#103: Take It Like a Mom

Take It Like a Mom, by Stephanie Stiles (New York: New American Library, 2011).

Summary:
"One thing sets her apart from other modern-day superheroes: mom genes. Annie Fingardt Forster used to be a lawyer who wore dry-clean only and shaved both legs. But things have changed. Now a stay-at-home mom, she wears cargo pants and ponytails and harbors a nearly pathological hatred towards hipster parents. With a three-year-old and a baby on the way, Annie knows what to expect...at least, she thought she did. Faced with her husband's job loss, pre-school politics, and a playground throwdown with her arch nemesis, Annie realizes that even with her husband and friends by her side, what she really needs is to learn to suck it up-and take it like a mom."

Opening Line:
"Since it's always kind of awkward getting started -- like a blind date, or a first date with a guy you only saw late one night in a bar -- I guess I should tell you right away that my name is Annie."

My Take:
More a sitcom than a real novel. A series of fairly entertaining chapters, but there's no real central conflict here. Ah well, it was a vacation read.

#52: The Uncoupling

The Uncoupling, by Meg Wolitzer (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011).

Summary:
"When the elliptical new drama teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High school in Stellar Plains, New Jersey chooses as the school play Lysistrata -- the Aristophanes comedy in which women stop having sex with men in order to end a war -- a strange spell seems to be cast over the school. Or, at least, over the women.

"One by one, throughout the high school community, women and teenaged girls suddenly turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom, for reasons they don't really understand. Dory Lang, a happily married forty-something English teacher, is mystified when she abruptly loses the desire to have sex with Robby, her cherished spouse of nearly twenty years. One after another, her friends admit to having the same perplexing and disturbing experience. They include Bev, a fiftyish overweight guidance counselor married to an anxious hedge fund manager; Leanne, a young psychologist of South Asian background with three boyfriends and no wish to be monogamous; and Ruth, a formerly lesbian gym teacher now married to a male sculptor, with whom she has twin boys and a new baby. And not long after Dory's daughter, Willa, has fallen under a very different spell -- one of teenaged infatuation and sexual discovery -- the sixteen-year-old suddenly feels the need to put an end to her new romantic relationship.

"As all these women worry over their loss of passion, and as the men become by turns unhappy, offended, and confused, both sides are forced to look at their partners, their shared history, and their sexual selves in an entirely new light."

Opening Line:
"People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness."

My Take:
Now that's what I'm talking about! I honestly don't recall liking The Ten Year Nap all that much -- back when I read it, it seemed unoriginal and tedious -- but maybe I just caught it on a bad day; after The Uncoupling, I may just be willing to go dig up another copy and give it another try. This book is brilliant -- high literature, no, but at once very funny, packed with trenchant, witty observations about upper middle class suburban culture (I'm still chuckling at the teenaged characters spending hours online in a Second Life-esque cyberworld called Farrest, and the two-person Snuggy ripoff one of the deprived husband orders called -- get this -- the Cumfy) ... and at other times, surprisingly poignant and sad. OK, I did knock it off in a day and managed to get some other things done besides, but it was a very good read nonetheless, and precisely what the doctor ordered right about now.

#40 - Independence Day

Also just finished Richard Ford's Independence Day (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Summary: "Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet he's still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. He's still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved along with their children to Connecticut. But Frank is happy enough in his work and pursuing various civic and entrepreneurial sidelines. He has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend: a search for a house for deeply hapless clients relocating to Vermont; a rendezvous on the Jersey shore with his girlfriend; then up to Connecticut to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son and visit as many sports halls of fame as they can fit into two days. Frank's Independence Day, however, turns out not as he'd planned, and this decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. Independence Day captures the mystery of life — in all its conflicted glory — with grand humour, intense compassion and transfixing power."

Opening line: "In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems."

