On Zadie Smith

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith

On Beauty is the work of someone very smart. White Teeth is also the work of someone very smart. Autograph Man I skipped.

According to critics and my friends, Zadie Smith came into her own with On Beauty, and I liked it -- I really, really liked it.

But.

There's something about her characters that I can't quite relate to. Maybe somehow that's the point, but it keeps me from quite getting engrossed in a book.

Howard Belsey is a professor at a private East Coast college. His youngest is in high school, the older two in college. He is in his late 50s. His 30-year marriage to KiKi is in trouble. Mostly, his problems are boring.

Howard reminds me of Grady Tripp from Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Both are sort-of has-beens who have been working on books with no end in site. But despite Grady's being pathetic and a bit of a dog, I rooted for him. I just want to tell Howard to get it together. Oh, and to stop being boring.

Kiki is the most sympathetic of the characters. She has problems, too. These problems are less boring, maybe because KiKi isn't so consumed with herself.

There's lots of academic politics in On Beauty, and so I couldn't help but think of Jane Smiley's Moo, though On Beauty is not as satirical or as mean.

Smith captures campus life, with all the language that goes along with it, in perfect detail, but it's been done.

Baby-sitters club, revisited

My Aunt Frannie (our neighbor in the first house I lived in) gave me Bobbsey Twins books. My parents gave me Nancy Drew (the originial series, not the sexed up one). I liked them both, especially the Bobbsey Twins, but not nearly as much as The Baby-sitters Club.

Even when I was 8, I knew the Baby-sitters Club was not good literature. I was frustrated with having to read a chapter in every book that described the girls. OK, I get it Mary Ann has neat handwriting, and Claudia is wild and artistic and likes candy, and Dawn eats health food. I wished Ann M. Martin would just have a primer in the front for newcomers.

Yet every time a new book came out (and joy of joys if it was a Super Special), I would read half of it before my parents could even get me out of the bookstore, in this case the Encore Books next to the Shop Rite -- it really was the '80s.

At 8, my baby-sitter was the coolest person I knew. Jeanie had boyfriends and long, straight black hair. She had gone to Australia and was learning how to drive.

My dad was desperate to get me to read "the classics," and every once in a while I'd throw him a bone like The Secret Garden or Little Women. But nothing could make an afternoon like the BSC.

Two of my friends and I even made our own baby-sitters club. It was of course an utter failure.

This librarian is making the journey again.

Sickness and beauty

Veronica
by Mary Gaitskill

It's strange how long ago the AIDS crisis in America seems. Not that it isn't killing people every day, not to mention ruining African nations. But in health class we learned that if you had HIV, you would get sick and die very soon. I remember the figure often given was five to 15 years that someone could live with HIV. Gay men now in their 40s and 50s watched their circle of friends die off.

I imagine that, as a child of the '80s, I read books about the early days of AIDS, much like a child of the '70s might read about preparing for nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

Veronica isn't only about AIDS -- it's about beauty and sickness and strength and memory -- but it's there. And it's there in the '80s and then again in the late '90s.

Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library doesn't mention AIDS and takes place before anyone's heard of it. (It was written in 1989.) But because it's about sex and gay men, with all it's nostalgia, it hurtles toward crisis.

Because of when I was born, I grew up learning that sex can kill you, and it is strange to get inside the head of a character who doesn't know that yet.

In a small Turkish town

Snow
by Orhan Pamuk

"'If only to see themselves as wise and superior and humanistic, they need to think of us as sweet and funny, and convince themselves that they sympathize with the way we are and even love us. But if you put in what I've just said, at least your readers will keep a little room for doubt in their minds.'"

I did think of the characters in Snow as sweet and funny. And I did sympathize with them -- even the political Islamists -- and love them. Then on the last page, someone tells the narrator to write in his book that we shouldn't believe anything he's written.

Snow is one of the few novels that employs meta fiction (and it does so just a little bit, hardly noticeable really) without being clever about it. It turns out that it's not such a bad technique in the right hands.

Pamuk's protagonist, Ka, returns to Turkey for his mother's funeral after years of exile in Germany. Ka goes to a small town, cut off from the rest of the country after a snowstorm, where he is ostensibly researching an article on a series of suicides by devout Muslim girls. A number of people criticize him -- sometimes with hostility -- for being or trying to be Western.

Against the (unmentioned) backdrop of Turkey's official desire for inclusion in the European Union, this presents something of a conflict -- not in the novel so much, although it's a problem for Ka, but in real-life Europe.

Recently, charges that Pamuk had denigrated Turkey were dropped. He wrote last year about facing trial.

"Living as I do in a country that honors its pashas, saints, and policemen at every opportunity but refuses to honor its writers until they have spent years in courts and in prisons, I cannot say I was surprised to be put on trial. I understand why friends smile and say that I am at last 'a real Turkish writer.' But when I uttered the words that landed me in trouble I was not seeking that kind of honor."

'Meaning at random'

The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus picks up chronologically where The Remains of the Day left off. But this time, war is paranthetical. Around it, there is private grief. Things are left unsaid. People reach middle age. Grief is rewarded.

The cicature of stitching on her gloves was an imprint on his brain. Earrings of pearl stared, white-eyed as fish. There was a streak of flowered scarf, inane, and the collar blue. Grief had a painter's eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random -- like God.

At 17, getting dumped by my first boyfriend, who was in St. Louis, I stared at a living room couch -- pastels on white. Thinking, "This couch is the same. My life is changing."

Tangled up in Dylan

Kathryn and I memorized "Tangled up in Blue" between Chapel Hill and Pittsburgh sophomore year of college. I was in unrequited love with a Dylan fan, and that fall I was listening to the version off a greatest-hits CD, the bootleg version (where you can hear the buttons of Dylan's jacket clicking against his guitar) and the Indigo Girls' live version. I think Kathryn was more of a "Hurricane" girl, but we had what we had in the Nissan.

By West Virginia, we had it, except for the line, "where I happened to be employed," which on Greatest Hits Volume 3 sounds like "where I [something something] employed." We were particularly fascinated with the extra rhyming here:

I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
She studied the lines on my face.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
Tangled up in blue.

A year later I would sing it in hotel room in Austin and imagine I had impressed the four or so people there by knowing all the words. (I got the missing ones from the Indigo Girls.)

These days I hear "Tangled up in Blue" mostly when my iPod shuffles to it. And instead of thinking about a boy from Asheville, I think about a friend who would drive to Pittsburgh on short notice.

I haven't heard from Kathryn in a couple of years, but I know she's in a band, and now that I think about it, she really did sound better than me in that Nissan.