A Gate At the Top of the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Did you know you can download a free Kindle application for your phone from iTunes or Amazon? It’s true! That means you can read electronic books right on your phone.  I typically like regular old paper books but, since I’m also not one to stand in the way of progress, I gave it a try. Several months ago I downloaded the app and selected A Gate at The Top of The Stairs by Lorrie Moore in which to read.

The combo of Moore’s book and the Kindle for iPhone was, well, overwhelming. At first.  I had a feeling I sometimes experience when watching Keith Olbermann. That is, it was a bit disconcerting to have so much truth and passion come out of such a small box. I read it in bits, a screen or two was all I could take. The narrator of Moore’s book is Tassie Keltjin, a 20-year-old college student in the Midwest. I’ve known a lot of 20-year-old Midwestern college students (hey, I was one), but none like Tassie. Her opinions seemed so fully formed and intense that I was convinced that either all her sentences were filled with multi-hyphenated words and exclamation marks (they were not) or we would find out that she was actually a 40-year-old posing as a 20-year-old (she wasn’t).

Yet I love Lorrie Moore’s writing. She is, quite frankly, a prose god. I treasure her short stories in The New Yorker and her book Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is one of my favorites (she’s also the author of Self Help and Birds of America). I know that she’s a funny, brainy and compassionate writer. So I stuck with it.  Eventually either Tassie calmed down or I did. Very soon I was able to stay up until 2am flick, flick, flicking away, thoroughly engrossed in A Gate at the Top of the Stairs.

The setting is a post-9/11 liberal-ish college town in Wisconsin. Tassie is hired as a between-classes nanny for a college professor and restauranteur who adopt a mixed race child. Moore hits every beat: love, hate, heartbreak, racism, classism, sibling relationships, adultery, friendships, precious restaurants and the popularity of baby vegetables, to mention a few. Even when the book is extremely funny, which it often is, there always seems to be something sad lurking in the corners.

I admit that “What I’m Reading Now” is a bit of a misnomer. I actually recently finished A Gate At The Top of the Stairs. It took me some time because while I imagined it would be easy to read while, say, waiting for my son during a park & rec class, it wasn’t. This was not Moore’s fault. I found that reading a book on your phone is convenient, but can also make you look like one of those obnoxious parents who are always checking his/her email and compulsively text messaging. Since I’m aware that I do enough of those tasks at inappropriate times, I didn’t want to add to my parental image problem.  A paper book never makes a reader seem obnoxious and uncaring like an iPhone does! Alas, on my last flick –by myself in the privacy of a doctor’s office waiting room — I felt sheer relief that the sad thing lurking in the corner was just ordinary life; Things didn’t turn out as bad as they could have for Tassie. Thank God — or, rather, Lorrie Moore. And guess what? As soon as I was done, I downloaded another book. I may not be able to read on my iPhone during those times I’m supposed to be posing as a good parent, but there are plenty of times when having a book on your phone comes in handy!

Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

By Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck

I know this book sounds really appealing, right? Bear with me. This is an excellent book that sums up much of how, when and why suburbs were created. It talks a lot about weird things (to non-city planner types): road width, intersections, residential and commercial sites in the suburbs, laws and tax codes. Suburban Nation taught me the  term “collector road,” for which I am grateful. Everybody should know about collector roads! I swear, the book is absolutely fascinating – that is, until you get about two-thirds through. That’s when the complaining about suburbs and everything that’s wrong with them gets old. By the end, though, the authors redeem themselves by giving very good advice to those of us who wish to make the burbs more livable and sustainable. If only city council people, planners, and other community leaders in the burbs had the wherewithal to read this! That would be something.

Now for my personal take on a major failing of these authors (and others in their field). They talk about the built environment and how much that has to do with how people live. Yes, it sure does. But where do they leave room for the human spirit? So the average suburban environment is, well, a bit appalling  – horrible architecture, collector roads, tract houses, even people with boring furniture. However, I don’t care how drab the built world is, people are always creative. There is always an artist, writer, an entrepreneur, a cool mom, an enlightened dad, the bizarre and funny kid. In short, there is life in the burbs. Much as urban planners like to deny it, we equal more than the sum of our built parts. That’s my lecture for the day. Now go read Suburban Nation. The authors are smart. Besides, this is your world and you should know about it.

Note: since there are seriously no independent bookstores in our part of exurbia, we’re giving you an Amazon link.

I picked a friend up from the airport several months ago. She’d recently seen author Laura Day interviewed on a morning show. She couldn’t remember the name of her book exactly, but she kept looking in the airport bookstores and was disappointed she couldn’t find it. This intrigued me enough to later track down the book at the library. I actually had to be put on a waiting list for this one. I suspect it’s the type of book with a title that really makes you want to believe, yet maybe not believe enough to want to part with $24. Anyhow, I did get it and read it. The whole premise is that any one of us can master our intuitive and psychic powers enough to get exactly what we want. Day has been around a while touting similar ideas. In fact, her Practical Intuition was a NYT best seller. (An aside: She has a lot of celeb friends, too. Cover endorsements from Demi Moore and Brad Pitt kind of made sense but I was a little surprised –and further intrigued — that Chris Rock also blurbed her book.)

Many of you may think all of this stuff is a bunch of nonsense. I don’t. As a health writer (a big part of what I do when not posting here), I put a lot of stock in researchers and JAMA studies and such. However, I also leave room for that which we can’t quantify,  can’t necessarily prove with with double-blind studies. There’s something to the whole idea that we know — or can know– more than we think we know. However intriguing I found Day’s ideas, however, I found the exercises she provided for readers a bit vague and hard to follow. Or, rather, hard to get results. Then again, as Day notes in the book it takes time to cultivate these skills. Perhaps I just need to practice my psychic abilities a lot more. When my husband found me reading this on, yes, our couch, he teased me a bit. I could tell he was interested, though. Guess what he got for Valentine’s Day? I’ll let you know if either of us begin ruling the world anytime soon.

Joel Kotkin, a Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange and author of  the forthcoming book “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” recently authored The War Against Suburbia in The American magazine. Here’s how he kicks off his article:

A year into the Obama administration, America’s dominant geography, suburbia, is now in open revolt against an urban-centric regime that many perceive threatens their way of life, values, and economic future.

As The Cheetah Girls might say: Here we go…Uh oh, uh oh…

First we got blamed (along with others) for the Prop 8 disaster in California and now Kotkin appears to be setting us up as the peeps who’ll bring down Obama. Have I somehow missed this ‘open revolt’ to which Kotkin refers? In his article, Kotkin cites Scott Brown’s win as indicative of suburbanite rage against Obama. Really? As proof that the Obama Administration is against us (and I guess we against them) Kotkin says:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood revealed the new ideology when he famously declared the administration’s intention to “coerce” Americans out of their cars and into transit.

… current climate czar Carole Browner threatened to block federal funds for the Atlanta region due to their lack of compliance with clear air rules.

OMG! Imagine!  Reliable mass transit and clean air? How horrible. I did find myself eventually agreeing with Kotkin, though, who, incidentally lives right in the San Fernando Valley. He says that urban planners, the movie industry and many others marginalize and misrepresent the suburban experience. The myth of the burbs is that it’s a miserable place and yet, as Kotkin cites, a 2008 Pew study revealed suburbanites displayed the highest degree of satisfaction with where they lived. They were also more involved in their communities. Writes Kotkin:

This contradicts another of the great urban legends of the 20th century—espoused by urbanists, planning professors, and pundits and portrayed in Hollywood movies—that suburbanites are alienated, autonomous individuals, while city dwellers have a deep sense of belonging and connection to their neighborhoods.

And, yep, I even agree with him later when he cites the growing racial diversity of suburbs and the fact that, no matter what urban planners may desire (FYI…many want a future America without suburbs) the burbs are firmly planted. Many suburbanites and exurbanites have now lived in their communities for generations. This is home, even if there are a lot of chain restaurants, little mass transit and too many wasteful big box stores.

Just to be clear…we in the burbs want mass transit, we want neighborhoods where we can walk to schools, services and shops. You don’t have to coerce us out of cars. We will turn over the keys if you give us another way to get around. Already, I see people here doing just that. There are far more bicyclicist, bus riders and pedestrians, in addition to people ditching the huge cars and going for more enviro-friendly ones. And, while it’s great that there’s so much talk about the proposed high-speed light rail system from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we still want something from Thousand Oaks or Agoura to LA. In short, we don’t want to leave but we want to figure out how to make suburbia work better. Mass transit and clean air actually seem like goals that are not inconsistent with the current suburban way of life or values.

The thing I don’t get, though, is how Kotkin can rail against the media for misrepresenting suburban/exurban people and yet, in the words of another great songstress, oops! [He] did it again.

Please tell us what you think. Do you think the current administration is against the suburbs? Do you think the burbs have a future? Click here to read Kotkin’s full article reprinted on JoelKotkin.com

I often have friends ask me what I’m reading or ask for book/author recommendations. So in “What I’m reading now” I’ll simply be posting on, well, what I’m reading! Don’t expect much off the NYT or LAT best seller lists, though. There’s enough out there about those books, plus I usually buy used books or check them out at the library. Occasionally, I’ll do something newish. Like next time I’ll probably tell you about this book I’m reading on how to increase your psychic abilities (it’s gotten a lot of press). Anyhow, for this week, it’s the novel Stoner by John Williams. It was first published in 1965 and it’s a meticulously written story about William Stoner and university life from about 1910 to 1956. Stoner is sent to the University of Missouri by his farmer father to study agriculture. Ultimately, he’s smitten by literature, dumps the farm and becomes an undistinguished assistant professor of English (he also gets married, has a daughter, a mistress, etc. etc.). The “undistinguished” part, though, is key. This is a story about an average guy getting by. It’s a quiet book. The author’s writing style is direct and plain but his descriptions are beautiful and, moreover, his take on the inner life is beyond illuminating. Here I should give you a sample but my feeling is that you can pick up the book and randomly point to any passage and it will be brilliant. So, wait, I’m going to do that…Well, I pointed to the part where he’s getting with his mistress. It is a great passage but I don’t want you to think that’s what the book is really about. Instead, here’s a good Williams description:

It was winter, and a low damp midwestern mist floated over the campus. Even at midmorning the thin branches of the dogwood trees glistened with hoarfrost, and the black vines that trailed up the great columns before Jesse Hall were rimmed with iridescent crystals that winked against the grayness.

And here Williams describes Edith, who would become Stoner’s wife:

Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force.

Stoner is a somewhat lonely and sad book. If you like Dan Brown, for instance, you might not like John Williams. However, is you’re up for something that operates on a higher level, you’ll appreciate it.