I like to read a mix of books, so this week’s review is of a middle-grade book. As the story opens, eleven-year-old Delilah “Dally” Peteharrington has lost her beloved grandfather, whose son—her father—died some years earlier. As a result, her mother is left to manage the family’s extremely wealthy businesses. Already uptight and business-oriented, she rises to the challenge, but is determined that Dally will be trained to take over. That means tutoring in business after school, and no time for other, more interesting activities.
Dally, however, takes after her father and grandfather: two adventurers who wanted to get out and explore what life has to offer. The mysterious letter that comes to her from her grandfather leads her to the Secret Library, which is not in itself secret but rather a repository of secrets. She eludes her mother’s control to delve into her family’s past and learn the secrets hidden there.
As is Octavia Butler’s Kindred, she is actually transported into the past, resulting in wonderful adventures but also creating some problems for the author. Dally is biracial—her father Black and her mother White—so she encounters the explicit racism that up to now she’s only heard about.
Pirate ships, the Underground Railroad, Jim Crow, slavery: there’s a lot here, brought to life through her adventures. The author goes further, having her encounter same-sex relationships, trans persons, Black persons passing as White, etc. While I enjoyed the story, and in most cases felt like it was a good introduction for 8-12 year-olds to some of this history, it began to seem like a lot.
Worse, as the story went on, my credulity was strained to the breaking point. For example, I had trouble believing Dally’s mother could be so entirely cold and controlling: the worst sort of businessperson stereotype. At times, the characters perform physically impossible feats. And, unlike in Kindred, there are no consequences when Dally acts like a modern person of color around White people in pre-Civil Rights eras. There are many more examples, but I don’t want to include too many spoilers.
I love the idea of a magical library. I enjoy stories about uncovering family secrets. I even like young people wanting adventures and experiences, though I’m not fond of the anti-education slant here. I respect and admire the challenge this author has set themselves: creating a coming-of-age story mixed with fantasy and historical fiction that is based on themes of identity, racism, LGBTQ+, friendship, inheritance, and family.
I found the story engrossing, and even stayed up late to finish it. It would be fine for a twelve-year-old, but any younger than that I think I’d want to read it with the child and be ready to do a lot of explaining.
Even those who don’t care who inspired Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes may enjoy this biography of three fascinating women in fin-de-siécle Paris. At a time and in a society where women had no power, these three embarked upon “a conscious strategy of self-promotion.” Like so many today, they became famous for being famous. However, Weber goes beyond that easy judgment and delves into their lives, showing us that in striving to be celebrities, they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to assert some agency over their lives.
Marcel Proust, half-Jewish, from a bourgeois background, first became infatuated with Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus through his friendship with her son. As the widow of composer Georges Bizet, Geneviève drew artists and musicians to her salon where she dressed in gauzy peignoirs in half-mourning colors.
Later he became obsessed with Laure de Sade, Comtesse Adhéaume de Chevigné, who made much of her descent from Petrarch’s Laura and from the Marquis de Sade—think of that combination! She chose to make her name by being the wildest of the wild and cosying up to whoever held political power.
Finally, Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, Vicomtesse Greffulhe embodied his “dream of patrician elegance and grace.” Dominated and all but imprisoned by her husband, she made herself famous for the beautiful clothes she designed or had designed for her. Trivial, yes, but her way of pushing back against a society where, as she wrote, “ ‘women are meant to be trophies, pretty possessions . . . Smiling, placid, charming.’ ”
The book is less about Proust than it is about Geneviève, Laure, and Élisabeth, providing a vivid portrait of the restricted lives of even these most privileged women. However, his journey—he himself pursuing a place in society—is our journey; he is our guide into this world.
He is not without his own conflicts. Especially towards the end, we learn a bit more about how he claimed to be studying the “monde” or “gratin,” the highest circles of society, in order to gain material for his writing. True enough, but he seems also to have simply been as fascinated by it as any of us obsessively watching Downton Abbey these days. Weber says:
Proust concedes that a man of letters might just as fruitfully write about the impoverished as about the privileged. He goes on to explain, however, that when authors pursue ‘opulence,’ what really motivates them is a longing for the unattainable . . . The gratin intrigues them as artists because it is not readily accessible to them (whereas poverty presumably is).
