Wednesday, May 5, 2010

every last one

I just finished Anna Quindlen's "Every Last One" and I'm going to spoil the plot right here.

First, I did enjoy the book and her description of the hubbub of family life. Everyone's busy, everyone has their own schedule, everything is hectic. The family in question is the mother (narrator), her doctor husband, their independent daughter Ruby and twin sons Max and Alex. The kids are teenagers so the mother Mary Beth is all caught up in their dating dilemmas, proms, curfews, drinking issues, college applications, etc. Then Ruby breaks up with her boyfriend and he goes nuts and kills the whole family.

This is my problem with the book. A skinny teenager strangles, stabs, and kills three people - Ruby, Max and the father - while the mother was asleep upstairs. Seriously? That is so implausible to me. It's hard to stab someone. You'd think the dad would have shouted something or fought back. The whole horrible scene is only indirectly referenced, no details are given. It's not Ann Rule or anything (which is good). But it seemed like a major stretch.

And of course the second half of the book is about the mother's grieving process. I really felt for her - the ending built up until I was almost in tears. Quindlen excells at writing with all kinds of perfectly on-point observations of modern life. (Plus only she would invent a mass murderer with a Tolstoy fetish.)

I also read "Second Time Around" by Beth Kendrick, who writes these extremely silly fluffy books. Friends from college are given a bequest when their friend dies and they all use the money to Follow Their Dreams.

While on vacation, I read "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel - yes, b/c Obama liked it. I admit I'm obsessed with the Obamas. I found "Life of Pi" very capitivating and I'm not one for seafaring adventure/fantasy books. I was totally enthralled by the boy's castaway story and stunned by the ending. But, crucially, I was not annoyed. Often I get very testy at the "it was all a dream" trope. I think it's unfair and against the rules to withhold info and make the reader less knowledgable than the story teller. But here, it was well done because the point was that we pick the better story. The amount of truth in it is not the deciding factor. And this is extrapolated to encompass religions. We choose what we want to believe and that is a totally understandable, respectable and even noble trait.

I want to talk to someone about this book. In this book, Pi's true story is a horrific tale of murder and cannibalism and "the better story" is about wild animals on a lifeboat and a magical island. So the implication is that life is harsh and ugly and religion offers a better story.

But I want to probe at that idea... I feel it sets up a false choice. I feel religion can be a tool of mysogeny and oppression and the real story of life on earth can be extremely beautiful and affirming. Obviously it can also be very brutal and painful as well. But what if the better story is the empirical truth? Perhaps evolution is a good example.

I was struck by a line where Pi mused that choosing doubt over faith is like choosing immobilization as a form of transport. This book made me think.

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