fiction

The Woman Upstairs, by Claire Messud

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Anger.

On page one Messud gives us an angry woman. Is that allowed? Women are supposed to tamp down their rage so as not to upset others. And writers are told to work up to an intensity of emotion because if you start with high passion, where can you go from there?

Messud shows us in this brilliant novel. Nora Eldridge is the woman of the title: the quiet single woman who never keeps you awake with loud parties, whose help can be called on when needed, a woman for whom “Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all.” A second-grade teacher who regularly calls and visits her elderly father and irregularly sees her married lesbian friend, Nora’s early dreams of becoming a famous artist have withered to her seldom-used “studio” aka the second bedroom.

I was captivated immediately by Nora’s voice. Unlike Barbara Pym’s excellent women, Nora is open about her passions. She says her anger is “not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman—or rather, of being me—because maybe these are the burdens of being human.” What she’s angry about is the “hall of mirrors,” a society that is “lost in appearances” where every door that seems to lead to a more authentic life (though she wouldn’t say it that way) just leads to more mirrors.

It’s not just thwarted ambition; it’s the sense that she’s done everything right and ended up empty-handed. Influenced by her now-dead mother’s admonitions to be independent and not rely on an allowance from a husband, she postponed marriage and children to the point where it now seems too late. The idea that turning forty seems like the end to her may seem absurd, given our long and often late-blooming lives, but I know many women feel that way.

Meeting a professional artist, a successful woman on the verge of breaking out to international fame, sends Nora into unknown territory. Italian Serena Shahid has come to Cambridge, Massachusetts in this beginning of the 21st century with her husband, Lebanese Skandar, for his year-long fellowship at Harvard. When their son Reza appears in Nora’s classroom, Nora falls in love with him, and ultimately with both of his parents.

As they become friends, Serena asks Nora to share a studio with her, not only prompting Nora to take up her own art again, but also giving her the chance to be around a “real” artist at work.

I’ve heard often from writers and artists about their feelings of imposter syndrome and certainly felt it myself at the beginning of my career. If you’re not careful, the goal post of deciding you are a real writer or artist can keep moving: completing the novel, publication, achieving a certain sales number, bestseller, matching some perceived rival’s status. The only way off the hamster wheel is to accept in your heart of hearts that, as Julia Cameron says, since you create, you are an artist, whatever your medium.

Messud raises valid questions about what it means to be an artist. Does it mean, if you don’t want to simply work in obscurity, sucking up to the pretentious gatekeepers, those who schedule shows and write reviews and hang out with the “right” people? What must you sacrifice? What do you have to tell yourself?

I’m rarely angry, but I could relate to Nora. Plus the questions raised are ones I have long been interested in. As a memoirist and teacher of memoir-writing, ethical questions around creating abound. Even more, though, ever since the women’s movement of the 1970s I’ve been fascinated by the choices women make within the changing and unchanging constrictions of our society.

The writing is amazing. Nora’s voice just would not let me go as her relationship to her art, to the members of the Shahib family, to herself, all twist and turn, tangle and untangle. I’ve rarely encountered such an inhabited voice, one that leaves me feeling as though I truly know this woman. The passion in her voice is sculpted with a poet’s concision for maximum effect.

I always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes — rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast.

Each phrase is so perfect: “deployed for domestic purposes!”

I especially relished the descriptions of the art: Serena’s Wonderland installation, Nora’s tiny boxes, each a room in a famous woman artist’s life. The ending felt a bit rushed, but satisfying. It left me speculating about what Nora would do next.

What novel have you read that cast a new light on your own experience?

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams

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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.

It rains all the time in Faha. Sometimes it is a hard rain, sometimes a mist, and anything in between. The rain loves the earth in Faha. Noel helps his grandmother, Doady, race out and hang clothes on the line for a ten-minute dry span. So when the sun comes out and stays out, it might be a miracle.

The other remarkable event on Easter Sunday is the arrival of Christy, a middle-aged man who works for “the electrics” and will be staying in Doady and Ganga’s cottage, sharing the loft with Noel. For electricity is finally coming to Faha, bringing not only light to the unsuspecting villagers, but the previously unknown modern world. And Christy has a secret agenda.

