872 pages of greatness…

….finished off with 25 pages of feel-good, too-perfect crap.  That’s how I would describe Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True. It’s 997 pages that I devoured in just over a week (at one time in my life, this would have been slow, but a full time job and 2 kids will change that) and it was so great – until it wasn’t.

So here’s my beef.  I related so much with a lot of the book.  Not in actual fact – I had a very happy, pleasant childhood, and I’ve never dealt with any of the more extreme drama that the protagonist, Dominick Birdsey, dealt with – but in the fact that the past few years of my life have been really tough.  Really, really tough.  And there have been times where I’ve simply felt the world was out to get me.

Dominick feels the same way.  And, like me, he loses his faith in God.  Like me, he also struggles a lot with anger.  (Although I’d say I’m better at controlling mine.  But it’s always there, beneath the surface.)  And so I could really relate to his struggle to come to terms with his life and to let go of his anger.  To realize that the world ISN’T out to get him, and that his anger isn’t helping anything.

I appreciated how messy and complex life was, and the ways in which he began to take small steps forward.  But the problem was the end.  Or actually, the problem was that there were NO problems at the end.  Every bad thing in his life is suddenly (and sometimes incredibly unrealistically) resolved.  In fact, things that weren’t even a problem were resolved – he’s suddenly a rich man!  And he suddenly has a cultural identity he didn’t even know he had!

I don’t know.  I’m not being very articulate here.  All I know is that for the last week or so, I’ve eagerly picked up that book at every opportunity.  And although I’ll still treasure the book for the first 872 pages, I did not anticipate that the last time I put it down, I’d be so utterly disappointed.

Edited: I’ve been skimming through the 3 star reviews on Amazon.com to see if other people agree (they do – it’s one of the top two critiques of the book, but there are a vast preponderance of 5 star reviews over any other rating).  And I found one reviewer, by C.S. Junker, who managed to say it far better than I did in two short sentences:

“If a writer wants to say something profound about life, he should avoid facile conclusions. He doesn’t have to end it like “Hamlet”, but it doesn’t have to be a fairy tale, either.”

A chuckle for the morning

I was driving home from dropping something off at Nate’s office earlier, and I passed a McDonald’s.  It has one of those electronic marquees with a scrolling/changing message, and it is HORRIBLE.  It can only fit two short lines of text, and it seems like something is always being broken up between screens at an odd place.  (This is a McDonald’s I drive by regularly.)  However, today took the cake.

Screen 1:

Play Monopoly

Win $1

Screen 2:

Million

I had a revelation

I think I’ve figured out just why I like history so much and why I prefer to read about history over modern day affairs.  Although I have very strong political ideals and am very interested in what happens in the political arena, I find that I actually avoid reading too much about it.  I’m not one of those people who soaks up blogs and books and newspapers and radio shows about politics.  Perhaps I should be, but I’m not.

See, the thing is, I’m a very empathetic person – empathetic to a fault, perhaps.  The suffering of other people actually makes my heart hurt.  This empathy is absolutely the foundation of my political beliefs, but it’s also why it’s often difficult for me to read about modern day issues.  Reading about people dying in Darfur or children starving in our own streets makes me want to cry.  It actually hurts, physically; when I say that it makes my heart hurt, I mean that literally.  I feel a squeezing in my heart and an ache in my guts when I read these things.  And other news just makes me angry, so much so that I clench my fists and grit my teeth.  Reading about avaricious pharmaceutical companies or lying CEOs just makes me want to scream.

On the other hand, history is calming and even uplifting for me because history is already fixed.  Problems of the past have been made better.  (I’m of the camp who firmly believes that human belief systems have evolved mostly for the better over time.)  We repudiated slavery.  Women can now vote, own property, choose to divorce, etc.  Children aren’t forced to labor in unsafe working conditions.  (Although I recognize that even today, these things still occur in other parts of the world.)  I think it makes me feel good and, more importantly, optimistic to see how humanity has progressed.  It gives me hope that all of the other social ills I see can one day be fixed as well.  I doubt we can ever reach “perfection,” because I also believe that while humans are inherently good, we are also inherently flawed.  But reading about history provides a bit of a balm for the sadness and anger that I feel about too many things that happen today.

