Empire of Pain and Other Late Summer Reading

You know the feeling when you read a book and you realize how ill-informed you truly are? That's how I felt reading Empire of Pain, which I highly recommend. 

Fiction

A few months ago, I decided to join the University of Illinois alumni online book group, which reads and discusses a book every quarter. There was a great series of discussions about Hidden Valley Road (a book I loved). Being over Isabel Allende, I then skipped reading A Long Petal of the Sea. This quarter, I was somewhat disappointed with All the Lonely People, by Mike Gayle. It's a pleasant enough book about an elderly Jamaican Brit, Hubert Bird, a widower who is estranged from his son and whose communication with his daughter is confined to weekly Facetime calls, in which he describes an active but totally fictional social life. When she announces she will be visiting in a few months, he decides to start making some friends so his stories won't be lies. The contemporary story is intercut with the story of Hubert's earlier life and the discrimination and challenges he faced as an immigrant in Britain. The book is okay, but I felt like it could have been so much more. Rather shallow in comparison to  many other novels about the immigrant experience. 

I read We Are Not Like Them, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, right after reading Fiona and Jane (see below), which was interesting because both books are about best friends. Like the interracial pair of writers who penned the book, Riley and Jen are best friends of different races. They grew up together in Philadelphia, where Riley was ensconced in a solid African American family and Jen, whose single mom was somewhat irresponsible, relied on Riley's family, especially her grandmother, for stability. Riley grew up to be a successful television journalist, while Jen is married to a cop. When Jen's husband shoots a black teenager and Riley covers the story, their friendship is severely tested. Their alternating perspectives reveal the betrayals both felt. While some of the explications of their feelings felt a bit obvious and the happy ending somewhat unlikely, I still enjoyed the book and hope the team of Pride and Piazza will work together again.

I must admit I struggled with Assembly, by Natasha Brown. It's a short novel but it's told in vignettes that I found hard to piece together. In addition, because the author doesn't name many characters, it's sometimes hard to figure out who she is talking about. We do know the protagonist is a black Brit who works in finance, has a white boyfriend whose family she is about to visit (with dread), and has cancer. Her company sends her out to schools to talk with young people about her success (touting the company's diversity), but she knows she is lying to them, as she doesn't talk to them about the reality of the micro and macro aggressions she suffers from colleagues. When diagnosed with cancer, she decides to regain agency by deciding not to have any treatment, choosing death over a life in which she has no control. 

So a second "theme" (besides best friends) in this batch of books was the #MeToo movement. Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas features an older academic whose husband John has been accused of inappropriate sexual relationships with students. The accusation is true, but his wife, the book's narrator, defends him because none of the relationships occurred after the college banned such goings-on and she and her husband had an open marriage. As John awaits his hearing, our narrator is under pressure herself--students feel uncomfortable around her. She has what I would call a breakdown, more or less kidnapping a new younger professor, the titular Vladimir (this isn't a spoiler because we know from the beginning that she has Vladimir chained somewhere). I have seen the book described as the first "camp" take on #MeToo. I just found it creepy. 

Surprisingly, I much preferred Jennifer Weiner's That Summer. I'm not generally a fan of Weiner, but I enjoyed her tale of a woman who, many years after being raped by a boarding school boy as a teenager, decides to seek out the boys who harmed her. She herself isn't sure if she's seeking revenge or simply some kind of acknowledgment. She finds herself facing a dilemma when she cultivates the rapist's wife as a means to get to him--and finds that she likes both the wife and their daughter. Entertaining, while still exploring the damage done by the "boys will be boys" attitude. 

The Man Who Lived Underground is a previously unpublished novel by Richard Wright. It opens with Fred Daniels, a Black man, walking down a Chicago street, counting his pay and thinking about his pregnant wife. He is picked up by the police, tortured into confessing (having worked on a Chicago Public Schools curriculum about the police torture of the 1970s and 1980s, I know this description, while horrifying, is not overdone), and then escapes into the sewer system. It's a gripping narrative that is well worth reading, made even more interesting by its publication with an essay by Wright, "Memories of My Grandmother," in which he discusses his thinking as he wrote the book. What he was thinking as he wrote didn't parallel what I was thinking as I read, but it definitely shed light on his intentions. Highly recommended.

