Review: Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent

Pity is an emotion that seems good and harmless at the first flush, understandable in the face of neglect, but becomes toxic in practice, fueling violence and serious damage if allowed to fester. Pity was the first emotion children felt for Oliver as they attended school together and sparked sympathy when school fellows invited Oliver home with them to share holidays and seasons where it seemed to them he had nothing to look forward to stuck behind at the Catholic school with the priests and never going anywhere during breaks or at Xmas. His clothes looked as though they came from the poor box, cast offs that did not fit well and had seen better days.

Pity gave way to anger for Oliver's father who was a prominent man in the parish and left his son to the priests to care for. Oliver grew up and spent time with some of his mates families, always eager to make Oliver feel wanted as he shared their happiness and family togetherness. No wonder Oliver felt he should have the life he should have when he grew up and graduated. A friendly priest also looked out for him, paying his way to college to further his education and fill in the gaps left gaping because of Oliver's father's abandonment of his only son. It was insufficient to pay for his primary schooling, especially after Oliver's father married and had another son by his new wife. At least the second son who attended the parochial day school was treated better as Oliver could see from an upstairs window that looked down at his father's house that was brought into clear focus through binoculars. Oliver's half-brother had everything Oliver lacked and was determined to have when he went to France for the summer between terms at college, working in a vineyard with Laura and her brother, Michael.

Laura was vivacious and beautiful, so like the wife Oliver would marry when the time was right. Michael was a good mate, but not acceptable to Oliver once it became clear Michael was in love with Oliver who was decidedly not interested. Living with the French family, Oliver soon made the transition to the house to work with and live with the family while Laura remained in the quarters meant for seasonal help, especially after Michael began working in the kitchens, leaving Laura behind with the African laborers who were learning to make wine and take that experience back to South Africa to begin a vineyard for their masters.

Unlike Laura and Oliver, both of whom spoke French, the African workers understood very little French and learned nothing when they were subsequently sent back to Africa after the fire that ended the Irish workers' French work-study holiday. A fire mysteriously started that burned down the chateau, killing the vineyard's patriarch and his grandson and ended everyone's summer break. Michael, Oliver, and the other Irish students went back to college, leaving Laura behind to care for Madame who had severely burnt her hands trying to rescue her father and son. Laura insisted remaining to help Madame, returning home the following spring thin and worn out only to commit suicide. By that time Oliver had moved on to another girl who was plain and biddable with a mentally retarded brother and an older mother who soon died, leaving Alice the house and her brother with Oliver. Alice had met Oliver during her summer breaks while traveling and fell in love with Oliver's stories of the prince and his magic kingdom. Alice agreed to provide the illustrations for Oliver's books on the prince and soon was folded into Oliver's life.

Nothing in Oliver's life was as it seemed to be. He worked very hard at fashioning the illusion of the happy and productive life of a children's book author living the perfect family life with Alice in her childhood home. Oliver was also instrumental in making sure her brother was placed into an institution where he could not hurt himself or others. What a shock it was the day after Oliver struck Alice, putting her in hospital and showing the cracks and chasms in their perfect life.

Liz Nugent begins with Oliver's awe-struck and smug declaration that beating his wife was necessary and right. The story of Oliver's life behind the scenes is told through different people, all of whom had played a part in building and maintaining the fictional kingdom where Oliver lived and what he became. Unraveling Oliver is a testament to pity and the force good intentions have in fashioning monsters, villains, and saviors. It is only with the widest possible view Oliver and his carefully created kingdom is at last understood and where readers fully understand who the monsters and villains are and how even villains may have redeeming qualities. Monsters are not created through the application of an abnormal brain as Igor procured for Victor Frankenstein but often through pity when all the pieces are masterfully put together. Nugent's piecing together the final picture is daunting, haunting, and nuanced where no carefully crafted piece is left out or ignored. The reader will be amazed when the puzzle comes together.  5/5 stars.

Review: Fives and Twenty-fives by Michael Pitre

I'd have to decide whether a friend would be amenable to a book that is more like a Quentin Tarantino movie jumping backwards and forwards in time without a clue which is which. Hopping around like a flea on a hot griddle takes the reader out of the story and requires time to re-acclimate to the story. Although the back and forth in movies and some books is done well, Michael Pitre does not handle this story style at all well. Even readers need sign posts to know where to go and how it all fits in and what works in movies does not always work in literature. The Quentin Tarantino story telling tropes do not work, but I only read the book once. Maybe it improves with multiple readings.

Fives and Twenty-Fives does reveal a leftist version of life and war. Pitre obviously didn't realize that his tales of redemption and friendship under fire also highlighted the conservative views of life and war. 

