The Great Divide, James, and Ship Fever: Reflecting on Historical Fiction

 I am not a huge fan of historical novels, for reasons having to do with the writing and the reading (or the aftermath of reading). I sense a lot of authors learn about an interesting event, do some research, and then write a book that informs people about the event while thinking that's enough to make a good novel--but, sadly, it's not. On the reader side--and maybe it's just me--I read a historical novel, realizing while reading that some parts of the book are accurate and some parts are fictionalized, but over time weave both the true and the fictional into my ideas about the past event. So basically all my historical "knowledge" is suspect. 

That's all an introduction to saying that somehow I just read three historical works of fiction  in a row; all were informative and well written--I liked them all though I didn't entirely love any of them (perhaps I am just fickle). The Great Divide, by Cristina Henriquez, focuses on the building of the Panama Canal and the effects of the massive effort on a range of people, from a teenage stowaway from Barbados who needs money to pay for an operation for her sister and has heard there are jobs in Panama to the researcher who has come to Panama to defeat malaria but instead loses his wife to the disease to the sisters who dedicate themselves to saving their village, whose destruction is threatened by the canal. Henriquez causes the reader to think about the impact of imperialism and "progress" at ground level, which is an achievement. However, I found there were too many characters and few were fully realized, so the book fell a bit flat as a novel.

James, by Percival Everett, is a reimagining of the character Jim from Mark Twain's classic Huckleberry Finn. In creating James, Everett explores the cruelty of slavery, particularly the treatment of so-called runaways. What I found most interesting was that he created a kind of reverse code switching, with enslaved people using standard English at home with their family and friends and the "patois" expected of them when addressing whites. I thought the book was well-done but it was too violent and too much of a "man on the run" plot for me to really enjoy it.

Finally, we come to Ship Fever, by Andrea Barrett, which is a National Book Award winner (1996)--had it not been part of my very slow project of reading award winners, I probably wouldn't have picked it up. It is a collection of short stories and the title novella, many of which feature characters who are scientists, some of which are strictly historical, others blending historical and contemporary stories. For example, in a story titled "The English Pupil," Linnaeus in old age is the protagonist; he is in terrible health, not entirely compos mentis; in a combination of thought and hallucination, he remembers his students, many of whom died on field expeditions he encouraged them to make. "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," in contrast, is a contemporary story about a couple in an unhappy marriage, but it also includes history related to Gregor Mendel because the husband is a botany professor and the wife's grandfather actually knew Mendel (her husband loves to tell her grandfather's story to students and colleagues, but the wife thinks he does it badly and therefore keeps some secrets about the relationship from her husband). Perhaps the most notable piece is the title novella, which is the story of a young Canadian doctor who becomes involved in treating Irish immigrants who arrive in Canada suffering from typhoid. It's a grim story, but also informative and oddly touching. As with most collections of short fiction, I liked some of the pieces in this collection and didn't care for others. But I thought the novella "Ship Fever" was great. 

Heads of the Colored People, Real Americans, and Other Late Summer Favorites

Reading in late summer continued to be good, although I was sad that I didn't read any mysteries that I really loved. I thought I might rant a bit about the disappointment of books with terrible endings but decided no one needed to read that (plus I think I've gone on about this before). So here's some good stuff from the past 6 weeks or so.

Fiction

Real Americans is Rachel Khong's second novel and it's another sophomore success. The story is told from the perspectives of three generations of a Chinese American family. The first section, set around the turn of the 21st century, features Lily, the 20-something daughter of immigrant parents who are accomplished scientists. Lily isn't quite sure what her passion is--but she knows it's not science. Then she meets and marries the handsome, rich (and white) Matthew and they have a son; shortly after that big event, she discovers a link between their families that disturbs her greatly. From there we jump to 2021 and Lily's son Nick, who does not look at all Chinese but doesn't know his Anglo father and lives with his mother in an island near Seattle. He's an awkward teenager, who gets thrown for a loop when he learns who his dad is; their relationship ebbs and flows. The final section focuses on Mai, Lily's mother, both in her early life in China and in the present, when she meets Nick and tells him her story. Although the title suggests the book is about the immigrant experience--and it is--it's also about family relationships and secrets, life in Maoist China, teenage angst, and the impingement of science and its unscrupulous practitioners on human life--and I found all of it interesting. 

Send for Me, by Lauren Fox, was inspired by a box of letters from the author's great-grandmother that she discovered in her grandparents' belongings after their deaths. She collaborated with a German professor to translate the letters and then thought for 20 years about how to create a literary work based on the letters. The result is a moving account of a Jewish German family facing the increasing dangers of Germany in the 1930s. The younger generations--a daughter, her husband, and their baby--manage to escape, building a new life in Milwaukee. The parents remain behind, trying to get their papers in order to leave. Fox also jumps forward to the next generation, whose thoroughly American life is affected in ways she doesn't fully understand by her grandparents' and mother's experience as immigrants, not just fleeing evil but leaving family members behind amidst it. My description is definitely not doing the book justice--it's moving and insightful and I highly recommend it. 

Imagine being on a plane, heading home, going to a wedding, or working as a flight attendant. A woman gets up and walks down the aisle, telling each person--including a newborn--at what age and how they will die (the newborn will drown at age 7). Not long after the flight, passengers begin dying as she predicted, and the freakout begins. That is the premise of Liane Moriarty's latest, Here One Moment.  She advances the narrative with alternating chapters from the perspectives of the people dealing with the predictions and that of the woman making them. I've read a couple of other books with a similar premise but Moriarty pulls it together in a way that, oddly enough, makes you feel good about humanity.

