Book review in today’s Strib

“Love in a ballet is something that does not exist and then suddenly does, its beginning marked by pantomime, faces fixed in rapture, a dance,” Maggie Shipstead explains in the opening act of her new novel, “Astonish Me” (Alfred A. Knopf, 257 pages, $25.95).

Watching from the wings as her former lover, Arslan Rusakov, takes the stage with his newly defected fiancée, Joan finds reason to celebrate what she knows will be her final performance. A secret pregnancy is about to tip her balance toward marriage and the suburbs, and her relief at leaving behind this rarefied world is palpable. “After, when they are hidden in the wings, or behind a curtain, the dancers will grimace like goblins, letting the pain show.”

Ballet may be infamous for its bodily punishments, but Shipstead finds even better material in the psychic costs of an art form fueled by creative rivalries and the relentless pursuit of the fleeting. “The ideal that lives behind the mirror makes teasing, flickering appearances but never quite shows itself, never solidifies into something that can be looked at and not just glimpsed,” the company’s coke-sniffing soloist Elaine muses as she edges near 30. “She might surprise it as she whips her head around, spotting during pirouettes, or catch it flitting through one hand or foot. But it never stays.” For the dancers who stay with it for life, “futility has become an accepted companion.”

A California subdivision in the 1980s is the setting for Joan’s second act, running a dance studio and raising a son with her high school boyfriend-turned husband Jacob. But her glamorous past as the getaway driver during Rusakov’s defection from the Soviet Union never fades from the family mythology, and soon begins to fascinate her son Harry, who grows to be a talented ballet dancer himself. Why did the mercurial Russian star choose a girl from the corps as his means of escape? How long can a person carry a secret before it stops mattering?

Shipstead’s sinewy prose here is well matched to her tightly wound characters, but fans of her often hilarious debut, “Seating Arrangements,” will have to rely on one of the story’s only carb-eating characters (a neighbor lady who allows herself to be groped on a Disney kiddie ride) for comic relief. Even so, by the time these two generations meet on stage in the final pas de quatre, Shipstead’s operatic denouement is just the right spin.

–Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

by Ann Patchett

(Harper Collins, 320 pages, $28.99, 320 pages)

“I was always going to be a writer. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything,” Ann Patchett declares in her new collection of personal essays, and she’s got the gold-plated publishing resume to prove it: degrees from Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Guggenheim fellowships and Yaddo residencies, meaningful personal references from such mentors as Allan Gurganus, Grace Paley and Russell Banks, not to mention an independent bookstore of her own that gets even more ink than Garrison Keillor’s.

Given Patchett’s well-charted c.v. as a literary over-achiever, there’s one award that may surprise—the pin she earned “for being the first person … to receive a perfect score on the written waitress test” at the T.G.I. Friday’s near her mother’s house, where she retreated after a short and disastrous early marriage. “I was required to wear a funny hat. I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled,” she writes in a painful and funny essay titled “The Sacrament of Divorce.” “I did not die.”

Patchett’s gift for getting the best material from the worst of times is one of pleasures of This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a cleverly repackaged collection of essays published between 1996 and 2012. Though most were written on assignment for venues as varied as Vogue and The Wall Street Journal, each piece advances the arc of the author’s own story as she introduces us to some of the loves of her life—the state of Tennessee, a dog named Rosie, the nun who took the time to teach her to read, and eventually her husband Karl, a Nashville doctor she took more than a decade to marry.

Readers will recognize he’s the one in “My Road to Hell Was Paved,” in which the on-again/off-again couple embark on a 1998 RV odyssey of the American West, winding up at Yellowstone (“which is to Winnebagos what upstream is to salmon,” Patchett explains.) Postponing marriage is her plan to keep breaking up at bay, but she finds a flaw on her strategy while flying through a blizzard to be at his bedside at Rochester’s Mayo Clinic. “By not marrying him, he would never be lost to me. Now I could see the failure of my imagination. I had accounted only for the loss I knew enough to fear.”

