The Seal Wife By Kathryn Harrison

In Harrison's historical novel set in 1915, the protagonist, Bigelow Greene, a 26 year-old meteorologist from the Midwest, is hired by the Weather Bureau to set up an observation station in Anchorage, Alaska. As the town is only just developing as an outpost in the wilderness, Bigelow finds himself largely alone, trying to maintain his sanity in the harsh Arctic climate and struggling to supplement his meager government salary with odd jobs. He faces below-freezing temperatures and winter nights that begin at two in the afternoon. Most of all, though, he fights against the consuming loneliness reinforced by the bleakness around him in near Gothic fashion.

That is, of course, until Bigelow meets the Aleut woman. She never speaks to him, only allows him to follow her home one day to a frame house on the mud flats outside of Anchorage. They establish a routine in which he brings her a rabbit he has caught, she cooks it for him, they have sex and then she soaks in the bath while he talks to her about his life and his meteorological obsessions. She never says a word. One day, she disappears, and Bigelow is devastated. The Aleut woman becomes a new fixation for Bigelow, from which he seeks solace in drink and other, similarly silent women.

This is the most curious aspect of Bigelow's character: despite his loneliness, he is most attracted to women who are silent and repulsed by those who would dare open their mouths. One prostitute he visits recognizes this and gags herself with a towel to please him, saying, "I know you can't stand my talking. So, here." In the Aleut woman's absence, the only other female who appeals to Bigelow, at least for a time, is Miriam, the daughter of a local shop owner who has a stammer so severe that she can sing, but not talk, and communicates by writing on a notepad. "You like em' quiet, I guess," says Miriam's father, Getz. "Women that don't talk back. Can't say as I blame you." What is the reason for this preference? Is it, as Bigelow maintains, an attraction to the mystery of a silent woman, to the fact that "She is self-possessed. She possesses herself,"? Or is it because he is so consumed by his own obsession with charting the weather, an obsession that dominates every other chapter of Harrison's novel, that he cannot allow another's thoughts to enter his mind?

And of what significance is the weather? It's what brings Bigelow to Alaska despite the low pay: he craves the opportunity to prove his hypothesis that a great current of air sweeps in a circular fashion from the poles to the equator and back again, causing the air high over the poles to be warm, and the air over the equator cold. To test his theory, he designs and constructs an enormous kite to take temperature readings thousands of feet above the earth, thrilled with the idea that he is "recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people." His work is a success: unbeknownst to him, word of the kite has given him a reputation as a scientific innovator in Anchorage.

Yet, he can find no happiness without the Aleut woman. He may be able to interpret the weather, to give it a narrative and a history, but he cannot do the same for her. He knows nothing about her -- her family, her feelings; not even her name -- and his solipsism prevents him from knowing how to ask.

Love Me By Garrison Keillor

I apologize for any lack of variety in my book choices. When I find a writer I like, I start a love affair with them so intense I can't touch, taste or smell anything else. The only thing to do is to let the infatuation run its natural course, until either I lose interest or run out of material. Right now, I'm totally enamored of Garrison Keillor. I read several of his Lake Wobegon novels before starting this blog and will continue until, broken-hearted, I find myself single again, trying to pick up someone new in the library.

It was a happy accident that I chose this particular Keillor work, Love Me, to read immediately after The Kiss. Both works grapple with the Horatio Alger myth that one should aim high, should be in constant pursuit of happiness. In The Kiss and Love Me, acting on one's aspirations only brings chaos and misery; the male protagonists only reach a measure of contentment at the end of the novels by deciding to make the best of what they have.

The big difference is that Keillor's treatment of this idea is dosed with the author's trademark humor. This isn't a Lake Wobegon novel, though. Rather, it's a semi-autobiographical (and self-referential) tale of a middle-aged alcoholic with writers' block and an inability to keep his pecker in his pants. Despite his dark subject matter, Keillor never leaves us without the light of laughter. True to his Prairie Home Companion origins, Keillor dispenses witty aphorisms at every turn to blunt the severity of his protagonist's, Larry Wyler's, complete ineptness. Consider the scene in which Wyler first commits adultery. It's a despicable act: while his wife, Iris, is out of town, Wyler brings home a mutual friend of theirs, remembering to clear Iris' underwear out of the way first. Comically, his back gives out before he can perform and he leaves us with this pearl of wisdom: "It is so clear to me why adultery should always take place at a hotel; easier to make an exit if things don't work out. Never commit adultery in your own home. This is a rule never to be broken." That's the Eleventh Commandment, no?

Eventually, Keillor's humor descends from amusingly witty to just plain wacky. Wyler gets a job at the New Yorker, which he soon discovers is being run by the Italian mafia. And guess who John Updike asks to put out a hit on the publisher, Tony Crossandotti? Keillor loses me a little here, but as with all his novels, you just have to suspend disbelief, retain a sense of humor, sit back and enjoy the ride. And it is a fun ride, filled with all the sparkle and charm that characterize Keillor's work. If his protagonist is a narcissistic toad, that's okay. Keillor's writing shines all the more for making you like Wyler anyway.

Envy By Kathryn Harrison

Harrison herself paraphrases pretty well what goes on in her novel: sex.

"Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex."

Envy certainly appeals to prurient tastes. So much so that I felt I should be carrying it around in brown paper wrapping, rather than just shoving it into my tote bag, as is my habit with books. Or maybe it would be better to have read it aloud on the Wendy Williams Show to a chorus of "Oh, snap!"s and "Oh no he didn't!"s, as Harrison uses every plot twist imaginable to engage her readers. Tragic deaths, adultery, accidental incest and rape are all in there, and I think I've even missed a few.

Maybe the salacious content of Harrison's work is an effort to deflect attention away from the author herself. Yes, this is the same Kathryn Harrison who wrote The Kiss, the memoir in which she revealed having an incestuous relationship with her father decades before Mackenzie Phillips went on Oprah. You'd think such a book would be a career-ender for sure, a point from which no one could move forward either personally or professionally. And yet Harrison has done a remarkable job defining herself by her work and not her past. She's written 11 well-crafted novels, and Envy is among her best.

It's about sex, sure, but the title is Envy, after all. Sex is a tool, a way to gain power and take it from others because you want what they have. The protagonist, William Moreland, is a psychoanalyst steeped in the belief that is Freud's legacy: that you can change your circumstances, your very being, and make your life happier just by understanding it better. Every character in Envy wants what others have. More specifically, they want to take from others what they feel they, themselves, lack. Will has a twin brother, Mitchell, who is absent from the action of the book and lives only in Will's obsessing over who got the better lot in life. From what we read of him, Mitchell feels much the same way and breaks taboo to get what he believes he deserves. Will is envious of others' children, having lost his own son to a tragic accident, and makes quite a mess of his life as a result. The whole book is a mess, in fact. It's a catalog of a chaotic existence, in which people scramble all over each other trying to get the biggest slice of the pie. Only when Will and his wife, Carole, make a silent pact to make the best of what they have can they find some peace and move forward with their lives.

Harrison's novel is a page-turner that will titillate you on all fronts. But it also goes deeper than that. Envy makes a cogent argument about the desperate search for something better that characterizes modern life. We've become so convinced that our lives are totally in our power, that we can have anything we want if we only reach out and take it, that we've lost sight of happiness altogether.

Liberty By Garrison Keillor

For me, opening a Garrison Keillor novel is like approaching the holiday season, when all the Christmases of your childhood are still alive and well in your heart, untainted by reality. I go to Lake Wobegon to escape, to imagine a place where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Those Midwestern Norwegians get up to their antics, sure, but the worst problem in this sleepy town is getting a seat at the Chatterbox at lunchtime so the waitress, Darlene, can pour you a cup of coffee and you can catch all the local gossip.

Liberty, though, is like the Christmas when your parents are screaming about the turkey, your drug-addicted brother doesn't come home and you're worried that if something doesn't start going right, somebody is bound to pull a gun. And that person just might be you.

