The Obama puppy is coming — can you feel the excitement!? Obama promised his daughters a puppy and said the new dog would arrive in the White House “by April” — yes, that’s soon! The country, no, the planet, is focused on the presidential puppy. NBC Nightly News did a completely news-free segment about it. So many questions: what kind will it be? What will it be named? And how CUTE will the little doggy be? (That’s the big one, inspiring NBC to include a segment about presidential pets through history. Did you know Roosevelt was buried with his dog Falla?)

When I went out shopping I asked for opinions. At the overpriced health food store, the clerk. a young woman with a distracted air, evinced not a lick of interest in the little pup. She said, “I don’t usually keep up with….” and couldn’t bring herself to even address the topic.

“The news?” I asked.

“No, I get my fair share of the news, just not…” — her voice drenched in disdain — “the presidential puppy.” She kind of put a damper on things.

Not discouraged, I also asked at my next stop, the overpriced regular grocery store. The three clerks standing around with few customers hadn’t heard much about the new arrival. But the main clerk, a young, kind of chubby guy with an earring, explained that he’s more of a cat person.

I assured him that the Obama puppy would be so cute and lovably adorable that it would essentially be cat-like. “Oh, that’s cool,” he said, with an agreeable nod.

My last stop was a large discount shopping store, the one whose name we should never say. (It’s an obscene place in many ways — but it’s the only one with decent prices.) It’s not a good place to make light-hearted queries about the Obama puppy. It’s in the middle of Appalachia, and the people were struggling even before the downturn. References to Obama’s puppy aren’t appropriate.

When I checked out, my clerk was a fiftyish white woman who was clearly tired. It was about 10 PM. “They got you working the late shift,” I said.

“I do every night,” she said, explaining that she works two jobs. We got to talking and she explained that she works 14 and a half hours every day, Monday through Friday, and a five and half hour shift on Saturday. Why, I asked — and I apologized if the question was too personal — why do you need to work two jobs?

She explained that since she left her husband, he bought him out on his share of their house, and now her house payment is $800 a month. She lives alone, but she helps support her kids and grandkids. I noted that it will be nice when she finally owns the house. Yes, she said, “I think it’ll be the only thing I’ll be able to leave my kids,” and she wondered if they would fight over it after she was gone. A lot of families do, I said, and she agreed.

Toward the end of checking out my groceries, she was talking about spending time with her grandkids. It’s great, she said, because she gets to see her grandkids all the time, and gets to help them out. Well then, I said, it’s all worth it. “Yes it is,” she said, without a trace of doubt.

Posted by James Maguire on April 08, 2009
Link to this post

I picked up this Young Adult title by Joyce Carol Oates because I wanted see how this virtuosic writer pared down her prose for the younger crowd. The answer: stripped of her usual complexity, Oates’s mastery shines through even more brilliantly. Her reduced style is as close to poetry as prose – just a few well chosen words, the bare essentials to create images.

Sexy moves incredibly fast, the pages almost turn themselves, yet the story is a heavyweight.

High school junior Darren Flynn is befriended by Mr. Tracy, an eccentric teacher that some of Darren’s cruel fellows students plant false rumors about – career-ending rumors. Darren must decide whether he’s brave enough to stand up for the teacher. But the issue is complex; though the rumors are a gross caricature, they’re not completely false. Darren is trapped in the middle – of his peers, and of his own uncomfortable search for who he is. This is a great book.

Posted by James Maguire on November 24, 2007
Link to this post

Me, at the library? I know what you’re thinking: but James, you’re a bookstore man. Yes, it’s true, I spend plenty of time at the bookstore. But sometimes it’s nice to hand over a library card rather than a credit card.

Library people are my people. They’re really book people. They’re not as pretty as bookstore people – far from it, actually (sorry, library people). Library people are older, less affluent, not as well dressed. But they’re good, good people. They stand in line with armfuls of books. They have little cards in their wallets whose sole purpose is to get them books. God bless the library people.

And then, invariably, every library has a sexy librarian. She may be young or old, it doesn’t matter – sexy librarians are timelessly sexy. Without fail, she drives a late model Volvo, she listens to NPR, and she watches indie movies. In the summer she wears big floppy hats. Oh, God, don’t we love the sexy librarians?

(Side note: this blog post will help me get listed in search engines for the term “sexy librarian.” Always a highly sought-after search term.)

Posted by James Maguire on November 17, 2007
Link to this post

I picked up this novel because I so enjoyed Sittenfeld’s debut, Prep. But I was disappointed – so much so that it took effort to get through it. Her first book, set in a cloistered upper-crust prep school, explored class, clique and identity, as well as a young woman’s coming of age. A wonderful read. Her new novel, The Man of My Dreams, is again about a girl’s journey into womanhood, but it’s an overly precious rendering, and it feels like it lacks resonance beyond this particular girl; it’s not a story that seems to refer to much beyond its own pages.

Sittenfeld created a challenge for herself by making the main character lean toward shyness. That’s a valid choice but it’s hard to make such a character interesting. Difficult, too, is the fact that the narrative jumps from era to era, leaving out chunks of years; again, that’s often a good technique, but in this case when the story picks back up we see that the protagonist has changed, but we didn’t see it happen, so we never get involved.

I give Sittenfeld credit for a prose style that’s simple and natural. She’s not trying to be “writerly,” instead she uses ordinary language to tell the stories of real people. But unfortunately, when the story and characters don’t support her effort, the effect is pretty flat.

Posted by James Maguire on November 10, 2007
Link to this post

This memoir by Franzen, author of the literary hit The Corrections, provides an intimate and entertaining view of his boyhood as a nerdy nebbish growing up in the airless suburbs.

