literature, community, education, social justice
NOVELS
(alphabetically by title: J-Z)
“Transforming silence into language and action” — Audre Lorde
Jack (2020) - Marilynne Robinson
Jack is the story of Jack Boughton, the son of the Presbyterian minister in Gilead, Iowa, the town described in Robinson’s first book (Gilead) in the quartet. In this novel, Jack has left Gilead and ventured on to St. Louis, where he meets and falls in love with Della Miles, a schoolteacher and an African American woman who is also the daughter of a minister. The difficulties and challenges facing consensual relationships between blacks and whites are central themes—the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. Robinson tackles all of these with compassion and honesty.
Robinson devotes more than 60 pages very early on in the book, to a chance encounter in a cemetery between Jack and Della. It is nighttime and the cemetery gates have been locked so the two are unable to leave. Jack offers to stay with her until morning. This is after they have not seen each other for nearly a year following a dinner date that Jack had botched.
We learn a lot about Jack’s character in these pages—his apprehensions about life, his insecurities about what others think of him, his sensitivities and vulnerabilities, his attempts to do what’s right—forever analyzing possible consequences. He wonders why, no matter what course of action he chooses, he always seems to get into trouble. He tells Della, “I’m going to ruin this.” She asks, “How exactly?” And he replies, “The way I ruin things. It’s a little different every time. I actually surprise myself. Except that it’s inevitable. That’s always the same, I suppose. One thing I can count on” (p. 42).
It is a cold night. Not wishing to be presumptuous or make her uncomfortable, he wonders if he should,
put his arm around the back of the bench behind her…if they were friends, he could say they would both be warmer if he put his arm, so to speak, around her. He could make a little joke about it, call her girlfriend, and she would say, Don’t you wish, that sort of thing, and settle against her. He didn’t move, and his arm and shoulder and then his neck became stiff with the effort of not moving…(p. 50).
Throughout the night, they have a very heady philosophical conversation about remaking the rules people live by and thus, remaking the world—a conversation that traverses a lot of territory. We discover that they have similar sensibilities, and though they may differ in their opinions, they regard each other with mutual respect and a kind of awe. In spite of Jack’s constant self-doubt, they manage to talk freely, easily and truthfully.
At one point, Jack contemplates what would happen if he were to touch her face:
…If he touched her face now, ever so lightly, things would be different afterward. That’s how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed. Which meant that the question was already in his mind—what would be left if the fragile were tested, pushed nearer the edge of the shelf, if that tension were sprung and the fragile thing, the essence of it, lost. This strange night lost, fallen into shivers and shards of embarrassment and distrust and regret. It crossed his mind that if he touched her dark cheek in the dark night, an elegant curve, bodiless as geometry, objectively speaking, if he followed the curve of it with just the tip of a finger, there would be a delicacy in the experiment that she would understand if he could explain it to her. Pure touch almost undistracted. He said, ‘Talk about something.’ Too abrupt. ‘Let’s talk ,’ he said, ‘about something’ (pp. 60-61).
Later, Della tells him, “I think most people feel a difference between their real lives and the lives they have in the world. But they ignore their souls, or hide them, so they can keep things together, keep an ordinary life together. You don’t do that. In your own way, you’re kind of—pure” (p. 75).
Much happens to Jack and Della after that night in the cemetery. A few happy moments as well as ones fraught with uncertainty and pain. Della’s family—especially her father—is disturbed and distraught by their relationship, and insists that she return to Mississippi. And Jack goes back to Gilead for a time to try to determine whether or not it could be “home" for Della and their child.
Kindred (1989; 1979) - Octavia E. Butler
In Kindred, award-winning author Octavia E. Butler shows us slavery as a lived experience through the eyes of her protagonist, Dana Franklin, a young black woman. Quite unexpectedly, Dana must take several trips back in time from her California home in 1976 to a plantation in antebellum Maryland. It is Dana’s mission to save Rufus Weylin, the son of the plantation owner, who will become her ancestor when he impregnates Alice, one of his slaves.
Dana, along with her white husband, Kevin, must navigate between these two jarringly disparate worlds. This plot allows the author to describe enslavement as a first-hand experience, while retaining a twentieth-century lens. The result for the reader is a sense of immediacy that might be lost in works of historical fiction on this ignoble era.
In her illumination of the insidiousness of slavery, Butler lays bare the brutalities and indignities suffered by the enslaved. Dana not only bears witness to these, but is herself a victim. Often unable to curb her desire to help her fellow slaves – as when she tries to dissuade her “owner” from selling off the father of a family – she is beaten multiple times with a whip.
But Butler looks beyond these horrors to other insidious aspects of slave society, perhaps most notably the ease with which people can accustom themselves to the status quo. Dana notes, “Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. . . [It] seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history – adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder” (p. 97). Another striking example of this easy acceptance appears when Dana and Kevin observe enslaved children “playing” at buying and selling one another in an all-too-real reenactment of a slave auction. Dana tells Kevin, “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery” (p. 101).
The author also addresses the complicated emotions that characterize the relationships between masters and enslaved. After the corn husking on the plantation, Rufus provides a celebratory feast for everyone. Dana notes that the slaves “gave him the praise he wanted. Then they made jokes behind his back. Strangely they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt the same mixture of emotions for him myself” (p. 229).
The relationships among the enslaved are likewise complicated. There is a hierarchy of sorts, where those working in the household have higher status than those working in the fields. More specifically, among the women, there are some who are contemptuous of, and at the same time jealous of, those who go to bed with their masters and attain thereby special favors.
The fact that Dana is a black woman and Kevin a white man gives Butler the opportunity to look at racial and gender issues. In their twentieth-century lives both Dana and Kevin are writers by profession, but Kevin feels free to ask Dana multiple times to type his manuscripts for him. When, after accommodating his first request, she subsequently refuses to do so, he tells her to leave his apartment. Later, when they are on the plantation, Kevin again assumes a stereotypical male role; he naively reassures Dana that she will not be in danger: “Not while I’m with you” (p. 77). He also comes across as naive when he tells Dana that he could survive living there permanently. She, on the other hand, realizes the danger he would be in:
If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. . . But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn't have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. Free speech and press hadn’t done too well in the ante bellum South. Kevin wouldn’t do too well either. The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility. (p. 77)
Perhaps Butler is also thinking here of the choices white Americans face today on racial injustice: stay silent or speak out.
At one point in the novel, Dana tries to escape the plantation on foot, but she is soon caught and beaten mercilessly. Later, thinking about how the aching in her back has dulled, Dana remarks, “Slavery was a slow process of dulling” (p. 182). In Kindred, Octavia Butler has sharpened our awareness of that inhumane and cruel “process.”
