Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

How shall I read Ethan Frome? It's my first Edith Wharton novel. My studies in early 20^th Century American literature are grossly lacking, so I fear I lack the proper reader's tools to appreciate all that I should. I'm left mystified, and wishing for enlightenment. I can only unravel my questions by spoiling the plot thoroughly, so be warned.

Ethan Frome tries to be a distinctively New England story, albeit with a decidedly particular slant on what it meant to be a New Englander. Wharton's own preface states: "…I had an uneasy sense that the New England of fiction bore little—except a vague botanical and dialectical—resemblance to the harsh and beautiful land as I had seen it. Even the abundant enumeration of sweet-fern, asters and mountain-laurel, and the conscientious reproduction of the vernacular, left me with the feeling that the outcropping granite had in both cases been overlooked." As an upstate New Yorker who now makes Massachusetts her home, I always know I've left my old home state for my new one when granite cliffs greet me just over the state line on I-90. New England has a stony spine underneath. I wonder what Wharton would think of our suburbs and strip plazas and central air today. Her "Starkfield" is a cold, stoic, frozen New England town. The landscape and the weather are a powerful presence, almost a character in their own right. The story's central problems directly relate to winter – snowstorms, blocked roads, even sledding. Starkfield seems always to be under the iron grip of snow. The entire novel, though it spans decades, all takes place in winter, as though winter was all that New England ever knew. Even the recollections voiced by townspeople almost never seem to acknowledge the existence of summer, or spring.

Ethan Frome is the subject of the story, and the unnamed narrator proclaims him to be "the most striking figure in Starkfield" on page one. I spent the remainder of my read waiting impatiently for that claim to be justified – for Ethan Frome to prove himself a worthy object of sustained interest. I believe we're meant to see him as a strong, silent type – lean and rugged, with deep inner passions – granite made human, as it were. But I couldn't quite sustain that view of him. I read him as someone with a social disorder and a crippling fear of loneliness, something we would now diagnose and treat with social skill therapy. It fits perfectly with his year spent "at the technical college in Worcester." As a graduate of WPI's rival technical college, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, I've known plenty of people whose moody reticence is not caused by a fascinating inner greatness, but by paralyzing shyness, plain and simple. Not so glamorous, but there it is.

Wharton's writing is as spare and economical as her hero is, punctuated with shafts of great beauty. Her sensibilities may resemble Frome's: "He had always been more sensitive than the people around to the appeal of natural beauty. His unfinished studies had given form to this sensibility and even in his unhappiest moments field and sky spoke to him with a deep and powerful persuasion. But hitherto the emotion had remained in him as a silent ache, veiling with sadness the beauty that evoked it. He did not even know whether any one else in the world felt as he did, or whether he was the sole victim of this mournful privilege." Indeed it is this aesthetic sense that does much to make Ethan Frome sympathetic and interesting.

Frome is a tragic hero, a restless mind trapped into a stultifying marriage he entered into in a rash and vulnerable moment in very young adulthood. By the end of the story the outward details of what happened are plain enough. But even after re-reading the ending twice, I still wonder, what happened? What did Miss Mattie say to Ruth Varnum? Why could Ethan have lived, if Mattie had died? What's the real state of Zenobia's soul, then and now? The author acknowledges, as does the narrator, that this is a story where you wonder right throughout whom one should believe. Every perspective on the narrative can be ignorant, or biased. Even the principal chunk of the narrative, written in third person, and supposedly pieced together and deduced by the narrator (which makes little sense, really), can perhaps be doubted. Except I'm not sure what Mrs. Wharton had in mind there, and while I understand there's a whole school of critical thought that says, in effect, "Phooey on what the author meant, the text is all we have," I still can't help feeling that Mrs. Wharton took confusion too far, or else I missed something. If it's meant to be a "YOU figure out what really happened" kind of story, then I want to chuck it out a window.

