Vitamin D Deficiency: What Not to Do

Holy moly! It's Vitamin D deficiency time here in Kentucky, with sunshine in short supply and cold rain in plenty. I feel suspended in time and space, as if I'm lingering in C.S. Lewis's "Wood Between the Worlds," a sort of twilight place in one of the Narnia books in which nothing much happens unless you jump into one of its numerous ponds. Each one of these is a portal that might lead just about anywhere, and you have no way of knowing in advance where that might be.

I haven't been jumping into many ponds, unless you count library books and job applications as portals to other worlds, which in a sense, they are, of course. In the Narnia book (I believe it was The Magician's Nephew), two children begin to explore the ponds in the Wood Between the Worlds out of curiosity, unleashing some rather powerful consequences. One would hope that the innocent choice of a library book or a job opening wouldn't have such dire implications, though you might be wrong in that hope, from what I've seen.

I try to be responsible in the books I choose to review, but suspended here as I am, living without a permanent address, not sure where I'll be or what I'll be doing a month from now, hoping something better awaits me than public assistance, I do end up reading a lot to pass the time. I will admit to being a more suspicious and skeptical reader than I once was (as you may have noticed), and this especially pertains to recent books, which I sometimes suspect of having a political subtext buried within whatever plots or themes the author has chosen to explore. This happens even with writers I respect, and it annoys me.

Let me be clear on what I'm talking about. I would expect that political themes and ideas could play a legitimate role in any work should an author wish to pursue them. Politics is a part of life. What bothers me is when I start to read something and get distracted by what seem to be coy, half-hidden, half-revealed references to things outside the scope of the fictional world itself. Yes, I know Dante's Inferno is full of topical references to events and people that he didn't even bother to disguise--and I know it's a great work of literature--but that is the thing I dislike most about it.

I think a work of art is powerful to the extent that it takes a particular instance and makes it universal (or you could say it happens the other way around). Literary conceits like taking potshots at people or sending hidden messages make me question the author's motives. I come to a book assuming the author's integrity and desire to tell a good story, maybe even to create a great work of art. If I start to feel that he/she is dropping names, manipulating me, or trying to send messages that will only be recognized by Abyssinian eunuchs or Macedonian spies, I start to feel that the contract between reader and writer, based on trust, has been violated. It makes me much less likely to bother with that author in the future.

Of course, I have reviewed some books recently that seemed to me to be referring to things slightly out of my ken, and I said so. One of them was Gregory's Maguire's After Alice, but I have to say that Mr. Maguire's book, while it startled me at times, did not offend me. Why not? It was simply a feeling I got that while parts of Mr. Maguire's novel were a little opaque to me, he was not trying to hit me over the head or sell me anything. It was a delight, rather than otherwise, to realize that some of his allusions were beyond me and not amenable to instant unraveling. His book wasn't reductive, in other words; it was more poem than mathematical equation. It raised questions without necessarily answering all of them, and I wanted to recommend it to other people to see what they would find in it.

This past week, I read a book about a World War II pilot who returns to France years later to reconnect with people he knew during the war. It was a good story and well written, but somehow I felt rather empty at the end of it. So why can I not recommend this book to you? Let me state that I know nothing of the author's intentions, so my reactions are strictly to the book itself. While it explored such laudable themes as memory, responsibility, humanity, and inhumanity, I just felt beaten down at the end of it. I kept getting distracted by names and references rather than feeling they were a seamless part of the story. I kept wondering why certain choices were made. And for a novel whose themes seem to be worthy and life affirming, it had a curiously deflating ending.

The pilot, who had succeeded in sneaking out of France during the war, reprises his escape decades later with the woman who assisted him years before but had never done the crossing herself. He hadn't wanted to relive the experience, for reasons that become clear, but the woman, with whom he has become romantically involved, insists on it, almost (it seemed to me) bullying him into it. Her motives somehow seem impure, though she is presented to the reader as a remarkable and courageous freedom fighter. Right about here, the author lost me completely. Why would this character, with so many painful memories of her own, insist that her lover relive one of his most painful war episodes? It all seemed a little sadistic.

I admired the author's skill in bringing the war vividly to life, but at some point, the plot and I parted company. Why did the pilot's life after the war suddenly seem to count for nothing until he returned to France? Perhaps that did not quite ring true to me. Why did he end up traipsing across the mountains after a vertigo-inducing journey by car that he hadn't wanted to make? I felt I had been left hanging. OK, so maybe this book wasn't the best choice for a cloudy week in November (though I don't think reading it on the beach in Cancun would have improved matters much). Something about it bothered me, making me wish I had chosen something more straightforward, or at least more straightforwardly opaque.

Picking library books is more of a crapshoot than it seems sometimes. I have no way of knowing how often anyone who reads my column seeks out books and films I've written about--maybe it never happens. But just in case you decide to track this book down, I recommend reading it by a sunny window or underneath a sunlamp, at the very least. I wouldn't want to be responsible for inadvertently adding to anyone's Seasonal Affective Disorder, and though it's quite possible you would respond to it differently, I can only tell you that I heard a giant whooshing sound as half the Vitamin D in my body seemed to escape when I turned the last page. It takes a lot of Ben & Jerry's to replace that much Vitamin D.