The Liar’s Dictionary (2020) - Eley Williams
Described as a well-crafted novel, The Liar’s Dictionary is about the writing of a dictionary and the challenges of working on the lexicon. Borrowing the title of the “M” chapter, we can say that this is a work of masterful (studied?) mendaciloquence. The novel offers a modern perspective on dictionaries, words and the character of the lexicographers and it juxtaposes this with earlier efforts by the same publishing family to complete the “Swansby’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary” in the late 1800's. Williams brings to the reader an awareness of the difficulties of determining what is a valid dictionary entry or a mountweazel; and an appreciation of the character of those who write our dictionaries.
The Magician (2021) - Colm Tóibín
The son of a prominent businessman and senator in Lübeck, Germany, the young Thomas Mann shows an early acumen for business, but his apparent interest in a career is feigned. He realizes “how cunningly he [has] won his father’s approval, what an imposter and confidence man he [is], and how little he [can] be trusted” (p. 8). Tóibín establishes here an important motif: Mann is a man of many guises.
Scorning the business career chosen for him by his parents, Mann bursts forth on the literary scene in 1901 with the novel Buddenbrooks, the saga of a bourgeois family in decline. In contrast to his radical brother Heinrich, who posits that books should be a force to change mores and society, Thomas believes a good novel should let readers “feel more that they are peering in through a window” (p. 66). Heinrich concedes that in this sense Buddenbrooks is a masterpiece.
Tóibín writes in great detail about Mann’s family -- his wife Katia and their six children. His unconventional marriage to Katia is based on tacit agreements: He won’t upset domesticity, and she will recognize the nature of his desires and “make clear her willingness, when appropriate, to appreciate him in all of his different guises” (p. 117). Mann is thus free to live an apparently conventional upper-class lifestyle while exploring his homoerotic desires, which are manifest in several works, most notably in the novella Death in Venice. Interestingly, three of Mann’s children -- Erika, Klaus and Golo, all of whom become writers -- prove to be sexually and politically more liberated than their father, who is “afraid of what might take over if he [does] not exercise caution and control” (p. 380).
Though a nationalist during World War I, Mann is forced to leave his beloved Germany when the Nazis come to power. Taking refuge in the United States, he comes to terms with the fact that his homeland “contained the seeds of its own destruction” (p. 382). As the most famous German expatriate in the U.S., Mann is called on to speak out against the Nazis’ barbarism. His ultimate assessment of Germany: “To be rescued, it will have to be defeated” (p. 398).
Despite his huge financial success and widespread fame as a writer, Tóibín’s Mann has doubts about his own talent and achievements. While listening to a Beethoven string quartet, Mann wishes “he had been able to do this as a writer, find a tone or a context that was beyond himself, that was rooted in what shone and glittered and could be seen, but that hovered above the world of fact, entering into a place where spirit and substance could merge and drift apart and merge again.” (p. 380). According to Tóibín, Mann believes that he has achieved this type of transcendence only a few times in his career:
On a few occasions in his own books, Mann thought, he had risen above the ordinary world from which the work emerged. The death of Hanno in Buddenbrooks, for example, or the quality of the desire described in Death in Venice, or the seance scenes in The Magic Mountain. Maybe in other parts of other books too. But he did not think so. He had let dry humor and social settings dominate his writing. (p. 380)
Ultimately Mann chooses to move back to Switzerland, finding the United States to be “soulless soil” (p. 478). There he considers writing one final novel, which becomes The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man.
If he were offered a chance to say a final word about the human spirit, he would like to do so comically, he thought; he would dramatize the idea that humans could not ever be trusted, that they could reverse their own story as the wind changed, that their lives were a continuous, enervating and amusing effort to appear plausible. And in that lay, he felt, the pure genius of humanity, and all the pathos. . . . It had taken him seven and a half decades on earth before he could freely speak the truth (p. 479).
The Marriage Portrait (2022) — Maggie O’Farrell
Maggie O’Farrell, in her second historical novel, focuses on the 16th-century marriage between Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, and Lucrezia, a 15-year-old from the de’Medici family. Lucrezia is forced to marry Alfonso soon after the death of her sister, who had been promised to the duke. Much to her dismay and in spite of her protests, Lucrezia must give in to the diplomacy needs of the Renaissance dukedoms.
O’Farrell offers a rich and varied portrayal of the vulnerability of women in the wealthy courts of Renaissance Italy. However, as in all historical narratives of the courts and kingdoms of Europe, not all the females are without strength and courage. Sofia, the nurse and attendant to Lucrezia and her siblings, is determined to protect Lucrezia for as long as she can from this unwanted marriage. Sofia …”has a plan. A strategy. Sofia was always a woman with a plan. She would have made a wonderful condottiero (captain, warlord), Lucrezia had often told her, had she been a man” (p. 41). Sofia staves off the marriage for a year by lying to Lucrezia’s family and Vitelli, advisor to Lucrezia’s father, about whether Lucrezia has begun her bleeding. The marriage, we are made fully aware, is about an heir for a man who seems unable to produce heirs.
While at times O’Farrell is, perhaps, unable to contain her love of similes, words and description, she does present to the reader an imaginative, audacious and resilient Lucrezia with artistic talent and appreciation for the beauty of colors, nature and animals. Alfonso himself, in an attempt to seek support in finding fault with Lucrezia for her eventual inability to be impregnated, recognizes her strength: “It is hard to define. There is something at the core of her, a type of defiance. There are times when I look at her and I can feel it—it’s like an animal that lives behind her eyes….It makes me fear that there will always be a part of her that will not submit or be ruled” (p. 302).
And indeed, the reader knows that Lucrezia feels this strength within.
She is not afraid, no, she is not. A beast—muscled and brave lives within her. She tells herself this over the cantering of her heart. Let the ghouls that hover in the corners of the room see what they are dealing with: she is the fifth child of the ruler of Tuscany: she has touched the fur of a tigress; she has scaled a mountain range to be here. Take that, darkness (p. 128).
Alfonso is more than an oppressive, opportunistic husband. Lucrezia recognizes that “[his] voice and his words are tender but…something else runs beneath them, an underground stream with black, corrosive intent. She feels herself shying away from his touch, as if it burns her” (p. 190).
The novel moves back and forth between the time prior to the wedding and during the marriage, with Lucrezia’s suspicions and fear slowly becoming apparently true. Her life is at stake. O’Farrell takes us to a surprising and entertaining ending; and she offers us one splendid moment for the audacious Lucrezia, when the latter realizes that the portrait commissioned by her husband was painted with tenderness and care by Jacopo, a soulmate in her tumultuous life.
Matrix (2021) - Lauren Groff
Not much is known about the life of Marie de France, but in Lauren Groff’s imaginative portrayal of her, Marie looms larger than life. The first woman poet of France, Marie is known mainly for her fables and lais, but Groff shifts our focus onto Marie’s passion and ambition. Readers may not find Marie a likable character, but they will certainly find her an imposing one.
