L is for Lighthearted Letts and a Less-Favorable Review

What I read: Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts

Where the Heart Is is an Oprah's Bookclub book. Oprah specializes in saga tales--or at least, it always seems as if the books I see with Oprah's stamp on them are saga tales--and I usually avoid saga tales. By "saga tales," I mean books that take readers through all the tragedy, heart-aches, trials, and tribulations of a person's life.

Most of Oprah's books (if not all) are about surviving the tragedy, heart-ache, trials, tribulations. Still, there's all that tragitribulation to get through, and it makes me tired. There's something to be said for "escapism" as the purpose of literature. (I get very annoyed when academics AND "all literature is a lesson" types insist that people who want escapism are escaping from reality in all facets of their lives. Entertainment has different purposes for different people--and often, different purposes at different times for different people. Not wanting to read about dead people--when one is a coroner, for example, and sees dead people all day long--is completely okay!)

However, Where the Heart Is--although it has its share of tragitribulation--is so lovely, the tragitribulation takes a back seat. The book is singingly optimistic. What a nice change from so many other Americana tales!

Part of this singing optimism is due to the tone/style. In some ways, Letts' style reminds me of McCall Smith's style in the Ladies Detective Agency books. There's this sense of wide-open spaces filled with the gentle current of humanity. And people are everyday nice: not nice in a sycophantic, sticky-sweet way but rather pleasant and quirky, in the way people really can be. I mean, there are people like this in the world right now!

Part of this singing optimism is Novalee who grows from a clueless, but still resilient, seventeen-year-old to a strong, compassionate, wise twenty-five-year old in the course of the book. Readers don't see much if any of her faults, but that's not the point of the book. We are so much on her side, her faults hardly matter, and her growth from naive teenager-with-baby to Renaissance woman-with-seven-year-old is completely believable.

The only part of the book where the singing optimism falters is when Lexie (Novalee's best friend) gets beat up by her pedophile boyfriend. 

It isn't the tragedy that kills the mood; the book can afford a few tragedies. It is, unfortunately, the platitudes that Novalee dumps on Lexie. Lexie blames herself and...Lexie should. She has continually dated guys who get her pregnant and dump her. At some point, yeah, Lexie should have learned to be more savvy or, at least, gotten the guy vetted, or, at the risk of sounding Puritanical, simply stopped dating. At some point, the thought, "I'm not doing my kids any good" should have crossed this woman's mind, and it annoyed me that Novalee sweeps away personal responsibility with a "bad things happen, but we look for the good in life and move on" speech.

As far as I'm concerned, Novalee's reaction should have been, "Yes, and I was a lousy friend for not telling you to be more careful about the jerks you date." At the very least, I would have liked some recognition by Novalee that her friend may be a wonderful human being (and should be helped, whatever her accountability) but doesn't have enough commonsense to fill a teacup and should never be allowed to take care of Novalee's own daughter.

Especially since Novalee herself does make tough commonsense choices for the sake of her daughter. Like Lexie, she messes up after Americus is born, but the event acts as a traffic signal in her life: Slow down! Think! The reader sees the woman Novalee is going to become, a person who has her feet firmly planted on the ground.

However, this shift from singing optimism to Pollyanna-erk is fairly brief and pretty far into the book. I'm not even sure why Letts put it in other than to add 1000 more words. Otherwise, the book's overall positive viewpoint is not saccharine or wishy-washy or uneven. It's gentle, plausible, and relatable, making the book one of my recommendations, saga tale or not.

2023 Update:  I read Shoot the Moon by Billie Letts.

The premise is fascinating and the read very easy: a young boy, long thought dead, returns to his mother's hometown to try to figure out who he is. He discovers she was murdered when he was less than a year old, the same time he was adopted in a different state. 

Major Crimes did an episode, "Curve Ball," based on this premise and it is quite good. The mystery is pretty much what a viewer could guess and unfolds organically, which I consider to be decent storytelling--no sudden twists but, rather, the natural next act. The boy's true identity is revealed by the crime unit's careful investigation, which slowly but inexorably moves towards the truth. The theme of reconciliation focuses on the son of the dead man, the man who recognized the boy, rather than on the boy himself. The ending is hopeful but can't promise much else--the boy is now without the father he knew while reunited with a parent he hasn't lived with since he was a toddler. 

Although the event is unique, a curve ball, the disclosures are treated as part of life, revealing human nature and the oddities of the human experience as opposed to a descent into melodrama.

Shoot the Moon, unfortunately, takes the hint of melodrama in Where the Heart Is and raises it to fever pitch. The villains are abusers, druggies, rapists, and corrupt politicians. They are all entirely one-dimensional. Worse, I didn't find the main protagonists particularly likable since they manage to get three people killed in the course of the investigation. I suppose the reader is supposed to find these deaths excusable since the suffering protagonists are simply trying to find out the horrible truth. But the only real difference between their behavior and the villains' behavior seems to be mostly a matter of designation (if everybody feels the way a villain does, does that mean that everybody is...).

Scott Hamilton adopted at 6 weeks.

The thing that I found most troubling, however, was how the book stigmatizes adoption. In 2004, this attitude towards adoption was part of a trend that has still not entirely died out--the idea that giving up a child for adoption is a horrific, socially-forced act. The child will never be happy, will always resent the birth mother, will have terrible parents, and so on and so forth. 

In many ways, the trend was an effort to walk back the over-reaction in the other direction: when a pregnant unmarried teenager was so stigmatized, the teenager had to go into hiding. But I think the overcompensation here is unworthy of people who care about single moms, kids, and women who wish very much to become mothers. Adoption being stigmatized doesn't help anyone. 

Consequently, the lightheartedness at the end of Shoot the Moon is less joyful and more "oh, it's time for the good guys to be happy." 

I can't recommend the book despite the interesting premise.