VANILLA ANGST

Let me make this clear, I don't "get" THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS. Yes, I find  Claire Messud's  writing  technically correct. However,  her dissection of her main character, Nora Eldridge, a would-be artist  turned school teacher leaves me untouched. It makes no difference that Nora is meant to be incandescent with rage, brimming with hoarded passion.Her rage is second hand. She gets it from her mother, who went to college but ended up being a mom and a housewife, poor little woman. Having lived long enough to learn that being a mom and a housewife can be a more satisfying job and a more positive contribution  than, say, making silly installations bespattered with aspirin flowers, I have no patience with characters  whose great tragedy is that  they are school teachers rather than  great artists. "Don't all women fell the same," Nora asks. "The only difference is..how in touch we are with our fury." Seriously, how observant   is a woman who  thinks nothing of  slapping such a neat little label on all women? Where does she get off assuming that everyone shares her First World angst? Maybe it is all a matter of cultural perception and as a Third World person, I am probably unequipped to empathyse with these little drownings in a teacup. I  can think of far more serious problems Nora's and I have a feeling that there are few artists who are truly great. But this is very much a First World book for First World readers. It is a book with the requisite number of expletives, the requisite number of allusions to social media and fashion trends to show that  Messud has her finger on the pulse of the Zeitgeist.

Nora mentions Lucy Jordan moments at least three times and I had to Google it to find out that Lucy is a housewife who goes mad in a Shel Silverstein (indeedy yes, Silverstein) poem made popular as a Marianne Faithfull song.  Nora gets that and is angry. She is angry that no one "gets" her. She does not worry overmuch about not getting others. Nora does not connect with her brother.Nora thinks her elderly aunt Baby is smelly. Nora talks about the world as a Fun House and  trap. Nora  is her own world and a very vanilla world it is. What does she do to adjust the status quo? She falls in love with with one of her Third Grade students--no, no, there is no perversion there--Reza Shahid, the exotic son of an Italian artist and a Christian Palestinian from Lebanon. Next she falls in love with Reza's mother Sirena, she of the aspirin flowers. Note that name, Sirena. It is one of the few instances in which Messud  is clearly heavy handed. If this were not complicated enough, she also falls in love with Skandar, Reza's father, whose lifework is the study of ethics. Logically, an ethicist has to have sex with a slightly deranged New England school teacher. So he does. Once. Very angry making this is.

What happens as a result is, in my opinion, much ado about nothing.There are references to Lebanon and its endless wars,but there are no references to what really goes on in New England during the Year of the Shahids. A sad place it must be for Nora to think that Italians are exotic. There is exotic Paris, there is quite a bit about how artists become darling of moneyed the buyers and there is a spectacular betrayal at the very end of the story. Believe, that betrayal makes Nora madder than a hornet's nest. Me? I think it is all very cool and very elegant and that the writing itself is superb, but the story has the static feel of flowers of the aspirin variety. Nevertheless,  I would like to read more Messud because I have the feeling that this book is not the measure of her powers.