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. Conflict doesn’t have to be a battle or a car chase; it can grow out of miscommunication and missed connections.

Through Noe, as he’s known, we enter into the life of the village: the doctor with his three beautiful daughters, the young priest whose well-known goodness leads him keeping the church door unlocked so thieves don’t have to break in. There’s a forge rather than a hardware store and of course the farms.

In the fields, cattle, memories dissolved by so many liquid mornings, noons and nights, had forgotten they dreamed of April grass and, by a clemency reserved for those who live placid in a perpetual now, standing in a green sweetness forgot the cold muck-grazing of February.

There’s a lot of gentle humor here. Williams describes the eccentric villagers with compassion and often a deft turn of phrase. In such a small village people must get along, no matter how oddly their neighbors behave. Noe and Christy take to riding Doady and Ganga’s bikes around to pubs—where of course it’s only polite to have a bottle of stout or three—in search of the legendary Irish musician Junior Crehan.

But it’s the language that lays a spell on me. Writers are often advised to avoid too much dialect because it can be challenging for the reader. I once actually had to give up on a novel written in broad Glaswegian dialect after only a few pages. Instead we are advised to find a way to suggest the lilt of an accent through the music of our sentences: the choice of words and the way we arrange them.

Williams is a master at this, and rewards careful study. Every now and then he’ll throw in an Irish phrase, but mostly it is simply the music. The villagers’ memory is embedded in story, stories told over and over, that become the fabric of their share life.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor the knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

And the other part of the binding is the old songs, traditional Irish music:

Gilbert Clancy… said the pipes recalled what couldn’t be remembered, the old bard times, and in their melancholy and joy was this world and another.

I loved being a part of this community for the space of this novel and will be looking for more of Williams’s books.

Sometimes we like novels or appreciate or even admire them. What novel have you read recently that you simply enjoyed?

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

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As a high school student in Tallahassee, Florida in the 1960s, Ellwood Curtis studies hard and is chosen to attend classes at the university. When he isn’t studying, he listens to a record of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches which fires his idealistic determination to stand up to injustice.

However, it only takes one innocent misstep to suck him into the criminal justice system. As one member of my book club who is a lawyer remarked, we don’t see the trial. Another pointed out that for a black teenager it was a foregone conclusion that he would be incarcerated.

Ellwood is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school for boys that Whitehead based on Florida’s actual Dozier School, which was not closed until 2011 amid longstanding accusations of beatings, sexual abuse, and even murder. For Ellwood, a young man from a protected environment, cared for and encouraged by his grandmother, the gritty truth of Nickel is a shock.

A member of my book club noted how quickly things can go wrong—something I well recall from my time on welfare—saying, “One thing unravels, and if you don’t have anyone to help it’s like a pebble rolling down a hill creating an avalanche.” Ellwood’s grandmother tries to help, hiring a lawyer, but he takes the money and disappears.

Luckily, Ellwood is befriended by Turner, another inmate who understands the system at Nickel and how to work it. A member of my book club pointed out that Turner is a fascinating character because he is so adaptable, finding ways not just to survive but to thrive even in this horrific environment. The two boys—so different—admire and support each other. Turner’s cynical realism makes him try to persuade Ellwood to keep quiet rather than speak truth to power. Yet Ellwood clings to his earlier role model: Dr. King.

The boys’ time at Nickel is framed by a story set in the 1960s where Ellwood is a successful business owner living in New York City. News stories of graves found at the now-closed Nickel Academy lead him to remember his time there.

Most of us in my book club had some quibbles about the ending, but all attested to the power of the writing.

As a writer, I paid particular attention to Whitehead’s treatment of the abuse. He himself has talked of how difficult it was for him to write about such subjects, saying in a USA Today interview, “I think if I was angry or sad every day I couldn’t create art. So the subject of slavery and the subject of the abuse in the reform school had to be held at a distance on a day to day basis.”

In order to start reading what was obviously going to be a serious book, many of us in my book club had to summon our resolve. We knew that we would be confronted by painful and terrible truths, yet knew too that it was important our eyes be opened and that we bear witness.

