Monthly Archives: November 2021

by

North River, by Pete Hamill

Hamill

James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. He had returned from the trenches of the Great War where he was a medic to find his parents dead from the flu, his wife furious at his desertion of them, and his daughter wary of the stranger he’d become. Now they have all left him, his wife first, simply walking away one day so that most people thought she’d thrown herself in the river, and then Grace, marrying a Mexican revolutionary and disappearing with him.

All Delaney has left is his work and, after the carnage of the war, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway with a note from Grace asking him to care for her two-year-old son Carlos while she goes in search of her husband. Recognising that with his work he cannot care for a small child alone, he enlists the help of Angela, who owns the local restaurant where he usually has dinner. She sends Rose, a Sicilian woman, to live with them and care for Carlito as he is known.

This incident is but one of the many that show the interconnected webs that support city life, something that I have thought about often. Cities are said to be impersonal, and they are, but we humans find and create our networks just the same.

This is the novel I’ve been wanting to read. None of these modernist games of “I’m using my real name and much of my real life, but much is fiction, and it’s up to you to guess what’s real and what’s not, and oh by the way what is reality?” No bouncing between multiple protagonists. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat, says, “Readers connect when they are able to make immediate, positive moral judgments about characters. Generally the characters who are the most universally appealing demonstrate heart values.”

Despite his near poverty, Delaney continues his work among his neighbors in the poorer parts of town, where he has chosen to remain. Even when they can’t pay him. Even when he sees the same problems over and over, such as men getting drunk and beating their wives. The neighborhood, like the city is caught between opposing gangs, part gangsters and part politicians. His own father had been a powerful leader in Tammany Hall, and Delaney is well aware of both the good and the not-so-good done by Tammany, so he has a complicated relationship with the gangs who both threaten and need him. Indeed, the leader of one served with him in France.

Beyond the brilliantly realised characters, Hamill recreates the world of Depression-era New York in all its vibrancy and squalor and beauty. Whether it’s the mayhem of the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade when the Irish immigrants march down Fifth Avenue to remind the rich that they need the Irish votes, or a visit to the Met to see the Botticelli exhibit where Delany and Rose have to drag Carlito away from the armor only to have Delaney himself mesmerised by the Primavera, Hamill conjures the scene so expertly that my own experiences are summoned and swell my emotional response.

The story is engaging too because it moves quickly from scene to scene, with little narration in between. When we do get a moment of reflection it is all the more meaningful for its rarity. This moment comes early in the book and captures the isolation that Rose and Carlito begin to heal.

There were too many people to ever know them all. Everyone has a story that he’d never hear, and he had heard more stories of human grief than most people. He met them in the present, but each of them had a past. Better to shut down, stop imagining, deal with all other human beings the way he dealt with patients. Cage the past. Deal with them, gently if necessary, and then seal them out of memory. They could vanish like the words of a song, recovered only in isolated fragments. Worry about your friends, he often thought, and the few people you love, and leave the rest to Providence . . .

In helping novelists understand how to create a story that will break out into popular acclaim, literary agent and writing guru Donald Maass says, “A breakout novelist needs courage, too: the courage to say something passionately. A breakout novelist believes that what she has to say is not just worth saying, but it is something that must be said. It is a truth that the world needs to hear, an insight without which we would find ourselves diminished.”

And that is what I found here: a truth about navigating this perilous world with its wounds and compromises, about love and work and family.

What novel have you read recently that satisfied a need you didn’t know you felt?

by

An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard

dillard

Dillard’s inimitable prose makes this memoir one of the best I’ve ever read. True, we are of an age, so much of her experience chimes with mine. I didn’t grow up in Pittsburgh where three huge rivers come together, but in another steel town, where rivers run into the bay and “old” money (much of it from Gilded Age robber barons) existed uneasily with a brawny, considerably immigrant working class.

