Jhumpa Lahiri

Several years ago, I came across an instrument in Hanoi that sounded amazingly like an blues guitar. It had only one string, but it could produce these great slides and bends—fascinating. But after a few weeks of hearing the same slides and bends on the same single string, I began to wonder if maybe there was a reason traditional Vietnamese music hasn’t translated well.

Jhumpa Lahiri is in danger of becoming a very fine one-string guitar.

Interpreter of Maladies is a fine story. I could imagine reading it several more times.

By the time I finished the collection by the same name, I felt as though I had. No, on second thought, that’s an overstatement. Her stories aren’t nearly as redundant as those of Thom Jones, and even Amy Hempel and Don Delillo recycle.

Maybe the problem is that some authors start writing and receiving praise while they’re too young. Their world begins to shrink to fit the praise of their first fans, and they lose appreciation for the characters and themes they haven’t already written.

Interpreter is a collection of traditionally-constructed stories, all set at a slow pace and minor key. “This Blessed House” injects some mild humor in relationships, but the collection seems generally designed for readers who think NPR is a little too light-hearted.

The Namesake develops the male-Indian-immigrant character (there is really only one in her work, although he/it is depicted by a father and a son). Evidently Indian emotions range from bored to mildly depressed, fairly depressed, lonely, alone, discontent, sad, discouraged, bland, calm, passive, pensive, and not really upset. The father’s odyssey involves to America for grad school, settling down, and making occasional trips back to India. The son’s adventures take him from the New England lower-middle-class suburbs all the way to New England upper-middle-class lakesides. His relationships include traditional Indian and traditional yuppie. (I know the word’s dated, but the relationships feel that way, too.) I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s not hard to imagine it being an easy sell to directors who like long close-ups of big-eyed people with pretty skin.

The stories show promise; so far, though, the promise isn’t fulfilled.

Francine Rivers

            There are people who read expecting authors to express new ideas, new voices, new points of view, new characters, or new stories.

            And there are a lot of people who like Francine Rivers.

            From what I’ve read, those people are separate groups.

            Redeeming Love is an attempt at reworking the biblical story of Hosea and Gomer as a pioneer romance. This poses some obvious difficulties for the author—starting with Gomer’s being a prostitute no character trait other than infidelity, and Hosea being a prophet. (I’ve never found a convincing prophet in a novel.) Then consider the difficulties of deciphering historical cues as to the relationship between the biblical couple, and trying to transpose it into a world of 19^th-century American mores, and make it all marketable to a late-20^th-century conservative evangelical audience… It’s more than any author could be expected to fulfill, so don’t blame Francine Rivers for failing.

            Atonement Child, on the other hand, is a more traditional book, and can be more accurately held to traditional standards. It centers on the abortion issue, which, to judge by the literature resulting from it, must be an extremely difficult issue to write well about. I knew that going into it, and adjusted my expectations accordingly, and was still disappointed. No characters proved complex and no plots twisted unexpectedly. I’m not an expert on the contemporary Christian women genre, but before reading it, I could have told you, within a dozen pages, where to expect the family epiphany.

            I can’t imagine wanting to read another of her books, but I can imagine respecting those who do.

Willa Cather and Pearl S. Buck

My Antonia gets full credit for being a story about 19^th-century Midwestern farmers that doesn’t remind me of the Little House on the Prairie books. Willa Cather’s prose didn’t dazzle me, but it fit the tone, and she has some quotable lines. So why didn’t the book move me?

I found myself going back over the characters—all realistic and likeable, or at least sympathetic in some way. I went over the landscape and weather descriptions—all worthy of being painted for the cover of a lesser book. She occasionally condescends to her characters by writing the immigrants’ speech in dialect, but that problem’s too common to destroy a book over.

And then, around page 130, I saw it. First, I was going over these things before I was half-way through the book, so the world she wanted to create wasn’t quite there. Second, that I kept having to remind myself that the first-person character was male.

Willa Cather is not a man. That is a trait shared by many other great writers. With few exceptions, though, the other great women writers remember that they aren’t men and don’t try to write as a male impersonator.

This presumptuous fault stood out especially because I read My Antonia just after finishing The Good Earth, which is also by a female author with a male protagonist. Pearl S. Buck demonstrates quite a bit more insight into the human condition, but I suspect her insights wouldn’t have rung as true if she had written in first person.

My Antonia is billed as a coming-of-age story of a boy in Nebraska. But it’s not. It’s a story of how women wish men would come of age: friendly-like, and respectable, and honorable (with minor, attractive flaws), and no more sexual than a single overly-intense kiss, and no more violent than an occasional bluster and hair rumple. When male authors try to write a female character first-person, you can almost always be assured a sexual fantasyland. The opposite happens in My Antonia. It’s a portrait of a gelding as a young man. She just doesn’t get it.

“It” means the concern for appearance and honor and significance and legacy and power and sex that is part of being male. (Maybe it’s part of being female, too, but I don’t think it’s the same.)

Pearl S. Buck gets it. The Good Earth is a masterpiece, on part with The Grapes of Wrath or Nectar in a Sieve for showing the point of view of the rural poor. Buck treats her characters with compassion and respect, refusing to escape from their problems through irony or other forms of authorial condescension.

It’s tragic how little has changed in Asia since she wrote it. Sure, revolutions have come over and over, along with cars and the Internet, but you could still meet most of the people today. I can’t recommend The Good Earth highly enough.

Peter Hoeg

The titular protagonist in Smilla’s Sense of Snow is an alienated Greenlander in Denmark, and one of the darkest, most unlikable heroines in mystery fiction. Hoeg’s book begins masterfully, and remains fascinating as he introduces and develops Smilla; provides background information on Danish imperialism, Nordic racism, and the science of ice; and hints at massive conspiracies behind the death of a small boy.

Unfortunately, he is unable to maintain the character complexity once the action picks up. The story devolves what could have been a fairly standard shoot-out scripted for a high-budget X-Files episode.

Herbert Fingarette

Confucius is a general introduction to the Confucius’ teachings and the historical development of the social-political worldview of about a billion people.

It’s presented in a factual, dispassionate style that touched nothing in me. But perhaps Confucius would have wanted it that way.

Anne Lamotte

Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamotte’s essays on her spiritual journey, is proof that while it is always dangerous to base your concept of God on your perception of your earthly father, this can be especially unfortunate if your earthly father wants to be Jerry Garcia.

The introductory chapters are the best: her early life in white, affluent hippieville; her full immersion into the stream of that 60s-70s cult known as “counterculture”; and her apparently sincere conversion to Christianity.

After that, though, you have to wonder whether the liberal counterculture, like the sun, can blind you to reality if you stare at it too long. Her San Francisco-centric (San Francentric?) world contains only women who are “objectively” beautiful, only good people who think everyone should be tolerated except for people who don’t believe in tolerance, and that rules of tolerance apply to sexual activity but not to animal training techniques.

I liked parts of it. She’s cute. Her stories are cute.

But maybe that’s the problem: it’s hard for me to stir up respect for 40-something women who try to be cute.

And that’s the underlying problem with her portrayal of God. The Bible describes God as a lot of things, but “cute” is never one of them.

After all, is salvation no more than a positive self image? Is living in truth no more than acting to increase the general flow of warm feelings among friends? Did Jesus undergo the passion just so women with fuzzy hair can sing, “I Feel Pretty,” and mean it?

It’s probably not wrong to imagine God with shaggy hair, John Lennon glasses, a tie-dyed T-shirt, and love beads. And it’s definitely not wrong to see beauty in people and situations that most people overlook.

But it’s wrong to do so at the cost of the power and the glory.

Helen Fielding

Regardless of how funny an author is, her ability to make a reader laugh out loud may depend more on the reader’s situation than on the author’s sense of humor. Keep that in mind as I admit that I laughed out loud often while reading Bridget Jones’ Diary.

I can’t imagine myself ever picking it up in an American bookstore, but I happened to find it in the closet of a house I was staying in while suicide bombers and rebels tore up the streets around my Central Asian city. I thought Helen Fielding was hilarious.

Even in that situation, Bridget Jones: the edge of reason didn’t seem as funny. Many jokes were recycled, and the author seemed to equate preachy characters with redeemed characters, but it wasn’t bad.

If I’m in a similar situation, I hope I can find another one of her books around. But I still can’t see myself reading one in an American suburb.

Tami Hoag

Night Sins… Yeah, that’s a book I knew I probably wouldn’t like, but it was recommended strongly by someone I respected, back before I realized that respecting a person didn’t mean you had to respect their book recommendations. It’s a trashy, middle-aged woman fantasy mystery of that type that describes male protagonists by comparing them to action movie stars and has said movie-star-like hero state repeatedly how much he likes the heroine’s small breasts.

It’s a cliffhanger, of the type that makes you wonder whether even the author knew who committed the murder until the chapter in which the murderer is revealed. Fortunately, by the end of the book, you probably won’t care which other characters die or go to jail.

For what it’s worth, neither Tami Hoag nor the woman who recommended her book to me is buxom.

Toni Morrison

In The Bluest Eye, a young girl goes crazy after being raped by her father. In Beloved, an escaped slave kills her daughter and then wrestles with the ghost.

So they aren’t books for teaching sixth-graders about symbolism and poetic language.

But they are beautiful, and they show truth, and redemption rings through them like a fundamental tone.

Playing in the Dark, a collection of essays on literary criticism, is the only book I’ve read by her that didn’t touch me. And I’ll take the blame: I haven’t read Edgar Allen Poe enough to appreciate her criticism.

But her novels grab and compel. I approach them with caution, knowing they will leave me changed.

For the record, I appreciated the movie, Beloved, but for very different reasons than I appreciated the book. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation between liking one and liking the other.

Susan Howatch

Glittering Images is a well-crafted psychological intrigue of an Anglican cleric sent to spy uncover the secret life of a bishop. Howatch does an excellent job analyzing situations from psychological and spiritual perspectives, the latter of these adding a depth that was missing from counseling-as-mystery novels by non-believers. Best of all, Howatch is a believer who seems unthreatened by non-glossy portrayals of believers dealing with problems.

Glamorous Powers starts promisingly enough: a sixty-year-old psychic Anglican priest goes through self-discovery and falls in love with a woman half his age. Unfortunately, it’s not as exciting as it sounds. There are a few good insights, but eventually it becomes clear that therapy does not equal plot. Surprisingly, considering how carefully Howatch observes her characters’ psychology, at several points they commit shockingly uncharacteristic actions without a second thought.

Glamorous Powers burned me, not only on Howatch, but on the fiction-therapy genre.