Civil Rights

On the Rooftop, by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

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In the 1950s, San Francisco’s Fillmore District had a large Black population, contributing to its reputation as the largest jazz scene on the West coast. Vivian sees music as the ticket to give her three daughters a better life. Ever since hearing Ruth, her oldest, astound the church with her choir solo, Vivian has been training her to become a professional singer, adding Esther and Chloe, the youngest, as they began to show interest and talent.

By the beginning of this, Sexton’s third novel, the three are performing regularly at neighborhood clubs as the Salvations. Vivian drills them relentlessly on their routines up on the roof of their apartment building, inventing warmup exercises, song arrangements and dance steps.

Having endured racial violence in Louisiana, the death of her beloved husband, and the drudgery of her own nursing job, Vivian wants more for her daughters. Now, just as the dream seems within reach, with an offer for major representation, the three young women begin to second-guess the path they’ve been following.

The joys and conflicts between three sisters are familiar from fairy tales and folklore. Some of us (me) also have personal experience of these dynamics. Sexton shifts between Vivian’s point of view and that of each of the sisters, giving us their distinct personalities and desires, as well as their complicated relationships with their mother and each other.

Further difficulties arrive with White developers, maneuvering to drive out Black residents and business owners with underhanded tactics and cash offers. Clearing out Black people in the name of “urban renewal” happened in cities across the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century. Here, not only renters like Vivian are threatened, but also the owners of the clubs, the church that is so much a part of the family’s life, and the businesses where they work.

This is not an action-packed thriller, but rather a story of family and community, how love and tensions can co-exist within them, how one generation’s dreams may or may not be relevant to the next. Even big blow-ups are treated with realism rather than melodrama. This isn’t a typical rags-to-riches drama of an artist’s life, but something more real, more important.

I mostly identified with Vivian and her concern for her children. However, I can imagine younger readers being put off by the amount of control she exercised over her daughters, trying to direct their lives down the path of her choosing. Having grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can attest to how common it was back then for parents to expect to make such decisions for their children.

Also, as we just saw during the Olympics, to achieve at such high levels requires dedication and hard work from an early age. This family reminded me of Venus and Serena Williams and made me consider what sacrifices they had to make. It also made me wonder about the emotional negotiations that must have taken place between their dreams and their father’s.

I enjoyed this slow burn of a story, with its focus on relationships. Vivian, the three daughters, Vivian’s best friend Mary, even the Preacher are all vivid characters with their own dreams and desires, their own flaws. I found it a gift to be part of this family and their world for a little while.

Have you read a novel by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton? What did you think of it?

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane

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Mary Pat Fennessy just wants to find her daughter. It’s 1974, and life is hard in the grinding poverty of South Boston’s housing projects. She’s buried both her first husband and her son, who fought in Vietnam but came home to Southie to overdose on heroin. Her beloved second husband left her, and now her sole remaining child, her 17-year-old daughter Jules, has not come home from a night out with friends. That same night a young, Black man was found dead in a Southie subway station, apparently hit by a train.

Mary Pat knows whom to talk to, who’s connected to whom. Her search takes her into the inner circle of Southie’s Irish mob, run by Marty Butler. They’ve known each other for years—everyone knows everyone in this tight enclave—and he advises her to let it go lest she bring the attention of the authorities down on his activities. One of his lieutenants explains that Jules has probably gone to Florida, which reminded me that the film Midnight Cowboy had come out only five years earlier, though it isn’t mentioned in the book.

This mostly Irish-American neighborhood may be Mary Pat’s world, the only one she’s known, but the outside world makes itself felt. There’s Vietnam and the heroin epidemic. There’s Nixon’s resignation and the recession caused by the oil embargo among other things. Most of all, there’s Judge Garrity’s order to desegregate Boston’s schools by busing children to schools outside their neighborhoods.

Boston exploded. I was living nearby and well aware of the uproar, though several members of my book club only read about it later. Lehane takes us inside one of its hotbeds: Southie, where residents—mostly the women—rose up in protest. The casual racism and racist epithets may seem incredible to those who were not around then, but they were common enough, not just in South Boston but most other places as well—certainly in the city where I grew up—though more often in private conversations than yelled on the streets.

By laying bare the web of connections between the characters, going back to childhood, and the insistent demands to conform to the neighborhood’s customs, Lehane shows how difficult it is to go against your tribe. You risk losing everything, even the little that you have. Once one of the leaders of the protests, Mary Pat is now only concerned about her daughter. The more she discovers the circumstances of Jules’s disappearance, the more she finds herself in conflict with the mob and her former friends.

