Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern

When you are in your bed by 7:30pm and willing the sun to go down on a dreadful, oh call it a baroquely dreadful day filled with anguish and unusual cruelty, the very last thing you think you need is to read a book about a father who says things to his son such as, on his first day of kindergarten, "You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life."

There is a certain ring of familiarity to this sort of parent. One of mine would say to us as we crawled home after a schoolyard brawl, "It's a dog eat dog world, get used to it."

The other parent would look at my tattered brothers and say "Looks like you were talking when you should've been listening."

So, cold is the temperature of the comfort we are accustomed to, sadly. But still. Does a whole book of it sound like the sort of thing you want to read? Especially when you've surely lived with it long enough to satisfy anyone not fully a masochist? More to the point, at this special moment in the history of our life, is this the sort of book that's even healthy?

Turns out Sh*t My Dad Says is astonishingly good company on a bad day, if for no other reason than it does a body good to laugh out loud when you think you might have lost the knack altogether.

The seal of sadness was broken with this gem:

On Spending the Night at a Friend's House for the First Time
"Try not to piss yourself."

Sage advice indeed.

Justin Halpern's dad is full of sparkling gems of advice like this. Halpern Senior has a remarkably foul mouth for someone who is a doctor of nuclear medicine,whatever that is, but maybe we don't know enough about the profession. What comes between your garden variety foul-mouthed mean parent's "I just tell it like it is" and the elder Halpern's is that beneath the crusty crust, he is truly and magnificently decent. He notices that the smelly unreliable pitcher in Little League is the troubled son of an alcoholic and takes him under his wing, in a brusque and crusty sort of way, then tells off the smirking self-satisfied parent who dissed the kid, you know, "trash talking" such that the poor hapless child was utterly thrown off his game. You have the impression that telling off a kid is ok in certain circumstances, dissing a victim is not. No, that's just being a bully. And, for that matter, Little League is about playing a game and therefore everyone gets a turn regardless of whether you're winning or losing. "You pitched a great game, you really did. I'm proud of you. Unfortunately, your team is shitty....No you can't go getting mad at people because they're shitty. Life with get mad at them, don't worry."

You learn a lot of valuable lessons from Mr. Halpern. Liars are number two after Nazis as the worst thing to be. And it's best not to cheat. "Cheating's not easy. You probably think it is, but it ain't. I bet you'd suck more at cheating than whatever it was you were trying to do legitimately." Now, that is worthy of consideration. As one who cannot tell a lie in part because my memory is so bad I immediately get caught, this had a pragmatic ring to it that gets you to the right answer without any fancy high-stepping around thorny ethics issues: Don't cheat, it's harder to do it well than you think it is. Play nice with others. Don't leave your toys where someone else likes to put their ass. And so on.

And, "you always have the right to be an asshole -- you just shouldn't use that right very often."

Can't argue with that.

It would be interesting to know what Mr. Halpern might offer as advice to someone trying to reach a coma state at 7:30pm. Probably something like "Get over yourself. Everyone has the right to be an asshole, but it's not worth feeling this bad about one."

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society + The Other Hand

It is a rare and fine thing to find a book so good you can't wait to get home to it, and lucky me, I've found two in a week.

Both are anchored by the direst of circumstances and times but both have such a life affirming lightness, without being affirmation-oriented in the least, so as to make it true that great art must come of great hardship.

Let us begin with Guernsey, and because this is vaguely British it might well be pronounced "Jersey" and mean that other place in the ocean, off the big island. But no, Guernsey it is, in print anyway, Jersey really is somewhere else. No idea how it's pronounced by natives, but I'm suspicious that it isn't as obvious as it should be.

The mouthful of a title -- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - is a bit of a set-back to be honest, promising something along the lines of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or maybe those large lady detectives, both referring of course to a series of books with cutesy titles which run perilously close to cloying cutesiness. But don't let the cuteness put you off. Nor the format -- it is a story told in letters but each is so compelling and funny and alive with character that you more or less forget that this is a literary trick that grows tedious.

Geurnsey is a gorgeous island occupied by Germans during the second world war. The hardship perpetrated on both the soldiers and the civilians was horrible, but maybe less than what was happening on the continent. Evil and cruelty and grief are revealed slowly, as are the character flaws and gold-star good things about each person within the tight circle of the literary group, a kind of book group where each member talks about what they've read or loved. But that's just the back drop of course. The interesting thing is what is endured and how, and what comes of it. Can a book about war be joyous? Ya ya it can.

The Other Hand meanwhile is dark and beautiful in a completely different but somehow related way. It has a slight scent of that other book with a mouthful of a title, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in that a great deal of the pain that is felt is articulated through a very small, very clever boy. It is another book about struggle and unfairness, but it also is so anchored in engagement and life that it, too, is somehow rendered a joy to read.

The Private Patient, PD James

The great thing about reading murder mysteries when life is stressful is that no matter how bad your day was, it was certainly a lot worse for that poor dead person. Somehow we horrible members of mankind find it comforting to know we're slightly better off than someone else. And then there is the lovely predictability of the form of the genre, and habit is always soothing.

