Not Your Grandmother's Vampire

"Why won't you watch Buffy?" Asked my BFF while driving at her space normal speed of 50 MPH on a city street in a rattling old Nisan convertible with the top down.

"Because I don't want to get obsessed with vampires like I was when I was a teenager," I replied.

"Obsessed like how? I'm obsessed."

"Yeah, you are, but have you sealed your bedroom windows with a paste made of crushed garlic, then painted a row of tiny crosses with actual 24 Karat gold leaf around the edge of each window pane?"

"What? Hell no. [pause] I'd be, like ---- What's the opposite of garlic??"

Considering my adolescent fascination and the lengths to which ti drove me, it was with some trepidation that I picked up the copy of DRACULA; The Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original Classic, by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. I felt somewhat protected by the simple fact that the book has three titles.

With some exceptions, the characters from the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, continue (at least by name) from the first book into this sequel, which is a true sequel and not a re-imagining or re-framing of the story. Except that it is. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the Original Version

For those few who do not know the story or about the story, the Original tells the reader how a vampire named Dracula makes use of the services of young solicitor Jonathan Harker to move house from rural Romania to England. Shortly after Dracula's arrival in suburban London, he begins his seduction (there's no other word for it) of the unfortunate and 1.75 dimensional Lucy Westenra, whom he successfully turns into a vampire. No clue is ever provided within the text as to why he picks Lucy or how she comes to his attention.

Jonathan, his (eventual) wife Mina and a small band of heroes chase down the evil invader from the east, some of whom tell their own part of the story in the first person, after the manner of Wilkie Collins. There is no omniscient narrator, no final authority to whom we can turn to let us know what is true and what is false. The closest we get to that luxury is Van Helsing. The reader decides for herself whether any particular narrator is reliable. Because the characters themselves know and present only fragments of the overall story, Bram Stoker's original Dracula requires that the reader participate in the story by actually thinking.

Van Helsing in his narrative sections orates for much too long at a time, and far too often, and then everyone else just runs off and does what he says, with no evidence whatsoever that he has a clue what he's talking about other than his own commanding presence. At first, his curious use of English is entertaining, then it often becomes confusing and sometimes cloying, at least to this modern reader. Otherwise, the characters have such distinctive voices, perspectives, and commentaries that it's possible to tell which narrator is talking to you by the tone and content of the passage.

The one critical character from whom we never hear is, of course, Dracula himself. Or, as Van Helsing would probably prefer it, Itself.

The Heroes discover poor Lucy's fate and kill the vampire she's become, after which the corpse becomes visibly human again, and they know they've saved her soul as she has not yet taken a life in her vampire form, during which time she supposedly had no soul to lose. this contradiction is never acknowledged let alone resolved. Subsequent vampire deaths follow, (we always get vivid descriptions of male humans driving massive stakes into the writhing bodies of female vampires), culminating in a wretchedly slow lead-up to the death of the title character at Castle Dracula deep in the Carpathian mountains.

Stoker describes his Count Dracula in memorable terms:

His face was a strong - a very strong - aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality for a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.

Mmmm. Sexy.

Nothing remotely like Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella or Christopher Lee. Only Gary Oldham's portrayal comes close to the image presented by Bram Stoker in the Original. And I didn't even get to the hands, which are stubby, have pointy fingernails like your Aunt Estelle in 1952 and hairy palms. Palms.

So what makes this book such a masterpiece of Victorian pornography?

It's the women. It usually is, but here there are the three overtly voluptuous female vampires at Castle Dracula whose sexuality Harker actually finds frightening before he realizes they don't want kisses of the garden variety. There is fragile, ethereal, plot-device Lucy, who epitomizes the ideal woman of the Eighteenth Century, over against her best friend Mina Harker, who is thoroughly modern (knows shorthand, types - albeit both in preparation of being useful to her husband in his legal career - picks up a revolver without flinching or struggling with the weight of it - and is described as having the brain/mind of a man).

The character Mina is the hinge on which the narrative turns from Bram's original vision to that of the sequel. And Mina herself turns.

Now for the Sequel

In the sequel, Dracula; the Un-Dead, the title character himself is definitely a post-Barnabas, post-Spike, post-Angel, post-Edward, and most especially post-9/11 kind of vampire. Vlad has, by virtue of driving back the Renaissance Islamist invasion of Europe, become not a bad guy at all, just seriously misunderstood. All that impaling.

In the sequel, nice female vampires follow their beloved in acts of suttee-like devotion. Bad female vampires bite the girls and they like it.

The Dracula of Bram Stoker's novel was a count. In the new book, he's a prince, and identification of the novel's character Dracula with the historical Vlad III Dracula who defeated the Turkish Empire's attempt to invade Europe with extremely severe measures, is made express, explicit and complete. No ambiguity here, whereas in the original novel there are hints as to a possible connection. This new Prince Vlad was a papal favorite, a hero of the Christian West, a good-guy member of the (historically real but somewhat murky) Order of the Dragon. This book's Dracula is the übermensch we've all been waiting for.

Also notable is that, in direct contradiction to the BtVS-verse, not to mention the original Dracula as envisioned by Bram Stoker, it turns out that vampires do in fact have souls. Let the debate begin.

The book opens with a scene so overtly, and so over-the-top-ly, pornographic readers will either put the book down or lick their lips for more. The body count is almost insanely high throughout.

The villain of this piece is actually not Dracula himself, but Elizabeth Bathory, who, like Vlad III Dracula was an actual historical person.

In the Original, Dracula has three female attendants, two dark-haired, one fair. Bathory here has two, one dark haired, one fair. When, in the Original, Lord Godalming hammers the massive wooden stake into his beloved's heart to destroy the vampire she's become and her head is subsequently severed from her body, no mention is made of her body crumbling to dust, only of her restoration to her humanity in death. When Van Helsing does his "butcher's work," destroying Dracula's female followers, they specifically are described as crumbling to dust. Perhaps this has something to do with how long one was a vampire before being killed/rescued, or perhaps given how vigorously Lucy's beauty has been impressed upon us, it would have been too much to have her crumble to ash just after her would-be husband has pierced her energetically with his big stick.

Dracula himself crumbles to ash when stabbed with a kukri and his throat is cut at the end 0f the first book. He is the only male vampire killed in the book, and killed by human men, and there is no piercing with a big stick, which I think clearly demonstrates that Stoker was fully intentional about the sexual symbolism of the stake. And yet, Dracula has managed to return. So one wonders whether the two attendants on Countess Bathory have any identity with the attendants on Dracula or are they meant merely to recall him and Bathory's replacement of Dracula as villain.

Bathory is more an embodiment of the mythical Lilith than she is of the historical Countess who spent the last years of her life bricked up for killing possibly as many as 600 women. And yet, there are significant differences. The fictional Bathory of this narrative began her human life like any other girl, then was denied the chance to be a normal wife and mother, her nature was twisted by the early experiences of her life. Her children are lost to her, the husband who should have loved her was cruel, and at least in this fictional version, in her vulnerability she was preyed upon by someone she should have been able to trust. Bathory's evil is the evil of the misplaced, thwarted, victimized feminine.

Mina, still young thanks to the gift received from Dracula in the Original Novel, still strong, is a loyal if frustrated wife and mother, her Jonathan still alive, but obviously ageing while she is not. Her son Quincey, named for the band of heroes but called by the name of the one who died in the fight, is himself abnormally strong, and inexplicably attracted to an actor who goes by the name of Barsabas. Quincey, you see, wants to be an actor himself. He first sees Barsabas perform in Paris, where Quincey has been sent to pursue his education, away from distracting influences.

You can stop laughing now.

The now aged (except for Mina) Band of Heroes tries to reconstitute itself, to fight once more the evil they (in this version mistakenly) perceive Dracula to be. But we are let in on the secrets - Dracula, who is now living in the persona of the famous actor Barsabas, is the Prince who saved Europe from the Turks, he is the hero who saved the West, suddenly possessed of a soul, a good soul that seeks to serve God, and the same character who could not endure the presence of a consecrated Host now claims status as papal representative against the Infidel.

And then one can look backward and see the three voluptuous women who attended Dracula in his castle in a different light. Impaling was, sometimes, used by the Romans and referred to as crucifixion. And the name Basarbas, which was in fact Vlad III Dracula the Impaler's family name, conveniently, is an anagram for Barabas.

Here is the best things about the new book. Well, one of the best things, there are two. First, copyright in the United States to the Dracula franchise has been restored to the Stoker family, who haven't seen much out of the US in the way of royalties due to an early legal oversight.

