Running with Scissors

Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

Okay, I went into this one with a really nasty attitude because A.) It was a huge hit several years ago, which usually means that there’s no way it can possibly live up the hype; and B.) Because I read Burroughs’ novel Sellevision and was deeply unimpressed.   But actually…this is HYSTERICAL.  I mean, it’s horrible, too, but Burroughs manages to play up the absurd aspects of his situation (crazy mother, sent to live with her psychiatrist, molested by a fellow patient) without negating the awfulness of it all.  You feel terrible for fourteen-year-old Augusten, who is involved in a “relationship” with his 33-year-old rapist, but the fact that he evenly splits his time between obsessing over his future as a hairdresser and figuring out ways to further erode his “lover’s” self-esteem…I am a terrible person, but I found that shit HILARIOUS.

I hope there are great poker games in hell…

 Recommended for:  Definitely not the faint of heart.  Or the homophobic.  Or Scientologists, for that matter, since the “mental health care professionals” in this book will only give Tom Cruise more anti-psychiatry ammunition.

 Frank Abagnale, Catch Me if You Can

Speaking of inappropriate sexual relationships with minors–Abagnale’s mother was 15 when she married his father.  His father was 28.

 Say it with me:  GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!

 Every time Abagnale started going on about how much he loved his daddy and how great the old man was, I just remembered what I was like as a teenage girl, and wondered what kind of 28-year-old man would have wanted to play house with me before I was old enough to drive.  Answer:  a seriously disturbed one.  But anyway.  Onward!

For those of you who have not seen the movie of the same title and don’t know the premise:  Abagnale was a con man, and a pretty damned good one.  He ran away at sixteen and spent the next five years or so pretending to be an airline pilot a decade older; in the process, he apparently porked a lot of ladies and swindled Pan-Am and various banks out of millions.  This was an enjoyable read, partially because Abagnale just seemed to genuinely have a great time fucking with people:  his childlike glee is rather infectious, even though you know he’s hurting people and taking advantage of them.  The other reason why I liked this book so much was that it pretty thoroughly puts paid to the notion of a criminal mastermind.  Abagnale succeeded in bilking his victims not because he was so incredibly clever–although make no mistake, he’s a sharp guy–but because he exploited existing weaknesses within the system and preyed on people’s desire to trust strangers in uniforms.  In short, it doesn’t take a genius to make out like a bandit; it just takes a crook.  If you’re willing to bald-face lie to people, you’ll be amazed what you can get away with.  But then, those of us who have dated sociopaths already knew that.

Enjoyableness aside, some things about this book just plain grated.  The language, for one, was overwrought and somewhat sickening:  Abagnale and his ghost-writer stuck to this outdated, kool kat sixties lingo that made me snort with derisive laughter until I finally became so numb that I quit noticing it.  Also, Abagnale’s attitude towards women is pretty much what you’d expect from a guy raised in the fifties and lacking a moral compass that points due north.  He talks about women like they’re walking blow-up dolls and calls that “appreciation.”  Blech.  His misogyny is gross, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by it; since he doesn’t view people in general as human beings with actual feelings, why should he think of women as anything other than objects?  I could have dealt with the constant, low-level hum of his hatred, but the fact that he ripped off a high-class prostitute and was proud of it is just plain repugnant.  He makes a big deal about how he’d never before stolen from an individual person or from any business where the money would come out of an employee’s paycheck; the prostitute was his first and only exception.  I don’t know why he felt so angry that she wanted him to pay for it:  it was nothing personal.  That was her line of business.  But he swindled her, and took great joy in it, and acted like he was some Robin Hood-style hero for doing it.  Newsflash, dickwad:  that hooker wasn’t the head of some huge corporation who would never feel the financial pinch.  Robbing her was the sex-work equivalent of knocking over a mom and pop store–it hurt no one but her, and fancy hotel suite aside, she was struggling to begin with.  You think there’s any security in whoring?  There’s no healthcare, no retirement plan, and if your looks start to go (and they inevitably will), if you haven’t socked away enough money to live on, you’re going to start a long, slow slide into more and more unpleasant forms of prostitution.  Trufax.  I don’t expect a teenage boy to understand that, but Abagnale wasn’t a teenage boy when he wrote this–and although he felt bad (or at least said he felt bad) about some of his other stunts, he seemed to take nothing but pride in robbing this woman, even over a decade later.

Prick.

Also…and this isn’t a criticism of the book per se, because it’s actually part of the Q&A portion that they did with Abagnale after the movie’s release.  In it, he said that he’s now actually a big fan of French prisons, because they totally suck and if you’re a criminal, that’s what you deserve.  Um, dude.  I read your book, even the part about the French prison.  They threw you, naked, into a stone cellar and forced you to live without clothes, light, a toilet, or a bed for six months.  By the time you came out, you were covered in your own shit and crawling with vermin.  You nearly died.  And for what reason?  Because you stole from people.  You stole from people–which is awful–but it doesn’t mean that you deserved to be brutalized almost to death.  Seriously.  What the hell?

Recommended for:  People who like to imagine what they would do if they had no conscience.

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Certain Girls

Jennifer Weiner, Certain Girls

The sequel to Weiner’s first novel, Good in Bed, Certain Girls is the continuing story of Candace (Cannie) Shapiro, a zaftig former newspaper reporter who now writes Sci-fi and helicopter-mothers her daughter, Joy.  The narrative is evenly split between Cannie and Joy; Cannie’s chapters deal with Joy’s psychotic 12-year-old moodswings and Cannie’s husband’s desire for another baby.  Joy’s sections involve feeling different because she’s hearing impaired, and because of her extremely untraditional family.  The driving force behind the action for both protagonists is Joy’s discovery of Cannie’s blockbuster first novel–well, “discovery” isn’t quite the right word.  She’s known about the book pretty much her entire life–her mother has an entire bookshelf dedicated to different editions and everything–but she finally gets curious enough to read it, and then all hell breaks loose.  Cannie’s novel is a sexed-up version of her own life, a life that included an unplanned pregnancy with a loser ex-boyfriend.  Guess what the result of that pregnancy was?  Yeeeeeah, that’d be Joy, who quite understandably spends a lot of Certain Girls angsting about whether or not her parents ever really wanted her.

Once I finished Certain Girls, I went back and re-read Good in Bed, and the difference is staggering:  Good in Bed is a fun first novel, but its plot-twists are over-the-top, and its ending is a little too perfect to be believable.  Okay, fine, the whole damn book is something of a fairy tale.  Certain Girls is not.  Weiner’s reigned in her wild imagination, tamed her plot twists, and improved her pacing.  The difference is astonishing, and not because Good in Bed was a bad book:  it wasn’t.  Good in Bed was a fun, witty, enjoyable novel–but Certain Girls is excellent.  I think I’ve said before that Weiner gets better with every book, and this just proves it.  She was good to start with, but she’s come a long way.  Love it.

That being said, there were some minor things that twigged me about Certain Girls.  To begin with, there’s a plot-twist towards the end of the book that COMES OUT OF NOWHERE, and that bugs.  I mean, its shockingness is kind of the point, but as a reader, it felt unearned and unnecessary.  Weiner did not need to go there, and I really wish she hadn’t.  Maybe she was trying to counteract the fairy tale quality of Good in Bed with some majorly depressing realism, but…not a fan, sorry.  That was my big problem with the novel; my minor one came when Cannie defended her first novel’s crazy plot twists by saying that insane things happen in real life, too, so SHUT UP, CRITICS.  Since Cannie’s first book sounded REMARKABLY like Good in Bed, having her defend the nutso plotline felt like a veiled jab at real-life readers.  To which I say:  there’s something about having a character so obviously serve as the author’s mouthpiece–or at least appear to be serving as the author’s mouthpiece–that just doesn’t sit well with me.  It was a little jarring.  Knock it off, Weiner.

Recommended for:  People who like inter-generational tales of mother-daughter frustration, people who are trying to negotiate having a non-traditional family in a world that still doesn’t quite accept them–also, people who like the funny.  It’s a pretty damned funny book, too.

