Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Review: Life Among the Savages

Reading, , , , ,

Before Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr wrote about life as housewives and stay-at-home-mothers in the 1950’s, Shirley Jackson had already published her account.

You’ve probably read, or at least heard of Shirley Jackson, but you might not remember where or how. Think back to your high school English classes. Remember reading The Lottery? If that doesn’t ring a bell, perhaps you are a fan of horror films. If so, you might have seen the 1963 film, The Haunting or its mediocre 1999 remake, both based on her novel, The Haunting of Hill House.

While Ms Jackson is more widely known for her Gothic horror stories, she’s likely the creator of the humorous housewife/mother sub-genre of literature.

In Life Among the Savages, Jackson tells us about raising her three children, Laurie, Jannie and Sally. It’s told with humor and not a little self-deprecation. Ms Jackson was matter-of-fact about not being the perfect stereotypical 1950’s housewife:

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without children and without books, going on soundlessly in an apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch and–as I say, I cannot think of a preferable way of life, but then I had to make a good many compromises.

I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living–sandwich bags, typewriters, little wheels off things and marvel at the complexities of civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder, at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then–this happening usually int he springtime–I begin throwing things away, and it turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things, new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They can make little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least faster than I can throw them away.

Life Among the Savages begins when Ms Jackson, her husband Stanley and their two children live in New York and decide to move to Vermont, where Stanley (Hyman)has a job at a local college. It describes their house hunt in a small town in Vermont.

One nice thing was, there were lots and lots of houses available. We heard this from a lady named Mrs. Black, a motherly old body who lived in a nearby large town, but who knew, as she herself pointed out, every house and every family in the state. She took us to visit a house which she called the Bassington House, and which would have been perfect for us and our books and our children, if there had been any plumbing.

“Wouldn’t take much to put in plumbing,” Mrs. Black told us. “Put in plumbing, you got a real nice house there.”

My husband shifted nervously in the snow, “You see,” he said, “that brings up the question of…well…money.”

Mrs. Black shrugged. “How much would plumbing cost?” she demanded. “You put in maybe twelve, fifteen hundred dollars, you got a real nice home.”

“Now look, if we had fifteen hundred dollars we could give an apartment superintendent–” my husband began, but I cut in quickly, you must remember, Mrs. Black, we want to rent.”

“Rent, did you?” said Mrs. Black, as though this proved at last that we were mere fly-by-nights, lookers at houses for the pleasure of it. “Well, if I was you folks, small children and all, well, I‘d buy.”

While Jackson’s other works are more widely acclaimed and on some “the best of” lists, Life Among the Savages is a well-told and funny slice of life tale. Some critics call it forgettable. I disagree and like reading about this side of a woman whose tales of darkness have fascinated me for years.

It seems to have been written before the darkness that ended up plaguing her took over. It’s readable and funny. While Jackson’s mental illness may have contributed to her genius and spawned some of the last century’s best horror tales, she was a good writer anyway and Life Among the Savages proves it.

One thing of which to be aware, however — this book didn’t age well. While I was able to laugh at many of the vignettes without really thinking, some made me chuckle with reservation. Remember this was written in the late 1940s and 1950’s. Back then people drank more. People smoked more. Even pregnant women smoked. And probably drank too, without thinking about how it was harming their unborn children. Shirley Jackson was a very heavy smoker and she wrote about smoking cigarettes a lot. While cooking; while reading; while waiting for labor pains to begin in her fourth pregnancy. In fact this book is, in some ways, a direct opposite of some of the mommy blogs I’ve been reading lately — yet similar in some ways. Current expectant moms wouldn’t think of writing about lighting a cigarette while pregnant, but they do write self-deprecating vignettes about their day-to-day life. I suppose the women who are writing the blogs about motherhood (the ones who do it well) are the current Erma Bombecks, Jean Kerrs, even Shirley Jacksons. The times have changed–technology, medicine, child-rearing; but maybe more has stayed the same.

Hmm, that might make a good Master’s Thesis.

Review: Digging to America

Reading

I don’t remember the title of the first book I read in which nothing happened, but I remember being surprised that 1) Nothing happened and 2) I enjoyed it. It may very well have been an Anne Tyler book.

In Anne Tyler’s latest book, Digging to America, nothing happens. Well, that’s not entirely true. What I mean is nothing but life happens. There is no mystery, no great climax, no real plot to speak of. And that’s ok. Anne Tyler’s gift is not necessarily plot heavy books, but books with intricate character studies.

I’ve been an Anne Tyler fan since I read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant back in the 1980’s and have read 15 of her 17 novels. Although I didn’t realize it until today, all of Ms Tyler’s books are mostly character studies, and therefore it is the characters I mostly remember from her novels. I loved the way Ms Tyler wrote about quirky characters and I often joked that my in-laws would make great characters in an Anne Tyler novel.

