Summer Reading part 3: My Sister’s Keeper August 6, 2009

OK, I lied. This is really a combo book review and movie review. It appeared that last night at the theater was book club night, as I and my fellow members were just six of a crowd comprised ENTIRELY of women. In a way, I’m glad about that. There’s something very special about seeing a tear-jerker in a room like that, especially if the movie is surprising and engaging and satisfying, as this one was. Even in our enlightened society, there’s something totally freeing about a gaggle of just girls, with no men in sight besides the teen-age ushers. Don’t ask me to explain it.

About half way through the viewing of the film “My Sister’s Keeper,” I realized that based on all the liberties the filmmakers took with Jodi Picoult’s story, they could have easily gone a step further and made the entire film center on the love story between leukemia patient and big sister Kate Fitzgerald and her fellow cancer patient/boyfriend Taylor Ambrose. And changed the name of the film altogether. This relationship was one of the things Picoult got right in the book, and it turned out to be the most affecting part of the movie.

And by the way, as pasty-faced cutie-pies go, my vote goes with Taylor Ambrose over Edward Cullen any day. See for yourself:

Maybe that’s because it seemed like the filmmakers took everything that was wrong with the book, and made the story into what I wanted it to be.

Earlier this summer, I was reading parts of Picoult’s novel out loud in the car to my husband during our trip South. My out loud readings were mostly the result of me having little outbursts over the author’s choices. I snorted at the “coincidence” of the court’s guardian at litem also happening to be the long lost love of Anna Fitzgerald’s attorney, Campbell Alexander, whom Anna — a test tube baby designed specifically to be a donor to big sister Kate — employs to help her sue her parents for medical emancipation. I wondered what was the point of having that awkward love story between these two adults in the book. Clearly the filmmakers also viewed it as unnecessary, and by leaving that part out of the story, it gave Alec Baldwin the opportunity to really shine as the flashy, secretly epileptic, hammy lawyer.

When that epilepsy secret comes home to roost in the final courtroom scene, the author had me shaking my head as Alexander collapsed into a grand mal seizure, with his service dog, Judge, helping out by opening the briefcase and getting a rubber tongue depressor for the attending humans to use. Anyone who has ever taken a first aid course in the last ten years knows that you are NOT supposed to put anything in the mouth of a seizure victim. In the film, the dog’s job, thankfully, was limited to incessant barking and whining as he detected his master’s impending episode. Not to mention the fact that, post seizure, Alexander recovers and, doused in sweat and hair disheveled, tells the judge he’d like to finish out the day’s proceedings. This part the filmmakers didn’t change, and the result is an unintentional sight gag, with Alec Baldwin covered in what could be construed as flop sweat. And maybe it’s just me and my personal obsession over all things hygienic, and my never-ending curiosity about the restroom situations in TV, books and movies, on behalf of characters, but from what I know about grand mal seizures, at the very least? Baldwin/Alexander probably would have needed a change of trousers. Just saying.

While reading the book, I scoffed at the contrived little irony about the father, a firefighter captain, being woefully oblivious to his son Jesse’s pyromania — and how convenient it was that Jesse’s little firestarting habit was limited to vacant buildings in the slums, so we didn’t have to deal with the messiness of him being charged with manslaughter. The author then had me seething in the epilogue, with her use of Daddy’s status as fire captain to help his pyro son get into the Police Academy — even AFTER finding out his son has been setting fires all over town. But I wasn’t seething because that bit of boys club nepotistic nonsense is so contrived, but because that part? She pretty much got that right on the money. In the film, Jesse isn’t so much into starting slum fires as he is into taking drugs, staying out late in downtown L.A. and staring at transvestites. So in the film’s epilogue … he goes to art school? Shrug. Whatev.

The final and most egregious contrivance of the book was its infamous ending, which, on our car trip last month, had me banging the spine of the mass market paperback on the dashboard of my poor unsuspecting Honda Element. It all has to do with Anna and Kate’s dad being a firefighter, and it seemed like Picoult had been setting us up for this moment throughout the entire book. After the judge rightly granted Anna Fitzgerald the right to make medical decisions about her own body — after everyone finds out that it was Kate, the sick girl, who has put Anna up to all of this because she just wants to have permission to die already — Anna implies that she’s going to give Kate her kidney after all. This comes after Alexander, now her medical power of attorney, asks her where she sees herself in ten years. Fine. Lovely. If Picoult had ended it with that line, “In ten years, I’d like to be Kate’s sister,” I would have forgiven all the other little niggling problems with the book, and walked away pretty happy. I might have even tried picking up another of Picoult’s books from time to time, because, as much as I criticize her story machinations, she is a wonderful writer on the technical side, with a great talent for an interesting turn of phrase and vivid descriptions that put you right in the thick of all these hairy ethical dilemmas. Her courtroom scenes in the book are worth reading on the face of them, and comprised about 80 percent of what I read out loud to my husband as we closed in on southern Kentucky.