While not at the level of Corrections, it’s lovely on its own: funny and bravely unsparing of his idiosyncrasies, with flashes of his prose brilliance and cut-through-the-crap humor. To his credit, some of the episodes are far from fascinating but he breathes life into them through the quality of his writing.

The downside is the long section about his passion for bird watching, which in recent years he’s pursued obessively. The point seemed to be how hard he’s working to avoid his life – an honest admission, if I’m reading it right – but the result was pages and pages about bird watching. Pretty droll.

This memoir makes it clear where Corrections came from. He mined his own life heavily. My hunch tells me it would be hard for him to do that again in novel form. He’s used his prime material for his masterpiece. What does he do now?

Just speculation, but maybe that’s why he put out a memoir instead of another novel – which there’s certainly a demand for: Corrections was published back in 2001. (I wonder about that bird watching – maybe he really is trying to avoid something.)

Whatever the case, I’m ready for another Franzen novel. He is a fantastic writer.

Posted by James Maguire on November 03, 2007
Link to this post

T.C. Boyle is one of America’s best prose stylists. In his eleventh novel, Talk Talk, the story is quite good, but it’s Boyle’s vibrant, fresh style that makes the book a great read.

Talk Talk is a dual narrative, alternating betwen the story of an identity thief, Peck Wilson, and his victim, Dana Halter, a deaf woman who’s fiercely independent despite her handicap. When Dana realizes that Peck has stolen her identity, using it to commit crimes, she sets out to avenge herself. Peck notices he’s being pursued, and the chase is on.

Boyle uses identity theft as a metaphor to explore identity – what it is, how it’s “owned” or “stolen.” Interestingly, Boyle portrays Peck as something of a sympathetic character, and Dana as sometimes so ornery and difficult (in her relationship with her boyfriend) that the strict white hat/black hat dimension is blurred.

Here’s the first paragraph. Notice all the details Boyle includes. Like exactly where Dana found her coat (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), and how authentically he puts us inside Dana’s mind as she hurries. The effect is to submerge the reader in Boyle’s invented world, which he does wonderfully:

“She was running late, always running late, a failing of hers, she knew it, but then she couldn’t find her purse and once she did manage to locate it (underneath her blue corduroy jacket on the coat tree in the front hall), she couldn’t find her keys. They should have been in her purse, but they weren’t, and so she’d made a circuit of the apartment — two circuits, three — before she thought to look through the pockets of the jeans she’d worn the day before, but where were they ? No time for toast. Forget the toast, forget food. She was out of orange juice. Out of butter and cream cheese. The newspaper on the front mat was just another obstacle. Piss-warm — was that an acceptable term? Yes — piss-warm coffee in a stained mug, a quick check of lipstick and hair in the rearview mirror, and then she was putting the car in gear and backing out onto the street.”

Posted by James Maguire on November 01, 2007
Link to this post

I was in an airport bookstore, desperately looking for something to read, when a woman walked up beside me and starting looking at the magazines. She was twentyish, with tight jeans, and it only took her a moment to find her favorite title.

“Dang it,” she said, “I already read it – when I was getting my nails done.”

She flitted over to a neighboring rack, scanning it. Her face had an anxious look. She glanced back toward her boyfriend, who walked over. “Whatever you want to do,” he said, glumly.

She walked out quickly without buying anything. Apparently if she can’t find her favorite – the one she reads while her nails are done – she’ll read nothing else. Some readers are more discriminating than others.

Posted by James Maguire on October 27, 2007
Link to this post

I picked up this 1983 comic novel because I’m a fan of Nora Ephron, whose screenwriting credits include When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. I love her blog posts on Huffington Post.

As the story opens, cookbook author Rachel Samstat is seven months pregnant when she discovers her husband is having an affair. That suggests all manner of comic high-jinks, but instead Ephron takes a meandering route, more interior monologue than actual story. The film version must have been hugely reworked for the screen – virtually nothing goes on in the book. At one point the central character addresses readers and concedes that “there’s not much plot here.”

(The book is supposedly based on her real-life marriage to, and divorce from, Carl Bernstein – perhaps she needed to work something out.)

Though I put Heartburn down a few times while reading it, I always wanted to come back. Its voice is so charming and authentic, even as Rachel digresses into recipes for key lime pie. At the end she turns deeply serious when discussing why she needs to leave her husband, despite her desperate straits. A good book.

Posted by James Maguire on October 23, 2007
Link to this post

I recently read a fabulous Young Adult title called godless, by Pete Hautman. It’s about a disaffected 15-year-old who decides to start his own religion, convincing a group of local teens to start worshipping the town water tower. He launches a new religion he calls Chutengodian and anoints himself the Big Kahuna, all the while nursing a crush on the pretty Magda.

At turns comic and serious, the kids (of course) end up on top of the water tower one night, facing great danger. Eventually they face weighty decisions about what they do and don’t believe. The book won the National Book Award and sparked controversy for the way it questions traditional religion. The narrator’s voice is so fresh, and the story so authentic, that I group it with S.E. Hinton’s YA classic The Outsiders.

Posted by James Maguire on October 20, 2007
Link to this post

In this bestselling memoir, famed journalist-screenwriter Joan Didion grapples with both her husband’s recent death and the life-threatening illness of her only child. Written simply and authentically, it never flinches from her profound sense of loss. It’s a meditation on mourning and grief, which in lesser hands could have been lachrymose or self-pitying, but Didion’s prose and the sharpness of her insight keeps it well above this.

I felt slightly guilty, at about 180 pages in – just 50 pages from the end – wanting to put it down. After that much loss, I was eager to get back to the land of the living. It’s no fault of Didion’s writing. But at a certain point I was in the mood for something shallow and funny. I’ll probably read those last 50 pages, but later.

Posted by James Maguire on October 13, 2007
Link to this post