Feed, by Mira Grant

Many times reading Mira Grant's novel I thought about how eerily similar the tone was to our current political climate. It doesn't speak well for us that her story of a journalist covering a presidential candidate takes place well into zombie apocalypse.  The year is 2039 and zombies have roamed the earth since approx 2012 - our heroine, Georgia, has known no other reality.  Georgia and her brother, Shaun, are bloggers - more respected than the "traditional" journalists of the day because bloggers were quicker to catch on to the zombie outbreak and provide real tips for survival. They've been chosen (with their partner, Buffy) to follow the favored Republican presidential candidate. I'm curious why she wrote the candidate as a Republican, he doesn't seem to have any particular agenda - although some of his colleagues espouse the politics of the religious right and sorAt of extreme measures when it comes to land management and well... zombie management.  For example, some politicians want to burn and bleach the national parks to rid all infestation of animals (any animal over 40 pounds can carry and pass the virus.)

Grant, the nom de plume of Seanan McGuire, is obviously an epidemiology geek and, I suspect, something of a policy wonk and allows the space in Feed to really dive into the details of what her zombie universe looks like - how the virus developed, how society would change and what kind of laws would exist in such a world.  She goes deep into adaptions in technology to detect the virus, and architectural changes to coral and isolate.  If the idea of delving hard core into the inner workings of the CDC during a zombie apocalypse sounds fascinating to you, my friend, this is Your Book.  There are three books in the "Newsflesh" series.  I'll probably take a pass on the next two, but I was definitely entertained for a few hours with Feed.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Devil in a Blue Dress is the birthing of a detective.  Easy Rawlins accepts a job to find a woman because he needs the money, and finds that the steps he needs to follow to track her down come naturally to him.  It's a detektivlerroman - a word I possibly just made up, sure, but accurate.


I used to read a lot of Dashiell Hammett but finally got tired of the racism and called it quits. Raymond Chandler is also, basically, unreadable, being ridiculous.  As the attendant reader of the blog knows, my mysteries are British, and written by ladies.  But, I heard this great interview on NPR with Walter Mosley and knew I had to give it a try.



Although first published in 1990, Devil in a Blue Dress takes place in 1948 Los Angeles and Mosley perfectly captures the "hardboiled" style of early detective novels (minus the racism and misogyny!) His hero, Easy, grew up a sharecropper, then entered the army and fought in WWII.  He and his fellow black soldiers were relegated to office jobs well behind the front line ("I was trained how to kill men but white men weren't anxious to see a gun in my hands."); the white soldiers called them cowards so he volunteered for combat. After the war, he managed to buy a very small house, his prized place of security.  The love of domicile allowed him to take a dubious job for a shady white dude.


Actually, there is racism in Mosley's novel - Easy confronts it constantly. He's accosted and abused by the police twice, he talks about the need to walk slowly in the dark, so he won't be considered suspicious. White people he encounters call him "boy" and "son".  And, when he meets a very wealthy white man, he has a slightly different experience.

    "I mean, there I was, a Negro in a rich white man's office, talking to him like we were best friends - even closer. I could tell that he didn't have the fear or contempt that most white people showed when they dealt with me.
    It was a strange experience but I had seen it before. Mr Todd Carter was so rich that he didn't even consider me in human terms. He could tell me anything. I could have been a prized dog that he knelt to and hugged when he felt low.
    It was the worst kind of racism. The fact that he didn't even recognize our difference showed that he didn't care one damn about me."

It really is remarkable that this is Walter Mosley's first novel - it reads like it was penned by a seasoned mystery writer.  I'll be reading a lot more of his work!  What really slayed me while reading Devil in a Blue Dress was how Mosley was hitting all these high notes nearly 20 years ago in his first goddamn book - the things he addresses in this book are so topical today - institutionalized racism, police brutality, identity ... although, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that as a white reader, like many others, I've been blind to that rather obvious signals of pervasive racism that the Black Lives Matter movement has brought to the forefront.  I'm sorry it's taken us so long to get here.

The Handmaid's Tale

I wish I could remember the first time I read The Handmaid's Tale (I remember how it made me feel, just not when it was). It must have been approximately 20 (!) years ago and, conservatively, I've read it at least 5-6 times.  It is My Favorite Book.  Margaret Atwood is My Favorite Author. And it is this book against which I judge all books.

It's recently come to my attention that not everyone KNOWS about The Handmaid's Tale book (WHAT) so, a brief synopsis: written by Canada's National Treasure, Margaret Atwood, who didn't include any details in this dystopian fiction that didn't have a historical precedent. The Handmaid's Tale is about a woman, Offred, living in Gilead in the former United States.  Handmaids are fertile woman who are impregnated for leaders of the Gilead community because a variety of causes have led to widespread infertility. 

I reread it last weekend because it's been a few years and also the show is on Hulu and also we're living in a dystopian nightmare and also why not.  Every time I read it I find something new, and, as I get older, the way I engage with it changes as well.  This time I noticed the repeated motif of eggs - how many eggs Offred eats, how she notices eggs, how she is a walking ovum, ready to be fertilized.  Atwood spends an incredible page and a half describing Offred's soft-boiled egg breakfast. They are words of singular beauty and elegance.

Earlier this year I saw this tweet that really made me laugh but is also true:

YA Dystopian: "Let's take this government apart! Revolution!"
Adult Dystopian: "Boy, living in this dystopia sure is bleak, huh?"

— Leon Husock (@LeonHusock) February 17, 2017

Offred isn't waging a revolution - she wants to survive and stay alive, so she's not sticking her neck out.  What's interesting in Offred's point of view that she knew what life was like before (similar to life now) and is experiencing the first wave of this new society.  The Aunts keep telling them "This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary."  I think one of the reasons people are so drawn to this book at this time in history is how quickly and quietly the citizens of the US rolled over and allowed the new regime to take over - first everyone was eager to allow for decreased freedoms in the wake of a terrorist account for the sake of "safety" (as we saw after 9/11) and then there came a point when protesters were simply killed - a terrifying tipping point of which the precipice feels ever closer.

image from the 2017 Women's March

There were hardly any notes in my 1986 hardback, signed (!!!!) edition (maybe 3rd?), but I tentatively put some in, in pencil, after explaining to M that it was my most prized possession and needed to be pulled in case of fire (my fiction books are obviously organized by last name.)

