Shockaholic by Carrie Fisher
(Simon & Schuster, $22 hardcover, 9780743264822, November 1, 2011)

Princess Leia Amidala Skywalker Solo strikes again--this time it's all about shock therapy, which Carrie Fisher rather likes. She's made a cottage industry of her addictions--think Wishful Drinking--and has no inhibitions about sharing. After rehabs and the death of a good friend--in her bed while she was in it, but he was gay so there was nothing going on--she was having troubles again and submitted to Electroconvulsive Shock Therapy. Fisher's only complaint about it is that it zaps the memory, although that isn't apparent from this memoir.
The one-liners keep coming and the temptation is to conclude that all this Gemütlichkeit is distancing behavior, but leave that to her army of shrinks and Dr. Feelgoods and just enjoy the ride. The underlying theme of the book is "celebrity." Fisher grew up around stars, with lots of fuss surrounding her parents and, of course, the juicy scandal of papa Eddie Fisher deserting Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor, Reynolds's best friend. Taylor's late husband, Mike Todd, had been Eddie Fisher's best friend, so it was a cozy swap. Not so much for Fisher, who longed for a relationship with her father, which she finally achieves when he is dying, drug-addicted, addled and asking her to bring him a prostitute. This is not a pretty picture and the author spares us nothing.
She chronicles her friendship with Michael Jackson, who asks her for pictures of her little girl, which she doesn't find alarming, despite accusations and lawsuits regarding pedophilia. She can forgive him anything because he was always a "celebrity," performing when he was six, pushed by a cruel father. She is less forgiving of Teddy Kennedy, with whom she has dinner when she is on a date with another senator, Chris Dodd. Kennedy asks her personal questions starting with: "Will you be having sex with Chris tonight?" She parries and thrusts, which apparently no one ever did with Kennedy and is applauded years later by the other couple at the table, neighbors of Ethel Kennedy.
Included in her reminiscences is a really funny encounter with Liz Taylor, which started with Fisher insulting her at an AIDS benefit and ending with Taylor inviting Fisher to a party at her home and pushing her in the pool. That somehow pulls down the wall between them; Fisher's resentment of Taylor for "stealing" her all-too-willing father dissipates. Eddie Fisher, as portrayed by his daughter, is a charming, handsome rake and had his own take on life: "The world was his shower and he used women for soap."
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: "The rich are different from you and me," to which Ernest Hemingway famously commented: "Yes, they have more money." According to Carrie, that's not all.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

Didion's last book, The Year of Magical Thinking, was a poignant memoir of her nearly 40-year marriage to John Gregory Dunne, who suffered a fatal heart attack at the dinner table in 2003, while their only daughter, Quintana Roo, was very ill in a New York City ICU. Blue Nights is a meditation on the death of her daughter at age 39 in 2005, illness, aging and the wisdom or folly of having children at all.
Blue nights are the long, light evening hours that signal the coming of the summer solstice; those nights in May and June that are "the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning." Didion uses this as the beginning of her incantatory rendering of all that she has to say about her current state, which is one of frailty, poor health and a deep longing for her husband and daughter.
Quintana was adopted on the day she was born, coming home to a house that would not have had a layette or a bassinet were it not for friends; Didion was at a loss as to how to anticipate a child's needs. And that is part of the crux of the tale. She accuses herself, excuses herself and constantly comes back to a variation on the same theme: Did I get it right? Was it something I did? Didn't do?
Quintana was eventually diagnosed with "borderline personality disorder," that nondescript basket of symptoms that means a person isn't quite fitting in. In view of that, it is interesting that Didion makes no mention of her own breakdown in 1968, when Quintana was two. She carefully documented it in The White Album, but it doesn't enter here.
There are several lines repeated like mantras, spoken by Quintana, who started worrying when she was about four, and by Didion, who was born worried. The reader is of two minds, questioning which reaction to the book is the right one: Are Didion's neurotic/neurasthenic tendencies a narcissistic show or is her beautiful prose truly indicative of a great sadness? The only fair conclusion is: some of each.
When the prose moves away from self-examination, there is more of Didion at her not quite best but still impressive writerly self. She is not aging gracefully, hates hospitals and isn't certain that she was very good at having a child. She writes with more enthusiasm about '50s parties, smoking, drinking and celebrities. A life of cosseted privilege not spared the two horrendous deaths that she could not stop makes us, ultimately, sympathize with her. -

The View From Here
Deborah McKinlay
(Soho, $24, 9781569478714, February 1, 2011)

The moral dilemma explored in this debut novel is whether good deeds cancel bad ones.  Can we expiate our sins by leading an exemplary life? Frances is grappling with this question as she, at forty-two and diagnosed with terminal cancer, revisits an episode of her youth which shames her in the recollection.

