BOOK REVIEW: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Writing a review of Bel Canto feels like writing the obituary of a long-lost friend who has just been found.

It touches something inside – something  rarely feel-able in this time of so much contention among so many different warring creeds, peoples, and thoughts. It reminds me that while something may have passed away from a troubled world, deep-down we may yet be touched anew and energized at rare times in our lives. Bel Canto heralds one of those times.

It is a feeling of love. Real love, universal love, not the everyday family-and-friends type,  but the kind that extends to all people at all times and which resonates with Jesus’ declaration that he has come, died and been resurrected for “all people.”

So while I write at the beginning of Holy Week, it is still a tough review to write for other reasons. The story is too beautiful to commit to the mere words of another writer. Patchett is the only person who could have written it. She is a “virtuoso,” says her publisher Harper Collins. And Bel Canto is her “most exquisite” work, The New York Times writes. In other words, you have to read it to get it.

Set in an unnamed Latin American city, a lavish reception for a visiting world-class opera singer is interrupted by a terrorist attack. A rough-hewn but disciplined band of armed thugs from the jungle forces everyone – the celebrated opera star included – to the floor and the warriors take over, making their nonnegotiable demands of the authorities which soon arrive outside the walled compound of he nation’s vice-presidential mansion.

Sounds like game, set, match … but the book’s just getting started when that happens. Its beauty is to come in the unfolding, which is simply one of the most remarkable stories I have ever read. At first it moves along at a barely perceptible pace. But you can feel it. Then you see a larger story building itself, bejeweled along the way by a strange and unexpected symbiosis of terrorists and their high-toned captives.

“…he had no secrets then and now he did: it was that now there was something that was strictly between himself and one other person, that it was something that was completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else…”

That’s it. Anything else would be what they call “spoilers". So spoil yourself, and read this amazing piece of literary genius.

And, of course, you can always buy it through Ms. Patchett’s now-famous Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books.

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Click here for a link to Parnassus Books

And here for a link to Ann Patchett’s interview with TerryGross on NPR’s Fresh Air

And here for a New York Times review of Ms. Patchett’s latest book, along with commentary on her style and career.

What every boy needs to know about sex

When I was working on my memoir, WarBaby, I doodled about some of the highlights of my growing up. One memory stands out. It was about sex and the public library.

I was 17. That was many years ago – days when students were required to do hard research and write original papers that had damned well have been at least C-grade in quality. A long time ago, for sure.

I came to love libraries in those days. I did much of my research for papers in the main city  library. It was near my father’s office. After school I’d ride the bus downtown, work in the library and then ride home with my dad.

One day, I was browsing in the library and I came across a book entitled What Every 16-Year-Old Boy Should Know About Sex. Well, being 17, I suddenly developed an overwhelming desire to see if I had missed anything.

I slid the book in with the three or so others I had picked out and approached the check-out lady. She processed my books until she got to The One. The quince-like expression of her face reminded me of Lily Tomlin as The Telephone Lady on the old Laugh-In TV show. (Tells you a bit about how long ago this was, eh?)

“I’m sorry,” she said with a salacious smirk. “You can’t check this book out.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m 17, and the book’s for 16-year-olds.”

“But you have to be 18 to check out books of this nature,” she replied, the salacious smirk morphing into a Leni-Riefenstahl-wannabe grimace.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, asking for the name and address of the head librarian to whom I later wrote.

(His reply was classic bureaucratese – wordswordswords, all saying yesnoyesnoyesno and my favorite “notwithstanding our commitment to learning…”)

I dealt with it. I waited out the bureaucracy. And when I turned 18, I went back and got That Book.

They should have called it What Every Ten-Year-Old Boy Already Knows About Sex. 

The poetry group's meeting

Once all were cozy

I started reading me poesy

in the dim-lit den

of a house with drawn blinds.

We brooked no interruption

from the noise and disruption

of the world in turmoil outside.

Just a little poesy,

with mayhap a nip of rosey,

as we sought some cheer for the ear.

But things have a way

of bringing a fray

when someone gets nosey.

So it was no surprise

when I came to surmise

a stranger snuck into our midst.

It was our vanity

to keep our sanity

by leaving warp and woof outside.

And here was this dude

with the potential for rude

interruption of our rosey and poesy.

But no posey lover

under cleverer cover

had ever darkened our door.                                             

For through fates unknown

into our midst he’d been thrown

to escape all the woofing and warping.

