Haunted house excellence: The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

I'm hosting book club this week, and the title I selected is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. I've wanted to read this book ever since Stephen King praised it to the heavens.  Well, I read it, and it's a good story, just not that scary. In fact, Hill House is funny--some of the characters are sketched purely for humor, I think. It's hard to be frightened when you're laughing.

So, today I'm posting about a really scary haunted house book by Southern author Anne Rivers Siddons: The House Next Door, published in 1978.  Siddons is better known for women's fiction; Peachtree Road and Colony are two of her best sellers.  The House Next Door is set and character-ed similarly: a prosperous Atlanta neighborhood, populated with well-heeled Yuppies who unexpectedly encounter life-changing conflict.  But this conflict is not racial or societal (as in Siddons' other books). It's purely supernatural.

Walter and Colquitt Kennedy happily reside in a peaceful suburb with a glorious, leafy empty lot next door.  Their quiet routine is disrupted when a young couple buys the lot and begins constructing their dream house.  The house soon rises sleek and uber modern, disturbingly lovely to Colquitt, who spends more time at home than her husband. The neighborhood chorus takes note of the house's unusual style, but when bad things start happening to its residents, Colquitt is the only one who doesn't dismiss the events as coincidence.

Siddons' novels frequently feature houses as primary settings.  As in life, a character's home is an expression of style and personal history.  Almost without exception, home is a haven, a comfortable touchstone, reminding the protagonist of her history and strength.  The House Next Door offers up an antagonistic setting: home as evil and so modern as to repel any history from sticking to it. The house is stylish, true, but like a killer stiletto heel that stabs.

Unlike chuckling occasionally at Hill House, I shivered all through House Next Door. How could a newly constructed house be haunted? It sounds counter-intuitive, but Siddons makes it work.  The reader ponders how the roots of evil--greed, jealousy, laziness, for instance--don't need time to settle into a foundation.  A house borne of same could start striking with the paint barely dry.

Book Clubs--Suburban Intelligentsia

Fall is here, if not in temperature, at least by calendar. Ah, Summer, season of reading, I shall miss you.  What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty, Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close, The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass, and The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly were all good books.  I also read some ho-hum to dismal ones I won't name.  Some of the latter came highly recommended, which strengthens my belief that book preferences, like friend choices, are extremely subjective.  Jonathan Franzen's Freedom might be a terrific bore/boor to many, but I like its bulky absurdity.  I will read any Franzen book, just as I gravitate toward long-winded people at parties.  (I prefer someone else to carry the conversation, but that's just me.)

These hard-wired preferences for certain books (as for certain acquaintances) are perfectly fine and could have carried me through my reading life quite contentedly until I was buried with a book in my hand.  But something slightly revolutionary happened to me a decade ago.  I joined a book club, and the reading world cracked wide open, spilling one treasure after another at my feet.

Informal social groups for the middle-aged abound in the 2000s. Bunko, travel, cooking, investment, knitting, scrap booking, pedicures, alcohol--whatever your interest, I bet there's a group of like-minded individuals in your neighborhood who meet to do it.  I've never been interested in any of these things (except for the alcohol and nail polish). My chief hobby since childhood has been stories, reading and sometimes writing them, and the former definitely trumps the latter in terms of enjoyment.  The book clubs (three!) to which I now belong remind me of another social group that flourished in 1950s and 60s suburbia--bridge clubs.  Socioeconomically, emotionally, and intellectually, the women in my book clubs remind me of my mother and her contemporaries who loved a good game of bridge and a killer chicken salad.  True, today's suburban women aren't exactly the same as those of my mother's day. Many of us work, some aren't married, some don't have children, and not one has a weekly appointment for a wash and set. But we have a keen interest in focusing on a topic (a book) just as my mother's group homed in on a bridge play, all while enjoying a lunch or dinner served in a member's home along with copious amount of coffee or wine. Now, as then, flowers ground a table, gently towered with china and silver (With us, this finery is not compulsory, of course. You can serve a deli platter with beer and no utensils. It doesn't matter.)

