A Spot of Bother in Late April

 Fiction

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon had been on my TBR list for years; I almost took it off, thinking I'd never read it. But I finally did--and I enjoyed it. It's the story of a English family, whose members are all having some kind of crisis. Most acute is the case of George, the father, who has discovered a spot on his hip that he is convinced is cancer; this discovery sends him into a mental health spiral. Meanwhile, his wife Jean is having an affair and wants to leave George, but feels too guilty to leave him when he's having some kind of a breakdown. Daughter Katie is about to marry Ray, whom no one in her family thinks is right for and she's not at all sure she loves. Meanwhile son Jamie's inability to commit has caused a break-up with his partner Tony. Events come to a head at Katie and Ray's wedding, which is a Murphy's Law kind of event. The book is both touching and funny--although sometimes the sadness inherent in the situations played for humor made it impossible for me to laugh.

The Henna Artist, by Alka Joshi, was our book group selection for this month. It's set in India in the 1950s; the protagonist is Lakshmi, a henna artist and purveyor of herbal remedies (including abortifacients) for upper class women in Jaipur. Lakshmi fled an abusive husband, armed with knowledge she had gained from her mother-in-law, along with money stolen from the same source. As the book opens, she is doing well (with the help of Samir, a married man who peddles her birth control herbs to his lovers, among others) and building a house of her own. Then her husband and a sister she did not know existed turn up, and her carefully planned world slowly starts to unravel (won't say any more about the details). I actually enjoyed the book, even though I thought the protagonist had some serious imperfections that weren't explored and the book overall presented a somewhat sanitized version of India. But our facilitator for today told us that the author had apparently done that purposefully, as she thinks there are too many overly negative versions of India's problems. Having read a number of those novels, I found that an interesting perspective--maybe not defensible but still interesting. The book is actually the first in a trilogy and I think I'll at least check out the second title.

I admire Jennifer Egan, but I didn't like her first book, The Invisible Circus. It was written in 1995 and set in the 1970s--so maybe it's time has come and gone (at least for this 60s-era reader). It's about an 18-year-old girl, Phoebe, who takes off from her home (without telling her widowed mother in advance), heading to Europe to try to figure out if and why her older sister committed suicide. There are drugs, sex, leftwing terrorism--but none of it really added up to anything meaningful for me (although, of course, other reviewers saw it differently). I'd say skip it.

Mysteries/Thrillers

At the beginning of Andrea Bartz's We Were Never Here, best friends Emily and Kristen are in a remote village in Chile on their annual getaway. We quickly learn something bad happened on their last trip to Thailand, and soon enough something bad will happen in Chile. It also becomes clear relatively quickly that their friendship is toxic and, while it seems at first that Kristen is the manipulator, we start to have doubts about Emily too as the story advances, too slowly in my opinion--I guess it's supposed to be a slow burn but it actually got tedious. This is my third Bartz mystery (destined to be my last) and I really think Bartz does not like women. I've read plenty of mysteries in which women are the villains or the deeply flawed protagonists, so I'm not sure why Bartz's stories give me a woman-hating vibe. If I cared more, I might reread them to look for clues, but I'd rather just avoid them from here on. 

The Escape Room, by Megan Goldin, definitely has a different twist. Four colleagues who work on the same team at an investment banking company are called to a mandatory after-hours meeting. But when they get on the elevator, they find it has been turned into an escape room with clues they must solve to get out of the elevator (they do not know who has set up this challenge). Suffice it to say they don't do too well. Their third-person narrative is interspersed with first-person recollections of Sara, who had been a junior member of their group but is now dead. There's maybe more about investment banking than you would want to read, the characters are all pretty obnoxious, and the story is not very believable . . . but The Escape Room still held my interest.

The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton, is based around a Groundhog Day situation, except every day the protagonist wakes up in a different body. And he has only 8 days to solve the mystery of Evelyn Hardcastle's death. If he does, he can escape from the country house where a party is being held; if he doesn't, he's condemned to repeat the cycle, able to carry forward only one memory from the previous cycle. Somehow, everyone he shares his situation with believes him; sometimes, he talks to himself in another body. It's confusing and not really worth the attention required to make total sense of it. 

Jade is a young Caribbean-American woman engaged to middle-aged white architect Greg. They are attacked in their home, with Greg suffering a severe head injury and Jade losing her pregnancy. They suspect everyone, including each other; when the case is finally solved, it's simply not believable they could end up together (at least not believable to me). Her Three Lives by Cate Holahan is not  recommended. 

I was equally unimpressed with the next mystery I read, The Girl Who Died, by Ragnar Jonasson. Una, wanting to escape Reykjavík, accepts a teaching job in the remote Icelandic village of Skalar, where she has only two pupils. But the town's 10 residents and the long-dead girl who haunts her attic flat make life difficult for her. Her story is interspersed with first-person reflections from an unnamed woman who has been forced to confess to a murder; there's no apparent connection until near the end of the book and then the connection is somewhat ridiculous. Not a fan.

