#17 for Victorian drama, the real kind

I'm not exactly sure how I came to be reading this book. It ended up in my ginormous books-to-read pile and it had been there long enough that when I stumbled upon it I could no longer remember how it got there. Did I see it in a bookstore and think, oh that looks interesting, I'll buy it and surely read it in a timely manner? Did someone lend it to me? Was it a gift with purchase?

Who knows. But find it I did, and read it I did, and it was, qualifiedly, interesting.

It's the story of one of the first divorces in Britain, after the laws had been changed to allow middle-class Britons access to divorce in the 1850s. Isabella Walker, a widow with a young son, married Henry Robinson, a well-off civil engineer and manufacturer, in 1844. They had two more sons together, but the marriage foundered from the start. Henry was cold and remote. He demanded, and took control of Isabella's money, leaving her with nothing of her own. He traveled often, and was angry and demanding when he was home. 

Isabella, on the other hand, was a high-spirited and intelligent woman, with a passion for new ideas, the arts, and for a married doctor named Edward Lane. What makes the story so interesting is that Isabella kept a secret diary in which, over five years, she recorded her ardor and longing for Dr. Lane, who finally returned her affections. Her writing is sensual and suggestive, although in good Victorian style she never directly states that she was unfaithful. But is there a reasonable doubt that she wasn't? I don't think so. Why else would the good doctor be warning her about post-copulation pregnancy prevention?

Unfortunately for Isabella, she became ill and in the height of her fever, and the presence of her husband, she called out her lover's name. In a rage, Henry tore her room apart looking for evidence and, in a locked drawer, found the revealing diary. He petitioned for divorce on the grounds of adultery. The diary was used in evidence against both his wife and Dr. Lane, and passages were read into the court record and published in the newspapers. The trial was the scandal of the day--a middle-class, respectable wife and mother who was restless and unhappy, a British Madame Bovary (which was published in France that very year but considered too scandalous to be published in England until the 1880s). 

The trial was humiliating for Isabella, whose very looks were used against her by her erstwhile lover. In his own defense he claimed he would never have become romantically involved with such an unattractive woman in her fifties (at the time Isabella was in her late thirties). She was labeled a harlot, a whore, mentally ill, a bad mother, a bad example of an Englishwoman, and any other mud that could be flung at her. Her defense, as sad as it was, was that the diary was an exercise in fantasy fulfillment, and not the record of an actual affair. 

Isabella's writing is so juicy that Summerscale's often pales in comparison. But it's a gripping tale that sheds quite a bit of light on the prejudices and assumptions we make about marriage and women, even today.

Miranda, he gets the job done

I think I'm better now. I think I'm over it. I've seen the show three times, I've listened to the cast album until I know every word and sound effect and breath by heart. I've analyzed the lyrics, read every article, watched every Ham4Ham performance. And now I've read the book. I think my hamilaria may finally be subsiding.

The book (#16) is Hamilton:The Revolution by Jeremy McCarter, a cultural critic and theater artist who was involved in the show from early on, and, of course, the creator and star himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Chapter by chapter, it takes us through the creation of the show, from that famous White House rap when it was just going to be a concept album, to the opening on Broadway six years later and the show's astounding success.

There are wonderful photos, a look at Miranda's notebooks (his handwriting looks like an eight-year-old's), interviews with dozens of the people involved, wonderful behind-the-scenes stories, every single lyric and every single line, including many that didn't make it into the final product, and more than 200 footnotes by Miranda himself, a fun little peak into the mind of a genius and really fun guy.

If you love the show (is there anyone who doesn't?) it's a thrilling look at how it came to be and the incredibly talented people (it isn't all Miranda) who made it happen, as well as a fascinating story of how any show goes from an idea in someone's head to atop the boards of Broadway.

#15 back to the seventies on a "Speedboat"

Probably the only thing I really liked about this strange book by Renata Adler was its depiction of New York City in the 1970s. It captures the grey gritty harshness and energy of that time perfectly, which it should, since the book is a sort-of roman a clef of Adler's life as a swinging journalist in this city in that difficult decade. 

