The Summer Reading Begins

Now is a very good time for some innocent escapism...it is hot and muggy outside, my children are pushing their boundaries again, and there is nothing on the boob tube. Let's jump in:

All the Available Light: a Marilyn Monroe Reader, edited by Yona Zeldis McDonough. This isn't another biography of Marilyn, rather a collection of essays from a varied group of authors who attempt to define the why of Norma Jean's enigma. Needless to say, I think Marilyn is an interesting choice of a national sex symbol in a country that flatly denies Sex a brain or heart and apparently I'm not the only one. I think I liked Gloria Steinem's The Woman Who Will Not Die the best of the clinical examinations; she was frank in her personal response to Monroe and bold in her judgement assessments. Sir Lawrence Olivier's The Prince and the Showgirl did quite well in explaining his (male) baffled response to her humanity in contrast to her iconography. The essays, like our collective conscience, range from lust to outrage, from dreams of rescue to shrugs of irreverence and brings us back where we began: looking at the American Mona Lisa and wondering why she smiles. Good for Marilyn.

A Cup of Tea, by Amy Ephron, is a frilly bit of old lace stained with blood. This little book, a study of class and passions, is set in WWI era New York. The story, staging, and characters comes across as old fashioned, but appropriately so, and modernity assumes the villains' robes. The main character, Rosemary, is a flip society girl whom on a whim rescues a homeless women from the street, a homeless woman who is beautiful and mysterious and independent-everything Rosemary is not. Of course her fiance falls for this woman and has a passionate affair with her, but marries Rosemary and leaves for the war anyway. What happens between this point in the novel and the conclusion is where Modern and Victorian standards clash, and the ending shouldn't be too hard to swallow for anyone familiar with melodrama. A Cup of Tea is a slight read, but the period details are well done and I liked it's skimming nature. Good for corseted flight.

Last, and the most enjoyed, is Nectar: A Novel of Temptation by Lily Prior. It is an extremely effusive, funny and lush tale about an albino woman and the irresistible smell she emanates. As it is set in Italy, there is much sex, food, weeping, singing, beauty, ugliness, praying and slapping of faces in operatic grandeur. Prior's characters are so ridiculous, and the scenes in which they are set are so ravishing that I was completely thrown off base with every chapter. True, it was a little exhausting, the line between satire and stereotype was crossed once or twice, and I did not love the characters at all, but it was a very amusing story. It was like drinking wine with diamonds in the glass in a field of honeysuckle while George Clooney sucks your toes. Good for being very naughty and very nice.