By Andrew Ervin
Sunday, June 4, 2006; BW13
Out in the Ozarks
I almost bailed on America's Boy (Dutton, $24.95) somewhere around the 50-page mark, but that would have been a mistake. Describing the humiliation of growing up fat and gay in the Missouri Ozarks, debut author Wade Rouse relies at first on a bitchy humor that is simply beyond his talent; he lacks the eye for detail and angry wit, and comes across like a David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs knockoff. But a palpable change occurs about halfway through, when the storytelling grows more personal and Rouse reveals his own impressive voice.
"On the Fourth of July holiday in 1979," he writes, "just a month after I graduated from junior high, a month after Todd graduated from high school, just as I was realizing I liked boys and hated my older brother, Todd died, and I quickly buried two things -- my brother deep in the ground and my sexuality deep in me." His brother's death in a motorcycle accident turns this memoir from a glib, more-fabulous-than-thou rant into a real tearjerker. At first, Rouse tried to be "normal" so his parents would not have "to mourn the loss of a second son." Later, his decision to come out of the closet further added to his woes. By the end, these angst-ridden vignettes accumulate into a revelatory story about acceptance, pride and the many ways even a seemingly prejudiced family can surprise us. Those early growing pains aside, America's Boy proves Rouse to be an original writer with the ability to reach what could be a large and grateful audience.
In the CloisterAt age 18, Beryl Singleton Bissell, "intrigued by a happiness found in deprivation" and against her parents' wishes, joined the Monastery of Saint Clare, an austere cloister near Trenton, N.J. There, renamed Sister Mary Beatrix of the Holy Child Jesus, she slept on a corncob mattress, endured hard physical labor and discovered a sense of inner peace. "As we hung the wet tunics up to dry in the cold morning air, my hands grew red and began to ache," she writes, describing her work in the monastery's laundry. "The weather had turned chill the week after I entered, and the morning was bright with frost. The cold ached through my arms and into my chest. I felt as though I was holding ice in both hands. The pain filled me with a leaping sense of joy."
But the good times couldn't last forever, as is clear from a dedication that reads, in part, "to my son." So the real story of Bissell's The Scent of God (Counterpoint, $24) isn't why she wanted to leave home (alcoholic father, raging mother) and become a "Poor Clare," but what went on behind those cloister doors, and elsewhere, to make Bissell kick the habit and reenter the world. The apparent schism between the life of the spirit and that of the mind presented her with some extremely difficult decisions, and working through them clearly gave her a unique and beautiful perspective, one that served her well when cancer struck in her family. Bissell seems to find inner joy even during life's most difficult trials, and she writes about spiritual matters with a marvelous clarity of vision.
Out of Control"Crazy" is a word so overused that it has begun to lose its meaning. But when Pete Earley's son -- identified here only by his middle name, Mike -- suffered a "psychotic breakdown" in college, Earley learned firsthand and all too well how potent that word can be. "Mike was mentally ill," he writes. "That was a lifetime illness. And like it or not, what happened to him was going to affect me too, for the rest of our lives." In writing Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness (Putnam, $25.95), Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, brought to bear all of his journalistic skills (if not always, he admits, his journalistic ethics). He attended trials, visited mental wards and group therapy sessions, tracked down arrest reports from police precincts. The book alternates neatly between Mike's story and accounts of the innumerable hours Earley spent learning about the vagaries of our nation's mental health system. It's a bold narrative approach, particularly as some of the crazy people's voices are a whole lot more colorful than his own. Part of what makes them so fascinating, though, is that Earley discovers in them clues to his son's illness.
Earley finds that an exorbitant number of mentally ill people in our society are not treated in health-care facilities but, instead, punished and thrown in jails. As one Miami prison officer sees it, "These inmates are here because they broke the law. They're criminals first, mentally ill second." A combination of old-fashioned muckraking and genuine empathy has allowed Earley to help his son and fashion an important manifesto in the burgeoning "civil rights movement for the mentally ill."
Between the LinesThe title of Listen (Bloomsbury, $23.95) is both an admonition and a plea; it's also a clue to how to read this impressionistic book. Wendy Salinger, a National Poetry Series winner, is an ornate stylist, but she also recognizes that words make up only part of any text. Here, she navigates the negative spaces between words and charts the distances between what is said and what we actually hear.
Listening is "a form of power really," she reminds us, and her memoir is first and foremost a disturbing story of power relations. Salinger paints her father as a cranky and mean-spirited poet and professor of languages who felt he was underappreciated both at home and at the North Carolina university where he worked. Although he cruelly belittled his wife at every turn, it was Salinger who took the brunt of his aggression.
Some books are called "difficult" because they use big words and complex sentences, others because they invent new syntactical rules and sometimes break even those. There's another kind of difficult book, though, one that details hideous interpersonal transgressions, such as incest. Listen includes all of these things, and in doing so reclaims for Salinger the power and authority her father denied her.
Out of the BoxAs a newscaster for the Univision Television Network, the most watched Spanish-language station in the United States, María Elena Salinas has covered some of the biggest stories of our time. She's not one to back down from a challenge: "I faced off with Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and John Kerry. I asked Panama's Manuel Noriega about drug smuggling, Chile's Augusto Pinochet about human-rights violations, and Peru's Alberto Fujimori about corruption." She volunteered to go to Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq. But for I Am My Father's Daughter: Living a Life Without Secrets (Rayo, $19.95), co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Liz Balmaseda, she took on "the most daunting story of my life" -- her own family's history.
Shortly after the death of her father, Salinas received a package he had stored for years in the warehouse of an old family friend. It was "jammed with personal documents, scraps of our lives: birth and baptismal certificates, report cards, family photographs, official letters, paycheck stubs, rent receipts" and evidence that before she was born her father had been a pacifist without a green card and, to her shock, a Catholic priest. Following the clues in the "Box of Secrets," Salinas delves into her father's fascinating past. Along the way she also comes to understand better her relationships with her own children, and proves herself to be as irrepressible on the page as she is on the air. ·
Andrew Ervin is a regular contributor to Book World.