Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Wow wow wow.  I keep my ear to the ground for good book recommendations - so when I was reading By the Book with The Phoebe Waller-Bridge and she casually mentioned Ghost Wall (2018) by Sarah Moss, I looked up the description.  "In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age."  That can only mean one thing, people:  Bog Bodies.  

via

One thing I have become completely obsessed with lately is Bog Bodies.  About a month ago I fell down a slippery rabbit hole of the Bredmose Woman, from 1400 BCE, who was found in Denmark, wonderfully preserved along with a charming cap created with a pre-knitting technique called "sprang".  This lead me to another pre-knitting and crocheting technique called Nålbinding, which I now want to learn how to do.  Nålbinding is made with a bone needle, which of course you can order on Amazon, but just as I was about to order one, I was like, "Am I really going to order a needle off fucking Amazon Prime to recreate an ancient Viking textile?  No. I. Am. Not.  I'm going to make my own damn bone needle."  So, I'm working on that.  Going to try to use the rib bone from our Thanksgiving roast.

I've been trying to get more in touch with my ancestry (mostly British, according to my DNA), and this quote from the blogger who got me excited about sprang and nålbinding really speaks to me.  "...objects are not just passively handed along, they have agency, extending the artist’s (or artisan’s) reach across distance and time.  People take action through the things they create, this way distributing their personhood."  (Apparently she's summarizing Alfred Gell's theory of "distributed personhood.")   That also puts me in mind about what Goldie Goldbloom said when I asked her about a chapter in her latest book.  She said that we are the products of our family history and the memories of our ancestors.  This is exactly the sort of thing that's happening in Ghost Wall.  Silvie's father is very interested in the British Iron Age, and drags his wife and daughter around England, walking the entirety of Hadrian's Wall, lecturing about their ancestors.  For him, it's partly based on a racist pursuit of proving his own white ancestry.  "...they had their horses and swords as well, didn't they, put up quite a fight and after all send them packing in the end, there weren't dark faces in these parts for nigh on two millennia after that, were there?"  They've joined a professor and his students who are practicing immersive learning, and living something like Iron Age people for a few weeks - wearing handmade tunics, leather moccasins, foraging and eating over a fire. Silvie's dad's along because he's a talented outdoorsman.  He's also violent and abusive to his wife and daughter.  The other campers notice, but are slow or unable to react.  What's interesting in Ghost Wall is just what that blogger and Goldie Goldbloom said - what characteristics are deep in these people's psyches, tied to their ancestors?  This inheritance of violence and the inheritance of meekness are tragic gifts for Silvie's family.  Like a bog sacrifice, she and her mother bear abuse quietly.  

Ghost Wall is a quick read, excellent prose and truly heart-thumping story.  I'm excited to read more by Sarah Moss.  Thanks, Phoebe!

Watching You by Lisa Jewel (no Spoilers)

Lisa Jewel's 2018 Watching You is a fantastic murder mystery in a small British town.  The narrative

alternates between short police interviews that take place a short time in the future and the actual story as it plays out.  It's a bit difficult to describe without giving the whole plot away, but I will say that there was a kind of "twist" that truly surprised me and a zinger in the last sentence that was a real stunner!  It's kind of fun to get to literally the last sentence and...

The school head (I think like the principle?), Tom Fitzwilliam, as charmed almost every woman and girl in town, but occasionally he'll creep out the ladies with a "wolfish" glance that hints at some nefarious interiority.  Tom's son sits in his bedroom window spying on the neighbors and teenage girls, photographing everyone and tracking their movements in a notebook.  Neighbor Joey has a hot, cuddly husband but also a crush on Tom.

It's sort of the perfect mystery novel - keeps you guessing, easy to keep track of the characters - a very clever twist that had me flipping back to the beginning of the book the moment I collected myself at the end!  Highly recommend!

Nota Bene:  I've also read her The Girls in the Garden - and at least based on these two books, Jewel doesn't seem to obsess on the details of the destroyed female body for her novels, which all-too-many people do.  I appreciate not having to wade through what feels like obsessive, masturbatory glee in the violence acted upon women.  She's not ignoring violence against women, just not resorting to the objectification of women that you often find in mystery novels.

Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman

You know what's cool about Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman - she uses  To Kill A Mockingbird as an influence on the story.  Reminder: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee was published in July 2015, and Wilde Lake was published in May 2016.  According to Lippman, she had already started her novel before Lee's second book was "found", as it were.  I just LOVE a story that is revisited or reworked from a different point of view, so I really enjoyed this aspect of Wilde Lake.  Done well, it enhances both the new work and the old one, because it calls you back and maybe helps you look at it a different way.

To wit, Lu (Louisa) is the first female state's attorney of her county in Maryland, following in the footsteps of her well-respected father, Andrew Brant.  Her brother AJ is the sort of person everyone admires, star athlete, strong student, friend to everyone.  They have a devoted black housekeeper, a gay neighbor kid that inserts himself into their lives, and, when they were younger, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks accused their black friend of raping her.

The story straddles two time-lines - one of Lu and her brother as teenagers (Lu a bit younger and sort of tagging along with AJ's friends.  For the most part, her father helps keep the accusation of the rape secret, everyone agreeing that it was most likely perpetrated by her abusive father.  In the present-day, Lu is taking the lead on a case of a woman murdered in her condo, with no apparent motive.  It's a good mystery, and she connects the dots nicely. 

Although Go Set a Watchman wasn't very well received, I quite liked parts of it, particularly the "you can't go home again" (to put it mildly) aspect.  Just as Scout finds that her father and brother aren't the white shining heroes of her youth, Lu is also struggling with interacting with her father as an adult, recognizing that the man she and so many others idolized isn't perfect.  There's also a continuing theme of how "people thought then".  Lu and other characters are grappling with how the casual racism and misogyny of the past continues to impact people today, and what the statute of limitations is on those actions.

He was a man of a certain generation, a man of his time. We always want our heroes to be better than their times, to hold the enlightened views we have achieved one hundred, fifty, ten years later. We want Jefferson to free his slaves and not to father children with any of them. We want Lindbergh to keep his Nazi sympathies to himself. We want Bill Clinton to keep it in his pants. Martin Luther King Jr., too.  And that's just what we expect of the men.  The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. The present, this day, this very moment we inhabit - it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

The Mothers by Brit Bennett

Brit Bennett's 2016 The Mothers was a wonderful read.  She creates a strong sense of place (southern
Cal, around San Diego and the military bases down there.  I visited that area this summer and it's really unique) and characters - Nadia and Aubrey are the type of girls you want to be best friends with.

In the beginning, Nadia and Luke, the minister's son, are secretly dating, and she gets pregnant.  She has an abortion and this connects them for a long time.  Nadia meets Aubrey, another motherless child in her town and church, and they become like sisters.  Nadia's mother died by suicide shortly after she was born, and Aubrey's mother failed to protect her from her abusive boyfriend, so she left.  These two black girls form a strong bond that surpasses Nadia going to college and law school in other cities.

The "Mothers" of the title are actually the collective elder mothers of the church, who operate as something like a Greek chorus in the book.  Bennett writes them from first person plural, like an omniscient narrator, but with some sass.

We would've told her that all together, we got centuries on her. If we laid all our lives toes to heel, we were born before the Depression, the Civil War, even America itself. In all that living, we have known men. Oh girl, we have known littlebit love. That littlebit of honest left in an empty jar that traps the sweetness in your mouth long enough to mask you hunger. We have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.

Spoiler!

The end of the book was exquisite.  The Mothers move from the position as distant narrators to active participants in the story as they casually share their observances about Nadia and Luke and Luke's parents, causing membership in the church to flag and eventually the church fails, the paster and his wife no longer pillars of their community.  And this last paragraph!  I die.

We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She's her mother's age now. Double her age. Our age. You're our mother. We're climbing inside of you.

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson

Oh, how I loved Jeannette Winterson's Frankissstein (and the gorge cover art, which helps makes sense of those extra esses!) Winterson, who's such a genius at mixing contemporary language and thought while telling an "old" tale, brilliantly merges the stories of Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron and Co., as they famously shared a house in Italy in 1816 and Mary began writing the novel Frankenstein, with a contemporary (perhaps in the not-to-distant future) cast of characters that resemble (/are?) that group.  Ry Shelley is a doctor researching the effect of robots on humans' health. Ry is transgendered and confuses many of the other characters by not presenting as a binary figure, but they are firmly and happily secure in their non-binary body.  I don't want to reveal the other names because I think they're rather clever and will leave that to the reader to discover.  Anyway, Ry meets with various people involved in robotics, hilariously, a man who creates sex-bots and thinks they're the wave of the future (and makes a pretty good case for it, tbh). 