What most fascinated me were the tiny, incremental changes in the characters. Not epiphanies or redemptive realisations, but rather the slightest doubt, the whisper of a question. Is what I’ve been taught and believed all my life actually true? Did I miss an important piece of information somewhere along the way? Questions all of us might find it useful to ask ourselves now and then.

It’s easy to look back, and in our self-righteousness call the crowds protesting integration ignorant, but Lehane enables us to see their point of view. I also loved the way Lehane, who grew up in neighboring Dorchester, slips in the little social codes of that time and place, such as that a man didn’t curse in front of a woman he doesn’t know, no matter what foul language she dishes out to him.

Some people in my book club thought Mary Pat was unrealistic. One called her “almost Wonder Woman.” But I’ve known women like Mary Pat who, hardened by life’s blows, have learned to fight back and win. They’ve learned timidity doesn’t work; you have to raise your voice and demand what you need.

This is a cracking good read, as you’d expect if you’ve read other Lehane novels. Like me, you’ll find it hard to tear yourself away. When you do, still thinking about Mary Pat and Jules and the other characters, you’ll find their story gives you a context for today’s news, a more accurate picture of the past instead of the fairy tale some people would like you to believe.

What’s your favorite Dennis Lehane novel?

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

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It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?

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?

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

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Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed.

With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood, the move to Atlanta, and the terrible path to her mother’s murder when Trethewey was only 19. The girl’s response was to bury all memory of the years in Atlanta, the good and the bad. The woman’s self-appointed task is to unearth them and find again her lost mother.

And she does. With just a few deft strokes she summons her mother to life. I felt immediately that I knew this young woman, now divorced, leaving Mississippi for a new life with her young daughter. I felt the bond between mother and daughter, all the stronger for their separation from the close family and community back in Mississippi.

One way the author effects this revival is to include her mother’s own words, searched for and now recovered. Also, she gives us the context of the time: the early 1980s when the bitter segregation of her childhood is giving way finally to new opportunities for people of color and for women in particular, the excitement, the whiff of freedom in the air.

There’s no melodrama or sensationalism in this account. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language.

Trethewey weaves into her story the effects of being a child of a mixed marriage—her father White and her mother Black—and of growing up amid the racism of the South. She looks at how these experiences and the lasting trauma of her mother’s death have influenced her own growth as a writer.

In doing so, she has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past. My friend Susan Mills’s debut novel On the Wings of a Hummingbird also explores this theme: how do we an individuals, as a community recover from or at least deal with terrible suffering? So I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially now when it seems nearly impossible to wrest reconciliation from sorrow.

In Atlanta, Trethewey and her mother lived on Memorial Drive. You can’t make these things up. This book is more than a memorial to her mother, more than a memoir, more than a masterclass in writing. It is a searing look at the lasting effects of racism and domestic abuse. And it is an invitation to think about our own losses and how they have shaped us.

Have you read a memoir that made you reflect on your own life?

Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

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In this debut novel, described as semi-autobiographical, we meet John Grimes on the morning of his fourteenth birthday. It’s a Saturday, but he is consumed by thoughts of the family’s Sunday routines, dominated by attendance at the storefront church founded by his stepfather. We sense the tension in the family as he wonders if anyone will remember it is his birthday.

Although everyone has always expected John to become a preacher too, his stern stepfather Gabriel constantly demeans John and favors his own son, John’s younger brother. But Roy is wild, running the streets of Harlem with his gang and uninterested in the church. Over the course of the next 24 hours, John wrestles with the conflicting expectations laid upon him and with his newfound sexuality.

In doing so, he has to sort out for himself what is holy and what is good, and whether they are the same thing. Gabriel’s strict Pentecostal religion demands that members forgo worldly pleasures, forcing John to decide where he stands, as he considers the people he knows at church and his friends at school.

The second of three parts consists of extended flashbacks where we learn about the early lives of John’s aunt (Gabriel’s sister), Gabriel himself, and John’s mother Elizabeth. This unconventional structure not only gives us needed background, but also heightens the suspense as we wait to find out what the long night will bring for John.

My book club agreed that this book was hard to read. The overwhelming context of harsh Pentecostal Christian teachings, preached by Gabriel at church and at home, and Biblical references made for heavy reading. Outside of the religious doctrine, though, Baldwin’s language is stunning.

He was ill with doubt and searching. He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God. Or else he wished to stand up now, and leave this tabernacle and never see these people any more. Fury and anguish filled him, unbearable, unanswerable; his mind was stretched to breaking. For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God. And his mind could not contain the terrible stretch of time that united twelve men fishing by the shores of Galilee, and black men weeping on their knees tonight, and he, a witness.

