Nellie Hermann

"It can't happen again, can it?" Ruby says to her mother when the second family member is afflicted with the same kind of brain tumor that killed the first (after yet another family member experiences a mental breakdown). I was hoping the same thing, but on a story level. At some point, the author would run out of tragedies to lob at her protagonist.

Or not.

Am I saying no one in reality has experienced this much darkness? Of course not. But the fact that "it happened to somebody once" doesn't make "it" credible in fiction. What we accept as truth in the news, we don't necessarily accept as plausible in a novel. In the case of this one, I can't suspend my incredulity, especially not long enough to care about this character's really-really-awful life.

Interestingly, Ruby (or perhaps Ms. Hermann?) seems to sense my skepticism. On p. 201, the following exchange takes place:

Secondary Character: "I really just can't believe your life sometimes."
Ruby: "I know. I can't believe it either."
SC: "And the way you speak about it ... You sound like you're in a play or something."
R: "Well of course I do! It's f***-ing ridiculous! Of course it would sound like a play--it certainly doesn't sound real."

Granted, dissociative behavior is a common defense mechanism, but to my knowledge, someone utilizing it is more likely to say, "Dissociating? What are you talking about?" The above conversation comes across more as a defense mechanism for Ms. Hermann, as if causing her characters to acknowledge the implausibility of events will suddenly make them more plausible.

So, could this book have pulled me in with one fewer tragedy? No, because I never get to know Ruby beyond the broad strokes: she's sensitive, observant, and thinks deeply and poetically. Grief has shut her down for a good portion of her life, but she is now on the other side of that. There's not much else to her character, certainly nothing to make her vivid or memorable. And here, again, lies the chasm between fact and fiction: if we hear about this story on the news, we sympathize with the person we know is out there somewhere living this story. If we read about it in a novel, we first have to be convinced that the character living the story is a person. Ruby never convinced me.

In addition, some reviews have praised Ms. Hermann's reliance on flashbacks. I found it frustrating. Far too many scenes are told in retrospect, rather than being shown in "real time." For example, on p. 68, Ruby sits on an apartment windowsill and muses the following:

"They hadn't fought over anything important--it started with the guidebook ... [Ruby's father] said he was tired of that guidebook, he was tired of [Ruby's mother] being so married to that g**-***n guidebook ... Which was a fair point, Ruby thought ... but her father was mean about it, and he snapped, and her mother was hurt and defensive ..."

Why on earth didn't Ms. Hermann just write the scene as a scene, show us the dialogue as dialogue, show us the characters' body language as they quarreled in the public square? Other places in the book, she drops a "shocker" line to keep us reading ("Three weeks later, [Character #1] was diagnosed with the brain tumor," "They knew about [Character #2]'s tumor for only three weeks before he hemorrhaged and entered the coma"), only to bounce to another point in time and leave us disoriented. I'm amenable to non-linear plotting when it serves a purpose, but this simply doesn't.

Between the unbelievable abundance of tragedy, the protagonist's lack of personality, and the author's insistence on scene-deadening flashback, I felt not one twinge for all that Ruby endures.… (mehr)

Before reading this book, I knew very little about the life of Vincent VanGogh other than the fact that he was an important artist who had cut off his ear! I learned a great deal more from this historical fiction account about his life in his mid-twenties. As a child and young man, he was a constant worry to his parents because of his strange behavior and lack of direction. When I read that he was born exactly one year after his brother of the same name was stillborn, I wasn't a bit surprised at his behavior. Imagine going every Sunday to the grave of a baby brother listening to your mother sobbing out your name and seeing your name on the tombstone.

The book starts out with Vincent beginning a new career as a preacher in a Belgium mining town after having failed at two previous occupations. He was so enamored with the simple working class people that he ventured into the bowels of the mine to see what their working conditions were like…and they were as chilling as one might expect. He left his cozy room to live in an unheated shack to ponder the meaning of life and pain, and the relationship of God and man. His only respites were long, solitary walks and the sketches he made of the villagers and surrounding areas. He thought of himself as a molting bird, waiting for his melancholy to end so he could realize his potential which is hinted at by these words in his journal: 'There is a reason why feeling is invisible; it is why art is necessary.'

Nellie Hermann's second book is written in a series of letters to Vincent's brother, Theo, containing his musings about their past life and his journey by foot to Paris after his time in the mining community. Ms. Hermann is a word master who captures the magic that VanGogh saw in simplicity. A wheat field is described as wheat stalks bowing to each other with the effect of a "rocky sea--not one wave breaking but a whole sea rolling this way and that. Over everything the sun casts its warmth, so that as the wheat falls and blows in the wind, the waves look alternately gold, silver, and a color that is some amalgam of both." This is a lovely book about an artist written by an artist.… (mehr)