Stepford Wife

I am also very bored. The mom reminds me of the typical La Canada stepford wife that stays at home all day and works out. It is hard to want to read this book. It also bugs me how the parents could just leave the two boys at home without knowing that the other does not have them.

Tobar's Subtle Irony

Okay.  I started reading Barbarian Nurseries again.  I just started Chapter 7.

The first thing I would like to share is the observation that Héctor Tobar writes beautiful prose.  He seems to know the words for everything:  garden plants, freeways, maids’ uniforms, etc.  The novel to this point has relied primarily on description, with snippets of the charaters’ thoughts woven in.  When a bit of dialogue arrived in Chapter 6, I was relieved.  It was excellent, advancing the story while suggesting real speech patterns.

You cannot have failed to notice the way the narrator’s point of view has moved in and out of the consciousness of the characters.  Their thoughts receive direct representation in italics.  This way of inserting thoughts into the narrative discourse is called “free indirect discourse” (at least that is what it is called in French, and it is probably the same in English).  Such thoughts need not be italicized, but the author (or his editor at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux) does it for the sake of clarity, I suppose.

This is only Chapter 7, but I must say I am bored to tears in spite of Tobar’s fine writing.  The characters are not likeable:  even the narrator does not really seem to withhold judgment on them. 

I detect a subtle irony in all these descriptions, simmering just under the surface, as the narrator pretends to “present” a world when, in fact, he offers up unflattering slices of it for his readers’ judgment.  Two examples:  1) The attention drawn to the lawn mower at the beginning of the novel asks us to pass a moral judgment about Scott (as a man, as a rich man, as an American, etc.), and 2) Maureen’s obsession with the garden, and her humiliation over it during the party, also suggest an implicit condemnation. She seems superficial and self-centered.

But this irony does not go so far as what you find in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where the dissonance between the tone and the content often border on cruelty and hilarity.  (This is a novel you must read next summer, if you remember by then.)

One thing does strike me as intriguing:  Tobar does not make Araceli especially likeable.  On the contrary, this object of our compassion, or at least of potential compassion, appears resentful, contemptuous, and cold.  A lesser writer would make her an angel.

I am wracking my brains to see where this book could be going other than simply providing a mini-tour of southern California by way of beautifully written descriptive prose.

I expect this novel to discuss the topic of illegal immigrants in L.A.  Since the book takes place in the twenty first century, it makes sense for the author to dwell on current contrivercial topics.

Non-Stop to New York

My idea behind having a blog for us is simply to find an easy way to discuss what we are reading, either by raising questions or simply by recording our impressions.  In the process, we will also have the chance to practice writing.  In my personal experience, it usually happens that a good book (or a good movie) only begins to get truly interesting once you start thinking about it--but the challenge is to think clearly and to find the right point of entry.  But we will work toward these goals.  Writing and thinking are always "in process," and so we usually begin with messiness and confusion and gradually work toward clarity and understanding.

The first novel we will read is The Barbarian Nurseries by Héctor Tobar.  This is apparently a novel about twenty-first century Los Angeles, touted as a "West Coast Bonfire of the Vanities" (a novel by Tom Wolfe which I have never read).  The only novel that I have read about L.A. is Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (published in 1939)--a weird book whose disturbing surrealism prefigures the films of David Lynch.  Of course, Los Angeles figures prominently in the celebrated crime fiction of Raymond Chandler (another famous novelist I haven't read), so let's see whether any elements of detective fiction appear in Tobar's story.  As a reader, I would expect some crime or mystery to drive the plot.

Do you have any expectations for this novel?  If so, what are they?  If not, what might you expect a novel about L.A. to be about?