I've been going
slowly through a few grown-up-style non-fiction books lately, so my
book reading completion rate has slowed down drastically. However,
in this time of long, jaunty books, I have also managed to whip
through one novel, one memoir and three audiobooks:
Let me first
encourage you to have your socks knocked off by Janice Earlbaum's
Girlbomb. I can't believe
I'd never heard of it before. It's unputdownable and brilliant in
that
slightly-voyeuristic-account-of-a-fucked-up-but-really-cool-scenester
adolescence way; it's basically Basketball Diaries
for women, although Janice keeps far enough above water that her
teenage depravity is not awkwardly unbearable, unlike in the Jim
Caroll. Janice is a teenager in New York in the eighties and she has
all the drugs (except heroin, meaning that the book ends on a hopeful
tone and not, as in the Jim Caroll, with the autobiographist
shivering in an alley). Janice also has all the freedom, after she
runs away from home. Her mom's series of bad boyfriends culminates
in a creeper named Dave, and Janice gets out before anything horrible
happens and goes straight to a crazy shelter, from where she's
transferred to a middle-class group home. All the money she can
steal from her snack bar job goes to drugs that she can share with
her girly best friends, who aren't that great. There's one passage where
her two best friends are sobbing and telling her about the subway ride
back from Coney Island with their guy friends and one of them stuck
his head out the train window and hit a pole and he fell back into
the train, bleeding, with his fractured skull mashed in, and he's in a coma and
Janice is thinking, "What the hell? They went to Coney Island
without me?" When cocaine comes to New York, Janice is living
with a bartender who can get it easy and she rockets up the
popularity ladder because she's the high school girl with the coke,
and then plummets because her friends are sick of her high all the
time and cutting their coke with talcum powder. She nearly dies,
cheats on the bartender with the guy she had a crush on last year,
moves back in with her mom, and goes off to college.
The
second Tiffany Aching novel, Hat Full of Sky
by Terry Pratchett, is just as good as the first. Tiffany goes away
to learn witching from Miss Level in the mountains, being followed by
a hiver, a pre-temporal blob of energy set to suck the meaning out of
the most powerful person it can get into, and it's on Tiffany's
trail. Witching turns out to be mostly looking after
not-that-grateful townsfolk, but there's big magic, and power, as
well as the flashy kind of witchcraft that wears a billowing cape and
a bunch of dangly, silver jewelry, as in the neighborhood teen girl
coven. The main thing is that Hat Full of Sky
is pure genius and I have two more Tiffany Aching books and thirty
more Discworlds to
read, so hurray.
But
back in the unhappy: Everybody Sees the Ants
by A.S. King who wrote Ask the Passengers is
so much more than a book on the Issue of Bullying. It's funny,
painful, sweet and raw. It hurts a lot to read this book, but not
unrewardingly. Every line is good, and the audiobook reader has a
great voice. Lucky Linderman is not okay to begin with, but he gets
sorted mostly, with a good ending leaning towards a future where he
doesn't have to deal with Nader McMillan, who's been harassing him
since he was seven. Lucky is a likeable kid himself, but he hasn't
been able to grow much without being knocked down by Nader and the
fear of Nader; he was palling around with him a bit in ninth grade
but some stuff happened that brought them both to the attention of
the school authorities and Lucky is on Nader's shit list again: Nader
holds Lucky down and rubs his face on a cement sidewalk to a wound
the shape of Ohio and Lucky's mom finally takes him out of the
situation and flies him to Arizona to visit his aunt and uncle, who
are both a bit off in their 'specially American ways, Jody being a
Dr. Phil-loving pill addict and chubby person and Uncle Dave a cool
guy who turns out to have his own dark side, although nothing
terribly untoward, just things are revealed that make Lucky think
less of him. Between the trip to Arizona, a series of flashbacks to
the just-completed ninth grade, and dream rescues of his MIA in
Vietnam grandfather, Lucky becomes more better than he was, although
in life there are no easy resolutions. I mean, imagine if he'd
gotten pregnant by some rakish scoundrel. How would that resolve
itself? He would have to find redemption in his own death.
Charlotte Temple
(formerly subtitled A Tale of Truth)
is the Go Ask Alice of
the early nineteenth century, being a "true" story of a
"real" person who, despite her good bearing was reduced to
infamy, and then, of course, died. Like you do, if you listen to the
silver-tongued badgerings of a man who's walking the tightrope of ill
repute. Charlotte Temple herself is a naive schoolgirl with a good
family and not a blemish on her except her blinding stupidity. Her
school's French teacher, a lady of bad character, sneaks Charlotte
out with her to meet some soldiers who are stationed nearby.
Charlotte is overwhelmed by the lovemaking (old meaning) of the man
whose father warned him that he must marry a girl with a good
inheritance. He is confused, because he likes Charlotte, who has
little inheritance, but she assumes he will marry her, so he acts as
if he has good intentions, and Charlotte never presses the issue.
The cunning French teacher, tired of teaching French, plans to travel
with the soldiers to America, where they are soon embarking to...
fight us. (Charlotte Temple is
set in the 1770s and was published in 1794. It's a linguistic
archeopteryx, as the book is perfectly readable but everyone says
"prithee" often and without irony.) Charlotte
prepares to meet the French teacher and the soldier boys as they are
embarking and tell them a meek and comely "no," but she
faints and is bundled into a carriage. At this point her honor is
irreparably lost, and her pregnancy and death will come as no
surprise. (Her parents raise the baby.) Despite being a meh book,
Charlotte Temple was the
bestsellingest novel in America until Harriet Beecher Stowe blew it
out of the water with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which
sold like firecrackers, unlike Our Nig: Sketches from the
Life of a Free Black,
languishing on the shelf at the bookshop and not on the
abolitionist's bedside table,
until it was rediscovered in the 1980s. Our Nig is
the first novel written by an African-American woman, Harriet Wilson,
whose harrowing early life provides the backbone for the story of a
little girl called Frado who is abandoned by her desperately poor
mother and stepfather. They conspire to leave her with a family in
the neighborhood too crazy to keep a servant, who therefore could use
an unofficially indentured six-year-old to function as housemaid.
And so Frado spends her childhood working her fingers to the bone and
sleeping is a drafty attic. Frado prays for a summons to live with
the family's oldest son and his wife in a different town, but he
falls ill and dies, and she is comforted by her Christian faith,
which her mistress tries to prevent her from partaking in, because
the woman, while on the fence about the souls of black folks, doesn't
believe attending meetings one evening a week can be more edifying
than washing the dishes and tending cows. Beatings, hardship,
Christianity, a pet dog, and wishing she could run away fill the
years until Frado turns eighteen and can take a job as a domestic for
saner people. Her health ruined from the years of hard labor, she
cannot work regularly and moves about, lives on charity, takes in
sewing, marries, and is abandoned. One reviewer made the point that,
although Our Nig is
written to the conventions of the sentimental novel of the day,
marriage does not resolve Frado's situation, instead the control of
her own labor is Frado's goal and redemption, and the real life Ms.
Wilson's novel based on her life story is another attempt to her make
her own way financially in the world where most Black Americans were
still enslaved, which is, it's argued, why Our Nig
did not receive the attention of, say, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl, which is
easier for the abolitionist to stomach than a narrative of oppression
in the free North. Our Nig
is an excellent historical document, although its merits as a novel
are not of particular note. On the other hand, it's quite short.
Next
time: A very special blog about my five days alone in the Canadian
outback.
