two umbrellas

Thanks to Condalmo, I can listen to William Faulkner reading As I Lay Dying. I already have audio of him reading his Nobel Prize speech. It always feels a bit surreal to listen to authors read, especially one of my favorites (not to mention, dead). It alters the relationship that was already created between myself and the text, although not always in a negative way.

When I was in college I started quilting. I went to a small state school in rural PA and was surrounded by Mennonite and Amish communities. I was always impressed by the simplicity and beauty of their quilts. I never really thought of their lifestyle because I was so used to seeing plain clothed men and women in horse and buggies. They were part of our larger community. It wasn’t until I moved to Philadelphia where I thought more about how they may have felt living with us. In Philadelphia, the Amish would come to Reading Terminal Market with farm fresh food or they would have stands at the city-wide farmers markets. I can’t imagine what it was like for the kids (many of the stands were run by teenagers – or younger) who went from the farm to the city on the weekends.

I was very interested in learning about going from the city to the farm when I saw Sue Bender’s Plain and Simple. It always seemed to me that ‘taking away’ was a harder lifestyle change than ‘adding’. With a second baby on the way, I am in the mindset of taking some lifestyle things away while adding a lot more personal complexity. I wanted a glimpse into a world where people lived with a lot fewer things but still led full, complicated lives. Bender’s was also drawn to this lifestyle through the beauty of Amish quilts. She herself was a quilter and saw some quilts hanging in a store. Something pulled her to them and she continued to visit the quilts until she realized that she needed to go live with the Amish.

I am still amazed that she was able to find an Amish family who would allow her to live with them. Bender grew up in New York City and lived in Berkeley, CA. She knew no Amish people but had some friends that lived near Amish communities. She didn’t know anything about how the Amish lived other than that they live in isolated communities without electricity. At this point, in this short book, I should have begun questioning this woman. What could she have gained by infiltrating the lives of an Amish family? But, then, I really wanted to know, too. Does this unknown culture, that has been living within my known culture, have the secret to a happy life? What can I learn from this woman’s experience, if anything?

Unfortunately, very little. The book was structured in an odd fashion: like a patch-work quilt with little vignettes about her experiences before, during, and after her experience with the Amish. It didn’t read fluently (unlike a patch-work quilt that comes together to form a congruous whole). It read more like pieces of a quilt haphazardly put together in order to show off the more important pieces (in this case, the author). In other words, I got the impression that this book was more about her and not about the Amish. Aren’t memoirs supposed to be about the authors? Yes, but there was a lack of perspective that made the author seem a little too self-absorbed – so much so that I was beginning to dislike her. At one point she criticizes one family she visits for what they eat (lots of sweets, white bread, and butter*) because it wasn’t what she expected even though she based her expectations on little to no knowledge of the Amish lifestyle. Her criticism of this and other small things showed how little tolerance she had for her hosts and revealed how exploitive her journey into the Amish community turned out to be. Truthfully, I think the only reason I finished it was because it was so short and I wouldn’t have felt good about myself for not being able to finish a book that was around 120 pages.

*Being from Pennsylvania Dutch country, this did not come as a surprise to me. Even just one visit to Lancaster, PA (which the author does do) should reveal the region’s love of refined sugar.

For some reason I have avoided reading John Updike. I don’t have any real reason other than it just seemed so obvious to read him, like reading Joyce Carol Oates (another confession, I’ve only ever read her essays in the New York Review of Books and none of her fiction for similar reasons: I’m sure she’s good and I’ll get to it someday, maybe). At any rate, I had been realizing how many books on my bookshelves that I haven’t read (I used to be a compulsive buyer; now, I’m a compulsive library patron) and Rabbit, Run was one of them. I have read some of Updike’s short stories but not many and that was quite some time ago. I guess it was time to read something more substantial and I was in the mood for a novel, plain and simple.