Before she hit the bestseller list with novels like Bel Canto and State of Wonder, Patchett paid her dues working as a freelancer for Seventeen, an experience she credits with honing her work horse writing habits, which she explores in several essays aimed at aspiring MFAs. “I would always rather knock off an essay than face down the next chapter in my book,” she claims, but all of the periodical pieces collected are finely polished, worthy of their new packaging between two hard covers.

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier has one of the worst spoiler titles in all of juvenile fiction, which may explain why I let it sit so long, hoping the book report would simply write itself.

An early devotee of what might be called “pre-chick lit,” I preferred reading about other girls–Pippi and Heidi, Ramona and Beezus, the March sisters, and Margaret Simon, whose daily pleas to God were being read out loud to a growing group of fifth grade girls, giggling in the bathroom of Widsten Elementary School in Wayzata. That’s how I knew Sam wasn’t my type. The front cover featured a boy in pilgrim-buckle shoes and a bayonet. Worse, there was a Newbery Honor medal attached to it, a sign librarians would love it, while eleven-year-olds like me would hate it.

I spent weeks complaining about the miserable injustice of the assignment, while my parents, both English teachers, ignored me. Having finally run out of excuses the weekend before the report was due, I took my place on the living room couch and with a heavy sigh resigned myself to turning the pages.

The first few started out breathless enough, as sixteen-year-old Sam Meeker arrives at his family’s Connecticut tavern after a thirty-mile hike from New Haven, wearing a uniform designed by Benedict Arnold. Like the father he butts heads with, Sam is cocky, hard-headed, and, of course, utterly irresistible–think James Dean with a cause and a tri-cornered hat. When he steals his father’s musket to go fight the Brits, his younger brother, Tim, is torn between his love for Sam and loyalty to his father.

Though we know which side will eventually win the Revolutionary Ward, the hardships endured by soldiers and civilians make it clear that war is hell no matter which side you’re on. And as the troops march ever closer to the Meeker family, I found myself turning again and again to the title page to see if there was any way to avoid the terrible ending it predicted. There wasn’t. Even so, Sam’s execution in the final pages of the book came as a violent shock–one of the reasons it still ranks high among the American Library Association’s list of the top 100 most challenged books, more than thirty years after it was published.

It was the first book that made me cry–but it was more than that. It seemed to mark the moment in my reading life when I was no longer just skimming the surface, comforted by characters who were just like me. The unfamiliarity of the story and setting seemed to have forced me to read deeper. And in doing so, I felt deeply discomforted, unsettled, full of questions. I also wanted to keep reading.

In the thirty years since I read My Brother Sam Is Dead, I’ve often heard reports that books are chosen for classrooms based on the fact that boys will only read books about boy characters, while girls will go along with whatever is given to them. And though this is often cited as an example of how girls are given short shrift, I sometimes wonder if the harm doesn’t fall harder on boys. Leaving your comfort zone–not to mention your gender chromosome–is one of the great pleasures of reading. You try on another person’s life and leave a book with the feeling that you have been somewhere you could not have visited on your own. This is why I have a copy of My Brother Sam Is Dead on our bookshelf, waiting for the day my three sons are ready to read it. It’s also why I will ignore all their complaints when a good teacher requires them to read Little Women.

Published in “Raising Readers: An Anthology for Early Literacy” 2009

When business titan Victor Delahaye shoots himself during a sailing excursion off the coast of Ireland’s County Cork, the obvious suspect pitches the pistol overboard — a plot point that muddies the waters only briefly in this mild, midcentury whodunit. For readers, the more compelling mystery in author John Banville’s pseudonymous franchise is the character of Quirke himself. With a weakness for bad women and good whiskey, the impenetrable Irish pathologist continues to puzzle, while the fluid prose raises it a few notches above the better-plotted competition.

“By the Iowa Sea,” by Joe Blair (Scribner, $16)

After setting out on an “Easy Rider” fantasy with his girlfriend Deb, reality hits hard when the author runs out of money in Iowa, gets hitched and has a family of four — including one son with an autism diagnosis. This bruising but hopeful memoir got its start as a Modern Love essay in the New York Times, and it covers everything from marital infidelity to HVAC repair and the meaning of life with brutal honesty and hard-won wisdom.

