aaron hamburger

Friday, June 26, 2009

Michael Jackson and Me

When I was nine, I remember a classmate of mine brought into school a 45 single of a song I'd never heard before by a singer I didn't know. The song was "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson.

My ignorance was soon rectified. Jackson's Thriller album was not just popular; it was a necessity like food, shelter, clothing. Or rather, a fact of life, like air, water, and earth. It was just there, inescapable, immovable, irresistible.

Though I knew the entire cassette by heart, and I had images of Michael Jackson on buttons and posters all around my room, had seen all of his videos several times and repeatedly practiced the "Beat It" dance moves in my backyard though never learned them, I knew almost nothing about Jackson the man. I had never heard his speaking voice. I had never listened to his previous solo record Off the Wall, and was only remotely aware of his career as a child star because a new group called New Edition was being touted as "the next Jackson Five." In fact, I knew almost nothing about him other than his image from his videos and megahit album. He wore sequined jackets. He sang and danced better than anyone alive. And he was shy.

Being shy myself, I became desperately infatuated with Jackson. I deeply coveted his zipper jacket from the Beat It video, which a lot of the boys in school were wearing. However, because it cost forty bucks, my parents were initially reluctant to buy it for me. Unfortunately, by the time they finally broke down and got me one, it had gone out of style. I wore it exactly twice. The second time, I was in a store and I saw two kids pointing at me and snickering, "Look, he's wearing the Michael Jackson jacket."

I dreamed of meeting Jackson, perhaps by writing him an eloquent fan letter that would so move him, that he would invite me to his ranch at Neverland to become his best friend. We'd watch movies together, go on rides, play with the animals in his zoo, have sleepovers. He'd dedicate a song to me. He would love me. I even wrote an unfinished story about our adventures called "Me and Michael," that I felt sure would get his attention.

Thankfully my fantasy never came true, as it did for other young playmates of a troubled grown man who'd formed a profoundly unhealthy attachment to childhood. Though never found guilty in a court of law of his actions, Jackson horribly betrayed the trust of these boys who looked to their idol for friendship and comfort. For this reason, much as I appreciate his music and career achievements, I cannot cry for the man who died yesterday or feel sad that he's gone. Furthermore, I find it nauseating that so many people, in their rush to participate in the orgy of celebrity glorification that defines our culture, are eager to whitewash this man's loathsome legacy. I wonder if these same people might also shed tears for the deaths of their local child molesters who aren't famous and don't have Grammys and gold albums to distract from their unsavory acts.

posted by aaron hamburger at 11:34 AM | 1 comments

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

How Do You Write a Novel?

Gee, I wish I knew, so I could sell my advice in bottles. Still, in an attempt to answer that question, I'm going to be teaching a workshop addressing novel-writing at the Stonecoast MFA program next month.

The idea behind the class is that the traditional workshop, while good for getting at what's wrong with a story or an individual novel chapter, is not ideally suited toward fixing what can go wrong with a project that spans two to three hundred pages. A workshop can't usually handle manuscripts that are more than twenty pages. Consequently, workshopping novel excerpts tends to lead to somewhat frustrating conversations that usually involve the author chiming in, "Well, if you'd read Chapter Five, you'd know that..."

To get around this dilemma, I've asked the students to provide what I'm calling "samples" rather than excerpts from their work. The idea is to get a sense of the whole from a part, rather than examine the scenes at hand as if they were stand-alone pieces. I've also asked students to provide a description of their projects, an outline of the major plot developments organized under the rubrics of "Beginning," "Middle," and "End," and a list of their major questions. Finally, I've asked the students to read two short novels and think about how they're structured.

When we meet next month, my plan is to work with exercises that get students to thinking about their books as a whole, rather than a series of scenes. The course will be divided into four themed days, in which discussion of student work will be interspersed with exercises on Plot, Character, Line-Editing & Setting, and finally, Getting Your Work Out into the World. I'm also hoping that as we go along, students will give me ideas for teaching tools that suit the longer form of the novel rather than a story or a scene.

I'm excited about this new venture, which I hope may eventually provide a useful model for the future...

posted by aaron hamburger at 5:38 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Kindling

A few years ago, when I met people and told them I was a writer, the first question they asked me was, "What have you written?"

Today, their face lights up with a big smile, and they say, "Oh, have you tried the new Kindle?"

The answer I say out loud is no. The answer I'm thinking is, completely not interested.

