Claire LaZebnik

Why I Love JD Salinger

My friend Kim gets news before I do.  So she shot me an email a few minutes ago, to tell me that JD Salinger had just died.  I’ve said to her in the past that his Nine Stories is probably my favorite book in the whole world, so she asked me if I wanted to write something about him for our bookstore blog, and maybe include my reasons for loving that book so much, since she didn’t have the same passion for it.  Salinger isn’t about Catcher in the Rye for me, I should be clear on that.  I read it once, didn’t like it, haven’t reread it.  But Nine Stories . . .  My god.  Nine Stories.

How do you tell someone why a book gets to you on some deep emotional level?

It’s one of the books that made me want to be a writer, I know that much.  And I know that every time I write a patch of dialogue that feels real to me (not as often as I’d like), I think about JD Salinger and how no one has ever written more realistic dialogue, dialogue which sounds like what people might actually say–but resonates in ways that stay with you for a long time.

And then there’s the Glass family.  Or should I say, first and foremost, there’s the Glass family, who are more real to me than most of the people I know.  Seymour and Buddy and the twins and Franny and Zooey and Boo Boo.  Did I leave anyone out?  Probably.  They weave in and out of Nine Stories, sometimes front and center (“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”) sometimes off to the side but still influential (“Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut”).

Oh, man.   “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.”  What woman can read that story and not weep for what she thought her life was going to be as opposed to what it is?  In that story, Eloise remember being in love with Walt Glass (who died during the war) and then looks at her life now, married to a guy who’s nowhere near as sensitive or smart as Walt was.  Miserable, drunk, disgusted with what she’s become, she is suddenly, savagely cruel to her own daughter.  And then she says to her friend, desperately, tragically, “I was a nice girl . . .  wasn’t I?”

Well, now I’m crying.  Salinger has that affect on me.  Seven words, that’s all it took.  Seven words–something someone might actually say–and an entire tragic life is summed up, right there. Continue reading this entry »

This is a tale of two books, neither of which I’ve read, but which together inspired me to change my life.  For at least a year.

But first, just so you know, I didn’t wake up all hungover and bloated on New Year’s Day and start making lists of how “this year is going to be different.” I’m too old to believe that January 1 is anything special. I’ve seen too many come and go and can’t help noticing that the woman who wakes up on on the first day of the new year is the same one who went to sleep the night before. She’s just a day older.

And yet there’s this:: I’ve decided to be a vegetarian in 2010.

I realize that’s not a big deal. A good portion of you reading this blog are probably vegetarians or are at least trying to eat less meat. The point isn’t that I’m doing this thing: the point is how I was inspired.

Part 1: I heard a snippet of an interview on NPR back in mid-December. I only got to hear a few seconds which is the story of my radio-listening in general since I’m always going on short pick-up drives and tend to punch the controls every few seconds until I arrive at my destination, but I managed to catch someone saying, “The best thing any single individual can do for the environment is to become a vegetarian.”

Continue reading this entry »

A Tale of Heartbreak and Hope, Told in Four Chapters

Chapter 1:  I discover Jane Austen.

I’m not yet a teenager when I come across a copy of Pride and Prejudice on my parents’ bookshelves.  It’s a copy I still have today.  It’s a beautiful, slim, surprisingly heavy paperback and really two books in one: Sense and Sensibility is the second novel.   I love the sound of the titles together and run them together in my mind: Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.  I’m not entirely sure what “sensibility” means but I figure it out when I’m reading the book.  More or less.

Pride and Prejudice is the most romantic book I’ve ever read, displacing The Scarlet Pimpernel which had formerly had that distinction.

Years later I’ll discover that every young woman in the world thinks that Pride and Prejudice is the most romantic novel ever written and that every romance novelist who has a “cute meet” or a heroine who hates the hero on first sight is trying to recapture the Elizabeth/Darcy passion.  But for now I think I’m unique in loving this book above all others.

Sense and Sensibility is good, but nowhere near as good as Pride and Prejudice.  I search out and read every other Jane Austen novel I can get my hands on.  Emma becomes my second favorite (years later it switches places with PandP to become number one).  I like Mansfield Park.  Northanger Abbey gets a big shrug.  Persuasion’s better but why did she have to make the heroine so old?  She’s already in her mid-twenties, the ancient hag.

And then . . . nothing.  No more.  No more Jane Austen.  That was all she wrote, except for some early stuff and one never finished novel.  I could have wept with frustration.  I have finally discovered the writer of my dreams but she died too young (at the age of 41).  She should have lived longer.  She should have written more.  I feel abandoned. Continue reading this entry »

Hi, everybody! (All together now: “Hello, Mrs. LaZebnik.”)

It’s been a while. Sorry about that. I’ve been kind of MIA.  I was finishing up some work and trying to relax over Thanksgiving break–except I wasn’t really relaxing because my deadline was today.

This post was written (as they all seem to be these days) for my bookstore blog, which is why it’s all about things literary.  But there’s some holiday whimsy in here too.  And a dash of me.

I figured this would be a good time to toss out some odds and ends, kind of clear the decks before the major explosion that is the winter holidays. That are the winter holidays?

First of all, run don’t walk to “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Oddly enough, it’s based on what I believe is the only Roald Dahl book that no one in my family has ever read. Maybe that was good: we brought nothing to the movie except a cautious love for Wes Anderson (cautious because we didn’t make it through that last train movie). FMF is wonderful–possibly the best movie I’ve seen this year. It’s lively but not frenetic, whimsical without being cloying, oddly relatable and absolutely gorgeous. As a side note, I have to tell you that after we moved into our current home, a neighbor informed us that Roald Dahl had lived here with his wife, actress Patricia Neal, when she was recovering from her stroke. We’ve changed the house completely, but I still feel like it’s been touched by genius. And so, for that matter, has Wes Anderson.  IMHO.

Moving on. That vampire movie sequel has broken all sorts of records. I haven’t seen it or the previous one because I couldn’t get through the first book in the series. I’m not a difficult reader. I’m the person who reads junky fantasy novels by the boatload. I LOVE an excuse to read something that’s fun and stupid–in fact, every vacation we go on, I look for one of those “lending bookshelves” where people leave the books they read on vacation for others to read, and if I find one, I take the junkiest thing I can find, preferably one with “passion,” “fiery,” or “wicked” in the title. So I’m not haughty and I’m not hard to please. I just hated the writing in that vampire book. I tried to read it twice and didn’t make it more than a few chapters either time. I realize I’m in the minority here and that millions of readers say I’m just WRONG. To each his own, right?  Don’t hate me because I don’t agree with you–there are so many better reasons to hate me.

The only reason I bring up the Vampire Book at all is because this past month I read the first two books of a YA trilogy that’s so kick-ass brilliant and wonderful, it leaves this other one in the dust.   Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games and Catching Fire are two of the best books I’ve ever read. Ever. Read. Three other members of my family share the sentiment. If you haven’t read them, I don’t care how old you are, rush out and get them now.

Go on. Go. I’ll wait for you.

Hi. You get them? Good. You’re in for some happy reading time.

(Disclaimer: I make no profit from either “Fantastic Mr. Fox” or the Hunger Games trilogy. Wish I had a hand in both or either, but I’m just a happy customer.) Continue reading this entry »

Celebrate by taking your kids to an Indie

(Hi!  How is everybody?  I’ve completely neglected this blog for a while.  My only excuse is that I’ve been kind of busy.  Really busy.  Going frackin’ out of my mind busy.  This post is actually borrowed from my other blog.  Remember: even though I’m a bad neglectful blogger, I’ll still answer any emails you send to me. xoc)

A couple of weeks ago, a teacher at my kids’ school stopped me and asked me if I had any advice on getting kids to read. He’d noticed that my kids (or at least my two younger ones, both of whom he’d taught) are voracious readers and he was wondering if I had done anything specific to nurture that. I was touched and honored a teacher was consulting me and, as always when I feel especially eager to say something helpful, my mind went completely blank and I couldn’t think of a single useful thing to say.

I ended up muttering something about how I stopped reading out loud to my kids as soon as they could read to themselves and maybe that had something to do with it?

He reacted to that useless bit of information as politely as anyone could, thanked me (lord knows what for) and went on his way.

A little while later, I had one of those hit-your-forehead-with-your-hand moments of frustration. Why hadn’t I mentioned the importance of bookstores in our lives when my kids were little? That was probably much more of a link to their love of reading than my bedtime neglect which, let’s face it, is more of a link to my laziness and selfishness than anything positive.

Here’s the thing: when my kids were little–like “what the hell do I do with these small foreign creatures?” little–I was always, and I do mean always–taking them to bookstores to pass the time. We occasionally went to toy stores too but those weren’t nearly as satisfying to me, since toy stores don’t have much for us adults but bookstores do. Continue reading this entry »

Please Don’t Hate Me Because I Don’t Know Who You Are!

A recent article in Harvard Magazine described how a team of psychologists has identified a subsection of people as “super-recognizers.”  These lucky few have an above average ability to identify others by their facial features.  These are not me.

In fact, as I read this article (which included a story about how a middle-aged Jimmy Cagney recognized a childhood classmate in the street whom he hadn’t seen since they were both kids several decades ago), all I could think of was how I still can’t recognize some of the mothers in my kids’ classes, even after meeting them two, three, four–a dozen, two dozen times.

In my panic to identify people when next I meet them, I’ll focus on one salient feature and cling to that.  One woman I know–who’s good friends with several of my good friends so I run into her once or twice a year–wore glasses when I first met her.  The next four times she said “hi” to me, I had no idea who she was, because she had switched to contacts.   She got a little testy around the fifth time I looked at her blankly and she had to remind me who she was.   To this day when I see her, while I do recognize her, I think her face looks “naked.”   

And there’s a mother at my kids’ school who has a mole and every time I see her, I think “Wait, which mom is she again?” and then I see the mole and I remember.  If she ever goes to a dermatological surgeon, I’m sunk.

So I’m obviously not taking in anyone’s actual features.  My inability to absorb the actual face forces me to seize on other things like glasses, hair, clothing–stuff that can change.   (There were two moms I used to confuse at school, but one wore more lipstick than the other.  Honestly, for a year or two, it was the only way I could remember which was which.)

Most women don’t have moles on their faces or wear distinctive glasses.  As a result, I’m so terrified that I’ll make a mistake and call someone by the wrong name, that I rarely say any names at all when I’m in a social situation–like at school or my husband’s office–where I’ve met everyone a few times and SHOULD know who they are,  but they still tend to blur for me.  It makes me look unfriendly: what kind of person doesn’t greet others by name after having met them more than once?  But it’s terror, not snobbery, that keeps me quiet.

But here’s the (to me) really weird part.  Halfway into watching a new sit-com on TV the other night, I turned to my husband and said, “See that woman?  I think that’s the same actress who plays Pete’s wife on ‘Mad Men.’”

She was wearing modern clothes, as opposed to the 60’s outfits on “Mad Men” and her make-up and hair were also completely different.  She was playing a younger character, too.  And yet . . . something about the face and voice just reminded me of that other character.  So we looked her up on IMDB.

And I was right.  Somehow I had managed to identify this woman who didn’t have a starring role in either show, was really a bit player–but still I recognized her.   

I’ve done this before.  Many times, in fact.  My husband always laughs at how we can watch a “Masterpiece Theatre” mini-series and I’ll spend half the time saying, “He was in ‘Bleak House.’  She was in an old 80’s production of ‘Jane Eyre.’  Oh, I saw her in ‘Room with a View’” and so on.

This makes me crazy.  “How is it possible,” I complained to my husband that night after we had IMDB’ed the actress, “that I can remember some stupid actress’ s face, but I can’t remember which mother is which in Will’s class–when that actually matters?”

To my amazement, he had an explanation.  They had been discussing that very issue at work (guess I’m not the only one who suffers from this) and someone there said, “People get anxious in social situations and worry about what they’ll need to say or do next, so they don’t actually absorb any new information like people’s names or faces.”

Well, that totally nailed it for me.  No one gets more anxious in social situations than I do.  I’ll often lie awake half the night before a school event, and even though the reality is usually perfectly pleasant, I’m a bundle of nerves while I’m there.  Of course it’s all a vicious cycle: a large part of my anxiety is that I don’t feel like I’m good at remembering people’s names and faces, and then I’m so anxious and scared about “performing” that I don’t really absorb anyone’s name or face–and so on.

I’m working on a solution to the problem.  My preference would be to simply stay home all the time, avoiding any and all social situations, but for some reason my husband isn’t all that eager to go everywhere alone for the rest of his married life (which might not be that long if I follow through with this). 

I also think it would help me if people could just be required to wear “HELLO, MY NAME IS  ___________” stickers 24/7 but so far that hasn’t caught on yet, nor has my movement to have people tattoo their names on their foreheads.

But I do have one last idea.  Since my facial recognition skills soar when I’m lying at home alone in my pajamas at night, I’ll just have to recreate those conditions when I’m meeting new people.  So the next time you run into me at a school or work event, come over and say hi.  I’ll be the one lying on the sofa in sweats with my feet up.   Don’t forget to come over and say hi the time after that, too.