PD James is especially good for the seeming paradox of the comforting mystery. She is more British than the Queen, always has people dressing in "fawn" as though beige were the answer, and then her characters drink lots of tea and want to reach out and hold beloved people undergoing grief but hold back and merely watch, yet somehow we are to understand they are nonetheless good and caring....the formality of her world restores order in the troubled mind.

The Private Patient is a relatively recent work, and having just read a very, very old James it had a ring of familiarity. Much like The Skull Beneath the Skin (circa 1982), there is a group of people in a mansion in the country, alas one of them is murdered and then one by one each of the guests is revealed to have motive and means. Well, James churns out these books at a clip and can be forgiven for revisiting a few story lines.

Those who follow her detective, Adam Dalgliesh, who sounds like the dreariest man alive if you strip out James' own infatuation with him, might be distressed to learn that in this one he marries some equally dreary sounding woman named Emma, who for no apparent reason is apparently beloved and revered by everyone who meets her. Dalgliesh is a detective and a poet, and anyone who has ever met a real detective will know how deeply unlikely it is that such a man would exist, if for no other reason than he'd have been laughed off the force long ago. Cops are macho boys' club members, "poets" not allowed.

In this novel the dreary Dalgliesh, who ruminates a lot, doesn't say much, leads a carefully controlled existence, really feels bad that his girlfriend/fiance Emma's close friend has been raped, and really wants to reach out and hold good old sobbing Emma, but decides it's not appropriate to do so. He aches to do it though, but doesn't, because he felt it would be "an insult to her grief" (huh??) and he was "afraid she would withdraw. Anything would be better than that." The man is clearly a cold hearted nutter. If such a response occurred in the real world Emma would have called off the wedding after putting a dagger through his icy chest.

Nonetheless it's an entertaining read with lots of twists, Big Reveals, murky motives, the whole lot. A classic.

There is a nice, very literary bit at the end which is worth pondering -- something you don't find in your average murder mystery:

"It was for her, not him, to decide how much she had been harmed by him. He could have no lasting power over her without her connivance."

Then

"The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all the earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seem a frail defence against the horrors of the world but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have."

Breakfast at Tiffany's

London was a-twitter about the new Breakfast at Tiffany's, the first-ever stage production of the book and beloved story of Holiday Golightly, a young woman of sketchy morals and indeterminate provenance who delights in New York and goes to Tiffany's when the world is too ruthless. The book by Truman Capote was selling out at bookstores, and magazines and fashion spreads were devoted to the "new" Holly, or at least the actress now playing her.

The play's producers were very careful to warn all that their production was 'very different' from the movie, and they followed Truman Capote's novella extremely closely. Alas they followed the words and not the nuance of it, and thus their play is indeed very different from the movie. It is not stylish.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is an iconic fashion movie, and there is not a woman alive who has not at some point in her life wanted to look a little like Holly. Or, show me the woman who denies this and I'll show you a liar who no longer fits into the little black dress she owns.

So pity the poor star and pity the poor costumer who must walk in the footsteps of Audrey Hepburn and the movie from which a million fashion dreams were made. The producers of the theatrical version avoided the trouble by setting the story in the 40's, with more or less period costume, rather than the uber-elegant late 50's of the film. This is accurate in one sense -- while the story is told in the late 50's, the narrator is recalling events that occurred 15 years earlier.

Why the playwright chose to lift dialogue and copy directly from the book and yet the producers ignored the very specific descriptions of Holly is a mystery.

Truman Capote, being a southern gentleman and maybe on account of being a gay man, had an acute sense of women and their style. He loved the "swans" as he called them, Babe Paley and Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli -- his friends and all wildly gorgeous and elegant, who indeed live in popular imagination as fashion icons even today.

The swan of his imagination is of course Holly, and she emerges fully formed-- small, slim, elegant and ephemeral. She comes from no where, she makes herself up as she goes along, she is an enigma that is nonetheless as identifiable as the statue of liberty.

Capote describes her extremely carefully. Her cropped hair is various shades of tawny blonde, her eyes are wide set and flecked, slightly squinty from the need for glasses. She wears only sunglasses though, prescription, day or night. She is ballerina-like, and wears simple, elegant black dresses; she is never seen without pearls in her ears and excellent shoes. She won't read bad news without putting on her lipstick first.

Given that Holly exists during the war years, what Capote has described and the movie depicts is an utterly modern and fresh style -- Holly's is simple, spare, fresh and elegant despite the depravity of her actual existence. Her refined, intelligent style is a counterpoint to her utterly modern set of values. She won't turn on a friend, she is open to the weirdnesses of others (in the book she likes dykes as housemates and is willing to spank men if that's what gets them through the night) and though she profits from it in the form of $50 per trip to the loo, she has compassion for the freaks and fragile souls that cross her path, making a point of ensuring even the ugliest little man feels tall and handsome. She is utterly American in that she is her own invention and always on the road to somewhere else, a free spirit who nonetheless gets scared of all that freedom. Moreover, she is open about the fact that the only real career path for a woman is a man and so she wants a rich one. This forthrightness, if that is a word, is out of its time; Holly is set in the war years and born in the straightjacket 50's. The clue that she knows it, Capote knows it, and the subliminal affirmative message in the movie is her style. Simple, straightforward, and not as easy as it looks.

