beautiful weather

Yesterday's Weather
by Anne Enright
Grove Press, $24
September 2008

To begin with, I can’t write about this incredible volume of stories without mentioning that I was unsure whether I could appreciate Anne Enright’s writing style upon my first reading of the Man Booker Prize winner, The Gathering. But I underestimated her understated, slippery prose. Upon the second reading, I realized that a full appreciation only awaits those who examine the sinuous sentences crafted and cleverly placed for the discerning reader to discover. The themes and ideas, expressed in silkily, playfully realistic phrasings, then fully come to light and dance across your consciousness.



In light of this, a reading of the Irish author’s new offering Yesterday’s Weather was approached with this knowledge in mind. To my delight, the stories produced the same pleasures of last year’s prize winner, only more so.

Most of the stories are twelve pages in length or less. Two excellent consequences result from this brevity. The highly imaginative tales, almost all of which have female narrators, have Ms. Enright’s characteristic style, but honed to perfection, in which not a word is wasted. Secondly, they have the classically longed-for “I want to know more” factor, which I associate with other noted (yes, Irish) modern short-story writers such as William Trevor and John McGahern. Comparison with Trevor also is relevant in the deeply humane delineation of life’s absurdities and with McGahern in the shedding of a highly realistic light on relationships, especially familial ones.

I have a few favorites, called favorites partly because they reminded me of things that I already knew, but had somewhat forgotten.

The first is “Honey”, about Catherine, a woman trying to psyche herself up to have sex with a known womanizer (not her husband) while coping with the death of her mother.
“Little Sister” is an elegiac told by a young woman whose sister, Serena, is leading their family through a harrowing, prolonged bout with anorexia.

The story “Yesterday’s Weather” is told, at turns, in melancholic and hilarious fashion by Hazel, relating the everyday painful realities of trying to manage an infant and a marriage while saddled with an often clueless husband.

As mentioned by the author in her introduction, the stories are presented in reverse chronological order, the earliest being published in 1989, and she likes the idea of seeing herself “getting younger… as the pages turn.” Ms. Enright wants to think of them as “a gift…presented not just to the reader, but also to the future – in my case, to an old woman called Anne Enright, who will read this too, with a bit of luck, and laugh.”

This great collection truly is a gift, and I plan on savoring it again in the very near future.

My Gateway Book by Denise Dee

You've heard of gateway drugs? Marijuana leading to heroin? Well, let me introduce you to one of my most dangerous gateway books…

Dreamland by Kevin Baker - This was my first experience with 'historical fiction'; the very term used to make me cringe. Cracking this book open, I walked into a time machine and found myself washed up on the shores of early 1900's Coney Island; host to Dreamland and Luna Park. Baker mixes in gangsters, Triangle Factory workers, midgets, Freud and Jung, Tammany Hall bosses, opium dens and Bowery bars with a glossary to the colorful terms used by the Irish, Jewish and other characters populating the book. I became obsessed with turn of the century New York while reading this book, and it led me to:

Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle - If you only read one book about the Triangle Factory fire, make it this one.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante - Sante's pace and tone is perfection in conveying, yep, the lures and snares of Five Points and other 'unsavory' neighborhoods.

Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury - You've seen the movie? Even more reason to read the book. The movie glosses over the reality that is described in these pages.

Five Points by Tyler Anbinder - I believe this to be the definitive book on the neighborhood. Ponder how many people were crammed into each square foot. Relive the stench and the sounds and the sights. That might sound depressing; it's anything but. A classic in urban studies.

When you think about how one of the roughest neighborhoods ever produced so much culture (music, dancing, writing), it's truly astounding. This is where the freed slaves met the freed Irish, which disgusted Charles Dickens enough to write home to London about it.

Hopefully this has inspired you to think about the dangerous path books can lead you down.

Try Not To Leave Your Fingerprints On The Cover - By Denise Dee

I know it's considered low-brow for a bookseller to confess to a love of true crime books but I've always been interested in the 'anti-hero'. People who were apparently so spellbinding they could get people to join gangs/cults, commit murder, or drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Or at least that's how the story goes. There's an attention to detail and to pacing in true crime books that any writer can learn something from.

Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi - This is a hefty book but it reads as if it's 50 pages long. Bugliosi zips us through the summer of love, hippies, the political climate in America, and the 'cast of characters', then puts us into the courtroom and smack in the locations where the crimes took place. I don't know that I will ever forget the image of the Manson girls and Charlie with Xs carved into their foreheads. The most haunting part of the book is when Manson says "I am only what you made me. I am a reflection of you". Someone is always going to act out our 'dark side'.

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer - Norman Mailer to my mind is usually way too heady. In The Executioner's Song Mailer brings us into the world of feelings. Mailer (who seemed to want to portray himself as an 'outlaw') meets up with a man who shows how deep 'outlaw' runs. Mailer stays put and listens and does a great job conveying Gary Gilmore's upbringing and the paths that led him to fighting to be killed for his crimes.

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore - Mikal, a long time staff writer for Rolling Stone is, yes, Gary Gilmore's brother. Mikal takes an unflinching look at the Gilmores, Utah, and some of the doctrines and myths of both the Mormons (blood atonement, for one) and what it is to be a 'man' in the West.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote - I read this after seeing the film in high school. Even though Robert Blake is hard to get out of your head, Capote's writing had me forgetting there ever was a movie. Capote, simultaneously an 'outsider' and 'insider' in his own life, really seems to understand what it could take to get these men to the point of killing.

The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob by T.J. English - Hell's Kitchen Irish mobsters following in the footsteps of the Kerryonians, the Dead Rabbits and the rest of the Five Points gangs. This book is more brutal than the rest. It's fascinating to walk the streets of Hell's Kitchen with the writer as he reveals where the bodies are buried while showing the circuits in these men's brains that made them long to be 'important' and 'known'- even if it was for crime and murders. Not for the squeamish.

When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down by Robert Cooley and Hillel Levin - And so I end my true crime list with 'crime' inside the Chicago justice system. I worked in a bookstore in Chicago blocks from where most of the action in this book takes place. Love Cooley or hate him (and I heard plenty on both sides) he's a compelling narrator to the goings-on of the system in Chicago. Mixes in a bit of history and a lot of colorful characters.

Who needs to invent characters when real life is chock full of them?

Easter Rising - Review by Denise Dee

Quite possibly the best punk rock memoir ever written.

Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie (South Boston) and has a very delicious black humor in his writing. He is 13 when he first gets into punk- back in the late 70's. MPM comes from a very large family and you can see how punk gave him a place in the world and might very well have saved his life.

Easter Rising is also a road trip book - not just a stroll down punk memory lane. He also goes with his Ma to Ireland as an adult. Some of the roads he travels are in his head and heart, and some of them are literal roads to NYC, London, Ireland, and Paris. I felt like I was at his side listening to his stories- rather than reading words on the page.

Some of the things I laughed the hardest at were when his grandfather comes over with holy water to exorcise him- because he heard MPM has been devil worshipping with the 'punk rocks'. When a friend of his sisters tells him he heard punks like to pee on themselves, MPM writes that he is so tired of trying to explain himself (and punk) by this point that he says- "Yeah that's what we do". I also loved a part where he is exchanging notes in class with a girl who tells him her name is Siouxsie. She writes "PUNK IS DEAD- GET OVER IT ".

And this is all before he's 16.

He realized when he visits in Derry that though many of his friends back in Southie have never been to Ireland, somehow the Irish message of 'Never give up the fight' has been imprinted on their hearts.

It's the kind of book you will be calling/e-mailing friends to quote lines from. My co-worker Justin's wife, who is in her 20's, loved it as much as I did.

By the end of the book when his Ma is carrying her accordion with her on Easter Sunday (he doesn't ask her why) he realizes that you "never know when you might be called on to give it everything you have to give". I was crying.

Read it or at least go to his MySpace page and check him out.