Memoirs of a Gaysha

Possible Side Effects

Augusten Burroughs

Picador

Honestly, how many memoirs can one fortysomething write? In Possible Side Effects, a book of short, but bitingly funny essays, Burroughs gives us yet another hilarious glimpse into some of the more, uh, interesting periods in his life. When I looked at this novel in the bookstore, I was a little worried that he wouldn't have anything new to say -- how could he top the stories he told in both Running with Scissors and Dry? As it turns out, my worries were not entirely unfounded.

Possible Side Effects seems to be very much about Augusten the writer of today, versus Augusten the abused child, or Augusten the raging alcoholic. Stories about his dogs or the holidays that he takes with his partner might be interesting someday, but right now, they don't have a lot of resonance with me. Maybe I'm not the target audience for some of these anecdotes -- I don't know. Burroughs does seem to understand that people, regardless of our melting pot mentality, still sort themselves into buckets and it could just be that I can't totally identify with the bucket that is GWM.

Having said all that, this book is still worth picking up. The essay entitled "Moving Violations" had me laughing so hard that people were staring. Never in a million years would I have thought that the phrase "the positive power of porn" would enter my head. No kidding -- reading this chapter has completely altered the course of my life. I'd tell you more, but that would spoil the surprise. Two quirks out of five.

Cryin' -- But Not Over You

Long for This World
Michael Byers
Mariner Books

For those of you who know me personally, you can attest to the fact that I rarely cry. When I was a little girl, my inconsolable moments were usually as a result of extreme frustration -- I shed many a tear over "not getting" long division in grade three and not being able to master a free-hip-to-handstand on the uneven parallel bars. Who'd have guessed that being eight could be so traumatic?

As a adult, I'm still not much of a crier. True, I do have weepy moments when I get hormonal, but unlike some family members, I am not predisposed to crying while watching sappy Tim Horton's commercials. You can imagine my horror (and that of the gentleman sitting beside me) when I burst into tears on an airplane this past week.

Why the drama? Long for this World is a story about an incredibly bright and funny young man, William Durbin. William has a rare disease, and his geneticist, Henry Moss, is on the cusp of finding a cure for the patient he has grown to love. It wasn't the fact that William died that did me in -- his prognosis was never good and his passing wasn't a surprise. Instead, it was the denouement signalled by his death that was so hard. I was not ready to give up the characters that I met in this book. If it is possible to fall in love with a fictional family, I think that's what happened to me this past week. Byers' characters are flawed, human, and ever so lovingly drawn. I did not want to say goodbye. Four shooting stars out of five.

Notes from a Posthumous Land

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Vintage

For whatever reason, I think I have been struck by a severe case of performance anxiety. I have been working on this post for a couple of days now and nothing I write seems good enough to keep. I wouldn't call it writer's block exactly -- I just know that there is a thought in my head trying to articulate itself on the page and somewhere, something is getting lost in the process.

A brilliant example of post-apocalyptic fiction, The Road chronicles the journey of an unnamed father and son as they travel through a catastrophe-ravaged world that offers nothing save ash on the wind. Pushing a shopping cart down the interstate, the rag-clad duo scavenge for whatever they can find while trying their best to avoid bands of menacing survivors, or as the young boy calls them, "bad guys."

At first glance, there is little hope in this novel. A pistol with two bullets is all that really stands between the travelers and an uncomfortable death. Why, then, I asked myself, do they go on? What could possibly be the purpose? The cynic in me says that the need to persevere is instinctual -- no different from the way in which a horse or a cow will turn its back to a blast of freezing prairie air. The critics seem to think that McCarthy's implicit message is that it is the love that the man bears for his child that is the wellspring of hope. I'm not really happy with either of those answers. If I look inside myself, I think I've traveled The Road from time to time (I'm pretty sure I was on it this week, in fact) and it was neither love nor hope that kept me going. It was the fundamentally naive belief that things will get better. Maybe I'm not so different from that cow in the wind.