“Circles of Time,” by Phillip Rock (William Morrow, $14.99)

You can’t help wondering whether “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes cribbed a bit from this family saga, the second installment of the “Passing Bells” trilogy published in the 1970s and reissued for the generation still reeling from Matthew Crawley’s car crash. The great house of Abingdon Pryory is the pivot point for plenty of Jazz Age angst, where the titled Greville clan is riven by World War I, climbing hemlines and crumbling social codes. It’s the perfect summer reading while you wait for Season 4.

“The Uninvited Guests,” by Sadie Jones (Harper Perennial, $14.99)

Sterne is the name of the Torrington family manor, falling into ruin and ready for a cash infusion that may yet come from an advantageous marriage for Emerald the ingénue. But just as the servants are preparing for her 20th birthday party, a passel of third-class passengers from a nearby train wreck arrive to wreak havoc, pushing what starts as a pleasant Edwardian comedy of manners into more ghoulish, Edward Gorey territory. Clever plotting and smartly observed characters (like the widow and second husband who meet “in the far-down places between grief and sex”) make for a highbrow page-turner.

“The Suitors,” by Cecil David-Weill (Other Press, $16.95)

Even more rarefied real estate is at stake in “The Suitors,” where the Ettinguer sisters contrive to save L’Agapanthe, the family villa on the Côte d’Azur, by seducing a billionaire to pay for it — or perhaps courting one so vulgar their parents take it off the market. Like a French Nancy Mitford, Cecil David-Weill (daughter of a former chairman of Lazard Freres) is at her most interesting when she’s parsing the manners of the super-rich, explaining why offering a Jet Ski as a hostess gift is simply never done.

“An Uncommon Education,” by Elizabeth Percer (Harper Perennial, $14.99)

In this coming-of-age novel set at Wellesley College, earnest narrator Naomi Feinstein overcomes her isolation when she’s initiated into the Shakespeare Society, a Seven Sisters secret that’s not nearly as sexy as it sounds. Equal parts “Prep” and “Dead Poets Society,” this elegant debut novel might have benefited from a little more Donna Tartt drama.

“Gossip,” by Beth Gutcheon (William Morrow, $14.99)

Miss Pratt’s, another exclusive single-sex school, serves as the starting point for this sharp and poignant novel about the triangle of friendship between scholarship student Loviah French, and the more privileged Dinah and Avis. Combining art world glamour, Upper East Side mores, big secrets and steady patter about what to wear, this novel is far more stylish than its shapeless title.

“The Distance Between Us,” by Reyna Grande (Washington Square Press, $15)

For eight years, Reyna Grande dreams of being reunited with her parents, who have left their children with abusive grandparents in rural Mexico so they can set down roots for a better life in America. But their eventual reunion is no happy ending in this affecting memoir about the Mexican immigrant experience and the author’s search for home.

“The Lost Saints of Tennessee,” by Amy Franklin-Willis (Grove Press, $15)

RC Colas and Moon Pies permeate this very Southern debut novel, which sees Ezekiel Cooper’s suicide plans sidetracked on a trip from Clayton, Tenn., to Virginia horse country. Burdened by the drowning death of his fraternal twin, divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughters, there’s a pleasing “Prince of Tides” quality to Zeke’s midlife turnaround.

“American Ghost,” by Janis Owens (Scribner, $16)

Hendrix, Fla., is a town of “listing cracker dog trots and trailers” where the giant oak tree in the square is missing a limb — the result of an infamous 1930s lynching. The crime has painful ripple effects six decades later for Jolie Hoyt, daughter of the town’s Pentecostal preacher, and a graduate student named Sam, who may be investigating more than he lets on.

“That Deadman Dance,” by Kim Scott (Bloomsbury, $17)

The “friendly frontier” of western Australia is the setting for this award-winning novel that explores the intersection between the Noongar people and the European settlers who soon alter the aboriginal landscape. Jumping through time, much of the story is told through the eyes of Bobby Wabalanginy, a welcoming third culture kid who comes to see that the cultural exchange of colonization works in only one direction: “We learned your words and songs and stories, and never knew you didn’t want ours. ”

“Seven Locks,” by Christine Wade (Atria Books, $15)

When her wastrel husband sets off in a huff and never returns from the wilderness around their Hudson River Valley farm, the narrator in this debut novel has to make her way with two young children and townspeople convinced she had a sinister hand in his disappearance. Set against the backdrop of the Revolutionary War, this compelling historical novel takes its inspiration from a sleepy Washington Irving tale.

