Month: July 2007

This collection of short stories by Elizabeth Berg shows all her strengths in  vignettes of plain folks of all ages…79 years old Mavis McPherson taking a few days’ retreat in her bathroom to revisit her memories, a home nurse relating to a difficult Aides patient, junior scientist Sarah Harris teaching English to a newly immigrated German grandmother, and other delightful persons.

These brief encounters encourage one to read Berg’s novelettes.  So far I have enjoyed WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE, in which ten-year-old Diana copes with her own conflicting resentment and  love while helping to care for her quadruplegic mother.  Berg captures children’s voices particularly well, I think.  In a compelling subplot, Diana’s astringent housekeeper chooses between loyalty to her employer and flight to save the life of her civil-rights protesting husband in that time when blacks were beaten and killed for efforts to obtain their voting and social rights.

In THE YEAR OF PLEASURES  newly widowed Bostonian Betta Nolan follows her beloved late husband’s encouragement to try out their dream of a house in the MidWest and her own dream of a store full of lovely things for women.  Here poignant moments from the past are skillfully interwoven with the demands of the present in a new environment.

TRUE TO FORM is narrated by a preteen who reluctantly accepts two summer jobs she expects to hate: helping an aging husband care for his stroke-damaged wife and baby-sitting for two obnoxious little boys.  To her surprise she does well at both jobs and comes to empathize  with  all her charges.  In addition she  learns that when one betrays an old friend in the effort to impress new ones, the result can be painful but instructive.

Here is a memoir, no fiction, which compares well with The Gravedigger’s Daughter. Like Rebecca, Jeannette Walls pulls herself up out of an incredibly filthy, abusive and deprived childhood to become a woman of culture, in this case a journalist.

Her parents are not immigrants but 60’s hippies, a brilliant but erratic engineer with complete architectural plans for a solar- maintained glass mansion, and an artist with no time for homemaking or mothering. The conditions are hard scrabble, first camping in western deserts and then barely housed without plumbing or heat and always, always hungry.

Yet Jeannette and her brother and sister save themselves. . She goes to Barnard College. At the end of their lives, despite efforts by their daughters to house them, her feckless parents choose to be homeless and living out of dumpsters in New York City.

Amazingly Jeannette never totally condemns them. There is humor and loyalty and tolerance for their foolishness throughout her history, an experience that would have destroyed most of us.

Joyce Carol Oates’ novel appears to be based in part on the history of her grandmother, daughter of a German math teacher and printer (Lutheran, not Jewish) who with his music loving but emotionally fragile wife and two sons manages to buy their passage out of Germany to escape the Nazis’ persecution of teachers.  The daughter, here called Rebecca Schwart (the misnomer given Joseph at Ellis Island), was born on the cattleboat in New York Harbor in the filthy conditions they somehow survived

The upstate New York town hires Joseph as gravedigger but does not give him enough to live on and the squalid cottage with contaminated water in which they struggle to live is a disgrace, but we see that in their eyes this educated couple seem like ignorant peasants speaking broken English.

Joseph becomes  trapped and broken, finally suicidally manic with delusions of Nazi troopers among the graveyard visitors.  His sons are not able to rise above day labor work.

It is a harsh story which loses some of its forcefulness as the angry. sturdy bodied  Rebecca transforms herself into  delicate, sexy, fastidious and impeccably dressed Hazel Jones (a name she adopts with its own murderous history), mother of a child music prodigy.

But in the final chapters, as she struggles to reconnect with her origins, we see the real Rebecca emerge again.

The American reader must feel a load of guilt, similar to that experienced in Snow Falling on Cedars, at how callously we have treated not only Nazi=fleeing German immigrants and native born Japanese citizens but also at how we still look down on and resist the influx of present day immigrants.

To be cured of any desire to visit the Mediterranean, read Paul Theroux’s account of his lengthy plod around its borders. Following the accounts of authors whose remarks (excepting Joyce) seldom inspire, he boards almost empty ferries and trains or hikes in the offseason and in dismal weather, striking up conversations with strangers who usually warn him to beware of crime and thievery.

Here and there the scent of herbs, a snow-capped mountain, the star-lit surf hint of something worth seeing, but more often cheap overconstruction of vacation accommodations, seedy vendors, and rain, rain, rain predominate.

Actually I could not bear to finish the travelogue.

I am fascinated by Thomas Friedman’s revelations about the worldwide commercial networks and ventures burgeoning daily via internet connections. His title metaphor suggests that time and place differences have been erased or are being used to advantage (Indians working during our night time, etc.)]

Far from alarming us with fears of too much outsourcing, the book is reassuring as it shows the benefits and markets that redound as new enterpreneurs and workers and facilities come online.

What is clear is that the US needs to get the picture out to everyone of how this all works and how to take advantage of it. Then we can take measures to retrain or soften thet transition for workers who must learn new skills….as they always have had to do as the old Industrial Revolution progressed.

The book is an eye opener, a window on how our commercial and cultural world is changing from hour to hour.