My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint far wind, which bid it: “Arise.“ And this weight began to move at the bottom of John’s mind, in a silence like the silence of the void before creation, and he began to feel a terror he had never felt before.

Even more than the preaching, it is the anguish that makes the book so hard to read. A controlling parent, emotional and physical abuse, being the one child out of several who is hated by a parent: these are experiences we know about, though the knowing doesn’t make them any less heart-breaking.

One person noted the outsized anger that consumes many of the characters. That reminded me of our last book, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, where she talked about how those who were part of the Great Migration found themselves crammed into overflowing segregated areas. Also, there was the disappointment of thinking they would escape racism by going north, only to find a different kind of racism. No wonder there is anger.

Like others in my book club, I found much of the preaching tedious. However, I was interested in Baldwin’s use of music in his prose. Here it is the music of hymns and the King James Bible, the one that I grew up on. In his later work he uses jazz rhythms but, as one person pointed out, we can see the influence of jazz even here in his riffs and solos.

We also appreciated his experimental structure, perhaps influenced by the modernism and post-modernism of the time. One person noted the similarity to the structure of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

Most of all we were struck by the honesty of the book, its brutal honesty, as one person put it. Baldwin doesn’t sugarcoat anything or anyone, even his own avatar.

Have you read this classic? What did you think of it?

The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron

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Confessions of Nat Turner

As the title suggests, this 1967 novel about the slave revolt of 1831 is told in the first person by Nat Turner, leader of the revolt. It starts with Nat in jail, chained hand, foot and neck. In meetings with his White lawyer, Nat dictates his confession, and we learn something of what sent him on this mission to kill as many White people as possible. But we need his whole life to get past the surface and truly feel what motivated him.

Nat’s life, brilliantly written, is a litany of injustice and often cruelty. Some of his owners treated him well, some viciously. He has joys and pleasures too: his friendships with some of the other slaves, his study of the Bible, his deep satisfaction in his carpentry work.

While reading, I was fully immersed in Nat’s consciousness, yet at the same time swept by my own horror and grief and shame. None of it was a surprise—I’ve seen, heard, read too much for that—but the effects of continual trauma brought to life like this affected me deeply.

Having grown up in the Tidewater area of Virginia during the Jim Crow years, Styron had been interested in the story of Nat Turner since childhood and “haunted by the idea of slavery.” His good friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write this story and to do it by taking on the persona of the protagonist.

Nat Turner has usually been presented as a fanatical madman, and apparently he truly did fast obsessively, see visions, and believe that he had been divinely appointed to this mission. Styron’s great achievement is to give us a credible and relatable individual within the confines of those facts. Two other recorded facts gave him some clues: Of the fifty-five White people killed in the revolt, Nat Turner himself only killed one, near the end, and the revolt “ran out of speed” after that.

Those facts indicate a moral consciousness at war with Nat’s mission. Throughout the book wee are in his head, thinking his thoughts, and he is always presented as rational and intelligent. By letting the reader merge into his life, taking each step with him, the author makes Nat’s actions seem reasonable, almost inevitable. Also, Nat’s thoughts are sprinkled with verses from the Bible which is his only reading material, verses which reinforce his decisions.

A third way this feat of characterisation is accomplished is by finding common ground between our experiences and his. Often Nat’s thoughts reflect insights that seem familiar to me, such as this one:

Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?

It took Styron five years to research and write the book. With little hard information to go on—the actual 7,000-word document produced by that lawyer being the only meaningful record of Nat’s life and thoughts—the author had to imagine himself into the mind and soul of a slave in antebellum Virginia. His intentions were good: he wanted to “fashion . . . an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution has persisted into this century and become the nation’s central obsession.” The book quickly became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month pick.

Yet only a few years later it was denounced as racist by a group of Black writers. I’ve not read their book yet and am not qualified to say one way or the other. What I do know is that it is no surprise that a book about the experience of slavery by a prominent White author would be considered proof of the privilege awarded to White voices by the publishing world.

Having already read many books about slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s injustices by Black authors, having grown up myself in a racially segregated time and place, I’m grateful to have this story too. It deepens my understanding of the early 1960s, when it seemed to me that things would never change. In some ways, sadly, they haven’t.

One thing I didn’t know before reading this book and the author’s Afterword is that in 1831 Virginia was poised to abolish slavery in the state, but Nat Turner’s revolt put an end to that. As Styron says, “the impact on the future (especially in terms of the possible avoidance of events leading to the Civil War) is awesome to contemplate.”

