Cheryl Truman on books

Today’s mail brings Winging It: Dispatches from an (Almost) Empty Nest, by Catherine Goldhammer (Hudson Street Press, $21.95). As demographics go, I suspect that empty-nest memoirs are about to join the me-and-my-dawg and me-and-my-childhood category as Hot Topics for books that you probably won’t read.

And while I am always ready to be cynical, and a tiny book with a $21.95 price tag does nothing to diminish the cynicism – in particular the sentence that begins, somewhat competitively, “Harper was accepted early to her first-choice college,” because a small-minded person might infer that the book is a showcase of the author’s great parenting! a kid with a college early decision! surely no evil will ever visit this house! — Goldhammer turns a wrenching phrase here:

“I began to envision other worlds, other lives, invisible cities, trying futures on for size.  … I thought of going somewhere, visiting my imaginary dwelling places, meeting them like blind dates, listening to their stories of joy and failure, drinking their tea.”

Well, in Kentucky our blind dates don’t usually revolve around pounding down the tea, but still.

Perhaps I find this moving because I am an almost-empty nester myself, although it seems that I am the one person in America who Does Not Have a Book in Me. On the other hand? If empty nesting means that I have wheedled guilt-cash for my last vat of fund-raising cookie dough, wrapping paper or alleged discount cards, empty nesting is surely the answer to my spiritual crisis. There is a God, and His extended title is Outta My Checkbook.

And also …

The New York Times discusses the great comic novels at http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/ and writer David Kelly wonders why there are no women in this comprehensive and ingeniously blog comment-stoking survey of his fellow Times employees. (The most obvious comment-stoking these days belongs to any post about Sarah Palin. Throw up the words “Sarah Palin Sarah Palin Sarah Palin” on a blog, and it’s the automatically the gold standard of viewership. “Sarah Palin,” “Bristol Palin” and “Trig Palin,” we’re talking trifecta. If Sarah Palin had written a novel, Kelly could have readers lining up to comment.)

Because of course the answer about great comic novelists is Nancy Mitford, in Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love, although among the Southern bless-your-heart novelists the answer could also be Lee Smith and Jill Conner Browne.  In fact, if there’s a trivia question you want to ask about the 20th century, the Mitford sisters are a pretty good bet. Who was imprisoned for fascist sympathies during World War II? Diana Mitford, who had a new baby at the time. Who shot herself in the head for said sympathies? Unity Mitford. Who muckraked with the best of the muckrakers? Jessica Mitford.

But as anyone who listened to Joyce Carol Oates’ uproarious reading of her story, EDickinson Repliluxe, at the Kentucky Womens Writers conference last week will tell you: Oates works on many levels, one of them being as a completely arch and wildly ruthless social observer. In the story, Emily Dickinson (and other celebrities, among them Babe Ruth) becomes available as a sort of cross between an American Girl doll and an on-demand home companion, available at catalog outlets, warranted and possessing no civil rights. Evil and funny: That’s our Oates.