Month: February 2024

The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble

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I dove into this 1987 novel, having long been fascinated by the way Drabble uses the closeup of individual lives to chronicle social history. We begin at a New Year’s party in 1980 with three longtime friends, now approaching midlife turning points, even as Britain itself enters a decade of change wrought by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cronies.

At the party Liz Headland, a psychologist, finds that her marriage to Charles, long tamed by child-rearing and busy careers, is falling apart. Alix Bowen is becoming disillusioned with her work as a teacher within Britain’s social-welfare network, feeling that the progressive fervor of the previous decades has not accomplished much. Artist Esther Breuer, pessimistic about the role of art in a changing society, contemplates leaving London for good and moving to Italy.

The three had met at Cambridge twenty-five years earlier, their social and academic success there promising brilliant careers. In a nod to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, they are “the crème de la crème” of their generation. However, at this point, Liz is the only one of the three to be financially stable, though even that might change with her divorce. Alix and Esther do piecemeal work and are often criticised for wasting their brains and for lacking ambition.

While wrestling with their own disappointments and demons, they navigate a society that is turning away from the socialism that has helped Britain recover from WWII, to a ruthless capitalism that rewards winners and ignores the suffering of losers.

In much of my reading over the last few months I’ve been looking at how writers balance the personal lives of their characters with the larger events in their world. In some cases, such as Sisters of Night and Fog by Erika Robuck, the correlation is obvious and inescapable. In others, such as Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, it is more subtle. Here I feel Drabble’s social context—miner’s strikes, social service cuts, a serial killer—sometimes overwhelms her characters’ lives.

I know from reading other novels by Drabble that her style is rather dense, with more exposition and fewer dramatic scenes than we are used to in today’s fiction. That’s okay with me—I search out these novels that call for a little more attention. I enjoyed the deep dive into the minds and hearts of these three women. The other characters are well-drawn and fascinating, not only within themselves but also how they interact with and affect Liz, Alix and Esther.

The novel is a wonderful portrait, not only of these characters, but of a decade whose changes are only now starting to lose steam. I found its paean to friendship between women equally fascinating, especially the way their bond survives even as each of them transforms in the course of the novel.

What novel set in the 1980s have you enjoyed?

Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng

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Twelve-year-old Noah Gardner receives a letter from his mother, who disappeared several years earlier. It has been opened by the authorities of course, and is covered with drawings of cats. Noah and his father, formerly a linguistics professor but now demoted to a janitor, live in a U.S. that shows what our current country could easily become.

A global crisis has lessened the country’s standing in the world, and in response, the government has created PACT, the Preserving of American Cultures and Traditions Act. The increasingly authoritarian government rigidly enforces PACT, indoctrinating children young, tolerating no dissent, and cracking down on any resistance. Because China is blamed for the crisis (sound familiar?), all east Asian people, even longtime citizens, are subjected to racial violence and discrimination.

Noah decides to find out once and for all what happened to his mother, a famous Chinese-American artist. He loves his white American father, yet wonders why the man allowed himself to be punished for whatever his wife had done. Noah isn’t even allowed to go by the nickname his mother gave him: Bird. It’s not hard to imagine the effect on a child’s identity when he loses the name he’s always been known by.

This is a fascinating story, part mystery, part thriller, part social commentary. Several choices by the author add to its power: putting current social/political tensions into a mostly fictional world, and concentrating the terrible racist abuse on Asians rather than people of color—not that it doesn’t exist now but not so blatantly and virulently—provides a little distance for the reader. We recognise them and can more easily appreciate how these fictional forces play out in today’s society. For example:

In Orange county a march protesting anti-Chinese bias spiraled into a clash with bystanders hurling epithets, ending with riot police, Tasers, a Chinese-American three-year-old struck with a teargas canister. For the officers, paid leave; for the protester, a full investigation into the family.

We can also see where our real world tensions could lead. More and more people are embracing the idea of an authoritarian regime, without actually understanding what that will mean for them. Like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, this dystopia is all too close to reality.

I love the descriptions of the protests in the novel. They are sometimes enigmatic and often playful, adding a touch of humor and reminding me of the Yippies’ protests in the 1960s. Most of them reference a phrase from a poem by Noah’s mother: our missing hearts. It’s a brilliant symbol, which accrues meaning as the novel progresses.

Even more, I love the role librarians play. I believe librarians are the smartest people around. They are my heroes. I appreciated Noah’s father and the sacrifices he makes to protect his family. I also liked Noah’s feisty friend Sadie. And I loved the way he used the stories and folktales his mother had told him when he was little. Through these characters, Ng delves into the power of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when people are silenced.

When are you ever done with the story of someone you love? You turn the most precious of your memories over and over, wearing their edges smooth, warming them again with your heat. You touch the curves and hollows of every detail you have, memorizing them, reciting them once more though you already know them in your bones. Whoever thinks, recalling the face of the one they loved who is gone: yes, I looked at you enough, I loved you enough, we had enough time, any of this was enough?

Wondering why his mother left, where she is, and whether Noah will succeed kept me glued to the book. True, parts of it dragged; the emotional lives of the characters could have been more fully developed; and there were a couple of consistency problems near the end. Overall, though, it is a brilliant book, and a worthy follow-up to Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere.