Like Dillard, I was allowed to run free from a now-surprisingly young age, learning the neighborhood and later the city street by street, landmark by landmark. She captures the essence of the period in details and imagery, such as: “Every woman stayed alone in her house in those days, like a coin in a safe. “

Loosely organised by chronology, the individual sections each explore some aspect of childhood. There’s one about going to the library, one about summers at the lake with her grandparents, one about being afraid of the nuns at the Catholic school—“They had no bodies, and imitation faces.” She talks about her love of baseball and spending hours perfecting her overhand pitch only to find that as a girl she was only allowed to play softball.

Not uncommon occurrences, but the detail and the verve with which they come at us make reading this book a vivid and participatory experience. She writes of being five and terrified of going to bed because of the thing that enters her room at night, searching for her.

It was a transparent, luminous oblong. I could see the door whiten at its touch; I could see the blue wall turn pale where it raced over it, and see the maple headboard of Amy’s bed glow. It was a swift spirit; it was an awareness, it made noise. it had two joined parts, a head and a tail, like a Chinese dragon. it found the door, wall, and headboard; and it swiped, charging them with its luminous glance. After its fleet, searching passage, things looked the same, but weren’t.

I dared not blink or breathe; I tried to hush my whooping blood. If it found another awareness, it would destroy it.

Though she later figures out that it is a passing car reflecting a streetlight—the moment when she realises that reason is a tool to conquer fear—she still sometimes lets herself be afraid for the pleasurable frisson of terror.

The fragments work together to achieve a coherent narrative. One of the most astonishing threads has to with her becoming conscious of herself. She writes of lying on the kitchen floor, listening to the icebox motor, cars going by, the “unselfconscious trees.”

Time streamed in full flood beside me on the kitchen floor; time roared raging beside me down its swollen banks; and when I woke I was so startled I fell in.

Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be? It drives you to a life of concentration, it does, a life in which effort draws you down so very deep that when you surface you twist up exhilarated with a yelp and a gasp.

Entering this book is like falling into flood that sweeps you away with a boundless enthusiastic drive to experience everything. We get not only these early years, but her exploratory middle years and frantic teens.

We see the beginnings of her interest in natural science that eventually flowered into the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. We follow her into the rock collection she was gifted by a neighbor, labeling her eventual 340 rocks, imagining the task of searching for rare rocks. We see not only her wonder, but her imagery and realistic humor. “When you pry open the landscape, you find wonders—gems made of corpses, even, and excrement.” Prying open the landscape seems like the essence of Pilgrim.

A continuing thread is about leaving, achieving escape velocity. She begins with her father’s decision—likely a result of his compulsive reading and rereading of Life on the Mississippi—to “quit the firm his great-grandfather had founded” and take his boat down the river all the way to New Orleans, “the source of the music he loved: Dixieland jazz.” She was 10 at the time. He did come back, but his adventure haunts her throughout the book, all the way to the end when she herself takes off for college.

She gives us full and vital portraits of her parents, both of them huge jokesters, practicing jokes before unleashing them at parties or at home. Her mother, given to practical jokes, “dearly loved to fluster people by throwing out a game’s rules at whim—when she was getting bored, losing in a dull sort of way, and when everybody else was taking it too seriously.” I envy Dillard some aspects of her parents: the jokes, the family dancing madly to records in the living room.

One aspect she doesn’t go into, which may speak to Pittsburgh’s population or to her being a little older than I, is race. For me, the increased pace of the Great Migration and the flight to the suburbs dramatically changed my home town. Dillard’s is a privileged childhood, more so than mine which was privileged enough. Privileged not only because it is a white childhood, not only because it is during a time of stability and prosperity, but also because it is a wealthy one.

While much of my enjoyment of this book was how much it recalled my own childhood, I imagine that people of all ages would enjoy it, not just for the portrait of a time now gone, but for the boundless energy of her amazing prose. I will be recommending it in the memoir classes I teach, for its structure, its detail, and its meditation on trying to connect the dots of your life, trying to find the connections that make them seem continuous.

