Fiction is Fun for Everyone

Three hefty bits of fiction this week, published between 1847 and this year, but I’ll take them in reverse chronological order of their stories.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – I don’t know what to tell you. Read it. There, done. I mean, I could get into the plot some (woman goes missing on her 5^th anniversary, husband is confounded and suspected, things happen) but really, it all unfolds so grippingly that I wouldn’t want to give a bit of it away in advance. What I will tell you is that Flynn knows her characters inside out, more thoroughly than most any author I can think of, and it is wonderful. And terrifying, because everyone is flawed, Flynn’s characters perhaps more than others. I listened to this book, narrated by Julia Whelan and Kirby Heywood, and you know, normally I listen to books while I do stuff – chores, work, exercise, whatever. But this, I was often enough just sitting, rapt. Or pacing, to better concentrate and absorb and anticipate and fret. Whelan was smooth as butter, which fit the character to a tee, and Heywood, oh - there was such a landscape in his narration. This was my second Flynn novel, and I found after the previous (Sharp Objects) that I needed a little recovery time before starting this, but I am unable to stay away from her. Her writing has become a serious, dangerous addiction.

My little palate cleanser after Gone Girl was Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which I hadn’t read since high school. I had the mistaken impression that I didn’t really care for it, that it was too gothic and silly and melodramatic for me. Well, maybe it had been, at one point (there is a madwoman in the attic, after all), but that would have been when I was stupid. Now that I’m smart, I love it. “Reader, I forgave him….” Oh, I was in tears. (Okay, I cry all the dang time at books. One of these days I’ll be crying over something in real life, and my family will just not blink, because they’ll assume my head is, again, as always, in a book or a movie. But these tears were realer than the rest! They were Velveteen Rabbit tears!) Anyway, I had forgotten large swathes of this novel – all of her school years, much of what brought Jane and Mr. Rochester together to start with, the annoying neighbors. (Mad women in attics and a little bit of transcendental communication will knock other details right out of the mind.) And I don’t think I’d ever noticed just how awesome a female Jane Eyre is. She’s far more the arbiter of her own fate than I’d realized, and I delighted in getting to know her strength and intelligence and morality. And the humor between her and Rochester! Such fun. I’m very glad I gave this another chance. (Now, will I do the same for Wuthering Heights? Reader, stay tuned!)

Madeline Miller’s debut, The Song of Achilles, is more a fleshing out of the lives of Achilles and Patroclus than a retelling of the Iliad, though of course the Trojan War comprises a great deal of the novel. We meet Patroclus, the narrator, when he is five and first encounters the depth of his father’s disapproval of him and the height of golden potential that is the five-year-old Achilles. Patroclus spends a few dismal years disappointing his kingly father before being disowned and sent off to foster with Achilles’s father, King Peleus. It takes time for the resentful and jealous boy to make peace with the glory that is Achilles, but soon they are intimate friends. The sea goddess Thetis is Achilles’s mother, and she is not best pleased that her son has taken an ugly mortal as his boon companion. The whole ‘mom’s disapproval of teenage son’s friendships only brings them closer’ thing is clearly at play here, and Achilles will not be separated, even when Thetis sends him off to be educated by the centaur Chiron. It turns into a golden idyll for the young men, and the exploration of their physical love for each other. Then Helen is kidnapped, and Greece goes to war against Troy. Fate sends Achilles to battle, to wrestle with his destiny and prophesized death, and Patroclus remains at his side. What I loved about this book – the reverting of Achilles from legendary warrior to sweet kid, the view of him through the eyes of a loving friend who doesn’t love war, the easy prose. My husband (who teaches the Iliad) snorted at the ‘they were lovers’ angle, but for us modern mortals who don’t ‘get’ godly motivations as well as the ancients did, adding the upset and jealous mom to Thetis’s relationship with both men was interesting, and effective. Note to self: approve of my kid’s romantic choices, or risk his rebellion.

Excellent Audiobooks. Excellent Books, Really. Read!

I mentioned how June is Audiobook Month, right? Well, I've got a few that I loved listening to, both for their greatness as texts and for the quality of their narrations. They're all debut novels, which encourages my writerly heart. You should seriously check these out:

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell, narrated by Laura Hamilton
Whereever you are when you start listening to this, be sure you won't mind the people around you wondering why you're snorting with laughter. Like, for instance, in the middle of the hardware store. (Those were some hi-larious toggle bolts, let me tell you what.) This is the tale of three co-workers at a newspaper. Beth and Jennifer are friends who exchange non-work-related emails throughout the day, discussing Jennifer's marriage and Beth's boyfriend and much else besides, and Lincoln is the tech guy who works nights monitoring non-work-related email for the company. His lonlieness and boredom contribute to his decision not to flag the exchanges between Beth and Jennifer, and their charm, humor, and personalities are enough to explain why he begins to care about them and look forward to seeing what they'll have to say next. Gradually Lincoln is drawn further and further into their orbit, especially Beth's, but it's awfully hard to confess to someone you've never actually seen that you've been spying on them and have fallen in love. Rowell makes vivid presences of all three, and Hamilton's narration is quick, wry, and fully engaged. It's all just so much fun.

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, narrated by Ann Marie Lee 
Also featuring a journalist, but otherwise a completely different type of book, this was Flynn's debut and as much as it made my skin crawl at times, I'm so glad that there are a couple of her other books for me to look forward to now. Camille's editor sends her to her Missouri hometown to get the local angle on the case of a missing girl, despite Camille's entrenched reluctance to set foot in the family mansion ever again. Camille's sister died when they were young, but her controlling mother, withdrawn stepfather, and precocious young half-sister welcome her back with anything but open arms. As Camille investigates the deaths of her half-sister's peers, she's disturbed by the girl's casual cruelty and the ways she is manipulated by and manipulative to their mother. The deeper the investigation goes, the more Camille's own disturbing past comes to the surface, like the scars of the words she has carved all over her body in the years since her sister's death. It's all haunting and fragile and cringing to listen to, especially with Lee's narration relentlessly moving onward. I'd have covered my eyes, but the words just kept pouring into my ears. Yikes.

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, narrated by Holter Graham

I will move back into the light now. Out onto a baseball diamond, in particular to that spot between second and third where the shortstop performs his magic. That's where Henry lives, whether he's actually there, or working out at Westish College's weight room with team captain Schwartz, or in the dorm with his roommate and teammate Owen. Henry has polished his work to a fine point, devoted to the game, but until Schwartz stumbles across him, even college ball was just a dream. As he moves through the years at Westish, the team solidifies and heads towards a championship. The college president, meanwhile, is torn both by his new, impossible love, and the devastated return of his daughter to his home. This is, of course, about baseball, but it is also about Melville, and independence, and dreams. Graham has a smooth and mellow timbre, with tension creeping in along the edges as Henry strives towards his goals. I rooted for the whole team, and I don't even care that much about sports.