Food and finery aside, book club women find pleasure in the focused discussion of ideas and themes. It's a relief to talk about something outside your life that isn't quite as real as current events or as annoying as politics. We find comfort in main ideas and heroes and anti-heroes. Chris Cleeve's Little Bee breaks our heart, but it's okay because he writes her so well. We don't want to read The Kite Runner but we do because Tatiana picked it, and it's the only book we've ever all agreed was splendid.  Many books selected have discontented readers, but that's okay. It's perfectly fine to disagree; as in bridge play, don't hold back, just be respectful with your words.

My book clubs have stretched my reading world: Atlas Shrugged, See No Evil, The Art of Racing in the Rain, Hanna's Daughters--these were not my favorites, but I'm glad I tried them.  Then, there have been authors like Anita Shreve, Susan Minot, Joyce Carol Oates, and the aforementioned Franzen, who were book club gold. I'll read whatever they write and might never have discovered them if not "forced" to by my book club.

As a solitary reader, I was living well enough through the printed word. But as a suburban book clubber times three, I seem to have found enough characters, ideas, and insight to populate multiple lives. I just might join a fourth one.

One Day by David Nicholls

My friend HGM loaned me One Day by David Nicholls with the simple comment, "see what you think." Her words might well have been a benediction, the way this book stirred me. See what I think, indeed! I haven't cried in years when reading, but Nicholls' novel reduced me to sobs. Good thing my husband was asleep or he would've wondered who died.

The two main characters, Brits Emma and Dexter, first meet in college in Edinburgh in the late 1980s. She is a pale, cause-committed beauty; he is an aimless adventure-seeking womanizer. Despite their different temperaments, there is a strong click of attraction between the two which slowly evolves into a deep friendship over the years. By years, I mean days, because, as you might guess from the book's title (and the movie due out soon), the author tells this love story one day at a time. From 1988 to 2007, he treats the reader to the events of July 15th, the anniversary of Emma and Dexter's college graduation day.

The pleasure of this novel is watching the maturing process of the characters. Nicholls knows of which he writes--first and foremost, the vagaries of aging; he wisely illustrates the career angst of the twenties, the get-serious thirties, the take-stock forties. Through the decades of friendship and bad romance timing between Dexter and Emma, I was struck by the ups and downs of each life. Dexter seems to be the successful one early on, not so much later. Emma finds her bliss through teaching, and then, writing, but these passions cannot save her from a hunger which claims to cripple them both as she approaches her 5th decade.

One Day is a love story, to be sure. However, I was left with the distinct impression after finishing the book, that love (and all that might follow, sex, marriage, children) isn't really the main idea here at all. In One Day, time, and the friendship it builds, is the chief protagonist. Time builds up and tears down Emma and Dexter, and it is sad, but oh so beautiful, because their connection endures.

Maybe this book slayed me so because I'm a sucker for an unsentimental love story, a rarity. Or maybe it's because in the summer of 1988 I was in Edinburgh on top of Arthur's Seat just like Emma and Dexter. July 15th also happens to be my son's birthday, a touchstone of a day, definitely. All I know is, after I finished Nicholls' novel, my eyes were swollen at work the next day, but there was a smile on my face.

Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden

Summertime reading calls for books with sex or dirty secrets. Dead End Gene Pool by Wendy Burden has plenty of the latter, so delicious that you won't miss the former. A memoir of growing up in a rich offshoot of the Vanderbilt family, Burden's story spares no one in that branch of the tree. Most of her relatives born in the 20th century are pretty worthless in the achievement department: one uncle has OCD, another is mentally challenged and ignored by Burden's grandfather; her brothers have both struggled with severe addiction and careened from lifestyle to lifestyle; her father killed himself, and her mother was an emotionally stunted anorexic alcoholic.

