Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories by Pamela Ryder
May 30, 2008
Fiction Collective 2, 2008
Nonlinear Flight
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen
What do you remember of the Lindbergh affair? That lost baby? Perhaps you heard once about how the man who flew the “Spirit of St. Louis” across the ocean lost his baby to thieves through the second-story nursery window. Older generations could never forget this sad and media-frenzied event if they tried, while younger generations might know no facts of the kidnapping and murder at all. Regardless of the amount of knowledge you bring to Pamela Ryder’s Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories you will be horrified, saddened, yet overall entertained as she transforms this historical event into tangible personal histories of the people involved.
The novel, written in nine stories linked by content and separated by nine different perspectives (from the kidnappers, to Lindbergh, Mrs. Lindbergh, the maid, wife of the accused, etc), contains the beautiful and unconventional/experimental poetic style for which this press (FC2) is known. Sometimes the prose moves through events and descriptions purposefully, as when Ryder is describing the immigrant culture of New York City in the early part of the twentieth century. Other times the language is playful, pure poetry—“Did he ever see the birds that dip into the waves, just above the foam where the sea becomes air?”
Moving from the first to the second (and title) story, the extreme close third-person narrative, including ominous flashbacks to the kidnappers’ childhoods, has become the highly self-conscious compulsiveness of a man who has always been so careful to see to every detail trying to come to terms with what overlooked factors could have led to his son’s disappearance. Thanks to Ryder’s elegant prose one can almost agree with him. How could someone steal a baby out of a room with a newly silvered mirror? “There had been self-reliance, priority, order.” Cross-atlantic flight is compared to “solitude, safety of woods surrounding the house.” At times the comparison becomes too adamant, “he sees the crib, the rails, the bars of moonlight”—as if for one second the reader might miss the parallels, the repetition. Even these distractions can be overlooked as Ryder’s wording remains lovely and engaging throughout.
As the second (his) story turns into the third (written in the bad grammar of the ransom notes), then fourth (Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s perspective), his focus on details leads to her fastidious homemaking. In his story we note her meticulous dress, in hers we see the commanding woman of the house who keeps her famous husband together. While the characterization of Mrs. seems simplistic in its primary focus of things commonly known, such as her love of fashion and seashells, we are drawn in by the repetition that runs parallel to Mr. Lindbergh’s checking and rechecking. In this (her story) his tendency to thoroughness is used against him. That the nursery window never shut tight is a contentious detail that becomes an obsessive, recurring image that shifts slightly in tenor with each passing mention. Even their luggage in leaving becomes equated to the window: “She will attend to the lock, the straps, the latch. She will see to it that nothing else is lost.”
Each subsequent story not only adds something new but also complicates and transforms, building upon and re-imagining the previous stories and information given. With the novel wrapping up in a tourist’s perspective of visiting the house years after the fact, it seems the only angle missing is an account from one of the many men who have come forward claiming to be the Lindbergh baby.
Also striking is the heavy use throughout of historical headlines about the event to precede each story. The headlines, often heartbreakingly conflicting, fill any gap in the reader’s basic knowledge of the Lindbergh history, so that Ryder’s lyric prose can get at the emotional experience behind each separate perspective. A truly fascinating read.
The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
May 30, 2008
Review by Grace Andreacchi
It is impossible to take this book seriously. It professes to be a re-telling of the great Indian epic ‘The Mahabharata’, from the point of view of a female protagonist, the Princess Panchaali. But the writing is so awkward and the sentiments so hackneyed and cloying, we know immediately we have been relocated to the sprawling suburban sensibility of modern America. If this were meant as a sharp-tongued critique thereof then there might be something in it, but alas, the author seems to have adapted thoroughly to the style of her adopted country, and so is bereft of irony. What is one to make of such sentences as ‘I was fascinated by Krishna because I couldn’t decipher him’? Or this: ‘I felt dejection settle on my shoulders like a shawl of iron’. Like a what? Or this: ‘A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so.’ That this sort of trite sentimentality passes for ancient wisdom from the mouths of the gods is only one of the things wrong with this book. The unevenness of tone, which veers wildly back and forth from a kind of by-your-leave-Miss storyteller’s affectation to the banality of the shopping mall is another. Merely to label a book a ‘feminist re-telling’ is not enough, the reader must find therein an engagement with the feminine experience that somehow both transforms and illuminates the ancient material. Instead we have a series of tired slogans.
The best that can be said for this book is that certain passages are not without charm, as the colour and sweep of the great epic itself sometimes take over. The Princess Panchaali is said to have been born of the sacred fire, and occasional flickers sometimes light up the pages, like signal fires glimpsed through the fog. But one would do far better simply to read the original than to bother with this pallid offspring.
