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This is what my edition looks like, and while it is so very '80s (down to the very odd posing)...

...I cannot imagine who is buying this newer one. When I glanced at it I thought the boy on the cover was an old lady ghost. That can't be what they were going for.

“This” is Paula Fox’s ONE-EYED CAT, a classic (a Newbery Honor) that I discovered only recently, and the problems of the book’s beginning were heightened by the fact that I couldn’t really get my head around the character; take this scene early on:

“I believe it must be close to your birthday,” she added. Ned was surprised; grown-ups often recalled things he thought they would have forgotten.

What kid doesn’t believe adults are always thinking of them and their birthdays? I scoffed. I now think this was in character for the book’s protagonist, an extraordinarily gentle boy who makes a mistake that leads him into secrecy and misery throughout much of the book.

Paula Fox, in fact, doesn’t mess around with her characterizations. The character painted with broadest strokes in this book is one Mrs. Scallop:

Ned went over to the radio and drew a finger down the back of the bronze lion. He imagined Mrs. Scallop saying, “Mrs. Scallop doesn’t dust lions.”

Or take this exchange that I particularly related* to:

He opened his mouth and she said at once, before he could speak, “Calm down, calm down.” He hated the way she spoke in that false soothing voice, as if she owned the country of calm and he was some kind of fool who’d stumbled across its borders.

But Fox rescues Mrs. Scallop from being a parody, not by redeeming her as much as simply revealing her. At the end of the book I still didn’t like or even particularly respect her, but I truly believed in her.

What I love about Fox is how moral her books are, and by that I don’t mean that she moralizes. I mean, instead, that she presents characters whose choices matter, and she shows us how they matter not by over-dramatizing their consequences in the outside world, but by showing the characters realizing how much their own sense of themselves depends on what they do.

In ONE-EYED CAT, I also particularly like the relationship between Ned’s parents. His father is the town minister and his mother, because she is the mother in an atmospheric novel for kids, has a mysterious ailment (I believe its technical name is Disneyosis). We get tiny glimpses of the family’s complicated relationship to religion; Ned remembers that before his mother was sick, his father (who provides very loving care for his ailing wife) never spoke in his “preacher voice,” but now he sometimes uses it like a shield; Ned’s mother has her own beliefs, which are not necessarily her husband’s, and not necessarily anything she feels an urgent need to spell out to Ned. They seem like real people, in other words.

And… holy shit, you guys. Writing this post and thinking about how principled Fox’s books seem to me made me want to learn more about her, and the first thing Google has taught me? Paula Fox is Courtney Love’s grandmother.

That kind of just took the wind out of whatever I was going to write. I leave you with that odd bit of trivia.

* One of my boyfriend’s favorite ways to annoy me — one of many, I might add — is to adopt just this condescending tone. “There, there, relax,” he’ll say, just to piss me off. “Just — shhh…... Just calm down.” He does it because it drives me to violence. He perfected this technique on his sister growing up; I think it’s a wonder she still speaks to him.

I finally finished some books, and I’m going to pretend that it isn’t made much less impressive by having skipped last week. So in the last two weeks:

Books finished:

• SEXUALITY AND SOCIALISM. I loved this. I am proud of Sherry Wolf, the author, who is also my friend. I was very familiar with the U.S.’s history of homosexuality and homophobia through the early ’70s, and with many of the debates in the LGBT movement today, but almost totally ignorant about the period in between. So my favorite parts of this book were about the rise of queer theory (which the author has an interesting and, to my mind, convincing critique of as “militant defeatism”) and the connections between the LGBT and labor movements, from the 1930s to today. Fun stuff.
• DIARY OF BERGEN-BELSEN by Hanna Levy-Hass. This was fascinating: Levy-Hass writes about the starvation, the diseases, etc. but what seems to pain her the most in her concentration camp experience is the collaboration of her fellow Jewish prisoners. A committed communist before her imprisonment, she helps to lead resistance in the camp: she is chosen to represent 120 women when they organize to demand control over the food distribution (to take it out of the hands of corrupt relatively ‘privileged’ prisoners and make it equitable).

  Her ability to keep her thoughts lucid in these conditions is remarkable, and she expresses immense frustration with her fellow prisoners and pain at seeing their servitude, even while acknowledging that her own relative physical health (and it was relative: the descriptions of all of their bodies are chilling) is likely what makes it possible for her to keep hold of her senses. At one point, she writes that for the rest of her life she will judge people not by how they act in “normal” conditions, but by remembering how they did, or imagining how they would, act in conditions of inhumanity.

  Levy-Hass was the mother of Amira Hass, who remains the only Israeli journalist to live in the Occupied Territories so she can report in honesty and solidarity with Palestinians. Hass’s introduction and afterword, substantial essays about her parents’ lives before and after the camps, contribute enormously to the book. In particular, she draws out the personal and political implications of her mother’s subsequent disillusionment with the USSR, whose Soviet Red Army had liberated both of Hass’s parents.

• Most excitingly, I am back to reading kids’ books! Yesterday I finished ONE-EYED CAT by Paula Fox, a lucky find at a used bookstore, and GEOGRAPHY CLUB by Brent Hartinger, which kicks off my LGBT teen book reading series. Reviews of these two are coming.

Reading this week:

• The LGBT reading continues — others I purchased are Perry Moore’s HERO and Peter Cameron’s SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU. More recommendations very very welcome!
• I also bought THE HOT ROCK, the first DORTMUNDER book by Donald Westlake. There’s a long and sad history here, because Emily lent me the Dortmunder series years ago, and I left them in my boyfriend’s car, and it will tell you a great deal about the state of his car that they remained there, lost, until he had to trade in his car a few years later. Emily spotted the books in one of my apartment’s many random book piles this past May, and justly took them home; as penance (and ’cause I usually trust her recommendations) I’m going to make this the first of my mystery reading kick after Mieville’s CITY & CITY.

That’s the plan — it remains only to be seen whether the fact that I’m moving these next two weeks (uck!) means I read less ’cause I’m packing, or more ’cause I’m putting off packing…

Posted in Sunday Summary

A lie was so tidy, like a small box you could make with nails and thin pieces of wood and glue. But the truth lay sprawled all over the place like the mess up in the attic.

– Paula Fox, ONE-EYED CAT

Besides liking this metaphor because it captures something I recognize*, I like this because it’s the opposite of that “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…” adage, which I first learned from a CHARLES IN CHARGE episode built around it. When I stop to think about it, it is astounding and horrifying how much of my basic cultural education comes from terrible ’80s sitcoms.

* And am I the only one who sometimes tells small, irrelevant lies, especially to strangers, for exactly this reason? Except then they sometimes spiral out of control and suddenly your tidy little box that you only constructed in the first place to avoid making small talk more complicated than interests either party is like a faulty Jack-in-the-Box of conversational pitfalls that could leap out at any moment and this is what I was saying about not being able to construct metaphors.