Second, it'll make a hell of a movie, and I can see the line of actresses waiting to play Bathory with my mind's eye. I have my first pick. Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt are careful in that they don't provide much of a physical description of Dracula at all. They certainly can't go with the original, which is actually not that far away from the only existing portrait of Vlad III.

Dracula; the Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original is not as good as the original, but sequels rarely are. This is not to say it's bad, because it's not. It's a very readable, interesting update to the story, not least for its politics, both geo- and gender. It's also exciting enough to make you keep the pages turning, if you aren't squeamish.

It may be a bit of a stretch of "poetic license" to have shifted the action of the original from 1893 to1888 specifically in order to bookend the story with Jack the Ripper on the front end and the sailing of the Titanic on the back. I wouldn't have made that choice but then I didn't write the book, either.

There is one other choice I would not have made. I don't particularly like Van Helsing, but I'd have given him a better end.

If you enjoy the vampire genre, you'll enjoy this book.

The Amazing Adventures of Sam the Bat by Allyson Beatrice

This is Allyson Beatrice’s second book, and her first for children and young adults. Sam the Bat, of the title, is born into a community of Mexican Free-tail Bats in the southern California desert. While he is still young, disaster strikes, and sends Sam on a world-wide adventure of discovery.

Ms. Beatrice has acquired her own amazingly detailed knowledge of bats around the world, and uses that knowledge well to underpin and compel the narrative. Sam’s adventures are improbable, but far from impossible, hence the Amazing quality. Sam is every mother bat’s ideal of a son – he is clever, brave, curious, kind, generous and loyal. Sam is also lucky in his friends. The story is smoothly written, at moments a little heavy on the exposition, but for the most part, it will likely be absorbed by younger readers not as information per se, but as the story of Sam the Bat. Very clever. Also woven into the story is the imaginative presentation of the perception of human behavior by animals. Equally clever, and possibly on the nose. I can see it as logical, but can’t ask them, so, who knows, but the points made in those dialogs are valuable: be kind, don’t harm others (even bats) randomly, don’t waste, stick up for your family and friends. Basic good morals in any context. The story hits all the notes – sorrow, joy, friendship, mutual and grudging respect between enemies, even love both puppy and mature.

Sam is a likable little fellow, as are most of the characters, and even those who are not are well-written. Renny is particularly well realized.

This is a good book, parents may enjoy reading it with their kids. I would take it as being aimed at readers eight to twelve, but it’s a little too complex and in places scary for the wee tykes.

Allyson Beatrice is a solid writer, able to produce enjoyable material in multiple genres. How often does that happen?

About as often as a young bat makes an unexpected trip around the world.

Still Midnight by Denise Mina

Denise Mina does not need me to tell you how good she is. If you’ve read her, you know. A new title with her name under it makes my eyes widen like I just saw something shiny.

Still Midnight is the story of a bungled home invasion, and the clumsy investigation that follows. At every turn, the characters’ choices are marred by the thoroughly human capacity for deception, desperation and hope. Some of the deception is intentional, some of it the deception of the self. Amid all of this are three love stories, hidden like gems, one so quietly you may not recognize it at first.

Three small-time marginal criminals, Pat, Eddy and Malki, are taking their game to the next level by means of a home invasion. Somewhat planned and pitifully executed, the home invasion goes off without a hitch, except for an accidental shooting and the kidnap of the target’s father. When one of the kidnap victim’s sons and his friend, still dressed in traditional clothing for their attendance at prayer services in their local mosque, take off in pursuit of the van in which the kidnap victim is being driven away, the police stop them, and give them a kind of full-court press appropriate to terrorists. The delay allows the kidnappers to escape. Fortunately, the confusion is rapidly cleared.

But the kidnappers are now faced with a dilemma: How to spin absolute failure into at least partial success. Eddie manages to sell the heavyweight who hired them the idea that the tiny old man they’ve parked in a filthy house with a pillowcase over his head will still provide leverage to get what they want. Which is, of course, money.

The police are left with the question of why this seemingly ordinary, quiet, middle-class family of ethnic Pakistanis who immigrated to Scotland from Uganda have become the target of a kidnap for ransom. There is no reason to think this family would have the requested “two million quid.” So what has happened? Did the kidnappers invade the wrong house? Why else would they demand to see someone they are told does not live there?

