Confessions from the Home Office

I discovered Tom Perrotta by accident. I was looking for someone else on the shelves of my library, poking around in the Ps, and there he was. I picked up Little Children because I’d heard of the movie (but never seen it), and when I read the back and realized he’d also written Election, I knew I had to check him out. The writer who invented Tracy Enid Flick bore further investigation.

As it turns out, his style is exactly the type of style I aspire to. I am a huge fan of stories inspired by people living regular lives. I was thinking about this earlier. I really often aspire to write like, say, Alice Munro or Richard Ford, but let’s be real here. I’m not nearly that poetic. I’m not as poetic as Tom Perrotta, either, but his style is much closer to my reality. The people are real, the situations are authentic, and the narrative is filled with wit.

To recap the story briefly: Sarah and Todd, both stay-at-home parents of toddlers, meet one summer. Both are in marriages that have lost their sheen, living lives vastly different than those they expected. Todd is (half-heartedly) working towards passing the bar exam while his film-producer wife is the major breadwinner, and Sarah, married to a middle-aged ad executive, has long given up her dreams of activisim and PhD’s.

They  meet at the park one day, when Sarah kisses Todd on a dare (to the horror of the other mothers present). Over that summer they bring their children to play together at the park and pool, and start an affair that offers escape from their less-than-satisfying lives in suburbia. At the same time, Ronnie, a convicted sex offender who has been released from jail, moves in with his mother. His life brushes up against Todd’s and Sarah’s in some unexpected ways, and as with everyone in the story, no one is as they seem from the outside.

Someone pointed out that writing about suburbia is nothing new, and that’s true. But I often think it takes special skill to make us want to read about characters whose lives are so similar to ours. And that’s perhaps what I liked most about Little Children. It takes a darker view of suburbia, yes, but it does it through the eyes of three-dimensional characters.

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I was hoping to come here and post about book four in my experiment, but instead I’m here writing about my small black friend, Len. We had to say goodbye to her yesterday, and our house feels far too empty and quiet for our liking. I thought it was quiet when we lost Ron, but we still had another small creature wagging her tail and asking for walks, and she provided a welcome distraction for us. Today there’s nothing but silence, something I feel especially keenly as I sit in my office. I’ve worked from home for five years, and this is the first day without an office mate. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it’s breaking my heart.

When I first met Mike (and Ron and Len), Len was only three. She still had that crazy-Dalmatian personality - they were both riotous bundles of energy who wrestled in the backyard and pulled for their entire walks. She was up in my face, literally - so much so that for a long time I thought she was the bigger dog. In reality she was a runt, a little stocky but also very delicate, but she was busting out all over with love, just waiting for someone new to discover how fabulous an hour of chin scratching  and Len-loving could be.

Over the years, as we got to know each other, she mellowed a little. She still loved a good run in the yard or a long walk on a sunny morning, but she also loved curling up with the pack to watch a movie or have a nap. In the last year or so, she’d taken to snuggling up on the couch beside me, her head resting on my leg, submitting to long love-ins while we all watched Dexter or 24 or whatever we’d recorded on the PVR. She’d actually coax us to sit on the couch together, milling about the room and staring at whichever of us had dared sit down in the chair across the room, until we relented and took our rightful place on either side of her. There’s a special dimension to movie night when you have a sweet Dalmatian head on your lap. I can’t explain how soothing it was to sit and rub those silky ears, to feel her burrow against me and hear her sigh.

She had a job to do, of course. She was the household Guard Dog. When Ron no longer hear, Len became her ears - they communicated effortlessly. She was the ears for all of us, really, alerting us to potential danger, whether it was her nemesis (the collie from down the street) or Jane’s Addiction (she wasn’t so sure about those dogs at the beginning of Been Caught Stealing). She sounded the alarm whenever the mailman arrived, the FedEx guy came by, or one of us came home.

For a long time she was also public liaison for the household. I met so many people in our neighborhood while we were out on walks the last two years. She won them all over, nudging them for affection and trotting off with a spring in her step after getting it. She even won over our crusty old mailman in the end - in the last few weeks he’d say hello and point out where all the ice was on the sidewalk; he’d seen her fall one day and struggle to get up, and I think he knew she was doing her best.

I know a lot of people say you can learn volumes from your dog, but it’s true. I’d often think on walks how she  and Ron were both filled with joy to be out in the fresh air. Len would come greet us at the door no matter what was going on with her that day. She’d lick your face if you cried, and sit beside you when you needed someone. She forgave instantly, ready to shake a paw the second you were - no hard feelings. She devoured every dinner with gusto and thought veggies were the best treat ever. She played hard, and she slept hard. It was all the simple things that made her happy.

I never thought I would own dogs, let alone fall in love with them so completely. I feel blessed to have known such a wonderful, small creature - and I feel doubly blessed to have known two. I hope that in spite of her rough beginning, Len knew in the end how much her pack loved her. And I hope that somewhere, she and Ron are snuggled on a couch together, butt to butt, in a universe with all the baby carrots and roast chickens they can handle. I can only hope to put as much love in the world as she did.

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This book has been sitting in my bookcase for almost ten years. I started it several times over the years, and I always seemed to lose interest about 50 pages in. This time, I was determined to finish, and I’m glad I did.

Bitter Grounds is the story of several families in El Salvador - rich and poor, their fortunes all revolve around the country’s main export, coffee.

