Jane Eyre's American Daughters

Jane Eyre was published in America in 1848, a year after its publication in England. A few years later, in 1855, Charlotte Bronte died at the age of 38, and two years after that, her friend, Elizabeth Gaskell, published a biography about Bronte which boosted the popularity of both the novel and its author among women on both sides of the ocean. In John Seelye's critical study, Jane Eyre's American Daughters, he examines the young heroines of wildly popular novels published in the 50-75 years after Jane Eyre and claims that in one way or another, the female authors were influenced by Bronte's classic novel as well as Gaskell's portrait of Bronte which would have you believe that Bronte modeled Jane almost entirely after herself.
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Susan Warner's 1850 novel The Wide, Wide World doesn't seem very much like Jane Eyre at first glance, with its dripping sentimentalism and strong emphasis on the Christian theme. Indeed, as Seelye points out, it seems like a book Mr. Brocklehurst would have made the young girls at Lowood commit to memory. Suffering is good. The more you suffer in life, that means God loves you so much, so be eager and grateful for suffering. But there are faint echoes of Jane Eyre. Like Jane, Ellen is alone in the world. She's not an orphan, but her mother dies and her father is distant. Eventually, she works as a governess. She doesn't have a temper, as Jane does, but she cries copiously, so one could argue that it's temper turned inward. There's also an older man that the reader is given to understand Ellen will marry eventually. The Wide, Wide World is briefly referenced in Little Women as Jo is sitting in a tree reading it and crying.

Elsie Dinsmore was more influenced by The Wide, Wide World than Jane Eyre. To drive the point home, author Martha Finley has Elsie reading it in one of the sequels (there are 25 of them). Elsie, who made her first appearance in 1867, is pious and a crybaby like Ellen. Her mother is dead, and although I'm sure Finley, a Sunday school teacher didn't mean it, the father is a little ...strange. Elsie resembles his dead young wife so closely that he often comes off like a jealous boyfriend. It's not incest, but there's a creepy feel to readers with 21st century sensibilities. He wants total obedience from Elsie; he wants her to love him more than she loves God/Jesus. Elsie feels guilt and self-reproach that she can't give him that but she's suffering, and that's a plus! Her behavior towards him alternates between acting afraid of him (lots of trembling and crying) and acting like a coquette ("archly" is one of poor style-challenged Finley's favorite adverbs when Elsie is speaking with her father, she's often perched on his knee, they kiss and embrace "tenderly"). It's no surprise that Elsie gets married to Mr. Travilla, her father's best friend.

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I wish I could say that I'm getting all of this from Seelye's book, but I actually went through an Elsie phase (my grandmother still had the books from when she was a girl in the 1920s) and read the first three.

In Little Women, the Christian sentimentality is toned way down and filtered through John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The March girls aren't orphans, but dad is off at war in the first part. Meg and Jo work as governesses. Jo has a temper that she's always trying to curb. When Beth dies, suffering makes Jo "better" --she gives up writing lurid thrillers and starts writing wholesome things. She ends up with an older man, Professor Bhaer.

Since it's known that Louisa May Alcott loved Charlotte Bronte's writing, it's so delicious to note that Alcott's thriller Behind A Mask turned Jane Eyre on its ear. It's like the madwoman was sprung from the attic. Conniving Jean Muir (check out that name and those initials!), a 30-something divorced actress has a scheme to marry money, so she disguises herself to look like a 19-year old and takes a governess job. Ultimately, her scheme is revealed, but not before she achieves her aim with the head of the family, an old widower. Too bad Louisa Alcott never met Mae West because they could have shared one of West's witticisms: When I'm good, I'm very good. And when I'm bad, I'm even better.

