Monthly Archives: May 2021

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The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

topeka

This final novel in Lerner’s autofictional trilogy has been much written about and much praised. Minimally framed by his present-day adult self, the bulk of the book is Adam Gordon’s account of his teen years in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1990s. The events and circumstances mirror Lerner’s own.

A debating champion, Adam uses words aggressively and defensively both onstage and off. He’s a master of “the spread,” where debaters spout multiple arguments as fast as they can spit them out, making it difficult for their opponents to respond or, I would imagine, for the audience to follow. If this sounds a lot like mansplaining and talking over people, if it reminds you of everything hateful in our current public discourse—whether on social media, political circles, or family get-togethers—welcome to the club.

I disliked this book from the opening scene where teenaged Adam, unmoved by the romantic potential of being on a moonlit boat with his girlfriend, is so busy sharing all the marvelous wonders of his mind that he doesn’t even notice his girlfriend is no longer beside him. Some members of my book club found this sequence hilarious while I was only reminded of too many teenaged hours pretending to listen to boys orate.

Since it was our book club’s selection, I kept reading and found much that was interesting, especially about the uses and misuses of language, about language as power.

Chapters about Adam’s teen years are interrupted by a two chapters each from his parents’ point of view. Adam’s parents are members of “the Foundation,” a progressive clinic and training center for psychiatry (Lerner’ mother is connected to the Menninger Foundation). Jane, like Lerner’s mother, has written a popular feminist book, which incites anonymous calls from angry men and envy among her colleagues. Jonathan’s research involves “speech shadowing” where words repeated at increasing speeds turn into nonsense.

Adam’s chapters are also interspersed with chapters from the point of view of Darren, a townie adopted by Adam’s group of friends who mistreat and befriend him at the same time. Not gifted with the verbal fluency of the Foundation kids, Darren’s only power is physical. The threat of violence winds through these chapters, providing a bit of tension, a story question we read to answer. The other tension comes from Adam’s preparation for a debating tournament.

Our book club discussion was enlivened by one member’s actually having grown up in Topeka where her parents were associated with the Menninger Foundation. Others had a more positive reaction to the book than I did, though I recognised the critique of modern culture and the idea that much of what is so hateful today is rooted in the toxic masculinity the teens in this novel are steeped in.

Some members spoke of the blurred boundaries in the book, such as Jane having her friend become her analyst as well. Others mentioned that the characters all sound the same, except for Darren, though of course that could be because they have all been brought up in Foundation-speak. Some people thought the author was trying to put in too much, perhaps because autofiction—using real events with some fictional tampering—tempts you to include everything.

I am not a fan of autofiction. Though I appreciate the fun for the writer of playing with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, and recognise that novelists have always drawn on their own experiences, I miss the alchemy whereby fiction transforms the dross of everyday life. Also, I’m not happy with the way lies have replaced facts in our political discourse, so blurring the line seems to me to go in a less than productive direction.

Lerner’s prose is occasionally quite beautiful. One of the benefits of novelists also being poets is increased attention to the music of language. However, I did find myself skimming sections, especially the many about debating, being bored and a little disgusted.

Writers are sometimes admonished to make their main characters more likeable, leading to debates among writers as to the necessity of having the main character be likeable (and a side discussion of whether this only happens to women writers). As a reader I don’t have to like the main character, but I have to find some common ground with them or I cannot engage with the story.

I didn’t here. My dislike of Adam only increased as I continued reading. At the same time, I appreciate the use of his specific story to shed light on much of what is wrong with our society today, at least here in the U.S.

And I’m clearly in a very small minority, as this book is both widely popular and critically acclaimed: another reminder that not every book is for every reader. It may be that I would have enjoyed it more if I were reading it 20 years from now instead of still suffering the fallout from this kind of behaviour. Still, I’m glad it being my book club’s selection pushed me to read it. I don’t have to like a book to admire it, and as a writer to learn from it.

What book of autofiction have you read? What did you think of it?

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The Moment Before the Wilt: Poetry, by Michelle Rose Goodwin

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This chapbook of poems by my friend Michelle Rose Goodwin documents a year, starting with “June” and ending with “May (3).” It was a terrible year, perhaps the most difficult year of the author’s life, and the raw vulnerability of the poems speaks to our deepest fears and sorrows.

The voice in these poems—steady, not looking away, sounding like your best friend whispering at night after the lights are out—draws us into her world. Even if I hadn’t already known the author, I would have been captivated by her first meeting with a man she thought “a cherry popsicle prince” and would have wanted to stay for her subsequent experiences.

It’s well-known that writing can be therapeutic. Often, though, what we write to help ourselves work through some trauma is either too private to share or not something that will interest others. The trick is what Stephen King recommends in his excellent book On Writing: write the first draft for yourself and then revise with the reader in mind. Clearly that is what Goodwin has done here.

These poems find the right balance of genuine emotions and engaging language. Goodwin transforms ordinary things into evocative imagery, as in this excerpt from “September:”

When it was over
He packed a suitcase with his dreams made of grit
And left her alone with her moment of cloud smoke
Rising up from the chimney and then gone

By not punctuating the ends of her lines, Goodwin creates an unsettled feeling in the reader, a sense that something more is coming, something just around the corner. A form where nothing is final contrasts with the content of the poems, creating tension and interest. At the same time it provides a kind of comfort.

In reading poetry, I love a startling image, something freshly imagined, such as this first stanza of “January:”

The juice drips down from every moment
And we fall to our knees in worship to lick it up

In the end, though, it is the emotional twists and turns of this journey that make these poems so real and this chapbook so satisfying.

Is there a poem you’ve read recently that drew you entirely into its world?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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The Question Is Murder, by Mark Willen

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As Mr. Ethics, Sam Turner writes a column for a Washington, D.C. newspaper answering readers’ questions about right and wrong. He also teaches classes on ethics in journalism at a local college, so a reader’s moral dilemma would have to be pretty convoluted to challenge him.

Then he gets a letter asking if murder is ever justified.

The writer is a young woman who is being stalked and threatened by an ex-lover, one who is immune to her appeals and too powerful to be stopped through legal means. Killing him seems to be her only option.

Knowing he should not get personally involved, Sam is worried about her, both what she is suffering and what she might do to stop it, and tries to find out her identity. Then Senator Wade Morgan is found dead. Despite his best intentions, Sam finds himself being drawn in deeper, trying to discover if his mystery woman could be the killer. When his own life is threatened, he realises he can’t bow out until the killer is found.

This new novel from the author of the Jonas Hawke contemporary fiction series makes good use of Willen’s 40 years of experience as a journalist in Washington, D.C., covering politics and government. The world of the story—the setting, characters, atmosphere, etc.—is conveyed with the authority that comes from shrewd observation and experience.

At a time when ethical concerns are in the news, mostly about the unethical behavior of political figures, a book like this that takes ethics seriously is most welcome. Lately, too many ethical standards that we took for granted are being flouted by those who have sworn to uphold them. Of course there has always been graft and corruption in politics, but now we have entered an extraordinary new phase of shameless lying and gaslighting.

So I’m grateful for this smart and fast-paced mystery. I love the combination of ethical questions with a mystery’s puzzle. Although much more serious in tone, Willen’s book satisfies me the way Alexander McCall Smith’s series about Isabel Dalhousie does. As a moral philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel considers the ethical ramifications of even her smallest action or thought.

Similarly, Sam Turner—perceptive, principled, flawed—is a character I’m happy to spend time with. I hope there are more books featuring Mr. Ethics to come.

What mysteries are you enjoying this spring?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

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Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

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The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team.

Deems gets away with just losing an ear, but all the witnesses are shocked by the genial drunk’s use of violence. They are also concerned about the danger to Sportcoat from the police, Deems himself, or competing gangsters. It is 1969, just before communities such as this—a mix of Baptists, Catholics and criminals; Blacks, Latinx, Irish, and Italian—began to disintegrate due to the loss of idealism after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the changes in city politics, and the influx of crack cocaine.

McBride uses what Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode calls a spiral structure, which “begins at a point and moves onward . . . spinning around and around that central point or a single axis.”

As we spiral out from the shooting, we get to know many of the people in the community: Sportcoat’s best friend Hot Sausage who gives out the high-quality cheese that appears regularly as if by magic, an Italian gangster known as the Elephant, and Deems himself, once a promising pitcher but lured away by the easy drug money. We meet Potts, a policeman near retirement who’s come back to his early beat in the Cause Houses, a number of strong church ladies, and a quiet Nation of Islam convert named Soup, among many others. It’s a large cast, but everyone is so colorful that it’s easy to remember them.

With humor and compassion, McBride gives us their stories, while always coming back to Sportcoat and the shooting. The deacon claims he doesn’t remember shooting Deems and instead is trying to get him to come back and play baseball. Sportcoat is also in near-constant conversation with his dead wife Hettie, who disapproves of his laziness and drinking, and refuses to reveal where she hid the money collected for the church’s Christmas Fund.

The Christmas Fund is one of a number of other spirals in the story, cropping up repeatedly, as does the question of who is providing the cheese. There’s also a recurring question expressed by various characters as to what exactly a deacon does, and stories about the founding of the church.

A lot of humor is created by the shenanigans the characters get up to, such as Sausage and Sportcoat sharing a single driver’s license on alternating weeks or trying to fix a recalcitrant generator. Even when poking fun at them, McBride sidesteps stereotypes to present each character as a full human being, flawed perhaps, but trying their best to get on.

While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed—one I am familiar with.

Between the humor and the human drama, the story moves quickly. A common problem for spiral stories is how to end them and, indeed, here the ending seems a rush to tie up the different subplots. Disappointingly, there are some loose ends left dangling and bit of time confusion, but these are small quibbles for a book that manages to be both rollicking fun and profoundly moving.

Most of all, I treasure stories such as this one where the characters, despite their failings, are treated with respect and compassion. We all want that for ourselves. And what a better world this would be if we could all manage to extend the same to everyone we meet.

It’s rare to find a bestseller that lives up to its hype. This one does. Have you read it? What did you think of it?

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A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

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It starts with fire—after the muse has her say about the poet’s invocation, of course. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, awakens to find the Citadel, the highest point of the city of Troy on fire. Her husband and five-year-old son missing, and the fire is rapidly spreading throughout the city.

The city is falling. But that’s impossible. Troy has won the war. Just a few days earlier, they had seen the ships sail away, the Greeks finally giving up after ten grueling years of war without winning back Helen, who had started it all. And yesterday for the first time in all those long years, the gates of Troy were opened and its citizens walked out, only to find a magnificent offering to the gods left by their enemies on the beach: a huge wooden horse.

Haynes deftly slips in this background as Creusa frantically tries to escape the burning city. This outstanding book is a reimagining of the events around the Trojan War through the eyes of the women involved: Greeks, Trojans, goddesses, muses, Fates. As the muse Calliope says:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

Even with a multitude of voices, the reader is always firmly grounded: only one narrator per chapter, with the name and often some explanatory information as the chapter title. Plus there are subtle clues in the beginning of the chapter to explain who the woman is. For example, here is the first paragraph of “Theano, wife of Antenor (advisor to Priam) mother of Crino:”

Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

The through-line of the book follows the women of Troy from the night of Troy’s fall through what happens to them at the hands of the Greek conquerors, while weaving in events from the past and future. For example, there are several letters to Odysseus from Penelope. As she waits the long ten years for his return after the fall of Troy, her tone becomes increasingly barbed.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.

We also get the events that led up to the war and to the fatal night. Haynes’s orchestration of these various pieces is an incredible achievement. Some incidents are slowly unpeeled like an onion, with chapters about other events interspersed between layers. Others are placed just where they will have the most emotional impact or when the reader needs to know about them to understand the next chapter or to see the previous chapter in a new light.

The women are presented so realistically, even the goddesses, that they could easily be people you know. I’ve quoted generously from the book to show how accessible it is to any reader. Haynes includes enough information to orient those who are not familiar with the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey, yet presents all of it in such a novel way that it is fascinating all over again for those who are.

The book reads so easily that I was surprised by the description in the Afterword of Haynes’s extensive research. The historical record of women’s lives from that period is almost nonexistent, so the author really had to dig to find anything about the women in this book, fragments that Haynes could then supplement with her imagination.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is not just a mesmerizing story, one that I could not put down despite knowing how it would all turn out. It is also a textbook for writers on how to reveal information and backstory. And it is a psychological masterpiece, a gorgeous tapestry of women’s lives and ideas and reasons. You’ll never think of the Trojan War—or any war—in quite the same way again.

Every now and then a book comes along that I want to send to everyone I know. What book have you read recently that you’ve recommended to your friends?