I had high hopes for this book, for I consider the territory of myth and legend to be one of the most fertile and rewarding for the writing of good fiction. That this book fails to interest or excite me is not due in any way to the subject, but rather to its tedious and awkward handling. There is probably a good book to be written about the vivid princesses of the Mahabharata. Sadly, this is not it.
Bruised Hibiscus by Elizabeth Nunez
May 1, 2008
Ballantine Books, 2000
Review by Mary Senior Harwood
Hidden Truths
The brutal murder of a white woman whose body washes up on the beach in the small village of Otahiti in Trinidad – the result of “man-woman business” say the men — sets this book in motion. Zuela, the Venzuelan wife of a Chinese grocer, meets Rosa, the daughter of a plantation owner, at the shrine to the Virgin in Laventille and acknowledge their shared past as childhood friends. Rosa’s fear is that this murder will be played out again in her own home by her black husband and Zuela finds herself drawn to the shrine to fight thoughts of retribution to her harsh husband who took her from her family and married her as a mere girl.
As playmates, the two girls witnessed the rape of a girl behind a hibiscus bush. Rosa is haunted by the rapist’s repeated mantra, Beg. I know you want it. Beg. When she hears her own husband uttering the same phrase, she fears for her own life. The image of the bruised hibiscus, whose brilliant flowers fade to the same purplish blue as a bruise, recurs throughout the book.
The cast of characters reflects the multi-hued Caribbean society. Rosa is the daughter of a plantation owner, but unknown to all (because of her pale skin and hair) except her mother and nanny, her father was a black man. Cedric, Rosa’s husband, is the son of a black woman and an Indian laborer whose father was sexually abused by Rosa’s father and who committed suicide when rejected by the plantation owner. Cedric’s marriage to Rosa is in part retribution. Zuela represents the population that migrated from South America and her husband, Ho Sang, the Chinese influx, many of whom became merchants like her husband.
Nunez uses the universal theme of violence toward women to echo the violence and injustice of the colonial era. Several events during the years Trinidad worked toward independence from the British Commonwealth frame her story and intensify the dual message of the immediate violence done to the two virtually enslaved women and the history of a country raped and enslaved by colonial masters. When the people revolt, they lash out at any symbol of that power – including Rosa, who they perceive as white.
It is also a book about secrets – the secret of Rosa’s father’s homosexuality, her mother’s affair, Rosa’s heritage. About the crimes that haunt Ho Sang and drive him to opium to forget. About secret passions of love and hatred.
If It Be Not Now by Natalie Miller
May 1, 2008
Athena Press, 2007
For lovers of Russian Literature.
- By Cheryl A Townsend
Natalie Miller’s story of Demetrius Ulyanov is a heart wrenching saga of most unfortunate events, beginning in youth and continuing to his painful death.
After his mother dies giving birth to his sister, who also dies, Demetrius’ grief-stricken father commits suicide. Demetrius, a young lad, is then left alone and utterly devastated. His interrupted attempt to hang himself leaves him forever marked and ashamed.
In young adulthood, Demetrius opens a tailor shop, living a quiet, simple existence until his childhood friend invites him to his wedding. Giddy with anticipation, he packs up for the big city of Moscow, entrusting his business and home to a close acquaintance and begins another chapter of despair.
Demetrius is Ukrainian and unable speak or understand Russian. Debarking the train, lost and confused, he asks simply for directions. No one understands him, nor he they. He is assumed an insane lunatic and subsequently becomes a scapegoat for the killer of a local doctor. A judge hurries the untried Demetrius off to life in prison where he is at a loss for the reason or anyone able to enlighten him. For 6 years, he is continually humiliated and beaten. Pathetic and meek, he wanes. On one of his trips to the infirmary, an opportunity for escape arises and he takes it.
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Demetrius’ run for freedom ends with him collapsing in exhaustion and ironically waking up in the yard of the very friend he initially came to see. I really hoped for the happily ever after here, but it’s just not in his fate.
Fairly soon after, the man who had initially framed Demetrius confesses his guilt in a suicide letter, leaving Demetrius officially a free man. A free man that still suffers his untreated prison beatings of broken bones and a final rendering of Tuberculosis.
Recouping at his friend’s home, Demetrius is contacted by a grandfather he never knew of and learns he is now an extremely rich Baron. Knowing his own impending death, Demetrius asks only for a simple cottage in the country to live his remaining days contentedly. His grandfather allots for all Demetrius’ expenses to be paid, including a new doctor that becomes his only friend there.
