South of Broad by Pat Conroy

I’ve got one word for Pat Conroy’s latest novel, South of Broad — overwrought.

After waiting 14 years for another book by one of my favorite authors and hearing nothing but good things about it, I’m having trouble making sense out of the breathless reviews.

This book is maudlin and bloated and completely unbelievable. So unbelievable, in fact, I’m tempted to put it in the fantasy category. That whole suspension-of-disbelief thing we’re supposed to give writers when reading science fiction or fantasy? I felt it was required here, too.

If you’re going to move your readers, Mr. Conroy, make your characters believable. Okay, maybe you do know someone who’s so inanely self-important and pedantic they’d demand an entire town recognize a once-a-year celebration based on a character from a book no one will admit they haven’t read (and most haven’t). And maybe you know a town so sycophantic it would entertain the whim of one narcissistic female. Maybe you do know heterosexual teenaged boys who sew dresses for their mothers because their mothers raised them to be feminists. I don’t.

And if you’re going to set a story in the 1960s – a time of rebellion and free love and all the rest – then you simply CANNOT expect teenagers to go to integrated parties saying things like, “We were raised with great privilege, but also with great expectations. Family is everything, the one holy word. The glue that holds our whole society together,” without the rest of the party laughing them right out of the room. In 1969, any teenager worth their salt would be thrilled to be thumbing their nose at the establishment by inviting – shudder – Negroes to a party.

These aren’t characters; they’re caricatures. The main character, Leo Bloom, is such a goody two-shoes, he's downright annoying. He is mature far beyond his years, so far it seems, that he's able to fend off a race riot, singlehandedly, on the first day of school and end the day by dictating to the adults how the participants should be punished and how the school should handle such events in the future. The day a school principal allows a child to tell her how to run the school… Well, I’m just saying.

Leo: “…I didn’t fail. I succeeded. It was you and the teaching staff who failed. None of you were there to help defuse an explosive situation.”

The prinicipal (aka Leo’s mother): “I had called a meeting to discuss the school year.”

Leo: “We needed a large presence of teachers.”

Coach Jefferson: “I’ll be out there tomorrow morning.”

Thank goodness Leo can tell the adults how to run the school.

The characters did so much crying and sobbing and gnashing of teeth that I didn’t feel the least bit moved anywhere in the book – it was emotional overload. This book left me so devoid of emotion that I have to wonder – is it Conroy’s writing that’s changed or is it I who’ve changed? And to be perfectly fair, I think maybe it’s me.

I’ll never forget sitting in bed for an entire weekend reading The Prince of Tides with a box of tissues on one side and a batch of mimosas on the other. I cried so hard I gave myself hiccups. He had me hooked from the first words. “Geography is my wound.”

I was desperately disappointed in Barbara Streisand’s butchery of the book on screen, certain that she’d missed the entire point. It wasn’t about the sex between the shrink and the main character, Babs, regardless how manicured your nails were or how many times you crossed your shapely legs.

It was about place. And how we are who we are because of place. And when place is destroyed, sometimes so are we. But, hey. Maybe I get it because I’m from Natchez, Mississippi, and not Malibu, California. Okay, I’m getting off the subject, I know.

I do remember thinking Conroy had gone a little overboard with the pathos a few times in The Prince of Tides, but it was so much fun I didn’t care and devoured the story like a fine meal. And I missed it after it was done.

I was disappointed in Beach Music, thinking there was much meaty history hinted at, but never delivered on. I didn’t buy My Losing Season.

Maybe it’s just that I’m 52 instead of 28 now. Maybe I’m cynical in my old age. Conroy does do good prose – elegant writing and beautiful descriptions. Perhaps this latest book was just as good as The Prince of Tides, The Lords of Discipline and The Great Santini, but I’m jaded. I think perhaps I’ve bought my last Pat Conroy novel. And that does make me sad.

Duma Key by Stephen King

Buying a Stephen King novel is a crapshoot. And I'm not the gambling type. After trying to read the last couple of installments of "The Dark Tower," I swore I'd never shell out good money for another of his books. But I found myself having lunch, alone, next door to a bookstore, and the next thing I know, I'm standing at the checkout counter with "Duma Key."

