Judging a book by its cover

There are very few downsides to reading books like Anna Karenina, The Grapes of Wrath and One Hundred Years of Solitude, but one of them is that whatever novel you read following one of them has an unusually high chance of disappointing. And disappointment is exactly what I was left with after reading the last page of Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam.

I found it at a recent used book sale and there were two reasons I bought it: I liked the cover, and I liked the title. After enduring all 369 pages, I still really like the cover, and I still really like the title.

I think the story itself is compelling. Focused on one family, the book is a tour of day-to-day life among a community of immigrants from Pakistan living in the U.K., in a city that was not immediately recognizable to me. It seems to me there were two, possibly three, main plot lines. The first is the search for the killers of the husband’s brother and his live-in girlfriend. The second is the husband’s affair with a woman who, it turns out, needs to accomplish some very specific things according to the almighty Allah: Since her alcoholic husband beat the shit out of her and then uttered the word “divorce” three times in a row, her mandate, as understood by the faithful, is to marry another man and then divorce him. Once that’s accomplished, she has the blessing of Allah to return to her abusive, alcoholic husband and remarry him. Don’t feel bad if you need to reread that to make sure you’ve got the order of it correctly. I sure did.

The biggest disappointment was the third plot line (and I hesitate to call it that because I’m not sure it qualifies), which focuses on the family’s wife and mother, Kaukab. The most devout of the characters, she’s at war on one level or another with all three of her children, with her husband, with the neighbors and with England, in a way that’s both specific and general.

What fell apart for me was that Kaukab’s concerns, like the concerns of nearly every character, are written in a way that is so trite I think I rolled my eyes through most of it. With the exception of the few paragraphs dedicated to Kaukab’s struggle with the language and the disparity between what she says and what she feels, which I thought were excellent, Nadeem Aslam paints her in the same way he paints the rest. He trots out one cliché after another, and they’re clichés conveyed with writing that rarely rises above the level of an earnest amateur.

Of course, in fairness, I do wonder how the book would have struck me had I read it at a different time. Because after a few weeks in Macondo with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the driver’s seat, most writing is bound to fall flat, including mine.

Pictures

This is not really a tale of Occupy Portland, but about something that happened as a result of my visit to it a couple of weekends ago. I saw two situations, or scenes, that I struck me much more like photographs than stories.

The first was a weary, weathered looking man in a wheelchair, and leaning into him in a way that suggested her body was constructed not of solid bones but of something more along the lines of rubber bands was a young woman with a clipboard. I stopped just in time to hear her explain something about the process of registering to vote, and then slowly – and this, to me, was the moment meant for a picture – she handed him the clipboard in such a way that it appeared they were at the same level, vertically, which they were not. There was something communion-ish about it, I thought.

The second scene I witnessed – and failed to photograph because I did not, at that time, have or own a camera – centered around the long row of narrow tables, covered in white plastic and stacked high with hamburger buns, loaves of bread, energy bars and so on. Behind the tables stood three people – servers, I presume – and behind them the statuary figures of three men, the hand of one of them holding a gigantic fork someone had placed there. And behind the statue, or over it, a white tarp that transformed the dismal light of a November afternoon into a quality that could almost be called bright. I cannot articulate the particulars of it, or the physics, but as I stood facing the food tables I had the distinct impression that the scene itself was both moving toward and moving above me, like a jet, I suppose, coming toward you as it prepares to lift and fly over the point where you’re standing.

The camera I bought on Sunday morning, after waking up to thoughts of the photographs I’d missed the day before, is a shiny silver Nikon Coolpix S3100. I’m still getting used to it, of course. On the one hand I feel like I’m carrying a pistol without a permit. On the other, I feel like I’m learning a new language, which has always struck me as a worthwhile pursuit.

Letter to the editor

I’m not sure how I feel about just retyping a letter I saw in a magazine and calling it a blog post. It’s not what I set out to do here, that’s for sure. But, I read a letter in this month’s Harper’s and it says exactly what I feel and think about our president’s perceived stature as a liberal. Or, more specifically, the country’s collective liberal mouthpiece’s ongoing insistence that it’s a stature that’s been abandoned by our president, which is impossible according to my calculations because his voting record clearly indicates that he wasn’t a liberal to begin with, at least not by my definition. But Chris Runk of New York City put it much more succinctly, so I’ll defer to her, or him:

In enumerating his proposals for a stronger America, George S. McGovern assumes that the president is a leftist and thus could be expected to endorse some of them [“A Letter to Barack Obama, Easy Chair, September]. This assumption is not new. Even before he was elected president, many of Obama’s champions took for granted his liberalism, notwithstanding that, as senator, he equivocated on free-trade agreements, indicated his support for an intensification of the war in Afghanistan, and voted for the release from civil liability of the telecommunications firms that assisted the Bush Administration’s wiretapping.

