Book 6: Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World, Vicki Myron with Bret Witter

I am unembarrassed to admit that I read, and cherish, the website “Cute Overload”. I breeze by “I Can Has Cheezburger”, “Cats in Sinks”, “My Cat Hates You” and various other sites full of adorable animals every few days. I cry at stories about heroic, lost or abused animals and barely made it through a recent visit to the Atlanta Humane Society. I am a sucker for cats, and therefore a sucker for books about cats.

I’m also a library employee. I went to what is generally known as “library school”, and although I am not a librarian (I’m an archivist, damn it!), I do work in a library and my field shares the philosophy and code of public service that is at the core of librarianship. For these reasons, it seemed that Vicki Myron’s current bestseller, Dewey, was made for a reader like me. Unfortunately, the sweetness of Dewey’s story is almost completely obliterated by Myron’s style and clumsy philosophizing.

Vicki Myron was head of the Spencer (Iowa) Public Library for 25 years. She is the kind of women who values family, public service and has a deep and abiding love for the town of Spencer and the state of Iowa. One cold December morning, the coldest of the year, Myron and another library employee found a tiny orange kitten shoved in the library book drop. The kitten was almost frozen, with frostbite on each paw, and Myron, with the help of her staff, nursed the kitten back to help. They named him Dewey Readmore Books and he became the country’s most famous library cats.

Myron’s book is primarily a chronicle of Dewey’s life, focusing on his mannerisms and habits and the ways in which they pleased library staff, patrons and visitors from all over the world. Dewey was clearly a special cat, in that he was extremely good with people, particularly children. I felt myself close to tears at the story of Dewey’s rescue, and only a monster wouldn’t be touched by the story of Crystal, a nonverbal girl without the ability to move her limbs or head, who would squeal with delight when Dewey would jump up on her wheelchair for a puppeted petting and then willingly sleep zipped inside her jacket.

Despite these stories, I was annoyed by Myron’s narration. The book is as much about the town of Spencer as it is a bout Dewey; Iowa was in economic crisis when Dewey was found, and his slowly growing fame not only brought the town together, but helped increase tourism to a severely depressed area. However, Myron is ill-equipped for any deep analysis and incapable of seeing beyond the borders of Iowa to the hard times that hit all over the country in the 1980s (my own father lost his contracting business when construction went bad in Texas). Her tone is frequently defensive; Myron seems to think that the rest of the country does nothing but mock Iowa and Middle American values as we swill out martinis and enjoy the unearned good life.

The third big story in the book is Myron’s own biography. We learn about her hardscrabble childhood, disastrous marriage, poor relationship with her daughter, and many, many illnesses, including her own breast cancer and cancer in members of her immediate family. At many times these episodes seem like filler; at others they are opportunities to tell other Dewey stories, but they are always also object lessons about the strength and upstanding morality of Iowans.

In addition, Myron has a severe case of “Precious Moments” disease when it comes to her own relationship with Dewey. As much time as Dewey would spend with patrons, other library staff, and even her own daughter, Myron is convinced that he really only loved and communicated with her. Last October I lost my own precious kitty to lung cancer. That’s her photo at the top of this post. Her name was Sparkle and I was devastated by the loss.

Like Myron, I felt like my relationship with my cats was special, and I wallowed in guilt that I had not noticed (or understood) the early signs of her illness. I completely understand how much an animal can mean to a human and I empathize with Myron, but Myron’s convictions are off-putting. When an elderly Dewey makes his last trip to the vet (it’s not a spoiler; you know from the introduction that this moment will come), she is hurt that Dewey would keep his sickness a secret from her. This is just the most egregious example of Myron attributing human-like qualities to Dewey. It makes her less of a professional relating a history and more of a stereotypical crazy cat-lady librarian. It hurts a story that is both touching and inspirational, set in a time and place that is ripe for more serious analysis.

New Favorite Blog

This past weekend I attended a white elephant party at my friend Julie's house (Yes! I finally have more than four friends in Atlanta!) and she introduced me to the blog Trash Heaven. Sweet Minty Jesus, take me home! There's nothing in the world I love more than to read someone hating/celebrating on the white trash of this world. Head on over and support the love/hate.

Book 5: Homecoming

Homecoming, from German writer Bernard Schlink, is a treasure. It’s hard to describe how it made me feel. The only way I can explain is that about halfway through book I realized that I did not know the narrator’s name (it’s only given once, but it’s on the back of the book), and I did not care.

The novel is the story of Peter Debauer; he is the narrator. It begins with his idyllic summers with his paternal grandparents in Switzerland. Peter has no father to speak of, as he died in the war and no one, not his mother or grandparents, are very forthcoming with details. Peter’s father is not an enormous presence in the first half of the book. He is mentioned, but not a key to the events of Peter’s life. Suddenly Peter’s father becomes an absent character and it becomes clear that the novel is a son’s search, both metaphorical and then physical, for his lost father.

Schlink’s prose is practically intoxicating. He describes the minutiae of life, an apple eaten, a book read, an affair begin and ended, in simple, touching terms. Even without remembering his name, I felt like I knew Peter, and I was frequently devastated by the bare emotion on the page. There is a great deal of honesty about the human condition in this novel. For example, when he is left by a lover, Peter describes how well he handles the break up, and how he parlayed it into other affairs, good humor, and sympathy from friends. An then, suddenly:

“No, that’s not what happened. I wish it had; I wish I had been so ironic, removed, in charge. Instead I was childish.”