The back jacket flap of my 1986 paperback (first publication, 1911) calls it a "story of great love shadowed by tragedy." I don't call it a great love. It's infantile, and a bit embarrassing. Ethan seems wholly susceptible throughout. Not a man of heroic passions, but pitiably weak and indecisive, suggestible. He has my sympathy most in how he shoulders up under his poverty. Am I applying a moralistic judgment to his choices? I hope not. I can empathize with his plight, but it's of his own weak-willed creation. The final outcome would seem to support that sense of embarrassment. He's not even allowed a tragic hero's glorious death. Even that gets botched. Does that not perhaps make him all the more tragic?

And yet, and yet, the very fact that I'm scowling and fussing over this story means that Wharton has done something interesting. She's challenged me, she's vexed me, and every argument that I mount against the story can itself be a reason to take another look at it. I'm reminded of the aggravation I felt at reading and critiquing The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. I didn't love the book when I read it in college, but I couldn't dismiss the superb control that created it.

For all that it bothered me, I couldn't put it down until I was done. It's a short book and a swift read. I may not race out to buy another Wharton novel (tell me if I should, please) but I often find that I learn as much, or more, from books that I don't love as I learn from books I gobble like candy. I'd love to hear thoughts from others who've read and studied the novel. Enlighten me.

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens: Tracing Roots in Wodehouse & Tolkien

As a child, I reread my sister’s copy of Little Women until my mother bought me my own, which I then lovingly destroyed. But I never made much sense of Chapter 10, “The P.C. and P.O.,” where the four March sisters conduct a meeting of their own Pickwick Club and induct Laurie as a member. Each sister goes by the name of a Pickwickian.

I could only scratch my head.

I recently read Jane Smiley’s biography of Dickens, in which she describes how The Pickwick Papers, first appearing in serialized form in March of 1836, made the young Charles Dickens an almost overnight literary sensation. I had never read the novel, so I set out to do so, despite Smiley’s warning that modern readers find the novel largely inaccessible. I can’t fully dispute that charge, but it ought not to be the case. Though long, rambling, episodic, and at times seemingly unfocused, The Pickwick Papers is still hilarious, snarky, rich, ridiculous, and enormously worth reading.

But more on that to come.

The Pickwick Papers is an early farce, and the first flexings of the literary muscle that would dominate (and partially create) the 19th Century novel, and indeed, all English prose fiction since. Even if modern readers may overlook Pickwick, it’s clear to me that generations of authors have known and loved the Pickwick Club, and it has sent tendrils of influence into modern works. Below are just two I noticed.

The first is a clear line connecting Pickwick to the huge catalog of farces by the comic master, P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse’s genius is undiminished in my eyes by the discovery that his formula for success had a precedent in Pickwick. His most successful Bertie and Jeeves novels provide the best illustration.

Both Pickwick and Wodehouse follow a band of bungling gentleman bachelors around the English countryside. The characters are useless but endearing, bickering but loyal when tested. They roam from house to country house, falling in love and spreading havoc. The main character, always aloof from matters of love, is nevertheless far from immune to getting into embarrassing and compromising scrapes with women, including prompting a breach of marriage contract suit (something perennially threatened in Wodehouse’s comedies). The main character is wholly dependent on his loyal, streetwise, practical commoner servant. Sam Weller and Jeeves are quite different personalities, but both are memorable originals, and both, in fact, make their series. Both Jeeves and Sam Weller provide needed cohesion for their respective episodic adventures. The Pickwick Papers’s serial sales began to soar when Sam Weller entered the narrative.

Both Dickens and Wodehouse employ a superabundant cast of memorable characters and recognizable types. Both authors display an affectionate regard for their (anti-) heroes’ follies. The Pickwick Club is a roaming pack of innocents, led by Mr. Pickwick, whose genteel manners may be more polished and mature than his companions’, but whose wisdom isn’t much greater than that of his younger charges. They’d all be lost in the woods still were it not for Sam Weller. The same could be said for Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Let’s look at another pair that I can’t help thinking traces its roots to Mr. Pickwick and Sam – Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. I still have Tolkien on my mind from my January rereading of Lord of the Rings, but in Frodo and Sam I couldn’t help noticing the replayed dynamic of a master who is painted as noble of character yet greatly in need of the practical, worldly-wise, common sense service of his loyal Sam in order to survive, that I saw in The Pickwick Papers. The bond between Frodo and Sam caught my attention more on this recent read, and puzzled me. I had nothing more than Tolkien’s word and Bilbo’s money to persuade me why Frodo deserved to be “Master,” and Sam his loyal subservient, yet that loyalty and that gulf of rank and superiority between them was acknowledged, understood, and even revered (by Sam) throughout. By contrast, the deep affection between Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller rang much more believably to me, and yet I wonder to what extent all such master-servant relationships in British fiction are idealized, perhaps, as a means of attempting to reconcile a fundamentally unequal social structure?


