It's been a while

I started a new job relatively recently, and my workdays are longer than they were. Also have been running around with visitors, getting ready for the holidays, traveling and so forth.

I recently read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, which is a perfectly fine book, but not what I wanted it to be. Too much teenage boy stuff. Way too much. Not nearly enough about everyone else in the book, whose characters seemed way more interesting. Probably if I'm going to read coming-of-age novels I should either stick to ones about women or expect this sort of thing.

Now I just started Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. It's a short story collection, which is normally not my thing at all, but I love her work and it should be good for the train. The first story was excellent.

Other work other places

I recently wrote this piece for my friends' website, Bully Pulp:

http://www.bullypulp.com/articles/2011/11/29/the-culture-of-white-people.html

It's a little ... strident. People who understood what I was trying to say saw what I was getting at, but I'm thinking I could have said it better.

I also just wrote this, which was published today, on my two-year anniversary of moving to New York City:

http://rustwire.com/2011/12/05/rust-belt-expat-story-2-finding-career-that-buffalo-couldnt-offer/

I hope a lot of people read the second piece. The editor called it "relatable." I like that. I think it's the most personal piece I've published anywhere besides my own website since I was writing opinion columns for The Bona Venture back in, gasp, the 90s.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

To me, this is a classic highly readable modern novel, a la Freedom. It's about people who seem real, and takes place in a real place and time -- New England and New York in the early 1980s. There's no complicated chronology, no scenes set in the future, no characters who reappear under different names, none of that. There's not much in the way of literary device (that I noticed anyway) except the plot itself, a re-imagining of the classic choice between the difficult maverick genius and the "nice guy." My roommate was just telling me about the latest Twilight movie and it sounds exactly like this book, if this book were terrible instead of being awesome, and also included vampire babies (?).

Adding to my enjoyment of it was that it begins in Providence, RI, one of my all-time favorite places. Eugenides' depiction of the mixture of college-town bohemia and uber-WASPiness (I have such a soft spot for WASPiness, croquet and summer homes and martinis at five and not talking about feelings ...) that characterizes Providence's east side was spot on. Just writing that makes me wish I was there right now, taking in the perfect Revolutionary War-era colonials, cobblestone streets and sidewalk cafes.

Bottom line is: definitely read The Marriage Plot if, like me, you real novels instead of watching television. And no matter what you read, visit Providence if you ever have the chance.

Look At Me, by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit From the Goon Squad, my number-one recommended book of the past year or so, is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. While I think anyone who enjoys literary fiction would enjoy Goon Squad, Look At Me is a different kind of novel. I've read so many books about which I thought, "that was good enough, but it was by, about and for men." Look At Me is the rare novel a man might not "get" at all.

The themes are gender, beauty, identity and power, what it means to have control, and what it means to be an object. It's dark and searing, not dark in say an Oryx and Crake kind of way -- that one I had to put down -- but dark in a "this is forcing me to face up to a lot of things I thought I was good at ignoring" kind of way. One of the themes Egan explores that I don't think I've read about before, ever, is the contempt beautiful women have for women who are not attractive, and vice versa. I spent a lot of my life pretending that didn't exist, but it does, and she nails it. She also takes a deep dark look into the advantages beautiful women have in life, and the ones they really do not. There's a great scene where one of the main characters, a 35-year-old former model, sees a young model walking down the street in Manhattan, watches the power the young woman thinks she has in her ability to attract so many male gazes everywhere she goes. And she remembers how she, too, once thought that's what power was, having other people own and control you because of this fleeting quality, and how now she knows real power comes from what you say and do, from autonomy, not from who owns you and how much money they have.

There are a lot of flat and unrealistic elements to this novel, but I really don't care. It's incredibly engrossing, and it has really made me think.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

This is the latest in a series of books that were the perfect thing for me to be reading during what was going on in my life in New York right then. Since my second week here, almost two years ago, I had worked at a social services agency in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a working-class, largely Hispanic community where a lot of young people from outside New York are moving for affordable rents and access to the L train. Ten or fifteen years ago, those same kids would have moved to Williamsburg, which is also along the L train, closer to Manhattan. Parts of Williamsburg are becoming expensive, but some of the housing projects and ratty old large apartment buildings look pretty much the same as I expect they did 50 years ago, and in the case of the apartment buildings, maybe more.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is set in Williamsburg, just north of Broadway off the J train (it's referred to as the El in the book, a reference to it being an above-ground train I think). Then as now, the parts of Williamsburg off the J train are poorer than the L train regions, teeming with immigrants, overcrowded apartments and small shops.

Several of my coworkers grew up on Williamsburg's south side, as some call it, the children of poor immigrants just like Francie, the main character, and her family. The immigrants are largely Puerto Rican (they're not technically immigrants but still need to learn English) and Dominican now, but the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods in the book are still semi-intact to this day, although few recent immigrants live there anymore.

Point being, the book helped me reflect on everything I had learned in the last two years, how New York changes constantly, but at the same time, some things never change. It's a classic of young adult literature about a bookish girl finding her way in the world and about the struggles of a poor urban family in the years before World War I when the world, as was New York, was becoming a different place.

I finished A Tree Grows in Brooklyn yesterday. Tomorrow I start a new job in the Bronx.

This Land is Their Land, by Barbara Ehrenreich

Published three years ago, this book's title and theme feel very current, with references to the 1% cropping up everywhere these days. I love Barbara Ehrenreich, but this isn't her best work. It's a collection of short essays and I guess newspaper columns; the shorter format doesn't seem to be a good showcase for her writing, which is characterized by a curmudgeonly tone, old-fashioned liberalism, and, usually, reliance on facts and empirical reason. In the shorter format, though, she kind of glosses over the "fact" stuff, replacing it with a punchy humor that sort of falls flat a lot of the time.

But there are still some great moments, like when she says she was caught trying to spread a rumor that Disney's "princess" line of toys are contaminated by lead, or when she honestly discusses why women, including herself, choose abortion. Still, if you haven't read Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed is definitely a better choice, and Bright Sided, better still.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World

I haven't left for D.C. yet, but I started reading yesterday. Today I read this exchange, on page 58, in a story about the author, Michael Lewis, visiting a Greek monastery:

... he pauses and asks, "But what is your religion?"

"I don't have one."

"You believe in God?"

"No."

Thanks for including that, Michael Lewis. I like his work either way, but now I'm adding him to my list of favorite "out" atheist writers and media personalities, along with Sarah Vowell and Ira Glass.