A few notes on a few books

I do not ususally discuss books in this blog, but I feel like doing so this evening. First I recently re-read (yet again) Gloria Steinem's Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (this was the 2nd edition, in which there are updates), a collection of a number of Steinem's essays. Several of them I had read in their original incarnations, in addition to having read them in the collection.

The wonderful thing about Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions is that the writing is intelligent, thoughtful, fresh, and often brilliant. The terrible thing is that every single subject tackled by Steinem is still a problem in the 21st Century. Whether she is writing about politics, body image, sexist language, the news media, or her mother, Steinem polishes each piece into a gem of feminist understanding and sociological/political meaning, and always with the trademark Steinem humor. Some of the essays are small masterpieces, putting into precise words thoughts and feelings that have sometimes been difficult for many of us to express.

I have decided to re-read The Feminine Mystique some time in the near future, too.

I just finished Sue Monk Kidd's second novel, The Mermaid Chair, and have a few things to say about it. Critics praised it a great deal, though many readers thought it was a disappointment. I stand between those two camps.

When I read Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, I was blown away. It is one of the finest novels I have read in the last who knows how many years, and features wonderful characters, superb storytelling, historical significance, and a transcendent quality that really cannot be desribed, but has to be experienced. The story of a troubled, abused girl and her African American friend and mother figure who run away together and wind up in the home of beekeeper sisters is haunting and beautiful. The language is breathtaking, and the symbolism unique.

In The Mermaid Chair, Monk Kidd deals with the restlessness of a middle-aged woman who "should" be happy, but is not. Stifled by her conventional marriage, estranged from her mentally unbalanced mother and haunted by her father's death, she travels to the dreaded South Carolina barrier island of her childhood to confront her mother's bizarre behavior, and while she is there, she falls in love with a monk at the island monastery.

The eroticism in The Mermaid Chair is as alive as the marsh surrounding Jessie and her lover, Brother Thomas. The symbol of the mermaid is used with great skill, the nature writing itself is a great read. So what's not to like? Monk Kidd chooses an unconventional POV: Most of the story is told in the first person, but there are breaks in which it is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator. I had no problem with that, once I got used to it, but I did have a problem with the first person narration.

Jessie's narration is conversational, and that is a device I do not like at all unless the author is writing in a unique dialect, such as that used by Alice Walker in The Color Purple. The fact that the third person POV chapters were written "straight" made the experience even more jolting. And Monk Kidd repeats some of her images so many times I could almost imagine a drinking game being played around them. Though the symbols and images in the novel are very effective, the author tosses us at them in such excess that the writing, at times, seems self-conscious.

I do not agree with those critics who say that The Mermaid Chair has more depth than The Secret Life of Bees; I think it is the other way around. It is hard for everyone when the writer of a brilliant first novel writes the next book. My question is: What in hell was Monk Kidd's editor doing while this was going on? Why didn't she address these issues of POV and superflous image creation? This question is troubling me.

Is The Mermaid Chair worth reading? Yes. It is the fact that it is almost great that is so frustrating.

Worth noting...The Secret Life of Bees is being made into a film, starring Dakota Fanning. No other cast members have been named. The Mermaid Chair has been made into a film by Lifetime Television, and will air in September. The character of Jessie will by played by Kim Basinger.