Be that as it may, Sam Weller is endlessly endearing, his spontaneous similes are delicious, and I wish I had Mr. Pickwick for a friend. This is one way Dickens shines for me, especially in his comic novels. His affection for his characters is ever-apparent, no less so for his allowing them to make convivial nincompoops of themselves. And the wit that pervades his narrative voice is a fountain that never stops bubbling and spilling over the sides. No wonder the book made 24-year old Dickens a star.

All this said, The Pickwick Papers isn’t a perfect read for time-pressed readers in 2011. It’s LONG. It’s episodic. It meanders at first, and ramps up slowly. It takes a bit of time to hit its full comic stride and confidence (cue Sam Weller). Before long the affectionate irony of the colorful narrative voice is in full bloom, a source for constant laugh-out-loud delight, but for me at least, it took some chapters to get my bearings. Again, thank heaven for talented audiobook actors. Mine was narrated by Patrick Tull, and published by Recorded Books, and I cannot imagine a greater talent to bring all the characters to life and to add so much humor and nuance to the production.

So if you’ve got 36 hours of drive time to spare, find The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens and narrated by Patrick Tull. Give yourself time. It’s okay if your mind wanders now and then. Sam Weller will get you where you need to be, on time, well dressed and fed, with a pint in your fist and a guinea in your pocket. I grieved when it ended, and smiled for a long time after.

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

For three days I’ve been the hopeless prisoner of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel North and South (1855), presented in audiobook format by BBC and superbly narrated by Juliet Stevenson. It’s 18.3 hours long. Now that it’s done I’m pining. I feel adrift, severed from scenes where my imagination belongs.

North and South is a romance set during the Second Industrial Revolution in Victorian England, and “north” and “south” refer to regions of England which interpreted England’s changing society and economy quite differently. I wonder how Elizabeth Gaskell escaped my knowledge all these years when she and I could have been such friends.

I presume Mrs. Gaskell knew her Jane Austen novels intimately. Comparison with Pride and Prejudice is inevitable. Both Pride and Prejudice and North and South bring two proud, stubborn, unlikely lovers with starkly different backgrounds into each other’s orbits. Paragons of manhood and irresistible women meet, sparks fly, what’s not to like? The female protagonists are not beautiful at first, but ultimately revealed to be utterly bewitching. Good, good, a well-known convention; every romance reader’s inner fantasies are thus far stroked. Both heroines are notably braver, cleverer, and more sensible than their flighty, shallow female contemporaries. Better still. In both stories, strong aversion and strong attraction do battle; impetuous proposals are prematurely made and indignantly refused, ushering in agonizing prolonged periods of awkwardness, introspection, re-examination, stiffness, self-doubt, and finally … whatever outcome the author had in mind. Relinquishing pride and changing one’s mind are fundamental to character arcs in both books. The outer shape of both romances is obviously similar.


But Pride and Prejudice is more comical, with a sharp satirical wit, and it concerns itself mainly with manners, money, and marriage among turn of the 18th Century aristocracy and gentry. North and South is a more earnest book, with obvious social reform sensibilities. If Elizabeth Bennett’s charms are chiefly her quick wit and her fine teeth, Margaret Hale’s are her lofty ideals and her limpid eyes.