Yet his pursuit of each woman ends in disillusion. “He would spend the next three decades writing and rewriting variations on this theme: the unreachable muse whose charm evaporates upon contact.” He is shocked to find that high social status is no guarantee of virtue. “[T]he juxtaposition of surface elegance and hidden corruption would become a defining feature of his portrayal of the monde.”
The end of the 19th century saw France’s Third Republic becoming more stable, as the hopes for restoring the monarchy dissipated, leaving the aristocracy with no political power. As some would say of today’s Western societies, they took refuge in entertaining themselves to death.
I seem to have read a number of Gilded Age books recently, perhaps looking for ways to understand and push back against our own age of extreme inequality, when the richest 1% own more of the world’s wealth than the bottom 95% put together. If nothing else, my readings of the robber barons of late 19th century U.S. tell me that they stored up trouble for their next generations. Look at all the mansions and luxury “cottages” of that time which had to be abandoned by the following generation.
Instituting an income tax system in 1913 after the ratification of the 16th amendment had something to do with that, of course, but I also remember my own time at an exclusive prep school. So many of those entitled young people simply coasted through, drinking and drugging too much, confident that Daddy’s money guaranteed them a free ride through life, without any effort on their part. Not all, of course. There were those who worked hard and deployed their intelligence to good effect. Still, we see it today in the Nepo-in-chief, who failed at every business he undertook, bailed out by bluster, fraud, and—yes—Daddy’s money.
There are a lot of names to keep track of in Weber’s book, some famous today—Bizet, de Maupassant—some forgotten. I debated whether the book could have been streamlined a bit, but in truth I am just as guilty as Proust: I enjoyed all the details of salons and balls and intrigues. They do give me a better understanding of the context for his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, but that is not what kept me glued to the pages of this book. No, I reveled in experiencing a world far off in time and place, yet having much to say about the one I inhabit today.
What biography have you read that introduced you to a different world?
In the summer of 1987, sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry and her mother know life is about to change for them. As if weighing over 300 pounds isn’t enough to set her apart, Diamond is the only person of color in their New England mill town. She and her mother, who has a drug habit, have been living in poverty ever since her father Rob disappeared, apparently committing suicide, leaving his shoes and wallet behind at the river’s edge.
Now it’s been seven years, so they can have him declared dead and finally receive his life insurance. An easy, if annoying, task for most people, Chambers shows us just how difficult it is for poor people to collect and submit the necessary paperwork. In a vivid scene, Diamond and Anna, who is White, have to decide whether to hitchhike or walk into town when their promised ride doesn’t show up. Anna decides they will walk, even though Diamond’s weight makes such a trek almost impossible, and they might miss their appointment.
Another complication is that some people say they have seen Rob in nearby towns, but Diamond attributes that to White people not being able to distinguish one Black man from another. Lonely and bullied, she faces both structural and personal racism.
Yet, for all that, she’s making plans. Not the wild plans Annabelle comes up for spending the life insurance money—buying ten of everything that takes her fancy—but more practical plans for a different life: leveraging her intelligence to work towards a college scholarship, and saving the money she earns cleaning rooms at the Tee Pee motel to use for Driver’s Ed classes.
Then Diamond receives a letter from her father’s Aunt Lena, and she is astonished to find that she—who yearns to see other people who look like her—has a Black family elsewhere. Through Lena’s letters she learns about her father’s childhood. Lena forwards her a cache of even older letters that go back to 1915, from her great-aunt Clara who was the only Black person in Swift River after the “Leaving,” when the Black mill workers and their families departed en masse.
The timeline moves fluidly from present to past and back again. The events and emotions of Diamond’s teenaged summer gain resonance from being held against the events of her childhood, her father’s past, Lena’s life, and Clara’s. Diamond becomes aware of the history that she carries and how that history helps her see her own place in the world.
Chambers brilliantly brings her to life, avoiding worn-out tropes about teenagers, obesity, and prejudice. In Diamond, we see what is extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary person. Her lack of self-pity, yearning for life, and eagerness for experience give us a person to cheer for.
A coming-of-age story, Swift River powerfully embodies themes of family, discrimination, and resilience. This is literary fiction, not a standard mystery. Some threads aren’t resolved. In some books that bothers me, but here it seemed appropriate. The past isn’t always tied up in a neat package with a bow on top.
