Are You My Mother?

Are You My Mother? – Via Cleveland.com

Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?”, is ostensibly an exploration of her relationship with her mom. But at the same time, it is so much more. The graphic memoir explores Bechdel’s relationships – with her therapists, her girlfriends, her parents, her writing and herself. As a way to figure out what has been going wrong the people and activities listed above, she explores the intersecting lives of Virginia Woolf and Dr. Donald Winnicott.

The tricky thing with parents is that no matter how old you are and how far away you get from them, in any measure of distance, their impact remains. It colors your professional and personal lives and as Bechdel struggles to unravel her complicated relationship with her mother, she has to dig deep into her own self to get where she needs to go. This awareness has its own drawbacks in her romantic relationships as she not only has to navigate the present with an eye to the future, but her past remains by her side.

While this is a memoir about her relationship with her mother, it is also about the writing of this very book, the writing of her previous memoir and how her mom responded to having the family’s baggage exposed for all the world to see. As a reader, especially one who isn’t familiar with Bechdel’s previous work, it takes a while to catch up with what feels like a pre-established narrative at the beginning of the memoir. The memoir kicks with a dream and jumps to the middle of a phone conversation between Bechdel and her mother while the author is driving to Pennsylvania.

Alison Bechdel – Via Barnes and Noble

Some of the most interesting moments come when Bechdel shares her experiences with her therapists. Three are featured in the memoir and they all play different, but important roles in her life. As someone who recently started seeing a psychiatrist, its amazing to read the thoughts of someone who has been in therapy for most, if not all, of their adult life, talk about the powerful impact it can have. It’s a testament to Bechdel’s willingness to share so much with her readers that we can see how her therapist’s world views eventually shape how she handles her own life.

“Are You My Mother” is broken up into a handful of chapters that all begin with the retelling of a dream. While these dreams give the reader an indication of what the chapter will cover, the more interesting feature about these dreams is that a few years pass after she has the dreams and only years later does Bechdel piece together the meaning of the dream and the role that lesson has in her life.

Inevitably, the story comes back to the mom. Even when Bechdel is writing about Virginia Woolf’s writing or Winnicott’s research into parent-child relationships, it all goes back to her efforts to create something with the mother who stopped kissing her goodnight when she was seven-years-old. While I won’t give away Bechdel’s realizations at the end of the memoir and where her and mom are at that point, tagging along with her as she gets to that destination, makes the ride worthwhile.

All Kinds of Time With Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk – Image via USA Today

One of the best songs written by Fountains of Wayne came from their 2003 album, Welcome Interstate Managers. “All Kinds of Time” tells the story of a young quarterback who in the middle of the game pieces it all together during one play.

Quarterback are at the center of the action. Fellow teammates on offense look to him for leadership. Either he calls the plays or relays them from the sidelines. The defense is watching him watch them as they line up. The QB can stick with the play or call an audible. All of this transpires in seconds. But it’s in the rush of the ensuing seconds between the snap and when the ball leaves the quarterback’s hands in flight down-field that 21 other players run, crash and push to either enable or stop the quarterback. It’s in these ticks of the clock where a quarterback has to scan the field for receivers and defenders alike. A half second there or a beat here is the difference between a sack or worse and a first down or better.

In “All Kinds of Time,” knowing that millions in the stands and at home tuned into their televisions are watching what he does, particularly his family around that flat screen, time slows down for him as he receives the snap. I remember reading as a kid that Michael Jordan was so good, he used to see plays develop before they actually happened. Fountain of Wayne’s quarterback seems to reach the same level.

As I read Ben Fountain’s novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” last week, I kept returning to this song. And not just because Drew Henson, one of just two non-fictional players referenced in the novel, never reached that level of ability in two professional sports. It’s because, in the hands of most writers, a character like Billy, a 21 year-old soldier with no college education who manages to have a deep reserve of natural intelligence and emotional intelligence, would seem like an unreasonable stretch of the imagination. But with Fountain, Billy’s almost preternatural internal dialogue seems like the natural outgrowth of his growing up in Texas and his experiences in Iraq with his fellow soldiers in Bravo Squad.

Fountain’s novel is set on Thanksgiving Day 2004, but the story is propelled by flashbacks to Bravo Squad’s time in Iraq, the doldrums during the squad’s national celebrity tour and the time he spends at home with his invalid father, his overrun mother, his two sisters and his rambunctious nephew.

In moments no longer than any given football play, but far more momentous, a few members of Bravo Squad found themselves under attack near a canal in Iraq. Other members of the squad arrive as back-up and take out the Iraqi attackers in a battle captured on film that was later aired by Fox and other news outlets, leading to the beautification of the soldiers back home as heroes. The death of one solider, Shroom, whose strong intellect and friendship with the squad’s leader, Dime, settles heavily on Billy, and the severe injury to another are brushed aside by everyone other than the squad during their national “victory” tour. The culmination of the tour is their attendance at the Cowboys game on Thanksgiving.

Without giving too much of the story away, the squad manages to make their way from the end zone and their field level seats to the bowels of the stadium for a press conference and a meet-and-greet with Cowboys cheerleaders to the owners luxury box. Spread across one afternoon, these interactions and developments flow naturally and occur in such a way that it seems totally reasonable that these ten guys who just weeks before were stuck in some god-forsaken desert in a country most Americans could barely locate on a map would be able to grip and grin with everyone from the Jerry Jones-esque owner of the Dallas Cowboys to the random fans coming up to them when recognized as Bravo Squad.

Welcome Interstate Managers – Image via Tradebit.com

Getting back to that matter of moments, Billy’s life is full of them. From the situation that drove him to the army, to the reaction under fire to instances throughout the game where split second decisions, the story’s internal engine and his direction as a character are powered by these choices. And while they are made with limited life experience, there is also a presence of mind and composure that others pick up on from the start. From Albert, the Hollywood producer looking to turn Bravo’s story into a blockbuster movie to Dime who sees in Shroom’s loss a need for Billy to step up, to a Cowboy’s cheerleader whose heart is in the right place and even to the Cowboy’s owner who wants to negotiate with Albert and Billy after Dime goes bonkers, people see something special in Billy.

When writing in the past about the novels I’ve read, I have, from time to time compared certain books to Jonathan Franzen’s unwieldy “Freedom.” “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” captures what it was to live in America and be an American in a lot of ways, in the closing months of 2004. President Bush had won re-election with the held of some Swift Boating of his Democratic opponent, the foundation for the economic collapse at the end of the decade was being swiftly put on credit and the unwavering devotion to a foreign policy that was killing Americans on a daily basis and doing little to make us safer at home were going at full-speed still. All of these are on display in this book. Fountain weaves all this together naturally by writing about characters who are at the center of these events and developments.

The story ends soon after the Cowboys game concludes in a Dallas loss. As the soldiers leave the game, Billy has one last decision to make. And much like the quarterback in the Fountains of Wayne song, he has just seconds to make it, but by the end of novel, for him and for us, it feels like all kinds of time.

Really? With the Books? Again?

How many books do you think Ahab read in a year? (Forbes.com)

Having a blog is a lot like taking care of one of those gold fish you’d win as a child at a street festival or county fair. There was that initial exuberance and excitement. The next morning though, almost inevitably, you’d find the gold fish, for whom you’d already gone to the trouble of naming and after feeding that first evening, scaring the shit out of by shoving your face up to the bowl, dead. Our parents, quick to avoid any pesca-tragedy would dispose of the little fella via a quick flush to sea. While that was always the case with my not so lucky goldfish, there are some people whose ability to keep their goldfish alive opened their eyes to the possibility of fish tanks filled with colorful aquatic life and the responsibility that comes with taking care of a fledgling eco-system residing in your dorm room or home.

Flipping through some old photos at what was my mom’s home a few months ago led me to one shot of me as a toddler in my father’s arm at street fair. Standing next to us was my Uncle Johnny doing his best BALCO impersonation and in my tiny hands was the top of a bag holding this bright orange fish. That fish and this blog have some things in common. But lets start with what they don’t so that inconsistency can be addressed. Most obvious is that that fish is alive and in the strictest of senses, this blog is not. It is a combination of coding and letters that become words that turn into sentences and paragraphs before hopefully transforming into something thoughtful and interesting.

If you don’t care for the fish, it’s not going to last. Just as if you don’t take the time to care for a blog or anything you are trying to create, it isn’t going to survive. Since we already established it isn’t alive, the blog is not going to die but it will drift away slowly. You might check in once and awhile, but it isn’t enough. And that, dear reader, is what happened here with The Composite. Life has a way of getting in the way. Over the course of the last two years this site has embarked on the possibly Quixotic effort to read all 100 Books on the New York Times’ Notable Books list in each respective year.

Born out of a desire to read a wider array of books, I now almost feel like a Bibliophile Ahab. Stymied two years ago with the onset of a job that demanded the entirety of my time, energy and focus, I strongly believed that 2012 was going to be the year. By March, I had already hit the 30 book mark – easily on pace to if not reach 100, get real close. And then life, again, inserted itself in ways unimaginable. Reading memoirs of loss stung too much, non-fiction about wars and tragedy were of no comfort and the saddest of it all, was fiction, which as a child was a world for our young mind’s to escape reality for just a little while, but now was littered with books about dysfunctional families, destructive relationships, death and situations where the possibility of hope was no longer in the cards. Staring loss head on meant turning away from the books, on the list and most any other. Until this week, I can’t remember a single book I was able to finish since I finished The Art of Fielding in April.

But unlike the legions of goldfish lost and the libraries filled with fictional characters doomed to repeat their fates with every new reader, the living, the truly living, have the ability to continue. And part of that continuation, for me at least, is to once again to try and read all of the books on 2012 iteration of the New York Times’ Notable Books list. The list was released the Sunday before Thanksgiving last year. And this Sunday, if all goes as planned, the race to 100 will begin anew. Lets see 2013 has in store for us.

The Book Blitz: Vol 27 – Bound by Antonya Nelson

Bound by Antonya Nelson - Via Bloomsbury USA

Hovering throughout Antonya Nelson’s “Bound” is the real life story of the BTK Killer. The serial killer, who murdered 10 people, was dubbed BTK because he would bind and torture his victims before killing them. The novel is set in the mid-2000′s when the serial killer returns from his hiatus, and it novel flashes back to when BTK began his murders in the mid-1970s. Despite this plot device, the BTK killer drifts in and out of the primary story.

The main story in “Bound” is about the power of friendship. Two women who were best friends growing up in 1970′s Wichita eventually drift apart, due in no small part to their post-high school decisions and their family backgrounds. Catherine, daughter of a university professor, graduates from college while her friend Misty, who lived with her poor grandmother drifts away in the wake of a series of bad decisions. Eventually, she settles down to raise her daughter Cattie. We learn all of these events through flashbacks as the novel opens with Misty dying in a car crash in Colorado.

Cattie, now a high schooler, is at a boarding school in Vermont. Upon hearing the news of her mother’s death, she disappears from school, hiding out in the house of a classmates’ sister in Montpelier.

As this part of the story unfolds, the reader meets Catherine and her much older husband Oliver. Nearly seventy, Oliver is on his third wife and believes he has just found the next love of his life in a young woman working at a restaurant he owns. The only reason Catherine finds out about her old friend’s death is because Misty’s will made her guardian of Cattie. Catherine and Cattie.

BTK Serial Killer - Via Frances Farmers Revenge

Reading “Bound,” I assumed that at some point the BTK Killer would rush to the forefront of the story. This was due in part to the opaque references to the serial killer and the fact that Cattie used to take long walks at night back home in Houston. Maybe I’ve become accustomed to TV/movie style foreshadowing. On top of that, I guessed that is what the bound in the title referred to.

The strength of the novel lies in the true meaning of bound and the role it plays in the plot development.  Some relationships start and end. Others develop unexpectedly. We are bound by the connections we’ve made in the past, we are bound by the decisions we make, the consequences of those decision, and in some cases, bound by the actions of others.

These bindings are evident in the relationships scattered throughout the story. It is crystal clear in the way Oliver deals with his two ex-wives, setting one up with a business and being a participant in an on-going art exchange with the other. These connections criss-cross. As Catherine’s relationship with Oliver sours, he and her mother, nearly the same age, enjoy a thawing of feelings.

While Cattie and Catherine’s relationship becomes the center of attention by the end of the book, it is Cattie’s exchanges with her classmate Ito and housemate Randall that take up a good deal of the early sections of the book. Ito is the only classmate Cattie connects with at the boarding school. He is the one who provides her with the chance to escape the school and stay with his sister after news of her mother’s death reaches Vermont. For as withdrawn as Cattie is, Ito is the opposite.

Antonya Nelson - Via REAaward.org

She meets her match in Randall, a housemate whose experience in the army has left him as solemn as he is quiet. Eventually, they decide to leave for Houston, Cattie’s hometown. The trip doesn’t go as planned. And, one of my few critiques of the book is that once Randall leaves Cattie to find help, he disappears from the story with little resolution.

The most moving connection, in my opinion, is the one between Cattie and her mother. Misty was a recovering alcoholic who had on a few occasions fallen off the wagon. It is her voicemails, left on Cattie’s cell, that are one of the last ties she has to her mother.

In such an emotionally powerful novel, it is surprising that Nelson devotes the first and last pages of the book to Cattie and Misty’s dog. Now that isn’t the bitter complaint of a cat person who believes Bound would have been better if the canine companion had been switched out for a feline. To this reader, it slowed the book down and the side story of the women, hiking with her boyfriend, who finds the dog seemed extraneous to me. Nevertheless, Bound is a good book that is well worth your time.

The Book Blitz – Vol. 26: White Egrets by Derek Walcott

White Egrets by Derek Walcott - Via Betterworldbooks.com

My relationship with poetry is very off and on. Besides required poetry readings in Freshman english, it was a rare occurrence for me to cross paths with poetry in high school. One instance where poetry and I did come together happened in the fall of my senior year.

I had developed a crush on this uber-brainy girl in my grade. In an effort to spend time with her and show her I had more to me than being a sports obsessed political junkie, I attended a meeting of the school’s poetry club. In my mind’s planning, I’d attend, keep my mouth shut, be attentive, and leave having said nothing that would reveal me for the scamster I was.

As it was, the Poetry Club met in the school’s library. As I showed up and took a seat, I was quickly reassessing the thought process that had brought me to this juncture. It would only get worse. There might have been a few poems read at the beginning of the meeting or not. All I remember is the faculty advisor posing a question to the group at large: Who is your favorite poet?

Sounds like an innocuous question, but I quickly realized my seat location towards the end of the circle doomed me as the old stand-bys quickly went off the board. My mind was scrambling. And then it was my turn. As if it were yesterday, I still remember saying, “My favorite poet is Bob Dylan’s favorite poet: Smokey Robinson.” Now a Poetry Club is a pretty quiet group as it is, but even their silence at that moment was deafening.

Uncertain how to respond at this out of left field response, the group kept going around the circle. I don’t remember anything else from the meeting, except that was the last time I show up at the Poetry Club. And my love of Smokey Robinson, the man who wrote Tears of a Clown, got me nowhere with said girl. Fitting.

My Favorite Poet in High School: Smokey Robinson - Via Lyricspond.com

I share this with you all not for purposes of catharsis but as a humble nod to my inexperience with poetry. This inexperience, I fear, if not put into proper context, could make the following, my review of a collection of poems by Derek Walcott seem facile, sophomoric, or even trite.

White Egrets is Derek Walcott’s 14th collection of poems. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992, Walcott’s poems offer a glimpse into the world seen as it was and currently is by an artist who knows his best days are behind him. Aware that what is in front of him is limited, the poems are more than just a collection, they represent a journey and a transformation.

Walcott hones in on this theme through various topics. Always close to Walcott’s thoughts is his home of St. Lucia as well as the titular bird. Those egrets, whose name is one letter off from the word regrets, appear throughout the poems. In the poem, The Acacia Tree, Walcott reveals the transformations St. Lucia has undergone in the name of attracting tourists.

From what St. Lucia used to be to the long dead British Empire, the theme of changes at home (St. Lucia) and glorious pasts lost (the British) are shown to the reader. While the theme stays the same, it is Walcott’s tone that changes. By the end of the collection he has come to embrace his old age and in some ways, his fate.

Nobel Prize Winner Derek Walcott

A recurring feature in the collection is suites or poems penned in tribute to his experiences in cities and places across the globe, from Barcelona and Sicily to New York and Amsterdam. I couldn’t help but smile as Walcott writes of my home city, ” Everybody is New York is in a sitcom.” His descriptions of these places make the locations jump off the page.

From the opening poems, the specter of death is present in odes to fallen friends, including the playwright of August Wilson. As we travel with Walcott and revisit the places of his youth and the loves he lost, the poet also shares new hopes and realizations that have been revealed to Walcott in his old age.

Subjectively speaking as a poetry luddite, I liked a good many of the poems found in White Egrets. But two stand out. In the first, Walcott encounters a past lover from his youth, now both ravaged by old age, she in a wheelchair, at an airport. There is a simple beauty in the description of this interaction. In the other, Walcott, who is also a painter, describes the realization that he not only never reached the heights of a Picasso or Bacon, but he also invites the reader into how it feels to be an artist who senses they are losing control over their craft as old age’s power increases. It is this honesty, found throughout the collection, that makes Derek Walcott a poet I wish I’d knew of in high school.

What the Heck Is The Book Blitz? A Primer

In 1953, the Boston Braves were on the verge of becoming contenders in the National League. After years of mediocre play and poor returns at the gate, the future looked bright. With players like Warren Spahn, Eddie Matthews, and a young rookie outfielder named Henry Aaron, the team was just a few years away from winning the World Series against the hated Yankees.

There was just one small hiccup from the point of view of folks in Boston. The Braves did all of this in Milwaukee. That spring, the Braves ventured west in search of a media market of their own and a less divided fan base.

Sign Me Up! - Via DowntownPhoenix.com

The Composite came to be, in theory, over a few drinks at a Queens bar last fall. By the time Rich and I kicked it off, I was living in Boston. The sole repeating feature on the blog has been the Boston Book Blitz. A quick reminder about the Blitz: At the end of the year, The New York Times posts its list of 100 Notable Books of the past 12 months. The Blitz is my attempt at reading all 100 and review/blog them. So far, two of the authors of the books have been kind enough to re-tweet the reviews. Check out the 2010 list here. I’m hoping, once I get wi-fi at my new place up and running, to create a static page listing the books read and other possibly interesting info.

Unlike the Braves, who left Boston for fresh territory, I am retracing the steps of many others who have once been my age, myself included. I’ve returned to New York City. It would make little sense to continue to have the name of a city I don’t live in as part of the title. At the same time, subbing Brooklyn in for Boston would make tweeting an exercise in character tight-rope walking; same for Brownstone Book Blitz. Also, that sounds kind of bougie. Next thing you know, I’ll be doing a 38-part series telling you all about which urban vineyards are the ones to kno-se. So now the series will be called: The Book Blitz. Or as my French readership likes to say, Le Blitz de Livre.

There is a bunch of reviews coming down the pipe over the next few days. So keep refreshing the home page, comment when so inspired, and remember, your public library is the best deal in town.

The Book Blitz – Vol. 24: To The End of the Land by David Grossman

David Grossman - Via TheWorld.org

In the early stages of David Grossman’s “To The End of the Land,” the book’s protagonist, Ora, sees her youngest son, Ofer, off at an Israeli Defense Forces location. With his three year tour of duty completed, Ofer and Ora were supposed to be setting off to hike the trails of Israel. Instead, Ofer voluntarily re-upped for the IDF’s newest military campaign.

