Month: April 2024

Erasure, by Percival Everett

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Several friends have recommended the film American Fiction, and of course I wanted to read the novel first. Thelonious Ellison, nicknamed Monk in reference to the great jazz musician and composer, teaches at a California college and writes dense, experimental novels that attract almost no readers and the criticism that they do not reflect the African American experience. My immediate thought was: okay, we’re in fantasyland. In real life, such a writer would not be able to have a second novel printed, much less—I think it’s four—and retain a devoted literary agent.

As his latest novel racks up rejections from publishers, Monk is incensed that debut novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a middle-class black woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” is a huge bestseller and will be a movie. It embodies all the worst racial stereotypes, but is being hailed as a genuine and brilliant representation of the African American experience, a criticism frequently aimed at Monk’s work. Apparently it’s a takeoff on the real 1996 novel Push by a person using the pseudonym Sapphire.

Monk is infuriated not only by the praise and commercial success of this exploitative novel but also by the publishing industry and book-buying public’s obliteration of the experience of the many African Americans like himself. So he writes his own parody of these stereotypes and sends it to his agent using the obvious pseudonym of Stag R. Lee. He assumes everyone will recognise it for the satire that it is, and is shocked when it sells for a six-figure advance and a seven-figure movie deal.

Meanwhile, he is wrestling with family issues. His mother and sister in Washington, D.C. need his help, while his brother is suffering the personal and professional fallout of having come out as gay. Presenting a paper at a conference in D.C. gives him the opportunity to see his mother and sister, but also entails encounters with bitter literary rivals of his own.

A big chunk of the book is a complete version of his surprisingly successful novel, which I found painful to read. Well, I didn’t read more than the beginning and the end. I began to think that Everett’s real purpose with this novel was to laugh at all the snobby readers who agreed with Monk’s anger at the praise of anything reinforcing these heinous racial stereotypes, and then devoured and praised an example of the same.

Oh, and look! Commercial success for Everett’s book and now a movie deal. Very meta.

Everett also inserts the complete paper Monk presents at the conference, a send-up of semiotics. A little of each was enough. Satire that goes on too long becomes boring. On the other hand, I thought the frame story of the family was well done, especially the mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. I began to think that this would have been better as a good novella or even a short story.

A little more thought led me to the realisation that—trying not to give away too much here—Monk in the frame story is actually doing the same things his protagonist in the parody does and experiencing the same frustrations; only the details are different. More meta; interesting, but not enough to sell me on including all the dreck.

Another thing I liked about the frame story was the representation of a writer’s mind. Every now and then Monk would get a story idea and create a short scene for it, or a thought would prompt him to create a short dialogue between two historical figures, philosophers, artists, etc. Plopped right into the story, these were brilliant. Been there, for sure.

There were a few more fantasyland moments, undercutting the supposed realism of the frame story. Overall, though, I found a lot of the book hilarious, boring at times, infuriating at others. A good workout!

Have you seen American Fiction or read the novel on which it’s based? What did you think of them?

The Stranger in the Woods, by Michael Finkel

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Subtitled The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, this nonfiction book introduces us to Chris Knight, a man who spent 27 years living alone in a tent in the Maine woods. Not alone the way Thoreau was at Walden Pond, where he entertained guests and took his laundry home to his mother, but truly alone. In all that time, the only word Knight uttered to another person was a gruff Hi to a hiker he ran into.

Obsessed with avoiding discovery, or even another chance encounter, he never built a fire or walked in the woods when there was snow on the ground. When the ground was dry, he knew the woods so well that he could move through them without making a sound or leaving a sign.

In researching this book, Finkel sets out to answer the questions we can’t help but ask: Why would he choose such a life? How did he survive the winters in just a tent? What about food, medicine, etc.? No matter how much you cut back on that etcetera, you surely need a sharp knife, a candle or lantern, clothes to replace those that wear out.

We learn, often in his own words, how Chris broke into nearby cabins to steal food, clothing, reading material, and other things—only dire necessities and only cabins that didn’t have year-round occupants. People in the area told stories about the North Pond hermit, and it was during a theft that he was finally arrested.

Wondering why anyone would choose such a hard path, Finkel delves into the lives of solitaries, from the Desert Fathers and anchorites to solitary confinement in prisons. He reviews current thinking about the autism spectrum and goes further to consult scientists about a physical component.

One’s desire to be alone, biologists have found, is partially genetic and to some degree measurable. If you have low levels of the pituitary peptide oxytocin, sometimes called the master chemical of sociability, and high quantities of the hormone vasopressin, which may suppress your need for affection, you tend to require fewer interpersonal relationships.

