LitPicks - October '06

A Lighter Touch | Wonderfully Written | Great Works




Early Bird: A Memoir of Premature Retirement
Rodney Rothman, 2005
256 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Funnyman Rothman has written a funny book. And like all good joke stories, this one contains more than a kernel of social truth. Rothman, a former joke writer for both "Saturday Night Live" and David Letterman, is 28 and burned-out. So what else to do but retire and head to a Florida retirement community?

Out of the rat race into the swimming pool, Rothman makes some keen observations about the over-65 crowd. He detects loneliness, adolescent cliquishness, and an undercurrent of desperation. Under the Floridian sun, an ambulance prowls the streets, a ghostly reminder that death lurks sooner than later for residents.

Most of all, though, Rothman has fun, sometimes at the expense of his elders but more often at his own. This is particularly so when his displays of weakness (physical and mental) surpass those of his betters, who happen to be 50 years his senior. He joins the softball league only to learn that he's the lousiest player on the team.

He plays bingo and shuffle board, attends dances, and eats dinner at 5:00 to get the early bird specials. He listens to poolside gossip and learns that the emphasis on body beautiful is no less obsessive among the older set than the younger. It turns out there's a pronounced social hierarchy here, too (mean girls at any age). A number of book clubs say Early Bird facilitated excellent discussions about our expectations for retirement and longevity, and about the way life is, no matter the age.

See our Reading Guide for Early Bird.

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The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger, 2003
546 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Sounds like science fiction, but it's not. Under the guise of literary realism, this novel takes on time travel as a genetic disorder. In a clever, sometimes funny story, time travel becomes a prism through which we view love.

The events are delightfully screwy. Henry DeTamble travels back in time to meet his future wife at seemingly random times. He may be 36, 32, 43, or 35 when he drops in on her, so to speak, while Clare is anywhere from 6 to 17. But when they actually "meet" in the novel's real time, Henry has no idea who Clare is. That's because he doesn't travel back to meet her until after they marry.

In an even stranger twist, Henry frequently meets his younger/older self. A particularly amusing incident occurs on his wedding day, when he finds his 38-year-old self grinning up at him from under the church window. It turns out that 38-year-old Henry ends up at the altar, while 28-year-old Henry is off time-traveling.

Henry and Clare remain deeply in love, struggling to make a normal life out of an abnormal situation. Many readers I've talked with love this book and see it as a poignant story about enduring love in the face of a debilitating condition, much like a chronic illness that besets some couples in real life. I agree.

Nonetheless, the novel has a slightly commercial feel to it, as if written in the expectation of a Hollywood film (which, I understand, is already in the makes). Also, what would it be like to bump into your older or younger self? And what, for heaven's sake, would you say to yourself? What new insights would you gain about free will or the development of personality. Niffenegger never pursues these intriguing issues. Yet in all fairness, they're not her concerns. She wants to tell us a good yarn, and it that she succeeds wonderfully.

Be sure to see our Reading Guide for The Time Traveler's Wife.

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Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, 1925
228 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? A lot of us. Despite her fragile elegance, Woolf is no quaint Edwardian. She's very much of the 20th-century: a writer who can be ferociously intellectual and sometimes downright intimidating.

Fortunately, we don't have to be all that intimidated by Mrs. Dalloway. On one level, it is accessible as a novel about class, unrequited love, and madness. On another level, though, the book is a more adventuresome read. It deals in merging realities, shifting time frames, and stream-of-consciousness. Count these as Exhibits A, B, and C for literary modernism.

Modernism is an intellectual and artistic movement that emerged at the end of the 19th Century and gained momentum in the early 20th. The cataclysm of World War I and thinkers like Sigmund Freud threw much of life's certainties out the window. Artists and writers (James Joyce with Ulysses, especially) reflected that sense of uncertainty.

Woolf follows Clarissa Dalloway throughout a single day in London (as Joyce does with Bloom in Dublin). During the day, Clarissa's thoughts continually revert to the past and to two friends, Peter Walsh, who had loved her, and the sexually-liberated Sally Seton. Both characters will turn up in person during the day.

A second story woven into the plot concerns Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked war hero suffering from severe depression and mishandled by an obtuse medical system. At the end, the stories merge, tangentially, causing Clarissa to ponder Septimus's courage and her sense that she is responsible for his fate. Two worlds converge.

You may know Mrs. Dalloway best through The Hours, a loosely adapted 2002 film with Meryl Streep (Clarissa) and Nicole Kidman (Woolf). I like the film a lot, but for a more literal version see the 1997 one with Vanessa Redgrave.


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