Into the Woods

Two confessions. One: it has taken me forever to write about Nightwoods by Charles Frazier. I finished it probably the same day I posted about Wilder Life and here we are, at least a week later, with me just starting to try to write about it. I don’t know why the avoidance. Perhaps actually writing about it will help unravel the mystery (okay, to be fair, I was in tech for a show all last week, so that might have been part of it, but I prefer to think it was something in the book itself!).

Second confession: I was very late to the Cold Mountain party. I heard nothing about the book when it first came out (because I live under a rock apparently) and later all I knew of it was a movie with Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, neither of whom are enough to propel me to a movie theater ever. However, eventually I picked it up and LOVED IT. Instant convert. What an amazing book - history, beautiful writing, wonderful characters...and all based on actual family lore. It made me want to write my great great grandmother's story in the same sort of sweeping, historical fiction kind of way - well, I still want to do that, but let's try to be realistic, shall we? I even finally watched the movie and it was far better than it had any right to be. I still don't much care for Jude Law and Nicole Kidman, but the movie was good.

So I was excited when Charles Frazier came out with a new book this year, Nightwoods, and the reviews were very good (he had another book in there somewhere, but I haven't read it - if you have, let me know if I should!). And it was good. It just wasn't Cold Mountain. So I think that has left me not sure what to say about it.

On its face, the story is kind of obvious and almost caricaturish what with the redneck relatives and the backwoods setting and potentially heartwarming ending all due to the love of children. Amazon certainly does the book no favors with this description: "Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways." Trust me, if I hadn't loved Cold Mountain, I wouldn't have gone near this book based on THAT!

But Charles Frazier is an incredibly talented writer, so he does lift the novel above that. Here are just a few examples:

The place spoke of time. How you’re here and then you’re gone, and all you leave for a little while afterward are a few artifacts that outlive you. Loc. 77

 Easy to be disdainful and ironic toward others’ false values. Loc. 85

 She might have been tall and willowy when she was young, before time compressed her into herself, thickening and shortening and bending year by year until all you could see of the young woman she had been were her quick blue eyes, faded almost to the color of steel. Loc. 209

 Now Luce lay awake in the dark, knowing Maddie’s murder ballads addressed exactly that situation, and taught that the flame of urgent coupling burned hottest against the women, no matter how romantic and high and heartsick the anguish of the man might be pitched in retrospect. Loc.227

He also gets huge points for echoing one of my favorite beliefs in life: "Probably, if you breaded cardboard in cornmeal and and fried it in lard, it would taste pretty good too." Loc. 580 (I generally apply this axiom to a paper napkin, but the sentiment is the same)

I think I came away from the book a little confused, though, because a lot of the deepest thoughts (for lack of a better phrase) seemed to come from the villain(s) of the book. What is the nature of truth? Why are we here? Can people really change?

The meaning of the necklace could be summed into one useful idea – adapted from the possibly true fact that sharks die if they stop swimming forward – useful for every single misstep in life. Move on. And the meaning of the tattoo was equally brief, and no argument about it. Everybody dies. Loc. 289

People don’t change, Lola said. Maybe you’re still young enough to pretend that’s not true. People are who they are, and everybody around them has to take it or go somewhere else.  Loc. 2871

 Truth isn’t in your own self, and it sure isn’t in theirs. Whatever you tell me or I tell you, and call it truth, is nothing but convenient feelings and asswipe opinions. Real truth is way beyond people. Our brains weren’t tuned to get but a glimpse of it off in the distance 

     -- No. That’s not the way it is.

     -- Yeah, that is the way it is. People love the word, but all the use it for is like a club to beat you with. If we ever had the truth in our heads, we couldn’t live with it. But because we’re friends, I’m happy to hear about your feelings and opinions, and maybe tell a few of my own, as long as we agree to call things by their right names. Loc. 2984

Lots of big questions put out there, but only the bad guys seem to have any answers or opinions. The heroine, Luce, just kind of floats along until she is forced back into real life and into confronting her past by the arrival of the children and a guy - and again, good thing the writing is fantastic because, ugh. I mean, just read that last sentence again. Ugh! Aren't there other ways that women can confront their past and get excited about the future again? Are the two options to have a pseudo family thrust upon you or to become a hermit forever?

I realize this makes it sound like I didn't like the book and I did. I really did. I loved the writing, I enjoyed the characters. But I think writing this post is helping me figure out the avoidance (I knew it!) - I am just not sure what the basic message is here. And that bugs me. Something wasn't fleshed out enough or examined deeply enough or given enough depth of thought. Is he just not good at writing women? I don't remember thinking that about Cold Mountain, but then, I wasn't trying to write about it either. Maybe he is just a really, really good romance writer. After all, even in her hermitage, Luce ends up with a wine cellar full of excellent vintage wine so she can have those nice evenings with the guy. Does it bug me? I guess so. But on some level, it doesn't matter when there is writing like this:

Luce poured two glasses of red wine from a basement bottle with a mildewed French label. Old and awfully good and autumnal in the November sundown with brown frost-bit apples still hanging from bare limbs in the orchard and a fingernail radius of yellow moon following the sun to the horizon. Leaves covered the grass. Something yet trilled in the woods, a final katydid or frog. A bit in the air, and not a cloud in the sky. Bands of soft color glowed above the westward peaks. Peach and apricot and sepia, fading in pretty degrees to blue and finally indigo straight up. Expressed as art, the colors would lay on the canvas entirely unnatural and sentimental, and yet they were a genuine manifestation of place many evenings in the fall. Loc. 3097

Oh Manly, I Love You So Much

I had originally intended to re-start this blog in January as one of those New Year's kind of things, but then I read THIS BOOK and I knew I had to start right away.

Our first book is The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure and for the love of Half Pint, it is fabulous! Laugh out loud funny and spot on for a kid of the 70's, which I am. Amazon describes it thus:

"Wendy McClure is on a quest to find the world of beloved Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder-a fantastic realm of fiction, history, and places she's never been to, yet somehow knows by heart. She retraces the pioneer journey of the Ingalls family- looking for the Big Woods among the medium trees in Wisconsin, wading in Plum Creek, and enduring a prairie hailstorm in South Dakota. She immerses herself in all things Little House, and explores the story from fact to fiction, and from the TV shows to the annual summer pageants in Laura's hometowns. Whether she's churning butter in her apartment or sitting in a replica log cabin, McClure is always in pursuit of "the Laura experience." Along the way she comes to understand how Wilder's life and work have shaped our ideas about girlhood and the American West."

Yeah, okay, I guess you could describe it that way, but it sounds so serious, right? Based on that description, my enthusiasm was a bit limited and I put off reading it for a quite a while (it came out last spring, I think). Big mistake. Huge. (Pretty Woman, anyone?) I read it in about two days and it would have been less if I hadn't had all those pesky real life things to do. I could not put it down. Hilarious.

Wendy McClure is about my age and actually went to the same high school as The Husband. I was very excited when I realized this and went running for his yearbooks, but she graduated the year before he started. Bummer. Anyway, she and I completely see LHOP the same way and I very much appreciated not only her similar view of books that I loved so much, but also her sense of humor about it, which is heavily laced with sarcasm. I'm a big fan of sarcasm, something that is in oddly short supply here in the heartland. Makes me nuts. They're all so sincere. Don't they realize that sarcasm is the Northeast way of saying you care?

But I digress. So, Wendy (I don't think she'd mind if I call her Wendy, do you?) is a big fan of the books and always wanted to be Laura when she was growing up. Me too! For Halloween when I was about 7 or so, I dressed up as Laura, complete with a sunbonnet purchased at the Dutch Pantry in Mansfield PA. Because my hair is reddish blonde, people automatically assumed I was Mary, not Laura, and I was very put out by this, as I'm sure Wendy would have been too. “But Mary is also so insufferably dull that it makes Laura’s badness seem quite reasonable, especially to those of us with an inner girl who likes to let down her sunbonnet once in a while. Which is to say, most of us.” Loc. 1161 (I read the book on the Kindle and I don't know what the etiquette is for quoting...anyone?)

As an adult, Wendy starts reading the books again and eventually goes on a quest to find out all about the real life locations and about Laura herself. Now, in the late 90's, I was living in western Massachusetts and definitely at a crossroads in my life. For whatever reason, I started checking all the Little House books out of the local library and re-reading them or reading some of them for the first time since in my actual youth the later books all bored me. I liked young, adventurous Laura, not older, marrying and settling down Laura, a feeling I think certain others might share: “In my mind, the world of the Little House books just went up in smoke at the end, their heroine disappearing into clumsy ordinariness and ignominy. It had always trailed off with a vague, unspoken disappointment. It’s the kind of story we learn over and over again about everything in the world: your life starts out as a wild open frontier that you explore until the forces of time or history or civilization or nature intervene, and then suddenly it’s all gone, it all weathers and falls down and gets built over; everyone dies or moves away or becomes a grainy photograph, and yes, at some point you just get fat and fall off a streetcar. Progress – it dumps you on your aging and gigantic ass!” Loc. 360

The library let me down when it was time for Farmer Boy and I was very worked up about this and complained to the high school students I was directing in a play at the time. I'm sure they thought I was crazy, but that did not stop them from buying a hardcover copy of Farmer Boy and signing it for my director's gift. One of the best gifts I've ever received, actually.

This was before the internet was The Internet, so I couldn't avail myself of the full world of crazy that Wendy McClure found and I think I'm happier that way. I'm jealous of her travels and would still like to make the trip(s) someday, probably when The Child is a little older and hopefully wants to go herself. I think I would have been horrified and disappointed at the types that share Laura World (Who knew it was such a favorite among the home schooling crowd? “They were all nice folks who shared my love of Laura but maybe not my support for legalizing gay marriage.” Loc. 2564), so it's good that I am now prepared for this. It was fascinating to see how much of the story is real and how much more is not. Like most people, I think, I've always assumed they books were basically autobiographical and didn't Laura have such an amazing life? Amazing, yes. True...maybe not so much. And I guess that's okay. But now I am reading them with The Child, who is 5, and part of what she finds cool about these books is that the people in them really lived, which is true, and all these things actually happened. Not sure what to do with that. Suddenly LHOP has entered Santa Claus realm. When do you tell the children the truth???

Another wonderful thing for me in this book was Wendy's utter disdain for the TV show. I loathed the TV show as a kid and it was my first experience of how much books can change when they are put into movie or TV form. It's not good and it has nothing whatsoever in common with the books, other than the character names. Some of them. Who is Albert? What is he doing there? Why is he addicted to morphine? I don't understand!!!! Like Wendy, though, I did develop something of a weird affection for it as I got older. For some reason in college, my friend, Louisa, and I took to watching it a lot. Our very favorite - or at least the one we remember - was the episode called "Annabelle," where the circus comes to town and Mr. Oleson is all ashamed because his sister, the titular Annabelle, is the fat lady in the circus! Horrors! This is not what makes the episode awesome, however. It's when Laura is mooning about over Almanzo and trying to figure out how to invite him to the circus. One of her practice lines: "Oh, Manly, I love you so much. Please go to the circus with me." It's amazing they ever got together and you have to think it only happens because the book said so. You can see the actual moment right here. It is in the first minute and it’s AWESOME. But you kind of knew that, since it’s been 20+ years since I watched that episode and I still remember it. (Don't know why I can't embed on this one. Bummer)

But the best thing about this book is the love for LHOP, for Laura World, and for all that those things embody. Even with all the craziness, or maybe in spite of it, I still want to sit down and re-read every one of them again. I look forward to sharing more of these books with my daughter and hope that someday she wants to read this book too. Whether Laura's life really happened that way or not doesn't really matter. "Sometimes, Laura World wasn’t a realm of log cabins or prairies, it was a way of being. Really, a way of being happy.” Loc. 2321

This I Believe

Welcome to Apple Pie for Dessert. This is, I believe, the fifth iteration of my attempt to chronicle what books I read and what I think of them. It started a few years ago as a blog that I oh so insensitively titled "A Year of Magical Reading," thinking I was clever to play off of Joan Didion's memoir of widowhood. No wonder it failed! Ugh. (In a further display of insensitivity and general idiocy, I also said I thought the book was depressing...nice) Then I tried blogging it over at MySpace, but MySpace had already exhausted its brief fling with coolness so that didn't work. A friend recommended GoodReads, which I do like for the ability to track what I've read and what I would like to read (especially great as an iPhone app, since whenever I'm in a bookstore and looking to buy something, I can see what I actually should buy!), but for the reviews...not so much. People seemed to like the reviews I posted - I had total strangers following my reviews and "liking" them, but to me they don't make any sense out of context. And that context is me. My reviews are less reviews and more reactions, which means you get a lot of my life and things I think about that have nothing whatsoever to do with the book. I'm glad people I don't know were entertained by them...perhaps they'll find them here and be just as entertained, only in context this time.

(Oh, and then for a little while I kept track of the books through an Excel spreadsheet. How boring is that? Then another couple of phone apps...so maybe this is the 6th or 7th iteration? Does it matter?)

I don't have any particular goals about how many books I want to read in a certain time period or how often I will post. Hopefully lots of book and I'll post as soon as I finish them, but don't let's any of us hold me to that, okay? I may, from time to time, post some of those old reviews as well.

As for the question I'm sure you're asking yourself...what does apple pie for dessert have to do with reading books? Nothing at all, of course. The Husband and I were brainstorming over lunch about what to call the blog and his suggestion was something to do with the word "ribald." He had a whole phrase, which is escaping me now, but at least "ribald" made it here. I suggested the eventual title and he vetoed it because it doesn't mean anything. Except that it does. Our lunch conversation moved onto other, more serious topics and at one point he said, "you have to believe in something." I replied, "I believe in apple pie for dessert."

We are getting close to Thanksgiving and my mom always made apple pie for dessert. Really good apple pie and my sister and I would argue over who got the pretty pink china plate at dessert. Interestingly, it turns out the secret to the pie's greatness is using a store bought Pillsbury pie crust. Who knew? And the last time we had dessert at my parents' house, my sister let me have the pink plate without a squawk. So neither of these things is of any import at all, but they still color my memories of Thanksgiving and my perception of how Thanksgiving should be.

NPR had a great series of essays called "This I Believe" all about how people's beliefs in various things, big and small, inform how they live their lives. Obviously, my various beliefs in whatever will inform how I read books and how I respond to them. So it makes sense that you, Dear Reader, know that I believe in apple pie for dessert.