Does not sound fun to read? Oh, but it is! It is book candy, and the reason is Burden's delightfully sardonic writing style. She weaves humor (though it is dark) through her tale, and opens wide the door on the super rich. Her grandmother, though clad in Chanel, continually passes gas (brfffft, a constant refrain in Burden's prose), her Uncle Ham-Ham's repetitive comments ring like a happy Greek chorus through gin-soaked gatherings featuring French cuisine and priceless works of art. Burden even can't resist poking fun at herself: for years she's fascinated by the Addams Family (author Charles Addams is a family friend); and she calls herself "about the ugliest thing anyone ever wrapped a diaper around." Self-deprecating to a fault, Wendy Burden and her wealthy, kooky world absolutely entertained me.

And as dark as her outlook can be, it is rarely mean-spirited. The reader gets the sense that Burden loved her grandparents; with her adult insight, she can now be grateful for the court-ordered visits to their 5th Avenue apartment, a ruling which provided the only stable residence of her childhood. Likewise, she doesn't disparage her privileged upbringing, even though there was plenty of bad stuff served with the good. Burden formed close attachments to servants, relished access to country homes, boats, and art, and traveled widely. These memories are gems for which she is grateful.

The only time Dead End Gene Pool nears nastiness is in Burden's description of her mother, Leslie Hamilton Burden Tobey. In the book, Leslie is the quintessential love with-holder. Absent from her children, she is a social x-ray, courting alcohol and men. (Amazingly, Leslie is also brilliant, graduating from Radcliffe and eventually earning a PhD from Oxford University--all the more amazing an achievement when she seems to exist on raw hamburger and Tab!) The Burden grandparents blame Leslie for their brilliant son's suicide and despise her. Indeed, the reader starts to side with the Burdens regarding this awful woman and her harpiness. Yet, Wendy Burden never lets the reader stray too far into mother hatred. She always tempers her stories with humor: her mother's obsession with tanning is hysterical--a photo in the book showing a dark faced woman with white moons for eyes proves the author's point. Though her mother is a nut, she is a nut with goals. (If perpetual sunburn counts as a goal.)

It is only at the very end of the memoir that Burden reveals a vital piece of information unearthed about her parents' marriage. This revelation softens her (and our) opinion of Leslie Hamilton Burden Tobey. A supreme loss in childbearing must have triggered some sort of sea change in her mother's personality which dominoed to her father's suicide. With this realization, Burden moves toward forgiveness of this strange, sarcastic person--her mother, who always called everyone "Toots."

Wendy Burden's late breaking life reinterpretation is an example of the prime reason I love memoir. The fact that adults can revisit childhood and see it with a mature eye, and maybe, just maybe, discover a new truth, strikes me as something like sorcery. How many of us, after having children, now see selfless acts in the everyday memories of our own mothers? Can't we all see a pattern and purpose in our early lives from our perch of time? Memoir is the adult mind making gold out of straw, finding logic in the chaos. First time out, Burden has proven herself masterful in this genre. Imho, her gene pool is definitely not dead-end.

Little Bee by Chris Cleave

Some readers stay away from sad endings. As my husband says, there's so much sadness in real life, why go looking for it in fiction? True, I cannot argue with that. We all get a taste or more of the tragic in our pilgrimage. But then a novel as well-crafted as Chris Cleave's Little Bee comes along, and I not only swallow sad, I lap it up like honey.

