Staging a House for Sale

The Bradshaw Variations

I guess Rachel Cusk doesn't watch Sex in the City or she'd have known to give her characters different last names. Bradshaw is taken! But Rachel Cusk does not seem to be watching much TV. Not like Lorrie Moore's whose book seemed jammed with pop cultural references, Cusk's writing is lovely and perfect. There is no TV or cable in Cusk's house, her writing exists in it's own rarified atmosphere. The book is about different people in the same family (Bradshaw), some of who are unpleasant and some who aren't ,or at least you're not sure what they are. It's told in short chapters that exist on their own which serves to make each of the characters lonely and distant.

She's such a good writer that in the end I forgave her that not much goes on in the book.

She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared cordoroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard's life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree.The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are sysmbolic too, commemorative, like the uniform veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.

In the next to final chapters there is end a moment of high drama and then a new chapter starts. She leaves the high drama dangling without any closure at the end of the book and since, I doubt there is a Bradshaw Variations Part II in the works, not finishing the story seems much more pretentious a move than I would expect of Rachel Cusk. So maybe she is watching a little TV on the sly and hoping for a regular series with her use of cliffhangers.

The Imperfectionists

This was very good. Some loosely woven stories of a failing newspaper. All the blurbs and reviews go on and on at how funny it is yet I actually found it kind of heartbreaking. Mostly about sad and dysfunctional people muddling through their lives. One of the stories about a young primatologist who in an effort to switch careers goes to Cairo to try out for a newspaper stringer position is quite funny but the rest are just sad. The writing is very good and clean, there are no pretensions in it. The last few stories sort of fizzle out and it loses it's earlier momentum but in the end maybe that's what is happening to the newspapers. Out with a fizzle, not a bang.

Tween Anxiety

An emergency pitstop for the Chain Reader when I was overcome with Middle School anxiety. This is basically a self-help book for the anxious Middle School mother. Some of the information is helpful---"Adolescence is a beauty pageant and every girl is automatically entered into it whether they want to be or not."

Every girl in the clique is described as a type----the Queen Bee, the Sidekick, the Target, the Conflicted Bystander...you want your daughter to be the Floater who is part of no clique and sails above the fray. Then Ms. Wiseman moves her steely eye on to the parents....like a Cosmo self quiz I anxiously tabulated the results wanting to proclaim myself the Hard Ass Loving Parent which according to Ms. Wisemen is the only good choice. Sadly I fell in the Benign Neglect Parent slot.

After that I didn't have the heart to go much further. Livvie's hardly the age where she's going out the back door at midnight to meet boys. She'll be fine.... I decided to return to my Benign Neglect and reached for the next book of fiction of the nightstand....Lolita ...The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...Lord of the Flies....hmm ...maybe not those today.

Let the Great World Spin---Without Me

I started this after rapturous reviews from one of the founding members of the MV Bookgroup. In fact the book jacket and interior were stuffed with rapturous blurbs and reviews and it had a big fat National Book Award sticker sitting smugly on the front...but somehow I didn't like it. After discussion I realized that I do not have patience for the sort of stream of conscience writing that is very popular now. Dare I call it Letham-esque? I want someone who writes straightforward prose. I'm sure it is a good book---Jonathan Letham liked it...half of the MV book group liked it...I just didn't like it.

Reading the Classics

Here I was so happy they were reading. Until I read the reviews of these books which everyone in Olivia's class was supposedly reading. TTYL is written in text message form between three 10th graders. Apparently they are not studying for their Advanced Placement exams but getting drunk at parties and talking about sex. After I read the reviews I weakly tried to pull them out of Olivia's tight grasp. "Hee-hee-hee" she chuckled "Too late".......arrrgggghhhhh......she unerringly found the the Jacqueline Susann of tween-lit. I went down to the basement and sadly dusted off my Little House of the Prairie books that I read in 5th grade...what would Ma and Pa think?

Blindness

I have nothing clever to say about this book. It was really one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's nothing I would want to read: a nameless city has an epidemic of blindness. First they herd the newly blind into an old asylum but the epidemic spreads and soon the whole place, the whole city has gone blind. No one has a name, they are the Girl With Dark Glasses, the First Man to Go Blind, the Doctor's Wife, the Boy with the Squint. The Doctor's Wife somehow escapes infection and she alone can see the horrors of the life of all the helpless blind people living on top of each other, wandering up and down streets searching for food, separated from their families and homes. In all this devastation and misery there is a part towards the end that was so filled with hope and promise that I actually cried.

And I thought I only cried at Reality Shows when someone gets sent home. Who knew?