A Spool of Blue Thread

The Family Plot

Denny is the kind of son who is often called the black sheep of the family. He appears and disappears at will, leaves no number or forwarding address and calls his parents at bedtime to tell them he is gay, just to stress them out. But he is also his mother’s pet, so that his sister accuses him of  “consuming every last little drop of our parents’ attention and leaving nothing for the rest of us.”

A Spool Of Blue Thread is Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel and she has not tired of dissecting the American family. The book seems to be as uneventful as normal life, but there is enough turmoil simmering under the calm surface of the Whitshank family. The story of four generations is not told in linear fashion, but by the time it ends, the characters have endeared themselves to the reader who might recognize in one of the Whitshanks a member of their own family. Tyler’s expertise lies in making the ordinary fascinating.

Abby Dalton fell in love with and married the placid Red Whitshank, who works in construction, having inherited is father Junior’s business and unique house that he built with his own hands. The family legend tells of how Junior built his dream home for someone else, and then waited patiently for the house to be sold and bought it for his family. His wife Linnie trapped Junior into marriage, by smothering him so that he was unable to escape. What she thinks of as a great romance, was a noose around Junior’s neck.

The other family legend is that of Red’s sister Merrick, who with Whitshank patience, steals her best friend’s fiancé and is then stuck in an unhappy marriage.

Red and Abbie’s daughters have stable but boring marriages, the tension in the family is caused by the hostility the prodigal Denny feels towards the son, Stem, his parents adopted—the boy who turned out to be more of a Whitshank than all the others.  The moving story of how Stem came to be adopted is built into the family album of memories made up of shared holidays, weddings, many joys and little tragedies. There’s even a little dash of suspense.

When it looks like Red and Abbie cannot look after themselves, and stubbornly refuse to move to an assisted living facility,  Stem and is strange wife Nora move into the house with their three noisy kids and dog.  Denny sullenly moves back too, to show that as the real son, he should be the one taking care of his parents. There is the typical mother-in-law and daughter-in-law tussle for supremacy in the kitchen, and a Denny-Stem fist fight.

Tyler narrates the Whitshank saga with sympathy and humour, without judging any of the characters. It would set the reader on a quest to discover Tyler’s other books.

  

A Spool of Blue Thread

By Anne Tyler

Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 358

Marisa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo

Enter The Dragon

Google and Facebook now rule the net universe, but Marisa Mayer, a shatter of the glass ceiling, was allowed entry into the boys’ world of Silicon Valley to transform Yahoo. She was called Geek Goddess by the media, though the young, blonde and glamorous and then five months pregnant Mayer did not fit easily into any slot.

The book, written in a light, often bitchy, magazine feature style is very readable, even though Mayer did not cooperate in any way with the writer. Also, Yahoo was a pioneering company that is not all that significant in the current scenario, in spite of all efforts to save it.  Even though she could not effect a miraculous turnaround for Yahoo, Mayer’s story is still worth something, simply because so few women reach the top in the corporate world and have to work so harder not to fail, while also managing their families and having to look good enough to make it to magazine covers.

Marisa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo

By Nicholas Carlson

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 357

Us

Portrait of a Marriage

The hapless Douglas Petersen is woken up by his wife at four in the morning and informed that their marriage has ended.

David Nicholls’s Us then takes the reader on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, as Douglas tries to repair his marriage to Connie and connect with his surly son, Albie.

Nicholls’s last bestselling book One Day was about two very different people finally realizing that they are in love. Here too, he pairs two opposites-- the free-spirited aspiring artist Connie, and the straitlaced scientist Douglas. After a youth dissipated on sex, drugs and failure, she married him for the stability he offered, but over the 25 years they stayed together, their marriage was mostly a series of compromises, with some happy highs. 

Douglas and Connie lose their first child, the marriage is rocked further by Connie’s casual infidelity,  but Douglas loves her so much that he accepts her as she is, restless and often remote.  Without actively doing anything to turn Albie against his father, she manages to cause a rift between father and son.  She believes in letting the boy do what he wants; Douglas, in a slight old-fashioned parenting style he inherited from his strict father, tries to inculcate some discipline into their son. The result is Albie growing up into an odious teenager with no emotional bond with his father.

Before Connie sprang the shock on him, Douglas had carefully and lovingly planned a holiday to bring him closer to his hostile family, and over Albie’s protests they go ahead anyway.  A holiday embarked upon in such a bad spirit is bound to go wrong. At some point, Albie vanishes with a hippie-like girl called  Kat, Connie decides to return to London, and Douglas stubbornly carries on by himself, hoping to find his son and make amends—though he has nothing to apologise for, to his spoilt rotten son.

In a way, Us is the tragedy of a good man who  is unable to cope with ‘modern’ life, that to his wife implies a relationship without responsibility or loyalty.

