The Bride of Science (subtitled: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter) is a biography of Ada Lovelace, an early 19th-century woman renowned for her mathematical ability and her friendship with Charles Babbage, creator of a very early version of the computer.  She was, of course, even better known as the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron — although Ada never knew her father, because her mother left him shortly after she was born and allowed no contact between Ada and Byron for the few short years between then and his death.

Author Woolley structures his biography of Ada around the nineteenth-century tension between “Romance” and “Reason,” which he sees as being embodied in Ada’s parents and, to some degree, within two sides of Ada’s own personality. This overriding concept sometimes strains the fabric of the story, as Woolley seems to be trying too hard to bring out the Romance/Reason parallels.

Generally, this is a competent though not terrible exciting biography of an intriguing woman.  Like so many biographies of women in earlier centuries, the main emotion The Bride of
Science leaves the reader with is regret — regret for another woman’s exceptional talents wasted by the narrow-minded society patriarchal society in which she lived, which never gave her the education or opportunity to develop those talents to the fullest.

Awhile back I reviewed Alison Weir’s Innocent Traitor, the first product of a noted biographer who has made the leap to historical fiction.  Having written nonfiction about the Tudors for many years, Weir now allows her imagination free play as she roams about inside the minds and lives of the members of that famous and mostly ill-fated family.

Elizabeth, of course, was the least ill-fated of them all — she eventually succeeded her father, brother and sister to the throne and ruled England wisely and well for many years.  The Lady Elizabeth is a scrupulously accurate but also vividly fictionalized portrait of her early years, up to the moment of her accession to the throne.  While there’s nothing new or startling here either from a literary or a historical viewpoint, this is a very readable and informative historical novel, and I will probably read everything else Alison Weir publishes if she continues in this vein.

Gilead is a completely strange and lovely book.  It’s the sort of novel that shouldn’t work, on so many levels, and yet it does.  Brilliantly.  Which just goes to show that a truly gifted author can break every rule and create something utterly compelling.

It’s a slow story.  There’s no strong plotline to pull you along, only the gentle, rambling voice of a sick old man, writing down a memoir of his life for the young son he won’t see grow to manhood.  The old man is John Ames, a Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town in the 1950s.  He is the namesake of a much better-known preacher, his fiery and sometimes violent abolitionist grandfather. As Ames’ life story unfolds in a stream-of-consciousness, not-always-chronological series of stories, we discover that the legacy of the first John Ames has been both a blessing and a burden to the narrator as well as to his own father.

This is very much a story about fathers and sons, about legacy and heritage.  John Ames’ recounting of his own life story and that of his father and grandfather — spanning the US Civil War, drought, the First World War, the Spanish Influenza, Depression and eventually the Second World War — is interspersed with scenes from his present life with the much younger wife he married late in life and the small son she has given him.  Also threaded into this tale are Ames’ oldest and best friend, Boughton, and his son, John Ames’s namesake, who has been a source of trouble all his life and has now reappeared to disturb the dying days of both his father and his father’s old friend.

And that’s really all there is for plot here.  This is a character-driven story held together by one thing — the quiet, compelling voice of the narrator, a man who, unlike his grandfather, has never seen a vision of God, but has seen God every day of his life through the world and the people around him and the deep love and joy he finds in those people and that world.

Anyone who thinks that you have to shy away from the subject of religion in literary fiction needs to read Gilead.  In the course of reflecting on his life and his present situation, Ames explores some very deep avenues of theology and spirituality. The book is unabashedly Christian yet soars so far above what’s normally packaged as “Christian fiction” that it makes me want to cry.  Why can’t the most brilliant and lovely language be used to develop the most important of all themes? In this book, that’s exactly what happens.

Gilead is a slow, gentle, thoughtful book with a powerful message — that the presence of God is found just as much in the beauty of an ordinary day and the touch of another human hand as in any blazing road-to-Damascus vision. If you pick this book up and find it a slow start, press on — it will reward you.  I read it twice through before returning it to the library and plan to buy my own copy so I can read it again.

I read each of these books in a day (that’s two days for the both of them, if math’s not your strong point). I think I may have mentioned before that I have a weakness for memoirs about addiction and recovery, but this father-and-son set of books were, in their way, even more compelling than A Million Little Pieces (and probably more accurate. At least David’s and Nic’s stories agreed with each other).

