The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

A girl, a woman, and a horse.

Velveteen Vargas, 11 year old daughter to an illiterate Dominican immigrant, gets a chance to visit the country as a Fresh Air Fund kid. Her foster parents, Ginger and Paul, live near a rundown stable, and in that stable, caged, for she is too aggressive to run free, is a scarred horse called Fiery Girl, disparagingly referred to as “Fugly Girl.” But Velvet has a calming effect on the dangerous horse. Velvet's love for horses and riding grows and it is soon revealed she is a natural equestrienne. Meanwhile, Ginger feels a powerful bond with the disadvantaged child while realistic Paul feels she ignores his commonsense advice about getting too involved.  Also maybe he feels that she ignores him. As Velvet enters adolescent, she encounters the boys of the neighborhood, who are at danger of being shot, and falls in love with one. Meanwhile, Silvia, Velvet's mother, attempts to beat the waywardness out of Velvet and resents the pull this white couple and what they have to offer has on the girl. She says they treat Velvet like a pet. The story always heads toward the climax, the competition with the white girls at the upscale stable.

This novel is plotted like a children’s book (specifically National Velvet), but written with high technical virtuosity, bringing the characters and the conflict to life using brief (sometimes only a paragraph) first person narrations. The writing and the imagery are simple and beautiful, showcasing the unmitigated pain of the characters. Velvet, seemingly unloved apart from a dead grandfather, childless recovering alcoholic Ginger, mourning the death of her mentally ill sister. And Fiery Girl, unable to trust, after being brutally punished by an earlier owner. The three are able to comfort each other, but only partially and only temporarily.

Nominally about a girl and a horse, the book is actually about so much more. This is about race and class in America, the huge and perhaps irremediable differences these two things make in the stability of people’s lives. It’s hard to be even tempered when there’s not enough money for rent, or when your mother’s unsavory tenant molests you, or every boy you know seems to get shot. Like Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood, one of the points of the book is social commentary, presenting a first person narration of American society from someone at the margins, someone not possessing or using the vocabulary of the elite.

In addition to the brilliantly written prose, I also enjoyed the way the tension was skillfully, almost unbearably, ratcheted up, as the plot points planted near the end of each section detonated. One of the questions asked (and not answered) is why do people have such painful lives and why do those people end up making things more painful? The final scene, Velvet’s triumph is also, (I guess) her defeat.

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli

A man and his imagination build a world for himself

Gustavo Highway Sanchez Sanchez is the eccentric hook on which hangs this intellectually impressive literary compendium. He is an itinerant auctioneer, a loquacious story teller, starting from the Beginning, the story of his birth, as a “tiny brown swollen blog fish”, then wandering into the Hyperbolics, the Parabolics, the Circulars, the Allegorics, the Elliptics and finally the Chronologics. There’s an extended sequence of a church sanctioned auction of some old teeth to a congregation of dementia patients. Highway manages to link the teeth to the greatest minds/mouths of European civilization. The book is a mosaic of off-the-wall tall tales. Finally there is an Afterword, (actually a graphical timeline) which Luiselli’s translator contributed.  The entire work is based on collaboration, in fact, with the employees of Jumex, a Mexican juice factory.

This book felt very Latin American, that is, taking silliness extremely seriously, using the flights of fancy as springboard to communicate life truths. There’s loads here, packed into 200 pages (and plenty of white space.) This is not a book the reader can blast through, the stories needs to be savored, to be considered. I’m not completely sure this was my cup of tea, however. I viewed the story of Highway and his troubles with a detached amusement and I prefer being passionately transported.

Radio Iris by Anne-Marie Kinney

A receptionist slowly starts to understand her job truly is a sham

Iris Finch, well meaning receptionist at a typical Los Angeles firm in a Class C office building, each morning dutifully arrives to perform her mundane duties.  Her boss is odd, occasionally abrupt, fond of making urgent calls from far off locales; the guy in the office next door is even weirder and apparently seems to be making the office his residence.  Iris becomes obsessed with this tenant, passing little notes beneath his door and tucked under his windshield wipers.  She also has a college friend who tries unsuccessfully to set Iris up with a man.  On these dates, Iris seems to be actively trying to repel the guy.  There are recurring alternating narratives with her brother and the aftermath of a tragic long ago (yet somewhat comical) accident.  The resonating ending has Iris descending into a new world, then escaping with her life just before everything caves in.

