Book Review: SUSANNAH, A LAWYER by Ruth Rymer

Susannah, A Lawyer: From Tragedy to Triumph
by Ruth Rymer
Langdon Street Press
212 3rd Avenue North
Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401
325 pages
978-1934938416
$ 14.95

Rape. Sexual Harassment. Deeply ingrained, gender-based social mores. Victim blaming. The Denial of a woman's identity. Trafficking in women (daughters) for social and economic advancement. Any one of these topics could be the subject of a lengthy body of work, but Ruth Rymer manages to draw all of the most common challenges facing women in the 19th century into Susannah's journey from the halls of Mount Holyoke to the defendant's chair, to a seat in one of the top firms in Chicago to read law before taking the bar exam. In Susannah, A Lawyer, Ruth Rymer manages to bring to life the complex world of intelligent women in a time where attending college was for meeting husbands, not for building careers.

One challenge of writing historical fiction is establishing the time and social climate in a period that is not in an unimaginable past in a relatable, clear manner. Conveying the differences between current social perspectives and perspectives from the past is a challenge for any historical fiction author. Add to that the need to unveil similarities between past and present social issues (sexual harassment, for example) that may seem simplified and "solved," and you have a task that few authors are capable of negotiating effectively. At first glance, the layer upon layer of circumstantial bad luck that Susannah encounters from the first chapter to the last seems to be an almost over-saturation of political and social points. But when taken in conjunction with the period in which Susannah, A Lawyer is set, and the impact that historical fact plays on the pursuit of a law degree by a woman, her obstacles, and the strategies she employs in overcoming those obstacles, the laundry list of assaults by friends, family, and society all become representative of the struggles women of the 19th century faced collectively. In this respect, Rymer's juggling of controversial issues (both in the 19th century and now) with historical accuracy and engaging dialogue makes the comparison between Susannah and the reader inevitable.

Don't mistake Rymer's accessible writing for lack of sophistication. Susannah is full of well researched detail in language, social mores, apparel, and customs of diverse groups of people. Rymer's experience in law is immediately evident but not intimidating, and through the voice of Susannah, readers are able to encounter reading law with the same confidence she does. Rymer creates a cast of memorable and three dimensional characters that are fallible and real. Few are absolutely despicable. Few are completely lovable. Because of the range of experiences and actions of her characters, Susannah becomes more realistic, and the end of this novel leaves the reader expecting to hear the next installment over tea in the salon tomorrow rather than waiting for a sequel. Susannah becomes a character readers grow frustrated with because of her naivete in social situations that modern readers are all too familiar with, but at the same time the audience can't help but root for her to stand up for herself, to challenge barriers and to be the path blazing woman the title promises.

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Book Review: Comeback Season by Cathy Day

Any time a woman writes a book about dating and relationships the market assumes it will be a trendy “how to” manual, a fluffy Chick Lit novel, or, worse yet, an insincere combination of the two genres. Most serious scholars wouldn’t look twice at books in this category. For many serious critics and readers, the thought of a book about football and the agony of traversing the dating world couldn’t possibly hold any literary value. For this reason, Cathy Day’s memoir Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love, is not only unable to be easily categorized, it shakes up notions of where and how about social theory and commentary can take place.

Comeback Season chronicles Cathy Day’s experience jumping back into the dating game over the course of the 2006 Indianapolis Colts season. A lover of both football and “locker room speeches,” Day uses the tenacity of Peyton Manning and the Colts as an inspiration to make a genuine effort to overcome dating obstacles in her career, a new city renowned for dating difficulty for professional women, and her own patterns of unsuccessful partner choices. She bravely reveals her foray into the online dating world, and single-handedly fights a predatory scam dating service. At times Day’s emotional admissions are all too painfully familiar to many professional women, but she manages to keep things in perspective with a sharp wit and outright laugh-out-loud humor. Day employs an imaginary female sports reporter to inject both self deprecating humor and social commentary, and it quickly becomes clear that the reporter embodies the traditional expectations that Day has to fight against throughout her dating season.