Digging to America is about two very different families that meet at an airport while waiting to meet their adopted daughters from Korea. The story revolves around the two families through the next five years: their evolving friendship, occasional bitterness, a loss, a romance and not a little misunderstanding.

Brad and Bitsy Donaldson are well-meaning, politically correct suburbanites. Sami and Ziba Yazdan are Iranian-Americans, adapting to American culture, while occasionally shaking their heads at Americans’ behaviors. Each family has extended families whose characters are as colorful as anyone in real life.

The book alternates between the two families’ points of view, each chapter providing a different character to speak, so the reader gets to be “in the head” of several characters in the novel.

If you are looking for a book with an intricate plot, I’d pass this one by, but if you want a cozy book in which the characters are highly developed, give Digging to America a go.

Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Reading

While Christmas shopping I came upon a book with an interesting title and cover in the teen section of Barnes and Noble. Reading the description on the back intrigued me so much I felt I had to buy the book and read it. Here is what the back cover says:

If you start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old by named Bruno. (Although this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds.) And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence.

Fences like this exist all over the world. We hope you never have to encounter one.

Because the book cover illustration was a simple striped pattern of sky blue and a paler shade of sky blue and a fence was mentioned, I assumed the book was about the Holocaust. I also assumed it was about a concentration camp. I also assumed the main character, mentioned in the title was a Jewish boy in the camp.

I was partially correct. The book is about the Holocaust. And a concentration camp. And there is a Jewish boy in it, but he is not the main character mentioned in the title. Instead he is the son of the Nazi who runs the concentration camp.

When I realized that the book was about the son of a Nazi who runs the concentration camp I thought to myself, “What a brilliant idea! I wonder how the author, John Boyne, is going to carry this off — especially since this was a book found in the teen section of Barnes and Noble and not in the adult section of Barnes and Noble.

How John Boyne carries it off is interesting indeed. But not interesting in a good way, really. He writes the book in a voice that becomes kind of annoying after a while. If you’ve ever read any picture books that repeat themselves over and over, you might understand what I mean by annoying after a while. In fact if this review is annoying you right now, you’ll understand what I mean by annoying after a while. I think this is a writing rhetoric called repetition. Repetition is good when you are first learning how to read and repetition is good when you really want to hammer a point home. Repetition is not good when you are using it to make a nine-year-old boy sound unbelievably naive.

Boyne seems confused about who he wrote this book for. According to Boyne himself, when he handed it to his editor he said he thought he’d written a children’s book. The voice seems to agree with that, because it is repetitive and the language is deceptively simple. However the text on the back of the book warns that the book is not for nine-year-olds. The subject matter of the book — Nazis, concentration camps, the Holocaust — is not subject matter I’d want my young children to learn about quite yet.

Because the book was in the teen section of Barnes and Noble, one would think it an appropriate book for teens — and yes, I think that the subject matter of the book– Nazis, concentration camps, the Holocaust — is subject matter my teens could handle. After all, they’ve both read Number the Stars. My daughter has also read a number of other books about the Holocaust including The Devil’s Arithmetic (my personal favorite) and Night. However this book, with its repetition and simple language might put off teens that attempt to read it. I’m pretty sure my son would be put off by the repetition and simple language, however my daughter might not be put off by the repetition and simple language because she’s an aspiring writer and understands the use of voice to convey a certain feeling in a book.

It is obvious that Boyne was using the repetition and simple language to create a voice of innocence and naivety. If this book were about anything other than the son of the Nazi who runs a death camp during the Holocaust, then the use of that voice would have been believable, but I could not get over the fact that the children in the story spent a year living at the camp and neither knew what was going on.

Another thing about the book that annoyed me was Bruno’s consistent mispronunciation of two words. He called Auschwitz “Out-With” throughout the entire book (thinking the former occupants were told to “get out”), even when told the correct pronunciation by his sister. He also said “Fury” for Führer. I kept on thinking, they speak German, not English and I’d bet the German words for “out with” and “fury” are not the same as in English. (Ok, I was wrong about “out with”. According to AltaVista’s Babelfish, the German for “out with” is aus mit. But the German word for “fury” is Wut.)

But do I recommend this book? Even though it is repetitive, carries an unbelievably innocent voice and has characters who are much more naive than they should be for their ages and situations? Yes. The basic idea is really very interesting and thought provoking. That I’ve spent the last few days dissecting it verbally, mentally and in writing is proof that it affected me more than I want to admit. Yes, I recommend it with the caveat that the reader suspend belief (about the character’s innocence) for a while and just get into the lyrical sound of the words. I recommend it to teenagers and adults, but not to anyone younger than, 12.