The book doesn't have any sort of conventional plot or recurring characters. We don't even find out the name of the young journalist narrator until the second half of the novel. It is a series of disjointed paragraphs, anecdotes, and stories that are by turns pointed, funny, neurotic, telling, occasionally moving, even more occasionally boring, that add up to a pointillist portrait of a time and place. It's the kind of book you can pick up and put down whenever. Some of the anecdotes are quite gripping, some left me cold. 

More of a collage than anything else, it's an entirely different sort of book. And while I might pick it up again sometime, read a paragraph or two, and walk away, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who likes those old fusty things like plot, or character, or story. 

I finished the hat! #14

Even a less-then-passionate Sondheim fan will get the reference: "Finishing the Hat" is one of the brilliant Stephen Sondheim's brilliant songs, from his extremely brilliant musical Sunday in the Park with George. It's a song about the art of making art, and the life of the artist, and is, according to Sondheim's book, Finishing the Hat, one of his few autobiographical songs. 

The subtitle of the book says it all: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. The grudges and whines come through loud and clear: Sondheim's critiques of other composers and lyricists are strongly phrased and withering. I don't get the impression that he suffers fools. And I do get the impression that, to him, most of humanity may fall into that category. His portraits of the many remarkable people with whom he's worked are also pointed. I may never again be able to fully appreciate Jerome Robbins's choreography for West Side Story now that I know what an egomaniacal bully he was. 

Little Stephen Sondheim at the piano

I've been reading the book a little at a time for a while and have finally finished it. It's mostly fascinating, an incredible inside look at how a Broadway musical is put together. Or actually, was put together, since the days of out-of-town productions in Washington and Boston are long over. As a history of the theater as well as the history of theater greats, and an inside look at Sondheim's creative process, it's pretty compelling reading.

The book covers the first half of Sondheim's career, from his first musical, Saturday Night, a student production, through his first lyrics-only shows (West Side Story and Gypsy) through the first show for which he wrote both music and lyrics (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) through his next nine productions: Anyone Can Whistle, Do I Hear a Waltz?, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and Merrily We Roll Along.

An impressive list, an astonishing list. Anyone would be happy with a career encompassing even half of those legendary creations. But remarkably, it's only the first installment. The second book, Look I Made a Hat, begins with the show from which the lyric comes, Sunday in the Park with George and goes through 2011. 

It's incredibly sad that there won't be a third volume. Can we clone Mr. Sondheim, please?

#13, not so lucky

I was really looking forward to reading Jonathan Franzen's Purity. I liked The Corrections, loved Freedom, and was sure I would thoroughly enjoy his latest. So wrong. Purity is like a massive buffet of what look like tasty treats: There are dozens and dozens of different things to eat, but only a bite or two of each, and, as it turns out, they all look prettier than they taste.

The plot (or should I say plots, since there are so many) is far too complicated to attempt to explain. There's a young woman named Pip (Purity) who doesn't know who her father is (or even what her mother's real name is), some Oakland anarchist squatters, German peace activists, a Julian Assenge-ish "truth-teller" in Bolivia and his many cult-like followers, a flashback to pre-wall-fall East Germany, a murder, several love stories, two high-minded, muck-raking journalists, a wheelchair-bound famous author, and dozens more. Much happens. No, MUCH happens. Way too much, for me. There was more plot than I could keep ahold of, and I started to feel like Franzen maybe couldn't either. He was like that guy on Ed Sullivan who had to keep all the plates spinning (that made me anxious, too). But that guy always succeeded. I'm not sure Franzen does.

In the end, I felt like the book was a mile wide and an inch deep, and for me, as a reader, I would much rather have writing that is an inch wide and a mile deep (Jane Austen, anyone?).