Some Obama apologists are keen to tout the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act as vindication of his liberal bona fides, but, in fact, that legislation represented the apotheosis of Obama’s “preemptive compromise” – in this case, an incremental, regressive abandonment of the ideal of universal health care.

And now, given the president’s near-total capitulation to Republican tax demagoguery, that anyone could still indulge in the pernicious illusion of his liberalism speaks more to the lamentable condition of liberals – and to the success of right-wing rhetoric – than to his political views.

This is just a test

My about-face

On Saturday afternoon I went downtown and took a tour of the two blocks occupied by Occupy Portland, and what I spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day thinking about was not the event itself but the response to it.

While I never personally witnessed the demonstrations in the south in the 1950s and 1960s or the protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, I have read and heard enough to register a few common themes, the same themes, believe it or not, that took hold in the 1980s when a shamefully small group of brave men and women took to the streets to call attention to the fact that thousands were dying of a virus most people who were not directly affected by it preferred to ignore. Catastrophically for many, among those who refused to acknowledge or address the virus and its implications were the residents of the White House.

Martin Luther King and those who had to make more than one attempt to even begin the march to Montgomery because they didn’t have appropriate permits to cross a bridge on the outskirts of Selma were deemed lawless in many newspapers, including the New York Times. A few years later, the people who believed that the country’s participation in the war in Vietnam was wrong were dismissed and marginalized for equally trivial (in my opinion) concerns: their clothing, the length of their hair, their music, the fact that they preferred their alteration in the form of smoke rather than drink. Forcing what I consider the ultimate act of patriotism into verb form, they were dismissed as unpatriotic.

From what I think is an impressive range of people, I am amazed, and not in a good way, at the response to Occupy Portland: Isn’t it ironic that they’re using Facebook? Isn’t it ironic that they’re protesting big business and yet almost everything in the encampment contains petroleum? And isn’t it ironic that the rally to urge people to move their accounts from one of the big banks to a credit union was staged at Pioneer Courthouse Square, where there’s not only a Starbucks but a Bank of America ATM as well?

After thinking about it and talking about it and debating it with myself and with others, here’s my answer: No.

In terms of the petroleum content and holding a gathering in a space occupied – pardon me – by two of the most egregious brands of all time, I’m comfortable shooting down both notions with the same missile. Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland is an easy to find, easily accessible gathering spot. The fact that the Starbucks on the busiest corner of the square has a Bank of America ATM beside the south entrance is not the fault of the Occupy Portland participants. Our short sightedness about allowing for-profit corporations to tarnish public spaces should not deter those exercising what’s left of the right to assemble to do so in a place known as “Portland’s Living Room,” a space that as of today still belongs to us all. Similarly, in terms of petroleum’s presence in a mind-boggling array of products, placing the burden of our decades-long preference for cheap over responsible on the shoulders of the occupiers is nothing more than an easy way to ignore the main point and focus instead on the incidentals.

My reaction to the criticism of the occupiers for doing their business on Facebook is a bit harder to explain. I do feel that the role of the cranky old man sitting in a broken down rocking chair out on the front porch, bellowing ridicule at any and all who are not wholeheartedly of his era, is one that I was born to play, not just because I like it but because I am good at it. So try to imagine how painful it was over the weekend when certain thoughts invaded the outskirts of my consciousness, and imagine how painful it is for me right now to type the following letters:

I love Facebook.

Seriously. It’s free, it’s easy to use, you can talk to the world almost instantly and without censure with nothing more than an Internet connection, and if you don’t have one you can go to the library and use the connection there. And, in a way I imagine is similar to how religion was regarded in this country once upon a time, you are free to not participate. While I think a lot of what gets posted on Facebook is horrid, a bit of blessedly uninterrupted reflection during the extra hours of Sunday morning led me to the very simple conclusion that hating Facebook because of the inane postings, of which there are millions (in my opinion), makes as much sense as blaming the U.S. Postal Service, one of our national treasures, for the avalanche of credit card offers and special deals on insuring your car, whether you own one or not.

