Two Women, Two Stories: The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood

Ann Hood's The Obituary Writer alternates between the stories of two women, Claire, a 1960s wife and mother in the Washington, DC suburbs, and Vivien, a single woman living in Napa, California, where she is grappling with the loss of her married lover in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thirteen years earlier.

Pregnant Claire is struggling with the loneliness of an unhappy marriage to Peter, whom she no longer loves (or isn't sure she ever really did), and its counterpoint is her affair with a man who pays attention to what she has to say. In those pre-DNA test days, she is unsure who the baby's father may be. Despite that, Claire and her friends are caught up in the hope and promise of the impending inauguration of John F. Kennedy, even to having a betting pool on what Jackie will wear on that all-important day. Claire's life has devolved into a soap opera, with all the clichés that implies.

Vivien is the more nuanced and revolutionary woman, especially given the society and period in which she lives. Her lost lover, David, was an older man, a successful attorney who provided for her every need in a beautifully appointed townhouse they had decorated together. He had left for his office the morning the earthquake struck, and she never saw him again. She has chosen to believe that he isn't dead, but suffering amnesia from a blow to the head, and that someday he will recover, and return, so that they can be together once more.

Meanwhile, Vivien has gone to live in the small town of Napa, where she has the comfort of her closest friend, and has created a career as an obituary writer of unique talent. She is sought out for way of bringing closure to others in their losses, even as she has chosen none for herself.

These two stories twist and turn until they inevitably come together, across the country from California and eight hours north of Washington in Providence, Rhode Island.

Hood is gifted at creating verbal pictures of her settings, and she has done a fine job taking us to Denver, where an amnesiac man Vivien thinks may be David is being cared for, and driving the highway (obviously the pre-interstate US1) with Claire and Peter from Washington to Providence in a blizzard, complete with a stop at a Howard Johnson's for a rushed meal.

There is a satisfying conclusion to the novel as the stories are unspun and become intertwined.

But... what brings this novel down are its jarring editorial errors. Calling one leading character by the other's name, for example, just couldn't have been intentional, and should have been caught by the copy editor. I almost put the book down when I saw that, but since I found Vivien so interesting, I kept reading, even though the end was not really a surprise, but still provided closure for the characters and the reader.

Righting Wrongs – The Girl Who Wrote in Silk by Kelli Estes

When the topic of the Chinese-American experience in contemporary literature arises, the authors most likely to come to mind are Amy Tan and Lisa See. Kelli Estes's first published book, The Girl Who Wrote in Silk, makes the perfect shelf-mate to Tan's and See's works.

On the West Coast, and in other parts of the Far West that depended upon the labor and services of the Chinese, prejudice against them in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth was intense. White culture completely dismissed the humanity of the Chinese and violent episodes took place. In some places, Chinese people, citizens or not, were forced out of their homes and driven out of the towns they lived in, including Seattle, where parts of The Girl Who Wrote in Silk are set.

The novel weaves back and forth between two stories. One is set in the late nineteenth century and its heroine is Liu Mei Lien. The outrages against the Chinese force Mei Lien (Liu is her family name, according to Chinese custom), her shopkeeper widower father and her frail grandmother to flee Seattle on a ship bound for China, according to an expulsion order from the city of all Chinese in February, 1886.

When it becomes clear that the Chinese passengers are in grave danger, Mei Lin's father forces her to jump off so she can save herself by swimming to a nearby island. There she is rescued by a kind white man and her story ensues.

The coordinating story takes place in our current decade and concerns Inara Erickson, a recent business school graduate, who has inherited a large family estate on that same island. Although her wealthy father, who owns an international shipping company, wants her to accept a job in business, Inara is insistent on following her own dream, following in the footsteps of the aunt who left her the property where she had hoped to establish an inn. She takes her aunt's dream farther by planning to turn the estate's buildings into a small luxury hotel and embarks on renovations.

Mei Lin's and Inara's stories are bound together when Inara discovers a beautiful, intricately bordered silk sleeve hidden in an old blanket beneath a wooden stair tread that has comes loose. How it got there and who had embroidered it became a mystery Inara has to solve, and her research leads her to Daniel Chin, a professor of Chinese history.

The book alternates between the two narratives, and gradually the details of the past and present mesh, through complex circumstances, into a well-rounded conclusion.

Estes has done considerable research into the painful backstory of the Chinese community in America, and deals very successfully with difficult issues, on one hand racial prejudice, and on the other, complex family relationships and loyalties. She portrays her characters with sensitivity and insight, and they, particularly Mei Lin, come to life.

