I'll start by admitting that Death's Daughter isn't something that I would usually read. I have and do read science fiction/fantasy novels but the stories, written by authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler, have had a pretty blatant second-wave feminist social commentary element to them. In fact, I would say that the feminism part supersedes the fantasy part of these novels.

In contrast, Amber Benson's first novel written all by her lonesome, rather than with sometime writing partner Christopher Golden, is very much a novel based in mythology with the fantasy elements at the forefront. Benson has called it a combination of fantasy and chicklit, and that description is fairly apt. Death's Daughter is intended as a fluffy, quick, entertaining read, and it does work on that level to an extent. However, the novel lacks what most engages me in the fluffy novels I usually read: an appealing main character.

Even though Calliope is supposedly in her twenties, her narrative voice sounds more like that of a teenager, which causes the book to read like a young adult novel with too much sex and too much violence. Callie is shallow, whiny, and self-involved, and Benson's choice to give a fashionista slant to her character disappoints because it's unoriginal. The literary world has no need of yet another Carrie Bradshaw or Rebecca Bloomwood, and perhaps because in real life Benson seems to have little concern for designers and labels, all of the name dropping of high-fashion heavyweights felt very artificial. I gritted my teeth and plowed through the first part of the book because I had to believe that Benson was writing Callie as so superficial and selfish so that she could be changed by the experiences that lay ahead. While Callie did show some evidence of character development, she never did transform into someone I liked. However, Benson does beat the crap out of her for 300 or so pages, so that's something to consider.

Eventually I started tuning out Calliope, but I didn't get bored. The story clips along at a good pace, and I enjoyed Benson's take on how Hell works and on Hindu mythology, with a little bit of Greek and Norse thrown in. I liked that she explored how immortality works in regards to the not getting killed. Something I've always been curious about: how do immortal people age? But Benson's version of Kali differs quite a bit from my imagining. I envision her as more wrathful rather than just peevish. I also really liked Runt and Clio, who seems much more mature than her supposedly older sister. Plus, Clio is the "Willow character," and I always have a soft spot for smart, nerdy girls, especially if they wear Buddy Holly glasses.

The chicklit portion of the novel is fairly light. The romance subplot does not conclude as is expected of the genre, and I was pleased that the story's main trajectory was not about Callie getting the guy. Instead, the plot focuses principally on Callie's hero's journey, completing her tasks to become Death and rescuing her father. While Callie certainly becomes more confident as the book progresses, I was disappointed that she never found complete autonomy. I wish that she could have completed one of her tasks by herself.

The male characters, at least the supernatural ones, seem to fall into two categories: diabolical or sacrificial. Vritra, the Devil, Marcel, and Indra all scheme and manipulate women, while Daniel and Jarvis sacrifice themselves to assure that Callie completes her journey. Callie's father is probably the only exception to this dichotomy, but he appears very little in the novel. The human men are decidedly less assertive and heroic with Callie's blind date failing to catch her eye physically speaking and her vegan co-worker fainting after seeing Jarvis. The women in the novel, with perhaps the exception of Clio, are all ball-busters of a sort but that does not necessarily translate to their seeming empowered. Though none come across as helpless, most become victims of men's manipulation.

Benson narrates the novel in a very conversational tone that's a little too familiar for my taste. There were several times that Benson repeated herself, conveying the same information through both Callie's thoughts and subsequent dialogue. For example:

How the hell am I supposed to know what I'm doing? I thought to myself. It's not like there's a book on the subject.

"Hey, you don't have to yell at me. It's not like anyone gave me an instruction manual—"

Just the dialogue would have sufficed. I also disliked Benson's use of the word "bitch" but more on a feminist level. Callie chastises Clio for referring to the Gopi as "bitches" but Callie herself uses the word several times throughout the novel. The sisters use the word differently – Clio refers to women being a man's "bitches," and Callie uses it as a derogatory term for a disagreeable woman – but I personally fail to see the word as anything but oppressive in any context. I vote that women leave "bitch" unclaimed.

But I do not wish to seem too negative. Death's Daughter is Benson's first solo novel, and I'm sure that she will grow as a novelist just as she has grown as a screenwriter. This novel is supposedly the first of a trilogy, and at this point I would be willing to read a sequel. The prose may not be perfect, but Death's Daughter is very readable and, like I said, I enjoyed Benson's take on mythology. My favorite bit: "...you, and the other Evangelical Christian sinners, would spend your days of punishment sewing sequins on all the gaffs for the Devil's favorite cabaret, The Gay Minority Demons' Drag Show."

Hmmm...but should I be overly sensitive and take that sentence to imply that gay people are demons? Eh, I'll give Benson a pass on that one because I know what an awesome ally she is to the queer community. She has said that she doesn't have any gay characters in this series yet, and of the characters in this novel I would guess that Clio has the most queer potential. I mean, short hair, dorky glasses, owns a white tank top, likes animals? Stereotypes, yes, but sometimes stereotypes exist for a reason. That list describes at least six lesbians that I know. OK, so Clio seems to have a thing for Indra in this book, but I would attribute that to whatever mojo he seems to work on the ladies. Or it would be fine if she were bisexual as long as she didn't turn evil or become an assassin. There's been enough of that already.

I admit it: I read The Da Vinci Code. However, I did not enjoy The Da Vinci Code. As he does with Deception Point as well, Dan Brown proves himself to be an author of detailed research. While I found the subject of his research in The Da Vinci Code more fascinating, its presentation frustrated me. Sir Teabing just talks and talks for pages on end. Too much set-up has to be delivered in one big chunk, which effectively, for lack of a better word, really constipates the plot. In the case of Deception Point, Brown is able to dole out facts more evenly throughout the novel, though it's still a bit of an overload for me. I'd rather have the information on a need to know basis. I don't really care about an OH-58 Kiowa helicopter's infrared thermal imaging or multitarget tracking abilities unless I really need to know about them for some part of the plot.

A lot of people die in this novel, so I have to talk about the body count, which isn't pretty. In chronological order, the deaths go: Charles Brophy, Wailee Ming, Norah Mangor, Marjorie Tench, Xavia, the Coast Guard pilot, Delta Three, Delta Two, Delta One, and William Pickering. Of course, the bad guys have to die, which leaves three women, one person of color, and two plot points, both of whom are male. While Brown doesn't seem to have a problem with smart women (Rachel and Gabrielle survive), he seems to let only the conventionally attractive ones live. Marjorie Tench is described several times as one of the ugliest women ever, and Brown describes Xavia as overweight and dark-skinned, so she also may be a woman of color, which only seems to make her doubly damned. Though Norah Mangor escapes being dealt the ugly card, no one ever considers her beautiful (she has a "pleasant, impish face") and the presence of gray in her hair suggests that she is older, something she and Marjorie Tench have in common. What connects all three female murder victims is their lack of a pleasing demeanor. All of these women are, at best, surly, with Norah nearly verbally emasculating most of the men who cross her path. Basically, Brown makes the female characters that die unattractive to men in one way or another. To look at the situation from a different perspective, the main female characters who live (Rachel and Gabrielle) are the only women whom men, at some point during the novel, find attractive. Not a main character though certainly no less important than Xavia, Yolanda Cole also lives, but Brown releases her from the obligation to titillate men by giving her maternal characteristics and even the moniker of "Mother." As for Wailee Ming, while he is not the only person of color in this novel, he certainly has the most, indeed the only, ethnic name. I have to wonder if Gabrielle were named LaTanya would she have lived?