For anyone who has ever worked a temp job, (especially in Los Angeles), Iris’s tale is very recognizable.  The calm acquiescence in absurdities, the precious minutes of lunch break, the getting and spending of office supplies.  The brother’s story didn’t really tie to anything – maybe we needed those chunks of semi normality to break up the airlessness of Iris’s world view.  But the claustrophobia, the absurdity, of Iris executing her meaningless job is the whole point of this novel, right?  This reminded me of Vida and Vida reminded me of Cusk.  So I’ve been reading a lot of stories lately of neurotics cast into otherworldly, absurd, situations.  The narrators must decide what they will do once they are embedded in the unnatural situations.  The genuine pleasures of reading these books do not come from the plot but from the increasingly suffocating atmosphere.  An atmosphere both comic and recognizable.  Maybe modern work lacks meaning.  The author is good at cranking up the tension, such as skillfully deploying a piano, as the story progresses.

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

A visitor to Morocco loses her identity

Our nameless narrator (one of twins) is, on her very first day in Casablanca, the victim of a particularly skillful pickpocket, losing her passport, credit card and money.  (First thing to do in Casablanca is to get out of Casablanca.)  She has no way to prove who she is. After several bumbling attempts at assistance, the intimidating police chief hands her another woman’s backpack, insisting that the case has been solved. The narrator uses the other woman’s credit card to rent a luxury hotel room. She turns to the US embassy, but soon becomes convinced the US Embassy is about to discover all her stupid dishonesties.  At her wit’s end, it luckily turns out she is an exact body double for the famous actress shooting a movie in Casablanca and our narrator gets a paying job.  But her body double acting is so good, on screen and off , that the famous movie star gets enraged. Just in the nick of time, and with the help of another astonishing coincidence, our narrator escapes being found out yet once again. In addition, at the end, the big secret from back home is perfectly detonated.

I really enjoyed this novel, although for most readers, this may be an esoteric pleasure, an extended joke, a meditation on identity. Critical bundles get stolen, seemingly nice doubles stab the heroine in the back.  There are also a lot of costume changes. The pleasure comes in the narrator’s increasing paranoia, her off the chart neuroticism and overall ineffectiveness. I kept reassuring myself: This could never happen, could it?

The book was perfectly crafted; the narrator never wears out her welcome in any particular role. This is one of the few novels I have read recently where the intensity properly increased as the story went on, and the “secret” was opportunely presented. The narrator doesn’t really go to all that much trouble to retrieve her identity, because if, at any point, she ever did the logical thing, the story would end. Finally, the book was hilarious – there definitely is a Keystone Kops thing going on.

In the Fold by Rachel Cusk

A thirty something married man visits a family of eccentrics

The novel opens with college boy Michael receiving an invitation to a party at his friend Adam’s family estate, Egypt. There he encounters the rest of the Hanburys: grouchy contrarian patriarch Paul; first wife Vivian, fashionably blonde; dour second wife Vivian; and an eccentric pack of maladjusted children. However, at this first meeting, most of their names rush over Michael’s head and it isn’t until years later, when Michael has settled down with his own beautiful yet moody wife Rebecca, and preverbal three year old Hamish, that the two friends reconnect. Adam asks Michael to help with the lambing on Egypt for a week. Hijinks ensue, but the hijinks center around the restraints of marriage and family. The prevailing opinion of the book is thumbs down on both.

A fold of sheep is dumb; the fold of family is dumber. Each Hanbury seems unhappy, if not trapped, and it isn’t very long before the reader realizes that first person narrator Michael is trapped as well. The writing is hilarious, vivid, like PG Wodehouse, a contrapuntal masterpiece of hilarity. Each character has a tic, a lamentation and a typical page has at least one crazily inventive metaphor. Although sometimes the parade of laugh lines can seem relentless and the ultimate meaning of the book feels obscure. 

