The Cue Card

I read “The Marriage Plot” for my book club this month, and I found it a great read. It’s the first book I’ve read by Jeffrey Eugenides and now I’m eager to go out and get his two other novels. I’m not sure why I never read his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Middlesex,” maybe I wasn’t sure of the subject matter, but I do want to get to it in the near future. Eugenides seems to really inhabit his characters, making you feel you know them, and “The Marriage Plot” was so easy sink into, so readable, the story and pages just flew by.

It’s about the lives of three senior college students at Brown University in the early 1980s. Madeleine is an English major who’s honors thesis is on the traditional “marriage plot” — the suitors, proposals, and misunderstandings in such novels as those by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James. Leonard is a smart, biology student from Oregon who comes to suffer manic depression. And Mitchell is a religious studies major who like Eugenides is from Detroit.

The book is a take on a modern marriage plot with Leonard and Mitchell both vying for the affections of Madeleine, who soon enough falls hard for Leonard. After graduation, Madeleine goes to live with him while he’s working an internship at a genetics lab, but all is not well. Madeleine spends most of her time helping Leonard cope with his mental illness. Meanwhile Mitchell is traveling around Europe and India, becoming more interested in religion and volunteering with Mother Theresa’s organization in Calcutta, all the while still dreaming of marrying Madeleine.

Later, all three lives intersect again in New York, where events transpire that lead to more uncertainty of whom Madeleine will end up with. Will she stay with Leonard, the manic depressive, or Mitchell, who’s trying to find himself through religion? Or will either one be the one for Madeleine as she pursues her graduate studies in the Victorian novel?

It’s a love triangle that’s up in the air till the very end. I found the lives of these idealistic young graduates to be quite engaging as they pursued their studies, passions, hardships and loves. It’s a book that delves deep and comes out on top.

I started out my reading year in 2013 by rereading the old classic Jack Kerouac novel “On the Road.” I had first read it in my 20s but now in my 40s I was curious to read it again because the film of it just came out with Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart among others. I guess I’m still a bit curious to see the film although some reviewers say it is “oddly lifeless” compared to the energy and craziness of the book.

As for the novel, I think I liked it better when I first read it in my 20s. It’s not an easy book for sure. Published in 1957, “On the Road” details the cross-country road adventures of the narrator Sal Paradise and his friends, notably Dean Moriarty, who’s one energetic “mad” dude. The novel is largely autobiographical and is based on Jack Kerouac’s road trips with Neal Cassady and others from 1947 to 1950.

I guess the first time I read it I was caught up in the spontaneous, personal writing style of it, which breathes life into the adventures but also takes a while to get used to. Kerouac claims he wrote it, typing continuously on one long 120-foot roll of paper. Back in my 20s, I also liked the buddy road trip and counter-culture aspect of it: the drinking, drugs, sex, jazz bars and driving like mad for endless thousands of miles.

But this time I didn’t seem to have as much patience with “On the Road.” The partying and irresponsibility sort of grew old (back and forth across the country three or four times), and Dean and the rest weren’t as cool or magnetic as perhaps I once remembered. The women get pregnant and left for the most part. And some of the book reads a bit like gibberish.

Still I was interested to see how Kerouac perceived the wide-open country in 1947 to 1950 and the cities of Denver, San Fran and NYC, which he writes mostly about. What it was like then, what it felt like. Some of his sentences still hold the magic of the time and of a group of friends hell-bent on seeking the marrow out of life. That’s what kept me reading despite the relentless road, the colorful details and language, and what would become of Sal, a writer, who was enamored by Dean but grew apart from him as well. It’s a telling book about a friendship that peaks and ebbs at various times over the years. Sal appears ready to settle down by the end, but Dean is still seemingly in transit after an indelible time on the road.

Have you read this Beat classic and what did you think?

I enjoyed the two books pictured in this post this week. You wouldn’t think they would have any similarities in common, other than their short length. Yet both include some vivid sentences and wisdom.

As for “Ru,” I was drawn to it after I heard the author Kim Thuy talking about it on NPR a couple weeks ago. Her first page, which was read on the radio, snapped me to attention:

“Ru” is an autobiographical novel that parallels Thuy and her family’s boat journey out of Saigon after the Vietnam War to a crowded Malaysian refugee camp for four months and eventually to a new life in Quebec. It’s told in a series of vignettes, the memories of which usually encompass a page each in the book and are shuffled back and forth between the various times of her life.

On the good side, the novel made me feel what it was like for the “boat people” who came over from Vietnam, their risks, fears and struggles. It also showed a glimpse into Vietnamese families and their culture, and especially expressed the feelings of living in a place of war and peace. “Ru’s” quite lyrical in the way it’s written, the passages evoke poetry in places, which I found both evocative and moving.

Just sometimes I got a bit lost in “Ru,” not knowing exactly who or what she was talking about, and maybe I couldn’t understand everything because of a cultural gap or perhaps the book’s back-and-forth structure. But still “Ru” left me with an impressionable picture of the boat people and of a survivor who seems grateful to have come through the hard sides of both war and peace.

“Good Dog. Stay.” from 2007 by Anna Quindlen was another pretty impulsive read this week. (Who knew she wrote a dog book?) It arrived in a package of dog books from my sister-in-law who was giving her collection away to us because we had recently gotten a puppy. The book is actually about Quindlen’s older dog, Beau, who is in the last stages of his life. In her usual wise and witty prose, Quindlen tells stories about Beau’s life and what she has learned from him along the way. Interspersed throughout it are lovely photos of a wide variety of dogs.

For anyone who appreciates canines or has lived through the passing of an old dog, “Good Dog. Stay.” is quite a soothing and touching quick read. It makes me want to read more dog stories, as well as other titles from Anna Quindlen. I think we can relate. Among other things, she knows the value of a dog’s life well-lived.