As far as themes, Deception Point features many images of ghosts of the past haunting the present. Along with the high body count, many characters in Deception Point have a person whose death has greatly influenced them in some way. Tolland's wife died of cancer, Sexton's wife and Rachel's mother died in a car accident, and Pickering's daughter was killed in combat. The influence of long-dead former presidents also echoes throughout the halls of The White House. But the novel's main theme, as the title reveals, centers on the idea of truth: how we determine the truth, how truth catches up with everyone, and the importance of telling the truth, of course.

Deception Point is a fun, fast read full of information about glaciers, meteorites, phosphorescent plankton, and megaplumes if you're into that sort of thing. But I might do some fact-checking before I started sharing the information Brown includes. From what I can find, it seems that the Kiowa helicopter I mentioned earlier is a two-seater and Brown crams four people into that thing at one point. I still can't stand Brown's myriad short chapters, but Deception Point has a pleasing mix of science geekery and political intrigue to keep me entertained.

I don't usually write about the crime novels that I read sometimes, but I just finished my first novel by Patricia Cornwell and felt compelled to make a comment. Plus, I'm trying not to be so ashamed of reading novels that are not published by McSweeney's or usually compared to Pynchon.

Unnatural Exposure is one of the many novels in Cornwell's Scarpetta series, which follows the cases of Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Chief Medical Examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Cornwell has written sixteen novels in this series, which perpetually hover somewhere on The New York Times Bestseller List, so I imagine that Cornwell and a sizable portion of United States denizens find Dr. Scarpetta appealing.

I really don't.

I don't know if she was cranky because she thought she might die from small pox, but I found Scarpetta thoroughly unlikable in this novel. Spending any time with her seems about as enjoyable as sitting through Bride Wars with all your faculties and a functioning brain. Scarpetta comes across as arrogant, privileged, peevish, self-involved, and practically humorless. Her predominant reactions ranged from irritation to anger and pretty much nothing in between. Her interactions with her niece Lucy managed to make Scarpetta marginally tolerable; however, her romantic interest Benton Wesley should probably run. Published in 1997, Unnatural Exposure falls in the middle of the series, so I'm definitely coming into things late. Perhaps Scarpetta has something in her past that explains her demeanor or even makes her very flawed personality endearing, but after reading this novel I don't care about her enough to make the effort to find out.

I felt like Cornwell was treading water for almost two hundred pages, with the story finally picking up with the first death on Tangier Island. I don't mind the misdirection of the dismemberment cases, but too much time was spent on these previous cases given that they remained unsolved at the end of the novel. In fact, the entire pacing of the novel felt rather awkward and very stop-and-start with Cornwell diverting from the case for some lengthy passages. I know that Cornwell set a precedent for including emerging technologies in forensic pathology in her work, but the incorporation of said technology really dates her novels. Cornwell also writes about technology, especially computer technology, in perhaps accessible but very inelegant ways. I also disliked Cornwell's over-reliance on acronyms. If something had an acronym, Cornwell mentions it, even if the acronym is never used again, and she also drops the acronyms rather inelegantly. For example,

Getting close, I squatted and rubbed gloved fingers over deep gouges and scrapes in aluminum in an area where the Vehicle Identification Number, or VIN, should have been.

Cornwell uses so many acronyms that I forgot several of their meanings when they were not referenced for many pages. In many of these instances, Cornwell could have used a few adjectives to prevent her readers from becoming muddled in an alphabet soup.

I was curious to read one of Cornwell's novels because I've stumbled across her name several times recently in regards to LGBT equality issues. And it was on sale at Half-Price Books for a dollar. For her part, Unnatural Exposure is pretty gay, with a total of four queer characters. However, with the series' central character failing to capture me, I think I'll stick to Kinsey.

Chaim Potok's The Chosen explores being a Jew in the rather tumultuous time of the 1940s and early '50s. Reuven Malter, raised by a liberal Jewish scholar, befriends Danny Saunders, the son and heir apparent to a Hasidic rabbi. The novel follows the development of their friendship over the course of seven years as it faces obstacles presented by their faith, their fathers, and growing up. ....Geez, this paragraph really sounds like the summary for a book flap.

I found Potok's writing style to be a little, well, flaccid is the word that comes to mind. His sentence constructions tended to be rather immature, though I do admit that his writing style became more sophisticated as the story progressed and the characters aged. I really disliked the way that he would jump through time, glossing over several months or a year. I understand that he really wanted to set this narrative against the backdrop of the conflict about Israel within the Jewish community, but he could have started the novel in a later year to accomplish that goal. He also could have used the chapter or "part" breaks to represent jumps in time.

Potok examines the different means of communication, emphasizing especially the importance of nonverbal communication. Silence and the compassion or alienation that can emerge from silence is one of the major themes of the novel. The senses are also very important to Potok with sight and hearing playing a big role. While the father/son dynamic is central to The Chosen, female/mother figures are either absent or weak. Many of the characters are also stricken with a chronic illness or recurring bouts of poor health, suggesting that the concept of "The Family" might be sick or ailing.

While I enjoyed the story, I most appreciated the information about Judaism that Potok provides. As I said, I found Potok's writing style lacking, but I think that I need to reread this novel to fully appreciate some of its themes.

Not my favorite of Coupland's books, but Eleanor Rigby offers an entertaining and sometimes poignant narrative. The story felt a little superficial, like he had a good idea but did not mine it for all of its melodramatic goodness. The content seemed to explore similar territory as my favorite Coupland novel All Families Are Psychotic and likewise does not have much of Coupland's trademark social commentary. However, AFAP's narrative felt sharper, better realized, and the storylines more intricately woven.

I read this book even though it breaks my rule about authors narrating in the opposite sex. Due to the content of the book Coupland's lack of a woman's perspective was a little glaring. But it was a quick read and resonated with me on some level, which is something. While perhaps not a masterful deliberation, Eleanor Rigby provides an interesting portrait of loneliness.

I finally, FINALLY finished this novel. I have been reading it for over a month for several reasons. First, I’ve been busy getting ready for the meet to open at Churchill. Second, Defoe’s writing style is very dry and difficult to get into. Third, whenever Defoe as Robinson would say something that offended me, I had to lock the book in my closet for at least a day so that my pissed off-ness could subside enough for me to continue reading. And toward the end of the book when Robinson starts declaring everyone who sets foot on the island his “subject,” the book was destined for the closet every couple of paragraphs, which really slowed the reading process.