What follows is a chapter listing Peter’s faults as he deals with heartbreak. He is cruel, dull, lazy and hateful. He treats women terribly and becomes a user of them. His friends finally pull him aside and intervene, which he ignores. Like all of us, he is childish and spiteful until ready to be human again. Schlink’s description of this state is striking. He knows us, he knows me, because he knows himself and bares it in his work.

The novel feels, for a long time, like it nothing but the story of a man’s like. He grows up, goes to school and finds a job, falls in and out of love and fights with his mother. But the book quietly becomes a mystery as well. As a child, in those summers with his grandparents, Peter was given reams and reams of paper from a series of novels edited by his grandparents, “Novels for Your Reading Pleasure and Entertainment.” His grandparents gave him the bound galleys because paper was scare in Germany after World War II. They warned him, and not in a mysterious way, to never read the novels printed on one side, that there were better things for him to be reading. Peter always obeyed until out of sheer boredom, he began the story of a soldier coming home from the war. He is enchanted by the story and disappointed when he realizes that he has already torn out the ending for a school paper.

Years later, Peter rediscovers the story when unwrapping items from storage. He becomes engrossed all over again, and now, with a college education, recognizes the soldier’s story as a retelling of The Odyssey, but still has no ending or even the author’s name. Over many years, Peter returns and abandons the mystery of the story, which becomes the mystery of his lost father and own birth.

Homecoming is also the story of modern Germany. Peter was born during World War II, and his story extends over decades. He flies to Berlin the week the wall is falling and the book ends soon after September 11th. The character of his country changes slowly as he ages and is so artfully rendered that the landscape of his home town, and the Switzerland of his youth, are as equally characters, if not more so, than people. It is a novel of “fathers and sons”, as the book jacket proclaims, but it is also a novel of modern Germany.

As mundane as many of the events seem, the ending of the novel is kind of a puzzle. Peter travels to New York as a visitor at Columbia. There he is drawn further into the story, specifically through The Odyssey and its murky morality. He is also subjected to a strange psychological experiment; it’s enough out of character with the rest of the book to have made me question Schlink’s decision to include it, but the tone of the story never changes. Schlink powers through this strangeness (and trust me, I’m dieing to give it away), but ultimately it is rewarding. Peter not only perseveres, but he breaks with the past, finishing his own ambivalent odyssey.

Book 4: The Reavers

The Reavers is the final novel of writer George MacDonald Fraser, who passed earlier this year. Never heard of him? Well, you should. In hi s lifetime he authored fifteen fantastic Flashman novels; all following the adventures of scoundrel Sir Henry Paget Flashman via false “memoirs”. Fraser’s style is always humorous and somewhat scholarly, with a fine and funny editorial voice. The Reavers is not a Flashman novel, but a comic adventure in the vein of Shakespeare, set in 1590s England.

The comparison to Shakespeare is due to the many plot contrivances that constantly reunite heroes and heroines with each other and their enemies. Think “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Twelfth Night”. Does anyone really believe that Benedict and Beatrice would talk themselves into loving each other just from overhearing some false gossip? And no one notice that Viola isn’t really a boy? Of course not. It’s the craftsmanship, the poetry and above all else, the humor that keeps it interesting.

Each chapter is separated by a narrator’s voice, one that is strong throughout, but also an easy example for the tone of the novel.

“Well, it’s been quite a night…highway robbery, swordplay, various raids (including one you haven’t heard about yet); hens; cats, a fortune in jewelry carried off; Bangtail deceased, Beauty robbed and beglamoured, our leading man in deep schtuck (but at least he’s fed and redolent of after-shave). What else? Ah, yes, dastardly Spanish rogues a-plotting to o’erthrow our green and pleasant land. A tangled skein, gossips, but fret not, it’s all under control…we hope.”

That’s quite a bit of the plot in a nutshell. There are two heroes, Archie Noble and Bonny Gilderoy, an English and a Scottish spy, and two ladies, the haughty and beautiful Lady Godiva, and her cute and lusty friend, Kylie. They uncover and must stop a Spanish plot (perpetrated by, among others, a monk with a Deep South accent, his pygmy companion, and a saucy sorceress known as La Infamosa), all while seducing each other, leading rebellions, falling in love, and enlisting a gang of football hooligans to save the futures of England and the Scottish crown.

The events are all preposterous and tongue in cheek; mentions of Paul Newman, Arnold Schwarzeneger, Jell-O, LSD, and football jerseys worn by highwaymen serve as constant, and not unwelcome, reminders that they are meant to be. When a monk wishes for an “anachronistic Polaroid”, it’s hard not laugh. Despite the good humor, the story does come a bit unglued toward the end; it’s as if Fraser decided to wrap it up as ridiculously as possible. However, the ludicrous ending in no way takes away from the overall story. Like Shakespeare, humor is Fraser’s saving grace. Who can really care about the plot when we’re having so much fun?

The Wrestler

I have been really remiss in not posting the official trailer for The Wrestler; it has been out for a couple of weeks. And God damn, is it a stomach punch. Since Mickey Rourke was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor this week, I thought I'd finally post it.

Twilight, My Ass

My truck broke down, so I am using it as an excuse to take the day off. That gives me a great opportunity to troll that series of tubes that makes life worth living. On it, I found a great Cracked article about what today's vampires can learn from The Lost Boys. It came with a clip of the world's most awesome saxophone solo:

Yeah! Where can I get a pair of those pants!