A Few Spoilers Below

One of my favorite parts of the book is the end, the "Historical Notes" which I didn't read for a few days after finishing the book the first time because I thought they were just the sort of boring notes that are sometimes included at the end of a book.  While the entirety of the preceding pages is from Offred's POV, suddenly the language and tone changes abruptly to some time in the future (the year 2195, actually) at a keynote session at a conference in Nunavit (Northern Canada) where is is revealed there are "Gilead" and "Caucasian" studies, those concepts being, presumably, inexistent by that time.  The speaker discusses the difficulty in authenticating the narrative (contained on a series of cassette tapes, in a bit of charming anachronism), and with what feels like agonizing academic distance, considering what we've just gone through with Offred, discusses the possible fates that awaited her, if indeed the tapes were truly authentic.

What jumped out at me this reading was how the male speaker, presumably of Inuit heritage (his name is Professor James Darcy Pieixoto), in the year 2195 (for fucksake), is still subtly undermining the female experience.  For example, he says that the title is a pun, "... having to do with the archaic vulgar signification of the word tail, that being, to some extent, the bone, as it were, of contention, that phase of Gileadean society of which our saga treats."  Similarly, he refers to "The Underground Femaleroad" as "The Underground Frailroad."  What Atwood does, again and again, is remind the reader there is no safe place. Inuit academics several hundred years in the future are not benevolent truth-tellers, they are just slightly sympathetic historians who crack dumb jokes. All women are not victims in this story - some women are the horrible propagators of terror and state-sponsored rape.

Throughout Offred's entire awful experience, her most violent reaction is to the sight of Aunt Lydia.  Not learning about her mother's death, not watching a child taken straight from a women's vagina to another woman, not seeing people hanging in the streets or the nauseating "Salvaging" in which the handmaids are forced to share complicity with netted punishment.  "I've begun to shiver. Hatred fills my mouth like spit."  That's what the sight of Aunt Lydia does to her.  I think it's the active cruelty of Aunt Lydia to the handmaids, specifically as a woman to other women, that causes this visceral reaction in Offred.  Cruelty of women towards women is a not uncommon theme in Atwood's books, and it serves a cold reminder that, unfortunately, some women don't support their sisters they way they should.  The side-effects of a paternalist society, say I - although I'm not entirely sure Atwood would agree with me.  For a long time, Atwood was reticent to call herself or the book "feminist" (although I think she's finally come around on that) and she certainly doesn't like to refer to the book as "science fiction" but rather "speculative fiction."  Fair enough, she's 77 years old and she's written one of the greatest books of the 20th century.  She can do what she wants. 

Running

Cara Hoffman's new novel, Running, is set in Athens, Greece and the main characters are "runners" - itinerant people who board trains and try to convince hapless travellers to follow them back to shitty hotels.  In exchange, they get a place to sleep and a few dollars to keep them high or drunk.  It's a rough life for Bridley, an American girl, who made her way to Europe and holds only the high aspiration of sleeping inside at night.  Focused only on the necessities, she doesn't have the luxury of kindness or thoughtfulness. "People think they need things. Money or respect or clean sheets. But they don't. You can wash your hair and brush your teeth with hand soap. You can sleep outside. You can eat whatever's there."

Bridley has been living by her wits for most of her life, abandoned by her parents at 11 and half-raised by a "prepper" uncle, so being semi-homeless in Athens is neither a shock nor much of an adjustment.  She falls in with two British boy/men and shares a room with a half-blasted out wall with a romantic view of the far-away Acropolis. The threesome is sharp, mean and terribly bright - their squat is full of pilfered books and their expressions of true intelligence shock those who get close enough to observe it.  The seeming contradiction of a homeless teenager with brains doesn't compute - much like the brilliant John McLamore from the S-Town podcast takes a minute to process - how could that hillbilly also be a genius?  

Much like Hoffman's So Much Pretty (2013) and Be Safe, I Love You (2014), she moves forward and back in the narrative, teasing out a mystery about what happened in the late eighties in Athens to one of the British boy's current life in present-day New York, where he's an award-winning poet and a visiting artist at a college, unable to adjust to living in a lovely apartment, more at home sleeping on a bench in the park.

Running has many layers, in the title alone - and more I fear I missed.  It's a fine and strong addition to Hoffman's small oeuvre and probably will benefit from multiple readings.  Hoffman has a delicate hand at pulling in current events (violence toward women, PSD in soldiers, terrorism) and the universal and applying them to the individual.  I love her work.  

All About Emily

The Rockettes made the news around the inauguration because, the story goes, they were told they would perform for Trump and lose their jobs if they refused.  Management denied that story and said they were free to perform or not as they chose. Ah, those were simpler and more amusing times when it was fun to at least laugh about how no one wanted to perform for or be a part of the inauguration "festivities" - before we realized that the Tangerine-tinted Trash Can Fire was going to do a lot more damage than we even thought possible.

Anyway, around that time, Connie Willis wrote a blog post about the Rockettes and how they have long stood up for what they thought was right.  In 2011, Willis wrote a novella called All About Emily featuring the Rockettes and she always does her research.   It took me a little while to get my hands on a copy and it's a fun, quick read about a robot (an "artificial") who wants to be a Rockette after seeing a performance at Radio City Music Hall.  She befriends an older actress who is happy to help her as long as Emily is going after her job.  The artificial manufacturers are conducting a campaign to convince the public that the robots are not going to take any desired jobs away, which is a bit of a problem when a perpetually young, perfect robot that doesn't eat or need health insurance wants one of the most coveted dancing jobs in America.

