A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I enjoyed reading this novel by Lorrie Moore. It is one of those books where you can tell the author has taken a great deal of care with the language. The main character, Tassie Keltjin, is living away from her Midwestern home in a college town. It is quite a transition to city life from living with her parents and a brother on a farm. For a twenty-year-old she is very observant as evidenced here:

“After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.”

Tassie makes this observation as she is interviewing to be a nanny. All the women she interviews with seem to be in their early forties. Tassie is eventually hired by Sarah Brink who is hoping with her husband, Edward, to adopt a baby. Tassie goes with them on their adoption interviews and meets the birth mothers along with them.

The Brinks end up adopting Mary-Emma, or Emmie as they call her. She’s a toddler who had been living in foster care. Tassie takes to her.

“I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn’t quite recall that being the case for me. And perhaps she would grow up with a sense that incompetence was all around her, and it was entirely possible I would be instrumental in that. She would grow up with love, but no sense that the people who love her knew what they were doing – the opposite of my childhood – and so she would become suspicious of people, suspicious of love and the worth of it. Which in the end, well, would be a lot like me.”

The Brinks have some adjustments to make to being parents and also find it challenging to be the parents of a mixed race child. Sarah starts a support group. Tassie spends her days with Emmie. She is taking classes and meets a boyfriend – I think this side story is a distraction from the main story. Tassie’s world starts to come apart in more than one unexpected way and how she copes is the main focus of the novel.

Ordinary Wolves by Seth Kantner

Seth Kantner was an invited author at The Nature of Words this year. I finally got around to reading his novel Ordinary Wolves. This debut novel is set in Northern Alaska and follows Catuk Hawcly, an Alaskan-born white boy. Catuk lives with his father, brother, and sister, and they are a two-day dog sled ride from the nearest village. It was difficult at first for me to follow Catuk as a young boy.

Here’s a passage that made much more sense to me when I re-read it after finishing the book:
“It was hard to look at Enuk – or any traveler – in the eyes after seeing no people for weeks. It was hard to speak and not run and hide again. Enuk’s frost-scarred face betrayed mysteries and romantic hard times that drew a five-year-old boy with swollen dreams.” … “ The day I turned old I was going to be Enuk. Small discrepancies left footprints in my faith, such as the fact that he was Eskimo and I seemed to be staying naluaġmiu. But years lined up ahead, promising time for a cure.”

It is a coming-of- age story. When Catuk tries to live in Anchorage you really get more of a sense of him and how isolated he’s been. He physically fits in better in Anchorage, but is constantly trying to figure out people.

“I paused in coffee shops, eavesdropping, trying to emulate, acclimate, relate. I watched the caribou – the average people grazing through their days – men who griped about Tongass timber harvests while their engines idled; women with big dyed hair carrying Can’t-Grows with shaved haircuts; homeless men asking for spare change and apologizing for needing it.”

Catuk’s father is an interesting character as an artist raising three children. Catuk’s sister and brother also go through their own identity crises and adapt to where they want to be in the world. Stories of the nearby villagers and Catuk and his family are interspersed with chapters following the lives of wolves.

Here Catuk seems to hit on the main reason he’s having trouble adjusting to life anywhere:
“‘Every time I get a grip on what matters, then I’m all confused again. A white-person career, with insurance? And a Pension? Something is missing in me – that feels like being born a wolf and choosing a dog’s life.’”

It would have been interesting to hear this author speak. I’d love to hear from anyone who made it to his reading or workshop.

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The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa

The three stories in this book focus on young women in Japan in seemingly ordinary situations. Each character minutely observes the world around her. In “Dormitory” a young married woman helps her cousin find a place to live while he’s going to college. From the first paragraph of “Dormitory”:

“I became aware of the sound quite recently, though I can’t say with certainty when it started. There is a place in my memory that is dim and obscure, and the sound seems to have been hiding just there. At some point I suddenly realized that I was hearing it. It materialized out of nowhere, like the speckled pattern of microbes on the agar in a petri dish.”

I think the most intriguing of the three stories is “The Diving Pool.” At first it seems like a story about a girl with a crush on a diver. She spends her afternoons sitting in the bleachers watching him dive. He lives with her as her parents run an orphanage. Here she struggles with the transient nature of her life and her parents’ focus on others:

“Sometimes I have thought it might be better if I were an orphan, too. If I could have one of the tragic histories so common at the Light House – an alcoholic mother, a homicidal father, parents lost to death or abandonment, anything at all – then I would have been a proper orphan.”

Ogawa’s word choice seems extremely important and her translator must have done a very careful job to keep her voice. She sets up initially idyllic existences while slowly increasing the slightly creepy aspects. In “Pregnancy Diary” a younger sister keeps a record of how her sister’s pregnancy is proceeding, along with her subtle attempts to alter the outcome.

The Diving Pool is a quick read, but the stories will stick with you as they explore what human beings are capable of doing.

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The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle

The Tortilla Curtain is on my list of favorite ten fiction books. I don’t know if favorite is quite the right word to describe how I feel about this book. It’s a book that people seem to love or hate. In this book T. C. Boyle addresses race, poverty, illegal immigrants, and suburban lifestyles. No one comes out looking good.

Kyra and Delaney are the suburban couple portrayed. She is a realtor and he is a nature writer. It is a second marriage for both of them and Kyra has a six year old son named Jordan. They live in a suburban development called Arroyo Blanco and during the course of the book the homeowner’s association debates putting in a gate as well as a stucco wall around the entire community to protect the homeowners. The couple has a car stolen and loses two dogs to coyotes, yet it is hard to feel any sympathy for them.

Delaney struggles with his liberal tendencies versus what he feels are his rights. Here he listens as a teenager in his community makes a racist joke:
“This was Jack’s kid. A kid who should know better, a kid with all the advantages, raised right here in Arroyo Blanco. … But then, maybe that was the problem, and his next thought was for Jordan: was that the way he was going to turn out? He knew the answer before he’d formulated the question. Of course it was, and there was nothing Kyra or Delaney or anybody else could do about it. That’s what he’d tried to tell Kyra over this wall business – it might keep them out, but look what it keeps in.”

The story is also told from the viewpoints of a second couple. Cándido and América are from Mexico and are in the US illegally. The hardships that they face are incredible and must be somewhat exaggerated, otherwise I can’t imagine why anyone would want to be in the US illegally. América is young and pregnant and Cándido struggles to find any work at all. They camp in a canyon near Arroyo Blanco.

Cándido feels haunted by bad luck. Here he reflects after they’ve just escaped from a wildfire caused by their campfire:
“Cándido didn’t know what the next day would bring, but as he looked down into the darkened canyon he felt awed by the enormity of his bad luck, stunned by the chain of events that had led from the windfall of the turkey and the simple joy of the campfire to this nightmare of flames and smoke and airplanes that exploded across the sky. Had he really been the cause of all this?”
Their luck continues to worsen.

The two couples’ lives intersect multiple times and in unpleasant ways for all parties leading up to a final confrontation. T. C. Boyle offers no answers to the issue of illegal immigration, but he’ll make you think.

Escape to Books

The Nature of Words is in Bend again next week. It is a great chance to hear some interesting authors or attend workshops. Sherman Alexie, author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian among other books, is a featured guest. There was some good news in the Bend Bulletin this morning. The Crook County School Board has reversed the ban on this book!

I’ll get back to reviewing books soon. We’ve been laid low with the flu, but are definitely on the mend now.

Escape to Books