Everyday I Write the Book

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THE SMART ONE by Jennifer Close

May 14, 2013 – 1:57 am

A few weeks ago, I posted a Q&A with Jennifer Close about her new novel, The Smart One. Like her previous novel, Girls in White Dresses (reviewed here), Close’s latest work looks at the disorienting years that follow college. This time, she follows three siblings in their twenties/early thirties: Martha, Claire and Max. None of them is living the life they expected: Martha abandoned her nursing training years ago to work at J. Crew and still lives with her parents; Claire called off her engagement and is living beyond her means in Manhattan; and Max, a senior in college, has just gotten his girlfriend Cleo pregnant. Their parents, Weezy and Will, live in a Philadelphia suburb, befuddled by their children’s less-than-enviable situations yet determined to support them by opening their doors for them to return home.

Like in Girls in White Dresses, Close’s style of writing is heavy on description and anecdote and light on plot. Not too much happens in The Smart One beyond the summary I included above. The whole book takes place over a 12-month period and there are only about two or three notable things that happen to each person. The richness of The Smart One lies instead in the details Close uses to flesh these characters out. I loved the little flashbacks and anecdotes that made me feel like I knew this family (particularly the women) so well. Someone on Goodreads described Close’s style as “simple and effortless”. I totally agree. The book reminded me of the endless hours I used to spend on the phone with my close friends, dissecting and analyzing other people’s lives. I miss those conversations – I don’t have those hours to spend these days (and does anyone use the phone anymore?). The Smart One was like a whole book full of them.

I suspect that The Smart One isn’t for everyone. It is definitely full of #FirstWorldProblems, and Claire and Martha in particular can be frustrating in their passivity and self-pity. This family is not out saving the world, and they aren’t even particularly nice to each other much of the time. But I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and looked forward to each brush stroke that brought Close’s characters into closer relief. The Smart One is like an Impressionist painting – each individual square inch may feel sketchy and incomplete, but taken as a whole it forms a lasting picture.

One little quibble (because of course I have one little quibble) – the title. The Smart One refers to Weezy, in relation to her sister Maureen (who, it turns out, is also pretty smart). This book doesn’t ultimately revolve around Weezy, nor does it particularly revolve around Weezy’s relationship with Maureen. I wonder if Close picked the title out when she thought the book might be going in another direction. It was a little disorienting; I kept having to remind myself who “the smart one” was, and then shifting gears again to get back to the kids. Of course titles aren’t that important, but like covers, they do contribute to the overall gestalt of a book, and this one didn’t seem to fit.

Tags girls in white dresses, jennifer close, the smart one | Permalink | Comment (1)

THE RED HOUSE by Mark Haddon

April 26, 2013 – 10:37 pm

You know how some books are good for you, but kind of hard to get through, like spinach or unsweetened Greek yogurt? I am going to put Mark Haddon’s The Red House in that category. This novel by the author of the bestselling The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time (reviewed here) is a literary experiment, often told in stream of consciousness as it shifts among the perspective of eight characters. While this writing style was inventive and sometimes powerful, in the end this book fell short for me.

The eight characters are two families: Angela and Dominic and their three children – Daisy, Alex and Benji – and Angela’s brother Richard and his wife Louisa and her daughter Melissa. Angela and Richard are estranged, but he reaches out to her a year after their mother’s death and invites her family to go on vacation with him in Wales. Angela and Dominic agree to go, even though they don’t want to be with Richard, because they can’t afford a vacation on their own.

The Red House takes place during the two weeks that the two families share the rental home in Wales. During that period, like most family vacations, there are confrontations, retreats, connections, realizations, and allegiances that shift and fade. Angela, mourning the death of her infant daughter eighteen years earlier, descends into hallucinations and depression, when she isn’t simmering with anger at her brother for not helping care for their sick mother. Daisy comes to terms with her sexual orientation, while Alex learns disturbing news about his father and flirts with his uncle’s wife. Richard tests his physical and emotional limits, while Melissa basically just glowers and acts entitled.

What makes The Red House unique is Haddon’s writing style, so different from his linear, childlike storytelling in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Here, points of view change even within paragraphs. Some sections are just lists, such as the variety of items sold in a souvenir shop the family visits on the trip, or the descriptions of figures captured in snapshots framed on the walls of the house. It can be difficult at times to figure out who is thinking, or even talking, due to the frequent perspective shifts. Ultimately, this made it hard for me to maintain interest in the book. When I didn’t know who was being discussed, I just sort of skimmed along until I figured it out, which I found pretty distracting.

Ultimately, The Red House was sort of boring. Not much happens, and the relationships Haddon explores don’t really evolve that much. I found that I just didn’t care that much about what happened, and wasn’t particularly eager to return to the book. I listened to this one mostly on audio, which was even more challenging, given that there was only one narrator. It was especially hard to know who was talking without the visual cues of paragraph breaks and quotation marks. The audio narration was fine; it was just a difficult script to read from.

