Box of Matches
is a quiet novel like I've never read. It was a delight. Emmett
gets up at 5:00am every day and lights a fire in the fire place while
his family is sleeping.
“Good
morning. It's 5:36am. I'm finding that a flat slab of junk mail
dropped in the mail-slot created by two hot logs can sometimes get an
unwilling fire to take the next step.”
“Good
morning, it's 4:03am, early, early, early. I did something new while
the coffeemaker was snuffling and gasping: I washed a dish that I'd
left last night in the sink to soak.”
“Good
morning, it's 5:44 am, and I'm up late again, but I've got four big
old logs on the fire, each with a layer of burn-scabs from yesterday
evening that break off when I arrange them.”
Somehow,
it's great. It's so simple, so kind. This book demands nothing but
our willingness to sit by a fire and watch the logs crackle. Emmett
has things in life that he thinks about while he's sitting in the
dark in front of the fire: his wife, his daughter and son, his cat,
his duck, his 1700s Vermont house. He is an editor of textbooks. He
once tried to write a mystery novel. He is a thoroughly ordinary New
England person, and New England is a foreign country. I don't think
about New England very often because they don't vote wrong and
they're quiet folk, but New England is a land of three-hundred year
old houses on winding roads amid maple forests where people keep to
themselves and the only thing surprising about them is their
affluence and the way that they manage to find extraordinarily
gainful employment in the hinterlands of Vermont or New Hampshire.
I've yet to figure that out.
Emmett
stares into his fireplace, contemplates, describes, breathes, drinks
coffee, wonders about the circumstances that brought him to this
quiet life.
Mariko,
a Japanese housewife who was 45 in 1993, also lives quietly in print.
But Mariko is real. The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the
Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family
by Elisabeth Brumiller, honestly, I knew it would be good because
books about Asian women always are: Factory Girls and
A Tiger's Heart. Read them.
Japan is interesting. And I mean that Japan is famous for its
deviant sexual exports, but Mariko was not of the Japan that dresses
up like sexy Pikachu on weekends. Mariko is the older generation,
and her family is culturally conservative, so Mariko is something of
a traditional Japanese throwback. She says when she first married
she used to bow and lay three fingers on the floor when her husband
came home from work every day. She stopped doing that pretty
quickly, but it was a reasonable demonstration of respect for her
husband that she would have kept on doing if he wasn't annoying her.
Ms.
Brumiller stopped seeing Mariko as a typical Japanese housewife early
on, but Mariko did the jobs of a Japanese housewife perfectly, her
attitude was atypical. One of the questions that came up: Who is
worse off in Japanese society, men or women? Women have limited
social status, limited career opportunities, almost no chance to
maintain both career and a family, they do all household chores, and
they are responsible for educating their children when they're not at
school, including teaching them to read the hiragana alphabet before
they start kindergarten. Men work the same job at the same company
their entire lives. They leave for work at 7:00am and get back
between 10:00 and midnight, and their leisure time is spent drinking
with colleagues. Mariko had two part-time jobs: meter reader and
typist for a tourism firm. She was a PTA mom, and baseball mom, an
American football mom, on the junior high graduation committee, on
the God-carrying committee for the neighborhood festival, she took
samisen lessons. Her husband would never have time to take samisen
lessons.
Ms.
Brumiller spent time in her book talking to people of national
influence in Japan about the factors that shape Japanese lives,
Mariko's included. The only problem with this is that the book is
from 1993. What was a study of the modern Japanese woman is that
it's now a study of the Japanese woman in the early '90s, and most of
the studies Ms. Brumiller cites are from the late '80s. In 1993 a
Japanese parliamentarian called Americans lazy, Americans said, “No,
we're not,” and there was an international kerfuffle about it.
Does anyone remember that?
The Secrets of
Mariko and A Box of
Matches are middle-aged lives,
quiet and calm. The passions are over but they still have spirit and
a self-determination unachievable by the young. As I drift through
my thirties, maybe the calmness of a life well-lived will guide me in
my reading to more mature books about adults and their meditations,
but it hasn't yet. I read Tangled. Not
the novelization of the Disney movie, but Carolyn Mackler's recent
one. Carolyn Mackler won a Parent's Choice Award for The
Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things
and she did Vegan Virgin Valentine.
Tangled is her best
ever. Carolyn Mackler is an adolescent's YA writer. She's great.
Tangled has four
protagonists telling the story in four chronological segments, and
each one of these teenagers is the most alone person on the planet,
they all have unspeakable pain that no one else could possibly
understand, and everyone around them is cool, adept, and has it all
together while they, Jena, Dakota, Skye and Owen, are all alone
fumbling through a cruel universe. So it's realistic. Jena starts
the book off when her mom makes her go on an island vacation with her
mom's friend and her beautiful, actress daughter Skye, who Jena's
always getting put with because they're the same age. Dakota is a
jock, wracked with guilt because the girl he was about to break up
with died in a car accident. Skye is a teen model/actress who is not
doing so well. Owen is Dakota's little brother with a
pain-of-being-me blog. The narrative is impressively structured.
All the characters are heartbreakingly well-written, and some
characters plot resolutions come as asides in other characters'
stories.
Carolyn
Mackler knows that teenagers do not have sex on the 90210 model. For
those readers who did not watch Beverly Hills 90210 on DVD last year
because they weren't allowed to when they were nine: Brenda and Dylan
decide to do it. They make an assignation for a hotel during prom,
start closed-mouth smooching, Dylan takes off his suit jacket, and
the camera fades. Then there's a consequence episode where Brenda's
mom finds a pregnancy test in the trash. I have no personal
expertise in the area of sexual conquest, of course, but from what
I've heard third-hand and read on fornication blogs, sex happens in a
gradual and unscheduled way. Jena and Owen sure as hell nervously
think about doin' it when they're alone together in Skye's empty
apartment, but Jena finally says, "Do you think we could save
some stuff for next time?" Owen, who's never touched a girl
before, is over the moon because there's going to be a next time.
Then they canoodle and probably get to second-and-a-half base. I was
thrilled that Mackler doesn't present sex as a
sitting-next-to-each-other-in-chilly-silence/vaginal-penetrative
dichotomy, as sex is presented to teenagers that way too often.
Going
in reverse chronological order by age of character, I listened to
Navigating Early by
Claire Vanderpool on audiobook. I can't recommend this book, but I
did finish it and that's saying something.
In
1946, Jack Baker meets autistic savant Early Odden (I couldn't decide
if the kid was named Early to make the near-pun in the title) at a
Maine boarding school and helps him go up the Appalachain Trail in a
boat to find Early's dead brother, who isn't. This book has literary
themes crawling out of its ears. Some of the themes are: fathers,
friendship, World War II, the Appalachian Trail, boats, brothers,
bears, autism, astronomy, astrology, π, pirates, reading, lost &
found, timber rattlesnakes, and the quest for belonging. If your
sixth grade teacher tells you to write a book report using themes in
literature, Navigating Early is
your obvious choice. In the end, everything is resolved through a
series of unlikely coincidences, including the Swedish ex-pugilist
outdoorsman who went to the woods after losing his lady love the
librarian who taught him to read; Jack has to go back to school to
find out that librarian Miss LeFleur's first name is Belle and she
has been waiting for Sven in a maiden state since 1928 or so.
Up
next: Good books from the recycling bin.