Laura Billings Coleman is a writer in St. Paul.

© 2014 Star Tribune

Larry and Marcia Arnolfini

Those folks who favor a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage are half right when they say the most traditional union in the history of the human family is the marriage of one man and one woman.

They’re just off by the number of wives.

“Actually, the most traditional form of marriage, which has been approved by more societies than any other, and which appears most often in the first five books of the Bible, is polygamy — one man and many wives,” says Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage.”

While the plot of HBO’s “Big Love” may still be too bold for network TV, Coontz says, “almost every marital and sexual arrangement … however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before.”

Coontz is coming to speak at Century College in White Bear Lake this week, as part of a speakers series designed to “enhance multicultural understanding.” Her two appearances, on Tuesday and Wednesday, may also provide much-needed historical background to this state’s self-appointed defenders of traditional marriage — if only so they have a better understanding of what traditions they’re really defending.

Far from a static institution, marriage has been one of the most mutable of human bonds — altering most profoundly in the last 30 years. Recent headlines heralding the new minority of married households is proof of the transformation, says Coontz, who also sees it as a sign of marriage’s surprising strength in our culture.

“Marriage used to be the way that people moved out of their parents’ house … and marriage was the gateway into adulthood,” says Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families and professor of history and family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

Now, with the rising age of first marriage, the fact that more couples have lived on their own, or learned they don’t have to stay in relationships that are unfair or unfulfilling, the optional nature of marriage may actually make the bond more meaningful.

“People value marriage more when it comes as the culmination of a growing-up process,” says Coontz. “Marriage is definitely not dead. In fact, it means more to most people emotionally than it did at any time in history.”

Who has pushed the hardest to change what it means to be married? Probably not who you think.

“It’s heterosexuals who have revolutionized marriages and who are challenging the traditional way that marriage is organized,” says Coontz. For instance, a recent study about family time found that in the space of a single generation, fathers have more than doubled the time they spend on child care. This change would likely not have come about if women were still hewing to the roles of traditional marriage.

“For thousands of years, marriage was … about men taking over women’s property. So the things that used to make marriage stable, also tended to make it more unpleasant,” says Coontz. The same historical changes that have given women more autonomy, or made men more romantic (they more than women consider marriage an ideal state), have helped “marriage become more fragile and more fulfilling as part of the same process,” she says.

While Coontz understands why people might be eager to stop the process and return to some halcyon period when the definition of marriage was written in stone, the marriage historian says that version of the past never really was.

“Things that reassure us, but are false, are not very helpful. The fact is marriage has always been changing. I understand why people are anxious about these changes, but I feel pretty confident in saying they’re not going to go away.”

What other illusions about married life is professor Coontz prepared to strip away next week?

“You know Anthony and Cleopatra? Sooo not a love story.”

Originally published in the Pioneer Press, October 2006

There is a tender moment in the epilogue of St. Louis Park native Peggy Orenstein’s new memoir, when she is gazing at her daughter, the beautiful result of her six-year struggle to have a child, and asks her husband, “Aren’t you glad it all worked out?”Don’t go getting all revisionist on me,” he tells her. “I don’t want you to forget what actually happened and start thinking it was all worth it.”

There seems little risk of that in Orenstein’s world. While other new moms may give in to the self-preserving amnesia that makes us “forget” the pain of childbirth, or the loss of miscarriage, or the soul-crushing unfairness of infertility, Orenstein, a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine, is in the habit of taking very good notes. Her painfully candid and moving memoir, “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother,” deftly wipes the Vaseline coating off the lens of modern motherhood and exposes it for the messy business it is. Messier still in an age when, Orenstein reports, more than 1 million fertility-related medical appointments nationwide are made every year.

Orenstein is funny and frank from the beginning, exulting in the good reviews that her cervical mucus has received from gynecologists who tell her she won’t have any problem getting pregnant. If only it were that easy. At a checkup to clear the decks for conceiving, breast cancer is found — a setback that comes to feel like a footnote compared with other obstacles that emerge.

