If a rose will be pink, I think this is the shade I love the best.
This particular bush in my neighborhood was well cared for, and so vigorous and happy:
Notice how the fading blooms develop a serrated edge, decorating themselves for their going-out.
I listened to The Secret Language of Girls in the car on my trip to Nevada earlier this summer. It had been on my Amazon wish list for a year, so when I saw it at the librar
y it was an easy decision to grab that one off the shelf. I had started my browsing in the section with the adult CD’s, but so many of those would be longer than I could finish on most of the trips I take.
This is the story of a year in the lives of some middle-school girls, which is not something I would normally like to read about. But I’ve appreciated the author’s voice in other books I’ve read by her, notably Chicken Boy, which I reviewed here.
I’m comforted knowing that Dowell’s books are on the shelves as a wholesome alternative to the slime that is oozing ever lower into nihilism, and into the younger age-range, the kind of thing Meghan Cox-Gurdon critiques in this article: Darkness Too Visible. Through her characters’ stories Dowell explores the issues that are common to every generation of modern adolescents, without any of it feeling antiquated. I assume that this is how the children themselves feel about the books — if they are still on the library shelves after ten years, is it not because they are actively in circulation?
Dowell captures the self-conscious angst of adolescent girls, revealing the cattiness, unkindness, confusion and downright meanness, without passing judgment on what is a difficult time for everyone. She wrote this book about ten years ago, when perhaps it was all too fresh in her own memory. Girls are best friends in 5th Grade, and then because of their personalities and choices they grow apart, sometimes so distant that they forget to treat each other as fellow humans.
“Let’s humiliate someone,” says one girl to Marilyn, and one of our heroines reluctantly agrees to humiliate the girl who not long before was her best friend. It’s because she feels trapped by the choice she’s made to be in the popular group and pay obeisance to the leaders of that pack. Otherwise they may turn against her….
Boys are often what comes between friends. Although I’m dismayed at the sexualizing of our society to the point where this most wholesome book has to include events such as kissing games between eleven-year-olds, this (and much worse) is the reality many children have to deal with, and Dowell does everyone a favor by showing us what goes on in Marilyn’s mind and heart at a barely-chaperoned party, and how she gains self-understanding.
The older brother of the party-giver is an amputee, and all the other girls say, in effect, “Oooh, that’s creepy.” They are disgusted, while Marilyn finds him very nice. But of course it’s her peers, the gangly adolescent boys, who end up awkwardly pecking her cheek or lips when the spinning bottle stops and points to her. She finds it very unsatisfying.
“She decided she didn’t like this game very much. She wanted to choose whom she got to kiss. Other people shouldn’t be able to choose for her.”
“She also knew that legs didn’t have anything to do with kissing. In fact she was starting to think lips didn’t have much to do with kissing either. Kissing was about hearts….As far as Marilyn was concerned, she was still waiting for her first kiss.”
Considering the likelihood these days of young girls getting physically involved with boys way too early for their good, there is a need for this kind of vicarious lesson. Girls can go with Marilyn to the party and leave smarter. They will be further on their way to knowing the truth that sex and all that leads up to it are about more than recreation and experimentation.
I remember how it was at that age — you fall in love with boys right and left, because you are falling in love with the whole experience of falling in love. It’s hard to be true friends when all that is going on, but in this book there is a new girl in school who is an little unconventional, and also refreshingly sensible and kind, as she tries to help another confused protagonist.
“Paisley laughed. ‘Why don’t you quit thinking about love and boyfriends and girlfriends? Why don’t you just think about Andrew O’Shea, the human being?'” Out of the mouth of babes! Isn’t that what we all should do, what it means to grow up — to think of the other person as he is in himself, not just as someone useful for our own ego or enjoyment?
My listening to this book in audio instead of print format added an extra level of complexity to my response. I kept wondering if the narrator’s interpretation of the characters was in line with the author’s. Michelle Santopietro narrated this Random House audio edition, and I found it hard to believe that the young people spoke in a sarcastic tone half the time.
Some of the mothers in the story are obviously so consumed with their own drama that they can’t shift their focus and notice what is going on with their children. I also recall from that age the vague feeling that I was on my own. But the voices that Santopietro gives to the mothers make them sound stupid to me, not just out of touch.
