We Live in Water

Short Stories by Jess Walter

Does anyone really like short stories? I mean, besides grateful middle school students who are just glad they don't have to read a whole book. Everybody who I mentioned this book to so far has said, "Yeah, I don't really like short stories. They're just so________." Fill in the blank. For me, the blank is two things: short and dark. Wait, I'm criticizing short stories for being too short? That's a bit obvious. I should have known what I was getting myself into there. But what I mean is that they leave me unsatisfied. I just get into the characters, figure out the setting, and then bam, the story's over. I'm the opposite of middle school students in that regard, I guess. The other thing is that every short story that's been written for adults after about 1950 is required to be incredibly depressing. I think they're trying to be very real and human and all that but it's not my reality that there are no happy endings.

Jess Walter's book of stories doesn't change my mind about the genre one bit. He is, admittedly, a MASTERFUL writer. I am blown away by how simple his writing seems yet how incredibly well crafted, from the purity of the voices to the tightness of the pacing to the endings that manage to surprise every time. And YET. Every single story is about drugs, homelessness, crime, rape, dysfunction, or wait for it...zombie. Yes, there is even one zombie story and while it's a very smart zombie story, it's still about the one supernatural, not-real thing that terrifies me (thanks to a combination of the movie "28 Days Later," Halloween, and pregnancy hormones. I don't want to talk about it).

I do have to say that if Jess Walter was to read this blog, I think he would say that I missed the point. He'd say he was being intentional with all the druggie stories and even the zombie one, that he's showing the effect and character of the poverty and education problems in our culture and especially in Spokane, that he tried to elucidate that with a list of facts and anecdotes  (A LIST! I LOVED THAT PART!) he calls Statistical Abstract for My Hometown, Spokane, Washington. And I get it. I do. He humanizes a very deep cultural issue. I guess I just don't want my light reading to be about how society is failing. I get enough of that in my education books. So thanks, Mr. Walter. I'll read your next novel and skip the story collections.

Joy for Beginners

Novel by Erica Bauermeister

It's sweater weather, folks. We're in the season of socks all the time, tea and coffee morning and afternoon (decaf, most of it), fight with the seven year old to get her to wear a coat every day. I'm sipping a vanilla cappuccino right now courtesy of my Keurig. And for many of us, this weather ushers in a new kind of reading material. It's the opposite of beach reads but with the same effect, like an eggnog latte versus a Frappuccino or a hot buttered rum over a daiquiri. Wait a minute...okay, I'm back. All the drink metaphors made me have to go to the bathroom.

So anyway, this book has a certain heart-warming quotient to it, where it's not too serious but touches on real life issues and relationships among a group of women of various ages, that makes it seem comforting and familiar. The beginning has a woman who has just overcome cancer and is celebrating with the circle of friends who have borne her through the disease and treatments. They encourage her to take a whitewater rafting trip with her college-age daughter to celebrate her victory, so she announces a challenge for each of them to undertake in the next year. The ages and walks of the women vary and so do their challenges, which the reader learns only in each woman's chapter. The voice telling the story remains impartial and consistent, so it's not too much of a bounce around to hear so many different stories. They each commit themselves bravely to their task and grow as expected but without too much sappiness or gift wrapped perfect endings.

And yet. Probably because I read this on the heels of a masterpiece (Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter) or because I was surprised and delighted to stumble on this author's first book (The School of Essential Ingredients) there were parts of this one that fell a little flat for me. The descriptions are too neat and tidy and come off as sentimental and a little sappy. They remind me of so many of the personal memoirish blogs I read, or all the thankful Thanksgiving facebook posts going around right now. Sweet but somehow all sounding the same. The characters, too, were less rounded and more like caricatures than I hoped for. I also recognize that these are issues I'm having with revising my own beleaguered novel, so I'm reading too much with a critical writer's eye. This is a "quiet" story, as one agent described my manuscript, and I enjoyed it quietly, like a warm pair of socks.

Two parting thoughts (and a list to keep my soul happy):

1) Next on my bookshelf is Jess Walter's recent collection of short stories. I'm kind of hoping I don't like it, because I usually don't like short stories, but he knocked my warm socks off with his novel, so I have to give it a shot. Plus, it's overdue at the library and we know how crazy that makes me.

2) I am trying to fix the blog so you can comment (that would be so much fun! like a real book club, kinda sorta). So far I've tried Google's suggestions to no avail, so I'm going to ask my husband will take a look. My kids think he can fix anything.

Beautiful Ruins

Novel by Jess Walters

Some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. I love reading Washington State authors. It makes them seem like normal people (I could have driven by his house!) and pulls me up out of the murky depths of trying to get published and being rejected for the 67th time. Jess Walter did it and he's from Spokane! Maybe I can, too!