The description of parents seeing children off to war, soldiers greeting each other with bellicose salutations, and the machines of battle revving up has a particular resonance for me. Over the last month and a half, my brother’s deployment date for Afghanistan has been pushed back time and time again. Originally scheduled for early June, and then later that month, it is now set for the middle of July.

The heart of Grossman’s novel lies in how family responds to a beloved relatives return to the front lines impacts those left behind at home. The sad explanation for the vividness of a parent’s struggle with the potential loss of a child in what has been such an endless fight can be found at the end of “To The End of the Land.” In a note from the author. Grossman explains that during the writing of the book, his son Uri, was killed in the closing moments of the 2006 war in Lebanon. The tank his son was in was trying to rescue a group of soldiers when the vehicle was hit by a rocket.

There is a beauty in this book and it emanates from the interwoven natures of the various stories coming together over the course of Ora’s hiking (Some spoilers ahead). With her youngest son back in the military and her husband, Ilan, along with their oldest son Adam, having run off to the Galapagos Islands, Ora commandeers Avram, her and her husband’s oldest friend, into taking Ofer’s spot on the hike.

The story of how Ora, Ilan, and Avram met and began their life-altering friendship is told in the opening chapter. All three are teenagers in an Israeli hospital, overcome by extreme fevers, in the midst of the Six Day War of 1967. It took me two weeks to read this book. The first week was dedicated to this first chapter. At first, I thought the whole book was going to be slow going, cover to cover. After finishing the book, the writing in the first chapter seems to be intentionally slow going since all three characters are in a feverish state where sometimes they believe their interactions are just figments of their own imagination, not reality (Serious spoilers ahead).

Revealed through flashbacks as Ora and Avram cross rivers, climb mountains, collect a canine companion, and meet a wide variety of folks during their hiking, the reader finds out how Avram and Ilan became inseperable as friends. We also find out how Avram deeply loved Ora, despite the fact that she was in love Ilan.

To The End of the Land - Via Bookstorepeople.com

Their lives change, inexorably, in 1974. A moment, that these friends can never shake, sends Avram to the front lines where he ends up being captured, tortured by the Egyptians, and then harshly interrogated by the Israelis on the grounds that he might have divulged classified military intelligence. Ilan and Ora are together and she becomes pregnant with their first child. After the birth of Adam, Ilan leaves them, only to end up moving into the shed in the backyard of the house they were living in – Avram’s house

During the hiking, Ora tells Avram about his son Ofer. Ora has decided to hike because she wants to get as far away from any possible bad news. She doesn’t want the military messengers to find her. She wants to protect Ofer with her thoughts. She wants to keep him alive, to shield him with her words. To do this, she tells Ofer’s life story to Avram. But to tell Ora’s story, she tells the story of Adam and the story of Ilan and Ora. In a year where many books have focused on the quirks and problems of families, “To The End of the Land” stands out because as Ora realizes, with her husband and oldest son gone and Ofer on the frontlines, she is eulogizing her family.

Grossman’s book is more than a novel about a family. It is a novel about history. History as it happened and history as it unfolds in the present. Before the hike, where Ora helps Avram reanimate himself, she has spent most of her time with Sami, her driver. A Palestinean, their friendship frays when she has him drive her and Ofer to his deployment. Later that night when she requests a ride to pick up Avram, he makes a pit stop at a school where illegal refugees who need medical care are being sheltered. On the ride up to this make shift hospital, Ora sits next to a young child with several serious conditions. Israel’s YNET described “To The End of the Land” as “the closest thing to antiwar novel that has ever been written here….” What makes it so antiwar is that it shows the devastating impact war has on individuals on both sides of the battlefield. The writing is evidence that skin deep wounds may heel, but a part of soldiers, and those at home, are never the same. Even worse, generations not yet born during these battles carry the wounds and scars of those fights into this world.