Matchless: A Christmas Story by Gregory Maguire

Matchless: A Christmas Story

by Gregory Maguire

William Morrow, October 2009

     Gregory Maguire is best known, perhaps, for his novel and Broadway hit, Wicked and its sequel, Son of a Witch. Now, he comes before us with Matchless, "An Illumination of Hans Christian Andersen's classic 'The Little Match Girl.'" It is a jewel of a Christmas story, which I plan to read to my grandson.

     However, one must keep in mind comments made by A. S. Byatt (The Children’s Story) at a recent talk at Duke University. She drew a distinction between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and those of Hans Christian Andersen. The Grimm Tales, grim though they may be, come from a tradition of folklore so the reader has a certain expectation that bad things are going to happen. As a result, little angst ensues should a character come to a bad end. Andersen, on the other hand, rewrote tales, deviating from the traditional, so when his characters come to a bad end, such as the little match girl, we are surprised and revolted. Maguire acknowledges this when he writes in a brief afterword that the little girl's "plight has come to seem too bleak for modern audiences."

Both worlds are encompassed in this four-part tale that centers on that sad girl with the matches. Frederik and his mother live on "an island so far north that it snowed from September to April." She is a seamstress to the Queen, a heavy-footed lummox who is always stepping on her hem and requiring a stitch. Despite her work for the Queen, mother and son are poor, down to their last bit of tea, and nearly out of matches. In the second section we meet the match girl who loses first one shoe then the other, which is picked up by Frederick. Freezing to death (This gives nothing away; who among us does not know the story.), she lights her supply of candles one by one. They light her way to the welcoming arms of her mother who is in Heaven. Back home, Frederik finds a key in the shoe and that leads him and his mother to the little girl's father and two baby sisters.

     Maguire's twist is that all ends well. The metaphor of being "matchless" fits the story on 3 separate levels. Because they are running out of matches, Frederik and his mother look for them. The little girl dies because she loses her shoes and runs out of matches. Because of these two related actions, Frederik finds a shoe that contains a key with a name that leads him and his mother to the little girl's father.

     This is a delightful little story of matchless loss and love, a story that is sure to become a Christmas tradition in many households. It was written for National Public Radio, part of a series of stories composed each year with a Christmas theme. It was designed to be read aloud, premiering Christmas Day 2008, on "All Things Considered" and read by Maguire. Maguire closes by noting, "I hope to honor the original by finding a way to return to the story a sense of the transcendent apprehended by many nineteenth-century readers, children and adults alike." This he has done marvelously.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/matchless.htm

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

Random House, October 2009

     Once again John Irving has fluently demonstrated his considerable literary merits and superb story-telling ability. Drawing on the lives of an unforgettable cast of characters, he has given us first an entertaining history of logging in the wilds of New Hampshire in the early 1950s, a subject that is to recur throughout the novel, and a remarkable description of the emergence of a writer. Combine these elements with his characters and the reader will immediately be drawn into another not-to-be-missed novel.

     Angel Pope, a young Canadian from Toronto, dies in a logging accident in the first paragraph. This death will affect and haunt the central characters for the next 50 years, including Dominic Baciagalupo, a 30-year old widower, and cook in Twisted River, a remote logging camp. He is raising Daniel, his 12-year old son, just upriver from Dead Woman Dam, the spot where Daniel's mother's drowned body was found. It is a world inhabited by grotesques. Ketchum, who is in love/lust with Six-Pack Pam (her limit when she drinks), and Injun Jane, who lives with the abusive Constable Carl (who shoots first and is insanely jealous) but loves Dominic, both help in raising Daniel.     Daniel's burgeoning sexuality and the sexual angst exhibited by these characters provide a recurring theme throughout the book. It is the relationships among these five adults that lead to the accident the last night in Twisted River. A 300-pound woman is mistaken for a bear and an 8-inch frying pan figures in the accident.

     That accident, the central conflict it creates, and their solution will follow Dominic and Daniel from 1954 to 2005. The story leaps forward in increments - 13, 16, 17, 1, and 4 years. In each jump forward, Irving skillfully fills in the salient events of the intervening years. In one paragraph, he can move us from the present into the past and back to the present so seamlessly there is never a question of where the characters are in time and the reader never feels a sense of disorientation. As Danny grows up to be a published writer, his novels tell us his version of stories heard earlier, stories that revolve around and evolve from that last night yet still tinged with the logging accident that set events into motion. Dominic says that "Daniel's fiction was both autobiographical and not autobiographical at the same time."