The reader gets a glimpse of the profit first mentality that underscores the native mentality as they put cheating Americans first at the top of their agenda. One character seeks to hide his privileged background and family money in order to fit in among college students lining up to protest inequities and lack of freedoms while doing his best to get to America to realize his dreams without owning up to the fact that he knew about the plans to bomb and massacre the Americans even though he was supposed to be their native interpreter. 

The soldiers come from both sides of society's railroad tracks and deal with being back home in different ways, some good, some not so good. 

The descriptions of home and abroad were not the same as in-country descriptions were richer and more nuanced than the American south. After all, don't readers know what life in New Orleans on both sides of the track are like? Why spend words on what readers expect and know so well? The point of life in the south is that life is no less gritty, poor, and seedy than life in the Middle East, a fact that the careful reader will not be able to miss. 

Overall, I was attracted by life in the midst of war and a close look at the collateral civilian damage and at least there I was not too disappointed. I'm giving Pitre 3/5 for his Tarantino time sense; I expected so much and got so little. What works for Tarantino fails to work for Pitre. 

Equality of Outcome

Growing up, my mother demanded that everything be equal for her children. Everything must cost the same for birthdays and Xmas for all four of us. If she spent $100 on spend the same amount on each of the other three. That was her version of equality. She was adamant on everything being equal for all four of us, but mostly because of me; I'm adopted and the other three were her biological children. None of them would have existed, as far as Mom saw it, if she had not adopted me since she had failed to deliver a living child before I was adopted. That was, as her doctor pointed out, the outcome of adopting when failure to bear and deliver a child is the case. Her doctor promised her that she needed to develop a mother's instinct before she could conceive and bear a living child. I was the way to develop her mother's instinct . . . or at least that is how she convinced my mother, her sister-in-law, to give up the child she carried in her womb when she arrived from Michigan after her divorce on the back of her older brother's motorcycle to live with her other older brother (my dad) and her sister-in-law (Mom who had not been successful in bearing the children she so desperately wanted . . . and needed).

My birth mother didn't renege on her promise even after she became engaged to Dewey because she was a woman of her word. She had promised her child (me) to her brother and his wife and, since she had already given birth twice, could have more children. It should be noted that she gave up her first child, a child conceived when her uncle raped her, to one of her husband's relatives before she conceived me after the divorce and before he obtained a Catholic divorce (annulment) in order to marry his second wife, a woman with whom he had nine children and who never knew about me . . . or so I have been told. I never asked him since I never knew him and was urged to let sleeping dogs lie.

The point is that Mom has decided when the other three children came along that we would all be treated equally, hence the way she gave gifts to us. What she couldn't control was how friends would give us all presents when they came to our birthday parties, but she had a way to fix that too. Oftentimes we (meaning I) got duplicate gifts. Mom decided that duplicate gifts would be given to my siblings while I kept one of the duplicates because it was my birthday gift after all. All of my duplicates went to my sister who was born a year and nine months after I was adopted, leaving me with one gift and my sister with all of the duplicates to be fair to her even though it was not her birthday. Her birthday was in November and I did not get any of her duplicate gifts because it wasn't my birthday. I didn't get any of my brother's duplicate gifts either (he kept them all because he was a boy) nor did I get any of my youngest sister's duplicates, but then neither did my brother or other sister either. They were too mature and would not be treated like the baby.

We all got clothes at the same time, the same number of items for each of us, but seldom (never) the same quality or style. We'd have been equal if we had all gone to the same school and wore uniforms, which would have happened if we had actually become Catholics and gone to Catholic school, but (thankfully) that didn't happen. The same amount of money was spent on birthdays and Xmas until we reached high school for my brother and older sister and me and we began to develop different talents and tastes. Jimmy kept getting Hot Wheels cars and accessories and my sister and I outgrew dolls, moving into clothes for my sister and art supplies for me.

As we grew up and moved into our adult lives, birthdays and Xmas gifts remained the same dollar amount spent for each of us, or at least that is what I was told since I spent many birthdays and Xmases far away from the others. Mom made a point to assure me that I was treated the same as the other three even though I was clear across the country and they all remained close to home. At least Mom and Dad came to visit me in Utah when they drove to California to see Jimmy off on his first long distance Navy cruise or to discuss his wedding plans when he decided to get married to his girlfriend's best friend when his girlfriend turned him down. He was on a deadline and had to follow through and get married on his 23rd birthday even though he wasn't marrying the girl of his choice. He was following in Dad's footsteps no matter what. It didn't matter that Bobbie accepted him after he broke up with Leslie who had refused to marry him as long as Bobbie would marry him on his 23rd birthday. Nothing else mattered. One girl was as good as another. They were equal because they had been best friends, a fact he lived to regret a couple of decades later. I guess the equality tree didn't fall far from the designer of equality of outcome.

Mom's quality of outcome was evident in many facets of our lives. When she fostered several children as we grew up and went our own ways, Mom made sure her foster children got the same number and cost of presents for Jimmy and the boys who were fostered because they were nearly the same age as Jimmy and Tracy, the youngest. Mom broke her own rules when it came to graduation gifts -- sort of. She gave me her high school graduation ring when I graduated high school and bought Carol, Jimmy, and Tracy diamond rings when they graduated. She explained that she attached a lot of sentiment to her graduation ring and only had the one to give me, her first born, and substituted diamonds for the other three because they only cost money and there was no sentimental attachment to diamond rings (hah! which is why she bought so many diamonds for herself over the years). I also didn't get a car when I graduated because I had already bought my own car my junior year in high school, a car I shared with my sister even though my previous car was used for a down payment my sister never had to match with money from her own earnings. I also had to give the car to my sister when I married and graduated high school because my sister would have to drive herself to school and use it to get to her job. My new husband would have to provide me with a car or I'd have to use public transportation to get to work. My problems were for my husband to deal with.

The equality of outcome also included homework. Since I'd already had the classes that Jimmy and Carol were dealing with, I was ordered to do their homework so Jimmy and Carol would pass as well as I had. I refused. I would be glad to help them with their homework, but they would have to do the work for themselves. I was punished for refusing. After all, I couldn't take their exams for them and only they could earn their own grades with knowledge they had learned for themselves. Their grades were far below mine, but, like the parents who bought presents for my birthdays for their children, Mom couldn't force teachers to allow me to take their exams or give my siblings the grades Mom thought they should have to equal my own. The grades they got were their own just as Jimmy having to repeat a year when he was left back the year he flunked. Mom could only control so much and punish me when she lost control or the world and people refused to follow her rules. So much for equality when she couldn't control the outcome.

She could and did control equality of outcome when it came to discipline. Whatever my siblings did wrong, she punished me because I was the oldest and was responsible for what the siblings did -- or failed to do. When Jimmy and Carol were banned from the neighbors' yards, Mom refused to allow me to go into the neighbors' homes or play with their children. The neighbors' children finally allowed Carol and Jimmy to visit so that I would be allowed to visit. The neighbors knew the score and were willing to suffer the mayhem and damage my siblings would wreak so that I wouldn't be punished for their errors.

The neighbors took great pains to run interference whenever feasible, taking the blame or allowing my siblings to get off without punishment just so I wouldn't be punished when Mom spread the discipline around to include me, the oldest and the most responsible for not keeping the others from mischief and error.

I alone took the blame for my mistakes and the other three got no discipline or punishment when I was caught doing wrong -- or when Mom decided I was the one at fault even when I wasn't there. Knowing about a mistake was sufficient cause for the belt or the switch and for the grounding that followed.

When I showed my parents the many scholarships from colleges I received and the offers from three of the USA's military branches, I learned that not a penny would they spend to pay for college for me because Jimmy, six years behind me in school, had to come first because he would eventually get married and have a family to support. I could wait until I got married and go to college and let my husband support me. Jimmy was the most important because he was a male. I could expect nothing unless I earned it myself or married someone who could afford to pay for college. Equality of outcome ended where Jimmy was born as a male. Jimmy would never -- and did never -- go to college with his below C level grades. After Jimmy got out of the Navy, he managed to use his GI bill to pay for technical college to cover a degree on robotics and IT. I raised children and earned my way on my own. My husband couldn't afford college either and I was too old to use the scholarships I had been offered in high school.

The problem with equality of outcome was never just with my mom, but also with the idea that four siblings, one of which was adopted, would ever end up with the same quality of life and opportunity. It might have been better for me if my cousin, Jimmy, had been adopted before I was born, but his mother, my adopted father's other sister, reneged on her promise to give him up to Mom for adoption because she did not like and did not trust her brother's wife's snobby treatment of her or her brother. Since my birth mother was low on the family totem pole (a fact not discovered until I unearthed the fact that my birth mother was the result of an extra marital affair -- oops!), my fate was in someone else's hands and not hers, although she rectified that mistake when I was 16 and she became my confidante and champion. Mom's version of equality didn't sit well with her brother or her parents who treated me with love and care in spite of Mom's unequal treatment of me when compared to her birth children. My grandparents and my uncle did their best to stand up to Mom and treat me as though I were one of their own, a feeling not shared by their offspring who had their own views of equality and outcome that were not far different from Mom's.

