Girl in Translation, by Jean Kwok

Before getting this book I heard some chapters on the radio. When I was listening to some chapters on the radio, randomly, I thought the book was nonfiction. I was a little disappointed to find that it is fiction. However, it is based in large part on experiences in the author's life so I believe we can take many of the details as real.

The main character, Kimberly Chang, arrives in New York from Hong Kong with her mother when Kimberly is eleven. The cost of her trip, as well as the medical care for a recent long illness her mother suffered, was borne by Kim's aunt Paula, and when they arrive Paula sets them up in an apartment and arranges for Kim's mother to work in the garment factory owned by Paula and her husband.

Paula's generosity is only apparent, however, not real. The apartment is in an abandoned building, has broken windows, rats and cockroaches and one old mattress. It is indescribably dirty. Paula keeps saying the two will be moved soon, when a better apartment becomes available that they can afford. They grit their teeth and bear it.

Kim's mother starts work at the factory and Kim goes to school, where she faces cruelty and prejudice because she does not speak very good English and her clothing is very poor and often not very clean. After school Kim is expected to join her mother and help her meet her quotas. It is hard, back-breaking work that goes on for long hours, well into the night, and the pay is for piecework, which is illegal. The pay averages less than the minimum wage and the work is often dangerous. There is, of course, no health plan but instead a doctor who is willing to overlook certain conditions when he treats those who have accidents.

Gradually, because she is "good at school", Kim improves in her studies and gains entrance to a prestigious private school. At work and at school Kim tends to keep her distance from others her age, but does find friendship with a few. She then has to make sure that her friends never come to her apartment, for she is deeply ashamed of it.

Thus we are introduced to an underground world, mostly familiar to new immigrants, and the adversities the immigrants face. Our story is of a young girl who is determined to beat the odds.

It may not be true but it could be true of many, and the details are interesting and compelling. I enjoyed getting to know Kimberly and her mother and seeing how she faced difficult situations, sometimes bravely and sometimes very awkwardly. It is easy and quick to read, enjoyable. 

The River King, by Alice Hoffman

Good stuff. A novel about a town and a school, and subsequently about certain persons who cross lines to be in both places.

The town is Haddon and the school Haddon School. For various reasons, the townspeople do not embrace the school and there is a rift between the two that few cross. An incident at the school brings the two together in a way, an uneasy way.

Carlin Leander, a naturally beautiful scholarship student from Florida, attracts the attention of Gus (August) Pierce, a sloppy awkward freshman who has not yet met his family's expectations, on the train coming to the school. The two make an odd couple but they share characteristics that make them best friends. When the school's prize senior persuades Carlin to go out with him, the relationship between Carlin and Gus changes. These changes lead, in a way, to a horrific event.

Meanwhile, new photography teacher Betsy joins the school because she has almost unthinkingly become engaged to one of the teachers there. Like Carlin, she is an odd one out, beautiful in her way but not engaged to that beauty. She is forever getting lost in the small town and in more than one way takes her own path.

Abe, a police detective, meets Betsy, and the two share a moment of deep attraction. This attraction threatens to destroy Betsy's relationship with her fiance as well as the school, and she resists more than once. There is a push-pull nature to the hidden "romance", adding to the suspense that kept me reading.

I became easily attached myself, to all of these characters as well as to one of the side characters, another teacher, stricken ill. I was also intrigued by the swans that had been placed in the area behind the school, whose bad natures were legend. I wanted a little more of them, in fact.

The story has an odd twist - something sort of paranormal but not in the usual way. The melding of the natural with something else, accepted by some but not others. It seems to be a way to point up problems and to indicate when they are resolved.

Altogether I found it a satisfying book, beautifully and clearly written.

Ash Wednesday, by Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke can write, clearly. Better than many with bigger names in writing.

This simple novel is about growing up, changing, learning to love, learning to commit. The two characters are James and Christy. They have both been around a bit, are no longer starry-eyed and too young, yet neither is yet thirty. James lets the world take him where it will, and doesn't as a rule stand up to temptations. He likes the simple things, like hanging in the bar with his buds. Yet he has entered a time of life when he is feeling some dissatisfaction with the way his life is going.

