by ELG Gray

Gilead

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 8/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
Overall: 3 stars

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson is the warmest-and-fuzziest book I have read thus far in my great book quest. I would not go so far as to say it is Happy, but it is much more heart warming than the previous 8 I have read. The biggest difference is that the narrator of the book is a content, and his contentment sets the tone for the story.

The narrator is a 76-year-old man named John Ames, writing to his 6 year-old son about all the things Ames would like to be able to tell him as an adult, but can’t because of the very great age gap between them. Whilst there is something bittersweet in such an undertaking, Ames is so happy to have a son and a family at all that I was much more impressed with the warmth and love of the endeavor than the morbidity of it.

For all its warmth (perhaps because of it), Gilead is really the ramblings of an old man. It’s a journal. There are no chapters. The style and tone adds charm, but also makes it occasionally tedious. Especially given that the man is a Congregationalist Reverend (whose father and grandfather were also Reverends), prone to philosophical debates and conjectures. Refreshingly he isn’t one to proselytize, but it can get a bit heavy. Several times I had to stop myself from skim reading. Prepare yourself for the inevitable conflict about predestination. He doesn’t like it, either.

So the book is about religion, and love, and parenthood. It is about loss and friendship and family. It tells a story (or set of stories) about a small-town in the Midwest and its history. Gilead, by the way, is the name of the fictional Iowa town. Set between 1880 and 1957, it touches on the events of both World Wars, and recounts a great deal about its Civil War legacy and abolitionist heritage. It’s a nice book, and if nothing else a very interesting chronicle of a life that lived to see huge technical and social change. Plus, you cannot help but to like Reverend Ames, who is clearly a very, very nice man.

What makes it award-winning, I suspect, is that it tackles a really interesting concept: what a parent wants to teach a child. Knowing you are not going to be present for most of your child’s life – what do you say? Are you selfish? Philosophical? Instructional? Supportive? Robinson, I think, does a lovely job of exploring all of the above.

It’s just that Gilead just didn’t wow me. I got through the book pretty quickly, but mostly because I had 6 hours of train-time over the last several days. I liked reading it, but it didn’t really compel me to keep going. I didn’t Need to know. Throughout, the book inspired me, and touched me, but didn’t – quite – move me.

11.09.13

by ELG Gray

The Great Gatsby

Page turner: 7/10
Heart tugger: 8/10
Thought provoker: 8/10
Overall: 4 stars

I really, really liked The Great Gatsby.

Also: Liking it was a pleasant surprise.

I – like most other teenagers in America- read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald in high school, and I remember feeling broadly ambivalent about it. But I think at the time I was looking for a happy ending, and my frustration and disappointment in the characters in the book meant my teenage self equated that with not liking the book. Whereas perhaps I should have realized that a book that could Make me feel disappointed might actually have something going for it. And actually, reading it now a decade and a half later (ish), I would quite happily read it again.

The thing is that this book is stunning. The language is descriptive, evocative, and meaningful without being overly descriptive. Which is particularly impressive given the opulence of the setting. After all, it takes place amid the extremely privileged crowds of New York and Long Island in 1922. Readers float along with the narrator, Nick Carraway, as he at first interprets his roaring life amongst the likes of the great Jay Gatsby as, potentially, the American Dream.

“There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam.”

I liken my experience of this book to that of my recollection of dreams: occasionally vivid but often overwhelming and blurry. And when I wake up I have an intense feeling of some emotion, without being quite sure how I got it. Yes, reading Gatsby is like having a dream, waking up, going back to sleep, and then having a bit of a nightmare.

I love Nick’s restraint, even as the dream-turns-nightmare. In the telling of events he states truth more often than his interpretation of it, so that when he does express his disapproval you feel it (and a warmness for him) all the more. But the way he paints a picture of the room as he enters it really what is outstanding – I don’t think I can now ever forget the white statuesque stances of Daisy and Miss Baker when he first visits them.

The Great Gatsby is a beautiful book. It is well worth overcoming your teenage impressions and giving it a re-read, and I can see why it is so high up the Modern Library’s list (though I am not-yet sure about being 2nd). I apologize to my 10th (11th?) grade English teacher. I am also horrified I can’t remember which year I read it. I might even open it again soon – at which point I reserve the right to give it 5 stars.