While this is specifically a story about Chinese-Americans and the overwhelmingly white community they live in, it is also a bigger story about the United States and resonates with the issues that are threatening our country today. Estes couldn't have known when she was writing the novel prior to its 2015 publication just how prescient her book would turn out to be.

Looking Back to 2010 – Armchair Travel, a Literary Journey

The following originally appeared at womenofgloucestercounty.com, but the books and films noted are still perfect for summer reading and viewing. © Copyright 2010 by Joan Kirschner

If real world travel is not on your vacation horizon this year, consider some armchair travel in the company of a good book (or film) with a foreign setting. No tickets or passport are required, just time and some lemonade or ice tea in easy reach.

Poet and professor Frances Mayes started a trend twenty years ago when she published Under the Tuscan Sun, her account of the pleasures and travails of buying and restoring a ruined villa near Cortona, Italy. Since then, there has been a charming film adaptation, more books, calendars and now her latest offering, Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life, chronicles another restoration project, and her account of the scenery, the people and the food is as appealing and tantalizing as ever. Many other writers have written about their Italian adventures, but Mayes is surely in a class by herself.

And of course, in addition to Under the Tuscan Sun, enjoy Italy on film with classics including A Room with a View, Mediterraneo, Il Postino, Cinema Paradiso, Night of the Shooting Stars and that classic of all classics, Roman Holiday.

If you’d prefer a visit to Provence, France, Peter Mayle is the master of that region. Mayle, a former advertising writer from London, also began his series of books about his life abroad about twenty years ago. Mayle has published a long string of titles, memoirs and fiction, beginning with A Year in Provence. A Good Year, starring Russell Crowe, is a recent film based on A Year in Provence. Let me know if you’ve seen it!

Last year’s Julie and Julia offers a charming picture of 1950s France, and with Meryl Streep playing Julia Child, you can practically taste the croissants and smell the Seine. Before watching the film, consider reading Child’s fascinating memoir My Life in France.

For a lighthearted romantic comedy with Parisian and wine country settings, and with a wonderful performance by Kevin Kline, check out French Kiss.

A trip to Greece, a country whose economy is currently far closer to the brink than ours, is a fantasy for many. For an escape to the Greek Islands, Shirley Valentine is a film adaptation of the London and Broadway play of the same name. An English housewife, feeling unappreciated by her family, needs a change of scene and a boost to her self-image. Her trip to Greece is a chance for her to reconsider her life and who she is.

For a more serious read, The Invisible Mountain, by Carolina de Robertis, takes us through the lives of three generations of women in a Uruguayan family. The setting is a country that has experienced political upheaval but has recovered and is now a travel destination.

Want more? Consider travel essays by Tony Cohan, Mary Morris and Paul Theroux on their trips around the globe, some of which were happy, and some not, but are all fascinating.

Paris in the '20s – A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway and The Paris Wife by Paula McClain

I have never been a fan of Hemingway's fiction, but I was truly fascinated by his memoir, an account of his early life in Paris, when he was married to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. His anecdotes about the various personalities who were key figures in the expatriate community – some of the best-known are Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Sylvia Beach (who established the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore) – and about the city itself and the general lifestyle of Americans in Paris in 1920s were transporting.

The writing is so different from the spare, blunt delivery of his fiction. It is so lyrical that it can carry you back almost a century, so that you can imagine what it was like to be young, driven and talented, and trying to make one's way as a writer or artist during one of those rare periods of time when the setting stars as much as the people.

The reader accompanies Hemingway to the various cafés, bars and other spots he frequents in Paris, on train trips and jaunts throughout France and elsewhere in Europe, with and without Hadley. Each episode he describes is related overall, but also can stand alone. In any case, it is hard to imagine a life as unrestrained and impulsive today as the one he lives during those years.

Not long after reading A Moveable Feast, I followed it with The Paris Wife, a fictionalized account of the marriage of Hemingway and Richardson, told from her point of view. It is fact that the two had a whirlwind courtship, and that Hemingway had an affair with her best friend that led to an eventual divorce. All this, and the difficulties one might expect in a marriage to a driven creative artist while living in the heady environment of Paris, are well-detailed by McClain, who conveys life among the glitterati of the time, but overlays it with a gifted novelist's emotion and insight.

A tasty combination, well-paired.

Gently Criminal – The Old Man & the Gun, 2018

I'd seen the trailers last year for this film starring Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek, but it was just last week when I was able to settle onto my sofa to enjoy this piece of masterful acting.