The Red House was just OK for me. If you like the idea of the stream of consciousness “prosetry” I’ve described, you may enjoy it. For me, it wasn’t my favorite.

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THE WESTING GAME by Ellen Raskin

April 24, 2013 – 11:53 pm

My daughters have to write a book report every month, with a different genre of book each time. (So far they’ve done fiction, fantasy, biography, historical fiction, non-fiction, and a few others.) This month’s theme is mystery, and both girls decided to read one of my all-time favorite books from growing up: The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. I decided to re-read it – thirty+ years later – to see if it was what I remembered and how it has held up.

For those of you who haven’t heard of this Newbery Award winner, The Westing Game opens on a cold fall day in Milwaukee, WI. Sixteen people have been hand-picked to move into a luxury apartment building next to an old, abandoned estate owned by a paper company magnate, Sam Westing. They are called to the mansion for the reading of the Westing’s will, as he has recently died. The will lays forth the rules of a game that these sixteen heirs are to play: teams of two are each given five clues, and are expected to use those clues to figure out the answer. But what is the answer – who murdered Samuel Westing? Or is there another mystery for them to uncover? Westing’s estate is on the line, but no one really knows how to inherit it.

The story takes a number of twists and turns, mostly centering around the odd pairings of the teams and the secrets that several of them are hiding. When a series of homemade bombs start going off in the apartment building, rattling everyone, the stakes get higher and the group more suspicious of each other. Will they work together to pool their clues and find out what the eccentric old man meant? Ultimately, the mystery is solved, but the answers aren’t what anyone expects – and the “winner” remains a secret.

I really enjoyed reading The Westing Game again. There were a lot of things that I thought I understood as a kid, but that in retrospect I never truly did, even after my many, many readings of the book. There are also loose ends and some really implausible plot points that are still pretty nebulous reading it now. But it’s a really fun book, and the characters are truly memorable. Now that I’ve finished it, I will sit down with my daughters and see how much they understood. Judging by the conversations I overhead between them when they were reading it, I think they got quite a bit of it.

The book is definitely dated: one character’s late daughter is described as “retarded” and “Mongoloid”; another character’s family was unhappy that she had married a Jew; one young woman drops out of college after a year to get married; and one character, a federal judge, wears an African printed robe to a party and someone comments on her looking “ethnic”. The bombings are relatively innocent in the book – a far cry from today’s headlines, but unsettling nonetheless. But considering I first read this in the late 70s, it has held up pretty well.

I would recommend The Westing Game for pretty advanced grade school readers, given the complexity of the plot and the fact that not everything gets wrapped up that neatly. There are some deaths in the end (which takes place many years after the actual Westing game), which are sad. But overall, The Westing Game is a ton of fun and one of the best books I read as a kid.

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Q&A with Jennifer Close, author of THE SMART ONE

April 21, 2013 – 11:58 pm

I was lucky to attend a reading by Jennifer Close, author of the new book The Smart One, at Politics & Prose last weekend. Close is the author of Girls in White Dresses, which came out in the summer of 2011. I really enjoyed Girls in White Dresses and jumped at the chance to read The Smart One (coming up next on the TBR list!). Here is a synopsis from Goodreads:

Weezy Coffey’s parents had always told her she was the smart one, while her sister was the pretty one. “Maureen will marry well,” their mother said, but instead it was Weezy who married well, to a kind man and good father. Weezy often wonders if she did this on purpose—thwarting expectations just to prove her parents wrong.

But now that Weezy’s own children are adults, they haven’t exactly been meeting her expectations either. Her oldest child, Martha, is thirty and living in her childhood bedroom after a spectacular career flameout. Martha now works at J.Crew, folding pants with whales embroidered on them and complaining bitterly about it. Weezy’s middle child, Claire, has broken up with her fiancé, canceled her wedding, and locked herself in her New York apartment—leaving Weezy to deal with the caterer and florist. And her youngest, Max, is dating a college classmate named Cleo, a girl so beautiful and confident she wears her swimsuit to family dinner, leaving other members of the Coffey household blushing and stammering into their plates.

Here is what Close said at the Q&A:

Q: Are your characters based on people you know?

JC: People will always think that. The answer is: not really. There is a little of me in Martha and in her mother too – they are both worrisome people, and I tend to worry a lot. I tend to take traits and heighten them in my characters. I don’t have a sister, but I found it fun to write about a sister relationship in The Smart One. My characters are never based solely on one person, but things to tend to creep in.

Q: How did you decide which characters in The Smart One would have the story told from their perspective?

JC: Claire was easy. And then once I included a conversation about Clarie and Martha, I had to give Martha’s perspective. The Smart One is about the roles played in a family, how they never really go away. Thus, I needed to give the mom’s perspective too. Cleo is outside the family, so she sees them objectively. She’s a fresh voice.

Q: What does The Smart One say about parenting

JC: There are no big, bold statements. I wrote it in Spring 2009; the magazine I was working for folded, and a lot of people I knew had lost their jobs. People were moving home. I took that in, and wrote about it. Where do people go when they have no job or income? This hadn’t happened in generations before like it does now. Parents don’t stop being parents – here, Weezy is controlling, and stays that way. We are all staying children longer.