11.05.13

by ELG Gray

Olive Kitteridge

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
**Well crafted: 10/10**
Overall: 4 stars

**Making a special appearance for this book, is the ‘well crafted’ rating. When I originally decided on the different parts of the rating system I took the assumption that all of these books would be at least moderately well written and conceived. And a fifth means of rating a book seemed like a lot. But this book is so very much in a league of its own, I have temporarily introduced the metric so that everyone knows how much it excels. (The temporary rating is very clever colleague’s idea. Thank you.)**

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. It really is the ‘American’ type of book that the Pulitzer Prize is looking for. Set in a small town on the coast of Maine in the years post 9/11, it resonates with all that is small-town Americana. But I think (hope) it would make it all the more appealing for an international audience as well.

Olive Kitteridge is the title and the central character of this story of the quietly intertwining lives of a town’s inhabitants. She is irritable, brooding, loving, passionate, and silent. She is the lynch pin of the book, tying together the narration as each chapter shifts to focus on the stories of other people’s lives. The execution is flawless. The story is tight – characters are never forgotten, or left hanging, or not somehow contributing to the progression of the novel. Whereas I often think of all of these pieces of fiction as books or stories, Strout has written a stunning novel.

A quick example: one of the characters describes her father having ‘sole custody’ of her. And for years she thought it was spelled with a u.

To the point. Pointed. But not labored or cocky.

There is little else I can say about this fantastic book. Read it. It is a book about the vastness of love, and anger, and death. Olive certainly feels these intensely. The book has a quietness about it – but the characters’ lives are not at all plodding or quaint. So it is a suppose about ‘quiet lives’ but makes the point that no life is quiet.

I do warn you of one thing: I read this a few years ago and remember not liking it all that much. I wasn’t hugely enthused about re-reading it. My turn-around, I hope, speaks in favor of the book. That said, for me it has very much been a book that displays is greatness through its prose and its craft. Don’t read it just to ‘see what happens next’. Read every word and let it sink in.

10.30.13

by ELG Gray

His Family

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 5/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

His Family, by Ernest Poole, was published in 1918 and was the first book to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I had never heard of it, and honestly I didn’t know what to expect, but I was intrigued to see what that first book, from that era of American history, was going to be about. So, in the age old tradition of saying cliches are bad but then doing precisely what they say – I judged the book by its cover.

My copy of His Family is a paperback, and the cover is mostly black and glossy. It is nearly perfectly square and unusually large at probably 7 by 7 inches. It’s not that thick (277 pages) and the font is a pretty good size. On the cover, the title is in white and there is a white rectangle cut-out that shows a sketchy drawing of a man (60ish-years-old) sitting at a dining table with a family, colored in with pastels. To my mind, all of this confirmed my prejudgment to think the book might be a bit antiquated, but looked quite sweet. Maybe a bit story-book-ish? Maybe just plain and unadorned.

The first few chapters only furthered my modern-prejudiced view. The book starts off quietly. The world it depicts is small: a 60ish year old man named Roger Gale (as depicted on the cover) is in fact a widower living in Manhattan, with 3 grown daughters and 4 grandchildren by the eldest. The younger two (aged 27 and 30 or so) are unmarried. And it takes place over a few years, around about 1913-1915. The writing is straightforward, and whilst I wasn’t particularly sucked into their lives I thought it was pleasant, even if I was a bit frustrated by Roger’s self-admitted distance from his bustling family of a mother, a debutante, and a teacher. I thought it might be an apt portrait of family life at that time. And it is. But I wrongfully misjudged what that should mean.

As the novel progresses, it deepens. Not nice (though not horrible) things happen to the family. And it very much takes on a Goldilocks and the Three Bears feel: where ‘Too big’, ‘Too small’, and ‘Just right’ are loosely equated to the three daughters being, ‘Too old-fashioned’, ‘Too fast and flippant’, and ‘forward thinking but respectful’. The parallels between their personal lives and the wider changes and growth of society is heavy handed, but intelligent and interesting.

