The immigrant man

Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
2003

I meant to be reading The Accidental by Ali Smith, but I went in search of "Ali" instead of "Smith" at the library and found Brick Lane, which I'd vaguely remembered hearing good things about. So next trip, it's to the S's.

It reminds me of White Teeth, though Ali was born in Bangladesh and her focus -- her whole world, really, is the Bangladeshi immigrants. What they have in common is London and the ridiculous (but mostly lovable) major male characters. Though in Ali's book, the ridiculous men are sad and not comedic like Zadie Smith's are. They also both have characters with the last name Iqbal, though Smith's Iqbals are much more prominent in her story.

In Brick Lane, Nazneen arrives in London a young bride in an arranged marriage. She is scared and longs for home. Her husband, Chanu, is much older than she and has been in London for more than a decade. He is always planning on going home and building a house in Dhaka.

Though for many years she barely leaves the apartment complex, Nazneen somehow understands more and accepts more about her new home than her husband seems to. Chanu has hopes (or maybe illusions) that she sees through rather quickly.

The other women in the book seem to be more perceptive about their new homes, too. Maybe it's because they make more connections among themselves than the men do. Or maybe it's because they largely don't have to face the outside world every day and live up to expectations back home.

Gateway drug

The rules at Bertucci's were clear on reading at work: don't. But I worked in the carryout alone many afternoons, and after the lunch rush there were only so many times I could wipe the counter and only so many balls of pizza dough I could prepare for the hostesses to give to kids.

So in between avoiding the cook who seemed to hate me and ringing up pizza orders, I sat (also frowned upon), for sometimes luxurious stretches, and read Kurt Vonnegut books.

Maybe "gorged myself" is more accurate. I started with Cat's Cradle, then Slaughterhouse Five and didn't stop until I'd exhausted the incomplete Kurt Vonnegut collection at the Newtown Square Public Library.

By the time I left Bertucci's at the end of the summer, I'd had my fill for a while but probably would have read just one more if it had been handed to me.

I hadn't known books could be funny and engaging, but also smart and serious and real. Suddenly, I just wanted to spend all my time reading.

Something similar had happened in high school when a friend lent me The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I didn't go on a Douglas Adams binge after reading it.

It was a year or so after college when I read Kurt Vonnegut again -- a copy of Breakfast of Champions I'd moved with twice after picking it up at used bookstore in Washington. I enjoyed it, but it didn't inspire the fervor my first taste had.

But if Kurt Vonnegut didn't give me a lifelong passion for Kurt Vonnegut, he did give me a lifelong passion for books.

Oh, so geisha aren't fancy hookers

Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden
1997

In a way, Memoirs of a Geisha reminds me of Gone with the Wind, only less crappy and less racist and whatnot. Oh, and the heroine is way less bratty than Scarlett O'Hara.

But there is a war (World War II) and it ruins an elegant existence (that in this case isn't even quite so elegant to everyone living within it -- no happy slaves in Kyoto).

Because the story opens with Sayuri, the geisha of the title, living in New York City and reflecting on what looks like a happy life, it's not giving anything away to say that things turn out better for her than for Scarlett. They didn't turn out the way I expected, though. (I expected less joy and more acceptance.) After spending 400 pages with her, I really felt she deserved a good outcome.

The old white man series

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
2004

The premise of The Plot Against America is what if instead of electing Franklin Roosevelt to a third term, Americans had elected isolationist, anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh president?

I love the concept of what-if-history-were-different books, but the execution can be awful. (See Stephen Fry's Making History, on what if Hitler were never born, for a bad one.) This is Philip Roth, though, and we are in able hands.

The Plot Against America is a story less about the historical concept than about a nation afraid. The Jews are afraid of a U.S. progrom. The rest of the country is afraid of war. They like hearing that the U.S. can stay out of World War II -- this Jew war -- and that their sons won't have to fight and that everything will be fine.

What happens in Philip Roth's World War II isn't even so different from what happened in the real one. In Roth's world, the Jews are targeted and forced to move. In the real history, Japanese-Americans weren't treated so well.

And even in Philip Roth's world, history doesn't get that far off course. Things are terrifying for a lot of people for a few years, but then they get back to normal. The narrator refers to Robert Kennedy's assassination after he wins the California primary in 1968, so I have to believe that Philip Roth's history ends up unfolding just like the real one.

A note on the authors


With the John Updike and the Philip Roth, I've been reading lots of old white men (though Updike wasn't so old when he wrote Rabbit, Run). But there are female and nonwhite and non-American authors in my reading pile, I promise.

Half of a good book

The Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde
2002

Jasper Fforde has a knack for making the absurd believable. Things unfold at a brisk -- but unrushed -- pace. And then it seems like he got tired of it and just decided to wrap it up as quickly as possible.

Thursday Next is a literary detective, and The Eyre Affair is part detective story, part science fiction, part fun with books. She ends up inside the narrative of Jane Eyre. This is billed as the plot, but this happens in only the last 100 pages or so, and the rest is a lot of build up to that.

Once Thursday is inside Jane Eyre, the book really starts to unravel. Thursday has lines like, "I wondered if Landen had ever loved me as much as Rochester loved Jane."

Sigh.

Back in the real world, Thursday meets up with her Landen (after an overused plot point that would be giving too much away to elaborate on, but it's cliche).

Then everything gets resolved in 18 pages. I feel kind of cheap, really.

The last of Rabbit, or halfway to 50 books

Rabbit at Rest
John Updike
1991

Over four books (about 1,500 pages), you really get to know a guy. And what I took away from Harry Angstrom is that life is long and short, and hard and easy. You kind of float along and things happen to you. Or you might snap out of the floating. Our roles in life are constantly changing. There's not much separating life and death. People get fat. They get pathetic as they age, or they really come into their prime.

Harry's granddaughter is born the same year I was, and he is a man behind the times, or maybe just of his own time. He talks about "queers," isn't quite racist but isn't quite not racist, isn't quite sexist but isn't quite not sexist.

But somehow I've been able to relate more to him than the men at the center of Independence Day and Herzog. And as I move onto other books, I miss him.