Christy is perhaps an "old soul". She seems to be almost too old for her years, yet at the same time she retains a hope that something special can still happen to her. She is cautious, though, and she reads people well. She knows she can take care of herself. Thus she leaves the town where she lived, heading back to her home town in Texas, when she finds herself pregnant. She doesn't tell James about the baby or about her leaving.

Coincidentally, James is starting to realize how important Christy is and he hunts her down, finds her at a bus terminal many miles away. From here on there is a struggle - he wants to marry her, he wants to be with her, and yet there is always a little something that Christy senses, a something that is holding back. So she is not quick to say yes.

We follow James and Christy in alternating chapters, one narrating, then the other, as they try to understand each other and believe in each other. They fight with their own demons as often as they have it out with each other.

It's a quiet little novel about a kind of growth. Many times I felt the conversations were a bit strained, like Hawke was trying too hard to make something happen. It reads like a stage play, wordy with each sentence heavy with importance. Sometimes I would have liked more action, perhaps just tiny actions, like expressions and body movements, and fewer words. For me the situations and inner changes seemed too neat and well-presented. It's a pleasant book, though.

Oh. One more comment. There is almost more than enough God in here for this to be classified a "Christian" novel. I did not enjoy this aspect of it. 

The Good Life, by Jay McInerney

A post-9/11 novel. I have now read, I think, three that might be put into this category.

Two affluent couples live in Manhattan in 2001. We glimpse their lives just before the attack on the World Trade Center and then follow them in its aftermath. Most particularly we follow Corrine, from one couple, and Luke, from another. After the attack, Corrine finds her way to a soup kitchen that was set up to feed the workers, and volunteers there. Luke happens by and joins as well, at least part, it seems, because he is attracted to Corrine.

The two fall in love. They carry on their affair carefully, to protect their children primarily. Both feel this is the love of their lives and cautiously they start to think of divorce and remarriage.

None of the characters is a saint. While I rooted, generally, for Luke and Corrine, I felt annoyed by their attitudes and expectations at times. At the same time I appreciated that their thoughts were thrown so nakedly on the page. No pretense. As an exploration of the characters, their weaknesses and strengths, it is an interesting book. By the end we are (or I was, anyway) involved in their lives and in how their choices affect others close to them. I wondered if they would follow their dreams or come crashing to earth or land some place in between.

The story is also a look at the lives of many of the affluent in Manhattan, a world unto itself. What constitutes a "good life"? 

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

Relentless. That's the word that kept coming to me as I was reading this.

The book follows the life of Juris Rudkus, who arrives full of hope from Lithuania as a young man in the early 1900s, and who finds himself in "Packingtown", the edge of Chicago where the stockyards existed. He enthusiastically takes on one job after another, gets ground down by it, underpaid and overworked, and subject to a wide range of dangers, until his enthusiasm is dampened and almost dead.

He has a wife and child to support and his wife's family emigrated with him, so he has a house full. Every person in the house who can work does work, including the children, yet they cannot stay ahead of the bills.

In fact, throughout the book there is no light, no relief from the suffering, nothing but pain, suffering, death. As I said, relentless. Until the end, when socialism catches Jurgis's fancy and he believes that at long last he has found salvation.

The book reads rather like a tract, a lengthy tract spelling out the abuses in the stockyards and in capitalism in general, and then defining just how socialism will make it all better. The characters are loosely developed, described well physically but not particularly otherwise. They serve as the engine that drives the train of the message. Sinclair can write but he spends too much time driving home his point again and again and not allowing us to see any complexity in the situation or the people.

Because Sinclair was an excellent investigative journalist, he writes with great detail of the abuses of the people who work in the stockyards, and in a few pages outlines the abuses to the animals themselves as well. What was taken away from the novel when it was first published was the lack of proper safety measures in the production of meat, so that much was contaminated, and there was an outcry about food safety that led to government inspection systems and greater regulation of the industry.

It is unfortunate that conditions are not much better now, and in some cases they are worse. There are regulations in place but there are few inspectors and often they are paid for by the company. Often the solution to contamination is to accept it and cook everything until any disease microorganisms are dead. The treatment of the animals is certainly no better and in many cases far worse than it was a century ago. The intense confinement of animals had hardly begun then.

The Jungle was a wake-up call for many. Sinclair had hoped it would be a call for socialism but that did not happen. In spite of his efforts to separate truth from fact about socialism the idea simply did not take sufficient hold, especially given that it was outranked by communism for a while, and that fell into deep disfavor. Unfortunately many think the two are the same.

