Kept by D.J. Taylor

Back in high school creative writing class, I had an assignment to write a soap opera script, which would then be read in front of the class. It’s not often that you get assigned to write something so ridiculous, so I went all out. In the span of 10 pages, there was amnesia caused by a tragic ladder accident, rival doctors, scheming exes, secret twins, buried treasure, familial revelations, covert relationships, and dramatic comas. It was a masterpiece. Of course, soap opera conventions are in and of themselves simple; it’s how the writers combine them that makes the whole thing complex. When you take something with already complex conventions and try to shove them into one document, things get a little hairy.

D.J. Taylor’s Kept is a web of Victorian literature tropes that can be mind-boggling to decipher. Here’s a short list of the conventions I was able to identify: deranged woman in the attic, heiress kept against her will, gothic setting, people reaching too far about their station and failing miserably, paid-by-the-letter subscription wordiness and servant/master relations. I am not faulting Taylor for these conventions; indeed, he does well by them. There were some points that I thought I was reading Dickens. However, the combination of all of the little details, instead of creating a Victorian supernovel, just becomes confusing. The connections between a murder in the beginning of the novel, a naturalist, a daring train robber, and the woman in the attic are all drawn by the end, but tenuously. I’ve had a night to marinate the story in my mind and I’m still not entirely sure what happened.

Though the plot is convoluted and the novel itself suffered from Too Many Characters Syndrome (if I’m bored someday, I’m going to count them all), it is in no way a bad book. I think that we have Kept credit for striving for authenticity. I honestly believe that if you had plopped this book in front of me after finished my college Victorian Literature course, I might have mistaken it for some Dickens protégé. If you read this book, you’ll appreciate the level of detail, but, for your own sake, take notes. Then share them with me.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Ugh, I hate this review. After gaining some perspective on some similar books, I'll be back.
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There’s something about Oryx and Crake, one of Margaret Atwood’s many dystopian novels, which has kept me from writing a review even though I finished the book a little while ago. It’s not that I didn’t like the book—it’s actually right up my alley. Dystopian novels give me a thrill down in my black little heart.

Atwood’s world is one in the near future, where cities are ghettos and the elite live in corporate enclaves with adults working in the owner-company’s complexes while the children go to company schools. The smartest students move forward to work in the growing genetically modified animal business while the less gifted are pushed towards the liberal arts (English major says ouch). Everything is provided for you. It’s a faux-utopia within a greater, stricter dystopian system. When the one-man scientific revolution in the form of the character Crake destroys most of mankind, a utopia appears to be built out of the ashes of the old. Or is it?

Utopias are a curious thing. I seem to remember that, back in high school health class, we studied Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid with basic survival needs at its base and self-actualization at its peak. Without the base, the pyramid crumbles and a human being cannot become a well-rounded human being because he is too worried about his own survival to care about things that don’t contribute to his warmth and caloric intake. Yet, it’s when that self-actualization is reached that humans begin branching off into areas of exploration that might be better left unexplored. It also may lead them to lose that sharpness that was so important to survival, making them easily cattle prodded into place. It seems to me that a utopia is a mere breath away from a dystopia.

What I would really love to do is to come back to this when I read Sir Thomas More’s Utopia. I feel that understanding the original definition of the word might coalesce my thoughts about Oryx and Crake into something more than a disjointed, crap-psychology ramble. This is a thought-provoking book and causes the reader to take stock of the shock entertainment that now seems so commonplace, of the scientific discoveries that daily either drive us to our salvation or our ruin.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I’m a little judgmental—I tend to stay away from books that I see being picked up by middle-aged ladies.

I’m not proud of it, but this habit has rarely steered me wrong. I’ve avoided hauling around books with that Oprah’s Book Club sticker on the front cover for years now and that’s enough for me. So I was pretty sure that I was never going to read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Too many baby boomers have nabbed it because they have been told to by the television and People magazine. Yet, it somehow ended up on my Kindle and, before I knew it, finished. Now I feel a little ashamed about being so hardheaded—it was an amazing book.

Set in early-1960s Jackson, Mississippi, The Help is narrated in turn by three women: Aibileen, an African-American maid who watched 17 of her white charges grow up and enter a society that she can never enter; Minny, another maid whose personality is ill-suited for the demeaning position; and Skeeter, the white woman who does not fit in with the Southern debutante society. With the help of Aibileen and Minny, Skeeter embarks on a path to give a voice to the pain of Jackson’s black help.

What makes The Help an exceptional book is that there are few clear edges. Yes, there are heroes that the reader is clearly supposed to support, but Stockett does not portray the white homeowner/black maid dichotomy as evil vs. good. The sentiments become mixed as maids raise white children from babyhood and these kids remember their help with more fondness than their distant parents. In her afterword, Stockett reveals that she too was raised by a hired black woman, which triggered her interest in this particularly Southern relationship.

The plot itself is very predictable, which gives it such a mass market appeal. Stockett’s writing, however, imbues all three of the narrators with rich, unique voices that make this book a joy to read. This is definitely a book that I would read again in a year or two, just to listen to the melodious Southern accents in my head one more time. I guess what I’m saying is that I was really, really wrong this time around in avoiding this book. I am suitably ashamed.

Figures in Silk by Vanora Bennett

While I was on the treadmill this afternoon, I watched as Gordon Brown, his wife, and his two children took their leave of 10 Downing Street. Brown stood in front of the hoards of photographers, smiled, then climbed into a car, streaking through London toward Buckingham Palace to give his resignation to the Queen. I’m not British, nor have I paid much attention to British politics since I spent the spring of 2007 in Scotland, but I got a lump in my throat watching his car make his way down the city streets. It’s amazing to me that some of us are lucky enough to live in countries where the our leaders step down after public elections when history has shown us that it’s just as easy to hold your position through battle and murder. Say what you want about politics and politicians, but there are times when the system is beautiful.

I just finished another one of my historical fiction novels, one that shows us what happens when the established system just breaks down. Vanora Bennett’s Figures in Silk— yet another novel based in the Ricardian period—centers around Isabel, a wealthy girl turned silkwoman after the death of her young husband during one of the many skirmishes of the War of the Roses. As she labors to break the Italian stranglehold on the silk market and establish a manufacturing center in London, she enters into a relationship with a secretive man, Dickon. To say any more would be a spoiler, so I’ll let things go here.

What I find so interesting about this period of Plantagenet decline is how people lived with what was essentially the same war through several generations. Yorkists and Lancastrians faced each other on the battlefield time and time again, two sides of a single family warring for the throne at the cost of their country and their people. In this novel, we experience the deaths of three kings (four, depending on whether you’re counting kings that made it to their coronation or not), each time throwing England into a tizzy of changing dynasties and loyalties. Such instability stifles intellectual and industrial growth; I don’t think that I can be faulted in thinking that England’s renaissance happened mainly due to the relative calm of the Tudor period. When our governments are stable, so are we. A good percentage of our politicians know this and graciously remove themselves from a seat of power when called to by the people. Figures in Silk is not a novel that will go will be touted in literature classes ten years from now, but it bears a read if only to appreciate what we have now.

Dune by Frank Herbert

I’m just going to out myself here and say that, for me, Dune is definitely a multi-read book. I knew going in that a science fiction classic wasn’t going something with a half-dressed space lady on the cover, but I didn’t realize that it would have several appendices. That’s Tolkien-level intense.

Dune, the much-beloved masterpiece by Frank Herbert, is not something that you can slam down in a day. It’s not just about the son and concubine of a fallen duke going native on a desert planet and leading a rebellion. Instead, it explores themes of ecology, religion, politics, and force of will. Herbert has created a deep and teeming universe, one that requires post-scripts about history, the ecology of the planet Arrakis, and the establishment of religion by committee. It has to be a monumental task to create a universe so intense that it requires its own dictionary (which can also be found in the back of the book).

Herbert’s novel has left me so off balance that I’m not sure how to review it. It will take me a while—and perhaps a brief look at the Cliff Notes—to pick it back up again, much less move on to the sequels. I’ve directed my little brother, he of the engineering degree, to pick this one up so that we can have a discussion about it. Granted, I’ll have to sit through a lecture about stillsuits, but it will be worth it to hear a different take on a book that requires you to sit down and think.

The Girls from Ames by Jeffrey Zaslow

Exactly what makes a good book a good book? How is it defined? Do we base it on an inspiring writing style? Or something that leaves you with a message sunk deep into your bones? Or is a good book something that has stood up to the passing years, surviving fads and unpopularity? I suspect that critics and lay people have been debating this since the advent of the printing press, but I only bring it up because I am unsure of how to judge this particular work.

I’m referring to The Girls from Ames, a book that follows 11 girls from Iowa during a journey of growth and friendship. Jeffrey Zaslow, the author, has created an odd work. He’s a columnist and it shows in the book, which really can’t be defined as a novel or a collection of stories. It is really just a column that runs 320 pages. This is where my difficulty with the book comes in. Zaslow, though an entertaining and gracious person (he wrote a really nice message in my book, so I’m required to say that), seems out of place writing as a stand-in for a group of women. Unlike his book co-authored by Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture, Zaslow doesn’t disappear into the stories. In fact, it’s incredibly awkward to the reader when he repeatedly uses the word “cute” to describe the women as children or their corresponding actions. Cute is a word that the women may have used in their interviews, but it sounds awkward in prose, especially prose that comes from a man’s pen.

If I just based my judgment of this book on the writing, I would probably end my review here with some curt punctuation. Yet, I have trouble doing that. Zaslow’s book made me think back on my old childhood friendships, ones that formed in day care, high school, camp, and college. I never had a bevy of friends, but I always had one or two from each group that I would consider real “friend.” The rest were just acquaintances. Now, at 24, I find myself in NYC for almost a year and feel terribly alone. It’s my own fault—I neglect my friends terribly. Out of sight, out of mind. If I don’t see them everyday, I forget to make contact, find myself too lazy to return calls, and generally fall off the face of the planet. The Girls from Ames made me feel that loneliness and guilt more than ever. The internet has made friendships easier than ever, yet still I’m lost in a vacuum.

That’s why I can’t decide whether this is a good book or not. Do I keep my opinion totally style-based? Well, then it’s a piece of garbage. Or do I judge it based on its affect on me? That would make it a perfectly reasonable read and a good use of my time. Regardless of my final judgment, I’m going to use this as an impetus to get off my ass and start being a friend again.