Girl Detective

Last year’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for best documentary, Trouble the Water, took a while to get to me on DVD, but was worth the wait. Kimberly Rivers Roberts, an aspiring rapper and New Orleans resident, was too poor to evacuate the city for Hurricane Katrina, so instead she turned on her video camera and captured one small group’s survival. Roberts is clearly no professional; her camera shakes and judders, yet what she films is so fascinating that I hardly was bothered by the camera motion. As the storm begins, she and her husband invite friends and neighbors in to weather the storm. As the levees break and the water rises, they realize this is not just another hurricane.

Roberts, who teamed with documentarians Tia Lessin and Carl Deal (who made Fahrenheit 9/11), is one of the few able to leave the city right after, and later returns. Intercut with her own footage are news clips that include Bush and the FEMA director making what would come to be disastrously ill-informed commentary. The doc also pulls the veil back on the myth of New Orleans recovery, and shows how devastated the city still is, especially in the poorer areas. Most damning, though, is that the number of white residents who returned vastly outstripped those of color, many of who remained displaced in what was called the greatest forced migration in US history since the Dust Bowl. This film is sobering and empowering, with glimpses of cautious optimism in the face of staggering opposition.

My husband knows me fairly well after fourteen years, and I surprised him this week by bringing home the DVD Marley and Me from the library.

“You?” he asked. “Dogs? That movie?”

I can understand his confusion. I am not a heartwarming-pet-movie kinda gal. In fact, after watching the movie, I have clarified my relationship with all creatures: I value those I can sit down and have an interesting conversation with. Hence my struggles with small children. And that’s the part of the movie–family and small children–I appreciated. One reviewer commented when this came out what a good job it did with the struggles about family, which is why I borrowed it from the library.

Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston are young married reporters when they acquire a puppy on the cheap. When one kid arrives, then another, along with the supposedly impossible-to-discipline dog, their lives are tossed about. There’s crying, screaming, anger and frustration. Aniston, near tears from exhaustion and what it’s done to her formerly sharp mind, notes that no one ever told them having a baby would be so hard. Wilson responds that even if they had, they wouldn’t have believed them. It’s a conversation that could have dived into cliche, yet it’s done simply, and illustrated well, and was one example of why this movie was better than the sap-fest I expected of it.

I’m still not, or never will be, a dog person. But Marley and Me is a decent movie about family, career and life choices, even for non-dog people.

It took me a while to see Where the Wild Things Are, not because I didn’t want to. I did, based mostly on positive reviews from two of my favorite critics, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and A.O. Scott of the NYT, who now host At the Movies. My challenge was trying to find a time to take my 6yo son Drake and leave my 3yo son Guppy at home. Since it finally became a choice of waiting for a good time or seeing it somewhere else besides The Heights, I decided to take both boys.

What I’d heard from other parents was true; the beginning of the movie has tough stuff about kids and families that can be hard to watch. The middle part, where Max journeys to the land of the wild things, though, was supposed to be more entertaining. Sure enough, at the end of the beginning segment, where Max gets into serious trouble with his mom, who is wonderfully and sensitively played by Catherine Keener, Guppy said, “I want to go home now.”

I told him to wait and see, and that it would get better. It did, and he liked the middle and end, as did Drake. I thought this film was wonderful and moving, showing a lot of the fleeting joys and painful truths of childhood as well as the mother/spirited son relationship. It’s authentic to the book:

Carol: Hey King! What’s your first order of business?
Max: Let the wild rumpus start!

yet a work of art unto itself. This is most definitely geared toward older children and adults. It was well worth seeing, especially on the big screen, where director Spike Jonze’s unique vision can get the scope it deserves.

Apparently, Neil Gaiman was surprised when he learned he’d been awarded the Newbery Award, annually give to an author for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children, for his novel The Graveyard Book.

You are on a speakerphone with at least 14 teachers and librarians and suchlike great, wise and good people, I thought. Do not start swearing like you did when you got the Hugo.

When I started this book, I was surprised, too. Typical of Gaiman, it has a horrific beginning. Atypical of awarded books for older children/teens, this begins with a frightening chapter about the murder of a family. Because this is a fantasy novel, the baby escapes, though, and toddles to a nearby graveyard, where he is taken in, named Nobody Owens (Bod for short), and cared for by its denizens.