North and South invites its readers to scrutinize shifting class boundaries in the changing economy of Industrial Britain. The novel acquaints itself with labor unions, strikes, riots, the volatile markets for raw and finished goods, squalor, suicide, industrial pollution, public education, and employee relations--scarcely subjects for Austenian salon novels that only concern themselves with laces, the social season, and who’s wintering at Bath. From our modern vantage point, with our experience of evolved labor laws and social services, as well as the dangers of reckless capitalism and pollution, Gaskell’s dinner party discussions of industrial ethics seem quaint and rustic, and at times misguided, but for her time, the debates reveal both an idealistic embracing of the new economy (why can’t a merchant be a gentleman?) and a nuanced, cautionary treatment of unrestrained industry and pollution. Gaskell’s answer to the master-laborer conundrum seems to be a genteel sort of master who listens to workers, respects them, and considers their quality of life – an image redolent of idealized manorial feudalism, with its reciprocal responsibilities, and everyone content whilst the system hums smoothly. At the same time, she argues in favor of a more inclusive and upwardly mobile model of British society than manorial feudalism ever allowed.

Morality and faith can’t be overlooked in the workings of the novel. The book’s significant events are set in motion when Margaret’s father, a country parson, admits to a crisis of personal doubt and leaves the Church of England, thereby assuaging his conscience but thrusting his family into poverty. A major turning point in Margaret’s own story is her moral crisis surrounding a lie she told in order to protect someone’s life. The extent of her guilt and anguish might mystify modern readers who might weigh a life against a lie in the moral scales and see no problem with Margaret’s choice, but we need to remember the absolutism of Victorian morality to fully understand Margaret. Mr. Thornton’s integrity becomes the deciding argument in his favor as both a potential lover and a gentleman, and Margaret is only ready to embrace (ahem) him once she has performed an inner penance for her sin. Gaskell’s character study of pride brings both her lordly main characters to a place of humility more morally and religiously colored than the humility Mr. Darcy and Miss Bennett acquired, which was essentially social. Denominational faith matters in this novel as well, and we observe characters expressing dismay at others’ non-orthodoxy, yet the text seems to me fairly liberal and tolerant in its acceptance of religious Otherness, from Mr. Hale’s lapsed Anglican non-belief to Frederick’s newfound Catholicism to Bessie’s impassioned Methodism.

Modern readers may face a few hurdles in appreciating this novel. For my part, I’m extremely glad I heard Juliet Stevenson’s audiobook performance before reading the novel. Her talent with dialects, and her thoughtful creation of each character made them more sympathetic than I might otherwise have found them. 21st Century readers may share some of my impatience with Margaret initial passionlessness, and her passivity in the second half of the novel, though I remind myself that a series of devastating losses may indeed have thrust her into a paralyzing depression, and in any case, inertness was a culturally familiar role for gentlewomen to play. At least Margaret does look inward and rebuild herself (and start to blush now and then). Early in the novel she was a stronger, more decisive (if unromantic) character. Modern readers may also feel some frustration that Margaret relies so much on men to make needed arrangements and communications for her, and that she lingers on for months under clouds of unresolved misery that a single written letter could have cleared up. But letters do not romantic scenes enable, and perhaps we can be generous and attribute her reticence to dignified reserve. I’m glad that Margaret asserts her independence (economic and spiritual) by the end and is free to act as her own woman in finally rejecting old class distinctions and choosing her own entrepreneurial and matrimonial happiness.

If I’ve analyzed and chopped the novel to death, thereby stripping it of its joys, let me make myself quite clear: I was entirely captivated by this story. I forfeited significant sleep for it. I fretted until I knew the ending. I’ve reheated and re-eaten the ending and other significant scenes many times since. I’m somewhat fearful of renting the recent miniseries, though I’ve heard good things about it, lest I destroy my own image of the people and places. (Tell me if I should relent and watch it anyway, please!) I can’t wait to spend more time with Mrs. Gaskell’s works. And my crush on a certain figure in the novel will be a guilty pleasure for many rereads to come.

Tolkien: It’s About the Journey. Setting, language, society, and race in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

My cat, by instinct, knows when she needs to gnaw on my houseplants to soothe her troubled belly, and sometimes I, in much the same way, know instinctively what I need to read to soothe a troubled soul. Over the holidays I needed rest, and a good story to take my heart on vacation. My hand reached for The Hobbit, despite a tall bedside stack of new books waiting to be read, and I plowed straight onward through the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I’m a different traveler each time I pass through Middle-earth. I pay less attention now to landscape and geography – I’ve already paid my dues to the maps of Mordor and Gondor.

It’s a travel story. The geography is a character, and by golly, to Tolkien at any rate, place details matter. I wonder what percentage of detail of every crag and bluff and outcrop would have been struck by the red pen of modern editors, not to mention the seven different names in three different dialects for each leaf, mound, tower, or Numenorean. But lest we criticize, where would modern fantasy be today without Tolkien in the first place? The landscape, and the language that arises from it, mattered to Tolkien, and not merely intellectually. (He was a noted philologist and linguist.) Desecration of the natural world to feed the maw of progress was one of his chief concerns, as he states clearly in his prologue, and as he illustrates plainly in the penultimate chapter, “The Scouring of the Shire.”

The “high” fantasy language, the over-embroidered speech, is both one of the great nostalgic comforts of reading Tolkien, and at times one of its barriers. My older attention span is more fractured, so the language can chafe at times, like a granule in my sock, but not enough to justify removing favorite socks. (That analogy is so reekingly bad, I just have to leave it in.) Language, just like scepters, crowns, and garments of rank, are outward signs and tokens of inner nobility and greatness in Tolkien’s well-ordered world. The series is a love song to a dying hierarchical notion of English society, as reckless industry and unlearned democracy threatened to topple all that was ever sweet and comforting about traditional English life. Or so, I think, did Tolkien feel. And he wasn’t alone. C.S. Lewis, T.H. White, and Kenneth Grahame, and countless other British fantasists sang the same love song in their own tune.

It’s harder now to reconcile myself to Tolkien’s treatment of race/color and gender. Thank heaven for Galadriel and Eowyn who raise the Girl Power Quotient from zero to, er, not-quite-zero. Skin color and purity of bloodline as tokens of greatness … the obvious slant against “swarthy” and even “Black” minions of the Dark Lord must be at least a partial product of Tolkien’s times. Perhaps this is merely the mythology of Middle-earth, with no reference to our world, but I think not; the allusions are too many and too obvious. The racial purity that places Aragorn on the throne feels much like the creed of Voldemort’s Death Eaters now. But it wasn’t meant to be, and Tolkien’s heroes didn’t feed on death nor practice genocide. Mercy, rightful governance, and freedom to live and let live mattered to him. Some of his heroes, hobbits for one, and Wild Men of the woods for another, seem absolute mongrels in contrast to the Elfstone, but they get their moment of heroism too.

Tolkien wrote a story of high heroism, of sacrifice and miracles, of an age when despite desperate odds, hopelessness and terror, a generation mounted up its courage and fought on through dark night to the tide-turning at the dawn. Again and again this happens – at Helm’s Deep, on the fields of Pelennor, in the mines of Moria, even in Bilbo’s encounter with the trolls. Stay defiant in the face of destruction, and hold on until the morning. It’s a tale of triumph, yet also it’s the tale of the dying of the Third Age, when all that was holy and magical in Middle-earth passed away, the good and the bad mingled. To rid the world of Sauron, Gandalf had to leave.

Tolkien’s generation, rightly called The Greatest Generation, has all but passed away, and if a man who fought in WWI and lived through WWII is not entitled to weave such a story as this one, I’d like to know who is. But his age, with its courage, and its fatal misconceptions, is fading away. The Greatest Generation helped stop The Third Reich and interred Japanese Americans. They are our fathers, grandfathers, uncles; our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. They deserve our forgiveness for their sins and errors, just as we will one day need our children’s forgiveness for our blindness and waste and greed. But forgiving does not require us to adopt their prejudices.

I reached for Tolkien because I needed a zap of idealism along with the comfort of a high adventure. I needed to borrow his belief in inner nobility, greatness, and courage, even as I set aside his notions of how such greatness is bred and fostered. And mostly, I think, I needed to be carried away to another world for a good long stretch, such as only Tolkien, with his thousand characters, geological micro-detail, and songs in Elvish could promise.

