Ordinary People (1976, Judith Guest)

Judith Guest's Ordinary People is a moving drama about a middle class family coming to terms with the loss of a family member. Conrad Jarrett is a teenager who spent his life in the shadow of his older brother Buck, until Buck died in a boating accident that Conrad blames on himself. After a suicide attempt and spell in a hospital, Conrad tries to rebuild an "ordinary" life at home and school, but finds himself unable to readjust. His teachers and classmates treat him like a freak, he no longer enjoys swimming or hanging out with his jock friends, and he retreats back into a self-imposed shell. His father Cal, a genial attorney, tries to reach out to him with forced kindness; his mother Beth, who favored Buck, responds with cold detachment, wishing that Conrad could simply snap out of it. Guest's book is simple in conception, but deeply felt in its particulars: Conrad's struggles with intrusive thoughts, a sense that he's not worthy of friendship and that he's to blame for everyone's standoffish attitude towards him, are heartrending and relatable to anyone who's suffered from severe depression. The book provides him a lifeline with Dr. Berger, an uncommonly empathetic therapist, and a furtive romance with classmate Jeannine, who finds his plight sympathetic rather than distasteful. His story's paralleled with the preoccupations of his parents: Cal wants to help his son but can't find the appropriate balance between authority figure and confidante; Beth tries to will their fractured family back to the status quo, an approach which is recognizable as it is futile. Guest's narrative doesn't entirely avert cliché or melodrama (a subplot with one of Conrad's fellow hospital patients has a predictable resolution) but in general is a careful, measured and moving portrait of how tragedy, stress and mutual misunderstanding can effect the most "ordinary" of families. Adapted into an award-winning film by Robert Redford, starring Timothy Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland.

Rating: 4/5

Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker)

 

Amazingly, I hadn't read Dracula until this Halloween - perhaps, given how deeply its tropes and characters embedded themselves in pop culture, I never felt the need? Regardless, Bram Stoker's seminal vampire tale remains a classic of the horror genre. Stoker's tale focuses of course on the battle between a cadre of Western Europeans and Count Dracula, an ageless, pitiless vampire from Transylvania who entraps the ambitious Jonathan Harker, spirits himself away to London and wreaks havoc on the city, targeting free-spirited young Lucy and Harker's fiancée Mina. The novel functions on several levels: as a horror story, of course, with Dracula the archetypal literary bloodsucker, all polite surface and deadly avarice; as a gothic romance of sorts, with prim and proper Englishwomen falling victim to Transylvania's thirstiest neck-nobbler (not to mention Jonathan's entrapment by Dracula's wives); as a pre-modern techno-thriller, with Victorian England pitting its technology (blood transfusions, trains, telegraphs and guns) against the superstitions of the East. The book's epistolary style takes some getting used to, as does Dracula's lack of the romantic characteristics which mark his screen appearances; he's a force of brute sex and manipulation rather than a suave charmer. But Stoker's pulpy prose, sharp characterizations (particularly the grim Dr. Van Helsing, the strong-willed Mina and the gun-totin' American Quincey Morris, who defeats the Count with a Bowie knife) and the novel's pervasive sense of dread makes it essential reading for the spooky season.

Rating: 5/5