Though we thought that we would not be able to read some of the scenes, in fact the author pulled back and left the details to our imagination, giving us instead scenes of the aftermath, the wounds, the scars—physical and emotional: an effective technique. This is a good book to study to see how we as writers can handle shocking or gruesome scenes so that they don’t turn off readers while still moving them.

I found myself thinking of a recent talk by Heather Cox Richardson about the news of graves being found at indigenous schools in Canada. She reminded us that the people who originally created the schools were do-gooders who thought they were helping the children. They meant well. Today we see them as misguided, but at the time most white people believed that indigenous people were “savages” who needed to be “civilised” if they were to succeed in what had become a white man’s world.

How did things go so wrong? How did benevolent intentions become institutions even worse than Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood School? I’m afraid I’ve become as cynical as Turner. Too many people are willing to exchange whatever moral code they have for the rewards of corruption and power.

As Turner himself thinks, in response to Ellwood’s invocation of King’s nonviolence, “The law was one thing. You can march and wave signs around and change a law if you convinced enough white people . . . You can change the law, but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

How people treat each other. Starve them in order to steal food and medicine and sell it elsewhere. Sexual abuse. Power plays. It can be hard to believe that human beings can be so selfish, so unfeeling, so greedy, especially when it comes to children. But there it is.

Whether this cruelty is simply human nature or learned behaviour is not a question I can answer. The only way I can think of to combat it is to expose it and bear witness to the suffering of the victims.

Have you read this important and timely novel? What did you think of it?

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

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As this popular novel opens, a 30-year-old woman returns to her hometown. Residents are shocked to see her, and word quickly travels around that one of the Vignes twins has been spotted. There are two reasons for this outsized reaction, one being that Desiree and her sister Stella have not been seen since they disappeared when they were 16 while everyone else was at the Founder’s Day Dance, dismayed that their mother pulled them out of school to start working as domestic servants. But the greater reason for the town’s shock is the dark-skinned daughter Desiree brings with her, described by the owner of the diner as “blue-black . . . like she flown direct from Africa.”

Mallard, Louisiana is an all-black town, like Eatonville in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Fictional—though based on a real town the author’s mother heard of—Mallard has a peculiar philosophy, created by the town’s founder: the best way to combat racism is to lighten their skin by always having children with lighter- and lighter-skinned people.

By the time of this story, most people in town can pass for white, which is exactly what Stella began doing when she applied for a job in New Orleans. She married a white man and neither he nor their daughter knows Stella grew up identifying as black.

Rebellious Desiree married the darkest-skinned man she could find, hence her daughter Jude’s dark skin. Now, in 1968, only a few weeks after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, she’s come home with a scarf hiding the bruises on her neck, hoping her husband won’t be able to find her. Unknown to her, he has hired a bounty hunter to find her.

There’s plenty to like about this story. The situation carries dramatic potential: Desiree adjusting to being back in the small town; Jude suffering the prejudice against her due to her skin color; Desiree and her mother trying to find a new connection; Stella wrestling with her reaction when a black family moves into their all-white neighborhood; and the threat of the bounty hunter on top of all that.

I was particularly interested in Stella’s story, having recently read Nella Larsen’s Passing. I’m fascinated by the strain of pretending to be someone you’re not. Of course, it’s not hard, and even fun, to do it for a little while, but to keep it up for years would not only make you feel as though you are always in danger, but would also cut you off from your past. Those memories and the narrative through-line that we create from our life experiences are foundations of our identity, so walling off part of them must have consequences.

There’s another aspect of this story that is fascinating: the hold that the culture we grow up in continues to assert on our actions and reactions, our emotions and desires. We may think we’ve left those childhood beliefs behind, no matter how hard our parents drilled them into us, but they crop up when we least expect it.

As a writer, one thing I’m taking away from this book is the subtle way we can use the works of our literary forebears. In addition to Hurston and Larsen, there are also references to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. If the reader recognizes these works, the references add depth to the story and provide a sense of familiarity. At the same time, the story stands alone; a reader who doesn’t know these works won’t notice the difference.