In Seelye's roundup, the heroines start to get considerably younger. 10-year-old Sara Crewe becomes an orphan and Miss Minchin is definitely from the Mrs. Reed mold. As soon as she realizes that Sara is both an orphan and a pauper, she sends Sara from her fine room up to the attic. Hmmm... Sara even works as a governess of sorts, because she is expected to help the other girls with their lessons, in exchange for her meager room and board. Like most of our heroines, Sara has a temper but she trains herself to hold her anger in because she feels that it makes her more powerful. An older guy figures into the story, but instead of becoming a husband, the "Indian Gentleman" adopts her when he figures out that she's the daughter of his old friend who he inadvertently caused to lose a lot of money.

Rebecca Rowena Randall from Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) has a dead father, and since there are seven kids in the family, mom sends Rebecca to her maiden aunts. Aunt Miranda is a little crusty, but she is eventually swayed by Rebecca's charming disposition. Rebecca's temper is generally good. She has a run-in with her classmate, Minnie Smellie, but who wouldn't, with that name? Rebecca is good in school and she gets a teaching position, but has to give it up and go home because her mother is ill. There's an older guy in the picture, but he's just a friend. His name is Adam Ladd, but imaginative Rebecca calls him "Mr. Aladdin" because she sells him a lamp.

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Fun fact: "Becky Randall" is a character in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Jerusha "Judy" Abbott from the epistolary novel Daddy-Long-Legs has been an orphan at The John Grier Home her entire life. Upon her graduation from high school, she finds out that an anonymous wealthy benefactor is going to send her to college and educate her as a writer, on the strength of a composition she wrote that he found amusing. Judy is proud, feisty and independent. She's determined to correspond with her benefactor (who she christens "Daddy-Long-Legs" -- she catches a glimpse of a tall gentleman leaving the orphanage) and eventually find out who he is. Temper? Judy gets frustrated when he won't respond to her chatty missives and when he brusquely sends orders through his secretary, she seethes and stops writing for a while. Meanwhile, Judy has a college friend named Julia who has a 3o-something tall and wealthy uncle named Jervis Pendleton who takes more than a passing interest in Judy. Hmmm. All of the Jane Eyre influences are there, but in a sunnier presentation.

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Sadly, Jean Webster's last year mirrored Charlotte Bronte's -- Bronte died of complications from pregnancy at 38 and Webster died the day after giving birth to her first child at 39. Daddy-Long-Legs was also one of my grandmother's books. It is my oldest movie tie-in book -- there are stills from the 1930s "photoplay" with Janet Gaynor and Warner Baxter. Back in 2005, a Korean remake was released; I really want to see it.

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Seelye concludes his examination of these American heroines with Anne Shirley from Anne Of Green Gables. Although it's hardly necessary, he defensively points out that as a Canadian she qualifies, being North American. Well, duh. Anne is also an orphan and she goes to work (happily) as a teacher but except for taking exception to comments about her red hair, she doesn't display much temper and gets along well with everyone. For the first time, there is no older man to beguile the heroine. Anne eventually settles down with Gilbert Blythe, her former classmate.

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Seelye obviously loves Anne and enjoys wickedly pointing out that the beloved character made her appearance in 1908, a year before the death of Martha Finley, the author of the Elsie Dinsmore books. Seelye actually writes: "Ding dong, the witch is dead." But he also takes a little jab at Lucy Maud Montgomery, saying that she must have had Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm open in her lap when she was writing the first chapter of AOGG. (Actually, the two opening chapters are pretty similar, as are the titles.)

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I really enjoyed Seelye's critical study. At times, his reach seems to exceed his grasp, but he never fails to entertain.

Larry's Party

I just finished Larry's Party by Carol Shields for The Second Canadian Book Challenge. I'm a Yukoner now. Nine books. Yikes. Time to get serious; I should drop everything and read Canadian till the first of July, eh? Pass the double-doubles and keep 'em coming.

Larry's Party follows Winnipeg, Manitoba native Larry Weller for twenty years, 1977-1997. During that time he changes from a slightly goofy 26-year-old to a 46-year-old who has recently had a rather serious brush with mortality. Along the way, the reader has glimpses of Larry as an awkward teenager and gets to meet his parents, his sister, his two wives, his son and his friends. At the center of Larry's life is his career and his passion -- creating landscape mazes.