I was horrified to read of the conditions the workers endured, and of the horrors for the animals, knowing almost everything in the book was documented. I am glad that others are now writing books about current conditions. I hope a decent fiction book will get written now that will finally grab the attention of the majority of people, who will then demand an end to the miseries suffered by so many. 

Circling My Mother, by Mary Gordon

As promised, Mary Gordon "circles" her mother in this curious memoir. She grabs memories from others along with her own, and tries to piece together how others saw her mother, to get at a more complete picture. At the end, she says she doesn't want to forget her mother, and it's apparent that writing about her helps her remember. But it isn't just memories that color the story. We learn of her mother's, Anna's, early years, when she contracted polio at the age of three, how she lived with her sisters, how she supported her family for years, years for which she never was given thanks. We hear about her unusual marriage to a literary man some years older, who never manages to make money at any of the many schemes he tries. And we hear of the surprise birth of little Mary, Anna's only child, almost a miracle. Mary remembers growing up with her afflicted mother, wondering how her parents got married. They fought every day but apparently made up at night. She remembers the beauty of her mother's face, complexion, hair, and doesn't forget the awkwardness of her gait, with her damaged leg, eventually encased in a brace. A part of this memoir that I found particularly interesting was Anna's religion. She was Roman Catholic to the max, a max I honestly did not realize existed (my ignorance). Not only did she adhere to Catholic tenets, but she also chose her friends and even film stars, based on their religion. This in spite of the fact that her husband was Jewish and the two did not easily combine their faiths but rather ridiculed each other. For several years Anna actually took time out to spend with a favorite priest. She, and other older women, would take a "vacation" to be near this priest, to listen to him, spend time in his environment as he moved to different locations. This relationship was an odd one, as the priest was falling continually downward in his work, not easily accepted by most churchgoers, yet these women were entranced with his view of the world. While Anna was held back by her affliction, Mary suggests that maybe this was actually what she wanted - to be happy in her clerical work and confined to a limited world. Her polio gave her what she may have really wanted. IN the end, Mary tries to connect the earlier almost glamorous mother with the ill, dying, demented, alcoholic one, relying even on the smell of her favorite perfume. She struggles at this point in the book in a way that she doesn't seem to elsewhere. It is a time of confession and exposure and she is uncomfortable with it, yet feels it is necessary. I found it a fascinating look at not just the woman and the family but also at the time: depression, war, post-war euphoria, religion. As well as the tidbits about genealogy, where Anna came from and how she hung onto it.

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard

There are some literary books, I have to admit, that aren't meant for me. I think of myself as omnivorous when it comes to books, reading many genres, many styles, fiction and non, and liking many unexpectedly. Then there are those with which I never can connect.

This is one of those books. It is written almost poetically, in short sentences and paragraphs, almost abruptly. Odd little bits are added to paragraphs, as if they are thrown in later, an afterthought.

It is a short book about the lives of Toby Maytree (always referred to as "Maytree") and Lou Bigelow (always called "Lou"), together and apart, from when they met to the end of their lives. It is about the nature of love, what it means to love, as well as the nature of life, what it means to live. The story is told in the third person and conversations are reported within paragraphs, usually without distinguishing punctuation. The effect, even though often the words are exact, was to me an effect of distance, as if I weren't really there hearing those words.

A paragraph:

Two years later they were dancing in the kitchen to "Lady be Good". Maytree turned down the radio and ran his notion by Lou. It is an unnameable boon love hauls down, that people rightly prize as the best of life, and for which it fusses over weddings. Not only will a cave-dwelling pair cull food and kill so kids thrive, but their feeling for each other, not to mention for the kids, brings something beyond food people need. Each felt it between them when they danced. It was real as anything the mind could know. Her eyes' crystal, her split-faced smile, agreed. He rolled the volume knob. Oh sweet and lovely.

I never really got to know them, although I had a general feeling I did not like Maytree and I somewhat liked Lou, what I could grasp of her. I was irritated by the names and means of some of their companions - Deary and Reevadare, for example, for no reason I can name. I simply never connected. I have read other reviews by those who so loved this book that they read it twice. I am missing what they have, and am perhaps poorer for it. I hope this book finds another like that.