not quite as advertised.

Things begin to go wrong almost immediately. No one is allowed to leave the old theater where the retreat is being held. Someone breaks the glass in a window and finds impenetrable concrete behind it. Rebellious would-be authors sabotage the food supply, then the furnace. In an effort to force the directors to let her out, one character hacks off her ear with a knife. This not only fails to get her out but also inspires the rest of the retreat-goers to hack off bits of themselves in an ever more obsessive race to become the star of the inevitable movie of their lives. Sure, they want to be rescued but not until things get bad enough to make a really great story.

Meanwhile, they're all sort of doing what they came for: telling stories. Interspersed with the narrative about what's going on at the retreat are short stories, each supposedly written by one of the characters. (Never mind that all the stories sound like they're written by Chuck Palahniuk.) These get more brutal as the situation becomes increasingly dire. In one, a resuscitation dummy is put to not necessarily educational use by a police department. In another, a reporter down on his luck frames and kills a former child star to win a Pulitzer. In several of them, children go missing for horrific reasons.

Still, the scariest thing about the stories is the same thing that's always scary in a Palahniuk book the hints of evil lurking underneath a seemingly placid reality. He's an expert at inducing paranoia by rattling off details that make you question long-held assumptions. Are those people who stand in line at movie premieres actually paid to be there, just to make the movie seem more exciting? Can you kill someone with a foot massage? Are the homeless really just bored millionaires out slumming? Can you explode from eating too many freeze-dried dinners at once? It doesn't even matter if the answer to these questions is yes. Once you're presented with the question, you can't shake it. (After Fight Club, for example, will anyone ever order clam chowder in a restaurant again?) It haunts you. And that is pretty scary.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you scratching at bookshop doors to get in the minute the book comes out. There's no in-between, especially not when the main thing people are saying about this […]
Fiction

A fast-forward glimpse of the future

Review by Becky Ohlsen

It's almost impossible to describe Never Let Me Go without giving too much away. Author Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) has painstakingly constructed the story so that key information filters through in a series of hints and implications. The more things become clear, the less they're understood, until finally the novel's slowly building sense of dread reaches a conclusion that, although not exactly surprising, is that much worse because you knew it was coming.

It's the late 1990s, and Kath H. is reminiscing about growing up in her exclusive boarding school, Hailsham, with her friends Ruth and Tommy. An experimental institution in rural England, the school encouraged creativity in its students to an almost oppressive degree—failure to churn out consistently high-level artwork was grounds for being teased by fellow students. Kath's narration provides other clues that Hailsham is no ordinary boarding school: the students are told they will never have children, and that while smoking is bad for everyone, it's "much, much worse" for them. Then there are the oblique references to what lies ahead when the students leave Hailsham and become "donors."

But mostly, the students do what students everywhere do—giggle, bicker, explore their sexuality, dream about what they're going to be when they grow up. It's almost mundane, except for the haunting knowledge of a dark future that creeps in now and then. Like the students, you sort of know what's going on, and little by little you start to figure out the grim context of their idyllic childhoods.

It's important not to give away the details, but the novel's stunning poignancy is no secret. In creating Hailsham and its inhabitants, Ishiguro has compressed everyday life to show a fast-forward version of what we all dread, the terrifying certainty of losing everyone and everything we love. But thanks to the richness of Kath, Ruth and Tommy's short lives, you leave the book feeling that, given half a chance, even we doomed creatures can carve out small moments of beauty and meaning.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

It's almost impossible to describe Never Let Me Go without giving too much away. Author Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) has painstakingly constructed the story so that key information filters through in a series of hints and implications. The more things become clear, the less they're understood, until finally the novel's slowly building […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

A rollicking journey to self-discovery

Review by Becky Ohlsen

It wasn't enough for Wesley Stace to be a successful musician and a devastatingly handsome guy; he had to go and write a novel as well. And it's not just any novel. Stace—aka folk singer John Wesley Harding—makes his fiction debut with a rollicking adventure told in classic bawdy-romance style. Considering that Stace leads something of a double life himself, it makes sense for his fiction debut to be built upon secret identities, parallels and opposites and the things that bind them together.

 Stace—aka folk singer John Wesley Harding—makes his fiction debut with a rollicking adventure told in classic bawdy-romance style.

