Lenten links of the day for 6 February 2008

It’s Ash Wednesday again, and time to begin Lent.  Like last year I plan to read a number of books on religious themes throughout Lent.  Unlike last year, I will post the book reviews as I go along instead of just one big post at the end of Lent.

I have some other plans of fasting, prayer and charity for Lent I’m keeping between me and God for now, but here are some interesting links for Lent:

• 40 Days 40 Ways to reduce poverty in America (Campaign to Reduce Poverty in America, 2/6/08)
• 25 Great Things You Can Do For Lent…besides giving up chocolate compiled by Renée LaReau (BustedHalo)
• On Loving Lent By Jane L. Wiesman (America, 3/30/85)

Here’s hoping and praying that Lent is good for all!

Book Review: American Pastoral by Phillip Roth

I’ve read two books by Philip Roth previously: Goodbye Columbus which I can’t even really member and Portnoy’s Complaint which is such a horrifying example of misogyny it made me swear of Roth for life. So I was a bit leery when my alumni chapter book club selected American Pastoral (1997) for our February meeting. A few pages into the book there’s a scene at a Mets game at Shea Stadium and I started warming to the book a bit right there.

The novel tells the story of Seymour “Swede” Levov, a handsome and talented high school athlete who gains legendary status in his WWII-era Newark neighborhood. After the war ends, Swede marries Miss New Jersey, inherits his father’s glove-making factory, and settles in a stone house in rural New Jersey. Swede and his wife Dawn raise one daughter Merry, Swede’s pride and joy. The American Dream appears fulfilled. Everything comes crashing down as Merry becomes involved with political extremists protesting the Vietnam War and bombs the local post office/general store, killing one man.

That’s basically the whole story in a nutshell, but the fills the novel’s many pages with long passages of the characters’ inner thoughts as they examine their lives. This storytelling style is especially illuminating – gripping even – when it focuses on Swede Levov. Unfortunately, Roth is ever the misogynist and thus his insights on the female characters are rather one-dimensional.

The novel also has an odd narrative structure. The first third of the book is written in first person by Nathan Zuckerman, who 45 years after graduating high school still has an obsession with Swede Levov the high school athlete, an obsession that tests the bounds of credibility. After a hundred pages or so, Zuckerman drops out of the narrative as a character although one has to assume that he’s still narrating the entire story, which creates a question of whether or not he’s a reliable narrator. The whole novel ends unsatisfyingly with no closure whatsoever.

I’ve mixed feelings about this book. Parts of it are brilliant, bringing a place, an era, and a personality to life, but it’s also weighed down by wordiness and inconsistency

Ireland/Britain 1998 day 17: Derry/Ulster American Folk Park

I took a day trip from Derry on 6 February 1998 to the Ulster American Folk Park.  This is an open-air living history museum that depicts the lives of people in Northern Ireland and how they brought their culture and tradition to the United States when they emigrated.  I’d actually visited and enjoyed a similar museum about the immigrant experience in Virginia called The Frontier Culture Museum.  Another commonality among these museums is that I visited them on miserable days in the off-season when there was absolutely no one else there.  Despite the challenges though, I submitted to my history geekdom and made the best of the visit.

In Derry that evening, I meet up with an Australian named Brooke whom I previously met in Killarney and is staying at Steve’s.  We discover that we both have Aqua’s “Dr. Jones” stuck in our head and find ourselves humming it involuntarily.  We go to Peadar O’Donnell’s where we meet a woman from Derry named Carmel and her Geordie boyfriend (that is from Newcastle, England).  We have a few pints and a few laughs, but overall it’s a quiet night.

Role playing in the school house at Ulster American Folk Park.