Winesburg, Ohio

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson was published in 1919. The book is essentially a series of character sketches about the inhabitants of the town of Winesburg, Ohio. Many of the same characters appear in multiple sketches.
The writing in Winesburg, Ohio is very clear and crisp, kind of like a serene, flat pond. It is soothing just to read it, even without taking in everything, kind of like listening to a song without focusing on any of the words. Anderson makes lots of direct matter of fact statements: “He was an old man with a white beard and a huge nose and hands” and “In Winesburg as on the farm Louise was not happy.”
The story begins with “The Book of the Grotesque” in which a fictional elderly writer sets out to write a book. “The writer had known people, in a particularly intimate way that was different from the way in which you and I know people.” The central thought of the writer‘s book is that “there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth.“
With Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson is saying that amidst the small town gossip and activities, something much deeper is going on in the lives of its individuals. With these character sketches, Anderson attempts to capture the essence of these people’s lives.
Some of the sketches are quite nice, for example “Hands”, where Dr. Reefy marries “the tall dark girl” and finds a relief to his loneliness during their brief marriage before she dies; he “read to her all the odds and ends of thoughts he had scribbled on bits of paper”
And some of the stories are downright depressing; “Adventure”, where Alice clings to the fantasy of a lover who has moved away and long lost interest in her, and who in the end decides to “face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.”
In this disparity of experience Anderson’s descriptions are accurate since every life experiences brokenness with some wholeness and brokenness with no wholeness. However, the sketches take on an overwhelmingly dark aura; “he was lonely and had begun to think that loneliness was a part of his character”, “her loneliness seemed unbearable”, “he hated life whole-heartedly, with the abandon of a poet.”
The darkness seems almost comical when you see it recurring in every character, and though certainly every person experiences loneliness during his or her life, to what extent would it characterize a person? When you consider that in writing these character sketches Anderson is singling out and highlighting the experiences that most define his characters, you wonder if he is choosing the right ones?
Additionally, Anderson often admits to his inability to describe exactly what it is that he is trying to say, writing instead, “The poet is needed here.” This makes the reader wonder, does he even himself know what he is trying to say? Or is he trying to achieve some sort of an artificial profundity, sort of like the kind of people who feign to have knowledge of classical music, but who should really be taking hits off of a bong and listening to Spoon? Why doesn’t he just write at his own level, rather than try to say something at a depth that he himself cannot even reach?
It is interesting to consider that Anderson names his book “Winesburg, Ohio” rather than “the people who live in Winesburg Ohio.” The characters seem to have a steadfast alliance to the community; consider the character who moves away from Winesburg, then does whatever she can to get back, using the money that she found on the ground in her desperation. And Alice, who lives her whole life in Winesburg, even though she is unhappy and lonely there.
This makes you wonder if a version of Winesburg, Ohio could be written in 2009, where people will quickly sever their ties to a community to go to college, for a work or a relationship.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Society hit a new low with the publication of "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" (Quirky Classics, 2009). Naturally, seconds after I found out about this book I raced to the bookstore where dozens of people had already congregated to purchase a copy.
P&P&Z stayed very close to the original story--including using much of Jane Austin’s exact text--except that in this version England is overrun with man-eating zombies have turned carriage rides across the countryside and neighborhood balls into life-threatening events. The Bennet family spent several years training under a ninja in Japan and so fought valiantly against the zombies in several gripping passages throughout the book.
Co-author Seth Grahame-Smith wrote the book over six weeks, pasting his own zombie passages in between Jane Austin’s original text. His writing stayed true to Jane Austin’s style of “using 40 words when one would suffice” (quote from Seth Grahame-Smith). Before settling on the concept of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Grahame-Smith experimented with classic titles such as Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment with themes like monkeys and ninjas. He comically altered some of the characters from Pride and Prejudice, writing about Mr. Bennet’s love affair in Japan, having Charlotte die the painful death of a zombie, and then her husband Mr. Collins kill himself in grief.
Undeniably, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a lot of fun, in a totally ridiculous sort of a way. Unfortunately, however, Grahme-Smith opted to make the book purely comical, and forwent the opportunity to turn P&P&Z into a satire on Jane Austin and all of her books in general. After enduring almost two decades of Jane Austin obsession—where every six months another movie comes out of one of her books--it would have been a breath of fresh air to read something that ridicules plots entirely consumed with matchmaking and marriage.
In addition, the entire concept, chosen at random, seems simply bizarre and silly, with very little creativity involved in the process. In fact, the only part of the book where Grahame-Smith exercised artistic liberties was when he made puns out of the frequent conversations that arise in the book about ‘balls’. This book was kind of like eating a bag of marshmallows; it may at time be fun, but mostly it feels like fluff and you have no sense of fulfillment afterwards.