Nurture always goes hand in hand with nature, and we learn that Chris’s family was compulsively private, living off the grid and having only minimal contact with neighbors. When 20-year-old Chris disappeared, driving away from his first and only job (one that he’d only barely begun), they didn’t report him missing or try to find him.

Finkel interviews Chris in jail and exchanges letters with him, thus giving us first-person accounts of Chris’s life in the woods. I can only imagine, having worked in one, how awful jail must have been for this man who had lived in silence (aside from natural sounds) for 27 years.

It’s a fascinating story, and one ripe for discussion. Was Chris lucky to be arrested before he aged to the point where he could no longer manage his survival? He was already slowing down. While he never took much, Chris’s thefts scared people and invaded their privacy; only once he was arrested did they return to not locking their doors. And what about Finkel himself? His pursuit of Chris in the face of the man’s reluctance to talk or meet with him borders on stalking. Or does it cross over? Is it okay because he’s brought us this incredible story?

While privacy ranks high on my list of moral imperatives, I have to admit that I’m grateful to know this much of Chris’s story. I make time to be alone, preferably among the trees, when I can. I’ve lived in a tent in the New England woods, though in a shelter with a wood stove in the winter. I would never do what he did, but a part of me understands it.

It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

Have you read a story—fiction or nonfiction—about someone who has turned their back on society?

The Quiet and the Loud, by Helena Fox

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In this Young Adult novel, Georgia at 18 is barely holding it together. Taking a gap year at home in Sydney, Australia, before college, she keeps getting texts from her alcoholic father who lives in Seattle, Washington. He has been a danger to her for her whole life, but she feels duty-bound to help him. The story opens with a vivid flashback to one such occasion.

Her best friend Tess, also 18, has deliberately gotten pregnant, determined to become a teen mom, and assumes that Georgia will not only bring her smoothies and wait attendance on her, but will also help her raise the child. They’ve been best friends forever, so Georgia feels she must support Tess, even as her attention is being drawn in other directions.

Such as her rewarding part-time work teaching art to children, which offsets her friend Laz’s despair about the climate crisis. Her grandfather, who lives with them, may be losing his marbles, or at least his teeth, but adds comic relief with his relentless pursuit of elderly women.

Georgia’s mother is happily married to successful artist Mel, whose brusque demeanor hides a penetrating insight. She is the one who gifts Georgia with two successful coping mechanisms: kayaking and painting.

Suspense grows as we learn more about how her father’s alcoholism has affected her. As he spirals and Tess becomes mired in post-partum depression, 2019’s wildfires come ever closer, sending Laz into an apocalyptic frenzy and Georgia to the brink of despair.

I loved Fox’s previous novel How It Feels to Float, and am myself overly sensitive to loud sensory input, so I was eager to read this one. I was not disappointed. While the themes can be difficult, Georgia’s voice is a welcome companion.

Much of the writing is gorgeous, especially lyrical passages out in the kayak. And Georgia’s burgeoning feelings for her new friend Calliope are handled with grace and compassion.

Can you recommend a Young Adult novel that you’ve enjoyed?

Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Like Antonia in Alvarez’s Afterlife, Richard, a widower, has just retired from his career as a college professor in what was formerly East Berlin.

Perhaps many more years still lie before him, or perhaps only a few. In any case, from now on Richard will no longer have to get up early to appear at the Institute. As of today, he has time—plain and simple . . . his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Such transitional moments in our lives roll grief and possibility, loneliness and freedom into a turbulent mess. The first thing in Richard’s mind, however, is the calm lake on whose shore he lives, and the man who recently drowned there, his body never found. All summer everyone has avoided the lake: swimmers, fishermen, boaters. Nobody talks about it; they just stay away. It stays calm.

On a chance trip to Alexanderplatz, he doesn’t notice the African refugees staging a hunger strike there until he sees them on the news later. He didn’t notice them because he was thinking of the Polish town Rzeszów, which had a system of tunnels, essentially a second city underground, originally built in the Middle Ages where Jews took refuge when the Nazis invaded.

Moved by the refugees’ refusal to speak or give their names, the academic in Richard stirs to life: Here is a project! He decides to learn who these men are by interviewing them. Through Richard we hear their voices, their stories, and learn about what it is to be a refugee.

I loved Erpenbeck’s Visitation and looked forward to this novel. The beginning is brilliant. Her imagery and profound insight moved me deeply and had me marking page after page. However, the story slows as Richard starts tangling with bureaucracy and coaxing the refugees to talk to him. It’s a difficult tightrope for a writer: to reflect the tedium of the situation without boring the reader.

