I’d been ignoring this novel. There are so many reasons to not read a book: time, money, a small fit of intellectual laziness, the fact that nobody at Viking saw fit to send BTWOF a review copy…. The reviews I’d read were intriguing but…. And then I received this email from a friend:

“Well, I’m in big trouble now…last night I started reading People of the Book.  I’m now in that familiar, conflicted position of being deep into a book that calls to me day and night…and yet, there’s clients to see, dog to be walked, other aspects of life to return to. What a pleasure, though, to begin a book and immediately love the new world and new characters.”

That tipped me over the edge and did what none of the publisher PR or reviews had managed and I was out the door to the bookstore.  And now People of the Book went on my personal shortlist for Best Book of the 2008.

Here’s the gist: In Bosnia, during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to save one of his museum’s most precious possessions: a beautifully illuminated Haggadah from fifteenth-century Spain. When the book resurfaces in the mid-1990s, rare-book conservator Hanna Heath , a caustic Aussie loner of a heroine, is offered the job of a lifetime: to prepare the manuscript for exhibition. Brooks uses the clues Heath finds during her restoration of the book – a wine stain, a bit of insect wing, salt crystals, a white hair – to lead the reader back in time to unravel the travels and travails of the manuscript, its evolution, and glimpses into the lives of its people.

I admit that there was a brief moment when I found the flashback format irritating. And several moments when I felt that twentieth century values and drama shaped the twentieth century a bit more than I liked. (Yes, that’s a totally contradictory complaint - see my Book Club entry for details. I’m not giving anything away here.) But Brooks’ depictions of ultra-nationalist and religious fanatics and petty tyrants (and ramifications of internalized self-hatred), across the centuries, are brilliant.

Mainstream readers will find a wonderful, rich, layered tale that celebrates and (re-)connects the intertwined cultural histories of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. BTWOF readers will also appreciate her rich vision of women’s lives and history, and her exquisite (re-)writing of women back into the center of all of the eras she touches. I found the book to be a profound meditation on insider and outsider perspectives, on how essential the “outsider” is to history and culture, and also, perhaps, on how quickly the credit for the outsiders’ contributions disappears. Can a writer receive two Pulitzers?

Lesbian content: You have to read for it. And then reflect on it. Subtle. Deep. And, by my definition, exquisite. Don’t spoil it for yourself by skipping over to the Book Group entries.

About the author: Novelist Geraldine Brooks, who won a Pulitzer for March, also has a past life as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She obviously likes to take compound, complex issues and tease them apart, to find their roots, to consider the way the past shapes the present, and to celebrate the rich complex diversity that makes up the world. And she brings it all and, in this case her Aussie upbringing, to her fiction. May there beanother novel, and soon! Meanwhile check out March, her consideration of possibilities of the heart and mind of the (absent) father of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women – a profound re-reading of the Civil War, slavery, and women’s lives. Year of Wonders, of which Publishers Weekly said: “Discriminating readers who view the term historical novel with disdain will find that this debut  is to conventional work in the genre as a diamond is to a rhinestone.”  Brooks’ nonfiction includes: Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women and her autobiographical Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal’s Journey from Down Under to All Over.

Aug. 10, 2008

-Carol Seajay

It’s a great collection. I picked it up because of its references to Kalamazoo, Plainwell, Comstock, and other small towns of my youth, references that, in another mood, would have sent me screaming from the room.

These are towns that don’t often make it into the pages of literature. And neither do Campbell’s characters, but they are so vividly realized and familiar that I found myself wondering if Campbell went to my high school. Except that if she did, it was a generation later — the drugs are more contemporary than the ones I remember; lesbians exist, and are visible on the fringes of these stories in a way they weren’t when I lived there. Women (and the male characters, too) have complex, difficult lives, and the complexity of their lives is well realized. These stories took me back to a life that I might have lived. They remind me that the expensive choice of leaving was a bargain. They remind me that the line between working poor white (Is it politically incorrect to say White Trash yet?) and escape into a kinder existence is as narrow as one good teacher, a scholarship, a pair of glasses, or the dumb Russian Roulette luck of not getting pregnant in a particular moment.

There are too many lesbian mentions in this book and they are too kindly for coincidence. Maybe, later in the collection, there’s a story with lesbians characters front and center, I’ll let you know if I find it.  But in the meantime, get your hands on a copy of the story “Family Reunion.” Circulate it among your friends and to all the women you know who survived some nasty something with adult male relatives back in their youth.

And someday, when someone puts together an anthology of girls-getting-(well justified)-revenge tales, let this be the lead story. I admit that it took me a good 24 hours after I read it to laugh. But I did laugh out loud when I went back to read it again. Campbell’s aim is that incredible, and her target is just perfect. 

PS: For another great, well justified (although much slower to arrive) rape revenge story, dive into Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood. It’s Atwood at her wicked, insightful, brilliant (and feminist) best.