So we welcomed him as guest

perceiving his quest

to be one with ours perforce.

And we had quaffed enough rosey

to invite his initiation by poesy

so the test was laid out for him thusly:

You can join our merry band

and we’ll gladly lend a hand

if you can pass this one little test

Promise never to pitch

a line with a twitch

like…

     “There once was a man from Nantucket…”

Style has a story to tell too

If you've ever doubted the dramatic degrees in which language truly evolves, then you've never read Jane Austen back-to-back with Cormac McCarthy.

I did that recently. It was almost scary.

First I read McCarthy’s The Road, which I eulogized earlier on this blog. I couldn't put it down. I wanted to. But I could not. I loved it.

Writing like this is why:

…They’re going to kill those people, aren't they?

Yes.

Why do they have to do that?

I don’t know.

Are they going to eat them?

I don’t know.

They’re going to eat them, aren't they?

Yes.

And we couldn't help them because then they’d eat us too.

Yes.

Okay.

But then, Jane Austen was like:

“Her grateful and gratified heart could hardly restrain its expressions within the language of tolerable calmness.”

As soon as I read that sentence – which is from Northanger Abbey, the book  I started after The Road – I knew.

The different writing styles did two things alike: they each joined in to and became part of their stories. And they did so by creating the emotions of each scene in which they had been placed.

In fact – and this was what I learned – their writing styles became intimate with their respective places in their narratives. They drove their narratives. They did not just record them.

McCarthy’s setting is simply the end of the known world. That’s all. The earth had finally been burned to some kind of dystopian crisp, leaving a boy and his father to fend for themselves in a world returned to primeval savagery.

Austen’s scene is set among the privileged lives of the comfortable, socially well placed  of England’s Nineteenth Century (a world Austen parodies and plays with elegantly, by the way).

After getting over my shock in moving from McCarthy’s bleak smoking planet to Austen’s lavish social niceties, the different writing styles began to appeal to my sometimes dense sensibilities.

But the writers’ styles did more than make sense. They improved their respective narratives by writing to their scenes rather than simply describing them.

Straight-up, preferably impartial descriptive journalism was the rule of my early writing.

No wonder it fell so flat in my first tries at contemporary fiction. 

Why we need evergreens

HOW EVERGREENS

HELP US GET THROUGH

THE WINTER

Just a little red tricycle?

The low angle of the January sun reflected brightly on the little girl’s red tricycle. Gleefully she rode it as her mother walked beside her. They had just left a large Goodwill store.

I was driving by and just happened to notice. Traffic was light, and I quickly took in the scene.

The girl, perhaps three or four, was just beaming; her whole face shown with happiness. Mom,  carrying a load of clothes, wore a meek and gentle smile. But it revealed stress lines. They were headed to mom’s car, a Honda Civic that had seen better days.

The tableau touched me deeply, for I could see a possible story there. I imagined Mom might be a single parent. Perhaps medical bills, or needed car repairs had meant Santa would be late this year. This was the child’s Christmas. And I remembered a Christmas many years before when I was a single parent, too. I had lost a good job just before school started that year. I connected, for I had been there.

As I drove on, I prayed for mom and daughter. Whether they really were as I had imagined seemed beside the point, because prayer never hurts. We were well past Christmas. It was now the season of Epiphany. As I considered that, I remember how Mary, the mother of Jesus, had “treasured” things and “pondered them in her heart.” And now amazing things were happening. Mysterious men of the East followed a star. Angels sang in heavenly chorus. I pictured Jesus coming up from the baptismal water as the very heavens opened above him. The drama was afoot.

And so it was that cold winter day: not millennial drama, just a small scene played out on a suburban parking lot while its message nurtured an eternal truth. We sometimes may feel abandoned, lost, with little hope. Then one day, the truth sets us free. Epiphany is made personal.

So that’s what I prayed for the woman and her daughter. And a bright red tricycle became more than met the eye.

(WRITER’S NOTE – This was originally published on Jan. 7 a year ago in The Spirit, the weekly newsletter of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, Va. It seems just as timely now as we near the close of the season of Epiphany. 

BOOK REVIEW: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

When I finished it, I realized I had no words to describe it … none that were adequate, anyway. But I shall never forget it.

Instead of words, I felt full of emotions. Words just did not work. I cannot explain The Road. You must do that for yourself. And you may discover that if you have never loved truly, you shall.