When you pin your life and your views on equality of outcome, you should also be mindful of equity in that outcome. We are all born with our own gifts, drives, and abilities. We are not clones and not robots. Our experiences and what we bring to the global table are different, sometimes complementary, but always worthwhile when we pool our resources in a common outcome. Some will push us ahead faster and farther and some will be of no use -- often counterproductive. What we end up with will be determined by who helped and who were little more than hurdles to overcome or ignore.

My sisters and brother and I have arrived at different outcomes in this time and place. That is as it should be. Only when the bottom line is tallied will our input be measured and stored in the mind of the Cosmic Creator. We are the bits and bytes of data are part of the Universal All.

That is all. Disperse.

Review: The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall

In the last few months of senior year at the Avalon Hills prep school where her father, George, was a teacher and a hero for saving students from a gunman, Sadie Woodbury watched as her father is removed from their home in handcuffs. It must be a mistake. The police are wrong. They must be. Her father, the best man in the world, whose family created the prep school and parceled up their land so Avalon Hills was born, cannot be the man police described as they read her father his rights, handcuffed him, walked him out to the cop car, put him inside, and drove him away. Her mother, a nurse, was in shock. Sadie, watching her hero, father, and teacher disappear from sight couldn't get it through her head that the same man -- her father -- hero of the town, celebrated, loving, and willing to take down a gunman intent on killing children at his school could possibly be the same one that girls from her school had accused of sexual impropriety during their last ski outing. Sadie's head was still whirling from her brand new love with Jimmy, her first ever sexual encounter -- was it moments or years before? -- whirling now from shock, anger, and disbelief. How is this possible? It had to be a mistake or the girls (there were girls) her father had been sexually involved with? Somewhere along the way, her whole family had fallen through an insane rabbit hole and ended up in bizarro land. 

George Woodbury's life and his family were in shock. How could this be? According to their lawyer -- and the Woodbury's son, who had become a lawyer and lived in New York -- George would have to stay in jail at least until Tuesday, after the long weekend, when he would appear before a judge and the case against him would be dismissed because it wasn't true. George would not be arraigned, no bail would be set, and he would be back home with his family and return to his life. Alexander was certain of that. 

Zoe Whittall's novel would be barely a couple of chapters if George Woodbury was the victim of a colossal mistake like being wrongfully accused of another man's abuse and misuse of 13-year-old girls under his care on a ski trip. Whittall is a better author than that. She would not drag the reader through an emotional rollercoaster for nothing. Would she? 

Having been present when police took my father away from an anniversary family celebration in cuffs and accusing him of exposing himself in a public park and running from the police, which ramped up the severity of misdemeanor flashing to felony flight, made my interest in The Best Kind of People personal and my fascination with the subject and the emotional fallout acute as I dove head first into the novel. I was not disappointed . . . at first . . . and plunged into the Woodbury family's emotional cauldron as the waters heated up. 

I understood Jimmy's mother's boyfriend's interest in writing about the Woodbury tragedy from Sadie's perspective, not just because she was living with them and he had access to the whole family's pain and distress, but because as a writer I sympathize with the urge to get closer to the fire and risk getting burned if I get the story on paper. I didn't expect Alexander to be gay and having his first gay sexual encounter with a teacher and coach, but the only gay people I knew were salesmen and workers at the shoe store where I first worked and sex wasn't a common break room topic while sipping a Pepsi or eating a microwave burger. I had no experience of living in an exclusive community or going to prep school. My life was middle class all the way down the line. I was as eager to get to the heart of the matter as Jimmy was to write about it. My only peephole was through the eyes of those most closely associated with the family through Whittall's words. 

During the months that George was in jail, the family were roasted slowly over a barbecue, basted with regret, disdain, outrage, fear, and acceptance. Sadie's mom was anxious to put their house on the market and use the money to pay George's lawyer since the family bank accounts held far less than she imagined. Where had the money gone? 

It is never easy reading about, much less being involved, in a close knit family's destruction, especially for so little payoff. The ending seemed far too convenient and George never did get a chance to respond to the allegations nor were the allegations more than stories told by a group of girls bullied into adding their stones to the pile ready for brandishing. The individual stories about the Woodbury family were engrossing, surprising, and fascinating, but were less than equal to the rest of the story about what George Woodbury did while chaperoning barely pubescent girls on a school ski trip. Reading The Best Kind of People was rather lacking in sound and fury -- and answers -- in the long run. I give Zoe Whittall's novel 3.5 stars out of 5 for the end result . . . and lack thereof. A 21st century version of Ordinary People which fizzles like waterlogged fireworks.