When Frances was twenty-two, she hooked up with a group of wealthy Americans vacationing in the Mexican desert.  She spoke Spanish, they did not; a chance encounter in a café leads the three couples to invite her to stay with them at their rented mansion.  They have maids and nannies to care for the children, so “Frankie,” as they call her, is free to join the adults in their self-indulgent lifestyle.  Her nickname lends a certain insouciance to her new-found life with these casual, devil-may-care, no-worries Americans. She still gives English lessons to two students, but that is the last vestige of the life she lived before meeting Patsy and Richard, BeeBee and Ned, Sally and Mason.  Their palatial home has a beautiful room for Frankie, a constant party atmosphere and no end of booze.  Quite a change from her squalid apartment and vanished boyfriend.

In the circumstance, the inevitable happens:  she has an affair with Mason, falls deeply in love with him and comes to believe that this is no mere dalliance but the Real Thing.  Alas, she is mistaken, very sadly mistaken.  The results of this affair and the internecine alliances and misalliances between and among the couples leave her shaken, ashamed and feeling betrayed.  She is not yet ready to examine her own culpability.

Now, two decades later, living in rural England with her much-beloved husband, Phillip, she finds a letter from his book editor, Josee, which is obviously romantic in tone.  She and Phillip had no children of their own but she reared Chloe, Phillip’s daughter, who had been abandoned by her mother.  Surely that is a huge mark on the good side of her life ledger!  She doesn’t deserve this infidelity…or does she?  Is this just desserts for her own cavalier affair with a married man?  McKinlay engages the reader  in a meditation, going back and forth between the Mexican sojourn and Frances’s illness and discovery of  Phillip’s indiscretion, laying out the events, her feelings and the understanding she has gained over time.

Shelf Talker:  A debut novel which asks the question:  can an adult life well lived cancel early indiscretions?    

The Still Point
Amy Sackville
(Counterpoint, $25, 9781582437095, 1582437092, January 20, 2011

“At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.  And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered.”
T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”

This apposite quote sets the scene for a lyrical and beautifully polished debut novel that invites the reader to experience the icy wastes of the Arctic and a too-hot lazy summer afternoon in a London suburb. 

Julia and Simon are aware of but not attentive to their fraying marriage.  Simon goes to the City every day to design buildings for the ages while Julia swans around her ancestral home, reliving her great grand-uncle Edward Mackley’s trip to the Arctic to find the North Pole and his wife Emily’s faithful vigil awaiting his return.  “Parting is the Mackley romance.  Parting, waiting, and romantic loss”  She is vaguely aware that all is not well but can’t quite suss it out; she finds it easier and more desirable to read Uncle Edward’s diaries.  Besides, what if one day Simon, like Uncle Edward, simply never returns?  Too painful to contemplate.  For his part, Simon is tempted by a seductive neighbor; will he succumb?

Sackville delineates scenes in the Arctic when Edward sets out with his fellow explorers, flushed with anticipation of realizing their life’s dream.  Heady scenes of manly camaraderie and fellowship, descriptions of the landscape and seascape engage the reader in Edward’s quest, even though we know from the outset that he never returns.  Emily’s never-ending vigil is Julia’s meat and drink.  She cannot get enough of its sadness, the romance of waiting, the desolation of widowhood.

On this sunny afternoon while Julia is busy organizing, napping, daydreaming and dusting, she has a late afternoon visit from a Mackley cousin she has known for years, Jonathan, come to say “hello” after a long absence.  In their desultory conversation, Jonathan unwittingly reveals knowledge that he thought Julia was aware of.  She was not, and this revelation makes all the difference. 

Julia immediately longs to tell Simon.  She calls and his cell doesn’t answer.  He is keeping a rendezvous with that neighbor; what might eventuate from this?  She calls her sister Miranda who is married, has kids, is having an affair and is thoroughly grounded in the here and now.  She must deal with the new reality alone.

Such is Sackville’s virtuosity and masterful storytelling that none of this is trivial.  There is yet another revelation that we might have guessed that has kept Julia mired in anything but the here and now. 

First novels are usually worthwhile and this one is no exception.

Shelf Talker:  At the turn of the twentieth century, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley sets out to reach the North Pole and never returns.  His young wife, Emily, awaits his return for many years.  His great-grand-niece Julia, one hundred years later, moves around the ancestral home which she and her husband Simon occupy, and she finds what she never looked for when a cousin visits.

Mink River
Brian Doyle
(OSU Press, $18.95, 9780870715833, 0870715852 , October 1, 2010)

Ivory From Paradise
David Schmahmann
(Academy Chicago, $24.95, 9780897336123, February 1, 2011)

As the story begins, Helga, matriarch of a prominent white family from Durban and firebrand anti-apartheid activist, lies dying in the London mansion of her second husband, industrialist Arnold Miro.  Her children, Danny and Bridget, now married and living in Boston, have arrived in London to be with her in her last days.  A simple domestic drama?  One where grieving adult children bid farewell to their beloved mother?

That is merely the jumping-off point for Schmahmann’s beautifully realized exposition of family, myth, the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and of apartheid itself.  Memory is tricky business; never more clear than in this ruminative unfolding of one family’s story of being South Africans, becoming expatriates and exploring who they were and who they are now.

Helga married Arnold just a year after her husband, Silas’s, death and left South Africa forever for the lush life in London.  Arnold is controlling, sadistic, a swaggering bully who is contemptuous of what he refers to as Silas’s “curios.”  Danny, as narrator, says: “I realized on my first visit to Arnold’s house…when I heard Arnold refer to my father’s collection as “curios,”  as if they had been picked up at some roadside stand, that he was among those who found the entire notion of owning and displaying anything African absurd.”  That is, until it became popular to own African folk art and Arnold discovered that they might have intrinsic value.

This collection, especially a pair of ivory elephant tusks, believed to have once belonged to Shaka Zulu himself, prominently displayed in Arnold’s home, become symbols in the story for all that we remember about our lives, and all that memory rewrites, often those parts we don’t care to look at.

The family -  Bridget and her husband Tibor the their daughter Leora and Danny and his wife Tesseba, are openly at odds with Arnold who insists that Helga wants him to have everything that was hers. While Arnold is visiting his mistress, the family conducts a heist, removing Helga from her deathbed to a sorry little flat and everything they believe to be theirs with her. 

Some time after Helga’s death, the family goes back to Durban at Bridget’s insistence, to hold a memorial for her.  It is a disaster, poorly attended, awkward, and features Arnold arriving, unannounced, to take center stage.  Also present is Baptie, the African maid/nanny who took care of Danny and Bridget when they were children.  They now take care of her, granting her a lavish pension.  She acts as the voice of the Greek chorus, sorting out all that is true from what Helga’s family would like to hold onto as true.  She is the realist in the story.  The night before the memorial, Baptie’s son, Eben, and Danny meet for a drink and Schmahmann, in their conversation, writes beautifully of white guilt, African rage, money and the lack thereof, Eben’s mother’s remembrance of apartheid days as her golden days, how difficult everything is now in the semi-chaos of African rule. 

Danny has learned something about his father’s collection; Eben has learned that the Zulu warrior after whom his rebellious son, now imprisoned for miurder, has renamed himself, never existed.  These are just two of the illusions, contradictions, woven in and out of this story, making it so poignant and  unforgettable.  In the end, Danny says of the tusks, “Their provenance, like ours, is incomparable.”

Shelf Talker:  A South African family returns to Durban to memorialize their mother and discovers the fragility of what they have always believed about themselves.

I Love a Broad Margin To My Life
Maxine Hong Kingston
(Knopf, $24.95, 9780307270191, 030727019X, January 18, 2011)

What manner of book is this?  It is a sort-of-autobiography, memoir, diary, journal, reminiscence, meditation, stream of consciousness poem that is 240 pages long.  Not exactly blank verse, because it doesn’t scan in iambic pentamenter, it is exactly Maxine Hong Kingston: original, captivating, revelatory and important.

She has written three novels and several works of non-fiction about the experiences of Chinese immigrants living in the United States and the difficulty of blending cultures. Kingston has received several awards for her contributions to Chinese American Literature including the National Book Award in 1981 for her novel China Men.

In this book, at sixty-five, Kingston looks back over her life as a writer, political activist, friend, wife and mother.  In rambling ruminations that go forward and fold back on each other, change direction repeatedly, move from ancient Chinese history to current events, she opens for the reader the “broad margin” that has been her life..

The title comes from a line in Thoreau’s Walden, which Kingston has hanging over one of her desks.  She writes:
                          “Trying broad-
margin meditation, I sit in
the sunny doorway of my casita, amidst the yucca
and loquats and purple rain birches.” 

This spot must be conducive to creativity because Kingston is off and running, exploring all the margins of her life, from edge to center and all around. 
                       “I’m standing on top of a hill,
I can see everywhichway –
the long way that I came, and the few
places I have yet to go.  Treat
my whole life as if it were a day.”  

She fills the reader in on her avatar, Wittman Ah Sing, of Tripmaster Monkey fame, now a family man, leaving his wife to discover China; revisits The Woman Warrior and writes at length about peace, justice, her arrest at a demonstration in front of George W. Bush’s White House, her work with war veterans.  Then, she goes to China for her twelfth visit and seeks out the villages of her parents.  She is mindful of all the changes that have taken place and also that one of her relatives still farms with a buffalo.

The reader goes on every inch of this journey, wondering what might happen next, in which century, country we will find ourselves and what language we will be called upon to understand.  She finishes the book by writing: 

“I’ve said what I have to say.
I’ll stop, and look at things I see
From the corner of my eye.  Become reader
Of the world, no more writer of it.”

One can only hope not.

Shelf Talker:  Kingston takes the reader through her life, the past lives of her ancestors, her books, her innermost thoughts and all that is important to her in a tour-de-force memoir.