Burning Down the House/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Long before the current unkempt presidential election season was set into play, the novelist Jane Mendelsohn (I Was Amelia Earhart) was embarked on her fourth novel, the story of a New York City family whose wealth is the product of intense (even monstrous) real estate dealing.

The family patriarch is Steve Zane. His "... office towers, malls, skyscrapers, housing developments, business contacts, political connections" have yielded tremendous, soul-darkening privilege. They have set decay—often violent decay—into motion, against the backdrop of sizable luxury.

Everything is in jeopardy in Burning Down the House (Alfred A. Knopf, March 31, 2016). The scheming son has had it with the father. The adopted child is self destructing. The Eastern European nanny who has emerged from a terrifying kidnapping and years as a sex slave is asked to revisit the terrors of her past. People are disposable. And when Zane—now older, now reflective, now negotiating the tenderness of unexpected affection—seeks at last to draw a moral line, it may (or may not) be too late.

Fearlessly deploying past and present tenses, multiple perspectives, and the smack of white space, Mendelsohn creates a harshly glinting (a Mendelsohn word) milieu.

Here is Steve Zane himself, for example, on the savages now destroying our world.

What we are confronted with in today's world are cruel degenerate people with no sensitivity or psychological awareness. Savages with no feelings. Maybe it's always been this way, but it's worse now. They are in charge. We are talking about people who are so numb to their fellow human beings that they think they know better how everybody should live. And do you know what happens to people who know what's best for everybody? They destroy the world. That's what they do. They dismember and disembowel the individual and boil her flesh and entrails down in a stew with everybody else.

Here a character elucidates artistic ambition, envy, and ego:

They'd followed his successful career as if they were bird-watchers and he some common pigeon who had inexplicably been accepted by a flock of rare eagles. They no more believed in his talent than they believed that they themselves might be untalented. Over the years they had won prizes and fellowships and commissions and professorships. They had been invited to lecture and appeared in numerous footnotes. These achievements had been like snakebites on their egos, swelling them out of proportion to the rest of their beings so that their sense of importance bulged and tottered on top of them like extra heads, as if they were monsters in a fable, muzzled, drooling, snouted, skin split to reveal pink bone and yellow ooze.

Like Lidia Yuknavitch, Mendelsohn brings a rare poetic sensibility to indecorous circumstances, a loveliness of language to odious characters. There's no hedging of any bets here, no softening of the tale, no hitching of this plot to a book-club formula. Obscene wealth and uncured ambition are often ruinous combustibles. Mendelsohn, in Burning Down the House, will not pretend that they aren't.

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I had a dream; I am a liar

A flight of unexpected corporate work came in, and I was awake most of the night getting it done. At 5:30 AM I thought it might be best to close my eyes for an hour or so, today being a teaching day at Penn. I pulled two blankets to my chin on the downstairs couch and didn't sleep until, suddenly, I was trapped in the net of a flash dream. It went something like this:

I was at a crowded bookstore, doing a Handling the Truth event, which is to say teaching a memoir workshop. A pretty young writer approached, clutching Jane Mendelsohn's magnificent American Music to her breast.

"I so loved this book, thank you for writing it," she said.

"Oh," I said. "It's a lovely book, a beautiful book. But I didn't...."

Interrupting me, the young writer began to speak, in detail, of her book love.  I nodded—of course, of course; I had raved about it endlessly myself.  "But," I kept saying.  "But...."  Thwarted time and again in my desire to disclose as she went on and on. Then, interrupting herself, she said, "I guess some author is here for the Handling the Truth event."

I nodded.

Leaning close, she confided, "I'm not staying for that. The book seems a tad overdone."

I never got to say what was true—about American Music, about Truth.

I hate that.

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that book trailer thing (as dissected by Tribune writer Nina Metz)

Readers of this blog know how tormented I've been about the whole book trailer thing.  Do trailers matter?  Should I indulge?  Do I have a trailer state of mind?

Well, you know what I mean.  For my home-made, no-budget Small Damages trailer, I decided to go with quiet.  With photographs I took throughout my travels in Spain, with a hand-strummed guitar riff that my husband recorded out in his old garage, and with a few words from early readers.  I knew I couldn't approximate Hollywood glam.  It seemed wrong to try.  And besides, Small Damages is a story of discovery, not just of self, but of place.  There are few places more beautiful, to me, than my characters' southern Spain. 

Lately, Nina Metz has been pondering the trailer topic, too.  She writes of it with great humor and pizzazz in this Chicago Tribune story.  Anyone contemplating the making of a trailer should take a look—not just for what Metz herself has to say, but for what her cast of interviewees contributes.  Among them is the very smart Nick Davis (who is married to the tremendously talented Jane Mendelsohn, the author of one of my favorite books, American Music).

And if you are in the it's-a-very-hot-day-and-I-can't-concentrate-on-words frame of mind, do yourself the favor of combing the story for its links to effective "trailers," particularly the extravagantly preposterous faux effort by Gary Shteyngart.  It had me snorting with laughter.

