Now They Tell Me I Have to Read Jonathan Safran Foer

I finished "The History of Love" by Nicole Krauss, who is also -- it seems -- Jonathan Safran Foer's wife. They live together in the same home, I hear, and talk to each other as a result, or at least I'm willing to bet they do. I have no concrete evidence of their many (probable) exchanges, some of which might well be intimate! Who knows? I'm getting off topic and probably sounding a smidgen envious. Of who, precisely? Let your imagination run wild!

N-E-wayz, I enjoyed Krauss' fiction published in the New Yorker recently (before I knew she was married, or to whom, so you'll have to excuse my obliviousness), and I wanted to check out a novel of hers, accordingly. So I have, "The History of Love," as said. Plainly stated, the novel is mostly good with a certain amount of saccharine schmaltz that muddies it more than I would deem ideal. And yet, she uses "and yet" -- the characteristic expression of Leo Gursky, one of two characters the novel mainly concerns -- to great effect. I am perhaps alone in feeling the way I do about this, but I've decided it was appropriate in every instance it was employed, nicely timed and not overdone, despite its being often used. But that's just one thing.

Friends who've read both authors (i.e. Jonathan S. Foer and Krauss), who are more "in the know" about these two writers (because they've read both and not just one), tell me I have to read JSF, if for no other reason than the following: the two authors' styles and motifs are, they say, awfully similar. It's possible that this authorial tandem, husband & wife style, has been negatively impacted, creatively speaking, by their close proximity to one another, i.e. their marriage and life together. And if true, brings me to my next point: no marriages. Ok, ooookkkk, hold on. I'll agree to end the marriage ban on one condition: someone send me free books all the time. Or how about this? At discounted rates of the very variety. No? Fine. Great, once again I'm left with nothing, but oh well. At least I have books (-- not very discounted, though).

And one of those books is "The History of Love." I'm not sure if it's a complete history, the definite article preceding "History of Love" certainly implies that this is so, and yet . . .

Krauss nicely layers things. You begin by not knowing which way is up, which in my view is often a nice place to begin. The story is, at that point, the narrative of Leo Gursky, a man in exile from life lived, simply existing without companionship of near every kind. The best he can do is his upstairs tenant-mate, Bruno, a childhood friend who has reappeared later in life, after both men have resettled and long resided in America. Bruno may or may not be real (spoiler: he almost certainly isn't). Leo, meanwhile, is pursuing contact with his son, a professional author who doesn't even know Leo is his father. Leo falls into the locksmith trade, on arrival in America, because of a relative already in that business. Leo in turn becomes a skilled locksmith, the irony of which being he can open any door except those that matter most, the metaphorical ones that keep him from the people he'd like to be nearest to.

Meanwhile, there's young Alma Singer whose mother is depressed, having never quite gotten over the loss of her husband, Alma's father, and whose brother thinks he might be the messiah. Things change for the family when a letter arrives from a man asking Alma's mother to translate the novel, "The History of Love," a book which already has relevance in their lives for its making a profound impact on her father, who passed the book on to Alma's mother with the notation, to paraphrase, that it was the novel he would write for her if he could write.

I don't want to describe much more, as I feel that would run the risk of giving too much of the plot away (something I'm honestly trying to avoid in general on the old blog here). The other main component concerns the ostensible author of "The History of Love" -- Zvi Litvinoff. As you might imagine all the layers of this story converge, as each character's life crosses the others. It works in the end, though in a near dangerously schmaltzy manner, as said.

So now on to Jonathan Safran Foer, to see what I think about all that . . .

Barbara Kingsolver, Solver of Kings

"Kingsolver." That would be a great compliment, if it were a term people used for description and not an author's surname. E.g. -- "Jim's a real kingsolver, you know?"

I wanted a Barbara Kingsolver primer before I got started on something of hers that's considered a cut above -- say "The Poisonwood Bible" or "The Lacuna." So I stole or "borrowed indefinitely" a book someone gifted to my mother a couple years back. Mom was finished reading it, to be fair to my sticky-for-books fingers, and she's aware that I've taken it for my own. So these facts justify my theft, I've decided. And anyway, what an enjoyable steal "The Bean Trees" is. Perhaps I might just start "liberating" books from all sorts of places I hadn't thought to before.

As for "The Bean Trees," well . . .

Some female writers nicely execute a very particular kind of coming of age story (Marilynne Robinson comes immediately to mind). Barbara Kingsolver achieves this nice execution, too, in the first part of "The Bean Trees." The second part is different, a narrative depicting her protagonist, Taylor Greer, fully come of age, you could say, and navigating the uncommon circumstances of life, of making one's way. Greer does so by abandoning the town of her birth and upbringing in Pittman County, Kentucky, for the greener pastures of anywhere else. She chooses a westerly path, going north and then south in that direction.

She's leaving the kinds of things that force one to remain static in one place, family and careers and, in general, responsibilities. She notes aptly of the young women in her town's tendency to become impregnated, "Believe me in those days the girls were dropping by the wayside like seeds off a poppyseed bun and you learned to look at every day as a prize." (An especially apt description because have you ever noticed how seeds fall off a poppyseed bun? It's amazing there are any that actually stay put.) Saying Greer's not looking to be tied to responsibilities is obviously not to say she's inclined to be irresponsible, but rather, she's a free spirited, slightly naive wayfarer content to roam and find her niche wherever it appears to her to be. This notion of allowing what will be to be becomes, slowly over the course of the novel, her guiding philosophy.

Taylor goes so far as to change fundamental aspects of her person, remaking herself with the legal change of her name from Marietta to Taylor (after Taylorville, IL, which is the place she is forced to stop in when her gas tank becomes completely empty -- a kind of new name roulette, she plays). She then travels southward where she by chance ends up in a hole-in-the-wall bar/diner whereupon she's spotted by a group of Cherokee who transfer abruptly to her custody a little girl no more than three years old. Thus, ironically, she becomes a young mother in spite of her best efforts to avoid that fate.

With the young Cherokee girl ("Turtle" she nicknames her) in tow, she travels further south to Arizona, settling near Tucson when her tires can no longer bear the burden of the road. She rolls up to a repair shop called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. There she meets Mattie, an elderly mechanic and proprietor of the shop, who also moonlights as a harborer of Central American refugees. In still more summation of the plot and its participants, Taylor eventually comes to live with a single mother of one named Lou Ann, who is left high and dry by her abusive husband and so needs a roommate to make ends meet.

But enough plot synopsis -- while Kingsolver doesn't floor me with presentation of a story I feel I've never seen before, she is still successful in the most crucial and compelling ways. One of those is that she richly establishes her characters, beginning with Taylor and branching out to Lou Ann (an obsessively careful new mother whose naivety profoundly trumps Taylor's); Turtle, who at only age three is surprisingly present throughout the story, if only referred to offhand usually, but she exhibits traits easily identifiable as the sort you'd expect of a girl her age, becoming a sort of amateur horticulturist with a vast knowledge of the names of vegetables, which she talks about in a still very kid-like way; Mattie, an unflappable and commanding matriarch with a deep devotion to following her own personal moral compass (which involves acting as protectorate to Central American refugees to whom she provides haven in her attic at Jesus Is Lord Used Tires); and though certainly not the only ones left who were carefully wrought, they are the last two whom I think bear mentioning -- Estevan and Esperanza, a couple from Guatemala who are revealed to have suffered a great many hardships en-route to illegal succor in the United States. Estevan's non-sexual but faintly romantic brushes with Taylor provide a strange bit of depth to the story, as well.

All in all, a good read with a fairly basic message -- though it's not always obvious everybody needs help in this world and there are those of us lucky enough to find it in unexpected places, and maybe even didn't entirely see that we'd been getting it all along. Taylor makes explicit reference to the latter point when she talks to Turtle about the rhizobia, a kind of microscopic bug that flourishes on the roots of plants, sucking nitrogen from the soil and making it fertile. The rhizobia implicitly stands in for the people who've helped Taylor get to where she is today, still standing.

On the "20 Under 40" Front Cont.

It must be an awesome feeling to have the kind of insanely acute perception Nicole Krauss has, as evidenced in her entry to the New Yorker's Top 20 Under 40 writers. The story "The Young Painters" is a story about the writers craft, which she subjects to not so subtly being put on trial. She indicates this with frequent references by the narrator, an author, to another individual who's called solely, "Your Honor." The story questions ideas of the culpability / responsibility of an author to his / her source material. It's a longtime conundrum, what right does an author have to co-opt, in a sense, others' stories? Should one feel guilty for doing so? What is owed to the source? It also questions how the author uses such material. Can they hide behind the idea that this is not journalism and owes nothing to "The Truth"? It is the great ambiguous morality of the author. And anyway, Krauss's narrator at least, finishes her tale with the line, "And slowly, Your Honor, I began to distrust myself." I thought that was a pretty nice way to end, dontcha think?