Some events are so important that we never forget where we were when we learned about them. The night Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, I was working alone at the Little Rock AP and proceeded to get reaction for the national desk. When my Nana died, I had just arrived at Sunday evening church services. When John Kennedy was assassinated, I was sitting in Mr. Fawcett's math class. Our superintendent announced that the president had been shot. We said a silent prayer, and moments later Mr. Key told us the president had died.
So, when I read Stephen King's 11/22/63, a novel in which a time traveler sets out to prevent the Kennedy assassination outside the Texas Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, I also did a bit of time traveling. As King mentioned things only a time traveler would notice -- no cell phones in 1963, for instance -- I, too, was transported back to that Cold War era and to my own memories of the assassination and my life then.
The book is long (849 pages), but it is an easy if at times frustrating read. King repeats sentences and even offers occasional plot summaries so to speak. "The past is obdurate," he wrote how many times? I lost count. I'm sure he did that intentionally, for effect. But the only effect it had on me was irritation.
Still, I enjoyed the book, especially fter a few hundred pages into it when King finally deals with the main plot -- you know, the part about how Lee Harvey Oswald, a Marxist and proud of it, came back to the United States after defecting to Russia. Along with Oswald, came his Russian wife Marina, their baby daughter and a death wish for Kennedy and the president's anti-Castro ways.
While the book is a novel with fantasy and fiction, King included much historical fact along the way -- so much that I found myself days later in my garage looking for the canvas-blue, three-ring notebook in which, as a child, I had cut and stored newspaper clippings from the now-defunct Memphis Press-Scimitar about the assassination. (I think such notebooks also have become part of the "obdurate" past.)
After reading the book and looking through the now-fragile clippings, I began noticing names and facts that as a 13-year-old girl I had not noticed. There was Ruth Paine, who in the book and in life had allowed allowed Marina to live with her during Marina's separation from Lee. There was Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, who had barely missed a rifle bullet in April 1963 -- an assassination attempt Oswald reportedly boasted about to Marina that night. And I had forgotten the point to which King repeatedly alludes -- how Kennedy had begun a withdrawal from Vietnam. Of course, that all changed after his death, and Vietnam became its own nightmare in U.S. history.
But the part of the book I was most curious about was not so much a question of fact as one of portrayal. Had King accurately depicted the 24-year-old Oswald's widowed mother, Marguerite Oswald, as a self-absorbed, controlling woman who most anybody would have been better off not to have had as a parent, especially Lee -- whose first name, by the way, was given to him in honor of Robert E. Lee?
It appears King was on target. According to an old Associated Press article I found, Oswald had been diagnosed at age 13 as having schizophrenic tendencies and being potentially dangerous. Yet his mother, who had little money, had "balked at aid from welfare agencies, ignored a court order that Lee receive psychiatric treatment" and refused to consider him "anything more than a truant," the AP reported, attributing the information to Lee's probation officer in the early 1950s.
The article also related how, in the days after the assassination, reporters and three Secret Service agents were at Marguerite Oswald's home when she called to the agents and said, "You all want to see me on television? ... I'm just exhausted. I haven't even had time to read the papers."
This book was the first I have ever read by King. I'm glad I read it despite a couple problems I had with plot inconsistencies. King seemed, for example, to change the rules on traveling back and forth in time near the novel's end for convenience sake. But when an author manages to hold my interest for more than 800 pages, prompts me to rummage through my cluttered garage for an old notebook and then causes me to reread almost 50-year-old newspaper articles, he must have done something right.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
Joan Didion's bestselling The Year of Magical Thinking focused on the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a successful writer and brother-in-law of Dominick Dunne. The book was published in 2005, just weeks before another tragedy struck Didion -- the death after a lingering illness of her daughter, Quintana Roo, at age 39.
Didion quickly updated the book with her daughter's death, but now she has written another memoir, this time focusing almost entirely on the daughter she adopted as an infant, the one who died, slowly, in a New York hospital. The book is Blue Nights and is written in typical Didion style -- short sentences and terse, obvious repetition for emphasis yet still concise.
The book is more about Didion's response to Quintana Roo's death than it is about Quintana Roo. It also is a mirror of the aging author's own frailties and vanities. She was 75 when she wrote this book in 2009.
Didion writes, for example, of realizing only late in life that she would not again be wearing the red suede sandals with 4-inch heels she once adored. Or the gold hoop earrings. Or the black cashmere leggings. Or the enameled beads. And she realizes that even the mention of such concerns in a book about her daughter's death "will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity."
And yet ... those realizations do not seem a reflection so much of vanity as a reflection of growing old -- and doing so alone, without spouse, without child, without some of the longtime friends Didion writes of having died as well.
As an aging woman myself, I know it's a lie to say I'm middle-aged unless I plan to live well past a century. When I broke my ankle and had to have surgery, I refused a walker despite the doctor's advice. I prefer not to tell my age, but my resume with the college graduation date is a dead-giveaway. I refuse to wear old women's shoes -- if you're under 50, you know the kind of shoes I mean. I toss all mail from the AARP. I'm not retired, so I surely cannot be that old, I tell myself. I do not request senior discounts at restaurants even when I qualify. I do not worry much about makeup and hairstyles. (I tell myself I am bohemian, not just too tired to fret over such things anymore.) But I do wish I could better conceal the increasingly visible veins in my hands, the scarred ankle that still hurts and becomes suddenly and dangerously stiff; the back teeth I am missing but cannot afford to replace.
So, vanity, you see, is not a quality limited to the Joan Didions and other rich and famous. Didion is just honest, candid about hers.
As an adoptive mother, I also identify with Didion's recollections of the fears regarding her daughter, adopted when Didion was 31, much younger than I was when I adopted my daughter from China.
"All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to be abandoned by their natural," Didion writes. "All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them."
Yes, I have feared such loss to the point that I borrowed money from someone I did not want to ask but did so because I felt my daughter's father and I needed to re-adopt her in this country and to do so very quickly -- just to be safe. My daughter has said don't leave me alone. -- Where are you? I can't find you, she has said. -- I was only in the other room or the back yard.
Didion recalls her daughter, as a child, speaking of her "other mommy," the biological mother. The same words have come from my daughter, who's even spoken of her four sets of grandparents -- if you count the ones in China, that is.
Ultimately, of course, Didion did lose her daughter, not to the biological mother, not to a court or to a foster parent, but to death -- at a far too young age.
If a memoir can be judged by believability, by truth, by remembrances of all things -- even the embarrassing -- Blue Nights certainly qualifies. It is not a depressing book, but it is a work that at times is so realistic it hurts, especially if the reader's life bears even small resemblances to Didion's.
Didion quickly updated the book with her daughter's death, but now she has written another memoir, this time focusing almost entirely on the daughter she adopted as an infant, the one who died, slowly, in a New York hospital. The book is Blue Nights and is written in typical Didion style -- short sentences and terse, obvious repetition for emphasis yet still concise.
The book is more about Didion's response to Quintana Roo's death than it is about Quintana Roo. It also is a mirror of the aging author's own frailties and vanities. She was 75 when she wrote this book in 2009.
Didion writes, for example, of realizing only late in life that she would not again be wearing the red suede sandals with 4-inch heels she once adored. Or the gold hoop earrings. Or the black cashmere leggings. Or the enameled beads. And she realizes that even the mention of such concerns in a book about her daughter's death "will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity."
And yet ... those realizations do not seem a reflection so much of vanity as a reflection of growing old -- and doing so alone, without spouse, without child, without some of the longtime friends Didion writes of having died as well.
As an aging woman myself, I know it's a lie to say I'm middle-aged unless I plan to live well past a century. When I broke my ankle and had to have surgery, I refused a walker despite the doctor's advice. I prefer not to tell my age, but my resume with the college graduation date is a dead-giveaway. I refuse to wear old women's shoes -- if you're under 50, you know the kind of shoes I mean. I toss all mail from the AARP. I'm not retired, so I surely cannot be that old, I tell myself. I do not request senior discounts at restaurants even when I qualify. I do not worry much about makeup and hairstyles. (I tell myself I am bohemian, not just too tired to fret over such things anymore.) But I do wish I could better conceal the increasingly visible veins in my hands, the scarred ankle that still hurts and becomes suddenly and dangerously stiff; the back teeth I am missing but cannot afford to replace.
So, vanity, you see, is not a quality limited to the Joan Didions and other rich and famous. Didion is just honest, candid about hers.
As an adoptive mother, I also identify with Didion's recollections of the fears regarding her daughter, adopted when Didion was 31, much younger than I was when I adopted my daughter from China.
"All adopted children, I am told, fear that they will be abandoned by their adoptive parents as they believe themselves to be abandoned by their natural," Didion writes. "All adoptive parents, I do not need to be told, fear that they do not deserve the child they were given, that the child will be taken from them."
Yes, I have feared such loss to the point that I borrowed money from someone I did not want to ask but did so because I felt my daughter's father and I needed to re-adopt her in this country and to do so very quickly -- just to be safe. My daughter has said don't leave me alone. -- Where are you? I can't find you, she has said. -- I was only in the other room or the back yard.
Didion recalls her daughter, as a child, speaking of her "other mommy," the biological mother. The same words have come from my daughter, who's even spoken of her four sets of grandparents -- if you count the ones in China, that is.
Ultimately, of course, Didion did lose her daughter, not to the biological mother, not to a court or to a foster parent, but to death -- at a far too young age.
If a memoir can be judged by believability, by truth, by remembrances of all things -- even the embarrassing -- Blue Nights certainly qualifies. It is not a depressing book, but it is a work that at times is so realistic it hurts, especially if the reader's life bears even small resemblances to Didion's.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Coming Up & What I'm Reading Now.....
will be reviews or commentary on:
by Annie Dillard.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larrson. I will follow up later with an item on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final book in Larrson's posthumously published and bestselling series.
Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel set in the aftermath of World War I and the fourth in a series of Jacqueline Winspear.
And a mention of a couple books, both novels, I started but just couldn't make myself want to finish them. ... Oh, and I am now reading Alice, Let's Eat, a 1970s book by Calvin Trillin, whose name many will recognize from his articles over the decades in The New Yorker. And I just checked out Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind.
by Annie Dillard.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larrson. I will follow up later with an item on The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the final book in Larrson's posthumously published and bestselling series.
Messenger of Truth, a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel set in the aftermath of World War I and the fourth in a series of Jacqueline Winspear.
And a mention of a couple books, both novels, I started but just couldn't make myself want to finish them. ... Oh, and I am now reading Alice, Let's Eat, a 1970s book by Calvin Trillin, whose name many will recognize from his articles over the decades in The New Yorker. And I just checked out Alice LaPlante's Turn of Mind.
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