Mina’s presentations of Glasgow bring it into awareness; the city itself is not only place but character. It is every city, and it is the only place this story could have happened. Every city has desperate heroin addicts and people who live on the margin of outright criminality to survive. Every city has a police department that is comprised of officers who are competent and motivated to solve crimes, who are competent and motivated to get ahead, who are burned out, who are marginally competent, who don’t like each other, who want to arrest not only someone but the right someone, who are under pressure to arrest someone, who have personal lives that may have unbearable tragedies hidden within them. Every city has at least one smaller community of immigrants who are largely misunderstood by those around them, including other immigrant communities, who have tried to make a successful place for themselves by one means or another. And yet,these particular marginal criminals, police officers, immigrants and the native Scots who come to know them are peculiar to Glasgow. To tell this story as if it happened in, say, Detroit or Johannesburg would be to tell a different story.

Somehow, out of this stew arise a series of truths. We learn who the kidnappers were trying to take, and who they should have been trying to take, and they learn why. But by then, there are bigger questions that absorb your attention.

And underneath those bigger question, the global question of the intersection of culture and identity, and we as individuals can meet each other across it.

“Billal wanted me to convert,” says a minor character, “go and live with his mother. Don’t get me wrong. I love Sadiqa, she gorgeous, but I’m Catholic, I’m Scottish, I’m not going to move in with total strangers and cover my head with a fucking scarf for the rest of my life.”

The impact of culture on personal identity is primary in this story, as is our ability to find ways to meet each other across cultural divides.

Finally, it is the love stories that stick with you. One perseveres in the face of tragedy. One endures in quiet dignity a threat that cannot be named because the relationship cannot be named, and fittingly leaves itself open to the understanding of the reader. Some will see one thing, other will see something else. The last finds its way into the sun like a weed cracking a sidewalk. You root for all of them.

Facts Are Subversive by Timothy Garton Ash

Finding this collection of essays originally published between 2000 and 2009 was one of those happy accidents that come along from time to time. In that the title appealed to me, I did at first judge this book by its cover. Then I opened the book. It begins:

Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and postmodernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men.’

These are the first three sentences of the Preface. Unlike some, this Preface is worth your time. I found it comforting to learn there is at least one real journalist left alive on the planet. I had thought the species extinct or close to it.

Ash describes his thorough methods of research in the Preface, his methods are worth bearing in mind as you read, and I can only say we would live in a calmer and better world if more in his profession followed his example. No one can ever by completely objective. All of our personal knowledge is based on our personal experience, and our experience is never direct, but always filtered through the twin strainers of our cultural and linguistic conditioning and our personal experiences up to that point. Since no one can escape these factors (humans are not alone – wolves, elephants and crows, for example, have strict cultural arrangements), no one can completely escape bias. Ash recognizes his own, and states it up front.

I have not read every essay (yet). I have read random essays, and have found good, solid writing evenly present in all of them. Since it seems unlikely that I would just happen to pick only the essays in which these factors are present, I think it’s safe to recommend the book as a whole.

The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, from 2000, was not entirely accessible to me in that my foundational knowledge of the time and place is limited to what I saw ten years and a few months ago on the evening news. These are contemporaneous essays written for an audience with a presumed interest in and knowledge of the topic at hand. If you were not following the story that was unfolding in Serbia in 2000, possibly you would not have read the essay at the time, when the names of the players were fresh, to the extent that we were aware of players beyond Milosevic himself. The evening news, after all, is sometimes limited to being essentially verbal headlines, and headlines do not have room for the second string. In a basketball game, the important things happen on the floor. In politics, they happen behind the bench. To continue the metaphor, even in basketball you may see the play on the floor, credit the player, and never know the name of the assistant coach who thought it up. The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic hints at a similar arrangement. In fact, all the so-called “velvet revolutions” leave room for multiple and varying interpretations. As do the other kinds of revolutions.

Two essays that continue to have relevance, and will for some time to come, are The Invisible Front Line (2007) and Liberalism (2009). The first explores the past, present and future difficulty of walking our collective way through the real culture war of our generations (plural intentional): finding mutual tolerance between Islam and “The West.” Ash propounds that there are as many fronts in this “war” as there are individuals who will connect with each other across that line. That it will be “won” or “lost” in terms of the interactions of these individuals, not in the broad-brush actions of the few at the top. He may be right, I don’t know. I do know that the few at the top have the power to change the lives of those of us farther down the food chain. Their personal interactions fall along that invisible front line as much as anyone else’s, they just have a greater ability to shift where the line lies.

Liberalism is as elegant as it is brief, and addresses one of the more import and abiding debates in US politics. It’s easy to forget that, like many adjectives, “liberal” is relative to the time and place. Ash proposes a short list the basic components of liberalism present as foundational concepts supporting the United States Constitution. These basic elements are, per Ash, “liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress.” Thus Ash helps the reader remember exactly how revolutionary the American Revolution was.

If you read nothing else from this book, I heartily encourage you to read this three-page essay. Is has genuine lasting value.

No matter what your political leanings may be, you will probably not agree with everything Ash presents in terms of political opinion. I did not, but even where I did not agree, it was refreshing to have alternate views clearly expressed and based on reason and facts. Sometimes that opinion is his, sometimes not. A book this broad and as interested in conveying content is useful in its ability to present a kaleidoscope of concurrent events. Political opinion is overtly present in some essays (see Liberalism, above), and largely absent from others (The Strange…).

If you are at all interested in the events that have brought us to where we are at present, you will enjoy or at least appreciate this book. If you are more of the what-we-call-in-the-US a Conservative, you will have to be open to an alternative point of view, but will probably be surprised at the degree to which you find yourself in agreement. The idea that modern day US liberals are somehow “anti-Constitution” will not survive an honest reading of the facts.

And facts are indeed subversive.

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

Reading The Fifth Witness is like riding on the back of an expert downhill racer. Connelly keeps the narrative fast-paced but the speed is always in control, and no details get skipped. The plot is complex and Connelly takes the reader through it with as much clarity as speed. Mickey Haller is a protagonist you can’t help but like, and this is a book you just can't walk away from until it's over.

In The Fifth Witness, Mickey Haller (also the protagonist in The Lincoln Lawyer), has shifted with the times, and focused his practice on foreclosure cases. As you might imagine, he has plenty of clients. One of them, Lisa Trammel, has turned her predicament into a cause, setting up a website, leading pickets, and offering sound bites to the media about the bank that is foreclosing on her, and one of its officers in particular. When that bank officer is found dead, the police, not illogically, arrest Lisa. It would be nice if the client was as likable as her attorney, but she isn’t. Despite evidence that she possesses some degree of intellectual faculty, throughout the case Trammel behaves like a three-year-old denied an ice cream cone. It's hard to get behind her.

For the most part, the characters behave consistently and believably. Mickey is a nice guy with a hard edge, and the nice guy wins out in a choice that seemed improbable, unless Mickey is not worried at all about being sued for malpractice. This was not a decision that made any kind of sense, and I wonder when in the future it will come around and bite Haller in the ass.

Not a bunny trail: The criminal defense attorney used to be, in reality and in fiction, a respected part of the legal machine, not only necessary but honorable. There are two ways of saying it. One is that the criminal defense attorney is all that stands between the accused and conviction. If you assume that accusation = guilt and therefore only the guilty are indicted, then you might tend to see the criminal defense attorney as almost an aider and abettor of criminal activity. The second way to say it that the defense attorney acts as a protector of the Constitution in that s/he sees to it that Constitutional principles are adhered to in all aspects of the trial, without regard to factual guilt or innocence.

In any trial, both the prosecution and the defense work to answer the same question: Can twelve jurors be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the defendant based on the evidence ruled admissible under in that jurisdiction? If the prosecution succeeds, the defendant will be convicted. The defense attorney’s duty is to highlight every inconsistency, every gap in logic, to find all reasonable alternative interpretations and present them to the jury, and argue alternate theories of the crime, even if it means making your secretary spend her lunch hour running through mud in high heels at the crime scene. No, wait. That was Perry Mason. Never mind about the high heels. It is inevitable in that scenario that on occasion a person who is actually guilty will be acquitted, just as it is inevitable that on occasion a person who is actually innocent of the charge will be convicted. Mickey Haller does his job ingeniously, and the title of the book is a clue to his defense endgame. Where Richard North Patterson would delve profoundly and with keen insight into the psyches of the characters, and Scott Turow would focus on the elegant details of the legal system, Connelly keeps the story moving by focusing on what the characters do. We come to know the characters through their behavior, just like in real life. Strategy is central to Haller's management of the case, but we have to wait to see it play out in the courtroom.

