Brief, crystalline linguistic frameworks around essential, sensual experiences characterize this unusually-structured novel by Michael Ondaatje. It reads like a train of thought from start to end, drifting across space and time as they evocative memories of its characters tug at it.

It’s a jolting ride sometimes, leaping unapologetically from Anna, Coop and Claire’s family on an idyllic, Stegner- or Steinbeck-esque California farm to a brutal, drug-addled gambling montage in Nevada, where everything seems to be done in deep blues and night. Then a long jaunt in southern France where everything is different but ever so slightly the same.

Ondaantje peels his words carefully from a layered world of experience and emotional intensity. He captures well the high, sharp emotions that shape our lives, the pivots of meaning at which everything changes, sometimes across generations. Experiences had by people divided from each other by reality or time, but connected by the barest filament of something. A senescing author in Gascony, an overconfident card shark.

Don’t wait for something to happen or make sense. It is not a logical progression, nor is there the satisfaction of resolution at the end. To some it will likely feel frustrating and ill-focused. But if you half-close your eyes and let your mind loosen its grip on causality, there are some golden, sun-calmed fields in Southern France and a hermit’s cabin in the hills near Petaluma that you might want to go on a quiet, literary vacation to.

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Book #55 of 2008

Tags: Books, california, family, fiction, france, novel, reading, review

Both quiet and compelling, Groff’s imperfect but lulling multi-generational tale of a neurotic family in small-town upstate New York is charming if not a masterpiece. And the sea monster is sweet, if not profound (expect some bang-you-over-the-head symbolism).

Despite frequently-updated family tree diagrams throughout the book, keeping the generations of the Temple and Averell and Upton flocks of protagonist Willie’s family sorted out is not a minor feat. It’s easy to get lost in the branches. But for readers who are suckers for multi-generational family affairs (I am looking at myself here), the book is formulaically digestible: emotional secrets, historical ephemera woven in with mythology, madness, sadness and love.

Groff is clearly enamored with her own personal setting and background: she explains in the preface that patriarchal writer Joseph Temple is based on John Fenimore Cooper and goes so far as to bring Cooper’s characters back to life (Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook) and reworking his hometown of Cooperstown into the novel’s eponymous Templeton. This trick is more clever than integral to the novel’s core meaning.

We are introduced into Templeton’s sphere by way of Willie, a late-twenty-something grad student who is simultaneously too precocious to be believed and woefully naive. Her own personal crisis leads her to investigate the realities of her own family, realities that suddenly become more complex. Told in many voices and through many generations, “Templeton” is not without its flaws–slightly unbelievable 19th-century stylizings, a bit too clean and peachy at times, and clearly a first novel–but it is enjoyable and worthwhile. A noble first effort from Groff. Hope to see more.

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Tags: Books, family, fiction, new york, reading, review

Today is my grandmother Pearl’s 94th birthday! When I called her to wish her well this evening she was watching a calculus DVD on her MacBook. Have I mentioned how proud I am of her? In general? We talk about FDR and history and Roman epics and argue about Clinton vs. Obama (she tends toward the former, I the latter). Her life has been a winding and marvelous tale, which she’ll occasionally remark on.

As if by some sort of stroke of coincidence, a heretofore unknown second cousin of mine got in touch with me today. She is the grand-daughter of Pearl’s sister. Hence the wonderful photograph of Pearl, as nurse, from the WWII era.

Here are some things I have figured out about my family recently:

• My great-great-grandfather is named Andrew Jackson Fister. I think that’s neat. I also have another relative named after Andrew Jackson and a third named Ulysses Grant. On my father’s side, there are some Napoleons.
• My great-grandfather (Pearl’s father)–it is rumored–killed a man, moved to Colorado, and changed his last name. I happen to know what his original name is so I’ve been able to trace the family.
• Pearl spent her early life in Pinyon Mesa, Colorado, a place that doesn’t really exist now and was never much more than a sheep-herding region near Grand Junction. They lived in the open spaces, and as a girl, Pearl spent time in the wildflowers, searching for arrowheads, riding horses.
• My family on Pearl’s (father’s mother’s, I think) side goes back to well before the American Revolution, in Pennsylvania. I could be DAR if I wanted.
• Go back far enough and you’re suddenly in Hessen, Germany in the mid-17th century.
• Women in my family have a rather appealing tendency to live well into their 90s and surpass 100 on occasion. Can’t complain.

Researching family history is a wondrous but heart-wrenching process of forward and back, revelation and mistake. What have you discovered about your history? I have found intrigue, heritage and some darkness and the shadows of people, some escaping, some reinventing themselves, some hiding. Some hiding in Colorado.

Tags: ancestry, family, genealogy, relatives

Segways on Pismo Beach

Originally uploaded by lyzadanger

We went “gliding,” as my father-in-law would say. The big all-terrain tires made it more off-roady as we glided over the sand.

The photo is on the pier in Pismo Beach. It was sunny but pretty darned cold.

Tags: california, family, holidays, pismo beach, segways, Travel