In the book and the movie, Holly is different from the others; younger, less constrained, more sleek and modern. In the play she fits in, she is part of the scenery rather than standing away from it as a beacon of what is to come. While it might be "just clothes" to many, Capote and the filmmaker used clothing as semaphore of something bigger and better than mere cloth. Her style is as much a character as the character of Holly herself. How profoundly the players on the stage and those guiding them have utterly, totally, missed the point.

And what a shame. It would be interesting to see what Holly might look like now.

Direct Red -- Read it, STAT!

Direct Red, subtitled "A Surgeon's View of Her Life-or-Death Profession" is an unlikely candidate for the term "good read" -- how sympathetic are we really to surgeons, those aloof and arrogant uber-doctors who swoop in, make a pronouncement then move on? Who cause such terrific agony and evoke such great fear?

Perhaps Gabriel Weston's book is so wonderful to read because, while she clearly has a vocation as a surgeon, she also had a passion for books and studied literature. Each chapter describes another aspect of what it means to have a life in your hands, literally, and each shows another example of how there is no such thing as "easy" surgery. Even a simple tonsillectomy can go awry.

But the book is also very much about Weston's inner conflict between being a cool intellectual and a person with a soul -- both are necessary for greatness as a surgeon, but neither quality sits well with the other. She talks about how she overlooked an ailing child, essentially gave him an aspirin and told him to go back to sleep without really considering why a young boy would have such a severe headache. He died. She talks about how terrified she was to make her first difficult call as the senior surgeon on a case, knowing that in the world of surgeons she'd be a laughing stock and her career would be over before it properly began if she were wrong. In that instance, she saved a life.

Direct Red is not a long book. It is probably a necessary book, humanizing a group that doesn't really want to be seen as merely mortal, and describing a side to health care rarely seen and poorly understood. Luckily it is so wonderfully written you won't mind taking the medicine in the message.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played With Fire

It is rarely a good idea to know much about the author of any novel, lest the "novel" part begin to seem less a work of imagination and more one of therapy. But the author of these two books, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire, is a shadowy figure lurking in the pages and is curious, mysterious and puzzling in his own right.

The main character of the books is an idealistic journalist and what a great coincidence, so is Stieg Larsson, the author! the "Girl" is a super-brainy computer geek who can find out anything with a few keystrokes. This sounds about as interesting as your average newspaper but hang on, the stories take flight despite the reporter-rhetoric.

By his author picture on the back covers we can see he is a typical reporter -- soft and squishy, not that attractive but not entirely un-; a bit nerdy, clearly a guy who didn't score big in highschool. He is dead, and these two books were published, part of a trilogy, posthumously. We anxiously await the third, as they improve as we go.

Larsson is also a bit pervy if the books tell us anything at all, a plain-faced and doughy man with a big kink and wild imagination, who is unlikely to have had much of the action he writes about. But then again, pervs don't often care much for beauty. His main character is a sexually voracious skinny boy-girl, almost autistic, who dislikes much communication. Talk about gift-wrapped for a man. The great news is she gets breast implants in the second novel so is skinny as a teenage boy, but with knockers. Gift-wrapped with a bow.

Larsson, it is said, is dead, felled in some way mid-story, while covering some intrigue. Sounds a bit perfect to me. I hope this is instead a massive marketing stunt and there's even more where the Girl came from.

American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld

It is hard to imagine that the bland Laura Bush could inspire anyone to do anything other than yawn, and this is why some people write books and you don't. Curtis Sittenfeld has written a terrific novel imagining the inner life and background of the woman who puts the "dull" into dullsville, whose automtaton smile and colour blocked clothes seem to suggest Stepford is not too far from Reston, Virginia. American Wife is an imaginary look into that blank brain, and in fact any brain of a certain generation of good upstanding women who somehow manage to cause no harm, or at least manage never to be actually blamed for the harm they do. That's quite a skill.

The young "Laura" is actually Alice, to whom some dreadful things happen. So far so interesting but as imprinted as she is by tragedy or startling discoveries she manages to actually say very little. She owns up to nothing, really, not even a christly crap that wrecks the plumbing in the one and only bathroom a dozen people must share -- she lets events wash over her and smiles and nods and goes with the flow.

Alice is called up short by two people, and not until the near end of the story. The great question is then posed -- is being "good" the same as being not too bad? Is "good enough" ever good enough? And what responsibility does the president of the free world's intimate partner have to ensure he doesn't run off and kill thousands in a country he previously would be unlikely to be able to find on a map? But she got away unscathed from something similar -- perhaps that then becomes simply the way things are done. You simply smile and get away with it, and everyone thinks you're nice. What a rich reward for doing and being so little.