I used to be able to read (really) light fiction. I loved a variety of mysteries, and often they had a supernatural element. I suppose I like those because you often have strong female characters in them. Interesting that. I wonder (as an aside) if marginal social groups like magic circles and social warrior societies attract writers for the same reasons that women were attracted to the early Christian church?

Back to the point…the deal is I don’t seem to be able to do light fiction these days. I recently bought a book (that will not be named) and haven’t been able to get past the first 10 pages. And it’s not really the writing. It’s the thinking (or lack thereof). There’s no precision, no real investment in the power of language, no care taken to address the mind of the reader. In fact the only thing really addressed is that wonderful feeling of being an insider – usually known as self-righteousness. I mentioned this to someone and got called a book snob.

I mean I find that kind of thing in a book (I’m a brilliant character/writer and I am going to dispense some real truth in these pages purporting to be a fun read.) painful. Don’t you?

I wonder if my aversion will pass? Or if I should even wish it to pass?

I used to be a big mystery fan, but read very little fiction these days. I had, and still have, a very particular taste in this kind of novel: strong female protagonists. Don’t really care if they kick ass through magic or fists but I do want them to be ethical, smart, fierce and independent. Lucky for me I was reading Ricki Tannen’s book and through that heard of Blanche White; I ordered a copy of one of the Blanche novels through my library and picked it up the morning of the day the flu sucked out my life-force and flushed it. Unlucky for me there are only four “Blanche” books and I just finished Blanche Cleans Up which only leaves three to go.

Blanche is the best kind of kick-ass woman I know. She’s fiercely independent but capable of loving; she’s nosy but ethical; she can tell the difference between justice and revenge; she’s realistic about how rotten-god-damned-awful “true believers” of any sort can be. I’m in love.

So much so that I asked my bookseller to find copies of all four so I can get my Blanche-hour when I want or need it.

Blanche is a maid/housekeeper/cook/chatelaine of the major-general type. The added bonus for me is the racial content. Blanche is black; her employers are white. It was really interesting to me to see the invisibility laws in action through the eyes of the author of the Blanche novels. I recognized many of them since the same “laws” work with Indian-white relations. Learning how to live with contempt pointed at you is a major pain-in-the-ass, but if it can be done without exploding or imploding, it can create the Blanches of the world. I have to say one of the reasons I like Blanche so much is that I am still struggling with the 3rd option (that is living with it instead of imploding or exploding). I really do appreciate the road map to success given to me via Blanche.

And here’s the real kicker – Blanche is a liberal, but one with common sense. She’s pro love and not anti-gay, pro choice not anti-woman, pro justice and not anti-white (or anyone in particular). Her one apparently absolute requirement is that people act with compassion and the recognition that we aren’t just individuals, but that we are also members of a family and of a society and should act with that in mind—and for women, that they aren’t just members of a family or of a society, but that they are individuals too. Her other “requirement” is that people act. Move through the world and see, sure. But also act.

There are things that can’t be changed but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something against it. There’s a bit in the novel where Blanche describes finding the kiddy-porn stash of a previous client. Now she knows she can’t do much against the guy (racial/class politics being what they realistically are), so instead she pours ammonia on his pictures and walks out on the job. Then she lets it go and moves on to the next job. Sometimes the people-world sucks and it makes it so that public justice is almost impossible to obtain, but to stay sane, to stay human (the way Blanche would describe it) means you have to take a stand for justice and refuse revenge. The “ammonia stand”, I now think of it.

Anyway, love, love, love Blanche.

Words, first.

Words to me are like insects. Maybe ants are the best image. They bump along in lines, they work together, build things, tear things apart, move things. They are endlessly fascinating and are often beautiful in their social instinct but if you get too close, they can sometimes be quite horrific. Very, very, very un-human, that’s how I feel words. Words are kinesthetic. They bug me, sting me into action, scare me, fascinate me but always, they are little alien life forms that take up space, move around and have desires and needs. But for Lilian, at least based on this one novel, they are more like coloured sound, like little magical prayers, and she is the artist, the conductor and the rabbi.

Reading The River Midnight is like watching red and blue plinking stars cascading across a darkening horizon on a sweet smelling summer night. There’s that sound—plink, plink, plink—like crystal droplets kissing a tin roof—and simultaneously seeing the sound splash outward in dark yellow arcs. It’s a sensual book, one that you can almost taste. Too much? You think so? Read the book, then come make a comment. But really, it’s the way the words create people. Not characters in a book, but people. That’s why I said that about magical prayers. I think that’s why I dreamt of my grandmother Polly, and getting scolded in Yiddish. That’s the real power of the book. Not the story, but the people you get to know.

So, now the review that made me mad.

The reviewer complained that the author didn’t give enough historical detail about some important events in the story line. Pish. It’s the people that hold the heart of the book not the events. Or I should say, events are not things that occur to people, but events are the interactions of the people. The magical forces around them, the desires and virtues of the various individuals flow together in such a way—as if out of their contact, the events coalesce. It’s good if you have enough historical knowledge to know that the Miracle Cloak fire that killed two of the people in the book was based on the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911, but you don’t really need to know that to feel the horror of it in the story. You can see how even the worst of things in the human world can result ultimately in some small good. I mean I am not sure how you can remain a Jew and not know that about human history; how history can produce a beautiful bloom even from the desecration and terror we visit on each other.

Anyway, I loved the book even if I found it a little disturbing because of my own history. But whether I would recommend it would depend upon why you read books. If you read for plot, I wouldn’t suggest it. If you read to better understand people, then, yes, rush out a get a copy.

However, in this case I didn’t do any of that. I bought the book based on the recommendation of a friend. I ordered it from my local bookstore along with two or three others. When they came in, I went to pick them up but since I was in the middle of several bits of non-fiction, the novels went on the shelf for “later.”

Later finally came for Olive Kitteridge.

I am rarely so moved by fiction. I have not finished it yet. It has become one of those books that I savor, like tappenade on toast for breakfast. I will not allow myself to read more than a story a day. I cannot really.

When I read the story about the man who planned to kill himself, I could feel something in me twist with the ending. My mother was suicidal and self-obsessed and to be honest that rarely turns out well. There is no way to know what Kevin does once his time on the stage of the story is over, but for those moments in the sea with Patty, he got to see something, to really see the life force of another, something my mother never did manage. The fact that Strout was able to take what is plainly pitiful and turn it into something gloriously human is, for me, the essence of why she deserved that Pulitzer.

I know I will be thinking about that book for a long time. Apart from anything else there is the structure of it and how it works to provide a platform for the world Strout has created. The fact that she uses related small-stories to talk-around her titled character, never really presenting her full on (at least so far), that does something to me and to the tenor of the world.  I recognize that feeling from the way I respond to Indian stories and Indian culture; sometimes the best way to really see something is from the side or out of the corner of your eye.

It takes longer to get to know someone this way, but it also provides more depth-of-field and it is ever so much more respectful of the delicacy and power that is a life lived.

Then I read an entry called What’s the fuss about episodic fiction over at that wonderful site Tales from the Reading Room. I hadn’t thought about Olive Kitteridge as episodic fiction. The term does something added to my sense that this kind of story telling, by looking aslant, is more like what I know from the Rez. I don’t really know what that “something” is yet; I can feel it rooting around in my cerebral cellar, but I haven’t seen its snout poke up above the stairs yet. It will, and if I feel it worth speaking, I will post about it. Maybe once I finish the stories.