"Have you read this?"

"No, sorry. I don't read fiction."

"Have you heard anything about it?"

He pulled out his New York Times bestseller list, which I pointed out was pretty worthless when it comes to giving the kind of information I was looking for. King could (and often does) write complete drivel and it would still make the bestseller list.

It's easy to tell when he's written a book just to meet a contract deadline. Some of his stuff is just so awful, it's embarrassing. At least, it ought to be. Ah, but sometimes what he writes is so downright beautiful, so artful, so.....sublime, that it floors me. And that's the rub. How to know whether the book I'm about to purchase is going to take me for a ride or send me on a journey.

For every stupid, ridiculous story about evil cellphones, murderous toasters, and wicked cartoon characters, is another that's a gem -- beautiful stories like "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" or "The Green Mile"; elegant psychological studies like "Apt Pupil" "Rage," and "Misery"; and groundbreaking horror stories like "Carrie" and "The Shining."

So I looked at the book in my hand - a rather hefty tome, and decided to toss the dice.

Duma Key is the story of Edgar Freemantle, a wealthy building contractor who is nearly killed in a construction-site accident. The fallout from the accident includes some brain damage, his right arm and his marriage. Hurt (literally) and angry, he decides a change of scene is the only answer to come to grips with the world he's now living in. So he moves into a beach house on a remote Florida key where he rediscovers a talent for painting and meets the two other residents of the key, whose own near brushes with death include the same sort of brain insult -- a contracoup injury. In addition to what they've lost because of their injuries, they all discover they've also gained something -- abilities with a dangerous edge.

What I got from this story was a bit of a mixed bag -- the majority of the book is the good stuff: a character-driven story that, at least initially, goes easy on silly. The prose is beautiful, at times poetic with descriptions like a Gulf breeze with, "a rueful salt tang" or "little scars of light dancing on the table."

"The thunderheads stacked up, huge flatboats, black on the bottom and bruise-purple through the middle. Every now and then, lightning would flash inside them, and then they looked like brains filled with bad ideas. The Gulf lost its color and went dead. Sunset was a yellow band that flicked feeble orange and went out. Little Pink filled with gloom"

The characters in this book, especially Edgar Freemantle, are thoroughly fleshed out. I cared about them. There's a lot of internal dialogue that made me like Freemantle and want to root for him. And while King tends to have moved inward with his stories since his own near-death experience, he loses focus occasionally, and missteps.

He has an annoying habit of letting the reader know ahead of time which characters won't make it through to the end of the book. After going through all the trouble of making me like a character, their demise would have a much bigger emotional punch if I didn't already know they were doomed. By the time he gets around to killing off his character, I'm prepared for it and have lost interest.

King also needs to pay attention to his characters' emotions. One scene, in particular, where Freemantle has just learned that a loved one has been killed, rings particularly false. He goes to bed sobbing over the death, and wakes up the next morning determined to stop the killing. So far, no problem. But as he and his two companions are riding over to do battle with whatever it is that's destroying everyone he loves, Freemantle suddenly decides he wants to hear what's on the radio.

"Jack backed onto the road and turned south. More out of curiosity than anything else, I punched on the radio and was rewarded with Billy Ray Cyrus, bellowing about his achy breaky heart."

Huh? A loved one has just died, he's on a dangerous mission where they might all be killed and he's curious about what's on the radio? It's a small detail, but I think an important one. If the plot needed that radio turned on so badly, there were two other people in the car who hadn't just lost a loved one.

And then it gets silly. I suppose there really are people who are frightened by frogs with teeth and flying lawn jockeys with big grins on their faces, but I'm just not one of them. That's the kind of gimmick that made me wonder if the reason King named that one book, Desperation, was because it's what he was feeling when he didn't have a really good story to turn in to his publisher.

Which is not to say I didn't like it. For the most part, I did, but the last quarter or so left me cold. It put my boyfriend to sleep during what was supposed to be the climax of the story.

I'm left wondering if his next book is going to be one of his gems. I do hope so.

Celbrity Detox by Rosie O'Donnell

Celebrity Detox by Rosie O'Donnell - I don't watch daytime TV. I don't watch nighttime TV, come to think of it. So it was really something of a remarkable coincidence that the one time I happened to have the television on during The View was the day Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck had such a vitriolic argument that I stopped what I was doing and sat, dumbstruck, at this train wreck of a broadcast.