A Woman Is No Man, by Palestinian American author Etaf Rum, is a disturbing read. I mention the author's ethnicity because if she were not of Palestinian heritage, I would have thought the book was stereotyping the culture. But because she is Palestinian, I must assume that her story of violent husbands and extreme restrictions on girls' life choices is based on the reality of at least some Palestinian Americans. The story involves three generations of women: Rafeeda, who saved money while living in a refugee camp so she and her husband could escape to the United States; Isra, a Palestinian girl whose family marries her off to Rafeeda's son when she is only 16; and Isra's daughter Deya, the oldest of her four daughters (she is shamed in her family for not giving birth to sons), all of whom are being raised by Rafeeda after Isra and Adam's deaths. Deya is a gifted high school student whose grandmother is seeking to arrange a marriage for her. The narrative moves around in time as the three women tell their stories, revealing family secrets and tragedies. Sad but powerful. 

Short Stories

As readers of this blog know, I am not generally a short story person. But I loved the darkly humorous pieces in Nafissa Thompson-Spires' Heads of the Colored People. Many stories relate specifically to the experiences of growing up and living as an African American, particularly a middle class African American. The protagonist of the title story, subtitled "Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology" is a young black man who does not conform to expectations--he has blond hair, wears blue contacts, and loves manga; on his way to ComicCon, he encounters a street artist and the police. "Belles Lettres" is an exchange of hostile letters between the highly educated mothers of the only two black students at a private school, funny yet sad, especially when one of the children emerges in subsequent stories bearing scars from her time at the school. Others to me, an older white woman, seemed to apply broadly. For example, "The Necessary Changes Have Been Made" details, with humor, the conflicts between faculty office mates at an HBCU. In one of my favorites, "Suicide Watch," Jilly considers suicide as a way to get more likes on social media--but can't decide what method would be most attractive. Favorite short story collection in a long time!

Nonfiction

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is Salman Rushdie's reckoning with the attempt on his life at a Chautauqua event in New York in August 2022. His memory of the actual attack is gripping, and his recover from the gruesome and extensive injuries he suffered is remarkable. Perhaps most interesting are his reflections on the meaning of violence, art, and life. The book is also a love story about his relationship with his wife, the writer and artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Her dedication and support were amazing, and the stress she endured was enormous (I must admit, however, that the love story did not resonate as much with me as it might have if she were not his fifth wife). I don't think I'm doing a good job of describing the book, but I think it's worth reading.

I didn't love Jamie Raskin's Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. I found it somewhat repetitive and, to be honest, I had some trouble thinking about the family's grief after the death of Raskin's son (which is very movingly described) and January 6 simultaneously (although the Congressman was able to do so!). And perhaps I had already read enough January 6 books. However, it offered some explanations that were new to me and made it worth the read. First was Raskin's discussion of Trump's myriad violations of the Emoluments Clause; although I realized this was an issue, I now understand it in more detail. I also appreciated his brief discussion of why progressives should want to keep funding the police (albeit with improved recruitment and training) because right-wing terrorism is one of the most pressing public safety issues. Another small piece that I found very interesting was his account of being interviewed by Jake Tapper and finding the experience very rewarding because of the way Tapper posed questions that called on Raskin to think and to blend the personal and the political--evidently, feeling happy after an interview is an unusual experience. Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was that Raskin somehow believed it was possible all 100 Senators would vote for impeachment in the second impeachment trial--of course, he knew the case better than anyone, but come on . . . that was never going to happen.

Poetry

I love Nikki Giovanni and her 2020 book Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose did not disappoint. She celebrates African American culture and the joys of everyday life (she references quilts frequently). She also pillories racism, injustice, and Donald Trump (among other things). She also mentions transitioning so often in what I took to be a reference moving from one part of life to the next, including death, that I had to Google to make sure she's still alive (as of this writing, she is). And, best of all, her writing is deep but accessible--although I'm unsure what she means when she talks in several poems about going to Mars. Two samples:

Quiet (for Marvalene)

Quietly
you open a book
to let the sunshine in

Quiet
you hum a song
that you create
to let yourself relax

Quietly
you shed a tear
when you let a loved one
go to Heaven

Quiet
like bread rising
or your grandmother
sleeping.

Quietly
when you sew
a quilt to keep warm

Quiet
as the salt melts
in the bathwater

Quietly
Quietly
 Quietly

when you know
whatever else it is

you were loved. 

Excerpts from You Talk about Rape (for donald trump)

Give me left
overs
and I will create
a cuisine

Give me scraps
and I will create
a quilt

Give me life
and I will give us
all the moon
and the stars

Favorite Passages

Nothing was more fulfilling, it occurred to her, than giving back to others and letting people know about it.

     --Nafisi Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People

In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. . . . You allow people to do what they will with your body . . . so that you can live. 

I believe that art is a waking dream. And that imagination can bridge the gulf between dreams and reality and allow us to understand the real in new ways by seeing it through the lens of the unreal. 

Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truths. It could cut through from one reality to another. 

We created God to embody our moral instincts. 

    --Salman Rushdie, Knife

How the Light Gets In, Relinquished, and More Great Reading in the First Half of Summer

Oh, the joy--after what felt like a long spell of not finding many great books, summer has been bountiful, so bountiful I'm posting when the season is only half over. I hope the second half of the season will be equally rewarding. 

But before we get to my favorites, a mini-rant: It's odd when you see your town (okay, Denver's not exactly my town, but close enough) portrayed in a novel in a way that is nearly unrecognizable. That's the case with the Adrian McKinty's Hidden River. Granted, it's set in the early 1990s, when gang violence was in the headlines, but its portrayal of Denver as seedy and drug-ridden doesn't reflect my memories of the era. Also, the notion that a drug-addicted former Irish cop could come in and solve a crime that mystified the Denver police seems ridiculous (McKinty mentions more than once that the JonBenet case was never solved as a justification; of course, that was in Boulder but whatever, Adrian). 

Fiction

The first novels I really enjoyed so far this summer are from authors whose first novels I thought were great. And, as far as I'm concerned, there's no sophomore slump.

The first one may have had particular resonance because I started listening to it while on vacation with my teenage granddaughter, who had some "mean girl" stories to share--and meanness among young women is one of the aspects of Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid. The book's primary setting is a transfer student dorm at the University of Arkansas, with some detours to provide backstories on the three main characters: Agatha, a visiting professor who writes creative nonfiction; Millie, a resident advisor in the transfer student dorm; and Kennedy, a student who transferred to UofA after an incident at the University of Iowa that caused her to become a social media pariah. A variety of other students in the dorm also play significant roles, as Agatha decides to write about them, Millie tries to counsel them and control their shenanigans (as well as the other RAs, who are barely older/more mature than the students), and Kennedy tries to make friends. In the end, they all make some serious errors that culminate in a nerve-wracking incident. I've read reviews that focus on Reid's presentation of American consumerism as the major theme of the book, but I see it as something broader--the ways in which people (perhaps particularly young women) fail to connect at a meaningful level and the ways in which consumerism, economic differences, race, sexual politics, social media, parenting, and a host of other factors contribute to that failure. Kiley Reid is definitely becoming a favorite--and the audiobook narrator Nicole Lewis is also someone I would look for again.

The second, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, by Xochitl Gonzalez, focuses on sexism and racism in the art world--but in a very entertaining way. The story is told in two different time periods with a different Latina woman featured in each. In the mid-1980s, Cuban immigrant Anita is working hard to advance her art career when she meets and falls in love with prominent minimalist sculptor Jack, an ego-maniac who affects her life and career negatively--eventually to the max, throwing her out the window of his apartment (this isn't a spoiler as we know early on she is dead). In a magic realist twist, she can still operate in the world after death as long as her work is still seen--but Jack does what he can to make sure that it isn't. Meanwhile, in the late 1990s, Raquel is an art history major at Brown University, where she feels out of place among the children of the upper class who attend the Ivy League school. She is planning to write her senior thesis on Jack, her professor's idol, when she meets and falls in love with an older student who is also an admirer of Anita's former husband.  I'll leave the rest of the plot to be discovered along with how Anita's and Raquel's stories come together--but I enjoyed it. Again, I listened to the audiobook and have to say that the narrator who voices Anita is at times so over the top she's unpleasant to listen to. 

Joyce Maynard's How the Light Gets In is a sequel to her family drama, Count the Ways.   She picks up the story some years after that book ended, with matriarch Eleanor returning to the family farm to care for her dying ex-husband, Cam. After he dies, she stays on to care for their son Toby, who suffered a brain injury in the earlier book. As Toby moves toward greater independence, Eleanor's daughter Ursula, from whom she is estranged, is experiencing her own crisis--her husband and the father of their two children is becoming a drunk and a right-wing MAGA nut. Eleanor's son Al and the son of Cam's second marriage play lesser roles here, as do a number of other characters whose lives intersect with Eleanor and Toby's. Maynard deals with a number of social/political issues and events--parental alienation, climate change, school shootings, police killings of black men,  COVID, the election of Donald Trump. Generally these events aren't dealt with in depth, though descriptions still managed to resonate--Eleanor's party on election night 2016 reminded me of being at a friend's house, watching returns in disbelief, and her sorrow at the death of John Prine during the pandemic brought back how sad his loss was and also brought home the seriousness of the disease. Some things that I suspect the author intended as surprises didn't really surprise, and everything was wrapped up a bit too neatly at the end--but I still found the characters' deep love for each other and their individual growth moving. Maynard reads the audiobook herself and she is fabulous. 

I often question the quality of my education because there are so many classics I haven't read. Often, I lack the motivation to address this lacuna in my reading, but this month I picked up Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, and am happy that I did. Set in a small, gossipy English town in the 1830s, Wives and Daughters is the story of Molly Gibson, a 17-year-old doctor's daughter whose  mother died when she was very young. When one of the doctor's apprentices expresses romantic interest in Molly, Dr. Gibson decides he must marry to provide a chaperone for Molly. His choice is the narcissistic social climber, Hyacinth who has a daughter, Cynthia, about the same age as Molly. Cynthia is beautiful and leaves a trail of jilted men behind her, but Molly loves and protects her. Like Jane Austen, Gaskell develops complex characters and presents social commentary within a romantic story. The book was originally published as a serial in the 1860s, which accounts for what I perceived as odd chapter breaks; sadly, the author died before she finished the last chapter, but it was completed by Frederick Greenwood, who apparently had knowledge of the author's plans. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll, is a fictionalized retelling of the Ted Bundy story (known here only as "the defendant") from the perspectives of one of his Washington victims, a young lesbian named Ruth, and Pamela Schumacher, the president of the Florida State University sorority where two women were killed and two severely injured. The narrative flows between the two women and from the 1970s to the present; the two women are linked not only by their encounters with the defendant but also through Tina, Ruth's lover who befriends Pamela in the wake of the sorority attack in an effort to link the Washington, Utah, and Colorado disappearances and killings with the Florida murders. I found  interesting the depictions of the long-term impact of violence on loved ones of victims, as well as the cavalier way that law enforcement officers, the justice system, and the media treated (and treat) women. The book isn't exactly a mystery or thriller, although Knoll is known to write in that genre, but I did find it compelling.