As happens rarely in books of this genre, Mickey Haller and his team are changed by the events of this narrative. The reader does not leave Mickey where s/he found him – Mickey Haller isn’t Perry Mason. It takes courage to shift a leading character in this fashion, and Connelly does it like a master. In fact, it almost slips your mind that the sudden changes in direction are being taken by a man with a long history as a criminal defense attorney, a man who spent years defending drug dealers, actual and/or alleged.

It will be interesting to see where future installments take Mickey Haller and those around him.

You can go and see the film version of The Lincoln Lawyer opening in theaters around the US tomorrow. I wanted to embed the trailer here, but the host site won't allow it. Bear with me while I move to a host that will. Meanwhile, here's a link to the trailer at imdb.

The Memory Thief by Rachel Keener

Thematic similarities exist between The Memory Thief and Keener's first novel, The Killing Tree.

Once again, we are in the lush and various landscapes of the Carolinas and Tennessee. The Appalachian mountains like a spinal column hold up the geographic setting and the plot. The stage is set by lowland events. The mountains bring clarity, evoke the dénouement of the truth behind the deceptions upon which the characters have structured their lives.

Once again we are taken into the world of class tensions, engaged by delicate characterizations built of spun steel, Keener's deft ear for dialect, and deep insight into the nature of evil.

The story is told from the perspective of three daughters whose lives are joined by adoption and separated by adoption; whose choices, to the extent they have choices, are shaped by the kind of self-righteousness that leads to crippling poverty even in the midst of material wealth.

Angel opens the story with a brief, cryptic description of the night she sets fire to her childhood home, if you want to call it that. Quickly the narrative switches to a recounting of Hannah's story. Angel tells her story in a profoundly affecting, engaging first person, a distinctive and memorable voice. Hannah, a less accessible character to begin with,is suitably conveyed in third person, past tense. It's a successful use of the two techniques.

As is true with all of us, you can't appreciate Hannah's life without some comprehension of the lives her parents have led. Hannah is the late-born only child of Mother and Father, Mother having grown up in an extremely pious family firmly set within a narrow sector of the holiness movement. Father comes to this church setting as an adult, having first sought out the attention of Mother’s sister, only to be rejected by her. Mother was only too happy to step into the place abandoned by her sister. Hannah looks like this ostracized member of Mother’s family, an unhappy coincidence that spurs Mother to greater heights of concern. Is it the case that Mother's need to provide for and protect Hannah is in part driven by an unspoken need to rescue her own sister? If she does this right, will it make taking her sister's place a morally acceptable action?

Hannah is the only child at her school who must live life swaddled in polyester from chin to ankle and wrist to wrist. Watching Hannah struggle leads the parents to adopt Bethie, an orphan from the Philippines, to keep Hannah company in colorless polyester. Bethie struggles to speak, finally retreating from her stutter into communication by means of sign language and writing notes.

The girls' world begins to open on a trip to the Carolina coast when Hannah is sixteen. Largely as a result of boredom, Hannah finds a job, working at a motel with a restaurant. The work is hot. They give her a t-shirt.

The sisters hid in Hannah’s room while Bethie slipped on the extra-small T-shirt. She looked at her reflection and was as amazed as Hannah had been. So many sweet things could be seen. The soft curve of her shoulders. Even the rise and fall of her breath.

Let me keep it, Bethie wrote.

Hannah shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. Mother would kill us.”

Bethie shrugged her shoulders and wrote back, She already has.

Hannah internalizes her Mother’s fears that she will turn out like the aunt she so resembles and eventually takes the concept of modest dress to an extreme. Once again, instead of encouraging Hannah toward a standard less extravagantly at odds with the societal norm, Mother ropes others into aping Hannah, creating another artificial cocoon as she did through the adoption of Bethie. Mother's greatest hope, her cherished dream, is that Hannah will "choose" to be just like Mother. Against any visible probability, Hannah grows in that cocoon.