     There are elements of the "autobiographical and not autobiographical" in this novel. In a recent conversation with Canada AM's Seamus O'Regan at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, he noted that this novel had haunted him for 20 years, and that many elements were lifted from his life. However, he said, do not read this as autobiography. ""What I think is more revealing is the things I write about that hasn't happened to me. Boy, do I write about them a lot."

     Last Night in Twisted River is, in Irving's words, an "old-fashioned, plot-driven novel. Hawthorne and Melville are my ancestors... my models of the form." This novel demonstrates that over a career that has spanned 40 years Irving still has the ability to meet the challenge of his reputation as a brilliant story teller. Since Setting Free the Bears in 1968, he has published 11 novels, won a National Book Award for The World According to Garp, been inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, and won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/twisted-river.htm

The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Little, Brown & Company, January 2010

     Tim Farnsworth has it all – a partnership at a successful Manhattan law firm, a spacious house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife and teenage daughter. It would seem an idyllic life, were it not for the inexplicable malady afflicting him. In short, Tim is compelled to walk.

     The urge strikes suddenly, unpredictably. Tim is unable to resist as his body carries him away from his home, his office, his life – far away, until the episode runs its course and Tim, exhausted from the pedestrian miles, collapses. Tim spends much of his life in remission from the unnamed disease of the novel’s title, but when the walking fits take hold, they linger for months at a time and wreak havoc on Tim’s career and family, threatening to tear his happy life asunder.

The Unnamed is a positively engrossing novel – a page turner utterly dissimilar from Joshua Ferris’ 2007 debut, Then We Came to the End. In that book, Ferris plied his considerable talents with dialogue and character to tell a story about office life, corporate cubicle culture. In The Unnamed, these same skills are employed in rendering what is at once a story of love and family and a thoughtful reflection upon the duality of human nature and the fleeting nature of life’s precious moments.

     This story of one family’s slow unraveling is heartbreaking, more so because Ferris, within the span of a few chapters, shapes these individuals as deep and sympathetic characters. You know them, you like them, and now you’re held in rapt attention at their downward spiral.

Ferris is a powerful wordsmith, and his prose is a pleasure to read. The Unnamed is not without its faults, however. There are matters of plot that never quite get resolved, and at times the needle of narration seems to jump its groove. Ferris loses direction toward the novel’s end, wandering much in the way his protagonist does, but by this point I was already well hooked into story and character, and I let the marvelous descriptions and elegant turns of phrase carry me to the book’s conclusion.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/the-unnamed.htm

The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw

Henry Holt, January 2009

   It’s not revealing too much to say that Ali Shaw’s magical debut novel, The Girl With Glass Feet concerns a young woman who faces what is indeed a most unusual malady. Ida Maclaird has come to the icy archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land seeking a man – one she’d met while on vacation in the mysterious islands six months back, before the glass. This man, Henry Fuwa – part Japanese, all recluse - had spoken to Ida of strange phenomena, of tiny moth-winged cattle, of a beast who can turn another living thing white with a glance, and of glass bodies hidden in a St. Hauda’s Land marsh.
   In her quest for Fuwa, Ida finds instead Midas Crook, a St. Hauda’s Land native, the victim of a loveless childhood and extreme self-consciousness. Midas awkwardly keeps the intimidating world at bay with his camera, for it is only through the filter of photography that he is able to interact with his environment. In fact, it is while chasing light with camera in hand through his home’s dense forests that Midas literally stumbles upon Ida, her feet swaddled in layers of socks within huge policeman's boots:

"She looked like she'd stepped through the screen of a 1950s movie. Her skin and blond hair were such pale shades they looked monochrome...Her irises were titanium gray, her most striking feature. Her lips were an afterthought and her cheekbones flat. But her eyes... He realized he was staring into them and quickly looked away."

   Ali Shaw paints his fictional setting in similarly cold Nordic hues, with writing that is rich and lyrical. His characters are hauntingly real, often maddeningly flawed individuals who find themselves more complexly intertwined with each other than even they were aware of. The Girl With Glass Feet is a story of love and transformation that, while not cheerful, is magical - a fantastic debut from this young British author.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/girl-with-glass-feet.htm

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Doubleday, 2009

     Margaret Atwood is famous for dystopic novels, including the Booker Prize-Winning The Handmaid's Tale. Fans of Atwood's won't be disappointed by The Year of the Flood, which explores environmental and Biblical themes. The characters are well developed, and they're a compelling mixture of archaic and futuristic-just like we moderns. The plot follows a religious group called the Gardeners who are waiting for what their scripture calls the Waterless Flood. While they wait, they live simply, following customs from earlier generations; they keep bees, wear top-to-toes (cloaks of a sort), celebrate saints' days, sing hymns, grow their own food (vegetarian), and heal wounds using maggots. However, many of their hymns include modern scientific concepts like DNA and evolution. We learn later in the novel that the Gardeners have been secretly using modern communications systems to keep in touch with other groups across the country. But the overall feeling of the group is of resisting modernity, sometimes to the disgust of its teenage members.

     The Waterless Flood - a disease pandemic - indeed arrives. Most people are killed. Many of the Gardeners we're following survive, thanks to their old-fashioned knowledge. They're forced to interact with the Exfernal World a bit more than they'd like. However, as the novel unfolds, we learn of the many ways they've already been individually interacting with that world, often to their detriment. After the Waterless Flood, some of the Gardeners reunite and share survival stories.

What's remarkable about this novel is Atwood's ability to write a world that feels so very familiar, yet so futuristic, at the same time. It's a joy to read the language describing animals, technology, and places that don't exist but that are still immediately recognizable. Some of the book is set in Scales and Tails, a (shall we call it) gentleman's club, where the dancers wear Biofilm Bodygloves, some of which shimmer with scales. SecretBurger employs wage-slaves. People who come from the Compound say things like "Illness is a design flaw. It could be corrected." CorpSeCorps serves as the police force. Criminals are put into the Painball Pit, where they fight to the death with sprayguns. Women primp at AnooYoo spa.

     The exfernals in this novel have created green rabbits and Mo'Hairs (sheep with long, soft, brightly colored fur). One of the religious groups has created a liobam to hurry the time when the lion will lie down with the lamb. (It's a member of the Peaceable Kingdom list.) But they've also wrecked the earth. They live with the horrors of rape, forced prostitution, and a wide gulf between the haves and have-nots. They're no better off than we are. The Gardeners revere the planet, and the book is framed with Adam One's sermons and the Gardeners' hymns. (A first stanza: "We praise the tiny perfect Moles/That garden underground;/The Ant, the Worm, the Nematode,/Wherever they are found.") But they keep apart from the rest of humanity and find themselves mostly impotent after the Waterless Flood.

     Atwood has a perfect ear for the incongruities and indignities of modern life. She makes everything just strange enough to teach a lesson, without alienating us. The more you know about religion, the more that language will resonate. The more environmental activists you know, the better you'll enjoy the Gardeners' saints' days. But this book is many-layered and can be appreciated on all of its layers: As a novel with rich and deep characters. As a parable. As a heartbreaking tragedy. As a referendum on modern life. It's a worthwhile and important read that longtime Atwood readers and those new to her dystopian worlds are sure to appreciate.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/sciencefictionreviews/fr/year-of-the-flood.htm

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde

Penguin, January 2010

   Jasper Fforde may just be my new favorite author. He makes my job easy and enjoyable and perhaps even entirely unnecessary. You don't actually have to continue reading this review, really. If you are at all disposed to dystopian and decidedly satirical coming-of-age steampunk, with a healthy dose of Monty Pythonesque laughs, you may skip to the end of this page where I recommend getting your hands on a copy of Shades of Grey immediately.

   Things are not as they appear - at least not to Eddie Russett. At 20-years-old, Eddie is a rule-follower in Chromatica, the civilization that has replaced our own some 500 years after a nebulous cataclysmic event took our race out of the picture. Eddie's is a race of people who each perceive color differently and who are ordered into a "colortocracy" based upon these perceptual abilities.

  At the top of the spectrum are the imperious Purples, for whom eggplant and lavender appear in their natural splendor; sea and sky are visible to the Blues, and Green citizens are privy to much of the natural world that appears colorless to Reds, Yellows, and the others. At the bottom of the pecking order are the Greys who see no color and who, though they comprise about a third of the civilization's population, occupy little better than slave status beneath their hued brethren.

Status quo is the modus operandi for the collective's residents. Laws, known simply as "The Rules" were handed down centuries before by Chromatica's founding prophet, Munsell (the very real founder of the Munsell color system), and provide residents with a complete, though often logically absurd, blueprint for behavior. Nonconformity is discouraged and even in the most mundane of circumstances, severely punished, which is how Eddie finds himself shipped off to a backwater burgh as a lesson in humility for his attempt to improve public queuing.

   It is there in East Carmine that Eddie starts to question his heretofore unquestioned adherence to Munsell's precepts, subversive behavior attributable in no small part to his infatuation with Jane, a revolutionary Grey with a cute nose and a sharp left hook. Speaking of hooks, Fforde snags the reader handily in the novel's first paragraph:
   "It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself - I'd hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Carvaggio, and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed in the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient."

And we're never let really off the hook; at the novel's end, Fforde jams a foot in the doorway to keep Shades of Grey from closing completely. Certainly there are answers, but questions and problems remain, enough to bait us for the two books yet to come. Jasper Fforde is very funny - something of a cross between Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams - and his imagination is immense. With its thoroughly entertaining satire and intricately wrought world, Shades of Grey is a pleasure throughout.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/sciencefictionreviews/fr/shades-of-grey.htm

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

Simon & Schuster, February 2009

This is literature.

   Don DeLillo's latest offering, Point Omega, is perhaps the best thing he's written since White Noise, and certainly one of the most thought provoking works that you are likely to read this year. DeLillo has always been a master of weaving seemingly disparate subjects into the same tapestry, but in this weird and haunting tale he has exceeded his own high standard, and achieved a personal best.

   The story follows the experimental filmmaker Jim Finley as he visits Richard Elster at his desert retreat somewhere east of San Diego. Finley is attempting to convince Elster, a former Defense Department advisor, to make a movie about his time with the Department during the second Iraq War. As the two men sit under the stars getting to know each other, the conversation slides easily back and forth between what was really going on in the War Room and what might really be going on with all of us as a species.   Why do we seem to be bent on self-destruction? Why do we seem to repeat the same histories over and over? Why do we ask for advice and then ignore it?

Hours turn into days, and days turn into weeks as the reluctant Elster warms to his guest. When the two of them are eventually joined by Elster's twenty-something daughter Jessica, on vacation from a mysterious relationship, the conversations become even more revealing.

   What makes this book great? Is it the interesting and hard questions that it asks in its brief one hundred and seventeen pages? Somewhat. Is it DeLillo's masterfully compelling and understated prose? Sure - readers cannot help appreciating evocative descriptions like:

   "I flew to San Diego, rented a car and drove east into mountains that seemed to rise out of turns in the road, late summer thunderheads building, and then down through brown hills past rock-slide warnings and leaning clusters of spiny stalks and finally off the paved road and onto a primitive trail, lost for a time in the hazy scrawl of Elster's penciled map."

   Is it the character development? Indisputably. The author says only what needs to be said to paint vivid, sympathetic portraits of his cast, with great emotional effect.
   But what really gives this novel permanent value is its excellence of form. The story in the desert, which makes up the vast majority of the book, is framed by two short chapters involving an art installation and a fourth, more mysterious character's reaction to it. The way that DeLillo relates this character's realizations in the art exhibit to the realizations of the characters in the main plot is ingenious, and completely changes the meaning and timbre of the novel itself.

Like a great movie, Point Omega must be viewed twice; not because the first try fails to satisfy, but because the second does so even more. At the end of the first reading readers will likely find themselves completely surprised and staring off into space while their minds cast about, grasping for yet deeper and deeper meaning. Upon reading the story over again from the beginning, they will find themselves astounded by the artistry and aplomb with which these two inextricably interwoven tales are told. Themes and ideas reflect back on themselves like a hall of mirrors, leaving readers unable to escape sometimes frightening conclusions about themselves and the world in which they live.
   Everything about the telling of this story makes it better. The title makes it better. The artwork on the dust jacket makes it better. The acknowledgements make it better. Nothing in this works seems to be haphazard; nothing here seems to happen by mistake - which is difficult to accomplish without sounding the least bit contrived.
   Once in a while you read a book that reminds you how good writing can be, and what a difference there is between well-crafted, thoughtful and provocative art, and just plain old pulp fiction. This is literature.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/point-omega.htm