Poetry (and More)

Why Fathers Cry at Night, by Kwame Alexander, is a unique collection of poems, essays, letters to Alexander's loved ones, conversations with himself, and even recipes. Written in the wake of his second divorce, his mother's death, and his estrangement from his older daughter, the book is quite often heartbreaking as he delves into his feelings toward the women in his life and his evolution as a husband, son, and father. Some parts are lighter--how he evolved from a student who believed his teacher Nikki Giovanni hated him (she gave him a C) to a close friend of the older poet. I intended to share the title poem on FB during poetry month, but I decided it was a little close to the bone for son #1, the father of a teenage girl. He won't read this, so . . . 

Ten Reasons Why Fathers Cry at Night 
By Kwame Alexander  

1. Because teenagers don’t like park swings or long walks anymore unless you’re in the mall.   
2. Because holding her hand is forbidden and kisses are lethal.   
3. Because school was “fine,” her day was “fine,” and yes, she’s “fine.” (So why is she weeping?)   
4. Because you want to help, but you can’t read minds.   
5. Because she is in love and that’s cute, until you find his note asking her to prove it.   
6. Because she didn’t prove it.   
7. Because next week she is in love again and this time it’s real, she says her heart is heavy.   
8. Because she yearns to take long walks in the park with him.   
9. Because you remember the myriad woes and wonders of  spring desire.   
10. Because with trepidation and thrill you watch your daughter who suddenly wants to swing all by herself. 

Nonfiction

No matter whether you like Brittney Griner or approve of the exchange that secured her release from a Russian labor camp, her book Coming Home is an informative read, casting light on the Russian "justice" system under Putin and the emotional and physical toll of being held in a foreign country with limited contact with family and friends (grueling in every way). One of the pleasant surprises (maybe the only one) is that Griner's Russian attorneys, while ultimately destined to fail in her case, were supportive and kind to her, as were a few women with whom she was imprisoned (others essentially spied on her or tried to use her fame to their own benefit). A brief description of Griner's subsequent work on behalf of other Americans detained in other countries ends the book. 

As you read the first essay in Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, you realize that author Aimee Nezhukumatathil is doing something unusual, as she somehow connects rambutan, hairstyles and styling products of the 1980s, and identity--all in poetic language. Some subsequent essays do similar work linking specific foods to events and people in the author's life--some in a touching manner, some humorously--while others are more focused on the joys of the actual food she is describing. All are delightful. 

In writing King: A Life, Jonathan Eig had access to many sources not available to earlier biographers, perhaps most notably the voluminous recordings the FBI made of King speaking with friends, family members, and colleagues. Eig also interviewed numerous people who knew King, including his children, and reexamined well-known sources, such as Alex Haley's Playboy interview with King. In the latter case, by comparing the recording of the interview with the published article, Eig found that King's assessment of Malcolm X was much less negative than portrayed by Haley. The result of Eig's research is a "warts-and-all" portrait of King. There's an interesting discussion of plagiarism and how the traditions of the black church might have played into this practice--but Eig doesn't excuse King's plagiarism in his dissertation, though he does place some responsibility on his dissertation advisor for not catching and correcting the problem. Having only ever read a biography by Coretta Scott King, I had always discounted the FBI's portrayal of King as a philanderer--but his behavior with women was, indeed, problematic in the extreme. His friends abetted his affairs while wondering why he behaved as he did (Eig briefly considers the similarities in this regard between Kennedy and King, speculating on the possibility that their fathers' influence was paramount). In addition, we learn that King was often hospitalized for "fatigue" that was actually depression. Warts notwithstanding, we also see clearly that King, an accidental leader in the civil rights movement (his dream was to become a college professor), was more radical than he is typically portrayed and pushed on despite everything he faced. We also see the complicity of a variety of public figures in the FBI's intrusion into King's life and J. Edgar Hoover's attempts to portray him (falsely) as a Communist. While Bobby Kennedy later became a King supporter, his earlier actions are deeply troubling; I hope Doris Kearns Goodwin reads this book and is reminded that Bobby was not quite the paragon she portrayed in her recent book. An excellent narration by Dion Graham.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood is an eyeopener. Author Gretchen Sisson has been researching adoption, particularly the effects of relinquishing a child on birth mothers, for more than a decade. She positions her interviews with these mothers in the problematic history of adoption in the United States, a history shaped and scarred by slavery and racism, imperialism, religious beliefs, and exploitation based on class. Sisson reveals that the profile of the relinquishing mother is not what we normally think--drug-addicted minority women or scared teenagers--a majority of relinquishing mothers are white and many already have children. And they are overwhelmingly poor--some would be likely to make the decision to parent their child if they had access to more resources. Meanwhile, adoptive parents are more financially stable, and the adoption system is set up to serve their needs (and, through doing so, make a profit). The result is that pregnant mothers who are unsure of what to do are often not given good (or any) information about their options but are pressured to relinquish their children. And the subsequent experience is not as it was marketed; open adoption agreements are not legally enforceable in most states and contact often diminishes or ends soon after the adoption is finalized. (Adoptive parents are also not given useful information, such as the benefits of maintaining a relationship with their birth family for the children being adopted.) This book probably had a particularly strong impact on me because, in reading it, I realized I was involved with early in my professional career was creating a tool for the marketing of adoption (viz., a curriculum Adoption Builds Families designed to normalize adoption for K-12 students). Of course, adoption does allow people unable to have children to build families, often happy families, but the deep-seated societal inequities that underlie the adoption system are worth learning more about. 

