A Young American Lounge Singer in Shanghai Tries to Keep Her Life in Tune in Lara Tupper’s First Novel, ‘A Thousand and One Nights’

Far from home in a five-star hotel with a no-star boyfriend

A Thousand and One Nights. By Lara Tupper. Harvest, 240 pp., $13, paperback.

By Janice Harayda

A popular joke about the late Norman Vince Peale said that all of his sermons consisted of “three anecdotes in search of a point.” You might have a similar reaction to Laura Tupper’s first novel, A Thousand and One Nights.

Tupper has woven well-researched anecdotes about China into this story of a young American alto and her callow guitarist boyfriend from Yorkshire, who meet on a cruise ship and spend months performing as a duo in a plush hotel in Shanghai (where the only guests who don’t want to hear “Candle in the Wind” seem to want to hear “My Heart Will Go On”). On a train to Hangzhou, Karla and Jack receive “little black plastic bags for spitting.” And in a Shanghai market, Karla sees live snakes for sale, spinning in red buckets, and watches a man skin one alive, its flesh still wriggling and “a blue organ of some kind dangling” after the blade strikes.

But the anecdotes don’t coalesce into a story worthy of them. Karla and Jack run on empty, spending much of their time drinking, whining and bickering. A Thousand and One Nights has so little character and thematic development that at the end, Karla seems as masochistic and Jack as self-absorbed (and as bereft of credible Yorkshire accent) as the beginning. In a sense, both are shanghai’d by Shanghai. For all we learn about their attraction to each other, Tupper might as well have set them down in Secaucus.

Best line: Tupper’s description of the train to Hangzhou: “Karla and Jack had ‘soft seats,’ with cushions, and once on board they were given little plastic bags for spitting. There was no AC, and Karla was wearing tight, black jeans. There were a few other Caucasian faces in their train car, all flushed, and Jack and Karla ignored them. A uniformed girl served complimentary tea in white plastic cups. Bits of green herb floated up, then sank down.”

Worst line: “In truth, Karla was scared every night, and she was tired of being scared, tired of her own cycle of pathetic thoughts.”

Editor: Stacia Decker

Published: February 2007 www.laratupper.com and www.HarcourtBooks.com

Caveat lector: This review is based on an advance reading copy. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Furthermore: Tupper is a former lounge singer whose site says that she has performed “at sea and in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, and on land in Thailand, Japan, China and the United Arab Emirates.” She lives in New York City.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com

After ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ — Joan Didion’s Greatest Hits

A lot of book clubs are reading The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, $13.95, paperback), Joan Didion’s National Book Award–winning memoir of the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne. And for groups or discussion leaders who would like to read more by Didion, the good choices include Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, the early nonfiction collections that helped to make her reputation as one of America’s finest prose stylists.

But perhaps the best “next book” is the first chapter of her 1992 essay collection, After Henry (Vintage, $14.95, paperback) www.randomhouse.com/vintage/. Didion writes in the chapter about an early editor of her books, Henry Robbins, who died on his way to work at the age of 51. And her comments on death relate, perhaps more directly than anything she has written, to her views in The Year of Magical Thinking. She also notes, correctly, that the relationship between writers and great editors has little to do with changes in manuscripts:

“The relationship between an editor and a writer is much subtler and deeper than that, at once so elusive and so radical that it seems almost parental: the editor, if he was Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, the idea of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down and do it.”

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

‘Hey, You!’ — A Picture Book Collection of Recent and Classic Poems for Children Ages 6 and Up

Tell me, O Octopus, I begs,
Is those things arms, or is they legs?
— From Ogden Nash’s light verse classic, “The Octopus”

Hey, You! Poems to Skyscrapers, Mosquitoes, and Other Fun Things. Selected by Paul B. Janeczko and Robert Rayevsky. HarperCollins, 40 pp., $16.89. Ages 6 and up.

By Janice Harayda

The thirty short poems in this picture book all speak to somebody or something — a shell, a horse, an astronaut – or use the literary device known as apostrophe.

Editor Paul Janeczko has chosen a mix of rhymed and unrhymed and comic and serious verse by living and dead poets, including Ogden Nash, X.J. Kennedy and Karla Kushkin. And some of the entries have an unexpected timeliness, such as Emily Dickinson’s “Bee, I’m Expecting You!,” which begins: “Bee, I’m expecting you! / Was saying yesterday / To somebody you know / That you were overdue.” (Could there be a better bedtime poem for a first or second grader who loved Bee Movie?) But the dark and heavy-handed illustrations – which hang over some pages like thunderclouds — are no match for the high quality of the poems. So this is a book to use selectively: Instead of reading straight through it, look for the pages most likely to appeal to a particular child. And just try to keep a straight face if they include Nash’s classic, “The Octopus,” which begins: “Tell me, O Octopus, I begs, / Is those things arms, or is they legs?”