There's a bit of an All About Eve angle going on and there are some funny bits about the not-so-distant future, like Shiloh Jolie-Pitt and Justin Bieber Jr doing a play together on Broadway and Twilight The Musical.  Per usual Willis's future might have a dramatic new technology but otherwise life remains recognizable. Sweet ending, great little read if you can find it.

The Idiot

I've been following Elif Batuman on twitter lately - she's very funny (I mean,@BananaKarenina, come on...) and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker and she's beautiful and obvi I am burning with jealousy. Many a day do I regret my lack of PhD in literature, or even a BA, for that matter (Elif's is from Stanford), but never have I felt it's sting so strongly as while reading The Idiot, which appears to be strongly influenced by various Russian authors but most importantly Dostoyevsky -  who I have never read, to my great shame. He also wrote a book called The Idiot in the 19th century which I can't help but suspect was an influence (even the wikipedia page is TLDR for me).

In this rather remarkable novel, the main character is Selin, who seems to be unabashedly based on the author, at least in that she is from New Jersey with Turkish parents and went to Harvard in the mid-nineties.  There are those that will turn up their nose at fiction or art with obvious links to their own biographies but I am not one of those people, I love it - for me, the personal connection makes it more... personal - there's so much heart in stories like this.

Batuman's writing style is almost shockingly simple, she follows a Subject_Verb_Predicate structure that I really do suspect is meant to read like a translation of a Russian novel (here again I regret my lack of formal study in literature or I'd state that a little more firmly) as well as a book written for a beginning reader of a second language.  For example, "Ivan carried my suitcase back up the stairs to Peter's grandmother's apartment. Cheryl was sitting under the piano. Andrea was teaching everyone how to say please and you're welcome in Hungarian."  When she occasionally breaks the mold, it's unexpected and often sublimely beautiful:  A plastic-lined canal was full of fat sleek orange carp, with gauzy fins and plaintive round mouths opening and closing. They wanted, and wanted.

It is infinitely quotable (my copy is full of highlights) and full of themes like how language and thought are connected, the many types of languages we engage with (spoken, mathematical, computer, sign, etc), nationality and identity, and it's also a bit of a historical novel about college-life in the 90s.  As that is also when I went to college, Batuman's spot-on descriptions of the posters we all had hanging on our walls, early and awkward interactions on email, the Cranberries, frickin' NETSCAPE... I just howled a million times to remember it all.  ("Dance songs turned out to consist of one sentence repeated over and over. For example, 'I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain.'")

At almost 500 pages, something worth noting is that... not much happens.  Selin has a crush on a boy with a girlfriend who gives her just enough attention to keep her hanging on, she has interactions with  weird roommates, she goes to class and thinks about language, and she goes to Europe for the summer to teach English in Hungarian villages but really to be close to the guy.  Also, there are two parts, no chapters, and barely a double space to break up the flow of words (at least in my proof provided by the publisher).  It's a modern story in a rather old-fashioned package (see also: that wikipedia page I couldn't get through), at least the kind we don't see very often in contemporary fiction.  However, in one rather stunning paragraph, we see Batuman spell it all out for us:

Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn't get to decide. And yet in the next moment it seemed to me that these superabundant personages weren't irrelevant at all, but the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about the way to live, about how the fateful character in your life wasn't the one who buried you, but the one who led you out to more people.

You might call this a Bildungsroman (I've even seen this particular book called an anti-Bildungsroman, but I disagree with that) and it seems to fit the bill nicely enough.  There's an interesting interview in Vulture where Batuman discusses this unplotted aspect of the book.  To me it's quite interesting because in terms of our modern expectations re: storytelling, yes, it is sort of

"boring" but if you're able to adjust and appreciate the literary qualities, it's a true gift of a novel.

Il Will

Ill Will is a new mystery by Dan Chaon.  Actually, it's less a mystery and more a story about memory and a weird time in American history.  In the mid-1980s, a moral panic surged across the US that Satanic rituals were occurring regularly in small communities - most of the stories involved children being killed or drinking their blood and/or sexual abuses.  I remember, as a child myself at that time, thinking that if the amount of alleged abuse were actually happening, someone I knew would surely be affected, and I didn't know of anyone.  Simultaneously, I also wondered if I had repressed memories, and beloved family friends actually put on hoods at night and sought to kidnap me and cut out my liver for a backyard bonfire.  So, thanks, Chaon, for taking me back so completely to this bizarre time in my childhood when religious nuts in my small Christian community spent a lot of time freaking out kids with hand-wringing about a bunch of nonsense.

Ill Will's main character, Dustin, a psychologist whose career launched (and quickly sunk) in the study of "Satanic Ritual Abuse" was seemingly a victim of the phenomenon himself.  His parents and aunt and Uncle when killed when he was a child and his adopted brother, Rusty, was jailed for the murder.  Dustin testistfied at the trial that Rusty was involved in Satanic rituals.  Dustin later marries and has several children who don't know about his past, but when a friend of his son goes missing, Dustin sort of gets involved in trying to figure out what happened.  Meanwhile, Rusty's been released from prison and has contacted one of his nephews.  Rusty seems to be a well-meaning man, lonely and good intentioned, however ill-equipped he may be to deal with life and human interactions in any  responsible way, having spent most of his life in jail.

For me what was lacking was a woman's voice - there were a few short bits with Dustin's female cousins whose parents were killed as well - they were the characters I was most interested in.

To tell the truth, I found the end of Ill Will very unsatisfying.  Things wrap up in a quick and sort of disassociated way.  I did enjoy the analysis of memory and memory recovery, as well as the sort of clinical view of this out of control urban legend that so many people believed in.

History of Wolves

Emily Fridlund's debut novel, History of Wolves (2017), is a lovely piece of writing - thoughtful and complex, weaving out the improbable death of a child while three people stand idly by.  Madeline is a 15 year old girl who lives with her parents in what is described as barely a shack in the woods, a former commune that her parents were a part of, until everyone scampered off.  Mattie and her family have little electricity, not to mention food, and no car. Mattie is responsible for getting herself to and from school and feeding herself and their ragtag dogs that wait for her every day, barking at the end of their leashes.  