In a nice example of one persona feeding off another, the inspiration for Stace's novel came from a Harding song, "The Ballad of Miss Fortune." Harding recorded the song, in which a rich English lord rescues an abandoned baby boy and raises him as a girl, in 1997, but found that his alter ego wasn't quite finished with the story. In Misfortune, Rose is that abandoned baby. For mysterious reasons he's rushed from a house in the slums of 1820s London and carried into the forest by a dimwitted child called Pharaoh. Easily distracted, Pharaoh sets down the bundle he's meant to dispose of, and Rose is found by the Young Lord Geoffroy Loveall.

The eccentric Young Lord still (after two decades) mourns his baby sister, Dolores. He's also under pressure from his overbearing mother to produce an heir. The foundling solves both problems at once. Except, of course, that this baby is not a new Dolores, but a boy. Geoffroy's on the brink of mental collapse, though, so the household goes along with his charade to save his sanity. This makes Rose's adolescence even more awkward than the usual.

By making Rose's search for identity a literal one, Stace sets the stage for a meditation on deciding exactly who you want to be. The book gets a little more florid than necessary toward the end, particularly because by then Stace has set out a number of mysteries you can't help wishing he would speed toward their solutions. But it's good fun to follow Rose on the journey to discover him/herself.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

 

It wasn't enough for Wesley Stace to be a successful musician and a devastatingly handsome guy; he had to go and write a novel as well. And it's not just any novel. Stace—aka folk singer John Wesley Harding—makes his fiction debut with a rollicking adventure told in classic bawdy-romance style. Considering that Stace leads something of a double life himself, it makes sense for his fiction debut to be built upon secret identities, parallels and opposites and the things that bind them together.

Fiction

An Evening of Long Goodbyes

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Imagine Bertie Wooster getting a real job in, perhaps, the assembly line at a bread factory and you’ll have some idea of the incongruousness of Charles Hythloday, redoubtable hero of Irish author Paul Murray’s excellent debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Though Murray’s story has elements of melancholy that the endearingly obtuse P.G. Wodehouse character never had to contend with, both writers traffic in the kind of humor that comes from the inherent absurdity of the European aristocracy clinging to its outdated ways in the modern world.

As his mansion outside Dublin crumbles and his family disintegrates, Charles, whose occupation up to now has been an effort to revive the tradition of the thinking gentleman of leisure, realizes something drastic has to be done. Since Father died and Mother’s been institutionalized, months of house-maintenance bills have gone unpaid; the mortgage is hopelessly behind and the records about it are incomprehensible. In short, Charles and his sister, Bel, are about to lose the family home. So, with the help of a shady postman/private detective, Charles decides to fake his own death and run off to Chile. This being a comic novel, naturally, his plan goes awry. Instead of sipping Chilean wine on the beach, Charles winds up booted from his home and living in the scuzzy hovel of his sister’s ex-beau, Frank.

Murray’s simultaneous skewering of both the upper and lower classes is brilliant, but the novel is much more than a farce. It hinges on the complex relationship between Charles and his sister, Bel, a troubled would-be actress and the source of the aforementioned melancholy. It’s one thing to write an outrageously funny book; it’s another to infuse that book with tenderness and real emotional depth. Luckily for us, Murray has done both.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

 

Imagine Bertie Wooster getting a real job in, perhaps, the assembly line at a bread factory and you’ll have some idea of the incongruousness of Charles Hythloday, redoubtable hero of Irish author Paul Murray’s excellent debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Though Murray’s story has elements of melancholy that the endearingly obtuse P.G. Wodehouse […]
Fiction

A memorable woman stands alone

Review by Becky Ohlsen

The latest novel by Stewart O'Nan (Speed Queen) is an ideal book for a rainy, tea-sipping afternoon. There's a calm, enveloping tone to the story that belies its unflinching exploration of a woman's chronically discontented heart. Readers of O'Nan's earlier novel Wish You Were Here will recognize the Emily of the title as Emily Maxwell, now 80 and widowed and living alone with her dog, Rufus, in a classy residential neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Her husband died years ago, and her children have moved to other parts of the country with their own families. She has remained close to her late husband's sister, Arlene, and the two of them make weekly forays in Arlene's car to a breakfast buffet that offers a two-for-one deal on Tuesdays.

This weekly brunch trip is both the high and the low point of Emily's week. And it's on one of these outings that we first catch a glimmer of Emily's odd blend of affection, dependence and resentment toward those she's closest to, a complicated attitude she holds without seeming to be aware of it herself. When Arlene collapses in a fainting spell at the buffet, Emily is suddenly forced into an independence she'd forgotten she could manage. Taking care of her sister-in-law and herself, and doing a good job of it, gives her a new confidence as she surveys her life and starts the hard work of reconciling herself to its approaching end.