Somehow I have a feeling that the electronic revolution we've been promised in the book industry may be more of a whimper than a roar. It's not like digital music, where an iPod or digital music player improves upon the existing technology. Remember the days of carrying around a portable CD player? (Let alone a walkman!)

Books, by contrast, are a technology that's already been perfected. They never skip between tracks or run out of battery power. They're easy to carry (at least paperbacks are), the right size and shape to hold in your hand, affordable. If you lose one, you can easily buy another. The only advantage I can see to replacing an actual book with a Kindle is that the Kindle can hold many books at one time, replacing an entire library.

I suppose carrying a library with you everywhere you go is a useful thing when you're going about your day and you're struck by a sudden urge to check a passage in Howards End, and another from Ulysses, and another from Pride and Prejudice. Or maybe you're a voracious reader who likes to make sure to have a back-up book at the ready just in case you finish the one you're reading.

But I never find myself in these situations. If I want a book, I'm perfectly happy to stroll to my neighborhood bookstore and buy it or order it and wait for it to come later. I have time. I can wait. Reading is an activity that cultivates patience and quiet reflection. It is not like the quick fix of ordering a song on iTunes. In fact, reading a book is the perfect antidote to the extremes of our Internet-driven age, when we buzz about like electrons with our websites and text messages and all the rest.

For those of you who want or own a Kindle, God bless you. But as for me, I don't want to replace my library with a screen. The books on my shelves are beautiful. They are covered in thumbprints, scrawled notes, food stains. The pages are dogeared, the covers wrinkled. They sit above my desk and wait for me. And when I have a few moments, I choose one, sit in a quiet corner, open the covers, and begin to read.

posted by aaron hamburger at 2:07 PM | 2 comments

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The Joy of Not Knowing Everything

I am in the not unique position of both teaching and practicing creative writing. An obvious questions emerges: Do I practice what I preach?

Almost every day when I sit down to write, I feel a heavy nostalgia for the days when I was in school and I had fellow students and mentors I could pull aside and ask for help whenever I felt stuck. (Of course at the time it didn't feel like nirvana. In fact, I felt anxious to get out of school and become a Published Author as quickly as possible.)

But then it occurred to me: I am a teacher. In numerous classes, I disseminate advice, exercise, quotes from famous writers on writing, anecdotes of my and other writers' experiences, all to encourage students. Yet there are times when I need a little encouragement too, and I'm currently writing without a teacher to guide me.

So why not be my own mentor and encourager-in-chief?

I began by doing some of the exercises I give others: character quizzes, freewriting on a theme, setting questionnaires. I plucked several of the craft guides on my shelf, which I bought to help me guide others, and reread the sections on character. As I read fiction by others (I've just finished three extraordinary new books: The Believers by Zoe Heller, Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill, and Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre), I paid special attention to the way the writers constructed their stories, characters, and settings, even though I don't have a class to report back to about my findings.

The most important lesson of all that I've learned through teaching is to forgive myself for my mistakes, for my utterly wretched passages of ugly prose, for my laziness at times, for my stubbornness in refusing to confront a sticky paragraph or troubling feeling on the part of a character. Though we as writers have to play God, we are not God. Maybe it's that rude disjunction that makes every writer I know feel like an impostor.

Nowhere do I feel more like an impostor, however, in the classroom, where I sit mandarinlike at the head of a table and tell other people what they ought to do. In reality, there's so much left for me to learn about this business. And that comforts me, because in that knowledge gap, I know, lies the potential for my greatest achievements, the ones of which I don't yet know that I'm capable.

posted by aaron hamburger at 9:40 AM | 0 comments

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Some Good News about the Book Biz

It's so easy to feel gloomy about the prospects of book publishing these days, I thought I'd pass along a few notes of encouragement.

1. Apparently, while most other industries are tanking as a result of the Bush/Cheney Economic Depression, the book business has actually flatlined, having found its bottom a while ago. It seems that we've hit a bedrock of readers who despite the bad economic news aren't willing to give up their literary habits. Which is quite an inspiring and wonderful thing. Let's keep it up! (Indie Book-buying day is May 1st, by the way, which means everyone who reads this post should visit their local independent bookstore or online retailer and buy a book on the 1st.)

2. I was at a reading Sunday night featuring Ira Sher, Joanna Smith Rakoff, and Stacey D'Erasmo at KGB Bar. I was talking to D'Erasmo afterward, who reminded me that A) She and I were not the only two people on the planet who care deeply about books and reading. B) Publishing may be going through a painful period of transition, but it's a transition that could lead to some wonderful new way of getting books and writing into the hands of readers, a way that we hadn't previously imagined.

