About a Boy

From StarMag, 29th June, 2008

Review by DAPHNE LEE

SLAM
By Nick Hornby
Publisher: Penguin, 342 pages
(ISBN: 978-0141324494)

I THOUGHT Slam was going to be about skateboarding. I was wrong and glad I was wrong. I used to skateboard when a teen - to impress a huge crush I had, who roller skated, but I didn't do any impressive stunts and I didn't think I'd be interested in reading about a guy doing them. However, as I said, Slam is not about skateboarding. It's just about Sam who skates and who worships the air skating champion Tony Hawks flips through.

He's so into Tony Hawk (or TH as he calls him) that he talks to a poster of the skater (skateboarding and skateboarder, Sam says, would be terms used only by losers) and, as he's read Hawk's authobiography countless times, finds it really easy to imagine his hero talking back, giving him advice, offering opinions, telling him where he's gone wrong and what he's done that's worthy of praise.

Anyway, Sam is a 15-year-old lad who lives with his single mum. Near the start of the book, Sam morosely reflects that his family isn't the sort that goes from strength to strength, each generation doing a little better than the one before. Instead, everyone just takes turns to make stupid mistakes that put paid to any hopes of success: "In our family," Sam says, "people always slip up on the first step. In fact, most of the time they don't even find the stairs."

Sam's mum's mistake was to have him at 16. She's only 32 - young for a mum, so young that Sam's skating buddy, Rabbit, considers asking her out! So, Sam is well aware that his family hasn't a good track record and although things seem to be shaping up nicely for him - he's doing well in school, especially in art; he's learning difficult skating tricks; and he has a girlfriend, a beautiful girlfriend called Alicia - you just know that this happy state of affairs isn't going to last for long. If they did, there'd probably be no book. Or a different book, anyway. Maybe one about skating!

Well, unfortunately for poor Sam and fortunately for those of us who'd loathe pages of him waxing lyrical about ollies, kickturns, 50-50 grinds and other skating tricks, the lad slips up, right according to family tradition. On his 16th birthday, Alicia announces that she's pregnant and Sam ... well, Sam, being young and stupid, runs off to Hastings where he hopes to remain for the rest of his life in blessed, childless anonymity.

However, since Sam is, deep-down, a good kid and life in Hastings isn't as easy as he envisions it, he comes right back and faces the music. This, as he's 16 and clueless, basically means panicking a great deal and making things up as he goes along, which new parents, no matter their age, do anyway. For Sam, things are rather more difficult though. Not only does he have to deal with problems that no 16 year old should have to face, he is denied the chance to face them one day at a time.

For some reason, Sam finds himself being whisked back and forward through time so that he's thrown headfirst into difficult situations. This results in some awkwardness. For example, when he has to get his baby vaccinated, he has no idea what the kid is called. And he has to do a nappy change practically not knowing one end of a baby from the other.

It is a bit like that though, being a new parent, so I think Hornby has hit on a plot device that conveys most effectively the shock-horror sensations experienced in the early days of parenthood. But as far as Sam's concerned, all this whizzing about through time is TH's doing. TH himself made his fair share of stupid mistakes and this is, supposedly, his way to helping Sam to cope with the consequences of being a young idiot. In a warped sort of way, it works: when Sam gets around to reliving those moments that he fast-forwarded to before, he has the benefit of hindsight and experience and is able to behave quite sensibly ... for a change.

If you've read Hornby's other novels, you'll know that men behaving badly is what the author is best at portraying. Or, or at very least, men behaving like selfish, petulant children. Sam, to break the mold, is a young lad behaving quite well, all things considered. Sure, he's flippant and foolish, and there are plenty of moments when you want to shake some sense and feeling into him, but he's 16, and he's allowed to have these moments. You expect him to be imperfect and make mistakes, you're prepared for heartless, cowarDly behaviour like attempting to dump Alicia by simply avoiding her, and you can even smile at idiotic ideas like choosing Green Day's American Idiot to play in the labour room.

