Tam Lin

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean

The classic story about the headstrong Janet who defies Tam Lin to walk in her own land of Carterhaugh and thenmust battle with the Queen of Faery herself for possession of her lover's mortal body and soul in the twentieth century. Set in a small Midwestern college in Vietnam-era America, Tam Lin is a contemporary fantasy about a heroine poised in that twilight between youth and passion.

This review is about Tam Lin, or as I like to call it, The Evolution of an Asshole. Not in the scatological sense. More like in the four-letter word sense. Janet Carter is a real dipstick. I'm not saying she's not realistic, I mean, we all know someone who was that person in college, heck, I was that person. But even I think it's kind of rank to be all,"I know you just got broken up with in a shitty way, but I hate even pretending to be sympathetic so much I have to trade off the job with someone else," and then turn around and use them for their dorm room. That scene where Janet gets told she's really not all that big hearted was pretty much the high point of the book for me. Suck it, Janet!

But Janet truly does become a much nicer person by the end of the book - four years down the line, and she finally learns not to be such a holier-than-thou snot. This is the second time I tried to read the book, and I gotta tell you, it was painful at first. Pamela Dean makes the weird decision to spend progressively less and less time on Janet's life as we approach the climax of the book, so we get about 180 pages on the first month, then another 130 on the rest of the first year, then 60 on the entire second year, then a mere 20 on the third year, then the whole last year takes up about 55 pages. And I'm pretty sure that's only because Dean had to stuff 80% of the plot into that, otherwise it'd be, like, four pages. What's even more obnoxious about it is that Janet as a freshman isn't nearly as fun to read about as Janet as a senior. Janet as a freshman is that kid who thinks that anyone who isn't exactly like them is barely even worth pretending to be nice to. Janet as a senior actually has feelings besides superiority, canyoubelieveit?

As you might have been able to tell, I was not a huge fan of the book. And I don't even know why, because this has been recommended by so many writers and readers that I trust. I just did not like it. It doesn't help that all of the characters felt supercilious and unsympathetic, and that (as discussed above) the book feels lopsided, so that the point to which it is building is almost an afterthought, like a snapshot of a more exciting story tacked on to a long treatise on how Janet Carter spent her freshman year. Plus, I was annoyed at how Janet managed to be friends with Nick and Robin, because let's face it, these guys are some real pieces of work. I don't care how many times you've been to college, when you attend a play, you sit your ass down and you shut the fuck up. People who talk and sigh loudly and wiggle around to impress upon you that how much greater their opinion of the play is than the play itself are jerkwads. Don't feed into their childish demands for attention. I once took this guy to a play (WHY, KATIE, WHY) and he basically did this thing, you know, the whole, my boredom with sitting here is more important than other people's experiences thing, and I pretty much never spoke to him again. I drove him back to his place in silence, my hands gripped tightly behind the wheel lest I be tempted to strangle him.

There was one line I particularly liked, because it swept me off into a frenzy of pleasurable imaginings, i.e., ones that distracted me from the actual story. I'm talking about the one where one of the guys is all, "Life's too short to be petty." Now, that's not a statement that I've never heard before, but this time it got me wondering, does this mean that if life were longer, it would be okay to be petty? So that people who live forever are incredibly nitpicky? Does this explain why vampires are always attracted to teenage girls in the novels? Is it just like cleaving unto like? I've always thought if I had a lot of time on my hands I would be pretty chill about the whole thing and not get fussed about the little details, but maybe not. Maybe I would be like, "You returned my book with dog eared pages? I'ma get you arrested for making pot brownies."

And I just could not get behind all the literary quotes in the book. I am not an English major. In fact, I hate English classes, mostly because most English teachers are fans of the "But what does Hamlet's talk with Yorick's skull mean?" school of thought whereas I am more of the, "It means Hamlet's off his rocker," school. And the more irksome I find a character, the less inclined I am to examine their motivations (I loathe Hamlet, and for that matter most of Shakespeare's 'great' tragedies. I cannot and will not give up my abiding loyalty to Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors, which my eighth grade teacher infuriatingly dismissed as "bathroom humour." Someday I will get you back for that comment, Ms. Banks. Of course, when I was younger I also liked Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom best, so maybe my taste is suspect). So all the deep character-revealing excerpts from poems and such that they all quote was just wasted on me. It was all tedious. Like that scene in Gattaca that my mother and I like to do to each other, where Jude Law just drawls, "I'm bored of talking to you. I'm bored." Gosh, that movie is good. And I hate that Janet quotes all these long passages. Robin and Nick also bother me, yes, but I am willing to give them a pass because when I'm five hundred years old maybe I'll have memorized Spenser's entire canon, who knows. But Janet? Uh uh. No one who is not actually (so many actuallys in this post!) a five hundred year old poet would have all that memorized. Heck, I couldn't even get the Jude Law quote right when I first typed it!