Young Adult

Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is the lightly fictionalized of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who fled the war and spent years walking cross country and then living in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Nigeria. He eventually came to the United States; after several years here, he learned his family was still alive. He returned to Africa and then decided he must do something to help the African people. His story is intercut with descriptions of a well being dug in a village where a girl named Nya lives. At the end, the two stories come together. My grandson, a sixth-grader, is reading the book, which is why I picked it up. I'm interested to hear what their discussions focus on. 

Nonfiction

Perhaps because of its very serious title (and because the author is a writer of serious fiction), I expected Bernardine Evaristo's memoir Manifesto to be a very serious work, perhaps something of a polemic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book is written in a conversational tone; reading it is almost like sitting down with someone who wants to tell you about their life. Evaristo's life story is certainly interesting. Just a few facts: she's one of eight children of a British Nigerian father and white English mother who experienced racism in many forms throughout her life; she spent a decade dating women but married a man whom she has now been with for many years; she started and ran a theater company, writing and acting, before turning entirely to writing; she has worked tirelessly to advance diverse voices in theater and publishing. However, I most enjoyed her discussion of how her writing evolved and her analysis of the influences on her writing. I was surprised to read that she has taken a number of personal development classes she uses to advance her writing and her positivity (she uses affirmations and has been described as a "positivity propagandist"--that surprised me). I don't think this is a great memoir but it's good enough to make me think Evaristo is a person I'd like to know. 

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, by Lisa Napoli, presents excellent insights into the childhoods of the four eminent journalists and explores the discrimination they faced in trying to break into the news business in the 1960s and 1970s. For someone their age, such as myself, it brought back a lot of memories of trying to find work with a liberal arts degree in the early 70s. The book also provides a lot of background on the history of NPR; so much time was spent on Frank Mankiewicz's contributions and profligacy that I thought perhaps the title should have listed Frank along with the four women. While the book certainly engaged my interest, it also annoyed me from time to time. The tone seemed a bit breathless (even the subtitle seems a bit overwrought to me); indeed, Napoli mentions repeatedly the beauty of the journalists. While their good looks likely played a role in their success, I felt like she was overdoing the references to beauty. She also started and ended the book with Cokie's death, which felt somewhat manipulative, so the bulk of the text was devoted to the early stages of the women's careers--the founding era for NPR. More seriously, she didn't fully deal with some criticisms, particularly a plagiarism incident early in Nina's career and how Cokie used her family connections to advance her career. I'm not saying either of these things diminished their careers--I love both Nina and Cokie--but I would have like to seen them examined more carefully. Finally, there were some passing historical references that just weren't right--for example, she refers to the protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention as rioting outside the hall when extensive investigation has established that the riot was caused by the police, not the protesters; it's minor, but it's careless. I still think the book was worth reading--just need a few grains of salt nearby while perusing it.

Near the end of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib talks about writing for one's own people but being unable to control who accesses that art once it is out in the world. Hearing that line, I was acutely aware that I was too old and too white to be one of Abdurraqib's people. That point reinforced the fact that, while reading his complex contemplation of performance not only in the traditional sense (i.e., performance of music, dance, drama, comedy, sport) but in a broader cultural sense (e.g., homegoings or funerals, playing whist and spades) as well as at an individual level (presenting oneself to others and to oneself), I was sometimes unsure of the connections when the author cut from one level of analysis to another. At the same time, the care Abadurraqib took in organizing the book was also obvious--meaning I was just missing some of his points. Perhaps if I had been reading a print book rather than listening to the audio version, I might have been more likely to slow down and interrogate the connections. Perhaps I'll actually do that . . . or not. 

Poetry

Vinegar Hill is Colm Toibin's first poetry collection, but the poems in it were evidently written over a span of time. The subject matter of the poems is expansive as well ranging from religion to politics, gay life, death, other poets, and the pandemic; I can't properly identify what some of the poems are about. A few poems are quite funny--for example, one about Mother Superiors driving when nuns were first allowed to take the wheel, another about how the staff maneuvered guests out of an Obama White House St. Patrick's Day party when it was time for them to leave. One poem described my old house, which sat on the top of a hill, with no protection, facing the prevailing winds coming down off the Front Range: "All night the sea-wind makes clear/Its deep antipathy to this house." Sadly, I only found one of the poems really moving (see below). And my favorite thing may have been the cover, which featured a lovely painting by Toibin's late mother. 

