War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Napoleon invades Russia and Natasha is exceptionally charming

Wow. This was the final book in my Rereading the Classics project and it turned out to be the best, though I was reluctant to put this one on the list, reluctant to read it. The book was so very thick and the typeface was so very small. Did I really have a whole month to devote to a single book?

But rereading War and Peace turned out to be quite a moving experience. This is a historical novel, with actual people, such as Napoleon and Alexander I, interwoven with the fictional characters. The three main characters, whose struggles with life and love and the invading French Army provide the plot structure, are: Pierre, the once illegitimate and now astonishingly rich nobleman; Andrei, the intelligent Army officer who turns influential people off with his hard edged sense of superiority; and Natasha, the black eyed beautiful singing darling of the happy Rostov clan. The reader cares deeply about these three flawed people.  Tolstoy had such compassion for his characters. He was a keen observer of human nature.

There are scores of minor characters as well. Figuring out who is who among all these similarly named Russian characters is a problem at first, but soon the reader pieces it out. Some of the cynical villains are sentimentalists at heart and some of our noble heroes have a despicable weak streak. What is bravery? What is nobility? What is innocence? They are a lot of successful society frauds in this book who believe themselves dependeable honest people. Society is hypocritical, and morality is something recognized only in the soul, not in society at large.

And there is Napoleon, of course, a key figure obsessing all the characters. Napoleon had quite an influence on European consciousness, didn’t he? Maybe his competence frightened the old relaxed elite, although virtually every engagement of the war on both the Russian and the French sides is a series of miscommunications and botched executions. The war scenes and the chain of command reminded me so much of the business world.   Russia defeats Napoleon, not because of a grand strategy, but because of bull headed inertia.

Tolstoy had an equal understanding of both male and female characters. How does he know what it feels like to breast feed an infant? How does he know what it feels like to charge into battle?  The key thing is that Tolstoy made the characters sympathetic, irresistible. You root for them. I wanted to call up Natasha on a nonexistent cell phone to warn her off Anatole. (Although this is yet another novel with a key plot point being the subjugation of women – women as untouched property.)

I sobbed a couple of times, the first time when the grouchy old prince died. 

The novel wraps up with only a few convenient plot twists. Pierre's wife’s opportune illness, Prince Andrei ending up in the Rostov's house just as Napoleon rolls into town. It's a little like a telenovela, but it works. The only thing that doesn’t work is that dreadful second epilogue.

The Signal by Ron Carlson

A man, a woman, the American wilderness

This novella is about hiking in the woods but apparently hiking in the woods is an insufficient hook so two unlikely plots are clumsily glued to the core story, with a heavy thumbed reliance on unrealistically evil villains. The real villain of this novel is civilization, the real estate development causing the end of the rancher’s influence. This story is similar to Galveston, the good guy who screws up trying to redeem himself.  Our hero, Mack, a flawed suffering macho man, is paired with his ex wifeVonnie, the innocent woman that he has failed to protect. Can he protect her now, now that their hike in the woods is interrupted by a pair of grungy rapists as well as a black ops CIA technician? However, the story was definitely gripping, and near the end, I couldn’t put it down. A story has power when you care about the main character.

Initially, I wasn’t crazy about the prose style - Hemingwayesque, with lots of description of nature. But it started to grow on me. The images of nature were very memorable. In some ways, this was a prose poem about camping.  It really didn't need the action movie plotting.

If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous

A young American woman experiences rural Japanese culture

This novel is about a recent college graduate, Marina, who, on a whim, and in an attempt to escape her feelings after her father’s suicide, follows her lesbian girlfriend, Carolyn, to a rural Japanese teaching assignment. Only it’s always freezing there, and her girlfriend starts to dislike her, and she just has lots of trouble fitting into this odd culture. But the harshness and the sadness and the isolation force her to grow up.

In addition to being a work of fiction, it’s also a semi journalistic view of Japan. A grouchy old neighbor harasses her about not sorting her gomi or trash correctly. The letters her handler, Miyoshi, sends to counsel her about the trash are truly hilarious, and Watrous was right to open the novel with a sample letter.

The first person narration was open and honest and very readable. The main conflict was not between the two lovers, as one would expect from the title, but between Marina’s freewheeling American ways and the Japanese rule driven conformist culture. That provided the narrative momentum, for a while anyway. Then the story went on for a bit too long and had to be forcibly wrapped up with characters screaming at each other on a beach. 

What worked was Marina’s analysis of this alien culture. What didn’t quite work was depicting the motivations behind the different relationships, or even introducting a romantic angle at all. I’m not sure why this got nominated for a Lambda award as Marina’s same sex attraction was almost presented as something she would grow out of. A phase.

Overall, this was enjoyable to read.

In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard

A girl and her best friend grow up and grow apart

This novel is the story of narrator Jo (apparently that is her name) and her early teenage years in a quiet little town. Jo has a drunken failure for a father, a hardworking mother, and a mischievous best friend Flea (though the two of them are certainly not bad girls). Once boys, hesitantly, at the edges, enter the picture, the bond between the two girls gets frayed. Will the friendship survive? Nothing really much happens in this novel, which bothered me at first, and then didn’t. The girls rescue some kittens and they go to a wake. A lot of time is spent in angst over whether the cheerleaders like them or not. It's probably a triumph that such an unassuming book got published and at first I wondered if this was a young adult book.

The sometimes hilarious details reminded me of my seventies girlhood but the meandering story line also reminded me that my seventies girlhood was so dull I ran away to Hollywood. Does a novel require an imaginative architecture, that is, a plot? When you eschew a plot, you eschew plot missteps, but the stakes stay small. Or do they? Isn’t this novel about small town girlhood also about life itself? Nothing seems to happen in Zanesville, but then perhaps everything happens.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

A woman must enter the jungle to find two people but ends up finding much more.

Much like Margaret Atwood, Ann Patchett combines exceptionally evocative literary description and imagery with a deep technical understanding of plot. That’s why her books are so hard to put down. The first image in State of Wonder is a blue airmail letter, a letter that sends our main character, Dr. Marina Singh, immediately packing for the jungle.  Not a scene in the book is wasted. The minor characters are also cogs in the plot, moving the story along.  

This book was wonderful, deeply satisfying, although only for the first four fifths. Dr. Marina, a mixed race Minnesota medical researcher, is apparently the only person who can be sent into the jungle to discover what happened to her lab mate, Anders, when he failed to return from his jungle assignment. Their employer, a pharmaceutical company, is interested in the status of their company’s billion dollar investment in drug research being completed at a hidden Amazonian lab. (Question: couldn’t the head office find the lab with a close perusal of Google maps?). The lab is overseen by the elderly terrifying Dr. Swenson, who was involved in a prior tragedy in Marina’s medical career. The establishment of Marina’s inner and outer conflict is set up brilliantly.

There’s so much to think about in this wonderful book – motherhood and industrialization and innocence and evil and nature. The plot serves as a frame to deliver at last Marina into a beautiful bizarre grove of otherworldly trees – trees that give life (and visions) to the tribe. The story is really about Marina’s discovery of herself and what she wants.

In the last part of the book, however, the cold mechanics of the plot take over, and the quick twists at the end are possibly unsupported. The final twist is unbelievable, actually, and is not emotionally true for the character of Dr. Marina. I think more open endedness and a touch of tragedy would have served the story better. The plot snaps into place so certainly it snuffs out the life of the story. We were headed for someplace great.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell

Three children visit separate Hells after their mother’s death

The story is about the Bigtree siblings, left adrift after their mother’s death devastates them emotionally and economically.  Their mother, Hilola Bigtree, was the star attraction alligator wrestler at Swamplandia!, the family business. When she dies, the tourists stop coming.  The novel is about what happens next.

Why didn’t I like this more? It sounded right up my alley – Ava Bigtree, the 13 year old alligator wrestler/narrator in a tale where she must descend into the world of the dead to rescue her beloved older sister Ossie who happens to have a date to marry a ghost. And yet, I couldn’t emotionally connect with Ava. The relentless whimsy of the opening section bored me. I much preferred the third person anarchic narration of her brother Kiwi’s adventures on the mainland.

I think I was not drawn to Ava because Ava did not have an internal conflict or struggle to match her vivid external struggle and journey through the swamp. She didn’t feel vulnerable and any vulnerability she possessed felt imposed on her.

The novel was slow going at first, but then I started to recognize the outlines of book’s majestic architecture and got more excited. But there never was a payoff. We had a scarlet alligator, a Birdman who can visit the dead, a rich heiress rescued from a pool of blood – and none of these truly eccentric and great details built to a conclusion. When something terrible happened to Ava near the end of the book, I didn’t care. The novel never came to an emotional climax for me. In the final section, the matter of fact explanation for the mysterious events put us 100 percent back in the world of reality. Apparently all the magical happenings stemmed from Ava’s gullibility and Ossie’s chemical brain imbalance.

It was a love poem to Florida, I’m pretty sure. That part worked. And I loved the fact that all the alligators were called Seth. But reading this book frustrated me.

Arcadia by Lauren Groff

A child cast out of a seemingly idyllic commune cannot get over the rupture

This is the story of Bit, the first child born on the commune of Arcadia in upstate New York.   He is quiet, tiny and precocious. In this novel, we see the world through his eyes – the heroic men and women – mother Hannah and father Abe, the young people who abandoned the straight world and tried to build a new one free of distortions and hang-ups. Only guess what – human nature reasserts itself and there is just as much greed, hypocrisy and power struggle in Arcadia as in the real world.

The first part of the book describes the life on the commune.  The inevitable collapse of Arcadia feels a bit forced and the story peters out after the family leaves.  Also, the forward momentum of the story is not helped by the use of Bit as the narrative consciousness – he’s passive and Christlike.

I have been reading Lauren Groff’s short stories and admired her facility with language, the gorgeousness of it, though sometimes I felt the core of a story was too sentimental, non nutritious. But here the prose was determinedly not showy, sticking to a muted palette of metaphor, the turnips, the tofu, the mud – the stuff you find on a commune. I didn’t buy Bit’s love affair and subsequent child with Helle, the troubled child of Handy, the creepy commune founder. She’s a heroin addict and it wasn’t emotionally set up for me why Bit would be in love with her or have a child with her.

In some ways the most moving part of the story was at the end when Bit's caring for his terminally ill mother was described. She had always been depicted as physically strong and extremely self sufficient. That part felt real and was very moving.

I liked it but the different sections didn't quite gel for me.