At this moment in time, when our democracy seems at a tipping point into destruction, largely because of deeply engrained racism, it’s daunting to consider how much can turn on a single event.

What novel have you read that gave you new insight into an historical event?

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

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In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. In 1945 George Starling left Florida for New York City. In 1953 Robert Pershing Foster left Louisiana for Los Angeles.

They were part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of this remarkable movement.

The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages. There are historical sections complete with supporting statistics, but these are kept to a minimum and related to the stories we’re following. The author brings all the tools of fiction to keep us interested in this meticulously researched history.

World War I is usually considered to precipitating cause of the Great Migration. Black soldiers serving in the military and in Europe discovered that it was possible to escape Jim Crow. At the same time, factories and businesses in the north and west were desperate for workers since the flow of immigrants had basically halted and the military claimed many of the remaining men.

The scope of the Great Migration was not recognised for a long time. The effects were felt locally, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, but it wasn’t until southern businesses found they could no longer hire enough Black workers—whose wages had been kept artificially low by Jim Crow laws and local corruption—that the outcry began.

The last part of the book, almost one hundred pages, includes Wilkerson’s notes on her methodology, acknowledgments, endnotes and index, attesting to the solid underpinning of research. She says:

This book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists . . . The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analysis of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

It is that historical context that is the takeaway I most value from this book. Much of the information here was not new to me. Yet what stands out is how I now have a framework for all the pieces that I was already familiar with. I felt them slotting into place as I read.

One area I wish Wilkerson had covered in more depth, though obviously there wasn’t room for it, is the Black communities that flourished during segregation and then dissipated, partly through “urban renewal” demolitions and partly through integration. Wilkerson mentions it briefly in a few places, such as speaking of Harlem’s rise and fall. Robert Foster’s story, too, shows it in microcosm: as he aged, he left his prosperous private practice, where he was popular among his mostly Black patients, to join the staff of a Veterans’ Hospital. He missed being in charge and disliked having to answer to higher-ups who he believed discriminated against him, eventually forcing him out.

I will remember Robert’s story as well as those of Ida Mae and George for a long time. They brought to life the indignities of the Jim Crow South they fled and the different kinds of injustice and prejudice they found in their sanctuary cities, far worse than the discrimination that immigrants from other countries faced. Through these individuals, I have a better understanding of the people around me.

What nonfiction have you been reading?

Best Books I Read in 2021

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2021. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

2. This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
At 17, Noel Crowe goes to live with his grandparents in the small rural village of Faha in County Clare, Ireland. Sixty years later he remembers the events of that remarkable season which started on Easter Sunday when the rain stopped. I have not enjoyed a novel this much in a long time. It took me a little while to adjust to the pace, somewhat slower than we might be used to, but appropriate for this tale of a time measured in a horse’s clopping hooves or a bicycle ride. There is conflict and suspense, too, as in any story, and mysteries to be explored.

3. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team. While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed— one I am familiar with.

4. The Fire This Time, by Jesmyn Ward
I read this collection of essays and poems three times over before I allowed the library to repossess it. Subtitled A New Generation Speaks about Race, it provides a nuanced portrait of racism and race in the U.S. today. The book’s title is a play on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which in turn takes its title from an old spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water, the fire next time.”

5. Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper, by Tim Mayo
Mayo’s most recent collection of poems helps me find a way through this difficult time. From his work as a teacher and mental health worker, he brings us encounters with the delusional and with our own pasts. Because it is sometimes hard to tell if the poem is written in the persona of a patient or a staff person, Mayo narrows the distance between the two, finding our common humanity.

6. The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny
Penny latest novel of Inspector Armand Gamache and the village of Three Pines in Quebec is simply extraordinary. More than any other book I’ve read, it captures this unprecedented time, while still being an engrossing mystery.

7. North River, by Pete Hamill
James Delaney is a 47-year-old doctor practicing in Depression-era New York, living alone in a house gifted him by a grateful patient. All he has left is his work and, after the carnage of the Great War where he served as a medic, he is determined to save what lives he can and comfort the dying as best he can. Then one morning he returns from the hospital to find a baby in the entryway. I loved this novel. For once, I could simply relax into the life of single person, one who is complicated and flawed but whose basic moral code is evident.

8. The Possible Pleasures, by Lynn Valente
In these poems Valente’s language is simple, yet her images are startling and fresh. In addition, exquisite care has been taken with the ordering of the poems. It’s no surprise that the prestigious Finishing Line Press chose to publish this chapbook. It embeds simple truths in experiences we can recognise and phrases that catch us by surprise.

9. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend who, in the first part of this new novel from Ishiguro, is chosen and taken home by 14-year-old Josie as a companion. The use of AFs harks back to the use of governesses, servants, and slaves to do the emotional work some parents, such as Josie’s mother, are too busy for. This theme of service and its evil twin power—the effects on both the servant and served—is one Ishiguro has explored before, notably in The Remains of the Day.

10. We Are as Gods, by Kate Daloz
The story of Vermont’s Myrtle Hill commune provides the narrative backbone of this nonfiction book. Daloz follows the group from its idealistic beginnings through the gradual disenchantment, conveying their stories realistically yet with sympathy. The book combines the focus on Myrtle Hill and its neighbors with a wide-ranging summary of the counter-culture of the period, the growth and brief life of the commune movement, and the gradual recognition among the commune members that no one is actually self-sufficient. We all, including their original Vermont neighbors, rely on our community.

What were the best books you read last year?

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

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Robinson’s fourth Gilead novel is all about Jack, the impossible yet much-loved son of John Ames’s great friend the Rev. Robert Boughton. In the three previous books, Jack has been glimpsed as the prodigal child, polite and charming but a failure in the world’s eyes.

Despite Boughton’s patience and preaching, Jack cannot seem to fit in. He’s not rebellious per se, but cannot resist pilfering small items, especially those with sentimental meaning to their owners. He lies, drinks, skips church, and plays pranks on family and neighbors in the small Iowa town. As Jack himself says in this novel, when he sees something fragile he cannot resist the relief of breaking it, calling himself “A destructive man in a world where everything can be ruined or broken.”

Jack has no illusions about himself. “He had always been drawn to vulnerability, to doing damage where it was possible, because it was possible . . . He was nothing, a mere unshielded nerve, a pang mollified by a drink or two, or shine on his shoes.”

This novel precedes the other three in time, so we meet Jack as a bum in St Louis. Released from jail where he landed for a crime he didn’t commit, he picks up money for drink and cigarettes, and sometimes rent, from stealing or menial jobs that never last. He is haunted by debt collectors ready to use force to get what they want. The only reason Jack doesn’t commit suicide is that he doesn’t want to hurt his father, vowing “to stay alive as long as decency required,” i.e., until Boughton himself dies.

When a sudden shower sends a young black woman’s papers flying, Jack’s ingrained courtesy makes him give her an umbrella that he’s stolen from a nearby park bench and chase down her papers. From his manner and his black suit, Della thinks he is a minister and they begin the conversation that makes up most of the book.

The potential for Jack to do harm to this person he loves and who so unexpectedly loves him is magnified by the 1950s-era law against miscegenation. She could lose her teaching job and both of them could be imprisoned. He acknowledges “the impossibility of going on together when the whole world has made and kept this infernal compact, making transgression and crime of something innocent, if anything could be called innocent, a marriage of true minds. Yes. Exacting from them a precious thing it had no right to and no use for.”

I have known a few Jacks in my life. They are not evil, just different, somehow estranged from ordinary life. They understand society’s rules but remain unmoved by them. So I was grateful for this deep dive into such a person’s mind.

It goes without saying that the book is beautifully written, though with few instances of the transcendence of everyday life that made the other books stand out for me. Only my affection for those volumes and personal interest in understanding Jack kept me going through the long first third of the book.

Jack and Della meet by accident in a graveyard. It is night and they are both locked in, Jack because he meant to sleep rough and Della because she forgot the time. It is a white graveyard where she is not allowed to be, so she is afraid to ask the watchman to let her out. Thus a great chunk of the book is their dialogue about religion, poetry, and philosophy. That part was a slog to read.

The rest of the book is great, though somewhat repetitive, as it would have to be given Jack’s floundering. While Jack is always down on himself, he manages to avoid self-pity, and Robinson finds moments of grace even for this sinner. Certainly grace in the religious sense plays a large role here, as does the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Adding to the sense that their fates are unavoidable is our knowledge from the other books of how things are going to turn out for the two of them.

I never got a good sense of Della, though of course we mostly see her through Jack’s besotted eyes. Only around her family do we get to see her in action. There’s an interesting story in Della I’d love to read, about an educated black woman raised by a family that believes in separation of the races, navigating the blatantly racist world of the 1950s.

Boughton intrigued me as well, always ready to forgive his beloved son, twisting his theology to find reasons to excuse him. Jack, himself, is not surprised when each attempt to improve himself is foiled, often for reasons outside his control.

I’m not sure I came to a new understanding of the Jacks in my life, but I’m grateful for the chance to see the world through his eyes.

Have you read this or other books in the Gilead quartet?