When a new family moves in across the lake, Mattie introduces herself to the young mother and her 4 year old son as Linda and soon begins seeing them every day. She is grateful to be easily pulled in by the generous and friendly mother, Patra, who pays her an unheard of $10 per day for babysitting Paul.  It's slowly teased out that Patra and her husband are Christian Scientists, a meaningless phrase to Linda, who is oblivious to the failing health of Paul, only happy to have recreated herself as the protected nanny/babysitter of this relatively wealthy family.

Fridlund does some very interesting things with the timeline, providing the briefest of glimpses into Mattie's future and the effect her year with Paul's family had on her.  She remains desperately poor but also responsible for her own ailing parents.  There's a frustrating lack of guilt from Paul's parents and from Mattie and what emerged for me was a pattern of negligence that bred negligence.  Mostly overlooked and uncared-for by her parents, Mattie was unable to recognize that Paul was in desperate need of help.  Her own desperate state, unacknowledged, left her without the capacity to see another being in need.  

Mattie repeats to those interested enough to ask, that her interests lie in the "history of wolves" - a subject dismissed by her teachers as something girls are fascinated with and actually something she knows very little about herself.  But the image of wolves roving silently around the lake, making what one can only assume is their brutal existence, is a powerful one and easily applied to these two families that have separated themselves from the rest of society to live as they wish, with mostly disastrous consequence. 

We Love You, Charlie Freeman

One of my favorite books a few years back was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler - so when I heard about  We Love You, Charlie Freeman, with a somewhat similar plot, I was chasing the idea of recreating that thrilling feeling of reading Beside Ourselves for the first time.  That is always a dumb idea, although I do it all the time.  I hope every dystopian novel I read will be as great as The Handmaid's Tale and every olive I eat will taste as good as those olives we bought in a market in Spain and ate in our beautiful apartment in Sevilla, overlooking a plaza with orange trees and a nice bottle of wine.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman, (2016) by Kaitlyn Greenidge, is about the Freemans, a black family who are chosen to live with a chimp at an institute outside Boston and teach him sign language.  Most of the story is told from the older daughter's perspective.  Charlotte is an oddity in their new town, being one of only a few black students, and lives in a huge institute with an animal and knows ASL.  The reason the family speaks sign language although none of them are deaf is slowly teased out.  The girls' mother forms an immediate bond with Charlie that they are never quite ever to match, despite the younger daughter's efforts.  Charlie attempts to dominate both children and diverts attention to himself as much as possible.  We learn that Charlie was taken from his own mother as a baby and never formed an attachment until he met the Freemans.

Charlotte's friend Aida introduces her to the racist history of the institute, which compared the chimps to a nearby black community, but Charlotte already knows that she's being observed just as much as Charlie by the scientists.  Greenridge also writes from the perspective of Ellen Jericho, a black school teacher from the early 20th century who became an object of the institute's early studies.  Ellen's story is heartbreaking - she's a clever, lonesome woman whose parents committed suicide.  She's part of a secret society, but always on the outskirts of that group and her community.

Another figure literally and figuratively hangs above the characters - Julia Toneybee-Leroy, who founded the institute and whose portrait hangs in the hall where the Freemans live.  Treated with deference by the scientists who repeat a clearly fabricated story about how Julia brought the first chimps to Massachusetts, and suspicion by the nearby black community, she's a nebulous influence until we do finally meet the elderly Ms. Toneybee-Leroy at a hilarious yet disturbing Thanksgiving dinner.  This privileged woman believes herself to be open-minded and open-hearted to both her chimps and the black community around her institute but of course treats them both with a motherly, condescending tone.  Toneybee-Leroy's ingrained racism is revealed wholesale in a letter she writes to "You, African-American people" that's meant to apologize but excuse herself from the painful experiments the institute inflicted on the black community it drew into its web.

To be honest, I was hoping for more storytelling around Charlie, but little text is devoted to his words -  that's simply not the story Greenidge is telling.  Just as there is no happy ending for man or beast in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the misguided experiment of Charlie and the Freeman family ends with disastrous results.  Greenidge's debut novel is a powerful story about institutionalized racism in America told with insight and beautifully developed characters.  I look forward to following her career!

Busman's Honeymoon

At the end of Dorothy Sayer's excellent and probably most famous book, Gaudy Night, Harriet Vane agrees to marry Lord Peter Wimsey - although the whole conversation is in Latin so you might miss it, as I did, until I looked up the rather obscure references online.  The next book, Busman's Holiday, (1937) has Harriet and Lord Peter getting married at the beginning and then swiftly retiring to the village where Harriet grew up. She always admired a house there, so, naturally, her fancy new husband bought it for her.  The first few chapters find the newlyweds mildly aghast that their country home has not been properly prepared as promised by the erstwhile previous owner.  There are many, many pages devoted to the cleaning of chimneys - although Harriet and Peter are so charming and in love it doesn't really matter.  After about a day, they discover the body of the previous owner is found in the cellar, leading to that curious phrase "Busman's holiday", which means to go on vacation and do the same thing that you do in your work-a-day life (like when Jessica Fletcher goes on vacation and

someone gets themselves killed and she has to solve the murder.)  There is, as you might expect, some assholery in the derivation, which is that when the bus driver goes on vacation, he has to take the bus to get there.

The mystery is a bit of a locked room, because all the doors to the house were locked from the inside when the Wimsey's arrived, so how could anyone have killed this guy?

There's a lot of talk about how to solve a murder - Wimsey maintains that you find the "How" and that leads to the "Who" and is less interested in motive than his new wife.  Harriet largely agrees, although she always comes back to the motive as a writer of mysteries herself:
  "If a thing could only have been done one way, and if only one person could have done it that way, then you've got your criminal, motive or no motive. there's How, When, Where, Why and Who - and when you've got How you've got Who. Thus spake Zarathustra."
  "I seem to have married my only intelligent reader. That's the way you construct it from the other end, of course. Artistically, it's absolutely right."  

this cover seriously
gives it all away

That sort of thing reads like fan service for the murder mystery reader and is, admittedly, enjoyable. Sayers includes quite a few of those expository moments for Peter and Harriet to reflect on their methods and the reader to geek out over her method.

Aside from the term "busman's holiday" I also learned about "banns", a Church of England requirement to announce intent to marry to the local vicar.  There's some anti-Semitic stuff about unattractive businessmen and their Jewish heritage that seems entirely out of context except for the year of publication.  And there's an interesting bit that briefly describes how Peter came to employ his remarkable valet, Bunter - the "Jeeves" of the operation.  They fought together in WWI and Peter offered him a job if they lived to survive the fox hole they were hiding in.  Peter was suffering from "shell-shock" and Bunter helped ease him out of it by knowing precisely what to do, as he always does.  If only we could all have our own Bunters.

What's most interesting, at least to me, is the negotiation of Peter and Harriet's married life.  Harriet turned down many proposals from Peter in the interest of her own independance - it's only when she trusts that he'll allow her to maintain her own personhood that she agrees to marry him.  When Peter suffers rather severe emotional distress upon uncovering the murder and consequently sending him to his death sentence, Harriet finds herself in the position of providing necessary "space" to Peter (although they didn't use that language in 1937).  Harriet feels like she has to wait for Peter to chose to come to her as a refuge, and when he inevitably does, it's a major triumph for her and the marriage.  It's kind of romantic, but also a bit odd  - but, then again, these are two oddball characters - both slightly older, neither naïve and each with a whole lot of murder baggage to carry around.

Busman's Honeymoon is Sayer's last book about Lord Peter and Harriet, with the apparent subtext that they leave the murder-solving business forever following Peter's mini-breakdown after the trial. The reader can imagine Peter and Harriet living out their rich lives without having to solve a murder everywhere they go like poor Mrs. Fletcher.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

Saturday I went to the Women’s March in Chicago, along with, at today’s count, at least 250,000 other people.  Earlier in the week I remember thinking, “Wow, they’re expecting 20,000 people, that’s amazing."

I was pretty nervous about going to the march because I was worried about getting harassed by the police, or, worse, arrested.  I don’t like big crowds and, yeah, my preferred way to spend Saturday morning is in my jammies, with coffee, talking on the phone to my sister.  But I went ready to fight - ready to be harassed and ready to harass.  What happened instead was thousands of women and men - the elderly and babies, racially diverse people, my trans sisters and brothers - filled the streets of downtown Chicago and then proceeded to take care of each other.  I’ve never heard so many excuse mes, thank yous, look out for that pothole, careful, watch your step.  I love your hat, I love your sign, I love your energy.  

We couldn’t hear the speakers, we couldn’t see the stage. Hell, we didn’t even know where the stage was, but the thick crowd of people around us, just east of the bridge on Jackson, cheered when a cheer wave came our way, joined in whenever someone started a chant, and, my favorite, sang along with two African American women who started singing Lean On Me. As we turned around and eventually moved into the loop, we happily followed them singing and pointing out potholes.  Pockets of protesters were out all day - we saw a group of students walking down Michigan Avenue around 3pm, shouting My Body, My Choice, although what really warmed my heart was the male voices in the crowd yelling HER Body, HER Choice.

For the first time since this horrible human being was elected, I felt more hope than fear.  I saw creativity and humor and love as powerful agents of change.  I saw women taking the word he used to brag about sexual assault and turn it into a strength. We’re going to get through this, we cannot fail.  

Thank you to all the people that made the day so great.

Thank you to my friends who travelled to DC.

Thank you, Chicago bike police, for being cool.

Thank you, dudes who support women’s rights.  

Thank you, Chicago, for restoring my faith in humanity.

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Swing Time

I saw Zadie Smith speak, shortly after White Teeth came out, in front of a relatively small crowd in San Francisco.  We were both in our twenties then, she's one year younger than me, and I was full of jealousy and awe for what she had accomplished, and how sophisticated she was, and how beautiful.  Someone asked her what she was going to work on next and she said she wanted to write a book like a musical, where people break into song, inconceivably, as people do in musicals. I wonder if Swing Time is that book, but with singing replaced by dancing.

I remain in awe, many novels later, and I love how her books have become even more thoughtful and contemplative. Swing Time moves slowly, and I read it that way, over several weeks, allowing myself to enjoy her phrases.  As in a recently article by Smith in The Guardian, What Beyoncé Taught Me, it's impossible to read without stopping to look up YouTube videos of people dancing. The book is intensely beautiful, and I often stopped to think about what it would look like if I drew a sentence, or what the movie version would look like.

I suspect that the style, told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, is borrowed from some aspect of British literature, and, once again I curse my non-existent PhD in the same.  This perspective is distancing, and the reader feels closer to the narrator's best friend, Tracey, who's brilliant and talented and clever and mean.  She's Tracey's companion and dancing partner, the Ginger to Tracey's Fred Astaire, and they fall out as Tracey's star seems to rocket and she takes a more conventional turn, both of them more than a little jealous of the other's path.  The narrator works for a Madonna-like narcissistic mega-star later in life and her activities absorb the narrator's time and talents.  They make multiple trips to Africa, where the star funds a school for girls. Smith delves deeply into themes of racial identity in this area, where the black, British narrator of Jamaican descent is often considered white and American by her colleagues and friends there.

Our narrator considers herself a dancer and an actor (despite never really practicing those things beyond
her childhood) although not as good as Tracey, but she finally allows herself a little freedom near the end of the book.  At a drum circle at the school, everyone is dancing:

Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. Aimee had extemporized, Granger had historicized - mooonwalk, the robot, the running man - but I still had no ideas about dance, only instincts. I watched them for a minute, the two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through everything. Five minutes later I was done and more tired than if I'd run six miles.

Like On Beauty, Smith ends Swing Time with deceptive simplicity, turning the final words in a book into, in fact, a world of possibilities - a beginning.

Hag-Seed

Margaret Atwood published Hag-Seed as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project along with some other writers like Jeannette Winterson who did an interpretation of The Winter's Tale and Gillian Flynn who is scheduled to do a Hamlet.  Atwood surely chose the most difficult play to reimagine - The Tempest, with it's sea disasters and magical island and all those mistaken identities.  I love a Shakespeare remix like nobody's business and, of course, Margaret Atwood is probably my favorite author, so I was pretty damn excited to see what she was going to do.

Felix is the artistic director for a Canadian theatre where he presents avant-garde productions of Shakespeare plays.  Right away he's ousted by his second in command, Tony.  Felix becomes something of a hermit and removes himself from society for a while, until he starts teaching Shakespeare to some prisoners at a local jail, under the name Mr Duke.  Sound familiar?  If it doesn't, you probably need to brush up on The Tempest.  I'm curious whether those who are not well-versed in the play would enjoy the book as much as one who isn't but my guess would be no.  Following the connections in part of the fun; wondering how she's possibly going to wrap it up, knowing the original ending, is like watching the master at work.  Anyway, it's a problem easily remedied, so, if you haven't read The Tempest before, give it a quick read before Hag-Seed and I think you'll find your experience improved.

Although Felix thinks things like "If anyone had told him then that he'd be doing Shakespeare with a pack of cons inside the slammer he'd have said they were hallucinating" he's actually a very good teacher with excellent critical thinking assignments for his players and a respectful attitude toward their strengths, with very little interest in their criminal backgrounds.

Shakespeare was famous for putting a "play within the play" and Atwood took that concept to the extreme.  At one point I think I counted five plays within the play but I did allow myself to get pretty meta - are we not all players upon the stage, etc.?  Hag-Seed is a joy to read and Atwood's joy in writing it is evident as well - she clearly knows the theatre very well.

Crises of confidence have been surmounted, grudges incurred, hurt feelings soothed. Felix has berated himself for his own lunacy in undertaking such a hopeless enterprise, then congratulated himself on his judgment. His spirits plunge, then soar, then plunge again.
  Normal life.

The Trespasser, Tana French (no spoilers)

It was, of course, with unparallelled excitement that I started reading Tana French's latest mystery, The Trespasser.  I was so absorbed that, despite being on vacation in the very beautiful city of Lisbon, I was often thinking about getting back to my book.  Per French's conceit for the Dublin Murder Squad series, the main character is a secondary character from a previous book, although, in this case, someone we got to know pretty well in The Secret Place: Antoinette Conway.  She and her partner, Stephen Moran, are the newest detectives on the team and are working the worst shift, when a murder is thrown their way.  "...the real reason everyone hates night shift is that nothing good ever comes in. The high-profile murders with complex backstories and fascinating motives might happen at night, sometimes, but they don't get discovered til morning." It seems simple enough, even boring, but Conway and Moran keep pushing for answers, mostly because their colleague and their boss seem too interested in them closing the case quickly.

As the only woman and only person of color on the team, Conway is acutely aware of being treated differently by her squad.  Although they claim that they're treating her with the same teasing and pranking that any new member would receive, Conway feels attacked but doesn't directly confront the behavior. As a result, the reader is left wondering if she's merely paranoid (maybe that is how all new recruits are treated, for all I know) or if they really are ganging up on her.  She even doubts her extremely likeable partner, who is so eager to get along he mostly tells people just what they want to hear. Antoinette's voice is hard, and her attitude makes sense when explained: "I can't tell if this is batshit paranoia or the bleeding obvious slapping me in the face. Two years of watching my back, watching every step and every word, in fight mode all day every day: my instincts are fried to smoking wisps." She's desperate to avoid looking weak and letting anyone else have any power over her.  Asking for help is the hardest thing she ever does. French does an amazing job capturing the unique voices of her characters, but especially the complexity of the detectives - and they're all amazingly good at their jobs.  Despite Conway's intense distrust of nearly everyone, she puts that aside when interviewing witnesses or suspects. Like an actress, she and her colleagues use a library of well-rehearsed scripts to find the truth.

The murder victim in this case is a woman so bland and the case so seemingly-open-and-shut that Conway and Moran often wonder if they really should just close the case with the obvious perpetrator.  As a reader, you also get pulled into the idea that their theories are wildly off-target.

Without giving anything away, most of the characters of this book are trespassers in one way or another - Conway feels like an uninvited guest in her department, her estranged father has weaseled his way into her life and the suspects have inserted themselves into the life of the victim. As usual, French continues to be one of our best mystery writers and now I'll go back to watching the clock 'til her next book comes out.

You Will Know Me

Megan Abbott is steadily establishing herself as the voice of authority re: teenage girls in contemporary literature.  She burst on to my scene in 2012 with Dare Me, about a group of cheerleaders and their coach, then The Fever, about a town where the girls are overcome by these mysterious seizures.  In the early aughts, she wrote hardboiled feminist pulpy noir that looks pretty interesting (let me know if you've read them and have a suggestion on where to start!)  

You Will Know Me is about another athlete, a 15 year-old gymnast and Olympic hopeful.  Like her other recent books, it's a bit of a mystery, although these three books defy traditional sorting into genres.  It's told from the perspective of Katie, the gymnast's mother, who tries hard to rise about the other mothers' "sports mom" coterie.  "The other parents always tried to do this. To drag her into their little circle, their gym drama, their coven rubbing their hands over their water bottles, fire burn and cauldron bubble." Katie and her husband have been devoting themselves to Devon's career since she was four years old - they're in debt and they have no free time because they're always driving her to either her expensive lessons or to meets across the country.

Reading this while the Rio Olympics were happening gave me a little extra insight into one of the themes of Abbott's book - the body of the devoted gymnast.  "Less than five feet tall, a hard, smooth shell of a body. Hipless, breastless still, but the way she's transformed her body in the last two years, thighs like trunks, shoulders and biceps straining her tank-top straps, staggered Katie."  I found myself so amazed to see how unusual Olympic athletes body's look - the triangles of swimmers' torsos, the dramatic profiles of the gymnasts: flat fronts, perky tushes, those legs...!  Their bodies are like objects of consumption over the course of the Olympics, all of us staring, staggered ourselves.

Like The Fever and Dare Me, You Will Know Me is a quick read and usually devoured in a sitting or two.  Abbott's recall of the pain of teenager-ness is spot-on. Her obsessive girls are so perfectly captured it carries me right back to my own tortured teenage years with embarrassing clarity.  I'm excited to see what she'll write next!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

According to the internets, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is The Greatest Spy Novel of All Time. Having gotten a bug in my bonnet to read my first (surely not, but I think so?) spy novel, I succumbed.  If it is the greatest spy novel of all time, all other spy novels are beyond terrible.  For one thing, there's hardly any spy stuff in it.  This dude just pretends to get himself fired from his British intelligence job so the Russians will pick him up and make him an informant.

It was written in 1963 so it's obviously a little dated. John le Carré  also wrote that horrible, incomprehensible Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so I probably should have known better.  Apparently the book had some cultural impact back in the sixties re: idealism and perceived moral values of Western espionage.  I suppose people coming off the high of moral superiority post-WWII must have met with some surprise that the shady actions of our government weren't born in the purest intentions.


Do you know there are hardly any spy books by ladies?  I ordered one by Stella Remington - At Risk - haven't started yet.  If anyone has any good recommendations, please let me know!

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Somehow I did not quite understand that JK Rowling did not actually write Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but merely "collaborated" with Jack Thorne.  That was disappointing, I'll admit.  Even though the new book/play is touted as "The Eighth Story. Nineteen Years Later" what we have is officially sanctioned fan fiction.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Plenty of literary critics love crowing about what a terrible author J.K. Rowling is - she was described as "artless" in a recent New Yorker, for example - I whole-heartedly disagree, I'm quite fond of Rowling's style and storytelling, and I'm a big fan of her work under the nom de plume Robert Gilbraith. While Thorne does an excellent job capturing the voice of beloved characters, I thought his stage direction was absurd ("And with that, time moves ever onwards - ALBUS's eyes become darker, his face grows more sallow. He's still an attractive boy, but he's trying not to admit it."), but then again, I am an utter classicist when it comes to stage direction.  His story is clumsy and way too long (for a play) and I honestly couldn't recommend reading it.  However, there were a few things I found very interesting:

Firstly, I really love that a play is doing this well - the book sold 2 million copies in 2 days, surely the first time that's ever happened for a play.  I love reading plays, but they do take some adjusting to, and I think it's great that children are embracing the medium.  Said my 10 year old friend, "At first I thought it would be really hard, but then I didn't even notice!" and then I said, "Shut your adorable face! No spoilers!"  What I found interesting as a reader was that all kinds of crazy stunts are going on on-stage - spells, people flying, multiple UNDERWATER scenes, all of which you can read on two levels:  1. I'm just reading a book and stuff happens. 2. I'm reading a play and I'm trying to imagine how this will be carried out on stage.

Secondly, plays are meant to be performed, and reading a play is always secondary to watching a play.  This play looks like it would be pretty amazing to see, assuming they pull off half the effects.  Apparently it is selling out in its current West-End production at the Palace Theatre in London, and GET THIS:  You buy a ticket for two shows - Part 1 starts at 2pm and is 2 hrs and 40 mins long.  Then you leave, then you come back for Part II, a 7:30 show, which is 2 hrs and 35 mins long!  I am agog.  I mean, that is some Philip-Glass-marathon asses-in-seats shit there and I did not know the contemporary theater-goer had it in him, much less, presumably: Children?  I'm not sure I have it in me, and I love both theatre and Harry Potter.  BTW, prices are between 30-140 pounds. That's $38-180USD.  Actually, the dollar doing very well against the pound right now thanks to Brexit and worldwide financial collapse so... book your tickets?

The Girls

Emma Cline's first novel, The Girls, is the kind of book that you can't put down. It's also the kind of book, if you're me, that fills you with jealous rage that the author earned an increasingly rare 2 mil book deal with Random House at the tender age of...wait for it... 25.

The Girls swings easily between the present, where Evie is a reclusive woman who moves anonymously from place to place, serving as a caregiver when she can, and her 14 year-old self, growing up outside San Francisco.  Evie is staying at a friend's cottage when the friend's son shows up unexpectedly with his girlfriend. "She was in the cult," he says to the girl.  The younger Evie is ignored by her parents, her life an expectant kind of waiting.  "All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you - the boys had spend that time becoming themselves."  Evie meets a girl, Suzanne, whose seeming confidence attracts her, and when Suzanne's friends invite Evie to join them, she is happy to follow.

At "The Ranch", Evie meets Russell, and is drawn into the world that they have created, what seems to Evie like the pinnacle of 1960s peace and togetherness: people living free and happy. Evie wants Suzanne's approval ∴ Suzanne wants Russell's approval ∴ Evie wants Russel's approval. Evie is as unformed as a teenage girl can be, easily malleable by everyone around her.  "I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board."

Cline's book has the astounding insightfulness of Being A Girl similar to the mood and tone of The Virgin Suicides. Like Eugenides, she captures the tragedy of American girlhood and its potential dire consequences.  "The Ranch" and Russell, are, of course, Charles Manson and his decrepit squat.  After finishing The Girls, not knowing much about the Manson murders, I fell down an internet rabbit hole about the women who murdered Sharon Tate and others in 1969, and how close Cline's story is to the actual events.  Side note: one of Manson's "girls" died in prison at the age of 61, and two others, near 70, are California's oldest female inmates. I read too much about the murders, to be honest, articles for and against their parole, including a sort-of serial from John Waters, and remain unsure how I feel about the women's incarceration.

Cline draws the reader into the mystery of what Evie's role in the murders was.  While her involvement slowly unravels, the older and wiser Evie is observing again, with no small amount of dread, the feeling of the transient, drug-fueled experience of her friend's son and his girlfriend.  She sees in the girlfriend the too-willing desire to please her jackass boyfriend, how she puts off too easily her own needs and desires for whatever interests him.  Their uneasy connection, in parallel with the '69 story, seems fraught with potential violence.

I thought the book was incredibly written and it really made me think about so many things  - although, one of the things it made me question was the sensationalism of this type of crime and my own place as a consumer of its gory details.  Cline's book doesn't dwell on the details (thankfully!) but draws a clear picture of how easily young women can be manipulated - that's what's most frightening about The Girls.

Into the Forest

After I saw a trailer for Into the Forest and saw it was based on the "best selling novel" by Jean Hegland, I picked up a copy, always eager to read 1996's post-apocalyptic fiction.  In Into the Forest, you never really learn what event has caused the electricity to go out and all forms of government and communication to cease.  Nell and Eva, who live 30 miles from the nearest town in Northern California and were home-schooled, were already pretty separated from the rest of humanity when the lights are on, but when the power goes out, even their small connections are lost.

At first the sisters and their father subsist on the supplies they were able to build up from town and can from their garden, and as they run out of gas they enter a kind of fugue state of inertia and confusion, waiting for things to return to normal, waiting to be rescued.   

The girls are sort of living like the people in the really wonderful TV show, Last Man on Earth, where everyone is trying to desperately hold on to the society they knew before - maintaining homes, and standing around kitchen islands as if their refrigerators are still cold. Part of what makes that show so funny - going to the grocery and walking the aisles with a cart, or going to a bar to play pool, like everything is normal - is that we probably would do exactly that, as long as we could.

As it becomes evident that no rescue is coming, the girls slowly come to the realization that they've got to learn to fend for themselves.  The forest, on whose edge their house sits, was their childhood playground, but also dangerous - every time they went out, their mother would tell them not to eat anything.  It takes about a year for the girls to discover how much food and medicine is available in the forest. Hegland does a good job of drawing the reader into that realization, or perhaps I'm also so focused on sustenance coming from a store, that I also didn't consider all the food that could be had from the forest, and much better than the old canned vegetables the girls are eating.  For example, the girls tear apart tea bags to eek out a cup of tea every night, and when the tea runs out, they drink hot water.  It takes them so long to think of brewing the herbs in the forest into their tea.  It reminded me of this Louis CK joke where God is chastising man about working, and Man's like, "I need to buy food" and God's like, "There's food EVERYWHERE."

Into the Forest becomes really interesting when it dawns on the girls that whether or not the power comes back on, and it probably won't, the hopes and dreams they had then are no longer relevant to their lives - they become new-born when they enter the forest.

For the most part, I was really captivated by this book, I found a lot of similarities between it and The Parable of the Sower, another Northern Cal fave. I saw it compared to The Handmaid's Tale in a few places but it is not in any way similar to that great classic, aside from the post-apocalypse, whatever it was.  I wasn't crazy about (mini-spoiler) the fact that it ends with a baby, which is boring as hell and apparently the only way anyone knows how to end a story these days).  And, in order to avoid more spoilers, I'll simply mention that some weird-ass, *trigger warning stuff* happens that almost made me put the book down for good.

"What an act of faith and luck it is to pluck and taste  a little green leaf. With Eva standing beside me and our mother's warnings buzzing in my brain, I felt as though I were re-creating the history of humankind as I bent, picked a leaf, brushed a delicate coating of dust from it's surface, and took a nibble, so tentatively I think I expected it to burn my lips. But it had a cool, delicate, clean taste. It tasted sour and green, like chlorophyll, pickles, the evening air. It was a little tough, almost like lettuce that's bolted - but fresher, more alive."

Doomsday Book

I was actually hesitant to read another Connie Willis book after To Say Nothing Of the Dog, because I loved it so much and didn't want to be disappointed.  How could another book live up to the sheer genius of that comic novel that made me LOL on practically every page, look up countless references about the Victorian period, start seriously studying bird stumps and sit down and have a serious think about Schrodinger's Cat?

So with no small amount of trepidation, I started Doomsday Book (1993).  Immediately: I'm hooked - why have I never heard of this author before now?  In Doomsday, a young historian, Kivrin, uses the "net" to go to the Middle Ages.  It's her life's goal to go there, and she's studied middle English, learned how to milk a cow, ride a horse, and dirtied her nails sufficiently to fit in.  Her tutor, Mr Dunworthy (also in To Say Nothing of the Dog, although this book takes place before that) is very reluctant to see her go because the Middle Ages are a 10 (very dangerous), especially for a young woman travelling alone.  Before she leaves she's given inoculations against illnesses of the time, and has a translater implanted (similar to the babel fish in Hitchhikers).  However, when she arrives in the middle ages, she immediately becomes very ill and also can't communicate with the "contemps".

One of the things I love about Willis's books is that the science is really simple - there are just a few terms the reader will need to grasp: the net, slippage, the drop, the fix.  Of course, it's deceptively simple. For example, the theory of Schrödinger's Cat plays heavily in this book - people love repeating that Schrödinger intended the thought experiment as a joke.  The cat-bit, yes, that's meant to be ridiculous, but superposition is not.

Meanwhile, back in the mid-twenty-first century, the lab tech who ran the drop also becomes seriously ill, and moments before he keels over and starts a pandemic in contemporary Oxford, he mumbles that something's very wrong.  Dunworthy wants to bring Kivrin back immediately but can't because of the convergence of academic politics, the pandemic, and the Christmas holiday.

In the 14th century, Kivrin is taken in by a family, nursed to health, and tried to find the location of the drop so she can return safely.  Doomsday flips between the treatment of illnesses in both centuries, and the misconceptions about the middle ages that flummox and delight Kivrin.

Doomsday becomes a nail-biting mystery about illness identification, a reflection on superposition, a real joy for anyone interested in language, and even an apt comparison to the crucifixion and the place of religion in our lives.