Based on aspects of a true story, Robert Redford is Forrest Tucker, an aging lifelong criminal who was arrested and imprisoned over and over, but managed to escape eighteen times. Forrest is a bank robber who works with two trusted fellow criminals (played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits). Each time he commits a robbery, he brings along and displays his gun, but is unfailingly polite. His victims say he seems like a nice guy.

He connects with Jewel (Sissy Spacek), a Texas widow, when her pickup breaks down, and he stops to assist her (although he knows little about cars), and craftily takes advantage of the moment to evade the police who are looking for him after his most recent hold-up. Jewel and Forrest gradually fall into a friendly, gently romantic, relationship but she does not know who he is or his history until well into their acquaintanceship.

Jewel has a mortgage on her large farm property and lives alone, except for her horses, and her children want her to sell and move, but she resists. Forrest secretly looks into paying off her mortgage, using some of his trove of cash, but he is not able to since the transaction can not be completed. The desire, however, is there.

A determined detective, John Hunt (Casey Affleck), is trying to find Forrest and arrest him again, and goes to great lengths, even after the FBI steps in because of the interstate nature and extent of his crimes. Hunt locates Tucker's daughter (a cameo by Elisabeth Moss), and interviews her, and the search continues. Eventually, of course, Hunt catches him, though that isn't the end of Forrest Tucker...

Throughout the film, Redford displays the incredible skill and the charm that have made him an icon of the movies over many decades. Even wrinkled, graying, and shuffling along, he is still handsome and charismatic. There is one remarkable sequence, in which we are treated to a look at a series of photographs of the young and gradually aging Forrest/Redford. This is one of the most magical moments of the film (which has many), since Redford has announced that this film is his last – he is retiring from acting.

Affleck and Spacek are also excellent. Sissy Spacek's Jewel has the perfect the down-to-Earth quality and wry humor to complement Redford's Forrest, and Affleck is appropriately intense. There are some nice moments from Glover and Waits too.

All around, the Old Man & the Gun was a delight, and makes you wish Robert Redford would keep acting forever.

Review Revisited – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

First published at womenofgloucestercounty.com. © Copyright by Joan Kirschner, 2012.

Born in 1920, dead in 1951 of cervical cancer, Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who lived in pre-Civil Rights Era Baltimore. She was poor, had limited education, a somewhat less than devoted husband, five children, and when she needed treatment, went to the “colored” clinic at Baltimore’s nationally famous Johns Hopkins Medical Center.

At Johns Hopkins, after a misdiagnosis of her type of tumor, she received the harsh but most advanced cancer treatments of her time but these did little to help her. While she was being examined, a sample of her tumor was taken and used in Hopkins’ research laboratory. Scientists were intent on attempting to grow cells outside the body that could be used to determine many bodily processes and how the various organs were affected by cancer and other diseases. Unlike other cell samples which had always died in culture, and so became useless, Henrietta’s cancer cells were unique. They divided and reproduced prolifically, becoming a valuable commodity that was eventually sold at great profit around the world to many research facilities and other medical institutions.

This cell material was used in all sorts of research, and many of the great medical breakthroughs we are all aware of and benefit from today, including the polio vaccine and chemotherapy, in vitro fertilization and many others, would not have been possible without Henrietta’s reproducing genetic material. Her family, however, knew nothing of this for more than twenty-five years after her death, and remained poor, and without medical insurance, despite the millions of dollars biotechnology companies eventually made from the umpteen generations of cell material that descended from the initial sample of Henrietta’s tumor.

How this all happened, and its effect on the Lacks family is the subject of Rebecca Skloot’s amazing book, a true story which combines partly an almost science-fiction-like odyssey regarding the fate of Henrietta’s cells, a history and commentary on bio-medical research and medical ethics, a study of the effects of poverty and poor educational opportunities in a minority community, and a biography of a previously unknown woman and her family.

This book, a New York Times bestseller, is fascinating, heart-breakingly sad, questions the morality of our society and our view of medical research and care, and has already made many readers, including myself, angry and disturbed by some of the inequities and tragic outcomes it brings to light.

There is no question that current medical ethics are quite different and the laws protecting patient information and privacy have changed greatly too, but most of us, and especially the poor and uninsured in our society, are still vastly uninformed about the medical establishment, and for-profit biomedical research firms and drug companies. Ms. Skloot works hard to make the ramifications of this clear.

Ms. Skloot became interested in the story of Henrietta Lacks and her tumor’s role in biomedical research when she was a reluctant student aged just sixteen, and taking a required biology course at her local community college. She was intrigued by her professor’s presentation on cell biology—his discussion of the use of Henrietta Lacks’ cells captured her attention and started her down a long road that led to a degree in biology, a graduate degree in writing, and a career in science journalism and university-level teaching in creative writing. She is the author of many articles for leading, respected publications, but it took her more than 10 years to research, develop and write The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her first book.

