Gregory Maguire

Matchless, A Christmas Story

(William Morrow; US: Oct 2009)

 Amazon

One of the great times in my life was the ten years during which I read to my daughter Julia every night before her bedtime. (My wife enjoyed the same with our daughter Alice.) Along with many other picture books, fairy tales, poetry collections, even The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book (one was enough for me), we made our way through all the Frank L. Baum Oz books. Wildly uneven, each Oz tale had its own treasures, and we didn’t think even one of them a total dud.

Gregory Maguire, of course, is the new standard bearer for the Oz kingdom, with his ongoing series of “Wicked” novels. (Here’s my PopMatters review of the latest in the series: A Lion Among Men.) 

Maquire has made a career retelling, or, more accurately, re-imagining great stories, such as his novel-length versions of Snow White and Cinderella. He can also concoct his own strange brews, as he did with the scintillating Lost.

Now he’s written Matchless, A Christmas Story, a brief “reillumination”, as he calls it, of “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen. The bleak story of the poor little Match Girl who imagines she sees her dead grandmother as she freezes to death is left largely intact (though it’s her mother she sees here), but is framed by the story of Frederick, a poor little boy who also comes close to dying from the elements, but is saved by the Match Girl’s guiding spirit. He goes on to live a somewhat improved existence when his mother marries the Little Match Girl’s father and their fortunes improve.

Matchless is a clever rescue of the Andersen story, bookending its sadness with a more hopeful tale, and, by changing the time frame from New Year’s Eve to Christmas Eve, making it much more appropriate for young children.

With many somewhat clumsy but effective illustrations by the author himself (Maguire’s usual illustrator, Douglas Smith, being perhaps too dark for the purpose), Matchless was written to be read aloud and is the perfect length for a single bedtime reading.

I’ll keep my copy and look forward to reading it to Julia’s children someday.

—Christopher Guerin

Andrew Davidson

The Gargoyle

(Doubleday)

 Amazon

The Gargoyle is a brutal story about a man terribly disfigured in a car crash, burned to an almost unrecognizable crisp following an alcohol and cocaine binge. Incongruously, it’s also about timeless love.

The nameless narrator may have been burned beyond recognition, but Maryanne Engel knows him. They’ve never met before, at least that he can remember, but she finds him in his recovery room and helps nurse him back to health through endless skin grafting, morphine doses, and physical therapy.

Maryanne is many things—an artist, a sculptor, a storyteller, a fantastic cook, and a tattooed schizophrenic. As Maryanne helps the narrator overcome his inclinations toward suicide and substance abuse, she gradually fills him in on their past romances. Davidson’s story mixes violence in the present with destruction in the past, conveying the intense connection that Maryanne feels about the man she perceives as her soulmate.

At times jarring, at times hopeless, at times saturated with a sense of inevitability, Maryanne’s stories are captivating and the narrator finds himself thoroughly dependent on her. Until, inevitably, the tables are turned and the narrator finds he must take care of Maryanne, trying everything he can think of to pull her out of her own spiral toward self-destruction. Davidson’s debut novel is a riveting page-turner. I’m hoping he’s hard at work on something equally fascinating.

—Lara Killian

Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein

Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism

(Seal Press)

 Amazon

Authors Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein document and reveal American women across the continent in Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism, while traveling the literal and metaphorical road. With a manifest certainty, these life-long friends hit the road in search of “what do other 20-something women care about? Have they heard of this nebulous idea of ‘feminism’ and do they relate to it?” As recent college grads, Nona and Emma decide to take to take this trip to hear women’s different stories about feminism in America, using their talents as writers and photographers.

There is a trio of plots being told in this unassuming book. The cover and size of the book is similar to that of a photo album, but it’s filled with more than just pictures and memories. The book starts with an ominous dedication, “For two kick-ass feminists who left this world too early”: Emma Bee Bernstein, one of the authors of Girldrive, and Ellen Willis, Nona’s mother.  This information lends a bittersweet poignancy to certain transitional passages.

As Nona and Emma travel the United States, they can’t help but feel “entrenched in a cinematic and literary idea of road tripping.” This nostalgic theme runs through the book, making it at times read like a travelogue, in the cleverest way. Like any well told road trip, this tale stirs wanderlust in the reader.  They actually travel sea to shining sea.

However, above all, this is a book about feminism. As Nona and Emma travel through the States, they interview young women about perspectives on being a woman in modern America. While the authors are strident feminist and embrace the word and it’s history, many of their subjects don’t subscribe to the term, ignore it, or protest against it. Yet, all of these women have very strong opinions about being empowered females.

The tales of these women accompanied by stirring photographs offers a decidedly feminine perspective in Girldrive. Nona and Emma manage to exhibit the feminine perspective on the American countryside, as well as social and racial issues, with a sense of humor.

—Katharine Wray

Last week, Randall Stross wrote an article in the New York Times called “Will Books Be Napsterized?”. Stross reports as more readers opt for e-books over print or audio versions, the usual slew of piracy web sites that traffics in free music downloads is making it possible to download e-books for free. In other words: more grim news for the already beaten-down publishing industry. Book sales have been plummeting for the past two years anyway; the article reports a 13% decrease in 2008 and a 15.5% decrease in July 2009. Of course sales were down in every industry in 2009, but everyone knows that the book industry has troubles of its own.