.Shields constructed the novel like a maze, and at the center is Larry's dinner party in Toronto where many of the characters meet for the first time. Carol Shields juggles a nine-way conversation between these people with incredible deftness and humor, and revelations are made. The party may be the center of Shields' novel, but if Larry's life is a maze, this seems less the center than another turn or possibly he's back where he began. I like it that Shields left readers something to mull over.

I was reminded of her previous novel, The Stone Diaries (1996 Pulitzer fiction winner), which also examines a character (Daisy Goodwill Flett) at various junctures in her life. Old photographs are used in both novels, although in Larry's Party, this is limited to a black-and-white baby picture of Larry which is on the cover of the Canadian edition and is described in full detail. This technique is a little disconcerting. Who are these people, really? Of the two novels, I preferred Larry's Party slightly more. The Stone Diaries leaves readers stranded on a gloomy note by necessity.
Browsing the internet, I learned that Larry's Party was made into a musical several years ago. Sometimes, I'm guilty of muttering something along the lines of WTF? when I read or hear that a book has been made into a musical. This time, I was charmed by the idea and could see how it would work beautifully. Have any of you seen it?

Shelf-Absorbed

I now have a 5-week class in which I teach interviewing skills. When I'm finished with those students, I have 3 hours of down time and the building where I teach is fairly close to the library. You know where this is going, right?



The honeymoon's not over by a long shot, but I felt the first pangs of criticism welling up in me today about my beloved library. Now that I've finally discovered Peter Sieruta's excellent blog Collecting Children's Books, I'm wishing there was a children's literature section in this library so I could check out some of the writers -- both old and new -- that he blogs so brilliantly about.

I got over my little snit pretty easily; my library and I kissed and made up. Combing through the stacks, I found:
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Lost Names: Scenes From A Korean Boyhood - Richard E. Kim. First published in 1970, this is a collection of seven autobiographical stories about a boy and his family living in Korea during Japan's often harsh colonial rule. How could I have lived here almost 5 years and am only just now stumbling onto this book?

Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction - Lee Horsley. A critical text aimed towards students studying this genre. Duly academic and slightly starchy in tone, but that don't scare me none. Besides, how could I pass up a cover like this?

Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own - Edited by Sharon Slaon Fiffer and Steve Fiffer. Richard Bausch, Gish Jen, Lynda Barry, Kathryn Harrison and several other writers each take a room and share their memories.
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Reading in the Dark - Seamus Deane. Deane's first novel is set is postwar northern Island, and seems to be a coming-of-age story.
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The Uncalled - Paul Laurence Dunbar. A 1901 novel by the famous African-American poet who died from tuberculosis at the age of 33. This 1969 edition is part of a series called History And Literature Of The Black Man In America and is a facsimile of the original.

Literary gem of knowledge: Dunbar went to the same high school as Orville and Wilbur Wright.
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All of these books are less than 300 pages long. If I stay home for a couple of weekends perhaps I can get them read before they're due back in a month's time.

Bookleaves Meeting: The Red Tent

While I was reading The Red Tent, I kept trying to imagine exactly how it looked. The closest I could get in my mind was this: Something tells me I'm pretty far off.

Anyway, the BOOKLEAVES book club met at Mitzi's, and she created a red tent by draping a wine-colored throw over her exercise machine. It was exotic, imaginative and funny -- just like Mitzi. I forgot my camera, so I hope someone took a picture of it.

Even better, Mitzi went to Ali Baba in Itaewon and had them make up a gorgeous feast of Middle Eastern cooking to fit in with the book's locale. We had pitas -- both steamed and baked, sweet yogurt, sour yogurt, yogurt with nuts, hummus and falafel. That was actually the first time I'd eaten falafel, although I've loved that word for decades. Delicious. I may have to make a trip to Ali Baba myself. Since Mitzi's birthday was the following day, she ordered a scrumptious lime pie from Tartine's and Veronica brought a beautiful ice-cream cake from Baskin-Robbins. Wonderful stuff.

