What There is to Say We Have Said (Ed. by Suzanne Marrs)

When was the last time you spent an entire day writing a letter? Suzanne Marrs has edited a collection of letters by two writers for whom this must have been a regular occurrence.

In an unrelated essay on photography, A.O. Scott wrote that “. . .while the literary canon has made room for a handful of diaries, letters and newspaper articles, these exceptions tend to reinforce the exclusion of vernacular forms from the pantheon of art (NYT Magazine 6 May 2011). A collection of letters between Eudora Welty and William Keepers Maxwell, Jr. (with an occasional letter from Maxwell’s artist wife, Emily Gilman Noyes) has been curated by Suzanne Marrs. While the collection on the whole belongs firmly in the aforementioned vernacular, to fellow swimmers in that drought-stricken pond known as the literary world, the collection offers a unique dialog between two able practitioners.  Editor Marrs reprises James Watson’s belief that such letters fit in the space between art and life, and this collection reaffirms that conclusion.

What is most remarkable about the dialog is not extraordinary prose, though there is some of that, and not the events in their separate lives, which spanned two long-lived and productive careers. Rather it’s the civility, the steadfast tone of mutual encouragement and affection.  When William signs off with “Devotedly” (26 December 1960), it strikes the reader as precise and faithful to the nature of the correspondence read up to that point in the collection.

As a 2011 release, the book will work better as an eBook than the advance proof print received for review. The reason for this is the extensive research done by Marrs. For each chapter of the collection, there are 75 to 120 endnotes. Today’s hypertext-savvy reader is accustomed to hovering over footnotes, rather than bookmarking the relevant page of endnotes and flipping back and forth. The endnotes provided can be ordinary, but sometimes they provide essential context for literary projects, characters or contemporaneous history. Consider endnote 43 in Chapter 6:

Eudora and her brother Edward drew dialogue balloons above photographs on magazine pages and folded the pages so that the photographs could not be seen. Then they exchanged pages, wrote remarks in the balloons, and shared the results” (p. 467).

On other occasions, the endnotes recall the writers’ public appearances, such as:

Eudora first met newsman Jim Lehrer in 1984, and he quickly introduced her to his colleagues Robert MacNeil and Roger Mudd. Late in 1989, as a reporter for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, Mudd interviewed Eudora about the photographs she had taken during the Great Depression. An extensive collection of these images, titled Photographs, had just been published” (p. 476).

An eBook also permits search. As the arc of these two lives becomes clearer in succeeding chapters, a desire to revisit mentions of certain events, places, opinions and literary works arises.  Old school thumbing through previous chapters is quaint but inefficient and error prone.

Devotees of the cult of the New Yorker magazine where Maxwell worked as an editor will find much to their liking, as literary figures major and minor make their way across its stage and the magazine’s host city. As a result, the letters occasion appearances by John Updike, Bernard Malamud, Rachel Carson, William Matthews, Katherine Ann Porter, Howard Moss, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Connor, John Cheever — well, only John Leonard would list them all in a book review. The particulars surrounding the editorial process and the publishing world of that era (Maxwell: “I didn’t like the jacket copy that Knopf sent and so rewrote it”) will also be of interest to cultists.

The letters are instructive for what they do not mention, or at least mention little. Their careers coincided with the space program, the personal computer, the Hollywood blacklist and race riots. Here and there are snippets of those events (Welty wrote “Where is the Voice Coming From” after the Medgar Evers assassination), but the sense of small pond-ness is everpresent. For this they can be forgiven, though less so Marrs’ effusive characterization of their intellect.

The book contains a few black and white photos (though none from Welty’s NYC photographic exhibition), but otherwise it lacks the compelling imagery that marked some of these letters. The letters were sometimes written on illustrated notecards, with performance notes, funeral programs and clippings included, and featured the requisite strikeouts and editorial commentary. A glimpse of some of those artifacts would have livened up the book’s inexorably linear course. (Perhaps there were issues in gaining permission.)

In a way, the collection can be seen as unintentionally didactic for today’s reading and writing habits. As editor Marrs wrote,

 . . . the lack of self-absorption, the embracing of experience in all its complexity, the capacity for love, the generosity of spirit, and the ability to face loss and death — these constitute the invisible signature of Welty and Maxwell, signatures that are as powerfully present in their letters as in their fiction (p. 14).

Theirs reflected the sort of disciplined friendship that may be put at risk by the mashed-up, cut-and-pasted  interactions the Twitterverse fosters. A wistful, reflective quality in many of the letters that goes beyond literary observations like Maxwell’s “It is raining cats and dogs. How I admire the person who said that for the first time,” and Welty’s “Nothing looks more disheveled than a thoroughly rained-on redbird.” It is a quality goes beyond their small town roots and sturdy sense of themselves. They spent those days and nights writing letters for the friendship, and to keep alive articulate, specific urgings the letters both sent and received sustained. As Welty wrote in a Vietnam War era letter dated 12 June 1967:

Please forgive me backsliding into not writing.

The book is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN-10: 0547376499.

Janice Y. K. Lee

There is much to like in a book that appropriates a cinematic swath of the not-too-distant past and brings it into sharp focus.  Why, then, does Janet Y. K. Lee’s first novel The Piano Teacher (Viking, 2009) leave an unsettled and incomplete aftertaste?

Despite the author’s seemingly glamorous recent background, she pulls no punches in delivering grim accounts of tortured lives lived beneath the conquering Japanese.  These landmines of agony (based mostly upon historical fact)  are saved for later in this story — a story so slow to take flight that it’s tempting to set this book aside for one better steered.  But patience is its own reward, in this case delivered in the form of World War II’s Colonial Asian horror,  and two romances. The romances are set apart by a decade but unified by geography and a common, curiously impassive love interest, Englishman Will Truesdale.  What Trudy and Claire see in Will’s typically distant,  sometimes damaged sensibilities is, if not mysterious, untold.  (Perhaps he was more handsome than the author is willing to write, though Lee’s powers of description are often strongest when describing faces, bodies and clothing).

A few weeks later, she asked, ‘Why me?”

“Why anyone?” he answered. “Why is anyone with anyone?”

Desire, proximity, habit, chance.  All these went through her mind, but she didn’t say a word.

“I don’t like to love,” he said. “You should be forewarned. I don’t believe in it. And you shouldn’t either.”

There’s a conscious and mostly successful attempt to paint Hong Kong as the background insinuating itself subtly into the foreground. When this succeeds, the result highlights the story’s cinematic canvas.

Dominick is one of those queer Chinese who are more English than the English, yet has no great love for them. Educated in them most precious way in England, he has come back to Hong Kong and is affronted by everything that is in the least bit crass — which is to say, everything — the swill on the streets, the expectorating, illiterate throngs of coolies and fishmongers.”

When less successful, the narration seems lifted from a period travel piece.  Interspersed between the upper class chit chat, gossip and internment camp negotiations are stark descriptions that will shock you to sudden attention.

A young woman, Mary Cox, says her husband was grabbed by Japanese soldiers and made to clean up after bodies had been dragged along the street, shedding body parts like animals. They had to clear all the bodies before they got in the water supply and spread disease. He came home soaked in blood and bits of decaying flesh and wept before falling on the sofa, exhausted. He was gone the next morning. She hasn’t seen him since.

As the story unfolds, the reader must keep track of evolving plot threads and also adapt to style shifts. These shifts take the form of shorter segments rather than the full conventional chapters (e.g., the chapter labeled “1943″), which have the flavor of  characters’ journal entries embellished into short story fragments. This later style might well have worked better throughout, since the style alternates between 50′s and 40′s scenes. Instead when they do appear later in the book, it’s a curious shift that compounds the temporal switchbacks that have occurred throughout.

Then there is the matter of the book’s title.  True, the principal narrator is piano teacher Claire, but despite references to childhood practice, Claire’s connection to music is coincidental.  Instead her teaching sessions with the daughter of a well-off family, Locket, are memorable for her interactions with household staff,  descriptions of food and clothing, and vaguely hinted-at dark moments from the past. Music plays no role in this; in fact, much later, when Claire is asked to play for a group of adults, she is desperate to find a way to avoid playing. You will not be alone if you finish The Piano Teacher without a single lingering melody.

