The Book Borrower - Alice Mattison

Alice Mattison has clearly been publishing for a while--she has something like five novels and four story collections out, but she didn't cross my radar until last year sometime, with In Case We're Separated, a collection of linked stories about a family during the Holocaust. I will freely admit that I'm suspicious of such collections, because I always think: what, too lazy to shape it into a novel? I admit to owning that book, but not having read it yet.

Anyway, on some ridiculous date like 12/20, Melissa and I went to the State Street Borders in the bitter cold, ostensibly because we had 40% off coupons, and I had $5 in Borders Bucks to spend, but not only is that really a 29.5% coupon, given Chicago's sales tax rate (now highest in the country), the line actually snaked around several aisles of books (I wandered through the fiction section in stupid mode, thinking why the hell are all these people just standing in my way?) By the time Melissa found me after not finding the cookbook she wanted, I had three books in my hands, but we agreed it was pointless. We went to Marshall Fields (okay, okay Macy's) and had better success: Estee Lauder perfume gift sets on sale for me and a cashmere scarf for her mom at something like 60% off. A cab home instead of the el made it a perfect outing.

My point (yeah, I do have one somewhere) is that one of the books I picked up was another Alice Mattison--Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn--which sounded good enough to track down on Amazon, along with a couple of others.

The Book Borrower is the first I grabbed from the stack near the front door on my way out one morning (I do most of my reading on the el--I have a 40-45 minute ride each way, but I always get a seat, so it's a fairly comfortable one, although the sardines do pack in after me). It's an odd little novel, I would say, but I did enjoy it. (note: on the back cover of the paperback edition I have, the plot description is actually incorrect, which was really weird). Two young mothers meet in a park, one hands the other a book: The Trolley Girl, which she immediately begins reading, as do we. The book within the book is the story of a trolley strike in a small city in Massachusetts in the early '20's, written by the sister of a woman instrumental in the anarchist movement backing the strike. We read this story in fits and starts, while the friendship between the two women grows, progressing in segments roughly ten years apart. The punctuation in the real-time, story-time is a little idiosyncratic (no quotation marks, for instance) but otherwise it's all pretty low-key. There are births, deaths, frustrations, grief, and an odd acquaintance with an elderly sculptor who turns out to have a very strong connection to the whole story.

I can't be more in-depth, I don't think, without revealing too much, but I will say that it explores the inexplicable nature of friendship: how we meet, why we connect, why we stay connected, and perhaps the peculiarity of women's friendships in particular.

I'm very interested in reading Mattison's other books, even the dreaded connected stories, heh. One of her short story collections, which I found on half.com, is called Men Giving Money: Women Yelling, a title I find worth the price of admission alone!