Most of the group had a favorable response to the book, but it didn't seem to generate a lot of conversation. While I was reading it, I wished several times that I had a Bible with the Old Testament, so I could compare The Red Tent with Genesis 34. I also mentally kicked myself once more for not buying a book I saw last year called Reading The Bible As Literature. I think it would've helped.

Although I like the idea of a red tent for those special days, and I enjoyed reading about the daily routines and customs of Jacob and his wives, The Red Tent didn't really rock my world. The pacing of the story often felt off -- either too rushed or too leisurely. Also, I don't think the first-person narrative by Dinah was the best choice stylistically. Another thing that bugged me is that Diamant seems to tip her hand too much. For example, young Dinah is practically dying with excitement to meet her grandmother. She goes on and on about it so much that the eventual disappointment she encounters is somewhat diluted for the reader.

I'd really like to hear other opinions of this novel because part of the problem was me. I'm at a point in my life where I'm just not interested in reading about mating and menstruation and childbearing. Twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago I couldn't get enough of stories like these. Now they just make me tired. I would rather have been following Jacob and his sons through their workdays.

Because of this, I was relieved when one of the BOOKLEAVES members, Rebecca, pointed out that we've been reading a lot of books lately with a feminine bent and she suggested Child 44 as a future read. I've seen this novel reviewed on several blogs, and I'm looking forward to it.

I'm going to head over to the library now and look for a copy of the Old Testament.

Library Challenge

During my latest round of blog-hopping -- my preferred form of exercise -- I saw that Carrie K had joined the Support Your Local Library Challenge hosted by J. Kaye. Without warning, I was catapulted ass-over-teakettle into challenge-land once more. It was that accompanying picture of the Folger library that did it. Ooooh, those shelves...I needed to be fanned, and vigorously.

I like J. Kaye's challenge because I'm really REALLY enjoying having a library again and because there are 3 different levels of participation: Read 12, 25 or 50 library books during 2009. I'm not as brave as Carrie K, who's going for 50, but I'm already at 7 (I've been tracking them in my sidebar under Library Loot), so 12 seems laughably timid. I guess that leaves 25 books. It's doable.

I'm not going to prepare a to-be-read list because I never know what's going to pop up on those bilingual and beloved shelves. Ever since watching that Zola biopic, I've had my eye on a Zola biography nestled in the French Lit section. Also, this might be the year that I finally buckle down and read The Forsythe Saga, which I can count as 3 books.

There's a slightly uneasy feeling that I'm letting myself get over-challenged again. I need to hurry and finish the Canadian challenge by July 1. I have the summer to do the Eco Reading Challenge, which is off to a good start as I'm halfway through Salt by Mark Kurlanksy. I got a little slothful on my Pulitzer Project Challenge (too bad stockpiling Pulitzers like mad doesn't count for anything!) but I'm getting back to good by reading the 1928 winner, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.
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Although I wanted to, I never joined that challenge in which one reads books by or about U.S. presidents, but it's hanging there so attractively in my peripheral vision. Its august image trembles in my bookwormy heart.

On Mother's Day

My son came through in fine style for Mother's Day, and I want to call attention to it with great fanfare. Feel free to lavish praise on my shot at immortality AKA Spawn of Susan because Korea doesn't "do" Mother's Day, so he was operating without the usual onslaught of incessant reminders that he'd ordinarily get back in the United States.

He usually gives me a book, but this time, he tapped into my movie-loving side with 6 DVDs:

1. The Most Dangerous Game (1932). This movie is based on the much-anthologized short story by Richard Connell, and features a pre- King Kong Fay Wray. I never had to read this story as a student, but I taught it once.

2. Dumbo (1941). An obvious and most excellent choice for Mother's Day.

3. The Life of Emile Zola (1937). I do love a biopic, and biopics about writers are even better.

4. The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (1948). The boy knows my weakness for all things Bogart.

5. The Bridge on The River Kwai (1957). I bought this on VHS a few years ago, started watching it, got distracted and never got back to it. Apparently someone noticed.

6. Captain Blood (1935). Errol Flynn always looks like he's having so damn much fun. This movie also stars Olivia de Havilland as his love interest and Basil Rathbone as his nemesis.


Wow, what a haul -- I love this kid!

Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle (1994)

I've got such a hopeless crush on Robert Benchley, and I'm still feeling the love since finishing The Benchley Roundup, so I popped in my DVD of Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle (1994) and I've been watching it over and over all week.
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The story of Dorothy Parker and other members of the Algonquin Round Table, this movie looks beautiful, has a terrific jazzy score, the casting is impeccable -- including a powerhouse performance by Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker and an especially luscious Campbell Scott channeling Robert Benchley to perfection.
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Did I mention the densely uber-witty dialogue that sparkles finer and brighter than a whole damn jewelry store? When I first watched the movie on IFC, I was struck by how many of Parker's witticisms the writers managed to get into the script. During this latest spate of viewing -- now that I've read more Benchley -- I realized that there were almost as many Benchley quips as well.
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Sigh. Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle is an English major/bookworm's delight.
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Going Green(ish)

Although my work with my challenges has been middling of late, I succumbed to a new one: Chris over at Book-A-Rama is hosting The Eco Reading Challenge. During these next few months, one can read 1-5 books, fiction or nonfiction, about things relating to the environment. After staring at my shelves for a few days, these are my choices:

1. Clay: The History and Evolution of Humankind's Relationship with Earth's Most Primal Element - Suzanne Staubach.

2. Salt: A World History - Mark Kurlansky. Ruby Rambling generously bookcrossed this book to me a couple of years ago. I loved Cod; I don't know why it's taken me so long to get around to Salt.

3. The Edge of The Sea - Rachel Carson.

4. The Log From "The Sea of Cortez" - John Steinbeck. In 1940, Steinbeck and his biologist pal, Ed Ricketts went out on a sardine boat looking for marine invertebrates on the beaches in the Gulf of California. I've been circling this book for several months. The Eco Reading Challenge provides a great excuse to add to my Steinbeck collection.

Many thanks to Chris for coming up with such a good idea. Should I warn my bookish brain that it's about to expand? This will also help me with my nonfiction numbers -- I'm aiming for 50-50 this year with fiction and nonfiction.

April's Reads: Optical Cruise Control

Even though my participation in the Readathon was woefully minimal, I still got a lot of reading done during April.

11 books. Dang.

1. Little Women And The Feminist Imagination - Janice Alberghene and Beverly Clark, editors. I talked about it --a lot-- here.

2. Jo's Boys - Louisa May Alcott. The final chapter in the saga about the March family. I had to read this after so many critics in Little Women And The Feminist Imagination pissed and moaned about the way Alcott treated Jo, by not marrying her off to Laurie *and* marrying her off to Professor Bhaer. To hear them talk, she would've been better off wrapped in a shroud and lying in the graveyard next to Beth.
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In Jo's Boys, we see Jo twenty years down the road, fulfilled as both a successful educator and writer. The boys (and girls) from Little Men that she helped raise are kind of boring but slightly flawed, and Jo (and Alcott) are there with a moral or two to ease them along into adulthood. The most compelling one of this group is the still-untamed Dan, who struggles for Jo's love and approval, but can't seem to shake the wildness that is so much a part of his nature. Dan is so well-imagined that he deserves a novel of his own. My heart broke for him, but I was glad that Alcott didn't have a pat little ending for him.
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3. Rilla of Ingleside - Lucy Maud Montgomery. I wrote about it earlier, here.
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4. Mansfield - C.K. Stead. A slice of writer Katherine Mansfield's short life -- 3 years during World War I. Shifting points-of-view. Oddly, the novel seems most charged with power when the emphasis isn't on Mansfield, except in the final chapter, when Mansfield comes to grips with what she's been trying to block out, and realizes that she's not going to live forever.

I was pleased to see a chapter from Frieda Lawrence's perspective -- in a private conversation with Mansfield, she has a few tart things to say about her husband's quaint but wrongheaded ideas about sex that still manage to mess couples up, even today.