Winterson conjures all sorts of fascinating themes in her book including where (and if) the nature of the soul resides in the body and the created body (ie Frankenstein's monster, sex-bots, and characters in books); creativity and computation; the mind and the computer as a holder of knowledge; and the ownership of creation - you know, like a lot of the stuff that makes us human.

Joy of joys, I also convinced husband to read this book which was a particular coup for moi, filling me with a pride unparalleled since he started using the term "toxic masculinity" with some regularity.  I personally loved the bits re: the nineteenth century while husband naturally enjoyed the 21st.  Percy and Byron are lauded as these brilliant British master poets and meanwhile there's this trickling little side story that goes, Oh, did you know Mary Shelley wrote one of the most enduring stories in the English language and, oh yeah, she was only 19?  But what Winterson draws out is her enduring humanity, mourning the loss of her children while trying to maintain a semblance of a home while her husband flits around renting homes in broke-down mansions in remote locations.  Mary's frustrations build to a culminating excoriation of the male poet:

 "His lordship upholds the law when it suits him. So do they all. Revolutionaries and radicals until it touches on property - and that includes women and children. Till it comes to whatever hurts them personally. Whatever checks their stride. God! Their infidelities, their indifference, their insensitivity. Great God! The insensitivity of poets. [...] 

How many 'great artists? How many dead/mad/disused/forgotten/blames and fallen women?"  

As startling and electrifying as Mary's rage is, Ry's experience as a trans person - amidst their careful academic exploration is an event of shocking violence that the reader learns has happened multiple times before and they quietly deal with, knowing from past experience that notifying the police will not help.  The sudden violence was a visceral reminder of how unsafe life can be for trans people - it comes without warning or reason.  The disruption I felt as a reader was merely a glimpse of what it must be like to experience that as a person, and I thank Winterson for showing me a bit of what that might feel like. 

So many wonderful things wrapped into this relatively small book, not least of all how reading and writing are such amicable contributors to our human experience.  Frankissstein is really a must-read for book lovers. 

After the End by Clare Mackintosh

I asked Mike to pick up a copy of After the End on his last trip to London because it was getting a bunch of good press and I like my books to come from somewhere interesting if entirely possible.  In fact, I've finally started writing in the front of my books where I bought them so I can remember better.  And here's a free marketing tip from me to independent book stores out there:  why not make cool book plates of your bookstore and stick them in the inside cover?  Then it'd create like a cool badge of honor for people who go out their way not to buy from Amazon.

Anyway, I love bookplates (see my pinterest board on them!)

After the End is a desperately sad book.  Reading it made me very very sad and reminded me of a terrible time in my life and some of my worst fears coming true.  I asked myself many times, "Why am I reading this book?" before I skipped about 100 pages and finally read the last 20 or so.  It's about a loving couple who's child has brain cancer, and at the beginning is lying in a hospital bed, brain damaged, with a bit of cancer still in his brain, on a ventilator, unable to speak and barely move.  They disagree about the medical path they should take and go to court.  Then, this is about halfway through (SPOILER coming) the judge rules that the child shall receive no further care (beyond palliative, of course) and in another timeline, he rules the child shall receive additional care.  So, in one timeline, or reality, their son dies shortly after, and in another (alternating chapters), he lives an additional six years.  In both realities, the parents' marriage suffers greatly and their lives are forever altered by their devastating loss. Both parents and doctor question their decision. Following the two story lines allows the reader (and the author) to indulge in the fantasy of actually knowing the result of the other choice.  They are haunted by their choice, but at least in the book, the other choice's outcome is known.

You have to applaud Mackintosh for writing such an unflinching book.  She obviously set out to confront the horror of losing a child and that is precisely what she did.  In an "Author's Note", "This has been an incredibly difficult book to write, but one that has also brought me great joy" she writes. She also writes that she had to make a life and death decision for her son and I suspect that writing it was a cathartic experience for her. I'm glad she found joy in writing these parallel tales, but I honestly can't imagine many will find joy in reading it - although some people really love sad stories.  If so, this one is for you!

