All About Books

JULY

Fiction:

Nancy Pearl told me about “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, and I marveled at its brilliance.  Thelonius “Monk” Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out:  his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been “critically acclaimed.”  He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a first novel by a woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days,” which purports to represent black inner-city speech.   Here’s what Monk says as he stares at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine:  “The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passages of “Native Son” and “The Color Purple” and “Amos and Andy” and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo,screet and fahvre! And I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, ‘Why fo you be axin?’”  Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies – his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.  In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a satirical novel meant to be an indictment of Jenkins’ best seller.  He doesn’t intend for “My Pafology” to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is – under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh – and soon it becomes The Next Big Thing.  How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this bold novel that manages to be scathingly funny even as Everett skillfully skewers the conventions of racial and political correctness.

Gabriela Garcia, the author of “Of Women and Salt,” brings us deeply into the intergenerational family dramas of Latin American women who have immigrated to this country.  In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction.  Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in Ana, the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE.  Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette.  Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past which are destined to erupt.  This is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals – personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others – that have shaped the lives of these extraordinary women.  From nineteenth century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, we find ourselves meditating on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them.  Here’s Carmen, in her mind, to Jeanette: “I never said, ‘All my life, I’ve been afraid.’  I stopped talking to my own mother.  And I never told you the reason I came to this country, which is not the reason you think I came to this country.  And I never said I thought if I didn’t name an emotion or a truth, I could will it to disappear.  Will.  Tell me you want to live, and I’ll be anything you want me to be.  But I can’t will enough life for both of us.  Tell me you want to live.”  This book is short but powerful, less about politics than about how to navigate the world as women.  These women do not surrender – in a book Carmen gives to Ana on her fifteenth birthday, Jeanette, who had loved the book, had written, “We are more than we think we are.”  It is a sentence Ana chooses to believe.  Garcia has given us a thoughtful, poignant story.

I am delighted that Nancy Pearl introduced me to the English and Australian novelist Angela Thirkell, as I found her “August Folly” to be thoroughly delightful.   It’s August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home.  But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family – exquisite Rachel, her capable husband and six of their nine brilliant children – have come for the holidays, and their hostess Mrs. Palmer plans to rope everyone into performing in her disastrous annual play staged in a barn.  Surrounded by the irrepressible Deans, Richard and his sister Margaret cannot help but have their minds broadened, spirits raised, and hearts smitten.  I think I smiled all the way through this very witty novel of England between the wars, with its way of life long gone, and was especially charmed by the conversational asides between Modestine the donkey and Gunnar the cat.   I can see that Thirkell’s writing could become addictive – she describes the head of the kitchen, Mrs. Phipps, as “a born cook only in the sense that she had brought up a large family chiefly on tinned foods” – and now I have to read another.  It’s a pleasure to spend time in a fictional world with no murders and no violence, one where all the wrongs get righted.   

Non-Fiction:

Even though I hate being cold in the winter and spend my days in fleece and down, I have always been drawn to stories set in places like Siberia, Iceland, Antarctica, the Himalayas (particularly those that involve climbing Mt. Everest), and now Greenland.  Go figure.  “The Ice at the End of the World:  An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future,” by Jon Gertner, is a riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change.  Greenland is a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000.  The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1500 miles long and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice.  For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland – at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate.  Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory.  He begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century – first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds – and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy.  The goal of exploring Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling miles down with the aim of pulling up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of the earth’s past, going back hundreds of thousands of years.  Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover Greenland’s secrets before it’s too late.  As Greenland’s ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas, it will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns.  As early as 1975, a Russian climatologist calculated that rising CO2 levels would drastically raise Arctic temperatures and melt the sea ice cover, perhaps as early as 2050.  He also pointed to the tenuous balance between a livable and non-livable climate, and seemed to think that man’s industrial activities could tip the future toward “climate catastrophe [where] the existence of higher forms of organic life on our planet may be exterminated.”   In 2008, glaciologist Ian Howast was quoted as saying regarding the Arctic, “The remarkable shrinkage of the sea ice is the largest change in Earth’s surface that humans have probably ever observed,” and trying to get a handle on how that effects the mass of Greenland’s ice next door must surely be a priority.  One question, as Gertner saw it, was whether confronting Greenland’s long-term challenges requires a scientific response or a political one.  He imagines it ultimately requires both, but that any action first has to be preceded by some kind of factual and ethical awakening that has not yet occurred. In general, we seem disinclined to think too far – or too selflessly – as a species, he notes, but if, perhaps around the 2100 mark, the world’s coastal regions are struggling with catastrophic floods and mass migrations, we will have to.  Jack and I both thought this book was terrific.