After reading about those left behind in Canada in Rilla of Ingleside, it was both moving and disturbing to read about the battlefield death of Mansfield's younger brother, Leslie and her mortally wounded friend, Fred Goodyear.
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Katherine Mansfield's on-again, off-again relationship with John Middleton Murry is a drag on the novel -- someone who didn't know her life story would probably have been shocked at the end note that she and Murry married a year after the events in this novel. Murry's own story is a little bizarre; a year after Mansfield died, he married a woman who looked remarkably like her, and they had two children named after Katherine and himself. The new wife also died young from TB.
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I'm becoming a big C.K. Stead fan -- let's hear it for the Kiwis! I also recommend his novel My Name Was Judas.
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5. A Gentle Madness - Nicholas Basbanes. Ever since there have been books, there have been book nuts. Bibliophiles. Bibliomanics. Nicholas Basbanes pays tribute to these people in this highly entertaining look at book collecting, because without collectors, a great deal of history would be lost. Libraries are also grateful to collectors because they are the ones with vision that unify collections -- libraries as a rule do not go out and purchase items with the idea of ordering a collection and also, they often get the collection as a gift after the owner dies or decides to place it somewhere in particular.

I'll never really understand the need to put a second mortgage on a house just so I can own a first edition of Gulliver's Travels or some great work of literature written on vellum, but I do understand the impulse to collect.

There are some terrific stories about bibliomaniacs and their libraries. Some are sad, like Harry Widener, a young (20-something) collector who was in England with his mother, buying books back in the early part of the 20th century. He shipped about eight rare volumes on the Carpathia, but decided to take his newly purchased 1598 Essayes by Francis Bacon with him when he and his mother boarded the Titanic. He reportedly told his mother as he was helping her into a lifeboat that "the little Bacon" was in his overcoat pocket and he was taking it with him. After her rescue, Widener's heartbroken mother took his collection, added to it with great taste and zeal, and built a library at Harvard (his alma mater) named after him.

Most bibliophiles hung on to their collections until death, but composer Jerome Kern began to feel enslaved by books and auctioned off his whole library in 1928. Basbanes wrote that Kern's play, Show Boat was sold out on Broadway, but bookish New Yorkers were scrambling for a seat at that auction. The sale of Kern's books garnered almost two million dollars. Nine months later, the stock market crashed, and books dropped significantly on many "to buy" lists.
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Another bibliomaniac was actually a bibliokleptomaniac named Stephen Blumberg. Beginning in the 1970s, Blumberg travelled to university libraries all around the United States, stealing precious and priceless books and ephemera. He was a master at breaking into special collections rooms, dismantling alarms and demagnetizing books so he could sneak them through the security systems, then cleaning the pages of any identifying marks. Although he could have sold the ill-gotten objects of his desire, he instead stored his collection in a house in Ottumwa, Iowa, which is where they were when the FBI caught up with him. When the FBI contacted the libraries about returning the stolen material, (Blumberg cooperated fully in helping the police by identifying which pieces came from where) many expressed surprise that they had things that had gone missing!
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In a couple of cases, book madness was heroism. In the late 1970s, college student Aaron Lansky wanted to collect Yiddish writing and preserve the language, which was dying. Jewish leaders were not impressed and told him he was wasting his time and that he should just go to Israel. Lansky persisted, often digging Yiddish books and papers out of dumpsters. In time, he was awarded a "genius grant" and Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for literature, both of which furthered his cause, and today there is a National Yiddish Book Center in Massachusetts. In the 1950s Charles L. Blockson played football for Penn State alongside Lenny Moore and Rosey Grier. Along with his teammates, Blockson had a chance to go pro with the New York Giants, but he declined and instead focused on becoming a "black bibliophile". According to Basbanes, he had already been collecting since he was a child and his grade-school teacher told him that black people don't have a history. His collection has been housed at Temple University in Philadelphia since 1984.