Favorite Passage

. . . every time I cooked, I felt a little bit closer to her [his mother], perched on a branch of her life.

    --Kwame Alexander, Why Fathers Cry at Night

Spring Favorites: The Caine Mutiny, Mrs. March, and More

I continue to be on a somewhat depressing reading streak; i.e., not enough great books, no book that absolutely swept me away. But that doesn't mean all the reading has been bad. Spring has seen some highlights!

Fiction

Small things can make me happy--such as liking the first novel of the spring season. In my teens and twenties, I read and enjoyed several of Herman Wouk's sprawling novels, but I had never read his Pulitzer-winning work, The Caine Mutiny. My favorite part of the book was, in fact, the description of the trial of the mutineer, Officer Maryk, who seized control of the Caine during a typhoon in which Captain Queeg (a name that has entered the zeitgeist) appeared to be paralyzed with fear. His attorney, who believes Maryk was guilty and others on the Caine were mistaken in their treatment of Queeg, nonetheless offers a vigorous defense. But there is much before and after the trial involving the book's narrator, Willie Keith, including his pre-war adventures as a vacuous rich boy and raw Navy recruit and his maturation as a result of his experiences on the Caine. There were times while reading that I thought "Why do we need this scene or vignette?--Wouk needed a more aggressive editor." Nevertheless I enjoyed the novel's sweep and exploration of ethical questions related to the waging of war. 

I came across Mrs. March by Virginia Feito while searching for something to read on Libby. I clicked on it, thinking it might be some alternative telling of Marmee's story (the mom in Little Women for non-Alcott fans). That thought proved way off base, as Mrs. March is the story of a woman's descent into madness, told from inside her head. The book begins when an employee at Mrs. March's favorite Upper East Side pastry shop suggests that an  unattractive and immoral character in Mr. March's latest novel is based on Mrs. March herself. As her mental health crisis deepens, she sees multiple versions of herself, imagines that her husband has killed a young woman upstate, and, well, I don't want to reveal too much. From her memories about her youth,  we realize her problems started years ago. Those memories carry added creepiness because she thinks of herself, even as a child, as Mrs. March; indeed we don't learn her first name until the last sentence of the book. I found Mrs. March weird, sometimes funny, but always entertaining. 

Mysteries

Another decades-old award-winner (the Edgar this time) was also a favorite this season--Sharyn McCrumb's She Walks These Hills. I haven't read any McCrumb for years--not sure why--but this one had so many characters who seemed destined to converge at the end. Among these characters: a woman police dispatcher serving her first weeks as a deputy sheriff, an escaped convict with mental problems, his geology student daughter, a history graduate student trying to retrace the steps of an 18th-century woman key to his dissertation, a local talk radio host who styles himself as "Hank the Yank," an abused teenage mother looking to escape her situation. While you know they're somehow going to come together at the end, there were surprises. And, of course, McCrumb captures both the physical and cultural features of Appalachia beautifully. I'm going to have to go back to some other McCrumb books I've missed over the years. 

At first, I thought The Quiet Tenant, by Clemence Michallon, was a rip-off of Room--and there are certainly similarities, in that a woman is being held captive by a man who sexually abuses her. But The Quiet Tenant goes off in a distinctly different direction. I don't know if I can say more without revealing too much--but I found the book entertaining. Not great, but enjoyable.  

As I've said before, I took a break from C.J. Box's Joe Pickett series a few years ago because I thought it had gotten too dark, but I've enjoyed the Cassie Dewell books, and Treasure State was no exception. Former cop, current Montana PI Cassie has two clients: a woman who wants to find the man who romanced and ripped her off and a man who offered a reward to anyone who could find a treasure he hid somewhere in the mountain west and wants to make sure no one can identify him. Box weaves Montana history with the procedural elements--and it all works.

Nonfiction

I never expected to read a book about Spiro Agnew, but a friend gave me the book Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, by Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, so there I was, reading about Spiro Agnew. Scarily, all the corruption described in the book was uncovered when I was an adult interested in politics--but I remember little other than Agnew resigned because of "a tax issue." But boy was it a lot more than that--and, as told by Maddow, the Agnew case foreshadows aspects of what we are now experiencing with Trump. I don't think the prosecutors in the Agnew case were ever as well-known as those involved in the Trump cases, but they were heroes of great integrity and it's worth reading about them. One thing about the writing bothered me. Many sentence fragments were employed; although I don't regularly watch Maddow, I sense this is characteristic of her speaking style.  And, in defense of my ignorance, when all of this happened, I had just finished up a hectic year as a legislative intern, gotten married, and moved to Tennessee, where we lived in the "guest house" on an Army base for a month because we couldn't find housing. I think there was only room in my head for Watergate and not for Spiro! 

I was familiar with Lyn Slater's online presence as an influencer known as the Accidental Icon. Although I am interested in fashion, one of her primary topics, and am about the same age, I never felt any connection with her because her style was too impractical (or, in my Midwestern brain, too New York) for me. Little did I know that, as the project she started when she turned 60--to write about the expressive power of fashion--morphed into a globe-trotting career endorsing products, she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with these developments: the extent to which her new role involved conspicious consumption and commodification of her expression through fashion, not to mention the cost in time not spent with loved ones. As I read about her multiple transitions in How to Be Old, it seemed to me she is one of the rare people for whom the pandemic had a positive effect, in that it brought the fashion industry to a halt and gave her space to rethink what she wanted her next step to be. I enjoyed her account of her evolution--and feel a great deal more resonance with her current iteration. Probably not for everybody but I enjoyed it.