Just don’t take it personally if I have no idea who you are.

We’ll all benefit if we agree to stop raising the stakes

My wonderful niece was out here visiting from New York and we started talking about the Public Theater production of Twelfth Night this summer with Anne Hathaway and Raul Esparza and how we both desperately wanted to see it.  The Public Theater’s very noble goal is to provide great art for free, which means you can’t just go online and point and click and give your charge card number, which is how I buy most of my theater tickets.    (Apparently there are a few tickets available for each performance for a very hefty sum, but I think they’re hard to nab.) 

Anyway, my niece said that a friend of hers did score a couple of tickets  to a performance, but to do that she had to get to the box office line at something like 4:30 a.m. because people start queuing up then to get whatever tickets are released that day when the box office opens at 8 (or whenever it is).  “I’m willing to wait in line,” my niece said with a sigh, “but not at 4:30 in the morning.  Why can’t people just agree not to start lining up until 8?  Then NO ONE has to get there that early.  But once people start going earlier and earlier, everyone else has to do it, too.”

I felt her pain.  It was a familiar one to me.   That annoying, “Why do some people have to ruin it for all of us?” kind of pain, where because other people are willing to raise the stakes, get up early, pay more money, waste more time, etc., the rest of us either have to do it, too, or lose out on opportunities and suddenly you’re in a mad race with the rest of the world for something that didn’t use to be so hard to attain.

I think it’s time to get off the treadmill.  This new financial austerity of ours might as well give birth to another kind of austerity–let’s all relax a bit, shall we?  Toward this end, I propose a contract between me and . . . well, everyone else in the country.   Some of the major points would run as follows:

LET US ALL JUST AGREE . . .

1.  To line up for tickets and events when it’s the official time and not hours earlier (or the night before.  Or two nights before).  We’ll all get more sleep and be in a much better mood for the actual event.

2. To stop tutoring our children for the SATs.  When I was in high school, studying for the SATs consisted of buying a big workbook, throwing it in the bathroom, and studying it when you were on the toilet.   Now everyone seems to take it for granted that his kid will take an SAT tutoring class AND get privately tutored.  Some of the smartest, most well-educated kids I know have spent hundreds of hours studying for a test that was originally meant to test native intelligence with the result that the SATs now are a test of whose parents can spend the most money on tutors.  This is stupid, people.  If everyone would just agree to stop with the tutoring, we’d be back to an even playing field and we’d ALL save a ton of money.

3. Similarly . . . what’s with all the private coaching going on these days?  My brother was like all-state doubles champ back in high school just from being coached by his high school math teacher who managed the tennis team.  I mean, yes, he had taken lessons over the years and gone to tennis camp, but he wasn’t “supplementing” the coaching with hours of private practice.  Now every kid I know who plays a high school sport also has his own private coach teaching him for hours every week.  Sure, the level of play has gone way up–but toward what end?  Most of these kids aren’t going to end up professional players.  Why can’t high school kids play at a high school level anymore? 

4.  In a very different vein, can we all agree that we don’t have to bring hostess gifts to every single party we’re invited to?  It’s getting so you can’t show up for an enormous cocktail party without a big gift-wrapped something in your hand.  There’s nothing wrong with that per se–I just think it would make all our lives easier if we agree that in the end it all evens out, and you don’t have to bring anything to my house if I don’t have to bring anything to your house.  There, now–isn’t that easier?

5.  To let ourselves look older as we get older.  Why do we have to look as good (if not better) in our forties and fifties as we did in our twenties?  Your body wants to spread a little bit.  Your hair wants to change color.  Your face wants to settle into a slightly different shape. The only reason we’re fighting it with billions of dollars spent in cosmetics and plastic surgery is to keep up with each other–it’s fine to look forty-five if everyone else does, but if all your friends look thirty, you feel decrepit.  Let’s all relax a bit, let that tire creep in around our middle, only dye our hair when we feel like it . . . and enjoy our middle years without feeling like we’re at war with nature.

6.  To just be mellow on the road.  Look, I know you want to get where you’re going as quickly as possible.  So do I.   When you cut me off, all you do is arrive at the next light one car-length ahead of me–and for that you risked both our lives?  But don’t slow down in front of me either–that’s not cool.  Let’s all just agree to drive at a steady ten percent above the speed limit.   I promise you it will work out in the long run.

7.  To bring down the level of our kids’ parties.  Come on.  They’re kids.  Hire a clown and serve cake.   And party favors should be a piece of candy and a little plastic toy that will break in five minutes–what’s with the huge packages of gifts my kids are bringing home that cost more than the present we gave the birthday girl/boy?  Let’s all agree to go back to backyard parties where kids run around and hit each other on the head for two hours and the cake is all homemade and lumpy.  I will if you will.

I could go on but you’ve probably alredy stopped reading.  The point is we need to stop raising the stakes and pull back.  But it only works if we ALL do it.

Please write in with your own additions to the “contract.”

Rewatching a classic with my kids

I remember the first time I saw Frank Capra’s  ”It’s a Wonderful Life” from beginning to end and it went from being “that old movie they show at Christmastime” to one of those works that stay with you for the rest of your life.  I don’t know how old I was–probably a teenager–but I think it was honestly the first movie that made me cry like a baby, tears streaming down my cheeks, the bittersweet happiness of the ending (nothing gets solved, the wrong doesn’t get righted, but none of that matters because there’s so much love) almost too much to bear.

I haven’t seen it through for years but when my daughter and I were looking for movies at the library, I realized I wanted to show it to my kids.   I wanted them to hear Capra’s message: “No man is poor who has friends” (a message, by the way, that gets made beautifully and more subtly in the documentary “King of Kongs,” which you should see if you haven’t yet).

I had told my kids it was a movie “about a man who finds out what the world would be like if hadn’t been born” and they were excited about the fantasy aspect of that–enough so to get over their deepseated suspicion of black and white movies.  Of course, I had forgotten that that part of the movie is just a tiny part of it.   An entire movie takes place before Clarence the angel even shows up.  And it’s far from the adorable bit of “Capra-Corn” that people make it out to be.

As I sat there, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” with my kids, I thought, My god, this is one of the darkest movies I’ve ever seen.

Oh, it’s not dark like, say 28 Days After–but then again, it’s much more realistic.  There are plenty of movies that use dark as atmosphere and blow things up and cut off people’s arms and all–but not many that with tender goodwill show you how growing up means surrendering all your ambitions and dreams , bit by bit, and settling for a life of pleasant mediocrity.

The beginning of “It’s a Wonderful Life” shows you a young George Bailey, filled with ambition and excitement: he’s going to travel around the world over the summer (earning his way by working on a boat), and then head off to college (which he’s had to postpone for four years to earn money for his family) and then embark on a career of designing modern buildings and mechanics.

For almost the entire rest of the movie, his dreams and hopes are systematically torn away from him.  First he can’t travel–his father dies and he needs to put his affairs in order.  Then he has to postpone going to college–the family banking business will only continue with a Bailey at the helm.  Then he can’t go to college at all, because his brother, who he was counting on to take his place at the bank, has a better future at another job.  Then the woman he loves ties him down even more: she says she never wants to leave their hometown, buys an old house, and proceeds to have four kids.  It’s also made clear to him that he can’t ever choose a career path that might make him powerful, famous, or wealthy: he’s stuck in the family business forever, never getting rich, always barely getting by, no hope for anything else in his future.

Do loving friends and family make up for the loss of all your dreams?

Well, yes, in the movie’s context they do.  Who wouldn’t get swept up in the outpouring of love and generosity that comes at the end of the movie?  You’ve got angels getting their wings, Zoo-Zoo reunited with her petals, everyone–even the nasty bank examiner–singing “Auld Lang Syne” together, and the assurance that George is now happy with his life because he’s seen what a huge effect he’s had on the world.

Only . . . the guy still never got to travel.  Or go to college.  Or design big buildings.   And the bitterness that erupts in the unbelievably realistic homecoming scene earlier in the movie–when he thinks he may have to go to jail for someone else’s mistake and is in such huge despair over what his life has been reduced to that he reams out his kid’s teacher then screams at his children and kicks over a table in his house–that bitterness was real.  It was the bitterness of diminished dreams and lost ambitions.

The thing is, most of us know that bitterness.  Maybe some of you have achieved everything you ever wanted and if so, brilliant.  But I’d say the majority of us reach our middle years with a sense that something’s passed us by, that we’ll never be one of the best and the brightest, that this life we’re living is all that we’ll ever know.   And that life may be pretty good.  It may be filled with loving families and decent jobs.  It may be successful . . . enough.   It’s only compared to the dreams we had when we were young that it’s maybe not quite enough, a bit of a compromise–even a loss.

So, once again . . . do loving family and friends make up for the loss of all your childhood dreams?  Of course they do.   They have to.  Because, like George Bailey–what else have we got?