At seventeen the orphaned Marie flees her homeland and seeks refuge in “Angleterre” at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The queen soon banishes the young woman from the court and consigns her to a poverty-stricken abbey where she will spend the rest of her days. Adjusting to the austere religious life of the nuns is a challenge for Marie, but she does not languish for long:
Fine then, she thinks with bitterness. She will stay in this wretched place and make the best of the life given her. She will do all that she can do to exalt herself on this worldly plane. She will make those who cast her out sorry for what they’ve done. One day they will see the majesty she holds within herself and feels awe. p. 45
Though Marie lacks spiritual aspirations – indeed, she scorns the very idea of religious faith – she is eventually made abbess, a position from which she can satisfy her creative and ambitious designs. With Queen Eleanor as her model, “she will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within” (p. 60). Under Marie’s tutelage the nuns of the abbey become skilled laborers, craftswomen and artists who are able to turn their abbess’s expansionary “visions” into reality. Marie transforms the abbey into a matrix, complete with a labyrinth to keep out the male species, especially church authorities.
Marie muses about the making of the labyrinth: “This feeling is the thrill of creation It jolts through her, dangerous and alive. Marie feels it growing in her. She gorges on it. And despite her vow, her prayer in her fleeing terror from the devil, she understands that she is hungry for more” (p. 136).
Marie is determined to realize her ambitions, even at the expense of others. When one of the lay women laborers dies during a construction accident, Marie not only comes to terms with the tragedy, but decides to use it to her advantage:
Perhaps one dead to save many is not a sacrifice too rich. But still this needless death will weigh upon Marie’s soul, she knows herself that there is no solace for a mother taken too young. Well she will do her best…. [a]nd through the countryside, the women will tell stories, women to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon this island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful (p. 144).
One could call Marie both an iconoclast and a proto-feminist. She muses, “[w]hy should she, who felt “her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden?” (p. 177) Later, when the English church is put under a papal ban and Masses can no longer be said nor Communion received, Marie conceals this information from most of the nuns, and, to the shock of her prioress, assumes the role of a priest for the abbey. She similarly ignores the church’s ideas on female sexuality; in fact, the abbey’s “infirmatrix” provides sexual pleasures for all the sisters who need it.
Some of Groff’s best description is of the sensual encounters between women:
...(Marie) thinks of her life.
Some of it returns so vivid it is nearly a vision. Cecily, so young in the fields the days they fled the estate in LeMaine to Rouen, a sudden rainstorm, drops thick as spit, the horses urged to a trot as the rain came down hard, a field with hayricks, a tunnel into the dry interior of the haystack, where the girls squirmed out of their soaked clothing and pulled the woolen blanket over themselves, laughing at the closeness of the other body and the way their limbs knocked as they moved and the sound of the rain and the thick sweetness of hayscent. They lay back pressed close for warmth, and Marie felt Cecily’s heart beating along the length of her, the pulse in her temple where it rested on Marie’s arm, and her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it. They had always rubbed together in their clothes, but they had never been naked like this; they would never have dared (p. 241-242).
Marie considers the qualities of her nuns and often compares herself to them:
She understood then that it didn’t matter that the landscape inside her looked so different from that of her sisters, that they had been taught to crave their own subjection and she had not, that they believed things that she thought silently were foolish, unworthy of the dignity of woman. They were filled with goodness as a cup is filled with wine. Marie was not and could never be. Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness (p 244).
Marie also reflects on her power over others:
It is true that she keeps Goda near because the woman’s venom dispersed swiftly with small easy obsequies to her dignity…Perhaps it is her very barnyard reek and her vulgarity and her loud voice and her proud stomping upon the motions of her sisters that draws the subprioress to Marie. Perhaps in loving a sister as difficult as Goda, Marie can be more sure of her own goodness (p. 186).
“Matrix” comes from the Latin root “mater,” mother. The novel’s title has, then, a double meaning. Marie, the mother of the abbey, creates a matrix in which she and her sisters can thrive – their own separate “Eden.”
Milkman (2018) - Anna Burns
In Milkman, the characters have no names and the narration is stream of consciousness. The narrator, eighteen year-old “middle sister,” lives with her widowed mother and three “wee sisters” in a Catholic enclave in an unnamed city (perhaps Belfast) in 1970, during the “Troubles” which is a time characterized by extreme physical and psychological violence. People are alienated from each other and themselves, and virtually everyone is suspected of being the enemy.
As regards this psycho-political atmosphere, with its rules of allegiance, of tribal identification, of what was allowed and not allowed, matters didn’t stop at ‘their names’ and ‘our names’, at ‘us’ and ‘them’, at ‘our community’ and ‘their community’, at ‘over the road’, ‘over the water’, and ‘over the border’…There was the fact that you created a political statement everywhere you went, and with everything you did, even if you didn’t want to (pp. 24-25).
…thing was, these were paranoid times. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody” (p. 27).
…it was best then, in those days, to keep the lowest of low profiles rather than admit your personal distinguishing habits had fallen below the benchmark for social regularity. If you didn’t, you’d find yourself branded a psychological misfit and slotted out there with those other misfits on the rim (p. 60).
…the whole place always seemed to be in the dark…part of normality here was this constant, unacknowledged struggle to see…I knew even as a child…knew the impression of a pall, of some distorted quality to the light had to do with the political problems, with the hurts that had come, the troubles that had built with the loss of hope and absence of trust and with a mental incapacitation over which nobody seemed wiling or able to prevail. The very physical darkness then, in collusion with, or as a result of, the human darkness discharging within it, didn’t itself encourage light. Instead, the place was sunk in one long melancholic story to the extent that the truly shining person coming into this darkness ran the risk of not outliving it, of having their own shininess subsumed into it, and, in some cases—if the person was viewed as intolerably extra-bright and extra shiny—it might even reach the point of that individual having to lose his or her individual life (pp. 89-90).
The narrator tries to distance herself from the overwhelming “fear and sorrow” of her environment by reading while walking. Ironically, it is this attempt to shield herself that brings her to the attention of Milkman, a sinister paramilitary who threatens to ruin her reputation and kill the narrator’s “maybe boyfriend.” Even as she tries to resist Milkman’s advances, she is written off by friends, neighbors, and family members, who consider her “beyond the pale.” Her relationship with her mother is a particularly difficult one.