Another book that probably isn't for everyone is Doris Kearns Goodwin's An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. The book was inspired by the efforts of the author and her husband, Richard Goodwin, to go through the many boxes he had kept from his work in the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses as well as the RFK and Eugene McCarthy campaigns. Kearns Goodwin tells the story in the present when the two are searching through the boxes as Goodwin's health deteriorates and in the past, as revealed in the documents and artifacts in the boxes and through their memories. I found the document excerpts and the recordings of speeches and conversations (I was listening to the audiobook) most fascinating, but the behind-the-scenes look at the period was also interesting. Of course, the book is a "personal history," so one can only guess how the couple's loyalties to leaders of the time (and Kearns Goodwin's love and admiration for her husband, whom she credits for nearly every significant speech made by JFK or LBJ), affect the telling. Still, as a native of the 1960s, I appreciated this glimpse into that seminal decade. 

Favorite Passages

Guilt was for the brave. Denial was for the rest. 

     --Virginia Feito, Mrs. March

There is one aspect of getting older that is under our control: How we choose to think about our age. 

    --Lyn Slater, How to Be Old

West Heart Kill, You've Got Murder, and Other Mysteries Not Loved but Notable

If you read this blog (or know me), you know I read a lot of mysteries, even though I don't think most of them are very good. A psychologist could probably find a lot to delve into there. But leaving that aside, in the past month there have been interesting things in mysteries that I want to acknowledge even though I didn't love the books.

First is West Heart Kill, by Dann McDorman. Amidst the narrative about an outsider detective who has finagled his way (for unrevealed reasons) into a holiday getaway at a hunting camp, where people start turning up dead, McDorman includes segments in which he addresses the reader directly about the mystery genre. These segments reference classics in the genre while discussing such topics as why authors write in first person, first person plural, or third person; the origins of the term murder, which then segues into the origins of collective nouns; the methods of murder used by mystery writers, etc. And the writing of the narrative makes stylistic turns that either reflect or are reflected in these "meta" sections. At one point, the narrative is written as a script.  I ended up not caring much about the actual mystery while finding the commentary on the genre interesting and certainly unique. But I expect some people would find the entire book both clever and entertaining.

You've Got Murder, by Donna Andrews, is an older Agatha winner that I had not previously read. Published in 2002, the book features an AI protagonist who charms the reader while solving a complex case involving a disappearance, murder, and financial crimes. I was surprised the book was written more than 20 years ago and yet still feels contemporary in terms of possible applications and misapplications of not only AI but other technologies. I felt the latter part of the book got bogged down in details about technology and financial crime but I still respect what Andrews did ahead of the technological curve.

Finally, I have noted a mini-trend (possibly just a coincidence) of mystery writers dealing with serious contemporary issues. Of course, mystery writers have dealt with important topics forever, but reading four in a row with attention to modern problems made me take note. My interest in John Sandford's books has faded of late because of the emphasis on extra-judicial killings. However, I keep reading them, and the new Lucas Davenport novel, Toxic Prey, presents a scenario that is truly frightening--a group of scientists become so concerned about saving the earth, that they decide to kill off a large percentage of the world's population by releasing a deadly virus. The book almost made me worry that it would inspire someone to take this kind of action. 

The most recent entry in another long-running mystery series--Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawsky novels--took on multiple issues, including the opioid epidemic and land-use issues that go back to the Civil War and Kansas's role in that conflict. Yes, Pay Dirt finds Vic back in Lawrence, Kansas, a town with which Paretsky (and therefore Vic) seems to have a complex relationship. 

The other two novels focused on racism at the neighborhood level and how responses can escalate (Perfectly Nice Neighbors, by Kia Abdullah) and violence against women and the actions of activists seeking to draw attention to the problem (One of the Good Guys, by Araminta Hall). Both books are pretty good and might get into my spring favorites list. But mostly I'm happy to see mysteries that try to do a bit more than entertain (although entertainment is important too)!

Favorite Reads of Winter: The Talk, Wellness, and More

 

I seem always to have issues with books that appear on "best of" lists, but I keep reading them to expand my thinking; meanwhile, I remind myself that what is "good" is a matter of taste and I have as much right to my opinion as the loftiest critic. However, I have read quite a few reviews of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, and none of the professional reviewers have mentioned the weird shift from third to second person midway through the book. Many reader reviewers mention it, so I know I'm not the only one it bothered. But I do wish someone with insight would have discussed the thought behind the switch. (The book was also too long and totally predictable.)

I also am compelled to ask if it's possible to write a book set in Iowa City (and they are legion) without including a scene in which a student at "The Workshop" suffers a savaging of their work. I believe I have read more than my share, most recently in another book from the "best of" lists--The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor (didn't care for it, although the savaging scene was okay). Perhaps it's a fad . . . 

And fads do exist in publishing, like books with "Girl" in the title, books set in bookstores or libraries, books written in first person plural, etc. January saw four mysteries in which the bad people escaped punishment for their crimes. Mysteries are generally little morality plays, in which the hero/heroine uncovers the truth and the perpetrator is punished, so it's somewhat jarring to have my expectations turned on their heads. All four were written in the 2020s, which does make me wonder if bad people getting away with stuff in real life (okay, one bad person) might be consciously or subconsciously prompting this trend. Come to think of it, gaslighting has been a theme in more mysteries in the past few years than I used to see--that, too, might be prompted by the public gaslighting we've all been subjected to of late.

But on to things I'm not complaining about. I've already written about Year of Yes and The Country of the Blind in my post on memoirs, so I'm not saying any more about them here--but they're good. And  I'll start with some other memoirs I liked.