More importantly, Comeback Season is a commentary about the unexpected results of the feminist movement. It is now far more common for women to put off getting married out of high school or an undergrad program in order to pursue a career and education. This is, unquestionably, a success for the feminist movement, but it doesn’t take into consideration the disparity between developing personal relationships and professional success that so many of those independent women, such as Day, face. When young girls were told that they can be whatever they wanted, all too often their attentions turned to career aspirations woefully devoid of female role models. Logically, then, those same young girls looked to male heroes to pattern their career paths after. Decades later it is no wonder that daughters of the early feminist movement are the ones left with the task of figuring out how to navigate between domestic desires and professional aspirations without crumbling under pressure to abandon one or the other. Couple this with the high personal and professional expectations of university English departments, and Day captures the complex lives of many female academics today.

From Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love:

…The ivory tower is full of single professional women, but in my experience, they very rarely talk about the similarity of their situations.

I was feeling mighty down the day of the exit interview. When Hattie asked me why I was leaving the college, I paused for a second and said, “Deep, soul-crushing loneliness.”

For a second, I thought we both might start crying. Hattie looked deflated, like I’d knocked the wind out of her with those words. “I know what you mean,” she offered. But then she recovered herself. She stood up from her chair, smoothed her blue skirt, and gave me a firm, businesslike handshake. “Good luck, Cathy.” (109)

To dismiss Comeback Season as merely a dating memoir is a mistake. Too often “serious” social commentaries are expected to be dry, boring, emotionless, and full of jargon. Because Day writes with an accessible, often humorous, style and does so without masking the core issues of her journey behind opaque symbolism, the questions her experience raises will reach more women, and generate more constructive discussion about road blocks women face, but are ashamed to discuss for fear of being perceived as weak. After all, the problems that intelligent, professional women face aren’t trapped inside the ivory tower. Cathy Day brings those issues to the streets in a way anyone can understand.

Review by Dawn Papuga

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Book Review: ENGLEBY by Sebastian Faulks

“I decided not to be mad any more; I was never going back to a place like that again.”
Engleby, pg. 191

Audiences love underdogs and surprises. They also love the formulaic nature of entertainment. Readers, even if they’ve never encountered the term “archetype,” recognize signature character types when they see them. Conventional literary signposts clue readers in on who to root for, who the good guys are, and who should be wearing the black hat. In Engleby, Sebastian Faulks turns conventional character development on its ear and, like Nabokov did with Humbert Humbert in Lolita, forces the audience to invest in a protagonist who is detestable, yet addictive.

By no means is Engleby merely a case study of a sociopath. Michael Engleby’s very thought process is intellectually elitist, condescending, and uncomfortably devoid of recognizable emotion. On page 2, he gives readers cause to question his own understanding of the world’s events. Because of the journal format of Engleby the protagonist is already set up as an unreliable narrator, but his intelligence and astuteness cause audiences to question the traditional literary device. Even still, through each analysis Engleby reveals regarding society and social practices in general, a clearer understanding of his anti-social mentality is gained. Engleby hovers on the fringe of social groups and is apt to point out that he likes “to be invisible.” At one point he invites himself to the country with a group of students working on an independent film to be close to Jennifer Arkland, and while no one can remember who invited him to begin with, they’re grateful for his cooking and drug supply. Other times he relives, in painful detail, the various abuses he sustains from countless others—both university dons and his fellow students at each of the schools he attends.

Though readers may sympathize with some of Engleby’s experiences and insights, there are equally as many instances for the reader to turn on him. The sharp disconnect between his intellectual understanding of the world and social interaction, and the practice of those skills and application of that knowledge, is the single most unsettling aspect in his character. You don’t like Engleby, but you want to understand him. You’re compelled to understand him. Through the entire journal you wait for some inkling of genuine emotion, for some signal that he hasn’t fully detached from society and reality, or that he is still, in some basic way, human. Faulks engineers this pseudo-diary in such a captivating way that the readers become co-conspirators with Engleby, and even to the very end, reserve a fraction of hope for the troubled young man.

Plenty of people have experiences or demonstrated the anti-social and intellectual superiority complexes that Engleby goes through, but not every one is Engleby. Not all intellectual elitists are certifiable. Not all highly intelligent people exist solely in the landscape of their own minds. Because Engleby had never experienced the guiding hand of a true teacher (he felt, and probably was, smarter than the “dons” at his various schools, including Cambridge). He stepped into the tiger pits of philosophy and sociology with no hand to help him back out into reality. His existential crisis is not merely a phase, but becomes a disease of the mind.