Angels’ story is in stark contrast to Hannah’s. While Hannah and Bethie’s parents carefully structure every moment of their daughters’ lives, Angel’s parents are present only as sources of danger by neglect as much as action. They provide neither guidance nor sustenance, and Angel grows up almost by accident, by her own lights, ransoming mercy by means of petty theft. There is no romance to this poverty, although Keener conveys well a kind of raw beauty in Angel's intimate relationship to the land. Angel finds in the land a kind of refuge, a bond as profound as it is primal, surpassed eventually by the need that drives her east into the mountains toward the answers she craves.

While Angel is abandoned by her parents’ physical and emotional distance, Hannah is abandoned by her parents' inability to see, to comprehend, by their sacrifice of compassion in the name of a sterile kind of purity. Both Hannah and Angel know what it’s like to be alone in a room full of people, to buy something that looks like acceptance by fabricating a lie of conformity.

Mother, Hannah and Bethie’s Mother, is a compelling character. Equal parts passion and coldness, capable of extreme cruelty precisely because of her devotion to the welfare of the people she mortally wounds, Mother is hypnotic. I wanted to put the book down, I wanted to avert my eyes from her brutality sharp as the edge of a well honed knife. I could not. Mother is as grand and fully realized a character as Lear, horrible and pathetic, powerfully capable of destroying out of love, needing everything to be just so for the glory of God.

Read this book. You won’t regret it.

Interview with Tom Mendicino

I had the happy opportunity this week to see an old friend, Tom Mendicino, whose debut book, Probation, is on the list of finalists for the 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Award. Tom was intended to be reading and signing at an excellent local independent book store, The Regulator on Ninth Street in Durham.

Write a book about a serial killer and no one will ever ask, “How many people are buried in your basement?”, and I was aiming to avoid the universally asked question, to what extent is this book autobiographical? My actual question was, given that the book is, as it says on the cover “Achingly honest (Vestal McIntyre, author of Lake Overturn)” how does Tom keep himself so much off the page. He's clearly deeply involved with his characters and the events in their lives, but there's still a lovely layer of cellophane between him and the people on the page.

The answer I got was “Well, no, let me talk about that, about that idea that books like this are inevitably autobiographical. I’ve never been married except to Nick. I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never given anyone a blow job on I-85,” At which point, Nick chuckled and Tom added, ‘I have given someone a blow job on I-95.

“But I’m really not interested in writing about my own life. What gets me interested is other people’s lives. This was the thing that got this story started:

"One night, I think it was the last night I was here after finishing Law School, I was leaving The Electric Company (a now defunct gay bar in Durham), and I met a stunningly handsome, rather shy man, who eventually invited me back to his home. I figured, what the hell, I'm never going to be here again. I found myself winding my way into a North Raleigh gated community, and this was back when gated communities were still new things. He was very concerned that I not park in the driveway. And as I was walking down the dark hallway behind him, I tripped and fell over what turned out to be a standard infant car seat. His wife was out of town. She was six months pregnant, and he loved her, but something was missing. He didn’t really enjoy having sex with women, he enjoyed having sex with men and so he sometimes did. And that experience has stayed with me.”

I said, “You realize, of course, that you’ve just perfectly described a significant number of young husbands in the upper middle class of Charlotte?”

“Really? So I got it right.”

“Yes. You got it right,” I said. (Please – they don’t call it the Queen City for nothing.) “But I’m also going to assume that every city large enough to have an old money country club has such a sub-set in the upper ranks where someone’s mother can walk in and insist that everyone act as though nothing whatsoever had happened. But that takes care of my second question as well, which was why North Carolina? As I said before, the geography here is interior.”

“Well, if I’d had that experience in Boise, I’d probably have put it there, but it didn’t and I had spent time here, and…”

“You could get away with naming him Andy.”

It took a while but Tom did finally confess that the use of the name Andy was intentional. I'm sorry, but you either get that or you don't.

I asked also about process - "It's something that fascinates me – an actor’s process of building the character, the director’s process of bringing a cast together in a way that communicates the play – some writers work from concept, some from plot, some from character – "

“The plot was cobbled out of characterizations," Tom said, thankfully cutting me off. "I’m an aleatoric writer, characters interest me, sometimes events you see or experience – I had one recently in a train station that will find its way somehow into the next book ... an unbelievable display of uncaution..." Nick cut in with, "Of foolish narcissism." [Tom and Nick described the incident, and I don’t want to spoil it for you, it just wouldn’t be fair.] It’s the opportunity to explore life or experience from a point of view not my own.”

