November reading choices get some heavy lifting

Highland Park's various book clubs are taking on some of the big stuff: race, religion, politics; and also reading authors that simply want to offer a means of escape to the great wide open. Two November authors created their own universes to ask some big questions, while others painted a picture of domestic hell.

Some writers try to do both at the same time. Interesting to see which books generate the best discussions.

East of Eden (1952)
John Steinbeck

East of Eden is where Cain is supposed to have settled after he killed his brother Abel, and you find many a principal player from the Old Testament principal here in Steinbeck's magnum opus.

Beginning during the Civil War, it joins Adam Trask's journey across the country to the West with a woman who is evil incarnate, Cathy. Cathy gives birth to twin sons but promptly leaves him. The boys grow up with a very despondent father, as their mother is now running her own brothel not too far from his farm.

Their surrogate mother is a Chinese man named Lee, who looks after their house and their father. Lee's religious discussions with Adam and with a man named Sam Hamilton (Steinbeck's actual maternal grandfather), are the backbone of this book. While younger male writers such as Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem are using comic characters and other trashy genre material as their backdrop, Steinbeck stuck with the Old Testament. Cal's struggle with his own nature, the sinner and his more humane side is the main conflict in this beautifully written novel. A nice way to become exposed to Northern California.

The School of Essential Ingredients (2009)
Erica Bauermeister

This is one of the smaller novels, but it is written well and is guaranteed, if not to make you want to cook, certainly to want to eat. Lillian is a successful chef and restaurant owner whose food makes her life tastier and connects her emotionally with first her mother and then her students. We all rush around too much, eating fast food, while instead, we should 'stop and smell the roast,' to paraphrase her motto. Lillian assembles a class of students, each at a crossroads: a mother of young children with no time for herself; an elderly couple looking back at their long marriage; a young widower; you get the picture. By learning to cook crab, white cake and other delicacies, they come to value people and themselves.

This is a first novel -- perhaps in the next one, Bauermeister will get her characters interacting with more than an egg beater and rolling pin. A nice simple read that will bring you back to the kitchen. You can tell the author is a chef who believes in slow cooking and it might be a good idea to pair this book with Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2010)
Martha A. Sandweiss

Sandweiss is a history professor at Princeton University who is fascinated with the life of Clarence King, the flamboyant geologist who is credited with mapping the West soon before it loses all of its romance and becomes settled. King is from a Newport family, once prosperous but now in the late 1800s fallen on lean times. All of his life he struggles to support his widowed mother, only fifteen years his senior and emotionally dependent on him.

 

Perhaps as a result of his family, King falls in love with women who are not of the upper or middle classes, and indeed are not white. King pursues Ada, a New York domestic worker who was born a slave in Georgia. He tells Ada that he, too is black, a railway porter named 'James Todd.' The blond, blue-eyed 'Todd' explains that he had a single Negro great-grandparent and is thus himself black according to the mores of the day.

 

Sandweiss shows us how simple it is to lie about yourself at the turn of the century, to reinvent your life and history. She writes the tale like a novel, giving us lots of background on race and class during the early part of the twentieth century. The two have five children together and Sandweiss also follows their lives a bit. Lots of discussion here.

The Man Who Loved Children (1940)
Christina Stead

Another book club favorite. If you are going to be an author, it seems to help to have eccentric parents. Stead's tale of family nightmare reads as if it could be written today and Jonathan Franzen is one of its most recent descendants. Samuel Clemens Pollit, a scientist who works for the government, has his own ideas about raising his seven children. The three principal characters are Sam, his once-wealthy second wife, and oldest daughter Louise (the author), born to Sam's first wife. Uncle Sam is another blond-haired, blue-eyed wonder, wanting to raise his children without the restrictions of society or religion. His actions border on savage and cruel, and Louise stands up to him in her telling of the tale. She actually bonds with her stepmother, whose equally constant insults take a more bearable tone than her father's. Each summer Louise is allowed to escape to her mother's people who fittingly live in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, where abolitionist John Brown launched his own homebrewed rebellion against the powers that be. Don't miss this one. Who can resist a dysfunctional family on the same plain as The Glass Castle?