It's Not Love, It's Just Paris/Patricia Engel: Reflections

Anyone who had the privilege of reading Patricia Engel's collection of stories, Vida, knew for sure: a new true writer had emerged, and attention was to be paid. Oh, the sentences, I kept murmuring, as I read. Oh, the heartbreaking sentences. (My thoughts on Vida are here.)

At the BEA two weeks ago, I came home with just three books—Someone by Alice McDermott (the immaculate surprise of that book shared here), Still Writing by Dani Shapiro, and It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel. Who could need more?

Engel's first novel is the story of an American girl (though indeed, for this is an Engel tale, and Engel is deeply entrenched in many languages and multiple cultures, the heroine is a Colombian American girl) in Paris. Lita del Cielo lives in the "House of Stars" under the care of an aging countess and in the company of other young women with international blood and sure ideas about love. She is a faithful daughter, a skipped-two-grades academic, a girl who wears her one good dress to a safe length below her knees. She is the sort of person who can judge the quality of a friendship by the silence it can withstand, and while the girls in the house go about their notching affairs, Lita waits, ghostwrites term papers for a sustaining fee, helps a young waiter perfect his English. Mostly she watches, and she listens, tries to make sense of the lessons brought to the worn down, still-haughty home of the stars.

Here, for example, Lita is having a conversation with a housemate with whom "you weren't required to respond in order for her to have a full conversation."

"But you see, men are born guilty Women are built to forgive and love and forgive all over again. Men are built for war and because we live in mostly peaceful times, they just turn on themselves. My point is you have to learn to get through life without being sentimental about boys because they are never worth the trouble."

But of course Lita does find a boy—imperfect and mysterious, capable of silence, slow to assume and long to love. He is the son of a notorious politician. His mother is dead and he is ill. He lives by himself near the sea, finds city noise and dust endangering. Lita has only come to Paris for a year. She has come certain that she will return to the family who needs her, but Paris changes everyone and Paris changes Lita.

This is a book filled with incomparable sentences, a book so international in its aura, so mysterious in its trajectory, so veiled and so specific at once. Yearning is a universal language. Paris just after Princess Diana's death, in a house of many languages, through the eyes of an unchastened soul, is resolutely particular. I read in awe of Engel's ability to bridge so seamlessly between the two—to burrow so deeply into the story itself and to transcend with great swaths of sudden truth.

My galley is wildly dog-earred. Here, below, one of many additional passages that I loved:

And then I understood that between us there was a common spore of isolation that grew in my overpopulated home and within his quiet cottage. We were young but we'd both grown well into our loneliness. We were the kind of lonely that wasn't ashamed to be so. A lonely without self-penitence.

It's Not Love, It's Just Paris is set to launch on the same day—August 6th—as Handling the Truth, a book birthday we also share with Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya, whose San Francisco I've observed from the balcony of his home in the hills.

I'm thinking cake. In the meantime, huge congratulations to Patricia Engel, for doing it, again.

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Summer Reading (and last day for the HANDLING contest)

With work on the first draft of my last novel now done, I can, as I mentioned a few days ago, turn to the piles upon piles of books that have been waiting for me. (As well as all the titles I've downloaded on my iPad.)

Recently I have shared my thoughts on Caroline Leavitt's Is This Tomorrow, Katie Haegele's White Elephants, Chloe Aridjis's Asunder, Jessica Keener's Night Swim, Marie Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, Susan Tekulve's In the Garden of Stone, and Elizabeth Graver's End of the Point.    

Throughout the next few months, you'll be hearing from me on books like the following:

Someone, Alice McDermott
The World is a Carpet, Anna Badkhen
It's Not Love, It's Just Paris, Patricia Engel
Still Writing, Dani Shapiro
Country Girl, Edna O'Brien
Reality Boy, A.S. King
The News from Spain, Joan Wickersham
Norwegian by Night, Derek Miller
Grace Before Dying, Lori Waselchuk
River of Dust, Virginia Pye
Perfect Red, Jennie Nash
Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo
Yesterday's Weather, Anne Enright
Some Nerve, Patty Chang Anker
Margot, Jillian Cantor


I'll also be sharing thoughts on a number of classic memoirs.

Speaking of which: Today is your last day to enter to win my last copy of Handling the Truth. The details are here.

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Vida/Patricia Engel: Reflections

Last night I was explaining to my brother how you don't get perfect from perfect.  Glass deflects, I said.  Airtight frames let no one in.  You get perfect from raw and real, from quest and search, from words that feel ripped out, not placed.  You get it from writing that honors bewilderment, that shapes it, even, from stories and language that make you feel.  I said these things, and then I went to bed and when I woke up I read Vida, Patricia Engel's debut collection (Black Cat), from start to finish.

Exhibit A:  My kind of perfect.

You're going to want to know what Engel's stories are about.  I'm going to tell you to go read them.  To find out what a writer born to Colombian parents and raised in New Jersey and residing now in Florida makes of a character named Sabina, who shares at least some of her author's lineage.  Sabina carries these stories; mostly she tells them.  She takes us into shame, confusion, unrest, dishonor, one version or another of love, and of love's betrayals.  She gives us ascent and tip and instability, and in every single story, I believed I was reading the true.  I believed that a woman could hurt like this, want like this, wish herself to be someone other than this.  I believed a woman living this kind of life would make this kind of poetry.  The point is:  I believed.

And can we talk about language?  Can I give you this?

Just when I've beaten the night, I feel his arm on me.  Lou shaking me from my half sleep, his muscular fingers tugging my skin.  The darkness breaks with the glow of the street, spots of car lights on the walls, shining right through Lou so he looks as if he has a halo.  He turns on a lamp.  He's got a guitar hanging from a strap on his back and another, which he hands to me.  I sit up, let the quilt become a pond around my waist.  Take the guitar from him and run my fingertips over the fat metal strings.

That's from a story called "Refuge," the hands-down best post-9/11 piece of writing I've ever read.  Because 9/11 is both backdrop and mood, but it isn't, ultimately, the story.

Patricia Engel does not need me to sing her praises.  Vida is, among other things, a New York Times Notable Book of 2010, a Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a Los Angeles Times Gift Guide Selection.  It is the debut that Junot Diaz said he'd been waiting for.

Vida is alive.  It trembles.

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The Hole We're In/Gabrielle Zevin: Reflections

I've been wanting to read a Gabrielle Zevin novel for quite some time, and after all the festivities of Christmas were bowed out and complete, I slipped away to the brand-new couch with Zevin's newest novel for adults in hand.  "Meet the Pomeroys:  a church-going family of five living in a too-red house in a Texas college town," the flap copy reads.  "Roger, the patriarch, has impulsively decided to go back to school, only to find his future ambitions at odds with the temptations of the present.  His wife, Georgia, is trying to keep things afloat on the home front, though she's been feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes for months, and can never find the right moment to confront its scary, swelling contents...." 

Too-red house, I thought.  Feeding the bill drawer with unopened envelopes.  I was already keen on the sound of this book, the implied possibilities, when I opened it to its first page and read:

Midway through his son's graduation from college, somewhere between the Ns and the Os, Roger Pomeroy decided that he owed it to himself to go back to school.  He was forty-two years old, though people told him at least once a week that he looked younger.  Last Christmas, a salesgirl had mistaken his then nineteen-year-old daughter for his wife.  Last week, a different salesgirl had mistaken his forty-one year old wife for his mother.  He knew it wasn't flattery, because in both instances the salesgirls had already made their sales:  respectively, a flannel nightgown (wife's Christmas) and a leather fanny pack (son's graduation).

In five seemingly effortless (though of course they are hardly effortless) sentences, Zevin has set a rather immaculate stage—framed a Mr. Pretty (if he does say so himself) who daydreams through his son's college graduation, declares himself worthy of just a little self-satisfying something, and dresses his wife, at night, in flannel. We're in for a ride, we eavesdroppers on the Pomeroys.  We're in for debt and guilt and shame and disaster; we're in for a portrait of our times and for killer characterizations achieved with economic zing.

Consider the way Zevin pulls back the curtain on a woman who is not the saintly Roger's wife:

Her lone suitcase was a creamy brown leather, a bit battered by glamorously so, the sort of thing a reporter carried to cover a war or a fashion show. She had a tiny spray bottle that she used to hydrate her face.  "Would you like a spritz?" she asked Roger just before they were told to put away their electronic devices.  He accepted and felt instantly transported to a tropical rainforest.  Why didn't George have tricks like that?"

All we need is the spritzer to conjure this woman.  All we need is the word "transported" to anticipate her oily impact on our anti-hero.  And of course Roger, so pretty, so self-indulgent, so righteous, so right, so self-forgiving, manages to riddle his entire family with pain, because when you're only paying attention to yourself, you are plain not paying attention.

There's parody here, and skewering.  There are scenes that made me cringe (Zevin wanted me to cringe) and scenes that made me cry (she's good at that, too), and all the while there are reminders that Zevin is up to far more than mere entertaining here, as when she writes, knowingly, "people did what they could live with; all sin was relative."

I received The Hole We're In as a gift from Black Cat—a surprise package brought on by a tired UPS mailman in the dark of Tuesday night.  I'm about ready to settle in with Patricia Engel's Vida now.  Let the snow fall where it will; I'm reading.  

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