The book was a Christmas gift, and, fellow readers, you know I love free. That's why the gentle warning of my friend that the book was kind of sad didn't deter me. I simply had nothing else to read at the time. (Apparently, this problem disappears once one gets a Kindle--there's always something seemingly better on the virtual shelf.) Later, midway through Cleave's story, I was grateful that I was so hungry for a story that I took a chance. An orphaned teenager calling herself Little Bee has escaped Nigeria and is being detained in in a English refugee center. She is trying to get to the home of a British couple she met two years ago while they were on an ill-fated holiday in her country. Told in alternating voices, the narrative crackles with the contrast between Little Bee's determined humor and British wife and mother Sarah's baffled bravery. Right from the beginning, there is tremendous charm to the story. (Unexpected charm, the reader rejoices, if she was forewarned about the book's sadness.) Witness the friendship between Little Bee and Sarah's son, a Batman-dressed moppet who provides a nice dash of four year old farce. Read Little Bee's spot-on humorous deconstruction of those Brits and, in a larger sense, the civilization of convenience and calm we take for granted. The contrast between these two worlds, close geographically with differing brutality, is at the heart of the novel. Little Bee hungers desperately for Sarah's world, and Sarah is equally wounded by hers.

Thankfully, with contrast comes comparison. We're all more alike than different, Cleave seems to be saying. A white woman in England can mean the world to a black African girl, and she can return the favor. Everyone, no matter where he or she lives, is capable of change and acceptance. The author makes no secret he is personalizing the term "globalization." His meaning encompasses someone like Little Bee finding her way to your front door and asking for kindness.

I am so glad I read this sad book. The charm and little bits of joy peppering its pages far outweighed any gloom. The characters of Little Bee and Sarah are entrenched in my brain now, and when I think of them, it is not with sadness but with joy.

Pardon Me, You're Stepping on my Eyeball by Paul Zindel

The teenage years continue to haunt me literarily. Stuck as I was in a Milwaukee back brace for scoliosis, books were my means of escape. I read a ton of Paul Zindel books from age 13 to 17. Zindel, who died in 2003, was the literary voice of adolescent angst in the 1970s and 80s. The product of a broken marriage, he lived a somewhat rag-tag life with his mother and sister which fueled his plays and, later, his novels. (Zindel's 1964 play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds won the Pulitzer prize.)

Zindel's characters were usually fringe-type folk: nerds, dysfunctionals, obsessives, and though mostly young, sometimes ranged to the elderly--The Pigman and The Pigman's Legacy had older main characters. The teens consistently had quirky family lives (a hallmark of 1970s YA fiction, it seems) and looked to friends for normalcy and balance. Although I loved everything Zindel wrote through the 80s, the novel that continually pops into my mind now is Pardon Me, You're Stepping on my Eyeball. Just the title was enough for me to grab it from the shelf at my local Paperback Booksmith back in 1979. The plot centers on Edna Shinglebox, a plain quiet girl, whose perenially dateless life is a disappointment to her mother. Marsh Mallow is the school misfit who carries around a raccoon in his pocket. The unlikely two befriend each other and head on a crazy cross-country trip. What strikes me now, reading Zindel's prose, is the delightful hilarity infusing every artfully constructed sentence. There is humor here, and delicious irony, as he simultaneously pot-shoots and pardons the popular kids. The football captain may be a moron, but he's not evil, is he? And the pretty girl is actually really kind. Marsh Mallow is weird but smart, and, well, cute. Not everyone is a stereotype, Zindel suggests. Don't look for either black or white, this or that--most people you will meet in life are a subtle blending of both.

This lesson of living life in the gray in-between is one to relearn. People cannot be defined by political parties or religion, by family background or street addresses. Polite conversations in American living rooms are nearing extinction. Democrats, Republicans, whatever--we're all guilty of shoving an agenda down chit chat's throat. I can't tell you how many times a well-meaning discussion about the weather has turned into a political debate about global warming [or climate change :)] When did polite conversation become a battleground? I'm a mild mannered soul, and even I've found myself trapped in a dialogue quickly turning to lava. So, I've decided to return to one of the lessons I learned very young, the theme of Paul Zindel's and other 1970s children's authors' books: tolerance in your community. Pluralism in your own kitchen. And (sigh, because this will be difficult) minding the gray in-between with your very own children. Listen, nod, and smile: life is more colorful lived in the gray.