What underpins the entire story is the one-drop rule, that one drop of black blood makes you black. Of course, that terrible rule was commonly accepted in 1968, so it’s appropriate for the story. However, we still see its effects today in who identifies as white and who as black. There are other aspects of racial prejudice, such as descriptions of people as an Oreo or a snowball, and colorism itself. And of course, the concept of race itself is a social construct. Still, Mallard’s obsession with lightening their skin through successive generations makes me wonder when, if ever, they would consider themselves white. What vanishes? What remains?

Have you read this best-selling novel? What did you think of it?

The Trespasser, by Tana French

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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Tana French’s mystery series. The early ones are police procedurals, with members of Dublin’s Murder Squad as protagonists. Since it’s the same squad, a minor character from one book sometimes reappears or even stars in a later book.

That is the case here. The protagonist and secondary character from the previous book swap places. In The Secret Place, Detective Stephen Moran has been looking for an opportunity to get on the elite Murder Squad when it arrives as a new clue in the unsolved murder of a popular boy on the grounds of a girl’s boarding school.

Stephen’s previous contact with one of the girls, Holly Mackey, daughter of detective Frank Mackey (protagonist of Faithful Place and a character in The Likeness), led her to bring him the clue. His ability to communicate with the girls persuades the lead detective Antoinette Conway to keep him on the case—provisionally. We follow Stephen’s twists and turns as he tries to figure out the best approach for each witness, determined to impress the bad-tempered Conway. She believes that the entire squad is out to get her for being a woman and that she’ds been given this one for her first case on purpose to see her fail.

In The Trespasser, Conway is our point-of-view character. Stephen Moran is still working with her, now as her partner and member of the squad. They are assigned minor cases, mostly domestics, when finally they are tapped to investigate what is apparently a domestic gone wrong: a woman found murdered in her own home amid the wreckage of what was obviously meant to be a romantic dinner for two.

They are also given Jimmy Breslin, star of the squad, to work with them which makes Conway bristle. She’s unsure whether this is more harassment or a lack of confidence in her, both equally maddening. Breslin pushes them to arrest the boyfriend, despite the lack of evidence, but Conway and Moran see more paths to investigate.

The interplay between the partners is what makes this book spectacular. Throughout, but especially in the interview room, Conway and Moran bounce off each other, inspire each other, support each other, tiptoe around each other’s wounds—all the things good partners should do. Until they don’t.

Nobody does friendships like Tana French. While most stories rely on love stories for emotional content, French gives us friendships, intense as any romance, whether the working friendship of partners, the intense intimacy of teenage girls, or—as in The Likeness—the friends who can become another family.

I’m not really sure how she does it, beyond the individuality and authenticity of their voices. It’s partly what they are willing to do for each other. It’s partly what they understand intuitively about each other. In this book, Moran and Conway have worked together long enough that when they are interviewing a suspect they can anticipate what the other is about to say. Acting as one, they can volley questions and statements to guide the suspect where they want them to go.

With the girls at the school, French brings out the passionate loyalty and secrecy of their friendships. Through interviews we learn what others say about them. We see and hear how little they themselves give the detectives. We learn more about them in the contrast and conflict between different cliques. And when the girls are alone, we sense through their thoughts and actions the volatility of their emotions and the potential for devastation.

This book in particular also examines the stories people tell themselves, stories about themselves and about others, and the influence of these stories on their actions and reactions. I’m fascinated by this theme and looking for other books that might examine it.

As you can tell, there’s a lot more going on here than simply a puzzle to be solved, though that’s here too, and it’s a knotty one. This layered and intricate story is captivating on so many levels.

Have you read any of Tana French’s novels? Which one is your favorite?

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

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In a back alley in 1791 London, a wooden door opens to what appears to be a storeroom. However, those in the know are aware that behind a hidden door lies Nella Clavinger’s apothecary shop. Like her mother before her, she caters only to women and dispenses powders and salves to ease their pains. However, unlike her mother—and this is why her shop is secret—she also sells poisons to women who need to get rid of a man who is mistreating them.

Nella’s work with poisons has prematurely aged her, and she suffers pain and weakness. One day she is surprised when it is not a woman who arrives at the appointed time to collect a poison, but a 12-year-old girl, Eliza Fanning, a maid picking it up for her mistress. Eliza is fascinated by Nella and begs to be taught her skills. Nella refuses, but Eliza’s presence still has catastrophic consequences.