In conclusion:  shove it up your ass, Jane Smiley

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Don’t blame me, blame Booksfree

By which I mean, don’t blame me for this odd combination of books–blame Booksfree and their somewhat arcane ranking process.  Anyway.

Holly Black, Tithe

Feh.  I went in with some bitchy feelings towards Holly Black because she’s very friendly with Cassandra Clare, and, for those not in the know, there are plenty of valid reasons to be put off by that.  But I realize that hating Holly Black for that reason is unfair, partly because she is no more responsible for what her friends do than I am or you are (duh), and partly because if I were going to boycott everyone who is now or has ever been chummy with Cassandra Clare, that would be…I believe the word I’m looking for is “completely petty and totally insane.”  And while I am somewhat petty and a little bit crazy, neither of those things comprises the totality of my person, so I tried to give Holly Black a fair shot.  I really did.

So:  Tithe is solidly average.  To its credit, it is infinitely, infinitely better than Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely, by which I mean it didn’t bore the pants off of me and its “rebellious youth!” details were convincing enough that they didn’t jar me out of the narrative.  I have one of the sequels, Valiant, lined up on Booksfree, and I look forward to reading it.  But I will not be buying these books, because Tithe was just not memorable enough to justify it.  Black seems to be a solid writer with enough grace to make Faerie seem like the very old idea that it actually is, not something new and exotic that she just pulled out of her ass.  But eh.  This just didn’t hold my attention very well.

Whitney Otto, How to Make an American Quilt

My god, this was wretched.  Note to writers:  people speak in contractions.  They do.  And writing without them does not make your characters seem more “deep.”  It doesn’t. 

Ugh.  WHATEVER.

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If I am Found Missing or Dead

Janine Latus, If I am Found Missing or Dead

Okay…this was incredibly painful, but pretty important to read if you want to try to understand the mentality of an abused woman.  Latus’ sister Amy was murdered by her boyfriend in 2002.  Both Latus and Amy had a history of dating (and marrying) physically and emotionally abusive men, a history that Latus traces back to her father’s treatment of them as children and teenagers.  There are hints that their father molested Amy, but he mostly confined himself to grotesquely sexualized comments (He told Latus on numerous occasions that she had sexy legs), and inappropriate kisses on the lips–at one point, he laid a liplock so disgusting and invasive on one of his other daughters that she actually fainted from ick.  As Latus explains it, her father brought her up to believe that women were good for exactly one thing, and that if they were victimized, then it was because they were asking for it.  This created an incredibly toxic atmosphere for all the children, especially Latus:  she was molested twice as a preteen and was raped as a young woman, but getting help was extremely problematic because of her father’s attitude.  At first she sought help from her mother, but was rebuffed when her father overheard; later, she simply internalized his feelings and kept silent. 

There’s also a lot of really interesting stuff about controlling the female body as a way of controlling the woman herself; Latus was extremely thin, and Amy was pretty overweight, but in both instances, their bodies and the maintenance thereof were used to degrade and control them.  Amy’s ex-husband liked the fact that she was overweight (even as he denigrated her for it) because he thought that no one else would want her.  Amy herself bought into this attitude, as evidenced by the fact that when Latus asked her why she was marrying a 30-year-old slacker at the ripe old age of 23, Amy said something along the lines of, “It’s not like I can do better.”  This book is sad on so many levels, but one of the ones that touched me the most was that by the end of her life, Amy was apparently so unhappy and so self-hating of her body that she became involved with a man who refused to have sex with her…and she thought that that was okay.  It seemed perfectly reasonable to her that her boyfriend could live in her house and spend her money, but not be sexually attracted to her at all. 

Poor Amy…

Latus had problems on the opposite end of the spectrum:  instead of wanting a wife “no one else wanted,” her husband wanted a wife other men would be jealous of.  Which meant that he expected Latus to go through life dressed up as a walking blow-up doll, and whined and pouted (or punched her) if she refused.  Oh, and he guilted her into getting breast implants.  Fuckface. 