By the time we hit Tennessee, though, Anna had died in a horrible car crash, and in a melodramatic moment I saw coming a mile away, her father, the firefighter, is called to the scene and has to cut his own daughter out of the wreckage. Then, she’s rushed to the hospital, where Alexander signs off on Anna’s kidney donation, along with a bunch of other organs for a bunch of other nameless people. Then for some reason, even though her organs have been harvested, the hospital staff sees fit to hook her up to a ventilator and heart monitor, only so we can have the dramatic scene where Mom and Dad say goodbye and literally pull the plug. BOO! BOO! BOO! (I’m visualizing that crazy hag shouting curses at Buttercup in The Princess Bride at the moment).

There’s been a lot of shocked disappointment coming from some of Picoult’s devoted readers regarding the ending of the film. Up on the silver screen the adorable Abigail Breslin (and if you haven’t seen her in Little Miss Sunshine, shame on you. Now go forth and rent it), as Anna, is granted her medical emancipation, but AFTER Kate dies from renal failure. It might seem pointless at first, now that Kate’s gone. And she’s gone because everyone comes to the realization that this is what Kate wants. And because her mother finally realizes she needs to let go, to stop struggling, and just say goodbye. So really, I found the medical emancipation decision to be a moment full of grace. The point was not whether Anna SHOULD give up her kidney, but whether she should be able to have a choice. After all, that’s what Kate would have wanted.

Summer Reading: The Graveyard Book August 3, 2009

There is a certain kind of story that’s so satisfying on its own, and as much as you love the main character and would like to hear how he’s doing from time to time, you’re pretty much OK with knowing there probably won’t be a sequel. This can be said of Nobody Owens, the boy raised by ghosts and other mysterious characters who haunt an ancient crumbly graveyard in England.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is a tribute to The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, the classic story about a boy raised in the wilds of the jungle, a story that Gaiman encourages the readers in his acknowledgments to seek out if they’ve only ever been exposed to the Disney cartoon musical. It’s on my list for my next trip to the library, as I’m sorry to say the Kipling book isn’t in my collection at the moment.

Our boy Nobody Owens spends his upbringing in the graveyard as you would imagine: exploring the wild, overgrown areas and befriending the long-dead witches that inhabit them, accidentally getting sucked into a ghoulish nightmare by traveling too close to one particularly menacing crypt, and disquieting the prehistoric spirit of the Indigo Man by going to a place he’s specifically told not to go into. All of his adventures and misadventures are not just a random collecting of delightfully harrowing tales; though each anecdote of Nobody’s meeting a new ghost or stumbling into danger is a story that stands on its own, Gaiman takes a great big cauldron and stirs up all of these moments and discoveries once again in the end, and the unexpected mixture comes to the aid of our hero during a truly frightening climax. The shadowy charcoal illustrations by Dave McKean are like none I’ve seen in a children’s book but echo perfectly the melancholy, wonder and foreboding that surrounds our small, seemingly insignificant Nobody Owens.

This book was sitting by its lonesome in a basket belonging to my mother-in-law in North Carolina; my husband discovered it one lazy afternoon, and, speed reader that he is, had the whole 312 pages gobbled up by the end of the day. This is not a terribly unusual place to discover a new book, as my mother-in-law works at a local bookstore in Lenoir, and from time to time has facilitated book groups for young people. I never have to suffer a lack of new book recommendations thanks to her. At the end of our trip, she generously sent the book along with us so I could read it on the way home. I started reading in earnest as soon as we were out of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and had the thing devoured on this side of Dayton. The relationship between Nobody and his childhood human friend Scarlett, and his mentor and teacher Silas, had me in tears by the end. Gaiman may have a huge following among adults, but he really knows how to hit on the remainders of childhood without being overly sentimental. Probably just one small reason he won the Newbery Medal for this book.

As a fan of Harry Potter I wouldn’t want to make too many comparisons, but as a book for middle-schoolers, Gaiman’s book has just as much charm, imagination, intrigue and gripping storytelling as Sorcerer’s Stone, if not more. I would recommend this to anyone at any age, I’m just a little bit sad that I’m only starting to discover Gaiman so late in my reading life.

Summer reading: You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers July 8, 2009

OK. I fess up. I may have read this one in early June. Technically before the beginning of summer, yes, but I still include it in my summer reading accomplishments. If I’m out on the balcony and not shivering and there’s a dog sleeping over there in a patch of sunlight, and if I’m seated comfortably in my camping chair with my cargo pants rolled up to the knees in true hillbilly style, hoping to catch some late afternoon rays on my white shins, a color known as “reflecting patch white” if it ever inspired a paint chip, and if I hold in one hand a glass of wine that I can neither confirm nor deny was in fact a spritzer, and a book in the other hand, it counts as summer reading.

It just means I have a lot to catch up on if I’m going to do a mini-review of every summer reading book. The already-read pile is starting to stack up, so now that the long car trips are pretty much over for the summer, I thought I’d better get started.