As he grows, Bod meets creatures both human and non-, and discovers there is good and evil in all. He’s a typical boy raised by ghosts, though, and thus his childhood is unique and fascinating, featuring fascinating adventures and encounters courtesy of Gaiman’s celebrated imagination. The book is aptly illustrated by frequent Gaiman collaborator Dave McKean, in atmospheric black-and-white ink spread out over three pages.

In many ways, this is the oldest story of all, about an orphaned boy growing to his destiny to fight forces of evil. In its particulars, though, it’s unique and quite wonderful, often funny, frequently moving and thought provoking. By the end I could easily see how this alternately simple and complex tale won over the Newbery judges, who have this to say:

“A child named Nobody, an assassin, a graveyard and the dead are the perfect combination in this deliciously creepy tale, which is sometimes humorous, sometimes haunting and sometimes surprising,” said Newbery Committee Chair Rose V. Treviño.

Not just an unconventional, challenging book for older children, it is an impressive book for adults as well.

The year after my 40th birthday I was very smug. Life was largely good. 41, however, has not been so kind. Weight gain, blurring of up-close vision, aching knees and joints were among the harbingers of age. As is my wont, I threw a flurry of attention at diet books, got several from the library, then ignored them for weeks. Several I returned. But Katzen and Willett’s Eat, Drink, & Weigh Less I renewed and finally read.

Simply, this book is what most everyone should do about their diet and health. Eat better (not less or more) and move more, and your chances for things like heart disease, diabetes and other age-related maladies are reduced. Throughout, Willett lists the long-term studies that prove what we know already: eat better, exercise more, and we’ll be in better health. The book is structured around 9 pieces of common-sense advice, such as eat more veg and fruit (but fewer white potatoes), choose good fats like olive oil over bad ones like trans fats, choose whole grain rather than simple carbs, and stay hydrated.

Additionally, Katzen, the author most famously of The Moosewood Cookbook (from which I learned to cook), includes a wealth of simple recipes and food advice. I tried several of the recipes, like the vegetable broth with peas, the vinaigrette and the avocado butter; all were easy, healthful and tasty.

For those looking for a diet book, this contains a quiz, a 21-day plan, a portable plan for travel and non cooks and maintenance advice. For everyone, though, is the short, sweet warm-up plan and the advice to practice the advice until it becomes standard practice.

What this book lacks is an emphasis on fresh, seasonal, local foods. For that, though, there are other books like Mark Bittman’s Food Matters. What this book does is make common sense health improvement easy to understand and easy to implement. Whether you’re looking to lose weight, or suffering from the lurking knowledge that your diet and exercise are not what they could be, this is a smart, helpful book to have on the shelf. Worth owning.

Adventureland glanced off me like water off a duck’s back. I didn’t get the appeal at all, though it received mostly good reviews when it was in theaters. Jesse Eisenberg plays the Michael Cera role–a smart geek inept with women. His post-college trip to Europe is canceled, and the only job he can get is at a local theme park. The year is 1987, and while some references were spot on (mostly the music) others were not quite right. Kristen Stewart and Ryan Reynolds look as if they were dropped in from a modern movie, Eisenberg is so vague in appearance he could have been, so the other characters often looked as if they were in 80’s drag rather than in character.

The plot feels like that of every teen movie, ever, except that it’s characters are supposedly post-college, which never felt quite right to me. Their emotional and communication skills seemed more suited to high school. And that’s kind of an insult to high schoolers. Eisenberg is a geek who likes the cool girl, Stewart, who has the emotional acting range of a turnip. Her idea of emoting is fiddling with her hair, which IMDB says she does 55 times in the film. Stewart is fooling around with the cool guy, Reynolds, but develops feelings for the geek, and things don’t quite come together. SNL’s Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig have a few good moments in supporting roles–one with a bat, the other with stuffed bananas. The plot is not dissimiliar to that of Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, which I liked at the time but seems cut from a similar cloth–trying to go for the charm of a John Hughes 80’s romance, and not being sincere enough to pull it off.

My husband G. Grod was similarly unimpressed with it, but two friends, The Big Brain and his henchman C, said they loved it. BB even said it was one of his favorite movies from last year. He wondered if perhaps when I am older and no longer caring for small children, and my heart has softened from its current stone-like state, if I might view it more favorably. I doubt it. I’d rather re-watch a John Hughes movie.

