The book I choose to read after We Took to the Woods and The Hobbit, is titled Swing Time, written by Zadie Smith. I heard about this book and this author during a talk Anne Patchett gave when she came to the Morrison Center in Boise last year. She filled the operatic venue with a sea of white-haired heads; my book club also attended.
Anne Patchett was an incredible speaker and I was gripped by her presentation- a story of the creation of her newest novel, The Dutch House, woven together with interviews she conducted over those years with famous authors, famous people who were authors and authors who were friends. She was funny, smart, snappy. The cadence of her speech took my breath away and left me with the notion that stand-up comedy in comparison was a garbage can. Not garbage, but in feel, a garbage can. Despite interviewing people like Tom Hanks and Melida Gates, Barabara Kingsolver and Elizabeth Gilbert, she said that the person she was most intimidated by was Zadie Smith. I can’t remember quite what Anne Patchett said about her but it was of the nature of reverence. She showed a picture of the novel’s cover, which I remember as striking me, curious-bright yellow with a clean red and black font, simple yet new. The author’s name was placed above the title of the book itself and in equal sized font, no pictures, as if to say, “this novel is Zadie Smith and thats all you need to know.”
This cover was a stark contrast to the one featured that night. Anne Patchett covered the process of her choosing it in the same breath taking speed as the rest of her talk. She had disagreed with the publishers and as a person at such a level in her career, did exactly as she please. She commissioned an artist in New York whom she knew well to draw it. A dark haired girl in a red coat, sitting to be painted, blue birds on the wall paper behind her. No houses. The cover, she explained was a depiction of a picture inside the dutch house, a focal point for the story. She wanted readers to imagine the house for themselves and she hand signed every copy of that book which she gave to every ticket holder that night. The venue seats over 2,000 and I cried hard and unexplainably at the end of that book.
Anne showed a picture of the cover of each book she reviewed and loved enough to promote, for the sake of the story she was telling, love of her colleagues and, I think, the craft. The salt of her talk was a constant reminder that by buying books from local bookstores, rather than on Amazon, you not only support the bookstore but also the author. Local bookstores pay authors quite a bit more than Amazon. She said this over and over throughout her talk, so to take her recommended reading list to Amazon would have felt like betrayal and surely devalued the experience, from her talk to each stories end. When I went to our local store downtown, Rediscovered Books, and saw the cover of Swing Time, in the obvious display in honor of Anne’s talk, I couldn’t pull away. She had effectively put me right where she wanted me and where I should be. Which is what all good authors do.
It’s neither here nor there for me to agree with Anne about the book and I don’t exactly remember what she even said about it anyways. Swing Time instantly grabbed me and like the two full pages of reviews say much better than I can, the writing emulates the ferocity of the dancers in the story. Smith touches on female friendships which span developmental stages as as complex as the characters themselves. It touches on parental dynamics and self-concepts in diamond like shape. The unfiltered self-reflection of the main character told in first person is uncomfortable, painful at times. Chapters in parts of the book bounce from one time frame in her life to another, a crude game of ping pong that is maddening and exhaustive yet addictive. We are getting at something, but what that is, I fear is the unbearable truth that the main character has spent her life suffering herself, for her own sake. It seems like such a waste. In the same way I have grown tired of myself, my own preoccupation with my own life, indecision, lack of clear direction, ability to be so easily swayed by others, living life in service to their lives, which appear more worthy or real than my own, I have grown tired of this character. It’s too good. It hurts. What keeps me reading Swing Time is not what the story is coming to, I am dreading that. I’m not interested in story or curious about the development of the character. She is not someone meant to be cared about. But I am in awe of the author’s ability to portray that while in the first person, so I continue out of respect and fascination with her.
I did take the liberty of a break. I knew that there was a chance that Kate and I could get out of town and into some alternative remote landscape again this weekend so I opened, Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffery. It is the first in the science fiction series, Dragonriders of Pern. The man who works at Once and Future Books, the other local and also mostly used bookstore out on the busy State Street, sold me on the series by explaining that Anne McCaffery was one of the first famous female sci-fi writers and that her books were classics. It was perfect read for the dessert landscape, redundant at first glance, made magic by fire and stars.
As a new fan to the sci-fi genre and as a new collector, I bought the first two in the Dragonrider series and asked to be notified when the rest in the same edition came in. It only took a couple of days to get more than halfway through the first book; I was immediately seized by the main female character. Lessa is a woman of inarguable will, cunningness and resilience. I find these characteristic irresistible and so opposite of the main character in Swing Time, whose name I just realized I don’t even know. I don’t think it is even mentioned in the book and I don’t think I even noticed that until just now. Perhaps another demonstration of her lack of existence and of the writers skill. At the moment, the power of the dragon woman and the impending challenge the world of Pern faces, keeps me engrossed and distracted from the unnamed woman who exists, or fails to exists in more or less present times.
Too much time for life reflection has gotten to me, no matter how busy or productive I try to stay. That has aways been the issue with time off. Its never fully enjoyable because I am constantly considering what it is I should be doing, how I will support myself and what I want my life to look like. What I sometimes interpret as a clear path ends in an uninspring suburban cul-de-sac. One week I’ll build a business out of SUPin, the next I’ll get a PHD and a pursue career in academia. Sometimes I think I’ll be a foster mom and home maker and other times a burlesque dancer and comic who tours Europe and resides in Amsterdam. Sometimes I swallow hard and am reminded that I could be all those things and the only thing I ever wanted to be, if I could just figure out how to write for other people.