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Project--Ten Books that Explore Alternate Timelines

You, my lovely readers, did such a great job with the books that break POV that I'm giving you an even tougher assignment--can anyone name a book that follows the same characters through two different possible futures?  The one I've recently become aware of is Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World, which shows the two possible futures of the same woman depending on which man she chooses.  Of course, there's always that Gwenyth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, in which everything splits according to whether or not Gwenyth's character catches the tube.  The Gwenyth who does gets that fabulous haircut she was so famous for for a while and the other is stuck with the mousy brown locks.

But I'd love to know of others.  You're all so smart, I'm sure we can come up with a bunch.

Retirement

It's Spring Break time, and even when you're working on the fringes of academia--such as teaching accounting students how to undangle their participles--that means you get a week off from the office.  I chose to take mine in the Carolinas with my parents, who are retired now and ran screaming from the Chicago winter straight into the saggy cellulite-dimpled arms of Myrtle Beach, where the only thing more abundant on the ground than porn shops and strip clubs is Bible churches.  You can sin and get redeemed AND buy a hermit crab all on the same street corner.

For the last three months I've been working three jobs--my day job at the university, the more-labor-intensive-than-anticipated-but-still-rewarding online writing course, and editing other people's unpublished novels on the side.  The first job is the only one on a break, so in order to get four days at the beach, I had to bring with me my laptop, my cell phone, three file folders and a 285-page mss. that seemed to weigh at least twenty pounds by the time I'd lugged it through both O'Hare and Dulles.  I'm not officially "off" but at least I get to look at four different walls, and it's been 75 degrees here instead of 7.5.

But that's OK.  I got the mss. read and critiqued late last night and was able to spend the day with my parents on a casino-boat cruise just baaaaarely off shore.  As regular readers of this blog are well aware, my new hobby is poker (and sometimes, when poker isn't available due to lack of seats, blackjack), and any chance to play is a good one.   I ended up spending the day teaching elderly retirees to never, ever split their tens and always double down on 11.

Which goes to show that a teacher's work is never done.  Even on vacation, I'm still working three jobs at once.

And now I can retire.  At least for tonight.

News

The terrific news I mentioned before has been formally announced here.

The Secret History

I finally finished The Secret History this week.  Mostly I thought it was a great read, carefully constructed to very slowly twist the screws on all the characters, if a bit overly long, especially the first 100 pages and toward the end.  I loved, though, how Donna Tartt makes it less of a mystery who committed the murder.  Rather, it is a story of why the murder happened. 

Then, in the middle of the novel, just when the murder is about to occur, she skips the gory details and moves into the aftermath, when the question of whether the perpetrators will be caught takes over, and slowly you see all the characters unravel--some slowly, some devastatingly.  My really big beef is that the final act (SPOILER ALERT) which is the moment Henry kills himself, seemed completely out of character for him.  It was neither as noble as the narrative tries to assert nor as hopeless as it might have been.  It seemed random and futile, in fact, especially given how smart and on the ball Henry had been throughout the novel.  But admittedly the rest of the book was very clever indeed, with some beautifully twisted and coldly amoral characters.

I'm also reading James Ellroy's My Dark Places at the same time (my first forays into the murder mystery genre continue) and I found The Secret History far superior in language, character, and narrative drive.  This given that the Ellroy book is nonfiction and based on the murder of the author's own mother.  Still, it's fascinating to see how a real police case works from the inside.  If it weren't a kind of research, I wouldn't be reading it, though, so I don't think I can recommend it.  B will disagree with me, as he's a huge Ellroy fan, but then again we disagree about The Beatles too, so it can't be all peace and harmony around here.

Encounters With Famous Writers: Anne Lamott

Last summer I wrote about how pathetic I am around famous men and women and how I usually clam up when I'm in the presence of celebrity.  This is especially true of writers I admire.  Blame it on all those years in New York, where accosting celebrities in public is considered extremely uncool and something only pathetic tourists would do.  (Hence why I never spoke to Susan Sarandon, Spike Lee, and John F. Kennedy Jr., among others.)

The one time I met Anne Lamott, however, I found her to be as wonderfully quirky in person as she is in her writing. 

We were at the same writing conference where I met Frank McCourt and Sharon Olds.  Anne was on my flight coming in for the conference, the only white woman with dreadlocks on the plane, and yet still I wasn't 100 percent sure it was her at first.  (I was, however, sure I recognized W.S. Merwin, who rode with B and I to the hotel from the airport.  Topic of conversation: why he and his wife had so much luggage.  Turns out they were returning from an extended trip to Hawaii.) 

We were invited to a dinner at Hemingway's house in Sun Valley, and at the dinner we were seated at the table with some of the other fellows (read: poor post-MFA students without a book published yet who were there by the good graces of the conference) and had a chance to chat with Anne and her boyfriend at the time, a man with the coolest name I've ever heard.  They were both lovely.  I felt a little bolder and told her how much I liked Bird by Bird and said I'd made my students read it.  I still make my students read it.

The next day we were given the option of several outdoorsy activities, and B and I and our friends Steve and Leann, who were also there as fellows, decided to brave the whitewater rafting trip.  The van drive took about twelve or fifteen of us an hour out into the mountains around the Salmon River, where we donned life vests and had a brief lesson in rafting, and then hit the water.

Anne and her boyfriend went in ahead of us, and every time we came around the corner, she'd call out, "The interns are coming!  Look, here are the interns!"

Now every time I think of Anne Lamott, I remember the sound of her voice.  There was something both mocking and tender about it, as if she were keeping track of us because we were too young and clueless to look after ourselves.  I remember the glee with which she shouted after us, her dreadlocks bobbing up and down as the raft carried us all downriver.

Uppers and Downers

This week has been one wild ride.  It started last weekend when I had a moment of clarity about the new book while stuck at home in the ice storm, then went south when I had a root canal on Tuesday followed by a day of complete uselessness due to the fabulous drugs I took afterward.  Then, on Wednesday, I got some terrific news (more about that later), and on Thursday, as another ice storm was bearing down on us, I got the hell out of town and got out just ahead of the storm to head down to Atlanta for the AWP conference, where I bumped into a bunch of old friends and classmates, as I do every time I go.  I drank way too much and had a lovely visit, albeit brief.

At the reception on Friday night, however, I also had the shock of running into my junior-year college fling, a poet of not inconsiderable talent, who was there in a professional capacity with his wife.  He didn't recognize me at first, though to be fair I wasn't a blonde 15 years ago and I've put on, ahem, a few pounds since then.  But it was surprisingly lovely to see him again, and his wife seemed like a nice person.  We exchanged books (he has a chapbook out).  Then I immediately had to call B and tell him about it, since the poet and he had known each other (and of each other) and because that's what you do when you run into your former flings: tell your husband all about it.

It's strangely fitting that my Year of Lost Acquaintances continues.  Now all I need is to run into the guy over whom I made an ass of myself in high school and the kid I had a crush on in the fourth grade and the humiliation will be complete.