News of the World by Paulette Jiles – Book

In Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World, Captain Kidd is in Wichita Falls, Texas, five years after the end of the Civil War, and Texas is in the midst of political upheaval. The Indians are still actively raiding travelers and communities whenever they feel that they need threats to help with treaty negotiations. Captain Kidd is a retired soldier and a printer/journalist forced out of business by the economy and then by the war. His great love of news has stayed with him through all the chaos of recent years. He is a lover of geography, literacy, and all human events in this world.

He has decided to earn his way in the world, now that his wife is dead and his two daughters are grown, by traveling to towns and small cities throughout the west, where newspapers are just about as scarce as readers, holding meetings to read out the “news of the world”. He avoids politics in these contentious times. He likes to read about exotic locations and interesting tidbits from lands people have heard of but will probably never travel to. He gives people a chance to escape the verbal battles that rage around them and marvel that other people live such odd lives and are, perhaps, unluckier than they are. People pay a dime to attend this somewhat cerebral entertainment.

In Wichita Falls he runs into an old acquaintance who works as a freighter, moving merchandise by wagon from a buyer to a seller, or vice versa. His friend Britt, it turns out, has been paid 50 dollars in gold to return a white girl, kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe when she was 3 to her Aunt and Uncle near San Antonio. His friend begs him to take this girl off his hands. Texas is a very big state and San Antonio is far out of Britt’s way. He will lose a lot of money if he takes her all the way home. He will give the gold to Captain Kidd.

“She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians’ manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. … She had no more expression than an egg.”

Now Captain Kidd does not in any way want to undertake this task. It is the rainy season and rivers are rising and he would have to cross several to get this child to San Antonio. Texas is relatively lawless and there could be bandits on the road. But he is the father of two daughters. And so we have a journey tale as this good man reluctantly undertakes the responsibility to get this child to all of the family she has left, people she does not even know. What happens on that journey, watching these two bond, is a sweet story and sometimes I do love a sweet story.

The author, Paulette Jiles, became interested in stories of children who were kidnapped by the Indians because they gave up their European heritage so easily and they were never happy to give up their second-hand Indian heritage. What was it about life with the tribes which gave children such a feeling of satisfaction and belonging even though it began as a harrowing and totally foreign experience? Of course we will probably never know the answer to this but there is still a part of us all that thinks that Native Americans or Indigenous People, or whatever the politically correct term is today, had a knack for living lightly on the earth and a natural social order which served most of them very well.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang – Book

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith) begins with a wife who stops eating meat. When her husband wants to know why she says “I had a dream”. As a reader we are privy to at least the text of her dream but her husband has little curiosity about this dream which returns over and over again. He never explores the dream with her because he thinks that he can be married and just go through the motions of the marriage relationship without any messy emotional subtext. He expects his wife Yeong-Hye to be the same. She will do all the wifely things the role requires and will be completely low maintenance and supportive. If women have fantasies about romantic love, perhaps there are men who have fantasies about no-fuss marriages such as this where no deep feelings are required, each partner simply plays their role.

Yeong-Hye’s vegetarianism is so extreme that it will no longer allow Mr. Cheong to live in his fantasy. The wife he chose for her ordinary ways is in a crisis that is disrupting the lives of her husband and also her family. I am what would be called a “maximillist”, if there were such a classification for people who like plenty of everything and who like it plush and fluffy. I guess the word often used is hedonist, although that word does not really fit. However, personally, I do have some experience with “minimalists” of varying degrees. I have a friend who is a fairly extreme minimalist, who does not even like gifts unless they are things that can be used up; who is so slim that she seems to be almost disappearing. This becomes the case with Yeong-Hye, who becomes so thin that her family tries to intervene, which ends up badly when her father slaps her and forces meat into her mouth.

The scenes change each time this book arrives at a new section. We think we have been transported into another story and that this is perhaps a book of short stories. It is, instead, more like a jazz piano composition that begins with a theme and then rearranges the notes in each new section only to have the main theme reappear and progress in new, but still familiar directions. This is a great book and short; a fast, but horrifying, yet artistically and intellectually satisfying, read.

How do we know so little about ourselves? How do we know so little about each other? Are most people this disconnected from each other? Even though this book is very sexual, it is not sensual. Even when connecting in very intimate ways these people have actually made little if any connection that brings any warmth to their daily lives.

