Foam of the Daze by Boris Vian (1947)

The lovely Bridget lent me her copy of Foam of the Daze by Boris Vian (1947) [L'Écume des jours originally and also translated as Froth on the Daydream]. I'd never heard of this book before the recent Michel Gondry adaptation (Mood Indigo -- which I really enjoyed), but apparently it is something like The Catcher in the Rye of French literature -- wildly popular among young people for generations and extremely influential.

I'd like to quote my own dear husband, Dr. Mystery, in his review of The Wanderer by Alain-Fournier: "In classic French tradition, this book is about nostalgia, idealized romance that turns tragic once it becomes real, the romanticism of adolescent desire and yearning and the painful loss of that desire when adulthood hits, and the impermanence of childhood idylls. The book is melancholy and concerned with loss, but it's not heavy-handed or oppressive and is often funny." In fact, I could just quote Dr. M and end this review right now, because in classic French tradition, this book hits all those same points.

Colin is rich and lives in a fantastical apartment. He is best friends with Chick, who is obsessed with Jean-Sol Partre. He also has a cook, Nicolas, who is extremely creative in the kitchen. He has mice that are his friends and a piano that makes cocktails as you play and everything is great except that Chick has recently fallen in love and Colin hasn't. He meets Chloe at a party, quickly decides he is in love with her, and they marry. Everything is great until, on their honeymoon, Chloe takes sick. Colin spares no expense in her treatment, but soon goes through all his money and has to sell his pianococktail and get a job, which nearly kills him. Chloe dies, they bury her in the saddest (but also funniest) funeral of all time, and that's just it.

As a girl who likes tragic endings, this book has a lot to recommend it. I am glad that I saw the film before the book, because Gondry puts a lot more life into Chloe and the other female characters, who are all pretty flat in Vian's novel. I was also able to really delve into the extensive (and helpful!) footnotes as I read and didn't have to worry too much about getting taken away from the plot or the characters, since I was already familiar with them from the film.

This was an interesting one, and definitely one of those rare cases where both the film and the book are worth experiencing, in either order.

The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (1995)

I had a mental block against reading The Liars' Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (1995) since 1995 was right in the heart of my time working at Barnes and Noble and The Liars' Club was a runaway best seller. Anything that was a best seller in the late-1990s makes me wary after all the time I spent sticking on and taking off 30% and 20% off stickers and restocking the shelves at the front of the store. My DAFFODILS book club, however, decided to read something from the 1990s and when this was was suggested, the nearly 20 years since I had to deal with those discount stickers disappeared and I finally felt ready to dive in.

This, the first of Karr's three published memoirs (along with other essays and books of poetry) tells the story of her mother, her father, and the childhood she and her sister had in Southeast Texas and (for a short period) in Colorado. Karr grew up near Port Arthur, close to the gulf, and right in the middle of the oil industry. Her father worked for the oil company, as did most of the people in her town (fictionally called Leechfield, but actually the town of Groves, between Port Arthur and Beaumont). Her mother was an enigmatic artist and voracious reader from west Texas who lived for several years in New York City and did not mix well with the other women in the town. Her father was a favorite among his friends at the Legion and known for his ability as a storyteller and his propensity for fighting (and for undoubtedly winning those fights). Both of them drank and both of them had tempers, but what really made things unstable was the depression and mania of Mary's mother, Charlie.

The action of the book takes place mostly in the early sixties, when Mary is about 6-8 and her sister, Lecia, is about 8-10, although the hard things that happen to them and their resourcefulness and (particularly in the case of Lecia) stoicism, often make them seem older. While there are plenty of pleasant and often funny memories of their time together as a family, the burdens placed on Lecia and Mary to hold their mother together, Mary's sexual abuse by two men outside the family, and Charlie's several very real (and dangerous) mental breaks can sometimes make this a pretty rough read.

The storyteller, of course, is a grown up Mary Marlene Karr and she never really lets the reader forget that she is a grown woman looking back on her childhood. She also admits when she doesn't remember something, when she might be remembering something differently than how it happened, and when her sister would undoubtedly correct what she was saying -- this gets around one of my big problems with many memoirs: the adult writer's tendency to make things seem better (or worse) than they really were and the reliance on memory (particularly a child's memory) as if it were fact.

The last section of the book jumps forward to the 1980s and brings some adult context to the lives of Mary and Lecia and some explanation and mellowing of her mother and father. I'm interested to read Karr's other memoirs, one of which covers her adolescence and early adulthood and the other her recovery from alcoholism and conversion to Catholicism. If the straightforward, funny, and sometimes brutal narrative voice of The Liars' Club is any indication, the following memoirs should be just as piercing and full.