The Widower's Tale

The Widower's Tale
by Julia Glass
(4/5 stars)

A good litmus test for how compelling a book is is that when you put it down, you want to pick it back up again.  I put down "The Widower's Tale" on December 1, 2010 after muddling through the first 75 pages and then I didn't crack it open again until after the new year.  So it did in fact take me more than 40 days and 40 nights to finish reading this book.  Not exactly what you'd call a page-turner.

I think a lot of my problem in being able to plow through this book was I felt I'd already read it before--several times.  Much of it focuses on Percy Darling, a retired librarian in a wealthy Boston suburb called Matlock.  An academic from Massachusetts?  The late John Updike made a career with that formula.  The rest of it, though, reads less like Updike to me and more like the well-mannered sibling of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections."  Glass uses a lot of the same techniques as Franzen, spreading the narrative among multiple characters, though Glass focuses outside the Darling family as well.  The chapters usually have the same structure where they start at a point in the future from the previous chapter and then work back to dovetail where we left off before.  This of course isn't unique to Glass or Franzen, which is only part of my larger point that "The Widower's Tale" presents little that's new.

The narrative I mentioned starts with Percy Darling a 71-year-old retired librarian.  His elder daughter Clover is a neurotic divorcee, who gets a job with a local preschool that takes over the barn on Percy's farm where his beloved wife Poppy used to practice ballet.  There's also 20-year-old Robert, Percy's grandson who goes to Harvard and is studying to be a doctor like his mother Trudy, a world-famous oncologist.  Robert's friend Arturo is a rabid environmentalist, who along with Robert and some other ecowarriors has been pulling various pranks against the affluent people of Matlock and other wealthy suburbs in a probably futile attempt to change the world.

There's also Celestino, an illegal alien from Guatemala who does some gardening work for Percy, and Ira, a gay teacher at Clover's preschool.  Glass could have saved a good 150 pages by eliminating their narratives, because neither really does much for the book.  Celestino's tale of being virtually adopted and taken to America by a wealthy French family is somewhat interesting, but doesn't really go anywhere.  Ira was the stereotypical effeminate gay type straight out of central casting, which I found mildly insulting and wholly unnecessary.

The plot, such as it is, involves multiple threads of Percy falling in love with a woman named Sarah Straight (Straight and Darling?  Really?), who is some 20 years younger than him and develops breast cancer that's treated by Percy's daughter.  The breast cancer part really made me yawn.  I think by now there are about 2,000 movies on Lifetime devoted to breast cancer.  Not that I have anything against people with breast cancer, but it's clearly been done before.  She's tired and loses her hair?  Really?  I'd never heard of that before!  (That might have been true if this were 1957.)

I'm being overly sarcastic here considering I'm giving it four stars.  Glass is a capable enough writer and I think a good many people will find it interesting and entertaining.  Those who thought Franzen's "Corrections" was too dysfunctional and mean-spirited would find this far more warm and soothing.  My primary complaint is that I felt overall I'd seen everything in this book before.  So while it was interesting, it couldn't hold my attention, as indicated above.

It's also the kind of book where a lot of stuff happened, but I didn't feel like I picked up anything of value from it.  I certainly wouldn't call affluent Massachusetts families, a day laborer, and a gay teacher a microcosm of modern American society, at least not a complete one.  Overall the message seemed to be that things change and you roll with the punches.  Wow, I've never heard that before.

That is all.

Geek Love

Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn
(3/5 stars)

A "friend" reviewed this novel and as something of a freak myself I couldn't resist reading a novel about freaks. But I found I didn't like this nearly as much as I thought I would.

The best way to think about this story is that it's like a darker version of "The Addams Family." Ma and Pa work for a traveling circus and decide that it's too expensive to recruit freaks, so they'll breed them! Ma takes all sorts of drugs and such in order to create deformed babies. Some of them die, but four (or five) survive. They are Arturo, a boy with flippers instead of limbs; Ely and Iphy the conjoined twins; Chick the boy with strange psychic powers; and Olympia the hunchbacked albino dwarf who is our narrator. As in most family sagas the narrator is the most boring character with the least personality. Arturo the Aqua Boy is the big star of the family. Ely and Iphy are second with their singing and dancing. Even Chick finds a niche when Arturo starts a cult devoted to making people into deformed freaks. Olympia's only real role is to be Arturo's valet and main worshiper.

I guess despite being something of a freak myself I'm not so deluded to think that being a freak makes someone special or better than "normal" people. As the story goes on I really found it increasingly grotesque and disturbing instead of funny or interesting. Adding to this is the portion that takes place in the present where Olympia is dealing with her daughter and a mysterious woman who thinks like Arturo that deformity is the key to enlightenment.

Anyway, other people obviously thought this was better than I did. I was just a victim of overly high expectations the book couldn't deliver upon.

That is all.