Although we do get glimpses into Yeong-Hye’s young life because in the last section of the composition her older sister In-Hye becomes the narrator and she does, superficially attempt to unravel the reasons for her sister’s behavior, that dream that haunts Yeong-Hye is never satisfactorily explained (or maybe you will think it is). While certainly not a cheerful book, it is gripping and it plays on you like that jazz piano calmly going through its variations, with perhaps a somewhat emotional bridge in the middle.

The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis – Book

If you are of a certain age then you were just in your teens when Sylvia Plath committed suicide and you probably read The Bell Jar which young people, especially young women, still read today. Sylvia Plath was very interesting to English major types because she was young and she was already famous. She won a sort of internship at Mademoiselle Magazine and went off to live in New York City. Quite an accomplishment for someone just starting out in life and we will never know if, or how much, her early success contributed to her clinical depression. We know she was gone too quickly and we wondered what else she might have done if she had survived.

For a while the young Sylvia Plath lived at the Barbizon Hotel for Women which may have gained its fame from her short tenure there. I remember being fascinated to learn that there was a NYC residence that housed only women, with strict rules about guests of the male persuasion, much like the dorms I lived in at college where we were separated by gender and girls had serious rules, governing both curfews and male guests. It seemed so elegant and atavistic at the same time for a city as metropolitan as New York to have this type of restricted boarding house among its many idiosyncratic offerings.

In her book The Dollhouse, Fiona Davis, takes her readers into The Barbizon about 50 years after the days of Sylvia Plath, and at the same time, in flashbacks takes us back to the Barbizon in the 50’s. Her main character is a journalist of sorts for an online publication who happens to live at the Barbizon, now in transition with some units redone and sold as condos and some still rented to original tenants. After her married boyfriend, the owner of their shared condo, throws her out to go back to his wife she continues to try to interview some of these permanent residents who were there in the old days. One resident is especially interesting. She walks her dog everyday but no one has seen her face in many years. She wears a veil and there is a story that she has a terrible scar on her face and that someone fell from the lounge on the roof of the hotel to her death and that the mystery woman was with her when she fell.

Upon hearing this story our journalist friend is even more determined to hear the stories that the older residents have to tell. It’s almost like solving a mystery but one that was obviously resolved long ago as the veiled lady is not in prison. When circumstances conspire to allow Rose Lewin to install herself (without permission) in the mystery woman’s apartment the story begins to take shape. (There are repercussions.)

Although I did not get really attached to any of the characters in The Dollhouse, perhaps that was not the point of the novel. The author, through flashbacks does recreate the experience of living in the Barbizon which was very similar to living in a very classy dormitory. She also takes us into the jazz club scene and some of the diversity that is always encountered in this iconic city. And there is a bit of romance in the mix. However the content is a bit light and I was not successfully drawn into feeling emotionally involved in either the characters or the plot. (There was a spice book mentioned that I would love to see and smell). This is a good read, but not a great read.

The North Water by Ian McGuire – Book

If you choose to read The North Water by Ian McGuire you will be signing on for the last whaling voyage of the Volunteer to Greenland with Captain Brownlee and his crew. You will be traveling with a murderer and you will be a pawn in a plot to make the rich ship owner, named Baxter, richer. The world has discovered fossil fuels, oil and gas, and the market for whale oil has all but dried up. Baxter doesn’t want to lose any money in this energy transition and he has a plan.

I guarantee that Ian McGuire will show you the truest depths to which men can sink and that you will feel only barely better about his main character, Sumner, who has been signed on by Baxter as the ship’s doctor. (Perhaps there are good reasons these men are almost never referred to by their first names.) Sumner has fallen far and he is addicted to opium from his time as a medic in India. A ship’s doctor can order in a big supply of laudanum and stay out of the limelight and find himself with very light duties.

You may not make it through the first chapter, which is harsh and brutal, and even these two words are understatements. If you do there is a sorry tale to tell with implications for another transitional moment that our culture is going through right now with our need to shift away from fossil fuels. A lot of people think they stand to lose a lot of money and seem to be ready to do whatever they must to turn back the clock to keep their fortunes growing. Is what Baxter is doing any worse than what these 21^st century billionaires seem prepared to do? Judge for yourself.

Of course Baxter’s plans for self-preservation do not call for him to actually get involved in any of the seamy details. Brownlee is in on the plan but no one in his crew realizes what he is up to. Why does he take the Volunteer north when all the other ships begin to head south? How many survive this ill-fated trip? How does Sumner end up reluctantly solving a murder mystery and exposing a man with no soul? With murders big and small all over the place is one villain any worse than the next? This story is in no way uplifting, but there are reasons to read it if you have the stomach for it. The North Water by Ian McGuire will set you to thinking. It reminds me of books by Joseph Conrad, and Cormac McCarthy, and Herman Melville because it is both brutal and meaty.

The Whistler by John Grisham – Book

John Grisham writes about the corruption that often seems rampant in our culture, and that seems to arise from the dark side of humans, tempting people to break laws and then to defend their behavior physically by intimidation and even murder, if necessary. In this book The Whistler we begin with an unidentified whistle blower. Whistle blowers have been learning to remain anonymous because the information they share is not information someone (or some group) wants shared. In this case the people who would like to silence the whistle blower are criminals so we see the need for secrecy, but how the two parties (info providers and info recipients) react is often less clear cut.

There is a go-between in this case, a guy who has no known address (lives on a boat) and has a fake name and basically lives off the grid. He relays the information from the whistle blower to Lacy and Hugo who work for Board of Judicial Conduct for the State of Florida in St. Augustine. Lacy and Hugo are tasked with investigating complaints about judges. They are not detectives or law enforcers and are not used to dealing with dangerous criminals or even equipped to do so. But this time the judge in question is entwined in a web of some complexity. There is a criminal gang involved, a Native America tribe, a ton of expensive and profitable development, and a casino on Indian land that is a gold mine once all that nearby development is in place.

But everyone is holding his/her cards close to the vest. The whistler wants to be protected before offering data that would prove that a corrupt judge is at the center of this web. The off-the-grid go-between has had dealings with this gang before, and although the gang is mainly interested in building things, raking off profits, accepting protection fees and off-shoring lots of laundered cash, the gang does not mind knocking someone off if it becomes necessary. In fact at least one person we have come to like does get killed and Lacy almost dies. As usual John Grisham puts himself and us at the intersection of human greed and human corruption.

Exactly how corrupt is the Honorable Claudia McDover? Is she worth taking down? Lacy is definitely in way over her head and even before she has any real proof to go on there is a target on her and her partner. This is one hot case for a pair used to going after small time judicial misconduct.

John Grisham, while he does not suck us in quite the way he did in his early books, still gives us a thriller that manages to cover both whistle-blowing and the human love affair with money however it is obtained. It is perfect for a weekend when TV is a wasteland, as it is most weekends, and if you like Grisham’s book you should enjoy The Whistler.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple – Book

“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”

This is the mantra that Eleanor chants (and since this book is written in the first person it is quite a while before we learn Eleanor’s name – first we know she is Mom to Timby, and she is Joe’s wife, she writes graphic novels, at least she is supposed to be writing one; her husband is a “hand” surgeon who is in much demand in sports circles – we learn all this before we know her name). No matter, the pledge she makes on the very first page tells us plenty about how Eleanor’s life has been going and it seems a bit haphazard, self-absorbed, and borderline clinically depressed. Once she catalogs her faults and commits to change you would think she would catch a break while she tries out her new lifestyle. But right from the very beginning this is a day that cannot be tamed and Eleanor’s creator, Maria Semple, treats us to a manic day that has us (and Eleanor) doubting whether she has already jinxed her life beyond repair. Here is a writer who puts us right inside her character’s head and has us experience this absolutely mind-bending day at the same breakneck speed that it assaults and is assaulted by Eleanor. I have never made a pledge quite this detailed but I have set out to live a day on my own terms and I have found that our best laid plans like to turn and bite us in the butt, just for fun. This book is so good that we fly through it as if the family dog Yo-Yo was pulling us at the end of his leash and when it’s over we’re hardly sure what will happen next – although clearly change is indicated by the events of this whirlwind day. Where does Eleanor’s sister Ivy fit in to the picture? Why doesn’t Timby know that he has an aunt? All is revealed. It’s complicated.

The story ends with Eleanor repeating the same pledge she made the previous day. Although we are unsure, it seems as if she might make some progress after the revelations of the day before. Maria Semple’s current title is Today Will Be Different. She is also the author of the memorable Where’d You Go, Bernadette. She is a true original, and her books are wonderful.

