Brief Landing on the Wednesday's Surface

[evelyn_b]

Nothing to report this week but books in progress:

What I'm Reading Now

My Life of Absurdity, the second volume of Chester Himes' autobiography, continues to be highy readable, irritable, and semi-opaque. Large sections of this volume are about the author's doomed quest to somehow get his money's worth out of a second-hand Volkswagon, which takes him into the bowels of French bureaucracy and down a rabbit hole of failed and falling-off car parts poorly reattached by confident mechanics. Later, there are other cars and other, similar quests.

I'm enjoying the rich blend of competency and weirdness in the hearts of every one of the politician protagonists of What It Takes. Except Dick Gephardt, who is Sir Not Appearing In this Book as of page 463/1000. I still don't trust Richard Ben Cramer's show-offy internal-monologue-ventriloquism approach to journalism one bit, even if I have to admit that his Joe Biden impersonation is spot on.

So far I like Homecoming a lot better as a back-cover description of a book than as an actual book. I probably should have read it when I was ten. The story: a mother abandons her four kids in a shopping mall parking lot, the kids wait for her overnight and then decide to walk to their great-aunt's house in Bridgeport, where they've never been. Like the actual experience of plodding silently along a highway, buying stale donuts, and hiding out for days in a campsite before the cops start snooping around, it's a little boring sometimes. The kids aren't very strongly delineated characters because who has time to be a character when all you've been doing for two weeks is walk, hide, sleep, and eat doughnuts? You can't blame them for that.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

Is Homecoming the prequel to Dicey's Song? Somehow I always vaguely meant to read Homecoming, which seems weird in light of my dislike of Dicey's Song, but there you go. Sorry to hear it's boring, though!

[evelyn_b]

I think it's the book to which Dicey's Song is a sequel. And it's probably not THAT boring if you're an impressionable ten-year-old who loves fictional suffering. I did cry with relief when the kids made five dollars carrying groceries in a supermarket parking lot, so it's not like I'm totally unaffected. It's just a little bit flat to my picky old-person ears. And long! This book is 400 pages long! It's a small paperback with YA-sized type, but still!

[osprey_archer]

400 pages is a LOT of pages to walk alongside the highway!

[landofnowhere]

It does get more interesting -- it's not all walking along the highway.

[evelyn_b]

They've just made it to Bridgeport, thanks to some helpful college students! The chapter ends with Dicey knocking on what she thinks is her great-aunt's door (but the back cover has already told me that their great-aunt is dead).

[landofnowhere]

Yay for the helpful college students sparing us from even more pages of walking along the highway! There is more travel after this, but it goes faster as I recall.

[landofnowhere]

I think I did like Homecoming better when I read it at 10 than rereading it as an adult! It's one of these things where the world seems bigger when you're small.

[evelyn_b]

I suspect I'd be willing to pump more of my own imagination into the task of walking with the kids if I were still ten. The appeal of a grittier and sadder version of The Boxcar Children would have been pretty strong at that time.

[delphi]

I loved Homecoming as a kid, although it didn't really hold up when I re-read it as an adult. Funnily enough, though, A Solitary Blue (one of the standalones from the series) was my least favourite as a kid but I absolutely adored it upon revisiting it a few years ago. It's probably because A Solitary Blue involves a whole lot going on with the adult characters that the young protagonist (and young reader, in my case) doesn't always fully pick up on.

[evelyn_b]

Interesting! I think what's getting between me and the love is that I've spent a hundred pages with these kids and I don't really feel like I know them any better. That's not their fault; they're too tired to talk, poor things! But it might be partly the fault of my adult expectations. If I'd read this book when I was supposed to, I could have just projected all my real and imagined feelings directly onto them without even noticing, because the situation they're in is so compellingly ugly and painful. Now I expect the author to do all the work.

And the thing where James says "It's still true" first thing every morning - I think that would have been a really effective chime when I was ten, but to my old impatient present self it feels forced. Especially when he goes back to saying it after being too sick to bother for several days. I just think, "James, we know you're sad, we're ALL sad, stop showing off for your siblings."

[torachan]

I loved Homecoming as a kid. I haven't reread it as an adult, but have been meaning to do so. Curious to see if I'll like it as much.

[evelyn_b]

I'd be curious to know how it turns out for you! I don't know for sure, but suspect, this book would have been absolute catnip for me at ten. Now it's a little hard to get into, but I doubt that's entirely the book's fault.

[littlerhymes]

Most Cynthia Voigt contemporary novels felt very grey to me - so much plodding along with stale doughnuts (why is that such an evocative image? ok Cynthia, you win on the doughnuts).

[evelyn_b]

You can taste the staleness right through the prose! To be fair to Voigt, I absolutely loved the surly grandma and her splendid isolation once they finally got there. And stale doughnuts would have been really effective daydream fuel back in the day (as a comfortable ten-year-old, I loved to work out grody survival scenarios in my mind).