Demetrius finds work at a tailor shop, meets Sofya, falls in love and marries her as soon as she’s free of her parents planned arrangements. Sofya tends to Demetrius through his fevers, weakness, and hauntings. They conceive a child and Demetrius is delirious with delight, albeit also remorse that he will not live to know it. I leave Demetrius’ final devastation for you to suffer on your own. And you will. It is impossible not to care about a man so giving in spirit and forgiving in nature. An extremely compassionate story just waiting for Adrian Brody to turn into an Oscar winner.
Mz Miller writes with incredible emotion and depth. I’ve never felt so compelled, so sorrowful for a character than here. I fell in love with Demetrius…and I miss him.
Road of Five Churches by Stephanie Dickinson
April 1, 2008
Rain Mountain Press, 2007
Where Could I Possibly Go Now That I’ve Been Here?
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen
From the very first story we can tell this will be a book full of fresh characters the likes of which you and I have never seen. To give a quick summary herein of the worlds experienced would be impossible. The people who populate Stephanie Dickinson’s Road of Five Churches include two teenaged girls (“down-winders”) running away from a fallout zone, a girl kidnapped by a traveling saleswoman, a young fundamentalist Christian mother of four who is contemplating abortion or suicide, underage prostitutes, the falsely accused informant sentenced to death, and a thieving Korean orphan, among others.
These stories, full of female protagonists and sidekicks, are feminist above all. They touch on such issues as reproductive freedom, government nuclear pollution, the war in Iraq, domestic spying, race relations and our history of lynching, Native American genocide, and the exploitative prostitution rings of young Eastern European girls. Dickinson somehow breeches all of these worlds with the effective voice of an insider, and without the didactic tone that might detract from the quality of the prose.
What works well in adjusting to the extreme shifts of location from story to story is Dickinson’s impeccable pacing within each narrative. While there is often much to see in the environments she provides, we are compelled to note and dwell more on the absences. In the desert of “Fire Maidens, ‘57” even the birds have disappeared in the wake of nearby nuclear testing. Our attention is drawn to the empty skies, to rusted automobiles and ditches at the side of the road. Everything through main character, Monarch’s eyes is seen through the lens of leaving. Anything that can’t assist her escape is left out of description. The language—as in all the stories—is mostly as spare as the landscape, with truculent dialogue and just enough back-story to see us through to an ample understanding of where the characters have come from and where they’re likely to end up.
Dickinson is at her best though when the language is unfamiliar, when there’s mystery to what a character reveals. As in the title work (somewhat reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” both in subject and for it’s near Southern Gothic style) when Nia tells us, “Even if I wanted to slip into the driver’s seat and turn the key in the ignition, my hands wouldn’t do it. God would turn them backwards on my wrists” or in “Leaping Elk Shootout” when Hatchet notes that, “The room is frigid; it’s the panic blowing in.” Not only is the language and rhythm on, but the meaning is incomplete. It gives us room to work with, leaving us with the open door through which to see ourselves, a quality the best of literature has.
At times though description of things can seem overly clever—as a walk up a flight of stairs is compared to the “Lewis and Clark expedition” and a secret to “the Paramount Theater with its purple velvet curtain”—when something spare and delicate would do. These moments are admittedly rare and forgivable in an overall engaging read from an interesting and emerging writer.
This volume shows cruelty and human culpability and pulls no punches. The women here get neglected, exploited, kicked, and killed, yet stagger on, prevailing in what will prove to be the long memory of their readers.
The Girls: A Novel by Lori Lansens
April 1, 2008
Back Bay Books, 2005
Reconfigurations of the Self
Review by Shannon K. Winston
Lori Lansen’s The Girls: A Novel is a subtle and carefully crafted investigation of what it means to be human and to engage with others in the world. It asks important questions such as: what does it mean to be “normal” and human? Where do the borders of one self-end and where does that of another begin? How do we relate to others, our bodies, and space?
The novel deftly addresses these difficult questions by narrating the story of Rose and Ruby, conjoined twins who narrate their story (stories) of their lives together who are abandoned by their biological mother and adopted by a hospital nurse. The girls are two fiercely different individuals who inhabit the same body. Rose begins the narrative by stating: “I have never looked into my sister’s eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon” (Lansens, The Girls, 3). These lines establish three of the central themes of the novel: the gaze (and unique perspectives), companionship, and life experiences, for this story is told by two girls who conduct both unusual and quite ordinary lives: they are defined as much by the experiences they have not had as by those they have.
