Good and Okay

It was a long week, so I went home to play in the snow (awesome snowshoe hike!) and veg out before a few long (but awesome) weeks to come. I also wanted a break from serious reading so I brought with me a book that I had grabbed on impulse last time I was at the BPL, Pauline A. Chen's The Red Chamber. It was more substantive than I was expecting, and/but I really enjoyed it. The re-imagining of a classic (apparently) Chinese story, The Dream of the Red Chamber, the book traces the lives of three women of the aristocratic (I...think? Kind of? Chinese social hierarchies confuse me; upper classes, in any case) Jia family in eighteenth-century Beijing. The three main characters are finely drawn, but I appreciated that other characters were multi-dimensional and nicely fleshed out as well.

 Chen also did a good job of setting the scene, and making the world the women live in, while obviously very far from my own experience, real and not overly, falsely exotic. Part of the reason I wasn't expecting much was that one of the blurbs on the back was from Arthur Golden, the Memoirs of a Geisha guy; I don't love that book, and I don't get why it was so popular, unless people were responding to the selling virgins / selling sex titillation aspect. That's probably unfair. I'm sure it was exhaustively researched and God knows he did love a setting-detail. I never thought there was much emotional depth, though - unlike Julie Otsuka's Buddha in the Attic, which I loved. Otsuka also wrote a blurb for this book, and that was what instantly decided me on checking it out. Interestingly, I probably also would have if I had read the acknowledgments and seen the should out to Leslie Levine (editor at Knopf / Random House), since I have yet, I think, to read a novel in which she participated in the production of, that I wasn't impressed with (full disclosure, there's something of a slim professional relationship there). I think Levine worked on Buddha in the Attic, too...

After Red Chamber I went back to Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to finish it, since I had a book club meeting centered on it last night. It is...okay? Honestly, I think it's a really, really long short story. But a great short story, probably. The title character is a young war hero home from Iraq after a massively publicized firefight with Iraqi insurgents, being trotted around the U.S. with his squad (er, or whatever - team? I'm not a military expert) for a publicity tour culminating in their appearance at the Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys game. We went back and forth about whether this was a book about sports or war, in the words of one of the book club organizers; I would say neither. It's about a young many, naive in many ways, who's never quite been fully integrated (mentally/emotionally) into the world around him who's now definitely somewhat adrift in a couple worlds that don't really make sense to him. And about figuring out who he is and what he wants - although in a book that takes place in a day, obviously there are no clear answers to be had. Billy, though, is a really appealing and believable character, and very well delineated. His fellow "Bravo squad" members, while never as fully drawn (the whole book is Billy's thoughts), are similarly human, with distinct personalities and backgrounds. Like the character of Billy, Fountain did an excellent job with the relationship of the team, and its one of the strengths of the book. Billy's sisters, too, and his relationship with them, feel very real, although his parents are surprisingly more caricature-like.

The book is rocky, though. The beginning is especially tough to get through, with a story that maybe is meant to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness-y, but just feels over-enthusiastic and under-edited. Fountain also does this thing where he has pieces of words trailing across an otherwise blank page to indicate the flashes of conversations that are getting through to our dazed (hungover and unsure of the world around him) hero. It gets the point across, I suppose, but it feels lazy or like something a writing class student would come up with and find very clever...and then do over and over again. I read the book, as I try generally to do, without knowing anything about the author, and I have to say, I wasn't surprised to find out afterwards that this was a first novel. Fountain is definitely a talented writer - strong characters and some really vivid, evocative descriptive lines - but the book felt like it needed to be edited way the hell down. Maybe not to short story length, but it should have been a lot shorter. In particular, it was one of those situations where the author would make a point really, really well with one or two passages, but then go on to make the same point, again and again, with several more "okay" passages. Less would definitely be more here.

I'm not even going to get into the fact that apparently Billy manages to, in a few moments in a hidden corner, get a cheerleader off merely by rubbing his pelvis into hers. Sure. I am, however, pleased that V, my book club-buddy, also had to go back and re-read that passage to see if she had missed something. I am also amused that the only guy at book club totally thought that was a perfectly reasonable scenario, lol.

So, overall...it was good, but not great. I'd have loved to have gotten my hands on it while it was still being edited, though. A lot of decent points about America and our war machine were made, although often made not subtly at all and repeatedly. Billy, again (I can't say it enough), was a fantastic and fantastically handled character. And the end was a lot better than the beginning. Maybe I just never got over the beginning. In any case, I'm still talking about it and mulling it over, so that's good (and V and I kept talking about it at the next bar after we bailed on the book club after it had melted down into a general discussion of...something).