2. No one knows what literary or commercial fiction really is. Not me (see the post in which I attempted to pin it down and failed), not publishers, not NPR. Cause this cover looks like commercial fiction, but the book is billed as literary fiction, but it's such an engaging read that it blows most contemporary literary fiction away. See what I mean?

3. I like starting my blog with lists. I like anything with lists, actually. And this book ends with a list! Really! A list of happy endings for various characters, both the expected and the unexpected. I hope that didn't ruin it for you, but it makes me feel better to know that it's all going to turn out okay. Which is very commercial fiction-ish, by the way.

4. I'm using a lot of exclamation points today. Sorry, sorry about that. I'll restrain myself.

Okay, here's the book in a nutshell...nope, can't do it. There is no nutshelling this book. Jess Walter wrote a TRULY sweeping story. It goes from 1960s Italy where the young owner of a small hotel hosts and helps a young American actress working on the set of "Cleopatra," to modern day Hollywood where a producer's assistant and would-be screenwriter are having early life crises, to World War II Italy, to the post-grunge music scene in the UK, to 1970s theater in Seattle, and back again. Sweeping. I was halfway in before I'd met all the main characters. And all these characters and settings blend not in a mixed up strangers sort of way but a completely natural telling of their lives. Walter makes the extraordinary seem ordinary and vice versa. His language is beautifully simple.

In fact, I think that besides the likeable characters, interesting settings, and surprising plot, this is what makes this book so excellent. The simplest scene is beautiful and important in both the smallest and biggest ways. There is a scene where the hotelier and actress go for a walk to see an old WWII pillbox bunker. A German soldier has painted portraits on the inside. It's a momentary distraction for the characters but as a reader you can sort of kind of start to tell the importance of the moment. And then we come back to it again. And again. In small ways all, but that's his style. Small becomes big, like these types of scenes, and yet the huge things (scandal! pregnancy! drugs! again with the exclamation points!) just fall in line and don't seem huge at all until you step back and see them.

Walter is such an excellent writer that I would be inordinately jealous, except that he confesses in the interview at the back that it took him 15 years to write this story. As I told a friend, I wasn't even an adult 15 years ago, so I'm okay with it.

I think my feelings are clear here: read this book. Everyone can love it, despite the literary label. High school students will probably be asked to write papers on it in 15 or 20 years and they'll hate it then, of course. I've also heard that some "real" book clubs are discussing this book, so for those two groups I'll leave you with some literary analysis that you are welcome to steal: one of the unifying elements of the book is how very human we all are in our constant striving for success. At one point a group of the characters are travelling to Seattle on a quest with many different purposes, though each of them is looking for some kind of fulfillment. Walter compares them to the Scarecrow and Tinman, who discovered on THEIR quest that the things they sought, they had all along. As they fly into the Emerald City, Walter uses imagery from "The Wizard of Oz." That's genius.

And it still has a happy ending.

Gone Girl

Novel by Gillian Flynn

Always a little late to the party on these uber popular books, aren't I? I think I have oppositional defiance disorder (ODD, that's a thing, much to the chagrin of school teachers everywhere) when it comes to current "it" books. I purposefully don't want to read it BECAUSE it's the book that everyone else is reading. Until I do.

I think with these books I also tend to tune out what the book is really about, beyond the premise, which is obvious from the title here. A woman disappears, clearly, and as usual her husband is the main suspect. But what I didn't know is that it's told from two perspectives, his and hers, and the timelines are different, his being the present day, the current disappearance and investigation, and hers being past, how they met and their first five years of marriage. And what I really didn't know is how completely mental it is. Like, get under your skin creepy crazy. I heard it was DARK, but wow. These people are nutso.

I have to give credit to the author. She must have read a ton of psychology books and then dove really deep into her own marriage and every other marriage she had ever witnessed up close in order to give this gut check analysis of a life lived together. The characters are incredibly detailed and rounded and you learn more about them than you know about yourself or your own close ones, which is incredible writing, but remember, crazy. And it made me a little crazy reading it. How much do you really want to know about other people, really? Even your own spouse or other loved ones? This is kind of the point of the book, that knowing someone so well is touted as true love and makes you soul mates, but it's eventually kind of disappointing. Or worse.

There. I've done my best to describe the satisfying creepiness without giving away any of the many plot twists. By the way, I saw that a movie version is due out next year. I'm not sure I'll see it. I mean, I don't think I want it to count as one of "my" movies when my husband and I take turns choosing what to rent because it will be somewhat violent and full of cringe-worthy swearing. I'm more of a feel good movie kind of girl. On the other hand, maybe it will be one of the rare movies we both like equally. We'll see.