Lionel Sampson reads to his brother from the flight magazine. "'The Seeing Eye dog was invented by a blind American.'"
Buster laughs. "Really. Invented. Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs."
Julia's sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother's house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they've had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster's wife's minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's, because now that Julia's getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it's *not* clean, you do have to tidy up a little before you get to work in Julia's kitchen, and Jewelle would just rather not.
Lionel closes the magazine and the homely flight attendant brings them water. (Remember when they were pretty? Lionel says. Remember when Pop took us to Denmark, Buster says, and they all wore white stockings and white miniskirts?) The flight attendant lays linen napkins in their laps. Lionel likes first class so much that even when a client doesn't pay for it, he pays for the upgrade himself, and he's paid for Buster's upgrade, too. Lionel spends more on travel than he does on rent. His wife thinks he's crazy. Patsine grew up riding the bumper of dusty Martinique buses and as far as she's concerned, even now, your own seat and no chickens is all that anyone needs.
Thanksgiving is a good time for "nostalgia reading." I seem to want to read--mainly--things that I've read before. So I've spent the first part of the week with "The Friend." And I will likely go from that to Richard Yates's "A Good School," though I know everything that happens, and I've known for years. It seems like a good time to refuse to try very hard to follow a brand-new plot. (And a good time to pick up something that you know--in advance--will be excellent, start to finish.)
And in that spirit, here's an old favorite: "Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous," by Amy Bloom. This writer taught me most of what I know about writing and reading--when I was an undergrad--so I'm biased.
Two brothers are returning to their mother's home for Thanksgiving. She's not biologically related to at least one of them. Years ago, the pseudo-mom slept with the young man she wasn't related to. It was a moment of weakness, something that happened right after a devastating funeral. Throughout most of her career, Bloom has thought about this (imagined) act, and about its consequences, for an entire (imagined) family.
Traveling home for Thanksgiving means tension, as well as levity. It means joking about awkward wording in a magazine, and leering at certain flight attendants. It means choosing words carefully: "I'm not saying it's dirty" in fact means "I'm saying it's dirty." Thanksgiving is about bending over backwards to make unnecessary travel plans, just to avoid some "iPads and laptops and gallon containers of creamed spinach."
Content dictates form. Bloom uses some long, rambling sentences to capture a sense of mild chaos, life as an ocean wave. (In fact, this story will end with an old Jewish joke about the ocean: A mother loses her son to a wave. He gets swept up, and he disappears, along with his hat. The mother asks God: Please, please, can't you do something? I will be forever grateful. I'll not ask for anything again. I'll be your servant. And God delivers. The child returns, and the mother is overwhelmed with gratitude, and then she pauses to look up to the heavens, and to say: "Excuse me? He had a hat.")
"IPods and laptops and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's...." The nervousness of the event is captured in the propulsive, ranting rhythm of the sentence. And small gestures conceal great depths of meaning. Jewelle's cooking at home might just be a matter of convenience, but it might also be a chess-move in a power struggle, a way for a younger generation to "stand up," quietly, to an older generation.
The last thing I love about this opening is that it reminds me a little bit of "The Odyssey." We don't think of car trips, in modern America, as epic events. We don't think of triremes and sharpened spears. But a writer can make us look at mundane things in a new way, and that's what Bloom does here. There is so much emotion in this juggling of cars and Tupperware and flight schedules. Something so minor calls up memories of the past: With wonder, one character can remember traveling via "dusty Martinique buses" with bossy, obtrusive chickens. Travel dredges up thoughts of a dead father, and thoughts of sex, and thoughts of the big, miraculous ways in which the world can change, and change so quickly. All of that is there in this short account of the start of Thanksgiving weekend.
Well, that's my recommended reading for today. Available at Amazon, and possibly at your library. (Mine is open on Thanksgiving Friday! God bless them.) Enjoy....
Buster laughs. "Really. Invented. Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs."
Julia's sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother's house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they've had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster's wife's minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's, because now that Julia's getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it's *not* clean, you do have to tidy up a little before you get to work in Julia's kitchen, and Jewelle would just rather not.
Lionel closes the magazine and the homely flight attendant brings them water. (Remember when they were pretty? Lionel says. Remember when Pop took us to Denmark, Buster says, and they all wore white stockings and white miniskirts?) The flight attendant lays linen napkins in their laps. Lionel likes first class so much that even when a client doesn't pay for it, he pays for the upgrade himself, and he's paid for Buster's upgrade, too. Lionel spends more on travel than he does on rent. His wife thinks he's crazy. Patsine grew up riding the bumper of dusty Martinique buses and as far as she's concerned, even now, your own seat and no chickens is all that anyone needs.
Thanksgiving is a good time for "nostalgia reading." I seem to want to read--mainly--things that I've read before. So I've spent the first part of the week with "The Friend." And I will likely go from that to Richard Yates's "A Good School," though I know everything that happens, and I've known for years. It seems like a good time to refuse to try very hard to follow a brand-new plot. (And a good time to pick up something that you know--in advance--will be excellent, start to finish.)
And in that spirit, here's an old favorite: "Fort Useless and Fort Ridiculous," by Amy Bloom. This writer taught me most of what I know about writing and reading--when I was an undergrad--so I'm biased.
Two brothers are returning to their mother's home for Thanksgiving. She's not biologically related to at least one of them. Years ago, the pseudo-mom slept with the young man she wasn't related to. It was a moment of weakness, something that happened right after a devastating funeral. Throughout most of her career, Bloom has thought about this (imagined) act, and about its consequences, for an entire (imagined) family.
Traveling home for Thanksgiving means tension, as well as levity. It means joking about awkward wording in a magazine, and leering at certain flight attendants. It means choosing words carefully: "I'm not saying it's dirty" in fact means "I'm saying it's dirty." Thanksgiving is about bending over backwards to make unnecessary travel plans, just to avoid some "iPads and laptops and gallon containers of creamed spinach."
Content dictates form. Bloom uses some long, rambling sentences to capture a sense of mild chaos, life as an ocean wave. (In fact, this story will end with an old Jewish joke about the ocean: A mother loses her son to a wave. He gets swept up, and he disappears, along with his hat. The mother asks God: Please, please, can't you do something? I will be forever grateful. I'll not ask for anything again. I'll be your servant. And God delivers. The child returns, and the mother is overwhelmed with gratitude, and then she pauses to look up to the heavens, and to say: "Excuse me? He had a hat.")
"IPods and laptops and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's...." The nervousness of the event is captured in the propulsive, ranting rhythm of the sentence. And small gestures conceal great depths of meaning. Jewelle's cooking at home might just be a matter of convenience, but it might also be a chess-move in a power struggle, a way for a younger generation to "stand up," quietly, to an older generation.
The last thing I love about this opening is that it reminds me a little bit of "The Odyssey." We don't think of car trips, in modern America, as epic events. We don't think of triremes and sharpened spears. But a writer can make us look at mundane things in a new way, and that's what Bloom does here. There is so much emotion in this juggling of cars and Tupperware and flight schedules. Something so minor calls up memories of the past: With wonder, one character can remember traveling via "dusty Martinique buses" with bossy, obtrusive chickens. Travel dredges up thoughts of a dead father, and thoughts of sex, and thoughts of the big, miraculous ways in which the world can change, and change so quickly. All of that is there in this short account of the start of Thanksgiving weekend.
Well, that's my recommended reading for today. Available at Amazon, and possibly at your library. (Mine is open on Thanksgiving Friday! God bless them.) Enjoy....
Comments
Post a Comment