What memoir have you read that took you back over your own life?

by

The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward

fire

This collection of essays and poems, subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, together provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. It is divided into three parts: Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee—past, present and future.

Ward, who collected the pieces, supplies the introduction and a piece on what she learned from DNA testing, noting how hard it is for people to discover the genealogy of the black side of their family. Two pieces look at the legacy of black writers, Rachel Ghansah comparing her grandfather’s life to James Baldwin’s and Honorèe Jeffers questioning Phillis Wheatley’s history as it is presented to us.

The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

Some pieces convey personal experiences, such as Garnette Cadogan’s essay comparing his experiences walking in his native Kingston, Jamaica with walking the streets of New Orleans and later those of New York. Never having been given “The Talk,” he had to work out for himself how to camouflage himself—preppie clothes and his college sweatshirt; never a hoodie or jeans and tee shirt—and the rules to follow to keep white people from being afraid of him or police from stopping him.

Many of the pieces respond to the relentless killing of black people by police and armed vigilantes, such as Claudia Rankin’s “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” and Isabel Wilkerson’s “Where Do We Go from Here?” Emily Raboteau describes going with her family to see the recently reopened High Bridge in New York City that connects Harlem and the Bronx. There she discovers a mural that leads her on a tour of discovery around the city to find all the murals that, combining love and activism, educate adults and children on how to protect themselves from police brutality and structural racism.

I was especially intrigued by Kevin Young’s funny and piercing “Blacker Than Thou” where he talks about white people wearing blackface or actually “passing” as black, such as Rachel Dolezal. “But if you are white but truly feel black, then why do you have to look like it?” Blackness, he says, is not about skin color but about culture. He says of black people, “Any solidarity with each other is about something shared, a secret joy, a song, not about some stereotypical qualities that may be reproducible, imitable, even marketable.”

Of Dolezal, he says, “She wears the mask not to hide but to gain authority over the very thing she claims she wants to be.” Her claim is of a piece with her other stories that paint her as a victim. And, as with blackface and other examples of passing, it says more about how those white people view blackness.

Poems by Jericho Brown, Kima Jones, Clint Smith add texture and imagery, always a more intense experience for me. And I loved seeing Natasha Tretheway’s familiar “Theories of Time and Space” opening the Jubilee section.

I learned a lot from this cornucopia of voices. I still have a lot to learn.

What have you read lately that made you cry and laugh and thunder with rage, and most of all made you think?

by

The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Nguyen

This 2015 debut novel finally gives us the Vietnamese war and its aftermath, not from an American perspective but from a Vietnamese point of view. The narrator is half-French and half-Vietnamese, rejected by both cultures, but told by his mother that he will do something extraordinary.

Like his parentage, he embodies the title: he sees both sides of every issue and can understand where the various parties he has to deal with are coming from. Even his loyalties are divided. He is committed to the communist cause and working at their behest as a mole in South Vietnam, an aide to a general. At the same time, he is utterly loyal to his two childhood blood brothers, Bon fighting for the south and Man for the north.

The story is framed as a confession to a commandant. A prisoner, though of whom is unclear at first, the narrator begins with April 1975 and the helter-skelter departure of the U.S. from Saigon. As a side-note, reading this book during the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan gave the story added power. After a harrowing scene at the airport, he and Bon escape on one of the last planes with the general and his family. The narrator would have rather stayed and cast off his cloak to welcome his comrades but is ordered to continue as a mole to track what the Vietnamese refugees are up to in the U.S.

Much of the book is taken up with his experiences in California. While the racism and colonialism are much as you would expect, the narrator’s voice carries the story here more than the plot, at least for me. Others in my book club disagreed and liked this part the best.

The voice being so engaging makes it hard to stop reading; I would often look up and realise I’d read long past the time I’d allotted. There’s an understated humor punctuated by barbed comments about the people the narrator encounters. Seeing through them so easily enables him to detect their machinations and dance around them.