David Sheff’s book, Beautiful Boy, is the more original and better-written of the two. It’s the most honest and complete look I’ve ever read at what it’s like to have an addict in the family — worse, to be the parent of a smart, talented, beautiful boy who becomes a drug addict in his teens.

David Sheff takes readers through the whole heartbreaking story, from Nic’s early childhood, through his junior-high experimentation with alcohol and marijuana, to his descent into the hell of crystal meth addiction. His father, and indeed the whole family, descends into hell along with him, as Nic’s addiction and his numerous attempts at recovery consume the family’s time, emotional energy, and resources.

Nic Sheff’s own account of those same years was released soon after his dad’s. Tweak is written with the raw honesty of a gifted writer who’s still quite young and very close, both in time and emotionally, to the events he narrates. Tweak lacks the polish of Beautiful Boy, but is just as difficult to put down. The book covers a period of abut two years (with occasional flashbacks into Nic’s earlier life) during which he relapses, then stops using, is clean for awhile, relapses again and goes through rehab (for the fourth or fifth time). The book ends with its author clean, sober and hopeful — but very much aware of the daily struggle of staying in recovery.

I loved both books, but reading them together was really instructive and I’d recommend both to anyone with an addict in the family (as well as those who, like me, work with young people with addictions). What’s striking about the two accounts side-by-side is that Nic’s and David’s accounts of their common life — the time they spent together, their relationship as father and son — agree on most points; there’s no striking discontinuity here. But in Beautiful Boy, it’s so clear that Nic’s addiction is the ONE central, driving force in their family life for all those years — a consuming obsession that swallows up everything else in David’s mind. Whereas in Tweak, Nic is concerned about his relationship with the family, especially his dad, but it’s just one of the many relationships on the periphery of his life — there are also girlfriends, friends, his twelve-step sponsor, and others — all orbiting the absolutely central fact of his addiction.

The contrast really helps you appreciate how co-dependency can absorb all your energy, and how absolutely essential it is for families and friends of an addict to try to set some boundaries to save their own sanity. It’s crushing, near the end of Tweak, when Nic realizes that neither of his divorced parents, both of whom love him very much, wants him to live in the same city they do after he leaves rehab. That might seem unkind or cold if you haven’t just read Beautiful Boy and appreciated the toll Nic’s addiction took on the family.

The sections in Tweak where Nic is using do have that tedium often associated with addiction memoirs — “and then I did a hit of this, and I took some of that, and I bought some of this from a dealer, and I took some of that, and I passed out,” etc etc etc — but his writing, though sometimes naive, is interesting enough to carry the reader through the boredom. And he never glamorizes drug use or makes it look appealing.

Nic Sheff, who’s still only about 23 or so and appears to have been clean for about a year or more since his latest bout in rehab, is clearly not only a “beautiful boy” to his father, but one of what I sometimes refer to as the “beautiful young men” — bright, charming boys in their late teens and 20s, struggling with addictions and mental illness and a dozen other issues, for whom I always feel such a strong affinity and a desire to help. I’m surrounded by them at work and having read these two books I feel much the same towards Nic as I do towards them — the books were that compelling and personal. I wish Nic all the best and pray that he stays clean and has a beautiful life. And I highly recommend both Tweak and Beautiful Boy.

I picked this one up in a bookstore awhile ago and was fascinated with the concept, though not enough to lay down actual money for it — I waited till it came to my library.  It’s a memoir about how writer and film critic David Gilmour allowed his teenaged son Jesse to drop out of school with only one condition: that he and his father sit down and watch three movies together — selected by Dad — every week.

Gilmour’s premise, I guess, was that his son would get an education through film.  Or maybe it was just that watching good movies together would keep their relationship alive during those difficult years.  That second part seems to have worked — the film club lasted for three years, during which David and Jesse Gilmour appear to have been surprisingly close for a 16-19 year old son and his father.

Gilmour admits to being less sure how much of an education his son got from watching all those movies — he got an excellent education in film studies, of course, but everything else was a bit sketchy.  What he did get was an opening to talk to his dad about almost everything, because everything comes up in the movies.

I guess because I’m the parent of one brilliant child who claims to hate school (and one brilliant child who loves it, but that’s less relevant here) I’ve given a lot of thought to possible ways of dealing with school-resistance in later years, and to unorthodox methods of education — though I can’t imagine ever adopting something quite THIS unorthodox.  The Film Club doesn’t really offer anything to answer my pedagogical or parenting questions, though — it’s a very personal memoir, about a three-year period in the life of a father and his son.  It’s warm and very readable — though there is perhaps a little too much information about Jesse’s love life, and I found myself hoping that the girls he dated had either signed release forms, or had been very heavily disguised before appearing in the book!

Oh dear. What can I say?

You all remember James Frey, right? He wrote a hugely successful memoir about his experiences with addiction and recovery which I, along with millions of other people, devoured and found fascinating. I reviewed and commented upon it on my old blog, but strangely, it wasn’t till this woman named Oprah Winfrey read it that it really caught on.

So once James had been on Oprah and she was all lovin’ him up, some people started to investigate some of the claims James Frey made in A Million LIttle PIeces and its sequel, My Friend Leonard, and found that not every single thing was exactly true.  Now, you can say that memoir is all about a person’s subjective memory of an experience, and James did indeed try to claim that, but it’s hard to convince people that you really remember spending three months in jail when in fact you didn’t do jail time at all.

So James Frey had to admit he lied about a bunch of stuff, and Oprah was mean to him, and I was pretty amazed he didn’t start drinking again the minute he left her studio because wow, people said nasty things.  But then, he did MAKE STUFF UP AND CALL IT A MEMOIR.  Bad move there, James.  Should’ve called it a novel “loosely based on a true story.”  I still think Million Little Pieces is a great book.  It’s just … mislabelled.

Bright Shiny Morning, James Frey’s literary comeback, is mislabelled too. But it’s … not a great book.

This one claims to be a novel, and Frey has certainly learned his lesson, because there’s a disclaimer at the front saying that nothing in this book should be considered accurate in any way.  OK, so it’s not nonfiction — but it’s also not really a novel, not in any sense I recognize.

Bright Shiny Morning is a book about the city of Los Angeles.  It seems to me to be filled with a lot of interesting snippets of local colour, but I’ve read some reviews by people from Los Angeles who feel like it’s a rather superficial outsider’s caricature of the city — I guess kind of like Newfoundlanders feel about The Shipping News. 

There are four main storylines in Bright Shiny Morning — four separate and unrelated groups of characters whose stories never intersect at any point.  In between episodes in each of these stories are other, shorter stories, complete in themselves, about even more unrelated characters.  Also punctuating the book are short essays, some serious and some tongue-in-cheek, about the city of Los Angeles, and lists of random facts about the city.  And this is all tied together by — well, the binding of the book, and the fact that it all happens in LA.  That’s it.

None of the four main stories is strong enough on its own to be called a novella or a long short story.  Each is fairly predictable and cliched, though all have some fine moments.  James Frey really can write — but he sure can’t edit, or structure anything.  His characters often have strong dialogue (though he is one of the most egregious transgressors I have ever seen in the too-cool-to-use-quotation-marks category, and uses one of the most annoying devices for attributing dialogue that I’ve ever seen in this exquisitely annoying category).

The occasional fine moments (which did keep me turning pages, though with lower and lower expectations as the book went on) aren’t nearly enough to excuse the formlessness of the book or the aimlessness of the four main stories.  Some of the kinder reviewers of this book have compared it to the work of greater writers, including Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  I guess that’s based on Steinbeck’s habit of inserting essays about the broader state of American culture and economy at the time, in between the chapters of his story.  But as I recall (it’s been awhile since I read GoW), those essays are always thematically linked to what’s happening to the Joads at the time, and there’s this single strong, powerful storyline pulling you along through it all.  Frey has none of that.  He has an untidy collection of pieces of writing about Los Angeles, some stories and some essays, of very uneven quality, thrown together and labelled as a novel.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, of course.  After all the excoriating of James Frey that was done by Oprah and others, the end result was to get his name far better-known than it would have been if there’d never been a scandal.  Bright Shiny Morning is currently #158 on Amazon’s bestseller list, and I’m pretty sure the publisher who accepted it knew it would sell well in the wake of the controversy.  There is no way a “novel” this sloppy and poorly put together — regardless of its occasional moments of brilliance — would have even been LOOKED at if it were submitted by a new or relatively unknown author. And maybe, as someone who’s still struggling with getting manuscripts accepted by publishers, maybe that’s what I resent most.  As an “unknown” you have to work so hard to polish your work, to make sure every piece fits and sparkles and shines.  And then someone who has James Frey’s brilliance and writing ability comes along and misuses it in this cavalier fashion, and his book’s a bestseller because everybody knows his name. 