A random observation

Ya know what I hate the most about blogging?  The pressure to come up with witty titles.  If you haven’t noticed, I mostly suck at it.  Every once in awhile, I come up with a good one.  I think the No one expects the Spanish Panic (Attack) one was pretty good, and Faith and begorrah was a nice little homage to my Irishness.  But for the most part, I come up with pretty boring stuff like On Books.

Be patient.  I’m trying to improve.  And if all else fails, I’ll enlist the services of my husband who, for better or for worse (usually for worse) is the King of the Bad Pun.  It is his gift, it is his curse.

Romanticizing violence

Why is it that there is often something oddly appealing about the idea of violence?  Not so much actual violence, but simply the idea of it.  Is this a uniquely American thing, derived from our revolutionary and manifest-destiny seeking history?  Or is it some fundamentally human impulse?  Does everyone feel it occasionally?  Are all women attracted to “the bad boy” on some level?  Is this fascination a luxury only available to those, like myself, who have been fortunate enough never to experience real violence?

I just find it strange to recognize this part of myself, because I consider myself (mostly) a pacifist, and I can’t imagine raising my hand (much less a weapon) to anyone in violence.  I have a HOT temper, but it takes a lot for me even to lash out verbally at someone.  (Mostly, I just unload on poor Nate after the fact or yell out my frustrations at stupid drivers who can’t hear me.)  Even in self-defense, I don’t know if I’d actually be able to harm another human being; I fear I’d end up on the dead end of a self-defense scenario. 

However, I notice that a lot of my entertainment choices are surprisingly violent.  I’m a big fan of The Sopranos, 24, and Heroes.  I recently saw The Departed and absolutely loved it, much as I did another violent Scorsese classic, Goodfellas.  One of my all-time favorite film scenes is the fight early in Good Will Hunting where Will and his friends have a brawl with a group of thugs who’d been verbally harrassing a girl.  It’s shown in slow motion, each punch, kick and head snap exaggerated, with Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” playing hauntingly in the background.  And last night, I found myself oddly enthralled by The Black Donnellys premier (prompting this post) and was particularly attracted to Tommy, the smart, thoughtful one with a hand of steel but a conflicted soul.  Wathcing it, I was reminded of the scene in the aforementioned Goodfellas where Henry violently beats and pistol whips a man who had assaulted his girlfriend, Karen.  When Henry gives her the bloody gun to hide, Karen’s voice over says, “I know there are women who would have gotten out the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide.  But I didn’t.  I got to admit the truth.  It turned me on.”

Of course, the difference here is that I am truly only attracted to the idea of violence.  If my (purely hypothetical) boyfriend gave me a gun to hide, I WOULD run the other way.  Violence in reality scares me to death.  But there is something about fictional violence that makes my pulse race a little.  And it’s certainly not the gore; I actually turn my head at gore.  But I guess if I think about it, the common thread is that I’m attracted to violence with a “good” purpose, like in 24 or Heroes.  And that definition extends in some strange way to shows and movies about organized crime because so much of the violence is perpetrated out of a sense of honor.  A warped sense of honor, no doubt, but perhaps it’s the Irish in me that finds the idea of defending one’s honor with violence vaguely noble. 

In any case, this is something I often ponder when I’ve indulged myself in some violence-laden film or show.  It actually bothers me quite a bit because I don’t want to find violence appealing, and because I wonder how much violent entertainment does relate to desensitization, which in turn creates real violence and/or apathy toward real violence.  Who knows?  But it’s both interesting and disturbing to consider.

An imponderable

Here is something I wonder about every time someone in the family has a cold, and I’m shopping cold medicines.

What on earth is the reason for creating a drug that contains both a cough expectorant and a cough suppressant?  I mean, the whole point of an expectorant is to loosen things up so you can cough them out more effectively.  So then why would you want to stop the coughing?  Wouldn’t that be kind of like making pot brownies and throwing in some Dexatrim? 

This genuinely confuses me.