June and July 2014 Book Clubs "Traveling with Pomegranates" and "The Mill River Recluse"

The Madonna of the Pomegranates

Hi Everyone,

As the summer flies by into the dog days of August, I find myself running to catch up with it, and as usual, here I am once again playing catch up with writing our book club news. Our June and July reads are the topic of this letter: Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and The Mill River Recluse a first novel by Darcie Chan. 

In attendance at June’s outdoor meeting at the Field House in Cabot were Barb K., Becky, Cheryl, Ginnie, Jody, Lori, and myself. The response to our beloved author Sue Monk Kidd’s book Traveling with Pomegranates did not manifest as I had expected. Given that our club fully embraced three of Kidd’s later novels (The Mermaid Chair, The Secret Life of Bees, and more recently, her brilliant work The Invention of Wings), it should have been safe to say that Traveling with Pomegranates would have been a winner. Wrong. It was one of the least liked books of the year!

A memoir, Traveling with Pomegranates was written before Kidd ventured into the genre of fictional novels. In this book, she and her daughter Ann write alternating chapters exploring their emotions during pivotal periods in each of their lives. Sue is struggling with aging, her spirituality, and a changing relationship with her daughter while Ann is coping with adulthood: choosing a career, overcoming personality limitations, and of course romance. Although at different stages of life, the two women share connections within them and around them. Looping these connections together through their travels and writing was for me a fascinating journey. 

However, the book club did not collectively agree with my affinity for the book.  Strange as it was, this book created one of the most capricious responses I’ve ever encountered at a meeting. “She needs to get over herself,” was the quote I most clearly recall in reaction to Kidd and her “self-absorbed” ramblings. “Ann is no better,” was another retort, “She needs to grow up!” On and on the critiques continued, and as individual club members took a turn at holding the mirror directly in the face of each author, I began to see their point. The pettiness of the authors’ mundane concerns tarnished my earlier opinions of the book.

It is not to say that I disliked Traveling with Pomegranates after hearing their judgments. While reading it, I was enrapt with the journey to foreign lands where a mother and daughter find their way back to one another, I saw my beloved Virgin Mary at the center of their reunion, and I saw their writing as the glue bonding their love in a way that can never be vocalized.  Although Ann and Sue’s struggles seem minimal to some of us, they were still struggles. Many of us battle the small struggles in life hard in preparation for the bigger heartaches, like we need practice in toughening up. In a way, it reminds me of a poignant poem one of my friends posted on Facebook recently by Edward Hirsch written in his grief over the loss of his son, here are the beginning verses:

I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night

The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief

For the most part, we are weak creatures and if we are to prepare for carrying a bag of cement up a mountain that has no end in sight, then we are going to need a lot of weightlifting practice. Struggling with menopause, romance, spirituality, career paths are light bags of feathers in comparison to Hirsch’s load, although sometimes with clouded peaks, they are still worth noting, sharing, and learning from for the day when true “grief” appears, “Poor Sisyphus grief” (in Greek mythology, a king who was condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down) and it will.

And so we come to poor Mary, the main character in Darcie Chan’s novel The Mill River Recluse, she carried her bag of cement for a lifetime and without ever leaving her home. She chose giving in to her fears and, but for a few instances, remaining inside the walls of her mansion in Mill River, Vermont, until her death. This book was one of our so-called “easy reads.” By providing us with a bird’s eye view of the characters living in the small town of Mill River, Chan was able to tap into our innate tendencies to hear and share gossip. Who does not have a collection of stories involving people in their hometowns much like Mary and the other Mill River citizens? Let’s take Chicora for example.

Like Mary, the Litzinger sisters were an enigma. Everyone walked ever so slowly when they passed by their Munster like Victorian home in town hoping to catch a glimpse of the odd pair, but rarely did they leave their asylum behind the rusted iron gates. Oh, at Halloween you were lucky to catch them before lights out and have a knobby hand reach from behind a creaking door drop a homemade popcorn ball or an apple into your treat bag. Other than that we created our own stories about them disregarding the evidence to the contrary once the Ferguson’s bought the home and dispelled myths such as money hidden in the walls and bodies buried in the basement.

The character “crazy” Daisy was not unlike my memories of tales of Sarah Riley who once lived on the outskirts of Chicora down a darkly wooded lane. I recall pilfering through the remnants of her cabin which had burned to the ground like Daisy’s mobile home. There I discovered assorted colors of small glass bottles of which I envisioned Sarah as did Daisy concocting her own herbal remedies from the wildflowers growing nearby. 

My favorite character is Father O’Brien. He is Chicora’s own Father Biller. Like Father O’Brien who took care of Mary, Father Biller took care of his mother. Together they resided in the parish house next door to the Catholic Church. The house, another Victorian relic akin to the Litzinger estate, no longer remains in the town as it was later demolished after Mrs. Biller passed away in preference for a modern updated parochial center. 

Like the home, however, Mrs. Biller was a living ghost. As children we loved to accompany my mother on her infrequent visits seeking council from Father. It was always with the hope that we would be greeted by the eccentric Mrs. Biller. She would answer the door in her very polite and genteel manner. Wisps of fine gray hair lose from the antique combs holding back a finely rolled French knot at the back of her head revealed a shriveled but kind old face. Small in stature and thin as a rail, she always wore a dark dress defining a waistline no bigger than a saucer. It was constructed of a material I just wanted to touch only to find it was a fabric nothing like the dresses sold in stores where we shopped in downtown Butler. A delicate ivory brooch at the base of her throat was an alluring embellishment for a child’s eyes. Yet, her shoes were the main attraction of her outdated clothing ensemble. They didn’t have laces! To this day, she is the only woman I have ever known to wear button top shoes. Black leather and creased from age, they inhabited her tiny doll like feet. 

Father Biller protected this antiquated mother in the privacy of their home as Father O'Brian protected Mary in the privacy of her home. I never saw Mrs. Biller at the grocery store, the drugstore, Mellon Bank, and certainly not the liquor store or beer distributor, the places my family frequented. In fact, I don’t ever remember seeing Mrs. Biller at Mass; I only saw her on the rare occasions I was blessed to enter the main hall of the parish house, and always under the coddling eye of her son.

So, character for character, we can all claim a Mill River resident as our own. Our discussion for Chan’s novel was lively as we found the reader’s guide in the back of the book to be beneficial, eliciting interesting and thoughtful responses. Including myself, Becky, Cheryl, Ginnie, Lori, and Mandy, were in attendance at the July meeting held at Mama Rosa’s Restaurant in Butler.

Our August title The Obituary Writer by Ann Hood has me looking forward to the quiet moments of bedtime reading. I can’t wait to snuggle under the covers and steal a few chapters each night. For those of you that enjoy racy characters and plotlines, this is a step away from our usual themes usually with conservative moral messages. I look forward to our meeting for this title at 6 PM on August 19. Since most of you were looking forward to a trip to the Narcissus Winery in July and we changed our plans due to inclement weather, let’s meet at my house and carpool to this destination for our August book club. Ginnie, bring your money for wine!

Your sister in wisdom,

Tammy