In writing Cult Classic, it seems that Sloane Crossley was trying to inject a sci-fi element into her story of a woman who has had too many boyfriends that she is still thinking about as she prepares to meet her fiance. The sci-fi piece has several of those old flames cross paths with her. For me, neither the sci-fi element or the basic story worked--though Crossley does turn some interesting phrases ("I'd done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing"). Not recommended. 

I've seen Reputation, by Lex Croucher, described as feminist and compared to Jane Austen. I'd say it's more like a Georgette Heyer with female debauchery. 

Short Stories

Fiona and Jane, by Jean Chen Ho, is a collection of linked short stories about two best friends. Both girls are Taiwanese American, though one was born in the U.S. and the other was an immigrant. The stories begin when the girls were young and jump forward into adulthood. I particularly liked the story in which Jane visits her father, who has moved back to Taiwan, and learns that he is gay, involved with a man whom he knew years before he left for the States. This revelation threads through other events in her life, including her friendship with Fiona and her sexuality. While I did enjoy some of the stories, because they are about the same two characters, I wished for them to add up to more as a whole. The book was very positively reviewed in the NYT and elsewhere. 

Mysteries/Thriller

Cold, Cold Bones is one of the better recent entries in Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan series-- perhaps because she doesn't seem compelled in this book to instruct us on some arcane aspect of forensic anthropology. She is still trying to educate us--this time about issues faced by veterans, including Tempe's daughter Katy, but it fits in the story and isn't overwhelming. The story is one of revenge, although it takes a while for Tempe and Skinny Slidell (who is now in business with Tempe's significant other Ryan) to put together how a series of grim events--starting with a human eyeball with GPS coordinates etched into it being delivered to Tempe's back door--are linked. Entertaining.

So I was wrong about Dalton and Casey having a baby in Kelley Armstrong's next book in the Rockton series. Instead,  A Stranger in Town brings us an incredibly complicated story of murder and manipulation linked back to Rockton's early days, as well as a suggestion of another future direction--it appears Rockton will be closed and Dalton and Casey will start their own hidden community. Or is this, too, a false lead?

American Girl, by Wendy Walker, is a murder mystery featuring longstanding conflicts between the powerful and powerless in a small town. The protagonist is presented as being autistic, but the characterization is incredibly lazy--the girl is good at math and likes order but in no other way does she seem autistic. Nor recommended.

Lola, escaping from a dead-existence in London, heads to Paris to stay with her half-brother in The Paris Apartment. But when she arrives on his doorstep, he has disappeared. As she tries to find him, she discovers that all is not as it seems in the fancy building where he lives. The author inserts French phrases throughout, then translates them into English. Of course, many of these conversations would be entirely in French since the setting is Paris. Kind of wondering if that technique actually makes many readers feel more ensconced in France. Overall, just okay.

Nonfiction

 As I mentioned above, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, by Patrick Radden Keefe, was an eye-opener. Although I am aware of the opioid crisis and the protests against Purdue Pharma and the many cultural organizations bearing the Sackler name, I really had no idea of the criminal perfidy of the Sackler family across at least three generations. They knew what oxy was; they marketed the hell out of it, including selling it to known pill-pushers; they corrupted FDA officials; they sucked all the money out of the company after it became clear the company was going to be hit with huge penalties. They were/are horrible human beings. The fact that the revelations of their criminality has posed a dilemma for the many institutions to which they donated huge sums of money suggests that perhaps people should be more discerning when they ask the wealthy for donations. Highly recommended. 

Favorite Passages

A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn't need studies to tell them this.

OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach--a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.

    --Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain (I could put a lot more quotes here--just read the book!)