…’Gee-whizz,’ ma, I said, and I said this without thinking, without attending to the fact, and it had been a fact that I was angry and dismissive and wearied by my mother, frustrated at her living on another planet and insisting in her ignorance that I come live on it with her; also, that I considered her a stereotype, a caricature, something, of course, I would never become myself..she leaned over and took hold of me by the upper arm...’It’s one thing to be off-color in your talk, and another, worse thing to be full of yourself and mocking of other people. I’d rather you came out with your filthy, unfitting language for the rest of your life than for you to turn out one of them cowardly people who can’t speak their minds but won’t hold their peace and instead mumble behind hands and get their fights out in sneakery and in whispers.’…In that moment I felt bad about the gee-whizz which meant I felt shame at having rubbished my mother. This was despite her own haranguing and prolonged mental battering of me (pp. 51-53).
With both tragic and comedic elements, this is a memorable coming of age story of a young woman living in a hostile and dangerous environment, who refuses to conform to anyone’s expectations.
I was going to die anyway, wouldn’t live long anyway, any day now I’d be dead, all the time, violently murdered—and that, I now understand, gave a certain edge. It offered a different perspective, a freeing up of the fear option (p. 309).
The Nickel Boys (2020) - Colson Whitehead
The Nickel Boys is an historical novel which brings to life the formerly untold story of the resilience of two young men. Elwood naively continues to believe in Martin Luther King’s words,“You are as good as anyone,” even when confronted with the abuses and remnants of enslavement in a juvenile reformatory. In contrast, his friend Turner fails to believe in the possibilities of life in the white world. The two form a strong bond. While Elwood holds on to the love of his grandmother and the hope for a reckoning and deliverance into a life of learning, Turner survives through tenacity alone. The story calls us all to understand that there are many untold narratives of abuses, cruelty and punishment meted out by those whose only purpose in life seems to be to diminish all of our humanity. Where there seems little to hope for in the novel, the writing, in all its descriptive and narrative beauty, forces us to look into ourselves deeply and to come to our own reckoning with our need to rescue these narratives from oblivion and to make them part of the story of America, with or without redemption.
From time to time it appeared that he had no goddamned sense. He couldn’t explain it, that even to himself, until At Zion Hill gave him a language. We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness. The record went around and around, like an argument that always returned to its unassailable premise, and Dr. King’s words filled the front room of the shotgun house. Elwood bent to a code—Dr. King gave that code shape, articulation, and meaning. There are big forces that want to keep the Negro down, like Jim Crow, and there are small forces that want to keep you down, like other people, and in the face of all those things, the big ones and the smaller ones, you have to stand up straight and maintain your sense of who you are (pp. 26-27).
Elmwood thinks to himself,
This sense of dignity. The way the man said it, crackle and all: an inalienable strength. Even when the consequences lay in wait on dark street corners on your way home. They beat him up and tore his clothes and didn’t understand why he wanted to protect a white man….Not because any attack on his brother was an attack on himself…but because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity (pp. 26-27).
The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.
Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing” (pp. 172-173).
The Night Watchman (2020) - Louise Erdrich
Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman and Chippewa council member, enlists the help of Louis Pipestone to get signatures on a petition to Congress in order to safeguard the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota against the U.S. government’s attempts to violate its treaties with Native nations, take their land and “terminate all tribes.” Louis Pipestone is the right person to entrust with this task,
… (he) tended the petition like a garden. He kept it with him at all times. In town, his eyes sharpened when he noticed a tribal member who hadn’t yet signed. Wherever they were—at the gas pump, mercantile, at Henry’s, on the road, or outside the clinic and hospital—Louis cornered them. If they were waiting for a baby to be born, he’d have them sign. If they were laughing, if they were arguing. If they were taking a child home from school, they signed. If it looked like someone was bargaining with the bootlegger, he got both to sign. His smile would appear. He knew the power of it. ‘Cheeks.’ Arms hard as fence posts. A homely buffalo head on bandy legs (p. 160).
Thomas’ cousin Zhaanat considers how things started to go wrong for Native peoples:
…when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance. But it seemed to Zhaanat that this behavior had caused a rift in the life of places. The animals didn’t come around to these locations stained by the names of humans. Plants, also, had begun to grow fitfully. The most delicate of her plant medicines were even dying out all together, or perhaps they had torn themselves up by the roots to drag their fruits and leaves to secret spots where even Zhaanat couldn’t find them. And now even these half ruined places were going to be taken. In her experience, once these people talked of taking land it was as good as gone (p. 345).
Zhaanat’s daughter, Vera, like so many native young people who are searching for a different kind of life, leaves the reservation. However, she confronts a society and culture that is both racist and sexist, and gets trapped and exploited by white men:
…(they) smelled of hot oil, liquor, sweat, spoiled meat, a million cigarettes, and they spoke in the language of the wolverine. Their beards ground against her face until her cheeks were raw. If she wanted to get away, she’d have to run through knives, she would have no skin left to protect her. She would be raw flesh. She would be a thing. She would be agony. Giant motors gnashed behind the wall. Occasionally, like a reverberating gong, she heard her mother call her name (p. 228).
For his whole life, Thomas has tried to “fit” into the dominant white culture; to mold himself to the will of white men. Echoing W.E.B. DuBois’ notion of “double consciousness,” a necessary survival strategy for African Americans and all oppressed peoples, Thomas intimately knows the ways of his oppressors. But he comes to the realization that he could never succeed in being accepted or protecting his family or community:
Without warning, they threw you down. That’s how it was to live with them. Oh it was! Thomas had studied them. He had striven in every way to be like his teachers. And every boss. He had tried to make their ways his ways. Even if he didn’t like their ways, he tried. He’d tried to make money, like them. He’d thought that if he worked hard enough and followed their rules this would mean he could keep his family secure, his people from the worst harms, but none of that was true. Into his brain like a foul seep was the knowledge of what men had done to Vera (pp. 225-226).
The Orphan Master’s Son: A Novel (2012) - Adam Johnson
The brutal physical and psychological oppression of this novel’s “fictive” North Korean regime can, at times, be difficult to stomach, but the ever-twisting plot and the grit and perseverance of the protagonist makes it a true thriller. Jun Do, an orphan, rises from the lowest rung of society to the very top. To survive he carries out whatever tasks his superiors assign him. His masterful skills in espionage and martial arts eventually enable him to steal the identity of Commander Ga, the main rival of “Dear Leader.” Unlike his oppressed fellow citizens, Jun Do, aka Ga, strives to create the story of his own life and thereby experience freedom.
On a diplomatic mission to Texas, Ga doubts he can explain his experience of “freedom” in his homeland.
How to explain his country… How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan—that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with the other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere—that was the purest freedom. How to make someone understand that the scorch-water they made from the rice burned to the bottom of the pot tasted better than any Texas lemonade? (p. 154).