The business model has never been particularly cost effective, with publishers footing the bill for printing, shipping copies off to booksellers and hoping for the best. E-books are certainly a more viable model in terms of overhead costs, but if the piracy of e-books takes off, the publishing industry is in big trouble. And of course, that’s not really an “if”. The piracy of e-books will take off, and it’s inevitable that books are headed down the path of CDS: towards the graveyard.

—Rachel Balik

Don DeLillo

White Noise

(Penguin)

 Amazon

“Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before’.”
—White Noise, Don De Lillo

An incident occurred in a grocery store aisle last Sunday afternoon that brought to mind Don De Lillo’s 1985 postmodern novel White Noise.

That’s how my brain is hard wired: everything gets filtered through a literary perspective. The ongoing contamination of beef in the US meat packing industry that was recently uncovered in the New York Times, for example, brings to my mind a discussion of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle that exposed those same filthy conditions in Chicago’s stockyards and led to the creation of safety standards that we are, apparently, not adhering to 103 years later. And if you tell me that you got a GPS microchip locator implant for your pooch, I’m going to sit you down for a short lecture on dystopian novels like Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. You say you’re taking a trip to beautiful coastal Monterey, California? Well, have a seat and let me tell you all about John Steinbeck and if you already know about Steinbeck then let’s talk about all the great Steinbeck-related spots you can visit on your retreat to make it a literary delight.

I would bore my friends to death, if I had any.

So I’m at the Albertson’s grocery store on Flamingo Road and Haualapia (Who-All-Uh-Pie) Road in Las Vegas. I’ve gone down the entire list she gave me when I left the house and everything is in the cart: dinner for two nights, salad, milk, garbage bags, that El Salvadoran beer that I like, a bag of Starbucks Caffe Verona coffee beans, green onions, a couple votive candles, and…shit, I didn’t get the dishwasher detergent.

I steer the cart down the kitchen supplies aisle: Playtex rubber gloves, 409 cleaning spray, Oh-Boy kitchen sponges, Windex, Windex Crystal Rain, Windex Multi-Surface Vinegar, Windex Multi-Surface Grease Cutter, Windex Outdoor Multi-Surface Cleaner.

Finally, the dishwasher detergent section; to the left of me, in the liquid dishwashing soap section (I’m buying those hardened rabbit pellet things you drop into the soap drawer), two women, obviously acquainted with each other, are engrossed in conversation. There is nothing memorable to pass on about their physical appearance because I was too engaged trying to find the cheapest Cascade or generic Cascade knock-off I could spot on the shelf to even pay them so much as a glance.

“—so, once again, I was washing my dishes at my usual time, five o’clock,” one of the ladies says, “and the sensation overwhelms me once more: I want to bake an apple pie like nobody’s business, a fresh, hot apple pie with vanilla ice cream melting all over it. I can literally smell it.”

Sounds like an olfactory hallucination, I’m thinking.

“Five nights in a row!” she continues. “Straight up, five o’clock, when I go to wash the dishes I’m struck with an overwhelming desire to bake an apple pie. And then I finally figured out what it was.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her sweep a 13-ounce bottle of dishwashing detergent off the shelf.

“This stuff!” she proclaimed. “Jergen’s Fresh Green Apple. It is so aromatic, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, it tricked my senses into thinking I wanted apple pie.”

I dropped the bag of Cascade into the cart and continued up the aisle, wondering if I had just been duped into watching a commercial product pitch disguised as live theater. You never know in this postmodern world.

—Rodger Jacobs

Stephen Dodson & Robert Vanderplank

Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World

(Perigee)

 Amazon

It has been an irrepressible activity since the dawn of man: to heap insults on enemies, rivals, neighbors, and even friends.

Despite the ubiquitousness of expressions of disgust and frustration, just because one may be well versed in Anglo-Saxon cursing doesn’t mean you’ll be ready to call out a Russian or an Italian while traveling through this increasingly multicultural world. Not only do authors Dodson and Vanderplank want to give you the tools you’ll need to understand that Swede when he invokes the devil, but also the understanding of where many colloquial put-downs come from.

Dodson, creator of the LanguageHat.com blog, and Vanderplank have gathered an admirable representation of the wide variety of Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World. In his introduction, Vanderplank notes that:

For me, insults and curses are the “dark” side of manners and customs and all the more interesting for that, as they may inform us about what lies beneath the social codes, what verbal games men and women play with each other.

The quest to bring obscure insults to English-readers starts in the ancient world, where many Roman insults have to do with sex, and Greek ones with drunkenness. Some of the insults culled from modern vocabularies may be quite familiar; for example readers in the US may have heard someone on the playground tell someone else they’ve been ‘beaten with the ugly stick.’ The Brits have many ways to refer to someone as an idiot, too many to list in this collection, but a favorite Britist insult of mine is ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ to describe a woman who uses clothes and makeup to try to hide her age.

In my experience, calling someone a mama’s boy is usually an insult meaning that he has been coddled and isn’t able to take care of himself. In Italy, sons are traditionally quite close to their mothers and this insult bears no weight—so instead they have figlio di papá, meaning daddy’s boy, implying that the person has left his father behind as he moves up in the world. ‘Scum of soya paste’ wouldn’t have meant much when thrown around at my elementary school, but in Japan misokakku is a popular children’s curse to describe someone annoying.

Translating the ‘Untranslatable’ presents a challenge even for Vanderplank, the Directory of the Oxford University Language Center, so the contextual notes are key to making this guide worth flipping through. Whether you’re looking for an unusual way to taunt your older siblings, or you’re something of an armchair linguist, you’ll find something unique and possibly useful within the pages of Uglier.

—Lara Killian