Post-Reading

Reflection: The Turner House

I promised myself to catch up on the books that I missed in 2015, in whatever meager way that I could, and I’m using the first few weeks of the new year to do just that. 2016, please be patient. I have five books on my catch up list, and I recently finished the first, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. The book was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, an impressive feat for a first-time author. My reading of The Turner House spanned countless locations, including the messy floor of an old apartment, the empty floor of a new home, on a plane flying south, under a weak light bulb in the early morning dark, and at Triste Cafe while drinking a $4 glass of red wine, where I was delighted to find the woman to my left engaged in similar activities (different book, same wine).
 
The Turner House is the story of Francis and Viola Turner and their 13 children, and continuously jumps between two eras. The first era stretches from 1944 to 1951, during which we learn of Francis and Viola’s Arkansas beginnings and their move to Detroit. The second era takes place in Spring 2008 and focuses on the children. While the eldest, Cha-Cha, is a baby in some pages of the book, in others he is 64 years old; the book stretches far and wide, in the way good ones do. At the center of the story is the house they grew up in, which now sits in a nearly abandoned East Side Detroit neighborhood. Francis is long dead and Viola is ill, so the children must debate what to do with the house. The book is described as “a major contribution to the literature on American families,” and it is a largely unromantic one, as in full of health problems and resentment and awkward moments and lost jobs. The book does not relieve readers of reality’s blemishes, but rather scatters them throughout its pages, creating a world that is recognizable, and thus meaningful beyond the dealings of one particular family.
 
The Turner House reminds me of the legacies that are behind each of us, of the infinitely nuanced lives that precede our own, yet how so much of it remains unknown; either forgotten or erroneously retold or simply never shared, sometimes with intention. I think of my own day-to-day, stories woven together from this and that, and I wonder if any of it will live on, how quickly details can lose their precision. And perhaps that is perfectly alright. But if that doesn’t sit well with you, The Turner House offers hope, as it suggests that in a myriad of ways, for better or for worse, the past is inherited by all of us, and even the details seem to work themselves in.

Post-Reading: In the Unlikely Event

I finished In the Unlikely Event the day after I attended Judy Blume’s talk at the Bay Area Book Festival, which was over a week ago. I cannot help but think that how positively I feel about a book correlates with how inspired, rather how rushed, I feel to sit down and reflect on it. In the final quarter of this book, far more bombshells go off than I ever suspected. While most of the book progresses naturally if not slowly, its final pages are inexplicably heavy with new drama. By then, I found myself a bit tired of Miri Ammerman and company.
 
Sitting down to Judy Blume, I felt time tick backwards a few decades. The name dropping included R.L. Stine and Francine Pascal, and when Blume referred to an old interview, she noted that it could be watched on AOL. She did discuss one of the main ideas of the book; is an event like three planes crashing into the same city within two months sheer coincidence, or something else? How do average people interpret unlikely events that do indeed happen? Even the most rational of us try to connect the dots, to create some kind of meaning. In the book, Blume appears to credit coincidence, but during the talk she said that after recently returning to the crash sites, she has begun to believe otherwise.
 
Before In the Unlikely Event, my most recent encounter with Judy Blume was in Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year. In her memoir, Rakoff writes of working at Harold Ober Associates, a literary agency that in its heyday represented the likes of J.D. Salinger and Judy Blume:
 
“As she crossed the threshold into my domain, something caught her eye and she retreated back into the corner, crouching down in front of the obscure bookcase where I’d found Judy Blume’s books. Oh no, I thought, as a frown arranged itself on the woman’s face. No. No, that can’t be her. She didn’t look at all the way I’d pictured Judy Blume. How had I pictured her? More plump and smiley? I wasn’t sure. Regardless, this had to be her” (p. 118).
 
We learn that Blume soon leaves the agency because its president does not believe her latest book will sell, a book for adults. We know how that story ends. In the Unlikely Event is Blume’s fourth novel for adults, though I do not plan to explore its predecessors anytime soon. Instead, I hear another Miriam Toews calling my name.

Post-Reading: All My Puny Sorrows

“Suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia.”
 
All My Puny Sorrows concerns itself with the seemingly inherent, unshakeable quality of suffering. The declaration above is found early in the book, and the idea resurfaces several times, inspired by the Von Reisen family’s “acres of existential sadness” and resulting suicides.
 
The narrative is entirely from Yoli’s perspective, which I had expected or rather hoped to be interrupted by that of Elf. We never enter Elf’s dark mind and she never articulates her reasons for choosing death; yet, her continuous desire and repeated attempts assure us that the story will not end in any other way. We catch her in her wild and brilliant youth – my favorite parts of the book – in the hospital, and during stints at home when she is temporarily released. In all of the book’s present moments, Elf is hardly alive; she is going, going, gone.
 
It is tempting to feel frustrated; why would anyone, much less a beautiful piano prodigy with a loving family, choose to die? It is tempting to point to the tragic impact this has on the people who desperately want her to live. The book is then a kind of litmus test for how strongly sorrow resonates with the reader. Is it something inherent, something to control, or something to fix? I felt deeply for Elf, and also for Yoli, when she finally tells her sister that she will “bow down before her suffering with compassion.”
 
A tale of suicide is brutal, but Toews weaves tragedy into a much larger family story. I was laughing aloud and got a huge kick out of Elf’s sheer genius. Elf describes a ringing phone as having “Hitchcockian implications,” as a teenager undergoes a project to “increase her visibility,” and plays the piano in a way that I never considered before. The ending is oddly unexpected, a dream-like sequence of what could have been. Regardless, the ultimate outcome is heartbreaking, and invites us to explore the dark corners of love and compassion.