Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking [BARGAIN PRICE] (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sweeney's debut novel centers around Miranda Donnal, who grows up on Maine's lonely Crab Island, where her father decides to hunker down and work on his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Shortly after their arrival from New York, Miranda's mother dies in a boating mishap, leaving Miranda in the care of her withdrawn father, who is content to keep his nose in his books. A half-Indian local fisherman, Mr. Blackwell, becomes something of a father figure to Miranda, taking on an unusually devoted caretaker role—cooking for the Donnals, taking Miranda to school and serving as her confidante. Yet secrecy also shrouds Mr. Donnal and Mr. Blackwell's evolving relationship. When Miranda graduates from high school, her father dispatches her to New York City and a job at the classical studies institute he was molded by. There she begins to peel away myth after myth of the father she thought she knew as she falls in love and has her own revelations about intimacy and connections. Sweeney's prose effortlessly conveys her characters' isolation and evolution, and her portrayal of the aftermath of life's slights—big and small—make this coming-of-age better than most. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Two years ago, David Leavitt published an essay in the New York Times about the welcome transition from gay fiction to what he termed "post-gay fiction" -- "novels and stories whose authors, rather than making a character's homosexuality the fulcrum on which the plot turns, either take it for granted, look at it as part of something larger or ignore it altogether." Aoibheann Sweeney's first novel is a lovely example of that shift, the striking way in which the issue of sexual orientation can now permeate everything in a novel without overwhelming it or even rising to the surface. Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking is a coming-out novel about a world we don't quite live in yet, a world in which the great dividing line between straight and gay looks as faint as that other once life-and-death demarcation between Protestant and Catholic.

The novel, which comes to us as a series of delicate short stories, is told by a teenager named Miranda, who lives alone with her bookish father on a little island hidden by a thick fog -- "our own dark kingdom," Miranda calls it. You don't have to catch the allusions here to "The Tempest," but part of the novel's considerable charm is how lightly it taps into older, sometimes ancient stories. Miranda's family came to Crab Island off the coast of Maine when she was almost 3; shortly afterward, her mother drowned, presumably a suicide. Since that time, Miranda has led an unusually isolated but contented life, enjoying the sea, leaving their island only when weather permits, and taking responsibility for all the chores around the house that her father can't or won't do. By the time she was 9, she tells us, "My father gave me his watch and told me to go wherever I wanted as long as I was home on time for us to make dinner." When he buys a typewriter, she becomes his secretary and drops out of school to help him with his work.

From a social services point of view, of course, it all sounds patently neglectful, but Miranda says she's "glad that we had left the rest of the world behind." Her father is an odd, taciturn man, wholly focused on translating Ovid's Metamorphoses. She grows up on these myths (they have no television), and even as a child she knows what a rich imaginative heritage her father has provided. "I was convinced," she writes, "that all around the island there were women inside the trees. . . . Sometimes I could almost feel my skin thickening into bark, my toes rooting into the ground, my arms raising stiffly to the sky." Swimming in a small cove, "I started imagining I was a fish, that my body was thinning and flattening, that my mouth and salty lips gasped open and closed on a translucent hinge." Her father may be stuck in time, emotionally frozen and locked in his own grief, but Miranda sounds like a character from Ovid's song "of bodies changed to various forms."

The pleasure of this novel stems from Sweeney's gentle balance of comedy and sorrow, the predicaments of an odd girl hurtling through adolescence with little guidance. At times, she writes, "loneliness descended on me like a cold fog," but now and then she manages to go through the motions of "normal" teenage life, gossiping about boys and listening to cosmetics secrets, but it's always like trying to sing along with a melody she can't hear. Her only real friend is Mr. Blackwell, a kindly fisherman who helps maintain their house, often cooks their meals and seems to be her father's lover. The nature of his role, however, remains entirely unmentioned by anyone.

At first blush, this reticence would seem to harken back to the pre-Stonewall days of a love that dare not speak its name, but in fact Sweeney is doing something far more modern. The gay relationships in this novel never become the subject of scandal, are never a source of pride, are never "accepted" in the face of an oppressive straight culture. Among Other Things isn't interested in looking at homosexuality as a socially constructed lifestyle or a biological orientation; in fact, although almost all the characters are gay, the novel doesn't seem interested in looking at homosexuality as a distinct and defining characteristic at all. Instead, Sweeney completely subsumes sexual orientation in a larger process of self-discovery, and with that subtle shift, she has moved from "gay fiction" to "post-gay fiction."