THE BIRTHDAY OF A NEW WORLD

 that forever altered the relationship between Colonial America and Britain

BUNKER HILL, Nathaniel Philbrick

This is how to bring history to life, " On a hot, almost windless afternoon in June, a seven- year-old boy stood beside his mother and looked across the green islands of the Boston harbor. To the northwest sheets of fire rose from the base of a distant hill. Even though the fighting was at least ten miles away, the concussion of the great guns burst like like bubbles across his tear stained face." This is the opening graph of Nathaniel Philbricks' BUNKER HILL.  The boy was John Quincy Adams, and his tears were for his beloved physician, Doctor Joseph Warren, president of the Provincial Congress, "the most influential patriot leader in the province of Massachusetts...the man who  ordered Paul Revere to alert the countryside that British soldiers were headed to Concord..." Thus Philbrick plucks Warren from the margins of American history to place him center stage where he belongs as the overseers of the creation of the provincial army and the orchestrator  the Correspondence Committee's "propaganda campaign to convince meant to convince British and American people that  Massachusetts was fighting for its survival in a purely defensive war."
 That the grievances of people of Massachusetts were not altogether based on fact, hardly mattered. Neither did it matter that "Britain had not launched a preconceived effort to enslave the colonies.Compared to other outposts of the empire, the American colonists were...some of the most prosperous, least-taxed  people in the Western world." Ideology was the prime mover in this  clash between conformists and nonconformists, of people  shaped by an ethos that deified a stratified class system and those who  believed that  every  individual could effect his own transformation. Both groups were, in the beginning, loyal subjects of the British Crown. Then, in 1770,  came the  The Boston Massacre when British troops fired into an unarmed  crowd killing five people.  The Tea Part not withstanding, up to the  battle of Bunker Hill, the dichotomy between patriot and loyalist had yet to manifest itself openly. This was a progression aided by coercive legislation, the skirmishes at Concord and Lexington, and the incendiary policies of of British authorities.  In the words of John Adams, the revolution  began "in the hearts and minds of the people." Philosophical difference plus British hubris, the unbridled arrogance of British governors and military figures, gross blunders, acts of out-and-out cruelty, compelled patriots to externalize their feeling of alienation from a distant and indifferent government.

Lest it appear that every patriot in BUNKER HILL wears a shiny halo, it is important to note that Philbrick makes no attempt to obscure the flaws in American icons. Rather, she shines a revealing light on our George, the social climber,  "...the Washingtons were not rich enough  to considered genuine Virginian aristocracy ....(his) best hope for achieving the social standing he craved was the military.."He shows us young George Washington  as the  inept military leader during the French and Indian Wars, when he could not control his troops nor keep his Iroquois ally from bashing open the head of   a Frenchman with whom he, George,  parlays. Philbrick uncovers the snobbery  of a George, who, having married money, thought himself superior  to  New Englander farmers, whom he considered great unwashed louts. He shows us George,   the slave owner trying to keep African-Americans out of the Revolutionary Army. But he also shows us George soliciting criticism so that he can become a better leader and this adds another layer of depth to a book that combines thoughtful analysis, vivid description, amusing anecdotes and amply documented fact.

This is ultimately, a beautiful, romantic story of people fighting for ideas, fighting for the cause of liberty. Reading BUNKER HILL one runs the  risks becoming the kind of  super-patriot LL Mencken claimed to despise. How can one not fall in love with the heroism of Henry Knox, the former bookseller who  traveled over three hundred miles through ice and snow to bring weapons to the revolutionary forces? How can one not admire Rufus Putnam,  the  self-taught engineer who progresses from theoretical knowledge to the actual construction of  effective fortifications?  These are just two figures in an engaging cast of flawed but admirable characters in an enthralling canvas..

Besides painting vivid portraits, Philbrick has a gift for making history read like a thriller. It is no exaggeration to say that his depiction of military battles are as fascinating  as Tolstoy's. It comes as no surprise that he spent three years writing a book that tells the reader what is a mandamus, what is brief of assistance, how long is a Colonial Era bayonet, how the speech of Colonists departed from that of British English, why George Washington invited  the African poet Phillis Wheatley to visit him, how many families in Boston owned slaves, how much gunpowder was available to each soldier  in the revolutionary forces.
 BUNKER HILL is much more  than a record of  the events that led to the first pivotal battle of the American Revolution. It is a portrait of a young country coming into its own. It is a book that  takes lifeless history and recasts it into a vibrant narrative that engages the reader and capture his imagination.  Better yet, it is an account of why and how thirteen disparate colonies coalesced into the United States of America.

