Last night we met at Claire's to discuss Waiting by Ha Jin. It won the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Award and was a Pulitzer finalist. High praise indeed, and while I liked it, I didn't love it, and I couldn't see it getting quite that much acclaim. I think I was in the minority last night, though—and to tell you the truth, the book is growing on me the more I think about it. I finished it only an hour or two before our meeting, so I'm still digesting it.
The title is perfect: The whole book is spent w-a-i-t-i-n-g. Lin is a doctor in the city. His wife, Shuyu, one of the last women to have her feet bound (it was an arranged marriage), lives in in their rural village with their daughter. Lin sees them every summer for 12 days. Meanwhile, Manna, a nurse, starts hitting on Lin, and they decide they want to be married. Lin tries to divorce Shuyu every summer, but he never succeeds (you learn all this on the first page, so I'm not giving anything away). After 18 years (and Lin and Manna have not so much as kissed in all this time), he is finally able to file for a divorce on his own, by law. I won't tell any more.
The pace of the novel is beyond s-l-o-w. It's meant to feel as though you are slogging through their lives with them. Unfortunately, for me it was too slow, and I grew impatient. The saving grace is the writing, which is exquisite—I wasn't surprised to learn that Jin is also a poet. It's remarkable that he writes so gorgeously in English, when he didn't leave his native China until he was college-age.
Many of the blurbs on the cover describe this as a love story, and I suppose it is in some ways, but it's certainly not a romance. It left me feeling mostly desolate by the end. In our group we talked a lot about arranged marriages versus love (or at least choice) marriages, and about marriage in general and how to know what you want—and whether you even can know what you want.
Next up is Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray. Which may just be the world's most fun name to say. Francine du Plessix Gray! Francine du Plessix Gray!
How does your bookgroup pick the next book? Turns? Consensus? Draw straws? My current bookgroup reads the "hot list" for the Newbery and Printz awards, which, because they are for older children, have the advantage of being quick reads if'n I don't like them (and the disadvantage of being available only in hardcover and not usually being at the library). When I used to belong to more ordinary bookgroups, I was often terribly frustrated by the fact that some people pick crappy books -- yes, yes, they may win the ol' Pen/Faulker or whatever, but they can still be pretty awful coughsnowfallingoncedarscoughalltheprettyhorsescoughcoughcormac
mccarthyiamtalkingtoyoucough. And there is never enough non-fiction -- someone always has a prejudice against it. I also hated it when I picked a loser (example: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower, which had won a Nat'l Book Critics Award and is deemed a masterpiece, but I still thought it was dull -- and I've actually read Novalis and Goethe and that crowd of German Romantics). From what I have read in your blog, you aren't suffering from a similar frustration with your bookgroup pals. Maybe it's just me, or maybe I just needed a different group (eventually that group was killed off by a rash of babies). Anyhow, in self-defense, after having to read 400-plus pages of Youth in Revolt, I finally adopted my liberating 100-page rule: if I still don't like it at page 100, I have permission to stop. And I do. Life is too short. I figure, after 100 pages, I can at least articulate what the heck it was I didn't like.
Posted by: Wendy | January 26, 2007 at 03:27 PM
We mostly choose by consensus. If someone has a strong aversion to reading a particular book, we don't do it. We try to line up a few in advance. When we reach the end of the list, I'll see if anyone has any suggestions (Waiting and Them were both suggested by other members); if not, I'll offer up a few.
We try to do some nonfiction when we can; a few months ago we did Madame Bovary because it turned out that none of us had read it! We hope to do another classic this year. We avoid short story collections because they're too hard to discuss in just one meeting; everyone always wants to talk about a different story.
Sometimes we all hate a book but enjoy discussing it (What I Loved by Suri Hustvedt comes to mind); other times we all love a book but there's nothing to talk about (like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay).
Cormac McCarthy is so NOT my idea of a good read.
In the last year or so, I've finally started allowing myself not to finish watching a rented movie if it's truly horrible. I'm not there yet with books, though. I MUST FINISH. Sigh.
I like the idea of reading YA books; it might be even more fun in a parent-child group. Or maybe not....
Posted by: Karen | January 26, 2007 at 04:04 PM
When "Them" came out there were a bunch of interviews on NPR, this is the only one I remember off-hand,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4646175
The story always sounds so grim that I don't want to get started.
On the other hand, Scott Simon's Pretty Birds is very desolate, but a fabulous read. Maybe I've got a new book to read...
Posted by: Charlotte | January 27, 2007 at 07:54 AM