Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl

[sanguinity]

33. Sherri L. Smith, Flygirl.

Ida Mae Jones learned to fly from her father, a strawberry farmer who bought a JN-4 "Jenny" and sidelined as a crop-duster. He died in a tractor accident just before Ida Mae was able to get her pilot's license, but she's saving her money from house-cleaning around New Orleans to make the trip to Chicago to get her license -- she has to go to Chicago, because it's one of the few schools in the country that will license both "colored" pilots and women. However, before she finishes saving for the trip, Pearl Harbor is bombed and Ida Mae's older brother goes to war. Ida Mae has to mothball the Jenny; wartime rationing doesn't leave extra fuel around for crop-dusting.

A year into the war, Ida Mae is chafing to do something more for her brother than just collect nylons and recycle bacon fat, when she finds out about the WASP: the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a volunteer service designed to free up male pilots from transport flights and other non-combat pilot duties. Ida Mae has to join. Unfortunately, the WASP appears to be a segregated service (as is all of the U.S. military), and it is unlikely to be large enough to have a colored division. If Ida Mae is going to join, she's going to have to join as a white woman. And she's going to have to forge herself a pilot's license.

I liked this book a lot. Ida Mae is a joy -- she's got dreams, determination, and intense loyalty to the people who care about her -- and the challenges of WASP training, as well as the fellowship among the women she trains with, makes good reading. These women are creative and gutsy, finding ways to rewrite the rules of engagement and squeeze victories for themselves out of situations that sexist officers and instructors had planned for them to fail.

I especially liked the subplot about Ida Mae passing as white, and the ramifications of that choice. ( mild spoilers )

Smith leaves one of the sub-plots open-ended, which (surprisingly) I actually appreciated -- tying that one up would have forced Smith to unnaturally compress another novel's-worth or two of consequences into a few "she lived happily ever after" paragraphs, which would have been a crying shame. Of course, if Ms. Smith should ever choose to take up that open sub-plot in a sequel, I for one would be very happy to read it... ;-)

Felicia Pearson, Craig Laurance Gidney, Varian Johnson, Gananath Obeyesekere, Samuel Delany

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

8. Felicia Pearson, Grace After Midnight

In my last set of reviews, I wrote:

I want to know how the wives felt; I want their motives... I am asking the wrong question. I have missed the point. Not everyone's insides work the way mine do.

The gods of reading sent me Felicia Pearson's memoir to address this exact point. Before I read it, I wasn't sure whether I'd include it here, and I am still antsy, because it's a ghostwritten celebrity memoir. (From the back flap copy: "David Ritz's most recent bestsellers are Tavis Riley's What I Know for Sure and Don Rickles's Rickles' Book. He has also collaborated with Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, Laila Ali, and B.B. King on their life stories..." Not only is he white, he's a Phi Beta Kappa from UT Austin. Hmm.)

Still, Pearson's such a remarkable person - jailed for murder in her teens, only to become one of the most spellbinding actors on The Wire - that I just wanted to know more. There's definitely a voice in the book. Who knows, maybe it's Ritz, but it sounds a lot like Pearson in her interviews. And it gave me a clue to reading those Aboriginal myths.

"His being away might have gotten me mad. Can't say for sure.
Lots of things got me mad.
Back then, though, I wasn't thinking about how I was feeling.
I was just doing."

"Who did I think I was?
Why was I doing what I was doing?
I look back and wonder why.
I look back and ask myself questions that are hard, maybe even impossible to answer.
But at the time questions weren't part of my life. Questions weren't part of my thinking.
I didn't ask.
I just did."

"God knows what'll happen to me.
Does God even care?
Do I even care?
It'll be what it'll be."

In each of these passages, Pearson indulges the introspection that is afforded by the leisure of her post-Wire life; no longer selling drugs, no longer living moment to moment. What I realized, reading this, was that the myths I read and wonder about may have been told and retold by people without the privilege of introspection. I don't have a lot of experience of survival mode. I've experienced it only in passing. But I know, at least theoretically, that it drives away every thought except what is necessary to survive.

I'm sorry if I'm labouring a point that is really obvious to everyone else, but this was such a kick in the pants to me. Psychological complexity of the kind I look for in books is an artefact of the bourgeois novel tradition as an outgrowth of an emerging leisure class almost by definition. When I read a passage that is opaque to me, in which people behave in what seem to me weirdly passive ways, it would probably be smart of me to remember that the status of (for example) women in patriarchal hunter-gatherer societies can be anywhere between marginal and dire, and that I am almost certainly failing to give them the enormous credit they deserve for the resourcefulness it takes just to get by. They're not opaque people. They're people who don't have the luxury of reflection.

Sigh. I am sorry I did not already know this. What can I say, I'm a slow learner. Nevertheless, a resolution: in future I will read myths while bearing in mind that the people described therein are struggling for their lives. And I expect they will make a lot more sense to me.

9. Craig Laurance Gidney, Sea, Swallow Me

I enjoyed pretending that this was the book Junot Diaz's Oscar Wao would have written if he had been gay. The first story, "The Safety of Thorns", was my favourite; I'd had a similar idea but no clue how to tackle it - the old African gods made manifest in America during the slave era. Gidney pulls it off with beauty and melancholy and a defiant ending that pulls hope from a bad, bad place. Many of the other tales retell one of my favourite stories, a story that never grows old: a stranger comes to town, and finds out that he or she is not the only [gay|lesbian|other|just plain weird] person in the world after all. If Desire isn't exactly my friend, one of these concludes, at least he isn't my enemy.

10. Varian Johnson, My Life As A Rhombus

This, interestingly, is a meditation on similar themes, especially the war between reason and desire. It's told, by a male writer, from the point-of-view of a teenage girl who is tutoring in math, and if Rhonda didn't quite ring true for me as a teenage girl, as a math whiz she jumped off the page. Some of the little math exercises set off in boxes beside the story were genuinely witty.

In any case, getting a teen girl's voice right is, I think, fiercely hard, and I may be an unusually picky critic of this. I was a total mess from 13 to 19 (and beyond!) with no insight whatever into my own needs or wants, although I certainly thought I was an expert on both. The protagonists of most YA today seem to me preternaturally ...organized. Rhonda, despite her pregnancy and her difficulty in coming to terms with its outcome, is a good example: straight As, attractive to boys and able to describe her internal state and achieve closure in simple declarative sentences. I'm sure there are teens like that, but I wasn't one, and I didn't know any.

Nevertheless, her story is engaging and affecting, and Johnson achieves one of his stated aims brilliantly. Race is present throughout the whole book without ever once being its focus. Here as in Angela Johnson's The First Part Last, it's an inexpressible relief to read about African-American highschoolers thinking about things other than being African American highschoolers.

11. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook

Maybe this is an exclusively Australian thing (or just a me thing) but did you ever have the fantasy that someone from, say, Sri Lanka would wander into anthropology from the English literature department, take a good hard look at some of the self-serving garbage being served up as delicious food by white apologists for empire even today, and write a long, erudite, witty deconstruction of the genre that is at once generous and devastating? Taking academia to task in its own language, with a knowing wink and the utmost skill? If you share that daydream or think you might like to, if you've ever been a subject of or had glancing contact with or even heard of the British Empire, I beg of you, read this book. It's the Orientalism of the Pacific.

12. Samuel Delany, Tales of Nevèryön

Great God almighty, he's the love child of Henry James and Ursula Le Guin. WHY WASN'T I TOLD???