ANNOUNCING BETH HOFFMAN'S NEW BOOK AND E-BOOK OFFER

Beth Hoffman's new novel LOOKING FOR ME hits stores on May 28^th, less than 2 weeks away! In advance of the release, the e-book of Beth's breakout debut novel, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, is a Daily Deal today and is available on all platforms for only $2.99.

http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781101189856,00.html?Saving_CeeCee_Honeycutt_Beth_Hoffman

ALAS POOR JULIAN

The point of view in John O'Hara's first novel, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA is that of a disgruntled teenager whose nose is glued, willy-nilly,  to a fishbowl.  Granted, O'Hara had a keen ear for dialogue and a clever outsider's acute powers of observation.Trouble is that as the son of a doctor living in mansion--the former home of the Yeungling brewery family--O''Hara's otherness  is a matter a perception.Possibly,in  his fishbowl,  Pottsville, Pennsylvannia, renamed as Gibbsville, in the novel, being an Irish Catholic was a social handicap. So much has changed in the 43 years that followed the publication of this book, its atmosphere reeks as strongly of must as an old attic.Therein lies O'Hara's  importance as a social historian and critic. Even as one deplores the infantile poking of eyes, the story remains as a decaying sample of the mores of an earlier and sadder America.

APPOINTMENT AT SAMARRA holds no surprises. O'Hara's gives away the ending away in the epigraph, a tale about a man who attempts to cheat death by fleeing Baghdad for Samarra, where he is meant to die. Why the suicide of the protagonist, Julian English, is unavoidable is a hurdle for  the modern reader to jump. Which modern reader  has not  read about  villains, such as the Watergate Seven,  who committed crimes, got religion, wrote books and reemerged,  as respectable members of society?  But anyone who lives in a small knows that the shelf life of middle class scandals is eternal. The pastor who is said to have slept with a colleague's wife, the councilperson who allegedly paid for his wife's assassination,the gay professor rumoured to have drugged his students in order to have his way with them,  the lawyer arrested in a child porn sting, are forever marked in the minds of most small town people. Is it a stretch, then, to believe  that once Julian throws a drink on the face a creditor he secretly despises, he might as well kill himself? Perhaps.
At a small town the most painful death is a social death. That means ineligibility for  A-list dinner parties, the Country Club, Cotillion, Kiwanis, Rotary, the Merchants Association. all the silly institution that give people an illusion of superiority. In America, where money determines social status,social ostracism can cause serious financial damage in that it tends to interfere with networking. In O'Hara's time, the Country Club was the world and never mind how ludicrously tiny, boring  and airless it was. There,  the ethnically homogeneous   in-crowd came to flex its monetary muscle and as the hoodlum Al Grecco knew, people with that kind of muscle do not take kindly to having bootleg or any sort of drink  thrown at their faces. If the ice in the drink gives the rich person a black ete, it is curtains for you, buddy, just as it was for Julian. By the way, I find Al Grecco, an unmitigated ruffian, the only likeable character in this story.
Why the account of waht is meant as a tragedy reads as a supremely unimportant tempest in a fishbowl is due, in part, to Zeitgeist. After nearly half a century since its launching, the conventions that were so important in O'Hara's time are on the wane. Unless the reader keeps in mind that there were no reliable contraceptives in Gibbsville, it is hard not to scoff at Julian's wife, Caroline, coy request about  "a thing" (condom)as he is about to deflower--deflower is now a mustily sexist term-- her.In America, the importance of virginity, the risk of pregnancy and its consequences declined dramatically in importance in the past 43 years. Remove the idea of virginity as a commodity, of woman as someone who submits---this is a biggie in O'Hara's book--rather than participates in sex, remove the idea that women can be more than wives and man can be more than the sum total of a paycheck and O'Hara little edifice crumbles.
It is essential to remember that in the Gibbsvilles of the Twenties, it all mattered, money, virginity, propriety and property.possibly, a person with more gumption would leave Gibbsville for another town where he could reinvent himself, I know. I live in a place the harboured at some time or another, witness protection program wise guys,  corps-de-ballet soupers turned Balanchine, alleged son of alleged tycoon allegedly related to the house of Rothschild,But, no.   It took all of three days in his stuffy little world for Julian to go from a member of the club to a nobody. Methinks he was a nobody all along and that is what killed him.