Happy (Left on Tenth) and Sad (Red Comet) Lives

A family reunion in mid-August seems to have kept me from doing a mid-month post, but the reunion was fun as I have some entertaining relatives!  A few books this month made me reflect on happy endings, which are definitely good in a memoir but can feel entirely out of place in a novel that has been successfully building dread for a couple hundred pages. 

Fiction

Any Other Family, by Eleanor Brown, is an interesting look at family. It features three sets of Denver parents who have adopted the children of one biological mother and made a big effort to function in a way that the four children feel like siblings. They are all on vacation together when the biological mother announces she is pregnant again and is hoping that the couple who adopted her youngest child will take this new baby as well; but that mother is struggling with mothering one child and is not interested in adopting another. The story of the tensions that occur on their shared vacation as they try to solve the question of who will take the new baby is interspersed with their backstories and statements from prospective parents for the new baby from outside their family circle. One of the mothers is incredibly overbearing and hard to take--but I still enjoyed the unique perspective on family until the ending, which  was disappointing and somewhat killed my positive feelings about the book. 

The Husbands, by Chandler Baker, is kind of a reverse-gender treatment of the classic satirical horror story Stepford Wives, in which women with controlling husbands "convert" them to supportive, domestic gods. But Chandler Baker is no Ira Levin and the book neither amused nor thrilled me. Since Baker also wrote the "MeToo" novel The Whisper Network, it's clear she hopes to illuminate women's issues, but I just didn't think this one worked. 

I absolutely loved Bruce Holsinger's The Gifted School, but The Displacements bore little resemblance to that satire set in Boulder (although there is a family dysfunction element that is common). In The Displacements, a hurricane of unprecedented ferocity is bearing down on Miami. Except for father Brantley, a surgeon who is the incident commander at his hospital and thus cannot immediately leave, the well-to-do Larson-Hall family--mother Daphne, stepson Gavin, and children Mia and Oliver--evacuate. Their evacuation is a disaster, and the family ends up in a displaced persons camp in Oklahoma, unable to leave because they have no ready resources and Brantley is inaccessible. Things go from bad to worse at the camp, where we meet small-time crook Tate and his addict sidekick Jessamyn, who undertake a variety of scams at the camp, as well as Rain, the FEMA employee in charge of the camp. There's a prevailing feeling of chaos and devolution that seems all too possible, making the relatively upbeat ending feel out of place. Despite that, I liked the book and recommend it.

I'm sure I had read something about This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub, or it wouldn't have found a place on my TBR list. But by the time I got it from the library, I had forgotten it had a time travel element. When Alice Stern is experiencing angst over her 40th birthday, turns down her boyfriend's proposal, gets abandoned at dinner by her best friend who has to rush home because her baby is ill (highlighting the fact that Alice has neither husband nor children), gets drunk, and ends up sleeping on the ground in the shed behind her father's house, she wakes up to find herself turning 16. There's a lot of going back and forth between 16 and 40, with variations in her life at 40 based on things she did when she was back in the teenage years. But I really didn't care. The book lacks the magic of really good time travel stories (e.g., The Time Traveler's Wife; Recursion; Here, and Now and Then; Oona Out of Order) and I can't recommend it.

Tom Perrotta has written some wonderful novels about characters who make questionable moral choices, but I didn't care for Tracy Flick Can't Win. In case you don't recall, Tracy Flick was the character portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in Election. But Tracy is now an adult, a divorced mom and assistant principal at a suburban high school. Her principal is about to retire and she hopes to get his job, but there are inevitably obstacles. The story is told from six perspectives, which for me dilutes Tracy's story. When something dramatic happens at the end, I don't care, nor do I take any meaning from it. I've read a number of positive reviews of the book, so know that others do like it, but I can't recommend it. 