The social commentary on the place of motherhood in women’s lives is blatantly the major theme. Nearly a century after the book was published the idea of the ‘modern mother’ – the balancing act that the author discusses – remains entirely relevant, if initially surprising. There is also a wider reflection on war and humanity and the book is a window into the mindset of Americans as it was feeling the pains of the First World War in Europe, but before the United States entered the conflict.

The book, also, has the surprisingly endearing feature of having the final two words of the book be, ‘…his family’. Which is a nice touch. Particularly if you read the first part of the sentence; but I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.

On reflection, the cover makes the book out to be more old-fashioned and simple than it is, though it definitely is not a book of great subtlety. I would not put it down as a forgotten classic because it can read what I think some might call ‘Dickens extra-light’. But I enjoyed it, and feel I have learned a lesson in so doing. I would recommend it to anyone who wonders what it might have been like to be born a hundred years earlier.

10.23.13

by ELG Gray

Midnight’s Children

Page turner: 2/10
Heart tugger: 4/10
Thought provoker: 8/10
Overall: 2 stars

My copy of Midnight’s Children is 647 pages long. I know this, not because I finished reading the book only a few minutes ago, but because I have checked how many pages I have to go probably about 447 times (I didn’t check the first 100 – that’d be rude, and I could do the math quite easily the last 100). This book was long. And it was a chore.

Now before I rant overly much about the hard-slog-reading-that-is-the-first-two-thirds-of-this-book I would like to conduct a bit of a thought experiment that I learned whilst reading Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’. I think (hope?) Salman Rushdie would approve. The true experiment isn’t exactly possible, but hopefully you’ll get the idea. I am going to describe this book in 6 words. First, three positive words. Then, three negative words. Then I’ll do it the other way ’round. Using the same six words. Bear with.

Positive: magical, intelligent, organic
Negative: dense, meandering, self-important

Now, think for a second about what impression this leads you with. Now try to forget the words.

Ok.

Negative: dense, meandering, self-important
Positive: magical, intelligent, organic

Think again about what impression this description leaves you with.

In his book, Kahneman is using a similar experiment show how humans are effected by first impressions. It is meant to do a great deal more than describe novels, but hopefully I can use the device to demonstrate how I feel about this book, resulting in a confusing mix of ambiguity and frustration. Which, to be fair, is probably what Rushdie was going for.

In the positive-first scenario I go away thinking that Midnight’s Children is a book of magical realism, a splendidly original and creative piece of fiction that brilliantly characterizes the birth and trials of India as a nation, that happens to be a bit self-indulgent and long-winded. And, upon reading this description, I don’t disagree. The way in which Rushdie manages to tie the life of Saleem (the protagonist) inextricably from that of his country – from the moment of his birth through his first 31 years – is intellectually fascinating. And worthy of a place in the top 100 books of the 20th century. (It come’s 90th)

In the negative-first scenario I get the impression that a windy-but-intelligent author has a good idea, but it. He’s intentionally perverse. And a bit mad. My gosh does he use a lot of ellipses … It does … I think … get to be a bit much. And I know I am occasionally one to get carried away with punctuation and capitalization. And why the need to recap so often through the book? And isn’t the part in the jungle just a bit much? And it astounds me how a book can manage to be Both meandering AND dense. That is a literary feat fit only for as much sarcasm as I can muster. And, as I pause to re-read this description I also agree with myself. I didn’t like the book. There are lots of others that I think I would give awards and plaudits to, instead.

I both liked and didn’t like this book. My ratings err on the ‘didn’t like’ side as a word of caution. It took me nearly three weeks (including two inter-continental flights!) to read this book. It would normally take me days. But I do feel good for (finally!!) having read it.

The front cover of my copy has a quote by the Sunday Times that describes Midnight’s Children as ‘vital’. Whilst my personal taste would disagree with the connotation of necessity, I very much agree with the idea of this book having vitality. (If you can make it through the first quarter of the book – during which the main character and narrator hasn’t even told of his own birth.) There is humanity in this book. And it is an utterly original idea.

Finally, this book features on both the Modern Library and Man Booker prize lists. Which means, it was recognized in its day and retrospectively – which is impressive. And I can understand that it is of historical significance, and for the ‘positive scenario’ described above. I can understand, but not personally Agree with it purely because I found it to be quite so unreadable. It’s a book I am proud to have read, but wouldn’t particularly advise you to read!