3. I was given an article by Robert Darnton, from the New York Review of Books, talking about the fate of libraries in the digital age. It pointed out that while the media for transmitting the written word have changed throughout the ages, the written word itself has not disappeared. Also, though books are increasingly being read in digital form, the sheer number of books that have existed and will exist over time is so vast that even the considerable resources of Google are not enough to encompass them all. Which means that the book still has an important and viable future.

It's rough out there, to be sure, but not apocalyptic.

posted by aaron hamburger at 2:18 PM | 0 comments

Friday, April 03, 2009

What's it All For?

One of my creative writing students recently asked me a very important question. In this age when fewer and fewer people are reading, when publishing only gets harder, and when writing doesn't get any easier, what's the point?

I often ask myself the same thing.

Recently the poet Patricia Smith came to visit my story writing class at Barnard, and she gave me a few ideas to help answer this question.

First, she said that in an increasingly chaotic and stressful world, the act of writing is the one thing she can trust, a life preserver that helps her to find comfort and guidance.

She also told the story of when she first began performing in poetry slams, when she would channel the voice of various characters from her life. After one of these performances, a member of the audience came up to her to say, "That was me! You got me!"

This made me think of David Foster Wallace, who said that the point of writing was that it helped people to feel a little less alone in the world.

My feeling is that the purpose of writing, if there is a purpose to it which is a debate in itself, is both inward and outward. When you write fiction, you take your innermost thoughts and feeling and try to communicate them to others. And yet the point of this process of clarifying yourself for other people is to get to know yourself. If other people benefit from it, great for them. It's an added bonus. The danger comes, however, when you come to count on others' approval and it becomes the motivation and guiding principle for what you do.

Sort of weird, but the best way I know how to put it.

posted by aaron hamburger at 6:04 PM | 3 comments

Friday, March 06, 2009

Those Weird Brits

The past week I read two weird works of literature by British authors: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnhim. Both are wonderful in their own ways, and deeply flawed.

Brideshead begins as a breathless love story between two Oxford students in pre-World War II England. Waugh, who was mostly known as a satirist, forsakes irony for lush, sensitive prose that details the blossoming relationship between Charles Ryder, an emotionally stunted man learning to love for the first time, and the free-spirited Sebastian Flyte, who increasingly depends on alcohol to help him escape the realities of life.

About midway through the novel, however, the story takes a strange turn as Sebastian drops out of it. We watch, confused, as Charles gets married, then has an adulterous affair with Sebastian's sister (who just happens to bear a resemblance to Sebastian himself). I kept wanting to ask, Waugh, what are you doing? You've just wrapped me up in this vivid story of first love, and now you want me to swallow this crap about Charles being in love with a woman without any explanation? Is this meant to be parable of sublimated male sexual desire? Clearly not, as Waugh simply moves Charles from man-love to woman-love like a chess player castling his king with his rook.

By the end of the novel, the meaning of it twists in on itself so completely that I felt angry as I read the book's bizarre, opaque last few pages. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Waugh didn't realize he was writing a love story between two men and that the conventions of the heterosexual love story just don't convince for the characters he'd created.

The Enchanted April takes a similarly strange turn. It begins as a wickedly witty satire of the lives of put-upon housewives in England. Their lot is so devastatingly well-rendered that when the housewives arrive in sunny Italy for a vacation from their husbands, we're thrilled... as well as mystified by their decision to invite their husbands to join them. Von Arnhim, I guess, is trying to make some kind of point about the redemptive powers of love and beauty, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not quite so forgiving nor so gullible to believe that if your husband's been treating you like shit for twenty years, a day in Portofino is all he needs to change his ways.

Perhaps the strangest thing about these two books is that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their flaws, I've been thinking of them since I put them down, which is more than I can say for a number of polite, nicely crafted works of fiction that have as much tang and bite as a bowl of melted jello.

posted by aaron hamburger at 9:17 PM | 0 comments


	Friday, June 26, 2009 Michael Jackson and Me When I was nine, I remember a classmate of mine brought into school a 45 single of a song I'd never heard before by a singer I didn't know. The song was "Billie Jean" by Michael Jackson. My ignorance was soon rectified. Jackson's Thriller album was not just popular; it was a necessity like food, shelter, clothing. Or rather, a fact of life, like air, water, and earth. It was just there, inescapable, immovable, irresistible. Though I knew the entire cassette by heart, and I had images of Michael Jackson on buttons and posters all around my room, had seen all of his videos several times and repeatedly practiced the "Beat It" dance moves in my backyard though never learned them, I knew almost nothing about Jackson the man. I had never heard his speaking voice. I had never listened to his previous solo record Off the Wall, and was only remotely aware of his career as a child star because a new group called New Edition was being touted as "the next Jackson Five." In fact, I knew almost nothing about him other than his image from his videos and megahit album. He wore sequined jackets. He sang and danced better than anyone alive. And he was shy. Being shy myself, I became desperately infatuated with Jackson. I deeply coveted his zipper jacket from the Beat It video, which a lot of the boys in school were wearing. However, because it cost forty bucks, my parents were initially reluctant to buy it for me. Unfortunately, by the time they finally broke down and got me one, it had gone out of style. I wore it exactly twice. The second time, I was in a store and I saw two kids pointing at me and snickering, "Look, he's wearing the Michael Jackson jacket." I dreamed of meeting Jackson, perhaps by writing him an eloquent fan letter that would so move him, that he would invite me to his ranch at Neverland to become his best friend. We'd watch movies together, go on rides, play with the animals in his zoo, have sleepovers. He'd dedicate a song to me. He would love me. I even wrote an unfinished story about our adventures called "Me and Michael," that I felt sure would get his attention. Thankfully my fantasy never came true, as it did for other young playmates of a troubled grown man who'd formed a profoundly unhealthy attachment to childhood. Though never found guilty in a court of law of his actions, Jackson horribly betrayed the trust of these boys who looked to their idol for friendship and comfort. For this reason, much as I appreciate his music and career achievements, I cannot cry for the man who died yesterday or feel sad that he's gone. Furthermore, I find it nauseating that so many people, in their rush to participate in the orgy of celebrity glorification that defines our culture, are eager to whitewash this man's loathsome legacy. I wonder if these same people might also shed tears for the deaths of their local child molesters who aren't famous and don't have Grammys and gold albums to distract from their unsavory acts. posted by aaron hamburger at 11:34 AM \| 1 comments Tuesday, June 23, 2009 How Do You Write a Novel? Gee, I wish I knew, so I could sell my advice in bottles. Still, in an attempt to answer that question, I'm going to be teaching a workshop addressing novel-writing at the Stonecoast MFA program next month. The idea behind the class is that the traditional workshop, while good for getting at what's wrong with a story or an individual novel chapter, is not ideally suited toward fixing what can go wrong with a project that spans two to three hundred pages. A workshop can't usually handle manuscripts that are more than twenty pages. Consequently, workshopping novel excerpts tends to lead to somewhat frustrating conversations that usually involve the author chiming in, "Well, if you'd read Chapter Five, you'd know that..." To get around this dilemma, I've asked the students to provide what I'm calling "samples" rather than excerpts from their work. The idea is to get a sense of the whole from a part, rather than examine the scenes at hand as if they were stand-alone pieces. I've also asked students to provide a description of their projects, an outline of the major plot developments organized under the rubrics of "Beginning," "Middle," and "End," and a list of their major questions. Finally, I've asked the students to read two short novels and think about how they're structured. When we meet next month, my plan is to work with exercises that get students to thinking about their books as a whole, rather than a series of scenes. The course will be divided into four themed days, in which discussion of student work will be interspersed with exercises on Plot, Character, Line-Editing & Setting, and finally, Getting Your Work Out into the World. I'm also hoping that as we go along, students will give me ideas for teaching tools that suit the longer form of the novel rather than a story or a scene. I'm excited about this new venture, which I hope may eventually provide a useful model for the future... posted by aaron hamburger at 5:38 PM \| 0 comments Wednesday, June 03, 2009 Kindling A few years ago, when I met people and told them I was a writer, the first question they asked me was, "What have you written?" Today, their face lights up with a big smile, and they say, "Oh, have you tried the new Kindle?" The answer I say out loud is no. The answer I'm thinking is, completely not