The story picks up again as we get to know the refugees individually, and as Germany’s bureaucracy begins to close in on them, narrowing their chances of being granted residence and thereby a work permit. As a lawyer whom Richard consults says, “The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.”

Most members of my book club agreed that, while this was a challenging read, partly because of the pacing in the middle and partly because of the subject matter, it was also an important book to read. We all learned a lot, even those who already worked in refugee services. Those who read through to the end found it a worthy cap to the story, and were moved by the generous responses of the friends with whom Richard shared his stories of the refugees.

We talked about the symbolism of the drowned man. Like the Polish city, there are hidden things here as well as things we turn our eyes away from. When do you become visible? What do you have to do?

When you do become visible, as when Richard listens to the men and shares their stories with his friends, things do change—minds change.

I also found much here about communication woven into the story. Some have to do with the refugees’ struggle to learn German and Richard’s to learn some of their languages. Some have to do with how words are like borders: mutable signs, or written in sand, the way the boy from Niger learned his own language, lost when the wind blows.

The Italian laws have different borders in mind than the German laws do. What interests him is that as long as a border of the sort he’s been familiar with for most of his life runs along a particular stretch of land and is permeable in either direction after border control procedures, the intentions of the two  countries can be perceived by the use of barbed wire, the configuration of fortified barriers, and things of that sort. But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding , as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked . . .  Indeed, the law has made a shift from physical reality to the realm of language.

The border between life and death is here too: the chances that determine which side we will land on, the ghosts that cross over. Richard is sometimes nostalgic for the lost world of his childhood in East Berlin, before the wall came down. As one member of my book club noted, perhaps that early grounding in communal living makes Richard more open to caring about the fate of these others. Indeed, the novel calls out the weakness of capitalism: its callous disregard of the common good.

As Mary Oliver asked: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Here is one man’s answer.

What novel have you read that illuminates one of the great political issues of our time?

Fortune Favors the Dead, by Stephen Spotswood

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Fortune Favors the Dead

This witty, fast-paced mystery starts in New York City in 1945, with Willowjean “Will” Parker and her boss, famous detective Lillian Pentecost, investigating the murder of society matron Abigail Collins. Will has been Pentecost’s assistant and protégé for three years, the two having met when Will saved the older woman’s life with her knife-throwing skills.

Knife-throwing? Yes, at the time Will had been working as a roustabout in a traveling circus for five years, gaining some unusual skills. She’s the one telling this story, and her sassy, smart voice makes this a thoroughly enjoyable ride.

Pentecost, too, is unusual, and not just because she is a female detective at a time when women who stepped up during WWII are being forced into domestic roles while jobs are given to the returning men. She has multiple sclerosis, a progressively degenerative disease which at this point affects her stamina and gait but not her brilliant mind.

I loved both these characters before even getting to the story. Casting someone with a chronic disease as a major character is a rare and brilliant stroke. Plus, Will undermines all the stereotypes for women, not to mention circus workers, of the time. The duo quickly put me in mind of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, reimagined as women, but I love that Will is still a young woman, still finding her way in the world, unlike Archie.

On to the story! Abigail Collins is found in the locked study of her home during a big Halloween party at her mansion. She’s been beaten to death with a crystal ball, used in the séance held there, while seated in the chair where her husband killed himself a year before. Rumor holds that the ghost of her husband appeared during the séance, so many believe he is the murderer.

There are plenty of other, more corporeal, suspects. The psychic Ariel Belestrade has been on Ms. Pentecost’s radar for some time. Skeptical anthropology professor Olivia Waterhouse has also been investigating Belestrade for fraudulent practices and written her up in her most recent book. The psychic’s seductive power is brilliantly portrayed in some of the book’s most chilling scenes.

Even more complications ensue when Rebecca Collins, daughter of the murdered woman and a continuing frustration to her straight-laced brother, starts putting moves on Will, and Will finds herself responding to them.

Spotswood does a great job of bringing the period to life with details small and large, whether about circus life, nightclubs, or the mean streets of NYC. As a side note, the cover art boldly announces both its classic noir roots and Will’s unusual character. An intriguing cover will always make me look twice at a book.

For a fun read, you can’t go wrong with this cosy mystery with a bite to it. Will’s voice and personality alone are worth the price of admission. I’m looking forward to reading the other books in the Pentecost and Parker series.

Have you read a novel recently where you’ve been utterly charmed by the characters?