Faithful by Alice Hoffman – Book

I’m still reading Alice Hoffman’s books, even after all these years and it is not a difficult task to be a loyal fan because her writing is always pretty flawless. Of course not every book has been a favorite; there are some tales I have liked better than others, and there are still books that really hit the literary spot for me. Faithful is almost in that sweet spot. It a very good book, just not one I would put on her top shelf. It has a beautiful blue cover and it contains lots of blue imagery, but it seems to lead to nothing more than a very blue mood, or perhaps the ink tattoo artists use.

We begin with two high school beauties, one slightly prettier than the other, with all the confidence and arrogance their looks endow them with. These two are a powerful presence in their school. Almost everyone is either in love with them or envies them. Then life happens. One beauty ends up in a coma in her childhood bedroom with the rose wallpaper. That’s Helene Boyd. The other Shelby Richmond, stops her life to do penance for still being alive. She shaves her head, once adorned with long stylish hair. She wears black clothing. She cuts herself. She slits her wrists. She ends up in a Psych ward where she is raped routinely by an orderly until her mother finds out and takes her home. Helene, it is rumored, can make miracles happen. Shelby can barely survive from day to day.

Someone is looking over Shelby though. Postcards arrive for her in the mail with interesting drawings and messages perhaps from an angel or a savior, or maybe somehow from Helene. They bear cryptic messages such as, “Say something”, “Do something”, “Be someone”. Shelby keeps them in a box with a blue velvet lining. Who will save her? Will anyone save her? That I cannot tell.

This is not rocket science. It is not the great American novel. It doesn’t employ deep symbolism or leave you in a literary trance. Still it portrays the depths of grief a human soul can plumb and it shows that the way out is a function of time and positive social interactions until one day hope becomes stronger than grief and the two strike a bargain that allows life to offer some sweetness once again. Faithful is a story of our times and one that young adults would find very relevant indeed.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett – Book

Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good.

The term literally meant “common well-being”.

There is, however, another form of commonwealth. The ever-helpful Dictionary.com offers this alternate definition: a “self-governing, autonomous political unit…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth

There are at least two commonwealths in the novel Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. In one instance the term most likely refers to the Commonwealth of Virginia (technically designated as such) and in the other instance it could describe the relationship that develops among the children in the two blended families we meet in this novel. If you have watched You’ve Got Mail as many times as I have, then you remember the scene in Kathleen Kelly/Meg Ryan’s little bookshop where Joe Fox/Tom Hanks is trying to hide his identity. When one of the children with him reveals that she is the aunt of the much older Joe Fox and the other young child reveals that he is Fox’s brother, Tom Hanks says, “We are an American family.” Well here in Commonwealth we find another such non-nuclear American family.

The beautiful Beverly is married to a man named Fix Keating, who is a policeman. When his second child is born an uninvited DA, Albert Cousins, crashes the party and that ends up being the catalyst that brings about the destruction of two marriages. The problem is that Beverly is a parent who really is not suited to parenting and her second husband, the wife stealer DA, Bert, is almost a completely absent father. These two parents reside in Virginia. Fix and the wife of Bert Cousins, Teresa reside in California. There are six children. Carolyn and Franny are the children of Beverly and Fix. Cal, Holly, Jeannette, and Albie are the children of Bert and Teresa. After Beverly and Bert divorce their spouses and marry each other, Fix and Teresa both remarry but not to each other. So each child ends up with 3 sets of part time parents.

Two of the children, Carolyn and Franny live in Virginia and only visit California; the other four spend the school year in California and the summers in Virginia. It is difficult to keep these families straight when the children are young. Although each child has his or her own personality, I found it difficult to remember which child belonged to which parent.

The children have complicated emotional responses to their situation and to their natural and by-marriage siblings. But as they age they find that they become a sort of commonwealth of five and we learn who is who, so it is not necessary for readers to worry about those early confusions. There is, of course, a great tragedy that brings the children together in guilt. They are keeping a secret about what happened to the sixth child, which does not really get told until the parents are dying. In classic novels this would have been the key to deep psychological wounds in the children, but the tone of this novel is perhaps too superficial, or too modern, to go “there” in any meaningful way.

Ann Patchett is an excellent writer who knows how to tell a story but this story is just giving us details of a tale that is so common in modern life as to almost be cliché. I liked the children and some of the parents but the story is more a slice of life than any kind of social commentary. Do I think fiction has to be culturally relevant? Perhaps not, but novels that stand the test of time usually have a je ne sais quoi factor that raises them out of the ordinary. I enjoyed reading Commonwealth, but I am not sure that it will turn out to be a keeper.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – Book

We live in a time when civility and charm seem difficult to find and tempers are on a short fuse. Even a trip to the grocery store can seem like negotiating a mine field of human hostility. People disconnect from fellow shoppers and single-mindedly rush to get items crossed off their errand list. All they long for is to get home to their personal sanctuary. In times like these, Amor Towles is just the antidote required to inspire introspection and self-evaluation. Perhaps he will even help us change the way we relate to the world. A Gentleman in Moscow, although just a fiction story, makes a point that could transform us all.

Our gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, Member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt, is 33 years old when we first meet him in 1922. He is a man caught between two ages in Russian history so disparate as to induce whiplash. He is an aristocrat who returns, to his peril, to Russia from Paris in 1918, which if you know your history, is just after the Russian Revolution when Russian society gets turned over like a compost pile. What was on the bottom is now on the top and what was on the top is now, for the most part, either dead or in Siberia.

But Count Rostov is such a benign style of aristocrat that he manages to wend his way through the anger and revolutionary righteousness of the new Communist state, not completely unscathed, but as a permanent resident of a luxurious Russian hotel right near the center of Moscow. Rostov has never held a job, has never been a worker, but he is trained by his former lifestyle to have skills that are quite useful to have. He is a great judge of human interaction and he knows how to arrange people at a state dinner or in a well-run restaurant so that any strife is defused and affairs run smoothly. Besides this talent he is charming and amenable and flexible in the face of change. His good nature is adaptable but he is not a chameleon; he is always himself.

Count Rostov’s punishment for coming back to Russia at exactly the wrong time is that he is imprisoned in the lovely Metropole Hotel where he has been living for four years. When asked by the tribunal why he came back he says he missed the climate and they all shake their heads in understanding. He has to give up a large suite of rooms with excellent views that he has been occupying and move into servant’s quarters in the attic. If you think that once sentence has been passed this tale will turn gloomy and scary then you have not yet met our Alexander. He’s in a hotel. Things happen. You may find that you have to “suspend your disbelief” a bit but it will be well worth it.

Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility writes like times that are past and gone, like one who is on earth to remind us of slower times when people were kinder and more (heaven forbid) socially correct. It was a balm to my spirit to read A Gentleman in Moscow at this particularly pugilistic moment in the history of our nation.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi – Book

homegoing-big

I have read so many novels that are also historical. People love to trace things back in time to see their beginnings, their causes and effects, and to feel some continuity in a constantly changing world. Americans of European descent can mine a rich trove of historical literature that speaks to them.

However, for Americans of African descent the pickin’s are a bit slimmer. We have books that happen in Africa and books that describe various aspects of the fraught history of Africans as slaves and later as citizens of America. There are only a few novels that connect the two, Roots by Alex Haley being the best known of these. In this case, in Yaa Gyasi’s book Homegoing, we get to follow an African family line through a pair of necklaces which have been owned by two sisters with disparate fates.

I don’t believe that white readers are able to experience this novel in as intimate and familiar a way as would an African American reader. Clearly we understand the words, get interested in the characters and wince at the injustice of the struggles, and perhaps even accept blame for the actions of our forebears. We may connect at some level with the idea of being sold into slavery by our own or neighboring people because the appearance of Europeans in Africa was somewhat comparable to what it might be like for aliens to appear in our home town. We can see, in hindsight, what the European drive to colonize did to Western coastal groups in Africa (Ivory Coast, Ghana). Still it is difficult to feel the imprisonment, the terrifying oceanic transport, the slavery, the aftermath of contempt that accompanied freedom. It is, I think, not as visceral an experience to read this book as a European transplant as it is for an African transplant. However, even if the experience is felt at a slight remove by some readers it is still a book well worth reading.

In these days when a white nationalist like Richard Spencer, President of a group called The National Policy Institute (gasp) says things like “As Europeans we are uniquely at the center of world history” and calls white folks, incomprehensibly, the “children of the sun” is cropping up on mainstream news we must insist that people are not ranked in any order – not from brightest to dimmest – not from most deserving to least deserving – not on a scale from best to worst – based on the color of their skin or the continent of their origin. In fact, since slaves were not allowed to read or write and families were often callously separated it seems more accurate to blame any perceived differences between white folks and black folks on the whole experience of slavery than on membership in an ethnic group.

As you can see Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is a book that inspires lots of internal thought and dialogue about cultures and histories and guilt and pain. And this book ends with hope. It ends with an offspring of two African sisters in a library at Stanford University researching her heritage in order to give the world this important book.