#12 goes to Austria

Never heard of The Post-Office Girl. Never heard of Stefan Zweig, who was, according to Wikipedia,  one of the most popular writers in the world during his heyday, the 1920s and '30s. An Austrian Jew (by "accident of birth" he said), Zweig was born in Vienna in 1881 and died in Brazil in 1942 after fleeing the Nazis in 1934 for England, then New York, then Brazil. He and his second wife committed joint suicide because, he wrote in his suicide note, he was more and more depressed by the growth of intolerance, authoritarianism, and Nazism, and he felt hopeless for the future of humanity.

Not a fun guy. And not a fun read. But a compelling one. The book, published posthumously in 1982, tells the story of Christine Hoflehner, a post-office clerk in poverty-stricken, post World War I Austria. She lives in a stuffy, damp rented attic room that she shares with her ailing mother, her father and brother both having perished in the war. She works like a drone in her stultifying post office job. She makes barely enough to keep herself and her mother from starvation. And she has no hope for the future.

Zweig

But then her aunt -- who had fled years before to America and married a wealthy man -- takes her away on vacation to a beautiful, elegant Alpine resort. It's like oxygen for the suffocating, food for the starving. And Christine opens to the beauty and hopefulness like a flower in sunlight. Until, of course, things change, and then change again.

It was not an easy story to read, but such an interesting one, not least because I've read so little about that time in European history, and never a story set in Austria. The awful poverty and sheer desperation of that time, the incredibly difficult recovery from the devastating war, and the losses upon losses it engendered...it's a world that seems to have no connection whatsoever to the swinging Jazz Age of America in the 1920s. The idea that F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Zweig's Christine Hoflehner could be living at the same time is hard to grasp.

The story takes unexpected twists and turns that continually surprise. And the ending, if it can be called that, is somehow both completely ambiguous and strangely satisfying. It's a book that stays with you, hauntingly, sadly, movingly, for a long time.

#11: So very sad

I've read a lot of memoirs, but this one was one of the hardest to read. At nine years old, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a very dangerous form of cancer (she finds out later that only 5% of people with this disease survive). In the surgery to remove the tumor, she lost a third of her jaw. Two years of subsequent radiation and chemotherapy left her with fragile bones and teeth. Year after year of endless surgeries followed, in useless attempts to repair the damage.

The number of ways in which Grealy suffered are beyond count. The horrific pain of the surgeries and therapies, the cruelty of other children, the agony of chemotherapy, her father's death, the continual disappointment as each reconstructive surgery fails...the pain becomes difficult to read about, I can't even imagine how she lived through it all. She writes without sentiment and without self-pity, which makes the reading bearable (just). But she also writes without a redemptive message, and although I didn't want her to come to an epiphany that taught her some great emotional lesson, the fact that it all just...ends, made the reading even harder. And knowing that not too many years after finishing the book Grealy committed suicide makes it all so very very sad.

I had already read the book Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, written by Grealy's best friend, the novelist Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder), about their long and very close friendship, so I knew much of the story and also knew what happened afterwards: Grealy's drug use and eventual suicide. Although it was probably backwards to read Patchett's memoir first, together the two books chronicle so much love and loss and pain that it is truly heartbreaking.

A mixed bag

Books 7, 8, 9, and 10 have nothing in common other than the fact that I read them all.

Two novels: one sunshine and warm, one dark and nasty. A memoir. And a classic children's book.

#7 The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins by Irvine Welsh. I have to admit that I bought this one because of the title. That name just jumped off the bookshelf and into my hand. Who doesn't want to know more about the sex lives of siamese twins? But it was a bit of a bait and switch, unfortunately. The book isn't about Siamese twins, much less their sex lives. The twins are just a background, a story that's on the news during the time the actual story of the novel takes place. The book is about a personal trainer in South Beach, Florida, one of the ugliest characters I've ever encountered in a book (or movie or any other work), a woman who rants, continuously, about her fat lazy pig clients and the whole fat lazy pig world. Only my language is far kinder than hers. It was hard getting though the book, I felt at times like I was swimming through sewage, and probably not worth the pain. But I have a hard time putting a book down once I've started, and luckily it wasn't too long (after War and Peace I can get through anything!), so I finished. And I have to report that the sweet and sunshine-y ending did nothing to help wash the ugliness away. Beware of this one -- you'll feel like you need a shower after ever chapter.