***

Will to live. Incredible tenacity. Resourcefulness beyond belief. Whatever the cost. And love.

The world, as we knew it, is no more. It is an ashen waste of some un-Godly holocaust.

A man and his young son are left. And they must move forward, to the south. And warmth. They hope.

At times. I had to make myself pick it up to continue. But I could not resist.

The pull of its narrative, and McCarthy’s post-dystopian style – maybe the makeup of  modern literature’s new best ever, we may one day say – captivated me and would not let go.

I’ve never felt that way about a book before.

You will see. You will see. 

Honor and 'Deflategate'

Many colleges and universities here in my native Virginia have codes of honor, most dating back many years and shining with that special patina of respect we in the Old Dominion reserve for the best of our traditions.

Absolute understanding of and respect for the Honor Code at my school was the first priority of freshman orientation in my day. So perhaps you can appreciate my astonishment about half-way through my first semester to awaken one morning to the news that several uppclassmen were no longer with us. They had been present the day before. And now they were not.

Well into the night before, the student-run Honor Council had found them guilty of honors violations. And now they were gone. I had known two of them for years. They had been like big brothers to me. I was very sad for them.

But it made the concept of honor very real to me.

And today in the world around us that same concept seems under siege.

Lying, cheating, and stealing seem to have slithered into many of our institutions, both at home and abroad.  

I first started thinking about this several years ago when I read Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy of Fools, a devastatingly honest book about the criminal behavior at that once-paragon of American business – Enron. How else could that have happened without a certain sense of permissiveness, a sort-of winking, nodding, and foot-shuffling among people who deep down inside probably knew better?

And this morning when I picked up my newspaper I saw a Page One story that felt like a little foot-shuffling going on in an unlikely venue.

“Tech to give its athletes stipend for attendance,” the lead headline read.

Right way an alarm went off…and it got louder by the time I got to the Sports Pages where I learned that other prominent state institutions of higher learning were thinking about the same thing.

The alarm sounded this way to me: the professionalizing of big-time college athletics has let the camel’s snout get under the tent flap.

College athletics are incubators for the talent driving professional sports. And things have gotten awfully cozy over the years. This stipend business seems to bring the noose full circle. And since when are those stipends fair when we consider the great majority of students who will be denied comparable goodies?

It’s alarming too because money brings compromise, temptation, and worse to an aspect of higher education that’s shown its bad side many times. Anybody notice what’s been going on at UNC recently?

And if you’re a taxpayer, you need to understand that the Tech program alone referred to in the Times-Dispatch story (which you can read by link here) is going to cost $900,000. Where do you think that’s going to come from?

I think it’s high time we drew a line in the sand and sent the camel packing. Because with the  professionalizing of big-time college athletics, can the supercilious mummery of “Deflategate” be far behind?

(Click here to read about "Deflategate.")

Contrasts

In the news…

LBJ gets short shrift in the new movie, Selma.

Why am I not surprised?

The headline says: “Hollywood takes history into its own hands.” The review is an op-ed piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch the other day. You can read it here. But the gist of it is that the president who “did more to bring about social equality than any President since Lincoln … had feet of clay;” and the real work of Selma’s legacy was done without the sitting President’s help.

Hmmm. I always think of Dr. Martin Luther King front and center facing off with frowning white guys with weapons. So where was LBJ?

Maybe the truth is in an attendant editorial cartoon showing a couple looking at a poster for Selma, the flick, with a caption reading: “It’s the original ‘I can’t breathe’.”

*

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the news we learn that in Richmond homeless folk are to be barred from under a new bridge by a $53,000 chunk out of the taxpayers’ hides for a high-tech fence. 

And the bridge is not that big.

But to hear the comments of various poohbahs interviewed for the story by the ‘paper, the tone is as if the homeless do not exist You may read the whole thing for yourself here.

What’s really going on is painfully evident to we the peeps – our “leaders” are dancing on the heads of pins while they are nowhere close to being angels.

*

So are Richmond’s homeless just as invisible as the shades of the poor slaves who suffered mightily and were buried on or near a plot other poohbahs want for a baseball park?

And it’s a baseball park that some say will never attract the fans that have turned out for the sport since my grandfather’s generation – Mooer’s Field, which was followed by Parker Field, and now The Diamond – all in the same general area just off an Interstate highway.

*

Meanwhile, your humble scrivener was rescued from all that folderol’s angst while “Adjudicating” at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School Literary Arts division where his faith in humankind’s ability to deal with the world thrived surrounded by grace, humor, and budding  literary talent.

I speak, of course, of the several dozen eighth graders  from throughout the counties, cities, and towns of Central Virginia in the admission’s process for one of the region’s best secondary schools.

Absent was the denial, posturing, and all-too-transparent façade of adults leading the charge for a fence to keep homeless people from their age-old custom of sleeping under bridges…

I was like – if not THERE, then WHERE? Fifty-three large would make a pretty good down-payment on a homeless shelter, but a fence? Come on.

… and the ducking, bobbing and weaving of poohbahs defending the indefensible – suburbanites’ hootin’, hollerin’, and drinking gallons of celebratory milkshake cups of beer in a place that should be preserved, protected, and reverenced as a place of remembrance for what some would rather forget.

Child's Play?

Over several years during the 1990’s, I participated in a half dozen short-term missions, including four to the  Mexican city of Reynosa.

Located along the Rio Bravo (which is called the Rio Grande in the U.S.) opposite McAllen, Texas, Reynosa by then had become a magnet for people migrating from the country’s interior seeking better lives.To accommodate the influx of thousands, the government made available large tracts of bare, semi-arid abandoned land for the migrants. The tracts became shanty towns.

It was in one of those – home to some 25,000 people living without any utilities including running water – that our mission work centered.

We did what we could – working with local church partners that our sponsoring organization had arranged. The work was typical -- building, teaching, working with children and on two occasions providing medical and dental clinics, all the while working in high heat and humidity along an inhospitable  landscape of constant dust, scraggly desert plants and the occasional rattlesnake. It was bleak, but the people were not. They were uplifting to be with, their faith instructive and palpable even in the face of daunting circumstances. The children particularly were bright and lively, and they were learning English in their schools. So to practice with Norteamericanos, was a real treat.

For us, the work was challenging but enlightening. If you had not thought of poverty in an absolute way, here it was. The real deal.  Pretty unnerving – nearly unbelievable – to those new to our trips.

So as welcome respite, on a couple of evenings we would visit a Christian orphanage in Reynosa. It centered on a traditionally styled three-story baronial home surrounded by ancient cooling trees and plenty of room for  outside recreation for the dozens of children who were there.

They enjoyed having us play soccer or simply encourage them on their swings and see-saws. Meanwhile some tended to gravitate to individuals among us, and that’s how I met a little girl named Erika. Somehow she had learned that I might be able to help her with her English, and I readily agreed. She was about 10 and a very bright and happy child. Erika quickly invented a way to learn the names of each person in our group. She had one of those tablets with a film covering a treated flat background. Using a stylus, she could write or draw on the film and the image would appear. When you pulled the film up, the images disappeared and she could start over. So Erika and I walked around, and I introduced her to each of the 15 members of our group, while she wrote their names on her tablet. When we were finished, she read them to me and pointed out each person. Pretty good for a 10-year-old, I thought.

          On the following night, Erika was excited to show me something, she said. Without the list, she led me around and greeted each of the 15 members of our group…by name. It was a remarkable demonstration.

Later, once the children had gone upstairs to get ready to sleep, three of us gathered for coffee in the cool of the evening under the trees’ canopy.

Our hostess was Elena, a local contact for our trips. She and I had become acquainted through working together on prior missions. We communicated in a working combination of English and Spanish which we called Spanglish…It worked.

 “I want to tell you a story,” Elena said to me that last night.

She recalled a time several years earlier when the city police brought an infant to the orphanage. The baby had been traumatized somehow, and did not speak or smile or make eye contact, Elena said. She just ate sparsely and slept. So Elena and a friend of hers agreed to pray twice a day with the baby. Days became weeks. And still the child did not respond. Doctors even said she might not ever. But Elena and her friend did not give up. They knew better …  and kept praying and holding and loving the little one, believing that God would heal her.

The day finally came when the baby girl made eye contact and smiled at the women. The child  began to get well, to come back to herself.

As I listened, I wondered where all this was going. And just then Elena said she had noticed what my bright little friend Erika was doing and how happy she was. 

Still I did not see the clues. But what Elena said next opened my eyes:

“La niñita … esta aqui …. Tu estudiante. Tu amiga nueva … She is Erika.”

I returned to work the next morning with a spring in my step – the heat and humidity irrelevant – realizing that I had just helped a 10-year-old miracle with her English.