Saving Fish from Drowning

About a year ago I read I book I really hated called The Lovely Bones. The narrator is a dead girl who is raped and murdered in Chapter One, and the rest of the book is her watching her family move on. They move on very fast. They are all very serene and accepting. Even when Mom leaves to relive her youth, no one is particularly upset. Some therapeutic sex is had - in one case rather disturbing therapeutic sex. But it kept reminding me of a MST3K quote from the short A Date with your Family: "Emotions are for ethnic people." It didn't seem to be a book about real people, or at least not the sort of people I know and identify with. I said at the time that if Alice Hoffman had written it would have been much improved. Not that Alice's characters are particularly ethnic (I don't know why that quote was always in my head), but they are always emotional.

(And what was with the fixation on women and children as victims? The book almost seemed to imply that when men are murdered it's not tragic. Why? They must have been asking for it? They should have been strong enough to make it a fair fight? I just keep thinking of a kid that was killed in Brooklyn Park some years back. He was 18, honors student, already accepted to college. He was sitting on the steps of his apartment building talking to a girl and was shot in the head with a stray bullet. The fact that he was 18 and not 8, man and not woman does not lessen the tragedy for me). Anyway, like I said, hated the book.

Which pretty much brings us to the novel I just finished, Saving Fish from Drowning. Not by Alice Hoffman but by Amy Tan, which would have been my second choice I'm sure. This is also narrated by a woman who dies mysteriously in the first chapter. Now this book I like (although it's not my favorite Tan; that would still be The Hundred Secret Senses). Is it just that I have more in common with crotchety old Chinese women than I do with dreamy young girly-girls?

No. I've said before the actual writing in The Lovely Bones is, well, lovely. Alice Sebold was a poet before she was a novelist and it shows. No, I hated that book because nothing made any freaking sense. The girl dies and she sort of hovers about, dogs sing in choruses and there's ice cream. She never once wonders when she's getting to heaven or anything of the sort. Did she have no expectations for life after death? Doesn't she feel ripped off or lied to? And we're told she's watching her family because that's how she wants to spend her time, but we're never told the mechanics of how she gets inside their heads.

I'm a spec-fic writer. We're all about the mechanics of how.

So. Saving Fish from Drowning. The MC in this one is a Buddhist, but a Chinese Buddhist which as she tells us means a bit of this and a bit of that. Her expectations for the after life and how they differ from what she's experiencing are brought up more than once. In Buddhist thought, the soul does not go on to the next incarnation right away, so there she is floating and waiting. Her friends were going to go on a tour to China and Burma with her as their guide; at her funeral they say a little prayer that she will be with them "in spirit", so of course she has to go. And how does she get inside the minds of the other characters? The MC tells us it's something Buddha would have called "the Mind of Others", and how she understands this changes as the book progresses.

And the characters are very real. It's an interesting catalogue of all the ways people can miscommunicate. I particularly liked the character of Harry Bailey, who works with dogs and constantly thinks that people will respond to the same behavior controls that dogs will. Sometimes he's right and sometime's he's wrong, but he was always amusing.

The Stephen King novel Misery also plays an important (and nongratuitous) part in the story, which I found amusing since the two writers are friends and bandmates in the Rock Bottom Remainders.