Memoirs

The Talk, the graphic memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell, focuses on what it is like to grow up as an African American in the United States--and then to become a parent who must learn from your own childhood experiences how best to help your children navigate a biased world. The title refers to the conversation parents have with African American children, especially boys, about how to survive encounters with police officers and others who may pose danger for young black people. Bell's white mother had "the talk" with him, but his African American father could not bring himself to share his own experiences with his sons. Bell makes a different decision, although he, too, feels the pain of memories. The book is sometimes uncomfortable to read, but it's worth it. 

Enough, by Cassidy Hutchinson, isn't a great book, but it does reveal some new information about the chaos of the Trump White House and the terrible events of January 6, 2021. It's actually alarming how quickly Hutchinson gained a great deal of influence as a naive young staffer, about as well-informed and insightful as most 20-somethings interested in politics (i.e., better informed than many but still a long ways from wise). It seemed fairly clear to me that many people in power were using her as a conduit for information. It was also clear that her influence went to her head, prompting an attitude and actions that I sometimes found distasteful. She, like others in the Trump White House (and in the Clinton camp as well--see the book on Hillary's campaign, Shattered, for more on that), placed a high value on loyalty, a principle that often discourages reflection on whether the person to whom one is loyal is acting in accordance with other important values. Of course, Hutchinson eventually thought through her experiences and decided to forsake loyalty to Mark Meadows and Donald Trump to be honest in the interest of preserving democracy, for which we can all be thankful. Enough is a cautionary tale for naive young people who want to get into politics--not to discourage them from doing so, but reminding them not to subvert their values for influence or "loyalty." 

After reading Enough and watching the January 6 committee hearings, I thought I knew quite a bit about January 6 and its aftermath. But it seems there's always more to learn--and none of it makes you feel better about Republicans and the state of democracy. In Oath and Honor: A Memoir and Warning, Liz Cheney makes the violence of January 6 more real than any account I've seen or heard. And she takes down Trump and his staff, as well as Republican Members of Congress, with a mountain of evidence and impeccable reasoning. I'm surprised Kevin McCarthy is still able to face himself in the mirror after the way she exposes his lack of leadership, integrity, and knowledge. Here's a telling anecdote from the book. At the first January 6 committee meeting, she was shocked to see Jamie Raskin taking notes for remarks another member would be making. She had never seen McCarthy or other Republicans taking notes in a strategy session. They relied on staffers to take notes and then synthesize the notes into talking points. This is perhaps not the most significant story, but to me it's an indicator of both classism and lack of professionalism and commitment to ideas. For a left-winger like me, every time Cheney mentioned her family was kind of a cringe-moment, but overall I found the book informative--I wouldn't really call it a memoir though, more like a first-person history (if that's a genre). 

Yikes, have I become a memoir person? 

Other Nonfiction

Ross Gay decided to write an "essayette" daily for a year, reflecting on things that delight him each day. The result was The Book of Delights, which I expected to consist of pieces on lovely things that, by attending to them, gave Gay delight. And there is some of that in the book (which includes 102 essayettes)--Gay writes about such things as bird song, gardening, a lavender infinity scarf, poetry readings, fireflies, lying down in public, and beating two 12-year-olds in a pick-up game of basketball. But there are also many much more serious topics that only a gifted "delighter" could include in the collection--pieces on, for example, the commodification of black suffering in popular entertainment, a study that involved exposing black children to huge doses of radiation, Donny Hathaway singing about death. Considering how delight can grow from these topics requires reflection on what delight means. Gay suggests not only that "delight and nostalgia, delight and loneliness . . . are kin" but that the combining of sorrows creates joy. I am leaning toward delight meaning laughing and crying at the same time. Gay has a delightful (see what I did there?) casual but incisive style. He describes the Super Bowl as our "nationalistic celebration of brain damage" and stops to reflect on his own use of the phrase "I found myself," saying "I adore that construction for its Whitmanian assertion of multitudinousness." He describes his mother as "one of the varieties of light." I found so much language to enjoy in these essays. I didn't love every piece (to wit, there are two about peeing that I found unappealing) but the book is full of delights of many types, and I recommend it.

I heard Jeff Sharlet talking on a podcast (I think it was Dahlia Lithwick's Amicus) and thought his book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, sounded interesting. So I read it and found that terrifying might be a better descriptor, as Sharlet reports on, among other things, a cross-country trip during which he talked with numerous folks who participated in or supported the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. How and what these folks believe is so extreme and fantastical that I find it impossible not only to understand but to describe. So I borrow from the NYT review by Joseph O'Neill: "The result is a riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America, one that horrifyingly corresponds to liberals' worst fears." The book is well written and researched, but I would only recommend it if the fate of our democracy is not already keeping you up at night. 

Novels

It's been a bleak winter for novels--most of those I've read, including both "serious" books and mysteries, have been less than totally rewarding. I will mention that, though the writing and characterization don't live up to its premise, The Measure, by Nikki Erlick, has a premise that offers lots of material for discussion. One morning, everyone in the world over the age of 18 wakes up to find themselves the recipient of a box, in which is a single string, the length of which accurately (governments do studies!) predicts the length of your life. Characters grapple with such questions as: Should they open their box? Should they get married if they're a short-stringer (or their beloved is)? Should they have children? Should a short-stringer be able to run for the Presidency? Should short-stringers in the military be protected from hazardous assignments? How should they live their lives?  Lots to discuss!