No, not the Adam Sandler remake. You know me better than that, right? The original, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, is one of those famous old movies that I’d never yet seen, so when Take-Up Productions had a Capra series, I made sure to address that gap in my movie experience. This is an utterly charming, funny movie, and a great example of Capra’s style.

Gary Cooper is Mr. Deeds, a small-town greeting-card writer who inherits millions when a distant relative dies suddenly. He’s a kindly eccentric, and tries to keep his head about him when he’s whisked off to NYC. There he meets Jean Arthur as Babe Bennett, a reporter who poses as an everyday small-town girl.

Louise “Babe” Bennett: That guy is either the dumbest, stupidest, most imbecilic idiot in the world, or else he’s the grandest thing alive. I can’t make him out.

They develop feelings for each other, but just as things might go well, he is sued for insanity in an attempt to seize his money. The suit is based on Arthur’s articles on him, and he finds out her real identity.

Will the bad guys steal his money? Will he be institutionalized? Will he forgive Arthur? Though the outcomes are predictable, the tension is real, and the enjoyment is palpable. This is truly a feel-good movie, though it easily could have been something else. Capra was to have made another movie, Cooper wasn’t available for months, the original female lead backed out, the studio head was against Arthur, yet it all came together. It has a further claim to fame. According to imdb:

This movie marks the entry of the verb doodle (in the sense of absent-minded scribbling) into the English language. The word was coined for the movie by screenwriter Robert Riskin.

Jane Gardam’s books were recommended to me over a decade ago by my dear friend Thalia. I was reminded of this recently when The Man with the Wooden Hat, Gardam’s latest, was reviewed at NPR. Since it is a bookend to a previous novel, Old Filth, I sought that out first, and am quite glad I did.

Filth is an acronym, supposed coined by the main character of the book, Edward Feathers:

His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.

Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement. (17)

Filth is indeed easy to love, all the more so as his life story unfolds in fits and starts. It swoops in time and perspective so wildly that in the hands of a less-skilled author, the book would be dizzying instead of dazzling. Filth was one of many “Raj orphans.” Like Rudyard Kipling, these were children of English parents sent East in the name of Empire. The children were often returned at four or five to foster families in England to avoid disease, if they hadn’t succumbed to it already.

From a tragic beginning, Filth’s supposedly golden life is deconstructed for the reader, though not to the people around him. He becomes a sympathetic, almost amazing figure, set largely against the backdrop of WWII. Several times in the book he’s urged to write his memoirs, something he struggles with and finally gives up on. Readers of fiction are well rewarded that Gardam created his fictional one. I look forward to reading more about him in Gardam’s story collecion The People of Privilege Hill and the sequel, his wife Betty’s story, in The Man with the Wooden Hat.

The December selection for the Twin Cities’ Books and Bars reading group is Hannah Tinti’s impressive debut novel, The Good Thief. It had been on my radar since Jennifer Reese, former senior books editor at Entertainment Weekly, reviewed it in 2008

It’s a thumping good read, one I finished in fewer than 24 hours. Tinti gives a New England twist to Dickensian themes of orphans, thieves and poverty. Young Ren was abandoned as a baby at an abbey, with two clues to his identity: a nightshirt with the letters “REN” sewn into the collar, and a missing hand. Years later, a handsome, silver-tongued stranger appears, claiming to be Ren’s brother. Adoption is the highest hope of the orphan boys, whose only other fate is to be conscripted into the army when they come of age. Whether Ren’s being claimed is what he’d hoped for, soon turns out to be much more complicated.

After [that] Ren couldn’t think anymore. Instead he felt the air on his damp skin, the smell of fish in his clothes. The lamppost disappeared behind them, and the boy realized that he was sharing a seat with a murderer. There would be no more bargaining with God. He was into hell now for sure. (177)

Villains, grave robbers, illicit surgery, and overall skulduggery abound as Ren encounters an embittered former teacher, a dead man, a kind but deaf housewife, and a sarcastic dwarf. It is a skillful and entertaining adventure novel with suspense and mystery to spare. Good stuff.

I can’t figure out why last year’s Pulitzer winner for fiction, Olive Kitteridge, wasn’t a contender earlier this year in the Morning News Tournament of Books. I read seven of those sixteen books, including the winner, A Mercy, and the runner up, City of Refuge, and this easily bested them both.