YA

My granddaughter had mentioned that she had tried more than once to get into They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera and had finally gotten far enough into the book to decide it was pretty good. So I decided to read it and could immediately see why it was hard to get into--in the first two chapters, the two main characters, teenagers Mateo and Rufus, learn they are going to die that day. That makes for a grim beginning. The central conceit of the book is that a "service" called Death-Cast lets people know early on the day they will die that it is their last 24 hours on earth (we don't learn how this service has come to be, and not too much else about society seems different). There are a variety of additional services available to "Deckers," those who have been notified they will die. One of these is a social media site called Last Friend, which allows Deckers to make a connection with someone to spend their last hours with. Through Last Friend, Mateo and Rufus connect and spend the day together, visiting people and sites important to them. Although I would have liked more explanation of how Death-Cast became a thing, I found, within the grimness, that the book celebrated friendship in a lovely way. And I enjoyed discussing it with my granddaughter!

Mystery/Suspense

To me, the most interesting thing about The Sacred Bridge, by Anne Hillerman, is that it looks like Hillerman the younger may be planning to take Jim Chee away from police work and back toward becoming a traditional healer. Don't know how that will translate into future mysteries but will definitely check out the next book to find out.

Alone in the Wild is the fifth in Kelley Armstrong's series about two police officers in a secret Canadian town established for people needing to escape from their previous lives. As with The Sacred Bridge, the most interesting facet of this title was the signaling that in the future, Casey and Dalton are likely to become parents. Since Rockton has no children, that could be an interesting development. 

A Line to Kill is Anthony Horowitz's third title in the Horowitz/Hawthorne series featuring a retired police detective and his mystery author sidekick. The first two titles felt fresh, but this one lapsed into more traditional territory and involved way too much explanation at the end. Not recommended.

I love libraries and have a love-hate relationship with mysteries so mystery about a dead woman in a library--sign me up. That's the set-up for The Woman in the Library, by Sulari Gentill. The author tells us that the killer is one of a small group of loosely connected young people who were at the library at the time of the killing. There's also a meta aspect to the story: a fictional writer is writing a novel about a fictional writer named Hannah who was part of the group in the library; a friend provides increasingly hostile critiques of chapters of the novel. Occasionally it got confusing, but it wasn't boring.

As the Wicked Watch, by Tamron Hall, is set in Chicago and features journalist Jordan Manning, who is investigating the disappearance of high-achieving African American teenager Masey James. I liked the first part of the book, which focuses on Jordan's work filing stories on why the police are characterizing Masey as a runaway when Jordan is sure she is the victim of violence. But then, when she is assigned to cover that store exclusively, she becomes more of an investigator than a journalist and the story seemed to spin out of control. Hall deals with a serious issue--violence against African American women and the neglect of such cases by both the media and police; I hope she'll stick to having Jordan remain a journalist rather than an investigator in future titles (assuming this is going to become a series).

What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline, also took a turn half way through the book. The Bennetts are driving home from a soccer game one evening when they are stopped by two men in an SUV, who demand their car; when the family dog jumps at one of the perpetrators, the teenage daughter is fatally shot. One of the bad guys also ends up dead on the ground. In the middle of that night, after their daughter dies in the hospital, the Bennetts are awakened by FBI agents who inform them that mobsters and drug cartels were involved and to be safe, they must immediately go into hiding in preparation for going into witness protection. The first part of the book deals with the difficulties of suddenly being displaced, how you and the people left behind react. I really liked this part of the book. Then the father, Jason, owner of a court reporting business, decides to seek vengeance on his own--to my mind, totally unbelievable. So I liked half, didn't care for the other half. 

I feel like I can't say too much about No One Will Miss Her, by Kat Rosenfield, without giving away some of the twists. Suffice it to say it's about two couples--a wealthy couple from Boston and a not-wealthy couple from a small town in rural Maine. There are a LOT of twists, many not very believable--but still entertaining.