I will say that the end of the book is pretty fun, though. I don't think it's worth slogging through the beginning, but maybe it's better to have a terrible beginning and a good ending than a good beginning and a terrible ending. I'm still confused about all the pregnant girls who committed suicide though. Is Dean suggesting that these guys knocked the girls up and then the girls were so upset they committed suicide? Or that the girls couldn't manage to rescue the boys so they committed suicide after their lovers' deaths? It was weird. And how come nobody noticed that all the classics majors are like, seven year seniors? Doesn't it worry the dean of the school that no one in the classics program is graduating on time? And how is it possible to switch from Classics to English and yet still have to take three additional years of credits, how does nothing from Classics fulfill the English requirements? It's not like you're switching from film production to chemistry.

I have no more to say on this book. It's boring, I'm bored.

Fox Girl

Fox Girl, by Nora Okja Keller

Set in the aftermath of the Korean War, Fox Girl is the story of its forgotten victims, the abandoned children of American GIs who live in a world where life is about survival. The "fox girl" is Hyun Jin, who is disowned by her parents and whose life revolves around her best friend, Sookie, a teenage prostitute kept by an American soldier, and Lobetto, a lost boy who makes a living running errands and pimping for neighborhood girls.

I was describing this book to my mother and I said, "I dunno, it kinda looks like a children's book, but I don't think it is," and she said, "I hope it's not a children's book." And then I said, reflecting on it, "Yeah, probably not, there's a pretty brutal gang rape scene in there," and then she was silent, probably in respect of my absolute inability to delineate what makes a children's book a children's book. And I don't want to spoil the book for you, but trust me, you're gonna thank me later for not letting you get to that scene unprepared.

Fox Girl is the story of Hyun Jin, who kinda gets sucked into the world of prostitution and sex slavery by accident. She's born with a bad luck mark, a large black splotch, on her face, and it is an ill-fated mark of her destiny. Throughout the book, the tale of the fox girl is told several times, in different incarnations - in some versions, she is a a thief and a murderer, in others, she is merely trying to fit in, in a world which isn't hers. Hyun Jin is all of these girls, both victim and abuser, as she charts her course through the camptown life.

As the book begins, Hyun Jin and Sookie are best friends, despite their differences, mostly because Hyun Jin is a teacher's pet and Sookie is a half-American whore's daughter and they share a bond of being outcasts. Events begin to spiral out of control when Sookie's mother, Duk Hee, disappears to the "Monkey House" which is a hospital and provider of abortions. As Sookie struggles to survive in her mother's absence, Hyun Jin is a terrible friend, bringing her food only when she remembers, and only when Sookie is agreeable enough to her will. When Duk Hee's American GI boyfriend comes looking for her and finds Sookie, starving, instead, things begin to take on a tinge of inevitability for Sookie. Hyun Jin, who really is kind of a bitch, still can't manage to untangle herself from Sookie, and winds up getting disowned and thrown out on the street after discovering that she is not the daughter of two upstanding Korean citizens, but Sookie's half-sister, the child of Duk Hee and Hyun Jin's father, who wanted a child but could not get one with his sterile wife. Her father's love is not enough to overcome his wife's hatred of the ill-marked child who was given to them, and who utters the self-fulfilling prophecy that blood will tell. Hyun Jin winds up staying with Lobetto, a half black, half Korean boy who runs errands and hangs about with Hyun Jin and Sookie sometimes. When Hyun Jin finally gives in to economic pressure, Lobetto is all too ready to introduce her to her new reality.