Q: How has your writing style evolved from book #1 to book #2, and through teaching?

JC: Teaching reminds me why I love writing so much. I love being edited, because sometimes I just stop being able to see my words. I am not sure if my style has evolved; my voice seems the same it was in book #1. Chatty.

Q: Talk about your retail experience at Politics & Prose Did your background at various jobs influence your work?

JC: Every job has helped in its own way. Writing at a magazine helped with my editing. At P&P, I used to talk about books, and get excited about them like I did when I was younger. I wanted to share books, which made me excited to read and write.

Q: Talk about your writing process.

JC: I have always written. As a kid, I took writing in college, and starting thinking that maybe I could do this as a job. My process is a mess. I start with a notebook and don’t type for a while. Handwriting seems better. Then I eventually move to a Word document, which I print after about 150-200 pages to see what I have. Usually it’s “the writing of a mad person”. The first draft is a disaster. The second draft is when I retype the whole thing. This part is both helpful and annoying. The third draft is a real draft. I like to work on paper, using a specific pen.

Q: Will your next work have multiple narrators, like your first two did?

JC: My next book may be told in first person. It has a great voice, but it might be limiting. When you’re bored with someone, as a writer, it’s nice to move on to someone else.

Q: Does good writing just flow out of you?

JC: There are days that are great when the writing flows, but that doesn’t happen every day. People have asked me, “Are there ever days when you just don’t feel like writing?” Yes – every day! Some days are really hard. Some people may write good, clean first drafts. Good for them! I have great times and low times.

Really looking forward to reading this one. Thanks for the great reading at P&P, Jennifer Close!

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A LAND MORE KIND THAN HOME by Wiley Cash

April 12, 2013 – 11:55 pm

There are a couple of genres of fiction in which I am particularly non-well-versed. One of those is Southern Gothic. In fact, I had to Google the term to make sure that the book I just read was, in fact, Southern Gothic. (Turns out it was.) What is Southern Gothic, you ask? From Wikipedia:

[A] subgenre of Gothic fiction unique to American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South. Common themes in Southern Gothic literature include deeply flawed, disturbing or disorienting characters, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events relating to or coming from poverty, alienation, racism, crime, and violence.It is unlike its parent genre in that it uses these tools not solely for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural character of the American South, with the Gothic elements taking place in a magic realist context rather than a strictly fantastical one.

The book in question is Wiley Cash’s debut novel A Land More Kind Than Home. It takes place in a small town in western North Carolina in the 80s, though it feels timeless, due to its rural, bleak setting. It is about the hold that religion (and alcohol) can take on people searching for meaning and direction and the misplaced trust that a small-town congregation placed in its sinister pastor. When the book opens, an eleven year-old mute boy is dead, leaving behind questions of how he died and why it happened at his mother’s church. The story is told by three narrators: the boy’s younger brother Jess, the town’s sheriff Clem, and the town’s elderly midwife Adelaide. The three narrators spin a sad, dark tale of regret, secrets, betrayal and loss that is deceptively simple in its delivery but rich with tension and conflict.

This is an impressive debut by Wiley Cash, who captured the diction and pace of this North Carolina backcountry perfectly. He has a gift for detail – the sweat of a beer bottle recently pulled from the fridge; the crunch of a police car’s tires spinning in the snow; the gentle clicking of a rattlesnake skin – that makes his writing breathe just under the surface. The book is well-paced, building slowly but inevitably to the climax you’ve expected from the first page. Yet Cash takes his time with his characters, teasing out their pasts slowly and frugally until they become filled in and in focus.

I also have great admiration for the audio version of A Land More Kind Than Home. The three performers were absolutely perfect – I felt like I was listening to a script reading. The voice of Clem, in particular, was superb. This may be the best audio production I’ve ever listened to.

A Land More Kind Than Home is certainly a departure from my usual fare, but I am glad I picked it up. It was a powerful, memorable read, and one that is sure to provoke discussion among those who read it.

Thank you to William Morrow for the review copy and to HarperAudio for the audiobook.

Tags a land more kind than home, north carolina, southern gothic, wiley cash | Permalink | Comments (5)

Winner of ME BEFORE YOU Giveaway

April 8, 2013 – 2:58 pm

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway for Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You. This is a popular book! The winner, selected by Random.org, is…

Linda Kish

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who entered!

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Giveaway: Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

April 2, 2013 – 10:13 pm

Yesterday I posted my review of Jojo Moyes’ Me Before You. Thanks to Pamela Dorman Books, I have a copy of Me Before You to give away to a an EDIWTB reader. To win a copy, leave me a comment here on the blog and I will pick a name at random on Sunday, April 7.

In addition to the giveaway, I also have some other assets to share. Here is a book club kit and a trailer for Me Before You, in case you are thinking of reading it or have already done so and are looking for more thoughts on the book.

Good luck!

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