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Oct
22
Blog Tour & Guest Post: The Best Place to Be by Lesley Dormen
2008 at 7am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
The Best Place to Be is Lesley Dormen’s “novel in stories” about Grace, a 50-year-old New Yorker who tells us the stories of her girlhood (which included multiple stepfathers), her relationships (she has been married, divorced, and the mistress of a married man), and her neuroses (which are plentiful). The stories are not presented in chronological order, which gives the book a non-linear structure that I find quite delightful. I love the concept of a novel told in stories, and I think Dormen succeeds in giving us a well-rounded sense of who Grace is and how her life has progressed without having to use a detailed, straightforward character arc.
That being said, The Best Place to Be just didn’t do it for me. Grace was a bit too neurotic for me, and I had a hard time relating to her. Perhaps it comes down to a fundamental difference of opinion: Grace calls “in between” the best place to be, and me, I’d rather be anywhere but in between (as Counting Crows would say). All in all, though, I enjoyed the format of this book and will be keeping it in mind as a gift for friends who might “get” Grace a little bit better. I’d give this book 3.5 out of 5.
Since her blog tour is nearing its end, I invited Lesley to write a guest post here and talk more about the concept of a novel told in stories, which I think is a lot of fun. Click the cover below to visit her website, and enjoy the guest post, which begins below.
I’ve been a fan of linked story collections long before the “novel in stories” description became, as it recently has, an officially recognized form of storytelling. I’m a passisonate admirer of Alice Munro’s work wherever I find it, but her collection called The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, about a young woman’s search to define herself independently, focusing specifically on her relationship with her stepmother, is a book I’m always dipping back in to. Like Munro, John Updike wrote short stories about Joan and Richard Maples, his sophisticated, neurotic East Coast Everycouple, over time. Eventually, the stories were collected in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories. They trace the dissolution of a marriage circa the early to late sixties, and though they are slanted toward Richard’s point of view, Updike’s extraordinary portrait of a marriage contains some of the most dazzling and psychologically astute sentences in literature. In both Munro and Updike’s linked stories, I admire the deep immersion the reader is given into the characters’ lives, and even though they weren’t written as a novel, even though the narrative skips over time and doesn’t attempt to fill in the blanks, the accumulation of knowledge and pleasure sneaks up on the reader. I don’t miss the trajectory of the traditional novel at all in these works. I find myself delighted by the prose, sentence by sentence, and as fascinated by the characters as their creators’ must have been since they came back to these same people so many times. I’m not sure setting out to write a “novel in stories” could be much better than these gathered refracted glimpses, each one practically a novel in itself.
Julie Hecht’s Do the Windows Open? is a collection of stories all told by the same nameless female narrator, all hilariously existential commentaries about so-called modern life by a vulnerable narrator in a perpetual state of horrified, deadpan outrage. They make me laugh out loud every time I open the book, they remain so fresh and original. Allegra Goodman’s The Family Markowitz, Justin Cronin’s Mary and O’Neil, Joan Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, Ellen Litman’s The Lat Chicken in America are novels in stories I also greatly admire. I love when characters from one story appear in another in an entirely new role, when the can be the focus or are temporarily relegated to the sidelines. For me, there’s surprise and unexpectedness when our assumptions about straightforward storytelling are upended. Sometimes the nature of the storytelling aks the reader to do a little bit more work or to simply put aside assumptions about the nature of storytelling, but for a certain kind of reader at a certain moment, that engagement provides another kind of nourishment-not the traditional meat and potatoes topped by a gooey dessert, but a feast of the most deliciously, perfectly concocted appetizers.
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Thanks to Lesley Dormen and TLC Book Tours for offering me this fun opportunity.
Have you ever read a novel in stories or something similar? Tell me all about it!
Related posts:
- Guest Post & Giveaway: Christopher Meeks
- Blog Tour Book Review: The Patron Saint of Used Cars and Second Chances by Mark Millhone
- On Post-Publication Depression–Guest Post from Eve Brown-Waite
- Blog Tour Book Review and Giveaway: Honey It's All in the Shoes by Phyllis Norton Hoffman
- "Becoming" [Guest Post by Tanya Egan Gibson]
I’m interested in this concept, too, so I will definitely look for this book.
I recently read Olive Kitteredge, a novel in stories, and enjoyed it very much.
There’s a short story in Updike’s, “My Father’s Tears and other Stories” about a man attempting to rid his property of a deer. Does anybody know the name of it?