Dancing with Rose

Here's a review of a Dancing with Rose, a moving nonfiction book that's like a gonzo journalism look at life inside a progressive Alzheimer's facility. It was published in The Oregonian.

Stint at care facility enlightens daughter on Alzheimer's experience

Sunday, June 03, 2007

MIRIAM WOLF

L auren Kessler was a writer, a mother and a wife when her own mother developed symptoms of Alzheimer's. Like a good daughter, she found a care facility and visited her mother weekly. And if she was freaked out and a little scared of the vacant elderly woman Alzheimer's had turned her vivacious, vital mother into, well, who wouldn't be?

But after her mother died, Kessler was left with the nagging sense that she "had faced [her] mother's illness and her mother's death with a combination of fear and detachment, with emotions shut down, and, [she] felt, lessons unlearned."

So Kessler set out to make amends -- to her mother's memory and to herself. She decided to write about Alzheimer's. She didn't just read books and interview Alzheimer's researchers, though. Instead, she began to haunt "Maplewood," a lightly fictionalized Alzheimer's care facility. (Kessler, the director of the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon, also changed the names of some of the people in her book for privacy reasons.) She observed the residents and forged relationships with the staff. Ultimately, she applied for, and got, a minimum-wage job as a resident assistant at Maplewood.

The result is "Dancing With Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer's," a riveting view into the world of people living with Alzheimer's.

"There's so much research about the medical aspects of Alzheimer's, the decoding of the disease . . . the race to develop drugs to cure it . . . . But there is little research, almost no attention given, to the experience of the disease, what day-to-day life is like for someone with Alzheimer's," she writes.

Through her work at Maplewood, Kessler discovers what the experience of Alzheimer's is like for the residents she cares for. She introduces us to people such as Hayes, whose dapper dress belies a man who needs to have everything he does, from getting dressed to chewing his toast, explained in minute detail. There's Rose, who wanders in and out of rooms, picking up anything that isn't nailed down and putting it down somewhere else. Or Marianne, a former university administrator who believes she is an administrator at Maplewood.

"She talks about the employees here. 'I value what they do,' she tells me, 'but I often find their productivity is lacking.' "

Because she didn't know the residents before they developed Alzheimer's, Kessler doesn't see them as diminished. She accepts them as they are (something she is saddened that she wasn't able to do with her mother), and, in writing about them in such a revealing, tender way, she imbues them with humanity.

But the patients are not all there is to Maplewood. Kessler also has a story to tell about her co-workers. In passages reminiscent of Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickel and Dimed," she writes about the women who brave the physically and emotionally demanding work at Maplewood -- and do it for minimum wage. Each RA must care for 11 residents, some of whom can take care of their own basic needs, others who need everything done for them, from toileting to feeding to dressing. The women who work there must find child care if they have young children and reliable transportation to work. They often have unstable home lives. No wonder the average tenure for an RA at Maplewood is three months.

Kessler stays there for nearly six months. Far from being just a writer observing, she ends up becoming attached to the residents and staff in a lasting way. She attends funerals, meets family members, listens to problems.

"It's odd," she writes. "This is the most draining work I've ever done, but as I am drained, I am also filled, and I think the equation often works in my favor."

Miriam Wolf is a Portland writer.

The Post-Birthday World

I loved Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World. I read it on a visit home to see my mom and it was completely absorbing; I was drawn into the characters' world totally. On the other hand, I recently tried to read Shriver's previous book, We Have to Talk About Kevin, and while I admired its rigor and quality of writing, it was just too intense for me. I had to abandon it. Here's my review from the Oregonian.

2 men, 1 woman split in 2

Sunday, March 25, 2007

MIRIAM WOLF

I rina, the heroine of Lionel Shriver's new novel, "The Post-Birthday World," is happy with her life. A children's book illustrator, she lives in London with her longtime boyfriend, a think-tank researcher. Their relationship is steady, boring and utterly comfortable. Irina cooks gourmet meals and waits for Lawrence to come home. Each night they eat a big bowl of popcorn while they watch TV: "Preparing their traditional pre-dinner popcorn, Irina was thankful for another routine of perfectly balanced variation within sameness."

And if Lawrence sometimes takes her for granted or subtly belittles her in public, and their sex life is smothering in its sameness and lack of intimacy, that's a small price to pay for contentment, isn't it?

Into this cocoon of domestic bliss walks Ramsey Acton, Britain's aging, flashy king of snooker. The husband of a children's book writer Irina collaborates with, Ramsey has, in the few times the four have gone out to dinner over the years (an accidental tradition, always on Ramsey's birthday), always made Irina feel nervous, giggly -- and sexy.

One year, however, things are different. Ramsey and his wife have divorced, and Lawrence is on a fact-finding mission in Sarajevo. Against her better judgment, Irina allows Ramsey to take her out anyway. In what feels more like a date than a companionable dinner, the two feast on pristine sushi, drink too much and partake in intimate conversation. When she realizes she's about to kiss Ramsey, she knows she stands on the brink of "the most consequential crossroads of her life."

The results of that moment are so shattering that they cause the very narrative of the book to split in two. And for the rest of the 528-plus pages, Irina's story is told in alternating chapters, each of which holds an alternate reality. In one, she has kissed Ramsey Acton and thrown her old life to the winds. In the other, she has not.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this technique would cry out "gimmick," but Shriver, who won Britain's prestigious Orange Prize for her last novel, "We Have to Talk About Kevin," does more than just pull it off. With a gimlet eye for detail, emotion and irony, Shriver turns a trope into a triumph.

With Ramsey, Irina has traded security for passion. As she's dragged around the world on snooker junkets, she has to fight to hold onto a sense of herself as anything more than a "snooker wife." Meanwhile, the Irina who stays behind takes ever-increasing pleasure in her domesticity, even as Lawrence begins spending less and less time in the cozy home she has created for them.

The chapters overlap and intertwine in interesting ways. A Christmas trip to Irina's mother's home in Brighton Beach turns out very differently depending on who is accompanying Irina. Both Irinas decide to write a children's book. The book written by Ramsey's wife is full of passion and color. About a boy who loves snooker, it doesn't sell well, but wins a prestigious children's literature prize. The book Irina writes under Lawrence's influence is a computer-drawn story that makes pots of money. Its moral is "Between betraying and being betrayed, the anguish may be a toss-up."

How often do we get to see "what might have been" in our own lives? With "The Post-Birthday World," Shriver gives us a satisfying window into the trade-offs and trials of two main characters in one.

Shriver reads from "The Post-Birthday World" at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

Miriam Wolf is the managing editor of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture.

When Will We Get There

Here's a review of a compellingly dark novel about a community of Eastern European expatriates in a dying mining town in Pennslyvania. It ran in the S.F. Chronicle. Click the title to go to the review at the Chron, or just hang out here and read it below:

Past weighs heavily on boy in a dying mining town

Reviewed by Miriam Wolf

When We Get There

By Shauna Seliy

BLOOMSBURY; 259 PAGES; $23.95

---

Winter has never seemed more barren, gray and without hope than in Shauna Seliy's new novel, "When We Get There."

It's 1974, and the coal mining town of Banning, Pa., is struggling. The mines are closing one by one, and the close-knit population of Croat, Hungarian, Russian and other Eastern European immigrants is feeling the stresses and uncertainty of change in the winds.

Lucas Lessar is feeling more stressed than most. When the novel opens, it's Christmas Eve, and 13-year-old Lucas is in the bosom of his extended family -- his great-grandfather, the patriarch of the family; Slats, his grandmother, who works at "the Plate Glass"; and his gaggle of rowdy great-uncles and great-aunts. (They drink shots of whiskey and "feed each other moonshine cherries.") It's a poignant evening for Lucas. His father was killed in a mine explosion several years ago, and his mother mysteriously disappeared only a couple of months ago.

The family's celebration is interrupted by the appearance of Zoli. A co-worker of Slats' down at the Plate Glass, Zoli is deeply in love with Lucas' mother. (Of course, everyone is in love with Mirjana, she's the most beautiful and vibrant thing in the fading town -- or she was until her disappearance). Zoli's love for Mirjana runs so deep it has unhinged him. He attacks Lucas, trying to choke him into telling where his mother is. Slats' brothers pry him off, but he comes back later with a can of gas. When he sets fire to Great-Grandfather's beloved pear tree, he sows the seeds of the family's near destruction.