Before I talk about Robinson Crusoe, I would like to discuss the idea of art as presented by Scott McCloud in his fascinating book, Understanding Comics. McCloud takes a pretty broad approach to art, describing art as anything humans do that does not directly ensure survival. This book, surprisingly, seems to support that description of art. When Robinson first arrives at the island, he has pen and paper, which allows him to record his doings. Keeping a journal is not essential to his survival, but Robinson seems determined to keep a record because, well, it’s what you do when you’re stranded on an island and expect someone to find you, or at least your manuscript, one day. When his ink runs out, he finds an outlet for art in other, more “primitive” expressions of art, namely making baskets and pots. I believe at one point Robinson mentions that he has an entire store of pots in one part of his castle and I cannot imagine that one man would need that many pots. The boat that he builds to cruise around the island also is a piece of art. However, when he uses the canoe he realizes that he must fight for his survival. The canoe then becomes abandoned because it does not fulfill its purpose, that is to be an escape from the tasks he performs to survive. When the threat of the “savages” completely overcomes Robinson, he forsakes all of his art to ensure his survival, fortifying his “castle” and finding a new stronghold in a cave.

Speaking of the journal, I found it equally annoying and interesting that Robinson as the narrator insisted on including the contents of his journal in his account, even though most of the entries recounted events which Robinson the narrator already described. Why did Defoe include this second voice of Robinson as island resident? What implications are suggested by the fact Robinson the narrator felt compelled to both detail his experiences on the island and include the much briefer journal entries?

Robinson uses language in his conquest of the island, but his claiming of different parts of the island also relates to the colonialism in which England was beginning to engage. Robinson’s first venture into colonialism — his experience with Xury — is not a difficult affair because he had the advantage of size and weapons over Xury. On the island, the task of colonialism is not quite as easy. But similar elements are used to ensure his dominion over the island, namely his reliance on weapons and destruction to assert authority.

Even though Robinson finds himself in very much the same situation as the “savages” he so often condemns, he strives to note in his recounting that he somehow lived above the “savages” on the island. He will often compare the ways which he constructs something to methods used by more primitive cultures, so he definitely sees the connection between his life and theirs. However, he calls one of his homes his “castle” and the other his “country house,” relying on his audience’s British upbringing to mentally upscale his living conditions with his use of these phrases. He also furnishes himself with a few trappings of British middle-class lifestyle, most obviously a tobacco pipe. He faces his ultimate challenge when he sees the footprint on the beach. At first, he schemes to kill the “savages” should he encounter them, however he eventually dismisses that idea as foolish. And the idea is ridiculous, but Robinson seems to discard the notion mainly out of desire to not act like a savage or even like a Spaniard, who he says were admonished for their treatment of the native people of the Americas.

And one concluding thought: shut up, Robinson.

I would like to express my great disbelief that writers as immature as Larson:

1. are published;
2. are nominated for a National Book Award.

The man seems to take his writing cues from scribes of the noir era. What Larson does not seem to realize is the average modern author mocks such writing. Larson’s prose is clumsy and hackneyed. He telegraphs plot points and uses an excessive amount of ridiculous and/or nonsensical similes, including:

• “came to see her as an obstacle, just as a sea captain might view an iceberg”
• “sitting down to dinner with these men was like being a stranger at someone else’s Thanksgiving”
• “the bride…appeared like a white ghost”
• “iron-clad wheels that struck the pavement like rolling hammers”
• “the tension was…like the inaudible cry of overstressed steel”
• “Chicago is like the man who marries a woman with a ready-made family of twelve”
• “glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals”
• “in the heat and haze [the plants] looked like desert troops gone too long without water”
• “Cinder and smoke drifted like soiled gauze past the window”
• “Sentences wandered through the report like morning glory through the pickets of a fence”
• “his eyes…gleamed…like marbles of lapis”
• “gas jets…hissed like mildly perturbed cats”
• “in his eyes there was only a flat calm, like a lake on a still August morning”
• “as if a giant wool blanket had settled over the house”
• “She felt as if a coarse blanket has been lifted from her life”
• “the human body was like the polar icecap, something to be studied and explored”
• “he looked forward to most were the days before his departure when her need flared like fire in a dry forest”
• “This notion came to Prendergast initially as a glimmer, like the first sunlight to strike the Masonic tower each morning”
• “Minnie was an asset now, an acquisition to be warehoused until needed, like cocooned prey”
• “laughter that rang like crystal touched in a toast”
• “chemical odors ebbed and flowed like an atmospheric tide”
• “The possession he craved was a transient thing, like the scent of a fresh-cut hyacinth”
• “[Ferris wheel] cars…stood on the ground like the coaches of a derailed train”
• “The frontier…stood there glittering in the sun like the track of a spent tear”
• “pale blue uniforms standing out like crocuses against black loam”
• “three huge Worthington pumps began stretching their shafts and pistons, like praying mantises shaking off the cold”
• “the great Golden Door, which arced across the light-red face of the building like a gilt rainbow”
• “Harrison’s murder fell upon the city like a heavy curtain”
• “Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead”
• “[The humidity] clung to Holmes and his fellow prisoners like a cloak of moist wool”
• “The house was charming…like the gingerbread house in a fairy tale”
• “For Dora Root life with John had been like living upon a comet”
• “now that Julia had begun looking at [her husband] as if he had just emerged from a rendering vat at the stockyards”
• “other days with a silvery medicinal odor, as if a dentist were at work somewhere in the building easing a customer into a deep sleep”
• “The wind pummeled the balloon as if it were an inverted punching bag”

I also think that Larson has tried to tackle too much material. In a work of this nature, the reader sometimes is confused by all of the one-shot characters necessary to telling the story. By switching between three or four different stories, Larson only compounds the problem. I think that Larson should have detailed Holmes’ killing spree in a separate novel. Though The Colombian World’s Fair provided Holmes a stream of victims, his killing was in no way motivated by or limited to the Fair. He didn’t kill anyone at the Fair; he killed people before and after the event. The connection between Holmes and the Fair seems arbitrarily imposed by Larson. Holmes’ geographic and temporal proximity to the event did not necessitate Larson detailing Holmes’ story along side the Fair’s. The inclusion of Prendergast seemed more appropriate, though I believe that his story could have been greatly truncated.

With Bee Season, Myla Goldberg delivers a rich, sensual novel that explores a breadth of subjects including religion, language and familial relationships. Goldberg creates four distinct characters with very different worldviews, each on his or her own spiritual journey.

