I'm in Love and I've Never Even Met You

The natural first impulse when reviewing John Berendt’s second book The City of Falling Angels is to compare it with his first blockbuster bestseller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That’s the first thing people ask, too – is it as good as Midnight? Did Berendt fall victim to the sophomore jinx?

I read Midnight long after the initial buzz about both book and movie had faded. Hubby and I spent a night in Savannah, Ga., on our honeymoon (the rest we spent in Charleston, S.C.), so I read Midnight the week after we returned. As usual, I prefer the book to the movie.

The City of Falling Angels follows a similar pattern. Berendt lives for a while in a city, interviewing its inhabitants and documenting the unique patterns of life there, all the while slowly reeling out a true mystery.

The mystery in Midnight was a murder in Savannah. The mystery in Angels is the burning of the last centuries-old opera house in Venice.

I’ve been fascinated with Venice since reading Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House several months ago. Berendt portrays a similar view of Venice – deceitful and charming, vibrant and mysterious, ancient and beautiful. After reading Angels, I’m even more desperate to visit the city with no cars and more art and history than one tourist can digest.

Angels is a pleasant, easygoing book, in some ways more poignant and insightful than Midnight, particularly the parts about the master glassblower who documents the fire in art glass.

But I don’t always need a book that’s packed full of excitement. Berendt narrated the abridged version himself (and an interview with him is included at the end), and that made me feel I was there, sitting in on the conversations with him.

In Midnight Berendt described Savannah through the people he introduced. The same is true of Venice but to a lesser degree. In Angels, the interviews at times seemed more about telling a story – a sometimes uninteresting story – than telling about a person.

But maybe this is the fate of all abridged books – to be edited down to bare story, no frivolous extra things like character development.

And in the case of Angels, the main story and all the subplots are weak. Because I love reading about Venice, I enjoyed most of the book. But if it had been set in a city less fascinating in its own right, Angels might’ve been downright dull. Even the investigation and trial over the opera house’s possible arson lacked suspense.

I recommend reading it but not for the mystery. Read it for the city.

Oh, High School

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld is the first book I’ve read both in hardcover and on unabridged audio CD. In the hardcover version, I sped through it in one long night, eager to find out what all these critics were talking about. Sittenfeld was getting compared to J.D. Salinger, her character to the beloved Holden Caulfield.

I didn’t see it – not exactly. I wrote an Amazon review at the time titled, “Fine writing but not the finest ever.” Sittenfeld’s tale of a lonely middle class teen at a preppy boarding school struck me as true at times, tedious at others. After this second reading, I still feel that way.

Like the main character, Lee Fiora, I was shy in high school. Hyper-aware of everyone around me. Observant and terrified of misstepping.

But even I grew impatient with Lee as I listened to her story on CD. I wanted to shake her and say, “Get over yourself!” (I’ve been reading all the Amazon reviews and noticed several other people had this impulse.) While I was at it, I’d shake the narrator and tell her to stop using that whiny voice!

During the first few CDs, the audiobook couldn’t hold my attention. I started thinking I’d made a mistake buying it. But somewhere along the way, it drew me in. I admit I’m a sucker for coming-of-age stories, especially ones that capture so beautifully that heart-tugging regret you can feel for unrequited loves, even now that you’re a happy adult. I always wonder, what if? Even when I don’t want a different end result. The adult Lee looking back seems to feel this way, too, and I identified with that more than anything in the book.

Sittenfeld portrays that emotion, and so many others, perfectly. Perfect is a strong word, but I think I’m safe here. Lee experiences a few moments in the book when she is amazed to realize someone “gets” her. That’s the way I felt reading about Lee – Sittenfeld gets teenage girls, gets me.

This is the reason I like Prep. It outweighs the things I don’t like – the slowness, the skipping back and forth in time within a scene, the anticlimactic ending – and leaves me with a good feeling about the book. It is the reason I’m keeping this book instead of sending it back into the eBay mill. I just might want to read it again one day.

Enabling Addiction

So I was in the library the other day and ran into my friend, Milissa, who is as addicted to audiobooks as I am. We were bemoaning the lack of new material—the library was between deliveries from the central place where it gets a rotating collection of audiobooks. We resorted to looking through the regular collection, and for some reason it came out that she hadn't read Angela's Ashes yet. I recommended it to her, highly. In return, she recommended Gap Creek, reminding me that this was the one she had been desperate to get back into her car to hear.

Well, not only is Milissa enjoying Angela's Ashes, but I loved Gap Creek, and coincidentally, they're very similar. Gap Creek is about a very young couple in Appalachia in the early 20th century, and includes all the expected hardships and traumas—indeed, more than you expect. Where Angela's Ashes rises above the struggle of its story with humor, Gap Creek rises above it with language.

The author, Robert Morgan, is a poet and it shows. The narrator, the very young wife in the story, tells the story in her dialect. (And the reader on the tape is a very effective one.) The simple words and down-to-earth story contrast with unexpected poetic passages that sneak up on you if you're not paying attention, kind of like high triangle notes in a deep, brassy march. The repeated words and phrases reminded me of folk music refrains.

The story itself is moving, though I wanted to rattle these people a couple of times for not seeing and preventing some of their troubles.

The author, who based the story on his grandparents' first year of married life, gives an interesting interview on the last tape.

Tic, Tic, Tic

As I mentioned in one of my comments below, Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem is a twist on the detective genre. The protagonist/narrator has Tourette's Syndrome, which affects both his behavior in the novel and his narration. One of a group of boys who have grown up in an orphanage in Brooklyn, he and the rest of them are hired at a very young age by a thug who runs a limo service/detective agency. The boss is murdered at the beginning of the story, and the protagonist, Lionel, spends the rest of the book figuring out who did it.

I confess I didn't always follow the plot twists, because it was on audio and I was driving, after all. But Frank Muller does a pretty amazing job on the voices, and on Lionel's compulsive speech. I have no idea how accurate the Tourette's depiction is, but the narrator explains all his tics as they're happening, and what he does to try to stop them, or how he gives in and uses them to his advantage. It helps that the character's well read; his echolalia, or verbal tics, turn into absorbing poetic narration.

Jonathan Lethem was interviewed recently on Studio 360; you can hear the interview here; click on Lethem, Bird, Dolly.