Just the other day I read Arti’s thoughts on what makes a good audiobook narrator, and another post on how different the experience of reading the text yourself is, from that of listening to a recording. I know I was very aware of the narrator coming between me and the author in this case, and I didn’t enjoy that aspect at all. I began to wonder all sorts of things about the narrator, while normally I’d aim my extra curiosity toward the author. “Is Santopietro a mother herself?” was one of the central questions raised.
The box of CD’s of The Secret Language of Girls says that it’s “Recommended for listeners ages 13 and up,” which is odd for a book about 11- and 12-yr-olds. I thought perhaps that was a strategy for getting the intended age group to be more curious about it. But on Amazon the book info says for age range 8-12 yrs., or grades 4-6. That’s more like it.
So far my granddaughters are homeschooling and I can’t see them having time or need for this kind of story. They have wise mothers who are paying close attention. I wish I had found a book like this on the shelf when I was young, and if I get to know some distracted or overwhelmed mothers of pre-teens, I’ll be buying a few copies for their daughters.
With my youngest daughter Kate getting married in just a few days, you’d think I’d have precious little time for writing here. And that is so true, which is why I’m mostly passing on some more gleanings from my recent readings. If you ever pray for bloggers you don’t know, add me to the list this week!
1) Leila writes about some of my favorite things in her post Housewifely. I specialize in ironing and wearing an apron, but the other 
things are also high on my list. She writes, “When you put on an apron, you do not merely protect the garments. You also announce your commitment to the task at hand, your willingness to suffer the slings and sputterings of the pots and pans, your resolve to see the work out to the end.”
I wish I had written this post. Sometimes I think I could write a whole book about aprons alone, and how practically and symbolically they are so significant to my own homemaking. I don’t only wear a apron in the kitchen, but to clean house and dig in the garden.
Aprons were one love that I shared with my now-departed friend Bird which is why I made her a new apron at a time when she had no obvious need for one. Bird and I knew that she did in reality use one, as a way to keep herself on the continuum of the woman she had always been.
2) Daphne writes common sense and wisdom about dating and marriage.
“Start dating after you are ready to get married, and date people you can actually see yourself marrying, as doing otherwise is typically a colossal waste of time. ”
“A good marriage is intentional and dating should be too.”
“And none of them live in magical fairy tales; no matter how it’s arranged a relationship always involves confusion, mistakes, and heartache. Crossed wires are built into every human interaction. ”
3) This article on acedia I found to be revealing of all the many ways self-love manifests itself. Fr. Aidan Kimel quotes a 4th-century desert monastic on the eight fundamental passions or thoughts; acedia is central.
“Frustration and aggressiveness combine in a new way and produce this ‘complex’ (that is, interwoven) phenomenon of acedia.”
“’A despondent person hates precisely what is available,’ Evagrius writes, ‘and desires what is not available.'”
4) The last thing I offer you, which was most helpful to me at this time, is Father Stephen writing about Comforting One Another, which is also about comforting ourselves — or rather, not comforting ourselves. You see, we try to comfort ourselves by running away from the heartbreak or pain and suffering, running to pleasures that we think will ease our hurt. They often bring us further pain. We have to make ourselves not run away, but turn to Christ and let Him truly comfort us by His being and presence.
“For it is when our hearts are broken and do not run away or hide that we can call on God to comfort us. And He does….That comfort is the gift of His own life within us, a sharing of His own joy and love.”
Today is Book Lovers’ Day, my friend Myriah just informed me, and I’m so glad she did. It’s actually one of two days that are celebrated for and by people like us. To mark the day I am re-posting an old book review I wrote, from 2009. It’s a response to three books, so we could think of it as a triple treat for our readers’ party:
In early summer I read three works of fiction in a short space of time:
Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful by Alan Paton
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Folding Cliffs by W.S. Merwin
These were all pretty dramatic stories of historical fiction. Paton’s book follows closely the events in South Africa mid-20th century. Hosseini writes about Afghanistan in the last 30 years, and Merwin’s book is an epic poem about Hawaii, mostly in the 19th century.
I was sitting around after surgery with my foot up, and that was what had made it possible for me spend more time reading and thinking. Some things I thought about: How funny that the settings of these thr
ee books were at three corners of the globe. Obviously they were not part of any theme. So were there some ways they were alike? What made them all worth reading to the end, when so many books I’ve tried lately were not?
Suffering was a large part of all the stories. The Afrikaners in Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful were treating all people of color unjustly and inhumanely. Whites who did otherwise suffered along with the oppressed, and often sacrificed their careers, homes, and reputations.
All the women suffer miserably in A Thousand Splendid Suns. War and famine, selfish and sinful men and women supported by bad cultural traditions, all combine to keep the women trapped in complicated and painful predicaments. Factions of Muslims hate one another.
The Folding Cliffs makes vivid the way conquering peoples oppress the vanquished, all the while thinking it is “for their own good.”
What benefit is there in dwelling on Man’s Inhumanity to Man? Don’t we already know how wretched we are? If that were all one gets from these stories, I don’t think they would be worth reading, but there is another bigger part to all of them, and that is Man’s Love. Just as Christ gave His life in love for us suffering humans, so He gives grace to men to rise above their suffering, show compassion to their fellow man, and do deeds of mercy.
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality,” said C.S. Lewis, and it is this courage that is shown by the young parents in Cliffs who flee to the hills and fight off government agents who are shooting at them, rather than have their family torn apart by the health officials who are shipping lepers off to Molokai like so many unclean animals. Their love is demonstrated in the test of courage.
In Land, the author and his companions find joy and fellowship in realizing the sacrificial, mercy-giving aspect of their humanity as they fight what seems to be a losing battle against political power. Perhaps they were living what Winston Churchill was talking about when he said, “We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.”
Alan Paton in his autobiography Towards the Mountain writes of the experience:
“…the inhumanity of man to man could be made endurable for us only when we manifested in our lives the humanity of man to man….there is a wound in the creation and…the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.”
I haven’t lived with the kinds of suffering I read about, and that is partly why I think these writings are valuable, for as we read we take as our companions in mind and heart characters who are historically real or fictionally true, who can train us in Christian virtue.
Khaled Hosseini has given his countrymen and all of us a wonderful gift in the two books of his I am familiar with. In Kite Runner and in A Thousand Splendid Suns he paints a backdrop of horror, including much personal moral failure. Kite Runner exposed my own innate cowardice as I empathized with the protagonist, and as he was able to find healing and hope after repentance, I was also comforted.
In Suns the author gives a tender role model to women everywhere who are beaten down by life. The character of Miriam is the ultimate in misery, as she has no friends and no family who care about her, and she is barren, so her husband hates her. Then a young woman comes into her life, a woman who could easily slide into being another tormentor. But instead she shows kindness and becomes a true friend, and Miriam finds hope and courage, as well as other parts of her humanity and womanhood that had been obscured. She is transformed from a passive recipient of abuse into a woman who can return love, and she is happy, even in the face of continued abuse.
These stories have the potential to become part of the collective consciousness of a people, and help us to live more humanly, more humanely. I hope that Suns in particular can give vision to the women of Afghanistan, a vision of themselves as able to rise above their circumstances by means of love toward others.
We won’t eliminate the oppressors; our hope does not consist of that, as Father Alexander Schmemann has summarized:
“The fundamental Christian eschatology has been destroyed by either the optimism leading to the Utopia, or by the pessimism leading to the Escape. If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism.’ These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian…. It is for us, Christians, to reconstruct this unique faith, in which there are no illusions, no illusions at all, about the evil.”
Keeping with the theme of inspiring fiction, I’ll end with a quote by Whittaker Chambers from Witness (which book I love, but it is not fiction) about a novel that was formative for him. I haven’t read Les Miserables, but I noticed a few years ago that at least three important writers I knew of had mentioned they read it more than once as children. Sorry, I can’t remember who the others were. Chambers describes what can happen when a good writer connects with the reader:
“I read and reread Les Miserables many times in its entirety. It taught me two seemingly irreconcilable things–Christianity and revolution. It taught me first of all that the basic virtue of life is humility, that before humility, ambition, arrogance, pride and power are seen for what they are, the stigmata of littleness, the betrayal by the mind of the soul, a betrayal which continually fails against a humility that is authentic and consistent. It taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice whenever humanity transcends itself to reach that summit where justice and compassion are one….”
Gladsome Lights 