You Don't Send a Gentleman to Catch Vermin

Ratcatcher

James McGee

Harper

When I checked out online reviews of Ratcatcher, I wasn't surprised to learn that women and men seemed to be divided about the relative merits of this book. In general, guys indicated that they didn't particularly enjoy the novel and felt that it was a weak example of the thriller/mystery genre. Female readers, on the other hand, offered praise for both the storyline and the uber-manly charms of the brooding (and, uh, hot) protagonist, Matthew Hawkwood. Why the difference? I'm just guessing, but I suspect it's because this wasn't really a thriller -- it was a Regency romance in disguise.

What's a Regency romance, you ask? Well, it is a novel set in England between the years 1811 - 1820. While the romantic plots revolve around marriages of convenience, compromised honour, and attraction between virginal maids and reckless rakes, the back stories often involve the intrigues of the British monarchy and aristocracy, the ongoing war against Napoleon, and, in some cases, the daring exploits of men such as the Bow Street Runners. Enter our mysterious hero -- former captain in the British military, man of brooding good looks, and quite the player with the ladies ... you can see why it was easy for me to draw my conclusion.

Ratcatcher is probably not a book that would appeal to most men. To be candid, I read the bulk of it by candlelight while lounging in the tub with a glass of white wine. Hawkwood was a good companion for a night, but I'm not sure that I will be asking him back. One Prinny out of five.

Delusional? Who, Me? ...

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins

Houghton Mifflin

This probably wasn't the kind of book that I should have been bringing home as bedtime reading over the Easter holiday. Admittedly, the timing wasn't so good, but it was recommended to me by a colleague and I just couldn't help myself. How could I resist a book that promised to raise my consciousness to the fact that atheists can be happy, balanced, moral and intelligent? (And yes, I did stoop so low as to remove the cover so I could smuggle it into the house. Sorry, Mom -- I'm not proud of it.)

Dawkins, an Oxford professor of ethology, asserts that a persistent (insistent?) "false belief in the face of strong contradictory evidence" is delusional. He then goes on to quote Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, who said, " When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion." And that, my friends, was just the introduction!

I would be a liar if I told you that I didn't enjoy the text and identify with parts of what Dawkins has to say. Yes, religion sometimes legitimizes some pretty dumb things. And yes, out of context, even the most sane and normal of religious practices can seem kind of weird. Unfortunately, much of what Dawkins asserts is undermined by that fact that he often comes across as a pseudo-religious zealot who glosses a text to hide/support a weak argument. I was expecting the book to be a little more persuasive, and frankly, a little more articulate. Two point five deities out of five.

Oh, and just because I know at least some of you reading this post will ask me what I believe, I will tell you here and now. I'm with Einstein. I can't conceive of anything as perfect as a strawberry or as beautiful and functional as, say, a golden eyelash, without understanding god.

Nature vs Nurture

We Need to Talk About Kevin
Lionel Shriver
Harper Perennial

I'm not exactly sure what it was about this novel that grabbed me so much. The central character, Eva, is a successful, hands-on business woman, who obviously has some serious commitment issues. Her job frequently takes her away from home (sounding familiar?) and while she occasionally grouses about being away from Franklin, her husband, she's really not that interested in changing careers. One day, she decides that she might not be "happy enough" and asks Franklin if he wants to have a baby. Franklin is dying to be an all-American dad and readily agrees.

Months later, Kevin is born. Right from the start, he and Eva have an uneasy relationship --he won't take to the breast, he goes through nannies like diapers, and is fundamentally a mean (can I say evil?) little boy. When, two days before his sixteenth birthday, Kevin turns into a Columbine-type mass murderer , Eva's world is shattered. In putting it back together, she is forced to re-examine her life in the context of Kevin's horrific act of nihilism.

Reading We Need to Talk about Kevin is both a gripping and a harrowing experience. Written in the form of an epistolary novel, Shriver uses the text to implicitly provoke readers into considering the nature versus nurture question. Did her son turn out that way because Eva was a cold, aloof, emotionally-absent mother, or was he just bad from the beginning? Personally, I believe that the latter is more often the case. Sure, parents can seriously muck-up their kids, but the existentialist in me asserts that we are all responsible for our own choices and that morally there is a right and wrong. Kevin, like my boyfriend Dexter, (remember him?) is smart enough to understand the conventions of morality -- even if they don't exist for him as part of his nihilistic world-view. Three and a half Nietzsches out of five.