Okay, so I’m deliberately discounting the fact that I finished up the two last-minute LBC reads over the long weekend. (You’ll unearth the results of that very soon.)
In the meantime:
Book #1: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent. Vincent disguises herself as a man, infiltrating male support groups, strip clubs, bowling alleys and monasteries (!) to try and understand masculinity. Now admittedly this is the kind of quasi-anthropological stunt that I’m interested in, particularly since I’m very interested in gender perceptions (likely due to being situated in San Francisco and counting a transgender individual as a friend, but that’s another story). But Black Like Me this ain’t. Vincent’s conclusions are neither terribly groundbreaking, nor are they entirely persuasive. She’s at her best when she’s investigating love and sex, but when it comes to supposed “earth-shattering” conclusions that men enjoy the cruel power of Glengarry Glen Ross-style balls-busting vocations and are capable of being emotionally sensitive too, this isn’t really news at all (and it actually doesn’t tell the whole story of masculinity). And it stops short of the kind of penetrating insight that I had hoped for. Vincent hints at a major emotional divide that separates the two genders, a folkway concerning the expression of sentimentality that seems to lock current gender roles in place, but she fails to offer a constructive analysis of why this exists — all this despite a philosophical background. In the end, Self-Made Man comes across as an entertaining stunt, but hardly the kind of soul-searching implied by the title.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (