The Book Babes

A REFUGE FROM REALITY?

FROM ELLEN: The well-established trend of authors as public speakers has always had its limits for me. If a person is known for what they write, that's how they should be judged, rather than as they appear on stage. Sometimes I resist meeting a writer I admire, simply because I don't want an unpleasant reaction color my view of his or her work. Which is to say...

The other night in Portland, I heard Terry Tempest Williams speak in a benefit for Literary Arts, keeper of the written-word flame in Oregon. Williams is not only an accomplished writer but also an environmental activist who traces the high rate of cancer in her family to atomic testing in her home state of Utah after World War II. She is a polished presenter and advocate, with a soft-spoken manner that bespeaks all things Gaia. Her talk was built around excerpts from her latest book, "Finding Beauty in a Broken World."

And yet: Was I the only one in the audience who found it hard to believe one of her anecdotes, about a Delta flight attendant who went to the mat to bump Williams' adult adopted son from the exit row because he was black? Williams used the story in part to describe how her father, a passenger sitting in the same exit row, had evolved from a "Marlboro man without the cigarette"  who saw the world through a racist's eyes to a man who sobbed over the phone while describing the insult to her son. That young man, it's relevant to know, grew up in Africa and "speaks six languages," but apparently, when asked if he could manage in case of an emergency, couldn't say "yes" in a manner the flight attendant understood. When Williams' father intervened, she demanded that the black man read aloud from the emergency card to prove that he was literate and capable of manning the exit row.

The story may be true. But it sounded too neat and apocryphal to me, not the least because the airlines have enough trouble without inviting lawsuits for racial discrimination. I've sat in the exit row many times, without incident to me or any of the more suspicious characters beside me. Likewise, as touching as it seems to see a grown man cry, a true macho man never weeps. (Ref: Tom Hanks, in "A League of Their Own ": "There's no crying in baseball.")

This is all small potatoes, except for the larger idea that these days world views are increasingly shaped and reinforced within the same narrow framework. The very people who appreciate Williams' sensitive writing and her feminist/environmentalist slant are more receptive than most to the idea that racial insensitivity is alive and well throughout American society. Maybe it is, but so blatant as this? And maybe the story as Williams told it holds an element of truth but had grown with the telling. I left her appearance puzzling less over the world's imperfections than the limits of the spoken word.

MOMS AND THE BLAME GAME

ELLEN SAYS: Just in time for Mother's Day: Debra Gwartney's story about her wayward teen daughters, which describes how the two girls acted out in ways that make them lucky to be alive today. "Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love" proves that motherhood is forever, and so is the guilt. Gwartney's self-recriminations -- an all-too-familiar feeling for moms whose kids go wrong -- color the book with a constant refrain of "woulda, coulda, shoulda."

But in spite of her self-doubt, Gwartney ends up a hero -- a single mother who stuck by her two older daughters even as they punked themselves up, dropped out and eventually ran away. One came back in three months after suffering a nasty heroin overdose. The other was gone for a year, and when she returned, she was just as recalcitrant as before she left. Still, even when she hated doing it and resented her daughters for what they were putting her through, Gwartney spent money she didn't have for their therapy and rehab. She spent years braced for the next confrontation or piece of bad news.

The miracle is not just that the girls survived their life on the streets, but that their mother never gave up. That doesn't mean she didn't practice some tough love. But she never slammed the door on either of them. 

Although, as I've said before, I'm weary of the dysfunctional family memoir, this one is worth the spin, if for no other reason than the ending confirms that it's never too late to find connection again. In the throes of their misery, Gwartney's oldest, Amanda -- shaved head and all -- told her mother, "This isn't about you, Mom." But Gwartney could never feel that way, because most mothers never can.

MOM, WE HARDLY KNEW YE

ELLEN SAYS: A week in New York City is heady stuff for a small-town persona like me, but it's worth braving the cold and congestion for the annual meeting and awards celebration of the National Book Critics Circle, which took place Thursday at the New School in Manhattan. You can find the names of the winners on the NBCC site. So I'll offer a few extremely pertinent observations about the winners, instead.

First, the winners were all men. This did not go unnoticed by a certain proportion of the very people who voted to give said winners their awards, specifically a certain number of women on the NBCC's 24-critic board. Not that we begrudged any of the winners their due, but really: What were the odds that we'd go seven out of seven (normally six, but this year two poets split that award). Not to mention that the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing went to Ron Charles (a man, as might be presumed), and the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award to Pen American Center, a worthy organization that fights for writers' freedom around the globe, brought three men to the stage to accept the award.

One possible exception occurred when Natasha  Wimmer, a tall, lanky woman with an improbable crown of curls, loped to the stage to accept the fiction award for Roberto Bolano, author of "2666," because Bolano couldn't be there: He died in 2003. Which is not an incidental point: The critics were divided on what would have become of the sprawling (as in, "where is this going?"), 900-page novel had he lived. Similar thoughts haunt the last work of David Foster Wallace, which is excerpted along with a touching profile in last week's New Yorker magazine. Wallace killed himself -- in part, it seems, over his sense of having failed at the nearly supernatural goals he set for himself with that work. The excerpt suggests room for revision. In both cases, readers are left to wonder what might have been.

But enough sorrow. In looking for small victories regarding this year's NBCC winners and the writerly strengths of our fellow women, I need search no further than the list of finalists to find the evidence. In fiction, Marilynne Robinson and Elizabeth Strout produced novels ("Home" and "Olive Kittredge," respectively) that were real contenders. In biography, few would argue that Annette Gordon-Reed, Paula J. Giddings and Brenda Wineapple produced exemplary work, even if Patrick French won the prize for his authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul.

Meanwhile -- and I doubt if you'll read this anywhere else -- two of the male winners invoked their mothers in accepting their awards. Seth Lerer, who won the criticism prize for his history of children's literature, praised Mom for taking him to the library when he was four. Juan Felipe Herrera, co-winner of the poetry prize, traced his lyrical gifts to his mother singing lullabies to him as a baby.

Women are everywhere, but sometimes -- often times, alas! -- it consists of being the power behind the man. An eternal verity, perhaps?       

ST. PADDY'S DAY TIP: WEAR GREEN, AND TAKE AN IRISH WRITER TO BED

ELLEN SAYS: I'm already wearing the green and hoping for the luck o' the Irish (or is that said in irony, as the Irish have had such little luck in their long history??). With St. Patrick's Day just around the corner, let's celebrate the wonderful literary heritage produced by the land of leprechauns. I'm not talking James Joyce, Yeats or Sean O'Casey, great as those writers may be. I'm thinking about contemporary writers, from Seamus Heaney ("Beowulf" translation; poet extraordinaire) to Edna O'Brien ("Light in the Evening") to Colm Toibin ("The Master") to John Mcgahern ("All Will Be Well")... and those are just the first names and books that come to mind.

This doesn't include all the American crossovers, transplants such as Frank McCourt ("Angela's Ashes") or homegrown chroniclers of the Irish-American story such as Alice McDermott ("Charming Billy"). I could spend the rest of my life on an Irish-only diet of books and authors and barely know I was deprived.

This week on KATU-TV in Portland I made some suggestions of new or nearly new books that readers ought to consider as they contemplate the blarney stone. All would make great gifts for St. Patrick's Day, guaranteeing that you'd have more than a hangover as a souvenir for your revelry!

1. "Heart and Soul," by Maeve Binchey. Heartfelt is the word for this latest novel from a phenomenal bestselling novelist who always gives you a sense of her characters' humanity. Here she focuses on the outpatient clinic a Dublin hospital creates and the people who inhabit it, both as staffers and clients. I don't want to spill the beans about what happens to the newly divorced cardiologist who's chosen to run the place, but the ending confirms how each of us has the capacity to change.

2. "Shannon," by Frank Delaney. The American-born Delaney sets this latest work of historical fiction in the 1920s along the Shannon River, which is to Ireland what the Mississippi is to us Americans. A priest named Robert Shannon (as in the river -- his people came from its shores) is suffering from shell shock after World War I. He's sent to Ireland to explore his roots (and to keep him out of the hair of his bosses in the Boston diocese, which is up to some mischief). There's a method to Delaney's madness in choosing this setting, putting his recovering priest in the midst of civil war. This is good stuff that helps you understand both the land and its politics.

3. "The Secret Scripture," by Barry Sebastian. This novel almost won the coveted Man Booker Prize, and it would have been my pick. The setting is the recent present, as a hospital psychiatrist takes on the task of moving a 100-year-old patient who has been incarcerated in a mental institution since she was a young woman. But the catalyst for the story -- her commitment -- occurred at roughly the same time as the Delaney novel, after World War I. The doctor begins to suspect fishy business, and he is right. Here you get a picture of the collusion between church and state that served its masters but gave women no voice.  

4. "The Gathering," by Anne Enright. An acute intelligence and sense of resignation color this fiction work about a large Irish-Catholic family and its past. The narrator is a woman who has gone to retrieve the body of her dead brother, whose tragic life is tied to a secret that only she knows. This is a subtle story that explores the source of melancholy and love that  binds together the Hegarty clan -- and maybe your own. The critics liked it: Enright's novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. 

5. "A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub," by Bill Barich. Barich, a Dublin-based American who writes for The New Yorker, fuses the story of the neighborhood "public house" -- a.k.a. pub -- into a wider explanation of how Ireland is changing in the face of globalization. If you don't know ale from stout, not to worry: This book is crammed with tasty tidbits about the Irish and their customs. It may be worth the price of admission just to learn how many different terms they have for getting sloshed. My favorite euphemism for saying someone was drunk as a skunk: He was just "taking a ride on the bingo bus."