I found this Dave Eggers novel at Mitchell Books, a local independent bookstore here in Fort Wayne, which the husband and I discovered after an early Saturday breakfast at Spyro’s. Of course I had to sit and salivate, full of coffee — or full of piss and vinegar, as my Gramma M. used to say — until the place opened at 10 a.m. I went in looking for Eggers’ more famous work, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” but came out with this one instead. See, I have this rule. If I like the place, and the staff is polite, I never leave an independent bookstore, or locally owned shop/boutique/drugstore/farm supply store/whatever, without buying something. Even if it’s a $2 tube of lip balm or a fancy bookmark, these places all need as much help as they can get. All I can say is, if you’re ever in Fort Wayne, take the time to seek out Mitchell Books. It’s a deliciously well-stocked bookstore with funky displays and a young and friendly — but not cloyingly friendly — staff. From the inside it looks like it should be in a downtown store front, but I can only imagine what the rent costs in downtown Fort Wayne these days. It’s actually in a somewhat older but nicely maintained strip mall called Covington Plaza, set back from Jefferson Boulevard by a sprawl of a parking lot.

Anyway, on to the book. I could go on all day about shopping and end up on the subject of high school and totally forget where I started from.

Eggers gives us only a one-sentence synopsis on the back cover, “$32,000 must be given away in a week, around the world, but why?” Somehow I knew better than to expect a Hollywood-style caper involving car chases and stunts and a $1 million reward hanging in the balance. Though the story does sort of include those first two, just not in the way you would expect.

What I did expect was an answer to the question “why?” Eggers does little to spell it out for us. I left the book not fully understanding why the main character, Will, needs to dump the cash in the particular way that he does, but I can take a stab at it here. Will has come into this money by way of a lightbulb company using his illustration as part of its logo on its lightbulb boxes. He doesn’t feel comfortable keeping this money, which he and his friend, Hand, had originally planned to spend in a dramatic rescue of their friend Jack who’d been severely injured in a car wreck. With this failed mission, and the memory of Jack, weighing on him, Will decides to do something good with the money. Instead of donating it to charity, he wants to make the act of giving a face-to-face experience, and, as long as he can afford it, why not make it a global experience? His friend Hand is coming along, and he can only get about a week off from his job.

The task proves to be more difficult than either Will or Hand ever expected, and they fritter away at least 36 hours just trying to get out of the United States. Once they get to places like Senegal and Morocco and Latvia, it seems even more difficult to find the most deserving people, and even when that happens, it’s awkward and messy and sometimes cringe-inducing. It feels tacky at times, even though Will and Hand are totally sincere. And so, it’s totally human and imperfect, but a full experience nonetheless. I think Eggers has hit on something here — the rest of us usually feel pretty good about things when we give. When we write that check, the noise of the paper ripping from the checkbook is the sound of our guilt dissipating. Our obligation to the poor is met for this month. Those of us who are privileged enough with means to give to charity, or to tithe in church, almost never get our hands dirty. But Will doesn’t want to go that route because I am sure he feels that he can do the most good by delivering cash in person and not through a charitable institution. For him, it’s about restoring faith in humanity.

Eggers fleshes out this idea of doing the most good through one of many frustrating international phone calls between Will and his mother. While in Senegal, he tells her about a game of basketball with some local kids, and how he gave one of the kids, a Bulls fan, $300. She asks, “Why not just bring it back here and give it to a charity?” Will’s reply is the perfect explanation for a person doing exactly what they think is right: “But what makes that better than this?” She thinks it’s condescending, and subjective, and of course he agrees that it is, but in his mind, he hates these words because “it’s a defense you use to defend your own inaction.”

He goes on later to say what might be my favorite quote from the book: “For every good deed there is someone, who is not doing a good deed, who is, for instance, gardening, questioning exactly how you’re doing that good deed … The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt …”

Reading this, I couldn’t help but think how true that statement is. Financially, I can’t help every single person holding up a “Will Work for Food” sign by the side of the highway, and yeah, maybe some of them would go and spend the money on alcohol. (Come to think of it, if I was that desperate, would I spend at least part of whatever money came my way on a little bit of hooch, just to cope with the humiliation of it all? Yes, I believe I would.) So let’s be honest then … the real reason I don’t stop to help is because it is uncomfortable, inconvenient, messy, and possibly smelly. So, by that logic, I’ve also missed a very human experience, a simple human interaction.

Crap, I’m really not doing this justice, am I? I’m making the book sound like some schlocky and sentimental Hallmark Movie of the Week, which it is not. It’s also not nearly as preachy as I’ve made it sound, or self-righteous. Truth is, Will and Hand are not given any kind of reward for their efforts, no TV people come to interview them, and they don’t necessarily live happily ever after. Life was hard before any of this happened to them, and tragedy of life — not the least of which the fact that Will seems to be losing his mind — just goes on during and after their adventures abroad. Still, even without the money to hand out, the two characters live more of life in one week than most of us do in 40, 50 or 60 years.

Overall, loved this book. I blasted through its 351 pages in one weekend of hillbilly-style porch sitting, after which I fretted just a little bit less over what other people might think of my own choices in life. Some of those choices are coming up fast, and they are some doozies. So I might as well get out of my chair and barrel on through, full of piss and vinegar, rather than do nothing. It helps to think about Will and about Hand, and about other characters in books who set off without much of a plan, because in books and in life, nothing ever turns out the way we expect.