Labor Day

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Labor Day, a novel by Joyce Maynard (William Morrow/HarperCollins: New York, 2009).

There seemed to be a couple of very tiny continuity goofs here: a maternal grandmother dies when the boy is old enough to remember, leaving his mother an orphan (49-50), then had died "so long before," when he was at least too young to remember (146); a man is shirtless (151), then wearing a shirt (154).

I don't know why I get so distracted by such tiny details, but they pull me right out of the story. (This reminded me of a 12/02/2009 Publishers Weekly blog post by Elizabeth Bluemle, in which she said that reading the acknowledgments page(s) in a novel kick her "right out of the world of the story and its magic.") It's so difficult to maintain a reader's suspension of disbelief.

But beyond that, I ended up putting aside the other books I was reading after the first two pages of this one.

Poetry by Sandra Beasley

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"Unit of Measure" by Sandra Beasley (poem from Poetry, July/August 2009; reprinted at Poetry Daily on July 7, 2009)

Fiction by Valerie Vogrin

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"Sisters-in-Law" by Valerie Vogrin (short story from The Summerset Review, Fall 2009)

Poetry and short fiction

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"Local Attraction" by Billeh Nickerson (poem from his collection McPoems, Arsenal Pulp Press, 2009)

"The Golden Age" by Piotr Gwiazda (poem from Linebreak, November 10, 2009)

"Her Untold Story" by Jean Thompson (short story from her collection Do Not Deny Me, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2009)

From pp. 280-281:

On her way home Lynn detoured to drive past Jay's new house. She guessed that if she kept doing this, there would eventually be some kind of restraining order. Jay and Margot had purchased a woodsy, faux chalet in a desirable district. . . . She rolled slowly past, noting the dim light in the no doubt spacious kitchen, and the illuminated upstairs window where Jay massaged his pregnant bride's swollen feet. Or consulted with her over the hipster version of What to Name the Baby. (Elijah? Paola?) Or any of the other things he'd never done with her. . . .

She turned a corner and veered around the block to make a second pass. Stupid and degrading behavior. How long did she intend to keep it up? The child would be born, learn to walk, head off for school, develop questionable friendships. The saplings in the yard would grow to mighty shade trees. The neighbors would wave at her as she made her rounds. Jay would be balding and fiercely deaf. She would have long ago forgotten the different layers of their life together: love, married struggle, boredom, acrimony, but still her curses would gather round him like crows on a wire.

Lynn changed directions and headed home. What could you tell from the outside of a house anyway? Wouldn't her own look just as peaceful and welcoming, no matter how forlorn the life inside it was?

"Her Untold Story" is sort of a continuation of Jean Thompson's story "Wilderness," which was near the beginning of this collection. I read that one when it came out in One Story.

Le temps qui reste

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Sometime in the past few months, I saw a movie about a very attractive, very successful man who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Now, how will he spend the time he has left? Etc., etc. For a variety of reasons, it was an absolutely dreadful movie.

A few days ago, in my pursuit of other films starring Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (who was mentioned in an earlier blog post), I started watching Le temps qui reste (English title: Time to Leave). It was in French and the main character was gay, but otherwise, the basic plot was exactly the same.

I admit, I wasn't exactly thrilled about the prospect of seeing another trite handling of the topic. This was a good film, though. It was very interesting to compare the two movies because the starting point was so similar and the details (and the effect) were so different.

Le temps qui reste, written and directed by François Ozon and starring Melvil Poupaud as Romain, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (credited as Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) as Jany, Jeanne Moreau as Romain's grandmother and Daniel Duval and Marie Rivière as his parents, Christian Sengewald as Sasha, and Louise-Anne Hippeau as Sophie.

Willful Creatures (stories) by Aimee Bender

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Willful Creatures was published in 2005 by Doubleday. My favorite stories in here were "Dearth," "Off," "Fruit and Words," "The Leading Man," "I Will Pick Out Your Ribs (from My Teeth)," and "Ironhead," which was peculiarly sad and satisfying at the same time.

Now I want to go back and reread The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (stories) and An Invisible Sign of My Own (novel).

Call Me By Your Name

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To me those hours spent at that round wooden table in our garden with the large umbrella imperfectly shading my papers, the chinking of our iced lemonades, the sound of the not-too-distant surf gently lapping the giant rocks below, and in the background, from some neighboring house, the muffled crackle of the hit parade medley on perpetual replay—all these are forever impressed on those mornings when all I prayed for was for time to stop. Let summer never end, let him never go away, let the music on perpetual replay play forever, I’m asking for very little, and I swear I’ll ask for nothing more.

From Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2007), p. 30.

There is also a lovely segment starting with the bottom paragraph on page 237 of the hardcover edition (“And like the old men who sat around the piazzetta—”), but it gives away too much of the story’s ending to type it out here.

Oh, and if you see this, thanks for the recommendation.