One of the greatest strengths of the novel is the range of experiences and emotions it addresses. The sisters often describe their feelings towards each other as continuations of their feelings towards themselves; the line between self and other thus gets blurred in interesting and complex ways. The narrative describes what it is to feel someone’s presence—as the sisters do—without every seeing the other. Girls: The Novel thus proposes an alternate way of being in the world, in which there are alternative ways of experiencing the self and others. Rose explains: “I’ve never set eyes on my sister, except in mirror images and photographs, but I know Ruby’s gestures as my own, through the movement of her muscle and bone” (5). Here, as elsewhere in the novel, Lansens probes the deeply familiar and the foreign and shows that the two terms are not always binary opposites; in fact, they often coexist. In short, this book is an understated attempt to challenge so-called “normal” lived experiences and to propose, instead, that we reinvestigate our own position in the world.
Finally, and interestingly, The Girls is also a meditation on the writing process itself and what it means to create a narrative. The story unfolds as we read it and each girl shares her side of the story. Each chapter, therefore, presents a shift in point of view. It posits the difficulty and advantages of a double narrative just as it describes the many joys and hardships of a doubled existence.
The Writing Circle by Rozena Maart
April 1, 2008
Tsar Books, 2007
Review by Suzanne Kamata
The group friendship novel is a staple of women’s literature. Typically, such a novel brings together several women who went to college together (as in Mary McCarthy’s The Group, a classic of the genre) or women who grew up in the same neighborhood (as in Rebecca Wells’ best-selling The Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.) Often the women in these novels are from similar socio-economic backgrounds, although their lives may have veered off in different directions. In her latest novel, The Writing Circle, South African expatriate Rozena Maart, who now lives in Canada, uses a writing group to bring together women of various walks of life. As the urge to writes affects people of all classes and cultures, it’s a clever ploy – one that allows us to see a dissection of multi-cultural South Africa.
The novel is told in five voices - those of Isabel, a counselor of sexually abused women; Jazz, a doctor of Indian descent whose parents are looking to marry her off; Amina, a divorced Muslim from a wealthy family who lives with her mother and son; Beauty, a Xhosa whose husband died at the hands of the police; and Carmen, an English woman who is in a relationship with Jazz’s brother. The book starts off with Isabel, who is hosting the writing group at her home in a suburb of Cape Town. She is brutally raped in her car while the others wait inside the house for her to come home. In her struggle to get free, she manages to grab the rapist’s gun and then accidentally shoots and kills him. The gunshot finally attracts the attention of the other women, who decide to dispose of the body and conceal the crime. Throughout the rest of the novel, Isabel and her writing companions, all of whom have been sexually assaulted at some point, deal with the emotional repercussions of this incident.
In South Africa, which has been called “the rape capital of the world,” women of all classes, ages, and cultures are at risk. Maart drives the point home in this compelling psychological drama.
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Suzanne Kamata is the author of Losing Kei and the editor of the anthologies The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs.
A Garden of Aloes by G. Davies Jandrey
April 1, 2008
The Permanent Press, 2008
Starting Over
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray
Gayle Davies Jandrey spent 28 years teaching public high schoolers and this experience, no doubt, has enabled her to create an incredible cast of real characters in her debut work of fiction, A Garden of Aloes.
Jandrey does an outstanding job crafting six characters’ (all female) distinct voices, particularly twelve year old Sam, the character readers will have a chance to meet first in A Garden of Aloes. In this suspenseful, witty, and poignant page-turner you will not have to read several chapters before getting to the juicy scenes. A Garden of Aloes is straight off heartrending and humorous.
In order to escape an abusive relationship, Leslie, along with her two daughters, twelve year old Sam and sixteen year old Audrey, trade in a well-to-do life and a big beautiful home in northern California for a poor life in Tucson Arizona. They move into a cockroach infested converted motor court, the Oasis Apartment, in a neighborhood swarming with winos, prostitutes, and crackheads. “The street is called The Miracle Mile. It’s a miracle all right—a miracle that we weren’t robbed or worse,” says twelve year old Sam about her new life and new neighborhood. The other three characters in A Garden of Aloes are Chablee, a biracial teen who befriends Audrey; Eden, a topless dancer and Chablee’s mother, befriends Leslie; and Dee, a 400 pound 40 year old with multiple personalities, befriends twelve year old Sam. Although the characters are somewhat dissimilar, they share something in common: abuse, abandonment, and life at the Oasis Apartment. But they “…learn to be like aloes—tough on the outside so they can stay soft within.” —Kirkus
Although Jandrey’s characters are fictitious, Sam does have Jandrey’s childhood fear of vampires. “On nights when I awoke too full of dread to go back to sleep, it was my very own sister who’d let me crawl into the safest part of her twin bed, no small sacrifice since I was a rather chunky ten-year-old at the time,” recalls Jandrey in her Acknowledgments.
A Garden of Aloes made me realize that I should take nothing for granted because what’s here today could very well be gone tomorrow, and just like the characters in A Garden of Aloes, starting life over can happen to anyone.
A Garden of Aloes will bring tears to your eyes and have you rolling with laughter. But do not get it twisted; the unfortunate state of affairs of the women who resides at the Oasis is no laughing matter.
The Kindness of Strangers by Katrina Kittle
March 5, 2008
William Morrow Press, 2006
Review by Cheryl A Townsend
When an elementary boy tries to kill himself, people tend to look for reasons. What they find is horrendous.
Katrina Kittle writes a deeply emotional, albeit fictional lament of little Jordan Kendrick’s childhood. A quiet, skinny, pale boy, he tries to kill himself to escape the horrors he endures through his parents sexual abuse and their party-life sharing. When their pornography ring is brought to light, the town is aghast at their own naivety and quickly accesses their own children’s potential involvement.
Jordan’s father subsequently skips town, his mother is thrown in jail, and Jordan is left with nowhere to go but a foster home. There he starts his long, tumultuous journey into trust and eventual love. With amazing insight, Kittle writes through the voices of foster parent, Sarah, her son’s Nate and Danny, and of course, Jordan with believable emotions. By the end of the novel, you know these characters. She includes concise legalities to give it credence and a little more to chew on.
An amazingly illuminating book that could easily serve as educational, were it nonfiction. I could not put this down. Though disturbing in nature, it was also a triumphant example of a happy ending. Kittle manages to get all the atrocities of this story across without the use of graphic shock value.
Kittle writes from Dayton, Ohio, where she also teaches middle school theater and English. Kittle previously wrote two novels, TRAVELING LIGHT, which focus is AIDS and the other, TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE, on alcoholism. Kittle was implemental in the founding of the All Children’s Theatre in Washington Township, Ohio. She earned an Ohio Arts Council Grant with chapters from this novel.
The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery
March 5, 2008
Riverhead Books, 2006
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin
Tea and Self- Reliance
Until the Victorian Age lessons in the art of Japanese tea ceremony, were afforded only men. That changed when Yukako Yen, took advantage of social change to amend the course of study for girls enrolled in Kyoto’s schools, to include training in the tea ceremony. Now lessons are offered to women all over the world. Ellis Avery studied the art for five years and drew upon that experience and her knowledge of Yukako Yen to create Yukako Shin, one of the primary characters of her novel The Teahouse Fire.
Like Yen, Shin saves the art of tea ceremony. However, she must overcome the disappointment of being married to a man who abandons her and the decline the Shin family. By gaining the trust of the new Japanese leadership she becomes an advocate for women’s education opening her home to girls who want training, many of whom come from wealthy families: “Baron Sono, who was amassing a second fortune selling Japanese antiques to Western art museums, sent Tsuko, his large-eyed girl. And Advisor Kato, with much clearing of his throat, came to ask if Miss Mariko could continue her studies with Yukako as a boarding student. He was till pushing for his electric stage to go smoothly and needed all the support he could rally.”
The following passage also underscores the novel’s over-all message of self-reliance which is put forth by Aurelia on the first page of the book: “When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate. I walked into the shrine through the red arch and struck the bell. I bowed twice. I clapped twice. I whispered to the foreign goddess and bowed again. And then I heard the shouts and the fire. What I asked for? Any life but this one.”
Thus from the beginning the story is about changing and recreating self. For Aurelia this means taking in as much as possible from an environment which is supportive only when she is performing the duties of servant: dressing Yuako, and accompanying her on outings. Otherwise she has no position — except that of a person so vile she must not even bathe in the community bath, as she is told by a women named Hazu: “Look. If you ever-ever-get into the bath her again-she began. I wondered what the end of her threat would be. Was she threatening to break my kneecaps if I dirtied her water? -we will have to drain the water, scrub down the basin, and start over.”
At this moment of this dialogue, Aurelia, realizing her situation, takes a translating job — a move inspired by Yuako whose first lessons were given, without her father’s permission, to a geisha. Most importantly, when dismissed from the Shin household, Aurelia will not leave, saying, you gave Aki a dowry for the nuns, I want a dowry, showing that Yuako has also, taught her servant to rely on her self.
