114 - Hothouse Flower & the 9 Plants of Desire

Today, waiting around in between out-of-town interviews, I finished Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire, by Margot Berwin (Pantheon, 2009). With a title like that, and a garish hot pink cover to boot, how could I resist?

And I'm glad I didn't. Like the rare plants of the title, this one was both highly entertaining and unusual enough in terms of plot to keep me guessing. The bookclubs.ca Reader's Guide describes it as "Eat, Pray, Love meets The Orchid Thief." Not having read the latter, I can't say if that's accurate, but it does hint at the book's intriguing nature. It tells the story of Lila Nova, a NYC advertising copywriter and recent divorcee who's decided that her "small, newly renovated studio with absolutely no character" needs some sprucing up. This decision takes her to the Union Square Greenmarket, where she meets the "rugged country-sexual" Plant Man, David Exley, who persuades her that a Hawaiian bird-of-paradise plant is just the thing. Whether it's David or the plant itself working the mojo, Lila's easily convinced ... but no sooner does she get the plant home than she begins seeing her life in a new light. The first and funniest inkling of this comes in the "Advertising" chapter, when Lila and coworker/ BFF/ surfer dude extraordinare Kody attend a film shoot for a sneaker commercial:

"When the hair and makeup people arrived, Kody and I gathered around to watch them turn the teenaged giant into a supermodel. ...

"The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while her genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over their faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a monotoned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes.

"When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the makeup artist dug through a suitcase of brushes and plowed through undreds of tubes of flesh-colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed, with a needle and thread, strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light-brown locks, creating a thick, full mane of shimmering gold."

It's on her way home from this very shoot that Lila notices "a most unusual plant" in a store window, and steps inside to find a far more unusual laundromat:

"I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. ...

"Thick grass grew from squares of soil perfectly cut to fit the tops of the industrial-sized washing machines and dryers. Dense pockets of jewel-colored flowers on long, thin stems grew from the grass. There were red poppies, purple bells, and bright-yellow daisies. The laundry looked like a meadow. Like a field of wildflowers.

"Plants were strung across the ceiling in between the tracks of flourescent lights, stretching from one side of the Laundromat to the other. Colorful flowers sprang from the pots and hung down over the benches and folding tables. The pots were hung on invisible fishing line, so the flowers seemed to float in midair.

"The Laundromat was like a jungle where washing machines had been dumped, or maybe a laundry where a jungle had sprung up."

She is drawn into a long chat with the owner, Armand, who offers her a challenge: take a cutting from the fire fern in the window home, make it grow roots, and he'll show her the 9 rare and valuable plants he keeps hidden in the back room -- that is, provided she agrees not to mention them to anyone else. While it doesn't make sense even to her, she is intrigued, and accepts:

"I stared at the cutting on the way home, trying to understand why I didn't throw it away. Or simply drop it on the street. It looked like any other cutting I'd ever seen. It was a basic, four-inch-long green stem with a few random leaves sticking off the sides. But somehow I knew it wasn't like any other cutting. I found myself gripping it more tightly than my bag with my money, phone, and credit cards. ...

"I'm not a superstitious person. I don't even read my horoscope for fun, but I knew I wanted to see those nine plants in the back room of that Laundromat."

In the coming days, Lila cares painstakingly for the fire fern cutting, and returns to Exley's plant stand seeking further exotic adventures, not all of them horticultural. Initially, Exley resists her overtures, but after learning about the fire fern, he changes his mind. Smitten, she reneges on her promise to Armand, and takes Exley to the laundromat on their first date before heading home for a night of unprecedented passion.

Sadly, not only does Exley not call the next day and disappear from the Greenmarket, but on Lila's next trip to the Laundromat, she finds it devastated: shattered windows, uprooted plants and soil everywhere, a hole in the secret back door, and the 9 plants gone without a trace. Exley is clearly at fault, as is Lila herself for leading him there. She offers to repay Armand, but he insists there's only one way she can make up for the loss: come with him to Mexico to replace the plants.

And so begins Lila's odyssey. Armand leaves before she does, so she finds herself driving and then walking alone through the jungles of the Yucatan, working her way towards Armand's second home as best as she can. She is rescued at gunpoint by Diego, a mysterious Huichol shaman sent by Armand who's a bit of a plant man himself ... just before she accidentally tramples on 2 of the 9 mythical plants. From here, the story veers into magical realism reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as Lila must confront demons internal and external to repay her debt and reclaim her identity. The conclusion offers just enough twists and turns to keep the reader on her toes, though one of the plot lines is wrapped up just a bit too neatly for my tastes (and in a way that doesn't quite fit the story otherwise).

The book is tremendously readable, and at 260 pages, not all that long. Funny, thought-provoking, and just a little steamy in parts (at the risk of conflating my Spanish-speaking artists, the combination of the humorous and the erotic reminded me of some of Almodovar's films in places), it's an excellent choice for a damp, drizzly November weekend.

#74 - Telex from Cuba

This book is one of the reasons I've gotten so behind in my blogging. It took me over a week to slog through Rachel Kushner's Telex from Cuba (Scribner, 2008), and once I finished, I cranked through two others in rapid succession. Granted, part of the delay was due to my having discovered and then overdosed on playing Bejeweled 2 to the exclusion of everything else for a few days ... but part of it was that Telex just didn't really draw me in enough to make me want to read more than a chapter or 2 at a time. The book was fairly well-reviewed in the New York Times, but frankly, a little disappointing.

Don't get me wrong; Kushner's writing is superb. Her descriptions make you feel like you're right there in pre-Castro 1950s Cuba, with all your senses; the book gives you a phenomenal sense of a time and place that few others (at least in the English language) touch upon. The only trouble is that nothing much seems to happen there. The story, if one can call it that, focuses on the American expats who work for the United Fruit company and their families, living lives of privilege amidst servants and tropical flora. It's told primarily from the vantage points of two children: K.C. Stites, rich and privileged even among the American elite, whose white-jacketed, uber-formal Southern father manages United Fruit's Cuban operation; and Everly Lederer, a bookish, upper-middle-class outsider who develops a crush on Haitian houseboy Willy Blousse rather than returning the affections of the far more suitable K.C. Ultimately, the Stiteses, Lederers, and all their neighbors flee to the continental U.S. by way of Guantanamo (no surprise here; we all know which way the Castro revolution ended up at this point).

Until then, though, the book is little but a sketch of the American enclaves in the Cuba of the day. There are a handful of side storylines that I found interesting: Charmaine Mackey's affair with a wealthy Cuban Lothario; Del Stites' typical adolescent rejection of the family he grew up in, and less-than-typical reaction (running away to join Raul Castro's band of rebels in the mountains). Neither of these are sufficiently well-developed to stand as primary plots, though, nor are any of the characters depicted with near as much depth and nuance as the setting. There's also a side storyline about an opportunistic World War II vet and a nightclub dancer that didn't quite seem to fit with the rest of the story, and which I found distracting. All in all, the book probably has some literary merit, and may well be a fitting tribute to the author's family (according to the blurb on the dust jacket, Kushner's mother grew up in one of the American enclaves in Cuba in the 1950s). And I didn't find it awful; the setting was novel and vivid enough to hold my interest, at least enough to make me finish the book. Not one I'll reread or recommend, though.

#25 - The Brief Wondrous Life ... Wow!

As I notes last night, my 25th book o' the year, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, deserves the Pulitzer (as if I'm fit to judge!) and all the other accolades it received. A high-octane, wholly original novel of contemporary Dominican history and culture, the immigrant experience, and one boy's coming of age, this one doesn't stop ... and you don't want to stop reading it. Chapter One is titled "GhettoNerd at the End of the World 1974-1987," and that pretty much sums up who Oscar is. "Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about -- he wasn't no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, nor a playboy with a million hots on his jock." A few pages later, Diaz describes him as "the neighborhood pariguayo," defined in 1 of 33 rambling, colloquial footnotes on Dominican culture and history as "pariguayos -- a word that in contemporary usage describes anybody who stands outside and watches while other people scoop up the girls. The kid who don't dance, who ain't got game, who lets other people clown him -- he's the pariguayo. If you looked in the Dictionary of Dominican Things, the entry for pariguayo would include a wood carving of Oscar."

Oscar, a fat Dominican growing up in New Jersey who loves comic books and science fiction, and "wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber ... Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to" aspires to become the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien, and aches to find love, but this is not primarily an ugly duckling story. It leapfrogs from New Jersey to the Dominican Republic, and from the 1940s to the late 1990s, presenting the stories of Oscar's family as a microcosm of the Dominican and immigrant experiences. His sister Lola struggles wildly against her role as "the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice way of saying a perfect Dominican slave," running away to a no-good Jersey Shore boyfriend and eventually to her grandmother's bakery in the DR in hopes of finding love and belonging. Their mother Belicia, orphaned in infancy and maltreated by the distant relations who took her in, parlays her beauty and courage into what she thinks is lasting love with the Gangster, a Trujillo henchman ... only to learn, in a heartbreaking and brutal fashion, that not only is he married, but his wife is Trujillo's sister. Diaz then takes us even further back, to the story of Belicia's father Abelard, a wealthy doctor whose favored status with the Trujillo regime goes tragically wrong when he refuses to introduce his beautiful eldest daughter to the lecherous dictator.

Themes of fate, cursedness, and familial influence vs. individual choice abound throughout the novel. Central to these is fuku, which the book's narrator, Yunior (Oscar's college roommate, and Lola's one-time boyfriend), explains thus:

Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku -- generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. ...
[F]uku doesn't always strike like lightening. Sometimes it works patiently, drowning a nigger by degrees ... Sometimes it's slow and sometimes it's fast. It's doom-ish in that way, makes it harder to put a finger on, to brace yourself against. But be assured, like Darkseid's Omega Effect, like Morgoth's bane, no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always -- and I mean always -- gets its man. ... It's perfectly fine if you don't believe in these "superstitions." In fact, it's better than fine -- it's perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fuku believes in you.

Do we choose our own destinies, or are we compelled to follow in our elders' footsteps, forever haunted by their choices and experiences? Are some settings (i.e., the DR under Trujillo's regime, which Diaz elucidates in both footnotes and the main text "for those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history") so horrific as to beg for a supernatural explanation? The novel raises but, fittingly, never answers these questions; instead, it leaves you thinking and wondering long after you turn the last page.

My one quibble, and it's a fairly minor one, is with the female characters. Diaz devotes plenty of screen time to Lola and Beli -- together, they probably get at least as much as Oscar -- but we see a lot more of their physical attributes than I might have liked, and not quite as much of what's inside their heads making them tick, particularly in Beli's case. This may just be one of my own issues -- perhaps Beli's only option for surviving and escaping was to trade on her, um, generous physical assets, and little else about her mattered -- but there it is.

Will write more if and when it occurs to me, and I think it will -- I'll be absorbing this one for a while. In the meantime, it's an excellent read ... both enjoyable and provocative. Highly recommended.