Loss dogs Lucas and his family. His great-grandfather falls ill, and the farm animals wander away. Lucas, a good student, stops going to school and haunts the town, looking for his mother and revisiting both his own history and the family history his relatives have passed down to him. He explores the woods and the abandoned mine buildings, one day finding a batch of carbide tins that miners used to fuel their lanterns. They make a satisfying explosion if you know how to rig them:

"My mother could hear that sound every time, no matter where she was. She would know what it was, and a lot of times she would know it was me, and she'd come running. If I made a lot of noise out of it, I was asking for trouble."

He does make a lot of noise out of it, blowing up can after can, until the town's dogs are all howling and his best friend's father (and another admirer of Mirjana), Marko Markovic, comes to find him: "I already have a headache like someone put a knife in my head, and then you are making so much goddamn noise."

Aside from noise control, Marko has another role to play -- one that shields Lucas from the surprising violence that erupts in this novel and fulfills Slats' prophesy that the Markovics always come to the aid of the Lessars.

"When We Get There" is a novel all about mood. There is a sadness running through the book, uniting all the characters, even when they are having an evening out at the Croatian Club. Seliy is wonderful at creating lingering images, such as her description of Great-Grandfather's pear tree, its fruit growing inside bottles fitted to the blossoms, the otherworldly quality of the pear brandy that fills the bottles. Or her meditation on Slats' post-work ablutions, a metaphor for the woman's strength and the toll her life takes on her body:

"Slats came home from the Plate Glass, stopped up the sink in the bathroom, and soaked her hands. She cursed the whole time. She cleaned her cuts every day so they wouldn't get infected. Most of them were small, invisible from a few feet away, and she painted them over with iodine. The white basin had a pink glow from all the years of her rinsing her hands and spilling the iodine."

Eventually, spring does come to Banning, bringing with it hope, and maybe even a little redemption. The seasons are like that, even for a boy whose family history seems so much stronger and more real than his own future.

Miriam Wolf is the managing editor of Bitch magazine.

George Saunders Watch

My 7-year-old daughter was doing her homework, which consisted of writing sentences based on simple pictures. Sample: Next to a picture of a ball, she wrote "The ball rolled into the street." Her complaints about having to write these sentences often reach the pitch and tenor of an undergraduate penning a term paper the night before it's due.

But I digress. Next to a picture of a goat, she wrote: "Goats eat everything. No note, no goat."

This is a not-so-veiled reference to George Saunders' brilliant Pastoralia, a book she has not yet read. Although I have read it, and apparently, I am also fond of speaking of goats and notes.

No word yet on what her first grade teacher made of the quote.

Napoleon's Pyramids

Here's the most recent of my book reviews for The Oregonian. I had never been a fan of historical thrillers, but this one was kind of a fun read.

A thrilling trip to beauty, mystery and fear
Sunday, February 18, 2007
MIRIAM WOLF

I f they had ever met, Philip Marlowe and Ethan Gage, the hero of William Dietrich's newest historical thriller "Napoleon's Pyramids," might have become fast friends. They're both clever and handy with firearms; they're morally complex; they're often caught up in situations they don't fully understand, situations that lead to them getting shot at, being beaten or waking up with snakes in their bedrooms. And they both appreciate a well-executed example of the female form.

The difference is that while Marlowe prowled Los Angeles in novels by Raymond Chandler, Gage accompanies Napoleon Bonaparte in his 1798 military campaign in Egypt. The general is hoping to conquer Egypt on the way to snatching India from British control. Gage is along as one of a team of "savants," scientists that accompany Bonaparte to help unlock the mysteries of the pyramids.

Gage's savant credentials are weak at best. An American, Gage was apprenticed to Benjamin Franklin, who taught him enough about electricity to perform a few parlor tricks. The real reason behind his recruitment is a medallion Gage won in a Paris poker game. Although the golden medallion with vaguely Egyptian markings seems innocuous enough, people seem to want it pretty badly, and dead bodies start piling up in Gage's wake.

Once in Egypt, Gage becomes allied with Astiza, a beautiful servant who is definitely more than she seems -- she speaks several languages, worships the goddess Isis and can kill a snake with aplomb. Meanwhile, Gage also proves himself to Napoleon, not as a savant, but through his battle skill with his preferred weapons -- long rifle and tomahawk.