#8 The Vacationers by Emma Straub. An upper-west-side family (magazine editor dad, journalist mom, recent high school grad daughter, adult son, and adult son's age-inappropriate girlfriend) plus two friends head to Mallorca on a family vacation. There are secrets, marital problems, money problems, and more complications. The jacket promised brilliance and smarts, but despite the gorgeous locale, and the gorgeous Spanish tutor hired to work with the daughter, there was not much of either. The whole thing felt kind of drippy, like those holiday movies with all sorts of complications that get magically resolved by final curtain. Not one character felt fully realized or at all compelling and the pages just passed by without a whole lot of interest. And then it ended.

#9 Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. How to make grammar a whole lot of fun. Norris is the longtime copy editor of The New Yorker (kind of like being a gold medalist) and in her first book, a sort-of memoir, she interlaces stories of her Ohio youth (she was a milkman!) with the story of her career at the famous magazine (three decades and counting) and the right way to use pronouns and commas. It's a fun read even if you aren't a word nerd, and you might just learn something.

#10 Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit. I thought I had read every children's classic book, either in my own childhood or to my kids. But somehow, I missed this one. And since I am going to see the new musical based on this story, I thought I should read the book itself first. It's a remarkably simple tale: a young girl meets a family that is either blessed or cursed with eternal life.  They have sipped from a magic stream, and the girl helps them outwit the man who has discovered it and intends to get rich by marketing its contents. It reads like a fairy tale, with a simultaneously happy and sad ending. It's short, and has lots and lots of description, which made it even shorter for me, since I tend to race past long paragraphs about green, dark woods and hot, steamy weather. It weaves a spell, though, and I wish I had read it aloud to my kids. Maybe they'll let me do it now.

Stopping to play

Number 6 is something different: two plays, which I'm counting as one since they don't take as long to read as even the shortest book.

Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw in The Crucible

Two wonderful plays, I should say: The Crucible by Arthur Miller and The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. I'd read Crucible before, and seen it on stage a couple of times, but in preparation for seeing it again on Broadway (a powerful new production with Ben be-still-my-heart Whishaw, Sophie Okenado, Saoirse Ronan (again!), and Ciaran Hinds), I decided to read it again.

Every time I read it, I am awed by it, and all its many insights into human nature and life. I know it was written as Miller's response to McCarthyism, but it's just as relevant to the crazy presidential race going on right now. And it's eternally relevant in its understanding of people, their desires, their relationships, and their flaws.

Laura and her Gentleman Caller

I'd never read or seen The Glass Menagerie, but I knew that it was Williams's reflections on his own family: his sensitive and withdrawn sister, absent father, and determined, aspirational, and near-delusional mother. I was surprised at how modern the many uses of visuals felt--Williams was experimenting with form, looking for visual representations of inner thoughts psychological states. And I was also surprised at how unexpected the turns of the simple story are. I did not expect to find myself gasping and then weeping over a play I've heard so much about over so many decades. Great art surprises! Great art survives!

Heading to Brooklyn for #5

The old Brooklyn, that is. As in Colm Toibin's beautiful Brooklyn, the story of a young Irish immigrant who comes to the borough in the 1950s. Eilis Lacey is quiet, intelligent, and charming, and so is her story. That tale is told in such a gentle, calm manner that it seems almost nothing has happened. Yet everything has happened: a young woman has upended her life, left her small town and her family (who, in those days of sea voyages, she may never see again) to create an entirely new existence in a strange and overwhelming new place. There is love, tragedy, sex, death -- all the drama of life -- yet it is expressed so simply and directly that you find yourself weeping and then wondering why you're crying. The book packs a subtle, powerful punch. And the movie is equally wonderful, with a different ending that, although I felt the book to be perfect, is even more satisfying. The characters are drawn so effortlessly yet so perfectly that you feel like you've met them all before. You will find yourself thinking of these people and this story often. It sticks with you like all great art.