This book resembles a This Country Life, but This Country Life made a certain sort of narrative sense and the end of that book contained a well plotted surprise. This end of this book is merely the end of a series of fascinating patterns. There may be, in fact, perhaps one too many characters for the reader to keep track of. I want to reread this book, not because of the depth of the theme or the imagery, but so I can figure out what’s going on. I sense that lots is going on, lots about marriages and families and how, deep down, they all hate each other.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

In every way, white society emasculates the black man

These eight stories are glimpses into people’s lives.  They are about a repressed boy from a Pentecostal home, a struggling actor who can never feel at ease, a math teacher trying to do right by his heroin addicted brother, and an aspiring woman fearful her lover will abandon her. What seven of the eight stories have in common is the negative effect society’s racism has upon people just trying to build a life, and the way racism insidiously corrodes self confidence on both sides of the equation. My favorite stories were “Previous Condition” and “Come Out the Wilderness.” “Previous Condition” is about an actor who wants to live a fulfilling artistic life, but is unable to because everywhere he goes in white New York; he is reminded of his inferior status, his sub humanity. He can’t rent an apartment, he can’t raise his voice to his white girlfriend without fear of being lynched, he cannot participate in artistic society. Only when he travels uptown to Harlem he can be freer, but only a little, because there he cannot live the intellectually and emotionally fulfilled life he longs for. In either world, he cannot be who he is. “Come Out the Wilderness” is about a professional young secretary, who supports a white lover and is terrified of his leaving her. Meanwhile, the professional black man at her workplace is interested in her. She is aware she is wasting her life, but can’t help herself.

Boy, were these stories bleak. In Baldwin’s world, there is no hope. The characters are pushed to the point of desperation. An air of sadness permeates this collection. I’m not completely sure these stories were my cup of tea. Perhaps my expectations were too high – I was expecting each story to be a literary masterwork, and the collection was uneven. Some of the stories felt a little dated, at times a little false. The writing was old fashioned, although monumental and authoritative. The prose reminded me of Flannery O’Connor but without the humor. A reoccurring incident is the innocent child being called a racial slur. Also policemen play a role in most of these stories. 

The passion behind the words and the declaiming rhythm of the sentences make me interested in reading Baldwin’s nonfiction. I think to really understand the rhythms of the sentences and the inspiration for the titles and imagery the reader would need a thorough grounding in the Bible and gospel music. 

The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff

My dad, the con man

This was a researched biography, from birth to death, of Duke Wolff, father of the author. As a young boy, the son, Geoff, hero-worships his dashing dad. World War II hero, Skull and Bones man, a take charge executive rolling in dough. This persona, however, turns out to be a lie.  Duke Wolff was actually a petty criminal, inveterate liar, yet talented enough to keep getting engineering job after job. The family is constantly moving, from shack to palace and back again, one step ahead of the bailiff. On the other hand, if the reader ignores the many scenes of sickening terror, it does seem like the family had some good times. Eventually, Geoff’s young mother gets fed up with losing all her friends and flees to Florida with the two children. Their country club lifestyle is downsized as she gets a job working forty hours a week at Dairy Queen. One day when he's twelve, Geoff, who is depicted as a menacing problem child, abandons his mother to live with his father, who always displayed a strong love for his son.Somewhere around age 20, Geoff snaps out of “it,” starts to achieve under his own steam rather than lying to people, and realizes he must cut off his father, if he wants a tranquil life.

This memoir was beautifully written, a mosaic of plain words, a tale shaped by a life, from Duke’s privileged birth as the only son of doting parents to his death, his naked corpse lying unnoticed for two weeks. I also admired the way Wolff weaves his own life story into the narrative, from innocent kid to serious trouble maker. His father seems like a demon seed and Geoff seems to be going down exactly the same path. Many times, Geoff is depicted as just an out-and-out asshole and I grew worried he was going to turn out like dad. Like many other excellent memoirs, this is a mixture of the high accomplished lyrical voice and the criminally insane parent. Maybe the criminally insane parent part is that part that forges a writer.

Are con men born or made? Probably born. Although young Duke Wolff seems to have had an amazingly spoiled childhood. One thing I can never figure out about people like Duke is the amount of effort they spend on the deception is almost as much if they actually worked hard to achieve what they wanted.  Perhaps their problem is a profound laziness. Or a profound rejection of society’s mercantile values. Also, again and again the father seriously underestimates people's intelligence. Geoff never speculates on mental illness but the father must have had one. The most ambiguous scene in the book is the scene where, the Duke gives his son a precious gift of a year at Princeton, paid for by selling his ex-wife’s family silver.