An avowed feminist (her previous books “Schoolgirls” and “Flux” also mined the lives of women and girls), she seems the obvious go-to gal when Oprah’s producers need a confident voice to rebut Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s much-hyped “Creating a Life” (2002), her book about the “crisis of childlessness” among high-achieving women. Instead, Orenstein and her husband are themselves reeling at their own realization that her chances of conceiving are receding with each passing cycle.

“I always thought it was a gradual decline,” her husband says, looking at a steep chart given to them by one of their many fertility doctors, “but it’s like falling off a cliff.”

Writes Orenstein: “I felt like the poster child for Hewlett’s thesis, the midlife professional who’d badly miscalculated, who found out too late that her accomplishments were meaningless compared to motherhood.”

This feeling may explain why a woman who admits to eating organic broccoli and running from microwave ovens finds herself taking a fertility drug linked to increased cancer risk. “Clomid was my gateway drug: the one you take because, Why not — everyone’s doing it. … First you pop a little Clomid, suddenly you’re taking out a second mortgage for another round of in vitro fertilization (IVF). You’ve become hope’s bitch, willing to destroy your career, your marriage, your self-respect for another taste of its seductive high.”

And while she endures a dizzying and disheartening array of treatments and procedures — acupuncture, injections of purified Italian nun’s pee, donated eggs, dirtlike tea and a sad series of D&Cs — Orenstein’s ordeal may be more typical than not. During the first four years she tried to get pregnant, annual IVF attempts rose by 78 percent, while Americans spent $2.7 billion on fertility treatments. “Why don’t you adopt?” people ask. “Why don’t you?” she wonders.

The book’s lengthy subtitle suggests something of the meandering nature of the memoir — a sense that it may not have been the book Orenstein set out to write, but rather the one that was thrust upon her. Visiting with an old boyfriend who now has 15 kids, she learns to be careful what you wish for. Suffering a miscarriage in Japan, she finds an extra tendril of connection between herself and the Hiroshima survivors she interviews there, some left unable to bear children after the bomb blast. And yet, each experience affirms her desire to be a mother, and brings her back to the question asked by anyone who has entered a fertility clinic: “What if it works?” Orenstein asks repeatedly. “What if this is the only way we can have a baby?”Waiting for Daisy” has a surprise happy ending, bittersweet and born of some painful lessons. It will surely resonate with anyone who has been an expectant parent — especially those whose expectations have been challenged.

This review appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune

Although “nature deficit disorder” may be the latest affliction to trouble today’s computer-glazed, keyboard-tapping kids, new research revealing the medicinal powers of a long day outdoors has literary roots that reach back a century.

For instance, “The Secret Garden” of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s turn-of-the-last-century classic has such a salutary effect on orphan Mary Lennox that her sallow complexion soon is replaced by roses in her cheeks. Her enfeebled cousin, Colin, finds the fabled Yorkshire air even more bracing, tossing off his lap blankets and rising up from his wheelchair, as straight and determined as a new crocus.

That pivotal scene is one of the pleasures in an excellent reissue of the children’s classic, newly illustrated by Inga Moore (Candlewick, $21.99, 272 pages, ages 6 and up). Like many of the best illustrated books for children this spring, it reminds young readers, possibly as pasty-faced as Mary Lennox after the long winter, of the beautiful scenery, startling creatures and great adventures that await this season if we simply go outside. Consider:

“Jack Pine,” by Christopher Patton, illustrated by Cybele Young (Groundwood, 32 pages, $18.95, ages 7 to 12).

The Canadian poet picks up where Joyce Kilmer left off in this charming ode to the least lovely of trees — the jack pine. A tree once blamed by farmers for poisoning the soil may seem an unlikely subject for a children’s book, but Patton’s poem recasts Jack as an unsung hero of nature, taking root in the least hospitable places to protect the seedlings of more desirable pines from wind and sunlight.

“The Ugly Duckling,” retold by Stephen Mitchell, illustrated by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Candlewick, $16.99, 40 pages, ages 5 to 8).