What dystopian novel have you read that seemed disturbingly close to our world?

Dark Bird, by Sam Schmidt

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Sometimes you start a book, and you cannot stop until you have turned the last page.

That is what happened to me reading Schmidt’s new collection of poetry. In fact, it begs to be read as a whole. It begins so innocently, with a tree—“An ordinary tree”—a tree in winter, in a graveyard across from the author’s home. A tree with a crow in it.

Of course I thought of Haworth. The first time I visited the home of the Brontë sisters, a bleak day in the dregs of winter, I was shocked to find that their front yard was actually a cemetery. The Brontë parsonage lay right up against the graveyard and, beyond it, the grey stone church, and everywhere the crows, hoarsely screaming and rising in the air at my intrusion.

These poems stand up to the comparison, even to the echoes of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Eleanor Farjeon, and others. The reader is pulled in, made complicit in this openness to the world as we move through the year from winter to winter. One poem begins:

A tree revolves among faces.
When I open my eyes, it’s back as it
was. It was never a god in disguise.
It won’t reveal
a passage through. An exit
out. It’s not a young
woman—or an old one—
transformed.

Everything I look for in poetry is here: language that sings, lines concise and perfect as a snowflake, themes that speak to the universal heart of human existence, and surprising images that range from fairytales to news stories. Some of the images recur, spiraling into new meaning each time they appear.

I love that these poems circle around a graveyard. Anywhere we walk is a graveyard, isn’t it? Layers of rock and older civilisations, beings that came before us. They represent the geology of time, personal time and the earth’s time.

In my review of Schmidt’s previous collection, Suburban Myths, I praised the depth of emotion and experience in his work. Here he achieves that depth partly by the brilliance of his writing and partly by the force of his themes. Even more striking is how vulnerable the author allows himself to be and, therefore, how intensely powerful each poem is. Wrestling with demons from childhood, coming to terms with a father’s criticism and your own child’s independence, navigating a decades-old marriage—the more personal the poems are, the more they open us to ourselves.

He balances between silence and speech.
Between hope that he
might talk his way
into friendship with the sky. And
despair that he’s asking too much.

These songs invite us to walk through this world bookended by graveyard and family home. We enter, not a wood, but a single tree. We bang on the doors that are shut and unearth what is buried within us.

What poetry collection have you read that you kept reading and rereading?
 
 

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.

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

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Andrew Bevel and his wife Mildred are bigwigs in early 20th century Manhattan. He’s a financier, a cold stick of a man who’s a genius when it comes to money—according to some anyway. She’s involved in various charitable endeavors, particularly when it comes to music. An otherwise reclusive couple, they become richer and richer; some say Bevel’s tinkering led to the Great Depression.

The premise of my book club’s choice for this month is an interesting one: tell the story of the Bevels from four different points of view. The first part of the book is a novel entitled Bonds, supposedly based on the couple, renamed Benjamin and Helen Rask. It is written in the narrative-heavy style of the early 20th century, no dialogue or dramatic scenes. I found most of it lackluster, though part of it was horrific and disturbing.

The second part contains Andrew’s notes toward an autobiography, intended to refute the story told in the novel, especially when it comes to his wife. The dry and often fragmentary notes magnify Andrew’s genius, and insist that his motives were less about making money, which he doesn’t care about, and more about doing good in the world. Much of it concentrates on portraying Mildred as a brainless little woman who didn’t understand what he did, and supported innocuous classical music.

The third part is a memoir written much later by Andrew’s secretary who had written up the autobiography from Bevel’s notes, giving us parts of it with her comments, among other things. It’s written in a modern style, with the astute characterisation, dialogue and dramatic scenes that make for more interesting reading. The final part is a diary giving yet another point of view.

It’s a fun premise: four parts, four points of view. I first ran across it in the 1970s when I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which entranced me and opened up a whole world of possibilities in fiction. Some reviews call Diaz’s book experimental fiction. I guess that’s true, though it’s been done so many times before that is seems a rather tame experiment. Many historical fiction novels also interweave two or more stories, often one in the present and one in the past.

My book club split pretty evenly between those who enjoyed it a lot and those who found it boring and predictable. Many of us confessed to skipping chunks of the tedious second part. I think we all shook our heads at the constant put-downs of women.

I came down on the boring and predictable side, among those surprised that it won a Pulitzer Prize. However, I will say that the book reflects our country at this moment in time: awash with false news and outright lies, making it hard to identify a trusted source. Even when you find one, you have to separate out the AI fakes from the real person.

The other relevant side of the book is the way its characters, even in that time period, are eager to present an image of themselves that may or may not be true, and defend that image if challenged. So much of today’s social media contains presentations of ourselves that have been carefully crafted to project a certain persona.

One discovery that interested me was that everyone in the group, including me, tended to believe each new section over the previous one, though of course there’s no way to actually tell. I guess it’s human nature to believe the last thing you’re told, especially if it’s something that fits best into your worldview: yet another way the novel speaks to today’s public discourse.

I also appreciate the way the author adapted the style for each part to reflect the writing of the time. So I liked the premise for the story and applaud the author to trying something grand, even if, in my view, it fell short in the execution.

Are you in a book club? What are you reading now?