Monday, March 18, 2024
Post St. Patrick's Day Pose
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
One Darn Yarn: Fostering Calm Through Crafting
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Boots Before Booties and Other Kitsch Cuties: Also, Hello Zipperless Denim
Sunday, March 3, 2024
Small Town, Big Heart, Up Down, Fresh Start
For the most part, I'm drawn to three kinds of fiction: cozy mysteries, romcoms, and heartwarming dramas. That said, I write about the mysteries and romcoms a lot. But when it comes to the dramas, not so much. I think it's because they demand a little more from me. Yet that's also why, more often than not, they touch me the deepest. And that was the case with Elizabeth Berg's The Confession Club.
The Confession Club is one of Berg's Mason, Missouri novels and revisits some of her characters from Night of Miracles. Local ladies of different ages meet weekly to take turns spilling secrets over coffee and cake. Sometimes the confessions that seem the most mundane prove to be the most cathartic. Because this club -- and this book -- aren't about shock value. They're about letting go and embracing the world.
For example, when the heroine, Iris, meets a man with a sad past, Berg describes the moment with wistful wisdom:
"It's beautiful outside. It's as though the edges of the world have been lightly erased, and everything is infused with a violet light: the sky, the droplets that hang from the tips of leaves, the mesh of tall weeds at the side of the road, even the road itself. Then, as the color begins to fade, she realizes it was a trick of the eye, a kind of saturation that occurred from looking so deeply at all those purple lilacs. But it was wonderful, that false vision, an unconscious surrender to seeing things another way." (73)
I like to think that this is what Iris and the other women learn -- that "tricks" are sometimes trails to the truth, and that beauty can be our salvation.
No wonder I didn't want to leave Mason. Luckily, Berg has a few more books set there, so it'll be a bit before I have to.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
A New Way to Be, Nothing to See, Just a Geriatric Pregnancy
Sunday, February 25, 2024
Sorority of Satire: Never Judge a Book by its Lover
For my last book club pick, I went with Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible. Not because I'm a Jane Austen fan, but because I'm a fan of Sittenfeld's Romantic Comedy. Eligible is (probably?) the latest in the many modern takes on Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Which gave me pause because -- and please don't send hate mail -- I've never liked that book. I found Elizabeth Bennett kind of cold and Austen's writing tedious. I know, I know. It's a classic, not to mention the archetype for every romantic comedy ever. Even the famously critical Sheldon Cooper couldn't argue its excellence when trying to denigrate things Amy Farrah Fowler loved on The Big Bang Theory, conceding, "He has too much pride, she has too much prejudice. It just works." That said, I was intrigued by Eligible as a pop culture comment on a novel that's never far from the zeitgeist.
And you know what? It was a hoot. This time Elizabeth is a New York City-based women's magazine writer. Her big sis Jane is a yoga instructor and lives in the Big Apple too, and their three younger sisters Mary, Kitty, and Lydia are unemployed and live with their parents in a crumbling mansion in Cincinnati. I always knew that Mr. and Mrs. Bennet were caricatures, but I never appreciated just how laughable they are until Sittenfeld reincarnated them as a health insurance objector and shopaholic hoarder. Even Elizabeth's dislike for Darcy rings truer when she overhears him disparaging her hometown to his bestie and Jane's love interest Bingley. Darcy, by the way, is an ER doc, a role that imbues him with all the arrogant pomp he needs to do his namesake justice. Not only that, but he's still super rich and master of Pemberley.
But it's not just the characters that emerge as more vivid. I really enjoyed the language. It's just dry enough, sharpened by wit and insight and, yes, heart to echo the vibe of the original in a way that doesn't, as I like to say, "stick in your throat." Add some very present-day social scenarios, all of which reveal Elizabeth to, surprise surprise, be the most traditional as well as the most forward-thinking of the Bennetts, and you have a silken satire.
So hats (bonnets?) off to you, Curtis Sittenfeld, for softening my misinformed prejudice toward this timeless title.
Maybe I'm a little like Elizabeth after all.