Mrs. Ted Bliss -- Blissful Enough Yet?

Stanley Elkin's Mrs. Ted Bliss (PS3555 .L47 M76 1995) is the story of a Russian Jewish widow who lives in a deteriorating condo in Miami Beach. The novel takes her from about age 67 to 82. Over time, Mrs. Bliss never stops grieving for her dead husband and son. When asked by a therapist to describe her interests, she can only think of card games and TV. Later, even these interests elude her. Her surviving children live far away, and her old friends keep dying. What keeps Mrs. Ted Bliss from being the most depressing book ever written? Partly just the existence of so many other depressing books, but there's more than that. No clues, however, can be found in the book-jacket description, which makes Mrs. Bliss seem to have just stepped out of Harold and Maude:

But Mrs. Ted is stepping out. She receives the attentions of Alcibiades Chitral from Venezuela, as well as Tommy "Overeasy" Auveristas, and Manny from the building. Why are they all so interested in Ted's Buick LeSabre?

They're interested in the LeSabre because Mrs. Bliss sold it to a criminal who's been sent to prison for 100 years. Elkin has created a prison so captivatingly implausible that we're forced to keep a bit of ironic distance from the characters and their plights. I haven't been to prison, but I'm pretty sure that in real life prisoners don't get to take flying lessons--and certainly not from their unlicensed fellow inmates.

Similarly, Mrs. Bliss's therapist is a follower of a school of therapy, Recreational Therapeusis, that exists only in Elkin's imagination. The movement's modest goal is for the "therapeusisist" to help the the client find life-enriching hobbies. Yet Elkin has created a world where Recreational Therapeusis is wildly controversial, "a sham, fodder for old call-in shows."

Mrs. Bliss lives in a semi-alternative universe, which makes her a semi-imaginary character, which keeps us from becoming overwhelmed by her despair. But Mrs. Bliss's kind of wisdom also makes her deserve respect: at the end of the book, she's comforting a minor character, someone she doesn't really like and considers crazy. She's thinking, "Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that's left is obligation." A kind of wisdom. I leave the book feeling sad, but certainly respectful of the character and her bravery in the face of difficult memories and responsibilities. Mostly, though, I just enjoy the semi-mad world of Stanley Elkin's last book.

‘The Privileges’ by Jonathan Dee

The Privileges is the story of one family that enjoys spectacular financial success. The book begins with the marriage of a very young and attractive couple shortly after college and follows them for approximately the next 25 years as they have a family and become gradually wealthier. There are many moments that made me feel as though I were standing on the edge of a cliff – how successful can people be without suffering some great disappointment? This may be the trick that kept me reading; a constant, paranoid feeling that things always go wrong. But maybe I’ve just read too many books.

I always expect books about money and wealth to end by reaffirming what all middle-class people are taught to believe – that money isn’t everything, money will be your undoing, love and friendship is far greater. Though the characters in this novel do place a good deal of importance on family, this isn’t the message that I took away from this book. Instead, when I finished this novel, I was left with the feeling that wealth should be comforting and endless. You’ll still get older, and you’ll still lose loved ones, but if you have enough money, you won’t have to suffer in the same ways that other people do. Having enough money means being attractive, being comfortable, and enjoying the ability to make people do whatever you want.

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was recommended by a former advisor, and since I had heard it mentioned before, I decided to pick it up. I didn’t really investigate the book much before reading it. The book jacket made a comparison to Animal Farm, so I knew that it was either a) about talking animals or b) a political satire. As disappointed as I was about the lack of farm animals, I still think this was a great book.

Though there are no animals in this book, the characters aren’t quite human either. The somewhat surreal characters are involved in a border dispute; the citizens of Inner-Horner must take turns occupying their country (large enough for only one person at a time), the citizens of Outer-Horner are constantly on alert for “invasions” of their country by the crowded Inner-Horner citizens. The border guards, rivalries, and government appointments, are all perfectly done. Saunders is hilariously funny and just a little bit tragic; this book is a fast read that promises enjoyment.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was surprising to me; I didn’t know what to expect and had heard very little about it. Apparently, I am in the minority, as it has been a selection for Oprah’s Book Club in the past and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Middlesex is the story of three generations of a Greek-American family living in Detroit as told by Calliope or Cal. Calliope, later Cal is of the youngest generation in the story, raised as a girl, but becoming masculine as an adolescent. Cal is the product of frequent genetic mutations of a close-knit Greek community that hails from a very small town. In 2010, it is no surprise to us that inbred communities tend to have abnormal genetic traits, but of course, Cal’s ancestors had no way of knowing that this would be the case.

