WWW.WEDNESDAY

 WWW. WEDNESDAY asks three questions to prompt you to speak bookishly. To participate, and to see how other book lovers responded, click here. 

PS I no longer participate in WWW.WEDNESDAY via that link because her blog won't accept Blogger comments. I mention this only to save you the frustration I experienced trying to link up.

1. What are you currently reading? Candy Apple Red by Nancy Bush. Our narrator Jane Kelly is a thirty-something California girl who follows her lover to a smallish town in Oregon. The man moves on without her but she stays. She was rudderless in SoCal and hopes to find some meaning/direction in Lake Chinook. She's been a bartender, now she's a process server, and through her legwork for local attorneys, seems to be slowly evolving into a PI. The case that she's investigating, almost against her will, is an icky one: The scion of Lake Chinook's richest family killed his wife and kids and disappeared. It's believed that if Jane gets in good with the suspect's dad and follows the money, he can be found.

 

It's starting slow, which I guess isn't surprising for Book #1 in a series. There are characters to introduce, backstories and relationships to explain. So even though this one hasn't grabbed me by the throat yet, I'm willing to give it time.

 

2. What did you recently finish reading? Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise by Sally Cline. This one will stay with me for a while. When I first read This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, I was a teenager. Scott, Zelda and their Jazz Age world seemed so sophisticated and glamorous – and I was so immature myself – that I didn't fully comprehend how young they were. Scott was 24 and Zelda just 20 when he became a celebrity writer and she became The Great Man's Wife. It was too much too soon. They were too gorgeous, too eccentric, too damaged and damaging. It's painful to read how they inevitably unraveled.

 

Cline tells their story from a distinctly pro-Zelda, feminist POV. I appreciated it. While Zelda was exasperating and exhausting and clearly not well – there's an episode of her playing tennis in the nude that is the very definition of disinhibition – it's not like Scott was the Gold's Gym of mental fitness himself. But it was Zelda who was stigmatized and institutionalized, in large part because Scott was a celebrity, Scott controlled the money, and, oh yeah, Scott was a man.

 

It's impossible to see her as Scott's victim, though. If that was Cline's goal, she missed the mark with me. He loved her so and never stopped, perhaps more than she loved him. She could be both loyal and breathtakingly cruel. They were so talented, so smart, so broken. I wonder if the real tragedy isn't that they found one another. 

 

Remember that line from Gatsby? Jordan says a bad driver is only unsafe when he meets another bad driver. I fear that Scott and Zelda were two fabulous bad drivers who collided. I'm heartbroken for them both.

 

3. What will you read next? I don't know.