In some ways, Hyun Jin's introduction into the world of sex slavery is worse than Sookie's, and is all the more brutal for her naivete. I really wanted to shake Hyun Jin, about 80% of the time. You see her just not getting it, and you want to yell at her for her stupid choices. It's a feeling I tried not to have, since she is more than repaid for her stupidity. The unrelenting stubbornness and take no shit attitude which got her into the mess in the first place is also what helps her claw her way out of it, though. I have to say, the most unrealistic part is when she becomes "popular" because she knows how to individually accommodate each man she services, because if there's one thing about Hyun Jin that sticks out, it is her absolute inability to read people or compromise.

The gang-rape/de-virginizing of Hyun Jin leaves her pregnant, which she (irrationally) decides to keep. When she loses the baby, in suspicious circumstances, she loses herself as well for a time, until she discovers that Sookie is pregnant. Hyun Jin makes a devil's pact: Hyun Jin will support Sookie if Sookie will keep the baby. In a world where the market is flush with young Korean girls prostituting themselves for GIs, Hyun Jin distinguishes herself by allowing any indignity to be performed on her body. After the baby is born, however, Hyun Jin finds it in herself to fight for a better future.

I know that's a lot of plot up there, but I kinda need to talk it all out, like therapy. I can't really do a critical review as I am still turning over the story in my mind. This is a killer of a book, and all the more sorrowful because this world is not a fantasy, it is history. The three young people who make up the center of the story - Hyun Jin, Sookie, and Lobetto - are sadly cruel to each other, demanding everything that it is possible to give. Lobetto and Sookie are more straightforward than Hyun Jin - they just want her body and her cooperation, while Hyun Jin wants their hope. They are all oddly loyal, even as they make each other's lives wretched.

It's in many ways a story that says that the family you are born with is not as important as the family you create. Despite the ways in which they use and abuse each other, Hyun Jin, Sookie and Lobetto are also the only ones keeping each other afloat, and Lobetto's final act is to give Hyun Jin the chance he never had. But at the same time, their closeness is poisonous, their ties to each other also binding them into the same old patterns. Only by separation are the three of them granted a future.

Besides being an absorbing, if depressing, look at the problems created by the American military in Korea, I'm not entirely sure what I should be taking away from the book. I don't think it's hopeful - even as Hyun Jin narrates her last chapter, she alludes to the fragile peace of her home, and the ever-present threat of destruction. In the end, Hyun Jin must let go of Sookie, her dark sister, who cannot leave the only world she's ever known. You'd be messed up too, if you were her, but you still can't help but hate a world that makes people like Sookie and Lobetto, and then abandons them.

It also suggests that you cannot escape fate - Sookie and Lobetto's courses were set for them long before Hyun Jin realized the depths to which you can sink, and only Hyun Jin, who was never raised in that world to begin with, manages to escape it by the end of the book. In a way, blood did tell, just not the way in which her mother believed it would. You almost don't want to root for Hyun Jin, because she is what Sookie accuses her of being: the fox girl who, taken in by a human family, eats them all in her hunger. But her courage and bravery make you admire her in spite of yourself.

It's a tough subject, and a tough read. Keller does a good job with the writing, and the twisted English phrases which mean nothing to Hyun Jin give off a detached feeling of unreality. It's a good book, and it makes me want to read more about it in detail, in a non-fiction format. South Korea has a prostitution problem, created by WWII, and exacerbated by the American military afterwards. What has been done is shameful, but there is hope for the future.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

Joe Kavalier, a young Jewish artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just smuggled himself out of Nazi-invaded Prague and landed himself in New York City. His Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay is looking for a partner to create heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit America - the comic book. Drawing on their own fears and dreams, Kavalier and Clay create the Escapist, the Monitor, and Luna Moth, inspired by the beautiful Rosa Saks, who will become linked by powerful ties to both men.

I hope everyone is ready for another nonsensical post in which I ruthlessly try to extract meaning using only my unaided brain. You bring the popcorn, I'll bring the metaphors. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I am only typing out once, and will now abbreviate to K&C which sounds like a baking powder manufacturer,¹ is a thick, pulitzer-winning book on comics, golems, jews, homosexuality, WWII, magic, and, most important of all, escapism. I actually read this book because of my overweening curiousity about my family's copy of the book, which was given to my brother many years ago by a young man who was hitting on him. My brother was, at the time, both seventeen and a clerk at the bookstore where it was bought. Customers take note: Don't be gross and hit on the hardworking members of the service industry when they are just doing their jobs to serve you, especially when they're still in high school, you creepoid. Anyway, so this guy gives my brother K&C, which has an inscription that says:

"Apparently this one's a good one for some such as we who are headed to 'The City'. Drop me a line."²

And ever since then, I have been dying to know what the fuck he meant by that. What is "The City"? Who is going there? Why is it capitalized? What does it all mean?!?!?!? and it's only taken me ten years to find out!