What coming-of-age novel have you read that brings the past into the present?
In this middle-grade novel, twelve-year-old Lucy starts at a new school in a new town, carrying a secret burden: she’s mourning the death of her younger brother Theo from congenital heart disease and the loss of the family environment she’s known all her life. Mired in their own grief, her parents pretend all is well, yet move to another state in hopes of a fresh start.
In a misguided attempt to place Lucy in a school that will help her deal with her grief, they enroll her in a school that suffered a mass shooting four years earlier and in the very class that suffered that trauma. As the first new member of the class since the shooting, Lucy faces a solid block of young people who have made their traumatic journey together, helped by therapists and hurt by public perception.
All except one girl, Avery, who is ostracized by the entire class. At lunch on Lucy’s first day, she can’t find an empty seat, so she sits at a table that is completely empty aside from Avery. Gradually Lucy begins to learn about this withdrawn girl, particularly through an after-school mime class.
As is obvious from this summary, the story tackles themes of grief, family, friendship, and mental health, and it does so in a sensitive way. The author’s extensive research underpins the story without loading it down. Of course, the experiences of Lucy and her classmates make for heavy reading– emotionally, that is; the prose flows well and the story unfolds naturally.
I especially enjoyed Lucy as a character. She likes math, its concrete answers that are either right or wrong, though she’s troubled by the concept of infinity. Each chapter is introduced by a math joke, which is fun. Lucy finds them in her room and wonders where they come from.
What kind of angle should you never argue with? A 90-degree angle. They’re ALWAYS right.
Some readers may find these jokes and Lucy’s way of using math to understand the world intrusive or boring. I loved them, though, both for their welcome lightness and for the way they reflect her need for structure and certainty in a world where such things can be hard to find. I also loved seeing a girl who likes math and logic: such a rarity in stories, though not in real life.
In the mime class—which may appeal to readers who are more interested in the arts than in math—Lucy and her classmates find another way to interact. Communicating without words, trying something new together, putting on a show at the end—these are all effective tools for opening emotionally to each other. Or in other words, for becoming friends. We all could use a friend.
There are a few issues with the book, such as that, after the school where the shooting had occurred had been torn down and new one built, such a class would have been split up rather than kept together in isolation. Also, the school’s lack of interest in dealing with Avery’s extreme situation seemed unlikely.
Still, I highly recommend this novel for adults and—with care—for young readers. Grownups get a chance to experience these devasting attacks and their long tail of trauma from the students’ point of view. Young people can see their fears or their own experience reflected—and not resolved so much as coped with—in a story. Which is, after all, one of the great gifts bestowed by sharing stories.
Have you read a middle-grade story that impressed you?
Suspecting we might need a reason to feel good about our country, one of my book clubs selected this well-known novel. It turned out to be an inspired choice (thank you, Pamela!). Published in 1918, most of the story takes place in the 1880s in Black Hawk, Nebraska, based on the tiny town of Red Cloud where Cather grew up.
After a prologue, the story is narrated by Jim Burden, who—like Cather—moved from Virginia to Nebraska. Unlike the author, though, his parents have died, and 10-year-old Jim goes to live with his grandparents. On the train he meets the Shimerda family, newly arrived from Bohemia and planning to homestead outside Black Hawk. He and their oldest daughter Ántonia immediately become friends.
It is still the early days of pioneers on the vast plains. While some, such as Jim’s grandparents, are finally making a living from the land, others must start from scratch. The Shimerda’s land turns out to have only a rough cave in the earth for a home and land that is mostly unbroken prairie. Near neighbors and somewhat isolated from town, Jim and Ántonia’s friendship grows.
The time and place come alive through their adventures in this picaresque story—tragedies, successes, hard work, plenty of play—and through the characters of Jim, described as “romantic and ardent” by another character, and Ántonia who is near bursting with joy in being alive. She reminds me of Lucinda Matlock from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology: “It takes life to love life!”
