Reflections: The Madonnas of Leningrad

It's rare I take the time to savor  a stumbled upon book. With a list of To Be Read that rivals the Eiffel tower in height, I have to be choosy. I was seduced by the vivid cover and compactness of Debra Dean's The Madonnas of Leningrad, and I'm glad for it.

It is not, it must be pointed out, an amazing piece of literature by any common standard. It does, however, offer the quiet pleasure of the picturesque. The story tacks back and forth between the siege of Leningrad and a wedding in Washington state. The reader follows the thoughts and memories of Marina who in her past was a tour guide and art protector at what we now call the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad and who in her present is experiencing the steep downhill of Alzheimer's affliction at her granddaughter's nuptials. What connects the two parts of this woman's life is her relationship to memory.

While suffering from a famine that is killing off the citizens of Leningrad after German bombs wipe out the city's food supply, Marina satisfies her need for pleasure by memorizing what used to be displayed in each room of her  museum before the art was shipped off for safe keeping. She remembers the lush still lifes and the pious Madonnas, the stiff portraits and the international curios. Dean's writing, at its best, conveys the semi-hysterical ecstasy that the starving girl feels in the presence of the imagined art works. Each reconstructed brush stroke really does help Marina dull the pain of frozen digits, dying relatives, and a fiance missing on the front.

In her present-day life, Marina is warm and loved by the long-found fiance (now husband) and their two children. She doesn't ache for memories of artistic beauty to fill other needs. This stage of her life is about the (painful, real, harsh, yet ineffably exhilarating, too) truth that forgetting allows one to see beauty too. Marina can no longer identify with accuracy herself in a mirror or her family members around her. This forgetting enables her to disencumber herself of all associations and to just be in the world, to experience the green of a dappled light as though she never has before.

Madonnas is a book to give yourself over to for an afternoon (and that's all it will take). It will bring you on a sweet and short journey into a different life than the one you lead.

Reflections: Ragtime

Thirty-five years after its publication, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime still speaks to readers. It is on the list of "1001 Books You Must Read Before you Die" and was voted one of Time Magazine's best 100 books of the 20th century. Its tale about the American era between the turn of the century and the nation's entry into WWI weaves together concerns and beliefs very much in the fore of American popular discourse today: immigration, capitalism, race relations, patriotism, the gap between the lifestyles of the very rich and the very poor. The scope feels broad, epic even. And for me, at least, this is the book's downfall. It reads like a writing exercise more than a novel, like Doctorow joined a microfiche exploration with a healthy imagination in search of a a plausible story. It only succeeds to a point, and the weakest sections are those least connected to the section of the story that gives the novel its title. In this strand, a black ragtime musician launches a life- unraveling spree of violence after becoming the victim of a vicious act of racism. This part of Doctorow's story, from start to finish, is fascinating, but it loses force of purpose from the penumbra of other stories that lead the reader to constantly try to connect one character to the next. While I try to discern the narrative importance of a luncheon shared by an investor and Henry Ford, the details that would radicalize a young man with a penchant for weapon design slip past, thus making the denouement hardly credible.

The novel begins with a murder: a wealthy sadist has killed the famous architect lover of his opportunistic wife. We are asked to care about this matter because: a> the sadist sees Houdini escape from a cell and later performs the same trick to free himself; b> the architect happened to design some of the buildings in which the action takes place--including the library of Pierpont Morgan; c> the wife, freed by a gunshot from both men with a claim to her finds herself at liberty to pick up with the younger brother of the family that will take in the illegitimate child of the ragtime musician. In the scope of the true core of the narrative, only the younger brother matters. Murder, wife, capitalist, sadistic husband, architect lover, and famous magician: all to no real end. This opening gambit displays the characteristic inefficiency that steers the novel.

Now, one could argue that to focus on plot and its necessary characters and scenes in such a concentrated manner is to take a very narrow view of the art of the novel and of Ragtime in particular. The appearances of Pierpont and Houdini, however tangential they might seem, paint the background of the extraordinary moment in American history in which the action unrolls. You have the great entrepreneurial spirit of Pierpont, with his unparalleled commercial success in all manner of capital ventures. His embarrassment of riches and lack of intellectual competition send him on a spiritual journey to fill his time and his desire for something to truly matter. Boo capitalism. Likewise Houdini seeks the extraordinary (like learning to fly a bi-plane) because these decades are rife with possibility, with arctic adventures and new inventions. But these stories are not presented as background information. In terms of space and depth, the stories of Pierpont and Houdini receive just as much attention as those of anyone else--including the ragtime musician, thus creating a Picasso-esque distortion of perspective.

In short, the novel seems to lack a core, both of focus and of point of view. And while we may take pleasure in the snappy dialogue of Emma Goldman or the plucky spirit of the system-bucking immigrant Tateh, the value of Ragtime as a whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

Reflections: The Help

There is something about Kathryn Stockett's The Help. This novel about the entanglement of racism and the expectations for cultured white women in the American South circa the mid twentieth-century has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for 62 weeks and counting. One cannot avoid an at least osmotic awareness of the title as it pops up so frequently in conversation and in the hands of strap-hangars.

Readers find Stockett's story attractive for its easy narrative style. Events are told from different perspectives as is needful in a segregated society, each side filling in details missed or differently experienced.  The physically awkward and intellectually ambitious Ms. Skeeter Phelan fills the heroine role. She is a white woman raised by a black nurse who risks her social status to write the untold story of the black domestics who work for the women in her town. She is easy for the modern, liberal reader to identify with as she seems the only white character to have anything like an identifiable relationship to the extent of the problems caused by the oppression of an entire segment of the population. Perhaps identification is too easy; Skeeter and her subjects only flirt with the real dangers posed by the civil rights movement--dangers barely engaged with by the book--thereby allowing the real circumstances experienced by black Americans and their active sympathizers to be rendered aesthetic and anodyne. Those concerns aside, there is no denying that Skeeter is a compelling character, fully realized and lovable. She is more than just a Junior League crusader: she is a devoted but put upon daughter, a reader, a woman recognizing the gap education can create between a young adult's past and future associates.

The other main voices of the novel are two domestics, Minnie and Aibileen. Each feels the injustice of circumstances, and each embodies a different response to it. Minnie gets her licks where she can, refusing to tolerate anything beyond a defined baseline of humiliation from her white employers. Pushed, she verbally lashes out, which often ends in her termination and leads to more violent than average beatings from her alcoholic husband. Her saving grace on the job market is her extraordinary culinary ability. Minnie's friend Aibileen responds to the entrenched habits of a racist town and country more meekly, believing that adults who've been raised to see a qualitative difference between black and white will never see beyond those divisions. Her tack is to influence her employer's children, teaching them that skin color provides little in the way of character insight. The stories of Minnie and Aibileen, like that of Skeeter, succeed at gripping the reader. They are told in dialect--a risky move for Stockett and one that initially raised my politically correct hackles--but that does nothing but communicate the shifted perspective and remind the reader how distinct the cultures of the black and white members of the area have become because of their historical separation.

Stockett's novel succeeds, undeniably, as a fiction. It tells a gripping story that the willing reader falls into, creating a believable world of interpersonal relationships and avoiding some of the most obvious pitfalls of writing on the tender subject of race in America. For all that, I find myself repulsed by it, and it took me several weeks after finishing to locate where that feeling came from and to what degree it was just. What I found was that Stockett's narrative impulses work at counter purpose to Skeeter's own project. Skeeter wants to humanize a group of women who have been dehumanized in the eyes of the establishment. In order to get their story heard, Sheeter and the maids risk their personal safety, and require some kind of protection to prevent the piece from being traced back to them. It will be published anonymously, of course, but with all the details of domestic circumstances that rise to the surface in detailing daily lives, they might be exposed. To prevent this eventuality, the women include in the text an act of humiliation perpetrated by Minnie on the president of the Junior League and the leader of town opinion, one Miss Hilly. The act itself is bestial, cruel, and disgusting all at once. In other words, it dehumanizes Minnie, destroying with one swipe all the sympathy built up around her and her plight over the previous pages. That this is what Stockett comes up with to keep the story rolling leaves this reader, at least, with a very bad taste in her mouth.