Month: August 2006

By Sigrid Nunez. Published in 2005.

The idealistic radicalism of the 1960s and ’70s has always bewildered me. I remember watching The Weather Underground, a documentary about the Weathermen, a violent organization of that era that sought to provoke revolution against the United States government, and feeling overwhelmed by the surge of conflicting emotions it inspired. As much as I abhor the violence of 1960s extremists and sneer at their misguided strategies and pity their naïveté and disdain many of their goals (I don’t support revolution, so back off, Gonzalez), I envy their conviction that real change is possible and that they had the power to effect it. I can’t comprehend that kind of idealism because I myself have never known it.

But I’m not the only one who was born disillusioned; one could say the same of many if not most of my generation. That’s certainly the implication of the title of Sigrid Nunez’s book, The Last of Her Kind, about a young woman who comes of age during the ’60s and ’70s. The novel’s protagonist and narrator is not, however, the heirless paragon, Ann Drayton, but her erstwhile friend, Georgette George. We see Ann through Georgette’s eyes, and we, too, chafe at Ann’s self-righteousness yet respond nonetheless to her principled certainty and charisma. She might be sanctimonious, but she holds herself to the same standards she does everyone else, and that relentlessness makes her far more intriguing than your average holier-than-thou hippie.

By Jhumpa Lahiri. Published in 2004.

Names have fascinated me for more than a decade. When I was a teenager, I started collecting baby name books, a hobby I kept secret because people could easily get the wrong idea about a fifteen-year-old girl with a small stash of books for expectant mothers. How could I explain that my obsession wasn’t with babies but with what people name them and why and what that means?

I love studying names because thinking about names means thinking about cultural background, class, race, gender, and family history. Thinking about names means thinking about individual identity, collective identity, and the negotiation between the two. That’s precisely why Jhumpa Lahiri can use the name Gogol Ganguli, the name of the principal character in her novel, The Namesake, as a vehicle to address all of those issues. She doesn’t need to stretch; the issues are inherent in the name itself.

By Philip Pullman. Trilogy includes The Golden Compass published in 1995, The Subtle Knife in 1997 and The Amber Spyglass in 2000.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is supposedly for “young adults,” teenagers, but the three books are so compelling, so powerful and thought-provoking and heartfelt, that they certainly should not be limited to a single age bracket. With beautifully drawn characters and a taut, suspenseful plot, the fantasy series makes for an electric, enjoyable read, and yet ultimately, the books are profoundly serious. As the story unfolds, Pullman’s true audacity becomes apparent: He has written a strange kind of sequel to Paradise Lost — unabashedly heretical but undeniably hopeful. By no means should teenagers have a monopoly on these books.