Cather’s prose fills me with delight. Appropriately for the setting and characters, it is both clear and rich. It’s plain enough for young readers, yet there are layers of complexity for adults to appreciate. She sets the pace for the story right away, in the prologue. We are on a train. We will get there when we get there. You can’t hurry it along, so relax and look out the windows:
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
From this encounter between a middle-aged Jim and a former neighbor, we move into Jim’s account of his youth. Some of it strikes us, more than a hundred years on, as problematic: the treatment of the few Black characters, the sod-breaking that we now know will yield only a few good harvests before blowing away in Dust Bowl storms.
But what does come through, and became such a balm to us, are the virtues of these two characters: Ántonia’s life force and Jim’s passionate loyalty to friends, family and country. Even more, though, it is how the inevitable tensions and prejudices of people who have been thrown together are overwhelmed by the need to work together. Best of all is the way they, without hesitation, give unstintingly to neighbors when they need help.
As happens in the best novels, Cather signals these tensions on the first page.
Once when he [Jake, the farmhand who’d been sent to accompany Jim to Nebraska] sat down to chat, he told us that in the immigrant car ahead there was a family from ‘across the water’ whose destination was the same as ours.
‘They can’t any of them speak English, except one little girl, and all she can say is “We go Black Hawk, Nebraska.” She’s not much older than you, twelve or thirteen, maybe, and she’s as bright as a new dollar. Don’t you want to go ahead and see her, Jimmy? She’s got the pretty brown eyes, too!’
This last remark made me bashful, and I shook my head and settled down to ‘Jesse James.’ Jake nodded at me approvingly and said you were likely to get diseases from foreigners.
Later in the story, we see divisions between the Catholics and Protestants, and between the “town girls” and the “country girls” who were often from immigrant families. But these distinctions were forgotten when an untimely death, a fire or a blizzard struck.
I was also impressed by Cather’s capsule descriptions of characters. Here is how she introduces Jim’s grandparents (in Jim’s voice):
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance . . .
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular—so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
We get a sense of how they look and of their distinct personalities. If you haven’t read this classic novel, or only long ago, try it out. You might find, as we did, a portrait of what is best about this country, what we can achieve when we remember that we are not just individuals, but members of a community.
What classic novel have you reread? How did it hold up?
Families. They can be great or not. They don’t mean to hurt you, but too often they do. In Napolitano’s 2023 novel, William Waters was raised without love or attention, his parents having withdrawn into silence after the death of his three-year-old sister when he was only six days old.
He finds respite and respect on the basketball court, and friends among his teammates. At college, on a sports scholarship at Northwestern, he meets Julia Padavano, the oldest of four tight-knit sisters and is welcomed into their family. Julia’s father calls her a rocket: she knows what she wants and won’t let anything get in the way. William is a welcome and malleable companion, happy to have her tell him what to do.
When he suffers a career-ending injury, he begins a descent into darkness. His teammates and the Padavanos stand by him. Still, these relationships—between William and those around him, between the Padavano sisters, between their parents—are challenged as the story unfolds.
I’d been told this novel, loosely based on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and infused with Walt Whitman’s poetry, was a tear-jerker. For me, not so much. It was enjoyable for sure—certainly enough so to distract me from the news—but I found the characters too shallow to engage my emotions. Admittedly, this is often a problem for me with stories that have multiple main characters and multiple points of view.
The writing in some parts of the story, especially one long night involving William, is just amazing. I loved the descriptions of one sister’s murals and their effect on others. There were some parts that I questioned, though, such as the way William’s parents completely shut down. I was a little dismayed by the depiction of William’s teammate and best friend Trent who seems to be in the story only to provide him with unstinting support and love. As a Black male, Trent struck me as a riff on the mammy stereotype.
Kirkus, home to the Kirkus Prize and celebrated book reviews, places Hello, Beautiful in the category of literary fiction. A subject of much discussion among my writer friends, categories and genres have undergone many changes. It used be that fiction was divided between literary fiction and genre fiction, which included romance, mystery, science fiction, horror, etc.
As many of the books in these genres have become so well-written that they qualify as literary (as some already were, but that’s another soapbox), literary has become a catchall for everything else. New genres have been added to try to identify books that are well-written, but a lighter read, perhaps, than people might think of when they hear literary: women’s fiction, upmarket fiction, book club fiction. However, as you can imagine, there has been pushback against these new genres.