That distinction is even more evident when, halfway through the story, Miranda's father sends her to New York to contend with a city of 8 million people. It's a crash course for a young woman who knows almost nothing of the world except what Ovid described. There's a lot of slapstick potential here, but Sweeney keeps her subtle touch as Miranda gasps at this "brave new world, that has such people in't."

Working as a secretary at the library her father founded long ago, she meets some of his old friends and begins to plumb the depths of his mysterious personality. It's a touching reminder of how long we're blinded by the conviction that our parents could never have had a life outside of us. At the same time, she also begins to plumb her own mysterious personality, and that leads her to try on some conventional roles that don't fit her very well -- particularly during a wickedly satiric scene at a high-society wedding. When she finally awakens to what she wants, the metamorphosis is painful, of course, but she's not surprised -- or sorry. Ovid has prepared her well. There's real wisdom in those classic myths, and there's real talent in this sensitive novel.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (June 24, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0143113410
• ASIN: B001OMHUZQ
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,231,255 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars , July 22, 2007

By	lost in space (all over) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking: A Novel (Hardcover)

Where has Aoibheann Sweeney been all these years? I loved this book. it's about Miranda, an odd girl who moves to new York from a small island in New England. Her father is a spaced out academic. He loves whiskey. He ignores his daughter. He never misplaces his pens. Her mother is dead. Poor Miranda is lost in New York, perpetually confused about who she is and where she's going. But everybody loves her nonetheless, and she gets plenty of action in NYC in no time.

Sweeney's writing is amazing. Spare and poetic, but not at all annoyingly so. I hope she gives us another novel soon.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lyrical Pageturner, August 3, 2007

By	S. Marion (Middlebury, VT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking: A Novel (Hardcover)

I loved this book! I found it beautiful, gritty, magical, completely moving, and sometimes very funny. It is an unconventional coming-of-age story that is terse and tough-minded but unafraid of portraying raw emotion. It is also a story about art-making, art's entanglement with life, and the imagination's ability to feed, transform and give shape to experience. Finally, it is a terrific read--with all the suspense of a mystery (which it is also), the intrigue and humor of a social satire (which it is also), and the stark lyricism and metaphoric depth of a poem (of the plain-spoken, restrained variety). The characters drive the plot and are totally engaging and idiosyncratic, most especially Miranda, the protagonist. She is a stalwart, dreamy loner whose adventurous impulses seem driven by a desire to break out of her isolation. On route, there is disappointment but ultimately hope and complicated, dogged love--love between men and women, women and women, men and men, father and daughter. Love in Miranda's world is a force that clobbers or saves or sometimes both. Despite these sobering investigations, Sweeney maintains a light touch and a sense of exuberance. Did I mention that Among Other Things... is also a playful feminist revision of The Tempest? Do I need to give you any more reasons to read this book?

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life's Surprises, August 25, 2007

By	Sam Sattler (Spring, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking: A Novel (Hardcover)

It is not unusual for first novels to be of the "coming of age" variety. But seldom has anyone come of age the way that Miranda Donnal, the main character in Aoibheann Sweeney's first novel, manages to do it. Miranda, an only child, was taken to live on an isolated island about a mile off the coast of Maine when she was only two years old, and because her mother died not long after the family's arrival, she spent her formative years on the island with only her father and Mr. Blackwell, the family caretaker, as company.

Miranda's father isolated himself with his books and his lifetime project of producing a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses and was not much of a father to Miranda, preferring to leave her to her own devices as long as she was always home for dinner and available to type up his latest pages of translation. Luckily for Miranda, Mr. Blackwell did have some paternal instincts and he came to love the child in a protective way that her father could never equal. It was Mr. Blackwell who made sure that Miranda was enrolled in school and who was there to take her by boat to the mainland every morning until she was old enough to handle the trip alone. And it was Mr. Blackwell who educated Miranda in the ways of life on the island during all the years when her father seldom seemed to think about her.

Despite this unusual upbringing, Miranda felt protective of her father and seemed to understand why he was incapable of expressing or showing his love for her. So when he surprised her after her high school graduation by arranging a job for her in New York City with his friends at the cultural institute he helped to found there before leaving for his new life in Maine, she exchanged her tiny island for a much larger one. And she found more there than she expected to find.

She found her father.

Clue by clue, she pieced together the life her father lived in New York and came to realize that he was nothing like the man she had imagined him to be all of her life. And, at the same time, she learned as much about herself. She found friends and she found lovers in New York City. Her problem was to decide which were which, and when she finally did that she was ready to begin the rest of her life.

Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, is a frank presentation of how life sometimes surprises us just when we think we have it all figured out. Sweeney places the reader in this unusual world in a way that makes it understandable and to seem almost normal, a remarkable achievement.