During an interrogation, Ga recalls:
In pain school, they’d taught him to find his reserve, a private place he could go in unbearable moments. A pain reserve was like a real reserve--you put a fence around it, attended to its welfare, kept it pristine, and dealt with all trespassers. Nobody could ever know what your pain reserve was, even if you’d chosen the most obvious, rudimentary element of your life, because if you lost your pain reserve, you’d lost everything (p. 209).
Ga, contemplating his pending imprisonment, muses:
In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you’d once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors, and your eyes had behold colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself -- Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs--you let go of all the others, each person you’d once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary (p. 369).
The Overstory (2019) - Richard Powers
The elegance of this book lies in its structure and detail, its poetic language, its tree-love, and the weaving together of nine disparate lives. All of the characters have their own stories about their reverence for trees, but their stories are deepened when Powers masterfully brings them together. In this way, trees serve as the loom where the threads of these disparate lives are woven together.
Nick Hoel’s tree-love starts through his ancestors’ journey from Norway to Brooklyn and then on to Iowa, with a pocket full of chestnuts. Nick intersects with another main character, Olivia, when she stops at his family farm while making her way to California to save redwoods, 30-stories high. After a near-death experience and an epiphany Olivia learns what she has to do. She is lured to the side of the road in Iowa by what, from a distance, she perceives as a hitchhiker, then sees it’s an enormous tree—big enough to fill an entire train car, like the one she had seen in Indiana, on “that lumber death-train” (p. 172). This alluring, gigantic chestnut tree is the one remaining tree that Nick’s ancestors planted. Nick is still living in the family farmhouse attached to this tree—making tree art from the fallen, diseased sister-trees and awaiting the imminent transfer of the farm. His extended family sold this land-legacy to “the devil and all his subsidiaries,” Nick tells Olivia (p. 175). Since he has no other plans, Nick joins Olivia on her pilgrimage west.
Mimi Ma’s first tree is her father Winston’s “substantial mulberry” in their backyard in Wheaton, Illinois. A young Doug Pavlicek, a Vietnam Vet, meets his tree when his supply plane, heading to Cambodia, burns and he falls from the sky into the arms of a 300-year-old banyan tree. Trees connect Mimi with Doug.
The couple, Ray Brinkman and Dorothy Cazaly, plant a tree in their garden for each anniversary to commemorate the fact that they met and fell in love when they were both members of a cast in a play in which Ray played the role of a tree.
In a tragic and transformative accident, eleven-year-old Neelay Mehta, falls from a high branch of a California oak. His body is broken but his mind-power magnified; he succeeds in the coding game-world of California. The author describes Neelay’s power: “Sometimes he’s a traveler in that country of surprise that he’ll come to build, when machines are at last fast enough to keep up with his imagination” (p. 103).
Powers creates a beautiful dad-daughter relationship for my favorite character, Patricia “Plant-Patty” Westerford. Patricia’s Dad is an agricultural extension agent in southwest Ohio. Recognizing that their child is more at home with twigs, plantlife, and the understory, than with people, Patty’s parents have her “evaluated” and find that she has a hearing deficit. Her father is devoted to his plant-girl and nurtures her love, bringing her on his ag tours. “She becomes her father’s star and only pupil for the simple reason that she alone, of all the family, sees what he knows: plants are willful and crafty and after something, just like people” (p. 114).
It is Dr. Patricia Westerford’s tree-love and seeing that bring her, before others, to the understanding that trees are signaling to each other; that they practice reciprocity. The best scientists are in love with the object of their science and so is Patricia Westerford.
What existentially links each character to the others is their tree-love and their understanding that destruction of the trees, of the forest, will be the annihilation of humankind. Their predominant tool is activism; activism to the point of body-as-barricade against the tree-cutters and their equipment, to the point of prison, and to the point of death.
The voice of each character is distinctive which helps the reader keep straight such a large cast. Here is Doug Pavlicek thinking, writing:
What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind…We’re cashing in on a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Doug Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo (p. 386).
Late in the book, Dorothy Cazaly is contemplating her husband’s feelings as he watches their stand of anniversary trees in the yard each day. Now paralyzed, Ray sees them from his bed.
It strikes her that she envies him. His years of forced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything (p. 458).
Powers begs the question: What if tranquility wasn’t forced but we invited it; what might we see?
There are advanced ancient peoples, still alive, still knowing that trees are living communities. When Patricia Westerford is on a seed pilgrimage in western Brazil, Powers writes:
Just upriver, the Achuar—people of the palm tree—sing to their gardens and forests, but secretly, in their heads, so only the souls of the plants can hear. Trees are their kin, with hopes, fears, and social codes, and their goal as people has always been to charm and inveigle green things, to win them in symbolic marriage. These are the wedding songs Patricia’s seed bank needs. Such a culture might save the Earth. She can think of little else that can (p. 394).
Nor can Powers.
Barbara Kingsolver, in her New York Times Book Review of The Overstory (April 9, 2018), wrote that the book’s “protagonists are trees.” I don’t totally agree with this. I think Powers is reminding us that we are partners—albeit humble partners—to the trees. And we have much to do to help them thrive, to help them withstand the considerable assaults we humans foist upon them.
The Prophets (2021) - Robert Jones Jr.
The Prophets demands a lot of its readers. At times semantically difficult, the novel also assumes some familiarity with the Bible, the source for many of the chapter titles. Nonetheless, the novel rewards its readers with a wide-ranging perspective on the matriarchal society from which Africans were taken and enslaved, the horrors and tragedies of the slave trade and slavery, and the moral courage of those enslaved. The story takes place on a plantation in Mississippi and while the plot centers around two enslaved young men (Samuel and Isaiah) whose love for each other inspires many of those around them, it is black women who rebel most fiercely against their oppressors and who fight to preserve their African heritage.
Samuel grunts and sighs about their hard work with the barn animals, “Tiny resistances were a kind of healing in a weeping place” (p. 8).
Puah, an enslaved young woman, ”knew that the secret of strength was in how much truth could be endured” (p. 103).
Isaiah and Samuel eat from a beautiful basket of food Maggie (the cook) left for them (a rare, appreciated gift):
Neither of them spoke, but they each continued to eat, picking things from the cloth, slowly, carefully, one with grateful hands, the other with discerning ones, like ritual, but without prayer because they didn’t need one , and respect was freely given. But still, it was solemn-like, holy, as unto a last supper”(p. 222).
Regarding the placement of the outhouse: “…far enough away from the house that the odor didn’t overwhelm. Not too far from the flowers so that they, too, could be the arbitration between what stank and what bloomed” (p. 251).
Adam (a light-complected, enslaved man on the plantation who preaches to the others), thinking about Isaiah and Samuel:
His (Adam’s) admiration for Isaiah and Samuel magnified because there they were, in that barn, dim in the shadows of a truth that openly vexed anyone accustomed to lies. They were in the midst of each other and that hurt Adam as much as it pleased him (p. 284).
Adam’s heritage would have made him free man…”Not that they honored law about skin. Their commandments—haphazard, arbitrary, and utterly provisional—shattered sense to pieces” (p. 291).
The day Isaiah, only a boy, arrived at the plantation, “Empty”:
Samuel gave him some water and Isaiah peeked into his soul. It shocked Samuel’s eyes wide open to feel something touch him from the inside, like a song unfolding in his gut. It tickled. He figured that was the day he was truly born, that was his birthday if ever he had one (p. 300).
About Maggie and her rebellion against her captors’ attempts at brainwashing the enslaved to denigrate themselves::
She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties.For she was the kind of black that made tuba men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark (p. 39).
The Sentence (2021) - Louise Erdrich
Many works of fiction require some suspension of disbelief. Reading The Sentence, I often felt as though this requested too much of that suspension. The tangible ghost haunting two of the novel’s main characters—Tookie, the novel’s voice, and the independent bookstore where she works. This ghost so real, it could wrestle Tookie to the floor and try to occupy the interior of her physical self. The juxtaposition of the fantastical ghost with the novel’s real-time setting and events perhaps makes the work all the more jarring.
The book pays tribute to small, independent bookstores—one woman drives an hour to shop at this one and is rewarded by Tookie and her co-worker Pensemon with getting her book selection complimentary! Set decidedly in our pandemic time, this novel provides insight into the very important role that books, bookstores and independent, specialty bookstores play now. Tookie remarks “We are filling school orders from all over the country. We try our best to vet our books and decide which Native books are good to carry, and we talk teachers and librarians through the process (p. 302).”
Erdrich captures feelings that can easily resonate with many of us in pandemic time. Tookie and her husband drive through their deserted town, in lockdown, to get Chinese take-out; she thinks: “There was a slick of rain on the empty, peaceful streets . . . Why was it that I felt this was the world I’d always waited for (p.189).”
Tookie is rebuilding her life after being incarcerated for helping friends with a dead body that was not murdered, just moved. One key contributor to Tookie’s rebuilding is Pollux, the arresting officer, now her husband. Pollux is the novel’s main keeper of Native American (NDN) stories and rituals. He shares them and we learn. Sometimes we get a glimpse of both the rituals and the uniquely special nature of Tookie and Pollux’s relationship. Pollux orders authentic eagle feathers and when they arrive he carefully, gently straightens the feathers over a flame. Tookie, watching this, thinks: “I know the feathers actually were me—Tookie—straightened by warmth a thousand times” (p. 231).
Erdrich is forever the great teller of Native American stories and beliefs. Pollux had a grandma who told tales about dogs so close to people that “sometimes when death shows up, the dog will step in and take the hit (p. 305).” This is confirmed for Tookie when the ghost-dog of an older character, who took a bad fall, shows up outside the bookstore; the older man had just averted death.
If Louise Erdrich is “your” author, read The Sentence. It’s part of her oeuvre, along with her best, and it won’t disappoint. If Louise Erdrich is new for you, then start with another—The Night Watchman—perhaps (also reviewed in this CLS section). Good reading, all!
Summerwater ( 2021) - Sarah Moss
A series of interlocking vignettes, the chapters of Summerwater allow us to peek into the lives of people at different stages of life who are vacationing in cabins on an isolated loch in the wilderness of rural Scotland. The incessant rain, itself a prominent character in the story, dampens the tone of the novel along with the spirit of its other characters, and forebodes a relentless sense of doom. At times wryly humorous, the novel lays bare the quirkiness of human nature. Lurking beneath the surface is a resentment at the presence of an Eastern European family, whose cabin, in contrast to those of the British vacationers, is constantly abuzz with visitors and merrymaking. A sudden tragedy brings all the families together, providing further insight into the very different personalities of each character.
Robert, a retired doctor whose wife, Mary is showing signs of dementia, realizes that, “There are moments in his retirement that seem to be the opposite of dancing, a game of hide-and-seek in which the unspeakable objective is to avoid the beloved” (p. 30).
Moss manages to take us inside Mary’s often confused mind,
Why did she come over here, anyway? What time is it? The light never changes, these dull summer days, hour after hour of grey pallor seeping through the trees, the sky at breakfast no different from bedtime. Still raining, Coming up five. If she makes something complicated for tea, it could be time to start cooking, or at least arranging things ready to cook. She made a plan when they went to the shops, wrote out a list of meals and ingredients. There was fish, wasn’t there, in the freezer? And potatoes, new potatoes in the summer, and you’re allowed to eat butter again now after all those years when it would kill you just to look at the wrapper. There’s mint in the pot on the veranda…Mary unlocks the French window but the key doesn’t work. David (her husband) looks at her over the top of his book. It’s already open, he says, what are you going out there for?
She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know why she’s opening the door, and the weather the way it is. Where is she going?… To pick leaves, she says, for the potatoes… David puts the book in his lap. Leaves, he says.
She makes a laugh. Oh, you know, she says, for the potatoes, you’ve always liked them like that. Butter and a bit of what’s-it. Mint, he says. Butter and mint. We haven’t had herbs out there for years, Mary (pp. 132-133).
Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Moss prefigures what will unfold. She writes about Lola (the daughter of one of the vacationers) who had two things in her pocket—(an inhaler for her asthma and),
a lighter she found in her Mum’s handbag, in the lining where Mum keeps the cigarettes they’re not supposed to know about…Lola likes lighters, the way you just flick with your thumb and there’s a real live flame right there in your hand and you think it will burn you but it doesn’t (p. 69).
Transcendent Kingdom (2020) - Yaa Gyasi
In her second novel, Yaa Gyasi draws her main character (Gifty) in such intimate detail that the reader might think that it is a memoir. Born of immigrant Ghanaian parents, a very young Gifty and her older brother Nana are abandoned by their father (the “Chin-Chin Man”). While visiting his native country, the Chin-Chin Man decides never to return to Huntsville, Alabama, where, as an immigrant and a Black man, he was treated with fear and suspicion.
Gifty is next “abandoned” by Nana, her beloved older brother, the person to whom she feels closest. Nana, a gifted athlete, is injured during a basketball game. His treatment with an opioid leads to addiction and, a couple of years later, to a fatal overdose. Nana’s addiction becomes the focal point of family life. Gifty verbalizes what many family members and friends of addicts must experience:
. . . I had exercised a “don’t dare mention it” kind of policy, figuring that if I avoided any talk of drugs or addiction, then the problem would go away on its own. But it wasn’t just that I avoided mentioning Nana’s addiction because I wanted it to go away; it was that it was so ever-present that mentioning it felt ridiculous, redundant. In just that short amount of time, Nana’s addiction had become the sun around which all our lives revolved. I didn’t want to stare directly at it (pp. 152-53).
Gifty’s mother, who has struggled to support her family and to keep Nana safe, feels guilty about not having helped her son enough. Soon after Nana’s death she becomes severely depressed and dysfunctional. She sends Gifty off for the summer to live with an aunt in Ghana. But when Gifty returns, it is clear that her mother will never be the same again. Thus, Gifty suffers a third abandonment.
Having experienced little affection in her life, Gifty has problems with trust and intimacy. She finds reasons to maintain emotional distance in her relationships – with her best friend Anne; her boyfriend Raymond; Katherine, a colleague who tries to help her; and Han, a fellow scientist who shares the lab with her.
Gifty is most at ease when alone in the lab, where she is using optogenetics on mice to learn about addictive behaviors. Undoubtedly, Nana’s death has helped her formulate the crucial question that she is exploring in her research: “Can an animal restrain itself from pursuing a reward, especially when there is risk involved” (pp. 174-75)? Restraint-and-reward is a way to visualize Gifty’s own life: restraint in the realm of emotions, love; reward from having a probing, smart mind that opens worlds for her.
Raised as an Evangelical, Gifty finds it possible to embrace both religion and science. She eloquently explains that there need not be any conflict between these two spheres:
I grew up around people who were distrustful of science, who thought of it as a cunning trick to rob them of their faith, and I have been educated around scientists and laypeople alike who talk about religion as though it were a comfort blanket for the dumb and the weak, a way to extol the virtues of a God more improbable than our own human existence. But this tension, the idea that one must necessarily choose between science and relation, is false. I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science. Both satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning (pp. 212-13).
While Gifty is at Stanford, her mother’s condition deteriorates, and Gifty has her mother move in with her. She is old enough now to realize that her mother has also suffered many losses:
It was hard for me not to take inventory of all that she had lost–her home country, her husband, her son. The losses just kept piling up. It was hard for me to see her there, hear her ragged breath, and think of how she had persevered, but she had. Just lying there in my bed was a testament to her perseverance, to the fact that she had survived, even when she wasn’t sure she wanted to (p. 265).
Gifty and her mother, both survivors, remind us of the depth of familial relationships, however emotionally fraught they may be.
The novel’s final chapter is an epilogue in which time has been fast-forwarded a few years. Now running a lab at Princeton, Gifty leaves us with one last impression of the meaningfulness of her work: “I’ve seen enough in a mouse to understand transcendence, holiness, redemption. In people, I’ve seen even more” (p. 288).
In this Bildungsroman, Gyasi masterfully weaves all her salient themes into the life of a wonderfully complex character. We watch intently as young Gifty struggles against so many difficulties to make meaning in her life.
Trust (2022) - Hernan Diaz.
Trust is a novel in four parts; its complex architecture is novel in itself; i.e., new, fresh. The book’s first section is a novel within the novel–an historical fiction based on the life of Andrew Bevel, a Wall Street phenom (or perp, depending on one’s perspective). The next section portrays Bevel’s life from his own viewpoint; Bevel wants to dispel the negative images of him and of his marriage that were presented in the aforementioned historical novel. To accomplish this he hires a young woman named Ida Partenza as a ghostwriter for his autobiography.
The third section is Ida’s “memoir remembered,” where she tells stories of her immigrant parents’ lives and of her own, including her ghost-writing job. The fourth and final section shows Ida years later when she finds Mildred’s diary. In a stunning string of diary entries, we meet the real Mildred–not the woman Bevel described to Ida as naive. dilettantish, and almost beatific. We also meet the real Andrew, a man whose capitalistic success is not, as he claims, due to his own “unique combination of instinct and method” (p. 180).
The women in Diaz’s novel are striking, real, well-drawn characters (and my favorites). This is not to say that his male characters aren’t memorable. For example, Ida’s irascible Italian-refusing-to-be-American father is exquisitely drawn: “My father never called himself an immigrant. He was an exile” (p. 214). The author’s depiction of their father-daughter relationship is equally compelling. When Ida thinks about moving out from her socialist father’s apartment, she anticipates his reaction: “Father would think I’m becoming a bourgeoise lady, interested in clothes, hairdos, vacations, hobbies. A fight would ensue, after which I would be summarily sentenced to years of tight-lipped rage” (p. 339).
Ida does move out, which is indicative of how well Diaz’s women know themselves, how well they search out and speak their truth–in contrast to the leading men in the novel. These women are heroic in a time period – the Crash and Great Depression – when women had scant public authority or power. In truth, the male characters here have only the veneer of power; the women have real, intelligent power. Mildred’s diary entries, her inner thoughts, are testimonials to this..
The greatest novels, even in the historical fiction genre, speak not only about their particular time period; they are timeless, like Diaz’s novel. Regrettably, his subject—the shady dealings of the stock market: stock manipulation, arbitrage, and what, since the 1940s, we call “hedge fund” activity–remain problematic today. (One case in point: In the wake of the 2008 housing/mortgage fiasco, hedge funds were buying up single-family homes that buyers-occupants could no longer afford in order to sell them later at outsized profits.)
In Trust, Diaz’s artistry is on full display. He draws his characters intimately, with exacto-knife precision. And he gives us beautiful, haunting descriptions:
Morning brought out a deeper sort of white from the changeless snows capping the peaks on either side of the valley, which, later in the midday sun, dappled with flocks of small solid clouds, while unseen birds found themselves, yet again, unable to break their bondage to their two or four notes. The air was laced with the scent of water, stone, and the long-dead things that, darkly, were finding their way back to life deep under the dew-soaked dirt. During that unpopulated hour, the buildings ceased to be objects of artifice and industry to reveal the nature fossilized in them and come forth in their mineral presence. The breeze dissolved in stiller air; the treetops, so green they were black against the blue, stopped swaying. And for a moment, there was no struggle and all was at rest, because time seemed to have arrived at its destination (p. 98; my emphasis).
Trust is a read to love.
Unquiet (2019) - Linn Ullmann
Unquiet: a novel is Linn Ullmann’s sixth book. It is a book about grief and loss, aging, family and love. But mostly it is about memory and about her father, the renowned Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergmann. She was the youngest of his nine children and as a child, she spent summers with him at Hammars, his estate on the Baltic Sea. She returns as an adult to interview him about his life and his legacy. But by the time she does, he has already forgotten so much.
It was no longer the odd word that had gone missing. Maybe half of them. The forgotten words formed a long, sinuous trail that stretched from the stony beach, through the forest, and all the way into the rooms at Hammars. When the moon rose and he went out to look for them, the birds had gotten there first…I said to myself: But he has lost his senses, we can’t do the interviews now, it’s too late (p. 71).