Defining the term “literary” is a discussion for another day. One of my book clubs, the one I’ve been a member of for decades, differentiates between difficult reads and lighter reads. We include both, of course, but like to mix it up. Some books take a little more effort on the reader’s part, a little more attention. This novel was not difficult to read, which is a plus for many readers. Another plus is that it explores family and love in new and fresh ways. It’s won literary awards and been selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Families are complicated. They can be wonderfully supportive. However troubled the relationships over the years, siblings are—or so my mother’s sister told me as she lay dying—the only ones who remember what you do. We also sometimes come to appreciate once-despised parents when we become parents ourselves. Not always, of course.
What I appreciate about this story is Napolitano’s exploration of one family’s story and of different ways of being together.
What would you expect to find in a literary novel? What’s a story about families that you would recommend?
People wander into Funiculi Funicula, a small café in a Tokyo alley and, charmed by its quiet atmosphere, become regulars. Almost unchanged since it opened over a hundred years ago, the café is mostly a haven for those who want to read or have a leisurely cup of tea or coffee. But sometimes people drop in who have heard the rumor that it contains a portal that enables you to travel into the past.
In this play-turned-novel, translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot, four people decide to risk a trip into their past. And it is a risk. You are launched when you sit in a particular chair and Kazu, cousin of the current owners, pours you a cup of coffee, but you must return as the title says or risk becoming a ghost, like the woman in white who inhabits that chair most of the time, silently reading a book.
Another rule is that the present cannot be changed, no matter what the time traveler does, so you would think no one would attempt such a dangerous journey. Why twist yourself to obey all of the arcane rules and risk becoming a ghost when you cannot change whatever it is about the present that is making you unhappy? Why indeed do we pick over our pasts, write memoirs, visit psychoanalysts when whatever we learn does not change what has happened?
It seems like a thin premise for a book, and I expected a light read. However, Kawaguchi endows each of the four stories with subtle and surprising layers of emotion. The writing was a bit clunky in places: repetitive or explaining too much. Perhaps this was due to its genesis as a play. And without giving too much away, some of the women’s stories were annoyingly patriarchal.
Still, I enjoyed reading it and am left wondering which part of my past I would visit if I made my way to Funiculi Funicula. Would I want to enjoy once again a particularly happy time or attempt to repair a terrible mistake I now regret?
If you could travel into the past, would you do it?
Subtitled A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, Doherty’s fascinating new book tells of a “messy experiment” at Radcliffe College. President Mary Ingraham Bunting became concerned with what happened to the graduates of this all-women college. Since at that time women were expected to marry and spend their time caring for their husbands and family, these educated women were expected to give up their academic or creative pursuits, or reduce them to hobbies, in order to become what Virginia Woolf called “the angel in the house.”
Remembering her own career as a microbiologist–and now college president–while raising a family, Bunting created the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study in 1960. Fellowships provided a stipend, office space, and a like-minded community to help women advance their careers as scholars and artists while also caring for a family. For a two-year period, the Institute would provide a fellow the prerequisites for creative work, as described by Woolf in her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own.”
Doherty concentrates on a few of the first fellows: poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, writer Tillie Olsen, sculptor Marianna Pineda and painter Barbara Swan. They called themselves The Equivalents per the Institute’s requirement “that applicants have either a doctorate or ‘the equivalent’ in creative achievement.” Her extensive research underlies this engaging story of five very different women and their creative journeys. And the book is so much more: a cultural history of the time, an in-depth look at creativity—what enhances it and what destroys it—and an examination of privilege.
I confess that it is the latter that most interests me because, after all, even in the 1950s and 1960s, while White women in droves were immersing themselves in being housewives, Black and working class women were already working while trying to raise a family. I appreciate that in covering the nascent second wave of feminism, Doherty includes the Black women’s movement. While acknowledging it isn’t “her” experience, she does examine the very real problems Black women had with what became the mostly middle- and upper-class White women’s movement.
Tillie Olsen’s story provides a needed corrective to Sexton’s upper-class privilege and that of the others’ somewhat lesser privilege. Olsen was “a first-generation, working-class American, an itinerant, and an agitator” who said outright that “the true struggle was the class struggle.” After early publication and literary acclaim, she had been side-tracked by the overwhelming labor of house, family, and dead-end job. Eventually the author of the best-seller Silences, she was alert to all the things that keep us from creating.