Links: www.harpercollinschildrens.com, www.pauljaneczko.com, www.rayevsky.com

Furthermore: Janeczko is a Maine poet who also edited Dirty Laundry Pile: Poems in Different Voices, a companion to Hey, You!. Rayevsky lives in Parksville, NY, and illustrated Caroline Stutson’s Pirate Pup and other books for children.

Reviews of children’s books appear every Saturday on One-Minute Book Reviews. They often deal with poetry for ages 2 and up. You can find other reviews of children’s poetry books by clicking on the “Children’s Books” category at right (below the “Recent Posts” and “Top Posts” listings).

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

The Adults Need the Diaper Change in ‘Dedication,’ the New Novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

OHMYGODYOUGOTTASKIPTHISBOOK!!! Because it has way too many lines like that one and, as its characters might say, It. Is. So. Retarded.

Dedication: A Novel. By Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Simon & Schuster/Atria. 279 pp., $24.

By Janice Harayda

Few young writers have squandered their literary capital faster than Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, the authors of The Nanny Diaries.Their first novel deftly satirized the world of financially overprivileged New Yorkers and their emotionally underprivileged children. But their subsequent Citizen Girl sounded dreadful, and Dedication is pure schlock, though “pure” may be the wrong word for a book that has many lines like, “Crapcrapcrapcrap.”

Kate Hollis has waited for 13 years to take revenge against “multiplatinum recording megastar Jake Sharpe,” a high school classmate who dumped her. She wants nothing less than to “make him regret his entire existence.” And she finds her moment when Jake returns to their hometown in Vermont to announce his engagement to “international recording superstar” Eden Millay.

But Dedication is no print equivalent of the appealingly frothy My Best Friend’s Wedding. Alternating between the past and present, Kate gives an exhaustive history of her relationship with Jake from middle school to more than a decade after high school, as though it were the run-up to the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V. The chapters have titles like “Seventh Grade,” “Eighth Grade,” and “Ninth Grade,” and give the characters many opportunities to say things like, “Ooh, gross,” and, “You’re so retarded.”

Throughout all of it, Kate and Jake mature so little little that when their confrontation finally occurs, it’s like watching a junior-high food fight. In a sense McLaughlin and Kraus have come full circle: Their plot has changed, but they’re still writing about characters who need nannies.

Best line: None on par with the best in the The Nanny Diaries.

Recommendation? Be prepared for some of the members to stop speaking to you if you recommend this one to a book club.

Consider reading instead: The Nanny Diaries

Worst line: Any of the many on the order of, “Movemovemove, I’ve gotta pee!” and “OHMYGODWHERE’DYOUGETTHATBODY?” For one that’s not a run-on sentence, there’s, “Her face mommabirds.”

Published: June 2007 www.simonsays.com

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

Review of Holly Peterson’s ‘The Manny’: The Worst Sex Scenes Ever Published in a Novel Excerpted by Newsweek?

A rich Manhattanite hires a male nanny for her 9-year-old son and gets more than she bargained for

The Manny. By Holly Peterson. Dial Press, 353 pp., $25

By Janice Harayda

The emaciated carcasses of Park Avenue socialites have been pretty well picked over by novelists. First Tom Wolfe satirized the women whom he called “lemon tarts” and “social X-rays” in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Then came a second generation of writers who cannibalized rich Manhattanites’ lives for parts he spared. Candace Bushell took their sex lives in Four Blondes and other books, Nancy Lieberman their obsession with private schools in Admissions and – most memorably – Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus their ruthlessness to their nannies in The Nanny Diaries.

To all of this Holly Peterson brings one new idea, at least for anybody who hasn’t followed Britney Spears’s fumbled attempts at child care: A status symbol for some mothers is a male nanny who takes boys to batting cages and basketball courts when their fathers can’t get away from their high-flying jobs in law or finance. A while back, Peterson wrote a lively story about this for the New York Times that explained why she had hired men to care for her 3-year-old son. (It seems Jack wanted to sell his baby sister at the supermarket. ”Just leave her on the shelf next to the Teddy Grahams, Mom,” he proposed.) She now returns to male nannies in a glorified romance novel that’s better beach reading than Danielle Steel but not nearly as good as The Nanny Diaries.

Jamie Whitfield, a 36-year-old television producer, hires a younger man to care for her 9-year-old son because her callow husband earns $1.5 million a year but doesn’t seem to care that Dylan is suffering from “loss of self-esteem more than likely due to an absent dad. ” Jamie has middle-class, Midwestern roots – she married “up” – and professes disdain for the “showy and vulgar” New Yorkers she meets at a museum benefit.

But she acts at times like as much of a snob as her friends. She scorns the clothes of a researcher for her TV show: “She was wearing one of her awful Ann Taylor suits from the last century – a cherry-red one.” (She tells the woman, cruelly, “You look like an Avis car rental agent again.”) One problem with the jab is that in some Heartland cities – whose values Jamie is supposed to stand for – Ann Taylor stores are the most stylish in town. (I was thrilled when Ann Taylor moved into the Galleria in Cleveland, where I worked after writing for Glamour – not because I didn’t know you could find more fashionable clothes at Bendel’s and Bergdorf’s but because it offered an alternative to the Limited.) If Peterson wanted to pile more scorn on the suit, she could have done it more credibly with a reference to the lapels or fabric – it’s the gratuitous brand name that’s the tip-off to Jamie’s snobbery.

The Nanny Diaries succeeded, in part, because McLaughlin and Kraus had worked for more than 30 families as nannies and their details consistently came across as fresh and authentic. Peterson achieves this only erratically. Just as important, McLaughlin and Kraus had control of their tone from the start and never let you forget whom you were supposed to identify with – the exploited young nanny. Peterson’s tone is so uneven that she never establishes full sympathy for her heroine. The Manny says several times that Jamie’s son has low “self-esteem.” And because that phrase has been so overused that many journalists and others now avoid it, you might think the references are satirical. But they seem painfully earnest. The novel has the further burden of a pace that’s slow for at least the first 150 pages, after which the plot elements begin to mesh and push the story along more briskly. Even then, there isn’t much suspense about the question at the heart of the book: Will Jamie leave her indifferent husband for the manny who has charmed her young son?

Peterson seems to be trying to have it both ways – to suggest that Jamie has joined the uptown elite while remaining superior to it. The Manny reminds us that, in novels as in life, this is an act that only the most skilled can pull off.

Best line: Jamie talks about a show with network lawyer Geraldine Katz. “Geraldine once asked me how I could prove Michael Jackson really was the King of Pop.”

Worst line: Any of Peterson’s attempts to write a plausible sex scene. These are irreproducible on a site with many links from public libraries. But next time you’re in a bookstore, check out the scene on page 167 that begins with “Now she was on her knees …” and ends with “like a fire hose in her expensive mouth.” This is possibly the worst sex scene ever to appear in a novel excerpted by Newsweek, which has posted a portion of the book in its Web edition for June 17. The magazine does not include this scene in its excerpt in but uses a tamer passage for obvious reasons, including that excerpting this one could alienate a large portion of its subscription base.

The worst line not involving sex occurs when Jamie screams at her husband, “We’re in the modern era, baby, you spoiled, Jurassic, archaic, Waspy piece of petrified wood!” Yes, this is a character we’re supposed to like.

Reading group guide: A Totally Unauthorized Reading Group Guide to The Manny was posted on this site on June 26, 2007, in the post just before this review.

Editor: Susan Kamil

Published: June 2007

Furthermore: Peterson is a contributing editor of Newsweek.

Links: Peterson has a page on My Space (www.myspace.com/hollypetersonthemanny), but I’m having trouble getting the direct link to work from this site. You can find the page by going to www.myspace.com and searching “hollypetersonthemanny” (one word).

I can’t seem to link to the excerpt in the online edition of Newsweek, either, but you can find it by Googling “The Manny + excerpt + Newsweek.” You can find the same excerpt that appears in Newsweek on the publisher’s site www.randomhouse.com/.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

 

www.janiceharayda.com

 

 

Second Runner-up for the 2007 Delete Key Award: ‘The Emperor’s Children’ by Claire Messud

The second runner-up for the 2007 Delete Key Award for the year’s worst writing in books is …

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud

How did this pretentious novel end up on so many best-of-the-year lists? Who knows? Every year there’s at least one book that earns praise far out of proportion to its merits. (Remember the great reviews Mitch Albom got when he started writing books? How hollow does some of the praise seem now?) The most overrated book of 2006 was The Emperor’s Children, a windy and cliché-infested novel full of repulsive characters who move in eddies around an aging New York journalist.

So why didn’t it win top honors in the Delete Key Awards competition for the year’s worst writing in books? Tedious as much of this novel is, The Emperor’s Children picks up steam in the last one hundred or so pages, when it borrows some drama from the events of Sept. 11, 2001. How many readers will stick with it until then?

Original review on One-Minute Book Reviews: Oct. 4, 2006, “The Emperor’s Children Wear Clichés,” Oct. 4, 2006, archived with the October posts and in the “Novels” category.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.