Olive Kitteridge is a good book, well written. Its reach is impressive, yet its grasp is perfectly firm. This is a series of related short stories, all of which refer, overtly or no, to the character Olive Kitteridge. Olive is one of the most arresting and memorable literary figures I’ve “met” recently, but she is surrounded by a dazzling panoply of others. Strout is masterful with characterization, and does much with little in each story. We see Olive most often through the eyes of others–her husband, neighbors, and son.

Olive…knows that loneliness can kill people–in different ways can actually make you die. Olive’s private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as “big bursts” and “little bursts.” Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee’s, let’s say, or the waitress at Dunkin’ Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

Yet we also see them through her eyes, and its a dizzying feat of perspective, pulled off so well I didn’t think to wonder how Strout managed to create umpteen authentic voices.

The stories progress in linear time, though with flashes to the past. Each can stand on its own, yet together they form a complex whole. Olive is a woman of strong opinions, and she often irritates those around her, including the reader. Yet I found her by the end irresistible. Olive’s honesty, her pain, and any hard-earned joy she’d won were a pleasure for me to read about.

We traveled around the holiday this year, something I usually avoid. But the flight east was easy, then we met family for lunch before driving south in time for a real barbecue supper. The boys played well together, and were affectionate with family, especially their great-grandmother, recovering from hip surgery at 93. The feast came together, as did family we didn’t think we’d see because of a timely improvement for an unexpected illness. The weather was good, beautiful for our drive back to the airport. We met more family again for lunch, arrived early to our gate, and 30 minutes early home to Minnesota. I read four books in five days (Odd and the Frost Giants, Olive Kitteridge, The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel Pie Society, and The Good Thief), all of which I enjoyed.

It was a family visit with countless logistics, yet it came together seamlessly with joyful reunions, and quiet time to read and relax. I often remark that family visits are not the same as vacations, but this one, this rare perfect one, actually was. I was and am thankful for it.

The Thanksgiving table:

Creamed spinach from Smitten Kitchen:

Savory Corn Pudding, from Cook’s Country:

Savory Corn Pudding, serves 8 to 10
1 tablespoon unsalted butter , softened, for greasing casserole dish
Table salt
6 cups frozen corn
1 1/2 cups heavy cream
6 large eggs , lightly beaten
1 1/2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease 2-quart casserole dish with butter. Bring large kettle of water to boil for water bath. Bring 2 quarts water to boil in large saucepan for corn.

2. Add 1 tablespoon salt and corn to boiling water and cook for 1 minute. Drain in colander and dry with paper towels. Pulse 4 cups corn in food processor until rough puree forms, about ten 1-second pulses. Transfer to large bowl and stir in remaining whole corn, 1 teaspoon salt, cream, eggs, cheese, sugar, cayenne, and basil until combined.

3. Pour corn mixture into casserole and transfer dish to roasting pan. Pour boiling water from kettle into roasting pan until it comes halfway up sides of casserole dish. Place roasting pan in oven and bake until pudding is set and a few brown spots appear around edges, 40 to 45 minutes. Remove casserole from water bath, transfer to wire rack, and let set for 5 to 10 minutes before serving.

Make Ahead:

The corn can be cooked, processed, and mixed with the whole corn, salt, cream, cheese, sugar, and cayenne up to 2 days in advance. Refrigerate until ready to use, then stir in the eggs and basil when ready to cook.

Grandmother’s Famous Cranberry Bread, from childhood favorite of mine, and now the boys, Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin

English Toffee Pecan Pie, recipe by Marjorie Johnson (The Minnesota Blue-Ribbon baking lady), and winner of Martha Stewart’s first pie contest.

G Grod and I watched The Princess Bride with 6yo Drake and 3yo Guppy. Once the man in black turned up and began to chase the kidnappers, George asked who he might be.

“I know.” said Guppy. “It’s the princess’ friend.” G and I exchanged a significant glance. Later, Guppy asked why there were two stories in the movie, (the grandfather and the princess.) And I was worried he wouldn’t like the movie.

At dinner, I reheated some frozen mac and cheese for the boys. Drake looked at it suspiciously. “Is this new, or leftover? I won’t eat leftover.”

“New,” I lied, knowing it was close enough, as I’d added extra butter.

“I’m not eating it,” Drake announced. “It’s not new.”

The down side to having a discriminating child.