New England Vacation Reading

When I go on vacation, I like to read fiction from or about the area.  For our trip from Boston to Acadia National Park in Maine, I read:

North of Boston by Elisabeth Elo.  This is a mystery about a woman who is out lobstering with her friend when they're hit by a larger ship.  Her friend dies, and she surely would have if she didn't have the uncanny ability to survive in ungodly cold temps.  Truthfully I found the book a bit convoluted with what felt like over-the-top details, like the main character's mother was a famous perfumer and her step dad was like a Ukranian mobster or something, and her best friend is a beautiful heiress and an alcoholic.  I mean, maybe I don't understand the northeast that well, but I was like, why was this girl out lobstering at night?  Anyway, Elo wrapped it all up with a bow and I had fun reading it, so, who cares?

Run, Ann Patchett.  Run takes place mostly around Cambridge, Mass.  It begins, as her books often do, with a killer first chapter that reads like a beautiful, stand-alone story (that nevertheless perfectly sets the stage for the novel).  One snowy evening, a father and his sons become entangled with a woman and her daughter.  A tender look at family, inheritance (tangible and intangible), race and class, this is Peak Patchett.  I love her.

Vacationland, by John Hodgman.  Did you know Maine license plates read "vacationland"?  That might seem funny to some jackass from Chicago (guess who? Me!) until you see how very beautiful it is there, and apparently in summer quite overrun with weekenders - in late September it was overrun with pensioners.  Hodgman is from Brookline, Mass, but writes at length about Maine and its curmudgeonly  and antisocial denizens.  Although most of the book is Hodgman cracking wise about making cairns while getting high and how he accidentally got famous and kind of rich making Apple commercials, he wrote this book while continually acknowledging his own white male privilege, just honestly and forwardly.  That was pretty damn refreshing to read.  He ends with a hard look at how in a place like Maine, composed mostly of wealthy white people, you can pretty much ignore the existence of racism and its terrible effect on minorities in this country.  I think about that sometimes too, like, I could quit reading news about black people being killed by police and I would probably be a lot happier. Anyway, a substantial chapter by a white male comedian on the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and how white people need to commit themselves improving our society.  Then he immediately writes how he online trolled a dummy online after making a similar commitment and felt like an ass.  Because life is really complicated.  Unexpectedly woke and thoughtful.

On Division, Goldie Goldbloom

My interview with the fascinating and wonderful Goldie Goldbloom is in Newcity!

The Silence of the Girls

Pat Barker tells the story of the Iliad mostly through the eyes of Briseis, who was a princess until the Greeks destroyed her city and gave her to Achilles as a slave.  Generally the story of Briseis and Achilles is portrayed as a love story, but Barker imagines the relationship quite differently, with Briseis feeling all the love a woman would feel for the person who had just killed her entire family and enslaved her, which is to say: not much.

Like Circe, Madeline Miller's wonderful novel about another minor female character in the Odyssey (and Galatea, and Livinia), the author tells the story from a feminist point of view, literally giving voice to a character who has just a handful of words in a book that is perhaps the first written account of toxic masculinity in western literature. 

Even though I knew what was going to happen, having seen Brad Pitt's ab-tactular rendition in Troy and, you know, other STUFF,  I could barely put The Silence of the Girls down.  What Barker does very well is move the focus to the women and help the reader imagine what it would be like to go from a life of freedom to one of enslavement.  "In later life, wherever I went, I always looked for the women of Troy who'd been scattered all over the Greek world. that skinny old woman with brown-spotted hands shuffling to answer her master's door, can that really be Queen Hecuba, who, as a young and beautiful girl, newly married, had led  the dancing in King Priam's hall? That that girl in the torn and shabby dress, hurrying to fetch water from the well, that that be one of Priam's daughters?"  The men fight in battles and either preserve their glory in conquest or perhaps in an honorable, brave death, but women suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives, a sorry footnote to the battle scenes.  But in these masterful retellings, the women not only become active participants in their own stories, but they also bear witness to the events.

The book reminded me of a performance of Trojan Women the IU theatre school did back in the 90s.  I was on the stage crew so I saw the show many times.  (What a season: Rough Crossing, Tom Stoppard, Trojan Women, Euripides, Hurleyburley, David Rabe, Uncle Vanya and Cabaret!) The actors created their own monologues that were interspersed throughout the show - it was all very 90's and felt like something special.  Anyway, I remember it fondly and also it wasn't too much work because all the sets were welded together and they didn't let the undergrads do that. 

image via

Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction if that impresses you (it does me!)  Happy reading!

Stay and Fight

My review of Stay and Fight, by Madeline ffitch, on Newcity!

Aug 9--Fog

My review of Aug 9--Fog on NewCity!

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

What a absolute pleasure it was to read Commonwealth by Ann Patchett.  It felt like one of those books that was written just for me, and I was very, very sad when it was over.  I think I couldn't read that book for the rest of my life.  The first chapter, for one thing, is as exquisit as any writing you'll ever read.  It could stand alone as a perfect short story.  But then, (mini-spoiler) the tone dramatically changes and the second chapter is ANOTHER amazing piece of story telling. Then the third, then the fourth.  Those first four chapters, I'm not kidding, you, I was in AWE.

It sort of has a JD Salinger quality, in that the family in the story is similar to the Glasses - each person is so interesting and Patchett writes about them with so much love and affection.  Even the ones who are dicking around become beloved.  The excitement I felt when Franny was staying with her older, famous, author boyfriend in the Hamptons and their guests are being awful and she's just dumped the lobsters in the sea and boyfriend's horrible daughter is about to arrive - I was on pins and needles.

And Teresa! 

He is fifteen and ten and five. He is an instant. He is flying back to her. He is hers again. She feels the weight of him in her chest as he comes into her arms. He is her son, her beloved child, and she takes him back.  

And Holly!  And Jeannette's husband!  I loved those people deeply. Can't wait to read more by Patchett.

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Less was such an enjoyable read - I really loved every page, and I loved the way the story was structured with (Arthur) Less trying to outrun the marriage of his former boyfriend by traveling to all these different countries.  My favorite happened to be Germany, because Less suffers from a similar delusion as me - that he's very good at speaking a foreign language, although everyone responds to him with some amount of alarm of not understanding him.  There's even a line that perfectly encapsulates my own philosophy on speaking a foreign language.  "The key to speaking a new language,"she told them, "is to be bold instead of perfect."  That led to another bit that just slayed me:

He kisses--how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

Swoon!

Another part that I thought about for a long time was this:

... As an areligious WASP, he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing.

It is such an interesting fact how difficult it is to process a death. You'd think it would be more of our muscle memory after our long histories. 

Much to my surprise, I found myself reading a love story - I haven't really read one in such a long time, and it was an absolute delight.  Mini Spoiler - I loved how the third person narrator slowly revealed his own personality and became a mystery and then suddenly it became very obvious who he was. 

The New Me

I ordered Halle Butler's The New Me before I even finished Jia Tolento's excellent review (Halle Butler’s “The New Me” Is an Office Novel for a Precarious Age) in the New Yorker.  Having just left my own toxic work environment.  A " late-capitalist nightmare"?  Sign me up!  Although, actually, don't.  Butler's novel is so bitingly caustic I had to put it aside for a few days, still feeling raw from my own experience.  So, read this when you're in a reasonably sane place, emotionally, because Millie, a millennial working "temp-to-perm" is not-so-slowly loosing her mind while trying to find permanent work, a loving companion ("really I would take anyone" she says), and, most wily of all: Happiness.

With only one horrible friend, a woman with "easily interpretable facial spasms", who clearly keeps Millie around to feel better about herself and a boring, low-paying temp job working for a woman eager to be the most dominant person in the room, there are no female heroes in this story (no male ones either).  The creeping ills of capitalism infest Millie's world.  "In the copy room, she bends down and brings out a small document shredder and pushes it toward me with her foot. She looks at me like I know what this means, like she's shown me the lord's chamber pot and I'm supposed to understand."

Butler's book definitely skewers capitalism, but I was left wondering whether or not this book is a satire.  (My working theory is that Americans have a hard time recognizing satire or maybe just me and like literally everyone I know?)  Eager to find out, I read a couple of interviews with Butler - while insightful, they did not answer my question, although, I'm not sure it matters that much.  Millie's experience is occasionally dreamlike and she frequently veers toward the Untrustworthy Narrator but what she experiences as a character is what many American workers go through on a daily basis: the indignities of low paying jobs and the soul-crushing experience of trying to make a life when you're exhausted at the end of the working day.

The New Me is not only a great addition to the annals of literature about "work" but also really captures the experience of some/many women struggling to find their way in life.  

Milkman by Anna Burns

We were lucky enough to go to London a couple of months ago and one of the top items on my shopping list, aside from some sweet Harry Potter swag was a paperback copy of Milkman by Anna Burns - winner of the Man Booker (2018) and shortlisted for the Orange Prize (aka Women's Prize for Fiction) and a whole bunch of other awards.

The first chapter is (sh)amazing.  Nay, the first sentence is amazing, and almost (spoiler alert) spoils the whole book. "The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died."  The main character, who is never named

goes on to explain that this guy called the milkman was trying to insinuate himself in her life. "I didn't know whose milkman he was. He wasn't our milkman. I don't think he was anybody's. He didn't take milk orders. There was no milk about him. He didn't ever deliver milk. Also, he didn't drive a milk lorry." (That's page two.)

I'm spelling this out because this is one of those new fangled, old-fashioned books that isn't very plot driven.  Basically, that's the plot: the milkman tries to ingratiate himself, he's eventually shot and Somebody McSomebody sticks a gun in her breast.  And yet, it is 350 pages of beautiful English language about life in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles".  Occasionally it veers into the territory of how when women band together, they can accomplish amazing things (like momentarily put an end to street violence that overtakes a town or help a girl out in the 'Ladies)

and occasionally how women do awful things to each other, by creating and prolonging misery just to have a moment of power in their otherwise powerless lives.  Or they're so beat down by a paternalistic, patronizing community that they themselves maintain the very power structures that are detrimental to their lives and happiness.

Milkman was difficult to read, I ain't gunna lie. The chapters are like 50 pages long, there's a new paragraph only about every three pages, it was about a time that I don't know that much about, and, did I mention no one in the book is called by their name?  There's Maybe-boyfriend, the Milkman, of course, then the actual Milkman (who delivers milk), first sister, second sister, First-Brother-in-Law through Third, and the Wee Sisters, who are actually three very charming younger sisters, and many, many others.  Actually, the names are not a problem, I loved that aspect, and Burns is brilliant about how she helps the reader maintain the thread with this large family.  Despite the challenges, it was a really rewarding book to read, and my copy is now full of underlined, insightful phrases, things to look up, definitions of words I didn't know.

There are a lot of themes that run through this book but one of the major ones is that people who live in war zones are traumatized.  It sounds simple, but, unfortunately, think of what a huge population of this earth lives in violent communities.  Not only is it hard/impossible to invest in society/arts/humanity as a whole, but the trauma to the individual is a heavy burden that's nearly impossible to overcome.  Maybe-boyfriend says, "It's that you don't seem alive anymore. I look at your face and it's as if your sense organs are disappearing or as if they've already disappeared so that no one gets to connect with you."  Or, as Jonathan Van Ness might say it:

SO!  Where does all this leave us?  A challenging book, not plot driven, let's face it: a very depressing look at a violent place in time that destroyed so many lives (did I mention parts are quite funny?)  I really think this book probably isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, but it was a journey I'm glad I took.

Eternal Life by Dara Horn

Dara Horn's latest is yet another amazing novel that once again has come out a bit under the radar, much to my surprise.  She's too good to be under the radar!  Eternal Life bears a significant comparison with Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, in which the main character comes to life again after every death she experiences.  Unlike the Atkinson character, however, Rachel was born 2000 years ago in Jerusalem.  Horn's descriptions of 1st century Jerusalem and the life of her young Jewish heroine are rich and exciting, combining what's got to be a ridiculous amount of research and a fertile imagination. 

In the present time, Rachel deals with contemporary issues like figuring out how to die and be reborn when a digital signature might follow her.  This becomes especially difficult after her granddaughter takes a sample of her DNA without permission.  But some patterns are all too familiar.  A group of ill-informed protestors gather outside her business in New Jersey, an innocuous event to most of her family but a frightful reminder for Rachel. "She could hardly think of a time when it hadn't started this way, with people yelling outside her store."  Rachel has seen it all - the only thing that really surprises her is when a male lover helps out with the housework. 

Like her previous novel, The Guide for the Perplexed, Horn impeccably mixes the seemingly incongruous worlds of slightly futuristic (though plausible) technology with ancient Judaism and makes it look easy. Of course, the hyper-computing of today, with its general goal of collecting data, is not too dissimilar to the goals of Rachel's scribe father, capturing the written word of religious figures of the day.

I love the intellectual challenge Horn's books offer - this book is funny, and sad, and smart.  It's a real treat for the imagination, and as I also do when I read her work, I learned a lot. 

The Optimist's Daughter

Faulkner House.  Image via

When I was in New Orleans last month, I took myself to a couple of bookstores in the French Quarter.  I love visiting bookstores on vacation, they really seem to stick in my mind.  One was Arcadian books, a frickin' tangle of books that felt like an avalanche was going to fall on me at any moment (which is not to say that I didn't love it) and the other was Faulkner House Books, in the same house where William Faulkner lived (both bookstores are near the cathedral). It is small and extremely civilized, it has the size of a fabulous private library, and for a few precious moments I had it to myself until a small crowd of maybe four people came in, making it almost unbearable.  However, I did overhear an amazing exchange between customer and proprietor that went something like this:

"I'm trying to remember the name of an author..."
"Hum me a few bars," she said. How charming is that?
"Well, he's a young man..."
"Black or white?"
"Black..."
and she gestured at a book on the shelf behind her...
"That's him!" 
Amazing.

I picked up a Eudora Welty, looking for something southern and New Orleans-related - The Optimist's Daughter, something I'd never heard of, but was pleasantly surprised to see had won the Pulitzer.  It's a quiet, short (180 pages) book about a woman, Lauren who has returned to her home just outside New Orleans while her dad has surgery. She's been living in Chicago after attending the Art Institute (hey, just like me!).  Her dad has married a young woman, maybe the same age or younger than Lauren, who's not as sophisticated or respected as Lauren's deceased mother. Her dad dies unexpectedly, and Lauren goes through the funeral and goes home, The End.  I could really relate to the hospital and funeral scenes, in which people say and do stupid things, but Lauren just suffers through.  Actually, Welty gives few details about Lauren's interiority and I was really struck by how little access I had to the main character's interior voice and thoughts. Lately I've mostly been reading contemporary literature and it was a real change to experience something written 40 years ago.  I've read most of the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction books since the 90s and I was really quite surprised that this ostensibly simple narrative tale won in 1973.  It's amazing how literature tastes have changed in the last half century.  But, actually, it wasn't a simple story, after some reflection. As Lauren floats through encounters with her hometown community, they prattle on around her and she says very little. What made it fun as a reader was to imagine how Lauren might have felt about the absurd things people were saying because she was too polite or tired to respond.  It's with a deft and delicate hand that Welty wrote this little novel, a real pleasure to read. 

Dystopian Novels: Women's Edition

There have been some absolutely amazing novels published recently reflecting the fear of the current political and social climate continuing and the potential disastrous effect it could (continue to) have on the lives of women. Louise Erdrich's Future Home of the Living God (2018) is my favorite - it begins with a road trip by an adopted daughter to visit her birth mother, an Ojibwe woman who lives on a nearby reservation.  Cedar's adoptive mother and father are anxious as she leaves because there is a "a new kind of virus. Maybe bacteria. From the permafrost. Use hand sanitizer."  Cedar is pregnant, and ostensibly visits her birth mother to ask about inheritable diseases.  What Erdrich teases out in those first few pages about a possible virus eventually becomes an excuse to police women's bodies. Within the larger global drama she's created exists a beautiful story about the love this family has for each other.  And within that narrative is the protective instinct Cedar has for her developing child, with not-so-subtle allusions to a newborn Christ. Which had me thinking, isn't it a natural reaction to consider that the child you bear might be the savior of the world? Listen, I get very *eyeroll* over pregnancy stories, but Future Home of the Living God had me ALL IN.  I've only read two of Erdrich's books but she's quickly becoming My Favorite Author Of All Time.  

Last year I saw Margaret Atwood speak and she hyped The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (and also, coincidentally, hinted at a big announcement to come which ended up being The Handmaid's Tale: Part Deux, which I now realize was painfully obvious). I wanted that book so bad I ordered a British copy.  Three girls live with their mother and father on an island and women visit to experience the water cure, administered by their parents.  The girls are under the impression that the outside world is a lawless, dangerous place for women and therefore they've created this extreme but safe oasis for them. The parent's solution, and how it further breeds mistrust between women, was a striking example of how isolation isn't the answer to the world's problems. (Hello, Mike Pence.) 

Christina Dalcher's Vox is perhaps the most infuriating (in a good way?) of the recent batch of dystopian novels.  In it, all women, even young girls, are required to wear a bracelet that provides an increasingly painful electric shock every time they speak over 100 words in 24 hours.  What really struck me was how the main character's daughter never came near her 100 words and easily adapted to this new paradigm, simply by the socialization of those around her.  It made me bristle to remember every time that I had been told that I talk too much, that I was better seen and not heard, that I was too loud, to forceful, and every argument I've ever heard that women aren't suited for certain positions and roles due to nature or religious conventions.  (Reminder:  It is commonly perceived that women speak much more than men - we don't.) . So, if you like being filled with RIGHTEOUS and FURIOUS ANGER, you should definitely read Vox (seriously, you really should.)

Cross Her Heart

Sarah Pinborough’s Cross Her Heart is so full of twists and turns it got me thinking about the modern novel, post-Gone Girl, and the role of the Unexpected Twist. First, it dawned on me that the “twist” actually existed BEFORE Gone Girl, it just wasn’t called a “twist.”  I mean, wouldn’t a nineteenth century reader be absolutely shocked to discover that, just as Jane was about to marry Mr. Rochester, she finds out his WIFE is living in the attic of the damn house she’s been living in.  THEN, when she hears his voice one night, goes back to Thornfield mansion to find the damn place burned down, Rochester’s wife lept off the fucking ROOF and he’s blind and only has one functional hand.  That’s ALMOST as nuts as Amy framing her boring husband for her own murder, then double-framing her ex-boyfriend instead, and then getting herself pregnant with some sperm she hid in the freezer JUST IN CASE this whole scheme went to shit.

Secondly, I am getting tired of books with crazy twists, although I almost always have to doff my hat to those that do it well, as Pinborough does.  I like reading mysteries, and it often it feels like mysteries are written in a formulaic way, with twists, with “girl” in the title, and ladies being raped and murdered on the page for reading pleasure (concerning all these conceits - see this whole crazy story re: AJ Finn and The Woman in the Window).

Anyway, to summarize Cross Her Heart would be too difficult without giving much away, aside from saying that it’s a captivating read, and I had a good time apprising M for a few days at the multiple twists and turns it made (namely re: some missing girls on vacation in Thailand and a concerned journalist.)  

The Dreamers

Karen Thompson Walker creates stories where an impossible event takes place, yet she paces it out so slowly and thoughtfully, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. In The Age of Miracles, the rotation of the sun slows until a single day lasts weeks; in The Dreamers, the population of a town is affected by a virus that causes people to fall into a deep sleep. At first a student in a dorm falls asleep, then, quickly others. The dorm is placed under quarantine, and then the town is placed under cordon sanitaire, a French term I was happy to learn, dating from medieval times and referring to a physical or guarded barrier that separates an infected area. 

The doctors and scientists who study the sleeping townspeople and college students soon discover that they are dreaming: 

The true contents of the dreams go unrecorded, of course, but in some patients, the accompanying brain waves are captured with electrodes and projected on screens, like silhouettes of the hereafter. [...] There is more activity in these minds than has ever been recorded in any human brain - awake or asleep.

Walker's narrative voice in The Dreamers feels like an all-seeing eye that peels back the ceiling of first this house and then another, revealing the contents like a dollhouse, or a scene in a Wes Anderson movie.  For example, some patients are kept in the college library, for lack of space. 

  In the Classics section, a visitor could read about the oracles of ancient Greece and Rome , how the people of those eras believed that dreams could sometimes reveal the future.
  One floor down, in the Psychology section, one might eventually discover that Carl Jung, at a certain point in his life, became convinced that he had dreamed of his wife many years before he met her.
  On another part of that same floor, in Philosophy, one could entertain the theory that if you could truly understand the complexity of reality, you could accurately predict the future, since every moment of the future is set in motion by the events of the past - the whole system simply too complex for the human mind to model.

She taps into the sense of environmental unease that permeates our society, and, in this case, literal isolation of people who are living in what feels like a complex and dangerous time, always on the brink of natural or man-made disaster.  The Dreamers shares themes with another book I've read recently, Nick Drnaso's graphic novel, Sabrina.  In each, internet fear-mongering runs rampant, with ignorant trolls both blaming and diverting.  Conspiracy theories run rampant, claiming that what we, the reader, know to be true, never actually happened.

How people react to disaster is a common theme in Walker's books. Two sisters find fortitude in each other while their dad sleeps; a young man from the college imagines himself a savior while he endangers those closest to him.  Most people close ranks, concentrating only on themselves or their families.  The virus further isolates people who are already isolated. 

Ultimately, this book caused me to think about dreaming and consciousness in a different way.  I love any book that sends me on a search - to learn more about a word or an event.  Walker's clear love of language and desire to understand human reactions to extreme situations permeates The Dreamers with an infectious (why am I the way that I am?) curiosity.