Favorite Passages

Creative writers are proud of our own imaginations: we cherish our ability to conceive of ideas and to find interesting ways to express them. I give myself complete artistic licence to write from multiple perspectives and to inhabit different cultures across the perceived barriers of race, culture, gender, age and sexuality. I am the most rebellious of writers; a freedom lover and disobeyer of rules, which is why I’m curious as to the concept of cultural ownership, which rears its head in discussions about artistic freedom. How can culture be owned by anyone when it is in a perpetual state of movement and metamorphosis, of permeability and responsiveness to global influences.

--Bernardine Evaristo, in Manifesto

Open House
by Colm Toibin

This is where they lived; only the old woman is left.
The realtor takes the measure of those who come.
One stray object would ruin the show: a single shoe
Under a bed, or an old tooth brush in the bathroom.

This is where they were happy, the ones who are gone.
Their clothes have been taken away, as well as crumpled
Tubes of sun-tan lotion, pills beyond their sell-by date,
Condoms not needed now, cold cream, insect repellent.

Life and time, the original realtors, make us feel
That all is change and flow; one family has its day
And another buys the house. The shadow that flitted on the wall
And scared the children will rise again to scare some more.

But the vinyl records are gone and will not come back.
The famous lasagna she cooked is history now,
And there was a bird who outdid all his friends one year,
Keeping the house awake. He--if it was a he--is toast.

As you depart, you notice the old woman sitting in an armchair.
Frail, except for her eyes. This was her room, her realm.
The house is open. She supervises all that has been lost.
What the woman sees are sharp, clear things,

Which window picked up dawn light, what names were being called
When silence struck, how life and time seem vivid as they fade. 

The Candy House and More Early April Reading

 Fiction

I don't know quite what to make of The Sweetness of Water, a novel by Nathan Harris. It's set in the post-Civil War South and it does provide insight into the tension in the region during that time, with many former slaveowners refusing to acknowledge that people were no longer property. The book opens with an older man, George Walker, who has just been told by his son's best friend (also his lover, we later find out) that his son Caleb was killed in action. To avoid telling his wife the bad news, George is out hunting for what sounds like a mythic beast when he finds two young freedmen, Landry and Prentiss, camping out on his land. Landry and Prentiss have nowhere to go, so George invites them to live in his barn. George has always been something of a lay-about but decides to hire Landry and Prentiss to help him work his land. Then Caleb shows up--not dead after all but ashamed of his cowardice in battle--and begins working together with Landry and Prentiss. The rest of the town of Old Ox, GA, does not approve of this arrangement, and things spiral out of control for individuals and the town. The Sweetness of Water provides some interesting insight into a slice of the post-war South, but I felt there were many questions left unanswered and the slice may be too narrow. Still, worth reading. 

Reading Rest and Be Thankful by Emma Glass is a traumatic experience. The book describes a few days in the life of a pediatric nurse driven to utter exhaustion by long shifts caring for desperately ill babies and their parents and by the collapse of her relationship with her partner. The style wasn’t entirely to my liking—too many “dream sequences” and impressionistic passages featuring sentence fragments. Still, I was finding the description of her time at the hospital interesting until I got to the end and wanted to throw the iPad on which I was reading on the ground and stomp on it. I guess there’s a message—nurses are overworked, weary, and stressed and the care they provide suffers because of that—but it could have been conveyed without the horror of that ending. 

The Candy House is something of a sequel to Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which followed a dizzying array of interrelated characters engaged in the music industry. Many of these characters reemerge, along with new characters, in The Candy House. With my flawed memory, I didn't remember much about the characters who make the leap from Goon Squad to Candy House--it didn't really matter (but it might have been better to stop trying to remember). Anyway, The Candy House looks at how people deal with a new technology, conceived by the brilliant Bix Bouton, which allows people to upload all of their memories to a collective archive, from which they can also access the memories of everyone else who is participating. The book opens with Bix, in a moment when he thinks he's had his last good idea but is then inspired to create the collective memory archive. What follows, as in Goon Squad, are chapters from different characters' perspectives, not presented chronologically or in a coherent plot--in fact, not always easily tied to the story you think Egan is telling about technology-- probably because Egan is actually telling a much broader story about the longing for connection, memory, pain, how life is changing. I felt confused a number of times while reading The Candy House but the confusion is part of the reading experience, which was complex and rewarding.

Several characters in The Candy House were, via various forms of memory, searching for their fathers, so it was interesting that the next book I picked up--Sankofa, by Chikbundu Onuzo--was all about the search for a missing father. Anna is a biracial British woman who, after her mother dies, discovers a diary written by her father in the few years he spent in the UK before returning to his African homeland. Reading the diary, she realizes her father was involved in radical politics and begins a quest to learn more about him--what she discovers is surprising and prompts her to visit the small nation in West Africa that is her ancestral homeland. In Africa, she has both good and bad experiences with her father and two of his other children and confronts questions about her identity and what it means to be part of the African diaspora. Some of her African experiences were nightmarish, and I had trouble reconciling how she turned them into emotional growth (perhaps because they were being read by an older white woman completely divorced from her ancestral homelands) but I felt the exploration of Anna's search for identity was well-done and I benefited from reading Sankofa (which means to go back and get). 

Mysteries/Thrillers

I'm not much for "cozy" mysteries, but I do like food, so I picked up Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia Manansala. I did enjoy the descriptions of Filipino food, about which I know nothing, but wasn't too keen on the mystery, which involved the death of a restaurant critic in the main character's family restaurant, an extortion scheme, drug-dealing, and a lot of other crazy details. If this becomes a series, I doubt I will pick up the next title--especially because it's set in a small Illinois town where, I am sure, there couldn't be enough murders to sustain a series!

The last few Lucas Davenport mysteries by John Sandford had made Lucas seem more like a vigilante than a law enforcement officer, so I was glad to see that the officer had switched focus to Lucas's daughter Letty in The Investigator, undoubtedly the first in a new series. Sadly, I was not much enamored of the book. It had an interesting domestic terrorism plot at its core (almost made me worry that a terrorist might read the book and find it a good idea) but the character development was lame, even for a mystery, and Letty is already a little too willing to kill. 

Nonfiction

I hadn't planned to read any more books about Trump, but I was looking for an audio book to check out of the library and Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa popped up, so . . . Not all that much new or unexpected about Trump; he was perhaps even crazier and more rage-filled than I had previously realized--sadly, I got no insight into why people continued to work for him when he threatened democracy and abused his staff. Woodward and Costa clearly believe we owe much to General Mark Milley in terms of surviving 2020-21.  One of the oddest anecdotes in the book is about Biden. President Biden and Senator Susan Collins were on the phone; Biden was trying to convince Collins to support his initial COVID relief package. All of a sudden someone (I can’t remember exactly what staff member it was) says “I just wanted to let you know I’m on this call, too.” Then they heard a couple of other pings meaning other staff members were getting on the call. Biden hadn’t asked them to be on the call and he didn’t know the first guy was on there. Woodward never explained how that happened, whether staff regularly monitor Biden’s calls without telling him or what. I know staff are on many calls for “documentation” purposes but this was clearly a political call so why would they feel they needed to be on there if not asked? 

Favorite Passages:

Without a story, it's all just information.

Jennifer Egan

How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith

 How the Word Is Passed's subtitle,  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, reveals a lot about the book. It is not a history. In fact, author Clint Smith is not a historian; he's a poet, journalist, and former high school English teacher with a Ph.D. in Education. Rather than a history, the book is the author's grappling with the history of slavery and how we preserve, teach/learn, and remember that history. He grapples with those topics by visiting sites where the history of slavery is either preserved or denied and talking with people he encounters there. He also does some more standard historical research, looking at relevant primary sources. 

The sites on which Smith focuses are Monticello; the Whitney Plantation, which focuses on the lives of enslaved people who labored there; Louisiana's Angola Prison, built on the site of a plantation; the confederate Blandford Cemetery; Galveston Island, where Juneteenth is of special significance; the African Burial Ground and other sites in New York City; and Goree Island in Ghana, the site from which many slave ships launched.

Where possible at each site, he takes officially sanctioned tours and scrutinizes how the site's relationship to slavery is presented to the public. He also talks to people who work at and visit the sites. Some of the sites are making serious efforts to preserve and tell the history of slavery. At Monticello, while visitors can still take a generic tour focusing on the architecture and the more traditional view of the third President, but there are also tours focused on the lives of enslaved people and the Hemings family. (I was appalled  that visitors to whom Smith spoke claimed not to know that Jefferson was a slaveholder or that separating enslaved people from their families was common practice--as a social studies educator, I felt a deep sense of failure upon reading that). 

Other sites that Smith visited ignore their relationship to slavery or attempt to "prettify" the peculiar institution. At Angola Prison, for example, no mention is made of the fact that the prison is built on the site of a plantation and that the warden used to live in a "Big House" right outside the prison. Yet the prison resembles a plantation, with black inmates toiling in the fields. Only through the inmates' newspaper is the relationship to slavery acknowledged. The people Smith interacts with at the confederate cemetery offer a stunning exhibition of historical blindness/denial.

Smith also must grapple with the idea that some sites with the best intentions are not entirely accurate. At Goree Island, for example, staff continue to provide inflated numbers of the people who passed through on their way to enslavement in the Americas, even though historical research has shown the numbers to be inaccurate. Smith asks, "Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?" 

I enjoyed vicariously wrestling with the questions of history, memory, and nostalgia while gaining some previously unknown information--the discussion of the Statue of Liberty is particularly interesting. Highly recommended.

Favorite passages:

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

"I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it."

"The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories."