I hate to see a good book end

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot was my big read during my late-summer vacation. I was taken by the various trials and dilemmas of recent college graduate Madeleine, a literature student who had turned to traditional romantic novels at a time in the ‘80s when deconstruction was all the rage. She marries the depressed Leonard in a fit of romanticism but later finds that as her husband had advocated to her, love is an illusion. After Leonard abandons Madeleine and her ex Mitchell returns, to her credit, rather than accept the romanticism of an old flame’s return, she opts for a third way: Independence. The characters are a thoughtful embodiment of the Jane Austen-Jacques Derrida axis of literature. I enjoyed this book, although it wasn’t as towering as Eugenides’ Middlesex.

American Wife was a barely veiled fictionalization of the life of Laura Bush. I’m not sure how many of the details are true but the hints are there: Alice Blackwell is a librarian who marries a party boy from a rich family who buys a baseball team and later finds God, serves two terms as president and gets involved in a war in Iraq. Alice’s character is compelling and sympathetic on her own, regardless of how much she may or may not resemble the former first lady in details that are ultimately unknowable. The central tension in Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel is the conflict between Alice’s closely held liberal beliefs and the degree to which she is culpable for standing by while her husband pursued policies that her conscience rejected. This is a fascinating look into the compromises any couple makes in a marriage and in the first couple’s situation, there is the nagging feeling that the things they sublimated for the other will come back to haunt them.

In the midst of planning a wedding, it was enlightening to read Dan Savage’s account of his own reluctant nuptials, The Commitment. In contrast to Savage, I never needed to be convinced that marriage was the best course for our relationship. This book was mostly about his thought process and how he allowed himself to be convinced. He wrote this several years ago and from that perspective, things looked pretty dire for the prospects for gay marriage, a reminder of the sea change that’s taken place in half a decade.

Video Slut was diverting. Sharon Oreck dished on the details of producing videos for many an ‘80s musical icon. I wasn’t that interested in Oreck’s interludes of her personal life, so I skipped those. It was much more entertaining to read how a terrified Madonna jumped screaming off a high dive for the “Like a Prayer” video or how they had to make purple woolen bikini briefs for Prince to keep his junk warm in a bathtub during the shooting of “When Doves Cry.” Oreck wrote with an exaggerated style that might make you call into question the exact details of her stories but she's so entertaining, you don't really care if she's telling a tall tale.

Don DeLillo’s short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, was just OK. I found a lot of the stories to be unmemorable. The exception was the title story, which stood head and shoulders above everything else. It’s the story of two nuns in the Bronx who try to befriend 12-year-old Esmeralda, who is later raped and thrown off a building. Esmeralda then briefly becomes a posthumous religious touchstone as people begin seeing a vision of her on a billboard. It was a deeply moving way of depicting a character like the elderly Sister Edgar, who had become beaten down before the vision of a murdered 12-year-old restored some of her faith.

Reading "The Angel Esmeralda" inspired me to re-read the novel of which the story was part, DeLillo’s Underworld. This is my all-time favorite. I read it over 10 years ago and while so much of the book’s sweeping, poetic narrative has stayed with me, how much I remembered very specific turns of phrase, I was surprised at how much I forgot. Underworld has a tremendous scope, covering the entire Cold War, and I guess if I had to tell someone what it’s about, I’d say it’s about how what we try to bury will always resurface.

Underworld is 827 pages and now I’m about to tackle another doorstop, Anna Karenina. I like reading big books and I recently realized why: Because when it’s a really good book, I hate to see it end.