Going Public

On Tuesday, October 12, my latest hardcover, Secondhand Charm, hit the shelves, published by Bloomsbury Children's Books. So began a whirlwind of activity which I will try to document below. But it didn't actually begin there. Earlier this season, the first two books in my new Splurch Academy for Disruptive Boys series hit the shelves, and my sister Sally and I celebrated with a large launch party at the Pittsford Barnes & Noble. Here's a picture of just the relatives who were there.

And here are Sally and me, signing books together for the first time. Aren't our mom's gladiolus pretty, there in the window? It was wonderful to see so many family and friends, and the Pittsford B&N hosted us delightfully.

On October 2, Sally and I visited Books of Wonder, the magnificent children's bookstore in Manhattan famous for its Oz obsession, its rare art, and its cupcakes, as well as its wonderful titles. We sat on a panel with Jon Scieszka, Michael Buckley, and Nick Bruel and talked about humor and creating silly books. Here we are signing and talking.

Not sure why these pictures insist on being itty-bitty. I mooched them from Sally's friend Alan. Moving on. Next came the launch parties for Secondhand Charm. Part one, hosted by The Friends of the Maynard Public Library, took place Tuesday, October 12. Tragically, my husband and I forgot to take pictures. If anyone else took any, please send them along and I'll update this post. We had a great turnout, and fantastic octopus-shaped decorations, along with other creepy crawly fun stuff in a culinary tribute to the cuisine at Splurch Academy. We repeated the fun two nights later at The Wellesley Booksmith, that pearl among indie bookstores, where again we had a fantastic turnout. Here I am, signing books afterwards.

During that same week I visited Greenhalge Elementary School in Lowell, MA; Fowler Middle School in Maynard, MA; and The Paper Store in Sudbury, MA. The following Monday I (barely) caught a plane for Salt Lake City, where I stayed with dear friends and visited four schools, two bookstores, and a library for author visits & signings. I didn't do as good of a job taking pictures in Salt Lake, so I'm mooching off friends' blogs. I visited the Orem Library, The Waterford School in Sandy, Beacon Heights Elementary School, Settlement Canyon Elementary School in Tooele, and Northlake Elementary School, also in Tooele. I also had my first television appearance on Park City TV, and if I can put my hands on the DVD I brought back with me, I'll post the clip on YouTube. Utah was breathtakingly beautiful, and it seems I got in and out right before winter snow began to strike. I had the chance to catch up with many old friends while I was there. The Orem Library treated me to a goody bag that included a dragon pin. Fun! One of the high points of the trip was meeting my author pen pal, Jessica Day George. We'd corresponded and talked on the phone for ages, and she was just as fun in person, and then some. We did evening signings together at The King's English in Salt Lake City and The Purple Cow in Tooele. Pictorial proof below.

Jessica is an obsessive knitter, and while we took questions she worked on a sleeve for her son's Ron Weasley Halloween costume. Envy! I wish I were that cool of a mom, and that good of a knitter. My kids had to fish from last year's box this year, or make their own costumes.

The pictures above were taken at the art gallery next door to The King's English by my dear friend and superblogger, Stacey Ratliff (pictured with Jessica and me at our signing at The King's English, below).

Isa Ventura of The Purple Cow treated us like royalty and fed me my very own purple cow at a spiffy little bistro in Tooele. Fun town! The Purple Cow and me, we're bonded for life. But the fun didn't stop in Utah. I returned home for a breathless week tried to dig out from under all the mess. While there I paid a visit to the Peabody Barnes & Noble, as well as another visit to the Fowler Middle School. On the Thursday before Halloween, we had a wonderful event at the Belmont Public Library with a full crowd of young readers and their parents. Here's a picture of three adorable reader gals.

Then, on Halloween afternoon, I got in my car and drove to my homeland of Western New York for a solid week of events there. On Monday I visited DeSales School in Lockport, NY, followed by a signing at Monkey See, Monkey Do bookstore in Clarence. I saw many dear friends, and made some new ones, including an inspiring family with an ambitious goal to visit and chronicle all 37 library branches in the Erie County Library System. Their blog is a terrific piece of advocacy for the role libraries play in keeping communities vibrant. Here I am with Anna and MaryGrace in a picture I'm borrowing from their blog.

On Tuesday, November 2, I visited my old alma mater, Clifford H. Wise Middle School, in the morning, and another alma mater, Oak Orchard Elementary School, in the afternoon. In the evening I signed books at Lee-Whedon Library in Medina. I had a lovely lunch with the fifth-grade teachers at Oak Orchard. I saw many dear and familiar faces in Medina, who haven't changed a bit and still look fabulous. The Book Shoppe of Medina and the Lee-Whedon library hosted me in style.

On Wednesday I visited St. Joseph's Catholic School in Batavia, as well as John Kennedy Elementary School. In the afternoon I visited Present Tense Books in Batavia, another indie store that I adore, and not only because it's owned by my cousin, Erica Caldwell. While I was there, I lost my voice! I suppose the back-to-back events, travel, and lack of sleep were a bit more than I could handle. Erica's peach of a husband, Darrick, trotted right out and got me steamed milk from the local coffee shop, which wetted my whistle just right.

So it was cough drops and bottled water at the ready, and whispering into microphones for the next two days of school events, but miraculously I was able to croak out enough. I visited The Norman Howard School in Rochester, NY on Thursday the 4th, where they treated me to a tour, a signing, authentic WNY cider, and donuts! Ian, Sam, and Zoe were the best tour guides an author could hope for. What a great school. From there I trotted over to School 12 for three back-to-back sessions with 4th and 5th graders. I drove straight back to my mom's that night and collapsed, mute as a sponge, and let my mother and sister dote on my like only the gals in my family can. Next morning I was up and off to Geneva Middle School (as well as two elementary schools) for five straight presentations. My good friend, Jonathan Porschet, is the librarian in Geneva, and he fed me his personal hummus, a kindness I shall not forget. (I'm noticing a disturbing trend of reporting what people fed me everywhere I went ... does it show that I really like to eat? And be waited on? It's plain to me as I look at these pictures that I like to eat. Oof.)

My week in New York ended with a bang at the Rochester Children's Book Festival, organized by the extraordinary Sibby Falk and Katherine Blasi. There were over 40 children's book authors there, and my only regret is that I didn't have more opportunities to hobnob with them all. The night before, they got together for dinner, but I skipped re: dead vocal chords, and the night of the event, they also supped from a common table, but after seven days away from my family, I was anxious to get back. What an outstanding turnout they had! It was enough to revive my faith in families encouraging their children to be readers. I was lucky that I got to sit next to Kate Messner, also from Medina, NY, the entire day. Kate was best friends with my older sister in junior high, and our paths crossed again a few years ago at an SCBWI conference. Now we both publish with Bloomsbury/Walker, among other houses. Her Brilliant Fall of Gianna Z. was an E.B. White Read Aloud award winner, and I'm already hearing good buzz about her upcoming Sugar and Ice. We promoted each other's books as easily as we could talk up our own, and that was tons of fun.

I dressed in a prison suit as Cody Mack, the hero of the Splurch Academy for Disruptive Boys, which was pretty weird, but Kate brought an actual beaver along, so I don't feel very self-conscious about my sartorial oddities. Here's a short video of the festival. These photos, BTW, above and below, were mooched from Kate's blog.

I got to see many wonderful author friends there, including Peggy Thomas, Elizabeth Bluemle, and Michelle Knudsen. Next year, if I'm lucky enough to come back, I'll make sure to eat more food with more authors. That's my new resolve. But my resolve du jour is to do less eating altogether ... ugh.

Now I'm back home, and the V.I.P. treatment has dwindled a notch, but there's no place I'd rather be. I visited the Russell Street School in Littleton and Merriam Elementary School in Acton, both yesterday, and there will be more events to come, though not with same machine-gun rapidity of the last few weeks. I'm happy not to live out of a suitcase. I keep thinking back, though, on how lucky I am that books give me an excuse to visit nearly all the places where I have dear ones, and reconnect with them in ways that otherwise might not be possible. I couldn't name you all by name on this blog, but if I got to see you this fall, I'm the lucky one. Please keep in touch.

And for all you bookstores who hosted me, and for hundreds of others who keep books alive in towns large and small, this one's for you. Here's today's humor column in the Metrowest Daily News. It's my small, inadequate way of saying thanks.

Stuck in Oz

Last night I saw Wicked at the Boston Opera House with my husband and my sons. I’ve been useless all day today, stuck in Oz, picturing the story, singing the songs, loving Elphaba. I’m scheming ways to get back, even though ticket prices make that a foolish notion, even though I’m a grownup who should know better. I want to go back to that place, that time, that immersion in the story.

This, I recognize, is the disease that made me want to be a writer.

What’s going on here? As Martine Leavitt said in a lecture I heard her give this summer at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, the older I get, the harder it is for me to suspend my disbelief in a story. Samuel Taylor Coleridge considered this the touchstone for success in the reader’s engagement with fantasy. Perhaps I’m a sucker for musicals, but Wicked’s Oz shattered my disbelief. It was the Oz I recognize from Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and from the 1939 MGM film with Judy Garland, so I entered this world of wonder with wide open eyes and fresh expectations, but I was already comfortable with the conventions of Oz. Its rules and denizens required no explanation, and the skillful twists with which the new invoked the old were a frequent pleasure.

But it takes more than just a world to make this mother and cubicle dweller spend her day composing emails and browning pot roast with her heart over the rainbow, romantically imagining herself completely green. It takes characters I can love intensely to snare me into another world and make me want to stay there. Perhaps “love” is too generic. Wicked’s chief players were complex, conflicted, immoral, amoral, passionate, self-absorbed, indifferent, casually cruel, idealistic, betrayed. In short, the stuff of family theater. They hooked me. I keep thinking about them. I want another invitation to their party. I’m like the wizard who dallied (wink) indulgently when he ought to have gotten back to Kansas and on with his snake-oil selling business.

This is why series have such power in our culture. Even at the risk of wearing out worlds and characters we adore, the consuming public would rather go back, and back, and back again to our favorite stories, served up in new episodes like warmed-up leftovers smothered in canned gravy. I’m no different. I clamor for sequels just like everyone else. At least now, if I want to get stuck in a world, I can create one.

In this instance I’m fortunate. If the textured landscape of Broadway’s Oz pleased me, I have Gregory Maguire’s novel to look forward to, and a signed copy on my bedside table to boot. And, what luck! It’s the first of a series. I can dally, stuck in Oz, for as long as I like. Wonderful.

The True Meaning of Smekday, & St. Patrick of Ireland

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex (Hyperion 2007).

A marvelous middle-grade mashup, irreverent and smart and funny. Equal parts Doomsday, alien adventure, road trip tale, biting satire, and, er, girl meets Boov. Begins with a mole and ends with a cat, and I won't say much more, other than that Gratuity Tucci, our protagonist, is as feisty and funny an unlikely heroine as you'll find this side of the galaxy. As for Adam Rex, the author, as if it weren't bad enough to be that clever and funny, also illustrated the graphic novel excerpts throughout. A bit of swearing if anyone's concerned about that, though Gratuity always apologizes, and anyway, she's being shot at by an army of poomps, pardon my language.

And now, in a complete reversal of genre:

St. Patrick of Ireland: A Biography, by Philip Freeman, Simon and Schuster, 2004
In keeping with my fascination with early Catholics (tardy Catholics intrigue me far less), I recommend for your delectation this slim little volume. If you can get past the bestial Druid rites of kingship, you'll love this. (Perhaps the bestial Druid rites of kingship will be an attraction for you.) A profitable read, accessible and interesting. A close look at the remarkable life and faith of St. Patrick of Ireland as revealed through his only surviving writings, with all the shamrock nonsense stripped away. Provides a thorough context of his life and times -- the social, political, adn religious backdrop of Britain and Ireland during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, loosely contiguous with the life of St. Augustine of Hippo. Well worth reading.