Aaron and Miriam seem to be on similar though diverging paths. Eliza’s spelling practice replaces Aaron’s guitar lessons in his father’s study, a time during which Aaron became acquainted with Judaism and prepared for his bar mitzvah. Ousted from the study, Aaron experiences a crisis of faith. At the beginning of the novel, Aaron is hyper-conscious of his body, sensitive that his body has not fulfilled the potential that his masculinity promised: he’s too pale, too thin, too weak, too small. Thus, in his exploration of religions outside of Judaism, he is drawn to ISKCON because of its emphasis of transcending the physical constraints of the body. Rather than transcending his body, Aaron reconstructs his understanding of his body through his religious experiences through Krishna. Once a source of embarrassment, his body becomes the ultimate instrument with which to praise god. The services at the ISKCON temple involve movement and expression with the body, and Aaron’s return to Beth Amichah prompts him to note that god should be worshiped through motion and not sitting in a chair.

Conversely, Miriam seeks a connection to her body or what she conceives of as her body or whole self. Miriam understands herself to be fragmented and describes the objects that she steals as pieces of herself. By “reclaiming” the pilfered goods, she strives to put herself back together. As an expectant and new mother, Miriam dislikes the baby’s demands on her body. Breastfeeding is particularly difficult for her because the baby is taking something from the body she strives to rebuild. Perhaps sex becomes appealing to her during her abstinence from breaking into houses because she feels as her body is being augmented in a way, even if sex is only a simulation of the feeling of reclaiming a piece of her “kaleidoscope.” Judging by Saul’s observations of his wife’s body during these encounters, Miriam does not derive any kind of sexual pleasure.

Aaron’s relationship to language acts as a gauge of his connection to a religion. During his studies with his father, Aaron masters his Hebrew pronunciation, which elicits a compliment from the rabbi on the day of his bar mitzvah. Performing the services in Hebrew that day evokes Aaron’s second experience of god, an experience which to him feels like an actual communion with god. However, Hebrew does not allow him a recurrence of that experience — he performs his part in services automatically, not needing to consult a prayer book for guidance, and plays “sheep” with Eliza. His distance from the language increases when he observes that he does not know what the words he says during services mean, merely how to pronounce them. While Aaron does not know the meaning of the words that he uses during ISKCON ceremonies, his lack of understanding does not concern him because he feels connected to god whenever he says them.

Saul and Eliza’s journeys are more closely connected. Saul’s spiritual path seems very much shaped by his father withholding his Jewish identity from him. Similarly, Eliza sees potential in his path to the national spelling bee because success at spelling could enable her to obtain something that Saul has withheld from her: his being proud of her for any reason but especially for her intelligence and academic performance. When Saul finally recognizes his daughter’s potential, he sets his daughter on a path that he had to abort because of his shortcomings. Besides her spelling ability, Eliza shows an understanding of language superior to her father’s in her ability to detect lies. Aaron notes several times his surprise at his father’s ignorance of his lying. Eliza always knows when Aaron lies and she knows her father lies when he fibs about Miriam after her arrest.

Saul is a character whom the reader both dislikes and pities: dislikes for his manipulation of his children and pities for his inability to attain his spiritual goals. Saul reminded me of a failed child prodigy in a way, in that he seemed to have greater success as a youth and young adult but his potential dried up and his success tapered off. Despite all of his aspiration to become a great spiritual leader, he only managed to be a dorm-room prophet, using his accumulated knowledge of mysticism to seduce young women and achieving spiritual transcendence only through the facilitation of drugs. He realizes the limitations of his collegiate and post-collegiate activities but never ascends higher than a cantor at a temple in his quest for transcendence through Jewish mysticism. Saul recognizes his children’s potential to continue the path that he started. With both Aaron and Eliza, he manipulates them into following a spiritual path: the safe haven from bullies that Saul offers Aaron becomes training for his bar mitzvah and the study help that Saul gives Eliza becomes conditioning for communing with god. Instead of offering obligation-free parental attention, Saul only offers his attention on the condition that the time ultimately results in his child fulfilling a part of his unattained spiritual path, i.e. Aaron becoming a rabbi and Eliza mastering Abulafia’s ladder.

Of the four characters, three have biblical names. In the bible, Aaron is Moses’ brother who leads Moses’ people in building an idol while Moses is up on a hill talking to God and the idol, of course, angers God. Naming the character Aaron as she does perhaps Goldberg alludes to Saul’s placing his faith in the wrong child: he expects Aaron to achieve the highest position in Judaism but ultimately Aaron “betrays” him by joining ISKCON. The biblical Miriam was Moses’ sister, I think, and one of the women who found him floating in a basket on the Nile. She was a prophetess and suffered from leprosy. This biblical characterization of Miriam as a prophet causes me to wonder if Goldberg is suggesting that her Miriam isn’t so crazy after all. And Saul is the first king of Israel whom God replaces with David because he broke God’s rules. Saul is a rather pitiable figure in the bible because God ousts him from his position for rather trivial reasons, including showing mercy to people in battle and not waiting to make an offering to God before heading into battle. Goldberg’s Saul has the namesake of his uncle Solomon, also a biblical king who was known for his wisdom. The combination of these two names describes Goldberg’s Saul rather aptly: he aspired to and was expected to attain wisdom but ultimately failed in a rather pitiable way. Eliza is the only Naumann name with no biblical counterpart, perhaps to accentuate her otherness in the family. “Eliza” is pretty similar to “Elijah,” who was an important prophet in the bible.

How to Be Good had a curious effect on me while reading it. Not to sound like the protagonist — whose continued insistence of goodness based on her occupation annoyed me after the first 20 pages – but I think that I’m a good liberal: I work at a nonprofit organization for very little money; I vote; I help out the Democratic party when I can (and agree); I volunteer at a food bank a few times a month; I don’t eat meat because I disagree with the treatment of animals in the meat industry and I try to stick to my values in other ways. But How to Be Good revealed great gaps between potential liberalism and realized liberalism. There isn’t an empty spare bedroom in my apartment, but I do have an air mattress and a living room that some homeless people could be using. Am I a bad liberal because I would never consider allowing a stranger to live with me? Even though at the most obvious level I was mocking GoodNews and David’s plans for being good, I was provoked to think about things that I do to be good and what I could do better.

In this novel, Hornby managed to create an almost conservative form of liberalism in a way. I’ve always envied staunch conservatives because they have the ability to paint an “us” versus “them” picture of the world. They have a clearly defined world in which there are good people and there are bad people and no one falls somewhere in the middle. Liberals often do not have the liberty of living in such a bifurcated world. Personally, I almost constantly feel trapped in the liberal paradox of we accept everyone except those who do not accept everyone. But GoodNews and David’s reasoning has the clarity and exclusionary attributes of the reasoning of the most conservative Republican.

One very brief part of the novel that I found interesting was the narrator’s ruminations about what life after divorce would be like for her family. Because of their respective careers, the narrator occupies the work sphere while her husband dominates the home sphere, which obviously is the reverse of what one is encouraged to accept as standard gender roles. The narrator’s realization that she fills more of “the man’s role” in her household causes her to ask her son if he thinks of her as his “mum” or his “dad.” I don’t know of any kid whose answer would have differed from Tom because the use of “mom” and “dad” or some equivalent is intended (linguistically at least) to differentiate from male and female parent. However, there is so much more associated with the word “mother” than just a pair of ovaries and a uterus and the same for “father.” When same-sex couples have children, most do not slap the word for a biologically female parent on a male or vice versa (unless one person in the couple is transgendered). Even if one parent in a lesbian couple stays at home with the children and the other works, their children usually call both parents “mommy.” I’m rambling, but I think it’s interesting when literal interpretation and interpretation based on social conditioning begin to tussle.

One small complaint for me about this book: for the first 30 pages or so I was often surprised by references to the narrator’s sex. Hornby most often and most deftly narrates with a male voice and his narrative voice didn’t change that much in the case of his narrator being a woman.

In Country was a bit of a disappointment for me. I read and really enjoyed Mason’s Shiloh and Other Stories so my hopes were high. And while I enjoyed the novel, I had difficulty connecting with the characters and the setting of the story, which might have been purposeful on Mason’s part. She seems to suggest the impossibility of recapturing a historical event through narrative. All of her references to temporal and regional aspects of culture, such as the song titles and K-Marts and McDonald’s-es, prohibit both Sam and the reader from delving into the experience of another time.

Mason’s message of the novel is fairly obvious: wars may end but their effects never dwindle. Several recurring images in the novel underscore this theme: the “new” song by The Beatles, a group that disbanded in 1970, appearing on the airwaves in 1984; information about Sam’s father being revealed, such as the fact that he chose her name; references to the veteran whose daughter was affected by Agent Orange even though she was never in the war. Even Sam’s observations such as this one, “Down the hall, Emmett belched. It was the tomato ketchup in the lasagna,” are also similar images.

All the veterans in the novel seem to be haunted by the war in some way, even those who deny that they think about the war. These men reminded me of a study, which found that men who fought in Vietnam had difficulties reintegrating in U.S. society when they returned. In Vietnam, they had been acting out a “warrior” version of masculinity and lost that status upon returning. They did not know how to reconnect with normal masculine roles. Pete seems to be the best example of this observation, with his inability to keep a job and his supposed keeping of ears of the North Vietnamese. Pete even admits to Sam that he almost misses Vietnam in a way. Jim, though he doesn’t seem to valorize his experience in Vietnam, remains deeply involved with the War. He works with veterans affected by Agent Orange to demand reparation from the government and urges people to be tested. For the dance that he arranges, Jim tries to recreate objects and weapons from the war, though everyone notes that they are not the same — the guns are only toys — or they seem out of place — Emmett says that a rations can looks like an antique. Tom is also haunted by the war, the memories of which seem to render him impotent.

Emmett’s experience in Vietnam seems to have affected his gender identity, as he exhibits more feminine qualities: he has a deep connection to the home and tries to make it sound by fixing the crack in the foundation and flea bombing the house; similarly, he has something of a caretaker role toward Sam as he is the one who cooks for them; and finally, most obviously, Emmett cross-dresses. He associates the War with the masculine, evidenced in his comment that a cardboard tank at the dance looks like “an elephant’s peter.” According to Mark Graybill’s essay “Reconstructing/deconstructing genre and gender: postmodern identity in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country and Josephine Humphreys’s Rich in Love,” his search to find the masculine is represented by his search for the egret as well as other bird imagery. I’m not sure I agree with Graybill, but I’ll return to that later.

Samantha is also on a quest similar to Emmett’s, though she is trying to connect to the feminine, according to Graybill. Even though Sam prefers the more masculine shortening of her first name and her father expected her to be a boy, I never thought that Sam exhibited particularly masculine qualities. Her quest throughout the novel, characterized by cat imagery, is for her father — the missing masculine influence in her life. Her mother did not remarry until Sam was older and, though she grew up with Emmett, he did not provide a fatherly influence nor a masculine one because, as stated earlier, he is dominated by the anima. Her father dying in the War has made Sam insatiably curious about the Vietnam War, but perhaps her endeavor to understand the experience is also her attempt to understand the masculine, or at least the “warrior” masculine that perhaps Sam has valorized due to her father’s death. Hearing the experience of the veterans — from their spouses, from journals, and from the veterans themselves — ultimately seems to disgust Sam. Learning of the soldiers collecting ears from the Vietnamese, her father poking a dead Vietnamese man with a stick and calling him a “gook” pushes Sam to revile those involved in the War. Only when Emmett reveals his experience does Sam come to something of an acceptance of what her father and her uncle had done.

So back to Graybill’s assertions that Emmett seeks the masculine and Sam the feminine. I think that actually it’s the opposite. Emmett’s quest is represented by his search for an egret, a bird he first saw in Vietnam. Like the other vets, Vietnam haunts Emmett and he, despite his dislike of the experience, does try to recapture it in some way. But unlike Pete and Jim who supposedly still own or try to recreate symbols of violence, Emmett is looking for a bird, something beautiful and alive rather than a force of violence and destruction. Samantha’s journey to understand the experience and the violence of the War is characterized by cat imagery: the haunting and fleeting Beatles’ song is entitled “Leave My Kitten Alone” and when she and Tom have their unsuccessful sexual encounter she feels for his erection and feels “a pile of kittens” instead. The two journeys are obviously related, and the relationship between the two representative animals is that of predator (cat) and prey (bird). Sam’s animal is associated with more masculine qualities, not Emmett’s. The climax of the novel happens during Sam’s night at the pond and her and Emmett’s confrontation the following morning. From her night at Cawood Pond, Sam feels as though she has finally connected with the experience of surviving in Vietnam — her search for the masculine has been successful. Emmett’s journey also comes to an end when he has a tearful, emotional outpouring, fully connecting to the feminine.

I do agree with Graybill that Sam’s experiences ultimately lead to her having a “healthfully androgynous ego.” The instigator of Sam’s journey seems to be her mother embracing the feminine roles of wife and mother, which disgust Sam. But through her quest, Sam seems to become more comfortable with her body. After her encounter with Tom, she has a different understanding of her body: “She imagined him driving up now. ‘I came over to play with your breasts,’ he might say.” Dawn’s pregnancy, which precludes Dawn’s desire “to play daddy” because she’s “sick of playing mommy,” and Sam’s mother’s home life, with her dull spouse and baby, repulse Sam at first, but by the end of the novel she seems more comfortable with her half-sister. She reconnects with her mother by giving her the cat statue. Her quest for the extreme masculine exhibited in war leads to her achieving a balance between the masculine and feminine. Emmett too finds that balance as he is able to smile, staring at the names of his friends at the Vietnam Memorial.

Usually I do try to read books before I watch their movie counterparts, but I was unaware of Eugenides’ novel when I saw Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation. Now that I’ve read the novel I can attest to Coppola’s excellent interpretation. As an appreciator of literature, I can recognize the superior quality of the novel, but as a feminist I like the film more. I understand the allegorical aspect of the material, but the story — the novel in particular — paints these girls as victims of the male gaze.

This gaze ultimately seems to destroy the girls. To protect her children from the ugly things in life, Mrs. Lisbon adopts the male gaze, criticizing her daughters’ dress and sheltering them from interacting too much with young men. When Lux comes home late from the prom and Mrs. Lisbon realizes that Lux had allowed herself to become a victim of Trip’s gaze, she keeps them in their house, away from the corruptive influence of males. In their one night at prom, the Lisbon sisters finally had the opportunity to stop being idols and just be young women and they were rejected (Trip left Lux on the football field and Bonnie’s date never called her). As much as the boys pretend to want to know the truth, I think that they prefer their romantic visions of the Lisbons and would not have wanted further contact to ruin their fanciful images. Anyway, as well as being rejected as real people, Mrs. Lisbon prevents them from reaching out to new people, which they might have done after their prom date, by taking them out of school. Perhaps knowing that they could never live up to anyone’s expectations caused them to kill themselves. That bit at the end about “[it] only [mattered] we had loved them” is a little disturbing considering that their “love” might have killed the girls.

Eugenides makes an interesting statement about memory, the importance of memory, and how people rationalize the differences in memory. He also draws an interesting connection between the decay of a suburb and the dwindling life forces of these five young women.

Despite Swenson’s claims that his and Angela’s relationship was about “love,” I have to agree with Sherrie that his attraction to Angela had very much to do with his daughter and their estranged relationship. I’ve seen and read stories of pubescent teens developing attractions to older people when one of their parents is absent or distant, trying to replace parental attention with romantic attention. However, this story is the first I’ve read in which the roles have been reversed.

Usually an older character with an absent child forms an unromantic relationship with a surrogate child, but during their unfortunate and unsuccessful sexual encounter Swenson makes an observation that again reverses the usual roles:

Her nipples brush against his face. He takes one in his mouth, from which she gently extricates it with a gesture so instinctive, so sure, that Swenson thinks—God help him—of how Sherrie used to reclaim her breast after Ruby fell asleep nursing.

While Swenson really does seem to care about his wife and child, he seems frustrated with the monotony and little irritations of daily life with the same people. He likes the familiarity that he shares with his wife but interactions have become too complicated for him to handle. His relationship with Angela seems much less difficult — his trip with her to Computer City goes smoothly while his trip with Ruby involves many hassles. In fact, in their trip to Computer City Swenson notes that Ruby dresses and acts as if she is trying to be invisible. Indeed, Swenson notices this tendency in Angela when he first starts becoming aware of her.

Even though I found this novel enjoyable, it did not seem very woman-friendly while I was reading it. The two feminist characters in this novel do not come off very well, and Prose characterizes women who are concerned with sexual harassment as some kind of brainless cult. Really I think that Prose intends to criticize overly fervent women who want to interpret every person with a penis and a Y-chromosome as a misogynist and possible rapist. However, she presents the hyper-feminist “villains” very clearly and does not provide positive portrayals of feminists with more moderated viewpoints. After evidence of Swenson’s affair with Angela is revealed, Sherrie and Magda, the likable female characters, join the side of the feminist antagonists.

I also am toying with the idea that casting the women in this light was intended to create the greatest role reversal of the novel. Most rape cases are structured around proving that the woman “asked” for what happened to her — because women are expected to control their sexuality as well as men’s, they must be proven innocent rather than their attackers be proven guilty. In this sexual harassment “trial,” Swenson’s character is attacked while Angela’s is never examined. With her mercurial swings in behaviour toward Swenson, the reader suspects that Angela did intend to seduce him. And while the reader may not forgive Swenson for cheating on his wife and violating the college’s rule prohibiting sexual relationships between faculty and students, the reader does recognize that the presentation of Swenson’s character at the trial is unfair. Swenson does feel misrepresented at the trial, but he repeats several times that he prefers their inaccurate portrayal of him as an inappropriate pursuer of this young woman rather than the reality of his being a spineless simp who fell for her machinations. Something that most victimized women would find degrading — being portrayed as promiscuous or sexually assertive — is an empowering experience for Swenson.

Critics seem to be debating about how to classify Louise Welsh’s first novel: crime novel or something more? Personally, I have to call it something more than a crime novel. While there are elements of a detective/crime novel in The Cutting Room — Rilke is, after all, interviewing people to uncover information about a potential murder — Welsh’s primary concern seems to be her characters.

Unlike the usual likable, hopefully memorable detective/main character, creepy-enough-to-intrigue-readers-but-not-overshadow-future-adversaries villain and cast of vaguely drawn characters who service the plot of most crime novels, each of Welsh’s characters seem to pop from the page, from main character Rilke to tertiary characters like Inspector Anderson and Chris. Each has his/her very specific voice and weltanschauung. Welsh seems more interested in presenting a study of characters and of humanity than presenting a tension-filled mystery plot. In fact, the climax of the book, which aside from Rilke’s gumshoe legwork is the most crime-novel-like part of the book, feels artificially imposed on the text. The novel does not build to that realization but rather Rilke’s disheartened mourning of the woman he failed to help in the very last chapter. In fact, the climax further proves that The Cutting Room is not a crime novel: Rilke only seems to imagine Anne Marie’s cries for help as he runs to rescue her — perhaps he imagines them as the cries of the woman from the photograph — only to find that she has protected herself from the villain. Obviously with a main character named Rilke, Welsh has culled material from more literary sources and her use of the Gothic is particularly effective.

Rilke also distinguishes The Cutting Room from other crime novels. Rather than being motivated by money, revenge or even insatiable curiosity as most detectives are, Rilke seems motivated by his conscience alone. Even though he accepts his identity as an auctioneer — he tries to back out of the game with the other auctioneers at the bar but ultimately knows that he will play — he is deeply cynical about his profession. He tells the reader with a mixture of frankness and melancholy how an auctioneer sifts through a person’s possessions, determining what pieces of a person’s life have real value and will sell and what pieces will ultimately populate the graveyard at Bowery House. Rilke feels a connection with the woman in the photograph and feels compelled to ensure that she does become another “body” in the cemetery of the auction house. But Rilke is not cynical to the point of being bitter and unlikable. He is street-wise but the gruesome things that people do to each other still horrify him. Rilke is essentially a very ethical man and yet at the same time somewhat morally ambiguous. He participates in a few activities that some readers might not find too appealing, like his drinking, smoking and drug habits as well as his tendency to engage in various sex acts with strange men. How is the reader suppose to interpret his want to dominate the young man with whom he has sex and his picturing during his orgasm the dead woman who he feels compelled to help?

Welsh’s handling of Rilke’s sexuality is a difficult subject. At one point in the book, Rilke dismisses measuring his homosexuality by counting the number of Judy Garland records that he owns and Welsh does not try in the least to make Rilke seem effeminate. And yet he engages in the cruising scene, having anonymous sex with strangers and balking at the potential of a more long-term relationship with Prof. Sweetman at the end of the novel. So Welsh dismisses one stereotype only to use another. Les exhibits more of the “screaming queen” tendencies and while he is meant to provide comic relief at times Welsh never goes too far so that the reader cannot find Les a dangerous figure when she needs him to seem menacing. And Rilke feels genuine empathy for the other transvestites and transgenders whom he meets, going as far as attacking two men to keep a transgender from being exploited for mockery. Rilke’s identity as a gay man allows Welsh to make interesting observations about social interactions between the sexes and between sexualities.

While Welsh created some interesting female characters, I was a little disappointed that all of the females in the text seemed to need saving. And many of them used/sold their bodies to succeed in the world. I suppose that Anne Marie’s turning the victimizer into the victim suggests that woman has asserted her power and reclaimed her body, but the reader is not witness to that event but rather its aftermath.

Anwanyu seems very much a product of the feminism of the 1970s, which, given the novel’s publication date of 1980, she probably is. As this novel’s depiction of the ultimate female or the ultimate feminine, Anwanyu has absolute control over her body — most importantly, probably, control over when she becomes pregnant.

Obviously one of the main concerns of this novel is the relationship between the sexes, explored through the relationship between Anwanyu and Doro. However, neither are defined by just one sex: Doro can possess the body of a woman and bear children and Anwanyu can become a man and conceive children with a woman. Therefore, I think that as well as representing man and woman, Doro and Anwanyu represent masculinity and femininity.

Doro is a rather amoral figure, living for centuries by preying on others, using bodies how, when, and for whatever he chooses. He has gained power by instilling fear in others, killing them if they do not cooperate. Anwanyu, many centuries younger than Doro, has lived relatively peaceably, obtaining her independence by gaining her village’s respect and trust, killing only when she is attacked. While Doro is interested in breeding and even the idea of making a family, he is not the great earth mother that Anwanyu is. From her body she can produce not only children, but medicines to heal and relieve and within her body she can communicate with animals and plants at a cellular level. Anwanyu nurtures where Doro destroys. Through the course of the novel, the masculine and feminine seem to fight each other until the end of the novel when both seem to realize that they exist better when they cooperate and complement each other rather than clash.

Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries culls similar source material as her autobiographical graphic narrative Persepolis, which depicts the conservative political climate in Iran after the revolution of the late 1970s. While Persepolis is personal in the sense that it is Satrapi’s story of growing up in pre- and post-revolution Iran, it has a larger scope as it also describes the effects of the revolution on Iran at a national scale. Embroideries is a more personal novel, occurring during the span of an afternoon and depicting the conversation of nine women having tea.

In Persepolis, Satrapi used a traditional panel form in telling her story, but in Embroideries she abandoned the panels.

In an interview with Fire on the Prairie, Satrapi comments that she did not use panels to facilitate and mimic the fluidity of conversation. Indeed, the lack of panels allows Satrapi to move from past to present – from the conversation to a memory – and allow her characters to interrupt each other, returning abruptly to the present again. But without boxes, this conversation seems less defined by time or by space. Satrapi’s drawing style is very minimalist: she draws her characters and whatever furniture they are sitting on or objects they might be touching but rarely provides details of the background. There are definite indications of Iranian culture in this novel, but often they come as a surprise. When Satrapi recounts a story in which two women are seen outside in the street, it was jarring for me as the reader to see them suddenly wearing hijab – I was very abruptly reminded of the cultural context of the story. Persepolis can only occur in a specific time and place, but Embroideries is a more universal story.

However, the very candid conversations about sex in which the women engage are not found in every culture. Most people view Iranian women as sexually repressed and oppressed, therefore the explicitness of the stories these women tell might be shocking to some readers. Indeed, I think that Satrapi intends to stretch people’s comprehension of the sex lives of Iranian women. One of the women, a mother of five, has never seen a penis and the women discuss hymen restoration surgery – the title is actually a reference to a slang term for such surgeries – but most of the women speak freely of enjoying sex.

Satrapi’s drawing style fascinates me because the white space seems to define the black areas instead of the opposite.

Embroideries strikes me as a story or example of survival. The title, like the women in this novel, is subversive. The idea of “embroideries” calls to mind afternoons of women sewing together, rather than the more disturbing connotation of hymen reconstruction to prevent women from being harmed for not being virgins when they marry. I do not think that Satrapi intends to criticize these women who have embroideries – as her grandmother says, “If people want to be sewn up, let them be sewn up” – but rather she is presenting the situation in Iran as it is. As disturbing as hymen reconstruction might seem to a woman like myself, Iranian women might see it as a logical solution for wanting to have premarital sex without taking the risk of not being a “virgin” on their wedding night. They are adapting to their cultural climate, seemingly conforming to the establishment while actually subverting it.

Posy Simmonds’ blend of prose and graphic storytelling intrigues me. Her combination of the two forms facillitated multiple storytelling voices—Joubert, Gemma (through her diary), objects (newspaper articles, letters), and an omniscient narrator—which I found similar to Art Spiegelman’s Maus. While there are not quite as many layers of narrative in this text as there are in Maus, Simmonds and Spiegelman both seem to be attempting what many graphic artists do not: they are not merely trying to tell a story with pictures and words, but to tell a story in a way that words alone could not accomplish. Indeed, in other ways Simmonds really pushes the graphic form to echo the subtleties of which language is capable. For example, toward the beginning of the novel when Gemma has very little voice in her own life and indeed the story, Simmonds pushes Gemma into the background, or draws her with Gemma’s back to the reader (or hides her face in some other manner), or draws her only sketchily, without full detail. Take even the cover image for a good example of Simmonds’ skill.

Well, I’ll back up a bit. The title reveals Simmonds’ source material as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and implies that her work will follow a similar format of the novels of that time—character studies that the author intends for the reader to consider autobiographical or at least biographical. And back to the cover image, which is of Gemma but rather than her image filling the entire space her upper body is framed. The frame and the scroll that bear the title of the text are reminiscient of the era in which Madame Bovary was written, which suggest that Gemma’s life is recounted through the frame of Emma Bovary’s life. Or just a frame in general. Her eyes are averted, not looking at the reader, giving her a sense of mystery—Gemma, while the subject of the text, will not be addressing the reader directly. She is also depicted in a very sexually provocative way: red lips, heavy eye shadow, her lingerie visible. But she is also wearing a coat. Is she trying to hide her sexuality or reveal it? Or maybe a little of both?

Simmonds’ drawing style seems appropriate for the story she is telling—her illustrations have realism and yet fancy as well. While the reader is aware from the first sentence that Gemma will come to an unfortunate end, Simmonds never allows her tone to become too bleak for long. Joubert and many of the ancillary characters provide comic relief to Gemma’s rather unfortunate tale. And with Joubert narrating, the story is like a fairy tale in a way—his somewhat romanticized view of Gemma’s life.