I'd heard about the feud with Donald Trump. Who could miss it? It was everywhere. In both instances I could see both sides. It seemed like Rosie lashed out unnecessarily at The Donald, but his overreaction was stunning and unkind. And I could see how Rosie's remarks about our soldiers and the terrorists could be misconstrued, so I felt like Rosie was being a bit bullheaded in her insistence on being right, even though I do think Elisabeth is naive in her support of the war in Iraq.

After the Big Bad Broadcast and Rosie's premature departure from the show, I clicked onto her blog to see what she had to say. A person needs thicker skin than I have to be able to withstand the hatred being spewed at this saucy Irish woman. But there's a lot of love being tossed around as well. Rosie seems to bring out the best and the worst in people. On her blog, she bares it all -- her home life, her anger, her joy, her art, her family and friends. She invites people into her life through this new medium in a naked, honest fashion that few celebrities would dare to do.

So when her book was announced, I ordered a copy. True to form, Rosie bares everything -- warts and all -- in an effort to make sense out of the madness that is the world -- hers and ours -- against the backdrop of her childhood, which was marred by the untimely death of her mother. She showed us, unflinchingly, what loneliness and isolation she felt as a child, and despite my early insistence that I wouldn't get sucked in, I found myself shedding tears for this little damaged girl, who in so many ways remains damaged to this day, but is also strong and brave and solid.

She readily admits to flaws that many of us would not -- selfishness, narcissism, self-loathing. She talks about her weight problem with a candor to which I could relate, having suffered the barbs of my own toddler's honest assessment of my more-than-ample derrière. Even though she laughs about it, I could feel the pain beneath that laughter.

I was surprised that so much of the book focused not on her feud with Elisabeth, but on the fray with Donald Trump and her feelings about Barbara Walters, whom she felt did not come through for her when the going got tough, and found myself wanting to explain to Rosie what terror some people feel when faced with confrontation. I know, I know. Walters is a journalist and should be unafraid of unpleasantness, but it seemed to me that she was simply being human. I've heard Walters is upset about the book, but really I felt like Rosie went out of her way to show how much she loves and respects her.

There's a large portion of it devoted to her admiration for Barbra Streisand, an affection that was nurtured by Rosie's mother before she died.

I think what struck me most about this book is Rosie's intensity. She seems to feel things more intensely than others, and in ways that would make me take to my bed for days. It's probably what makes her an artist, but what also gives her pain. In the end, I was left a little sad by this woman whose life is so open for people to see and pick apart, and I wish her all the best.



www.bambooks.biz

Just Finished - Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes by the World's Greatest Chefs edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman - Haven't you always wanted to start your own catering business? Open your own quaint little restaurant? I know, I know. You have visions of sitting around at the bar, sipping tea and creating delicacies that everyone will oooh and ahhh over. Everyone will love you. You will become beautiful and life will be perfect. Not! Trust me. I know this from experience. I had a restaurant once. It was nothing but a nonstop nightmare.

So when I ran across "Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs," I thought maybe it would help me lick the wounds I'm still licking 25 years after I lost my little fantasy. And it did! This is the stuff of nightmares that everyone -- even those who don't cook for a living -- can enjoy. Grab a cup of tea with a nice side order of schadenfreude, and eat your heart out.

Chefs aren't always brilliant. Now, don't you feel better just knowing that? The book opens with a truly horrific tale of a chef who let the lobster spoil the night before catering a lobster dinner for 3,000 people. I almost had a panic attack, myself, just reading about how he had to scramble to try to salvage that disaster.

A story by Anthony Bourdain about a New Year's Eve dinner that flopped spectacularly had nearly the same effect on me. Then there was the one by former Good Morning America food correspondent Sara Moulton about cooking and flubbing her first Thanksgiving dinner after attending culinary school that was downright heartwarming. And the one by Gabrielle Hamilton, who, worried about being politically incorrect, hired a blind line cook...with disastrous results.