The way Doherty sensitively examines these women’s different struggles and achievements lifts this narrative above the ghoulish interest in Sexton’s suicide attempts and the tendency to concentrate on those artists who have been anointed as important—almost exclusively White males at the time, or the handful of women championed by them—to look at a broad range of circumstances and personalities.
She acknowledges the privilege but goes deeper. As Olsen said, “There’s nothing wrong with privilege except that not everybody has it.” This is as true today as it was in the 1960s. Fellowships, grants, prizes are wonderful but not everyone has the resources—time and money—to pursue and take advantage of them. As a single parent working two and sometimes three jobs to support my family, my own writing career had to be mostly put on hold for years.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the creative life and what can inspire or hinder it. It’s also a wonderful portrait of that era and of these remarkable women.
Most people are familiar with this story of the rowing team from the University of Washington that won the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. A good example of narrative nonfiction, it is a well-researched, factual account that is eminently readable.
All the basic elements of good prose are here: the clarity of well-constructed sentences, good pacing through varying sentence structure, consistency achieved by presenting information in a logical sequence that the reader can easily follow. Beyond these, I want to point out a few methods that Brown employed to make it so absorbing a read.
One is that he centers the book on one character: Joe Rantz, a student from a working class background, left to fend for himself at a young age after his remaining parent abandoned him in the small town of Sequim, Washington. Recruited by rowing coach Alvin Ulbrickson, he attended the University of Washington; however, for him to aspire to a coveted spot on the rowing team meant competing against the privileged young men from expensive prep schools who embodied the elite image of rowing.
With a main character to root for as he confronts the physical challenges of competitive rowing and the psychological challenges of the U.S. class system, Brown begins to introduce other people of interest. One at a time—giving us a chance to get to know them before moving on—he gives us Ulbrickson, the head coach; Robert Mox, coxswain; Donald Hume, stroke; and freshman coach Tom Bolles.
Another way Brown makes the story so compelling is through making the Olympic race the climactic moment near the end of the book. Even though most readers know the outcome before starting the book, the suspense of waiting to see how it happens is immense. The suspense is fed by all the minor trials and setbacks, all the races against Washington’s main rival, California, and the Ivy League founders of the Rowing League, Columbia, Cornell, and Pennsylvania. Adding to the tension is the fact that the story takes place during the depths of the Great Depression.
These details are proof of the extensive research the author completed. The details that Brown chooses to include—the tip of the iceberg—serve the story by giving the reader a fuller picture of the time and the character’s motivations. In particular, the details about the construction of the shells are presented in context and in such a way as to fascinate any reader.
Three themes of the book adds to its hold the reader. One is the portrait of poverty at the time (though it’s certainly as bad as today in some areas). Joe’s struggle to get by as an abandoned teenager, as well as his and some of his teammates’ difficulty in coming up with the necessary funds, give the reader a better appreciation of the effects of the Depression.
A second theme is the difference between today and life in 1930s. Beyond economics, there is the relative isolation, with only radio and newspapers as media. The physical isolation comes through in the description of the trip to the East Coast to compete in the League championship. It is Joe’s first train trip and his first view of other parts of the country.
The final theme I want to point out is the context of the 1936 Olympics itself: Hitler’s Germany. The Berlin Olympics served Hitler’s goal of presenting Nazi Germany as a superior nation. Beyond hiding evidence of the Nazi’s abuses, the image of Berlin was meticulously orchestrated by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl as propaganda to prove to the world Aryan “purity” and Nazi supremacy. However familiar we may already be with this context, the details and the engaging way they are presented give us a deeper understanding of this early foray in marketing an image and a precursor of the horror to come. They also add further pressure to the U.S. team in the climactic race, as they strive to overcome the handicaps imposed by the Nazi organisers and beat their German rivals.
Narrative nonfiction occupies a particularly fertile middle ground between fiction and nonfiction. And it’s even more challenging for an author who must undertake the necessary research and abide by the limitations of accuracy imposed by nonfiction, while also employing the tools of a fiction writer. Brown ably demonstrates proficiency in all of these areas. This book deserves its accolades.
If you’ve read this popular book, what was your main takeaway?
The lead article in the 4 January 2024 issue of the London Review of Books (Vol. 46 No. 1) began to sound eerily familiar. In “Say Anything, Do Anything,” James Meek reviews Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television, by Peter Biskind.
The premise of Pandora’s Box is that a series of daring, innovative shows on US cable channels, starting in the 1990s, blew away the anodyne output of the traditional TV broadcast networks.
Released from the censorship that delivered shows that were “lowest common denominator programming, comforting, predictable and morally neat,” cable channels began producing shows such as The Sopranos, Oz, The Wire, Dexter, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. These shows were not only explicit in language and violence but featured “[a]nti-heroes like Tony Soprano, the man who garottes a fink while taking his teenage daughter on a tour of prospective colleges.”
While the movement from traditional TV shows to cable was supported by new bandwidth availability and an exponentially higher number of shows to choose from, Meek also identifies the use of algorithms to determine what viewing audiences want.
Netflix was a data-mining operation long before it got into streaming and [Reed] Hastings believed his algorithm could be used to predict the films and TV shows subscribers would like, whether they’d been made or not; if not, he’d make them.
And what did audiences want? Sports, of course, but also more nudity and lots and lots of violence. Thus, dramas like Game of Thrones became big hits.
I’m not a prude, but I am grateful that I can fast-forward through the endless nude scenes in certain dramas. Trained as a writer, I can’t help mentally wielding my red pen against gratuitous scenes that don’t move the story forward. As a woman, I can’t help suspecting these scenes are due in part to the misogynistic writers’ rooms described in Biskind’s book.
Look, I’m not here to rail against television. I have enjoyed and appreciated the craft of shows like Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and The Wire. In fact, the scene Meek calls out—”the almost loving meeting between the Baltimore drug dealers and childhood friends Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in The Wire, where each knows the other is setting him up to be killed”—is in my opinion the single best scene in any TV drama ever.
But I don’t idolise Stringer Bell or Al Swearengen in Deadwood or Walter White in Breaking Bad. They do evil things. I appreciate that they are presented as complex characters, instead of purely evil monsters. They have their own moral codes, a line they won’t cross. Meek mentions the save-the-cat device (per Blake Snyder) of making audiences like them by having them rescue a woman or child.
What gave me chills, though, were the parts of the book about the “significant fraction” of a show’s fans that cheered the violence, demanding more, and glorifying the characters because of their evil deeds. Meek mentions the “little old ladies” who fawned over Joe Pantoliano, Ralphie in The Sopranos. Pantoliano said, “‘They were flirting with me, turned on that I was the guy who beat up this hooker. It was sick.’”
Perhaps a little disingenuously, [David] Chase said later that ‘he was troubled by how much the “less yakking, more whacking” contingent of his fan base loved his mobbed-up characters, no matter how badly they behaved. The show is “about evil”, he said. “I was surprised by how hard it was to get people to see that.”’
Evil that becomes commonplace. Evil that becomes entertainment. Evil that becomes something to cheer on. Until some people don’t even see it as evil. They applaud when a would-be dictator, already a convicted criminal, threatens to use the power of the government against his political opponents. and respond “Kill them!”
Of course, I’ve long thought about the moral damage to viewers from the bullying and cruelty of reality shows that depend on elimination, whether by firing, being voted off the island, or whatever. This part of Meek’s review hit home for me because many of these shows I’ve watched and liked. I especially appreciated the nuanced way a good man like Walter White gradually, and for reasons that seem good to him, embraces evil.
I remember the flap over films like Bonnie and Clyde and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that glorified criminals. It seemed silly to think that watching them would make me or anyone else go out and rob a bank. I’m older now, and appreciate the more subtle ways that such things work upon our psyches. Also, that exposure a two-hours film is quite different from binge-watching five or six seasons of a TV show.
Still, I’m not advocating censorship. I’m just saying that the bloodthirsty viewers, the ones who adore their violent anti-heroes, remind me of the crowds these days baying for the blood of journalists, political opponents, immigrants—anyone they’re told to hate. I’ve been surprised by how hard it’s been to get them to see the evil in these demands. I guess I shouldn’t be. After all, they’ve been practicing this behavior night after nights in their own homes.