In short chapters with eccentric lower case titles, Nicholls takes the reader into Douglas and Connie’s romantic past and juxtaposes it with the unhappy present. There are also insights into the places Douglas visits and how every unpleasant experience toughens him and also unbuttons his reticent personality.  He endears himself to the reader for being a decent man in a not so nice world.  If the open ends means a shot of happiness for him, at age fifty-four, he deserves it.

The book (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 204) is poignant, bitter-sweet and gently humorous—David Nicholls gets it right again.

Us

By David Nicholls

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 400

The Blazing World

Heartless Art

Harriet Burden, the heroine of  Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel, The Blazing World, is a well built Amazonian woman, talented, opinionated and frighteningly erudite.  In a world where women are still expected to be feminine and beautiful by the current standards, Harriet, called Harry by her friends, would have no place, if she had not managed to marry right. Her husband, Felix Lord, a rich art dealer, dies leaving her with immense wealth which, ironically leaves her even more ‘invisible’ than when he was alive. She was the ‘wife’ then and is the middle-aged ‘widow’ now; the art world doesn’t care much for her or her work.

Harriet then decides to expose the art world’s sexism, shallowness and ignorance, but getting three young men to show her work as theirs. Predictably, the response to the work is gushing. She finally gets the attention she craves, even if it is under other names.  Then, under one of her aliases she writes to an arts journal, exposing the hoax—that three series of elaborate installations, were Harriet Burden’s work, attributed to male artists.

 The book has been written as a series of interviews with her children, friends and critics, and her own journal entries, compiled by a fictional professor of aesthetics, after her death. So her plan is revealed right at the start in his foreword, what the reader gets layer by layer is how she did it, her interactions with the three men, other people’s responses to her as woman and as an artist.

Even though, the gender barrier has been lowered somewhat in the art, literary and media circles, remnants  of old biases remain, and women continue to be judged first by their appearance and then their ability.

Hustvedt does not portray Harriet as a likeable or even sympathetic woman, but a bundle of contradictions and quirks.  She puts up with her husband’s many infidelities, her daughter accuses her or caring more for her son,  and till her husband’s death she prefers to remain in the background, simmering with discontent, but doing nothing about it, except bursting into occasional loud harangues that embarrass Felix.

The book offers many glimpses into art, philosophy and critical theory—all explained in footnotes—which makes it a difficult as well as enlightening read. The title comes from a work byMargaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, a sixteenth century writer and scientist, who also went unrecognized in her time. Posterity recognizes her as a feminist heroine.

The Blazing World

By Siri Hustvedt

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 357

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Walking Brave, Walking Tall

She gave herself a new surname—Strayed—that best described her state of mind at that point of time. In 1995, Cheryl Strayedembarked on a solo 1,100-mile trek along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) that stretches across nine mountain ranges, from the California-Mexico border to Canada. Even seasoned hikers would admit it’s a tough trail and for a woman with little hiking experience to go solo was a remarkable achievement.  Strayed is also a very good writer, so what she sees, hears and experiences on her adventure is written in evocative prose.

The book that came out in 2012, spent months on bestseller lists and was, last year, turned into a movie produced by and starring Reese Witherspoon – who was nominated for a best actress Oscar.  The film was a hit, inspired people to go on the PCT and rightly turned Cheryl Strayed into a feminist icon.

Cheryl grew up in a poor but loving family and very attached to her mother.  Suddenly her world falls apart when her mother dies a slow, lingeringly painful death of cancer—a woman who didn’t smoke and advocated a healthy, environment friendly lifestyle.  Her mother’s passing break up the family too, as her stepfather and siblings drift away without a binding force to hold them.

Her marriage a good man, Paul also cracks under the strain of her casual infidelities and drug addiction. Finally, with the support of friends, saving money from a waitressing job, she gets set to go on a solo hike, hoping the experience will change her life.

Amusingly, she fills a huge backpack with things she feels will be useful on the trek and carries a weight that chafes her skin and puts a burden on her feet crammed into boots a size too small. The physical suffering, aching muscles, bleeding feet are overcome by the stunning landscape and the kindness of people she meets on the trail and the books she avidly devours in her tent reading by the light of a headlamp.

There are times when she is broke, but someone turns up to feed her.  There are ‘trail angels’ who travel to the spots where the hikers halt to replenish stocks, and help the exhausted travellers. People leave behind stuff they don’t need for others to pick up for free. Gradually a family of PCT hikers is established, people she meets sporadically on the trail and looks forward to running into.  One of them helps her empty out her bag—she calls it Monster—and carry just the absolute essentials. Others offer friendship and support when she needs it most.

Wild is a fantastic book, even for the armchair trekker, who can go through a step-by-step guide to endurance and survival, written by a young woman who learnt every lesson on the trail through firsthand experience, whether it is encountering bears or losing toenails. Her body covered with scars that she has earned, the two-month trail helps Cheryl heal her soul, let go of the past and begin again.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

By Cheryl Strayed

Publisher: Knopf

Pages: 336