As the mother of three mentally healthy adult children, I found the family in “Hidden Valley Road:  Inside the Mind of an American Family,” by Robert Kolker, terrifying to contemplate.  Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream.  After WWII, Don’s work with the air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children – ten boys, then two girls – spanned the baby boom.  They all tried to play their parts in the “perfect family” script – hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony – but behind the closed doors of the house on Hidden Valley Road was a far different story:  psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, and hidden abuse.  By the mid-1970s, six of the Galvin boys, one after the other, were diagnosed with schizophrenia.  And the other six children stood by, horrified, not knowing whether they would be next.  Since their story was so extraordinary, the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health.  Kolker tells the intimate story of the Galvins alongside the epic tale of science’s quest to uncover the true nature of this mystifying disease.  Each mentally ill brother emerges as wholly individual, with remarkably different expressions of the same disorder.  The two youngest children, girls and best friends, both victimized by their brothers, make sharply different choices about how to cope.  The Galvins’ story culminates in a breakthrough that, thanks to their unique DNA, offers hope of eliminating schizophrenia forever.  And how did the parents deal with all this? Here’s Kolker on Mimi, and her need to create the illusion of family perfection – “But she was also aware that the slightest acknowledgment that all was not well in her family risked coloring everything else about her life – Don’s new professional prospects, the standing of the other children, the reputation of them all.”  She tended to agree, most of the time, when Don said what he’d always said when there was something wrong with the children; that the boys should not be coddled; that they should leave the nest, make their own mistakes and learn from them, take responsibility for their actions, grow up.  “And she thought about how perfect their life was otherwise.  And how fragile her husband’s happiness had always seemed to her.  And how sometimes it seemed as if the slightest move in any direction could bring the whole place toppling down.”   The cover photo of the ten boys, teenagers down to baby (the only one not in a suit and tie), in descending order on the steps of a circular stairway with a pregnant Mimi and uniformed Don at the top – the staged epitome of Mimi’s “perfect” family – breaks your heart.  When you read that Dr. Robert Freedman, whose research has focused on the study of the brain, noted recently, “Half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia,” you realize the significance of what Kolker writes near the end of his book. “There is no way of knowing how life might have been different for the Galvin brothers if the culture of mental illness had been less rigid, less inclined to cut people off from mainstream society, more proactive about intervening when warning signs first appeared.  But there is, perhaps, reason to hope that for people like the Galvins born fifty years from now, things could be different, even transformed.”  This story is a shocking eye-opener.

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard,  reveals the hidden lives of those who share her status in the powerful and deeply personal “The Undocumented Americans.”  She was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name.  It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she’d tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell.  So she wrote her immigration lawyer’s phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants.  Looking beyond the flashpoints of the border or the activism of the DREAMers, Cornejo Villavicencio explores the lives of the undocumented as well as the mysteries of her own life.  She finds singular characters across the nation who are often reduced in the media to political pawns or nameless laborers and helps us come to know them with stories that are not deferential or naively inspirational but show the love, magic, heartbreak, insanity, and vulgarity that infuse the day-to-day lives of her subjects.  Here’s some of what she says in her Introduction:  “This is a work of creative nonfiction . . .  Maybe you won’t like it.  I didn’t write it for you to like it.  And I did not set out to write anything inspirational, which is why there are no stories of DREAMers . . . I wanted to tell the stories of people who work as day laborers, housekeepers, construction workers, dog walkers, deliverymen, people who don’t inspire hashtags or T-shirts, but I wanted to learn about them as the weirdos we all are outside of our jobs.”  In New York, we meet the undocumented workers who were recruited into the federal funded Ground Zero cleanup after 9/11.  In Miami, we enter the ubiquitous botanicas, which offer medicinal herbs and potions to those whose status blocks them from any other healthcare options.  In Flint, Michigan, we learn of demands for state ID in order to receive life-saving clean water.  “What I saw in Flint was a microcosm of the way the government treats the undocumented everywhere, making the conditions in this country as deadly and toxic and inhumane as possible so that we will self-deport.” In Connecticut, Cornejo Villavicencio, childless by choice, finds family in two teenage girls whose father is in sanctuary.   As she closes, this fierce writer lets Jesus Christ himself bring home what she most wants us to understand:  “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

Mysteries:  Nancy Pearl recommended “Shadow Intelligence,” by Oliver Harris, which will quickly immerse you in the murky world of spies that most of us know little about.  There is a dark side to England’s MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane – volatile, inquisitive, free-floating, with multiple identities.  When the woman he loves, another operative named Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception and conflicting agendas in that snowbound country poised between China, Russia, and the West.  Today’s dark web intelligence and geopolitical complexities make the Cold War look simple by comparison.  I’m still reeling from the ending of ”Take It Back,” by Kia Abdullah, which was recommended by my brother Bob.  Zara Kaleel is an independent Muslim woman who has exchanged her high profile legal career in London for a job at a sexual assault center helping victims like Jodie Wolfe, a 16-year-old girl with severe facial deformities.  When Jodie accuses four Muslim boys in her class of raping her, even Jodie’s best friend doesn’t believe her, but Zara does, and is determined to find the truth in the face of public outcry.  Issues of sex, race, and social justice collide in an explosive criminal trial.  I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough as the tension rose and I raced toward the surprising conclusion.  I picked up the latest mystery by Louise Penny, “All the Devils Are Here,” delighted to be heading back to the welcoming village of Three Pines, only to find myself in Paris! The Gamaches are gathered there as a family to have a bistro dinner with Armand’s godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz.  Walking home together afterward, they watch in horror as Stephen is knocked down and critically injured in what Gamache knows is no accident.  To find out why, they are led deep into the secrets Armand’s godfather has kept for decades, finding themselves in a web of lies and deceit that will make Armand question whether he can trust his friends, his colleagues, his instincts, even his own past.  His own family.  Penny’s books are always a treat.  I enjoy Jacqueline Winspear’s mysteries featuring investigator Maisie Dobbs that are set in England during WWII.  In “The Consequences of Fear,” it’s October, 1941, and while on a delivery young Freddie Hackett, a message runner, witnesses an argument that ends in murder.  After waiting until the coast is clear, he arrives at the delivery address – only to come face-to-face with the killer.  Dismissed by the police, who don’t believe his tale, he turns to Maisie Dobbs, whom he once met while on a delivery. She believes him, but has to be careful because she’s working secretly for the Special Operations Executive assessing candidates for crucial work with the French Resistance.  When she spots the suspected killer in a place she least suspects, her two worlds collide.   “The Stranger Diaries,” by Elly Griffiths, is a modern gothic thriller written with compassion and humor.  Clare Cassidy is a high school English teacher who specializes in and teaches a course on the gothic writer R. M. Holland.  But when Clare’s colleague and close friend is found dead, with a line from Holland’s most famous story, “The Stranger,” left by her body, Clare is horrified to see her own life collide with the story lines of her favorite literature.  Worse, one day she notices something odd – writing that isn’t hers, left on the page of an old diary: “Hello Clare.  You don’t know me.”   Police suspect the killer is someone she does know.  So delicious.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere. Jean Rhys