Critic’s Choice Welcomed Meg Wolitzer to Naples

Each year, the Critic’s Choice Program, a season-long book club at Artis-Naples, welcomes one of its favorite authors. This year, Elaine Newton invited Meg Wolitzer, the author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap and more. Elaine engaged Meg in a smart and friendly discussion in front of two packed houses on February 13 and 15, 2014.

I first raved about The Interestings last year, so if you haven’t read it yet or can’t remember the details, you might want to check that post out first. One of the many wonderful things about the Critic’s Choice program at Artis- Naples is the fact that most of the audience has already read the book. It gives the author license to reveal things about their book they otherwise wouldn’t. And the audience reaps the benefits.

Elaine and Meg seemed like dear old friends by the time they took to the podium. Elaine’s love of literature and her passionate praise for The Interestings drew Meg in and created a sense of intimacy that doesn’t always happen in an author interview. It was a remarkable appearance.

Meg revealed her thoughts behind the book. She was inspired to write about friendship, envy and talent, but wanted to tell the story looking back in time, in order to capture the full sense of nostalgia in the tragedy and comedy of life. When she wrote the first line of the book: “On a warm night in early July of that long-evaporated year, the Interestings gathered for the very first time,”  she didn’t have the words “long-evaporated.” But with that small addition, she knew she had captured the sense of nostalgia she wanted her novel to project. Because what does time do but evaporate in front of our eyes? And aren’t we powerless against it, just like we are powerless against the simple, invisible powers of nature and science?

Elaine and Meg took the characters one by one and talked about them as if they were real. Because a well-written book makes you feel that way, doesn’t it? And The Interestings even more so.

Meg revealed that she enjoyed writing Ethan’s character the most. He was the natural-born cartoonist with the most raw talent out of the group, and actually came from a piece of Meg’s own childhood. Meg admitted that she had her own version of Ethan’s Figland – she hosted her own talk show in bed alone at night that she called Meg’s Treasure Box.(To which I say, it’s obvious Meg was born to be a creative genius just like Ethan, no?)

And in fact, it seems to me that Meg also has a little cartoonist talent in her as well. Check out the fabulous way she personalized my book:

Meg confessed that in the first draft, her editor complained that Ethan was too good, so Meg invented a character flaw. Ethan would be a bad father to an autistic son. On the other hand, Ethan’s wife Ash would come from a family with a corrupt heart, so Meg made her a good mother and a good friend to Jules. And it is here that you begin to see the artist’s hand at work. This is how to make your characters come alive: no one is one-dimensional. As Meg herself said, “no one survives unscathed.”

And then there was Jonah, who Meg said was “vulnerable, childlike, enjoyable to write about.” Folk singing stood for the innocence of the era, and Jonah’s story was about betrayal, the loss of innocence and the stifling of talent. His mother Susannah, on the other hand, stood for resilience, adaptation and survival.

As Meg explained, the marriage between Jules and Dennis asks the tough questions, “can you love someone without a resumé? What is interesting?” Dennis isn’t one of  “The Interestings.” He never went to the same summer camp as the rest of them. He is ordinary, he lacks talent, he suffers from clinical depression. But Meg made a brilliant choice and had Dennis become an ultrasound technician. How perfect. One the one hand, what a mundane, uninspired profession, but yet it’s a miraculous skill: Dennis can show us what we cannot see under the surface of our own skin. He can see what envy can do, and he admonishes Jules to enjoy her own happiness. It is Dennis who earns the right to ask: “And specialness – everyone wants it. But Jesus, is it the most essential thing there is?”

So bravo, Meg Wolitzer, Artis-Naples and Elaine Newton for putting together such a very (I can’t resist) special and interesting program.

The Interestings: Highly recommended

My Favorite Historical Fiction of 2013

Historical fiction deserves its own category, don’t you think? After all, the Golden Globes separate drama from musical and comedy. That way they don’t have to play favorites, unlike the Oscars, where the judges have to choose just one Best Picture.

I’m not saying that historical fiction doesn’t compare to literary fiction, that it lacks the same depth and swagger, because oftentimes it doesn’t. But I do believe that the reader of historical fiction is looking for a slightly different experience.

We’re looking for a unique insight into history through story. We know where the nonfiction section is, and we spend a lot of time there too, but that’s not what we’re looking for when we read historical fiction. We want a good story. We’re looking for a hybrid experience where we can make an emotional connection to characters and events from the past.

We admire the research the author has done, and we also appreciate it when they’re savvy enough not to let it show. (A nod here to Barbara Shapiro, author of The Art Forger, one of my favorite historical fiction books from 2012, who said that her writing group used to warn her: “your research is showing.”) Historical research is a skill that not all authors have the skill or interest in. And fitting a story into a historical theme and setting, with real pesky facts to deal with, is no easy task. You can’t just make this shit up.

My Top Historical Fiction 2013

1. The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

It’s hard to argue with a book that has that magical golden sticker on it, isn’t it?

At the time I was reading this book — which is knock-your-socks-off fabulous by the way — I kept thinking to myself: this is how you do it. This is how you write historical fiction.

McBride made up one of the best fictional characters I’ve ever met — a cross-dressing mixed-race ex-slave — and plunked him down in the middle of an intense historical conflict. The story of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry is about as intense as it gets, but with McBride’s  Mark Twain-like sense of humor, a brutal Civil War story becomes rollicking good fun. It’s so good it’s like watching fireworks.

2. The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin

No one gets in the heads of famous women of history better than Melanie Benjamin.

She started with Alice Liddell in Alice I Have Been, tackled Vinnie Bump in The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, and now in The Aviator’s Wife, Benjamin has soared to new heights. She literally brought Anne Morrow Lindbergh out of the big dark shadow cast by her famous husband, the aviator Charles Lindbergh.

This story gave me completely new insight into an author I’ve admired for many decades — Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote Gift From the Sea, a series of early (1955) feminist essays with a beach combing theme — and sent me back to her writing with a whole new perspective on her life and times. I can’t wait for the movie with Jennifer Garner.

3. Longbourn by Jo Baker

I can’t believe how much I loved this book. I’m begging my book club to choose it as soon as we can. It’s a total slam-dunk for fans of Downton Abbey or Pride and Prejudice. Told from the point of view of the Bennetts’ servants, it shows us that the downstairs lives are just as rich and full and interesting as those upstairs. 

As I was reading along, I kept thinking of Harriet Tubman’s quote: “Aint I a Woman too?” It will make you reexamine many of the classics from literature, and wonder, but what did their downstairs folks think?

One of my favorite moments in Longbourn was when the head maid Mrs. Hill had a moment to contemplate her own life, and wondered: “Would she someday have what she wanted, rather than rely on the glow of other people’s happiness to keep her warm?”

4.   Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

It’s about time.

Ernest Hemingway had his turn for much too long. Ever since his Moveable Feast in 1964, we’ve all dismissed Zelda Fitzgerald as crazy, drunk and suicidal.

As Therese Fowler herself has pointed out, it’s called “gaslighting.” It comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. (Her husband wants to drive her crazy, so he sets their gaslights to flicker off and on, and when she complains, he tells her she’s just seeing things.) Hemingway gaslighted Zelda in Moveable Feast and tainted our perception of her for decades.

Finally, Therese Fowler gives Zelda her voice back. And thank goodness, because what great stories she can tell about the Lost Generation. It’s payback time, Ernest!

5. The Painted Girls by Catherine Marie Buchanan

In The Painted Girls, Catherine Marie Buchanan explores the seedy side of Belle Epoque Paris, and tells a story of the petit rats, the young ballerinas of the Paris Opera, and in particular, the story of Marie van Goethem, the girl who posed for Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer, age 14.

Buchanan did her research (yay) and discovered that  Degas exhibited Little Dancer in 1881, right next to his painting Criminal Physiognomies, which featured two young men accused of murder. Both the Little Dancer and the men in Criminal Physiognomies shared facial features that 19th century Parisians associated with some kind of criminal underclass. Buchanan tied these characters together to make a dark and suspenseful plot.

When my book club read this book, we watched the entire BBC documentary about Little Dancer, age 14 that inspired Catherine Marie Buchanan to write this book. It was a great combination. (I now notice that the YouTube video has been muted due to copyright issues, so you might need to hunt around a little to find it.)

6.  The House Girl by Tara Conklin

The House Girl by Tara Conklin has two intertwined plots: one is the story of a young slave, a “house girl” named Josephine Bell, and the other is the story of Lina Sparrow, a young lawyer assigned to a high-stakes class action lawsuit for reparations payments to the descendants of American slaves.

The two stories merge into one when Lina Sparrow’s search for the perfect representative plaintiff leads her to a brewing controversy in the art world. It turns out that the famous paintings of the antebellum artist LuAnn Bell, a Virginia slaveholder, may have instead been painted by her house slave, Josephine Bell. Lina begins an urgent search for Josephine’s possible descendants, in hopes that the truth will remedy the wrongs of the past.

Both threads of the story complement each other in a way that makes for an intriguing and thoughtful novel. Although many early readers seemed to enjoy Josephine’s story more, I have to say I loved Lina’s story just as much. Lina is the link between the past and the present. Her story shows us just how complicated the search for long overdue justice can be.

7.  My Notorious Life by Kate Manning

Based in part on the true story of a notorious Manhattan midwife in the mid-1800s, this is a marvelous story full of Dickensian characters, but none more vividly imagined that the utterly delightful Axie Muldoon.

Axie battles ignorance and arrogance as she fights for women’s right to take control of their own health care in a time when choices were few and the consequences were dire. With a nice mix of both hero and villain, Axie will win your heart and make you cheer for the defeat of her enemies.

Fun fact: Axie Muldoon has her own Twitter account where she tweets in character. Check it out here.

8.  Yonahlossee Riding Club by Anton DiSlcafani

This book is one fun ride.

It’s set in a North Carolina equestrian camp for southern debutantes during the 1930s. Isn’t that just marvelous? What more do I even need to say?

But there is indeed more. This is a coming-of-age story of a teenage girl named Thea who has been banished from home because of a shameful secret. Thea struggles with the guilt and responsibility her family wants her to feel, but in the course of her year at the camp, she learns to think for herself. And sometimes that gets her into even more trouble. . . .

It’s a compulsively good read.

9. Mary Coin by Marisa Silver

Just take a minute and enjoy the cover of Mary Coin, taken from the iconic photograph Migrant Mother by Dorthea Lange. Just look at that face of the migrant mother. Pretty powerful stuff, huh?

Well, I’m glad to say that the story imagined by Marisa Silver measures up to the photograph, which is no easy task. Silver imagines a full life not only for the migrant mother, but also the female photographer who defied convention to live the professional life she desired. Then there is a third character, a professor of cultural history who teaches his students how to find the big truths of history in the small moments and in the ephemera that remains — “the molecules of the past” that most academics overlook.

Here is a great example of historical fiction done well. It tells us an even bigger and more powerful story than a simple nonfiction approach could have. Bravo.

10. The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

My book club is reading this book this month, so I haven’t yet heard what they all think of it. I have a feeling that reaction will be mixed.

On the one hand, I admire Elizabeth Gilbert’s ambition and determination to explore the story of an intelligent and frustrated 19th century woman who lacks sufficient outlet for her energies, both intellectual and social. It is a beautiful imagined study of what that kind of life would feel like.

Gilbert spins a fabulous, epic story of adventure, travel and risk for Alma Whittaker’s father, and then she creates a blissful and fascinating childhood for Alma, full of books and learning and big hopes. Luckily, Alma finds a field of study – the study of mosses – to keep her challenged and engaged in what would otherwise have been a long and lonely life.

As much as I truly enjoyed this story, there are times in the book when I just had to shake my head and say, hmmm, that was weird, was that really necessary? You’ll know exactly what I mean when you get to the moss-covered cave in Tahiti.

11.  The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

From the author of Schindler’s List comes the story of two Australian sisters who join the World War I effort as nurses, and whose epic adventure brings them to the Battle of Gallipoli and the Western Front in France.

Keneally’s nurses are brave and strong, with large emotional lives and a complicated history back in Australia that make their inner challenges as interesting as their outer ones.

The Daughters of Mars is a real tour de force in a crowded field of World War One stories in this centennial year. Oh! and the ending!

Best Reads of 2013: Literary Fiction

This Florida reader had a fabulous year of reading in 2013. So good, in fact, that one list of  favorites just wasn’t enough. I had to divide it into three separate lists: one for general literary fiction, one for historical fiction and one for nonfiction. Because sometimes you feel like you’re comparing apples and oranges and its just not fair to the books. Because books have feelings too.

Literary Fiction:

1.  The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

I tore through this puppy in less than a week. Combine some tragic Dickensian characters with an edge-of-your-seat plot and a meditation on the power and meaning of art, and you’ve got me. The story begins as a terrorist bomb goes off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a 13 year-old boy staggers out of the rubble with The Goldfinch by the Dutch master Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) in his hands. Surely no trouble could come of that. . . .

I recommended this book to my book club and I don’t think I’ve ever heard such uniformly rave reviews. If you haven’t seen Donna Tartt’s interview with Charlie Rose, during which they visit The Goldfinch while it was at The Frick in New York City, take a minute to watch it now.

2.  TransAtlantic by Colum McCann

I am in love with Colum McCann’s way with words. He’s like an artist who can squeeze paint out of a tube and with a few strokes of genius, turns out something that doesn’t just resemble life, but something that is truer than life itself.

Like Let the Great World Spin, which was all about the connections between us, TransAtlantic is about the space and the sea that separate us, and the ways in which we have crossed that space. It’s hard to describe what this book is about – it ranges all over the place, from Frederick Douglass’ trip to Ireland to Senator George Mitchell’s role in the Irish Peace Talks – you’ll just have to trust me that the different parts work together like a deck of cards in the hands of a magician.

3.  The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I first wrote about this book back in April after I’d just finished it and couldn’t stop recommending it to my friends.

I said it then and I’ll say it again, but reading this book feels like catching up with old friends. It dares to ask the uncomfortable questions about how long-term friendships are affected by success and talent, envy and regret, what-ifs and why-not-me’s. I mean, look back at your own friends from high school and college and tell me what differences you see. Kind of staggering, isn’t it?

Meg Wolitzer is coming to Artis-Naples for the Critics Choice Author Event on February 13 and 15, 2014. I can’t wait to hear what she has to say.

4.  Someone by Alice McDermott

I have been a huge Alice McDermott fan ever since I read and fell in love with After This (2006), so I picked up a copy of Someone as soon as it came out. No one tells the simple domestic story better than Alice McDermott. She can turn her characters’ longings into what feels like a poem, a hymn, a prayer.

“Who is going to love me?” asks the main character, an Irish Catholic girl whose heart has just been broken by a cad. “Someone,” her brother says kindly. That just kills me. How simple, but what an enormous, universal truth.

Here is the story of just someone, no one special, just another someone in this big world of what now, 7 plus billion? And yet it is a universal story of grace and and family and the search for someone who loves you back. I loved it.

5.  The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

The Woman Upstairs is brave and fierce and just plain balls-to-the-wall fabulous.

It’s the story of Nora, “the woman upstairs” — you know, the plain, unmarried elementary school teacher who lives in a semi-shabby apartment upstairs from you along with her cats and her regrets. She lives vicariously through the lives of other artists she envies and admires. Nora’s transformation will come, but how she gets there — through an absolutely stunning betrayal — is fueled by sheer fury.

Put on some music by Bonnie Raitt or Pink while you read The Woman Upstairs and let out a little of your own rage. Oh, come on, you know you have some in there somewhere. . . .

6.  Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Tale for the Time Being is a sheer delight to read.    It’s clever and witty and fun, plus there’s a spiritual Buddhist vibe that makes you feel like wow, maybe we are all connected here somehow, in ways we’ll never really understand.

Imagine the Elegance of the Hedgehog set in Japan, with a sad young protagonist, and combine it with the story of a woman across the Pacific Ocean who discovers her diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox that washed up on shore after the 2011 tsunami.

You should read it.

Call Me Zelda: A New Twist on the Twisted Life of Zelda Fitzgerald

Whether you’re excited by the glitz and glamour of the new Gatsby movie, or you think it’s going to be a frenzy of hype and excess, we recommend you check out a wonderful new novel, Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck.

Call Me Zelda isn’t just another book about Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s the richly imagined story of a psychiatric nurse, Anna Howard, who served Zelda during her years in Baltimore “after the party.” It is Anna’s story more than Zelda’s, as we get to see how Anna’s life is transformed by her relationship with Zelda and Scott.

Anna struggles to keep her own footing as she becomes increasingly involved in the celebrities’ lives. Zelda is admitted to the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in 1932 where Anna is a nurse. Anna has suffered her own tragedies, having lost her husband in the war and their young daughter in the influenza epidemic, but rather than face her own sadness and survivor’s guilt, Anna is consumed by the need to help Zelda. She is eventually hired to be Zelda’s private nurse when Zelda moves out of Phipps and into their private home just outside of Baltimore (in true Gatsby style, the house has it’s own French name: La Paix). Scott and Zelda’s relationship is toxic and Zelda is deeply troubled, but Anna is determined to help Zelda find some peace and happiness. The wake behind the Fitzgeralds’ celebrity lives is indeed very choppy and you worry that Anna will get lost in it.

We all know that Zelda and Scott’s story ends in tragedy. But you will hope that Anna’s doesn’t. Will she be redeemed by her dedication to Zelda, and ultimately find a way to live her own life, or will she become another “Woman Upstairs” who loses herself by living vicariously through others?

Call Me Zelda: Highly recommended.

The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer

I just finished a really good book.

The Interestings is the story of a handful of teenagers who meet at a performing arts camp called “Spirit-in-the-Woods” in 1974. The story starts with their their first heady summer together (so much so that they actually call themselves “The Interestings”) and follows them through their eventual coupling and careers, and then onward toward the present, with everything that middle age brings.

These characters get under your skin. They burrow into your conscience and demand that you get to know them. By the time you’re done, they’re like family.

There’s Julie from the suburbs, whose quick wit gets her into the camp’s inner circle (“the hot little nucleus of the place”) despite her white-bread background. Ash and Goodman Wolf are siblings from the upper west side of New York who have more in the way of family connections than raw talent, and Ethan Figman, a natural born cartoonist who is the one member of the group who is a true creative genius. There is Jonah, a gifted guitarist who stifles his own talent, and Cathy Kiplinger, an aspiring dancer whose own developing curves will get in her way. To Julie Jacobson (who quickly transforms herself into a cooler “Jules”) these new friends are the most interesting people she’s ever met. Most of them will be friends the rest of their lives.

For many of us baby boomers, these characters are just like us. The historical detail in this book is so rich and precise that I kept looking over my shoulder – does Meg Wolitzer know me? She must! How else could she know that I too wore Dr. Scholl’s sandals and corduroy jeans that swished together when I walked? I swear to God, my brother had the exact same red flannel lined sleeping bag as Ash Wolf, with “a repeating pattern of cowboys swinging lariats.”

Like the characters in the book, I was at a camp when I heard the news about Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation. (Okay, I’ll admit, it wasn’t an elite East Coast arts camp, but rather a no-frills Wisconsin trailer park.) But still. I was camping out with my high school friends, and I vividly recall how the entire campground broke out in celebration when we heard the news over our Zenith transistor radios. It was like a war had ended, and I guess it had. It was a little bit like the night we got Bin Laden.

What an inspired place to start a book, the summer that Nixon would “lurch away, leaving his damp slug trail.” Wolitzer conjures up many other stunning details that portray the end of one era (powder blue Smith Corona typewriters, nasty-tasting Tab, aging folksingers, Moonies, Princess phones with long tangled cords) and the start of another (Ronald Reagan, computers, our first gourmet club dinner parties with cilantro, and the mysterious disease we would come to know as AIDS).

The Interestings start out just like many of us when we were in our late teens. You know. Obnoxious, smart and promising. Most Boomers seemed to have this faith that something would come of our talent and promise – that we were meant for great things. And then. Time marches forward and the Goon Squad arrives.

Not everyone succeeds. Not everyone is a genius. And if it’s not you (odds are it probably isn’t), what do you do? Do you keep fighting the good fight, or do you settle? If you settle, are you happy, or do you have regrets and envy the rest of your life? How do you deal with your friends and family who have more or less talent or money than you? Does it change your friendship?

The Interestings raises big questions that are hard to answer, whether you’re a baby boomer or a millennial or something in between. What a joy it was to watch Wolitzer’s characters grapple with them until the very end, when a middle-aged Jules concludes:

And didn’t it always go like that  . . . all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn’t stop watching, because despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.

And so it goes. How interesting.

Critic’s Choice: The Cat’s Table

On March 16, several hundred readers attended the Critic’s Choice Program at the Naples Philharmonic to enjoy Elaine Newton’s discussion of The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje.

Newton is a fabulous speaker, a passionate reader and an obvious fan of Ondaatje, a fellow Canadian. But it was her insight into the central mystery of the book that pushed the audience deeper in our understanding and appreciation of The Cat’s Table‘s magic.

And it reminded me why we love book clubs. Together, we push each other forward, we make new discoveries, and sometimes we just share the wonder. When a book is  *that good* it’s nice to share the experience. That’s when a book club meeting can feel like the fireworks on the Fourth of July. There’s just something wonderful about the sound of a collective “ooh! . . . aah!”

And so the audience joined Newton’s ooh-ing and aah-ing over Ondaantje’s talent, his ability to create such a compelling cast of characters: an entire community of the powerful and the persecuted, the have’s and have-not’s, those honored to sit at the Captain’s Table versus the losers and strays at the Cat’s Table.

The entire story is set aboard the ship The Oransay on a voyage from Ceylon to London in the 1950s. The Cat’s Table is as far from the Captain’s Table as you could get, and there sat three unaccompanied minors, young boys on the verge of maturity, too young to fully comprehend the complicated world of adults, but old enough to dream up scemes, spy on their shipmates and sneak into the first class breakfast buffet. Their fellow Cat’s Table outcasts include a botanist, late-night bridge players, circus acrobats, a curious pigeon lady, a jazz musician and a mysterious shackled prisoner.

The turning point of the book occurs when the ship enters the Suez Canal, a narrow channel where a young innocent boy emerges as a darker, wiser and more mature adolescent. It is there where the mystery of the prisoner grows more complex, and when fellow passengers’ secrets start to be revealed.

Most of the fellow readers I have talked to about The Cat’s Table have wanted to discuss the prisoner. Who was he? Who was for him, who was against him, and why? Without revealing any spoilers, I can tell you that Newton gave us a huge hint that seemed to help us inch toward a deeper understanding of the social and historical forces at work in The Cat’s Table.

The prisoner’s name was Neimeyer, meaning new steward.  Hmmm, . . . think about that. A “new steward” in Sri Lanka, which had just won its independence from Great Britian, but which would continue to be under its dominion. A “new steward” who had murdered a British judge. Consider that in the context of Sri Lankan history, and you realize there is much that Ondaatje left unsaid about the politics on board the Oransay.

Once again, Elaine Newton did a fabulous job engaging and enlightening Naples readers. about

A Nineteenth Century “Amazing Race”: Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman

Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World

This book is probably not your typical beach read for a Florida reader (I’m reasonably sure I was the only one down at the beach with this hardcover in my lap), but I hope to spot more people reading this terrific adventure story in the weeks and months to come. It’s the kind of well written, story-driven nonfiction that will appeal to fans of Erik Larson or Laura Hillenbrand.

Eighty Days is a fascinating adventure story of two young women’s race around the world during the winter of 1889-1890. At the same time, it’s an interesting and thoughtful piece of social history, revealing exactly how the world treated two fearlessly independent women in the late nineteenth century.

Nellie Bly 1889: Wikipedia

Nellie Bly was a “plucky” young female journalist for The World, a sensational New York newspaper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. An utterly unconventional girl for the time, Bly had already worked as a correspondent in Mexico and an imbedded reporter in the notorious Blackwell Island Asylum, so she was not afraid of solo travel or dangerous assignments.

Bly came up with the idea herself, thinking: why not try to beat the record set by the fictional character Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne’s 1871 book Around the World in Eighty Days? The World agreed to fund the trip, and made arrangements for her to set sail across the Atlantic on November 14, 1889. Bly left the Port of Hoboken with only one carry-on “grip sack” that contained nothing but the absolute essentials. The World covered her every move.

Elizabeth Bisland 1889: Wikipedia

In the meantime, word got out about Nellie Bly’s plan, and the publisher of Cosmopolitan magazine decided to send out his own female reporter, a young Southern intellectual named Elizabeth Bisland, turning it into a two-woman race. Believing that the prevailing winter winds would favor travel from east to west, The Cosmopolitan started Bisland off on a train from New York to San Francisco.

The Cosmopolitan made a public wager of $1,000 against The World, and one of the world’s biggest publicity event at the time was launched.

The suspense of the race propels you through the book. At each step of the way, Bly and Bisland run into the threat of travel delays that could ruin their plans. Steamships struggle across stormy seas, coming into port days later than expected. An unexpected blizzard nearly closes down all train traffic in the western United States. A boat’s propeller is damaged, connections are missed, and misinformation is suspiciously leaked.

But Eighty Days so much more than a nineteenth century version of The Amazing Race. It’s the story of two very different young women fighting for their own place in the world. Bisland was an intellectual, a poet, and an aristocrat from a former slave-holding family in Mississippi, while Bly was a scrappy muckraking story seeker who had gotten her first break writing for a local Pittsburgh paper. They both undertook a trip that no man had yet accomplished, and they did it in long dresses, hairpins and heels.

Eighty Days by Matthew Goodman: Highly recommended.

Critic’s Choice Book Club Welcomed Katie Ward

       

Earlier this month, the Lifelong Learning Program of the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts held its Critic’s Choice book discussion with host Elaine Newton and guest Katie Ward, author of Girl Reading (Simon & Schuster, U.S. paperback February, 2013). Elaine Newton’s book discussions are so popular that they are now scheduled for two dates each: one in the “Phil’s” Daniels Pavilion on Thursdays at 10am, which has room for 282 people, and one on Saturdays in Hayes Hall at the Phil, which has up to 1,425 seats. Some call it the “biggest book club in the world.”

Girl Reading is a highly original concept for a book. It takes seven different portraits of girls and women reading, each in a completely different era of history, and invents an entire story around each portrait. From the past to the present and even the future, Ward tells us the seemingly unrelated stories of a Renaissance orphan, a Dutch servant girl, an 18th century painter, a Victorian Era photographer, a woman in World War I, a contemporary woman sitting in a bar, and a woman in a very virtual world in 2060.

Each chapter could have been a novel of its own. My favorite part of each story was figuring out what each portrait looked like (Katie Ward has links to the images available on her website), and then reading on to learn what Katie thought the woman was reading and why.

My favorite story was the Victorian chapter, Featherstone of Piccadilly Carte de Visite, 1864, because that was when you could feel the women’s stories start to change. It began to remind me of Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, which I adore.

The Victorian chapter features a widow carrying on with her former husband’s photography business, making Victorian era calling cards called cartes de visite. (Katie Ward got a big laugh from the crowd when she compared them to today’s Facebook.) The widow is taking a photo of her unmarried and very unconventional twin sister, and asks her to hold a book, which was often done in the early days of photography in order to get the sitter to remain still for an extended period of time. During the sitting, the sisters argue about their place in the world and the very different choices they had made in their lives. The book the sitting sister is holding just happens to be “Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management.” Very clever move.

  

My advice to anyone who hasn’t read this book yet: just take it slow. Be patient. Let each story take its time with you. Spend the time to look up each painting or picture on the internet. You can’t truly enjoy the story without seeing the art that inspired each story. Here are a few from Katie’s website:

  

  

Katie Ward admitted that a lot of people believe Girl Reading is more of a collection of short stories than a novel. In fact, when she was meeting with potential editors to discuss publication, one had suggested that it be published as a set of separate stories collected together in a box. Katie resisted this idea, and feels that if you look closely, you will see a thread of women’s history and feminism that will carry you through the book.

To read more about Katie’s visit to Naples, check out her blog, which includes photographs, including the one above picturing Elaine and Katie on stage at the Phil.

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The next Critic’s Choice event takes place on Thursday, March 14th (sold out) and Saturday, March 16th (tickets available here). Elaine will be discussing The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, which she describes as follows:

Three feisty, unsupervised schoolboys spend 21 life-changing days aboard an ocean liner headed from Sri Lanka to London; privy to the adult gossip, intrigue and mayhem.