As I read this story, I’m tormented not by how unusual and painful Calliope’s puberty is, but how normal and painful it is. How different am I really from Cal? The feeling of alienness in one’s own body, the shame of being imperfect and different from other girls- I don’t think any of this is so unique. Perhaps that is the point; interesex individuals and hermaphrodites aren’t really so different from those of us who only exhibit characteristics of one sex.

The book feels like a cross between Forrest Gump and Lolita, the single male narrator that covers several decades in history while trying to explain a sexual situation that is foreign to most. The book is a startling contrast of the tragic and the comic, and Eugenides himself points out, but that seems to be the case with most things.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I feel like I must have been the last person to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; I heard good things about it from both my parents and my advisor on my Master’s thesis. So writing about it feels very unoriginal. Yet here I sit, writing about it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a wonderful suspense story about an unlikely pair investigating an old missing person case. A middle aged journalist who was recently convicted of libel partners with an unpredictable, punk private investigator. The two are trying to find an explanation for the disappearance of a teenage girl from a seemingly isolated island in the 1960’s.

Of course, the key for any suspense writer is to arrange circumstances and characters so that the solution to the mystery isn’t obvious. Larsson has created a cast of characters diverse enough to keep us guessing without making it confusing. (Though, as this book was originally written in Swedish, there are far more surnames beginning with “Bj” than the average American is used to).

One of my favorite things about this book is the fact that although the translation is excellent, there are still occasional spots where the wording seems a bit strange. Perhaps this is because I enjoy the foreignness of it. There are points that seem like a dubbed movie - you can tell that it isn’t really what the characters are saying, but it doesn’t matter. Whether you find these slightly awkward phrases charming or not probably won’t make much difference in the end; it’s a clever book that most will enjoy.

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

Why have humans in different parts of the world been so consistently dominant over the people in other parts of the world? How do some societies manage to produce so many trade goods and services while others simply work to sustain themselves? These are just a few of the questions that Jared Diamond attempts to answer in Guns, Germs and Steel.

As the reader may guess, Diamond states that economically and politically dominant countries have prospered because they possess guns, germs and steel. This may be obvious, but it is not this conclusion that takes up the bulk of the book. Rather, Diamond tries to explain how European and Asian cultures have been especially prosperous without resorting to racist or ethnocentric assumptions. Some of his most interesting points are the following:

The geographic layout of Europe and Asia are more conducive to the spread of
cultures and technologies than other continents.
The fact that humans
first evolved in Africa and migrated north through Europe and Asia before reaching other continents helped to preserve more large animal species for later domestication.
These things don’t necessarily mean that Europeans and Asians are more intelligent or innovative than other societies, but that their situations have been better suited toward some types of developments.

I really enjoyed this book; I am not an anthropologist or archeologist, but I found the topic very entertaining. Diamond writes in a way to explain these complex evolutionary topics to people who are not well acquainted with the field (though I think a little bit of knowledge of human evolution is helpful). Diamond's writing and conclusion were enjoyable; I felt that I took away a good deal from reading this book. And the topic was an admirable one, reminding us that people of different cultures aren’t as dissimilar as we sometimes seem.

Create Great Puzzles

For the past few months, I’ve been including word search puzzles in the student newspaper, The Southwestern Eagle. Just one of the many reasons that I have for doing this is the fact that they are so easy to make! The site www.puzzle-maker.com/ makes it easy for me to supply a list of words and generate a puzzle that includes them all.

Now, as far as using word search puzzles for actual school assignments, I don’t really see the point. But the site also creates crossword puzzles that could be lots of fun. For example, instructors may want to compile lists of review questions (which most probably do already) then have this program make a crossword puzzle. Each clue could be a review question and the answers would be the puzzle solutions. This is just one idea that I happened to think of, I'm sure there are many other ways that teachers could very easily incorporate this into their curriculum.

This may not do anything to actually improve the work, but it may help make it more fun!