At one point he is asked to consult on a movie. He accepts even though he knows they only want him to collect Vietnamese refugees to be extras—extras who will be killed in a multitude of ways. He tries instead to bring some of their point of view to the story, correcting details, finagling speaking parts.

This section to me illustrates what this novel is: not so much an anti-war story as an attempt to show what the Vietnamese really thought or think about the war, the U.S., and the Americans’ arrogance and entitlement. Seeing the narrator code-switch as he moves between different groups of people is illuminating.

Just as a big part of my interest in the tv drama Breaking Bad is watching the main character change from a caring teacher to a progressively more aggressive drug dealer, here I enjoyed seeing how our narrator navigates different circumstances.

The parts I come back to are where he and other characters reminisce about their country, their homes, the village routines. As one person in my book club said, it’s something they hold close to their hearts. Even going back and finding everything changed does not disrupt that connection.

I think most of us can identify with that. Reading itself helps me be more aware of other ways of seeing the world, so I’m grateful that my book club likes to explore diverse voices. Nguyen’s book won the Pulitzer and is a great addition—and corrective—to books about the Vietnam War.

What books about the Vietnam War have you read?

by

Pumpkin Moonshine, by Tasha Tudor

tudor

With little ones in the house several days a week, I’ve been reading lots of picture books. This one is a favorite just now, as we enjoy all the pumpkins on porches while we walk around the neighborhood.

Sylvie—who appears to be around four years old—is visiting her grandparents in Connecticut and wants to make a Pumpkin Moonshine. She and the dog Wiggy climb up the hill to the cornfield where she chooses the largest pumpkin, one that is half as tall as she is. She can’t lift it, so she rolls it in front of her, like a snowball in winter.

When they reach the edge of the field it gets away from her and caroms down the hill, starting the livestock (cue various animal sounds) and knocks over the hired man, making him spill a can of whitewash over a startled cat (the 20-month-old’s favorite page) before bumping into the house. Sylvie and her grandfather go on to make a Pumpkin Moonshine from it.

I’d never before heard this term for a Jack-o’-Lantern, but it is certainly descriptive. I don’t know whether the author knew it was also a term for a homemade alcoholic beverage made from pumpkin, sugar, yeast and water. The book was first published in 1938 and Sylvie puts on a bonnet to go to the field, so the time period is well established.

Writing a picture book is said to be one of the hardest writing tasks there is, and nothing chills the heart of an agent like hearing that their popular author of adult books wants to write a picture book. Of course, you have to consider what words and ideas are appropriate for your young audience, but the biggest problem is that you have very little real estate in which to tell the story. Every word needs to be essential, even more than in poetry.

If you are the artist, too, like Tasha Tudor, you do have the advantage of knowing what information will be conveyed in the pictures. Tudor has been my favorite artist of children’s books since, well, since I was a child. I’ve collected a shelf-full of books with her illustrations. While some might view them as sentimental or outdated—more kindly characterised as nostalgic—I found and find them full of magic, probably because she illustrated my copy of The Secret Garden, one of my favorite books of all time and a formative one from my early years.

She lived in New Hampshire and then in Vermont. Somehow I always sensed the air of New England in her work. Pumpkin Moonshine was Tudor’s first book. She went on to write and illustrate many others and illustrate still more, gathering awards along the way.

The children love the idea of going out and choosing their own pumpkin. The terror of losing control of it on the hill is manageable for them. Add in animal noises and the face on the startled cat and you have an exciting (but not too exciting) adventure for young children, ending with the somewhat subversive comfort of Sylvie and her grandfather hiding in the bushes hoping to see the surprise and fear of passersby when they see the Pumpkin Moonshine on the fencepost. My munchkins enjoy even more the description of the process of making the scary thing and of Sylvie planting its seeds the following year.

Who is your favorite picture book author or illustrator?