My Name is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)
I closed this book with tears in my eyes and with gratitude in my heart for Maren McEuen of the Book Trail, though I’ve never met her and probably never will. Doesn’t matter: She introduced me to the achingly honest, painfully gifted and sharply *real* character of Asher Lev. Aches, pains and sharpness — it’s not a novel for those of who think Bridget Jones was heart-rending. But the finished book is a work of art as surely as the paintings produced by the main character are, a duality that, while obvious, strikes to the heart of the book’s … I won’t say “moral” or “message.” It reveals the book’s purpose for existence — it’s destiny — through the quest of Asher to find his.
You see, Asher is not an ordinary boy walking the well-worn rut of self-exploration. He’s an Orthodox Jew in a sheltered Brooklyn community who wears ear locks, eats kosher and believes that everyone has a purpose, a role to play in the world, a mission bestowed upon his by the “Master of the Universe.” And this purpose is communal, for the good of all. So when Asher exhibits a talent for drawing from the time he can hold a pen, this talent is seen as child’s play, something to dabble in, but also something that could grow to be dangerous, a manifestation of evil instead of good.
Asher doesn’t draw pretty pictures. “The world is not a pretty place,” says Asher. Eccentric to the point of near autism (did anyone else see that?), the boy is able to reveal emotion and meaning with the stroke of a pen or the swish of a brush. Unless he is able to release it, this meaning wells up inside of him and threatens to burst through the dam of his flesh. But when he releases that meaning, it can often hurt his mother and father and his community, the people he holds dearest to his heart.
Is art selfish? Can we thwart our destinies, the talents given us at birth? Is it better to be a great man or a great artist? Is it possible to be both? The words stream across the page like paint across Asher’s canvas, as if the writer is also battling these concepts in his head, reaching within himself for the story only he can tell, no matter how painful it is. Reaching inside for his truth as Asher finds his — a truth that may shock his community, wound his mother and turn his father against him forever.
A powerful tragedy, this book left me with an aching in my own intestines and an urge to search my own soul for my artistic destiny, my purpose, my art. It reminds me that creation is simultaneously an act of destruction, that we cannot have one without the other. And it makes me want to make that sacrifice, even while my tears for Asher are still on my cheeks.
I thank the “Master of the Universe” for this book, for giving us the raw material and raw talent in the human plane to create it in all its stark beauty, and I thank Chaim Potok for channeling this creative truth — this *art* — onto the page where I could devour it. Oh, and one more thanks, again, to Maren, who gave me a book that I spent an entire Sunday reading. I haven’t found one of those books in quite a while.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars — Buy the hardcover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Book Trail | Comment (1)Becoming Naomi Leon (Pam Munoz Ryan)
The second choice for the Book Trail online club, this book is an incredible departure from our last dense and incredibly intellectual first book, Housekeeping. Instead of dragging by, this one flew. Of course, a great deal of its aerodynamics stems from the fact that its a young adult novel — not that such a designation is a bad thing — geared for younger readers. There has been a resurgence in young adult fiction of late, thanks partially to the ever-present Harry Potter books (which, aside from the first volume, I don’t follow. Sorry, Heather). Quality writing is no longer geared just for adults, and that’s a fabulous thing. Why should kids read if all they have to read isn’t, well, good?
This is the story of the title character, Naomi, who lives with her great grandmother and her brother Owen, who is whip-crack smart but suffers some physical birth defects. The girl’s parents, long absent, become a force again in her life and circumstances cause Naomi to step outside her elementary existence to find what it means to be happy in a complicated world. It’s this complicated world that I was enamored with in the novel.
Instead of Christopher Robin and his 100 Acre Wood or the privileged, upper class boy in the Velveteen Rabbit, among other rather antiquated figure of kids’ fiction, this book is about our modern world. A young girl deals with her mixed heritage, a mother who has been in and out of rehab, an aging guardian who some think isn’t young enough to raise a family again. I was refreshed to see a novel set in a trailer park, that deals with custody issues and physical deformities. That’s what kids have handed to them in today’s world often, and they need a heroine who they can relate to on that level. The author tells a story of hope without ever talking down or resorting to obvious cliques.
Even though I appreciated the novel only on a young adult level (in other words, I wouldn’t have picked it up if not for the book club), it was a breath of fresh air, talking about controversial issues that grown-ups sometimes shy away in a way that speaks to adults and children alike. I hope every girl (or boy, I suppose) who reads it can see that finding their voice — their inner Lion (or Leon in Spanish) — is a noble and attainable feat of bravery.
Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)
(Howdy to the Book Trail, who suggested this book for its first online book club selection.)
My threshold for pure words for words sake is pretty high. I mean, I dig on David Foster Wallace. I’m down with Coover. And sheesh, I love a good Ayn Rand book, too. But Marilynne Robinson might be in an entirely different ballpark. She’s Foster without the biting wit and Coover without the post-modern time and perspective shifts. Instead, Robinson’s writing is dense, overly intellectual (honestly, who knows what “lucifactions” are?), claustrophobic, oddly structured grammatically, almost plotless, frustrating, meandering and… well, brilliant.
Though the words seemed to leak out of my ear as I took them through my eye, making me reread paragraphs two or even three times, it was obvious throughout that I was in a master’s hands (or a master’s hands were in my eyes?). The prose may be sluggish and dense, but it’s purposeful in what it doesn’t say, in what the characters don’t do. The main character, Ruthie, places herself and the few people in her life under a microscope, dissecting their every trait, every action or every stillness. Yet at the same time, she brings the most minor incident — a coil of hair kept by her grandmother, graham crackers her mother purchased, the way a woman brushes her hair — into a cosmic, philosophic perspective.
“If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected–an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never need one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.”
Ruthie and her sister Lucille, you see, were dropped off by their mother at their grandmother’s house in the small, harsh and wet town of Fingerbone, where long ago their grandfather was killed when his train tumbled from the very high, very long train trestle over the town’s lake. The girls’ mother, after dropping them on the porch, soon follows her father’s fate in her car, driving her car purposefully over a cliff. The girls eventually wind up in the care of their aunt, Sylvie, a drifter by trade and by nature. (Again, plot is not the books’ strong suit, nor is plot summarization mine.)
This is world inhabited by women, and solely by women of two types: the isolated homebody whose neat, proper actions are the only signs of their identity and their love, and then the dreaming drifter, her head as full of cobwebs as the corners of her parlor, which she’d rather use for her growing tin can and newspaper collection than for guests.
True to the title, the book is about housekeeping, literally and also metaphorically. Some abhor cobwebs, others are thrilled at the way the sunlight sparkles, caught in the spider’s silky net. Some women are about casseroles, peach prom dresses, hair ties, wedding rings and other physical manifestations of life. They turn up the lantern to stave off the dark, not realizing they will see only themselves reflected in their windows, thereby sealing up the mysterious, dank and magical outside world. The latter group stands in the dark just to feel it permeate their skin, to feel themselves soak into it. They look in windows at the trapped souls, shaking their messy heads in wonder that those caged animals don’t realize all their material goods and social niceties mean nothing, vanishing like mist through the fingers, intangible. Thoughts the only commodity of value.
Just as Ruthie’s mother, the suicide, made more of an impact on her daughters’ lives than her presence would have, sometimes the lack of plot actually causes the most dramatic of realizations.
I think that if it’s possible for a reader to get into this thick and marshy style of Robinson’s, anyone who lives a bit more inside their head than in the real world is going to “get it.” Those introspective, pondering, impetuous, romantic and idealistic women who know what it is like to float around the edges of life, who often don’t understand the fervent importance of certain traditions or possessions, and who — most importantly — don’t see why that is such a bad place to be. Who see the freedom in that.
Granted, most of us who fit that description still enjoy a casserole now and then. And yes, hopefully we pick up a rag to dust the essentials every blue moon. But we understand the friction between the halves as well as the freedom of casting off all housekeeping for an afternoon pondering the dew in the cobwebs. We catalog all those poignant moments that “bulge like the belly of a lens,” showing us the underside of reality, which is more transparent and amorphous than most people dare to imagine.
Award-Winning, Book Trail, Fiction | Comment (1)