This may have been as intended.  The character who is “trying to become invisible, so that she will be all the more visible around Will” dimly senses that her skill as a pianist is a sort of deformity, not unlike Will’s limp from a wartime injury. But this doesn’t explain why the skill that gives her entree into the central plot becomes the role given billboard status for the novel. Writ large, it’s as though the novel’s wartime privations become a power for dissociation and confusion in which Lee’s prose is complicit. 

A passage representative of this discipline describes a loyal amah who followed a family after they had been interned during the war. She brought them food and supplies into the camp in a large picnic basket.  Because she had known them from childhood, she brought food every week:

. . . until one week she had not appeared. The day after she was to have come, the family received the same picnic basket. Inside was a small hand, wrapped in dirty towels. “They thought it was a funny joke. Of course”, [Will] said, “the truly sadistic Japanese were the exception, but they were all we could think about and all we ever remember. We never knew what happened, whether she had offended someone or done something wrong or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The story was his apology.  She knew he didn’t owe him one. This was how she knew his affection.

Italics mine. The narration ends there, and moves impassively on to describe the couple’s arrival at Macau Station and a striking portrait of a governor, “with mustache and white hat.”  The reader is swept along in such eddies of helplessness, of disorder dissolving into surface order.

The Piano Teacher succeeds in drawing parallels between the fateful directions taken in the affairs and the fate that befell Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation. But because its characters are themselves not always capable of making sense of what has befallen them, the book lacks a certain clairvoyance of purpose, or at least enlightened telling of the adversities.

One is tempted to point to stereotypes of Asian cultural passivity, a much-decried Western cliche to explain this, but a more plausible explanation (especially considering that the author is Asian herself)  is surely that Lee’s characters are too much a part of the landscape that envelopes them: like narrator Claire’s self-avowed chameleon-ism, allowing fate to wash over them, accepting it with lament, wry comment, disdain, or simply striving to look ahead to the normalcy that it’s hoped will befall them just as surely. Perhaps the stereotype belies a more careful interpretation. William James wrote in “Varieties of Religious Experience” :

When, for example, Achilles, about to slay Lycaon, Priam’s young son, hears him sue for mercy, he stops to say:

“Ah, friend, thou too must die: why thus lamentest thou? Patroclos too is dead, who was better far than thou…. Over me too hang death and forceful fate. There cometh morn or eve or some noonday when my life too some man shall take in battle, whether with spear he smite, or arrow from the string.” *

* Iliad, XXI., E. Myers’s translation.

Then Achilles savagely severs the poor boy’s neck with his sword, heaves him by the foot into the Scamander, and calls to the fishes of the river to eat the white fat of Lycaon. Just as here the cruelty and the sympathy each ring true, and do not mix or interfere with one another, so did the Greeks and Romans keep all their sadnesses and gladnesses unmingled and entire.

Lee leaves convincing traces of a deeper, if calmly laconic, insight.   “So that’s how it goes, [Will] thinks. That’s the beginning of how it all changes.  We become survivors or not.”  And later:

The  reunion is sweet, the late afternoon sun slanting through the window, the flat horizon of the sea and the boats floating in the harbor, and Trudy, right here, right next to him.  He has thought of her for so long, missed the feel of her skin and the smell of her breath, that he moves as if he’s in a dream, She is quiet, more than usual, and seems skittish. They are both too sapped, too thirsty, to ever be quenched by something as mundane as the physical.

But wait —  this is Will, who has done little to earn his place in the hearts of the women he was typically at pains to claim he did not love.  Whether betrayed by him, or simply wounded by his stubbornness, Trudy deserves more.  His other lover, the adulterous but increasingly sympathetic Claire seems to wander through the plot looking for her own denouement; when it comes as an anticlimactic exit,  some readers won’t care, or find the exit to be a cynical symbol of the character’s failure to carry a greater burden of the story.

At times this is lovely work, drawn in pastels of a fateful stillness. Perhaps Lee’s next canvas will be equally broad, taking from a history no less rich, no less stark, but wielding a sharper brush, filling out characters capable of making just a little more sense of what they experience.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood

But I was not persuaded (and O’Rourke is not after any mind-changing; the grief-striken are in a far different place) of the potential for anything short of the angry, wounding ricochets of loss Romm documented.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood

This is as it should be.

Readers should be prepared for plainly difficult passages such as:

On very bad days, Mom will look up at me, fear and pain staining the brown in her eyes, and she will say, ” I want to go home.”

“You are home, Mom,” I say, holding her hand, which is hard as plastic from edema.

“I know, ” she says, her face pleading, “but I want to go home.”  My dad says I’m attaching meaning to this when it’s nonsense.

At other times, The Mercy Papers’ rant achieves more.  This is where Romm is at her best,  craft giving lift to the despair where nothing else could. That lift — one is reluctant to use a more demonstrative expression — is very much in need.

Legacy.com operates a hosted  for paid obituary notices for 275 national newspapers, including the New York Times (not to mention Gadzoo, a pet finder service, perhaps suited to the sensibilities of the Company) .  As fate would have it, I’ve had occasion to sponsor a legacy.com post / guest book and to visit three others since January.  A casual visit to most guest books on legacy.com confirms Romm’s perception that outside the small world of those directly affected by the loss, an abundance of platitudes and poorly reasoned sentimentalities serves to create a sense of isolation. In Papers, this plays out in many scenes. One that comes to mind comes after Jackie asks the rabbi  what happens in Judaism after people die and the rabbi offers up that “there is a great energy in the universe . . . and when you die you rejoin this great energy.”  Little wonder the sense of estrangement deepens as this memoir continues:

We could get a cup of coffee.  But who wants coffee? Who wants to see anyone in the outside world?  The outside world has gotten increasingly foreign. People smile for no reason, purchase sugary snacks, worry over leaky roofs out loud to strangers. Who needs this? No one in this house wants to talk about leaky roofs.  We want to sit quietly and be known. We want to be soothed by quiet warm hands. We want to be passive, have the world come  to us. If we are going to use our tiny reserve of energy to strike up conversation with a stranger, well, it might as well be with God.  No one else is useful. Not that God is being very useful — up there punching buttons on his death remote, smirking away.

Or, as Romm writes elsewhere, having nine years to prepare for the coming death still left her ill-prepared, and she works to convince the reader that this is as it should be.

. . . the changes won’t be hopeful — like the clarity of vision I sometimes feel when I’m in my bedroom after crying and the lines of the windows and slatted doors all look too sharp, hyper-sharp, and all people seem tragic and plain to me, easy to understand. Some of the changes will be only pain. Pain when I see babies, pain when my friends go to lunch with their mothers, pain on my birthday, on her birthday, on every birthday of every person I know.  Pain and a deep, toothy hollowness inside me that will go on grinding forever.

There’s some transference/substitution wound in the author’s psyche, as there’s far too much narration about pets. Even though the comings and goings, food ingestion and waste discharging of the beasts lends a certain authenticity to the story, this may appeal to only to inveterate animal lovers.  On the other hand, had Ms. Romm not been an only child, descriptions of siblings might have been no less meaningless.

When the reader arrives tearful and bloodied (and the blood will not all be your own) on page 194,  Ms. Romm gifts the purchaser of this volume twelve Six Feet Under-esque blank journal pages (imagine the conversations with the publishing house over this decision).

Loss doesn’t end. It goes on and on and on, written on every day that will follow.

There you have it. Twelve blank pages for notes, after 194 pages of meticulous coaching. Preparatory notes, should it not yet be your time for such loss.  Or, if your time has come, as it has for me and my mother (www.billieunderwood.com) only three months ago, then twelve blank pages just to gather up the bits of memory that loss has tried its best to obliterate.  Ultimately, there is no making sense of it, but we are each judged — perhaps by someone much like Robin Romm  – by the character of our wail.

When the wailing ends, probably through mere fatigue, prepare to be instantly teleported back to that other place you live, the one where Barb would like her CD back.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood

It starts with the literary pedigree that seems to bind a number of her characters together. In “A Dream of Men,” Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked a nun off a bridge.”  “The Agonized Face” takes place at an annual literary festival in Toronto.  The protagonist speaks of making love even while the images in her head are “subtly flavored” by a novel she is to review. A composer in “Mirror Ball”  is bedeviled by ghosts “floating between him and the books he read before going to sleep.”  Dani in “Today I’m Yours” works “as an editor of a small press distinguished by its embroilment in several lawsuits,” and Ella, the narrator, spent “five dreary years” writing a book “that was like a little box with monsters inside it.”   As told by “The Little Boy’s” Bea, the line from another character ”I feel so old and so worthless” came after a discussion about Mrs. Dalloway. In “Description” (doubtless ironically echoing a chapter in many a fiction-writing text), Kevin and Joseph argue about which of their classmates would be most published, and compare experiences with Janice, who ran the writing workshop. The narrator of the collection’s namesake, “Don’t Cry,” recalls that while her friend Katya was “having experiences,” she was ploddingly “putting herself through a writing program.”

It would be easy to conclude from this that Gaitskill is drawing from personal experience.  But her writing is filled with trapdoors and secret passageways. It all seems too obvious, these traces of literati and arteests earnest and not so earnest. I choose a path somewhat  different from others when throwing myself upon Gaitskill’s work.  In this framework,  characters and “Description” should be seen as props — important elements, but props nonetheless, for flourishes of wit and insight more philosophy than fiction.

A few brief excerpts may illustrate this.

“On one of those long ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money” (from “The Agonized Face”).

“Jennifer tried to imagine what this man’s life was like, what had lead him to where he was now.  Gray, grim pictures came half-formed to her mind: a little boy growing up in a concrete housing project with a blind face of malicious brick; the boy looking out the window, up at the night sky, kneeling before the television, mesmerized by visions of heroism, goodness and triumph.  The boy grown older sitting in a metal chair in a shadowless room of pitiless light, waiting to sign something, talk to somebody, to become someone of value, a soldier” (from “The Arms and Legs of the Lake”).

“His openness had made him wise, but it was not a wisdom he could do anything useful with” (from “Mirror Ball”).

My take on “Don’t Cry” (the collection) may be peculiar. I found the least appealing among the stories to be ”College Town, 1980;”  its characters were too lifelike, their speech less elevated than in the other stories. Gaitskill’s best characters spit articulately, with a spittle that insinuates evil, or, at least a compelling dissolution. Their minds wander, sometimes struggling with the apparent senselessness of what they see, or of the curious turns taken by their own cognition. As with many writers who favor this style, expect unexpected juxtapositions of people, place and events, and the occasional shameless rhetorical theatric.  It’s all intended to jar us into glimpsing Gaitskill’s layered visions of yearning and loss.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood

Accordingly, budget a generous space on the coffee table for this project, and an equally generous portion of time — and not leisure time.

Advice to readers might well include:

• Read with a netbook nearby. You may need some Wikipedia refreshers to catch up on science concepts that you have forgotten or neglected in your science education.
• Prepare for a roller coaster ride across disparate specializations — not just cosmology and astronomy, as the Cosmic’s title implies — but historical footnotes like the “anthropocentric piece of interstellar advertising” affixed to the Pioneer 10 Jupiter probe in 1972, drawings of flying saucers from science fiction comic artists like Alex Schomburg,  and the frozen geometry of self-taught, snowflake-obsessed Wilson Bentley.
• While Barrow’s preface argues that pictures “save words . . . change the pace, alter the style and make things more memorable,” in fact you’ll have to do much more than simply stare at the ponderable images in his collection. The images sometimes require painstaking explanations — painstaking, because Barrow wants to avoid being sidelined by the underlying science.  Laudable, but probably an impossible ambition.
• As with any good coffee table book, Cosmic Imagery can be opened to any chapter at random. Open to “Stepping Out: Laetoli Footprints”  (p. 223) and you’ll be treated to a line of hominid footprints left in Tanzania 3.6 million years ago.  In “Two Easy Pieces: Aperiodic Tilings” (p. 397), a gallery of Islamic tilings is presented in tribute to an  “almost overwhelming” exploration of “symmetry and periodicity.”

To enjoy Barrow’s work, an extended sitting may not be suitable.  His museum of artifacts from the history of science (subtitle: “key images in the history of science:) calls for a dizzying tour of divergent corridors and anterooms.  Better to let the collection rattle around in the skull, as surely it did in Barrow’s.   How else could one explain Chapter 19, “Shapeliness: The Symmetries of Life” (p. 255), which begins with a quotation, as does every chapter:

He had the sort of face that, once seen,
is never remembered.

- Oscar Wilde

The image is Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man from 1490.  A tribute to symmetry — yes, but Barrow doesn’t leave it there.  After remarking on the remarkable evolution of right-left symmetry in biological systems, he wryly observes that

The most interesting feature of the high degree of symmetry found in human faces and our external bodies is the contrast with the squalid muddle to be found under the skin. our bodies are not symmetrically engineered under the surface. Hearts are on the left, our brains are laid out in an asymmetrical fashion. . .

But there’s more.  Hypercubes, the normal distribution, the periodic table — science-haters will begrudgingly admit and be fatigued by Barrow’s restless quest for images that inspire.  The book is effort, and coffee tables will bow as if the book was ten times its weight. But Barrow’s work is it itself inspired, not by coincidence quoting from a great seer who got science wrong but understood its fearsome symmetry:

To see a World in a Grain ofSand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

Cosmic Imagery succeeds to such an extent that the music its visual/verbal modalities lack can be heard rising up from the covers when the book is set down.  It is a small achievement about the grand achievements of others, which is itself  kind of a perfect symmetry.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood

In the course of what he terms a “dramatic poem,”  Hillstrom’s (pen name) ambitious arc takes the form of three voices: poet, woman and welder, brought together “at a historic moment,”  a moment never described.  This is how the telling, most decidedly not the showing, begins.   The scene-setting first couple of prose pages could been condensed into a single stanza.  Alternatively, Hillstrom could have supplied a richness of prose detail, created momentum, or sketched a memorable character.  This judgement weakens much of  “Story,” underlining an intrinsic challenge to interweaving prose and free verse.

There are provocative noun phrases in Hillstrom’s work: “plexing trails,” “pensioned eyes,”  “common day bonds” that suggest a keen poetic mind.

There are also underwhelming passages:

. . . testimony to our mortality.
No one survives. (“Mortality”).

. . . our long march begins
through ages of darkness,
light and cavernous reflections;
yet our future is a wax tablet (“The Resurrection of Brotherhood”).

The outline of “Story of Our People” has an interesting and potentially fruitful design. “Let the Orchards Blossom” is the title of one section of this work.  Perhaps Hillstrom will one day revisit this fine orchard to plant a more durable species.

(c) 2009  by Mark Underwood

Ketzel Levine Uprooted - a blog

Yesterday Ketzel Levine posted her last “Talking Plants” content (for now?) as she leaves NPR.   Keep us posted, Ketzel, as you put down roots elsewhere.

Update: As of April 28, Ketzel was blogging about a trip to Turkey. Visit her blog to see some lovely flower photography and ponder how bad things could be going for her about now.

Judging by Nancy Irwin’s You Turn: Changing Direction in Mid-Life (Touch The Sun Publishing, 2008), a collection of career change narratives by 40 folks over 40,  all may not be lost.  Irwin collects stories ranging from a cocaine dealer turned real estate investor to timid housewife turned landscape architect.  Some of the stories are inspirational, told by You Turners eager to share not only the plot twists their careers ensured, but the ideas that got them through the difficult years of transition.

Irwin begins the book with several brief  but reasonably sensible essays.  Her essays, intended to introduce the narratives that follow, are not wanting for platitudes (“We are all born with a mind, and most people don’t have a clue how it works.  I’m going to give you the Manual [sic] for the Mind [sic] so you can start driving your life in the direction you choose, rather than staying on a dead-end street”).   Overlook these.  Go instead for the lists she offers up, such as these selections to be savored  — albeit paraphrased thus:

• Don’t wait until you are not scared
• What is the worst possible outcome you can imagine? Could you survive . . . “
• If you could be present at your own funeral, what would you want to hear the eulogizers saying about you?
• What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
• If money were no object, what would you be doing?
• Celebrate milestones along the way

The earnestness of the stories in this collection make me reluctant to criticize, especially since many You Turners found themselves, or better put, created for themselves, careers in comparatively rewarding nonprofit or charity sector work.  Alas, there is much advice that is less than helpful. For example, one You Turner complained convincingly about how an abusive husband held back her career transformation. Perhaps this sidebar enhanced the vignette’s story, but it also felt off-topic.  Some of the stories sermonize or rhapsodize more than they persuade. Others are self-promotional.  Try to see past those to the personal triumphs.

Also, there is precious little about the practical dimensions of You Turns, to which I offer my own short list of somewhat neglected topics in You Turn:

• Finances: funding new education, funding new businesses, bankruptcy, refinancing
• Family finance issues
• What kind of education is valuable for career change
• Mentoring.  It’s on Irwin’s list (“Driving Your Business on A Shoestring” # 11), but figures in only a few of the collected stories.

Irwin closes the book with more self-help lists.   List quality varies.  I was unimpressed by the suggestion of SCORE, whose well-intentioned organization of retired workers I have personally found to be uniformly unhelpful.  Irwin also pays too little attention to social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and professional society forums and blogs.

On the other hand, Irwin goes out of her way to point out that each You Turner path is unique, or as she puts it, “Life is built on exceptions.  Be an exception!”  That each story is unique is proven by the collection.

If you find the diversity of stories underwhelming,  go to the book’s companion web site, where Irwin invites you to submit your career change story.

Irwin’s outline for this book is quite strong, and despite regular lapses into Pollyanna-isms,  many of her suggestions will have a ring of authenticity for those of us who have been through the You Turn process. In some respects, the outline is stronger than some of the narratives she has included.  While her emphasis on daring is certainly part of career change,  there is only indirect discussion of how one’s existing career and skills can be reapplied elsewhere in ways that may lead you back to somewhere not so far from where you started.

One’s personality unifies the careers you find yourself  inhabiting, like houses you made home for a time.

There cannot be too many self-help books on this subject.  You Turn is worth a closer look, even if you find only a few pages of inspiration in it.  It will be inspiration delivered at a time when it’s genuinely needed.

The following comments concern aesthetics, not content.
Production and Design It’s the publisher’s doing, presumably, but I have a few nits about the design and layout of the book.

• Each narrative is accompanied by a photo, perhaps provided by the storyteller.  The photos vary wildly in size, quality and tastefulness.  This creates a dissheveled appearance, as text sometimes flows around these photos, sometimes not.  Some of the photos look as though they were taken from promotional brochures, while others appear to be casual family snapshots.  Most of the photos are so poorly executed that I wished they hadn’t been provided at all. To be clear, my complaint here is about the photographers and publisher’s art direction, not the career-shifters themselves.
• When I see “Dr. Nancy Irwin” splashed liberally throughout the book’s cover, spine,  table of contents and chapter titles, I am reminded of the radio program “Ask Dr.  Science.”  Dr. Science’s introductions began “He knows more than you do,” and “He has a Master’s Degree — in Science!”  This is a nontechnical self-help book.  No doubt Ms. Irwin’s training in psychology has given her additional insights, but her credentials are given embarrassing prominence.  This is unfortunate, as some of her best suggestions and observations are common sense and stand on their own.  Obviously both a design and a content decision, I found this practice a distraction.
• The lists should be offset with a different design. The CSS used in this blog creates more interesting lists than are typeset in You Turn.

(c) 2009 by Mark Underwood