It seems both utterly appropriate and completely irksome that Gemma’s tale is conveyed by a man. Irksome because her voice has been muffled concerning her sexuality. Appropriate because her voice has been muffled concerning her sexuality. It somehow seems fitting that a woman’s adultery be articulated by a man, as is the case with Madame Bovary. With Simmonds offering her version of Boverian events, I would expect her to make the woman’s voice more rather than less prominent.

I mean this statement in the best way possible, but reading The Namesake is like reading a Mukherjee novel. As Mukherjee does in Jasmine, Lahiri explores the idea of identity and the dual identity that many immigrants and children of immigrants to the United States experience. Naming is also an important aspect of the novel, as well as adaptation.

Lahiri emphasizes the expected dual identity in Bengali culture, the “good name” and the “pet name” that every Bengali has. Except Gogol. Gogol has only a pet name—that isn’t even Indian—which separates him in a way from his family’s culture. But his name doesn’t make him feel quite integrated into American culture either. When he leaves for college, he seizes the opportunity to be unshackled from the shame that “Gogol” causes him and adopts his good name, Nikhil. While “Nikhil” connects him to his parents’ culture, it somehow seems to separate him from his family. His parents had finally become resigned to the fact that his name was simply Gogol, and “Gogol” gave him an essential connection to his father. When his father finally tells him of the significance of his name, Gogol feels badly for changing his name. At the end of the novel, when Gogol realizes that with his mother moving to Calcutta his identity as Gogol is disappearing, he finally begins to read the book of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories, which suggests that perhaps he intends to reclaim Gogol as, at least part of, his identity.

Food. We have to talk about the food because it’s everywhere in this book. And I’m not exactly certain of what to make of it. Food is very obviously a cultural marker. Ashima tries to find American ingredients to substitute in Indian recipes, but when she is about to leave for Calcutta at the end of the novel she admits that she never managed to duplicate the recipes as accurately as she would have liked—she never fully adjusted to the United States, but she managed well enough. Gogol and Sonia requesting to have turkey at Thanksgiving and hamburgers and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch suggests their Americanism and introducing more of American culture into their parents’ lives. The food also manages to indicate emotions as well. As soon as I read the line about the chickpeas going bad at Gogol and Moushumi’s wedding reception, I knew that the marriage would not last. At their anniversary dinner, Moushumi mentions that she and Gogol switched plates as usual but she did not like Gogol’s meal and sticks with her own. Then I knew the end was near. Actually, I should have known that Moushumi and Gogol’s relationship would come to no good end when their dinner burned on their date.

I’ll probably get a “The hell?” look for this statement, but the way that Lahiri characterizes the relationships kind of reminds me of D.H. Lawrence. Emphasis on the “kind of.”

Oh, and Moushumi wanting to hook up with Dimitri coupled with Isadora’s reaction to Adrian in Fear of Flying compels me to ask: am I the only woman who would be repulsed and disturbed by a man making overt sexual advances on a first encounter?

Didn’t like this book. At all. I kept telling myself, “It was written in 1973. I’m sure it was a revolutionary portrayal of woman as a sexual being. Blah blah blah trying-to-make-allowances-cakes.” But I still didn’t like it. It wasn’t, you know, well-written.

I admit that I’m a bit of a prude and all of Isadora’s talk of douching herself with wine and vinegar and trying to examine her genitalia in the mirror as an adolescent isn’t my idea of captivating reading. But even if Jong’s exploring a female’s interest in sex was groundbreaking it doesn’t seem to have presented a particularly female point of view of sex. In fact, Isadora’s experiences and fantasies seem to fit quite well into the standard repertoire of male sexual fantasies. I mean, twice the woman is practically—well, pretty much raped and Jong doesn’t give the reader any insight into her reaction. Rather, she describes how the men responded.

The entire novel seems to be a half-assed self-help exercise of sorts. I mean, it actually says, “People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves.” Excuse me while I vomit. If Isadora is supposed to be the typical feminist of the early ’70s, I’m glad that I was -10 at that point. She contradicts herself and suggests all “so-called feminists” really just want to be married and pregnant. She wasn’t a sympathetic character to begin with and instead of making her sympathetic Jong chooses to detail three of Isadora’s previous relationships. These men were interesting when mentioned briefly; when their entire relationship is explained in excruciating detail, only her crazy ex-husband manages to remain interesting. But sadly I found his character more interesting than Isadora. Isadora’s account of her and Bennett’s bad years in Germany did garner some sympathy for her though. Too bad there was more book after that.

Oh, and could Jong have made Adrian any less appealing? If Jong was going for some kind of declaration about women as sexual creatures being okay, why did she make Isadora look absolutely insane for instantly being attracted to a man who grabs her ass three seconds after meeting her?

Brontë addresses two important issues in Agnes Grey:

1. Class: The upper class indulges their children and forces unrealistic expectations on their servants to tame the children they are unwilling to punish. Brontë seems to offer sympathy to the children, but not to the parents.
2. Religion: The upper class professes concern about having a “christian” house and their children behaving in a “christian” way but Brontë does not feel that they ascribe to basic Christian values: enjoy what you have and try not to hate anyone, perform your duty.

Agnes, as a governess, seems to exist in a middle class of sorts. She doesn’t seem to get on well with the servants, yet she is not on the same social standing as the children she tutors or their parents. Also, Agnes seems to look down upon poorer people—even though her family is quite poor—as uneducated, pitiable creatures. Brontë seems to promote a moderate way of life. One must dedicate oneself to performing the duties God has intended; education is not frivolous or vain, but one must not have too many possessions as Mr. Hatfield does.

Brontë and Agnes are both very moralizing in this novel. Though Agnes is still likable most of the time and the reader does pity her position on many occasions. I tended to think her a little foolish to continue to hold such high expectations for her charges, particularly Rosalie, after she discovered their temperament. And, on the whole, Agnes is a bit naïve. She becomes world-wearier as the novel progresses, but she remains optimistic about people’s abilities to perfect their moral compass.

This novel seems like a modern-day version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” In Gilman’s story the unnamed narrator is literally imprisoned in a room that separates her from the rest of her family and the outside world. Gilman wrote the piece to protest a popular medical treatment of her time, which prescribed total bed rest and isolation for women suffering from depression. “The Yellow Wall-Paper” describes the insanity that this treatment can cause. But more than that, the short story provides social commentary on women’s limited roles in society.

Like the narrator in Gilman’s story, Cisneros’ narrator Esperanza feels a similar imprisonment. Gilman’s narrator’s surroundings are literally meant to imprison her: the bars at the window, the gate at the top of the stairs, steel rings on the wall, and the nailed-down bedstead. Esperanza’s surroundings, the house on Mango Street, are not so obviously ominous but are equally imprisoning. Rather than being confined on the basis of her sex, Esperanza is trapped both ethnically and economically. Her house, indeed her neighborhood, defines her place in society.