Engleby could be a treatise on the mind of a single mentally ill young man, but it shines a light on issues that are far more complicated. It’s about the lack of perception of those around troubled individuals, and it can easily be a warning to society about the dangers of closing your eyes to bullying—specifically bullying based on a warped sense of tradition or “boys will be boys” attitudes. Most importantly, Engleby speaks to the dangers of knowledge and unguided intelligence, and the dangerous line in the sand between intelligence and insanity.

The last third of the book shifts perspective from the Engleby readers know, to a medicated, institutionalized Engleby who can identify his behavioral problems of the past and the crimes he committed, but still cannot feel appropriate emotional responses. The difference is that he wants to. While others may criticize this turn in the novel, it is absolutely necessary to complete the story. To leave the journal incomplete, or to shift to third person would render the tragedy in Engleby trite and meaningless. Without his shift from book knowledge to personal knowledge, his experiences and writings would be rendered pointless because even after he is given the tools to help himself, Engleby chooses to remain locked in the safety of his own mind where he can rearrange reality and history, and that itself is his tragedy.

Faulks departed from his comfortable writing styles with Engleby, and readers may or may not be appreciative of the sudden shift in gears. He moves from his comfort zone of historical fiction to a fiction riddled with history and both mental and social illness in such a way that reading the novel once would cheat readers out of the carefully woven clues and allusions Faulks works into his writing that are only able to be appreciated after the final revelations of the protagonist. Engleby may be a departure from Faulk’s other writings, but it is a path well following him down.

Review by Dawn M. Papuga

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Book Review: The Rose of York: Fall from Grace

The Rose of York: Fall from Grace
By Sandra Worth
End Table Books
Release date: May 9, 2007
$ 16.95 ISBN: 9780975126493

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”
Richard III, I.1.1-2

For all the disservice done to Richard III by Shakespeare, his opening lines of Richard III could do no more to accurately divine the shift in thought that Sandra Worth’s trilogy seeks to influence about the last Plantagenet king of England. In “The Rose of York” trilogy (Love and War, Crown of Destiny and Fall from Grace), Worth joins the likes of Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More, Horace Walpole, Alison Weir, and Beth Marie Kosir in her contribution to the commentary about the most reviled king of the English monarchy. Unlike most of her colleagues from the Early Modern period, however, Worth is not writing to appease a crown; she has no sedition laws poised to censor her text; she isn’t a mouthpiece of Tudor propaganda. Instead, Worth’s historical fiction sets out to correct centuries of rumor, political attacks, and exaggerations that have molded the image of Richard III into a villainous, “bunch-backed toad.”

In The Rose of York: Fall from Grace, Richard III is deeply in love with a woman, with the law, and with his quest to embody the ideals of King Arthur. Rather than displaying the Machiavellian suspicion that Shakespeare’s villain thrives on, Worth’s Richard III is too trusting and makes decisions based on the hope that the inherent good in his courtiers will outweigh their greed and opportunism. Unfortunately, the malicious scheming and plotting of individuals like Buckingham and Lady Beaufort consistently undermine the progress and general good that Richard III’s new laws promote. Far from the traditional depiction of Richard III as a murderous opportunist, Worth’s characterization of Richard highlights the villainy and cut throat tactics of those who would become the central core of the Tudor court.

In Rose of York: Fall from Grace, Richard is a handsome, athletic man who risks his own health to comfort his dying queen. He is a man touched by beauty and tragedy. He is a man who did not covet the title of King, but bore it with a raised awareness of responsibility and desire to change the world. Many historical fictions fall off the razor’s edge and either inundate the reader with facts and dates, or dismiss historical accuracy altogether. Worth’s Fall from Grace treads that ground carefully by giving Richard a voice that is idealistic and genuine—if not a little naive. Captivating description and real, recognizable dialogue act as a vehicle for not only historical accuracy, but a heartbreaking romance. Though readers will undoubtedly know the outcome of the story before they open the cover, Worth’s skill as a storyteller heightens audience investment in the personal lives of these historical figures and makes their tragic ends more than just an historical laundry list of dates and names. The complex relationships of the medieval court of England become easily navigable through Worth’s vibrant characterizations.

Attempting to overturn history is no small task. The complexities of court interactions and allegiances have always been convoluted, and the interpretations of those interactions have most often been told by those who had the most power. Thanks to Shakespeare, Richard III’s legacy has been one of deformity, conniving, regicide, cruelty, megalomania, usurpation, and murder. When such a negative portrait has been painted (indeed, even physical portraits were altered to reflect propaganda spread by the Tudors to alter the legacy of Richard) and maintained for generations, persuading an audience to consider facts more closely can be a monumental undertaking. Luckily, Worth’s intensive research brings together historical documentation and private correspondences to piece together the facts about Richard III’s rise to power and his short reign. Most of these facts have been available to the public, but to get an audience with a set view to revisit those same facts for reconsideration is a decisive task. Not surprisingly, Worth tackles the public opinion and wrestles it into experiencing familiar facts from a new, creative point of view.

Through the parsing together of timelines, records, and documents that have survived over 500 years of threat and suppression, Worth manages to paint a picture of Richard III that stands in direct conflict with what most people are familiar. The text is far from a didactic gloss of historical dates, names and locations, but it manages to recreate the life of Richard III with such vivacity and personality that it will forever change the mental image of one of history’s most hated monarchs.

~Review by Dawn M. Papuga

*This book was originally written for contribution to Bookpleasures.com

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What if Poe were in your Creative Writing class?

Following the Easter festivities yesterday I began my quick read through of the mandatory blogs, news sites, and journals that generally make up my day. Usually this takes an acceptable amount of time, and usually this trek through cyberspace (is it a problem that I still hate that word?) leaves me with nuggets to think about for the remainder of the day. Most often I read the morning blurbs and get to work preparing lectures, editing reviews, and writing chapters of one of the three novels I am juggling. Occasionally it leads to research ideas for articles or papers for conferences. Today it rattled my world as a scholar, a reviewer, and a reader in general.

I was half way through reading my list when I landed at Snark Central on Miss Snark's blog. She posted a link to an article on the Washington Post's site that troubled me. There was no way to embed the article and accompanying video so I'll just link it here:

"Pearls Before Breakfast" by Gene Weingarten

What will happen when one of the world's best violinist plays some of the worlds most respected classical music on a violin whose worth could feed a small country in the metro station in DC? Nothing. According to the article, of the 1,097 people passed by Joshua Bell as he played for 43 minutes in plain clothes in the busy station, "seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look."

There are many issues that come to mind when considering the outcome of this experiment. Perhaps those 1,097 people were just not classical music fans. Perhaps they had more important things to do. But when considering the gravitas that art, beauty and music are supposed to have on an individual, this becomes troublesome. For a scholar of English literature, this becomes problematic. For any art aficionado, be it literature, sculpture, music, or painting, this raises the uncomfortable question: Do you only appreciate X because society has deemed it worthy?

It's no secret to Early Modern scholars that Shakespeare was not the blockbuster playwright that we in the Academy tend to make him out to be. One look at the Stationer's Register will show you that his contemporaries were much more sought out than he. Middleton was adored by the "common" folk. Marlowe's death was mourned as an artistic tragedy. Dekker, Kyd, Greene -- they all were performed extensively, and Shakespeare was just "one of those actors."

So why is Shakespeare taught in high schools and universities the world over as the greatest playwright to ever grace a quill to page? Canonization occurred, and suddenly we're all appreciating Hamlet because we're supposed to. Or, alternately, we're loathing him because we want to break with the accepted tradition. Fine. I'm for discussion of texts and the value of any given work, or body of work. In fact, I am elated to discuss why something fits in the "good" category or the "bad" category. Those distinctions are just as arbitrary, though. Who gets to decide what "good" writing is? Or "good" music, for that matter? You could argue that those guidelines have been trained into us socially and passed down generation to generation. It's why pop culture is always so controversial. Pop culture usually breaks with these norms, and forces people to look at things outside of the traditional boxes of what are good and bad. Just ask Andy Warhol.

All of this is well and good. But more to the point -- would we (I, even) recognize the "brilliant" artists if they were not presented to me in a way that indicated their "genius?" Would I recognize something written by any of the "greats" and value it for brilliant writing? Or would I tear it to shreds because I have no predisposition to the author? Would a successful contemporary novelist's work fall under my Red Pen of Doom? And if it did, should I feel bad about that? If they're breaking rules of aesthetics, should I merely bow down to the genius nature of their abuse of the language for effect, or should I do as I do every day in the classroom and chastise them for lacking the ability to construct coherent sentences? Does the name matter? "That was So and So, you know... and you tore them to shreds."

I don't think we should feel bad. In fact, I think the experiment that Joshua Bell participated in goes a long way to show us just how much we actually know about the subjects we claim to be so proficient in understanding. It goes beyond simple Good/Bad categorization. To label art as just good or bad is to ignore what places them in those categories to begin with. You can train a monkey to point out the traditionally accepted "good" art, and it wouldn't understand what put it in that category. So are most people "artistic" monkeys? The one man who stopped and listened for nine minutes at the end of Bell's performance didn't stop because he recognized the virtuoso. He stopped because he understood the craft and skill, and he recognized masterful aptitude when he heard it. I only hope that if put to the test, those of us in the positions to judge the works of others are able to hear those same underlying tones of mastery with equal clarity.

Comments are always welcome. And remember -- write well, people are watching!

~D.M. Papuga

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What is VidLit? (Director's Cut)
originally posted: March 17, 2007

My last installment of updates on LTR included an embedded video of Tara Ison’s new book, The List. Being an avid reader, I was somewhat confused by this phenomenon as I’ve never come across the likes of it before. Authors write books, right? They do book signing tours, and create websites, develop a MySpace page for their latest book (It’s strange that I even can say this with such ease and flippancy today), give readings, and show up at conferences eager to be plucked from the masses to become the next greatest thing. So you might imagine my surprise to see this relatively unusual form of promotion for a novel. I have never, in all my book buying glory, encountered this thing called “VidLit.” If I’ve never experienced it, I’m guessing quite a few readers have never encountered it either. And so, like the good academic I have been trained to be, I set out on a research mission.

What, exactly, is VidLit?

VidLit is actually VidLit.com, a company that produces book trailer videos, as well as unique VidLits for short stories, social commentary and some, it seems, just for fun. Liz Dubelman, the founder of VidLit and an Emmy winning producer and director, recruited Paca Thomas, an Emmy winning sound designer, and VidLit was born. (Check out the VidLit.com Masthead)

Like Google, the name of the company has become synonymous with the product and action. Whether intentional or not, this appears to be the case. The marriage of the company and the product name seems to be a direct result of the lack of similar professional competition and the high quality of VidLit’s work. That is not to say they don’t have competition from independent video producers!

Okay, so what about the product?

The product commonly referred to as VidLit has been described as many things: A music video for a book, a visual calling card, something akin to a movie trailer, even a moving poster. In very basic terms, VidLit is a promotional tool that takes the effective aspects of movie trailers (their short, evocative nature), technology (Flash films—though people are starting to organize their own “VidLit’s” using actual film, as is the case with Ison’s promotional film for The List), the prescient knowledge that attention spans are waning, and the wonderful insight to cross traditional boundaries of publicity for a genre to reach as many people as possible. Each VidLit can include a reading by the author, a dramatization of key plot points (think movie trailer here), a spoof of the book, the list goes on and on. Nothing seems out of bounds for this medium.

When did this come about? Is it new?

Well, that depends. VidLit first hit the scenes in a big way in 2004 when the folks at Vidlit.com launched a VidLit to promote Yiddish with Dick and Jane by Elis Weiner and Barbara Davilman. Amidst lawsuits and bandwidth breaking hits, the new phenomenon took hold. VidLit.com has created promotional VidLits for authors such as Bill Maher, Bill Bryson, M.J. Rose, Timothy L. O’Brien, and Christopher Buckley.

VidLit has been discussed repeatedly over the past three years with articles appearing in Publishers Marketplace’s Publishers Lunch, Slate.com, PublishersWeekly.com, Bookstandard.com, USAtoday, Poets&Writers, Inc., and even among notable bloggers like Miss Snark. Expect to hear more about VidLit, though, as they’re currently producing VidLit entries (called NewsLit Newsreels). They have all the flavor that Slate.com readers expect, and are something to watch for.

It is not too far out of bounds to expect this form of publicity to become a staple in the author’s repertoire. But the use of this medium raises a number of questions: What is the direct goal of this kind of marketing? Is it to raise awareness about a particular book? How effective have they been (In the case of Yiddish with Dick and Jane, quite) over all, and what are the forecasts for the future? That brings me to questions to you, the readers. Authors, are you considering using this form of publicity? Publicists, are you pushing this as an option? And Readers, will this effect whether or not you read a book?

~D.M. Papuga

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Book Review: THE LIST by Tara Ison
originally posted: February 7, 2007

The List
By Tara Ison
Scribner
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9414-0

Folk wisdom about love proclaims that opposites, like magnets, attract. Tara Ison’s second novel, The List, depicts the obstacles and darkly comic circumstances of two opposites trying repeatedly to tear themselves apart. Isabel, a gifted heart surgeon about to begin her residency, and Al, a video store clerk and director whose only film turned into a cult-classic, are involved in a toxic relationship where neither of them is capable of breaking the cycle of enabling the other’s destructive behavior. In a vain attempt to bring her chaotic personal life into the kind of black and white order her career contains, Isabel and Al create a list of things they always talked about doing together but never got around to, and then proceed to ceremoniously check the activities—a sunset walk on the beach, steamed clams on the Santa Monica Pier—off in order to bring closure to their dysfunctional relationship. But like their every attempt to smooth things over, eventually things take a wrong turn with their final plan. They persist with The List (sometimes with the begrudging notion of completion rather than enjoyment) and destroy a little bit of each other with every item they cross off.

Unlike in many relationship crisis novels, Ison manages to balance strong plot development with an insightful examination of the emotional and psychological rollercoaster that Al and Isabel experience in The List. The narrative voices of both main characters are clearly distinguished as each chapter shifts between their points of view, and decisions that might otherwise seem haphazard are justified as the story is not just told, but experienced through the eyes of both Al and Isabel. The strength of this novel is not in the main characters alone, though. Because of the depth of the minor cast of this novel the audience is able to experience the relationship as intimately as Isabel and Al, and at the same time clearly see how their behavior is comically destructive through the eyes of family and friends.

Anyone who has ever done something seemingly out of character, irrational, or sacrificial because of love will immediately recognize and appreciate the complexity of The List. Emotions and rationalizations don’t fit into any neat little boxes (though, Al and Isabel would argue that their lives can be seen in terms of physiology and classic film), and Ison’s treatment of the down-spiral of a relationship is unapologetic and gritty. In short, it’s real. Readers will certainly find the characters conflicted, but may be surprised by their own shifting allegiances between Al and Isabel, what is healthy and unhealthy, and whether or not they should stay together in the end.

The List is a captivating, nearly voyeuristic look at the reality of a contemporary conflict in love—to stay with a partner for the sake of comfort and the looming ticking of a biological clock and career, or to enter into the frightening world of independence and being single. The journey blends dark humor, vulnerable intimacy, and snapshots of the highs and lows that virtually anyone in the dating world can, perhaps disconcertingly, recognize. With her sharp wit, honesty about love, humor about dysfunction, and her gift for unforgettable characters, Tara Ison crafts an addictive story that leaves the Al or Isabel in us wanting more.

Review by D.M. Papuga

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Academically, my training is in the Early Modern period, critical theory, and film, but my reviewing interests are as ecclectic as my reaserch interests: wide ranging in fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, and history. I earned a Masters in English Literature from the Hudson Strode Program in the Renaissance from U of A, and have taught at six major universities. I have worked as an assistant editor on a variety of publications including the Academic Journal Mythosphere (funded by the Joseph Campbell Foundation), the Black Warrior Review (Asst. Poetry), and Carnegie Mellon University's award winning newspaper The Tartan.

Recently I launched Lyrique Tragedy Reviews, a site dedicated to reviewing contemporary commercial fiction, most genre fiction, non-fiction, and providing author interviews. I am currently seeking a position in the publishing industry and completing my first novel.