Latus does a pretty excellent job of showing how both she and Amy were manipulated and tricked and all-around messed with because of their bodies, albeit in different ways.  Without ever explicitly coming out and saying it, she makes it pretty clear that there’s more than one way to manipulate and control a woman.  You can call her a fat, disgusting pig, or you can turn her into a beautiful fucktoy, but the end result is the same:  you don’t see her as a real person, and by the end, neither does she. 

In addition to talking about the female body as a method of control, this book also blasts apart the whole notion that abused women are somehow weak, or even that they’re always particularly meek.  Latus is degraded by and frightened of her husband, but it’s not like she never speaks up:  in the beginning, when he hits her, she hits back; when he screams, she screams back.  It’s not that she’s passive; it’s that she’s made the mistake of playing by his rules (where a fist to the face is a perfectly valid discussion technique) and of believing the awful things he says about her (he gets her so turned around that she actually believes him when he tells her that briefly entertaining carnal thoughts about another man counts as cheating).  And Amy, who was ultimately murdered by her boyfriend, was an incredibly strong person.  This is a woman who divorced her abusive ex-husband, who put herself through school, who was loved and liked and admired by just about everyone who ever met her, and who was ultimately murdered because actually, she did tell that sumbitch to hit the road.  Latus shows that the truth is always more complex than just “woman as passive, voiceless victim.”  That you can fight back and be strong and still be victimized.

That, in short, it is not your fault.

This is an amazing book.  My only critique is that Latus is an incredibly restrained writer and leaves it largely up to the reader to dissect and interpret the action.  I can understand why she took that approach–no one wants to sound didactic–but it does leave her work open to misinterpretation.  Still, an amazing book.

Recommended for:  Everyone.  Ever.

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In which I disagree with my sister’s literary opinions

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

I read this because I loved The Moonstone and my sister just kind of scrunched up her nose and said, “The Woman in White is better.”

It isn’t.  But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.

The Woman in White has everything you could ask out of a potboiler:  intrigue!  Horrible death!  Secret societies!  Women wronged!  Thwarted love!  The only thing it’s missing is sex, obviously, but it was the 1800s–you can only ask so much.

The best part of this entire book, though, was its virulent anti-Italian sentiment.  Oh, those Victorians and their ethnic and racial hatreds!  They make me giggle inside.  

Recommended for:  People who want credit for reading a classic, but don’t want to, you know, actually have to read something that’s boring.

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Rambo

A few months ago, I went to see Rambo with my boyfriend.  As a result, my boyfriend now owes me two chick flicks or one viewing of The Vagina Monologues.

Dude, I’m not making him pay enough.  Really, I’m not.

Anyway, my god, y’all, Rambo was awesomely bad.  Every stereotype ever got shoved into that one little low-budget movie.  The pure blond chick who manages to touch whatever spark of humanity is left in Rambo’s cold, dead heart gets kidnapped and almost raped by the Asian villians; the villains’ leader turns out to be a pedophile–and a gay pedophile at that.  And the man who spouted completely irrational and unrealistic nonviolence nonsense at the beginning of the movie beats a man’s face in during the final climactic battle.

I think that the “writers” of the screenplay sat down and made a list of action-movie cliches and used that as their outline.  Really.  I do.

Recommended for:  No one, particularly not the guy in the audience who screamed “Never leave a man behind!”  Because that guy actually seemed to be taking this piece of schlock seriously, and that burns.

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Let’s play…catch up!

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Orphaned German child moves in with foster parents who hide a Jewish man in their basement during WWII.  Also, Death is the narrator.  HARDCORE!!!!  But, um, this never quite gelled for me, frankly.  The language is always beautiful, but sometimes it comes off as the sort of poetry a clueless but talented teenager might write:  “The flowers were the color of pain and gasoline.”  Sure, it sounds cool, but when you break it down, it has no meaning.  Like, none.

In case you were wondering, that was not an actual line from the book.