 

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American Music/Jane Mendelsohn: Reflections

Sometimes all I want to do is run up and down the street, and then to the mall and through the mall, and then to the beach and across the whole of the coastal shore, and then through an airport (among all those airport-bookstore-book toting readers) and then across an ocean to proclaim, I have just read the perfect book. 

I have read a book that held me, moved me, stirred me, awed me, restored and redeemed me—I have read that book.  It's called American Music, and by all rights I should have heard about this book since it was released in June; it's been O blessed and New York Times Book Review reviewed, and this is an author (Jane Mendelsohn) with whom many are already familiar, thanks to her debut novel, I was Amelia Earhart.  But I didn't know about American Music; I just found it in a bookstore and because I loved Earhart, I brought Music home, after the most cursory glance at the jacket.  Mendelsohn is that good.

No. In Music, she is that great.  I don't even want to try to explain this book, how it works.  I can't imagine wasting a second explaining (all right, the briefest bit of explaining) how the story involves a 21-year-old physical therapist, Honor, and the young Iraq War veteran she begins to treat—her hands on his flesh, her strength in his muscles releasing stories from generations past that both can see and hear, that not he, not she understand for the longest time.  Did that just make any sense?  It doesn't perhaps, it's not possible, perhaps, but it is utterly convincing and powerful and so well made and by the end it does not matter, because all the fragments of the stories released tell a real and aching larger story, and because every single line of this book is something approximating perfect.  You know I love Michael Ondaatje and Colum McCann.  Mendelsohn joins that league of writer here, her Honor like Ondaatje's Hannah, her understanding of jazz music and the birth of cymbals and swing on a par with McCann's mastery of gypsy poets, say, or Nureyev ballet.

She pulled down the sheet and touched his back.  He listened closely to the music.  He heard the scrape of the recording and the piano like rain and the voice lifted above the music like a kite jerking and soaring above the trees.  

I said that I don't want to explain.  I simply want you to go out and buy this book—buy it and read it and see what literature can be, how a webbing intelligence electrifies and haunts and utterly defines the mood of a day, no matter how hot it is outside, how swampy.

As I write these words, thunder rolls in from some place north.  A storm brewing.  A prelude to your reading of Music.

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How do you choose the books you are going to read? she asked

A few days ago, when Amy Riley and I were taking a wee break from techno talk (Beth:  HTML code?  Amy (long distance):  Okay.  I'm doing it with you.  Are you on the Feedburner screen?  Do you see the box next to the words ....?), I told her that I'd just returned from the bookstore with an armload of new books.  She, being a great reader herself, asked me which ones.  I listed Libba Bray's A Great and Terrible Beauty, Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, John Green's Looking for Alaska, and Jane Mendelsohn's American Music.

There was a bit of a pause, as Amy searched (I imagine) for some pattern in my selections.  "Interesting," she said at last.  "How do you choose what you are going to read?"

In answering the question I realized just how many influences weigh upon me.  The fact that I work in multiple genres, that I teach, and that I care a whole lot about language has me scurrying after the books I hope will teach me—in every genre.  The fact that I sometimes wonder why the rest of the world reads what it reads (e.g., The Help, Girl in Translation, Loving Frank) gets me curious enough to buy.  Blogs influence me (hence my purchase of My Name is Mary Sutter).  Friends do (Kate Moses has led me to The Names of Things; Jane Satterfield to The Importance of Music to Girls).  Reviews do (The New York Times Book Review led me to Forest Gander's As a Friend, Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, and Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds).  I trust imprints, like Graywolf, because they publish friends like Alyson Hagy and so I read and not surprisingly love Jessica Francis Kane's The Report.  I trust editor friends like Laura Geringer, Jill Santopolo, and Alane Mason, and so I read, respectively, Virgin Territory, Between Shades of Gray, and Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and Nothing Happened and Then it Did.  Many, many authors send me their books, and I do all I can to read them.  On lovely afternoons, I drift through bookstores and find titles that appeal, and some of my favorite books have come to me this way:  Michael Ondaatje's work, The Book Thief, The Cellist of Sarajevo, to name just a few.

This time around, my reasons were thus:  Maile Meloy because my writing friends adore her work and because I've been impressed by earlier stories.  John Green because he is John Green.  Richard Russo because I always meant to read him and because bloggers I respect insist.  Libba Bray because two minutes in her presence and I adored her.  Jane Mendelsohn because I absolutely loved her first novel, I Was Amelia Earhart, which begins: "The sky is flesh. The great blue belly arches up above the water and bends behind the line of the horizon...."

Marketers would love to know the why behind book selling.  Pundits speculate (interestingly, following the recent New York Times story suggesting that book trailers are highly influential, my in box was full of readers saying they never watch trailers).  I can only tell you what I do.  I wonder what your methods are.

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