Then Ullmann wonders if the expression, “lost his senses,” is misleading for Bergmann can see out of one eye, can hear out of one ear and “His sense of touch must have been magnified sevenfold. He would flinch if I so much as brushed against him, as though his skin had been torn off. I didn’t touch his cheek or hand as often as I used to. He opened and closed himself, continuously” (p. 71).
Nonetheless, woven throughout this memoir/novel are excerpts from their conversations, many of which are very striking.
Ullmann asks her father: “…you once said that words and memories go missing when you grow old. I was wondering if there are other things that disappear, things that you regret or don’t regret having lost?
He replies, “That I regret or don’t regret? I don’t know. There are ordinary, everyday things that used to matter but that don’t matter any longer” (p. 127).
Apparently, throughout his life, Bergmann had thought a lot about the nature of anger, and at one point, he asks Ullmann if she is angry or if there is anything “unresolved” between them. Ullmann writes,
The kind of anger he called murderous rage…Feeling like you can’t breathe?…Scorn, contempt, resentment, self-pity?…Rage as a form of gluttony: First the anger devours you and then you devour the anger, it never stops. If you are unfortunate to be saddled with such rage, he said, you have to learn to control it…He said: some people have perfect pitch, they can hear the buzzing of a bee and say, You hear that? That’s a G sharp! Some people are stingy. Some people can dance. Some are angry…if you let your rage get the better of you and lash out like a poisonous liver sausage, you’ll only waste valuable time and ruin things for yourself and whatever you hope to achieve, not to mention the fact that you’ll have to call everybody the next day and apologize” (pp. 69-70).
Ullmann also writes about her father’s sense of grief and mourning :
“To mourn another person is not necessarily the same as despair. When Ingrid died, my father was grief-stricken. He despaired. He said he wanted to die but was too much of a coward to kill himself. I am a seventy-four-year-old man and only now does God decide to kick me out of the nursery, he said. My father lost a son as well. Jan, his oldest. If I had lost a child, despair would have been too feeble a word…I wouldn’t have known how to go on. But he did…Children were not what mattered most to him…To be honest, I think I have mourned my parents all my life They changed before my eyes the way my children change before my eyes and I don’t really know who I was to them (p.68).
Ullmann opens chapter five with musings about writing, especially writing about real people, and about memory:
In order to write about real people—parents, children, lovers, friends, enemies, brothers, uncles, or the occasional passerby—it is necessary to make them fictional. I believe this is the only way of breathing life into them. To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time…(I) felt unnerved by how much I had forgotten. I have some letters, some photographs, some scattered scraps of paper, but I can’t say why I kept precisely those scraps rather than others, I have six recorded conversations with my father, but by the time we did the interviews he was so old that he had forgotten most of his own and our shared history. I remember what happened, I think I remember what happened, but some things I probably made up…(p. 275).
The Vanishing Half (2020) - Brit Bennett
In The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett explores the theme of identity in unique ways. Stella and Desirée Vignes are raised in a black town where light skin like theirs is prized. When the twins leave home at sixteen, their lives take completely different paths. Stella decides to pass for white, marries a white man and raises a daughter, Kennedy, all while keeping her heritage a secret. Meanwhile, Desirée, who has escaped an abusive husband, returns to live in her mother’s home with her dark-skinned daughter, Jude, who must find her way in this oddly prejudiced town. Coincidence brings the adult Jude, whose partner is transgender, in contact with her cousin Kennedy, to whom Jude eventually reveals Stella’s secret. Ultimately it is the younger generation that comes to grips with their identity.
About “passing,” Stella thinks, “A secret transgression was even more thrilling than a shared one. She had shared everything with Desirée. She wanted something of her own” (p. 257).
Bennett describes Jude as “… so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and end of the world.” And, on account of her blackness, she is isolated from the rest of the community. Here Bennett writes about Jude’s loneliness in high school: “You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it” (p. 84).
Jude thinks about her loneliness in high school: “You could never get quite used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it” (p. 88).
What Are You Going Through (2020) - Sigrid Nunez
What Are You Going Through is a compelling, compact novel about the depth and beauty of friendship and death’s inevitability. If you’re interested in friendship, friendship renewed, and the journey toward death when a terminal-illness sentence has been delivered, Nunez’s novel is one you’ll want to read. Her keen insight is on display. Human-to-human friendship is central, as is death at its most poignant time of life when it is truly imminent and more present than usual.
This novel is set in the current historic moment minus a couple of years. The narrator’s ex, a man who lectures on climate, sees only foreboding and doom. He tells her: “All other issues aside, who could ever forgive those Americans…all those privileged, well-educated Americans who elected a climate-change denialist to the world’s most powerful office” (p. 146).
The timeframe is now, but the novel’s subjects are timeless; e.g., how human beings caught up in their own crises lose sight of the immediate context and of others. An old male friend visits the woman in hospital, where she is having final tests. He’s lost his job at a paper and his teaching position because of sexual misconduct; crying, he tells the dying woman, before catching himself: “I might as well kill myself.” Being a woman, she tells the narrator: “I comforted him, but it wasn’t alright.” And to him, she says: “No goddamn sniveling or blubbering in front of me” (p. 72).
The questions we might pose to ourselves, Nunez understands and asks. The dying woman, a friend from a much earlier time during journalism school, asks the narrator to stay with her through her last days of life, in a neutral, short-term rental house in New England, where she will end her life. The narrator’s first response is that she cannot do this. Then she does.
There are exquisite ruminations by the terminally-ill woman. As snow falls outside her hospital window, as the sun is going down, the dying woman says, “Pink snowflakes…Well, I’ve lived to see that” (p. 73). Silent exchanges signal the connectedness between these two women, which Nunez describes so well. The dying woman tells the narrator: “When I lie here thinking, especially at night, often it’s as if I have all the time in the world. ‘That must be eternity,’ I said without speaking. ‘The nearness of eternity,’ she agreed silently” (p. 72). This is an early preview of the special intimacy between these two friends.
Maybe the decision to go alongside the friend on her journey to death is sealed the night the two women visit an old NY watering hole where they did their drinking in the early days of friendship. The place is “fancied up now but still holy ground.” The narrator thinks, You know she’s your girlfriend when she holds your hair out of your face while you puke” (p. 100).
Nunez shows us how the ordinary is sustaining, even in a friend’s final days, even when death is palpable. The two friends watch DVDs, they laugh, “they choke and clutch each other like two people hopelessly trying to save each other from drowning” (pp. 132-3).
One of the films they watch together is Ozu’s Tokyo Story, which depicts the growing emotional distance between elderly parents and their children. Death then intervenes, making renewing the connection between the generations impossible. The narrator tells us that Orson Welles dubbed this the saddest picture ever made, but she lets us know she didn’t regret watching it: “No matter how sad, a beautifully told story lifts you up” (133). This applies to What Are You Going Through.
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