Dietrich is great at bringing these historic battles to life. His description of the Battle of the Nile, in which England's Admiral Nelson destroyed Bonaparte's ships in the harbor near Alexandria, is particularly poignant, all smoke and chaos and fear. Dietrich also slyly shows some parallels between Napoleon's Middle East misadventure and a more modern one:

"When the Egyptians understand that we're here to liberate, not oppress, they'll join us in the fight against the Mamelukes," notes Bonaparte.

"Victory is sometimes more untidy than battle. An assault can be simplicity itself; administration an entangling nightmare."

Dietrich evokes the beauty and mystery of Egypt. He lets us wonder at the pyramids and other monuments that rose out of the desert, full of secrets and mysteries. And he doesn't neglect the thriller part of the historical thriller genre. We follow Gage as he faces down assassins, frees a band of slaves, sneaks through a sequestered harem at midnight, crawls through secret passageways in pyramids that no one has seen for millennia. And all the while, Gage wins us over with his American charm and gumption.

Dietrich discusses "Napoleon's Pyramids" 7 p.m. Sunday at Borders Bridgeport Village, 7227 S.W. Bridgeport Road, Tigard; and 7 p.m. Monday at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 S.W. Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton.

Miriam Wolf recently reviewed "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra for The Oregonian.

Sacred Games

Here's my Sacred Games review from the Oregonian

Story sweeps reader deep into gangland Mumbai
Sunday, January 28, 2007

By MIRIAM WOLF
Once in a while you find a book that sucks you so thoroughly into the world it creates that each time you slip your bookmark between the pages and close the cover, you come up blinking, surprised to find yourself in your own skin again.

Vikram Chandra's intricate "Sacred Games" is just such a novel.

Set in Mumbai, India, the book opens as famous gangland leader Ganesh Gaitonde commits suicide inside an impenetrable bunker. Sikh police inspector Sartaj Singh has been mysteriously summoned to the bunker and bears witness to Gaitonde's last words.

Instead of closing a chapter in Mumbai crime, Gaitonde's suicide sets in motion an increasingly desperate hunt for answers: Why would an extremely successful (not to mention handsome and respected) man take his own life? Who was the woman found dead in the bunker with him? How does Gaitonde's guru fit into the puzzle. In alternating chapters, Singh and Gaitonde tell their stories.

Through them, Chandra weaves a dense tale, filled with intersecting characters. Singh is a moral man who must immerse himself in the bribery and corruption that fuel the police department to get anything done. Like any noir hero worth his salt, he's world weary: "Time had visited him with its depredations, and worn him down, but he liked the feeling of being dilapidated. It was restful."

But unlike Philip Marlowe, Singh's crime-fighting tools include a form of meditation:

"He began to breathe deeply, in a rhythm he had developed in a thousand stakeouts. If he could get it just right, heat and sweat would recede, and time would turn inward on itself until it whirlpooled into stillness, and he was relieved of the world while he was still in it."

Gaitonde, meanwhile, is the very picture of an international criminal, consorting with movie stars and amassing fortunes, even when he's commanding his gang from inside prison. But a powerful spiritual guru comes into his life, asking nothing from Gaitonde but his devotion -- and some light gun-running duties.

With mounting horror, both characters begin to discover the true dimensions of the guru's plans: Singh discovers that the bunker in which Gaitonde ended his life is a bomb shelter, while men who Gaitonde send on a secret smuggling errand for his guru begin to die of radiation poisoning.

"Sacred Games" can be read and enjoyed as an edge-of-your-seat thriller. It has plenty of action, violence and blood -- and if you can't curse fluently in Hindi when you're done with it, then you weren't paying attention. But Chandra's sure-handed writing injects the novel with layers of depth and meaning; he captures history, politics, current events race, class and religion. He clearly loves Mumbai and evokes it in dazzling detail: You can smell the streets, taste the foods and hear the cacophony of the big, chaotic city on every page. And through his evocation of the Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians who interact with each other in this crowded nation, we see how old wounds and new hurts can spark into sudden violence.

In the 928 pages of "Sacred Games," Chandra has a lot of space to stretch out. He uses it to show how the strands of people bound together through family, loyalty or simple geography weave a web that is as interconnected as it is inescapable.

Chandra reads from "Sacred Games" at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

Miriam Wolf is a Portland writer. She last reviewed "Ines of My Soul" by Isabel Allende for The Oregonian.