Books in 140 Seconds: Prep

As we announced a couple weeks ago, Erin Balser and I have decided to run a book club in a mere 140 seconds, and we’re taping it for your viewing pleasure. Just watch the video and then join in the conversation here. Books in 140 Seconds runs every second Thursday, and we’ll give you a heads up on the next fortnight’s book at the end of every post, so the overachievers among you can get reading.

For our first foray into digi-micro-bookclubbing, we decided to go with the frequently recommended boarding school classic, Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. We read the book, I donned my pearls, and here’s what happened:

140 seconds isn’t much. We still had a lot to say, and we’d love to discuss it here. There are a lot of big ticket issues at play in Prep — including race, class, sexuality, some fascinating characters, and Lee exposes herself to the same dissection she applies to others. I’ll be posting a review next week, but this is a great place to discuss ideas and reactions as well.

A quick note on the method to our madness when it comes to selecting our next book: like at the KIRBC, there isn’t really one. We’ll aim for a variety of formats from a variety of publishers, but those are the only rules. So basically, anything’s fair game.

On that note, the next book to receive the book club blitz is: Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including, Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. As an intro to the book, check out my review, and by all means, pick up the book itself — cause like all of the ephemera the book so lovingly catalogues, I think this one’s a keeper.

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Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including, Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, by Leanne Shapton

Probably ever since we rested our tired nomadic feet and decided to settle down to some nice farming, humans have become curators in our own personal museums.  Some may be conscious cultivation of our tastes such as art or certain impenetrable classics on the bookcase, while objects are things that we need in day to day life — tools of the trade. And then there’s the sentimental stuff that we are either too lazy or too tender-hearted to dispose of: ticket stubs, event programs, photographs, and shoebox love letters. Anyone who’s tried to move recently can tell you we have far more than we think we do, and yet it’s difficult to part with. And much of that stuff is invested with almost totemic significance, especially the bittersweet flotsam and jetsam of relationships long returned to the sea.

In her clever graphic novel posing as the catalogue for a Valentine’s Day auction, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including, Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry (Macmillan, 2009), Leanne Shapton uses the accumulated detritus of a relationship to tell the story of its rise and fall. For in this catalogue of inanimate objects,  a rich and absorbing portrait emerges that completely indulges our guilty voyeurism. But it’s even better than rooting around in someone’s house while they’re gone or in your grandmother’s attic, for each artifact is accompanied with an explanatory caption (along with dimensions and starting price), to establish that object’s significance in Lenore and Harold’s relationship. We see matching sets of paperbacks (for the couple to read when they’re apart), homemade cards, poodle salt and pepper shakers, clothing worn by both parties, postcards, photographs, and telling excerpts from Lenore’s NYT Cakewalk column. We can analyze their most intimate moments from their marginalia to their lingerie guilt-free, and by the end of this emotional archeological dig, we feel we’ve got a grasp of both parties of this failed pairing.  Harold Morris is a type many women have encountered — dashing, tender, a man of the world who affects maturity but in fact refuses to grow up, who can’t be tied down or contained, who prefers the distance of his photographic trade rather than the muddiness of real life. Lenore Doolan is a food writer who nevertheless seems to have a strained relationship with her passion, her compulsive dietary record yo-yos between healthy and indulgent, and her meticulous listing seems to be a way to attempt to apply control retroactively — much as she tries to control her relationship with Harold.

We start with early love — an envelope of Scrabble tiles spelling out Thank You, frequent postcards and polaroids and mixed CDs — and over time, we watch tensions creep into the relationship: Harold grows restless and Lenore anxious, though the couple hangs on for years. I was completely absorbed in the catalogue, even with its restrained descriptions, which let the artifacts speak for themselves, and a quick before-bed read stretched far longer than it should have. Though everything is clearly staged, the people, objects, and their relationship remain convincing and genuine. At times I was almost envious of the thoughtful exchanges between these two fictional characters — the handwritten notes, the physical prints, things that perhaps are being lost to the ease of technological exchange.

Fresh and fascinating, Important Artifacts would make a great gift, or is perhaps just the smart, trendy book you’d want to have on your shelf to face the scrutiny of house guests, or heaven forbid, the auctioneer.

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Mathilda Savitch, by Victor Lodato

“Isn’t language amazing? I can’t get over it. Sometimes you can just say things and it’s like a bomb that blows all your clothes off and suddenly there you are naked. I don’t know if it’s disgusting or beautiful.”

So says Mathilda Savitch, protagonist of the novel of the same name by Victor Lodato. It’s a lovely quote for lovers of words, but beyond that it encapsulates so many of the prevailing tensions in the book — innocence, violence, and vulnerability. For not only has Mathilda grown up in the age of terror, but this incomprehensible fear, this intangible evil is manifested in her personal life by the death of her cherished older sister Helene. It is a sensless death by train that left Mathilda’s whole family permanently shell-shocked, and their remaining daughter emotionally orphaned by her parents’ inability to let go of their dead daughter. And so Mathilda tries to make sense of her world, tries to achieve some control, pulling out hairs from her head to control errant thoughts, building a bomb shelter in her basement to find some protection from the emotional fallout upstairs, and launching an investigation of what really happened to her sister, even though deep down she knows the truth.

Mathilda is a somewhat unreliable narrator, a fact I’ve seen criticized, but for me, Mathilda’s unique, if not entirely factual, narration is what makes this novel worthwhile. What happened is rather mundane, how Mathilda tries to deal with it is far more interesting. She peels away all her secrets, fantasies, and fears, taking us deep into the mind of a young woman on the cusp of growing up, dealing with all the normal conflicting emotions about her body, her friends, and her family, while trying to grapple with tremendous guilt, grief, and fear in a world that has proven unpredictable and often irrational. This book is not a simple loss of innocence like we’re taught in high school English, one that operates like s a swift kick to the stomach, changing the person forever. Instead, Mathilda Savitch demonstrates that innocence is lost in fits and starts, like growing pains.  In fact, though she has lost her sister before page 1, it is toward the end that Mathilda realizes “This is where grown-ups live, and suddenly I’m afraid I’ll have to stay here forever.”

A book with a striking voice will capture my interest instantly, and Mathilda Savitch qualifies. I was with her from the opening sentence, and my attention never wavered.  It is appropriately blurbed by Healther O’Neill, for the book is in many ways reminiscent of Lullabies for Little Criminals. The same striking and unusual metaphors, the same deep-seated fears guised as courage. Sometimes Mathilda may seem a little too mature for her years, but I ascribed this too the effects of loss and growing up too young, rather than any failing of Lodato, who, as a successful playwright, surely knows how characters should sound.

It’s a book you should absolutely read (in fact, it was my recommendation for the Advent Books series created by the brilliant Julie Wilson & Sean Cranbury). Read it for Mathilda’s brilliantly rendered voice. Read it to rediscover truths we know too well, as seen through a child’s eyes. Things like: “Time is funny lately. Nothing to do with clocks,” or “Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have to believe in evil.” And even if you’ve never lost someone, and you watched the Twin Towers fall as an adult, read it to remember that growing up is always fraught with peril, with insecurity, with an unshakeable desire for the world to be different, and to be a different person in it. Read it because you’ll find your own childhood in this fragile emotional landscape, for as Mathilda says,

“The best stories are like that. They’re like spaceships. They take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I’ve been here before. Maybe I was even born here.”

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