I wanted to like this so much, I really did, because after all the controversy I still love A Million Little Pieces and I still admire and respect James Frey in many ways.  This book was a page-turner and it held my interest, but if Frey’s goal is still to be the greatest writer of his generation, he’s got a long ways to go.

Sue Miller is one of those writers you can trust.  I’m hard-pressed to think of any author, except Anne Tyler, with whom I can feel more confident that when I pick up a novel I am going to get a good, well-written story with some thoughtful insight into character. 

The Senator’s Wife alternates between the perspective of two women: Delia, the title character, whose long marriage to a U.S. Senator has been marked by sexual infidelity (on the senator’s part) but a kind of emotional fidelity: the two have been separated for years but have never really stopped thinking of themselves as married to each other, and they maintain a kind of connection even in their estrangement.  Delia’s new next-door neighbour, Meri, is a young woman, recently married and feeling out of her depth in her marriage and in the social circles her new husband has moved her into.  Meri’s friendship with the older woman next door provides a source of strength and insight as she moves through her first pregnancy, the birth of her child, and months of post-partum depression.

But nothing is as simple as it seems — in a Sue Miller novel, or in life.  Meri’s and Delia’s friendship, and the uneasy truce between Delia and her charming, cheating husband Tom, are both changed irrevocably when Tom suffers a stroke and Delia appoints herself as his caregiver. Can a marriage that has survived as much as Delia’s and Tom’s finally come to a breaking point — and if so, what will cause it to break? Meanwhile, what about the marriage next door — Meri’s and Nathan’s attempt to forge a mutual life despite their differences? Everything comes to a climax in a shattering scene in which Meri makes a decision that, years later, she’s still able to justify what she did.  I thought her action was totally inappropriate, and yet I still sympathized with her as a character — which I think is a tribute to how real the author has managed to make Meri.  Like a friend in real life, you might disapprove of what she does yet still care about her.

I was disappointed that the epilogue gave me a glimpse into Meri’s future life from her point of view but not into Delia’s — I wanted her perspective on the events of the story to balance Meri’s.  But that was my only quibble about a thoroughly well-written and enjoyable novel.

So after I read The Turning, I said I wanted to read a novel by Tim Winton. I picked Dirt Music mainly because it was such a great title.  It’s a story set in Western Australia, about an unlikely liason between two people who are both at the end of their rope in one way or another.  Georgie is a woman who seems never to have found her place in life, in the world or even in her own family.  She was a successful nurse, but has left nursing, is living with Jim whom she doesn’t love and who doesn’t love her, and seems to be descending into depression and alcoholism when she meets Luther. 

Luther is a man who did once have a place in the world, living on his family home with his brother, his brother’s wife and their two children, playing “dirt music” in a family band. When Luther’s whole family is killed in a tragic accident, he is cut adrift and unable to re-start his life. Georgie and Luther drift together, but the fact that Georgie’s boyfriend Jim is a powerful man who has every reason to dislike Luther and has the power to destroy him, drives them apart.

Of course, there’s a lot more going on here than just a love story.  The setting — a fishing community in Western Australia, and then various other locations as the characters journey north — is as important here as any of the characters.  It’s one of those novels that really gave me a sense of the foreignness, strangeness and beauty of a faraway place.  My favourite sections of the novel were the ones where Luther is living alone in the wilderness on a remote island; the prose painted a picture both of how gorgeous and how harsh that landscape was.

Of the the two main characters, I was inclined to find Georgie a bit of a whiner (”Pull yourself together, woman!!”) while I liked Luther better and sympathized with him more.  His journey through grief is compelling and believable, and I completely felt what he was going through. I loved the passages in which he was forced to confront the memory of how flawed his lost loved ones really were, so that he is able to remember them rather than his idealized image of them.  I also loved that fact that in those passages, after having been unable to play music since the tragedy, Luther unlocks and confronts those memories when he starts making music again.

I’m still unsure how I felt about the ending of this one, but I thought it was a strong and evocative novel with one of the most moving fictional portrayls of grief that I’ve read in a long time.

Shane Claiborne’s first book, The Irresistible Revolution, was one of the most influential and thought-provoking books I read last year. I wasn’t sure if I would like Jesus for President as much, since from the title and opening pages it seemed very much addressed to a U.S. readership. But Shane’s writing is so eminently readable, and the book was so visually appealing, I couldn’t resist picking it up and giving it a try.

If the goal of Christianity is to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable,” then the mission of Shane Claiborne (and his co-author on this volume, Chris Haw) definitely falls within the latter of those mandates. If you’re a comfortable, middle-class Christian in the western world and you’re not disturbed, troubled or challenged by SOMETHING in this book, then … I don’t know where you’re coming from. From a very different place than I am, I guess.

Although there is a very American focus to the book, its message is relevant to Christians anywhere and everywhere. It can be boiled down to a simple statement: Christians owe their allegiance to God above any earthly country or ruler. I think we can all agree with that, can’t we — even the flag-waving God Bless Americans? The difficulty, of course, is how we apply that belief — what does it really mean to put allegiance to the kingdom of God first? Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw would take that allegiance to some pretty radical extremes — and they’re prepared to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. Me, I’m more in the category of “I agree in theory, but I’m not sure I can change my lifestyle enough to catch up with my theories.” Still, I make more changes than I would if I weren’t challenged by reading people like Shane Claiborne.

Not that there are, as far as I know, really very many people like Shane Claiborne (except possibly Chris Haw). It’s interesting that the message of Jesus for President is very similar to that of Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change. But while McLaren’s book left me thinking, “Yeah? And? Of course this is what I believe, but what’s new here?”, Jesus for President challenged me, excited me, made me see the whole world in a different way. In fact, Jesus for President was the book that made me think “Everything must change!!”

Partly it’s the writing style, and I do have to say the visual appeal of the book was a big part of it too. It’s a beautifully designed book which is a pleasure to look at. The style is similar to the layout of Geez magazine and some other lefty publications — that is to say, it looks like the scrapbook of a brilliant sixth-grader with ADD, and there’s heavy use of Courier New, which is the Official Typeface of the Revolution, apparently. OK, I mock, but it really is attractive and I think adds to the weight of the words themselves. A little humour doesn’t hurt either.

I know I’m never going to be a Christian-retro-hippie living in an inner-city commune sewing my own clothes and getting thrown in jail for protesting pretty much everything — in other words, I’m no Shane Claiborne. But reading his work does make me rethink and re-examine many things about my own life and see what changes I can make, and I’m grateful to him for that.

This book won the Giller Prize this year, and I think (after some reflection) it was deserved, although I’m still overwhelmed that Cloud of Bone, which I think is a better novel than most of the shortlist, wasn’t nominated. But I’ll lay aside my bitterness over that enough to admit that Late Nights on Air is a beautifully written and haunting novel.

Set in Yellowknife in the 1970s, the action of the novel centres around the small local CBC radio station. I’ve never before read a novel set largely in a radio station, and having spent much of my life working or volunteering in a small radio station I enjoyed some of the details of the setting. The technology is of an era I remember — the tedious splicing of reel-to-reel tapes to edit an interview, the use of cart decks for promos and IDs, etc — and I enjoyed those little details that were so well rendered.

The larger setting is the Canadian North, during the time of a national inquiry into whether an oil and gas pipeline should be built across the Arctic — a debate that brings to the fore many questions about environment and the rights of aboriginal people.  The novel’s main characters are all white people, transplanted to the North from various places in Canada and the rest of the world, and are all interested observers of the political issues of the day — as they would be, working in radio.

But the novel is not just about a vast landscape or the huge political issues that affect it, but about very intimate relations between the small group of people who work together in the radio station.  The shifting viewpoints, moving among four or five different characters, and the rather distant and restrained narrative voice, kept me from getting deeply involved in this novel right away.  I enjoyed the setting and the beautiful writing but wasn’t strongly engaged with what was happening in the lives of the characters.  But they crept up on me, and by the time tragedy strikes as four of the characters go on a challenging wilderness canoe trip, I genuinely felt that tragedy.

This book is a slow starter, but it’s a beautiful read and definitely rewards the reader’s persistance.