I can’t help but talk about where it takes place, the fictional town of Brewer, which was based on Reading, PA. I grew up in Wyomissing, PA, a small suburb about five minutes outside of Reading and a beautiful bike trail away from Updike’s hometown of Shillington, and had family that still lived in the city. I have visited places where many books have taken place but there was something eerily familial about reading Rabbit, Run. I can only imagine how New Yorkers and Londonders feel to have their hometowns constantly immortalized. Reading, PA is no NYC or London; in fact, it’s anywhere (or nowhere), really, as it probably felt to Updike then.

It’s hard to tell whether or not Brewer had a strong influence on Rabbit. It felt that Updike spent a lot of time describing places: the streets – even street/road/route names (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve driven Rt. 422 to and from Philadelphia), Mt. Judge (or, Mt. Penn, if you could really must call it a mountain – it’s more like a hill, which is a lot easier for me to say now that I have views of both the Cascade and Olympic Mountain Ranges), the golf course, the Pinnacle Hotel, etc.; but, it could have felt that way to me because I have such a strong connection to them. I will admit I was looking for the bits and pieces about my hometown, which certainly put place as a literary function in my reading, but I do believe that a lot of the detail of place was intentional. Rabbit seemed like a man who was caught in the ‘big fish – little pond’ syndrome’: stuck in the past, no real future, hoping the familiar will carry him to a good life. It doesn’t and he gets caught and needs to run. I can appreciate that feeling – the feeling that in order to improve, one must leave and start over.

It is easy for me to say that I didn’t like Rabbit. He was immature, irrational, and simple. I found it hard to sympathize with him but willingly accepted his discontent.There was an intimacy with the characters that I haven’t read in a while – and something I greatly appreciated. It could have been very easy to attempt to elicit pity but I never felt that way. Somehow Updike was able to create enough distance, through intimacy, that I felt no obligation to the characters – even when they needed it the most. I will never forget when Janice gets drunk after she gives birth and she ‘knows that the worst thing that has ever happened to any woman in the world has happened to her.’ How simply put. How tragic.

I find that often intellectual simplicity appeals to my reading sensibility. While Rabbit seems like an immature and simple man, Updike does not tell the story that way. He doesn’t try to capture the moment of what it’s like to be a restless, married, twenty-something, small-town man, which I find plagues some contemporary writing. He attempts to capture how Rabbit is a restless, married, twenty-something, small-town man. I am not sure why I’ve held out on Updike’s novels before because I was truly amazed at how well he framed his characters.

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve even debated whether or not I should continue this blog but I’ve have twoumbrellas for five years now and I just can’t part with it. Besides I really like writing my thoughts down about the books I’ve read and (as I’ve said many times before) I’m forgetful – sometimes even forgetting what I’ve read over the last few months. So on that note, here’s a list of my reading over the past few months (which may or may not be complete):

• Netherland – Joseph O’Neill
• Let the Great World Spin – Colum McCann
• The Hospital for Bad Poets – J.C. Hallman
• Look At Me – Jennifer Egan
• Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
• Tender Is the Night* – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Road* – Cormac McCarthy
• Love and Obstacles* – Aleksandar Hemon
• The Master Bedroom* – Tessa Hadley
• The Other City – Michal Ajvaz
• What the World Will Be Like When All the Water Leaves Us – Laura van den Berg
• The Interrogative Mood – Padgett Powell

*unfinished. Seeing that this list has four books that I did not finish, it hasn’t been the most productive few months in reading. I can list excuses: moving across the country, being pregnant, renewing a hobby, and freelance work – but they would just be excuses.

I really wish I would have kept up with writing about each of these individually. There is much to say about all of them – even the ones I haven’t (or won’t finish). I will say that my favorite (surprisingly) was The Other City but I think that has to do with my mood. Moving to Seattle, while being pregnant, has become quite an experience – generally positive, sometimes surreal, and utterly different – I’m continually amazed how much the East Coast is ingrained in my psyche. I am constantly evaluating my perspective and The Other City somehow captured these feelings. It was the right book at the right time, as they say.

So I am hoping to get back on track with my current read (Rabbit, Run) and stay that way. I miss writing about reading; in fact, I miss writing in general.