A better novel is Wellness, by Nathan Hill. Wellness seems to have a narrow focus--the lives and marriage of two people, Jack and Elizabeth. But within that story, Hill deals with a plethora of themes, many satirically--what it means to stay and fall in love, the utility of psychology, art and how scholars and collectors regard it and talk about it, the effects of technology, gentrification, polyamory,  parenting, and even more--but it never seems like he's stuffing too much into the book. The book is non-chronological--at one point, Jack's friend Ben tells him that hypertext will change literature forever, which made me think that perhaps Hill was putting the book together as one path through the story--but we could cut up the pieces, rearrange them, and find another meaning in the book (perhaps I am being fanciful). My favorite humorous piece is when Elizabeth is reflecting on strategies she's tried with their son and what she might do next to bring him out of his shell--and her thoughts include citations! It's a long book, but it's worth it.

Favorite Passages

. . .in witnessing someone's being touched [in the not quite right mentally sense], we are also witnessing someone's being moved, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another, moonwalking toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening. 

    --Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

I went looking for trouble and I found it and now I realized what a fool I'd been. We're past the days of "looking for trouble" in America. They were always an illusion. Trouble has always already been present. That's the fear I felt racing too fast under the skin of my left wrist.

    --Jeff Sharlet, The Undertow

Good Memoirs: Year of Yes and Country of the Blind (And Some Bad Ones)

I have often whined about not liking memoirs--but I continue to read them and even like some. Since I've read four memoirs in the first month of 2024, I thought I'd ruminate on what makes a memoir good or bad from my perspective. 

The Good

In The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight,  Andrew Leland does not confine himself to looking inward, as so many memoirists do. He does certainly examine the impact of his vision loss due to retinitis pigmentosa on how he lives his life, interacts with people, and thinks about his identity--and he does so in a thoughtful manner. But he also looks outward to the experiences of other visually impaired people, as well as to assistive technologies and medical treatments that have been developed or are being tested. There's much to be learned as well as much to think about. In the former category, among other things,  I learned a lot about the use and learning of Braille and about the development of assistive technologies by blind people themselves, who often have not gotten the credit for their inventions, which have gone on to find wide applicability among the sighted population as well. In the latter category: Is blindness defining when it comes to identity or simply incidental? How is it that the male gaze continues to be relevant when we are talking about blind men? What can we learn about intersectionality and discrimination in its many forms by considering the varied thinking of blind people who are also black, female, and/or LGBTQ?  Well worth reading. 

I never intended to read Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes. The subtitle in particular sounded like a gimmicky quasi self-help book by a celebrity. But then it was available on Libby and I needed something to listen to while taking my daily walk and I actually liked it a lot. Rhimes was a highly successful TV creator and single mom when her sister shocked her by complaining that she never said yes to anything. She realized her sister was right and decided to say "yes" to every intimidating, scary offer that came her way, from giving a commencement speech at her alma mater to going on Jimmy Kimmel. As she took on these challenges, she also recognized she needed to expand her thinking about saying yes to include saying yes to her family, to herself, and to saying no not out of fear but out of conviction. It gave me a lot to think about, which for me is what makes a memoir worthwhile. Plus, Rhimes is funny!

The Not-So-Good

Reinforcing the idea that subtitles can be important: While a subtitle pushed me away from Year of Yes until I was desperate for a book, the subtitle of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser intrigued me. Based on my understanding of the essay form, I thought a memoir in essays would surely offer interesting insights. Um, no. First of all, the book starts with a long section of anecdotes about the love stories of Hauser's progenitors, no resemblance to what I expect from an essay. This is followed by a series of what I guess are essays; I did enjoy pieces about Hauser's responses to The Philadelphia Story, The Fantasticks, and The X-Files, even though I wearied of everything being run through a lens of Hauser's love life. Did she have nothing else in her life but failed relationships? Then, near the end of the book, she concludes a piece by saying "If you are waiting for me to tell you how the story of my going to the fertility clinic comes together with the story of the man who drove me through the park in lilac season with the story of whether or not I want to keep my teats, you are missing the point."  And she goes on to blame any reader dissatisfaction with her approach on the reader's misapprehension of "what has to happen in a story." I go on to conclude there really just isn't a point. 

I received John Stamos's memoir If You Would Have Told Me as a Christmas gift;  I wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but I did read it and don't regret it too much, as it's a quick read. It actually starts with a nice anecdote about driving in LA drunk, with people in other cars yelling "Uncle Jessie, pull over." When I recounted this story to my son and DIL, they both thought it sounded highly unlikely. And, sadly, Stamos didn't provide any real insight into addiction and recovery. Mostly, he talked about famous people (especially the Beach Boys) he knew--and he threw his ex-wife under the bus. There's nothing to ponder or take away. It's one of those memoirs that makes the reader ask, "Why did you think this was worth writing?" 

Favorite Passages

I found that the experience of blindness encompasses both tragedy and beauty, the apocalyptic and the commonplace, terror and calm. This is true of most of human experience: the same can be said of the process of aging, or of dying. In the end, I found that the separation between the blind and the sighted worlds is largely superficial, constructed by stigma and misunderstanding rather than any inherent differences. If we could remove the misperceptions people have about blindness--the image of it as a place of fear, claustrophobia, infantilization, and fundamental otherness--the landscape would begin to look very different. The two worlds would cease to feel so distinct, and their overlapping zones would grow. Ultimately, they'd have to yield and concede and share territory. The blind belong to our world, and we belong to theirs. It's the same world. 

    --Andrew Leland, The Country of the Blind

When you negate someone's compliment, you are telling them they are wrong. You're telling them they wasted their time. You are questioning their taste and judgment. You are insulting them. If someone wants to compliment you, let them.

    --Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes