I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS-Euphoria (2014).

I found out about Around the World in 80 Days when they started following me on Instagram.  I’m not sure which photo it was that interested them, or if they just follow lots of people, but I was intrigued that they are a post-rock band from Yekaterinburg, Russia.  They formed in 2009 and have a few releases out (EPs, mostly).  You can hear all of them on their soundcloud page (and other places).  This was their first full length album.

Their bio says

Around the World in 80 Days is a three-piece band formed in 2009. It’s impossible to compare their music with anything. The guys just play whatever they want and don’t care about genres, styles and cliches.

I appreciate the sentiment, but it’s not impossible to compare them.  They have elements of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky in their swirling post-rock instrumentals.  But they definitely add elements that those bands don’t.  There’s some heavy metal riffs in “Racing the Light” and some more poppy elements in “Inside Me.”

 I typically try to listen to an album a few more times before I post about it, but I was so interested in this band that i wanted to get the word out right away.  I’ll certainly be listening more intently to their output over the next few days.

[READ: May 24, 2015] “Mislaid”

I read an excerpt from this book in Harper’s a few months ago.  And then I found the full book at work.  Huzzah!

I had said that I didn’t know how long this novel could be because the excerpt seemed so complete.  And in a sense I was right.  Except that the book went so much further than the excerpt led me to imagine.

The excerpt was about Peggy Vaillancourt.  She was born in 1948 in Virginia.  A transformative event leads her to believe she must be a lesbian (something unspoken of at the time).

She winds up going to Stillwater College, a female-only school in the middle of nowhere Virginia.  She loves poetry and wants to be a writer.  She meets the poet-in-residence Lee Fleming.  Fleming was a local boy with wealthy parents.  His father believed himself to be as “queer as a three dollar bill.”  It was his father who put him in a cottage on the family’s property across the lake from Stillwater College.  Everyone in town also assumed he was gay, and there was much talk and consternation about it, although everyone assumed he was fine while he was by himself in that cottage.

The college asked Fleming to be a teacher (he canoed to work every day).  Instead of a salary he asked them to create a literary magazine called Stillwater Review, which became a success.  Many other famous New York poets came to Stillwater to be charmed by the idyllic Stillwater (and all the young girls).

Peggy was interested in poetry but freshmen were not allowed to take Fleming’s class.  And while she didn’t wind up taking his class, she did wind up sharing a canoe ride with him.  And after several months of straight sex (surprise!) Peggy wound up pregnant.  Not bad for an excerpt.

The book moves beyond this section of their lives and follows them throughout their (rather crazy) lives.  There is a big plug from Jonathan Franzen on the front cover and I will say that the book reminded me of a Franzen novel (different details of course) but in that sort of “I’ll interest you in a character and then explore many avenues of that person’s life” kind of way.

So their first child is born and they call him Byrd.  A few years of very unsatisfying married life later they have a daughter, Mirelle.  Lee is pretty much a jerk–he’s used to his flamboyant (by Stillwater standards) and free life.  Meanwhile all of Peggy’s dreams were dashed–she didn’t finish college, she couldn’t write, she had to look after the kids.  It was misery.  She was so miserable she even drove Lee’s car into the pond (she and the car survived, sort of).

He said she should be institutionalized.  And, rather than find out if he was serious, she decided to flee.  She was going to take both kids, but during her escape, she wound up only with Mirelle.  And she wound up hiding further in the middle of nowhere Virginia–in an abandoned house.

Zink makes all this believable, even as things go more and more crazy for Peggy and Mirelle.  Like that Peggy decides (through illegal and persuasive means) to raise Mirelle as a black child, with a false identity.  She will now be known as Karen Brown.  And because the community is interested in upping minority student ratios they accept Karen as black even though she is pale and blonde.

Lee is of course, furious about this adornment and he hires a detective to track her down.  He assumes she has fled for bigger cities, so they never think to look for a black girl in a small, backwater town.

Peggy (now Meg) makes some terrible decisions and really should be arrested for child endangerment.  But things seems to work out okay for her and Karen.  Karen befriends Temple, the only other black kid around (he is super smart and very cool) and she is quite happy–oblivious to the life she could have led.  She doesn’t even remember she had a brother.

Byrdie remembers his sister and really hopes his mom will get in touch with him.  But since Lee is “after” her, that seems unlikely.  Nevertheless, Byrdie thrives with his connections and intelligence.  He winds up going to UVA in Charlottesville.  He lives in an ex frat house which is quite consumed with smoking pot.  Despite his highness he still succeeds.

And so does Karen.  When Temple gets a full scholarship (academic, not race based) to college, they agree to bring Karen along because it will up the minority numbers and it will make Temple happy if his girlfriend (or whatever she is) goes with him.

The final section of the book (there’s still quite a lot to go, fret not) is full of delightful coincidence and a (to me) surprising ending.

This story pushed all the elements of plausibility in a wonderfully endearing way.  It was really interesting watching these two kids grow up so differently.  And then end was really exciting and funny.

But more impressive is Zink’s writing style.  She is really efficient (the book is quite short despite all that goes on in it) and her sentences read more like poetry (that’s to highfalutin sounding–let’s say she is economical and doesn’t waste words).

I especially enjoyed the audacity to have a character (Lee) say “You just reminded me of a terrific racist joke.”  The joke?

So Jean-Paul Sartre decides to tour the back roads of the South, and he runs out of gas at the bottom of a long hill.  He takes the gas can out of the trunk and starts walking up the hill.  He can see there’s a black guy at the pumps, so he yells, “Y’all got any gas?” and the black guy yells, “Yeah!”  So Sartre keeps walking and he gets up to the top and he says, “I’ll take three gallons, please.” And the black guy says, “Sorry, man, can’t sell you no gas today. Huis clos.”

If you like that joke, (and I couldn’t stop thinking about the raging cleverness of the title of the book) you will like this book too.