 Also…I don’t know.  I think it’s time for a somewhat sympathetic depiction of Nazi Germany–actually, wait.  Nope, don’t really feel that way.  So that’s my bias, and it made me an incredibly tough audience for this book–and frankly, I stayed rather unmoved.  Zusak had to walk an incredibly fine line between depicting the virulent, unreasoning hatred Nazi Germany felt for Jews, and showing that racism for the load of illogical bullshit it really was.  I…don’t feel like he did such a fantastic job with that.  Too many mentions of Jews as rats, too little analysis of German intolerance.  I think that the problem was that although Death was the narrator, he tried to tell things from Liesel’s (the protagonist’s) point of view.  And Liesel was a German child who grew up under Hitler:  she saw these things as a natural part of the landscape.  Zusak didn’t use Death’s ominiscient view to counteract that enough; too much of the time, Death echoed Liesel’s views with a sort of subtle irony. 

Sorry, but when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, “subtle” doesn’t cut it.

This book did have at least one truly excellent moment in it, though:  when Liesel’s neighborhood is crowded into a bomb shelter, waiting and trembling with fear, Death says something like, “You can pity them–and you probably should–but at least they had a chance.  The Jews in the death camps didn’t.”  It’s a great reminder to be compassionate…but to balance that compassion with pragmatism.

Recommended for:  Um, honestly?  I wonder what my “Arts and Literature of the Holocaust” professor would have thought about it.  But I wouldn’t give this to teenagers (even though it is YA), unless they had already spent a lot of time reading about WWII and the Holocaust.  This is not the book to begin your education about that period with.

Angela Nissel, Mixed:  My Life in Black and White

Wow.  Just…wow.  Also:  ouch.  Just…ouch.  If I was still under any illusion that racial identity wasn’t complicated in this country, or that biracial and multiracial children aren’t forced to “pick a side,” this book would have disabused me of those notions.  It’s Nissel’s memoir of growing up with a white father and a black mother in the 80s in Philly.  It’s very, very funny and very, very hard to read.  So go get it.  Now.

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Oh, Jane: STFU, already

I now bring you your daily dose of feminist rage.

It’s hard to really describe what Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed meant to me when I was seventeen, other than to say that I read it before I read The Beauty Myth, or Unbearable Weight, or ever visited a single fat-acceptance blog.  So Good in Bed was the first time I’d ever heard—even from a fictional person—that it was okay to be fat, that being fat did not make you a bad person, that (shockingly!) you could have a very nice life without ever going down a dress size.

I cried like a baby when I finished that book.  It meant that much to me to be able to hear that I was not ugly and worthless and a horrible person because of the size of my butt, and even though it didn’t fix everything (how could it?), it helped, just a little. So when I ran across Jane Smiley’s review of Good in Bed’s sequel, Certain Girls, I just…I nearly blew a gasket.  To begin with, this is the most willful misreading of an author’s work I have ever witnessed, as evidenced by Smiley’s summary of the first book:

In spite of her eloquence and wit, it’s clear all the way to the end of the novel that [the heroine, Cannie] really cannot see her situation or her friends with any perspective or empathy. Her mother loves someone Cannie finds unattractive. Her father has apparently abandoned the family. Her ex-boyfriend has written a rather insightful article about their relationship.

It doesn’t matter how kind these characters are to Cannie, their efforts are never enough.

To begin with, Cannie’s father did abandon the family, out of no better motivation than that it was convenient for him to do so.  And ultimately, Cannie does come to some sort of understanding with all of the things Smiley mentions:  Cannie makes what peace she can with her father’s memory (which isn’t a lot, because he’s a TOTAL TOOL), she learns to value her mother’s partner, if not like her, and she comes to understand that a lot of the problems she had with her ex–problems he described in the article Smiley mentioned–stemmed from the way she felt about herself.  Does that sound like “[Cannie] really cannot see her situation or her friends with any perspective or empathy”?  Because it seems to me like she’s gained some perspective, and maybe even a leeeeetle bit of empathy.

But Smiley cannot see this, and I think that’s because she dismissed Weiner’s writing pretty much out-of-hand.  “In her latest novel,” Smiley writes, “[Weiner] seems boxed in by her chosen genre, and it’s a shame, because she’s got the intelligence and the ambition to address larger questions than the psychological ups and downs of her nice Jewish characters.”

