Discoveries

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Amy Chua

The Penguin Press: 226 pp., $25.95

I can’t wait to see the mommy backlash on this one: If Ayelet Waldman is tarred and feathered for saying she loves her husband more than she does her children, imagine the Internet brouhaha when Yale Law professor Amy Chua tells the world that it’s OK to put your 3-year-old out on the porch in the freezing cold and shut the door for a spell for playing the piano badly and to excoriate your 8-year-old for getting an A-minus. “Battle Hymn” it is — Chua believes that Chinese mothers are superior to Western ones, and she does not mind saying so. Western parents are too concerned with self-esteem. Chinese parents are correct in raising their children with a feeling of indebtedness to them and they know what’s best for their kids — forcing them, for example, to play the instrument the parents choose (violin or piano) and never drums, which “leads to drugs.” Chua provides a list of the things she will not let her children do: have play dates, attend sleepovers, be in school plays, “get any grade less than an A,” watch TV or play computer games. “You must never compliment your children in public,” “you must always take the side of the teacher or coach,” “the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal,” “that medal must be gold.” Oh dear. It’s a very entertaining read, even liberating for the oppressed helicopter mommy, but success at all costs is always disgusting and violent, and there is a great violence beneath this book — Chua’s stories of the way her own father treated her and how his parents treated him are nothing but sad, even if she insists they earned respect. Chua, embarrassed as a Chinese American child growing up in the Midwest, has found her pride, her inner Tiger, and that is thrilling — but she justifies her parenting style by hiding behind her lineage, which is cowardly.

Lizard Music

Daniel Pinkwater

New York Review Books: 158 pp., $15.95

National Public Radio commentator Daniel Pinkwater wrote this book, his first novel for children, in 1976. Reminiscent of the work of Jules Feiffer and E.B. White, it has the feel of imagination set free and a humor that’s pure New York: sly and rich in strange characters and a feeling of safety — we will land back on our feet in the smaller world, protected, coddled but forever looking around for signs of magic. Victor is 11 when his parents leave him home alone for two weeks with his 17-year-old sister, Leslie, who promptly takes off on a camping trip with her hippie friends. Victor, delighted with his independence, watches his favorite TV star, Walter Cronkite; works on his model airplanes; and falls asleep in front of the television. What could be better? One night he is awakened by a band of lizards on television. On a trip to town he meets the Chicken Man and together they travel to the island of lizards, a parallel universe where the inhabitants have been watching his world on TV! The lizards (almost all of whom are named Reynold), show him their fair town, Thunderbolt City; take him to the House of the Egg; show him the statue of Cronkite; and reluctantly put him on a surfboard back to his old life. It’s “Alice in Wonderland” meets “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” — a fortnight of pure pleasure.

Heavenly Questions

Poems

Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 64 pp., $23

Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a pillar of American poetry. This, her sixth collection, is the first in almost 10 years. The six long poems form a lullaby to a tired universe — in the background a reader hears a great crashing of statues falling and tectonic plates scraping past each other. In the foreground the poet sits at the bedside of her dying husband, the philosopher Robert Nozick, who succumbed to stomach cancer in 2002 at age 63. And so these are love poems, some of the most beautiful you will ever read. With a childlike willfulness, Schnackenberg tries to trap her husband, forever alive, in her considerable cosmography, to preserve “the selfsame dream/That all was well, and we were going home;/But first it was imperative to find/The house where no beloved ever died,/And when you find it I’ll restore his life.” This death has changed the writer. A poet who trafficked in myth, in Oedipus, Archimedes and Dante, who is so often compared to Robert Lowell, in this collection wanders in the transcendental halls of Coleridge — hospital corridors are “[r]eceding planes, and looming gray-lit rooms/And coral vaults how many stories high,/A rainswept mosque anchored by semi-domes,/A distant crown of forty window-jewels.” There is a new DNA in this collection, in the spiraling self-creation of shells and also in the portrait of grief as the poet finds herself weeping in a phone booth, looking up his name, “still listed with the living.” But most important, the re-creation of love for our benefit: “His striking conversation, magic ease/In seeking what the other could, then more,/In understanding, warmly understood;/A quest for truth but not for certainty./ And the integrity I idolized;/Another’s mystery never trifled with./No one was belittled in those eyes./Nothing denied, held back, or kept apart.” The goal: “not to possess, but to be known; to know.”

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.