My take: Not exactly what I was expecting, and maybe not quite what I was in the mood for, but still an interesting meditation on suburbia in the late 1980s, life and parenthood after divorce, autonomy vs. interdependence, and aging in America. Can't really complain that there's no plot here, as this is essentially a road novel with a twist: Our hero, Frank Bascombe, travels (by way of his girlfriend's beach house at the Jersey Shore) to Connecticut to pick up the aforementioned teenage son Paul, and from there to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame in Worcester, Mass., and Cooperstown, NY. The pacing is fairly languorous itself, and much of the book seems a bit dated, but Frank is indeed a likeable, interesting character ... which was what moved me to see the novel through to the end. (I wish I could say the same for his irritating son, or his ladyfriend Sally, who I Just Didn't Get.) Well-written, provocative in places ... but not one I'll return to again, I don't expect.

#37 - The Shadow Year

The Shadow Year, by Jeffrey Ford (New York: William Morrow, 2008) is an ordinary book, set in an ordinary time. What makes it almost magical, though, is Ford's ability to capture that place and time absolutely perfectly.

Jacket blurb: "In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the 1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home, where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines representing family and neighbors. And so the time passes with a not-always reassuring sameness -- until the night a prowler is reported stalking the neighborhood.

"Appointing themselves ad hoc investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police -- while their little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices, inhabits alternate personas ... and unbeknownst to her older siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games: disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement."

Opening line: "It began in the last days of August, when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn."

My take: It's hard for me to be objective about this one, but not for the usual reasons. No, this time it's because Ford has captured perfectly the unremarkable, minute details of a middle-class Long Island neighborhood from the 1960s or '70s. This is the South Shore of my childhood, complete with Nair bombs and middle-schoolers dressed as bums on Hallowe'en, elderly Italian widowers with fig trees in their yards, Bazooka gum for a nickel, and spooky neighborhood rumors of bad guys in white cars. For the uninitiated, The Shadow Year reminded me of Stand By Me: there's a somewhat scary frame story, but this is first and foremost a story about growing up in a time and place that doesn't really exist any more. From the narrator's description of his first day of fifth grade at the neighborhood elementary school (dubbed, in distinctly un-P.C. fashion, "the Retard Factory" by the narrator and his brother), I could practically feel and smell the everyday details of his world:

"School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother had made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he'd outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were as stiff as concrete and, after months of my wearing nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of work."

Likewise, Jim's advice to Mary before she heads out for her first Hallowe'en night without the parents could have come from my own oh-so-wise teenaged next-door neighbor:

"'The idea ... is to get as much candy as possible. You want candy, wrapped candy. If you get a candy bar, that's the best -- a Hershey bar or a Milky Way. Mary Janes are okay if you don't mind losing a few fillings, little boxes of Good & plenty, Dots, Chocolate Babies, packs of gum, all good. Then you've got your cheapskate single-wrapped candy -- root-beer barrels, butterscotches, licorice drops -- not bad, usually given out by people who are broke, but what can they do? They're trying.

"'You don't eat anything that's not wrapped, except for Mr. Barzita's figs. Some people drop an apple in your bag. You can't eat it, but you can throw it at someone, so that's okay. Once in a while, someone will bake stuff to give out. Don't eat it -- you don't know what they put in it. It could be the best-looking cupcake you ever saw, with chocolate icing and a candy corn on top, but who knows, they might have crapped in the batter. I've seen where people will throw a penny in your sack. Hey, a penny's a penny.

"'You always stay where we can see you. If someone invites you into their house, don't go. when we tell you to run, run, 'cause kids could be coming to throw eggs at us. If you hear someoen should 'Nair bomb,' run like hell.'"

Oh, yeah; the plot behind it all. Solid enough, if none too exciting: a prowler, a sinister guy lurking around the neighborhood, a vanished classmate. Ultimately, though, we don't get most of the gory details; the story is but a backdrop for a gorgeous, subtly rendered portrait of scenes from a childhood. I was sad to see it end.