Faith (what we believe)

“Faith” by Jennifer Haigh isn’t so much about religious faith as much as how what we believe can be shaken to the core. Using the backdrop of the real-life abuse in the Catholic diocese of Boston, Haigh takes a look at one family that’s crushed by the allegations toward one of its members. Father Art has made a life in the church, a glory for his mother, and so when he’s accused of molesting a young boy whom he’s grown fond of, everyone is thrown off-balance, including his stepsister, Sheila, a lapsed Catholic, who narrates the novel.

While Sheila’s struggle is with what she believes about her brother, the other characters, devout, turn on the brother, and still others, skeptics, use the allegations to say “I told you so.” Haigh’s skillful ability to bring the story together, to reveal so much through the first-person narrator, is remarkable. I mean, it hardly makes sense that Sheila knows so much, but in the end it does. As the layers peel away, the story becomes clear, a story both more horrifying and more believable.

And everyone, the priest and his family and the participants in the allegations, are real, characters whom I could ache for by the end.

I’d seen this book praised in several places, though I hadn’t heard of Haigh before. But she’s got chops: I think I’ll check out her other books.

Still ( )

I’m a reading maniac these days, spending lazy (!) afternoons finishing books. I hadn’t succumbed to barnesandnoble.com lately, but I read about Lauren Winner’s “Still: notes on a mid-faith crisis” and hit the button. “Girl Meets God,” a book I should reread since it’s been so long, followed Winner’s path to Christianity, “Real Sex” about—duh—and now “Still” is about post-both of those books. Finding herself an evangelical darling of sorts and also a fiancé of the perfect man, she plunged ahead into this new life. Six years later, she’s divorced and on the outs with those evangelicals. And maybe I’ll start here. What we expect from others is undoable. I mean, do we want to work and learn from real people or from cardboard cutouts? (Yes and no, in that order.)

The book is written in desultory style, though I read in the afterward that she experimented with many organizations. It’s basically chronological from her low point to a place of grace. But it’s told in snippets—vignettes and musing—as she travels to a place of (mostly) peace.

At times I had to set aside the thought that she’s in the business of writing—kind of like I felt in Anne Lamott’s last book—and maybe this crisis came in handy for a writer. But this place of torpor is too real to be fiction.

I’ve been thinking more lately about the American (?) desire to chart everything, to show progress, to make linear the meanderings of faith. Born to wander, boy I feel it. And so I like the ending of the book, that’s really no ending at all. We can only hang on in the still times.

The Fault in our Stars (R + J)

I like John Green, think his YA fiction is smart instead of totally sappy. This read, too, is an assignment, a book I finished in about three hours and will dutifully report on in terms of likability and objectionable elements—the new reality of our planning for school. (FYI: boob feeling by page 20 and losing virginity and mild—depending on how sheltered you are—swearing. It’ll probably be a no go as a “school” read, but the kids love John Green.) (I cannot believe I am commenting on boobs and such: I believe there are several someones already doing that.)

(Coincidentally, Markus Zusak, the author of “Book Thief” is the first blurb writer on the back. “A novel of life and death and the people caught in between.” Well, okay.)

“The Fault in our Stars” follows Hazel Grace/Support Group Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient as she falls in love and navigates life and love and death. SPOILER ALERT: I, of course, knew she would be living on the last page—though certainly not forever—because she is the narrator, and John Green is too classy to have a character narrate her own death, a trope popular for young inexperienced writers and silly old ones.

Hazel knows Shakespeare and Allen Ginsburg and William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson and an obscure novel that I’m too lazy to look up to see if it’s real. (Okay, it’s not.)

I thought of calculating the chances that a girl like this ends up with cancer AND falling in love with someone else with cancer. But I didn’t.

Do we really want to read about someone who falls within the realm of probability—or someone who sparks the imagination, who's quirky, whom we “can’t-believe-exists” in the same way we react to a really cool person we meet at a party?

Speaking of probability, I’m suffering from “Beowulf” fall out. My feminists of first hour hate it, don’t see the point, while the athletes and gamers in third hour said, “Finally, a book about someone who actually does something.”

What is it we want out of a book? To sit crying at the end (oh, SPOILER ALERT), reminding Chris that this is a YA novel so, of course, it’s going to be sad. Crying because, yes, young people do die and parents lose their children. But recognizing at the same time that Green has captured the love of life, not the sappy sort, but the want to live longer, to live, period. Just as I was typing this paragraph, Lurlene McDaniel came to mind, she of the books that always end with a teenager dying of some horrible affliction, leaving a true love behind.

Thank goodness John Green knows how to write.

The Book Thief (keep)

Sometimes I look at the blurbs on the books and wonder what the “. . .” is, added between “BRILLIANT and ambitious” and “It’s the kind of book that can be LIFE CHANGING.” (No kidding? Caps?) I wonder how the reviewer decided on the adjectives, maybe having a sliding scale of laudatory comments, kind of like the pain scale at the emergency room. This is between ambitious and brilliant. (“Ambitious” sounds like something I’d say to a kid who wrote a 30-page short story that was absolutely agonizing to read.)

When “The Book Thief” showed up on my desk at school, an assignment really, students were all like, “Well, finally you’re reading this book, Mrs. Smith.” And then I vaguely remembered that several of them had read it over the summer and dutifully reported on it. Death follows little German girl Liesel, fostered by a couple after her brother dies and her mother, a Communist, can no longer care for her. She-who-is-not-Jewish also suffers loss in Germany at the beginning of World War II, a revelation for many of the readers at school, readers who have been school primarily in Holocaust stories. So thinking about their reactions and reading the book educated me, too, along the way.

What I liked was how her foster father—Papa—read together with Liesel when nightmares nightly interrupted her sleep, stumbling reading that Papa could hardly sustain, that taught Liesel to read and create her own book. And what I liked was Max, the young man hiding in the basement to escape Nazi capture, both losing life and coming to life there without the light of day. And what I liked was the mayor’s wife who became magic for Liesel. What I liked was the style—because I’m a sucker for post-modern narration.

And I find starting this list, that the list can go on, a sign that the book is—brilliant?—worth reading: beautiful language and voice and plotting. And not too heavy-handed in this genre that easily leans into distress.

The Big Crunch (almost)

I knew that I’d heard of Pete Hautman before but waited until I finished this book before I looked him up. Turns out he wrote “Godless,” the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. I remember seeing the book in the library and reading about it: wanted to read it, in fact, but never have. “The Big Crunch” made it into my lap because a student left it at school, and when we hustled out last Wednesday—under orders to vacate because of snow/ice/sleet—I picked this up off the counter. It took a little over an hour to read, and it’s cute. Quirky Jen moves to town and sees Wes through a side glance. They don’t fall in love. And then they do. It’s a magnetism that pulls them, and even when Jen moves (again), she can’t quite let him go. It’s not as good as a John Green book (sorry, Pete Hautman, whom I don’t know anyway), but it was fun. To its credit, the book isn’t a predictable teen romance, there’s no indication that they’ll live happily ever after. But they’re happy for now.

I googled Hautman after I read because young adult authors fascinate me. He’s almost 60. Now I’d like to think I’m not an ageist, but he’s not even a middle school teacher. Does he read Seventeen or something. Hang out at after-school spots. (Creepy.) I want to know where he gets his ideas.

APPS (tangent)

If children are nothing else, they are a prompting to stay up-to-date in the digital world. (Love you guys!) While we were in Hawaii, Andrew showed me Flipboard, a cool app for the iPad. It allows you to flip through news, conveniently sorted into categories. It’s possible, I think, to endless flip, until you are folded into those nice digital pages.

I’m addicted.

He and Mo also said I need to have Foursquare so I can check in. (Andrew became mayor of Baby Beach while we were there because he checked in on five consecutive days.) As I sit here in the dark post-Hawaii, I’m considering whether it was an ironic suggestion. I did create an account and dutifully checked in, gaining my jetsetter badge by the time we landed at PDX. But when I opened the app the next day, I noticed I have no friend activity within miles. I’m not sure Foursquare is going to catch on in Richland.

The Glass Castle (clear)

First, I have to tell you about the Farmer’s Market in Hanapepe. (Trust me, it’ll tie in somehow.) Andrew, Mo and I wanted to get local produce, so we wandered up the road to this little town. At the park, vehicles backed up to the edges, and farmers set out their produce. (Starfruit, avocado, watercress, local bananas, bok choy: all beautiful.) We started to look around and were ready to buy. But the people weren’t selling. At the stand where I was I asked when they would begin selling. The woman showed me her whistle: “When I blow my whistle. Eighteen minutes.” Then she saw someone start to pick up produce at the next stand, and she scurried over to assert her authority. We began precisely at 3 p.m.—when the whistle blew.

The point is: I got “The Glass Castle” because we got to Hanapepe early and wandered the (single) street, poking in shops along the way. Near the end of the street, was Talk Story Bookstore, the only bookstore on Kauai, according to their poster. Talk about books to the ceiling. They were everywhere and every which way, mostly used and mostly organized. But I found this nicely used copy and grabbed it.

I loved the book, just as I loved “Half-Broke Horses.” It’s a heart-breaking read, thinking about the selfishness of Walls’ parents. On the other hand, it’s inspiring to read: these parents, flawed as we all are, raised imaginative, responsible children--from all accounts. (The youngest of the four seems to have suffered the most long-lasting effects from the upbringing.) And I can relate to a certain extent. (No, I’m not headed for a sob story.) From the outside, many of us who grew up in a certain time and a certain place looked impoverished, looked a little neglected, but there’s a richness to this wild upbringing that not everyone can understand.

I love Jeannette Walls' writing: her books (I’m making them twins) are in my top 10. They’re true—both the fiction and the nonfiction. And they’re without apology or manipulation.