Somebody started one of those ridiculous threads on Facebook, and naturally, I couldn't resist. This time, it was, "You are the main character in the last book you read. Your name is..."
To my utter mortification, I was forced to confess that "My name is Don Vito Corleone."
I know. I know. What can I say? It's been a stressful week. First Breaking Bad...now The Godfather. Somebody stop me, before I start referring to Snooki as the Dorothy Parker of the 21st century.
But here's the thing. A lifetime of reading, in combination with a lifetime of ups and downs, has convinced me that sometimes, you need to read for escape. There are days, weeks, and yes, sometimes even months, when it is just...All...Too...Freakin'...Much. And that's when we turn to our Guilty Pleasures.
When was the first time I read for escape? Hard to say. I think it may have been in my first grade classroom. It was back in the days of the deadly dull Dick and Jane primers, but a few story books were lined up along the classroom wall, just in case the teacher (a hardbitten old dame, who obviously loathed her job, not to mention all children) ever felt our behavior merited the reward of Story Hour. To the best of my recollection, this never happened. But by the end of the school year,I had mastered the art of reading enough to pick up some of the books I was not expected to be able to read yet and laboriously spell my way through them, always enticed along to the next page by the compulsion to find out what happened next in the Olive Fairy Book.
I do recall having the chicken pox in fourth grade and whiling away my convalescence by getting all the way up to the part where Scarlett O'Hara is throwing up that radish and vowing that she'll never be hungry again; at this point, the idea of eating a dirty radish and puking it back up turned me queasy, and I had to put that book down for a while. I remember liking the descriptions of Scarlett's party dresses in the early chapters, thinking that Melanie was kind of a simp and deserved to have Ashley taken away from her, and that Rhett Butler, since he had a mustache, was just too old.
Most people have some sort of innocuous never-fail remedy to turn to when it's All Too Freakin' Much. Some of us go for a tuna melt and a black & white shake. Some go on eBay and buy another yet designer handbag we don't need. Some of us pick up the phone and call all our friends to see if anybody else is overburdened and overwhelmed, and to confirm to ourselves that nobody else is quite as overburdened and overwhelmed as we are. (Anybody who produces a life emergency that is more drastic than our own is considered a very poor sport and doesn't get called a second time.) A few annoying ones - beg pardon, I mean, healthy ones - hit the gym or unroll yoga mats. And then, there are the chronic and incurable readers. When the heat is on, we go on Brain Vacations...and that's when the Guilty Pleasures come out.
A short list of my Never Fail Comfort Food for the Brain is (as they say in legalese, including, but not limited to):
- Anything by Betty MacDonald. Best known today for her children's series about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the little woman who lives in an upside-down house and has an unending supply of amusing magical remedies to cure children of their faults (I find myself, on occasion, wishing I had a vial of Interrupter Powder that I could blow onto unwary family members and watch their mouths snap soundlessly open and shut like so many goldfish when they try to jump in and beat me to the punchlines when I am regaling dinner guests with my best stories), Betty MacDonald scored a surprise bestseller with her wittily woeful tales of Life on a Backwoods Washington State Chicken Farm in The Egg and I. She makes it all sound pretty sprightly, including chicken droppings, an unexpected visit from an escapee from the local asylum that sends her reaching for the poker (instead of for the rifle her husband has taught her to use in case of emergencies, such as a lunatic trying to climb through your window when you're home alone and you live 5 miles away from anybody, anywhere), and the shenanigans of Ma and Pa Kettle, who live on the next farm and never pay for anything they can borrow from a neighbor. Still, it comes as no real surprise to the reader that in her next book, MacDonald has scurried back down off the mountain, gotten a divorce and found an office job in Seattle.
