Three books, three
worlds. One was everything, two could have been so much more. One
for children, two about children. One wild, two domestic. One
stunning, two lame. Two old, one new: 2015 new. I had an ARC of
The Honest Truth by Dan
Geimenhart and it isn't good. I was excited because The
Honest Truth is an outdoorsy
novel; but the trouble with a kid alone in the wilderness is that things
rarely happen when one is alone in the wilderness. Dan Gemeinhart
circumvents this problem by spending 175 pages of the 229-page book
getting Mark onto Mount Rainier, and only a few pages on
mountaineering fail before Mark succumbs to exhaustion and
hypothermia and nearly dies, which is what he came to Rainier to do
(spoiler: he's rescued). Mark has cancer, and Mr. Geimenhart tries
to build suspense... with cancer. Teasing your audience with
glimpses of hospital rooms and bald children is creepy. It's also
easy to quickly figure out that the author is hinting at cancer, so
by the time the big reveal happens, everyone has understood for a
while and they're really uncomfortable about it. But fortunately for
Mark, he has a best friend called Jessica, who turns up in flashbacks
and half-chapters of third-person inner-turmoil because she knows
Mark probably ran away to die on Mount Rainier and she can't decide
whether to let Mark die peacefully in a snowstorm or abet the kidhunt
that started several hours after he bolted. The trouble with Jessica
is that their relationship is too didactic, too forced. She's a
girl!, she's brown!, they're best friends!; Gemeinhart can't show, he
needs to tell you! that white boys and brown girls can be best
friends. (The white boy is the main character.) Every encounter
Mark has: the waitress, the thugs, the tortilla makers, the bus
driver, and especially the Forest Service biologist who gives Mark a
ride up the mountain, is suffused with overbearing life lessons. And
Mark brings his dog along: he plans for Beau to find his way down
the mountain with a goodbye note clipped to his collar. But Mark
doesn't bring any dog food! You'd think that in the weeks he's been
planning his escape, and the day of, when he throws some granola bars
and and dog treats in
his backpack, that he might have thrown some dog food in a baggie;
that his dog might want to eat while they're climbing a mountain, but
no. There are so many little things in this book that strain
credibility. So many bizarre actions and big, throbbing omissions,
along with the stilted dialogue and sloppy plot. I'm sorry.
Further
along in disappointing books that sucked was The Morgesons
by Elizabeth Stoddard. If you
ever need rigid Protestants, humorless New Englanders, Puritans,
dreary, stone-faced people who trudge through a grim half-life before
taking up another space in the family plot where the past generations
of people who bear their names rest at the mercy of
an implacable God. Cassandra and her emo sister Veronica, she of the
unlikely dialogue, were intentionally spared the fate of bearing
names already carved on tombstones, but beyond that their lives are
set to resemble every joyless moment of their forebearers.' The
Morgesons' reviewers emphasize
that women of the 1860s were groomed to be married off as soon as
possible and that is why this book is revolutionary, but I didn't see
it in the Morgeson household: Cassandra and Veronica are beyond their
father's control, expected to do nothing but live as monotonously as
possible in the unbearable silence of their parents' home. Veronica
stays indoors and says things like, "Why, morning and
night are wonderful from these windows. But I must say the charm
vanishes if I go from them. Surrey is not lovely." but
Cassandra's willingness to leave her parents' house for moderate
periods of time results in three long visits to friends and relatives
that punctuate The Morgesons' long,
domestic non-drama. When Cassandra is thirteen, she is sent to live
with her grandfather for a year. He is a dour man who doesn't
believe in things like novels and walking, and Cassandra spends her
year entombed, except when she attends school where all the
girls hate her. Cassandra returns home, uneducated, until, at
seventeen, she is invited to visit the family's cousin, so distant
that they have been unacquainted with him up to this point, Charles
Morgeson. Cassandra is now, somehow, an unremarkably ravishing
beauty and she is popular in Charles' village and makes friends for
once, becoming particularly intimate with Charles' damp sponge of a
wife Alice. Charles goes all Edward Cullen, and Cassandra guesses
Charles is watching her sleep when she finds cigarette butts on the floor
of her chamber and is somehow okay with this. Charles has a penchant
for breaking unbreakable horses and, at the apogee of their
unrequited, adulterous love, he invites Cassandra for a ride on the
fiercest horse in his stable, who has a thing about carriage covers.
It begins to rain. Naturally, Charles assures Cassandra that his
horse is broken and no longer afeared of carriage covers; Cassandra must be protected from the rain!, he puts the cover up,
the horse spooks, runs into a wall, and Charles dies. Cassandra
awkwardly leaves her grieving widow friend Alice, who looks to be on
the verge of growing a pair, and returns to the silent torpor of her
family's home. Eventually, she goes to visit her school friend Ben,
who is inexplicably in love with Veronica, and she meets some cool
women but nothing happens and Ben's mother hates her, so she returns
home to find her own mother dead in her rocking chair and then
everyone grows up and becomes slightly more self-sufficient but still
ignorant and languid. I kept waiting for this book to get better and
it didn't. So many morally bankrupt people I felt a little dirty at
the end of it for reading all this terrible, unctuous dialogue and non-sequiturs. ("I look for a reason in every
action. Tell me fairly, have you had a contempt for me—for my want
of perception? I understand you now, to the bone and marrow, I assure
you.") The Morgesons is
a bit of a feminist tale for it's time specifically because it stars
a young woman who takes a damn long time to get married, but that's
no reason anyone should read it.
Which
brings us to Thursday's Children which
should be read as part of our greater Rumer Godden revival. I dug it
out of the misc. female authors pile by the desk when I was looking
for something exquisitely beautiful to read a few weeks ago. The
only other adult book I've read of Ms. Godden's was The
Lady and the Unicorn, which
turns out to be her first and worst book, but Holly and Ivy
is one of the best Christmas orphan stories of all time (Christmas
orphans!) and the Japanese doll books are incredible. Thursday's
Children is certainly a book for
grown-ups with grown-up comments and asides, but it is about
children, which makes me wonder why anyone bothers with adult fiction
when it's about children half the time anyway. It's structured in an
interesting way: the only other place I've seen this is The
Secret Garden, where one
character arc spans half the book until its resolution when another
character picks up the plot torch and runs another hundred pages to
the end. (Thursday's Children is
without the last Hail-Mary-redemption-of-the-hunchback-father-pass
that rounds out Secret Garden).
Concerning the Penny family, they're a greengrocer and wife in North
London sometime back when the people were simple but middle class
affluence was creeping in. Mrs. Penny desperately wants a daughter
whom she can groom to be a famous dancer. Four sons later, she
finally gets her, Crystal, who is absolutely beautiful and
everything her mother ever wanted and, while she's busy turning
Crystal into Honey Boo Boo, she becomes accidentally pregnant with
something she has no interest at all in and he ends up named Doone,
as the parents were going to call him Lorna had he been a girl.
Nobody wants Doone or bothers about him much except Beppo, the
Italian tumbler who lives in the shed. Besides Beppo, with his early
admonitions to keep limber and practice every day, Doone is a
parasite on the side of whoever's stuck minding him, like Crystal who
makes him carry her shoes when she goes to dance lessons at Madame
Tamara's, where Doone is first enchanted by the ballet. Mrs. Penny
is aggressive about Crystal's supposed prodigy and Doone tags along
until he's accidentally noticed, and from then on Mrs. Penny makes
them a package deal. Everyone hides this from Mr. Penny, who, when
he does find out, can say that ballerinos are queers and he'll have
none of it because this is a book for grown-ups. Doone is bereft,
but his life is one of exclusion and hard knocks so any one setback
isn't as shattering as a combination of all the other setbacks
together. His arc continues back to ballet class and up to the
school of the Royal Ballet where he's finally found his place, and
Crystal's story takes over. She's bound and determined to do
something but she's also a moody adolescent whose passion isn't
really ballet even though she's almost as talented as Doone and she's
been raised to think she's the best. She's a bit spoiled and she's
also in love with Yuri the special guest teacher at the Royal Ballet.
And Crystal is great. Doone remains a child to the end of the book,
(he's still eleven or so) but Crystal manages to turn Thursday's
Children into an awkward, early
adolescent bildungsroman and it's perfect.
Next
up: Sequels!