Ms. Skloot set up a foundation to help the Lacks family and other deserving individuals receive grants for medical and dental care, education and other assistance. Henrietta Lacks’ remaining children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have been beneficiaries, and now Oprah Winfrey is reportedly involved in an HBO film about Lacks. Between Ms. Skloot’s compelling book and the forthcoming movie, it seems that Henrietta Lacks will become immortal in more ways than one.

Review Revisited – a favorite piece from 2010

Originally published at www.womenofgloucestercounty.com. Copyright 2010 by Joan Kirschner

Now at the Franklin Institute: Cleopatra

Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history and one of only a handful of powerful female leaders who truly dominated their countries and their ages. Her reign and influence in ancient Egypt could be compared to those of Elizabeth I or Victoria of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, or in more modern times, Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi of India or Golda Meir of Israel. 

A tantalizing view into the reign and life of Cleopatra recently opened at the Franklin Institute in Center City, Philadelphia. The exhibit, formally titled Cleopatra, The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, was developed by National Geographic and focuses on new underwater archeological finds.

Most of us are familiar with Cleopatra through film, books and plays. Her associations with Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony are widely known. She is regarded as a legendary beauty. We have probably all heard of her suicide by poisonous snakebite. Despite all that, she is surrounded by a great sense of mystery. Her tomb has never been found and there are very few representations of what she may really have looked like. This exhibit provides us with a historical, political and geographical context for her life.

The exhibit explores the ancient cities of Egypt, including Alexandria, Cleopatra’s capital, which in her time was the most advanced city in the Mediterranean, along with other sites associated with the political and religious hierarchy of the day. There are fascinating artifacts and information about new finds made by advanced underwater archeological techniques and digs that are underway in the Alexandria vicinity.

If your memories or knowledge of ancient history are a bit sketchy, the exhibit also goes a long way to explain the relationships between the Greeks, Egyptians and Romans. Egypt is the oldest of the three cultures. Cleopatra was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic line, the Greek conquerors of Egypt, who blended the two cultures together in government, art and religion over several centuries. When the Romans came to power and began to spread their influence throughout the Mediterranean, Cleopatra’s Egypt was a strategic trading partner because it supplied the Roman army with the grain needed for food. Cleopatra entered into political and romantic alliances with both Julius Caesar and Marc Anthony. To learn more about the details of these relationships and the tragic results, you will have to explore this fascinating exhibition on your own. Visit http://www.fi.edu/cleopatra/for complete information on dates, tickets and more.

In the fall, Camden County College will offer a free lecture series that will offer further insight into the world of Cleopatra. See http://www.fi.edu/cleopatra/CCC.htmlfor more information.

If all of this whets a further interest in Egyptology and the ancient world, a number of museums in the northeastern United States have excellent collections of ancient Egyptian mummies, artifacts and jewelry. The University of Pennsylvania’s Archeological Museum is an outstanding source in Philadelphia. Go to http://penn.museum/. In New York, the Brooklyn Museum’s collection is known for its Egyptian Galleries, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/mummy_chamber/and the Metropolitan Museum offers the amazing Temple of Dendur: http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/collection_database/egyptian_art/the_temple_of_dendur/objectview.aspx?OID=100004628&collID=10&dd1=10and an in-depth collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. 

Meanwhile, the world of Cleopatra awaits in Philadelphia just off the Benjamin Franklin Parkway!

I Had High Hopes for Prague Spring

Hoping for a read that would catch the energy, hope and heartbreak of 1968-69, a monumental time of change around the world, led primarily by young, idealistic people, I eagerly checked out this novel from my local public library. Thinking that it would offer some insights into the events of the Prague Spring, a political uprising of students and other intellectuals against the Communist rule of Czechoslovakia, I plunged into the book.

About seventy pages in, I abandoned it. It is really a pair of slutty tales presented from what appears to be a misogynistic viewpoint, with 1968 Prague as a mere background. There are two couples: one a pair of English students, he from working-class Sheffield, she from the Home Counties. The class warfare angle there comes at the reader like a blunt instrument. The other couple is (he) a British diplomat assigned to the British embassy in Prague and (she), the younger Czech student with whom he quickly begins an affair when his more proper English girlfriend returns to England. His bed is barely cold before he starts rewarming it. My time is better spent on other things.

However, having done my author research, I am going to try this writer once more with Trapeze, also an espionage novel, but with a female protagonist. As an optimist, I like to take a second chance and see where it goes.