- Anything by Florence King. I first discovered her by reading Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, a very funny, very bawdy memoir that reads like a novel. Since all of the people in it are gloriously loopy (there is a hypochondriacal Cousin Evelyn who, convinced that "My womb is falling out!" goes into a squat on the boardwalk and tries to catch it in a pickle jar) and since the author, a child of the Fifties, discovers that it is perfectly all right for a gently-bred Southern lady to bed down with partners of both sexes, as long as she never acts trashy by smoking a cigarette in the street, it took a while before I found out that - O, horror! - when she is not writing fondly about her nutty family, King is a conservative gun-nut of the stripe that makes Charlton Heston look like Brigitte Bardot. By that time, I was hooked on her sheer elegance as an erudite and scholarly prose writer who is also funny as hell, so now I read the good stuff and merely flip past anything relating to politics with a shudder. Florence King on the subject of Lizzie Borden is - well, words fail me, but I read it whenever I really need something to get me snorting with glee. It's all sardonically splendid, but the kicker is the explanation that WASP-y little Victoria Lincoln, a Falls River native who grew up to become Lizzie Borden's biographer, was given by her parents when she asked why they were not on speaking terms with their neighbor, Miss Lizzie:
"Well, dear...she was very unkind to her parents."
- Forever Amber. The extravagant costumes! The bitchiness! The indiscriminate sex-for-material-gain! Is it New York in 2014? No, it's Restoration London, complete with the Great Fire, Newgate Prison, and the Bubonic Plague! And there is always that great imponderable to ponder - which fictional spitfire is the more morally abandoned - Scarlett, or Amber?
- The Godfather. So, how many of you knew it was a book before it was a movie? Be honest! Read the book, and you'll find out why The Godfather, Part III was such a stinker. It's because the novel was too long to make into a single movie, so Part I and Part II are pure Mario Puzo, but God only knows where they came up with the tripe that they put in Part III. Puzo may be a hack, but he's a gifted hack. He knows how to tell a story, and his techniques of interspersing action with exposition and flashback are actually quite sophisticated. And speaking of gifted hacks, you know who else I like? I like
- James Cain. Most of James Cain, anyway. Mildred Pierce. Serenade. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Double Indemnity. All right - I've tried three times, and for some reason, I've never made it all the way through Love's Lovely Counterfeit. I still don't understand what it is that makes that one so different from the rest of them. Maybe it's that Cain doesn't bring on the femme fatale fast enough. Incidentally - did you know that Caine was an aspiring opera singer in his youth, and that's why opera singers appear so often in his books?
One of the finest passages in Mildred Pierce didn't make it into the movie, because Hollywood decided that portraying Vida Pierce as a ruthlessly ambitious opera singer was needlessly complicated, when all they really had to do was make her man-crazy for her mother Mildred's rich boyfriend. But in the novel, the vocal instructor Mr. Treviso, who, thanks to Vida's immense musical talent, takes her on as a pupil despite her loathsome personality, gives her long-suffering mother this pithy explanation of What Makes Vida (Such a) Tick (reproduced here with the original phonetic spelling):
(Your daughter Vida) is snake...No, is coloratura, is much worse...Coloratura soprano love nobody but own goddamn self. Is son-bitch-bast', worse than all a snake in a world. Madame, you leave dees girl alone...Madame, is special fancy breed, like blue Persian cat. Come once in a lifetime, sing all a trill, a staccato ha-ha-ha, a cadenza, tough stuff...All coloratura crazy for rich pipple, all take no give, all twiddle a la valiere, all same, every one. All borrow ten t'ousand bucks, go to Italy, study voice, never pay back a money, t'ink was all friendship. Sing in grand opera, marry a banker, get da money. Got da money, kick out a banker, marry a baron, get da title. 'Ave a sweetie on a side, guy she like to sleep wit'. Den all travel together, all over Europe, grand opera to grand opera, 'otel to 'otel - a baron, 'e travel in Compartment C, take care of dog. A banker, 'e travel in Compartment B, take care of luggage. A sweetie, 'e travel in Compartment A, take care of coloratura - all one big 'appy family.
James Cain likes to write about sleazy people, their greed, and their sexual obsessions. And I like to read about 'em.
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