interested. Somehow I have a feeling that the electronic revolution we've been promised in the book industry may be more of a whimper than a roar. It's not like digital music, where an iPod or digital music player improves upon the existing technology. Remember the days of carrying around a portable CD player? (Let alone a walkman!) Books, by contrast, are a technology that's already been perfected. They never skip between tracks or run out of battery power. They're easy to carry (at least paperbacks are), the right size and shape to hold in your hand, affordable. If you lose one, you can easily buy another. The only advantage I can see to replacing an actual book with a Kindle is that the Kindle can hold many books at one time, replacing an entire library. I suppose carrying a library with you everywhere you go is a useful thing when you're going about your day and you're struck by a sudden urge to check a passage in Howards End, and another from Ulysses, and another from Pride and Prejudice. Or maybe you're a voracious reader who likes to make sure to have a back-up book at the ready just in case you finish the one you're reading. But I never find myself in these situations. If I want a book, I'm perfectly happy to stroll to my neighborhood bookstore and buy it or order it and wait for it to come later. I have time. I can wait. Reading is an activity that cultivates patience and quiet reflection. It is not like the quick fix of ordering a song on iTunes. In fact, reading a book is the perfect antidote to the extremes of our Internet-driven age, when we buzz about like electrons with our websites and text messages and all the rest. For those of you who want or own a Kindle, God bless you. But as for me, I don't want to replace my library with a screen. The books on my shelves are beautiful. They are covered in thumbprints, scrawled notes, food stains. The pages are dogeared, the covers wrinkled. They sit above my desk and wait for me. And when I have a few moments, I choose one, sit in a quiet corner, open the covers, and begin to read. posted by aaron hamburger at 2:07 PM \| 2 comments Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Joy of Not Knowing Everything I am in the not unique position of both teaching and practicing creative writing. An obvious questions emerges: Do I practice what I preach? Almost every day when I sit down to write, I feel a heavy nostalgia for the days when I was in school and I had fellow students and mentors I could pull aside and ask for help whenever I felt stuck. (Of course at the time it didn't feel like nirvana. In fact, I felt anxious to get out of school and become a Published Author as quickly as possible.) But then it occurred to me: I am a teacher. In numerous classes, I disseminate advice, exercise, quotes from famous writers on writing, anecdotes of my and other writers' experiences, all to encourage students. Yet there are times when I need a little encouragement too, and I'm currently writing without a teacher to guide me. So why not be my own mentor and encourager-in-chief? I began by doing some of the exercises I give others: character quizzes, freewriting on a theme, setting questionnaires. I plucked several of the craft guides on my shelf, which I bought to help me guide others, and reread the sections on character. As I read fiction by others (I've just finished three extraordinary new books: The Believers by Zoe Heller, Don't Cry by Mary Gaitskill, and Lake Overturn by Vestal McIntyre), I paid special attention to the way the writers constructed their stories, characters, and settings, even though I don't have a class to report back to about my findings. The most important lesson of all that I've learned through teaching is to forgive myself for my mistakes, for my utterly wretched passages of ugly prose, for my laziness at times, for my stubbornness in refusing to confront a sticky paragraph or troubling feeling on the part of a character. Though we as writers have to play God, we are not God. Maybe it's that rude disjunction that makes every writer I know feel like an impostor. Nowhere do I feel more like an impostor, however, in the classroom, where I sit mandarinlike at the head of a table and tell other people what they ought to do. In reality, there's so much left for me to learn about this business. And that comforts me, because in that knowledge gap, I know, lies the potential for my greatest achievements, the ones of which I don't yet know that I'm capable. posted by aaron hamburger at 9:40 AM \| 0 comments Thursday, April 23, 2009 Some Good News about the Book Biz It's so easy to feel gloomy about the prospects of book publishing these days, I thought I'd pass along a few notes of encouragement. 1. Apparently, while most other industries are tanking as a result of the Bush/Cheney Economic Depression, the book business has actually flatlined, having found its bottom a while ago. It seems that we've hit a bedrock of readers who despite the bad economic news aren't willing to give up their literary habits. Which is quite an inspiring and wonderful thing. Let's keep it up! (Indie Book-buying day is May 1st, by the way, which means everyone who reads this post should visit their local independent bookstore or online retailer and buy a book on the 1st.) 2. I was at a reading Sunday night featuring Ira Sher, Joanna Smith Rakoff, and Stacey D'Erasmo at KGB Bar. I was talking to D'Erasmo afterward, who reminded me that A) She and I were not the only two people on the planet who care deeply about books and reading. B) Publishing may be going through a painful period of transition, but it's a transition that could lead to some wonderful new way of getting books and writing into the hands of readers, a way that we hadn't previously imagined. 