You know, I haven’t read Certain Girls yet, but in Good in Bed, Weiner addressed the role of fat women in American culture, the lingering effects of divorce on grown children, and coming out as a lesbian later in life.  In In Her Shoes, she talked about learning disabilities, the death of a parent, and mental illness; in Little Earthquakes, she addressed pregnancy, race, class, and the death of a child; and in Goodnight, Nobody, she talked about losing your sense of self even as you’re trying to create a family.  And guess what?  Each of these books contained at least one “nice Jewish character,” if not multiple nice Jewish characters, and each novel dealt intimately with their psychological ups and downs.  So call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure Certain Girls will address some sort of broader issue–maybe even one that Smiley would ordinarily consider quite important, if not for the fact that “Certain Girls, is about the pinkest book you can imagine.”

Because that’s what this bitchfest really boiled down to:  “The pinkness of Certain Girls raises another issue for me, though, and that is, why is this considered such an inherently women’s novel that men aren’t even invited to buy it?” That’s a valid question–why are such witty, complex novels about real issues solely marketed to women?  And marketed as “fluff” at that?  But unfortunately, that’s not the direction Smiley’s going in:

Weiner’s voice is smart and edgy, and her male characters, though relegated to the sidelines, are sharply drawn. She writes about issues, such as the dynamics of family life, that are of interest to all humans, or have been in other generations.

In comparison to Good in Bed, the pinkness of the novel implies to me that Weiner herself has given up seeking a wider audience, and so given up developing her fictional premises from lots of different perspectives. The introduction of Joy might have allowed Weiner to expand the roles (and the voices) of Bruce, Joy’s father, and Peter, Joy’s stepfather, not to mention Josh, Joy’s uncle, and Todd, Joy’s second-best friend.

These characters don’t have to take over, but they could speak up, especially since their perspectives intrigue Joy. But somehow, in the last 10 years, American fiction has split again, into the boys’ team and the girls’ team. Certain Girls demonstrates that this works to impoverish both sides.

Um…I don’t know how to say this any other way:  shut the fuck up, Jane.  I’m all for gender parity and everything, but you know what?  I don’t think anyone’s going, “Pride and Prejudice would have been a great work, if only Jane Austen had thought to include a male perspective.  I mean, as it is?  Total rubbish!”  I’m just…I can’t believe she thought that this was a “progressive” or “thoughtful” viewpoint to express.  Great novels are not great because they contain an equal number of male and female voices; great novels are great for a variety of reasons that I can’t even begin to list here, but “achieves perfect gender balance” is not one of them.  Whether she’s realizes it or not, Smiley is insinuating that a female-dominated narrative is unacceptable, that such a narrative will never appeal to a wider audience, and that the only way to “fix” the “problem” is to add in more men.

What.  The.  Fuck?!

Look, the problem isn’t that the book is fucking pink.  The problem isn’t that there aren’t a lot of men in it.  The problem is that we accept both of these things as excuses to marginalize Weiner’s work, to the point that Smiley is chiding Weiner for “the pinkness of the novel” and for not ”seeking a wider audience”–by which she clearly means dudes.  Look, I watch and read things that aren’t marketed towards me all the fucking time; if something’s got pink pages and a poofy dress on the front cover, that should not prevent a man from checking out the plot synopsis, any more than seeing a giant sword on the cover prevents me from giving a book a shot.  In other words, BE YE NOT SO SHALLOW, FUCKERS.  Oh, and Jane?  Quit making excuses for them.  If they don’t wanna read the giiiiiiirlie book, omigod! then you should be calling them out on their immaturity, not telling Jennifer Weiner that she needs to court the frat-boy demographic more assiduously.

And in the interest of full disclosure:  yes, I dislike your writing and yes, I think you’re completely overrated.  But my opinion probably doesn’t matter to you, since I have the temerity to read romance novels and occasionally even like them.

Many thanks to Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez for bringing this to my attention, and thereby raising my blood pressure to a dangerous degree.

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