White Oleander

Janet Fitch paints a fascinating set of characters in her debut novel “White Oleander” ( 1999). Set in L.A., Fitch’s book tells the story of Astrid, a teenager who lives in a series of foster homes after her mother has been imprisoned for murder.

Astrid corresponds with letters to her mother during this time, who is a fierce and opinionated woman, managing to control her daughter despite their separation. After Astrid converts to Christianity her mother writes, “Are you out of your mind? You may not 1) be baptized, 2) call yourself Christian” In another letter she condemns Astrid for befriending a neighbor: “You will attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention….proved (yourself) every bit as retarded as your school once claimed you were.”

Astrid encounters no small amount of trauma and strife in her experience with foster care; her first mother, Starr, shoots Astrid in the shoulder when she discovers that Astrid, at fourteen years old, is sleeping with Starr’s fifty-year-old boyfriend. Another mother, Claire, kills herself (Astrid discovers the dead body) when she thinks that her husband is having an affair and will divorce her.

In their extremity, however, Fitch’s characters are surreal and the story seems unlikely. Although Fitch is writing about something that might actually happen to a foster child, what is likelihood that Astrid would have Starr, a Jesus-freak/super-slut/alcoholic for a foster mother, only to later live with Claire, an ultra-pathetic failed actress who doesn’t work at any job, and is passive about her husbands’ affair? In addition, Astrid’s biological mother is very eccentric; an artist who Fitch has based on someone from the Heian Empire, a society based on ethics. Astrid’s mother sees her role as an artist possibly as more important that of a mother; when Astrid was a tiny girl, her mother left her with the neighborhood daycare for an entire year while she travelled and went to the beach with friends. And Astrid herself is a modern-day version of Lolita. If one of these characters had appeared in Fitch’s novel, it might be believable, but to have four (in addition to other extreme characters not mentioned here) it is too much, kind of like drinking cherry syrup straight, and not having it watered down with club soda.

Fitch paints a poetical and not often seen picture of L.A. in this novel: she uses flowing, descriptive language to describe the foliage and flowers blooming at different times of the year. And her characters are not the caricatured ultra-superficial people so often seen in books that take place in Southern California. (Consider, for example, the character of Banks in Steve Martin’s book “ShopGirl”, a middle-aged man who is so paranoid about his appearance that he won’t appear in public if he thinks that he might have been wearing the same outfit twice!). Fitch describes the neighborhood where she lives in L.A. as having a ‘different universe in every house”, and with her book has tried to captivate this, and she certainly has.

“I always know what time it is in California,” Astrid says at the end of the book, when she is living in Berlin with a boyfriend and working as an artist. With the ending, Fitch conveys how enduring fractured experiences have brought about Astrid’s wholeness and maturity. In addition, the confidence that Astrid has gained from her experiences enables her to stand up to her mother. In a closing scene, Astrid asks why her mother left her for so long in another person’s care. In her response, Fitch conveys well the oftentimes overwhelming responsibility that a child can have on a mother. “I was used to having time to think….(as a mother) I felt like a hostage.”

White Oleander became a national bestseller and also was made into a movie starring Alison Lohman and Michelle Pheiffer. In an interview, Fitch claims to be surprised by the book’s widespread appeal. And although most women certainly don’t have Astrid’s experience with foster care, perhaps in the same way that “Girl Interrupted” appealed to women who hadn’t spent time in a mental institution, any woman who has come of age in America has lived with brokenness on some level and so could empathize with the character Astrid.