Someone does pull a gun in Liberty, a rare occurrence in a Keillor novel, unless it's dosed with the proper amount of humor. There's less humor here, though, than plain old whining. The woman packing heat is Irene Bunsen, whose husband, Clint Bunsen, has been carrying on an affair with the town's Fourth of July parade's Miss Liberty. There's nothing especially attractive about Miss Liberty, although Keillor mentions her flat stomach at every turn, and she doesn't even seem to like Clint despite sleeping with him on occasion, even running off to California with another man. Yet, Clint spends most of the book pining after her. The rest of his musings are devoted to the life he might have led had he stayed in California after getting out of the Navy, lo, those many years ago. The men of Lake Wobegon are family men who don't ditch responsibilities out of boredom and have no regrets. Sure, they have their quirks and insecurities, or the novels would be without humor. But Keillor has veered far from his tried-and-true formula with Liberty, and I wonder why. I can go just about anywhere for existential whinings; I go to Lake Wobegon to get away from all that. You don't go to your vacation home to worry about the plumbing.

Finishing the novel was also like Christmas. Closing the back cover, I understand that in order to keep the myth -- of idyllic small town life, of happy family gatherings -- alive, I need to forget everything that just happened.

American Gods By Neil Gaiman

I have to confess, science fiction/fantasy/allegorical novels don't really trip my trigger. The few books of these genres that I love (ie: Harry Potter and the Southern Vampire Series), I love because of the author's captivating storytelling, which is also what hooked me on Neil Gaman's American Gods.

We enter the story with Shadow, who's about to leave prison after serving a three-year sentence for assaulting his cohorts in a bank robbery. His outlook is bleak ("He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.") but he gets through the days by creating rituals to impose some order on his small existence. Shadow makes lists of what he'll do when he's free again, practices coin tricks and searches for meaning in weather changes. Throughout the novel, he'll continue this gravitation toward ritual, illustrating Gaiman's point that we lost too much when we left behind the gods and religion of our ancestors; man needs ritual to feel alive.

No one is this book is alive. Shadow's wife, Laura, dies the day of his release from prison in a car accident while fellating his best friend. She spends the duration of the book as a corpse or ghost (Gaiman is never quite clear on this point), popping in and out of Shadow's life to remind him of how much he misses her and supply the object of his quest: to either bring her back to life or give her a restful death. Laura points out that Shadow isn't alive either, despite the heart beating in his chest ("You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world").

I enjoy Gaiman's characterization of Shadow: a man seeking something sacred in a world full of profanity (Gaiman's America is gray, cold, and full of foul odors). He meticulously studies the board meeting minutes of the small town where he moves after his release, desperately seeking a heritage not his own, some sense of continuity to life. He tries (and often fails) to build relationships with the people around in the hopes of forming a human connection.

From there, though, Gaimain veers into a thinly veiled religious allegory. There are two camps of fantastical characters: the old gods and the new. Shadow is enlisted into the camp of the old gods: Odin, a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, an Eastern European god called Czernobog and Egyptian deities like Bast and Horus. The power of these old gods is waning as they teeter on the brink of obsolescence because people don't believe in them anymore and gods can only exist in the hearts of the faithful. Instead, Americans are "clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." Odin wants to confront the new gods before he and his fellows are obliterated; he and Shadow, harried by agents of the new gods, travel across America, seeking out the old gods and asking for their aid.

Odin is slain in battle and Shadow is committed to conducting his vigil. This means -- wait for it -- hanging from a crucifix. And get this: he develops a bleeding wound in his side! I get it; Shadow is the messiah come to return the ancient gods to their rightful place in the heart of these faithless Americans, whose lives are literally shit (Gaiman seems to really like describing feces, since there's plenty of it in this book) without a sense of religion and ritual. I think there's something to this point -- religion is a binding force in society and human beings crave some degree of ritual to center their lives and give them a sense of purpose, whether it be going to church or the gym -- I just wish Gaiman could get to it quicker and not shove it down my throat so much.