The story spans several decades, from the 30s to the late 70s. It begins in 1933, when Mercedes Prieto and her daughter Jacinta come across the headless body of a member of the National Guard. The next 24 hours see their lives change irrevocably, as they lose their home and much of their family in a massacre - the government’s attempt to quash an uprising by plantation workers, who are demanding better conditions.

Over the years, Mercedes and Jacinta find their lives intertwined with those of the wealthy Contreras and Tobar families. Jacinta and Magda Tobar raise their daughters, Maria Mercedes and Florencia, together. The tale of the two girls occupies most of the last third of the novel, as Flor and Maria Mercedes take two very divergent paths in life - Flor marries into a wealthy family and has children, and Maria Mercedes joins a revolutionary group.

Benitez’s style is sometimes very formal, and the book often felt to me as if it were a translation, rather than written in English - and I think this, more than anything - is what kept me from finishing it a decade ago. In some ways I found it to be the standard “family epic”, spanning decades and great historical events, told through the eyes of “regular people” whose lives are intertwined in remarkable ways (and often end in tragedy). She gives equal time to the story of Jacinta and her mother, Mercedes; to the story of Jacinta and Benito, grown and working for the Tobars; and to Maria Mercedes and Flor, the rich girl and the servant’s daughter. The lives of the rich and poor women often mirror each other closely - both suffer deep losses, have children, make sacrifices on similar timelines.

At any rate, what often kept me reading was the account of the unrest in El Salvador, and how it affected both rich and poor. Novels have such an amazing capacity to open windows (doors, whatever) to stories from history, and Bitter Grounds, which won the National Book Award in 1996, tells a story many of us have forgotten or never knew in the first place.

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This one was on Jane Smiley’s list, but since I’d wanted to read it for a really long time and it was eye-level in the “cheap classics” section of the bookstore at Christmas time, I figured I had to include it on mine, too. It’s considered a classic piece of feminist literature, which may be part of the reason I wanted to read it, but also part of the reason I hadn’t read it yet.

The Awakening is about Edna Pontellier, a woman living in New Orleans at the turn of the century. At the start of the book, Edna is a dutiful wife and mother, away with her family on a vacation. But right from the beginning, something isn’t quite right with her world. You get the sense that even in her comfortable life, in an idyllic setting, Edna isn’t happy. She chafes against her role in society.

The novel caused a lot of controversy when it was published in 1899, and it’s not hard to see why when you read it. Even today, some of the reviews on Amazon.com point to Edna’s behavior as “selfish.” I guess on many levels it is – she abandons her role as wife and mother, stops taking visitors, keeps questionable company, and indulges her passions for art. She doesn’t fit the mold, and it seems to unnerve everyone… including Robert Lebrun, the young man with whom she falls in love and, in many ways, the person who sets her transformation in motion.

I’m going to admit right here that I was unsettled by the ending. Enough that I had to look for spoilers on the internet to see if I’d interpreted it correctly. I can’t decide if the ending is the only way it could end, or if I feel cheated by it, or both. I do know that that the book in general made me ponder, as great books always do, how much and how little has changed in 100 years.

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All righty then. I’ve been meaning to post an update for a while, but I’m a bit lost when it comes to messing around with my templates (I’m a-skeered of code), so screw it. I had these big, beautiful plans for a whole separate section, but if we wait for me to figure that out we’ll be waiting until this book becomes part of that Five Foot Library Reader’s Digest used to put out. And now Julie has pretty much goaded me into getting started. So here we go.

For years I picked up this book and put it back on the shelf. I don’t know quite what kept me from reading it. I think I was a afraid it was going to be uppity CanLit, all anti-heros and oppressive themes. Or that the tiger would talk, a la the movie Beethoven. In the end, I chose it because the grade 8 and 9 Language Arts classes Mike was student teaching were reading it, so he read it. He’s not what you’d call an avid reader of literature, so for him to say he really liked it made me think it must have been worthwhile. It was!

The book tells the story of Pi Patel, a boy from Pondicherry in India. Pi (which is short for Piscine), is the kind of kid who likes to think about things. The first part of the book deals largely with how he remembers his childhood, and explores themes of religion and spirituality a-plenty. Pi is fascinated by Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, and there’s a great scene that explores whether one can practice all three or follow only one. Pi’s parents are zookeepers, and he also spends a lot of his childhood learning about animal behavior.

The second part of the book follows Pi as he floats in a lifeboat for 227 days, his only companion a Bengal tiger. (I’m going to say right here that I think this is what made me avoid the book for a long time. It shouldn’t have put me off.) Pi, who only ever “wanted to know God”, begins to do things he never imagined he’d do, just in order to survive. Some of them, like eating meat, fly in the face of his beliefs.

I’m not going to spoil the plot (like Wikipedia! booo), but I will say that a shipwrecked main character has a lot of thinking to do. And even though there’s a lot of “boy vs tiger’, the book doesn’t get bogged down. Martel uses some fascinating devices to convey the sense of the empty days Pi experiences. Pi makes list after list - of his surroundings, of his behavior, of the things he sees and does. He also manages to create a set of beautifully rounded characters, whether they’re human, tiger, orangutan or hyena.

I think what I liked best about the novel is that it lends itself to a range of interpretations. I came away with a different set of ideas about it than Mike did, for example. When we talked about the book we both found we had opposite impressions of what happened in the end. We both had wildly differing ideas about whether the tiger was real at all, and what the book was trying to say.

I didn’t set out to tag these novels as good or bad, but I’m going to channel Siskel and Ebert for a second and give this one two thumbs up. It made me think, it was beautifully written, but it also entertained me. I devoured it, much the way a shipwrecked tiger might devour a giant fish.

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