3. I was given an article by Robert Darnton, from the New York Review of Books, talking about the fate of libraries in the digital age. It pointed out that while the media for transmitting the written word have changed throughout the ages, the written word itself has not disappeared. Also, though books are increasingly being read in digital form, the sheer number of books that have existed and will exist over time is so vast that even the considerable resources of Google are not enough to encompass them all. Which means that the book still has an important and viable future. It's rough out there, to be sure, but not apocalyptic. posted by aaron hamburger at 2:18 PM \| 0 comments Friday, April 03, 2009 What's it All For? One of my creative writing students recently asked me a very important question. In this age when fewer and fewer people are reading, when publishing only gets harder, and when writing doesn't get any easier, what's the point? I often ask myself the same thing. Recently the poet Patricia Smith came to visit my story writing class at Barnard, and she gave me a few ideas to help answer this question. First, she said that in an increasingly chaotic and stressful world, the act of writing is the one thing she can trust, a life preserver that helps her to find comfort and guidance. She also told the story of when she first began performing in poetry slams, when she would channel the voice of various characters from her life. After one of these performances, a member of the audience came up to her to say, "That was me! You got me!" This made me think of David Foster Wallace, who said that the point of writing was that it helped people to feel a little less alone in the world. My feeling is that the purpose of writing, if there is a purpose to it which is a debate in itself, is both inward and outward. When you write fiction, you take your innermost thoughts and feeling and try to communicate them to others. And yet the point of this process of clarifying yourself for other people is to get to know yourself. If other people benefit from it, great for them. It's an added bonus. The danger comes, however, when you come to count on others' approval and it becomes the motivation and guiding principle for what you do. Sort of weird, but the best way I know how to put it. posted by aaron hamburger at 6:04 PM \| 3 comments Friday, March 06, 2009 Those Weird Brits The past week I read two weird works of literature by British authors: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnhim. Both are wonderful in their own ways, and deeply flawed. Brideshead begins as a breathless love story between two Oxford students in pre-World War II England. Waugh, who was mostly known as a satirist, forsakes irony for lush, sensitive prose that details the blossoming relationship between Charles Ryder, an emotionally stunted man learning to love for the first time, and the free-spirited Sebastian Flyte, who increasingly depends on alcohol to help him escape the realities of life. About midway through the novel, however, the story takes a strange turn as Sebastian drops out of it. We watch, confused, as Charles gets married, then has an adulterous affair with Sebastian's sister (who just happens to bear a resemblance to Sebastian himself). I kept wanting to ask, Waugh, what are you doing? You've just wrapped me up in this vivid story of first love, and now you want me to swallow this crap about Charles being in love with a woman without any explanation? Is this meant to be parable of sublimated male sexual desire? Clearly not, as Waugh simply moves Charles from man-love to woman-love like a chess player castling his king with his rook. By the end of the novel, the meaning of it twists in on itself so completely that I felt angry as I read the book's bizarre, opaque last few pages. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Waugh didn't realize he was writing a love story between two men and that the conventions of the heterosexual love story just don't convince for the characters he'd created. The Enchanted April takes a similarly strange turn. It begins as a wickedly witty satire of the lives of put-upon housewives in England. Their lot is so devastatingly well-rendered that when the housewives arrive in sunny Italy for a vacation from their husbands, we're thrilled... as well as mystified by their decision to invite their husbands to join them. Von Arnhim, I guess, is trying to make some kind of point about the redemptive powers of love and beauty, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not quite so forgiving nor so gullible to believe that if your husband's been treating you like shit for twenty years, a day in Portofino is all he needs to change his ways. Perhaps the strangest thing about these two books is that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their flaws, I've been thinking of them since I put them down, which is more than I can say for a number of polite, nicely crafted works of fiction that have as much tang and bite as a bowl of melted jello. posted by aaron hamburger at 9:17 PM \| 0 comments		Literary Blogs Beatrice Book Angst 101 Bookdwarf Booklust Book Ninja Book Slut Conversational Reading Emerging Writers Network Gawker James Tata Jessie Sholl Literary Salon Moby Lives Queer Type Rake's Progress The Reading Experience Tingle Alley Recent Posts Michael Jackson and Me How Do You Write a Novel? Kindling The Joy of Not Knowing Everything Some Good News about the Book Biz What's it All For? Those Weird Brits The Origin of Genius Bye-bye, Bush! 1.19.09 That Thing You Do in Maine Archives October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 September 2007 November 2007 December 2007 February 2008 May 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009