There’s more: This book has a dual timeline.

In present-day London Caroline Parcewell is visiting from Ohio. Although this long-planned trip was to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, she has left her husband at home, after discovering that he has been having an affair.

As she wanders disconsolately around the city, she stumbles on a mudlarking tour, mudlarks being the name for people in earlier centuries who dug in the edges of the Thames looking for anything they can sell. She finds a mysterious vial and eventually suspects she’s on the trail of eighteenth-century London’s “apothecary murderer.”

The two stories intertwine, both speaking of women trying to control their own destinies. Nella keeps a register, the one started by her mother, noting the name of each customer, the date, and what they purchased. She knows that women like her—not wealthy, not royalty—are not recorded or remembered. So her register is one small way to recognise women who would otherwise be forgotten.

Even as Nella tries to find a way out of the troubles that come upon her, Caroline looks back over her marriage, assessing where she has abandoned her own dreams and debating whether she can continue with the marriage.

There’s a lot of suspense, with as many twists and turns as a back alley in eighteenth-century London. As always, after my first immersive read, I examined some technical aspects of the book. In this case, I was interested in how the two timelines bounced off each other, sometimes reflecting, sometimes diverging. I was also interested in the way information was gradually revealed, heightening the suspense. I have a few minor quibbles, but overall the book was a good read and a fine way to while away a rainy afternoon.

Can you recommend a book with a dual timeline?

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner

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This final novel in Lerner’s autofictional trilogy has been much written about and much praised. Minimally framed by his present-day adult self, the bulk of the book is Adam Gordon’s account of his teen years in Topeka, Kansas, during the 1990s. The events and circumstances mirror Lerner’s own.

A debating champion, Adam uses words aggressively and defensively both onstage and off. He’s a master of “the spread,” where debaters spout multiple arguments as fast as they can spit them out, making it difficult for their opponents to respond or, I would imagine, for the audience to follow. If this sounds a lot like mansplaining and talking over people, if it reminds you of everything hateful in our current public discourse—whether on social media, political circles, or family get-togethers—welcome to the club.

I disliked this book from the opening scene where teenaged Adam, unmoved by the romantic potential of being on a moonlit boat with his girlfriend, is so busy sharing all the marvelous wonders of his mind that he doesn’t even notice his girlfriend is no longer beside him. Some members of my book club found this sequence hilarious while I was only reminded of too many teenaged hours pretending to listen to boys orate.

Since it was our book club’s selection, I kept reading and found much that was interesting, especially about the uses and misuses of language, about language as power.

Chapters about Adam’s teen years are interrupted by a two chapters each from his parents’ point of view. Adam’s parents are members of “the Foundation,” a progressive clinic and training center for psychiatry (Lerner’ mother is connected to the Menninger Foundation). Jane, like Lerner’s mother, has written a popular feminist book, which incites anonymous calls from angry men and envy among her colleagues. Jonathan’s research involves “speech shadowing” where words repeated at increasing speeds turn into nonsense.

Adam’s chapters are also interspersed with chapters from the point of view of Darren, a townie adopted by Adam’s group of friends who mistreat and befriend him at the same time. Not gifted with the verbal fluency of the Foundation kids, Darren’s only power is physical. The threat of violence winds through these chapters, providing a bit of tension, a story question we read to answer. The other tension comes from Adam’s preparation for a debating tournament.

Our book club discussion was enlivened by one member’s actually having grown up in Topeka where her parents were associated with the Menninger Foundation. Others had a more positive reaction to the book than I did, though I recognised the critique of modern culture and the idea that much of what is so hateful today is rooted in the toxic masculinity the teens in this novel are steeped in.

Some members spoke of the blurred boundaries in the book, such as Jane having her friend become her analyst as well. Others mentioned that the characters all sound the same, except for Darren, though of course that could be because they have all been brought up in Foundation-speak. Some people thought the author was trying to put in too much, perhaps because autofiction—using real events with some fictional tampering—tempts you to include everything.

I am not a fan of autofiction. Though I appreciate the fun for the writer of playing with the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, and recognise that novelists have always drawn on their own experiences, I miss the alchemy whereby fiction transforms the dross of everyday life. Also, I’m not happy with the way lies have replaced facts in our political discourse, so blurring the line seems to me to go in a less than productive direction.

Lerner’s prose is occasionally quite beautiful. One of the benefits of novelists also being poets is increased attention to the music of language. However, I did find myself skimming sections, especially the many about debating, being bored and a little disgusted.

Writers are sometimes admonished to make their main characters more likeable, leading to debates among writers as to the necessity of having the main character be likeable (and a side discussion of whether this only happens to women writers). As a reader I don’t have to like the main character, but I have to find some common ground with them or I cannot engage with the story.

I didn’t here. My dislike of Adam only increased as I continued reading. At the same time, I appreciate the use of his specific story to shed light on much of what is wrong with our society today, at least here in the U.S.

And I’m clearly in a very small minority, as this book is both widely popular and critically acclaimed: another reminder that not every book is for every reader. It may be that I would have enjoyed it more if I were reading it 20 years from now instead of still suffering the fallout from this kind of behaviour. Still, I’m glad it being my book club’s selection pushed me to read it. I don’t have to like a book to admire it, and as a writer to learn from it.

What book of autofiction have you read? What did you think of it?

The Question Is Murder, by Mark Willen

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As Mr. Ethics, Sam Turner writes a column for a Washington, D.C. newspaper answering readers’ questions about right and wrong. He also teaches classes on ethics in journalism at a local college, so a reader’s moral dilemma would have to be pretty convoluted to challenge him.

Then he gets a letter asking if murder is ever justified.

The writer is a young woman who is being stalked and threatened by an ex-lover, one who is immune to her appeals and too powerful to be stopped through legal means. Killing him seems to be her only option.

Knowing he should not get personally involved, Sam is worried about her, both what she is suffering and what she might do to stop it, and tries to find out her identity. Then Senator Wade Morgan is found dead. Despite his best intentions, Sam finds himself being drawn in deeper, trying to discover if his mystery woman could be the killer. When his own life is threatened, he realises he can’t bow out until the killer is found.

This new novel from the author of the Jonas Hawke contemporary fiction series makes good use of Willen’s 40 years of experience as a journalist in Washington, D.C., covering politics and government. The world of the story—the setting, characters, atmosphere, etc.—is conveyed with the authority that comes from shrewd observation and experience.

At a time when ethical concerns are in the news, mostly about the unethical behavior of political figures, a book like this that takes ethics seriously is most welcome. Lately, too many ethical standards that we took for granted are being flouted by those who have sworn to uphold them. Of course there has always been graft and corruption in politics, but now we have entered an extraordinary new phase of shameless lying and gaslighting.

So I’m grateful for this smart and fast-paced mystery. I love the combination of ethical questions with a mystery’s puzzle. Although much more serious in tone, Willen’s book satisfies me the way Alexander McCall Smith’s series about Isabel Dalhousie does. As a moral philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, Isabel considers the ethical ramifications of even her smallest action or thought.

Similarly, Sam Turner—perceptive, principled, flawed—is a character I’m happy to spend time with. I hope there are more books featuring Mr. Ethics to come.

What mysteries are you enjoying this spring?

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.

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

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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.

Deems gets away with just losing an ear, but all the witnesses are shocked by the genial drunk’s use of violence. They are also concerned about the danger to Sportcoat from the police, Deems himself, or competing gangsters. It is 1969, just before communities such as this—a mix of Baptists, Catholics and criminals; Blacks, Latinx, Irish, and Italian—began to disintegrate due to the loss of idealism after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the changes in city politics, and the influx of crack cocaine.

McBride uses what Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode calls a spiral structure, which “begins at a point and moves onward . . . spinning around and around that central point or a single axis.”

As we spiral out from the shooting, we get to know many of the people in the community: Sportcoat’s best friend Hot Sausage who gives out the high-quality cheese that appears regularly as if by magic, an Italian gangster known as the Elephant, and Deems himself, once a promising pitcher but lured away by the easy drug money. We meet Potts, a policeman near retirement who’s come back to his early beat in the Cause Houses, a number of strong church ladies, and a quiet Nation of Islam convert named Soup, among many others. It’s a large cast, but everyone is so colorful that it’s easy to remember them.