If you want to get technical about it – and I do – forget for a moment the notion that Facebook is corporate, which, for the record, I think is inaccurate. There is indeed advertising on it, as there always is when the marketing team gets involved, and many companies have pages with thousands of followers who are offered special deals on this that and the other. And that, say some, makes Facebook corporate. As one friend said to me on Sunday morning, if the protesters were truly sincere about opposing corporations they would have chosen craigslist to communicate rather than Facebook. Or they could communicate with blogs. Why the hell should they? Facebook is there, an astounding number of people spend an astounding amount of time already signed in and it’s free. Well yeah, said my friend, but it’s corporate. There’s advertising. To which I said, there is advertising on the Number 20 bus I ride downtown from time to time. Does that mean public transportation in Portland is corporate? And furthermore, if ads make it corporate, does my riding it undermine my belief that public transportation is a critical component of a city’s character? I don’t think so.

What I decided on Sunday morning is that the wrongness of what friends have said to me about the hypocrisy of using Facebook to protest corporate domination really stands out when applied to the protests against Vietnam and last-class citizenship of black people in the south. Those demonstrations, after all, were staged on streets and sidewalks and in plazas built and maintained by the very government against which they were protesting.

So, their endeavors were hypocritical? Yes, according to the many who preferred commenting from the safety of the sidelines over actual participation, but, according to many more, whose clarity of purpose became only more so with the passing of years, no.

No cake

The latest on marriage arrived in this month’s issue of the Atlantic, a magazine I’d never subscribe to on my own but that a friend of mine gives me as a gift each year, a friend I do not have the heart to tell what I really think of the magazine. I think it’s smug. I think it purports to embrace a liberal point of view when in actuality it’s the magazine version of the Clinton Administration: It’s bourgeois in that it disguises an embrace of the rich and powerful behind a screen of adoration in a way that’s just slick enough that it can be denied later. In addition to publishing writing that I think is of a questionable quality – James Fallows comes to mind – the magazine sponsors all kinds of forums and summits on various pressing issues – like social media – and the lists of speakers always strike me as people with a lot of money and a lot of privileges – like Bill Clinton, like Tina Brown – who think we should all have an equal shot as long as they get theirs first.

This month’s take on marriage was written by a woman called Kate Bolick. Maybe she’s a great writer. Maybe she’s got phenomenal insights and instincts. I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s the “culture editor” – apologies for the quote marks, but seriously – of a magazine called Veranda, which, according to its website, offers its audience a front row seat to “the best of everything.” Compared to the fact that an article about an approach to paying for healthcare in the same issue was penned by a couple of partners at a huge consulting conglomerate who have just published a book on marketing, I guess it’s not so egregious to dedicate many pages to a lifestyle magazine writer’s musings on a subject that many believe is their birthright while many others think it is, of should be, a civil right. But for a magazine once considered a standard bearer, I think it’s unfortunate.

Before I slam the author properly, I would like to applaud her for finally saying something that’s long overdue (even if others with less cache than she have said it before, which I’m sure they have). The business about two-parent families of yesteryear where the mother stayed at home with the young ones while the father went to a job every morning that he returned from in the evening was a television show. That’s because the poor have always been forced to take jobs that required them to do things like build ships or railroads or fight in wars waged by the money for extended periods or, for the poor women, work in other people’s homes, where they raised other people’s children and did other people’s laundry. And the rich, even though they aren’t and weren’t forced to spend a lot of time outside of their homes away from their heirs, did and do so because … well, who knows? Perhaps they’re dialoguing at forums sponsored by the Atlantic.

It’s all downhill from there, unfortunately. It seems Kate Bolick is unable to get her hands on husband material because, in spite of the thousands of words it took her to explain it, she just cannot find anyone good enough for her. And being good enough for her would be a tall order, I suppose. She did an internship at the Atlantic (full disclosure!) and she lives on both coasts and she stayed, while writing the article, at an impressive array of digs described in the article in a way that really flexed her culture editor muscles and that, sadly, seemed perfectly natural in an Atlantic cover story that, if I were the betting type, I’d say will mark her ascent into the realm of big-time culture commentator: books that explain to us how we feel about ourselves and that explain, furthermore, how she discovered how we feel about ourselves and how wrong those who went before her were, and how this all relates to her mother, and how she’s had a much rougher go of it than her mother, and big fees for speaking at conferences and appearances on an endless slew of talk shows, where she’ll doubtlessly explain what’s trending this way and that and why it’s all really, really interesting.

The inclusion of a snippet of chatty e-mail she exchanged with Julianne Moore while writing the article was unforgivable, but worse, I think, was this. Near the beginning of the article, the following passage was so painful that it made my fillings ache:

We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up – and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with.

I’m confused, you know, about the men you – which I assume means her – don’t want to go out with. I kept waiting for a reason or two, and all I could find, over and over again, was that the kind of man with the looks and the position and the money Kate Bolick believes she’s entitled to is elusive. Which for me, you know, begs a very specific question, one that, in spite of the thousands of words dedicated to her take on the whole situation, was not explained: What’s so special about Kate Bolick?

No smelly books

Although there are several of them throughout the year, the granddaddy of Portland’s used book sales happened over the weekend. On Monday morning, just for the hell of it, I looked up the Friends of the Multnomah County Library on the Internet and learned a thing or two. This weekend marked the 38th year that the sale has been held. There were more than 100,000 books for sale in the airplane hangar-esque room at the Lloyd Center Doubletree Hotel, and there are guidelines regarding what the friends will and will not accept: Books with excessive markings are out, as are computer books older than 2007 and books deemed “smelly.”

There are many reasons I love this particular sale. First of all, it’s huge, and it’s annual, and there’s a certain ritualistic feel to it. Somehow it’s highly organized without being regimented for regiment’s sake. I also like the fact that it’s held in the fall. Saturday was so autumnal it was almost Midwestern. It was warm, and the sky was blue, and the sidewalks my friend and I hurried along were covered with gold and golden brown leaves that whispered across the concrete.

Inside there was, as always, row upon row of long tables marked with signs and covered with books of all shapes, sizes and subjects. Which brings me to one of the best aspects of the book sale: The people who shop it. You have to move slowly along the side of a table looking down at a stunning array of titles on the spines of books. Even though there are people on either side of you doing exactly the same thing, there is, for reasons I have yet to understand, a rhythm to it that enables people to glide along the edges of tables going in different directions and somehow not run into each other. Here’s what it looks like: Hold both of your hands up in front of you, palms out, and move them slowly toward each other. When they’re about to touch, pull your right hand back and continue moving your left hand in the same direction until it is eclipsed from your view by your right hand.

I have no idea if these two facts are related or not, but first of all, I did not witness or experience a single sloppy, slovenly collision. And secondly, although there were many hundreds of people looking at books for the more than two hours that I was there, I did not overhear a single cell phone conversation. And I didn’t see anyone texting, either. Is that because people who go to events sponsored by an organization whose sole purpose is to support the democratization of the written word have better manners? Or are they simply more focused? Either way, as “an elitist” I like it. I like it a lot.

Before I get to the books, there are two other things I really like about the sale. Maybe they do this every year, but Saturday was the first time I noticed what they call The Book Depot. If you’re finding so many books that they’re getting difficult to carry, you just go to a table and they put them in a box, write your name on it and hold it there until you’ve got another load. The second is that, in the same way I prefer yard sales and thrift shops to stores where everything is new, the tables at the book sale are full of surprises.

Every time I leave a job, voluntarily or otherwise, I take a dictionary with me, so I have a lot of dictionaries. And now I have one more: The Tormont Webster’s Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary. It’s huge, and it’s beautiful, and it’s printed in a font a bit larger than my others. That was the first thing that caught my attention, and while I moved on initially, two tables later I returned. The second find of the morning was even better. On Saturday morning, as I was finishing a section of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the sister book group, I thought that I’d like to start Christmas morning this year with Love in the Time of Cholera, preferably a hardback edition. And there it was, waiting for me.

A Thousand Splendid Suns is Khaled Hosseini’s second novel. His first was The Kite Runner, which I thought was great. I’ve always wanted to read Willa Cather, and now I have a beautiful copy of My Antonia. I picked up Dreams from My Father because my enthusiasm for knowing that I live in a country whose president can write a decent sentence has yet to wane. One of the books I bought is Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam. I had never heard of the book or the author, but I bought it for a reason that has never before compelled me: I really like the cover.

And finally, a bit of moderation. I forced myself on Saturday to not lunge after everything that catches my attention. While I haven’t craved either of them, there are two fairly recent books by David McCullough that seem interesting to me. One is entitled, simply, John Adams; the other, entitled even more simply, is 1776. I’ll buy one, I thought, and then, next year, if the interest is still there, hope to find the other. The one turned out to be 1776, and while I try to not have two books going at once, figuring that one novel and one history doesn’t really count as two – it does, of course – I started 1776 on Sunday evening, and although I’ve barely dented it, the tales of this country’s quest for independence, I must say, are as intriguing as they are familiar.