I made more trips by plane this year than normal. Here are reviews of a couple of books that I picked up in airport bookstores.
The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks is the subject of a new motion picture. It is a predictable love story narrated by a man in a nursing home whose wife has Alzheimer’s Disease. Though touching, in fact heartrending, at times, the story never lingers beyond the quixotic story line. Good writing saves the novel from descending into romantic drivelry. Sadly, though, the individualistic slant of the novel annoyed this socially conscious reader. Sparks presents Alzheimer’s as a personal tragedy that robs one man of his wife, and the wife of her dignity.
The problem with this novel is that it deepens the perception that Alzheimer’s is a personal tragedy rather than a social problem. No one denies the pain Alzheimer’s wreaks on families – even Ronald Reagan’s. My own mother died from complications of the disease last year. I would like to see a novel that assesses the damage Alzheimer’s does to communities, cultures and the world economy. Or, perhaps, a novel about the financial burdens US citizens must shoulder when family members have the disease. I realize I am accusing Sparks of writing his own novel and not the one I would write – but hey. A little old-fashioned socialist realism would be so welcome today.
The other novel is The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. This is Kidd’s first novel, and it suffers from the common pitfalls of most first novels. However, although the story is contrite and thoroughly predictable, Kidd’s level of social consciousness surpasses that of many white southern women writers.
It is about a white teenage runaway in 1964 South Carolina. The main character, ironically named Lily, runs away from her abusive father, T. Ray, with Rosaleen, her African American maid, whom some local whites assaulted and jailed. The pair escapes to the town of Tiburon, where they move in with a trio of fascinating Black women, named May, August and June, engaged in a honey-making business. In the end, Lily stays with the Black women, forming a tight makeshift family more real that that of her widowed and bitter father.
That said, the novel suffers from excessive attention to heroic individuals. The main story line is about Lily’s gutsy determination to find out whether she was truly responsible for her mother’s death when she was a small child. Heroic white men punctuate the thin but present Civil Rights theme. Lily’s whining self-pity is occasionally irritating. There is also a persistent and occasionally confusing symbolic theme shaped around the Virgin Mary, which is the image printed on the honeymakers’ labels. Otherwise, the book is laced with tons of trivia about the lives and mating habits of bees.
In the end, I must give both novels a negative assessment. The main characters in both stories are self-interested soul searchers. Noah Calhoun finds his soul mirrored in the eyes of his dying wife, and Lily finds her lost mother inside her own heart. These are typical romantic themes, and I find them stultifying. But then, why should I expect something different? They are, after all, American novels – written by and for proponents of capitalism in a self-interested society.
Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook, New York, Warner Books, 1999.
Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees, New York, Penguin Books, 2003.