With humor and compassion, McBride gives us their stories, while always coming back to Sportcoat and the shooting. The deacon claims he doesn’t remember shooting Deems and instead is trying to get him to come back and play baseball. Sportcoat is also in near-constant conversation with his dead wife Hettie, who disapproves of his laziness and drinking, and refuses to reveal where she hid the money collected for the church’s Christmas Fund.

The Christmas Fund is one of a number of other spirals in the story, cropping up repeatedly, as does the question of who is providing the cheese. There’s also a recurring question expressed by various characters as to what exactly a deacon does, and stories about the founding of the church.

A lot of humor is created by the shenanigans the characters get up to, such as Sausage and Sportcoat sharing a single driver’s license on alternating weeks or trying to fix a recalcitrant generator. Even when poking fun at them, McBride sidesteps stereotypes to present each character as a full human being, flawed perhaps, but trying their best to get on.

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.

Between the humor and the human drama, the story moves quickly. A common problem for spiral stories is how to end them and, indeed, here the ending seems a rush to tie up the different subplots. Disappointingly, there are some loose ends left dangling and bit of time confusion, but these are small quibbles for a book that manages to be both rollicking fun and profoundly moving.

Most of all, I treasure stories such as this one where the characters, despite their failings, are treated with respect and compassion. We all want that for ourselves. And what a better world this would be if we could all manage to extend the same to everyone we meet.

It’s rare to find a bestseller that lives up to its hype. This one does. Have you read it? What did you think of it?

A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

by

1k ships

It starts with fire—after the muse has her say about the poet’s invocation, of course. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, awakens to find the Citadel, the highest point of the city of Troy on fire. Her husband and five-year-old son missing, and the fire is rapidly spreading throughout the city.

The city is falling. But that’s impossible. Troy has won the war. Just a few days earlier, they had seen the ships sail away, the Greeks finally giving up after ten grueling years of war without winning back Helen, who had started it all. And yesterday for the first time in all those long years, the gates of Troy were opened and its citizens walked out, only to find a magnificent offering to the gods left by their enemies on the beach: a huge wooden horse.

Haynes deftly slips in this background as Creusa frantically tries to escape the burning city. This outstanding book is a reimagining of the events around the Trojan War through the eyes of the women involved: Greeks, Trojans, goddesses, muses, Fates. As the muse Calliope says:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

Even with a multitude of voices, the reader is always firmly grounded: only one narrator per chapter, with the name and often some explanatory information as the chapter title. Plus there are subtle clues in the beginning of the chapter to explain who the woman is. For example, here is the first paragraph of “Theano, wife of Antenor (advisor to Priam) mother of Crino:”

Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

The through-line of the book follows the women of Troy from the night of Troy’s fall through what happens to them at the hands of the Greek conquerors, while weaving in events from the past and future. For example, there are several letters to Odysseus from Penelope. As she waits the long ten years for his return after the fall of Troy, her tone becomes increasingly barbed.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.

We also get the events that led up to the war and to the fatal night. Haynes’s orchestration of these various pieces is an incredible achievement. Some incidents are slowly unpeeled like an onion, with chapters about other events interspersed between layers. Others are placed just where they will have the most emotional impact or when the reader needs to know about them to understand the next chapter or to see the previous chapter in a new light.

The women are presented so realistically, even the goddesses, that they could easily be people you know. I’ve quoted generously from the book to show how accessible it is to any reader. Haynes includes enough information to orient those who are not familiar with the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey, yet presents all of it in such a novel way that it is fascinating all over again for those who are.

The book reads so easily that I was surprised by the description in the Afterword of Haynes’s extensive research. The historical record of women’s lives from that period is almost nonexistent, so the author really had to dig to find anything about the women in this book, fragments that Haynes could then supplement with her imagination.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is not just a mesmerizing story, one that I could not put down despite knowing how it would all turn out. It is also a textbook for writers on how to reveal information and backstory. And it is a psychological masterpiece, a gorgeous tapestry of women’s lives and ideas and reasons. You’ll never think of the Trojan War—or any war—in quite the same way again.

Every now and then a book comes along that I want to send to everyone I know. What book have you read recently that you’ve recommended to your friends?