Girl, Forgotten, by Karin Slaughter, is a follow-up to her bestseller Pieces of Her, which became a Netflix series. The daughter from that book, Andrea Oliver, has just become a U.S. Marshall when her uncle the Senator gets her assigned to a case that involves crimes her cult leader/criminal father may have committed as a teenager. A number of things about the book really annoyed me, including: (1) a novice U.S. Marshall would never be sent out on a mission that involves her family and is a secret form her colleagues, (2) her new partner tells her that investigation is not the job of the U.S. Marshall Service--and then they spend the whole book investigating, and (3) Slaughter sets up a new confrontation with Andrea's father at the end of the book, obviously prepping us for a sequel--we've had that from other authors and it's just annoying! 

Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography

Before I started reading, I definitely had the wrong idea about Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, by Delia Ephron. I thought it was about Delia finding love in her 70s following her husband's death. For a brief time, it was about that--and what a gem of a partner she found in her second husband Peter. But then the book--actually her life--took a turn and became about her grueling battle with leukemia. She has unbelievable support from family and friends (even though she doesn't tell her friends about her illness for quite some time). Although I read a review by the novelist Joyce Maynard that suggested Ephron spent too much time praising people who had helped her, I disagree. If it hadn't been for reading about the support she got from loved ones,  reading about her illness would have been almost unbearable. Of course, she survived, which is cause to rejoice. Reading the book is an emotional experience but definitely not for everyone.

I'm not sure why I kept listening to the 45-hour Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark. Clark obviously adores Plath's work and is proud that she had access to sources that the other numerous biographers of Plath did not have. So the work is adulatory and detailed. But the only real takeaway is that Plath had serious mental health problems and chose probably the worst possible person to be her husband. I loved The Bell Jar but have never really understood her poetry--perhaps if I go back to it now, I might be able to see my way through the poems. But even if I can, I'm not sure it will be worth the hours it took to get through the biography!

Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City started as a 2013 series in the New York Times but Elliott continued her reporting for a total of eight years, following young Dasani from age 11 through her graduation from high school. Dasani was one of eight children of Chanel and Supreme. The family lives for years in one room in a truly awful homeless shelter. They also spend time in public housing, which is a much better situation, but one her parents are unable to sustain because of an array of bad decisions. Despite the fact that there is a lot of love in the family, the children eventually end up in foster care. Dasani initially avoids foster care because she's accepted at the Milton Hersey School in Pennsylvania. Although she does well at the school, she self-sabotages (it's not entirely clear why but concern for her siblings seems to be a major factor), getting into fights and eventually being sent back to a foster care placement in New York. New York political leaders do not come off well--particularly Letitia James, who tries to somehow take "credit" for Dasani after she became a mini-celeb when the NYT story was published. Even those who want to help the family seem unable to really make a difference. As I was reading the book, I thought it was a modern update on There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, a book that had a huge impact on me back in the 1990s--and Elliott acknowledges that that book inspired her reporting. This book reminds us that the problems of poverty have not been solved, and the innocent victims of both systemic issues and parental problems are children. 

Dawn Turner's Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood made for an interesting follow-up to Invisible Child. Turner's work provides insight into many of the events that have shaped Black Chicago, from the Great Migration to the development and then neglect of public housing, to gentrification. All of this is context for her real focus: her own story and that of her younger sister Kim and her childhood best friend Debra. Despite their involved parents, Kim starts ditching school and drinking at a young age; after she has a miscarriage as a teenager, she is depressed and drinking more and more until she dies of a heart attack at 23. Debra was always a bold girl, but she loses her way somewhere along the way. She dances in strip clubs for years and then is convicted of killing a man she was doing drugs with. She never denies killing him but claims it was an accident. She ends up serving 19 years in various Indiana prisons. In prison, she gets a degree and works to help other inmates. She also, over time, goes through reconciliation with her victim's family. Based on the title of the book and her comment that "there but for the grace of God," Turner seems to see the women's different lives as a matter of chance. As someone who is not religious and does not believe in fate, I see individual decisions and systemic conditions as more central. Despite this difference of perspective, I did find the book a rewarding and insightful read.