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.

Jack Schaeffer

A student once remarked that Shakespeare’s plays were basically just a bunch of famous quotations strung together.

A similar criticism could be made of Jack Schaeffer’s Shane. How many clichés, of words characters, or metaphors, can be held in one coming of age story on the American frontier in a sodbusting family when a mysterious gunslinger dressed as a teacher but who’s a real workhorse and man’s man comes to town and turns all the women’s heads?

The big difference between Shakespeare and Schaeffer, of course, is that Shakespeare’s lines weren’t all cliches before he wrote them, and Schaeffer’s were.

But the thing is, they work. I read the book so often that by the time I was ten I could spend twenty minutes telling all the ways the movie didn’t measure up. I loved it. Sigh.

Frank Peretti

I doubt that angels have inferiority complexes, but if they do, they should read Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, and Piercing the Darkness. Both books give the impression that God is to the universe what Professor X is to the comics. He has the most impressive powers, and he probably can’t be beaten, but he couldn’t do it without his blade-wielding sidekicks. In this corner, God and the Angels. In that corner, Demons and the Universal New Age Big Government Conspiracy. The match of the eternity! Whee!

As pulp fiction goes, they’re no bad. As theology goes, they’re slapstick.

Prophet is a little darker, choosing to take on the favorite conservative evangelical whipping boy—abortion. The characters are a little more complex than in the previous books, and the tension builds a little better since the threats are more realistic. Still, if you don’t already see the world as Peretti does, I doubt it will change your mind.

Lensey Namioka

I’m not a great fan of “ethnic” fiction. By “ethnic fiction,” I don’t mean fiction written by non-EuroAmerican writers or fiction about non-EuroAmerican characters, but that whole genre of fiction that’s really just disguised propaganda for colorblind peace love and understanding.

This dislike started early in me. As a child, I didn’t like any book that could be summarized, “_____ are people too,” or “we’re all the same even though we’re different.”

Those biases are why I was so pleasantly surprised by Yang the Youngest and His Terrible Ear.

It’s a story about children, for children, and it’s a good story. The title character happens to be an immigrant to the U.S., and his problems growing up are aggravated, and made more interesting, by cultural misunderstandings. But the theme is growing up, not growing up-while-being-an-immigrant; discovering who you are, not discovering who you are-as-an-immigrant.

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.

Walter Wangerin, Jr.

What if the Bible had been written by a single author as a novel?

The obvious answer—that it wouldn’t have lasted thousands of years and impacted people around the world and be the Bible—didn’t stop Walter Wangerin, Jr., from trying to write it, and doing a pretty good job.

The Book of God will not change lives over the coming millennia, but it’s not a bad book. Wangerin approaches his subject with far more reverence than the majority of Bible Story writers or biblio-novelists. He slides over most of the theology, focusing instead on how the recorded events might have felt to characters from the time.

His depiction of Jesus didn’t ring true to me. And he seems to have trouble making most of the strongly masculine characters believable. But he does a great job with the Exile, and the relationship between Zachariah and Elizabeth (John the Baptist’s parents) would have been a great short story.

I don’t know that I’d ever read it again, but I can’t think of a novel based on the Bible that I’ve liked more.

Beatrix Potter

As a kid, I was given at least three copies of Peter Rabbit. As a parent, I’ve been given two more copies of the individual book, as well as two complete boxed sets of Beatrix Potter’s books.

I didn’t get the attraction then, and I don’t now.

Maybe they were wonderful a hundred years ago, when no one wrote picture books for children. Now, though, there’s so much else that’s better.

Somewhere, I’m sure there are children who asks to read Beatrix Potter books before bed. I’ve just never met one of them.

Marjorie Kinning Rawlings

Life in a Florida swamp in the early 1900s moved slowly.

Slow is the tone of Marjorie Kinning Rawling’s Cross Creek, and it may be a central theme as well. There is no plot and very little along the line of characters in this collection of impressions of her life there.

But there’s also a beauty that comes though as smoothly as humidity in her descriptions of making ice cream or holding a coral snake or listening to lizards on the walls. It’s the chamomile tea of literature. I usually prefer espresso drinks, but this isn’t bad once you know what to expect.

Paul Reiser

Mad About You was a very funny TV show. Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt had an unusual chemistry for a TV couple, the writing was tight, and it touched on issues of marriage and parenthood that hadn’t made their way into sitcoms before.

If you’re thinking about reading Reiser’s Couplehood or Babyhood, imagine the TV show, but without Helen Hunt or a supporting cast or other writers or a plot. And then remember that those issues that got extra humor from their edginess on 90s primetime aren’t exactly edgy in standup routines or books based on the routines. Then put the books back on the shelf and walk over to the DVD section.

Ivan Turgenev

Fathers and Sons contains complex characters, and it’s easy to see how it could have been provocative in its time. Its themes, though, don’t seem all that relevant today, and its political and social setting are too far removed for most modern Western readers to appreciate it.

If you’re interested in themes of science vs. aesthetics and truth vs. beauty, try Chesterton instead.