This is Hornby's first young adult novel and it looks like he remembers rather well what it was like to be a teenager who expects not to make decisions more difficult that what cereal to eat in the morning and how many 'O' levels to take.

When he says something like how someone might try to steal your IPod but never your baby, it's cringe-worthy, but only if you're a parent whose greatest fear is that someone will kidnap little Timmy from his stroller at the playground. If you're a teen it's spot on and rather funny.

It's impossible not to like Sam, warts and all. And, after all, he isn't a bastard, just a scared, unsure kid who, by the end of the novel, looks like he might actually be quite a catch when he's 28. Although Sam slips up on the first step, he gets right up, starts climbing again (albeit thanks to some prodding), and will probably reach the top of the stairs ... some day.

The Mysteries of Fate

From Tots to Teens, StarMag, 27th January 2008

By DAPHNE LEE
THE MYSTERIOUS EDGE OF THE HEROIC WORLD
By E. L. Konigsburg
Publisher: Atheneum, 244 pages
(ISBN: 978-1416949725)

MOST of the time, coincidences are simply an accidental concurrence of events linked in one way or another.

But what of coincidences that bring people together? In E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, George Emerson says that it’s fate that causes people to be “flung together” and “drawn apart”.

But Mr Beebe the clergyman insists that it is often common interests, purposes or backgrounds that bring people naturally together. Yes, the old birds of a feather theory.

It’s not immediately obvious what Amadeo Kaplan, William Wilcox and Aida Lily Tull have in common that would cause their paths to cross.

The first is a 12-year-old, newly moved to Florida from New York. His secret wish is to make a discovery: he wishes to find something that has remained hidden for so long that no one remembers it or realises it ever existed – and he longs to share that wish with a friend.

William Wilcox is aloof, given to long silences, so self-assured he inspires “awe and fear or both”. Amadeo recognises him from school and is surprised when, one day, William gets off the school bus at his stop. It turns out that William is headed for Mrs Zander’s house. And Mrs Zander is Amadeo’s neighbour and was once Aida Lily Tull, heiress and opera diva.

Amadeo, William and Aida are characters in The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World, the latest novel by E.L. Konigsburg.

Like many of Konigsburg’s characters, they are slightly odd (eccentric, if you will). Amadeo and William are pre-teens who speak like wise (if slightly pompous) old men. Both are only sons, close to their mothers, drawn to Aida, a flamboyant, fabulous woman who likes spectacular outfits, champagne (served in crystal flutes, if you please!) and princess phones.

William is helping his mother, a liquidator, prepare the contents of Aida’s home to be sold off, as Aida is moving into a retirement home.

Amadeo is fascinated by Aida and her house, which, unlike his mother’s tastefully, professionally decorated home, is choc-a-bloc with things both precious and kitschy. He senses that this is where he might make his discovery and persuades William to allow him to help sort through Aida’s stuff.

Of course, Amadeo does make a discovery – in fact, he makes several, not least about love and life, human nature and friendship.

William and Aida open up new worlds to Amadeo, exposing him to unexpected and unusual situations and provoking reactions and emotions that are amazing, surprising and disturbing.

Each experience gives Amadeo fresh insights into himself and his intentions and, finally, plays a part in shaping the action he takes when he finds a sketch of a woman drawn by Amadeo Modigliani, an artist whose work was labelled degenerate by the Nazis during World War II.

The Modigliani is the point at which the long and winding roads walked on by Konigsburg’s various characters converge, but Amadeo’s discovery is not something that no one remembers, but something that haunts the memories and conscience of a number of people.

However, more than simply recovering a lost object and work of art, he helps restore lost dreams and dignity.

The author writes in her usual straightforward style, but her characters are complex, mysterious and secretive, and their actions and motives are unclear, even to themselves.

One might see The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World as a simple but moving story about a boy who gets what he wishes for, but a deeper reading reveals a tale about the profound effect art has on the human spirit, how the past affects the present in ways unimaginable and fantastic, and how beauty can provoke the greatest kindness as well as the most incredible cruelty.

In the end, it is the common desire to set things right as well as the shared belief in the truth and life-changing possibilities of great art that brings Konigsburg’s characters together.

Konigsburg is a two-time winner of the Newberry Medal, for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) and The View from Saturday (1997).

For a complete list of her books go to this site.

An Affair to Remember

From StarMag, 25th November, 2007

Review by DAPHNE LEE

EVENING
By Susan Minot
Publisher: Vintage Contemporaries, 288 pages
(ISBN: 978-0099273493)

WHEN I’m on my deathbed, I wonder which of my boyfriends I’ll remember as the love of my life.

Reading Susan Minot’s Evening, it occurred to me that one might not be aware that one is experiencing true love while it is actually happening. If you have six lovers your entire life, you would surely need to have had them all before being able to rate them.

Ann Lord, dying of cancer at 65, married thrice and mother of five, is overwhelmed and overtaken by memories of Harris Arden, a man she met when she was 25.

It is the summer of 1954 and she is a bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding. The bride’s brother comes to meet Ann at the train station and, with him, is a stranger: “She noticed his mouth was full though set in a particular firm way, the combination of which affected her curiously. She felt as if she’d been struck on the forehead with a brick.”

On reading this description, the reader is bound to think, “Ahh ... love at first sight”. But Ann ... does Ann know it’s love? And does she know she will be thinking of this man 40 years hence, while her body is being eaten by disease and her mind is filled with a jumble of words and pictures overlaid by a drug-induced fog?

Visitors come and go, the doctor drops by, her children whisper in the next room. Reality recedes and advances, and is overlaid by and inter-woven with memories, fantasies, visions and dreams.

Ann’s thoughts move seamlessly from the present to the past – Minot uses no quotation marks, which, although confusing at first, is an effective way of portraying Ann’s hazy state of mind.

She is only occasionally aware of where she is and her lives, with various men, in various houses, with various people, merge. She begins a conversation in 1954 and ends it in 1994. Her children are babies, then adults, then toddlers, and then adults again. Her husbands fill her with grief, lust, pity, disappointment, apathy. She is full, full, full of love for Harris. Three days were all they had and then there he is, again, finally. Or is he?

The drug-induced hallucinations allow Ann to return to that enchanted summer when she met a wonderful man who made her self-conscious and drop things like a nervous, lovesick schoolgirl. They allow her to revisit the past, allow him to grace the present, allow questions to be asked and answered or asked and left unanswered.

Was Harris really so lovely, his face “lit from within” or is it the morphine talking, transforming someone who was perhaps just rather sexy into a creature so sublime he eclipses everyone who came before and after?

Perhaps he was truly special. Perhaps he was, only because Ann did not see him grow old and bitter and unfaithful.

This 1998 novel was re-issued this year because a movie based on it was made. But watching the interaction on the big screen earlier this year between Claire Danes as the young Ann and Patrick Wilson as Arden, it’s hard to understand the attraction between the couple. Well, obviously, Danes is a beautiful young woman. However, Arden’s attention seems driven solely by lust. Their first meeting is unremarkable; subsequently they seem merely horny, inspired, perhaps, by fine scenery.

But the movie does not have the benefit of Minot’s fine, poetic prose, her ability to spin emotions into vivid pictures that shine with the transparent light of summer evenings and glow with the brilliance of cloudless star-filled skies.

The three days Ann and Harris shared contain a lifetime’s worth of ecstasy and agony. Doomed love usually does, the emotions experienced by its victims are intensified by the futility of the situation. What if they had never met, fallen in love and been forced by convention, good sense and misadventure to go their separate ways? What if they had not parted, but stayed together and become disillusioned and tired of each other?

Happily, the heartbreak of Ann’s loss casts a light on the shadow of her impending death. Imagined and remembered, Harris is probably better than he ever was in real life.