American Salvage
Bonnie Jo Campbell
WW. Norton
$13.95 pb Dec 2009

The Year of the Flood
Margaret Atwood
Doubleday
$26.95 cloth Sept 2009

Margaret Atwood signing 600 copies of The Year of the Flood at the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association office. Photo by Carol Seajay.
 

by Helen Humphreys

Norton, March 2009, $23.95 cloth, 177 pages

Sweet, tender, short and not a word awry. And one of the best anti-war novels I’ve ever read. Just what we need, right now, as we’re settling into to Obama’s “next 100 days,” with none of the wars ended and another one emerging in Pakistan. Coventry reminds us what it means to live (work, marry, love, eat, sleep, die and survive) under a rain of bombs.

Coventry, for those of you whose WW II history is no better than mine, an industrial city in central England, was the subject of one of the most infamous bombing raids of that war. The terror and destruction were used, in turn, to justify Allied bombings of urban areas – people’s homes – in Germany. Based on accounts of survivors of that brutal night and on eyewitness accounts of the bombing of Baghdad, it offers an immediate and very current reminder that war begets war, and that bombing, however rationalized, begets terror and death and destruction and, inevitably, more bombs. Something that the survivors of bombings know, instinctively, and something that most Americans, despite 9/11, have yet to understand. Send this book to your Congressman/woman and Senator.

But read it first, for the story. If Sarah Waters, in The Night Watch, asked what happened to those fine, brave women (lesbians in that case) who spent the War risking their lives to save others’ lives, In Coventry Humphreys is asking about that spark of connection between women – named or not – that sees them/us through.

Humphreys has explored this war before, in her lovely The Lost Garden. Her most recent novel, Wild Dogs, BTWOF’s 2005 Novel of the Year, asks some of the most interesting questions about (lesbian) relationships – about love and work, and about commitment, freedom and passion as it applies to both – of any book I’ve ever read. Humphreys doesn’t believe in easy answers. So I took the liberty of reading her new novel as an exploration of that spark between women that might, in another time or place, evolve into something differently intimate. Or might not. It’s a covenant that’s rarely named and even more rarely honored. Humphreys has given us that gift with Coventry.

Lexicon:

Perhaps, if we had a word for these relationships, they would more often and more fully honored? Coventry? As in “I had coventry with her.”

Trivia:

Coventry was also remembered as the home of Lady Godiva, who rode naked through the town in effort to persuade her husband not to tax the townspeople so heavily, back around 1050. A daring woman if ever there was one.

Also just published:

In January Delacorte (Random House/USA), published Humphrey’s short stories, The Frozen Thames, which was published in Canada in 2007. I’m saving them as bribes to get myself to spend time on the exercycle at the gym. (Hey, it worked with Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy and Jumpha Lahiri Unaccustomed Earth!)

Let’s start with the PR — while I sympathize with the publicists’ dilemma (there’s almost nothing you can say about this rich novel without giving something away), the catalog and jacket copy make the book sound like it’s about people so sad and lonely that even their dogs won’t speak to them. I’ve spent forty years searching out good lesbian reading and I just couldn’t get past the promo until Emma Donoghue wrote, in TLE’s “Best Books of 2005” issue, “Helen Humphreys’ Wild Dogs — about a group of people whose dogs have run off to the woods — is a ravishingly written novel about the contrary pulls of danger and home.” I bit the bullet, ordered a copy and dove in.

Donoghue is right: This is one of those rare books you haven’t read before. Luckily I read it just in time to insist that it be added to the Lammy’s Lesbian Fiction shortlist. (Winner to be announced May 18.) So, hopefully, it will yet land in the lesbian reading community.

Humphreys explores the edge between when we think we’re wild young things cherishing freedom and independence and that awkward moment when the attraction of the domesticated life begins to frighten, or worse, when we discover we’ve already failed at settling in. She looks at how people (mostly women, but some others as well) build relationships in the context of the everyday, seemingly banal, damage all too commonly inflicted in our cultures. In the end she redefines success living in that context. That alone would make this a breakthrough novel.

But I also love the way Humphreys plays with the gender of the beloved throughout the initial sections of the book – she certainly kept me on edge for those first 50 pages. Everyone will read this section differently, depending on their own assumptions and experiences, which makes this a perfect reading group book. The relief, when it comes, is a throwaway line from the least expected quarter. Others have used this device before (Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown, and June Arnold come to mind), but here it’s an aspect that leads the reader deeper into the book, not the central conceit. Humphreys holds the tension just long enough to keep it interesting.

But more fun, even than that, is her wickedly spare prose. A few seemingly backhanded sentences describe childhoods that others have spent entire novels documenting. A short riff, early in the book, on jobs and boyfriends past and on the confines and traps of each is encyclopedic in its insight. I keep expecting to come across it as a broadside somewhere.

Don’t look here for a simplistic, romantic resolution. Humphreys’ exploration of loss and betrayal and love is much more complex; her characters dream in conflicting visions, and a single, shared future won’t suffice. That’s a story that is rarely told, rarely told well, and when it is, the characters are much too rarely women. In Helen Humphreys’ Wild Dogs we get all three. Paper: June 5, $13.95, Norton, 0393328422; cloth $22.95, Norton, 0393060152.