Book review: "How To Be An American Housewife"

When I was first asked to review How To Be An American Housewife, I was immediately intrigued by the title. I knew it was fiction and not some how-to guide (because really, that would be kind of awkward if they'd actually made a how-to book for acclimating to American domesticity), but the title piqued my interest, especially when juxtaposed against the photo of the Japanese woman set behind it.

It turns out the title was based on a book by the same name that actually did exist back in the 1940s when Japanese women were marrying American GIs in droves during WWII. The novel's author, Margaret Dilloway, noticed an old copy her Japanese mother owned, given by her GI husband (and later Dilloway's father) in an effort to help her acclimate when he first brought her to America. It was this book, which later turned out to be a manual of sorts for Japanese maids and therefore was never read, that was the inspiration behind Dilloway's debut novel of the same name.

How To Be An American Housewife is not only a book about mother/daughter relationships, it's commentary on cultural assimilation. Of yearning to fit into a new culture and land while missing family and letting go of traditions left behind on native soil.

The first half of the novel is narrated by Shoko, a Japanese woman determined to come to America. She marries an American GI she falls in love with much later in life, but her struggles going from Japan to setting up a home near a military base in San Diego, California, are at the same time both humbling and heartbreaking. Dilloway cleverly crafts Shoko's narrative so that everything Shoko thinks is written in perfect English, while everything she communicates to her husband, children's teachers, or fellow parents comes out clunky, broken and distorted (since English is her second language). Through Shoko readers have a window into what it's like as a foreigner in America, of the language barriers and sometimes physical traits that shouldn't but often cast one as "an outsider."

The story continues through Shoko's narrative, gliding along memories she has of experiences in both Japan and America and the transition between, when about half-way through the narrative baton is passed to her American-born daughter, Sue.

Sue is a single mother and working professional with one divorce under her belt. She hates her job, has no love life and feels misunderstood by everyone, including her parents (and especially Shoko). Even though she's in her 30s, Sue still feels like she has no identity since she was raised in a multi-cultural household and loathes the fact that she could never fully fit in growing up; Shoko with her broken English seemed always an embarrassment for Sue at school functions or when she wanted to invite friends over. Even at 30-something, Sue's still not sure where she belongs and because of this has remained quiet, withdrawn and passive -- a wallflower, through and through.

It's only when Shoko asks Sue to travel back to Japan for her to mend a decades-old family argument that Sue (with her daughter in tow) comes into her own as a woman and begins to see the beauty of growing up multi-culturally. The acceptance of her upbringing and heritage (which were both solid but much different than her peers) starts to quickly transform Sue into a new woman, and brings about a level of understanding for her mother and mother's life before America that is fascinating to read.

I recommend this book to anyone who's ever felt like their mothers (or daughters) misunderstand them, or to anyone who's questioned their roots and what it means to be a part of a certain ethnic group. Dilloway's excels at showing the uncomfortable situations Shoko finds herself in once she arrives in America, the loneliness Shoko experiences as she lets go of her past to build her future, and the wallflower Sue who eventually blooms by reconnecting with her origins as a favor to her ailing mother. For a debut novel, I was thoroughly impressed.

Book review: "Let the Great World Spin"

Lately I've become jaded with the whole NYC-as-the-stillpoint-of-the-turning-universe thing. I've heard just about every story that could be told about Manhattan and its outer boroughs, from Annie Hall to Taxi Driver and everything before, between, and after. I'm tired of reading about life in New York. That is, until I read Colum McCann's fantastic new novel, “Let the Great World Spin”.

Before receiving my copy to participate in an online book tour, I researched critical acclaim for the text and tried not to roll my eyes. Another novel about what it means to be a New Yorker? Just what the world needs, I thought. And that was the mentality I went into reading the book with, which was foolish since after finishing my copy I can honestly say that “Let the Great World Spin” is one of the best novels I've read in a long time and deserves all the acclaim and accolades it has received (it won the 2009 National Book Award and was Amazon's “Best of the Month” pick in June of last year).

It's August of 1974, when the Vietnam War is still simmering and tensions in the city are high. Real-life tightrope walker Philippe Petit decides to walk thousands of feet above Manhattan across a tightrope between the World Trade Center towers, and so he does after practicing for months at his country cabin and illegally rigging up a rope with friends. But McCann's novel doesn't focus on the factual Petit or his tightrope walking feat – it's about the native New Yorkers watching the spectacle above while their own lives tread more or less in chaos.

The story begins far below the tight rope, on street corners in the crime-riddled Bronx and swanky apartments on the Upper East Side. McCann deftly weaves together a dozen or so different narratives – each chapter is from a different character's point of view – from New Yorkers of different ethnicities, religions and socioeconomic statuses. Each character is tethered to the next through tenuous, claustrophobic and often purely coincidental relationships based on occupation and social standing.

The first chapter begins with two brothers, Corrigan and Cairan, raised by a single mother in Ireland. As fate would have it both brothers end up in New York as adults, first Corrigan and then Cairan, who travels across the Atlantic in search of his brother only to find him living in Bronx squalor—with heroin needles lining the street gutters and hookers hanging on every corner. Corrigan has come to New York in search of “a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of everyday” and he finds it in the hookers he befriends and tries to help, buying them coffee and allowing them to use the bathroom in his dingy apartment. Only Cairan, as a newcomer, can see that his brother's attempts are futile, that Corrigan can not save any of these people, least not himself because he provides until he has nothing left to give emotionally, financially, or spiritually.

From there McCann transports us to a tony apartment on Park Avenue, where the wife of a Manhattan judge sits nervously awaiting a group of ladies – a support group of sorts – who all share a common bond: Sons killed in the Vietnam War. Then the next chapter glides like a panning camera lens to two young artist newlyweds, children of privilege with simmering marital problems, smoking a joint as they race down the FDR and cause a horrific crash that changes the trajectory of a handful of characters in the book, including Cairan, the newcomer to New York City. Pages after there is another narrative, of the Park Avenue housewife's husband who became a judge to try and make the world, or at least New York, a better place only to realize during his first day in court faced with pimps and prostitutes that none of his rulings could ever clean up New York's streets.

For me the most heartbreaking chapter was “This is the House that Horse Built,” where one of the hookers introduced earlier in the book gives a tragic first-hand account of how she fell into a life of prostitution and heroin, and how her daughter eventually followed suit. It was a painful reminder of how poverty and addiction can be gaping, cyclical holes that swallow people whole—people who are past the point of being saved.

The tightrope walker high above all these characters is a metaphor for the lives of not only all New Yorkers, but people in general. Each of us, at least once if not constantly, “walk a tightrope just one inch off the ground.” Though the Twin Towers are now gone, with nothing more than open space where the pinnacles of the modern world used to stand, Petit walking his rope high above Manhattan in the late summer of '74 was and is a reminder of humanity and compassion, courage and awe, then and now. I have to agree with Dave Eggers when he called the book “one of the greatest-ever novels about New York.”