I told them that I was glad to get to the end of the book, read the acknowledgments and, “Learn that you’re still Mrs. Ift. What would either of you tell people who want to be together for 30 years or more, as you have?”

Tom said, “Well, I am Mrs. Ift. But, seriously? …it’s Nancy with the Laughing Face[the song by Frank Sinatra], which everyone assumed was about big Nancy Sinatra, and it wasn’t. It was about little Nancy Sinatra, his daughter. But to quote big Nancy Sinatra when she was asked why she never remarried after Frank moved on to Ava Gardner and all the others - I’m still Mrs. Ift because I’m an Italian wife and I married once and I married for life. You have to have the willingness to commit to it and you can’t have unrealistic expectations.” Nick added, “One of the great ridiculous fictions we have bought into in this country is that people can be happy all the time. You aren’t going to be happy every second of your time together, and it’s foolish to expect that.”

In keeping with my running preoccupation with conversion experiences, I noted that I placed it in the scene where Andy rests on the floor of what had been his bedroom with Alice, whereas Tom had placed it later, when he tells himself "Get out of bed. Shower. Check out. Move on." This led to discussion of meaning as written and the meaning invested by the reader. I could only say that moment in the empty house was pivotal for me as a reader, and as something that I could relate to – the experience of making sure you pack yourself as well as your things when you leave a place. I saw the moment of “conversion” – in this case Andy’s acceptance of himself and everything that acceptance entailed, as being off-page, and Tom felt is had been placed rather clearly and overtly on page.

And I want to make clear, something I failed to do in the course of the conversation, I'm not talking about a conversion from straightness to gayness for Andy, Andy was simply discovering how to be what he already was, and perhaps that is the core of conversion, the discovery of what can be lived as one's own truth. But I shall put away my soap box.

The other thing I realized in the course of the discussion was that I felt Alice had been left unfinished, and Nick reminded me of her new house, her new engagement, her upcoming marriage, all of it indicating her successfully moving on. This is perhaps a gender issue, but to the extent that fiction can reflect reality, I imagine Alice’s new life as being constructed from defiance on the rebound, and am fairly certain that it will unravel in the not too distant future – but that is clearly beyond the scope of Probation. But I wonder if some reader won't provide this book with its own version of The Wide Sargasso Sea where we learn how the first Mrs. Rochester went mad and wound up in that attic. If you have read Jane Eyre, you really should also read The Wide Sarggasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

Probation is phenomenally driven by all the characters, of course most strongly by Andy but also by Father McGinley, and one can’t help but care about the other man caught in the bathroom stall on I-85. What happened to him each reader gets decide for her- or himself.

All of which makes me look forward eagerly to the next book, which Tom describes as a study of family conflict set against the backdrop of the 2008 Democratic Primary in Pennsylvania. Unlike Probation, this next book will be as dependent on place as on character and moment in history.

“It’s set in South Philadelphia," Tom said, "Where we live, and it could not take place anywhere else. The bulk of it takes place in the 7 weeks between the Ohio Democratic Primary and the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary in 2008. The focal characters are two brothers, the older one is gay, lives above a barbershop, and is a stylist. The younger brother went to college, law school, married into a solid mainline family and is firmly upper-middle class. It’s a look at the incendiary effect of the election on class divisions, divisions based on sexuality and gender, a marriage already in crisis over loss of a daughter in a car accident.

“I think it’s harder for men to understand the electrifying effect Hillary Clinton’s candidacy had on women, but the depth of anger …”

Nick cut in “Never in my life have I heard the N-word bandied about - quite openly. It was astounding.”

“It was the most divisive thing I’ve seen,” Tom concluded. We learned we had both worked on the Obama campaign, and both knew women who had been Clinton supporters who found their way into heartfelt support for Obama after he chose Joe Biden as his running mate, in at least some cases because of now Vice President Biden’s long, consistent and effective support for legislation that has made a positive difference in the lives of women.

I don’t have a spiffy ending, no neat bow to tie everything up in. We had covered the main points. Those with cameras handy took photos, we talked for a few minutes about past mutual friends and parted ways.

There's no other way to end this: