Miss Garnet's Bad Gay-Dar

Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I went into this with all my warning lights flashing: it's gonna be spiritual (and I'm not), "oh god, there's gonna be romance" (ew); and "she's gonna see angels, isn't she?" This was probably unfair to the author, but that hasn't stopped me before.
Miss Julia Garnet is a rather stupid woman who becomes fascinated by a story from the Apocrypha when she could be enjoying the endless art of Venice. She also has very bad "gay-dar." Vickers tries to interweave these two stories but as the outcome of the older one had already been laid out for the reader, I wished it would just go away. I've read pseudo-biblical novels and actually enjoyed them (The Red Tent by Anita Diamant) because they were saying something interesting on two levels: this is the way it was, this is us looking at it from behind the screen of the laconic biblical version.
In the end, I think this is someone who actually does write better than Dan Brown trying to write something similar to The da Vinci Code or such, but running up against the same problems: the straining of credulity chief among them. While I welcome this in cheezy mystery fiction, I expect something better from this sort of book.
The angel business is telegraphed all over, Miss Garnet (not sure if I can blame the author directly on this) makes a silly error over the usage of "Signore" [no, my dear, they aren't calling God by the homely title of "Mister" - Signore means "lord" and it and mister/master have been watered down to apply to all men], and the Apocrypha story contains such an egregious ball of lard as: "In your language, if you spell dog backwards ... well, you are not stupid, I guess, or you would not be reading this." So, this Jew in Assyrian exile knows English? Wow, how magical is that.
And I think: really, am I not stupid? Why am I reading this? Because I was ordering "Barbarella" from amazon.com and this would only be another $2.22?

View all my reviews >>

The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

This was in my shelf-reading area (along with Bully-Be-Gone, see below) and looked interesting. The jacket blurb reminded me of David Sedaris's story of his foray into Shakespearean acting when he was a kid. As the title indicates, it is typical teen hyperbole where everything is about them and their own petty problems. There are no wars. Holling is just the only non-catechism student in his class, causing his teacher to find something to do with him on Wednesday afternoons. Because she tries giving him away, giving him icky chores, and finally caves in and forces him to read Shakespeare, he thinks she hates him.
Schmidt must be my age or a year or two younger. I remember all this Viet Nam angst and I certainly heard about generation clashes (which just didn't happen between me and my parents but I knew it must be going on because I saw it on television). There are some things, though, that I'm pretty sure did not happen, but I guess had to be written this way for the sake of the story. I am from New York and while we had air-raid drills my kindergarten year (none of the "duck-and-cover" nonsense from earlier in the Cold War), it was all over after then, so I doubt it continuing in 1968. Teachers were not delivered telegrams about the life or death status of their loved ones in the service in their classrooms. Any right-thinking administrator would call the teacher to the office to be given news in relative privacy with adult support ... if indeed the message goes there at all.
And one other thing bothered me.
Mrs. Baker and Holling read together "The Merchant of Venice" and have a fine discussion about it. They discuss what happens to Shylock and Mrs. Baker finishes by telling Holling that this is the reason this play is called a tragedy. I flipped to the back blurb about the author to confirm what I had read about him before. He is a college English teacher. Shylock's position in society and his losses at the end of the play notwithstanding, "The Merchant of Venice" was classified as a comedy at its first printing. Today we might refer to it as a "problem play," but the merchant of the title not only doesn't lose his pound of flesh, he gets the girl at the end. It might be a tragedy for Shylock, but the play itself is not called a tragedy.
This does not spoil the overall book, which is chock full of pathos that brought this reader to tears even as she resisted it. The book is not without humor as Holling relates how he suffers numerous "humiliations" such as playing Ariel, a fairy, in a scene from "The Tempest." I have to agree that playing a fairy, even in a Shakespeare play, would sink a teenage boy's macho rankings in the herd, much more so with tights and feathers on his bottom. (I also heartily disbelieve that any performance of any Shakespeare would move his peers to tears, but that's why they call it "fiction." I'm beginning to feel sorry for Mickey Mantle, by the way, because of how he's used in fiction to symbolize all idols with feet of clay. I know he was an alcoholic and hardly Mr. Nice Guy to his fans. It just seems to be kicking someone when they're down or dead or otherwise can't defend themselves. Feet of clay is an important lesson to learn, but I'm just sayin' ...) There is also the sole Vietnamese student who has to bear the hostility of some and the "noble" support of others.
I finished reading the book while working out at the club. I'd done my limit on the cardio machines and got to the end of the story by walking laps on the track. You know it's a good (if manipulative) read if I lose track of how much time I've spent exercising while reading! I'm willing to set aside my little quibbles (not without airing them to make me appear smarter - say, aren't those standard achievement tests called the Regents exams? My sister sweated those each year and had to go to summer school one year because she flunked them!) to call this a Good Book.