Scratch that, I still don't know what it means. There is not, as far as I can tell, a "City" in K&C. There is a city, New York City, in fact, but not a "City". And it's not like my brother going to a real city at the time, he was actually going to be moving out of a city. So I can only assume it was a metaphorical city. Maybe we can take a hint from Captain Hammer of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, who seems like a man who knows his way around a metaphor:

"The hammer is my penis."

Oh, well, okay then. I'm not even sure what I'm talking about anymore, but I think I should get back to the book, which is ostensibly the reason we're all here today.

I think that Kavalier&Clay is a well-written, thoroughly exhaustive book. That's not to say it didn't have problems. But the problems that crop up in a book of Kavalier&Clay's caliber are not the same kind of fun-destroying problems that crop up in, say, "The Sheik's Pregnant Heiress Secretary". I mean, even if you're not swept along in it, at least you won't hate yourself afterwards.

Let's get the story out of the way first: It begins, well, not quite at the beginning, when Josef Kavalier and Samuel Klayman meet for the first time. Then we back track to Josef's daring escape from Prague during the crackdown on Jewish citizens, and moves forward into Kavalier & Clay's partnership, their comic hero the Escapist, and jogging swiftly through the build-up to and entry in WWII, with Josef's struggle to free the rest of his family and their first romantic relationships, before jumping abruptly twelve years later, and the final act.

One of the things I didn't find particularly great about Kavalier&Clay was that I felt that it was one-sidedly plot-driven, rather than character driven. It seemed sometimes like Joe and Sam were blown always by things happening to them, and never by making things happen themselves. It's as though they were little pinballs, wound up and let loose, buffeted by outside forces into changing directions but never themselves making a choice. In the final part, there is a story about Harry Houdini and his wife, no more than a few pages long, and I felt like I got to know the wife better than I knew Joe or Sam. They had quirks, yes, but put them in an unfamiliar situation, and I could not have said which way they would jump. My standards might have been a tad high, since I was also catching up on episodes of Friday Night Lights when I was reading Kavalier&Clay, and that show does character like nobody's business. It does character so well that you actually forget that half of the show is made up of absolutely asinine and/or ridiculous plots like the time they made a sidekick geek high schooler character murder a rapist/stalker who then covers it up and lies to the police about it. Like, this show is about a high school football team, what the shit is that? And yet! That is the beauty of character.


The flipside to this equation though, is that the plot is absolutely stunning. (It'd have to be or else the book would have been mulched). It's very in the spirit of comic book heroism, and Chabon exploits that by setting his characters up, often at the beginning of a chapter or a section, in a weird or wonderful situation, and then later going back to the origins and working up to why, for example, Joe is suddenly threatening to jump off the Empire State Building after a 12 year absence. Haha, SPOILER! It's hard for me to explain if you don't know anything about comics, but it's very !comic book cover! wait, wait, actual story line, things that give the cover context and make it less absurd. Chabon really brings the events to life, and they're also very comic book in that they're larger than life, everything, all the time. Joe doesn't just enlist in the navy - he gets sent to Antarctica, and lives in a snow tunnel and everyone around him dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and then he and his crazy bunker mate make a pact to kill the last person on the continent who is a Nazi, only his pilot gets a burst appendix, so he crashes the plane, and then Joe tries to make conciliatory overtures to the German, but the German gets shot anyhow, and Joe winds up dragging this dead body along the ice for miles, and meanwhile you're like, what the...? How is nothing in that previous sentence made up?! I swear to you, it's true.

My other beef with Chabon is how he thinks I (and you too) am a Special Slow student.³ Yes, it may take awhile for things to sink it, but you don't need to shout, Michael. I am referring, in particular, to the scene in which Sam and Joe dream up the Escapist, and Chabon does this:

Page 119:

Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat — was, literally, talked into life. Kavalier and Clay - whose golem was to be formed of black lines and the four colour dots of the lithographer - lay down, lit the first of five dozen cigarettes they were to consume that afternoon, and started to talk.

