March
Fiction:
I’m a big fan of novels by Sigrid Nunez, who won the National Book Award for “The Friend.” “The Vulnerables” is her slim meditation on our contemporary era, including the pandemic, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka. “The Vulnerables” reveals what happens when strangers are willing to open their hearts to each other, and how far even small acts of caring can go to ease another’s distress. The narrator, an unnamed writer, moves into a friend’s apartment in Manhattan during the Covid lockdown to care for Eureka when his owner gets stuck on the West Coast, as the macaw needs company. I loved the narrator’s thoughts about life with the parrot, who had his own room with a large cage and a slew of toys and seemed happy. (“But playtime with Eureka could make me melancholy. Animals having fun can be a poignant spectacle – I suppose partly because it narrows the gap between us and them. And if you gave too much thought to what an animal might be feeling and how close to, even indistinguishable from, a human (say, your own) emotion that feeling might be, you could find yourself, well, melancholy.” When the young man who had previously cared for Eureka needs to move back into the apartment, Nunez brings her singular voice to a story about modern life and connection.
J. M. Coetzee, who has won the Nobel and was the first to win two Booker prizes, is an influential and provocative writer renowned for his sparse yet powerful prose. “The Pole” tells the story of Wittold Walcecyziecz, a vigorous, extravagantly white-haired pianist and interpreter of Chopin who becomes infatuated with Beatriz, a stylish Spanish patron of the arts, after she helps organize his concert in Barcelona. Although Beatriz, a married woman, is initially unimpressed by Wittold and his “gleaming dentures,” she soon finds herself pursued and ineluctably swept into his world. As the journeyman performer sends her countless letters, extends invitations to travel, and even visits her husband’s summer home in Mallorca, their unlikely relationship blossoms, although only on Beatriz’s terms. The power struggle between them intensifies, eventually escalating into a full-fledged battle of the sexes as Coetzee reinvents the all-encompassing love of the poet Dante for his Beatrice, showing how a chance meeting between strangers – even “a Pole, a man of seventy, a vigorous seventy,” and a stultified “banker’s wife who occupies her days in good works” – can suddenly change everything. This short, elegant novel is compulsively readable.
In “Hope,” by Andrew Ridker, it is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb went of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father’s footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, we follow the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives. This novel manages to be both sweeping and intimate, reflecting the complexities inherent in even an “ideal” family as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives.
Non-Fiction:
“The Deadline,” by Jill Lepore, is a brilliant collection of 46 essays by this Harvard Professor of American History, staff writer at “The New Yorker,” and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist whose many books include the international bestseller, “These Truths.” Written over the last decade, they offer a portrait of American life and letters, politics and technology, law and society. From gun rights and police brutality to Bratz dolls and bicycles, and from lockdowns to the losses that haunt Lepore’s own life, these essays again and again cross what Lepore calls “the deadline,” the “river of time that divides the quick from the dead.” In this wide-ranging collection, she attempts to make sense of the first wobbly decades of the twenty-first century. Challenging both the right and the left, Lepore objects to easy, hair-trigger partisanship, making the case for an open-minded, democratic society, animated by inquiry. She also refuses to cede a distinction between the intimate and the intellectual. With “The Shorebird,” a profile of pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, Lepore shows how all thing are part of an intricate, interdependent ecosystem; in “Prodigal Daughter,” an elegy for her mother, she interweaves personal narrative with the story of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane. Lepore’s writing doesn’t fit easily into any category, partly because she writes so much, and writes about so much. The book is long but the essays are short, easy to drop in on and be stimulated by. In “Hard News,” she quotes Alan Rusbridger, for twenty years the editor in chief of the Guardian, that the rise of social media meant that “chaotic information was free: good information was expensive,” which meant, in turn, that “good information was increasingly for smaller elites” and that “it was harder for good information to compete on equal terms with bad.” About gun control,she writes, “When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left.” There is great richness in this historian’s approach to modern life in America. As she says, “The rule of history is as old as the rule of law. There are no certainties in history. There are only struggles for justice, and wars interrupted by peace.”
“The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary,” by Sarah Ogilvie, is the history of, and a paean to, the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word. The Oxford English Dictionary is one of Western culture’s greatest literary achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never acknowledged. How did it get made? Who were the people. behind this unprecedented book? As Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, a daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, the inventor of the first American subway, a female antislavery activist in Philadelphia – and thousands more. This book unravels the mystery of the fascinating global cast of contributors who, for more than seventy years helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. Their combined efforts resulted in what is arguably the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time. It is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs and failures, enriched the English language. Until the OED, the major English dictionaries were prescriptive texts – telling their readers what words should mean and how they should be spelled, pronounced, and used. This would be the first dictionary that described language. In 1857 three Englishmen proposed to the London Philological Society – one of the scholarly societies that were such a hallmark of their day – the creation of “an entirely new Dictionary; no patch upon old garments, but a new garment throughout.” It would trace the meaning of words across time and describe how people were actually using them. The three English founders recognized that the mammoth task of finding words in their natural habitat and describing them could not be done alone by a small group of men in London or Oxford, so between 1858 and 1928 members of the public were invited to read the books that they had to hand, and to mail to the Editor of the Dictionary examples of how particular words were used in these books. The response was massive. These volunteer “Readers” were instructed to write out the words and sentences on 4×6-inch pieces of paper, known as “slips,” and send them in (one of the most prolific female contributors, Edith Thompson of Bath, for instance, over time sent in 13,259 slips). When in 1914 Ogilvie came across the address books of James Murray, who became editor of the OED in 1879, for eight years she pored over them, researching the three thousand people listed inside them and “falling in love with them.” This crowdsourced project was powered by faithful and loyal volunteers who took up the invitation to read their favorite books and describe their local words not just so that the bounds of the English language could be recorded for future generations but so they could be part of a project that was much bigger than them. These Dictionary People have been largely forgotten and unacknowledged – until now.
Mysteries: “The Eden Test,” by Adam Sternbergh, is an intriguing and ingenious story. Daisy and Craig’s marriage is in serious trouble, so Daisy has signed up for the Eden Test, a weeklong getaway in a remote cabin in upstate NY for couples in need of a fresh start even as, unbeknownst to her, Craig has plans to leave her for another woman. But what Craig doesn’t know (and neither do we) is that Daisy, a slyly talented actress, has her own secrets, and as the week goes on the lies and revelations pile up as does a haunting Hitchockian sense of dread. “The Ruin,” by Dervla McTiernan, is an engrossing police procedural set in Ireland. Twenty years ago Cormac Reilly discovered the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home, and he’s never forgotten the two children she left behind. When Aisling Conroy’s boyfriend, Jack, one of the two children now grown up, is found in the freezing waters of a river in Galway, the police tell her it was suicide, although his sister suspects foul play. At the same time, while Detective Cormac Reilly has been quietly reinvestigating the overdose of the children’s drug- and alcohol-addicted mother and trying to connect the mother’s death to Jack’s, his colleague discovers evidence that will change everything. It’s a page turner.
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” Joseph Addison
bestlau 