I'd love to see those collections, plus a few more that made my mouth water: Actor John Larroquette's first editions of contemporary authors, including Anne Tyler; Chicago restaurateur Chef Louis Szathmary II's culinary arts collection; the children's literature collections of Betsy B. Shirley and Ruth Baldwin; Louise Taper's Lincoln collection and Louis Daniel Brodsky's Faulkner collection at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.
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Please read this book. Pretty, pretty please.


6. Slam - Nick Hornby. Young Adult fiction always feels a little phony to me -- like the authors are trying too hard to display their hipness quotient, or they're straining to shoehorn in a natural-sounding moral. I shouldn't be surprised that Nick Hornby (in all his awesomeness) managed to avoid those pitfalls and got the YA novel exactly right. As another reviewer pointed out, his characters are usually boyish men enjoying an extra-long soak in adolescence, so it's not that much of a stretch to introduce a boy careening on greased wheels into the adult world long before he's ready. I love the role Tony Hawk plays in this novel.
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7. Shanghai Baby - Wei Hui. Should I be nice and say that this 1990 Chinese novel is a homage to the novels of Erica Jong, or should I be absolutely blunt and say that she blatantly ripped off the author of Fear of Flying? Everything -- the quotes at the beginning of each chapter, the copious but unsatisfying sex, the mention of masturbation and menstruation, the nod to Henry Miller as a kindred spirit, the agonizing about writing -- just cries out Erica! to me. Except Jong can actually write, and when she's occasionally clumsy, her humor more than makes up for it.
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I could blame the bad writing on the clunky translation, but I'm not going to, except for one part where our heroine, Coco (whose real name is Nikki, which made me think of the Prince song and I didn't really want to) begins a sentence talking about a handbag and by the end of this (short) sentence, the item has strangely turned into an item of clothing.
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Coco's English name should have been Katrina (as in Katrina & The Waves, not Hurricane), because Wei Hui has Coco referencing sunshine in practically every scene. If she could have, I'm sure she would've had Coco dribbling a ball of sunshine down court and shooting it into the net for a 3-pointer.
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Also, there's too much tell and not enough show. Wei Hui cuts corners by having Coco rush to tell readers how cool and artistic her friends are right before their cameo at a party where we really don't see enough of them to be impressed or otherwise.

Nobody has compared this book to Fear of Flying, but they have compared it to Less Than Zero. Valid comparison, yes, but so NOT a compliment.
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On one occasion, Wei Hui tries to be socially and culturally relevant, when an American and a Serb end up at the aforementioned party. Of course there's a row, but it's brief, almost obligatory. Worse yet, the reader was already tipped off a couple of pages before when Coco worried that there might be a scene between the two. Cringe.
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I would mention how Coco is torn between two lovers -- an impotent, drug-riddled but oh-so-sensitive Chinese guy named Tian Tian and a virile, healthy, rich German guy who's an SOB named Mark (like Deutsche Mark, right?) -- but I'm typing with my head hung over the wastebasket at this point, so never mind.