(And side note, how fucking awesome is that? Blew my mind. Chabon can write, no doubt about it. But he doesn't think much of his readers).

And then page 134:

The sound of their raised voices carries up through the complicated antique ductwork of the grand old theater, raising and echoing through the pipes where it emerges through a grate in the sidewalk, where it can be heard clearly by a couple of young men who are walking past, their collars raised against the cold October night, dreaming their elaborate dream, wishing their golem into life.

Like, okay, you were right, I needed that kick in the pants to get it the first time around. They are creating a golem, a creature enlivened by words and given a soul and sent off into the world. I was amazed, I hadn't made the connection. But your insistence on repeating yourself cheapens the effect. It's a golem! I got it! You don't need to bludgeon me with it.

And if that doesn't make you nuts like it did me (I can be tetchy, I admit it), how about their names, Kavalier and Clay? Could you get more anvil than that? Kavalier is not cavalier, exactly, but he is a cavalier, a soldier, a mounted gallant tilting madly at windmills. His whole mission: Escape from Prague: Family Edition embodies that romantic, stubborn era. Meanwhile, his buddy "Clay" over there is the embodiment of solidity, of opaqueness, and also represents the final golem of the book, clay brought to life by his own words, his fatal testimony. It's like Chabon didn't trust us to get it, so he was like, I'll put the fucking clue bus in there, that'll run em down.⁴ That, to me, is Chabon saying this:

"The hammer is my penis."

Another big theme of the book is escapes. Literal and figurative. The comics are escapism, the hero is called the Escapist, and Joe literally escapes twice: once in Prague to avoid death, once in New York City to avoid life. Sammy only manages to escape by the skin of his teeth, which is a lot more horrible than it sounds, before he escapes a final time, which is not so much an escape as it is a release.

You know what this book actually needs more of? It ain't four dollar words. I think it needs more golem! Now, I will warn you, everything I know about golems I learned from Terry Pratchett (I feel like I said that about something else in this blog, which is either sadly indicative of schools these days, or awesomely indicative of Sir Terry). However. I was more affected by the opening of the golem's coffin than I was by Tommy's death (Caveat: this may have been because I was like Han Solo in the garbage chute, all "I have a bad feeling about this," in regards to Joe's one-man crusade to rescue a boatload of children (not an exaggeration) and I am nothing if not an inveterate ahead-reader when I get anxious about inevitable tragedy). I may have also misled myself (I accept all blame for this) into believing that Kavalier&Clay would involve some sort of golem revenge-rampage, which I think would really have lightened the mood and given us all something to cheer for.

I can't remember if I wanted to talk about anything else, but I will say that it's worth a read, it's work, it won't necessarily be a delight, but I think it's worth the time, and it'll make you feel smarter. It's a unique book, that's for sure, unless there's a whole comic-book-origin-story-spirals-into-madness-and-skinned-dogs subgenre I'm missing out on. Don't expect much depth, but the pop and sparkle are enough to make you forget about it for awhile. Now I have to go breath life into this particular golem, which I hope lurches all over your doorstep, shedding mud everywhere. Get it? I made a golem. Of words. Fine, I'll spell it out for you:

The golem is my penis.

¹I pretty much know Where the Red Fern Grows by heart. I mean, how else could Billy have saved up $50 to buy his two pups if not for his trusty KC Baking Powder can?! Does this book still make me cry even though I've read it, like, seventeen times? Am I tearing up right now? YES and YES.


²Although it is not important for this anecdote, you may be interested to know that this gesture might have gone to better effect if my brother were actually gay himself. Moral of the Story? DO YOUR RESEARCH.



³Not that this is relevant at all, but why is the entire text of Up the Down Staircase on some Russian website? Complete with doodles and everything! Sometimes the internet mystifies me. And often it does so while violating copyright laws, so this is a red-letter day all around, I'm sure.




⁴What's with all this swearing? It's not the heat, it's the humidity; I should have written this yesterday, when it was abnormally cool outside. Instead I'm in here trying to keep my fingertips from sweating.