There are plenty more tales of woe, tender and tough, and I recommend this highly to anyone who's ever had to pass off store-bought pecan pie as homemade to a busload of tourists who just have to have real Southern cooking because someone forgot to write it down. Who me? Never.

www.bambooks.biz

Just Finished - Possible Side Effects

Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs - It takes a certain kind of person to find the humor in tragedy. I’m one of those people. My husband simply cannot understand it when he finds me giggling maniacally as I watch a southern-Gothic Betty Butterfield tell the emergency-room doctor that the pills he’s prescribed for her Fox News-induced panic attack are not what she had in mind. “I want somethin’ with a “X” in it,” she wails.

http://www.bohnsplace.com/betty_butterfield/ and http://www.mmmhellooo.com/.

If you don’t think Betty Butterfield or Augusten Burroughs are funny, then you either led a boringly normal childhood or you’re completely psychotic.

When my mother saw that I was reading Possible Side Effects, she remarked, “I don’t think that man is funny at all.” In case you’re wondering, she didn’t live a boringly normal childhood. I doubt Augusten’s mother would’ve seen the humor either.

See, me and Augusten? We’re so much alike it’s kinda scary. And it’s not just because we both have southern backgrounds rife with mental illness of the Auntie Mame variety. Or because we’re insecure, hypochondriacal slobs with a tendency to write down our lives. It’s because I get it. Oh, I sooo get it. Burroughs has this kind of Seinfeld-episode quality to his stories it that I can relate to.

When he writes a chapter about buying up as many first-edition John Updike novels as possible because the guy’s old and could die any minute, and just THINK how the value on those books will skyrocket when he does, finally, bite the dust… Well, let’s just say I understood, and brushed the dust off my two Easton Press signed Kurt Vonneguts.

And when Burroughs recounts the story about taking a weekend getaway with his partner at a private B&B only to get completely creeped out by the owner’s doll collection, I knew just how he felt.

“Standing there on the foyer, on the inch-thick maroon carpeting, I stared directly at a human baby girl doll, seated in a high chair. Behind her on a bookcase, a row of little girls, all in Victorian dressing gowns and black flats… ….All around the room, dolls. Little dolls in a display case between the windows. A doll on the sofa right next to us. Two dolls sharing a seat behind the innkeeper’s chair.” Geeze! Who could sleep with all those dolls leering at you?

Later, behind the closed door of their room, they fantasize about sneaking through the house at night, removing all the dolls’ heads, or writing things in the guestbook for the next guests to find. “She watched us,” or “There’s something about one of the dolls.” Har!

But Burroughs has something Seinfeld doesn’t have. There are stories here that break your heart. These are stories about damaged people, some who bloom in the face of tragedy and some who succumb to it, and what is to be learned there.

While Burroughs has a knack for skewering people in his life, he also shines the spotlight on himself, revealing his less-than-pretty habits and his less-than-noble intentions. It’s this unpitying self-revelation that makes me like him because I recognize so much of myself in his essays.

He’s damaged goods, that’s certain. But it’s the kind of damage that reveals the strength beneath it, even in humor, the wisdom gained through pain – his own and others’. And it makes me think that maybe I’ve got some of that strength, too. It makes me want to have him over for tea and compare mental illnesses. I’ve got some funny stories in my family, too, that I just know he’d like.

www.bambooks.biz

On the Bedside Table

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
The National Enquirer (yeah, yeah. I know.)
Bookmarks Magazine
Discover Magazine

Just Finished - It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News

It's Not News, It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News by Drew Curtis, founder of Fark.com - Every time I see Nancy Grace on television, I have an urge to destroy the television. Come to think of it, I feel the same way every time I see Bill O'Really [sic.], Larry King, Stone Phillips, Geraldo Rivera... Heck, I've even started hating Katie Couric, and nobody hates Katie, do they? I feel like the guy in that movie who went around saying, "I've had it up to here and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" We don't get news anymore. What we get is pure, unadulterated crap. And I'm sick of it. So when I came across this book at Barnes & Noble the other day, I figured I'd found a book that'd make me feel like I was beating up on all of 'em. And I was right! A satisfying read it was! And funny, too.

Drew Curtis, the author of the book is a news hound who used to email news stories to all his friends until one day he decided to quit sending them out and told his friends if they wanted to read interesting news stories, he'd post them on a website and they could come take a look, themselves. Before he knew it, people were sending HIM stories and now Fark.com is the busiest news-aggregate website on the net. Curtis's pet peeve is also mine -- the absolute crap that the news media pass off as news that's not really news, what he's termed Fark.

According to Curtis, news had degenerated into about four or five categories:

Fearmongering -- this includes terrorists, natural disasters, global warming, pandemic illnesses, meteors hurtling through space toward earth, etc. that are all supposed to make us panic.

Missing White Chicks -- It's true. Have you noticed how much news time missing white chicks and missing white kids get on national news? Since when was this a global or even national concern? It's local news masquerading as Big News.

Unpaid Advertising Placement Masquerading as Actual News -- Top-ten lists, movie stars' opinions on antidepressants, Banned TV commercials that the advertisers intentionally made so they'd be banned. All of these are designed to bring attention to the star's latest movie, the magazine's latest issue, the store's latest clothing line. And it works. Sales go up in direct inverse proportion to the buying public's instinct for bait-and-switch.

Seasonal Articles - These include how bad the traffic is going to be this Christmas, how hot it's going to be this July 4, how busy the stores will be the day after Thanksgiving. It's the same thing, year after year. It never changes, and they still roll it out and make us listen to it all over again.

Bellybutton Contemplation - Okay. That's sort of my moniker for it. It's the media talking about whether the media has gone too far in covering certain stories, or about how someone got in trouble for plagiarizing the news. The media love to talk about themselves as if they're as important as the news they're not reporting.

So that's basically the meat of the book. But the best part about the whole thing is Curtis's well-honed sense of humor. I laughed out loud so many times, I had to finally slink into the other bedroom so my husband could get some sleep. Some of my favorite passages from the book:

"Equal Time for Nutjobs"

Journalists are taught to give equal time to both sides of a story.... But in some cases, there flat-out isn't another side. Take moon landings, for example. Any time moon landings are mentioned in the media they always have to go get a paragraph of comment from the nutjobs who think the moon landing was faked.

"Media Fatigue"

Having no new information [on a developing story] is the bane of Mass Media. ....so if you want to continue to report on something, you've got to start exploring Other Angles. Right after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, a Fox News reporter on a live feed interviewed the first person he saw: a man walking a dog.

REPORTER: You're live on Fox News Channel. What are you doing?

MAN (INCREDULOUS): Walking a dog.

REPORTER: Wh-why are you still here? I'm-I'm just curious.

MAN (SLIGHT STUNNED PAUSE): None of your [***ing] business!

REPORTER: Oh, that was a good answer, wasn't it? That was live on air on national television; thanks so much for that.

MAN: Well, you know...(continuous yelling at the reporter)
[National desk cuts live audio feed]


HAR! I've seen this sort of thing myself. I remember a few years ago during the big Malibu conflagration, seeing a news reporter come up to a harried-looking firefighter who was shoveling dirt over dry brush:

"Sir, can you please tell us what you're doing?" to which he responded (paraphrasing), "Can you please get the hell out of the way? We're trying to fight a fire here."


Curtis tells a hilarious story about news coverage on a terrorism drill at a Kentucky goat show.

"Homeland Security's explanation for the staged attack: 'Kentucky is one of the nation's top five goat-producing states...'"

Curtis then points out that if they say top five, then it's number five. "Because if Kentucky were the number one goat-producing state, they would say that instead. I've lived in Kentucky most of my life and have never seen a goat farm. They're probably around somewhere, but my point is, it likely doesn't take a lot of goats to be the number five goat-producing state."

He outlines other hilarities with headlines like, "Oh, my God! There's bacteria on everything!"

The only drawback to the book is that if you're not internet savvy, a lot of what he's talking about won't make much sense to you. I'd really like to give this book to my father, but he'd be completely baffled by the reader's comments from the website at the end of each section. He'd just never figure out that "MyNameisMofuga" is someone's internet alterego.

But for those of you who've joined the 21st Century and actually go onto the internet as well as read the news, this is a book that will have you laughing uproarously, satisfied in the knowledge that it's not just you -- the news really is crap.

www.bambooks.biz