I almost want Raych to read Shanghai Baby because she gives such good insult, but on the other hand, I don't like to be cruel to my book blogging buds. In spite of everything, I'm glad I read it because my Tough & Cool Inner Bookworm can use it for bragging rights when we tally our international reads at the end of this year.
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8. The Classic Era of Crime Fiction - Peter Haining. According to Haining, who is English, crime/detective fiction all began with Edgar Allen Poe, and the spy novel began with James Fenimore Cooper. Go, Americans! This is a gorgeously lovely book that meticulously traces the history of these genres and is brilliantly illustrated with reproductions of illustrations and book covers from Haining's extensive collection. I read this book with pen and paper at the ready, so I could jot down ideas for future reading. I want to find books by: (this is just a sampling) Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, E.W. Hornung, Horace McCoy, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, W.R. Burnett and Jim Thompson.
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9. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver - Raymond Carver, Bob Adelman, Tess Gallagher. Adelman's photos didn't really rock my world, but coupled with Carver's poetry and prose, they reawakened an ache. Gallagher's lengthy introduction provides good insight into Carver's last years, but she seems a little too self-congratulatory about how good she was for Carver, and when she talks about Carver's mother, first wife and children, there's a hint of a cat scratch via reminiscence. To be fair, this was in 1990, when the sadness of Carver's passing was still relatively fresh.
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10. The Hidden Flower - Pearl S. Buck. This is the story of an interracial romance, but it's so much more. In fact, it's too much more. Buck has a world of interesting characters and ideas here, but it's too much for this one slim novel -- it can't bear up under the weight. Still, missing-the-mark Pearl Buck is better than a lot of things you could read.
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11. The Benchley Roundup - Robert Benchley. This compilation of Benchley's writing was compiled in 1954 by his son, Nathaniel. I'm a little put out with the younger Benchley for not including the humor piece "How To Sleep Anywhere", which is the one that made me fall in love with Bob all those years ago in 11th grade American Literature class with Mrs. Lucille Huffine at Lawton High School. I was also slightly annoyed with Nathaniel Benchley for not arranging the pieces in chronological order and putting dates on them, but some of the later work is a little uneven -- he was definitely phoning it in, so it was probably a good decision to scramble them a bit and finish with some stronger pieces.
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This compilation is a sign of younger Benchley's times as well as his father's. For example, at the end of a piece called "Whoa!" (which fancifully chronicles Paul Revere getting on his horse for the famous midnight ride, suddenly getting a vision of America and Americans in the future, and deciding to steer the horse back to the stable) there's an acidic little note: This piece was first published in 1924, when derision was not confused with disloyalty.
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Blissful sigh. What can I say about Benchley's writing? He was sweet, he was funny, he was crazy. He had a wonderful vocabulary; I learned so many new words reading this book ("chivvy", "mux", "footpad"). He played with language like it was Silly Putty, all the while charmingly dropping apologies to the proofreaders and typesetters before madly scampering on.
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Choosing my favorites in this volume has been a difficult task. I liked "Kiddie Kar Travel", which begins with my all-time favorite quote: "There are two ways to travel -- first class and with children.."; "Take The Witness!", in which Benchley imagines himself on the witness stand breaking down his cross-examiner instead of vice versa and "How To Get Things Done" ('I've refined this theory over the years; now I'll have to start coarsening it up again').
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I was delighted to see Benchley the bookworm make an appearance in "Mind's Eye Trouble". Benchley apologetically admits that he has a problem visualizing scenes in books and for him, great works of literature and history are set in his birthplace of Worcester, Massachusetts. For example, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire all take place under the "porte-cochere" of his future wife's house, every tale out of Dickens (except A Tale Of Two Cities) is set in his own boyhood home, his side yard is the American South, his aunt's side yard is the Wild West or Australia and Venice is simply King Street flooded with water. The school playground can be seen from Clarissa's room, and is also "the scene of Tom Sawyer's evasions of Aunt Polly and Katherine Mansfield's garden party."
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In the last piece in this book, "Do I Hear Twenty Thousand?", I encountered a second mention of the 1928 auction of composer Jerome Kern's library. Written in play form, Benchley wickedly imagines the "shades" of the giants of literature, Poe, Keats, Shelley, Lamb, Wordsworth, Swift and others drinking several rounds at their ghostly literary gentlemen's club and looking on Kern's auction and expressing amazement at the prices their work went for. Shelley is particularly shocked that Queen Mab was sold for $68,000, ("It wasn't my best work by a long shot") and he's indignant on Keats' behalf that one of his original manuscripts went for a "measly $17,000". Tennyson affects boredom, but when he learns that his Maud drew down only $9,000, he gets testy and remarks that auctioning off literature cheapens the beauty of it. Poe orders another round, can't pay for it, and a new member of the club, Avery Hopwood, (a Jazz Age playwright who died at 45 in 1928) offers to pay the bill.

This blog post is waaay too long. Oh well. Too late now. Next month, I'll divide my fiction and nonfiction reads into separate posts. If you've stayed with me till this point, I owe you one!