Not much actually happens in the story; its chief pleasure comes from unraveling this little old lady's messy tangle of emotions. O'Nan never retreats from Emily's less flattering qualities: she means well, but she can be hypercritical, tight with money, and hung up on outmoded courtesies, and she's consistently surprised when others fail to take her own bleak view of things. It's refreshing to see someone who could've been a stock character drawn so fully. In fact all the women in the book are well-realized; the men are peripheral, opaque or simply beside the point. That you never really miss them is a testament to Emily's strength and complexity. She holds her own.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

The latest novel by Stewart O'Nan (Speed Queen) is an ideal book for a rainy, tea-sipping afternoon. There's a calm, enveloping tone to the story that belies its unflinching exploration of a woman's chronically discontented heart. Readers of O'Nan's earlier novel Wish You Were Here will recognize the Emily of the title as Emily Maxwell, […]
Fiction

Coping with a disappearing husband

Review by Becky Ohlsen

About halfway through Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, you realize you're going to be devastated. You love the characters, you're deeply involved in their lives, you can sense tragedy coming and you know it's going to hurt. But there's no way you can stop reading. And that's exactly as it should be. The novel is all about unstoppable fate, inevitable heartbreak and how to keep trudging happily along when you know your path leads to despair. It's the story of a couple, Henry and Clare, told in alternating segments by each of them. And though it's about time travel, the book is more literary romance than science fiction. Henry is a 28-year-old librarian who has a genetic disorder that causes him to travel through time involuntarily. Stacking books on the shelves in the library's inner sanctum, he'll suddenly vanish, leaving behind a pile of clothes, only to materialize in some unknown past or future moment, naked and nauseated. Often he travels to a certain Michigan meadow and visits a little girl Clare who sneaks him food and clothes.

So when Clare and Henry meet in "real time," October 1991, Clare has known him since she was 6. But Henry, now 28, doesn't recognize her, because he didn't start time traveling to Clare's meadow until he was older. Henry, for his part, has been time-traveling long enough to understand that certain events are bound to happen, no matter what.

If that sounds complicated, don't worry. Niffenegger structures the novel clearly enough that the timelines never get tangled, and her writing is so strong you'd keep going even if you did get confused. She's hip without being shallow. Her characters talk about punk rock and Rilke with equal enthusiasm, and their note-perfect dialogue is at once cool and clever, poetic and realistic. You like them and you want to save them from pain, but all you can do like Henry, like anyone is enjoy the story and try not to think about the inevitable end.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

About halfway through Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife, you realize you're going to be devastated. You love the characters, you're deeply involved in their lives, you can sense tragedy coming and you know it's going to hurt. But there's no way you can stop reading. And that's exactly as it should be. […]
Fiction

Finding your inner geek

Review by Becky Ohlsen

I probably could've finished this book in a couple of hours, except that every few pages I was seized by a compulsive need to leap off the couch, run down to the corner bar and slam a stack of quarters into Ms. Pac-Man. Lucky Wander Boy was a siren call my inner geek couldn't fail to heed. It's the story of Adam Pennyman, one of those well-educated, culturally aware, 20-something Americans paralyzed by infinite career possibilities. They know it's within their grasp to find fulfillment in their work, but they haven't found it yet; instead, they turn to pop culture, using nostalgia to elevate once-mundane entertainments to the level of religious icons. You've seen these people in car commercials.

But Adam is obsessed with something most adults consider sort of uncool. He's not just a slacker, he's a geek. By his own definition, "a geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status." In Adam's case, it's classic video games: Frogger, Asteroids, Donkey Kong and, in particular, a little-known Japanese game called Lucky Wander Boy.

Adam spends his free time writing his magnum opus, The Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments. The encyclopedic entries, many written while Adam is in the grip of a certain recreational vegetable, plunge deep into each video game's inner realms to find its true meaning. A clever writer, Weiss uses hyperbolic intellectualism to give Adam that ironic-sounding, but not really ironic, tone of worship: "It is difficult to ignore the similarities between Donkey Kong (the creature) and the demiurge of the Gnostic heresies," one Catalogue entry reads. "After imprisoning the true creator and occupying her harmonious creation, Donkey Kong defiles it, knocking it out of whack, making it as imperfect as the material world we are compelled to live in." It's at least as tragic as it is pretentious. We have no gods; we have Pac-Man. There is no true love; all chicks are really pixilated princesses waiting to be rescued.

So it's no surprise when Adam screws up his life for the sake of the game. He gets a job at a dot-com, where he's put in charge of a screenplay based on Lucky Wander Boy. In his quest to learn the game's secrets, he spirals out of control. The book turns into a wild romp that draws on samurai and Yakuza culture, alien conspiracy theories and Choose Your Own Adventure books. It's smart, fun and fast. If there's a scrap of geek in you, you'd better start saving up quarters right now.

Becky Ohlsen writes from the geek-chic city of Portland, Oregon.

 

I probably could've finished this book in a couple of hours, except that every few pages I was seized by a compulsive need to leap off the couch, run down to the corner bar and slam a stack of quarters into Ms. Pac-Man. Lucky Wander Boy was a siren call my inner geek couldn't fail […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

An unrepentant slave owner

Review by Becky Ohlsen

In Property, Valerie Martin, author of Mary Reilly, has set herself a difficult task. How does one elicit sympathy for an unlikable narrator? Her approach is a gutsy one: Don't try.

Manon Gaudet is a sugarcane planter's wife in the antebellum South. She has come to despise her husband because, in addition to being a humorless dullard, he has produced two children with Manon's own slave girl, Sarah. All while Manon herself remains childless.

Manon tells her story in an intimate monologue, forcing readers to see the world through her eyes and the view is not a pretty one. She's a solipsistic young girl, self-pitying and arrogant, who would prefer nightly dinner parties among New Orleans society to the country life her husband has given her. She is also an unrepentant slave owner and an oblivious hypocrite, raging constantly about her husband's mistreatment of her, his controlling ways, his undisputed ownership of her body and her fortune, while utterly failing to note the similarity between her situation and Sarah's. She never sees that she's doing to Sarah exactly what her husband has done to her, because she can't imagine why Sarah would ever aspire to being anything more than Manon's prized possession. She doesn't understand why Sarah seems ungrateful to belong to her, a kind and sophisticated mistress who values her servant's housekeeping and hairdressing skills.

Telling the story from Manon's viewpoint rather than Sarah's is an interesting tactic, and a brave one. Few readers would be unmoved by a young black woman's story of slavery, rape and emotional blackmail. But choosing a protagonist who's impossible to like is a greater challenge, and it makes for a novel that works on an entirely different level. It forces the reader to understand that the world of slavery existed for years as the unquestioned norm, that it was so commonly accepted for so long that its wrongness never occurred to many who lived within it. This is a novel that, while well written in high gothic style and deliciously evocative of the atmospheric New Orleans area, is not always as pleasant to read as it is important.

Becky Ohlsen is a freelance writer and editor in Portland, Oregon.

 

In Property, Valerie Martin, author of Mary Reilly, has set herself a difficult task. How does one elicit sympathy for an unlikable narrator? Her approach is a gutsy one: Don't try. Manon Gaudet is a sugarcane planter's wife in the antebellum South. She has come to despise her husband because, in addition to being a […]
NonfictionFictionAudioMemoirFilmArts & Culture

Coming soon to a theater near you

Review by Becky Ohlsen

Who doesn't love to be able to walk out of a holiday blockbuster and say, "Well, not bad but the book was better"? Get a jump on the season's upcoming films by reading the great books that inspired them, several of which are available in new editions.

It would be impossible to read the entrancing prologue to The Hours by Michael Cunningham and not keep going. The novel, awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999, begins with an evocation of Virginia Woolf's suicide, then jumps to the contemporary era, where two women seek to escape their varied bonds through Woolf's writing. The film, with a screenplay by David Hare, stars Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore as the two women and Nicole Kidman as Woolf.

In About Schmidt by Louis Begley, Jack Nicholson again plays the unlikable guy who grows on you; this is said to be among his most affecting performances. Schmidt is an old-school lawyer, now retired, whose beloved wife has recently died. Always cool and distant toward his daughter, Schmidt now finds himself unable to accept the Jewish lawyer she married. The novel sets his pride and loneliness against warmly humorous social commentary as Schmidt's reserve is shaken by the two women who enter his life. The Ballantine Reader's Circle edition includes a reading group guide.

Was Chuck Barris, undisputed eccentric and the mastermind behind The Gong Show, really an undercover CIA assassin known as Sunny Sixkiller? So he claims in his characteristically nutzoid memoir, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, soon to be a major motion picture directed by George Clooney and starring Sam Rockwell as Barris. First published in 1982, the book has long been out of print; Talk Miramax's new trade paperback coincides with the film's December release and includes eight pages of film stills. The script was co-authored by fellow eccentric Charlie Kaufman, the man who brought us Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (see below).

Sticking with the theme of the zany memoir, Adaptation is screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's manic account of his effort to make a film adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. In the film, Orlean's true story of the orchid thief, John Laroche (Chris Cooper), has to compete with the screenwriter's self-obsessed fever dream sparked by his infatuation with the back-cover photo of Orlean (Meryl Streep). Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman and his imaginary twin brother, Donald, a character-within-a-character in a story-within-a-story. The film, both a wacked-out satire of Hollywood and a writer's quest for meaning, reunites Kaufman with Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze.

Occasionally you come across a book that makes you wonder at the deep wells of strength and gumption its author must draw from. Finding Fish by Antwone Quenton Fisher is one such book. Fisher was born in prison to a teenage mom and spent two years with a loving foster family before being moved to the home of the Pickett clan, where he endured 14 years of unimaginable abuse. At 18 he joined the Navy, and it almost certainly saved his life. His remarkable memoir has been adapted for the screen by first-time director Denzel Washington, who stars as the Navy psychiatrist who mentored Fisher.

In conjunction with the film Gods and Generals, directed by Ronald F. Maxwell (Gettysburg), Ballantine is releasing a new boxed set of the Civil War trilogy by Michael Shaara and his son, Jeff M. Shaara Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure. Gods and Generals, a prequel to Gettysburg, documents one of this country's bloodiest eras and follows the rise and fall of legendary war hero Stonewall Jackson (Stephen Lang); Robert Duvall and Jeff Daniels also star. Also timed to coincide with the film is Gods and Generals: The Paintings of Mort Kunstlerfeaturing more than 65 works by the noted Civil War artist and text by historian James I. Robertson Jr.

 

Who doesn't love to be able to walk out of a holiday blockbuster and say, "Well, not bad but the book was better"? Get a jump on the season's upcoming films by reading the great books that inspired them, several of which are available in new editions. It would be impossible to read the entrancing […]
FictionDebut Fiction

The Lovely Bones

Review by Becky Ohlsen

When you kill off your narrator in the first 10 pages of a novel and tell readers who the killer is you'd better have one compelling story up your sleeve. Alice Sebold does.

"I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973," Susie Salmon tells us in the second sentence of The Lovely Bones. She shows us who did it—a neighbor everyone thinks is weird—and describes the horrible scene, a brutal assault and dismemberment in an underground hideout in a bleak winter cornfield. Sebold's triumph is in making Susie's voice so immediately compelling that we don't want to let her go, even after she's dead. We want to know what happens next. So does Susie.

From up in what she calls "my heaven," Susie watches the repercussions of her death among her friends and family. She sees her broken parents crumble away from each other, her younger sister harden her heart, her classmates cling to each other for comfort. She watches her murderer in the calm aftermath of his awful deed. She longs for the one boy she's ever kissed, knowing she'll never touch him again. She misses her dog. She aches for her parents and siblings, yearning to comfort them but unable to interfere. In her heaven, she's granted all her simplest desires—she has friends and a mother-figure—and she delights in her ability to see everything and everyone in the world. Observing her sister one Christmas, she says, "Lindsey had a cute boy in the kitchen. . . I was suddenly privy to everything. She never would have told me any of this stuff. . . She kissed him; it was glorious. I was almost alive again."

But watching the world without being among the living isn't enough for Susie. She's 14 forever, and the pain of her unfulfilled promise infuses her voice as she watches her younger brother and sister growing into roles she'll never play. Still, Susie's no wispy, thinly drawn ghost; like nearly every other character in the book, she's a remarkable, complex person who has as much humor and kindness as grief.

In the end, what Sebold has accomplished is to find her own inventive way of expressing the universal alienation and powerlessness we all feel, trapped in our own small worlds apart from each other. More than that, she has convinced us that, through love and hope and generosity, these things can be overcome.

 

Becky Ohlsen is a writer in Portland, Oregon.

RELATED CONTENT:
Read an interview with Alice Sebold.

When you kill off your narrator in the first 10 pages of a novel and tell readers who the killer is you'd better have one compelling story up your sleeve. Alice Sebold does. "I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973," Susie Salmon tells us in the second sentence of The Lovely […]

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