Books Read in 2007 | The Remainder Table

Ricochet River by Robin Cody

I heard about this book when there was a controversy over the author rewriting certain passages so the book banning crowd would stop trying to prevent its use in schools. I wrote about it here. Now, I can understand the author wanting his book to be picked up for school reading lists. This is a first novel with regional appeal published by a small press in the early ’90s. If schools hadn’t taken an interest in it, it would almost certainly be long out of print.

I, of course, read the original version, not the revised version. Every summer we go to Penticton where there is this great used bookstore called The Book Shop. So many books. You should go! Anyhow, last summer I ran across this book at The Book Shop and I had to get it, if only to see what was so controversial about it.

Sigh. Yeah, I don’t know. People are whack when it comes to sex. There are two sexual passages in this 266-page book. Both are appropriate to the context of this story and these characters and would be perfectly fine for high schoolers to read. As for the drinking & driving and language choices—it’s a period piece. I think all too often people forget how things were in the not-so-distant past. Would be better to use these things as points for discussion rather than getting all revisionist and sweeping them under the carpet.

This is a coming-of-age story set in 1959-60 in a small Oregon town. I liked the West Coasty-ness of it; the setting was very authentic. The narrative voice was engaging. Storytelling (i.e. the characters telling stories to each other) plays a significant role in the book and this is, I think, what sets this story apart from others in its genre, but at times this device bogs the story down. The story itself is a quiet one with no dramatic plot developments—except for the ending. On the one hand, an ending in this vein was inevitable. On the other hand, what happens is perhaps a bit too surreal. But perhaps not. I think the author was going for a sort of magical realism thing, tying the events of the story to the myths & legends of the storytelling. If there had been a tighter linking between the two streams all along it would have both evened out the pacing and made the ending a better fit. Nevertheless, it was a pretty good first novel.

The Great Failure: A Bartender, A Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth by Natalie Goldberg

Hey, look, it’s day 1, and I’ve already finished my first book of the year!

I spotted this on one of the remainder shelves at Chapters last week. Last book purchased; first book read. All the books on my “to be read” pile are jealous. But I figured (a) it would be a quick read, and (b) what more appropriate way to start off than with a remaindered book?

So, it was a quick read obviously. This is a brief memoir of Natalie’s relationships with her father and her Zen teacher and her coming to grips with them being human, i.e. flawed. Essentially, it is about her figuring out whether she is able to admire/love people even when she feels that they have disappointed/betrayed her by their actions (or inaction, in the case of her mother).

I’ve read most of her books. I like her writing books best. This one… well, it was interesting, because I’d read the others. But on its own, I could take it or leave it. Writing Down the Bones was truly a book that changed my life. Wild Mind and Long Quiet Highway were also lovely books. I found her novel disappointing because I like what she writes about—her ideas—more than how she writes. Her writing style is very simple and straightforward to the point that I find it almost clunky. It’s a style that works for a book on writing practice, but, I think, works against her in a narrative. After reading her writing practice books, I had high expectations for her novel, Banana Rose; I suppose I expected that all that writing practice would have led to a tangibly more polished narrative writing style. But it wasn’t. I realized that’s just how she writes.

The Great Failure didn’t resonate with me in the same way as her earlier work did. It’s not that I couldn’t understand where she was coming from; I could. That part was fine. But I think if you’re going to write about how people have disappointed and betrayed you, you also have to turn that around and dig into how you may have disappointed and betrayed others. She touches on this, but she doesn’t dig into it. I also didn’t feel that she was breaking any new ground here; the realization that people—even people you respect and trust—are human/flawed isn’t particularly insightful on its own. I think probably everyone has had to accept (in order to move on) the fallibility of a parent or parental figure at some point in their lives. And I’m not saying that that’s not a difficult thing, but… she wasn’t sharing with a friend; she wrote a book. There has to be something more than that, I think. A deeper insight.

Also, she seemed unable to accept that not everyone has an inner life (well, an inner life of substance), that people are, in general, not really that interested in your interests no matter how close they are to you, and that no one else will ever see the same events from the same perspective as you. In my un-expert opinion, her constant fight against these things didn’t seem very Zen. Once you accept these things, it is much easier to be content.

I wanted to read this because it was a Natalie Goldberg book, but maybe it was a book I just didn’t need to read. Perhaps for someone else, it could be the right book at the right time, the way WDTB was for me.