“The Kids Aren’t Alright” flier for our Dystopia in YA discussion with a cast of YA all-star authors including Jenn Bosworth, Chris Howard, Sherri Smith and LARB’s own YA Editor Cecil Castellucci (The Year of the Beasts). Artwork by Skylight Books’ Jenn Witte.  More info here.

In Illuminated Manuscripts, Ariana Kelly considers the history of neon. But first, a story:

Behind a plywood partition in Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles, a neon light has flickered unseen since the Great Depression. Purchased by Clifford Clinton in 1935, the cafeteria is governed by “Clifton’s Golden Rule,” a precept that ensures that everyone who enters can eat, even those unable to pay in full. Clinton transformed what was formerly Boos Brothers’ Cafeteria into a space that reflects time he spent in the Santa Cruz mountains as a child. A cascade of water spills into a handmade stream that winds its way through plastic redwood trees; on the walls, numerous paintings of forest scenes lit by neon emphasize the idea and its artifice.

In 1949, one of these illuminated tableaus was obscured when the restroom that contained it was renovated and transformed into a storage area. The electricity, however, was never disconnected, and the neon tubing has glowed in the darkness for the past 62 years, costing Clifton’s a cumulative 17,000 thousand dollars in electricity bills.

Read more.

The Good Wife: Reconsidering The Good Earth’s O-lan
By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Prequels, sequels, and alternate-perspective takes on famous novels abound in the publishing world today. In March, Geraldine Brooks imagines the life of Little Women’s absent father as his family awaits his return from the Civil War. The Wind Done Gone offers a slave’s viewpoint on the events of Gone With the Wind; a new book will soon recount Pride and Prejudice from the servant’s corner of the drawing room. Probably the most famous of these re-imaginings, Gregory Maguire’s best-selling Wicked (also a hit Broadway musical) reveals that the Wicked Witch of the West has been misunderstood by those who only know Dorothy’s side of the Wizard of Oz story. And while re-tellings have flourished in recent years, there are older examples of the practice, too: Wide Sargasso Sea (a prequel to Jane Eyre) and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (a play revolving around two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet) both appeared in 1966.

There’s also a long Chinese tradition of playing around with famous works of fiction. Dream of the Red Chamber, the country’s most famous novel, has yielded a dozen sequels or more, such as Shadows of Dream of the Red Chamber (1877) and The New Story of the Stone (1908). As far as I know, though, no one has yet given similar treatment to the most famous novel about China written in English: Pearl Buck’s 1931 bestseller, The Good Earth.

If I were to take on such a task, I’d write The Good Earth through the eyes of O-lan, long-suffering wife of Wang Lung the farmer. O-lan is the heroine of Buck’s novel, though Wang Lung is the book’s main character and the only one whose thoughts are made known to the reader. But Wang Lung wouldn’t have accomplished half the things he did were it not for the actions of his taciturn and inscrutable wife. While he recognizes this as O-lan lies dying, for most of the book, Wang Lung regards her as nothing more than a “dull and faithful creature,” almost beast-like in her ability to endure hardship without complaint.

But O-lan is The Good Earth’s most complicated character, far more interesting to me than the increasingly acquisitive, status-conscious Wang Lung. Sold by her parents at the age of ten during a famine, she spends a decade as a kitchen slave in the wealthy House of Hwang, the most powerful family in the town near Wang Lung’s farm. Wang Lung, a poor young farmer, goes to the Hwangs in search of a wife and is given O-lan as his bride. Slowly, the two work together to improve their standard of living, only to see all their gains erased when another famine hits the countryside.

This is when O-lan steps in to save the family: they travel to a southern city and she builds a hut from straw mats after Wang Lung cannot figure out how to do so. She teaches the children to beg and ensures that they have rice in their bowls. She keeps her ears open and picks up rumors of a coming attack on the city; when this takes place, O-lan and Wang Lung join a group ransacking the home of a rich man, and she finds a cache of hidden jewels. Returning to the countryside, those jewels provide Wang Lung with the capital to purchase huge amounts of land from the now-impoverished House of Hwang, and the House of Wang begins its ascent.

In time, Wang Lung casts O-lan aside for a younger, prettier concubine and O-lan is left to waste away in the kitchen as her body is eaten by a cancer that she endures without complaint. Only in her last months, feeling “some strange remorse,” does Wang Lung show O-lan any true compassion. His basic feelings toward O-lan remain unchanged, though: “When he took this stiff dying hand he did not love it, and even his pity was spoiled with repulsion towards it.”

Throughout it all, the reader is left to guess what O-lan’s thoughts and feelings might be. Buck offers us no insight into O-lan’s decision to suffocate her newborn daughter at the height of the famine, nor does she explore how O-lan might have felt during the early days of her marriage, when she and Wang Lung worked side-by-side in the fields, scarcely exchanging a word. It’s easy enough to assume that O-lan resented the presence of Wang Lung’s concubine Lotus, but we as readers cannot really penetrate her generally stoic countenance. Only rarely, such as when Wang Lung forces her to hand over two treasured pearls so he can give them to Lotus, do O-lan’s tears hint at the depth of her pain. Even then, Buck tells us, O-lan continues washing clothes upon a rock, duty-bound and uncomplaining as always. What I imagine O-lan might have thought and felt reflects more about me, a 21st-century American feminist, than what Buck tells us about her inner world.

But Pearl Buck, too, was a feminist, as Peter Conn writes in his biography of her, and I don’t think her decision to narrate The Good Earth from Wang Lung’s perspective was an insignificant one. With a male protagonist, the book avoided being dismissed as the 1930s equivalent of “chick lit”—a woman’s story written by a woman. Instead, the millions of Americans who read The Good Earth learned about the plight of rural Chinese women through scenes such as the one in which Wang Lung wonders about his wife’s past in the House of Hwang, then chastises himself for such foolish curiosity, telling himself that “She was, after all, only a woman.”

Still, I’m frustrated that O-lan remains so unknown, a martyr who rarely reveals what’s going on behind her stolid exterior. I wouldn’t want to see a new version of her story that positions O-lan as a frustrated feminist burning with desire to escape her life with Wang Lung and strike out on her own as a career woman in the city—that wouldn’t be true to Buck’s portrayal of her as a woman devoted to her husband and family. And I’d be surprised if a new take on The Good Earth ever made it to Broadway. But there is a 1937 film version, and the Best Actress Academy Award Luise Rainer won for her portrayal of O-lan reflects that there’s far more depth to her character than what Wang Lung saw on the surface. If given the chance, what would O-lan say?

Find the entire LARB China Blog here.

T. Clutch Fleischmann argues that it might be a little early to title a book on the history of the gay rights movement “Victory”:

Standing in contrast to this diverse history is Linda Hirshman’s Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution, a recent accounting of the gay rights movement in the United States. The choice to title such a book Victory while queer people continue to fight for basic rights and safety is a good indication of Hirshman’s scope.

Click here to read of Fleischmann’s review of Linda Hirshman’s Victory.

Did you start your Monday morning off with a cup (or three) of coffee? Did it make you “depressed and sarcastic”? That was the fear in 18th Century Paris, where there was great debate over the hot new caffeinated beverage. As Steve Shapin explains in Enlightenment: It’s What’s For Dinner:

In the 1780s, a Parisian critic condemned “the black water” that is consumed at the café as “more harmful than the generous wine on which our fathers got drunk,” making men depressed and sarcastic. Coffee might cause weight loss and dysentery; what was beneficial wakefulness to some was pathological overstimulation to others, raising the risk of nervous disease. Voltaire’s physician tried in vain to wean him from the 40-cup habit: the spread of hot drinks in general, the doctor claimed, was causing physical and mental degeneracy. Of all people, those living the life of the mind had the most reason to avoid coffee.

Get all the Enlightenment food facts over at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is proud to partner with KCRW to present author Jamaica Kincaid in conversation with Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt in West LA on March 26th. 

It’s sure to be a great event, but you know what would make it even better? Free tickets. Sign up for our weekly email and you may just get lucky and receive a pair of tickets on the house. Click here for details and to sign up.

Marjorie Heins raises important but troubling questions about academic freedom in her new book Priests of our Democracy. From Stephen Rohde’s review:

Heins juxtaposes her compelling and distressing account of the anticommunist purges [during the 1940s and 50s] that reached into the ivory towers of our colleges and universities with a chilling cautionary tale that asks whether history is repeating itself through the repressive reactions to 9/11. Have the earlier witch hunts that targeted alleged communists (with a disturbing and disproportionate focus on Jews) been replaced with an obsessive targeting of alleged terrorists (with a disturbing and disproportionate focus on Muslims)? Have we learned anything from the excesses of McCarthyism, or are we condemned to repeat them?

Read more over here.

Nathan Deuel says Nick Flynn is “among our very best” memoirists. His review of Flynn’s new book The Reenactments begins:

A single mother in Massachusetts reads through her son’s notebook and shoots herself. Still grieving, the son ends up working in a Boston homeless shelter, where one day his alcoholic father seeks refuge. The father is a bad drunk, as many are, and after a while the clinic votes to bar his reentry. The father spends his first night on the streets, sleeping on exhaust vents behind a library. During the vote that sent him outside, the son either does or does not raise his hand. Then the son writes an entire book about his mom’s suicide and the booze and the homeless shelter and that vote. The writer later stands onstage with the likes of James Frey, and this man, Nick Flynn, makes Frey’s semi-real book about semi-real addiction pretty much disintegrate into oblivion by comparison. Flynn leaves Boston and marries and has a daughter, and his father eventually makes it into a subsidized apartment and then to a hospice and then gets to meet Robert De Niro, who will be playing him in a movie about his son’s book. It’s all Nick Flynn’s doing and the result is Flynn’s third memoir, The Reenactments, a poetic and probing diary of writing, memory, and filmmaking.

Click here to read the rest at the Los Angeles Review of Books.